He paused by the bed, thought about it, then slipped his old revolver under the mattress. He didn’t trust Berle not to maybe run to the police over that stuff with the Colt. Wouldn’t do to be stopped for questioning while carrying the Peacemaker.
Hector smiled crookedly at her reaction to seeing the gun. “Best be careful about lugging that around for a time, about now, I’m thinking. Besides, for the moment at least, all your enemies are fled.”
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
— George Bernard Shaw
20
SHOP TALK
Hector walked slowly enough for Hannah to maintain a comfortable pace. She slipped her arm through his and he smiled, gently disengaging her from his arm. Hannah felt her blush—ashamed at having been so familiar with the elder author. Hector shook his head and smiled and kissed the top of her head. “It’s not what you’re thinking, honey. I’m right-handed.” He offered her his left arm and she took it.
She said, “If Berle, or this other man….”
“That’s why you’re on my left arm,” Hector said. “If I should have to swing…. Though I think Berle is safely out of the picture now.” Hector smiled uncertainly. The sun disappeared a last time behind the clouds and rain scented the wind. “Perfect timing,” he said as they reached the Ram just as the rain began falling—a hard, cold rain.
Hector looked around—one man following them to the restaurant. But he was no threat: It was Andy Langley, junior G-Man.
Well, right now, Hector kind of liked having Andy around. Presumably the kid was packing a gun, and if things went crosswise, well, Hector wanted to think Andy would take his side.
Hector gave Hannah another once-over as he held the door for her. Her burr aside, there was still something palpably European about her; something in the way she moved; in the way she regarded men.
While they waited to be seated, Hector said, “Your accent….”
“Scottish.”
“The Highlands, I’m guessing.”
“That’s right!” His ear for accents surprised Hannah.
“I’ll hazard Glencoe,” he said.
“You’re amazing,” Hannah said. “Kinlochleven—nearly the same as Glencoe.”
“After the last war—the last big war—I was slow getting back home,” Hector said. “I rambled the Highlands and fell in love with ’em, really. Through most of the late ’forties and early ’fifties, I’d try to get back once every year or two. Go back and roam the Highlands. Fish Loch Leven and Glen Orchy. Get me a little cabin on Skye. Been a long time since I last visited. That accent of yours makes me want to go back a last time.”
Last time bothered Hannah, more than a little: Hector still struck Hannah as vital…as very much alive.
Business was slow; they were the only diners, save one particular young man who followed them in. The waitresses were on break so the bartender was serving them.
She said, “There’s another man back there in the corner table…the man in a black suit. He seems to be watching us.”
Hector glanced over his shoulder. “You’re right. Don’t mind him, honey. He’s my shadow. FBI.” He caught her reaction to that, smiled and said, “Don’t look at me like that, Hannah. No worries—I haven’t caught Hem’s paranoia about the Bureau. They’ve been following me since 1958. Mostly Andy, there, of late. They really were following Hem, too. Following Tennessee Williams…even old Carl Sandburg. Hear Hoover is on Steinbeck, too. Norman Mailer as well. I should have warned you up front: you’ll probably get your own Hoover file now, just for hanging around with me. And if you should write a novel, especially one that has any truck with young people…?”
“I don’t care about any of that.” She looked up at him, frowning: “What did you do to justify this surveillance by the FBI?”
Should he go into it with her? Tell her about the FBI’s long campaign not just against him, but nearly every other American novelist of stature? Should he tell her about Nashville and what he’d done there to nettle Hoover? No…why spoil the moment? He winked: “Your mistake is to put ‘justify’ and ‘FBI’ in the same sentence.”
Hector glanced out the restaurant’s front window at the falling rain. There were reflections on the wet glass—looked like men with guns approaching the front of the restaurant.
Guns?
Hector narrowed his eyes—the shooting ranges were on the other side of the complex….
