Hector said, “Then you and Alva should talk. She’s doing much the same thing.”
The little man smiled at Alva and handed her a card. “Our studio’s address is there. Come by. Please bring some samples of your work.”
Hector said, “Why do it here, Bishop? Why not work from Paris? At your age, and with your reputation, why expose yourself to all of this risk?”
The little man pulled out a Puro and Hector lit the cigar for him with his Zippo. “There was an American writer many years ago, an Ohio journalist turned novelist,” Bishop said. “He was old and felt the world was leaving him behind. So he went to Mexico — to revolutionary Mexico. His stated intent was to find and meet Pancho Villa, but he had a second, highly idiosyncratic agenda.”
Hector ground out the stub of his cigarette and lit another. “I know who you mean. Ambrose Bierce. I was in Mexico a few years after and heard the story — when I was part of the Punitive Expedition, chasing old Pancho.”
“Then you remember what Bierce wrote in his last note, Mr. Lassiter?”
“Vividly. ‘To be a gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!’”
Bishop Blair puffed and waved smoke from his face. “Exactly. That’s also why I’m in Spain.”
Alva said, “You must keep painting Mr. Blair.”
“I miss my Harriet,” he said. “I painted for her. She was my real audience.”
Hector said, “Alva’s husband was killed by the fascists last year. She knows loss, too. She’s right, we push on. We soldier on. Hand some back to this bloody fucking world as we can.”
The little painter stood up and leaned again on his cane. “I didn’t mean to intrude upon you two, but I thank you for allowing me too. And thank you again, Mr. Lassiter, for the joy your books gave my Harriet.”
Hector rose and squeezed the man’s arm in farewell. “Don’t let the bastards get you down, Bish.”
The little man smiled, unconvinced, then stumped off into the cold night.
Alva said, “You should take your own advice to that old man, Hector. Put what happened with Rachel behind you.”
Hector drained his espresso. “Yeah. But I’m too often a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do kind of fella.”
“I am responsible only to God and history.”— Francisco Franco
THE DENUNCIATION
18
Alva moved around her apartment with a flashlight and box of kitchen matches, turning on oil lamps. She took a couple of spindly pieces of scrap lumberyard wood from a small pile and tucked the stingy slats into the fireplace and bent to light them.
Watching her, Hector said, “Excuse me a moment. I’m going to run down to the corner...getting low on cigarettes.”
When he returned she frowned. Hector’s arms strained under a stack of fresh cut planetree logs. He said, “Don’t look at me that way. And there’ll be another delivery tomorrow. Enough to see you into middle May and the warmer weather. It’s the least I can do.” Smiling, ignoring her frown, he bent to her fireplace and put in three of the logs, positioning them over the smaller fire. The frost on the logs cracked and popped.
Alva moved closer. She knelt beside him, holding out her hands to the growing fire. “You really shouldn’t have done this, Hector. But thank you — it feels wonderful. I think I may sleep on my rug here tonight, by the fire.”
She went to a gramophone player and cranked it and set the needle down: Ciaccona from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor.
Alva smiled and walked to the kitchen. She opened a bottle of wine, then shook her head. “I’m sorry — I forgot that you’re no longer drinking.”
“No, it sounds wonderful,” Hector said. “I don’t think of wine as liquor. Wine is wine.” God, he was sounding like Gertrude Stein.
She smiled and poured him a glass, then said, “It’s Algerian. Cheap, but good.” She paused, then said, “Unless you’d like to run down to the corner for more cigarettes as pretense to perhaps buy a bottle of Rioja Alta.”
“I said I’m sorry for the wood.”
“And I said thank you.”
They tapped glasses. He said, “To what?”
She pursed her lips and wrinkled her brow, thinking. “To art.”
