Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Hemingway shouldered past him, mounted the boarding ladder; turned. “Don’t get ideas about trying to arrange some kind of accident for me, Agent,” Hemingway yelled. “Anything odd happens to me, this information will go to people even more dangerous than me. I can think of one man in particular who would really know how to use it to most devastating effect.”

  Hemingway gave Creedy his trademark grin, relishing the look on the G-Man’s face.

  He said, “I’ll always remember you looking this way, Creedy.”

  Creedy said, “Mr. Hoover won’t forget this, either, asshole.”

  That wiped the smile off Hemingway’s face.

  “No artist tolerates reality.”

  — Nietzsche

  24

  HEM’S ROOMS

  Richard exploited Mary’s sweet-tooth: brought her a box of chocolate-covered cherries provided by the man that laid the widow out flat.

  Thanks God for that: Despite the man’s assurances Mary wouldn’t remember her confession—that mess with the shotgun—Richard still felt uneasy in her presence.

  And that was the other thing—he’d gotten Mary’s confession, but since she wouldn’t remember and would likely deny it all…well, Richard’s bombshell “exclusive” was problematic. He kept thinking he was going to have drag it out of her again without the man’s potions.

  And that still didn’t address the matter of Hector Lassiter having heard Mary’s confession, too.

  As Richard was checking to make sure Mary was really asleep in her chair, he heard a crash in the kitchen. He followed the sound and found Mary’s Mexican maid crumpled on the floor. The woman had snuck two or three chocolates for herself. Silly bitch still had a chocolate moustache as she lay there, snoring heavily into the floor tiles.

  The professor wrestled the maid into a kitchen chair; left her head resting on the table. He wiped off the chocolate stains around her mouth. Running some water to wet the rag he used to clean her up, Richard saw the key on the counter above the sink—the same place the old bitch had left the key Papa had used to get at his guns, by Mary’s own account.

  Richard snatched up the key and crept down to the storage room and turned on the lights.

  My God—all those shelves and pigeonholes full of letters…manuscripts and papers.

  All of it in Papa’s distinctive hand, or from his famous typewriter.

  Richard began to dig through it all, finding most of it to be various working versions of A Moveable Feast.

  But he also found a letter or two that contained a paragraph here or there that revealed some new biographical insight about Hem — stuff any of his peers would give both balls to possess.

  Richard shoved the letters down the front of his shirt. He followed those with a few handwritten pages of familiar passages from Feast. Stuff that was duplicated in other versions stored here and so probably would never be missed.

  There was nothing in any of those pages for his scholarship, but it was Hemingway’s handwriting.

  And, anyway, if he ever needed the money, the stuff could be sold for serious cash to well-heeled Hemingway collectors through New York rare-book dealers and auction houses.

  Then Richard saw it: sitting there, glowing in a shaft of light through the storeroom window—like some heavenly beam cast down upon it for his benefit. Richard swallowed hard: This was a moment. He could feel it.

  There was a typed short story resting next to Hem’s typewriter.

  The title was unfamiliar to the professor. Holy God!

  Richard sat down in the chair set before the typewriter—forgetting for the moment that Hem famously wrote and typed standing up. He lifted the sheaf of paper there. Yes, there was no doubt—this was an unknown Hemingway short story!

  This was bigger than Mary’s confession, in its way.

  He read the story straight through—gripped by the clear, beautifully spare Hemingway prose. He savored the uncharacteristically knowing, subtle shading-in of the female character who centered the short story—a young female writer in thrall to an elder, seasoned novelist. In that, it reminded Richard a little of James’ “The Lesson of the Master.” He finished the story, sitting there stunned and tingling:

  Accomplished…moving…it was vintage Hemingway.

  Richard chewed his lip a long time. He couldn’t help himself: He took the manuscript along with a few mores pages of Feast and some letters and ran up the stairs to hide them in his rental car.

  When he returned, Richard locked up the storeroom and replaced the key on the counter. He retrieved the box of tainted treats and walked down to the Wood River. He tossed the box into the rippling current.