He looked again: Donovan Creedy was out there—even through the blur of the rain on the glass, he recognized the bastard. Hector’s mouth was suddenly dry; his underarms wet.
Creedy was talking to two men with deer guns. Creedy pointed through the rain-streaked window. The men nodded, and Creedy passed the men some bills.
Hector swallowed hard. Well here it was—total war.
The men took up seats on a bench under the restaurant’s ledge, waiting.
Hector absently reached under his jacket, feeling for the reassuring hardness of his Colt ’73’s wooden butt. Then he remembered shoving the Peacemaker under the mattress.
Goddamn it!
***
The dishes had been cleared. Hector had hardly touched his food; he wondered if Hannah had noticed. The cook had, but Hector had held up a hand before the man could ask the obligatory, “Is something wrong?”
Sitting at Hem’s old table in the Ram, it would be the expected thing to strap on a meal worthy of an Etruscan eating orgy; to drink an ocean of booze.
Hector had resisted alcohol since Hannah couldn’t have any, and hell, she already had one problem drinker in her life. And with those men loitering out front, he needed to be sharp now. There were two of them after all, and they were armed. Hector cursed himself again for leaving the Colt in his room.
Now, Hector tarried over coffee…trying to figure out some gambit that might get them out of the Ram and safely back to the lodge.
Hannah was looking at him again…inquiringly. He figured he’d best distract her. After the scare the fat scholar threw in her, he dreaded the reaction she’d have to a couple of thugs waiting for them out front with rifles.
He kept a wary eye on the hunters sitting vigil outside, but said, “So, you said you write fiction. Published already?”
“Just recently graduated college,” Hannah said. “I studied writing.”
“Studied writing,” Hector said, half-distracted. Hannah thought he said it like it was an alien concept…as though he was skeptical it was something that could be learned in a university.
Hector nodded, flexing his fingers under the table. He had his roll of nickels, so maybe he wouldn’t break any knuckles if he got in close enough to take a shot. He said, “Novels?”
“Short stories, for now,” Hannah said. “Or I’m trying, anyway. Can’t imagine writing something as big as a novel.”
“It’s just an incremental task,” Hector said, looking around the Ram. If the damned interior decorators had only opted for some more appropriate wall bric-a-brac: say, a rifle or shotgun he might be able to use to bluff those men waiting on him out front.
Hector saw the sign for the restrooms. He needed to get Hannah out of the line of fire; a trip to the ladies room would do nicely.
He said, “Write five pages a day, every day, and in a couple of months, you’ll have written a novel.” He snapped his fingers, still staring out the window. One of the hunters kept tugging at his ears…scratching his neck. The man also had this occasional nervous tick that sent his head jerking spasmodically to one side. Hector began to wonder if that one might not be a junkie.
Hannah said, “I’ve been reading you at the local library. And I’ve been reading about you. They say you used to write more like thirty or forty pages a day.”
“Those were in the pulp magazine days,” Hector said. “I was a working writer. Had to do that. It’s a pace that kills. A pace that can dry up the well.”
He
’d plotted his course. He said, “I’d love to see your writing, darlin’.” As he said it, he reached across the table to pat the back of Hannah’s hand and upset her glass of milk. “Damn, so clumsy of me,” he said, frowning and righting the glass. The milk spilled over the edge of the table and onto Hannah’s lap. She said, “Oh, no!”
He stood and offered a hand to help her up. “Restrooms are right down that hall,” he said.
He kept hold of her arm, starting her down the hallway. He said, “You dry off and we’ll get you back to the lodge. By the way, you ever hear of a man name of Donovan Creedy?”
Hannah frowned, dabbing at herself with a napkin. “No. Should I have?”
“Not at all,” Hector said. He glanced back into the dining area; Andrew Langley was relishing a stack of pancakes topped with whipped cream and strawberries. The dining room was still all but empty—just Hector, the waiter, and Andy.
Hector motioned to the waiter. He nodded his head at Andy and said, “I’ll take my check, and that fella’s too, but let’s not make a big deal out of me doing that, okay, pal?”
