The Hemingway Thief

by Shaun Harris

  “It’s like driving blind,” he said. I felt the front tire on my side begin to sink, and Dutch corrected the wheel. He let out a low whistle and I wondered what would kill us first, La Dónde’s bullets or Dutch’s driving.

  The road leveled out again and we emerged onto a dusty pan extending out for about a quarter of an acre. The canyon was on our right and the mountainside to our left. Dutch drove the truck away from the canyon edge and closer to the cliff at the far end of the shelf. The cliff dropped down about two hundred feet and ended in a broad, torrential river that fed the canyon’s stream. On the other side of the river was a green, leafy crop of marijuana the size of a Nebraska cornfield.

  “El Cuerno’s?” I asked, and Dutch nodded. “Where’s the camp?” Dutch pointed out his window at a squat domicile made of red adobe jutting out of the mountainside like a cyst. This was where Ebenezer Milch, the Hemingway thief, had made his final home. The windows were decorated with shabby burlap drapes blowing lazily in the breeze. The door had been cobbled together from several packing crates, and the centerboard declared it to be the property of Pensacola Air Force Base. Ebenezer had built a low wall of cinderblock and mud extending around his home and to the cliff. Along the top of the wall he’d fixed a series of upside-down broken beer bottles as makeshift spikes. The gate in the middle was less foreboding, made from the same crates as the house door and carved into pickets.

  We piled out of the cab. Milch and Grady rolled out of the truck bed hunched over and stiff like old, broken men. Grady reached back inside and groaned as he pulled out a long canvas sack. It contained two .22 rifles and a Remington .12-gauge shotgun Elmo had lent us. A cold drop of rain splashed on my neck and snaked down my spine. Dark, angry thunderheads were devouring the bright morning sky.

  “Storms come up quick around here,” Dutch said. “They go just as quickly, too. Let’s get inside.” The rain started to fall in fat gobs as we dashed through the gate and burst into Ebenezer’s home.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The air was dead and smelled like a frat-house laundry bag. There was a spindly chair on its side next to a large wire spool Ebenezer had probably used as a dinner table. A potbelly stove sat in the corner, its kinked and dented pipe rising out through a hole in the roof. A hummock of ash and charred wood bits surrounded it. Outlaws, runaways, and fugitives had all called this place home for a night or two in the days before El Cuerno had claimed it, and the red dirt floor was littered with evidence of their stays; a few tins of Dinty Moore here, a pile of cigarette butts there. But there was no evidence of a suitcase or anyplace it might be hidden.

  “It’s not here,” Grady said. Milch’s shoulders slumped, and he fell against the wall. His knees buckled and he slid down until his ass rested on his ankles.

  “Hold on now. We haven’t searched the place,” I said.

  Grady put his hand above his eyes like he was shading the sun, craned his neck forward, and pantomimed a swiveling examination of the room.

  “There,” he said. “I searched it.”

  I started to say something, but he held up his finger.

  “Hold on. It pays to be thorough.” He repeated his mocking search and when he was done he threw up his hands. “Damn, still nothing.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said. “I’m only trying to help.”

  “It’s not here,” Grady said, and adjusted the gun sack strung across his back.

  “Let’s think about this for a second,” I said. Milch was running his tongue slowly over his bottom lip while staring at a Mexican candy wrapper splayed open on the ground. “You okay, Ebbie?” He nodded unconvincingly. I patted him on the shoulder and turned to Dutch. “What happened to Ebenezer after he died?”

  “Before my time, Coop,” he said. “Elmo was the only one who knew him.”

  “He never talked about him?”

  “Not to us,” Dutch said. “How often do you talk about someone who died thirty years ago to a room full of people wouldn’t care if he died yesterday? I doubt most people in camp’ve even heard of Hemingway, let alone his suitcase. Why would they give a shit about the man who stole it?”

