The Great Pretender: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Hector sipped his espresso, then broke off a corner of a scone. He liked Joe Cotten—the actor remained solid, charming, every-inch an American.

  Joe was playing the lead in The Third Man, cast as an American pulp writer who comes to believe his childhood friend Harry Lime—the latter to be played by Cotten’s longtime friend Orson Welles, of course—might still be alive. To his horror, it also slowly dawns on Joe’s character that his dear friend is a black marketeer of coldest calculation, an actual villain of the blackest stripe.

  Joe was hopeful his many years of friendship and playing against Orson on stage, screen and radio would inform both parts with rare resonance.

  Impeccably suave with his brushed back waves of sandy-colored hair and tailored herringbone overcoat—like Hector’s, a coat worn indoors against the chill of the under-heated café—Joe Cotten drummed fingertips on the table top.

  “He’s two days late arriving, you know,” Joe said. “He’s not doing himself any favors with that. My God, how he frustrates me with these pointless… episodes I guess we’ll call them.”

  Hector watched Joe fidget. He said, “Orson would probably just say it’s his nature, like that’s all the explanation that’s required.”

  “But off the point,” Joe said. “You should see the desperate letters I was writing him about trying to save Ambersons while he was down there in South America on that other farce of a film for Rockefeller. The letters I wrote about trying to save Journey Into Fear from the studio hacks. Those letters probably damaged our friendship. Don’t think we’ve ever been quite the same since. I love the man, I do—I revere the artist—but both Orsons also exasperate the daylights out of me.”

  “Hell, don’t get me started,” Hector said. “Do you know he told me the South American film, It’s All True, that and everything since, has been undone by a voodoo curse? I think he really believes it’s so.”

  “I’ve heard that story, too,” Joe said. “Absurd. And you know it didn’t happen to Orson, not at all. It was Dick Wilson who met with the alleged voodoo priest. It was Dick’s copy of the script that was cursed with that spike through its page.” A wry smile. “Though in light of all that, I have to observe that Dick’s luck hasn’t been so good since, either. But he’s still intensely loyal to Orson, despite it all. That says something.”

  Hector signaled for two more coffees. The first had lifted Hector’s spirits and pulse, had him feeling fitter and maybe sharp enough to whip a ten-year-old in a fair fight. Some tough guy to be sure.

  “Shall I go to Rome and try to fetch him for you all?” Hector asked. He hoped Joe said no. Hector still wasn’t up to that kind of travel. He feared his contemplated travel all the way back to the States might actually put him under the earth.

  The actor shook his head. “No, I hear he’s on his way. Lured here somehow, or so I’m told, after a silly gambit involving a magician of rare skill and a promised private performance for Orson the Magnificent.” Joe finished his first espresso. “Enough of this Orson talk. Let’s stop his ears from burning. What’s your next novel, Hector?”

  “Struggling to find that,” Hector said candidly. “Reading anything yourself?”

  Another funny smile. “A potboiler western called The Oklahoma Kid. By a ‘master of suspense.’ And what a swell cover it has. All guns and sneers. You know, there’s a bit in this picture that reminds me of you more than a tad.”

  “Oh?” Hector settled up their bill as the waiter delivered their fresh coffee. “How do you mean?”

  “Some interlude where my character—my novelist, Holly—is being quizzed by some sinister character in front of a book club of old lady types. I—you—I mean my character, is being cautioned about the danger of mixing fact with fiction. A dangerous game, this mysterious man says.” Joe toyed with his cup. “Hector, it seems to me that with each new novel you write you increasingly blend the two—fact and fiction—as well as to highlight that fact in the work itself. It’s like you almost mean to tear down the fourth wall.”

  “Hell,” Hector said, “find me a single book of fiction that doesn’t have its share of fact.”

  “Anyway, thanks for the breakfast and the company,” Joe said. “Nice to talk to someone from back home. A man with at least the trace of a Texas accent. If you see Harry,” an embarrassed smile, “I mean Orson, if you do that before me, please get his broadening ass to my hotel. I’ll take it from there and get him to Mr. Reed, our British gentleman director.”

