Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “That’s academic, now,” Hector said. God, that’s the last thing this pretty young thing needed—some new penchant for trying to live like Hector. He was starting again to think pursuing his attraction to Hannah—or indulging hers for him—would be a disaster for both of them. Still, he couldn’t quite put the thought out of his head. Goddamn indecision carried its own warning, didn’t it? Hector shook his head. Or maybe not….

  He said, “And, frankly, a lot of old gone friends got themselves in terrible fixes or even killed asking themselves ‘What would Hector do?’” He stroked Hannah’s hair behind her ear and dropped the film canister in his pocket. “Well, what I’ll do now is I’ll head down to Ketchum. Find someone to develop this roll of film.”

  “Could you use some company? I hope so.”

  Hector said, “What about Dick? Where’s he now? Hiding in the dark and guzzling coffee in some quiet place, I hope?”

  “Off to Mary’s.” She couldn’t yet tell him the rest: that Richard was unwittingly going to Mary’s to be fired by the widow. She didn’t want to be alone around Richard when he returned. She also didn’t want to be alone thinking about how Richard might take his dismissal. And Hector was such an enticing distraction….

  Hector said, “That’s very bad strategy, too, particularly in his sorry condition.” And Hector figured that meant the scholar would almost certainly return to his pregnant wife freshly drunk. And Mary—Richard might try and drug her again. But, thank God, Jimmy was there to run interference on all that.

  Hector said, “You’ll certainly be safer with me than here alone after that camera stunt.”

  Hector lifted his sports jacket from the bed, revealing his gun. He pulled out a soft brown leather holster and slid its straps over both shoulders. He holstered his old, long-barreled sixshooter—something that looked to Hannah like a gun she might see in a western.

  She said, “Is that truly necessary?”

  “Might well be now. Better to be safe.” Hector shrugged on his big, loose-fitting sports coat.

  Hannah scowled: “You often carry a gun around with you?”

  “Have it close by, anyway.”

  “It still works? I mean, it looks like an antique.”

  Hector nodded. “No less deadly for that. Now let’s roll downtown and get us a look at this bad customer you photographed.”

  ***

  Hector had slipped the man at the camera store an extra ten for quick turn-around developing the film. It was still going to be a couple of hours before the pictures were ready, however, so Hector was treating Hannah to lunch in the Christiana. She said, “This town needs more restaurants.”

  “This town needs more of a lot of things,” Hector said. “And those will come. I can already see the sorry signs. Another twenty years, this will be one of the West’s great tourist sites. Everything about it that originally drew Hem here will be swamped or built over. I’ve seen it in the Keys, seen it in Paris and in the Pacific Northwest.”

  “You live in New Mexico now, aye?”

  “Place on the Rio Grande, nearly in Mexico.”

  “Is it touristy?”

  “Nah. I think I finally found the spot that will see me through whatever time’s left me in that sense—my present home isn’t going to become a tourist trap, not ever.”

  “Sounds like a good place to write.”

  “It’s quiet, if that’s what you mean. Solitary. Not saying I get many of them, but it’s far enough away from anywhere to discourage acolytes seeking me out. Still get a few interviewers my way, but not too many wannabe writers.”

  Hannah sipped some soup and said, “So, you’re not taking on students?”

  “One at a time is all I can handle,” Hector said. He relented on riding her, just a bit: “Right now, I’m committed to working with a pretty Scot.”

  Hannah smiled and said, “I’m taking your advice, Maestro. I’m binding those stories and fragments together into a single narrative along the lines you proposed.”

  “Can’t wait to see what results. I know it’s going to be wonderful. And please, don’t call me ‘Maestro’…just stick with Hector.”

  She hesitated and said, “You’re the first to say it: that my writing is worthy.”

  “It is. Who else has read your stories?”

  “Richard.”

  “He’s it?”

  “He’s all that’s read this current crop of stuff. I wrote different things for writing classes at school.”