  He had a point. In our quest to find Hemingway’s lost suitcase, I had forgotten that most people had never heard of it. I had been imagining Elmo sitting around the fire, retelling Ebenezer’s Parisian adventure over and over again with his band of reformed smugglers, thieves, and murderers sitting in rapt attention. Dutch disabused me of this fantasy and replaced it with the image of a group of barely literate, formerly overviolent men telling dirty jokes and bloody vignettes. Ebenezer had found the perfect place to hide the suitcase: in the middle of a region filled with men who could not begin to express how little they cared about its existence.

  “When Elmo tells stories, they’re usually about J. W. Booth and how he died fighting the Apaches,” Dutch said. “Elmo’s a man who knows his audience.”

  “Fuck this place,” Milch said, standing up and sticking a cigarette between his lips. “Let’s go. We need to go.”

  “We just got here,” I said, blocking Milch’s way to the door. “And not without a little bit of trouble either.”

  “It ain’t here,” Milch said. His eyes were red and the corners of his mouth were set in terse, wrinkled triangles. “If the suitcase ever existed, it’s at the bottom of the Paris River.”

  “You mean the Seine,” I said.

  “Whatever the fuck,” Milch said, and pushed past me. He was opening the door when I shoved him. The door closed again as he fell against it. He caught himself before he fell, and wheeled around with a wild fist. If I had been an experienced fighter, I could have easily dodged it. I was not an experienced fighter. The blow caught my ear, and I heard a small pop followed by a dull sound like a distant airplane.

  “I owed you one from Tequilero,” Milch said.

  “Tequilero?” Grady said.

  “Forget it,” Milch said, and made for the door again. This time it was Grady who stopped him. His punch was faster and more compact than Milch’s, out and back like a striking rattlesnake. Milch took a step back and fell on his ass. A small rivulet of blood trickled from one nostril.

  “It’s forgotten,” Grady said. “Now let’s think about what we do next.”

  “We fucking leave,” Milch said. He touched the blood under his nose with his fingertip and examined it. “It ain’t fucking here. You were just saying it to Coop. That Dónde bitch could be here any second.”

  “We’ve got time,” I said.

  “No, we don’t,” Milch said in a whine. “It ain’t here, Grady, you said so yourself.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a pessimist,” Grady said, massaging the hand he used to hit Milch. “You’ve been the one who was so gung ho we’d find the case. What changed your mind?”

  “A room with nothing but food wrappers and used butts,” Milch said. “And an old fucking stove.” He kicked his leg out at the potbelly, striking one of the legs with his sneaker. It was heavier than Milch expected and he let out a howl and grabbed his foot. He snarled at the stove, lifted his foot up, and brought his heel down on the center. This time the stove lurched to the side and almost upended. The pipe’s connection gave a low, rusty groan, and when the body came back down on all four feet, the stack broke away entirely. An ashy nebula of black soot spilled out and dusted Milch.

  “Calm down, kid, or I’m gonna hit you again,” Grady said. “The case is probably hidden in one of the hills around here. We just have to look for it.”

  “Don’t you get it? Elmo never even saw the fucking suitcase,” Milch said. He wiped the blood from his nose with his T-shirt. “You heard him yourself. He has no proof anything Ebenezer told him was anything more than just another con.”

  I backed away from Milch, giving him space to have his tantrum. I wanted to throw a fit too, but one was enough. I stuck my finger in my ear and wiggled it. The ringing was starting to dissipate, but my head was swimming like a barrel of eels. I leaned forward, to
ok a deep breath, and noticed a thin rut in the layer of ash next to the stove. It was too linear to be accidental. The ringing stopped.

  “He never saw it because it never fucking existed,” Milch continued. “It was just a fucking story my uncle told my grandfather. Ebenezer was a loser who died alone out in the desert, and nobody noticed for a whole goddamned year.” His shoulders hunched over and he covered his eyes with his hands. His next words came out in a barely-audible croak. We inched closer to hear him, but I kept my eye on the rut in the ash. “Pop never saw the suitcase either,” he continued. “I asked Dad why and he said Ebenezer didn’t want anybody to see the stories without Hemingway’s permission. I asked him why he never went after the suitcase, even after Ebenezer died.”

  “What did he say?” Grady asked.

  “He said the knights never find the Grail. They come close, but they never get their hands on it. They weren’t meant to.”