  “Certainly.” Hector drained his last coffee at a pull and rose, steadying himself with a hand on the table as another brief bout of dizziness threatened his balance. He had to remember to take it easier getting up and down, to not move so quickly that every motion triggered a head rush. Hector pulled tighter his warm, big overcoat and put on his fedora. He buttoned his coat and followed the actor out in the crisp November air as he pulled on his leather gloves.

  Joe gestured at the big old Ferris wheel yonder. “We film there soon, you know. Have a big scene on the ride.”

  “Very picturesque,” Hector said.

  “Let’s hope,” Joe said. “My humble opinion—and all apologies to Mr. Graham Greene whom I usually revere—the dialogue for my confrontation with Orson on that wheel could frankly use some work. It’s a pivotal scene, and probably Orson’s most crucial. Right now, it lacks, well, let’s call it punch.”

  Hector shrugged, his breathy icy in the air. “Maybe the actor will fix it. Certified genius, right?”

  Joe laughed. “So he says.” A beat, then, “I mean, so they all say. It’s how he’s perceived anyway.”

  ***

  The chill air hinted of snow. Anywhere else, Hector figured he’d be right about a coming storm.

  But here? He’d smelled the snow in the air of Vienna for more than a week, but no more than a few light flurries that left no trace on the ground had fallen in that time.

  The wind whipped at his coat tails and made Hector tug his hat lower on his brow. Kids chased after him, begging coins, tugging at sleeve and coattail.

  The city was divided among allied overseers, quartered essentially, so eventually tiring of the urchins, Hector flashed his passport and simply crossed sectors, just trying to lose the begging children who couldn’t roam the city at will.

  Money was running a bit lower, and it was harder to access funds from Vienna, this city where he’d stayed on far too long already for his taste. Hector figured he could maybe solider on another four weeks—just make Christmas—before he’d have to move on to some other part of Europe, England or France, where he could more easily access money by wire and mail from back home.

  Hector once again pulled his collar up against the wind, slowly making his way back to the hotel and Cassie. The wind chased brown leaves; his shadow was lengthening. Footfalls—his and another’s. Hector paused to light a cigarette, looking back as he did so.

  There was a slim silhouette in one of the few working streetlights. Male, tall. That’s about all Hector could discern in the growing gloom.

  A passing car blocked Hector’s view for a moment—someone who could still afford fuel. When the vehicle had passed, Hector saw the silhouetted man was gone or blended into shadow.

  Hector cast down his unwanted cigarette. Some impossibly wrinkled old woman stooped and snatched it up, gratefully sucking down its smoke. Zither music came from a bar; Hector almost succumbed to its zinging siren’s song.

  Why didn’t he feel like going back to Cassie and their bed?

  Why didn’t he feel drawn to spending time loving and lolling in the warm sheets with Cassie?

  He knew he was again on the verge of some realization—probably an unhappy one, but one that would come eventually anyway. Rather than push it away this time, Hector decided it was better to keep walking, to allow the bloodhound in his head to follow that destructive scent to its natural end.

  Maybe it had something to do with a kind of foresight. Unlike Cassie, he couldn’t see their future—wouldn�
�t presume to guess at it. It wasn’t her mixed race that was an issue, not that at all, Hector insisted to himself. No, it was the very fact of her superstition that was a wedge between them. The longer they were together, the more impossible Hector found it to write.

  Now, coldly thinking back—having murdered a morning with Joe discussing film, literature, talking about art in general—Hector was struck with an epiphany. It was a potentially fatal one for Hector and Cassie as a couple, he realized.

  Yes, it indeed all came down to her damned superstition. It was all about Cassie’s spooky acceptance of predestination and fate, of this crazy belief in foreordained events etched on a man or a woman’s hands.

  Honest belief in any of that precluded serendipity, invention and all the happy accidents that kept creative types like Hector infatuated with their craft.