  “This is the stuff that matters to you,” Hector said. “I can tell—the passion comes through in the newer stuff.”

  “It is the kind of thing I want to write.”

  “And were born to.”

  “Not to hear Richard tell it,” Hannah said. “He said it’s all the same…too confessional.”

  “We all use ourselves and our lives, Hannah. Hell, the only way to justify our mistakes is to use them in our writing. You know what Papa said, ‘Use the hurt.’ You do that, Hannah. Don’t let some academic, or a husband, dissuade you from that. It’s your core material. So protect it. Don’t ever deny it. This of yours I’ve been reading—it’s all written since you became pregnant, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting.”

  “How so?”

  Hector couldn’t imagine sharing with Hannah his theory about links between her medication and the quality of her writing. But he wasn’t above maybe leading her to her own epiphany on that front. He said, “Just is. Timing is everything.”

  Frowning, Hannah said, “I have to confess, the other day, I read a few pages of your novel.”

  “It’s okay,” Hector said evenly. “Tables turned? Frankly, I’d maybe have done the same.”

  “You’re going well beyond using your life. You’ve made yourself your own character in this novel, Hector.”

  “People have always accused me of doing that. So I’ve decided to ram the concept down their throats in this novel. They all talk about postmodernism. I’ll give ’em postmodernism. And hell, Hem really kind of beat me to it with The Green Hills of Africa—he blurred all the lines between the novel and nonfiction, between persona and writer, in that one. He takes the concept much further in his best unpublished stuff.”

  “So this Toros & Torsos, it’s mostly fiction?”

  Hector shrugged. “Let others decide, that’s my thinking. Maybe I’ll really play with their minds: I have my own long game to think about. Maybe I’ll let that sucker sit for a while. Arrange to have it published thirty or forty years down the road and maybe under some other byline.” He squeezed Hannah’s hand. “Maybe something Celtic sounding.”

  He stirred around his food—not much appetite. He sipped some wine and said, “You thought anymore about taking me up on my offer? I think you should think hard about clearing out of here. Not just because of all this crazy stuff swirling around us, but because I think Richard is going to crash and burn, hard and soon, and I don’t think you can wave him off before he slams into that sorry last wall. Sometimes a true alcoholic has to hit bottom, hard, in order to turn it around. I think Richard’s headed toward that crash at the least. But in your present condition, it’s too risky to have you here to try and pick up the pieces.”

  And there was of course the other wild card in the mix: goddamn Creedy. Hector had this vision he was suddenly warming to again—living in Europe with Hannah, both of them writing fiction together and raising that baby.

  It might be a fine life, far from America and maybe even far enough from J. Edgar’s reach.

  “I’m still thinking about it all.” Hannah couldn’t look at Hector: She was angry at him for his blunt and unsolicited estimation of Richard’s sorry condition and likely fate. She felt angrier still that Hector had stated again what she hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to confront so nakedly—not with Hector’s certainty.

  Hector said, “What’s on tap for tonight?”

  “Dinner with some fellow academics, if Richard isn’t l
egless by then.”

  Hector said, “Berle possibly going to be one of those at dinner?”

  She searched his face. “Could happen.” She didn’t believe that, of course.

  “Then invite me as your guest. Can you do that, Hannah?”

  “I can, but do you really want to sit through that, Hector?”

  “I think I better.”

  “They can be so snide, and, well….”

  Hector smiled. “I’ll finish that sentence for you: ‘And you being a hack writer, Hector….’”

  “I wasn’t going to say that. And you’re not that. God, not at all.”

  “But we both get the drift. I’m a genre writer in their eyes. You fear for me at that table.”

  “Well, whatever kind of writer you may be, they’re never less than snide and snotty,” Hannah said. “They’re all so cruel-tongued. And you’ll be outnumbered.”

  “I’ll have you,” Hector said, “a fellow fiction writer who’ll have my back. And I think of it this way, darling: I’m not going to be at that table with all of those academics. They’re going to be at that table with me.”