  “What the fuck does that mean,” Grady said.

  “It means he knew my uncle was full of shit,” Milch said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think your grandfather understood Ebenezer’s story better than any of us.”

  “Hey, if Milch wants to go, maybe we should go,” Grady said, and offered his hand to Milch. Milch moved his arm, saw Grady’s hand, and took it. Grady pulled him to his feet. “The suitcase was our only bargaining chip, and we don’t have it. Our only chance now is to run like hell for the border.”

  “No,” I said. “The suitcase is here.”

  “I hit you too hard in that ear, Coop,” Milch said. “You’re not listening. I’m telling you it’s bullshit. I’m telling you we got to get out of here.”

  “Hemingway wrote Ebenezer’s name down in that manuscript. We saw it with our own eyes,” I said. “That wasn’t bullshit. He wouldn’t remember a guy forty years later unless he meant something. Chavez met Hemingway. Hemingway came all the way down here for a suitcase. The manuscript is real. Ebenezer’s stories were real. That means the suitcase is real.” I lifted the leather satchel containing the manuscript that still hung off my shoulder. “You came here because of this, because it confirmed your uncle’s story. You came because you wanted to have a bit of the legend for yourself, something your grandfather never had the balls to do. You wanted to be a part of it, so you came down here.”

  “And I was wrong,” Milch said. “Nobody has seen the fucking thing.”

  “Of course not,” I said. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. My lips were dry and cracked. I ran my tongue over them and it was like sandpaper scraping over sandpaper. “Your uncle was a professional thief. A professional knows how to hold onto his score. Didn’t you see Goodfellas? What happened to the guy who bought his wife the Cadillac? DeNiro fucking whacked him. That’s what.”

  “Are you losing it, Coop?” Grady asked.

  “Why would he show it to Elmo? Fucking guy lives in a mountain fortress full of thieves and cut-throats,” I said. “He’s supposed to walk in there and say, ‘Lemme tell you where I keep my priceless piece of fucking history?’ No, he’s gonna keep it hidden. And you don’t keep something like that hidden in the goddamn hills where the elements can get at it either, Grady. You keep it close. You keep it warm and you keep it dry. The suitcase is here. It is in this house.”

  “Plenty of people have come through here since then. How do you know one of them didn’t take it?” Grady asked.

  “Ever see The Great Escape?” I said. I was tired of answering hypotheticals, tired of trying to understand the mind of a dead man I’d never met, tired of using logic as an unsuitable substitute for hope. I was tired of arguing.

  “Never seen it,” they all said in one form or another. I wasn’t surprised.

  “Surrounded by goddamn philistines,” I said. “Great flick. Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Fucking Coburn. Great movie. There’s a scene where they’re explaining where they hid the tunnels.”

  “Does this have a point?” Grady asked.

  “Charles Bronson was the Tunnel King. This was back before Death Wish, when Bronson was an actor, not a joke. He’s talking to Dick Attenborough in one of the dorms and he shows him a stove.” I edged around the potbelly, dragging my boot through the ash. The thin rut got longer as my boot moved over it. It met another rut and made a corner, then another rut and another corner, until it made a square surrounding the stove. I mimed lifting something heavy and did my best Bronson impression. “No one moves a hot stove, yes?”

  “I’m leaving,” Grady said. I lifted my foot and kicked at the stove with my boot heel just as Milch had, but I was standing and I aimed for the top. The stove leaned back on its rear feet, and just as it was about to right itself, I kicked it again. It crashed down in the dirt and spilled more ash from its belly. I dropped to my hands and knees and rooted through the ash at the center of the square. My fingers grazed over something cold, round, and hollow in the center. I seized it and pulled. It was a metal ring attached to a chain that ran down into the ash. I wrapped both hands around it and thrust my weight backward until I felt something give, and I landed on my ass.

