Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “More or less. We put our trust in these damned uniforms and my German. Get in close as can be, then use these blades.”

  The Irishman frowned. “He looked at his own uniform. “Good thing we have vintage SS togs.” There weren’t many of these black S.S. uniforms like the ones we were wearing in circulation anymore. Himmler had recalled most of them in recent months.

  I arched an inquiring eyebrow.

  Jimmy said, “Black doesn’t show blood. Close in is hard on clothes.”

  8

  According to Duff, we’d reached the rendezvous point a full hour early. It was safer, she said, to stay in the tunnel system than to loiter on the streets. That was hard to argue given the motley crew we were.

  We sat on the floor of the traboule. The child was curled up on Duff’s lap, asleep again, but with troubled dreams. I said, “That little angel could sleep through the end of the world, I think.”

  “I’d settle for her sleeping through the end of this war,” Duff said. “What this child has already seen in her short life? My God.” She stroked Marie’s hair. She made a face that made me think she didn’t approve of the hasty dye job.

  Jimmy shoved fingers down his boot and pulled out a silver flask. “Whisky,” he said. “Hector? Duff? It’s Glemorangie.”

  I pulled a flask from my left boot. “Got my own. Well, really it was meant for you, Jimmy. Your fee for riding shotgun. Talisker.”

  Jimmy swapped flasks with me. “This might even make it worth it,” he said.

  Duff took my flask from me and finished unscrewing the cap. She sampled the Glenmorangie. “Wow.” Her voice sounded raw from the Highland single malt. She took another hit. “Okay, it gets smoother.”

  “It’ll warm you at any rate,” I said. “All this encyclopedic knowledge you have on us and others sets me thinking. What do you know about Klaus Barbie? I want the good, inside stuff.”

  “Golly, I wish I had it to give you,” Duff said, handing me back the flask. “I know a lot less about him than I know about you, frankly. He’s about twelve years your junior. Born in Bad Godesberg. He’s zealous for torture and very ardent about Nazism. That’s about all I know. He’s still a bit of a cipher.”

  I finally allowed myself a cigarette, or rather, Duff allowed me one. Clicking shut my Zippo, I said, “So the girl’s presumed parentage is what’s driving all this support from the resistance?”

  “It is a child’s life, Hector.”

  I blew some smoke and rested my head against the wall. “You think that way, honey, and I cherish you for it, but the resistance leaders do not operate that way. That’s not the way things are done in bad times like these. To risk all these so-called assets for a single child’s life? That doesn’t strike me as credible. It’s not sound strategy.”

  Duff searched my face, then nodded. “You’re right, of course. It’s all about who she is. If she escapes, it will drive Höttl crazy. Also, the revelation he fathered a Jewish child can be held over Höttl. Maybe even used to control him. But this child has to make it out of Europe alive. America might be far enough away for her to be safe. Short of that?” She smiled and said, “If only we could kill every Nazi…”

  “You’re a woman after my own heart,” I said.

  That earned me a look. Duff said, “What about you and Werner Höttl? According to your file, you were in Paris together in the 1920s. We have some time before we can go out there. Tell me about all that, Hector.”

  PARIS,

  JANUARY, 1925

  They were sitting in a café on the Rue Vavin.

  The whippet-thin German blew smoke and smiled, a death’s head grin. He was so undernourished-looking, his eyes so sunken into their that sockets, one was made aware of the contours of the skull beneath the pale, nearly translucent skin.

  “People will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one,” Werner Höttl said. In addition to his unsettlingly scrawny frame, Höttl’s face bore a wicked scar. The livid, fat red welt started on the right side of his forehead, just at the border of his black widow’s peak, trailing down to disrupt a rather bushy eyebrow, then resuming at his too-prominent cheekbone. The scar ended at the edge of his upper lip. “The things fools will fall for at the mere promise of hope…” A wicked grin.

  Hector said, “That wisdom sounds cribbed from Abe Lincoln. You know, ‘You can fool all the people some of the time…’”

  The German had just more or less latched onto Hector, probably because he was the only one sitting at a table alone in the crowded café. They’d met once before, years ago, but Hector sensed the man didn’t remember that, and so hadn’t raised it in conversation yet.

