The Atlantic had swept over the Key for hours, and deep inland were the stinking, deposited remains of octopi and tarpon and barracuda...the twisted knots of dead moray eels and the remnants of Spanish mackerel, now being picked at by the surviving land crabs. The trees had been stripped of all their foliage.
The bodies had swollen so much in the sun that in several cases the seams of their dungarees had given way. Many of the dead were entirely naked, their clothes stripped away by the wind, and the portions of their nude bodies that had faced into that wind looked like lovingly polished and posed skeletons in a museum — everything scoured cleanly down to ivory-colored bone.
His voice cracking, Hem pointed to the bodies of two naked women hanging in a tree and said, “Like something out of Brugels or Bosch,” he said, “if Brugels or Bosch had ever truly seen hell.” The women were nude and hanging twisted in the trees, their bodies swollen to twice natural size. Their breasts were red and mottled and looked ready to burst. Flies swarmed between their legs. Hem said, “They used to run the sandwich shop over by the ferry. I liked them.”
About 4 p.m., Hector found the first body of a child...presumably the daughter of one of the vets who’d brought his family down to the Keys to live with him.
Hector crawled off on all fours to try and vomit again, but there was nothing left, not even bile. He felt Hem’s naked hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Hec. We’ve done enough.” Hector nodded, struggling up to his knees. Hem offered him a gloved hand and he pulled Hector up to him.
“It’s too much,” Hector said.
“It is,” Hem agreed, pulling back on his other glove. “It’s like you said the other day. Some things are too true to be good for the purposes of fiction. But I mean to write about this...journalistically. Ram it down that invalid President of ours goddamn throat.”
Hector nodded, then frowned. A few yards away, behind a stand of mangrove, he saw a shack, sheltered on three sides by accumulated sand. The wind seemed to have been directed over and around the shack by the storm-fostered sandbars.
Hem said, “Just in case, we should look in.” He nodded back over his shoulder in the direction of the dead young girl. “Maybe this is where she came from, or was headed.”
Hector said, “Just what I was thinking.”
But it wasn’t like that.
As bad as the rest had been — and it had been worse than what they found in the shed — the sight Hector beheld in the shack was the most appalling of all to him.
Later he would decide it was worse than the rest because this had not been an “act of God” or capricious nature.
The shack also smelled of death, and Hector could hear the flies buzzing inside before they even opened the door.
Standing back from the rough-hewn door, Hector edged it open with his work boot. There were two female bodies inside.
One was stretched out on a cot by the door. The woman was dark-haired and nude, and her body had been gutted. Her organs lay haphazardly discarded next to the cot. Inside the woman’s torso, someone had tucked stray pieces of metal...discarded hand tools and fishing lures.
Hem said, “Just like the other, by the lighthouse.”
“Yes and no,” Hector said, breathing through his mouth and biting back his bile. “This is sloppy. Like somebody’s first draft.” He pointed at the other body. “Just like that one.” The second body was also that of a nude woman, dangling from her wrists by a rope tossed over an exposed rafter. The woman was dirty blond, and her belly had been slashed open at the navel. Into the ragged incision, someone had tucked a dozen red roses, now wilted and browning.
Hem, wincing and pointing at the second woman said, “That another allusion to some fucking surrealist piece?”
“Yeah,” Hector said. “Salvador Dali. Les roses sanglantes.”
“The Bleeding Roses,” Hem said softly.
“Just so.” Hector frowned, his eyes searching the mottled thighs of the woman stretched out on the cot. Hector edged closer, his left hand held over his nose and mouth. He beat away the flitting flies with his right hand. He said:
“Fuck! No...!”
On the upper, inner portion of the dead woman’s left thigh, just above the knee, was the distorted tattoo of a red heart.
Hector realized he was sitting down when Hem said, “Christ, you okay?” and helped him to his feet again. Hem said, “What is it, Lasso?”
“That tattoo — it’s Beverly...Rachel’s missing friend.” Hector turned on heel, shrugging off Hem’s hands. “I’ve got to get back to Key West. Tonight. Right now.”