  When the ash cloud settled, we could see that I had pulled up a square piece of board and there was now a hole in the floor where the stove had been. I heard shuffling feet and felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Grady. Milch was at his side, and at the far end of the room Dutch stood with his hand over his mouth. The rain had let up enough to allow some daylight through the hole in the ceiling where the stovepipe had been. A shaft of light the diameter of a fence post illuminated what I had unearthed: a scratched, plain brown, and incredibly old suitcase.

  Chapter Thirty

  Back then, they would have called it a valise. It was cheap and common, the type of suitcase a correspondent for the Toronto Star could afford—black fiberboard with thick paper pasted on it to give the illusion of leather. It was smaller than I’d expected. I figured it couldn’t have held more than a few large hardcover books. The clasps were tin painted to look like brass, and the paint was chipping off to reveal the rust underneath. It was in remarkable condition for being in a hole for the last few decades—a touch of mold on the side and the beginnings of rot on one corner, but that was it. There was a small stamp near the handle that read “Shwayder Trunk Co.” It looked like something you’d find in your grandmother’s basement while cleaning it out after her funeral.

  “Go ahead, Ebbie,” I said, and nudged him with my elbow. We were crowded around the hidey-hole, hunkered down on our haunches like trackers studying signs. Milch rubbed his hand on his forehead, mixing ash with sweat. The corner of his mouth pulled up toward his squinting eye as he considered the package less than a foot away.

  “Should I touch it?” he said. “I saw in a movie where Nicolas Cage put gloves on before he touched the Declaration of Independence. You know, because of the oil on your fingers or something.”

  “Did you bring any gloves?” Grady asked.

  “No.”

  “At least wipe your hands on your pants first, then,” Grady said. Milch drew in a deep breath like a high diver about to jump. He wiped his hands on his jeans several times and reached out slowly, tenderly. His hands started for the handle, hovered over the rolled fiberboard, his fingers dancing over it as he thought. He shook his head and reached in with both hands, picking the case up with the gentle ardor and uncertainty of a father picking up his child for the first time.

  He carried it to the wire-spool table and set it down. The rusted clasps resisted and he pushed against them with his thumb, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, until they gave way with a plaintive squeak. Milch wiped his hands again, this time on his T-shirt, set them on either side of the top, and opened the case.

  The person who had last packed the suitcase had done so with loving attention. The paper inside was stacked neatly in three columns, one on the left, one on the right, and a third placed on top of the other two so that it sagged in the middle. The middle column was made of o
nionskins, the translucent paper used to make carbon copies during the typewriter age. The ink was blurry and faded, like a notebook left in the rain. I could only make out one word in the title: Auteuil. Milch closed the lid and left his hands there, claiming it.

  “You think it’s real?” he asked. It was hoarse and whispered, like a parishioner in the middle of communion.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but that was a lie. I knew. I knew the moment the case opened and the words were splayed out in front of me, naked and seductive. It felt like we had peeked into a window and found something private, something not meant for our eyes. Elmo had been right. We were looking at the intimate workings of a man long since dead, a troubled man who led a troubled life. I felt a creeping sensation up the back of my neck, and I knew I would never be able to explain to Milch and Grady what this suitcase really meant.

  “But you know people who would know, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But with things like this it’s never a hundred percent. There’ll always be someone who calls it a hoax.”

  “And there will be people who will pay for it.” Grady said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I whispered. “No one will see it, but us.”

  “What?” Milch said.

  “Coop, you’re being a defeatist again,” Grady said.

  “We kept asking why Hemingway would have given up the suitcase, you know, the reason for the theft,” I said. The room, which had already carried the flavor of death, took on the quality of a funeral parlor; the suitcase, that of a corpse; and my heart, that of a mourning child. “But what never made sense to me was why he brought Hadley into it.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?” Milch said.

  “Why blame her?” I continued. “At first I thought he was just being cruel, but that wasn’t it.”

  “Coop,” Grady said. “We should get moving.”

  “I chalked it up to Hemingway being a woman-hating asshole, which he was, but misogyny doesn’t explain why the suitcase was real. Why put real stories in there? For that matter, why even have an actual theft? Couldn’t he have just told the publisher it was stolen? Wouldn’t it make sense to keep the stories in a drawer somewhere so he could pull them out later?”