Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “(Hemingway) is seriously ill, both physically and mentally, and at one time doctors were considering giving him electro-shock therapy.”

  — Confidential memo to J. Edgar Hoover

  CREEDY:

  NEW YORK, 1960

  The sedatives were having no effect. They had Hemingway in restraints. He was straining against those, screaming at Mary, “Get me out of here, Pickle, please! You have to get me out of here! Don’t let them do this to me!”

  The doctor said, “Perhaps we should go outside, Mrs. Hemingway.”

  “No,” Hemingway snarled. “This is my decision. My life. Mary, don’t let them do this to me. It’ll destroy me!” Wild-eyed, Hemingway looked from Mary to his doctor and back to his wife. “Pickle, please get me away from here.” Creedy knew that one of Papa’s sons had been given electro-shock therapy. So Hemingway knew too well what it did to the brain. And with all Hemingway’s concussions there might be no coming back.

  Then, over his doctor’s shoulder, Hemingway saw him…standing there skinny and grinning, wearing a doctor’s coat. Hemingway snarled, “Creedy! You cocksucker! You’re behind this.” He said to Mary, “That man! He’s fucking FBI! His name is Donovan Creedy—I’ve told you about him before, Mary, remember? He’s one of Hoover’s fucking storm troopers!”

  Creedy shivered a little—this wonderful tingle coursing through him to have Hemingway recognize him here, now. Delicious that Hemingway now knew who was behind his undoing…his imminent destruction at the hands of these doctors.

  “You see the level of paranoia, don’t you Mrs. Hemingway? Now, if you’ll sign this….”

  Hemingway screamed over and over. “Creedy, please, no!”

  ***

  He felt the rubber bit being forced into his mouth so he wouldn’t crack his teeth.

  This flash of white…pain and straining.

  From far away, in what he thought might be a dream, the old man heard Creedy say, “No. Again. And again after that.”

  There was another crackle and white flash; the old man felt his brain explode.

  “Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ‘What will you have, sir?’ And I said, ‘A glass of hemlock.’”

  — Ernest Hemingway

  42

  THE TRUE GEN

  Traced in pink ink on her map, Hannah and Hector’s cross-country itinerary resembled nothing so much as a horizontal lightning bolt or the EKG readings of a terminally arrhythmic heart patient.

  Hector was Hannah’s self-described wheelman. He’d bought a baby bed with aluminum hooks that fastened to the back seat of his blue and white Bel Air.

  Hannah and Hector zigzagged north and south. All the while, they continually moved westward on Mary’s nickel, carefully interrogating the usual suspects whose names routinely recurred in a bookcase-worth of miscellaneous biographies and memoirs spread across the longer, if not better, span of too many tumultuous, bloody decades.

  Inquiries and interviews, en route to Idaho.

  The old woman lit another cigarette with her shaking hand as Hannah unbuttoned her blouse and situated Bridget. The usual baby-bird, open-mouthed, head-thrashing side-to-side commotion ensued until Bridget was secured at Hannah’s right breast. Hannah’s scribbled-over notebook lay open by the wire-recorder.

  Hector sat across the room, smoking a cigarette, watching Hannah and Bridget, too aware of this silly smile on his face.

  “It was never about death-infatuation,” the old woman said. “Never, ever about that. Not for any of them. They were both sick as hell. So many sicknesses. Daddy was suffering from diabetes and paralyzing headaches. He had high-blood pressure. Poor, poor Ernest.…”

  The great man’s sister shook her head slowly. “I read a book once listing all of the injuries he sustained in his life. It was set in little tiny type that made me reach for my glasses, but it filled three pages. Imagine that—three pages.” The elderly woman shook her head. “Life had become utter hell for him, and he died on his own terms. Please dear, leave it at that.”

  ***

  Hannah made an overseas phone call as Hector swabbed her daughter dry following her bath. The receiver was tucked between Hannah’s shoulder and cheek as she scribbled notes.

  Hector rested the little girl on the foot of the bed and began to dress the baby.