“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”—Salvador Dali
BLEEDING ROSES
13
It seemed like the whole of Bone Key’s population was waiting on the docks as the Pilar idled back into harbor. The whole town, or so it seemed to Hector, was awaiting the verdict of the island’s legendary man of letters...every man and woman ready to hang on each of Papa Hemingway’s words about what he’d seen north of Key West.
Josie presumed to jump on board the Pilar. “It’s not looking good here,” he said. “Poor fucking Tito...they found his boat half-submerged over on the East End. When they towed it in, they found him drowned in the hold. Poor luckless rummy.”
Hector felt freshly stricken. Josie seemed to have forgotten that Hector had banished the “poor rummy” to the far side of Bone Key to minimize the danger of him crossing paths with Rachel after Hector had used the one-eyed Cuban to finesse Rachel into his bed.
The fry-cook from the Electric Kitchen stepped on board behind Josie. He said, “Can’t find my damned dog. And Karen’s now among the missing.”
Hector nodded distractedly. He said, “Hem, I’ve got to—”
“Go. I know.” Hem slapped his back. “I’ll check in with you in a bit, Lasso. My best to Rachel. And, Lasso, thanks for riding shotgun.”
Hector licked his lips and nodded. “Sure. But I’ve gotta fly.”
***
Hector sprinted across the Key. When Rachel didn’t open the door at his knock or to the sound of his voice, he fished his back-up key from a hook hidden behind a shrub to the left of the front door, just above the frost line.
Hector keyed himself in, calling again to Rachel. He was unsettled by the silence of his house.
He walked back to his bedroom and found the bed made...the drapes opened. But Rachel’s bags were gone. Her travel trunk was missing.
Shaken now, Hector wandered back into the living room. He sniffed, scenting death on himself. But there wasn’t time for a shower. He looked around, then narrowed his eyes. There was a fresh sheet of paper in his Underwood.
Hector was certain he’d left the typewriter empty.
A note had been typed and left in the machine:
Dear Hector:
Sorry, my love, but word finally came from Beverly.
She is, she wires, on Tavernier, recovering from injuries sustained in the storm.
Her “friend,” a Mr. Vale, is to meet me at the ferry in a few minutes and take me to her.
I’ll get back down to Key West in a few days, when I know Beverly is on the mend.
Until then.
Love,
Rachael
Hector bit through his lip — that goddamned extra ‘A’ in Rachel!
He was tingling all over...could feel his pulse in his ears.
The doorbell rang, then emphatic pounding. “Hector, it’s Papa...open up dammit!”
Walking clumsily backward, in a daze, Hector stumbled toward his door and said, “It’s unlocked.”
Hem stepped in...Sheriff Jack Dixon followed. Both men looked ashen. Hem said, “Hector, uh...”
“We found a body,” Sheriff Dixon said. “It’s a woman, nude, chained to a pier down at Negro Beach. She’s, or she was, blond. We know that from her pubic hair.”
“We saw the rough draft,” Hector said in a daze. “He’s refining his craft. The killer is no longer content to copy the Masters...now he’s executing elaborations on themes.”
“The murdered woman,” Jack Dixon said, looking bewildered, “well, she had no distinguishing characteristics...no birthmarks or blemishes. And, without a head... But, we did find a purse discarded nearby, with some identification.” The sheriff held out his hand with the missing finger. Something glittered in his mutilated hand. “We also found this...on her wrist. The only thing she was wearing.”
Hector recognized Rachel’s bracelet — his last gift to her. He heard himself scream.
Hem grabbed him tight. “I fucking led the cocksucker to her,” Hector shouted. “I sent that bloody bastard a telegram telling him just where to find Rachel!”
The elder author held Hector tightly to him as the crime writer’s misdirected rage and blows to Hem’s back softened to sobs and then to shaking.
Several minutes later, Hector shook loose from Ernest’s embrace.
He staggered into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face.
The writer considered his hated face in the mirror, and then he smashed the glass with his fist.