“Right.” Hector sipped and began roaming her loft. The furniture was big and worn but inviting — suede couches draped with throws...worn leather armchairs. Big armoires and bookcases lined one wall. Hector saw several of his own novels there — English and Spanish translations. But there was nothing particularly masculine in the room — nothing that might have belonged to her husband. There was no sign of him, not even a photograph of the man. Hector understood the urge — put away every reminder of the lost love and wait for all that hurt to finally go away.
The remaining three walls of the loft were covered with paintings. Hector was awed by them. As Hem had said, there was something not quite original about any of them, but they were beautiful and Alva’s execution was indeed flawless. They were all Cubist and surrealist works...many of them homages, or elaborations — responses — to the works of male artists. And as the male surrealists used women in their art, Alva just as often used men.
But Hector was drawn most strongly to her paintings of other women. And somehow, the women in those paintings all looked a little like Alva.
She said, “Be honest — what do you think?”
“I think they’re exquisite,” Hector said. “I see at least three I want for myself. I also have a friend from Paris, and the old days. Libby is living in Cannes now, and she has a gallery there. I’m going to alert her to your work.”
“Then thank you again.”
Alva had returned to the fireside, her back to the flames. Her legs were silhouetted through the careworn, back-lit fabric of her dress. She had long legs, like Rachel, though a bit thinner. But Hector suspected that food, too, was in short supply for the pretty young widow. Properly nourished, he thought Alva would be just as curvy as Rachel had been. But she seemed fit...a dancer’s body and carriage.
She said suddenly, “Okay, all is really forgiven for the firewood. It’s heavenly.”
Hector smiled and moved next to her. “I love fireplaces. In Key West, we don’t even have interior heating — rarely gets that cold. If it does, you just start stacking blankets on the bed...coats and other clothes.”
They stood there a long moment, neither knowing what to say. Hector felt like he was hanging around. He asked himself what he wanted — an improbable invitation to spend the night? He wasn’t yet sure that his feelings ran that way, and her resemblance to Rachel was so pronounced he wasn’t sure bedding Alva wouldn’t be more unsettling than satisfying.
He could talk to her for hours, he figured, but Alva seemed tired...mellow past the point of small talk.
Hector made a show of checking his pocket watch and sighed. “I should head back. Hem will be bitter if I don’t at least show up in time to let him think I helped him close the place down.”
“Hem’s still like a big, overgrown boy.”
“Still?”
“I’ve always gotten that sense of him from his books and articles,” Alva said. “And in person, despite his age, he comes across as strangely boyish at times.”
Hector suddenly wondered if, at thirty-seven, he also came across as “boyish.” Rachel had characterized him to be at least nearly so two years before.
He checked his watch again. He really needed to shove off. When Hector had suggested his leaving, Alva hadn’t tried to talk him out of it and that fact wasn’t lost on him. But Hector didn’t want to leave without some kind of a commitment for another rendezvous. He said, “I’d like to buy you breakfast...discuss terms for those three paintings of yours that I want to buy.”
She smiled. “Have you found a place that’s good for breakfast?”
“Anywhere I set off too, I seem to end up at Chicote’s. Say, nine?”
“Nine tomorrow morning it is.” She hugged him chastely and gave him air kisses. “Thank you again for all
you did — all you tried to do — for my sister. It’s too bad for her it was too late, but Rachel found a very good man in you.” She seemed very sad.
Hector smiled uncertainly and walked to the door. He saw his overcoat draped across the back of her couch but decided to leave it...to feign having forgotten it. It could serve as pretense for another visit. If the world didn’t turn that way, Alva obviously needed it more than he did, anyway. Hector said, “Goodnight Alva.”
***
Hector turned up the collar of his sports jacket and buttoned it across his chest. His eyes were already tearing and stinging from the cold. Snow was sifting softly down — already a thin cover of snow draped the rubble. His prospects of finding a cab during the sporadic, unpredictable night shelling appeared remote, so Hector began steeling himself for the long cold walk back to the Casa Botín, or perhaps just back to his room.
