Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  We moved across two similar rooftops after that one—it was very easy going. When we hit the edge of the last roof, we were confronted with a four-foot gap between rooftops.

  The roof on the other side of the narrow abyss was about two feet lower than the one we were standing on.

  Jimmy made the jump with no trouble and turned around to face me. I could tell he was trying to decide between urging me to make the jump with her in my arms, or perhaps tossing Marie across the distance. I was afraid if I did the latter, she might scream—it was a long way down.

  Making the leap alone wasn’t any problem I knew I could make the jump, even if I would hate doing it. But weighted down with sixty pounds of squirming child and a slick surface to launch from?

  Cursing inside, I took a few steps back, started running, and kicked off.

  I hit the other side, lost footing, then began tumbling backward. Jimmy said, “Whoa there, boyo!”

  He grabbed my belt and waistband of my pants in his big hand and pulled me away from the edge.

  I thanked him with my eyes, not wanting Marie to know how close we’d come to falling over the edge.

  Short of breath, we made our way across the roof and saw we were now confronted with a ten- to twelve-foot gap between our building and the next.

  “So much for this Spring-Heeled Jack nonsense,” Jimmy said.

  He began to scrounge around the rooftop for a tool.

  “Hello! Here we go,” he said. Smiling, Jimmy hefted a rusted lug wrench.

  Jimmy crept over to the roof access door and broke off the outside door handle with a single swing. He turned the wrench around, then used the tapered handle to punch out the interior door knob through the hole left by the handle he’d sheared off. Through the weather-ravaged door panel, I heard the interior doorknob bounce off the floor.

  Jimmy opened the door, smiling. The hinges were rusty and the door’s opening sounded like some small animal being tortured. “We’re in,” he said redundantly, very proud of himself.

  “And everybody in the building may know it,” I said. “Way our luck’s running, this will probably end up being the rooftop of some flea bag hotel being tossed by more Nazis.”

  I was nearly right: we made our way down three flights of warped, creaking, shadowed stairwells. Then we began to hear all the groaning and moaning.

  Not moaning from pain. No, it was the other kind of moaning.

  No hotel, this. We were in a bawdy house.

  Marie said, “Monsieur Hector, is everybody sick in here?”

  “That’s it exactly, honey,” I said. “Cover your ears and keep your face pressed to my neck. Can’t have you catching anything. Keep those eyes tightly closed too, darlin’.”

  We made our way down two more flights of stairs and then tiptoed down a long, lowly lit corridor past more noisy rooms.

  We ran into the boss whore at the front door. She was big, overly made-up. Confused, but glowering.

  I shrugged. Jimmy said to her, “Au revoir, Madame.”

  It was drizzling rain again when we reached the street. We ran another two blocks in the rain.

  The Renault was idling at the corner.

  I slid into the back seat with Marie and Pancho. I crouched down below the window level and pulled blankets over the three of us. Pancho licked my hand, then started licking Marie’s face, setting her to giggling.

  Jimmy slid in next to Duff and began checking his weapons as she slid off the curb. She flicked on the wipers and said over her shoulder, “Any trouble?”

  In English, I said, “I nearly fell off a roof, but apart from that, nada.” I paused, added, “We found a sporting house.”

  “Useful knowledge for the future for you fellows, perhaps,” Duff said. “Important thing now is that they don’t have any roadblocks set up.”

  “We might catch a break there,” Jimmy said. “They seem focused on the city’s interior for the present.”

  I said, “Jimmy, you said you heard on your radio they were searching every hotel in town.”

  “Right.” Jimmy got out his pocket radio and began to fiddle with it again.

  Marie clutched a bit tighter to me at the sound of the German voices coming from the tinny little radio’s speaker.

  Half-listening to the radio, Jimmy said, “They knew you were in town, Hector, but not where. Seems you were spotted and recognized at that church. That’s why they’re turning the town upside down presently. They know you’re here somewhere. They’re starting with hotels, inns.”

  I pulled the rather itchy blanket from over my face. “How’d they find me at the church?”