  Hem’s Cuban doctor wrapped up:

  “More and more, there after the plane crashes and the many sicknesses that resulted from same, Papa was tired and through and not a damned bit happy about it. I was his doctor during all of his time in Cuba and I am amazed—amazed, you hear me—that he survived into the 1960s. One of his so-called ‘biographers’ should give him credit for his incredible feat of sheer will power embodied by his living past the middle 1950s. Do you understand what I say? Me? I would not have lasted so long. And perhaps not you either. But Papa endured.”

  Hannah thanked the old Cuban physician for his time, watching Hector playing with Bridget as the old doctor broke the connection at his end. There was a pause, then a distinct, second click of a connection being broken.

  Ice down Hannah’s back. She hung up and said, “Hector, I think this phone is tapped.”

  Hector frowned and handed Bridget to Hannah. He sat down with the phone and called his answering service…jotted down some notes.

  Hannah looked at his notes to see what kind of calls the crime writer was receiving: Mary Hemingway, many times…Alfred Hitchcock…Sam Ford…Bud Fiske, the gadfly noir poet. A man named Tilly….

  Hector said, “Thanks, Suzie,” and hung up, but kept the phone to his ear—heard that second click. Hector frowned. He hung up the phone. “Someone’s tapped it sure enough. I’m thinking FBI. Only Hoover, or someone like him, could set something up like this with this kind of speed.” He smiled sadly. “Suppose it’s the price you pay for hanging with me, here forward.” Rueful, he said, “I think I’m Hoover’s new hobby.” He smiled, said, “That’s okay, ’cause he’s mine, too.”

  ***

  Hannah suffered a night of tangled dreams—feverish vignettes that unreeled like some poorly cranked, badly edited, and sometimes-silent film punctuated by restlessly shifting points of view.

  The worst was something more akin to a memory:

  Hannah’s father, Malcolm MacArthur, a large, burly, muscled man with thinning gray hair and a hoary beard, loomed over his smaller, blond daughter. He tore at her flannel nightgown. Malcolm reeked of the black, single-malt whiskey he had emptied from the bottle he had left discarded on the nightstand by his daughter’s bed.

  As she struggled to escape him, Malcolm wrapped his hands around Hannah’s shoulders, forcing her back onto her bed. Malcolm tried to wedge his tongue between his daughter’s lips, supporting himself with one big hand while the other fumbled with his souvenir Nazi belt buckle.

  Hannah shut her eyes tight against the broken glass that fell in her face as she smashed the heavy Loch Dhu bottle against her father’s forehead. Regretting her attack, she clumsily tried to brush the blood from the terrible cut above her father’s left eye as, roaring, he staggered back from her bed. Hannah’s gown and hand were slick with her father’s blood.

  She stared at the blood for what must have been a very long time, for her father was now gone, and she found herself on another couch, but this time sitting with a kindly old constable.

  The nice old man had come to tell her that her father—who stormed out of the house drunk and angry and bleeding—was reported by another motorist to have been recklessly driving his lorry in wet-falling snow around Lochleven Side.

  The other driver saw Hannah’s father’s plunge to his death when he missed a hairpin turn above Caolasnacon. Although visibility was generally good, there were no skid marks found in the truck’s snowy wake—no sign at all of any attempt to brake.

  Evidence pointed to suicide, the old lawman confided carefully. Indications, h
e said, were that Malcolm MacArthur had deliberately driven his truck over the cliff.

  The old man squeezed Hannah’s hand and raised his eyebrows. “Was yer father drumly—depressed—when he left? Upset over anything? Lassie, can ye think of any reason, any reason at all, yer papa would want to hurt himself?”

  Hannah shrugged and said, “No sir, nothing at all.”

  Hannah felt someone gently shaking her then. She realized she was in her hotel bed and bathed in sweat. Hector wrapped an arm around Hannah’s shoulders and stroked her damp blond hair behind her ears with his big and callused hand.

  Hannah blinked a few times, her eyes adjusting to the dark. She saw the connecting door between their hotel rooms was open. Hector said, “You were screaming…dreaming. A very nasty nightmare, I mean.” Hector was sitting on the edge of the bed, hugging her. He had on a pair of boxers. Hannah hugged him back, feeling scars on his naked back.

  Very aware of her sweat-slicked fingers on his skin, he said, “You have nightmares like this often, honey?”