  Then Richard stalked back up the hill, intent upon trying to rouse Mary. He’d say something like, “Should I call a doctor, Mary? You seem to have fainted….”

  As he mulled his cover strategies, his thoughts returned to the Hemingway short story. He couldn’t wait to be alone—to read the story again and study it.

  ***

  Hector and Jimmy were standing among the pine-tree dense slope of a foothill above the Topping House. The sun was high overhead; a pair of snakes slithered in the high grass. Jimmy got out a fresh cigarette, and Hector lit it with his Zippo.

  Hector hated running surveillance. If he was alone, he could at least have brought a notebook and done some writing, but with Jimmy along, well, that would have been rude. Jimmy, the retired cop, seemed more resigned to watching the Topping House. Although it was a staple of his former job, after about an hour standing in the cold woods, Jimmy had said, “This is a part of the work I truly don’t miss.”

  Hector said, “I’m a little concerned about Paulson being able to snoop around in there with Mary and her servant in the place. Unless he drugged her again, I don’t see how he can—”

  Jimmy passed Hector the binoculars. “Your boy’s coming out again now—his arms are full of paper this time.”

  Yes, Richard had gone for it, after all. That really raised the question what had happened to Mary to allow this theft. And where was Richard headed with all this stuff? Maybe back to Creedy? And all the papers he was hauling—Richard had truly gone for broke…taken much more than just Hector’s plants, goddamn it. He never envisioned the scholar being this brazen in his theft—it was like grave robbing. Christ, he was going to have to take it all back before it fell into Creedy’s hands…or the goddamn collectors’ market.

  Hector said, “I’ve got to go—gotta tail this egghead and take back what he took beyond what I intended. You get back in the house, Jimmy. Make sure he hasn’t done something unpleasant to the women in there.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Looks like your gambit with the faked short story might be playing out—too well, maybe, but still — yet it doesn’t solve the other problem. By that I mean the damage the little widow is doing your friend’s legacy with her ‘editing.’”

  “One battle at a time,” Hector said. “Hell, I haven’t got a single good strategy for dealing with the Mary dilemma. Not yet.”

  Jimmy said, “The colleen, she know about your suspicions regarding her husband?”

  “Christ, no,” Hector said. “I think Hannah doesn’t know what her husband is up to, either. Doesn’t know he’s in league with the Bureau.”

  “Jay-sus,” Jimmy said, huffing as they set off down the hill toward the house and Hector’s hidden Bel Air.

  Hector nodded. “It’s a mess, for sure.”

  Jimmy winked and blew smoke. “Goes without saying, but me being me, I’ll say it anyway, Hector: If Hannah finds out what you’re keeping from her, that you’re actively conspiring against her husband…?”

  “Yeah,” Hector said. “I know.” He got out his car keys and jingled them. “I need you to hold down the concrete fort here, buddy.”

  ***

  It was 4 p.m. and there had been no phone call from Richard. Hannah had been shocked to hear Richard had returned, without giving her word, to visit Mary earlier in the day. And now he’d fled ba
ck to Boise with still no word. Hannah knew of no likely hotel to call to ask after him; nobody would answer the phone at the university at this hour.

  Earlier, she shared a late lunch with Hector and the retired cop, Hanrahan, in the Sun Valley Lodge’s restaurant—a quick bite before returning to the Topping House. There had been no cadre of academics chinning themselves on their vocabularies and gorging on bullshit, metatextual gossip.

  No red-faced man with a widow’s peak stalking her, or, at least she didn’t spot him if he was there.

  Perhaps the whole rotten lot of them had stayed over in Boise.

  Still, Richard owed Hannah a phone call at the very least. But she was actually glad for the distance; savoring the time alone to soak it all up. She had seen Hector Lassiter up close and personal now. He represented a kind of model for a generation of male writers who tried to shape themselves in Hector and Hem’s images…charismatic men of action whose swagger and bluster concealed bookish, intellectual qualities such men’s men couldn’t quite countenance in themselves. Hannah found that endearing…very appealing, in its way.

