Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  It was clear the Widow Hemingway needed looking after, too. It made perfect tactical sense: get the pregnant lady-in-distress, the threatened widow, and Hem’s papers all in one place—that imposing concrete house Hem had picked for his own fatal final scene. And hell, all those guns of Hem’s were there, too—enough to equip a good-sized guerilla unit. Then there was the matter of Mary and her dreadful admission. He needed to take a sounding on the widow…make sure she wasn’t blurting her “confession” out to anyone in proximity.

  Biting his lip, Hector checked his wallet for the number, then dialed Mary’s house. He expected the maid to pick up, but Mary answered her own phone: “Hector! You’ve been scarce! When are you finally going to get over here so we can get to work on the books?”

  That was odd—no threats out of the gate. No screaming at him for nosing around amidst Hem’s manuscripts. He said, “Well, after the other day….” Hector let that one hang there, feeling a bit confused.

  Mary said, “Been a long time since I got that drunk.” He heard this smile in Mary’s voice. Flirty, she said, “I woke up in my own bed and don’t remember getting there. You carry me up there, you handsome ape?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  That smile still in her voice: “You able lug, you.”

  “That’s me all over,” Hector said. “Listen, strange stuff is going on here in Sun Valley. I’d like to take you up on that offer of staying over if you’ll have me.”

  “I’ve got plenty of room,” Mary said, sounding very pleased.

  “Good, because I’m bringing Hannah Paulson along. Her husband is away in Boise, but maybe you know that since he’s working with you, too. Given what’s been going on around her, well, Mrs. Paulson needs a safe place, too.”

  “Sure, bring her. I like her. I’ll expect you soon?”

  “Before late afternoon, yes. If it means taking the couch, no problem, but I need to bring one more with me.” Hector figured to maintain some operational latitude, he’d be needing to call-in a friend, someone reliable, to have his back.

  “I have a guest quarters behind the main house. They’re small, but warm and quiet,” Mary said. This hesitation, now: Mary asked, “This friend isn’t a woman?”

  Christ. It was going to be a long few days, Hector thought. And much of it was likely to be spent deflecting Mary’s goddamn advances if he was reading things right, and he figured he was. Damn it.

  “Nah,” Hector said, “not a woman. More like a batman. Extra muscle.”

  “He can stay out back then,” Mary said, then, “It’s really that bad—that you need some thug at your back?”

  “Looking to be.”

  “Sounds like Cuba and 1959 all over again.”

  “Let’s hope not that bad,” he said. “See you soon, honey.”

  Hector hung up and stared at his empty glass. Not a word about her confession. No hint it had ever happened….

  Hector poured some whiskey and mixed in a little water from the bathroom sink.

  He leaned into the bedroom and saw Hannah was already asleep. He pulled the covers up over her and closed the door between them.

  Then he sat down with his black book and started calling old friends, trying to find one who was good under the gun and might be in something like his present neck of the woods.

  He thought more about Mary. He’d really figured Mary might still be bedfast or fulminating after that drug Richard Paulson slipped the widow sent her into murderous, manic fits. Strange.

  “No one is entitled to the truth.”

  — E. Howard Hunt

  22

  ART IN THE BLOOD

  Hector had spent an hour taking Mary’s measure. He’d worried about bringing Hannah into the Topping House given its mistress’s previous psychotic state.

  But now Mary was her usual self. Mary’s mind seemed to be a blank slate after she’d taken the first few sips of Paulson’s tainted cocktail. She wrote it off as Paulson mixing too-strong drinks: Mary figured she’d simply gotten drunk and passed out. She didn’t seem to have any recollection of nearly murdering Hector with a shotgun.

  Mary hadn’t balked at the notion of Hannah moving in. Mary was used to Hem parading a succession of young infatuations through the Finca; through hotels in Spain and Venice. And Mary seemed to be playing to “sisterhood” with Hannah now—commiserating about wanting, dissolute husbands. Richard Paulson aside, Hector wasn’t up to hearing Mary run down Hem. Hell, he was haunted by the memory of Mary looking down those twin barrels at him….