  Nine months together, and he’d written the fewest number of words he’d strung together since 1920 or thereabouts. Disaster.

  He realized instinctively he needed to get back to the States as soon as possible, to get back in touch with the ground there.

  He would poke around Ohio, learning some more about this mysterious Andrew Parker who’d died pretending to be Hector and, maybe in the process, Hector would find his way back to fiction, write a novel about a man who became another man and died for his trouble. Hector’s own headlines would sell that novel, no sweat.

  Hector sighed and looked back over his shoulder again, almost hoping something—someone—might be gaining on him. Something to feed his creative beast with a necessary sense of uncertainty and menace, restoring creative sparks stripped from him these past months of convalescing and having supernatural claptrap shoved—sometimes literally—down his throat.

  But there was nothing back there but more storm clouds on the horizon. Even those were probably just another false alarm, just like the smell of all that heavy snow that couldn’t seem to fall.

  A hand on his shoulder; something at his back. “We really are losing our touch, aren’t we, Mr. Lassiter,” a voice filled with menace said.

  CHAPTER 34

  MAN, BEAST AND VIRTUE

  “Is this a robbery, or something worse?” Hector waited for the answer, gloved hands raised.

  A tall, dark figure swung into his path. It was a big man, imposing and nattily dressed. It took Hector a moment to recognize him. Orson hugged the author to his chest and said, “Old man, so good to see you again! Forgive the theatrics but I couldn’t resist. Just me being me, yes?”

  “To the bone,” Hector said. “You just got in?”

  “Just. Have an early day tomorrow.” Orson smiled, dark eyes twinkling in the moonlight. Hector looked up, smiling at the moon. Orson liked to say how much the moon meant to him personally, claimed that his moods closely attuned to its phases. “Up for a nightcap first? Some catching up?”

  “Definitely,” Hector said. “Yes, please. We must do that and right now.”

  ***

  Despite the actor’s required early morning set-call, Hector and Orson sat up many hours, drinking and discussing writing, acting, and all things creative. In the end, all of that deep talk about the act of creation only firmed Hector’s darker theories about what was holding back his own writing.

  ***

  Hector at last wandered into their hotel room at two in the morning, exhausted in the good old, dissolute way, slightly drunk and somehow freshly aflame with new notions about potential writing projects.

  He stripped again bedside and crawled in next to Cassie. She said softly, “The hour’s wickedly late, or early, rather. Where on earth have you been?”

  “Café Marc Aurel, then a bar or two… Walking and talking the day and night away.” She heard his cockeyed smile in his voice. “Had breakfast with Joe Cotten, then for hours roamed and haunted the stacks of a bookstore full of books whose languages I can’t read, but it was good to smell the old paper and leather. Took in a string concert. And, walking home, I ran into Orson. Time got away from the two of us from there.”

  “Sobriety flew, too, I see. Still, I’m glad you were able to make your way through a whole day and night on your own… and even soldier on into the start of another day. Probably sleep like the dead tomorrow, but there you have it. Got to take the rough with the smooth, right?”

  She drew her thumbnail across the side of his hand, trailing across his “love affair lines,” as her occult books he’d secretly browsed over during his recuperation had called them. She said, “So we start the final search again tomorrow, since your stamina seems there again and Orson is here now?”

  “Possibly. Subject didn’t really come up this time. Frankly, I don’t want to encourage any distractions in Orson. Joe Cotten’s much more in-tune with Hollywood politics than me, and I get the strong sense from Joe that Orson’s career rests on the knife’s edge back home just now. He desperately needs a victory. This picture seems the best shot for that from my perspective. I refuse to foul things up for Orson with this madcap treasure hunt.”

  “It’s my quest, too, you know, and I don’t take it so lightly, not at all.”

