The critics deemed Cícero’s films “dark” and “transgressive.” Those were the fawners’ verdicts.
The less enthralled cineastes threw around terms such as “sadistic,” “misanthropic” and “diseased.”
There was hand-wringing scuttlebutt in some obscure cinematic journals that an on-screen murder in his latest Portuguese-language film, The Grand Inquisitor, was not acting, nor a special effect. One wag had actually declared the movie a “snuff film.”
Reading a synopsis of the flick, I caught myself squirming. The movie was about an interrogator and his hapless… er, subject. The latter was stripped naked and tied to a chair for the duration of the movie. He was “interrogated” and tortured and, finally, murdered in the final seconds of the three-hour film.
I didn’t think anything could set my skin-crawling more than that capsule summary had, but I was wrong.
The next article I read described this Cícero’s work-in-progress. It was a mysterious film he called The Garden of Suffering.
***
I splurged on the hotel. As it was apt to be one of the last chances I’d have for comfort and modern convenience for some unknown time, I decided I deserved some decadent opulence, some high-end mollycoddling.
After checking in, and after a bracing shower, I sprang for a massage from a comely, raven-haired woman who offered a bit more for some cash. It was an offer elder, happily married me found surprisingly easy to decline. Instead I headed to a Japanese quarter of the city and a purported local favorite restaurant called Rua Galvão Bueno. I ordered some sukiyaki and unagui that I washed down with butterscotch-tasting, belly-warming sake.
After my meal, I toured the city a bit more, finding that my fluent Spanish gave me enough of a leg-up to adequately communicate with the Portuguese-speaking natives.
My cabbie, on the other hand, was a French-speaker. He said there many French and Italians living in this part of Brazil. He gave me some tips on travel to the interior. “You picked a good time of year to come—winter is cooler, drier, of course,” he said.
Funny to think of July as winter, but it was that part of the hemisphere where everything kind of up-ended on you.
And, hell, even for “winter,” it was still nearly eighty-degrees. Call it a wet heat: I’d already sweated through my second shirt of the day.
My driver said, “Where do you go from here, Senhor Beau?”
“Mato Grosso,” I said, dragging a sweat-slicked forearm across my damp forehead.
Although I was in the backseat, I could tell my driver was surreptitiously crossing himself to hear where I was headed.
***
Back in my hotel’s lounge, I ordered a Vinho tinto and started combing back through my files on the filmmaker I suspected of being Höttl, going over again what my sources had been able to gather for me about this Mato Grosso place.
Now that I was in country and very much alone, this whole enterprise was starting to strike me as the insane undertaking it was.
Alicia had been too right. Here I was, topping seventy, and preparing to penetrate a lawless jungle populated by bands of mercenary pistoleiros.
The country was a kind of logging/diamond/gold mining territory—a denuded and strip-mined wasteland surrounded by the densest jungle.
The parts of the country that hadn’t been raped for wood, precious stones and ore were said to be thick with malaria, capivara, soldier ants, and man-eating caimans. The rivers teemed with piranha.
I was seemingly going to be riding a train the locals called the “Devil’s Railroad” to the so-called Portão de Inferno—the Gates of Hell.
The jungle areas were thick with lost tribes, mercenaries and hunted men. And sundry other Nazi war criminals if the rumors were true.
If the natives or Höttl’s praetorian guards didn’t kill me, yellow fever or heatstroke might easily take up the slack.
I looked up from my notes, freshly dejected.
Yes, my Alicia had been so right: at my age, and alone, this was the daftest quest of ’em all.
Some mild commotion across the room.
A tallish, thin man in a white seersucker suit was talking to the maître-d and pointing my way. The man had dark brown hair, starting to silver at the temples. He had prominent ears. A black eye-patch covered his right eye socket. He smiled and I recognized him.
Son of a bitch if it wasn’t my poet-friend, Eskin “Bud” Fiske!
57
I ordered Bud a whiskey on the rocks and slapped his arm. “Christ, it’s good to see you, Bud. But how on earth?” I winced and said, “Alicia’s behind this, isn’t she?”
