Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  He smiled sadly at her, then looked out at the crowd. The audience fell into a hushed silence as he gathered himself for a moment. Then Hector began to speak:

  “What truly killed my friend, Ernest Hemingway? Who really killed Hem, and cost us more books—some of which might have equaled those first two early great novels?”

  Hector shrugged. “It wasn’t just a strain of depression that runs through the Hemingway family. It wasn’t just Hem’s failing health and his body’s inability to endure and engage in the athletic endeavors that fed Hem’s muse, though all of these played a role to great or lesser degree.”

  Hector gripped the corners of his lectern in his big hands…heard a firmness settling into his voice. He crossed one leg behind the other at the ankles, casually, starting to settle into a kind of serenity of certainty that he held the room in his hand and knew just the words and narrative line he wanted to follow—it was like writing when the writing went very well.

  Pausing for effect, searching rapt scholars’ faces, Hector said, “My friend Hem was killed by an organization, at least in part. He was, in a sense, killed by a man’s obsession. History, it’s been said, is made at night. Historical events and watershed moments that bind us as people are too often symptomatic of deeper, darker machinations hatched by conspiring men and devious cabals with impossible-to-fathom aims. Destinies are realized or derailed by men who have bizarre but passionately held beliefs. These men, these organizations of men, often spin against the drive of the angels of their better natures, reassuring themselves that their peculiar ends justify the blackest and bloodiest of means.”

  Hector glanced at Creedy, who was staring back at him now, hateful and his mouth hanging open. Hector winked at Creedy, some part of him still waiting to feel that burn and then hear the lagging crack of the bullet that had already buried itself in his heart or head.

  Still, Hector pressed on: “For a very long time,” he said, mostly to Patricia, “there’s been a war waged against our greatest writers—a campaign to silence and to intimidate men and women of letters. You academics, so focused on the works of writers, have been blind to this war. Tonight, I’m going to lift the veil for you. I’m going to give you new context for Hem’s final, fatal act. I’m going to tell you what the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the direction of John Edgar Hoover, has done and continues to do: monitoring and spying on America’s novelists and poets. Tapping our phones and opening our mail. Having us shadowed…. People thought Hem was paranoid because he said he was being hounded by the FBI. The fact is, Hem was goddamn right.”

  It was a calamitous admission—his life wouldn’t be worth spit after this day, he knew. The FBI would settle for nothing less than attempting to destroy Hector Lassiter.

  But then Hector had some notions along those lines himself.

  And his audience for this life-changing speech? It was a crazy mix: scholars who would spend careers trying to add his comments and allegations to the historic record and men of secrets who’d be just as dogged in their efforts to have those same comments suppressed and stricken.

  He soldiered on.

  ***

  Afterward, Creedy, red-faced, stalked up to Hector. Scholars were swarming around Hector, imploring him for further details, slapping his back and offering to buy him drinks.

  Opening and closing his fists, his jaws tight, Creedy snarled, “You’ve now thrown down the last gauntlet, Lassiter. The Director will make your life a living hell.” Creedy smiled meanly. “I mean, for as long as you remain alive.”

  Hector swallowed hard but managed a grin. He sensed Patricia hovering behind him. Hector said, “Bring it on, cocksucker. Know this—I’ll give as good or better than I get, Creedy. And I swear to God, I’ll see you dead long before me.”

  “This isn’t nearly over,” Creedy said.

  Hector thought about the scrap of paper Hannah had shown him and the address written there he had committed to memory. He reached over and tousled Creedy’s immaculate hair. “Got that right, pal.”

  ***

  It was late afternoon and raining. Creedy was intent upon setting down early before his typewriter. Perhaps he’d write an extra couple thousand words tonight. He felt in the mood. After the Lassiter debacle he needed to do this thing he loved, this thing where he could most fully shape people and the world to his own whims…needed to flush this dreadful day from his mind by losing himself in the words.

