The Great Pretender: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Digging around in the hole, Orson at last pulled out another medallion, smaller than the first. He shone his light on it. One side contained another map, similar in construction to the medallion that had led them to this place. This new medal also had notches along its edges. On the flipside, or “obverse” face of the new medal, there was an image of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

  “I guess we’re not through here,” Orson said. “Not by a longshot.”

  “No,” Cassie agreed. She frowned at Hector. “My God, you look terrible, darling.”

  “Really not feeling too well,” Hector admitted. “Terrible, actually.”

  “We need to get you out of here,” she said. “Someplace warm and dry.”

  CHAPTER 31

  SOCIETY OF THE LIVING DEAD

  Hector couldn’t remember the last time he’d been really sick. And he couldn’t remember being sick quite like this: he was shaking so hard he could hear the bed springs squeak. His teeth and jaws were starting to ache from impact with one another. He was at once freezing, yet soaked through with sweat.

  At some point, eyes closed, he heard testy voices. He heard Orson saying, “Take the goddamn thing then. I’m through with it, finished with all of it, Goddamn you all.”

  Later he heard Orson say to an accusing Cassie, “What difference does it make now, now that I’ve established to their satisfaction neither I or Hector have the spear and I’ve given them the real medallion to conduct their own search? Let the idiot Thule or Vril or whatever these Germans regard themselves to be trace the first map back to that empty hole in the floor of those catacombs.”

  Doctors—Hector was aware of them coming and going, too. One with a professional-sounding voice, speaking English but heavily inflected with Italian, said, “This is very strange, not like flu, at all. More like, I don’t know… Typhoid, dengue? I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I hope it isn’t the first indication of some coming epidemic. I confess I really don’t know how to effectively treat this. His body can’t sustain this fever for much longer…”

  After the doctor left, Hector heard Cassie say, “I think it’s up to me to save him. I think this is something that’s been sent against Hector.”

  Orson’s resonant baritone had an odd tremolo: “A curse or a hex?”

  “Yes,” Cassie said. “I truly think that’s so. This has been made to happen to Hector, I’m convinced of that.”

  Rebelling at that absurd notion, trying to claw air, to speak or call out to get attention, but having no result with either, Hector lay there, screaming inside, but to Cassie and Orson, looking terrifyingly motionless, looking like a dead man.

  ***

  Hector came to with the sun in his eyes. He could hear birds chirping, a radio set low—a shortwave, he suspected, for it was playing an obscure American tune—Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “God Don’t Like It.”

  Some of our members gets on a drunk

  Just to speak their sober minds

  And when they raise the Devil, Lord,

  They put all the blame on shine

  Hector forced himself up on his elbows. His back and shoulders cracked. He was in a hospital, he could see that much.

  Still, there was this strange smell, overcoming even the odor of his stale sweat and sour breadth from his mouth that tasted of days of having been violently ill. This mystery scent was overcoming even the usual antiseptic smell typical of all hospitals, European or American.

  Looking around, trying to get his bearings, Hector seemed to remember Cassie’s voice in his ear, soft. Then something was held up to his dry, cracked lips. Her voice coaxing, “That’s it, let it out darling. You get all that nastiness, all that poison out.” Words in something like French followed, but not French—not any version known to him.

  He sniffed the air again, tracing this other, stranger stench to his pillow. He felt under there and found this ratty, foul smelling little burlap bag. Disgusted, he tossed it across the room. Just that small effort made him dizzy; his field of vision was a shimmer of floaters and glittering spots of color.

  Blinking, looking around, Hector saw a pitcher and a glass. With shaking hands, he poured himself fresh water. He called out and said, “Is there anybody there?”

  He thought he heard a call back. As he sipped the water, still looking around, he saw a newspaper resting on the stand by his bed.

  Blinking his eyes afresh, rubbing some dried crust or sleep from them, he focused at last on a headline on page three, to which the paper had been opened and folded back.

  It was an English-language paper.