  So now Mary and Hannah were upstairs, in the sitting room, trading marriage war stories. Hector hoped in bringing her along he wasn’t setting Hannah up for worse grief than she might find on her own. But the house was defensible, and a good base from which Hector could take the battle to the other side on his terms.

  To that end, Hector had moved Ernest’s old typewriter to the document room, where he sat now, facing a blank wall—no distracting vistas for Hector Lassiter. He was thinking about what to write.

  He’d told the women he was behind on his daily word-count; that he needed to work on his own stuff. That alibi had passed: even though he’d brought his own portable typewriter to Idaho, Mary hadn’t questioned Hector when he presumed to commandeer Papa’s typewriter. Hector had to do that: it was critical to his evolving strategy.

  But he found himself distracted by all the intrigue swirling around him—all the pressure points that might be used against him: skulking scholars, a vulnerable, pregnant woman who viewed herself as psychologically damaged…. And Mary Hemingway, who actually was a bit half-wrapped, and a drunk to boot.

  And Donovan Creedy.

  Hector wished he knew more about Creedy. The bastard was a lousy writer, he knew that much from The Krushchev Kill: leaden, hackneyed prose, and plot twists you could spot chapters out. So many fucking exclamation points!

  He needed to know more about the man and his day-job.

  Thinking of Creedy, and of Hem, put Hector in mind of Paris in the old days.

  And thinking of Hannah, a young female writer he sensed was increasingly drawn to him, irresistibly dragged Hector’s mind back to another striking woman writer he’d met in Paris in the winter of 1924. The woman who had made Hector the writer he was, in most ways—his beloved Brinke Devlin. So many years passed, yet Brinke still stalked his dreams.

  Hector had this craaazy notion—one Brinke would have savored as few others could. He was going to do what the malignant others only dreamed of doing. If Creedy and whatever other shadowy figures were trying to attack Hem, to attack Hector and even an innocent bystander like Hannah and do it by seeding the Hemingway papers with forgeries, then Hector was going to turn it around on Creedy.

  Hector was going to write his own false Hemingway short story.

  Only Hector’s faux-Hemingway story would be what the others could never be, not ever, not on any of the other authors’ best days at the writing table.

  Hector’s spurious Hemingway short story would be pitch-perfect. Utterly convincing. Hector would write the kind of short story Hem would write in his halcyon days. A masterpiece. No mean feat, that.

  Especially considering the short story was going to have to satisfy another, darker aim: Hidden within its convincing Hemingwayesque prose and sensibilities, it would need to contain a kind of hidden code or textual watermark. Hector’s sub rosa aim was to use the story as a plant—as a trap.

  Then, if it surfaced later in some other context as Hem’s work, Hector would be poised to step forward, armed with the short’s hidden rubric, and say, “Wait a minute, you lying cocksucker….” It would bring down the whole house of cards Creedy was trying to construct. And if one fake story had found its way into the Hemingway papers? Well, scholars and academics would then be on high alert for others—looking for other spurious pieces they could seize on…trying to build into tenure or the like.

  It was an audacious ambition—to write a perfect Hemingway story and bury a hidden message in
the thing. Could he accomplish both aims? He meant to try.

  But now, sitting here sober and alone in one of the last rooms Hem had passed through—sitting in a room surrounded by Hem’s own words, his fingers poised on the keys of Hem’s last typewriter—well, it was more than a bit daunting.

  Hector lit a cigarette, then reached across the desk and picked up the leather case there. The improvised valise was one of Hector’s old saddlebags from his cavalry days — a souvenir from the Pershing Expedition. Following the abortive chase after Pancho Villa, Hector had turned the saddlebag into a document carrier. Hector slipped out Hannah’s sheaf of stories, thinking some of her youthful writer’s passion might fire his own muse. It had been a hell of a long time since Hector had written a short story; it was all novels and script work for him since the late 1950s.

  He found himself seduced by Hannah’s voice, which was unique and strong, if unfocused at times. Hector finished the first of Hannah’s short stories. Hector was impressed: Hannah had a clean, direct prose style and a good and instinctive ear for dialogue. In fact, she advanced her stories through dialogue in a way that strongly reminded Hector of Papa’s own storytelling tactics.