  Creedy hesitated, his hand still on the doorknob. Hector Lassiter was sitting on the foot of his bed, his ancient Peacemaker pointed at Creedy’s belly.

  “Not exactly an effective weapon for a stealthy killing in a busy hotel, Lassiter.”

  Hector shrugged. “As you’ll note from my speech, me and subtle don’t often cozy up, Creedy. Not off the page, anyway. After all you’ve done to Hem, all you’re still trying to do, I am sorely tempted to blow you away right now, consequences be damned.”

  Creedy wet his lips, staring at the big old Colt. “Where’d you get that cannon, anyway?”

  “A long story unto itself. But suffice it to say, from another writer. I was just a kid. Come in, Don. Take a load off. I’ve already poured you a drink. We have other things to talk about.”

  The FBI agent figured Lassiter had been waiting for a good while—Creedy’s ashtray contained the stubbed-out butts of half a dozen Pall Mall cigarettes. Creedy eyed the cigarette butts, thinking he might yet find some use for those one day.

  After he locked the door behind himself at Hector’s instruction, Creedy sat down on the edge of the bureau opposite the bed.

  “It’s over, Creedy. I’ve now pointed all those academics at you regarding your harassment of Hem. They’ll start digging. Find confirmation…fill biographies with facts about the Bureau’s war against Hem. And more importantly, I’ve seeded Hem’s papers with my own forgeries. My stuff convinced Paulson well enough he took it to be Hem’s. The thing you couldn’t do, I did. I wrote faux-Hemingway that convinces. But I’ve also laid traps in those plants—complex hidden codes and anagrams—things that can be used to prove their falsity.”

  That last was an exaggeration. Hector had intended to bury an encrypted message in his story, one claiming authorship, but using those needed letters to start each sentence to form that hidden message was too constrictive and Hector had gotten caught up in the writing…. He’d instead just focused on crafting a bloody great short story.

  Hector said, “I’ve beaten you on that front, Donnie. All the way, and for keeps. Screw around with Hem’s papers now, and it’ll blow up in your face, and in J. Edgar’s.” Hector handed the man a glass of whisky. Hector tapped his glass against Creedy’s and said, “To routs and reunions…even the unwanted ones of the latter.”

  He watched Creedy sip, then smack his lips. “Top-shelf stuff,” the FBI agent said.

  “Some things you don’t skimp on,” Hector said. “I’ve been doing some digging on your history, Donovan. I’m thinking hard about making you my hobby, just like you made destroying Hem your project. Just want you to know, pal, I’ll be watching you from now on. You look over your shoulder, often, and you try to stay far clear of my path, because I’ve made it a personal goal to see you worse than dead if you ever again try to tamper with Hem and his legacy.”

  Donovan sipped more whisky, said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I want that valise I’ve decided you stole back in ’twenty-two, Donovan,” Hector said. “Tell me, did you do that at Hoover’s direction? Does this gambit, whatever it is, extend that far back?”

  “‘Gambit’ hardly does it justice, Lassiter.” Creedy stared at his drink now, frowned. He licked his lips. He looked a tad suspicious. He pressed his fingers to his lips, as if testing sensation.

  Watching him, Hector went for a change-up: “This piece of Hem’s you stole, this sketch about me and Hem on Christmas Eve, did you put that stuff in about Victoria? Did you…I don’t know, know Victoria in some way? How’d you know
that stuff about her and, well, call it her procedure?”

  “I did add that stuff in,” Creedy said. He seemed reluctant to talk, but unable to help himself. Creedy could hear this manic edge in his own voice; he despised it. “The Director wants to discredit Hemingway by planting materials in Papa’s posthuma. I figured I could take advantage of that operation to slip in an item here or there that would hurt you, too.”

  “Why on earth would you want to do that to me, Donovan?”

  Creedy’s face grew dark. “Because that baby you helped her abort was mine, Lassiter. Victoria was mine until you stole her away from me. Then you helped her kill my child.”