  At the top of the page was a headline that immediately set Hector to wondering if he was truly awake. Reading that scream headline, he wondered whether he was really even alive:

  Novelist, screenwriter Hector Lassiter dead at 48

  Author found strangled in hotel room in Vienna

  BOOK THREE

  THE THIRD MAN

  Vienna, November/December 1948

  “Every true artist must,

  in his own way,

  be a magician, a charlatan.”

  —Orson Welles

  CHAPTER 32

  THE POISON DEATH

  “Do you miss holidays in the States? God knows, this place doesn’t exactly feel festive, not even when there’s snow.” Cassie held out a gloved hand to stop some flurries in their slow-motion fall.

  The giant carnival wheel was still today, just no paying customers, Hector figured. And it would surely be miserable to go up there anyway in this biting cold.

  A lonely truck rumbled by, hauling more rubble to somewhere; the city was a warren of impromptu scrap yards and slag heaps. Post-war Vienna: like so much of war-scarred Europe, Hector thought the city might be a generation or more rebuilding. And then it would never be the same. It was like moving through Eliot’s Wasteland. Here, the loss of old structures and statuary seemed more acute to Hector, more the pointless waste.

  Hitler had said of Vienna, “This city is, in my eyes, a pearl. I’ll give it the setting it deserves.” Too often we speak our plans and God—or the Devil—laughs.

  In terms of his own ruined body, Hector felt oddly attuned to the ravaged city. It was nearly twelve months since he’d fallen so very ill back in Rome, yet he was still struggling to recover his health almost a year on. As he did that, Hector was also trying to trace the last steps of his dead doppelganger; still spreading news to the right parts of the world that the one true Hector Lassiter still drew air, was “still vertical and published,” to use a writer chum’s term for remaining in saddle or still “north of the dirt,” to use one of Hector’s phrases for the same happy state of being.

  “Holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he said, reflecting, “I don’t think I’ve spent those two with family of any kind, not since I was a little kid.”

  Cassie drew closer, freshly troubled he still seemed to lean so much on her as they walked, still needing her unremarked-upon support in that way across longer distances. It was worrying to her that this once vital man’s man was still recovering from the terrific toll to his body by his self-described flu.

  Surely enough, giving Hector some lucky cover for what Cassie regarded to be his mistaken self-diagnosis, a flu epidemic was indeed raging across Rome even now, but that scourge had hit the city many months after Hector had taken ill.

  No, Hector’s case was something else entirely. His malady, Cassie had decided to her own satisfaction, was the result of a very powerful and malignant Voodoo priest’s curse. Probably the work of that mysterious little German man, she figured.

  In confirmation, she’d found a jar filled with Hector’s nail clippings, discarded cigarette butts and a chicken heart in a sealed mason jar under their hotel bed back in Rome the first night after he’d become seriously ill.

  She had never confided to Hector about that discovery—he was simply too steadfast in his doubt about all things supernatural and would have dismissed it as macabre nonsense. She was frustrate
d the writer was such a headstrong naturalist, despite all he’d seen in his storied life that should have convinced him otherwise a hundred times over. Stray hairs, a scrap of fingernail—these could be made weapons against their source. Cassie was quietly frantic herself to find a scrap of fingernail somewhere in their hotel room. She’d broken the nail, she guessed, opening and closing a suitcase, only noticing later when it began to hurt. Since the attack on Hector, her life had become a sustained search for Hector’s and her own shed hairs and nails.

  Anyway, Cassie had been far too preoccupied saving his life to debate with Hector then about supposed flu bugs and the like. It had taken all her stamina and skill simply to hold all that foul black magic ranged against her man at something like bay.

  Hector would never know the days and nights she sat at his bedside, giving him tonics, stuffing myriad spell and hex bags under his pillows, slowly nursing him back to health while laying down salt trails at hospital window and door every night.

  That last was to keep evil loas and the zombie of Rune Fuchs at bay while Hector recovered, while Cassie and Orson contrived to find a secure hiding place for the second medallion until Hector was better and it could be used.