***
Andrew Langley sat staring at his pancakes, savoring the food and rustic surroundings.
He’d been following Hector Lassiter for two years now. Fact was, he felt fairly lucky to have drawn the crime novelist as an assignment. So many guys in the Bureau spent their days and nights shadowing thugs, communists and perverts…sundry political agitators. Surveillance of those types almost always involved a procession of fleabag hotels, dive bars or hole-in-the-wall “safe houses.”
Andy had grown up in Iowa. Before joining the bureau, the biggest city he’d ever seen was Des Moines. But Hector Lassiter (a rough-edged guy and occasional hell-raiser, sure, but none of that found its way into Andy’s reports, because, hell, he liked the old guy, after a fashion), well, dogging Lassiter’s heels had sure broadened Andy’s horizons.
Hector Lassiter lived his life on a big canvas: exotic ports of call and only the best hotels and bars; a procession of famous faces —athletes and beautiful starlets. Andy secretly sent extra surveillance pics of the more famous of Lassiter’s friends/conquests to his mother back in Fontanelle.
Fact was, Andy kept waiting for some bean counter in the Bureau’s accounting department to pull the plug on it all, citing Andy’s often staggering expense report vouchers. Andy dreaded the day he lost his present assignment.
Sensing motion, he glanced up:
Hector was walking briskly toward him. Old guy was probably going to needle him again with some teasing backtalk: “Hey, Andy—going to play some hands with Frank and Dean; why don’t you fill the fourth seat?” Yeah, something like that. What a card.
Andy turned back to his notes; he’d have to get a dictionary to check a couple words here; his supervisors were always on him about his poor spelling. Hell, maybe he could ask Hector the novelist for the proper spelling. Still smiling, he glanced back up just in time to see Hector’s fist flying at his face.
***
Hector felt very bad about it: Sure, he’d picked up the tab for the kids’ breakfast, but that hardly made up for what he was about to do to Andy.
The blow knocked Andy out of his chair. Though he knew the kid probably couldn’t hear it, Hector mumbled, “I’m so, so sorry about this Andy, but if I don’t to do this now, those men out there mean to kill me, I think.”
Hector hauled the young FBI agent back up and folded him into his chair, scooting aside his pancakes and then lowering the FBI agent’s head to the table; Andy looked like he was taking a nap. Hector looked out the window — the two men were still out there — laughing and checking their guns. It was still on….
Hector reached under Andy’s jacket and took out his gun.
Turning—half expecting the waiter to come at him with rolling pin or spatula—he saw the man was standing there with the two meal checks in his hand, his mouth open.
Hector quickly shucked some bills off his roll and said, “My girl comes out, give her a slice of pie, huh? Tell her I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Hector slid out the back door into the rain.
***
The two men were still sitting on a bench under an overhang, watching the front door—evidently waiting on Hector and Hannah to make their exit. The duo smoked and passed a flask back and forth. One looked like a drunk. The other had nervous hands and feet…definitely some kind of addict. Local muscle, clearly—improvised hit men, or the like.
Fucking Creedy….
Hector pointed his gun between them. They looked up sharply, their rifles balanced on their laps. The quicker of the two, the drunk, said, “Can’t shoot both of us, old man. We’ve got the numbers on our side.”
“Oh, I might be able to shoot you both,” Hector said. “Least I’m sober and my gun is already up.” A decent bluff—particularly since the knuckles of his right hand were starting to swell and stiffen from that shot he’d given Andy Langley. He said, “Guns on the ground, boys.”
The men looked at one another and shrugged. It was clear this was turning into more than they’d bargained for. Hector gave them a good hard look and decided they were both junkies. He had them quiet and cowed for the moment, but with that junk and hooch in their veins, there was no telling how things might go crosswise, fast.