Stamping his feet to keep warm, Hector shook loose another Pall Mall and lit it. As he closed his lighter, he heard engines gun and tires squeal.
Three trucks pulled alongside the curb and several men jumped out, holding rifles and handguns.
Hector’s stomach rolled: Spanish Secret State Police. Some of them wore uniforms, but several were wearing long black leather coats and peaked black leather caps. Hector gestured with his cigarette at the black clad men and said, “You boys look like ex-Cheka. You some of old Joe Stalin’s flunkies?”
One of the uniformed men, a squat, thick-necked man with bad skin and a too-long mustache said in English, “You would do better not to joke, hombre, especially not to joke with those ones.” He nodded at his black-clad comrades.
“Okay,” Hector said. “What’s going on here?” He already suspected the answer would be that he had been denounced. He could also guess who had done that denouncing. Hector’s money was on Quentin Windly. The English-speaking policeman said, “You are Héctor Mason Lassiter of the Key West, Florida, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“I need your papers.”
Hector made a show of patting his pockets. He fished some pocket change from his pant’s pocket, gripping it in his right hand, then he acted as if he remembered and pulled his identification papers from the interior breast pocket of his sports jacket. With his left hand, Hector passed the policeman his passport. Then he took aim at one of the second floor windows he guessed to be Alva’s. With his right hand, Hector pitched the heavy coins at the glass.
His unexpected pitch drew the expected response: rifle barrels and Mausers were quickly trained on Hector’s head and heart.
Somewhere, a dog barked.
A light came on in the window struck by the coins.
The window opened and Alva leaned out, frowning. In pitch-perfect Spanish she said, “What’s going on? Why are you accosting my friend?”
“There has been an allegation,” the big man who spoke English said. He responded to her question in Spanish. He said, “There has been a very serious allegation, Señorita.” Hector also spoke fluent Spanish, but he didn’t want the secret police to know that — at least not yet. If they took him into custody and didn’t suspect he spoke their language, they might say something he could use to his advantage.
Other lights were coming on now in Alva’s building. Other tenants were now peeking out their windows. When they saw it was the secret police, the neighbors quickly closed their windows or pulled shut their drapes. The citizens of Madrid lived in fear of nighttime visits of the secret police. The madrileños had even evolved a term for it: “The Knock of Death.”
Alva said, “What is this allegation?”
“Murder, Señorita. Murder.”
Now Hector was surprised, but he continued to play unilingual. He looked up at Alva, raising his hands in apparent confusion. Not that it took much acting: Murder?
“It’s murder, Hector,” Alva said.
Hector said, “Find out who’s dead.”
The policeman who spoke English said to Hector, loudly enough that Alva could also hear, “Many several. You go with us, now.” He took Hector’s arm and began pushing Hector toward one of the trucks.
Alva said, “Where are you taking him?”
“Seguridad headquarters. Unless he continues to provoke these others.” He nodded at the men in black leather. “If he does that, then he may find himself in Lubyanka.”
Alva looked stricken. She said, “I’ll get word to Hem...he can call your embassy. I promise, Hector, I’ll get help.”
“That’d be real swell,” Hector said.
One of the men in black coats punched Hector in the right kidney, sending him to his knees, vomiting.
When he was finished being sick, three of the black clad men grabbed Hector — two taking him under the arms, the other picking up his feet. They tossed him up and into the bed of the lead truck. They piled in behind him, taking seats along the sides of the truck and pointing their guns at Hector.
In agony from the kidney punch, Hector lay on the floor of the truck’s bed, nauseous and cold. In the distance he could hear the night shells coming over from the fascist side of the front. Sometimes he could hear the whine of the shell if it was passing close overhead, but each time, he could hear the concussion — some other part of Madrid blown to rubble...sending more smoke drifting through the ruined city.
Hector thought of José Robles and of Alva’s missing husband.
He prayed he wasn’t about to make it a trifecta.