  “One of the nuns ratted you out,” Jimmy said sourly.

  Well, damn. I said, “Not Sister Bernadette, I hope.”

  “No, another of the penguins,” Jimmy said. Under his breath I heard him mutter, “The bitch.”

  “When we get clear of the city,” I said, “I think we maybe best head southwest, Duff. Forget the run to Niort. Hard as they’re hunting us, they’re going to figure us to go straight for the coast, hell-bent-for-leather. And it is my strong impulse to do just that. But if we mender a bit, trail down away from England a ways, well, it might confuse the bastards. Might at least thin them out in that direction as they try to block us on the straight run.”

  “Problem now is we’re violating curfew and doing it in a civilian car,” Duff said. “And driving with lights on at night this close to the city, we’re also an easy target for airplanes. With these storm clouds, there’s not even moonlight to navigate by with headlights out.”

  “We play the hand we’ve been dealt,” I said. “We drive on, Duff.”

  ***

  On the outskirts of town, a single young dark-haired Nazi stopped us. He was polite, officious. He struck me as a conscriptee.

  Yet for all that, he was a tad too nosey. Call it the misguided diligence of youth.

  As he began to press, and then to grow suspicious, I saw where we were inevitably and bloodily headed.

  From the gloom of the backseat, I said softly so only Jimmy and Duff would hear, “Marie is asleep.”

  That simple declaration was a death sentence for the young German. It was trading youth for youth, really.

  In civilian life, I’d maybe have gotten on with the young guy.

  I pressed my palms to Marie’s ears.

  Jimmy said, “Right.” He crooked a finger. “Here lad, I’ll show you my papers.”

  As the young man leaned in with a flashlight, Jimmy grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

  The soldier opened his mouth to scream for help. Jimmy shoved his Luger inside there and shot the kid through his palate.

  He let the young man’s corpse slide down the side of the Renault.

  Our car was black. As Jimmy said, at night, particularly, it wouldn’t show the blood. The rain would wash the offal off, eventually.

  “Get rolling now, Duff,” Jimmy said thickly, wiping at his bloodied hand and gun’s barrel. Duff watched the big Irishman. She looked pale in the low light. Her hands were tightly gripping the steering wheel. I said, “You okay, Duff?”

  “I have to be,” she said. She swallowed hard and got us moving.

  15

  In a glade, in a lull between rainstorms, we popped the hood on our car and connected the cables of Duff’s suitcase radio to the car battery.

  Duff said, “Who’ll it be? The resistance? British intelligence? Our boys?”

  “OSS,” I said.

  ***

  I put my back to a tree’s trunk, smoking a cigarette and watching Marie play fetch with Pancho.

  It wasn’t really much of a game of “fetch” per se. When Marie could pry it away from him, Marie would hurl the stick, and then Pancho would lope after it. Head down, he’d carry it back to her, then, as she reached for it, he’d bolt, sending her chasing after him, laughing.

  Duff put a shoulder to the opposite side of the tree, smiling and watching Marie and the dog. She said, “So, what’s the
plan, mister?”

  “We’ll be splitting up soon. They wanted to try and arrange some commando drop behind us. Thought they’d drop someone to protect our caboose. I nixed that. Sounds daft, and if they could really get a plane near here, I’d want to get on the sucker and fly the bastard straight out of here and back to England.”

  Duff nodded. “Okay, so you rejected sending in the cavalry. So from that nixed option, how do we arrive at splitting up?”

  “Notion is it’s better to divide the German’s search efforts and give them something extra to chase,” I said. “Can’t say I’m fully sold on this scheme, either.”

  “What, exactly, is the scheme, Hector?”

  “Jimmy, Marie and the dog will go north of Bordeaux. There’ll be a small fishing boat waiting there for them. Some Greek salt of a sea captain the Germans think they have in their pocket. Old man is actually semi-retired British Secret Service. He’ll run them into England.”

  “And us?”

  “We go to a farm house where the split occurs. There, we’re to be given a loaner black Labrador and a female midget.”