  It happened so fast, he didn’t fight it: Hannah impulsively leaned into him. Her mouth found his. He felt her tongue pressing against his teeth. Hector wrapped an arm around her shoulder; his other hand strayed to her milk-swollen breast. His thumb massaged her stiffening nipple through her soft cotton sweater.

  He pulled away, looked around to make sure nobody was watching. He said, “That was wrong of me.”

  “I did it,” Hannah said. “I wanted it. I want you in my life.” She pressed her hand to her belly. “In our life.”

  “You’re married.”

  “Not happily.”

  “But, married,” Hector said.

  Hannah just shook her head. Marriage could be remedied easily enough; surely Hector knew that. Hell, how many wives had she read Hector had had already? Three, four? And she was already taking steps….

  She said suddenly, “I…I have told Mary I’m going to write that book about her. It won’t hurt my fiction writing, I swear…just delay it a bit.”

  Hannah shuddered at the look that elicited from Hector. He said, “Oh God, honey, no! That’s the worst thing you could think of doing. This is no time for an artistic failure of nerve—”

  She slapped him hard, shocking herself. Hector took the blow. He pressed a finger to his lip and looked at the blood there. He said, “Darlin’, please don’t make this mistake with your career. This will ruin you…mess up your whole path. Mary’s nobody to get entangled with.”

  “I’m going to do it, Hector. I know this is the right thing. It’s a book about a Hemingway—it will give me a head start on my fiction in a way nothing else can. I am going to do this. Better me than Richard! I can do what you’re doing—protect Papa…help protect his legacy and long game with my book.”

  “It’s a calamitous mistake,” Hector said again. His cheek still stung.

  Her chin trembling, Hannah searched Hector’s face, then threw her napkin across her plate and left him there, sitting alone, stared at by the other diners.

  ***

  Creedy held the phone close to his face, his palm cupped over the mouthpiece lest the person in the adjacent booth overhear.

  He remembered Lassiter telling him about the false and booby-trapped manuscripts he claimed to have inserted into the Hemingway papers. He remembered Lassiter handing him a drink.

  Then things were…foggy. A void. But Lassiter had mockingly left an empty vial on the bed next to Creedy. That told the agent everything: Lassiter had slipped Donovan his own dope. Creedy shuddered again, thinking of it. God only knew what Lassiter had pulled out of him with that stuff coursing through his veins. God knew what might fall out from all that…brain damage…burgeoning paranoia. That stuff never left your system, not really. Not ever.

  So he had no recourse now—Creedy had to inform the Director the Hemingway operation, at least for the moment, was sliding crosswise.

  Creedy said, “Yes, I’ve reviewed the taps on the Hemingway phone—the recordings made before those bugs were disabled. There’s no question: Somehow, this Lassiter is on to us. He’s actively working to discover the provenance of the doctored documents inserted into the Hemingway papers recovered in the basement of the Ritz in 1956.”

  Hoover was harrowingly quiet, then said, “I’m sitting with Hector Lassiter’s file now. It’s prodigiously thick. This Lassiter has sometimes been of use to us. He’s wily, gutsy, and worst of all, he’s a chaotic idealist. In a word: unpredictable. That stuff Lassiter pulled in Nashville in 1958? Audacious. And I’m still furious over that. Prepare a wet team, Agent Creedy. I’m not saying we’re going to cancel Lassiter, but we might need to.”

  He hesitated, then Hoover said, “Is there any indication Lassiter has come into possession of the other information Hemingway was holding against us? Perhaps he has found letters, a manuscript about…well, about me?”

  Creedy thought, You mean about you being a colored. That’s what you really mean. He said, “No, sir. None so far.” Creedy thought, Self-serving nigger prig.

  The Director said, “Then perhaps canceling Lassiter has just become more attractive a proposition. Let me think more on that. But this professor you were using? This degenerate alcoholic? He seems too dangerous to perpetuate.”

