The Hemingway Thief

by Shaun Harris

  “Ain’t you gonna go help him?” the driver asked, reaching into his jacket pocket and coming up with a pack of Marlboros.

  “I’d just get in the way,” I said. The driver shrugged, and we stared at the hotel’s front door like two husbands waiting for their wives outside of Victoria’s Secret. Time ran by and the only sound was the breeze stirring the parking-lot dust, the driver pulling in gulps of air, and my cigarette burning.

  Grady reappeared with Digby in tow. They conversed in hushed tones as they approached. Digby pointed to the ocean and then the hills. Grady nodded and threw up his hands in an annoyed “whatever” gesture. They parted, and Digby stalked up to Glenn the Driver and put an arm around him. As I watched Digby steer poor Glenn back to the truck, Grady sidled up next to me.

  “Doc says Richard Kimble is up and wants to talk to us,” he said.

  “What for?” I asked. Digby climbed into the passenger seat of the truck and it pulled out in a cloud of dust.

  “To thank us, probably,” Grady said, and headed back for the hotel. I watched the truck pass over the rise and out of sight. Somehow I knew Mr. Kimble’s gratitude would not be the only thing discussed.

  Chapter Five

  The man we knew as Richard Kimble was sitting up against a white pillow on a steel-frame bed, trying to choke down a cup of coffee. His head was wrapped with an Ace bandage holding a cotton pad against his temple, and a patch covered one eye. He looked like the fife player from Willard’s Spirit of ’76. His naked torso was a relief map of misery. Yellow, blue, and purple bruises fit together like jigsaw pieces, and when he moved it was with a symphony of agonized grunts. His suitcase sat open on an orange crate in the corner, clothes tossed about as if someone had been hurrying through it. He looked up when we came in the room, and he set his mug down on the wicker nightstand.

  A late-middle-aged man in a canvas work shirt and slacks sat at the desk in the corner, taking notes. There was no reason for the record keeping. Doc hadn’t had a genuine practice in over two decades. He looked up at us, nodded to his patient, and went back to writing the notes no one would ever look at.

  “Gentlemen,” Kimble said as Grady walked across the room, leaving me by the door. He kicked the suitcase off the orange crate, grabbed the crate, threw it next to the bed, and sat down on it.

  “My name’s Grady Doyle. This is Coop. You met Doc and Digby,” Grady said. His voice was even, but there was a flavor of animosity in each word. “Listen, pal, you know that feeling you get when you’re walking in a big city and all off a sudden you’re lost and in a bad neighborhood? You know that sucking feeling in your gut that says your ass is in some trouble?”

  “Yeah,” the bruised man said.

  “You got that feeling now?”

  “Not really.”

  “You should,” Grady said.

  “How about you start with your name and go from there,” I said. Grady rolled his eyes at me. The injured man tugged at the bandage on his head, exposing more tufts of wavy black hair. His one good eye was a deep, shimmering blue, and it jumped around the room.

  “Ebbie Milch,” he said.

  “Where you from, Ebbie?” I asked. Grady gave a low grunt. He wasn’t happy I had taken over his inquisition.

  “California,” Ebbie said.

  “Left coast, huh? I’m a New England man myself,” I said. “I mean I’m in Chicago now, but I always wanted to make it out to California. Kind of my own manifest destiny.”

  “What did those men want with you?” Grady interrupted. He was balling and twisting the end of the bedspread between his beefy paws.

  “It’s a little embarrassing. I don’t even know you guys,” Milch said.

  “We promise not to laugh,” Grady said, and the look on his face guaranteed it.

  “I owe them money,” Milch said.

  “Gambling?” Grady said. Milch nodded. Grady stood up and threw his orange crate against the wall, cracking the plaster. Milch crawled up against the headboard and held his hands out defensively, but Grady kept his back to him and seemed to focus on the shadows on the wall. He wiped his hand over his face, marched the five paces to the wall, and retrieved his orange crate. He set it down back where it had been and took a seat.