  Richard has asked her which Hemingway wife she would have wanted to be. She still resisted the notion that she would ever have fallen into that trap Hem’s other women had: drawn in by fame and then kow-towing to Hem’s self-centeredness.

  No, marrying Papa meant becoming a kind of satellite—eclipsed and gripped in the great man’s greater gravity and outsized public persona.

  Maybe it was the same being one of Hector Lassiter’s women….

  Mary had stopped in after Hector left. Mary said she intended to sever her relationship with Richard—his drunkenness was too great a threat to the quality of their book together. But, Mary added, perhaps if Hannah would definitely and contractually consent to co-write the book with Richard, well, Mary might relent… “Time a woman wrote a book about a Hemingway,” Mary said.

  Despite the fact Hector had cautioned her earlier, Hannah provisionally accepted. “But,” she said, “you’ll have to be the one to convince Richard I should help him, Mary. He’ll be furious, I expect.”

  “Richard doesn’t have the luxury of choice. It’s my life after all,” Mary had said. “That makes it my book. If he balks, you’ll write it and it will be our book, Hannah.”

  Hannah was still trying to figure out how she would tell Hector she was briefly sidestepping into nonfiction writing. After all, Hector had almost snarled at her when she’d mentioned Mary’s offer to have Hannah write her autobiography. Hector’s visceral reaction still had Hannah second-guessing her agreement to take Mary up on her offer.

  Did the strategic decision to write this book about Mary really represent some terrible misstep, as Hector insisted?

  Before he’d left, she’d tried to broach the subject with Hector again, and the crime novelist—the former Black Mask Magazine pulp writer—had surprised Hannah by invoking some obscure line from William Blake: “If you, who are organized by Divine Providence for spiritual communion, refuse, and bury your talent in the earth, even though you should want natural bread, sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to eternity…You will be called the base Judas who betrayed his friend!”

  Hannah had furrowed her brow at that, said, “That’s very…daunting.”

  Hector had just smiled and winked. “Nah: They’re just good words to keep a fiction writer honest.”

  Now Hannah picked up an old paperback crime novel by Hector but found her mind was still racing too fast to concentrate on it.

  Jimmy was downstairs with Mary. Hector had headed back to the lodge to look for someone who might be staying there, he said. When she pressed him for the identity of the person he was searching for, Hector was vague: “Just a guy from the old days. Thought I might have seen him in the lodge a few days ago. If he is here in the mix, it would explain a lot of the strange things going on here, darlin’.”

  She lay there for a long time, her back throbbing, unable to find a comfortable position.

  Her thoughts kept returning to Hector Lassiter. Hannah struggled up and bit her lip. Set in her mind, she crept into Hector’s empty room.

  Hector had left his leather valise there by his own typewriter.

  Wetting her lips, Hannah carefully slid a thick sheaf of manuscript pages from the leather saddlebag.

  She turned the first few pages and began reading a manuscript Hector had titled, Toros & Torsos. She was surprised to see that the story was about Hector. Hector was writing about himself in third-person—using his real name and some biographical facts about himself. And Hemingway was also a character in the book.

  Hannah thought perhaps it was a memoir, but as she read on, it became clear that Hector intended that the manuscript be read as a novel.

  She thought of what Mary had said about living as an artist and thought Hector must represent an extreme example. Still, the notion of blending one’s life with one’s work in such a way fascinated Hannah. And Hector’s prose? It transcended any notions of genre writing she’d ever indulged. She thought Hector had the chops and reach to be a literary writer if he set his mind to the task.

  Hannah felt guilty about sneaking looks at Hector’s draft. She stacked the pages neatly and returned them to their leather bag. She sat down with a notepad and the stacks of her own short stories in the order that Hector had arranged and then numbered them. She had some time now—before she’d have to put aside her own fiction to help craft Mary’s biography.