  There was some motion in a mirror beside their table. Hector turned and saw his date had arrived. Smiling, he rose and kissed her on both offered cheeks. The woman straightened his tie and kissed his mouth. “Who’s your friend?” She ran her fingers back through her long, blue-black hair and whispered in Hector’s ear, “He must be a lousy fencer. I know they pride themselves on such scars, but most of those look dashing or piratical. That wound is truly horrid.”

  Hector held her hand as she sat down and smiled at the bone-thin German. Hector took his own seat and said, “This is Werner Höttl. We just began talking a few minutes ago. Werner, this is my friend, Victoria Jensen. Victoria, meet Werner. Werner here has been going on about this prison writer.”

  Höttl shook his head. “Prison writer? Nein. That’s not right at all. He is a thinker, a kind of philosopher-warrior, who is unjustly in prison and writing a book. My friend, Hess, has sent me some excerpts. They are powerful meditations and indictments on how the Jew is wrecking the world.”

  Victoria confiscated Hector’s wine glass, took a sip and licked her full lower lip. “What prison? What thinker, this anti-Semite? And really, how smart can he be if he’s in jail?”

  Hector shifted uncomfortably. Less than the diplomat, was beautiful Vicky.

  “He’s in Landsberg Prison,” Höttl said cooly. Höttl went on a bit from there, more anti-Semitic rants. He said, “I think this book could be very important. Soon the world will be discussing it. Mark my words here, and mark them well, you’ll hear of it, and of its author. It’s called Mein Kampf, and—”

  “We’re already late, Hec,” Victoria said curtly. “I know it’s my fault for being tardy meeting you here, but either way, now we’re both late.”

  Hector stood and pulled her up to him. “Vic is right. We need to shove off, Werner. Maybe we’ll see you around the Quarter again.” He hesitated, then said, “This fella, this writer, what’d he do to get himself in prison?”

  Höttl waved a hand. “He was convicted for his part in the rebellion the reporters called the Beer Hall Putsch.”

  “I remember reading something about that,” Hector said.

  “It’s an injustice what has been done to him,” Höttl said. “Herr Hitler is a visionary.” A terrible smile and another death’s head grin. “He greatly admires your countryman, Henry Ford.”

  Hector nodded. Ford: that racist son of a bitch. Hector said shortly, “Me? I’m a Chevrolet man, myself.” He took Victoria’s arm. “As you said, darlin’, we have places to be.”

  ***

  Walking in the crunching snow, shivering and looking for a cab, Victoria said, “He’s unattractive on the outside and the inside. Werner Whatever, I mean. How’d you meet that creep?”

  “You were late,” Hector said. “He found me.”

  “He’s horrible.”

  “He is surely that.” Hector wrapped his arm tighter around her waist. “To be completely honest, tonight wasn’t the first time he and I crossed paths. I remember; I don’t think he does.”

  “So you know him more than just tonight?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You met here in Paris?”

  “No, in Berlin,” Hector said. “Just after the war. I was making my way here. I decided to see the country we’d beaten. See how it was rebuilding itself after all the carnage
and our imposed penalties. There was a short story of mine that had been purloined and printed in translation in some German magazine. A director in Berlin read it, liked it, and asked me to spend a few days in the city on his nickel helping him adapt it for the screen. Höttl was a kind of understudy to the director. I guess he doesn’t remember us meeting. It was very brief. And I had the impression Werner was under the influence of something at the time. Opium? Cocaine? Something like that.”

  “Did he have that wicked scar, even then?”

  “Nah. Anyway, he was about as charming then as now. Only loopier back then.”

  Victoria shook loose his arm and waved her hands over her head, calling out, “Taxi!” She pulled Hector across the slick pavers of the boulevard. “Our cab, thank God. This wind is cutting through me.”

  Hector helped Victoria into her seat, then swung up into the carriage beside her. They snuggled close under a blanket. Hector called up, “27 rue de Fleurus, vite!”