  “I know. I apologize.” Hector stretched out an arm. She curled into a familiar cuddle. Destructive as he now viewed her strange “trade” to his writing—now that he regarded Cassie as almost a kind of anti-muse—he was still dreadfully fond of her. “You’re no longer on Uncle Sam’s nickel, he said. “You’re a free agent. So what is your real ongoing stake in this quest exactly? What do you hope to gain in discovering this particular flavor of grail?”

  Her long silence was an indictment. She finally said, “After all the roadblocks thrown down before us, all the things that conspire to make us ultimately impossible as a couple, you really have to ask?”

  Hector took too long responding—he knew that. When he did, he said, “Orson really does needs to focus on this role. Shouldn’t take too long for him to finish up here. I’ve seen the script and he should be able to wrap up his bits of business in a mere couple of days here before they all head back to England to finish up at the studio for the interiors and such.”

  “And you, Hector? Are you staying on for the holidays as promised?”

  “I’ll help you find this thing. I’ll do that if you’re sure it’s what you want.”

  They were both aware of his dodging of the second part of her question.

  “Thank you, Hector.” She stroked his chest. “How are you really feeling?”

  “Better, a little stronger,” he said. “But I pushed too hard today… yesterday, now, I guess. Feel freshly beat to the wide for certain.” She could hear it in his voice.

  Cassie’s hand strayed south. Her hand was warm—all of her seemed to radiate a strange heat. “Can you make me feel wonderful now, despite all that? Please make me tingle? Don’t you want to be one person for a while again, while there’s time?”

  ***

  Despite his deep feeling of fatigue, Hector found himself up early, showered and out again on the ruined town. He sat with Joe and then Orson at the Cafe Marc Aurel. The place was, both remarked, an actual future setting for Joe and Orson’s characters’ last, ill-fated reunion.

  Orson was characteristically last to their little breakfast party. While they waited for Welles, Joe had confided to Hector their friend had tried to drop out of the picture overnight.

  Joe sensed it was cold feet—some sense of tension of working for another accomplished director, particularly one of Carol Reed’s renown and accomplishment. At Joe’s cunning urging, the British director had appealed to Orson’s populist bent, imploring him to think of all the working men he’d be putting out of a job if he truly bailed on the project.

  Orson grudgingly relented, but was still resisting spending much time in the city’s sewers for a climactic chase scene. Given Orson’s asthma, Hector could see the actor reasonably seeking concession on that point.

  Even as they ate, work was purportedly already hastily underway at Pinewood Studios to construct a warmer, more san
itary sewer set for Orson to run through to his character’s forlorn end.

  Joe had an earlier first call than Orson and so excused himself. He looked at his watch, looked at Hector and said, “Please make sure that Mr. Welles isn’t far behind me, okay?”

  “Do my level best,” Hector said.

  Alone again together, the writer and actor tapped glasses. Orson said, “You survived our little alcohol orgy I see.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m better, but short of fully fit. I’ll get there.”

  Orson nodded, drummed his fingertips on the marble countertop. “And you and the dusky lady? I meant to ask last night, have you proposed to Cassie yet?”

  “No,” Hector said. “Fairly certain that’s not in the cards.” He winced at his own bad, unconscious joke. “That was awful, and not intentional. I meant to say—”

  I know exactly what you meant,” Orson said. “You’re worlds apart in every sense. She’s not your real type, of course. I fancy I have a handle on the women who you’re most drawn to. She simply doesn’t fit that rarified template.”

  “Tell me one thing,” Hector said. “Are you here for the film, or is this role just an excuse and paycheck to fund leg two of this quest for the spear?”

  Orson took a deep breath. His brown eyes darted left to right and back again before at last focusing on Hector. He couldn’t tell if the actor was seeking the right words, or rather, the right lie. He said finally, “Why, both, old man. They’re of equal importance to me. Of equal weight, I suppose. At least in this moment. Or maybe not, frankly. The older I get, the more I find I can change my mind on a dime. Is it the same for you, old man?”

  “Quite the contrary,” Hector said. “Longer I stay alive, the more I find I just harden into the man I’ve always been.”