“A great killer must love to kill; unless he feels it is the best thing he can do, unless he is conscious of its dignity and feels that it is its own reward, he will be incapable of the abnegation that is necessary in real killing.”— Ernest Hemingway
MY ENEMY’S ENEMY...
19
The chief interrogator was dressed like a banker. At least he was dressed that way when he entered the room. He wore an old, well-cared-for business suit that was several seasons’ out of style. His thick gray mustache matched his hair that was cut into a short, salt-and-pepper bristle. He wore wire-rimmed glasses.
He returned to Hector his nearly empty pack of Pall Mall cigarettes and the engraved Zippo lighter. “It’s permitted to smoke while I change,” the man said in English. “My advice is to savor this last cigarette.”
Then the man walked to a cabinet, took off his suit coat, and hung it on a wooden hanger inside the cabinet. He next tugged off his tie and stripped off his shirt. He was wearing a T-shirt cut to expose his hairy shoulders and parts of his back. He kicked off his loafers, then slipped off his pants. Hector began to squirm. He got edgier when the interrogator said, “Hurry with the cigarette, please. When you finish, I’ll need you to take off all of your clothes.”
Two men were standing on either side of Hector. Each held a rifle pointed at Hector’s head.
Not looking good.
The interrogator stepped into a bloodstained pair of overalls and shrugged the top on over his shoulders and then pulled the front zipper up from the crotch to his neck.
Stalling, Hector rubbed his burning kidney and said, “Was the beating really necessary? I was cooperating. If it’ll keep me dressed, I intend to keep cooperating...enthusiastically.”
The man blinked several times. “Beating? You were beaten?” He nodded gravely. “Was it one of these pigs? Do you wish to file charges?”
Hector exhaled smoke through both nostrils and shook his head. Given what looked to be coming, it didn’t seem worth the charade, though his presumed torturer was clearly enjoying the dance. Hector exhaled more smoke and said, “Who the hell is dead?”
“Many, hombre. Many, and terrible deaths they were. Where were you three weeks ago tonight?”
Hector thought about that and said, “At sea. I was making the crossing from New York. A week ago tonight, I suppose I was on the night train from Paris. I’ve been in Spain for just about a week.”
The man in the bloodstained overalls chewed his lip. “A week? Just a week in Madrid?”
“A week in Spain
,” Hector said. “More like six days in Madrid.”
The torturer slammed his fist down on his desk. “Give me this bastard’s papers.”
He looked at Hector’s identification and passport and then handed them back to Hector. “I am sorry. You can remain dressed.” Seething, the interrogator looked around his desk. He picked up a chunk of ore — some rock he used as a paperweight — then hurled it at the head of one of the men standing guard over Hector.
Hector instinctively ducked. That was a good thing: the rock hit the guard in the head. The man’s finger spasmed and he gutshot Hector’s other guard. Hector’s ducking saved him from an accidental headshot.
The two guards fell on either side of Hector’s chair. The torturer said to him, “Don’t get ideas.”
Hector held up both hands. “Not me, brother. I ain’t movin’.” Hector wet his lips. He said, “You’ve got some time troubles, I take it — making me for the murder, I mean.”
“Murders. Yes.”
The gutshot guard was rolling on the floor, groaning and bleeding hard from his belly. The torturer bent over him, pulling the man’s hands from his stomach wound.
The head interrogator said, “That can’t be fixed. So it’s the gift of death for you.” He picked up the guard’s own Mauser and shot the man twice in the head. He walked over to the guard whom he had felled with the rock and put another shot behind that man’s left ear.
Hector tried to look like he was taking it all in stride. Carefully, he lit another cigarette. He offered one to the interrogator, now standing with a smoking Mauser in his hand. The man nodded. “That would be very nice, yes.”
He took the offered cigarette and Hector fired him up with his Zippo.
Hector said, “You got a handle, sport?”
“Handle?”
“What’s your name?”
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 13