Hector contemplated his distorted image in the fractured mirror.
His first work of surrealist art.
PART TWO:
THE GOOD FIGHT
(1937)
“Man is, above all, the plaything of his memory.”— André Breton
SPAIN IN FLAMES
14
They were driving back from the front to their hotel — a disturbingly short distance.
The ground shook under their truck from the concussion of the shell strikes behind them. The film director and cameraman had gone ahead in a lorry; Hector, Hem and Dos were in the first of four trailing trucks.
“Fucking parched,” Hem said. “What have you got, Lasso?” It was cold and Hem’s breath trailed frostily from his mouth as he called out over the rumble of the truck’s engine.
Hector rooted around through his knapsack and pulled out two bottles. “What’s your pleasure, ’Stein? Whisky, or whiskey?”
“Let’s go with the top shelf stuff,” Hem said. Hem twisted off the cap and tossed it over his shoulder into the dust plume of their wake. “Now we’re committed.” He took a long pull and handed the bottle back to Hector, who took a deeper drink and then passed the whisky to Dos, who was sitting up front.
“Bless those fucking crafty Scots,” Hem said. He dragged his sweater’s sleeve across his mouth. Hem pulled off his dusty glasses and wiped them clean then put them back on, tucking the curled arms of his wire-rimmed glasses behind each ear. “Some good stuff we got today, yes?” The truck lurched as they bumped up and off the dirt path and onto pavement, climbing the last hill to their hotel.
Hem had arrived in Madrid in early April as a NANA correspondent. Now he was also working with the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens to film a documentary — really a propaganda film — entitled The Spanish Earth. Hem and company were angling to use the film to raise American money to support the Republicans standing against the fascist insurgency of Francisco Franco.
Ernest was still working under the auspices of a correspondent’s visa for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had set up in the Hotel Florida — a too-short traipse from the front and within occasional striking distance of the Nationalists’ artillery fire. The top floors of the hotel had been abandoned and lay mostly in ruins.
Nevertheless, a motley array of journalists, military advisors, dissolute bullfighters, soldiers-of-fortune and camp followers had set up in the surviving, lower floors of the hotel...a place to which to retreat from the front to sleep, eat, drink, write and fuck working girls and girlfriends.
Dos — slope-shouldered, pot-bellied and bald — handed the bottle back over his shoulder to Hector as they rolled to a stop by the shelled-out Hotel Florida. “Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig,” Dos sing-songed.
“Home again, home again to fuck a fat pig, you Portuguese bastard,” Hem said, surly.
The writers staggered out of the truck and Hector stowed his unopened bottle in his rucksack. He held the opened Scotch whisky in his left hand by the bottle’s neck. With his free hand, he brushed dust off his leather jacket and corduroy slacks and ran a hand back through his hair, now, like Hem’s, graying at the temples and along the nape of his wind-burned neck. Hem’s hairline was continuing to recede. Hector was holding onto his hair, at least so far.
Bald Dos, still smarting from Hem’s barb, said dully, “What’ll it be tonight, boys?”
“Figure we’ll gather in Hec’s rooms for some more Scotch, say about four,” Hem said. “Then, properly fortified, we’ll head over to Casa Botín. Got some old acquaintances — loved and unloved — to meet up with. So until then...”
Hector shook his head: Hem was off to his own front with lusty young Martha Gellhorn.
Dos and Hector walked into the Hotel Florida together, stepping wide around some fresh rubble that had fallen from the increasingly decimated upper floors of the hotel. The smell of cordite and blasting powder and the sharp scent of violently upchurned clay-heavy earth permeated Madrid. Smoke seemed to drift through the streets, all day and all night, blown from elsewhere in the city — from some fresh devastation somewhere.
The writers walked the long, dimly lit corridor to Hector’s room, 107, and deposited their bags on the floor. Hector fetched two glasses and poured more single malt for Dos and himself. Dos drank some of that and said, “He’s becoming unbearable...at least to me.”
