“Excellent,” I said. “Stay at it, brother.”
Bernard dragged a hand across his sweating forehead. “There is, however, one man, a German named Werner Höttl. He seems quite committed to fighting to the bitter end. He’s also some kind of filmmaker for Hitler. He’s been dispatched to help orchestrate, then to record the destruction of Paris. He’s to capture it all on film for posterity. I know it sounds utterly mad, but I believe it to be true.”
I could believe that well enough. Höttl was well capable of all that.
“Höttl and I have crossed paths over many years,” I said. “He’s a fanatic of the first water, believe that. Burning Paris and filming it would be right up his alley. Keep me informed on anything you pick up on him. Nothing is too small to interest me about that son of a bitch. I’ll let you know what I hear from my sources. My side doesn’t want him dead for some reason. But I have different aims. We just can’t leave any fingerprints if we get a killing shot at him, do you understand me? Are we clear?”
“Fully,” Bernard said. “Between us, perhaps, we can do it.” More music from somewhere above, Reviens mon amour. Bernard hesitated, then said, “But if I may speak frankly, I fear for your duration in the final onslaught, Hector. I may be speaking out of school here, but you need to know that you are in some jeopardy of a very different kind. Rumblings are even reaching me and I am really nobody.”
That got my stomach going. “What kind of rumblings?”
“Rumors that you may be in trouble with your own government. Your fellow reporters are raising issues about you and how you’re helping us. They say you’re callously breaking the rules of conduct for war correspondents. I tell you this because you are a valuable ally to me. I warn you because you need to take steps to look, well, to look somehow less engaged on our behalf. You need, at least cosmetically, to appear that way to your journalistic peers.”
“Message received,” I said. “Thank you for the warning, Bernard.”
Journalistic peers? Screw them ten ways from yesterday. Yellow voyeurs. Cowards. In times like these, journalism was too often a hack’s and a coward’s sanctuary.
I’d heard many similar rumors about me over the past few years, of course. But it did seem these past couple of months I heard them more often and from more directions. If they’d reached into the ranks of the resistance I figured I might be in real trouble.
***
For nearly four days, I’d been bunking at 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein’s long-languishing salon. Enterprising Nazis were trying to steal art for themselves as their cause failed around them, looking after their post-Third Reich retirement needs, I reckoned.
In the rush to get Gertrude and Alice out of Paris in 1940, their apartment had been left more or less intact and in the care of friends. The arrangement worked well enough until the European war’s tide decisively turned.
And, as she’d noted so many years before, Gertrude’s other friends just weren’t the scrappy types.
As the Germans’ grip on Paris faltered, word had come my way some Nazis were eying Miss Stein’s collection of modernist paintings as easy and vindictive pickings.
So I’d moved in to play watchdog. Me, and a dislocated Maquis named Robert Lécussan. Robert was small, smart and chillingly feral.
As I slept in a bed, Robert was most often to be found bunked on the floor of the salon, clutching a carbine and surrounded by grenade boxes, liberated firearms and all those modernist works of art he frequently disparaged.
I rapped lightly on the door three times and said, “Robert, don’t you damned shoot me—it’s Lassiter.”
He opened the door a crack, confirmed I was me, then stepped aside so I could slide in. “Any problems while I was away, Robert?”
“Just a woman who came by. I sent her away.”
“Christ, Robert, women we aren’t worried about. What did this one look like?”
“Too tall. Pale skin and reddish-blond hair. Blue eyes. Some might call her beautiful.”
“And her name is Duff,” I said. “Right?”
“That’s right!”
“You turned away my wife.”
He shrugged. “Well, she will probably come back then, yes?”
What a chucklehead. Lethally effective, but decidedly not a thinker.
I shrugged off my coat. “You’ve been a while cooped up in this joint without a break, Robert. I’m going to be housebound a day or two, I think. Come back tomorrow evening, about seven. Between now and then, indulge yourself, old pal. Maybe think about finding a bath or a shower. Frankly, you’d be hard-pressed to sneak up on an unfriendly smelling like you do now.”