He didn’t even pretend. “That’s right,” Bud said. He was in his late thirties by my reckoning. His face was a bit lined. He was wearing glasses over that eye-patch. He’d lost the orb on some CBS Studios back-lot, attacked by a drunken Peter Lawford during the wrap party for Bobby Conrad’s The Wild Wild West.
I said, “You’re the best of friends to do this, Bud, but I want you to use my credit card and book yourself a flight home to Tennessee, pronto. I won’t have you take this risk, buddy. You’ve got no dog in this fight. You should be back in Nashville.”
Bud got a hand up. “Drop it, Hector. And you introduced me to Marie. She was my friend, and I worked with her for a solid year trying to get that sit-com up and running. I spent more time with her than you ever did. I loved her like a sister, Lass.”
Oh yeah. That damned “situation comedy.” Something that was supposed to be ABC’s answer to Hogan’s Heroes. Some whacked project called My Chaufführer that revolved around a decrepit Adolph Hitler, still on the lam twenty-two years after the fall of Berlin.
The way Bud had first explained it to me over the phone had made me ask him what he’d been drinking and smoking. The premise was Hitler faked his death in the bunker in forty-five, intent upon disappearing into South America. A booking accident, exacerbated by Adolph’s notoriously shaky English, resulted in the disguised Führer’s misrouting to Beverly Hills. There, the reeling ex-Reich-master would grudgingly take work as a driver for a borscht belt variety show host and comedian loosely modeled after Sid Caesar.
Marie seemed to have bought into the whole jaw-dropping enterprise.
As such things are wont to do in the world of television, nothing quite went to plan and the mess never got far beyond a filmed pilot.
Bud said, “Marie was a great kid and what happened to her, well, goddamn that Nazi, anyway. And besides, I gave Alicia my word, Hector.” He smiled and added, “And I’ve got us some capable help for this thing, too.”
I was still resistant. “Bud, you inject insulin. You need to have a steady diet to quell your diabetes. Where I’m going? Hell doesn’t do it justice.”
“I’ll be fine, Hector,” Bud said. “And I’ve brought really good help.”
I ran my fingers back through my damp hair. “What kind of help, exactly?”
Bud smiled. “Called in a longstanding marker.”
Dubious, I said, “Some friend of yours?”
“Friends of ours,” Bud said.
“Who?” Hell, I’d been benched so long, they’d have to be nearly as old as me.
“More of a case of what,” Bud said. “And that ‘what’ would be the State of Israel.”
I nearly sprayed the poet-screenwriter with un-swallowed hooch. “Say again?”
Bud looked surprised. “Don’t you remember? Nashville, December 1958? That item that fell into our hands and your decision to hand it over to…?”
Oh, yeah. “Christ, I’d forgotten that outstanding debt. It was a big one for sure.” A gift that kept on giving in goddamn spades. Goddamned Gnashville gold, so to speak.
“Well, I didn’t forget,” Bud said. “I made some calls, and the upshot is we have a couple of tough operatives being sent to help us with the hunt for Höttl.”
Well, well. I said, “These old boys they’re sending to help, they’re Mossad?”
“Frankly, I don’t know w
hat they are,” Bud said, “but they pretty much specialize in hunting Nazi war criminals from the story I was told.”
I sipped my red wine. “When do they get here?”
Bud signaled for a waiter and asked for a menu. “Haven’t eaten in too long,” he said. “With the diabetes, well, like you said…”
Yeah, like I said, goddamit. The prospect of Bud in the jungle with his precious, fragile vials of insulin and hypos and unsteady blood sugar side-effects tied to dieting terrified me.
Bud ordered himself a meal in faltering Spanish, but it seemed enough for the waiter to grasp Bud’s request.
Watching him go, Bud said, “The two Israelis are to meet us for breakfast tomorrow. They’re already based here in Brazil, hunting some other Nazis.” He smiled. “They were pretty floored to hear that Werner Höttl is still alive.”
“Not as surprised as I was,” I said sadly. “Surely not as surprised as Marie.”