  But the stories Hector had read so far didn’t arc. They read as incomplete; lacking a resolution. Hector wondered if the stories he had just read were written before or after Hannah had been forced by her pregnancy to forego her medication—whatever edge-dulling, psychiatric pharmaceuticals the sawbones had prescribed for her. The question ate at him.

  Hem would have admired Hannah’s stories, too, Hector thought. And Hem would have been crazy for Hannah. Hem would be calling the comely Scot “Daughter” and bestowing her nicknames by now.

  Hem would be running Mary crazy by insisting Hannah move in with them—hell, become their constant traveling companion, just as Ernest had done with other young women nearer his own end.

  But in becoming Hem’s muse, Hannah’s own writing would likely suffer or even be subsumed, just as happened with Pauline and her journalism.

  As Hem had tried disastrously to do with Martha.

  As Hem had done with Mary and her own nascent but admittedly undistinguished career in journalism.

  He realized he’d stopped reading Hannah’s short stories at some point and begun thinking about Hannah in a very particular way. He was thinking about her golden good looks; the haunted, candid blue eyes that seemed to hide so little, but that was a delusion—he sensed layers and layers within the young Scot…undertows and passions of which she was unaware. He thought of Hem’s famous metaphor for his writing technique, the so-called iceberg principle, in which only an eighth of the surface is above water. Hannah struck Hector a bit like that—a vast, uncharted country to be explored by some intrepid wanderer with a poet’s tongue who could send back worthy dispatches of what he found.

  So, there it was: Hector wanted Hannah.

  Equally unbidden, the whole scenario reminded him of Brinke Devlin. Brinke had been Hector’s one-and-only lover/writer; the only fellow author in any sense in that long line of women who’d shared Hector’s bed.

  Hannah? Well, there was maybe symmetry in this.

  Brinke had come to Hector in his wild, tyro writer days. Brinke had shaped Hector, given him focus and pushed him in the direction of becoming a crime novelist.

  Now, with many more years behind than in front of him, feeling increasingly like the crime novels he was still writing were becoming passé, well, here was Hannah: another vibrant, attractive young fiction writer—one of the new breed.

  In 1958, after all that mess in Tennessee that bought him constant FBI attention, Hector had been toying with shifting direction in a profound way. Even then, “Hector Lassiter,” that tiresome public commodity, was starting to feel like a straightjacket. Hector had increasingly flirted with simply walking away from it all in recent years. Maybe instead endeavor to become that writer he’d set out to be in Paris in the 1920s. But his reconciliation with Hem in early 1959, and things spiraling out of that, derailed his plans.

  But now? Hell, his own persona was even more the albatross.

  The FBI was always on his heels—fucking tiresome and claustrophobic, that.

  And Hector truly sensed the reading public’s interest was increasingly moving away from the kinds of books associated with his outsized, macho byline.

  Becky the scholar’s words echoed in his head: The novel is dead.

  If he let himself fall for Hannah, if he took her away from this wastrel, boozing, loser husband of hers, Hector sensed he’d get a book out of it, at the very least…a very different novel than he might otherwise write. Hannah might be the gateway to that long deferred self-reinvention he’d once envisioned for himself.

  And Jesus, wasn’t that a terrible thought? Using Hannah like that?

  Hector remembered what Scott Fitzgerald said about Hem: that Ernest always needed a new wife to prime the pump of inspiration for each new novel.

  Still, undeniably, Hector felt this surge of inspiration now, thinking of Hannah—thinking of bringing her into his life. She could be his muse and he could be her mentor—that would be a fair exchange, in a sense. Muse/mentor—they didn’t have to be mutually exclusive…did they?

  Sparked by the tension driving that question, Hector began to compose his own Hemingway short story.

  ***

  It was dusk. In Creedy’s mind, he was now officially off the clock.

  He slipped off his jacket, but still wearing his tie, still wearing his shoes, he sat down in front of his portable typewriter to commence his night’s writing. These were the hours he lived for.