  Duff checked my face to be sure she’d heard right. “A female midget? You’re joking.”

  “That’s just what Jimmy said.”

  “Where is Mr. Hanrahan?”

  “Back at the car, using your radio to try and get word back to Cleveland. Letting his sister know what’s coming her way.”

  “What’s the story with the midget?”

  “Circus performer,” I said. “At a distance of ten feet, she looks like a midget. But in a car, in the right dress and from a distance?” I gestured with my cigarette hand at Marie.

  Duff scowled. “That’s truly insane, Hector.”

  “No, that’s military intelligence’s finest planners at work,” I said.

  Marie was now rolling in the grass with Pancho. Duff smiled, watching me watch Marie. She veered: “You mentioned a wife. You two ever talk about children of your own?”

  I stared at the end of my cigarette. “Sure. But that wasn’t to be. How about you and your husband?”

  “He wanted children,” she said. “I didn’t, then.”

  “And now?”

  “Not for me, I think. It’s nice being around her, even under these circumstances. But that responsibility forever? I can’t fathom that. It scares me in some primal way. A way I don’t think I could ever overcome. And unconditional love? That’s some cross to bear.”

  “It’s funny how things you thought impossible sometimes just become your life,” I said, dropping my cigarette and twisting my toe over it. “But I understand how it’s not for everyone.”

  Duff offered me her hand. “I can’t tell which side of this issue you fall on.

  I bumped my forehead head against hers. “It matters?”

  She was candid. “I can see how it could come to count for something.”

  Hm.

  I squeezed her hand, then lifted it to my lips. “Let’s just say that under the right circumstances I wouldn’t run from the prospect. On the other hand, I’m not hungering for it, either.”

  Duff smiled and shook her head. “You always manage to have it both ways?”

  I shrugged.

  “Our splitting up, does that mean the two of us aren’t going to England?”

  “Oh, we go. Got to give the Germans something to chase, like I said. And our side wouldn’t mind netting a few Krauts at least connected to Höttl.”

  Duff said, “On that note, Jimmy said you’re under strict orders not to capture or kill Höttl. Why is that?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I hated those unexplained orders that tied my hands when it came to really laying into the German filmmaker.

  “We’ll be about two days behind Jimmy if all goes to plan,” I said. “I’m to draw fire, like I said. But I do want to change the plan a bit. I want you to go with Jimmy and Marie.”

  “Huh-uh,” Duff said. “You’re under orders and you can’t disobey those. And I was doing this kind of thing long before you and I joined forces.”

  She stared at her feet. “And I don’t trust you alone, darling. You’ll take bigger risks by yourself, I know it. I can take care of myself and you. I make my own decisions, too, Hector. So we’re going to do this together.”

  I shook out a fresh cigarette. “I know you can handle yourself. But now, having talked to people, well, I have a sense of the real magnitude of what’s been chasing us since we fled Lyon. The scale of it. And, honey, it terrifies me. I’ve been a nervous wreck since breaking that radio connection. Honest to God, it’s a miracle we’ve come this far, Duff. We’ve been damned lucky to get here. It’s going to be even harder to press on as we get nearer Bordeaux.”

  “I’m staying with you, Hector, it’s a closed discussion.”

  I could see she meant it. “Okay, darlin’, I hear you.”

  “Good,” she said. “We’ll waste no more time on such talk, then.” Duff ran her slender fingers back through her strawberry blond hair and sighed. “If everything against us is of the scale they’re telling you, it does settle one question.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All this being thrown against us, to justify that, Marie must be Höttl’s daughter.”

  “That makes terrible sense,” I said. “And if it’s so, that’s a story I mean to learn more about. Somehow, someday, I’ll get that tale.”

  Some bars of light were breaking through the heavy clouds, stray shafts of light in sharp contrast to the slate-gray sky.

  “Maybe the weather is finally clearing,” Duff said.

  “Let’s hope not,” I said. “So long as it stays like this, the search planes have to stay down. ’Tween here and the coast, stormy weather is our best friend.”