“She was a great gal,” Bud said softly. “And a very fine writer.” Watching him, I wondered if something had happened between them, decided it did. The kid had to stay.
***
After Bud’s meal, we wandered the city for a bit. Despite my earlier driver’s assertions, I was surprised to see what a large Italian population there was in São Paulo. We found ourselves a good Italian joint for an early dinner, and I gave my Great War-era Italian a dusting-off.
Further wandering of the city took us into a tenement zone that stank of open sewers. I hailed us a cab away from there.
As we waited for our hack to make it through traffic to our side of the street, Bud eyed the dilapidated wooden cortiços. “We should do this quickly and go home. I’m not liking this place, Lass.”
“Savor the city, Bud,” I said. “This is as civilized as it’s apt to get for us.”
The poet opened the door of the cab and I slid in first. “So you said,” Bud growled, sliding in behind me. I told the cabbie the name of our hotel. Bud said, “Alicia made it sound like you’ve already got a little on this guy. A general sense of where he might be.”
“General at best,” I said, twisting around in my seat to watch a Volkswagen microbus that had seemed to me to have been trailing us as we made our way on foot. “My files are back at the hotel. Along with some notes about where I suspect we’re headed to close matters with this cocksucker. If that stuff doesn’t put you on a plane back to Music City, then I guess you’re crazier than many claim I am.”
Bud pressed his hand to his belly. “Might be the food that chases me out. The Italian stuff was good, but that soup I had for lunch? I haven’t felt right, since. What was that I ate, anyway?”
I shook his bony knee. “Sure you really want to know?”
Bud looked a little green, now. “Oh, God, maybe not from the sound of your voice. I kind of figured from the name it was some kind of fish.”
“Some kind,” I said. “That was piranha. You feelin’ feisty, Bud? They say it’s an aphrodisiac.”
Now Bud looked extra queasy. “Those fish eat people, don’t they? I could be a second-hand cannibal.”
“Life’s always eaten life, son.” I was still focused on the VW behind us. “Pretty sure we’re being followed,” I said. “You carrying?”
Bud shot me this look. “Uh, no. Figured you’d know how to get us guns here.”
This time I had taken the trouble to arrange a weapon for myself in advance. I bit my lip, then said to our driver. “Pull over for a moment, would you?”
He did that.
I leaned in close to Bud. I whispered in his ear, “I have a forty-five. Get out, keep an arm under your coat like you’ve got a gun, too. You take the passenger side and I’ll approach on the driver’s side. Just look like trouble’s meaner older brother.” In Bud’s case, the eye patch would further the cause. He looked like a skinny badass now.
Bud nodded and wetted his lips. “Really think this is that kind of scene?”
I shrugged. “They’re obviously not following us for no reason at all.”
Bud said, “It is a German manufactured vehicle.”
“Uh, right.” We slid out and I reached under my coat, clicking off the safety on my automatic. The sun was on the glass on my side of the VW. I held up a left hand, trying to shield the window glass and get a look at the driver while I kept my right hand on the butt of my gun.
The window of the van was being cranked down. There was a flash of light that blinded me.
Jesus Christ! I blinked, seeing spots. Another flash.
This voice with an Asian accent: “Can we have your autograph? We’re huge fans!” I was just beginning to see again. The driver was an elderly Japanese man. He thrust a notepad and pen at me. His wife, beaming, had a camera on her lap. She was twisting in a new flash bulb.
Chee-rist!
I scribbled my name on the sheet of paper. Through the VW van, I could see Bud on the other side, struggling his maintain his composure. I handed the notepad and pen back to the man. He read my name there, and, frowning, said, “A good joke, but could you sign your real name for us, Mr. Holden?”
His wife smiled at me and said, “We love your films. That movie of yours, The Wild Bunch?” She pretended her fingers were a gun, shooting me in the heart. “Oh, boy!”
Not for the first time, I played along, scribbling down William Holden’s name. The male Holden fan said, “Can you give us a line from The Wild Bunch? We really loved that movie of yours, even with that bloody ending.”