  Hector was pole-armed. Donovan said, “And I don’t know why I just told you that.”

  The FBI agent held his drink up to his nose; turned the glass in the light. He said, “You drugged me.”

  Still reeling, Hector fished the now empty vial from his pocket, held it up where Creedy could see. “Yeah, I did,” he said distractedly, still thinking of Victoria. “Dosed you with your own stuff, whatever the hell it is. Didn’t know how much to use, so you got it all. Is that a bad thing?”

  Creedy nearly came off the bed, the Colt pointed at him be damned: Jesus, in volume, the stuff had been known to cause irreversible brain damage. Strange visions that might be months or years manifesting themselves. The goddamn stuff was like a time bomb in your head. Creedy began spewing profanity at Hector—almost lunged at him until Hector pressed his gun to Creedy’s sweat-beaded forehead.

  After a time, Creedy settled down and Hector said, “Well, it hardly matters what the stuff does to you in the end as I mean to destroy you and Hoover now, whatever it takes. And you know, that brew hit Mary so slowly, I figured maybe a larger dose would loosen your lips faster. Seems I was right.”

  Donovan sneered. Unable to check himself, he said drunkenly, “That speech of yours today—pathetic. You’ve only glimpsed the barest tip of the iceberg. You still know nearly nothing. I’ve already destroyed you and your world, Lassiter. Going back to the 1920s, the Bureau has been infiltrating writers’ groups. Putting a hand in where we could. Over the years our techniques and tactics have broadened, deepened. Become more subtle and potent. Now we’re nearly in position to shape and ultimately discredit creative artists at will. Hemingway and Steinbeck and others like you might have dominated the first half of our century, but I’ll control the second. The Hemingways and Lassiters of tomorrow are being shaped and twisted by me, and others of my kind. The Papas and Hectors of tomorrow are getting their artistic visions from LSD and mescaline we cook up in our labs, Lassiter. And their work is suffering, becoming fragmented…disjointed. These budding writers don’t even know the truth—that I’m their muse.”

  Hector said, “You truly are insane. Even it if is so, what would you get out of it? Why would you help with all that? Such as you are, you’re a writer yourself.”

  Creedy said thickly, “That’s it, exactly! When the American novel descends into postmodern gibberish and formless prose experiments informed by deconstruction, think how my stuff with its plot and pace and clear language will be devoured by the masses. My talent will finally be recognized. I’ll be the writer everyone reads.” A sneer: “And you? You’ll be more irrelevant than you’re already fast becoming, Lassiter. Using yourself as your own character in your books—chasing postmodernism. Hell, you’re letting yourself be influenced by all these doped up young turks I control. So you see, clearly, I’ve already won.”

  Hector knotted his hands in Creedy’s hair. Hector said, “If this is the same stuff you gave Mary, then I’m guessing you won’t even remember much of this session of ours after you took that drink. But maybe you will, or parts of it, anyhow. So listen good: If I don’t wind up killing you in the next few minutes, you son of a bitch, well, I am going to make you my mission now, Creedy. I’m going stalk and hunt and haunt you into the ground, just like you did Hem.”

  His temper got the better of Hector then. Hector holstered his Colt and hefted his roll of nickels. He tugged a pillowcase loose and wrapped it once around his hand. Then he began beating the FBI agent until the sheets were bloody.

  Creedy whimpered until he finally collapsed, unconscious. Hector tried to shake him awake—he wanted to ask about the whereabouts of his other “stolen” manuscripts…the whereabouts of Hem’s long-lost writings. But he’d cheated himself of the opportunity. Even at age sixty-five, Hector didn’t own his anger; it still too often owned him. Hell, his temper seemed to be growing shorter along with time.

  He couldn’t rouse the son of a bitch. Hector began to wonder if maybe he might not have killed Creedy. Then he decided maybe he should go ahead and do just that, fast-like.

  Hector again pressed his Peacemaker to Creedy’s forehead, then cursed and gently lowered the hammer and holstered his gun. He couldn’t do that to an unconscious man. Not even this man.