Hector shrugged off his leather jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. “I know. But those who don’t know Hem like we do think he’s marvelous. They think he’s exuding ‘grace under pressure.’ They think he’s a good man to have around when the chips are down. And that’s true enough, so far as it goes. But Jesus, we know it’s been a downhill slide for Hem since his old man shot himself. That old bastard’s selfish death may well have doomed our Hem.”
Dos nodded slowly and said, “Hem says something similar about you, you know. Hem claims you’ve never overcome the death of that woman a couple years back...Rachel?”
“Rachel Harper.” Hector shrugged. “I’m soldiering on, just fine, Dos. And anyway you slice it, near as I can tell, Hem didn’t drive his father to suicide. And even if he had in some way, the final decision to put the revolver to his head and tug the trigger was nobody’s decision but sick old Clarence Hemingway’s. Rachel was different, Dos. Rache was an innocent who got killed because I got cute playing ‘last-tag’ with some killer who I never even laid an eye or a fucking glove on. I’m culpable in her death, every inch of the way. But that’s history.” Hector drank more whiskey and said, “Any new word on Robles?”
José Robles was a friend and translator of Dos Passos’. They’d known one another since 1916.
Dos, the committed social activist, had been among the vanguard of American writers and intellectuals to rush to Spain. Dos had arrived for the first time many months before, well ahead of Papa, and that was still a sore point between Hem and Dos.
Robles was a professor — an instructor at John Hopkins — and a Loyalist. But the Soviet “advisors” had gained control of the Madrid front in late December of the previous year and someone — some kind of “secret police” had arrested Robles on unspecified charges. Robles’ fate and whereabouts were still a mystery.
“No word,” Dos said, somberly, “but I keep asking. I’ll keep asking, Hector, consequences be damned, until I have my answers.” Dos drained his drink and set it on the table next to Hector’s typewriter. Weak-eyed, Dos pulled on thick glasses and read a few paragraphs there and said, “Thi
s is damned fine stuff, Hec. A bloody good beginning.”
“I’ve got plenty of bloody good beginnings, Dos. It’s the finishings I’m having trouble with, lately.”
“But this is fiction, Hector. Not genre stuff. It’s swell to see you’re getting back in the swing — and reaching farther.”
“It is crime fiction, Dos. If you actually read good crime fiction you’d know that.”
“Okay. But you’re not writing about this...?” He gestured at the window and presumably what lay beyond it.
Hector said, “Hell no. I’m no political animal. You know that. As regards subject matter, I have my rails and I run on ’em. And so far as Hem is concerned, the Spanish Civil War is his and his alone to write about. And his conversion to a political animal is startling. Guess I saw the first signs of that after the hurricane in ’35. He wanted to personally kill FDR for what happened to the vets.”
“Well you should at least feign some interest, or express some opinions about the conflict here,” Dos said. “I mean it Hector, the paranoia runs thick in these parts. People are already talking about you. You’re not here on a correspondent’s VISA. You’re not fighting...not attached to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And you also have an anti-FDR reputation that makes some think you are a mean-streaked conservative.”
“Those are people who didn’t or don’t live on Key West,” Hector said. “The ones who don’t know what the New Deal has done to that island. It’s ruined, now.”
“Sure, for an isolationist like you. FDR made it accessible to the masses. That’s what you hate. And Hem, too.” Dos shook his head. “I guess what I’m really saying is, some people are beginning to talk here about you, Hector...to wonder about you. Some think that you’re a spy, here on our government’s nickel, snooping around for J. Edgar and the Republicans back home.”
Hector shrugged. “I am here as a spy and that’s no lie. I’m spying for Pauline on that son of a bitch Hem and that roundheels journalist he’s screwing.” Hem was deeply mired in a dubious love affair with a younger “journalist” and sometimes fiction writer named Martha Gellhorn. Martha was a pretty, strawberry-blond Midwestern woman with a foul mouth, extreme nicotine addiction and equally strong activist streak. Hem seemed drawn to the Spanish Civil War primarily by his lust for Gellhorn.
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 10