  He said to Victoria, “Better to get there sooner rather than later tonight. This frigid wind is killing me, too. I’m near finished with this weather.” They were scheduled to leave for the States soon—Hector for the Florida Keys, Victoria elsewhere.

  Victoria rested her head on his shoulder. She said, “I wonder how he got that scar. I’ve seen dueling scars, but that’s about the nastiest, if that’s indeed what it is.”

  Hector took her hand in his under the blanket. “Rapier? Epée? What difference does it make?”

  “Quite a lot if it’s your face on the receiving end,” she said. “An épée would make a smaller scar than a rapier. And a saber? Though I have to say, that scar looks like it was made by a broadsword or an axe.”

  ***

  They’d nearly reached the door of 27 rue de Fleurus. Across the chilly courtyard, a voice called out, “What is this? You’re friends of Miss Stein’s, too?”

  Werner Höttl trotted across the ice-glazed pavement, hands thrust into the pockets of his greatcoat.

  Victoria whispered, “Friend? There is no way on earth this anti-Semite doesn’t know Gertrude Stein is Jewish.”

  “I don’t think he cares,” Hector said. “Maybe he’s here to solicit an endorsement from her for his prison-writer friend, for this Mein Kampf.”

  “Not funny, Hec.”

  “I wasn’t necessarily making a joke. Some authors will solicit an endorsement from an arch-enemy if it will sell them some books.”

  Hector thrust his hands into his own pockets to short-circuit Höttl’s attempt at another handshake. He said, “You’re an invited guest, Werner?”

  “A guest of a guest to be strictly accurate,” Höttl said.

  Well that other guest must be no real friend to Gertrude, Hector thought. He said, “Really? Which guest?”

  “The poet,” Höttl said, smiling. “You know, Ezra Pound.”

  Quelle surprise.

  It made sense. Ezra was another one of them—increasingly given to horrific anti-Semitic rants and grand conspiracy theories regarding Zionism.

  Hector nodded at the door. “After you, Herr Höttl, I insist.”

  ***

  It was an unusually busy night at Miss Stein’s salon. A haze of cigarette smoke obscured those famous walls lined with modernist paintings. The pungent scent of sweet cakes and candies and Alice and Gertrude’s personally distilled fruit-derived liqueurs was cloying.

  And then there was that other odor—the stench of sweat from all the nascent novelists, poets and playwrights granted audiences by the mercurial Miss Stein—exchanges that often ended in cutting, even career-stunting bons mots from the short, heavyset and tart-tongued Grande Dame.

  Alice B. Toklas peeled Hector away from Victoria and steered him toward the Great Woman. “Gertrude Stein saw you come in and insisted I bring you right to her,” Alice said. She cast a look back at Werner Höttl. “I must admit, your presence here tonight might be a kind of blessing.”

  Hector wet his lips. That was a surprise coming from usually testy Alice. He followed the little woman through a tangle of tipsy painters, intellectuals and slightly addled sycophants—Alice sometimes crept hashish into the baked goods she fashioned for these heady soirees; Hector had been steering clear of them since February.

  Gertrude was holding court in her usual chair, ponderous and pitched forward, forearms resting on her knees. Above her chair hung a portrait of Stein as painted by Picasso. The pose in the painting mimicked or anticipated Miss Stein’s present posture. When she saw Hector, she waved her hand, dismissing some heavily perspiring and foppish-looking young man.

  Hector said, “That boy looked a bit too fey to be a novelist.”

  “Poet,” Gertrude said. “At least in his mind he is so. My star, I saw you come in. But the man you came in with? You didn’t bring him, did you?”

  “Of course not. You know all my guests to your salon are of a type.”

  It hung there between them, unsaid: Female and comely. Worldly. Guests like Victoria, like the also raven-haired female crime writer Brinke Devlin who’d preceeded Vicky.

  Hector accepted a glass of red wine from Alice. He nodded his thanks and said, “He happened to follow me and my date up. We’re at best fleeting bar acquaintances. Fact is, I don’t even like Werner. Hell, if I gave him any real thought, I’d probably hate him.” He sipped his wine, then added, “He claimed to have been invited by Ezra.”