  Their plan had become one of waiting for Hector to recover so the three of them, “We three Musketeers,” as Welles sentimentally put it, “can complete our quest together as it clearly is meant to be.”

  Holding tighter to his arm, leaning in still closer in hopes Hector wouldn’t realize just how much support she was giving him, Cassie said, “You and Brinke never shared a Thanksgiving or a Christmas together?”

  Painful silence. Hector said, “Time wasn’t on our side. No Thanksgiving. No Christmases. We had Valentine’s Day, Independence Day.” A catch in his voice that shredded Cassie. “We had a Labor Day together. And then…”

  She knew too well how that story ended. If Hector ever finished his book about all that, the world would know it too.

  “You and I,” Cassie said, firm and sure, “are going to spend this Thanksgiving together. Christmas, too. Yes? Here, perhaps in Paris. In the Alps or even in Germany, I don’t care which city or place we do it in. I don’t care where so long as we’re together. But we will do that, won’t we?”

  “Yes, definitely,” Hector said. “We surely will do that.” Somewhere behind them there was the echo of laughter on rain-slicked cobblestones.

  ***

  Five a.m. was Hector’s usual writing time. Cassie was in the bedroom next door, in a deep sleep, long lush eyelashes twitching with her dreams.

  Hector sat with a notebook, pen and a pot of room service coffee—some extra strong, wake-the-dead Viennese blend—dreaming while awake. He was trying to write fresh fiction but instead found himself once again turning over the scattered and sorry rocks of another man’s life, a man who had desired to be Hector Lassiter and been killed by someone for daring to impersonate the author.

  It seemed that Hector’s double was born Andrew L. Parker, son of Miriam and Jerry Parker of Steubenville, Ohio in 1906. There was not much after that to be found on the lad until Andrew changed his life’s direction.

  After adopting the slightly older novelist’s persona, Andrew had cut his profligate, headline-generating swath across post-war Europe, including that last, jarring headline that greeted Hector upon waking from what doctor’s described as a near coma.

  Hector Mason Lassiter, dead at 48.

  Jesus.

  No man should live to read his own obituaries. Hector’s had run the spectrum of hagiography to downright character assassination.

  A few too-candid remarks from so-called friends and sometimes lovers ensured they were no longer regarded as such by the resurrected novelist.

  In time, Hector got beyond all that, simultaneously cutting back on liquor and cigarettes to hasten his physical recovery. Making a point of daily exertion, he felt himself coming back, regaining strength and muscle tone, but it was a painfully, frustratingly slow process.

  And he remained frustrated in another respect. Hector couldn’t get a firm handle on who this Andrew Parker had been in terms of deeper detail, even after the man had contrived to become Hector. He couldn’t get at what had impelled the stranger to adopt Hector’s persona when so many other men’s identities might have been claimed.

  Hector couldn’t find his answers here in Vienna, anyway.

  Maybe the clues to all that lay back in Ohio.

  When he talked of heading back to the States to take up his search for more dope on Andrew there, Cassie balked. At first Hector thought her resistance had something to do with lingering racism in the States. Here in Europe, they were left alone for the most part, left to just be together without remark or accusing gazes. They were never turned away at a restaurant, or at a club. She was never ordered to the back of a bus or denied the use of a water fountain.

  And when he signed a hotel registry, “Mr. and Mrs. Hector Lassiter,” no eyebrows were raised, no hotel dicks loomed, ready to run some shakedown on a morals beef or to drop coins to some scandal rag for a quick-cash kickback and resulting headlines that might end a career like Hector’s back in the States.

  No, like Orson, like Cassie, Hector couldn’t say he truly missed America himself.

  But there was that other thing binding Cassie and Hector to Europe, to Vienna, particularly—that thing for which Hector had no patience whatever.

  Cassie and Orson were still fixated on finding the damned Roman spear. Before his health collapsed, Hector had of course bought in to the chase for the chase’s sake—it was like a dry-run for some caper novel waiting to happen. But now that he was little more than an invalid? Hector’s heart might be in the quest, but his legs were a different matter.