  “And his wife?”

  “Does she know what’s going on?”

  “Not presently. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “So long as she remains in that blissful state, then Mrs. Paulson can be spared, Mr. Creedy.”

  “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

  — Flannery O’Connor

  34

  MISTAKES

  Stretched out in the Hemingway bed, Hector smoked a cigarette, staring at the wall. Patricia was wrapped around him, warm, naked, and already asleep.

  After his argument with Hannah, Hector had returned to the lodge.

  Shaken as he’d been by her reaction, Hector hadn’t chased after Hannah. He hadn’t tried to reach her by phone and he had no intention of going up to the Paulsons’ room to talk to her just yet. They both needed time for things to cool between them—to cool in several senses of the word.

  Hector was bitterly disappointed in Hannah—terribly upset at her decision to undertake this misbegotten project with Mary Hemingway.

  Hannah was clearly furious with him not just for doubting the rightness of her decision to cooperate in Mary’s biography, but for also deflecting her advances.

  Hector was certain, however, he’d made the right decision in declining her overtures.

  Hannah’s admission she was going to eschew fiction writing—even “fleetingly”—for sensationalist nonfiction writing had settled it all in his mind.

  The man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.

  Holy Jesus, but how he loathed that facile characterization of himself and his craft.

  His third wife, Duff, had long ago said, “You know, Hec, one day you’re going to have to choose a side of that equation. Does your life inform your writing, or does it run the other direction?”

  He’d just smiled and waved his hand then. That was darling Duff — always throwing crazy riddles like that one at him. The princess of conundrums and head games….

  But sitting there in the restaurant with Hannah, Hector assured himself he took his art more seriously than his life. He was adamant now that his art was driving his life and that it had always been so.

  And, that being the case, he’d be damned now if he’d take Hannah on, even if his passion and affection for the beautiful young Scot was strong. He’d have no part of an affair with Hannah—not so long as some part of him still toyed with the notion of maybe getting a novel out of the relationship.

  And so, sitting in the Sun Valle
y Lodge lounge, still mulling his decision to walk away from Hannah, and yes, sulking, a bit, he happened upon Patricia.

  Tish, as he now called her, was still dressed as she had been for his speech. Dressed just for him, he could tell. Tish was very fetching; a beguiling distraction.

  Hector didn’t even mind the fact that Tish was talking to him in echoes of lines from his own novels; almost as if she was modeling herself on a Hector Lassiter-crafted femme fatale.

  Hell, that made it easier to comply this one time. Tish’s sexy game allowed Hector to treat it as the horny, one-time fling he sensed Patricia, too, knew that it would be between them.

  A holiday affair…ships in the night.

  And, frankly, Patricia seemed every bit as excited by the notion of getting naked in that famous bed as she was by the prospect of making love with Hector. Sensing that didn’t hurt his ego, though…much. They were using one another and it felt good. Where was the harm?

  But when he was making love with Patricia, Hector found himself imagining there at the end that Tish was actually Hannah. He’d almost called out Hannah’s name as he came.

  That had soured things for him in several directions.

  And he felt even more guilty lolling in bed now with this lusty, bookish looker when he should be plotting against Donovan Creedy…Creedy, who must be seething and spoiling for revenge now.

  Hector needed to move his ass. Muy pronto.

  Hector ground out his cigarette and slid from under Patricia’s long, bare body. She didn’t stir when he left the bed. He pulled the covers over Tish and then dressed; let himself out as quietly as he could. He left a note: “Back in time for dinner.”

  ***

  Richard had returned from Mary’s, drunk, again. The old bitch had fired him—taken the book away from him, despite the fact that he now had her over a barrel with her confession to killing Hem. When he played that card Mary had just sneered and said, “What the fuck are you talking about? That’s exactly the kind of crazy thing that’s brought us to this point, Dickie. That’s why Hannah’s going to write my book. She signed the contract at the lodge an hour ago.”