  “Pretty often, aye.” She was still shaking, holding tightly to him, but stroking his back.

  “Me too,” Hector said, stroking her back, as well. “Helps a bit if I write a little just before I go to bed. Gives my subconscious something else to gnaw on overnight.”

  “I’ll try that,” Hannah said. “At least I didn’t wake Bridget. I’m sorry I woke you. I suppose when Bridget is weaned, I’ll get back on the medications.”

  “Like hell.” Hector nodded at his portable typewriter. “There’s your medicine; that’s your shrink.”

  Hector moved out of their embrace. His hand traced her damp cheek. “Must have been a pretty intense nightmare,” he said. “You’re just soaked.”

  She nodded. Hector was aware of her looking at him…realized he was nearly naked. “I’ll go and fetch a robe,” he said.

  Her hand on his bare shoulder, stroking it. “No, it’s okay.”

  “Well, you should get back to sleep, darling. It’s one a.m. Still plenty of time to rest up.”

  Her hand was still on his shoulder…her fingers trailed downward, her nails dragging down through his graying chest hair. Hannah said, “Hector, I’ve been watching you with Bridget. I’ve been thinking a lot about us. About what we could be. You’re a very good man.”

  “You’re a beautiful liar,” Hector said. “It would probably be a mistake. And Christ, I’m just an old guy. Hell, I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.”

  “You’re not old to me. I think you’re maybe the finest, most vital man I’ve ever met.” Hannah pulled him toward her. Hector’s resistance was token.

  She appraised him again, smiling: He was still fit; still had his muscle tone. As her fingers traced the lines around his mouth, Hannah said, “And I am such a goner for dimples.”

  “It’s a mistake,” Hector said again.

  “A mistake we’ll make together, aye? That way there’ll be no blame to be placed later.”

  Hannah kissed him, taking charge. “Wasn’t that fine, Hector?”

  She slipped her wet nightgown over her head and cast it to the floor. She felt his fingers stroking the aching nipples of her milk-swollen breasts…then his mouth there, suckling. Hannah’s fingers wrapped around his neck and back, drawing Hector down with her onto the damp sheets.

  “A clique of celebrity-minded hero worshippers surround Hemingway wherever he goes…. To them, Hemingway is a man of genius whose fame will be remembered with Tolstoy.”

  — Confidential memo to J. Edgar Hoover

  CREEDY:

  NEW YORK, 1961

  He was back in the clinic—in Creedy’s hands again. Another round of electro-shock that robbed the old man of concentration, robbed him of emotional control and memory…robbed him of words.

  The old man had managed one last bit of prose though—a crudely scrawled sign he insisted be posted on his door: “Former writer.” Creedy heard Mary tell a doctor the sign broke her heart.

  Hemingway lay in his bed, crying. Creedy, dressed in a white lab coat, crouched down next to the bed. His young partner stood with his back to the door, guarding it.

  Creedy said, “I told you years ago, one day you’d end up back in the States, and I’d have you to myself.”

  Hemingway struggled to focus his eyes: “Creedy?”

  “That’s right, Papa. My young friend over there is George Abbott. He’s Bureau. I’m not, anymore. Another thing you took from me, in a way. That revelation you shared with me in Africa, that soured the Bureau for me. How’s it feel Hemingway? To lose everything? After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, you know you can never go back to Cuba. Your house, your boat, your writings there…all your books and possessions—they’re Castro’s now. But I’ve taken more than that from you. I’m the one who saw the juice was put to you. Wrecked your mind. Stole the words from you. I just wanted you to know, it’s me who got the last laugh, Papa.”

  Creedy leaned in closer with a wicked smile. “And when the world learns the state you’re in now, that you’re quite insane, all those ‘great novels’ of yours won’t matter for shit. Me, on the other hand? They’ll be reading my novels long after the worms have done with you.”

  “I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.”

  — Doris Lessing

  43

  ROAD WORK

  Sitting in the diner after, scribbling away in a notebook, Hector looked up as a skinny shadow fell across his page.

  Donovan Creedy.

  “There goes the neighborhood,” Hector said. He’d been wondering how long it would take Donovan Creedy to come straight at him.

  Hector sat back in booth, smiling and winking. “Take a load off, Creedy.”