  “Ok,” he said, once again in control. “Tell me about the manuscript.” Milch flinched. His eye shot to his overturned suitcase and the clothes littered around it.

  “You went through my stuff?” he said. Grady nodded. Milch’s mouth curled into an indignant snarl. “You had no right.”

  “Bullshit,” Grady spat. “I saved your life. A man is dead because of it.”

  “In all fairness, he was kind of an asshole, though,” I said.

  “Who’s dead?” Milch asked.

  “Dell,” I said, and when Milch looked at me like I was speaking Klingon I added, “The one in the suit. The other one, the Texan, the one that kicked your ass, is in a hospital up the road.”

  “What killed him?” Milch said. He was looking at Grady now.

  “Lack of situational awareness,” Grady answered. “Tell me about the manuscript.” Milch nodded, taking it in stride.

  “Have you read it?” Milch said, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking to me.

  “Enough to know it’s worth something,” I said. “If it’s real.” I kept my place by the door as if my proximity to Milch equaled my involvement in his problems.

  “It’s real,” Milch said. He grimaced and scratched his bandage again. “I took it to a rare book dealer in Modesto. Guy looked at it with a magnifying glass had a little light on it and everything. Tells me he thinks it might be some lost chapters from the other book.”

  “A Moveable Feast?” I said. “Your guy said this was Hemingway’s work?” I remembered I had left the portfolio in Grady’s bag under my chair by the bluff. Never-before-seen work from the most famous American writer ever, and I left it in a pile of sand. “How the hell did you get something like that?”

  “An auction,” Milch said, focusing his attention on me like a field mouse eyeing a hawk. “I went there with this girl and I tried to impress her. Bid on a cheap little trunk and won. Bought the case for like twenty bucks, and this chick, you know, she thinks I know something about art or whatever. Nothing in it ’cept some old stationary and those pages.” Doc gave an impressed whistle. I had forgotten he was even there. I turned to look at him, and he adjusted his glasses on his long nose.

  Doc was a British surgeon who had lived at the Hotel Baja for the last two years. He claimed he used to fix bullet wounds for the London Mob. He also claimed that he had been on the run ever since stealing seven hundred thousand pounds from them and absconding with the boss’s wife. The wife had taken the money and left him when they reached Los Angeles, and now he was stuck in Pendira with nothing but his hands. Butch had let him stay as a concierge doctor for the hotel in exchange for free room and board. His booze he had to pay for himself.

  “I was an amateur collector once,” Doc said. “Long time ago, so I don’t know as much as I used to. Still, I imagine lost chapters from an original draft of A Moveable Feast would be a hot item. Chapters that no one has ever seen may be worth a lot of money.”

  “How much do you think it would be worth, Doc?” Grady said. Doc looked up at the ceiling, his eyes ticked back and forth in their sockets like twin metronomes.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Depends on what’s in it. Literary scholars have enjoyed arguing about that book since it was written. Posthumous publication, you know. Lots of back-and-forth about the editing process. I imagine a new draft, if it can be authenticated, mind you, would cause quite a stir among the book set. I can think of only one other Hemingway item that would cause a bigger stir in the community.”

  “Guy I took it to said it was worth maybe five K,” Milch interrupted.

  “Sounds low,” Doc said. “Then again, I imagine he was hoping to get it cheap. He wouldn’t want to put out too much money unless he knew what he was getting.” He t
ook off his glasses and cleaned them. While he wiped the glass with his hanky he glanced around the room at us. I liked Doc, though most of this affection was born from pity. He had been an important man once. Someone the Caesars of the London underworld had come to for advice and succor. He had been a man of letters and science and, if his story was true, of women. Going from there to sometime nurse for drunks and drugged-up surfers was a long way to fall. And so I didn’t blame him for reveling in our attention; for taking a long drink from that fountain. Grady, on the other hand, did not suffer such things.

  “Come on Doc, for chrissakes,” he growled, “what makes you say that?”