  Jimmy cleared this throat to signal his approach. That spoke volumes. He clearly sensed something had happened between Duff and I.

  I said, “We were just talking about the weather and search planes.”

  “Yes,” Jimmy said, eyeing the sky like it might try something. “Prayers for more rain are in order.” He got out his own cigarette and I fired him up with my Zippo.

  “It’s all arranged,” he said. “Even passage for that canine. Now we just have to reach the coast and make the boat. No mean feat that, of course.” He watched Marie and Pancho gamboling through the damp grass. “God willing, in a few weeks, she’ll be able to do that every day. Won’t that be something?” His voice cracked as he said it. That pierced me.

  Duff smiled and hugged Jimmy tightly to her. “Tonight, we’ll practice pigtails.”

  Jimmy sighed and jerked his head in my direction. “You had to say it in front of him?”

  ***

  We were bunked in the barn of an OSS-vetted farming family named Dupuis.

  We weren’t off to the most auspicious of starts with the Dupuis clan.

  After introductions, we sat down together for a rather lackluster meal. When we came outside to fetch some things from our car, we found the rear tire was flat.

  Neither we nor any Dupuis had a patch kit or spare tires. Christophe Dupuis said, “Don’t worry. We’ll loan you our truck when you leave in the morning. Somehow, we’ll just have to see the OSS gets it back to us.”

  Then Mrs. Dupuis apologized for not putting us up in their main house.

  “We do what we can for the cause,” Gabrielle Dupuis said, “but we’re not spies nor are we soldiers. I’m sorry we cannot offer you more.”

  Duff assured her the barn would do us nicely.

  We’d pushed the car into the barn and Marie and Duff were already bedded down in the front and back seats. I inspected the tire. It looked to me like some kind of puncture.

  ***

  Jimmy and I were wandering alongside a small stream, hands in pockets, breath trailing frosty in the crisp air. The skies had cleared a bit and the moon winked between the clouds.

  Jimmy said, “Don’t strain yourself with disingenuous denials, Hector. You know
I’m no fool and I certainly know your urges. Let me just say this much about Duff and you. This one seems a keeper. Duff’s a special one, and she clearly has your number, yet she’s still drawn to you. Thus you’d be a goddamned fool to let her slip away.”

  “I agree,” I said. “That’s why I want you to convince her you need her along on the trip home to care for Marie. Orders be damned. I want Duff to go with you tomorrow, Jim. I’ll hook up with all of you in London once I make it through. I really want you to convince Duff she’s critically needed with you.”

  Jimmy chuckled. It sounded humorless. He slapped my back then squeezed the back of my neck. “Ah, Hector. As I said, that woman utterly has your number. Right here you’ve gone and proven that’s so.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Duff said you’d ask this of me, Hector. She saw it coming. She said you’re badly shaken by what you heard from your spymasters about the scope of the search for us. Parenthetically, I’ll ask you not to tell me about any of that, Hector. I have a comforting, false optimism carrying me forward and I’d not have it fecking compromised. Anyway, Duff thinks you think we’ve no chance. As to me taking her, it’s no use, boyo, so you better be clever and best Höttl this one last time. Stay safe of that Kraut bastard’s clutches and I’ll do the same. Then, when we get to London, you and I will get properly plastered. God knows, as a proper Irishman, it’s the only way I can enjoy myself in that damned country.”

  16

  I was suddenly awake. I was wide awake.

  But why?

  Eyes open, I lay there in the semi-darkness, listening.

  I heard whispers. The murmurs were not Marie’s, and not Jimmy’s, either.

  Pancho was alert, head cocked. He was listening, too. His muzzle twitched.

  Duff’s lips brushed my cheek. “You sleeping?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “Good. I was thinking we might take a little walk.” Her intent was really something else, of course.

  I smiled. “This is truly a crazy time for it.”

  “Then say no,” Duff said. “You’re right of course. It’s completely crazy.” A little smile. “And yet…?”