He pulled his shirt collar up to his nose, sniffed, frowned, then shrugged. “You’re certain you can spare me?”
“No worries,” I said. “See you tomorrow night, mon ami.”
***
Say this much for Duff: never the expected entrance with my darling.
There was this determined rap against the door, then, when she heard the floorboards squeak on the other side of the panel, she said, “I’m pointing a gun at the door and any shot can more than go through it and you, little man. So open the door so I can wait on my husband.”
“Don’t shoot, honey,” I said. “It’s me, Hector. I’m opening the door, and I’m doing it slowly now.”
She wasn’t bluffing: Duff was holding twin forty-fives. Given the flimsiness of Gertrude’s front door, blowing holes through the thing with those automatics would have been easy enough.
I said, “You can put those away, love. We have the place to ourselves for the moment. I utterly surrender.”
Duff kissed me and then slid past. “My bags are outside,” she said.
As I bent to pick them up, she said, “That guy who sent me packing earlier, who is that psycho? He definitely qualifies for the Rogues Gallery spectrum of your burgeoning KA file.”
“Maquis, named Robert. He’s a great watchdog, and that’s about all I can say for him on the good side,” I said. “He is lacking in the social graces. Hell, any graces.”
“He’s lacking in any human qualities so far as I can tell,” she said. “And hygiene, too. I could smell him through the crack under the door.”
I put her suitcases down inside the door and locked up. We kissed again, then Duff began exploring the painting-filled main room. “So, this is the famous salon of Miss Stein,” she said. “I’m not a writer or painter and even I’ve heard the legends of this place. How many times did you have to face Stein, here?”
“Je ne suis pas certain. Dozens, maybe.” I followed Duff around as she surveyed the paintings. “Only my first couple of times here produced those kinds of exchanges with Miss Stein. You know—the storied, challenging recitations and the like. The insults. Only one of those, the first, I think, would even rise to the level of her more legendary confrontations. I stood about there, a callow kid from Texas with no high school diploma and dreams of writing prose. I was leaning hard on a cane with a bum leg. Yet I made the cut with Gertrude pretty swiftly, relative to most others. Alice, on the other hand? She’s never quite come around to my charms.”
“She’s a lesbian,” Duff said. She kissed me again, then continued exploring the salon. Hands on hips, Duff considered the famous portrait of Gertrude as painted by Picasso, hanging over Gertrude’s favorite chair-cum-throne. The Miss Stein in the portrait looked engaged, intense… argumentative.
Duff said, “It captures her?”
“For all I know, it may have shaped her,” I said. “That portrait predates my knowing Miss Stein by many years. Think that thing was painted about Ought-five or six. I was just a little boy back in Galveston, then. I came in with this bloody century.”
In the portrait, Gertude still had long, dark hair, piled high—a far cry from the salt-and-pepper, Romanesque bowl-cut she was sporting the last time I saw her in 1940.
“All these paintings,” Duff said, “it’s amazing. And it’s remarkable they’ve so far survived o
ccupation.”
“Friends have watched over the apartment. I moved in a few days ago when I heard fortune-hunting Nazis were mulling making a run at this place.”
“So you and the psychopath ‘Robert’ are the new guardians of Modernist art. The world is now truly crazy. What would Gertrude think?”
“Figure we’ll find out soon enough when the Germans are gone in a few weeks, and Miss Stein and her fearsome little friend can return. Good news is, I’ve gotten Robert out of here until tomorrow night.”
Duff stroked my cheek. “Dreamy. You doing any real writing, Hec?”
“I’ve started to write again, yes. A novel about some of this. Mostly looking to damage some people’s reputations under thinly veiled fictional guises. I’ve decided that as an author it’s my sacred obligation to serve as caretaker of my enemies’ memories.”
Duff smiled fondly and shook her head. “So what else is new? I’m going to be hungry, soon. I suppose your sending your little crazy man away means we’re hostage to this place until tomorrow night?”