  “Would you buy a car without checking to see if it ran?” Doc said with a light chuckle. He placed his spectacles back onto his bony nose. “You see the problem is there is no way of telling if the manuscript is real or not just by looking at it. At least not at first blush. I imagine the initials on the portfolio are for Harry Brague, the original editor who helped Hemingway’s last wife put the book together. If that’s the case, then I would love to know how it came to be in a random trunk at an auction, selling for twenty dollars.”

  “How the hell should I know?” Milch said, and it came off more defensively than Doc’s statement had warranted. Doc gave a solemn nod.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “But you have to understand it would take a team of scholars from several disciplines to determine its authenticity. You’d need a literary scholar, at the very least. Preferably someone with a heavy background in Hemingway. There are chemical tests to determine the age of the paper. You could get access to Hemingway’s typewriters and compare the ink and typing structure to determine if the pages came from one of them. There are ways, gentlemen, indeed there are ways, to determine if this is truly the work of Ernest Hemingway; but I assure you, taking a look through a magnifying glass, even one with a little light on it, is not one of them.”

  “Well, someone thinks it’s real,” Milch spat. “I got a guy lined up in Ensenada to buy it.”

  “Is that N. Thandy from Atlanta?” I asked.

  Milch flinched again, this time almost imperceptibly. His visible eye narrowed, and he looked at me down along the line of his nose.

  “How do you know that name?” he asked. I took the business card out of my pocket and tossed it at him like throwing a playing card into a hat. Milch looked at it for a moment, checking both sides.

  “It was in the portfolio,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, he was the first guy I brought the manuscript to,” Milch said, sticking the card in his shirt pocket.

  “And you went all the way to Atlanta to meet him?” I said with a raised eyebrow.

  “No, smart guy. In California. I found him on the Internet and he was already in Cali on a thing. So I met him up in Modesto. That’s where he did his thing with the magnifying glass and the little light. Told me he thought it was real, offered the five grand, but, see, the guy I’m meeting up in Ensenada is named Norwood, Philip Norwood. Seventy grand he’s offering. That’s why I’m down here. I figured I could use the money to pay off my debt.”

  “But Dell and Andy thought you were lamming it, right?” Grady said.

  “‘Lamming it’?” Milch said. “Who are you? James Cagney? Yeah, they thought I’d rabbited, but I’d told them about the manuscript and how I was going to get the money to pay them. I owed them thirty grand. I guess they wanted the whole thing.”

  “Seventy thousand?” Grady said. He adjusted his weight on the orange crate with a series of clicks. “That sound right to you, Doc?”

  “Who knows,” Doc said, and pulled on the end of his nose as he thought about it. “Of course, I’d be suspicious of anybody offering money for it at this stage, especially that kind of money.”

  “Look, I need the money,” Milch said. He bent his head in that aw-shucks way again and pointed to his bandages. “I can’t make the deal myself. Not in the shape I’m in. I need someone who knows how to take care of himself. Someone like you, Grady. You go up there and make the deal for me and I’ll cut you in for thirty percent.” Grady sucked his back teeth and said nothing. Milch relented. “Ok, forty percent.”

  We left Doc to tend to his patient and closed the door behind us.

  “You believe him?” I whispered, and patted my pockets for cigarettes. Grady recognized it as the signal that I wanted to bum one of his. No one actually looks for anything in their pockets by patting the outsides. He offered me one from his pack and fished one out for himself.

  “I believe that manuscript is worth something,” Grady said, leaning in to use my lighter. “But I’m not sure we got the straight dope on why he got his ass handed to him yesterday. I say we go up tomorrow and check it out.”

  “We?” I pinched my nose and leaned back against the adobe wall. I felt a terrible headache rising. The sweat on the back of my shirt had cooled, and it felt like a long, icy finger down my spine. “Look, Grady, I consider us friends and all, and the last month’s been great, but I think this seems beyond me. I think I’m done.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?” Grady said, affecting a puppy-dog look.

  “I’m just saying we don’t know for sure if Andy and Dell were the only ones after Milch. There could be others waiting up the road, you know?”

  “They’ll be looking for Milch, not us,” Grady said with a condescending sniff. “All we have to do is get to Ensenada and make an exchange with some book nerd. It’ll be a cake walk.”