They both seemed skittish, scratching the backs of their hands. Time for another fix, from the looks of it. And from the threadbare condition of their coats and pants, money was scarce. Probably needed more scratch for their smack, and they pretty clearly were willing to do anything—including murder—to make their rolls.
Hector pulled his wallet from his pocket with his left hand and said, “Man who knocks the other man out first gets a twenty.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth when the drunken hophead snarled and let fly. He dropped his taller buddy with a sloppy roundhouse.
Hector whistled and said, “Nasty. But you win.” Hector looked at the man there on the wet pavement at his feet. Couldn’t leave the bastard laying there in case some other lodgers decided to brave the rain for a drink or a dinner at The Ram while Hector was debriefing the junkie hunter left standing. He said, “Get your buddy back up on that bench now.”
As the smaller man struggled to haul his compatriot back into a slumped position on the bench, Hector shoved Andy’s gun between the juicer’s eyes. “So, pal, what was the order? Scare me, or kill me?”
The man swallowed hard, said, “Follow you until the girl was out of the way…then….”
Kill you.
It was clear that was what the alcoholic hunter hadn’t said.
Looking up at Hector, the man scrunched his neck down into the folds of his coat collar, rubbing his cheek vigorously against the lapel. The man said, “What about my twenty?”
Hector took a look around, saw there were still no witnesses. He held up the twenty-dollar bill and said, “Right here, pal. First, there’s a message I want you to pass on to that man who sent you after me.” Hector smiled: When it came to routing foes, he was about to be three to one for the day…not a bad confidence builder. He said, “Tell him I take things like this real personal.”
Then he swung the Colt’s butt between the drunken hunter’s eyes.
Hector left the man slumped across his unconscious hunting partner. He fished around their pockets and found the dregs of their drugs, their hypos. He tossed those into the pines. He figured finding their rigs and next fix would keep the duo plenty busy and out of his hair.
He thought about it and left the twenty-dollar bill there in the second man’s bruised hand. Let the two argue over that when they came to.
***
Hector edged back around the restaurant and slid through the back door. Hannah was sitting at their table, pushing around a piece of cheesecake with her fork. She hadn’t registered the commotion out front.
She smiled up at him. “I was starting to worry….” Then, softly she said, “Your FBI shadow seems to be taking a nap.”
&nb
sp; Hector offered Hannah his left hand; helped her to her feet. “Yeah, I’ve been keeping poor Andy running hard these past few days. We’ll leave him to his dreams.”
The rain had subsided and they stepped out into the barest drizzle. Hannah frowned, staring at the two hunters wrapped around one another in this strange pose that almost made them look like lovers.
She whispered in his ear, “What on earth are those two up to?”
Hector shrugged. “Who can say?”
Hannah chuckled. “Sharing bodily warmth, maybe? Or, too long afield and feeling amorous?”
He offered Hannah his left arm, which she accepted. “Could be, honey,” he said.
Steering her wide around the unconscious men, he kept his sore right hand in the pocket of his sports jacket, fist wrapped around the butt of Andrew Langley’s gun, all the while keeping an eye out for Donovan Creedy, or more of his minions.
“Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.”
— Sun Tzu
21
THE ART OF WAR
Hector walked Hannah back to his room; held her hand as she kicked off her shoes and then sat back on the bed. “Rest up a bit, darlin’,” he said. “I’m going to make some calls, strategize.”
“Thank you so much again, Hector,” Hannah said. “If you hadn’t been here…?”
He smiled and kissed her cheek. “Thank me when I’ve actually done something, kid.”
Hector checked the door locks, then moved into the parlor room. He was checked into the Hemingway suite for another few days: He’d keep the room, but Hector felt there was enough real danger now—particularly now that Creedy was evidently sending improvised assassins after him—to warrant hunkering down somewhere else for a time. It was time to think about going into bunker mode somewhere more defensible.
Hector didn’t know the town well enough to think of any option better than the Topping House.
If he could only patch things up with Mary….
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