  Pushing his coffee aside, Hector picked up his notebook and pen. He capped the latter and shoved it into the pocket of his sports jacket. The notebook he placed on the seat beside him. “I’ve read some more of your thrillers since our last confab, Creedy. Well, two or three more—all I had the belly for. They’re shitty. And with all the politics you’ve freighted in there, suckers are going to date worse than Dos Passos’ stuff did. People reading potboilers don’t much cotton to being lectured to. Why are you here? Since you hounded Hem into his grave, you need a new project? Am I the lucky son of a bitch?”

  “The Director is concerned some materials that Hemingway may have possessed might have been passed to you. I’m here on instruction from Mr. Hoover to give you the chance to voluntarily turn over those materials, if you have them, and he will pull back on your surveillance. You’ve seen these past few days how it can be for you, going forward. I’m giving you a chance to dodge that. Not my own choice, of course.”

  “That’s mighty white of Edgar,” Hector said. He smiled when he saw Creedy’s reaction to that simple statement.

  Hector said, “Frankly, I’m rubbed the wrong way by all this. After all I’ve done for the Bureau, informally, but importantly, over the years? Well, this is a stick in the eye. And I still mean to harm you at some point, Creedy. For Patricia. Figure it was you Hannah saw from her window just before she and her baby almost died. Figure you were there to kill her, like you vowed to. And you did help kill Hem, in a thousand different ways. I’ve been thinking more, too, about this plot of yours I foiled to fob off all this bogus stuff as Hem’s. Thinking of ways to maybe return the favor. Tell me, that pro-Castro piece of crap you snuck in: That had to be your work, didn’t it? I mean, the falsity of the sex scenes alone was a tipper.”

  Creedy said, “What happened to that manuscript, Lassiter?”

  Hector winked. “Destroyed. Try that again, and I swear I’ll do you and your boss damage with another Hemingway manuscript.” He shook his head. “Just can’t believe old J. Edgar would turn on me like this after so many fires I hauled his fat and overtaxed ass out of.”r />
  Creedy scoffed: “Any services you rendered the Bureau were voided by your activities in Nashville in 1958. The Director is still furious at what you did there. Me too. You and your lamentable white man’s burden driving you to do all that… Jesus. Bad as Hemingway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hemingway and his adventuring in that uprising in the Dominican Republic in 1947. And then his last Africa trip. Time I spent chasing his ass around the bush in 1954 cost me operational success in a more important objective. I was this close to killing Jomo Kenyatta in prison. I’d have changed history, single-handedly. But chasing Hemingway, I lost my chance. Now Kenyatta’s president of Kenya, and the white man has most probably lost the whole of Eastern Africa. Worse, the uprisings over there are stirring up the uppity coloreds back here. I could have stopped all that—headed it off.”

  Hector shook his head. “You’re certifiable. Tell me, where Hem’s suitcase? Where are my other writings?”

  “Safely hidden. Like this manuscript Mr. Hoover wants.”

  “Not all of it safely hidden. You evidently tried to peddle a little of my stuff to some bookseller—half the reason I’m onto you, cocksucker.”

  Son of a bitch: Creedy had done that—tried to sell one of the few signed pieces of Lassiter’s. Creedy had done that during his lean time, before Hoover took Creedy back into the fold. If Hoover ever found out he had done that, and that his attempt to profit on Lassiter’s old prose had been what had drawn Hector into the fray…? Still, Creedy couldn’t help himself. He said, “I’ll yet destroy Hemingway with my manuscripts. Mark my word.”

  He struck Hector as reckless enough to try and do just that, independent of Hoover.

  Creedy said, “I’ll trade you. The suitcase and all its contents for the Hemingway manuscript you hold.” He hoped Lassiter would say no: Creedy was only extending the offer of trading the suitcase because Hoover had ordered him to do it.

  “No. Never.” Hector chewed his lip. “Still, it would be nice to drive somewhere without having some asshole in a black sedan riding my Bel Air’s bumper. Be heady to end a phone conversation without that extra click. To get an envelope in the mail that doesn’t look to have been steamed open and then resealed. I do have something for you. Hang here a couple of minutes, Agent. Need to run to my hotel room and fetch something.”