  “Pound?” Gertrude glowered. She gestured at an empty space up against the wall. “Pound hasn’t been welcome here since he broke that chair.” She again pointed at the emptiness. She shook her head. “Well, if Pound is the one I have to thank for that man being here again, it explains a few things. That horrid man, Mr. Höttl, he showed up three nights ago. He left me a packet of writings. One was some execrable, dreadful and ineptly composed kind of manifesto.”

  Hector shook out a match. Through a haze of smoke, he said, “And the rest?”

  “His own works. Some kind of cinema treatments, I gather. They, too, were terrible. And… racist.”

  “Have you given him your appraisal of these works?”

  “I suspect that is coming momentarily,” she said. Gertrude watched the German talking to Victoria. The raven-haired, blue-eyed Victoria looked to be at wit’s end while having to suffer his company. “I’d have you stay close, my star,” Gertrude said. “Close by me, I mean. In case he reacts badly to my critiques.”

  Hector smiled thinly. “Much in his reaction might be determined by the way in which your criticism is couched.”

  “Of course,” Gertrude said. “That hardly needs to be remarked upon. But I have a reputation.” That was true.

  “I have a reputation for honest, blunt criticism,” she finished. That was true with caveats.

  Hector smiled again, shaking his head. He doubted others who’d been on the receiving end of Miss Stein’s criticisms would put it quite as diplomatically as she had.

  He shrugged. “Why me?”

  “Don’t be daft,” Gertrude said, waving a hand. “Don’t play dense, Hector. Look at the men in this room. I can’t look to them for defense. But you, my star? You can more than deal with that one.”

  Werner Höttl was drawing closer. Gertrude looked apprehensive, even frightened. Hector had never seen her quite like this. He said softly, quickly, “No worries, Miss Stein. I’ll stay right here. Still, you can probably let him down more gently than you incline. He is a man who moves in unpleasant circles. There’ll be other nights when I may not be so close to provide muscle.”

  “One cannot think like that,” Gertrude said, wetting her lips and watching Werner draw closer. “If one did that, one would never do anything. Analysis breeds paralysis. Now, he’s almost here. If it comes to fisticuffs, remember my furnishings, my paintings. I want you to finish him with a roundhouse or whatever you call them in those pulp magazine stories of yours. Lay him out flat. That’s what I expect of you, Hector.”

  The lady didn’t ask much, did she?

 
Hector rolled his eyes and sipped more wine. He said, “Right. No repeats of Ezra and the ill-fated chair. No worries. But if you put this to him in the right way, we don’t even have to worry about—”

  Gertrude cut him off, raising her voice over the din of all the chattering intellectuals crowding her salon. “Herr Höttl,” she said loudly, saying it for the benefit of the room. This was, after all, a reputation-enhancing moment for Miss Stein. At least Hector wagered Gertrude figured that was so.

  “No doubt you’ve come for the manuscripts and my opinion of them,” she said.

  “Just so,” Höttl said, smiling and bowing exaggeratedly.

  Gertrude glared at him. “Your racist diatribes provoked me to consign all of the papers you left me to the fire.” She nodded at her fireplace. “From that reaction, even you can certainly infer my personal appraisal of those so-called writings.”

  Höttl’s smile faltered. “You’re joking, surely.”

  “The only amusing thing about any of this is your temerity to ask me to suffer to assess that racist drivel,” Gertrude said. “No, Höttl, I’m quite serious. Believe I burned the writings. All of them.”

  Gertrude flicked her hand, as if she was shooing away a fly. “You, Herr Höttl, are dismissed and may not come back here, not ever.”

  Well, that had torn it. Hector dropped his cigarette into his empty wine glass and handed it to Victoria as she sidled up beside his chair. She whispered, “Go get ’em, champ!”

  Werner Höttl’s expression had quickly passed from incredulity to panic and now, all too swiftly, to rage and gathering wrath.

  “Easy,” Hector said, standing. “Let’s take the air, eh, Werner.”

  Höttl took a step toward Gertrude. Hector slipped between them. At six-two, Hector had at least four inches on the German, and, he figured, at least forty pounds of muscle.

  The salon had grown eerily quiet.