I managed a smile and a wink. Good thing I liked old Bill Holden well enough, since I was so often being confused for him as the years went on. And I’d recently seen The Wild Bunch. Hell, given how things might go in the jungle, I might be living that bloody film’s final porch battle in a few days, I figured.
There was a particular line of Holden dialogue in that movie I’d found hauntingly resonant. Trying to catch old Bill’s tones, I repeated, “We’ve got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast.”
The woman clapped her hands, beaming. He husband clearly liked it fine, too.
Bud’s look was harder to read.
58
Bud’s Israeli friend was a tad like a saturnine body-builder. He stood right around six-feet and nearly all of that appeared to be muscle. Curly dark hair framed a beetle-brow over very dark eyes.
He grudgingly gave his first name as Eli, but wouldn’t give up more of his handle than that. He wouldn’t even hang a first name on his partner, and that hombre was nowhere to be found, allegedly made off to parts unknown, following up some Höttl lead.
The hotel staff set up our breakfast on the terrace of my room, cranking up the table’s umbrella to cast some much needed shade over us. We were nine floors up, but the street noise at this relatively early hour was fairly intense.
“Sorry about the din,” I said. “Perhaps should have taken breakfast in the restaurant downstairs.”
“Not for this talk,” Eli said, glum-faced. He tasted his orange juice. “This is good.” Fella had a way with words.
I settled in across the table from him and sipped my own juice. “Bud said you boys were already here in Brazil, hunting other Nazis. Who do you suspect to be here?”
“Klaus Barbie, who we hear is perhaps some kind of agent for your government,” Eli said. He sounded like he personally blamed me for that. “Also, we think, Mengele, the Angel of Death.”
Bud slid into a chair. He said, “You saying Mengele is under U.S. government protection in some way, too?”
“No, not him,” Eli said. “We merely think he might be here in Brazil, too. We think Barbie is on your government’s payroll, and Höttl, too. How can that be?’
“That’s about a thirty-year question for me,” I said. “Main thing is, when we finally lay hands on this son of a bitch, I get to put him down.”
Eli scowled. “Put him down. What does this mean? Be precise.”
“It means I get to be the one to kill Höttl,” I said.
“Kill?” A scowl. “No.” Eli waved a hand. “No killing him.” Eli, the bastard, seemed emphatic.
Bud said, “I told you up front that was our intent.”
“Your intent, not ours,” Eli said. “Once we learned Höttl lives, this became a matter for us. We will apprehend this criminal and we will smuggle him out of this sordid safe haven to stand trial for his war crimes. He is an important symbol in that sense.”
Couldn’t help myself—it came as a snarl. “Trial? You’re fucking crazy. You don’t put monsters like this on trial. You just put ’em down, and you do it out of sight. You don’t martyr the cocksuckers. Putting this kind on trial is an idiot’s reasoning.”
“Nonsense,” Eli said. “Trial. For war crimes, as I said. Just like Eichmann.”
I jabbed a finger into Eli’s chest. “The only trial this bastard has in his bleak future is one of pain and then death. I’m serious, boy. I’m going kill that rotten son of a bitch, and slow, with my bare hands. I’ve earned that privilege, all the way up. It cost me beyond your wildest imagining.”
Bud said, “Damn it, I came to get your government’s help for this, Eli, not to have you try and hijack our mission.”
“Your plan is no longer relevant,” Eli said. “Go home before you get hurt, or before I have to be distracted from task to detain or hold you in some way until Höttl is in our hands.”
Bud gave me this look of mixed contrition and rage. I held up a hand. “Calm down, Bud. I’m sure Eli here can be made to see reason.”
That was lip service. Eli wasn’t the kind to bend and me either.
Eli had drained his orange juice. The hotel flunky had left the sweating pitcher of juice back in the room, out of the sun. Bud had nearly polished off his juice too. I finished off my own OJ, then rose with our three empty glasses in hand.
As Bud continued to tear into Eli, I poured three new glasses of juice.
Alicia had thoughtfully packed some sleeping pills for me in case I had trouble with jetlag. I shook a few capsules out and pulled them apart. I emptied their contents into one glass of orange juice.
Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 29