  Hector left the FBI agent on his hotel bed, breathing raggedly and drooling blood.

  Hell, maybe he had fatally overdosed Creedy. Hector rather hoped so.

  As he stood there, everything Creedy said about Hoover’s long-range, insane plan to destroy authors and artists gnawed at Hector.

  Crazy as it was, it gave strange, potential context to some other long-lingering mysteries that had troubled Hector’s picaresque life since Paris and the 1920s.

  Swarmed by Creedy’s black, grandiose claims, Hector closed the hotel room door; stepping out into the harsh Idaho sunlight.

  Hector saw shadows everywhere he looked. Now it was about more than his own legacy; about more even than preserving Hem’s long game.

  Now it was a war to save his craft; a war against an enemy Hector couldn’t yet figure out how to point a gun at.

  “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is…an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, and then a master, and then it becomes a tyrant.”

  — Winston Churchill

  32

  BLOCKED

  The wind pushed around their hair as Hannah drove the back roads through the Sawtooths’ foothills—insanely priced houses for sale…mansions under construction.

  “What’s going to happen, Richard?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a wreck. You need to get help; go into treatment for the alcohol. It’s not working on any level, ya know that, aye?”

  She searched Richard’s eyes in stolen glances, keeping a skittish eye on the weaving, sometimes dipping and sometimes climbing road.

  Richard Paulson smiled sadly and shrugged. “It’s not coming like it used to. You know that description of Hemingway’s about Scott Fitzgerald losing the words? He compared Scott to a butterfly who started thinking about the mechanics of flight and then could no longer fly. Like the old tale about the centipede thinking about how it walks and losing the ability. It goes like that. Technically, I know what to write. It’s clean, it communicates its message. But there’s no resonance. The poetry is gone. Even just the ability to turn a nice phrase here and there. Gone. Gone.”

  Hannah took a deep breath. From what she’d read of Richard’s works, she wasn’t sure “poetry” had ever been there. She said, “How long gone?”

  “Don’t even know anymore. Years, I guess.”

  “You need to write without the alcohol.”

  “Jesus, it’s even worse then. The Paris book — the one you love, the one they all love? I wrote it drunk. I can only write with drink.”

  “You’re a teacher, too. Focus on that.”

  “But I’m a writer, in my head. It’s how I think of myself, Hannah. I’m a writer.”

  His beard was coming in so white. He looked a decade older to Hannah. Looked older than Hector Lassiter, who had at least a couple of decades on Richard. Remembering Hector reminded her of Creedy and that vial. But it didn’t seem the time to pursue any of that. Hector’s cautions on that front still had her cowed. Instead, she asked:

  “What are you going to do, Richard?”


  He stared at his hands. They looked like green lizard claws now. “Keep writing.”

  “Writing this book?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  They’d found their way back to the fringes of Ketchum.

  She reached over and squeezed Paulson’s hand. She thought of Richard’s metaphors for his inability to write. “Richard, please please please, just stop thinking about it. Stop being that self-reflective bug,” Hannah said. “Just write. Just write.”

  “You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”

  — Edward Abbey

  33

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING

  Hannah found Hector in his room at the lodge.

  Hector turned down the radio on Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and weighed the canister of film in his bruised hand. “I hope you came here expecting a lecture, honey, because you’re going to get one.”

  “It was a risk and it was crazy, aye,” Hannah said, studying Hector’s now-battered right hand. “But I was just so mad and frustrated. And at least now we have a picture of the man.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken that chance,” Hector said. “And now you’ve ratcheted things up. Despite the near-confrontations you had with him, before you did this we could all just sort of go along pretending it all wasn’t happening. We could bide our time to pick the best moment to go at this. Now you’ve raised the stakes. It was a pretty reckless provocation. Hard to predict how this son of a bitch might react.”

  Hannah said, “What would you have done? Something just like this I’ll bet.”