  Using Hector’s portable typewriter, Hannah set about writing the “connective tissues” that Hector—her new teacher as she’d already come to think of him—had called for to make her stories into the start of a novel.

  “You will recall that in my conference recently with the President, he indicated that some message had been sent to him, the President, by Hemingway through a mutual friend….”

  — J. Edgar Hoover

  CREEDY:

  AFRICA, 1954

  Agent Creedy said, trying to modulate his voice, “I’m at the hotel, yes, sir. In the bush, and flat as it is out here, it’s hard to run surveillance as we think of it back home.”

  Donovan Creedy had been playing a double game for some time.

  When Hoover found out in ’fifty-one, he’d only allowed Creedy to continue his CIA affiliations and yet maintain Bureau status because Creedy’s highly-idiosyncratic and aggressive racial objectives coincided with his own.

  And his FBI status made Creedy a valuable commodity in the eyes of his CIA handlers.

  “Let’s take some of these excuses and turn them into some cheerful action directed at realizing my desires, Agent,” the Director said, fuming. “Let’s do some things consistent with enforcing my will, Agent Creedy. I want to see you engaged in your efforts for me again, like old days.”

  “Yes, sir. I will do that, sir.” Creedy thought, Duplicitous cocksucker.

  “The plane went down near Murchinson Falls,” the Director said. “It struck a telegraph line, it’s believed, mangling the prop, and sending the plane crashing amid a herd of elephants. On board were Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway, and their pilot, a man named Marsh. There were some initial distress signals from the pilot we’ve successfully ordered ignored by domestic craft…done via channels, of course. Cut-outs.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “A passing commercial liner spotted the wreckage,” the Director continued. “The liner saw no sign of survivors.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Faggot cocksucker. Creedy managed, “No, I don’t, sir.”

  “Exactly. The world is already coming to grips with the probable fact of Hemingway’s death,” the Director said. “We have a rare opportunity here to neutralize forever the Hemingway threat. I want you to confirm that death. If he isn’t post-mortem, then help Mr. Hemingway along. Understood?”

  “Clearly.” Damn it: He didn’t have time for this; he was in a delicate final stage of
an operation to kill another man for the Agency—one threatening to trigger an African independence movement that could easily spread wide, jeopardizing colonial interests across the continent and erasing established white rule.

  Creedy had spent months planning the operation and wanted—no, he needed to be there to see it all went as plotted. And he wanted to see—wanted to see that evil black devil fall.

  The Director said, “You better move then, Agent Creedy. I’m told Africa is a very big place. I’d be peeved if this didn’t go to my plans. So peeved in fact, I might cease to turn a blind eye to your other, shall we say, domestic government entanglements. Understood?”

  Creedy said tightly, “Yes.”

  “Succeed, Agent Creedy.”

  ***

  The agent held tightly to the bottom of his seat and the windshield frame of the bush Jeep as his driver bounced along the rutted road. All the impacts to his spine and tailbone had Creedy convinced he’d be an inch shorter when he climbed out of the Jeep.

  It had all gone to hell plenty fast enough: Creedy had reached the first crash site—nearly being trampled by elephants in the process—only to learn that the Hemingways and their pilot had walked away from the downed plane with minor injuries.

  After an uneasy night camped out among all those elephants, the crash victims had waved down a passing water craft—the actual boat used in The African Queen—and been taken on to Butiaba. Only Hemingway….

  Creedy figured he’d lost his chance to “help” Hemingway along to his grave, but then reconsidered. Emboldened, and still angered to be distracted from his larger, primary objective to kill Jomo Kenyatta in his prison cell, Creedy had contacted one of his associates, a man named Stapleton, and arranged for him to disguise himself as a mechanic with an eye to “fixing” Hemingway’s next aircraft.

  Only Ernest Hemingway could go down in back-to-back plane crashes and not raise eyebrows, Creedy figured: It all seemed consistent with Hemingway’s larger-than-life persona.