  “I already shot a guy, Grady.”

  “In the foot. Come on, you’re not going to make the drop with me?” Grady asked.

  “No,” I said. “And don’t say ‘drop.’ It’s a manuscript, not microfilm of Soviet tank placements.”

  “There’s money in it for you.”

  “I got money. So do you.”

  Grady ran his hand through his hair and looked at the ceiling. “Yeah, um, as it turns out, buying a hotel in Baja cash on the barrelhead may not have been the soundest of investments,” he said.

  “You paid cash?”

  “Yeah.” Grady picked at a tear in his sleeve. “And apparently there are some back taxes.”

  “How much money do you have left?” I asked.

  “That’s kind of a personal question, Coop,” Grady said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Forget about that. Come on, it’ll be fun. You’re not going to let me go up there by myself, are you?”

  “You just said it wasn’t going to be dangerous,” I said.

  “No, I said it would be a cake walk. No one wants to do a cake walk by themselves, right?” I knew trying to talk him out of going at all was a nonstarter. I saw the junky gleam in his eye. He was an ex-cop or agent or whatever. Movies and TV taught me these guys couldn’t give up the action. They needed it as bad as the crackheads they busted needed their rocks. The best I could hope for was that he wouldn’t make me go too.

  “What the hell is a cake walk,” I said, trying to change the subject. “I hear that phrase all the time and I have no idea what it means.”

  “Look, the manuscript is worth something,” Grady said. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “You see how pissed Milch was when he found out we had it?”

  “We don’t have it. I left it up by our lawn chairs.”

  “Where do you think I sent Digby?” he said, and waved his hand absently. “And to take care of the other thing. Can’t leave a body up on the side of the road, you know?”

  “Yeah, the dead man isn’t exactly sweetening the pot here, Grady. And if he is, um, being taken care of, and the Texan is in the hospital, then why does Milch need to make the deal? And if it’s so valuable, then why is he letting us do it? He doesn’t know us,” I said.

  “He doesn’t have a choice. Doc says he can’t go anywhere for a couple of days. He needs to make the deal now. Besides mine is not to reason why.”

  “There’s a second line to that quote you might want to think about, pal.”

  “You wanted a chance to write
something gritty, right? You been bitching about that since you got here.” He put on a high-pitched voice and flailed his arms. “I want to write something dark, Grady. Oh, Grady I want to be a real man and write something gritty. This is it, buddy boy. This is the gritty train. Get on board. In order to write life, you need to live life. You know who said that?”

  “No idea.” I wasn’t falling for his line. “You really need the money, huh?”

  “You ever deal with Mexican tax collectors?” he said with a grin. “Hey, look, if it’s all bullshit, I’ll owe you a soda.” He laughed and slapped me on the back, not giving me a chance to reply. “Meet me downstairs,” He rubbed his hands together like a greedy poker player about to collect his pot and was gone before I could say no again.

  I was going to go with him. I knew it. He knew it. The wind made the moth-eaten curtains on the window at the end of the hall swirl and dance like the maenad at festival time. I stared at it for a long time and I couldn’t help but think this business would go poorly.

  It would.

  Chapter Six

  Digby returned from the bluff while I was on the phone with Ox. He’d been able to convince the VW driver that Dell was involved with the cartels and was trying to shake us down. Digby gave him a bag of weed and some of the money out of petty cash for his troubles. He also made sure poor Glenn knew exactly what happens to gringos who cross the law in this part of Old Mexico. Digby had rolled Dell’s body over the side of the cliff and down to the raging surf below. He’d wash up somewhere else where there wouldn’t be much of an investigation. With the cartel wars raging, it was an odd day when a body didn’t show up someplace.

  “I need you to do me a favor,” I said when Ox picked up the phone.

  “Get back to Chicago and I’ll do any favor you want,” Ox said. He had the usual twang of irritation in his voice that was oddly comforting.

  “You’re the one who suggested I come down here, remember?”

  “For a week, maybe two,” Ox sighed. “You’ve been there for over a month.”