“Hostage isn’t the word I’d choose. And I’m making dinner for us. I’ve stocked the place, and very well. Good food, tasty baked goods. Some excellent liquor. That’s no mean feat with all the rationing and siphoning-off of goods by the occupation.”
She smiled. “I like this idea very much. Let’s stay right here and pamper ourselves.”
I broke the seal on a bottle of single malt and poured a couple of glasses. I poured a little water on top of the scotch to open up the taste. I said, “So, where have you been since Easter?”
“Probably easier to tell you where I haven’t been,” Duff said. She stirred the ice around with an alabaster finger. “And I really shouldn’t tell you either of those things, even as pillow talk. It’s all classified. Please don’t get offended that I can’t confide in you.”
“I understand. What have you been doing generally then?”
“Can’t say that, either,” she said. “But for me, this is all winding down. I’ve already started to arrange travel papers. I’ve been kicked loose. I’m ready to go home.”
“To the States, you mean?”
“Yes, to New Mexico or Arizona, I think—to scout properties for our house.” She wrapped her arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. “I’d ask you what you’ve been up to, but I’m afraid I know already. Frankly, I’m scared for you, Hec.”
Something there in her voice. I said, “Höttl, you mean? I’ve weathered his storms before, no worries there.”
“Not the kind of problem I’m talking about,” she said. “You’ve got other worries. Maybe bigger worries than that crazy German.”
“What do you mean, darlin’?”
“Three days ago, I was ordered in by SHAEF.” She bit her lip. “I was ordered in to be questioned about you.”
SHAEF: the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.
I swallowed hard, then took another shot of what the Scots call the water of life. “The goddamn other reporters,” I said, “they’ve raised some kind of ruckus?”
Duff sighed. “Exactly. They say you’re compromising their protected status as war correspondents by taking up arms and playing soldier as a few have put it. Some people on Patton’s staff are listening, darling. They’re listening hard.”
It would be goddamn Patton’s staff, wouldn’t it?
“Jesus Christ.” For the first time, I sat down in Gertrude’s favorite chair—always had wondered how the sucker felt. It was not worth the waiting for. But I couldn’t really focus on that, just now. I reached up and took Duff’s hand and pulled her onto my lap.
“I’m between a rock and a hard place,” I said. “Can’t let the damned correspondents know I’m really OSS, and the OSS can’t admit they’re using a journalist as an operative.”
This knowing look. She wasn’t buying it, not a lick. Duff ran her fingers through her strawberry blond hair, then traced my lips with her fingertips. “True so far as it goes, darling. But rumbles through the OSS also have it you’re playing soldier, Hec. Going rogue and far outside the sphere of orders you might have, explicit or implicit, from Wild Bill to spy. They say you’re a kind of de facto guerilla leader.”
“That’s… overstating it.”
Duff cupped my chin in her palm. “Make me believe that, Hector.”
“Höttl’s here in Paris, Duff. He’s one of Hitler’s point men. That twisted cocksucker is charged not just with helping to incinerate this city when the Nazis inevitably have to abandon it, but also to film the place being destroyed. He means to turn the destruction of Paris into some kind of damn movie.”
“That’s some cinema Hitler will never see,” Duff said. “He’s already beaten. There’s just nobody honest left in his bunker to whisper that truth in his ear.” She brushed a comma of hair from over my right eyebrow. “Höttl aside, word is you’re still more than pushing the line, Hec. They’re going to haul you in and interrogate you. At least I’ve been led to believe that’s so.”
“To what end would they do that to me?”
“For a hearing,” Duff said. “A hearing to determine if there are grounds for a court martial.”
Well, damn.
I squeezed the bridge of my nose. “How long until they order me to appear?”
“Things are too busy right now to make you a priority,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck. “The thought is we’ll take Paris back in a week, two at most.”
“Sounds about right.” I ground my teeth.
“Yes. And then they will have time to deal with you. Probably sometime in late September or early October.”
“Goddamn it to hell,” I said. “I’m just trying to help win and end this war.”