  Typical: He was having trouble getting started. It was always like this at first. He sensed many writers—writers like Hemingway and Lassiter, say—pushed themselves to have experiences to feed their fiction. They sought out danger and intense aesthetic experiences to have something to write about. Creedy had come to believe he came at the craft from the other direction—the harder direction, which, in his mind, made him more the artist.

  Creedy pushed himself to write, and in doing so found experience. Hell, he could never really use his own life and experiences for his fiction, not really. His own life was so crowded with intrigue and bombast—much of it grotesque and bizarre—that he could never really make sense of it or figure out how to use it in commercial fiction.

  And other writers, like Hemingway and Lassiter, well, they were the men they were, and in Hemingway’s case, all his men in his stories and novels were the same man…that is to say, a version of Hemingway. And Lassiter? Lassiter had actually begun to use himself as a character in his own books.

  But Creedy had played so many roles in his blood-and-thunder life, adopted so many guises and selectively shown calculated profiles to so many different masters, he no longer knew what his own core was—wasn’t sure he owned a center. He sometimes saw himself as one of those Russian nesting dolls: Pop off Stalin’s head and inside is Lenin. Creedy had to drill down deep beneath his various espionage guises to try and fasten onto a fixed point that would carry each novel.

  He’d once let himself sample alcohol to try and fire his muse…maybe gain access to his subconscious through drink the way Byron and others claimed to through drugs or absinthe.

  The outcome horrified and unsettled Creedy. The resulting pages were a riot of shrill, self-contradicting voices; a cacophony of characters that so disturbed him, Creedy actually put writing aside for several months and deprived his readers their favorite author’s voice.

  Eventually, he struck on a different tactic. He’d regularly survey the top-sellers in his genre and then synthesize a narrative voice that combined what he perceived to be the most sellable aspects of each of the other writers’ works.

  If there was a certain falsity in doing that, Creedy trusted the ingenious conception behind each of his published works—his implicit genius as a writer—redeemed and elevated his resulting manuscripts.

  Each novel was a part of a larger conce
ption that when available, whole, to his readership, and to the works’ creator, would represent an undeniable achievement: nothing less than one of the great literary legacies of the twentieth century. A century that Creedy, as writer and spy, had helped to shape. He made history. In time, Creedy assured himself, his deserved position in the western canon would be secure. He was worthy.

  His phone rang. Reluctantly, Creedy picked it up. “Report.”

  The young agent, rather breathless sounding, said, “Sir, all the listening devices in the Topping House have gone dead!”

  Creedy racked the receiver.

  Ironically, the scene Creedy had been sculpting for his new thriller was eerily similar to what was unfolding now here in Idaho: two crafty and seasoned intelligence officers angling to outscheme one another.

  This stuff with Lassiter was potentially grist for Creedy’s fiction.

  Except Creedy had to go out now and really live that scene—to do Hoover’s fucking bidding.

  More and more these days, Creedy just wanted to stay in his chair, writing.

  Creedy stared at his typewriter, realizing he was blocked.

  He slammed his fist down on his desk and muttered, “Fucking Lassiter….”

  “Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do with it.”

  — Maxwell Perkins

  23

  PUPIL

  Mary handed Hector his coffee. She said, “Are you sure it’s the best thing, you leaving for the airport now, Lasso? You said there are things going on…bad things.”

  Hector nodded. “Sure, but it all seems directed at me…. Well, and Hannah a bit, too. You’ll be fine here, I think. And I won’t be too long away.” He couldn’t make eye contact with Mary. He kept thinking about her boasting having shot Hem. He didn’t believe it anymore, or he didn’t think he did, but just the thought she’d make the claim….

  Hector slipped a copy of the document room key from his pocket. He put the duplicate key on the shelf above the kitchen counter, just where Hem had found it that bloody morning. Hector felt like twisting the knife, just a little. But Mary didn’t show any reaction if she even got Hector’s implication in hiding the key in plain sight there. And putting it there would certainly make the task easier for Paulson, or Creedy, if they meant to get at the now-salted Hemingway manuscripts…to get at Hector’s new faux Hemingway short story, for instance.