  Yet his comrades in the crusade for the Holy Lance remained indomitable.

  Orson had accepted a role in this new film, The Third Man, penned by no less than Graham Greene, in order to fund his ongoing search for the holy relic as well as some self-mounted film project.

  Cassie, too, was still fully invested in the myth of the spear and its power.

  Hector stared at the nondescript name again: Andrew Litner Parker.

  Well, adios, Andrew. We hardly knew ye, you luckless son of a bitch.

  Too bad you had the misfortune of being born with a face that looked so much like the real article’s mug, Hector thought, raising an imaginary glass to his dead double’s memory.

  The only thing Hector thought he did know—and this, too, was mere supposition—was that Hector’s picaresque life that seemed to so entice luckless Andy had almost certainly been Mr. Parker’s fatal undoing.

  Old Andy had evidently been just close enough in situ to the real Hector that one of Hector’s all-to-real enemies had erred and killed Andy in his stead. Hector was sure of that much—the fool’s death hadn’t been a result of anything Andy had done other than pretending to be Hector. It wasn’t some lover’s tryst gone bad—Andy/Hector hadn’t been found choked to death in some tangle of sheets or in some men’s room somewhere with his pants down.

  No, Andy had been found tied to a chair, fully dressed, and choked to death with a length of cord cut from an electric light and twisted tight with—a piercing touch—a couple of number two pencils.

  Maybe it had been the Thule or Vril. Maybe the Nazi filmmaker Werner Höttl or possibly one of those murderous surrealists. They all had reason to mean Hector harm.

  Whoever had done the deed, Andy perished because he had been swamped in the backwash of Hector’s lurid, larger-than-life legend.

  A scream from the street below—male or female, Hector couldn’t tell which.

  Was a time, he’d have run to that scream. Now his back simply wasn’t in it. If he over-exerted himself he coughed, and when he coughed he still saw spots and felt like someone was sitting on his chest.

  His last doctor in Rome said it might be spring of forty-nine before he felt fully himself again.

  Disgusted at his inability to find the words, Hec
tor sat back in his chair and cast down his pen.

  There would be no fiction writing tonight—he could already tell from the way his mind raced in every direction except the one that would result in words on paper it was fruitless to push on now.

  Despite the extra-strong coffee, he felt beat to the wide.

  Hector sighed, struggled to his feet, then stripped and slid into bed.

  Cassie kissed his cheek, said, “How did it go?”

  “It didn’t.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Another kiss on the same cheek. “The words will come again, I know it. And soon.” She tried to move his head from the pillow, to gain access to his other cheek. Probably she figured he didn’t remember her long ago caution about just such kisses, he thought. Either way, he didn’t oblige her urging to get the other side of his face. She studied his pale blue eyes and said carefully, “Sleepy?”

  “Nearly always these days.”

  Another scream outside. She shivered and felt Hector’s muscles tense at the sound from the street. “Easy there,” she said. “Not your fight, not tonight. Not until you’re entirely yourself again.”

  “Yeah,” he said, raw-voiced. “Wonder when that will be exactly.”

  He fell asleep to the distant sound of more screams.

  Yes, he thought, even as the darkness enveloped him, You are far from yourself, old pal.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

  It wasn’t so long ago, sitting in Los Angeles and talking about a cabal of killer artists, Orson had tried to talk Hector into turning all that madness with the surrealists into a film. “Ben Hecht will write it, and we’ll get Joe Cotten to play you,” Orson had said.

  Now, to further dizzying effect beyond his usual recent bouts of lightheadedness, Hector and the very actor who might have impersonated him onscreen were seated across from one another amidst the ruins of Vienna, snug in a café in sight of the Prater Amusement Park and the Wiener Risenrad—the park’s giant Ferris wheel and still the largest such wheel in the world. Half its gondolas were gone now, the result of more war damage.