“But you’re doing that masquerading as a reporter,” Duff said. “Look at it from the professional journalists’ perspective. You carrying firearms and using your credentials to function as a spy and soldier undermines their protected status. You can’t really blame them. Your actions threaten their lives if they’re caught and presumed to be spies or secret soldiers like you.”
“Sure I can blame them,” I said. “I blame them every time I see these so-called journalists out on the street or in the fields, writing and taking pictures or rolling cameras instead of reaching down to pull one of our wounded boys to safety. Instead of picking up a dropped machine gun and strafing those German bastards back after they’ve shot to death a few of our boys as these correspondents look on. But let a journalist take a stray to the heart or the head? Holy Christ, then these reporters came all over outraged. Then not all corpses are created equal. I say we’re Americans first and writers second.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, Hec, you’re not the only one in this jam. Your former friend, Hemingway, he’s in the same fix. Almost identical circumstances. He’ll be pulled in, too. Same timetable. Maybe you two should patch things up, finally. You might end up in some room together, after all.”
“Room? You mean jail cell.” I closed my eyes and tipped my head back. “Hem and I are finished, and I mean forever. Stuff happened in 1937 between us that can’t easily be taken back. Neither of us is what you call the forgiving or forgetting type. And what a Christ-awful mess I’m in.”
Duff hauled herself off my lap. She walked around behind Gertrude’s throne and began to massage my shoulders. “I’ve made some inquiries. Inside the OSS and inside the Inspector General’s office. Even among a few friendly staffers I know of Patton’s. Shared opinion is you should deny everything, Hec. Don’t try to explain it or to rationalize it. Just deny everything and brass it out. You should disclaim everything they claim. That, and keep your nose clean between now and then, since people are actively looking for evidence now. Don’t feed the fire.”
“Fat chance of me laying low,” I said. “Look around, this is practically the endgame so far as the European theatre is concerned.”
“Exactly, and damn it, Hector, you’ve had more than your share of adven
tures. Sit out these last couple of weeks. We’ll murder the days together in bed. The brass does not want Americans getting any glory, not an iota, in the liberation of Paris. Leclerc was handpicked for this honor five months ago. Quasi-celebrities like you and Hemingway undermine the public relations boys’ plans to let the French liberate the French. Or at least to have it look as if they did that.”
“But I need to kill Werner Höttl,” I said.
“Hector, I know he’s your longstanding bête noire. One of several I can count. But the OSS still wants Höttl alive.”
“Any better sense of why that is?”
“Still a mystery,” Duff said. “But the big boys want him left alone, so there it is.”
“Can’t happen,” I said. “I need to kill this man, and I’m going to do it, regardless of the cost to myself.”
Duff stopped massaging my shoulders. “Why? Why do you so want Höttl dead?”
“Because he sent me a message a few days ago. A letter, actually. Sucker put it in writing.”
“A letter?”
“It’s there on the mantle,” I said. “He sent it to me via one of my friends, from the old days. I went by Shakespeare and Company, the American bookstore that was kind of a second home to all of us back in the great old days in Paris. The store space itself is empty now. The books are all in hiding from the Nazis. But Sylvia Beech still lives above the shop. She’s Jewish, and therefore vulnerable. Höttl rightly guessed I’d check on her. That I’d watch over Syl during these treacherous last few days as the Nazis retreat.”
Duff nodded. “Höttl threatened this Sylvia?”
“No, she was just the delivery mechanism, so to speak. Read the letter there, you’ll see.”
Duff squeezed my shoulder a last time, then headed over to the fireplace. She scooped up the letter, unfolded it. I watched her read. I watched as her jaw tightened, as her cheeks flushed. She looked up from the letter, blue eyes filled with hate.
“Threatening my life is a big so what,” I said. I poured myself a fresh drink. “Offering to spare it in return for turning Marie over to him, or at least divulging her whereabouts?” I shook my head. “To hell with Höttl. I’ll kill him first, whatever its costs me.”
Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 14