He smiled and said, “Thank God you’re okay, Lass. You are okay, aren’t you?”
“Probably bruised and will be sore as hell come morning. Need to give my knee some attention, but yeah, I’m okay.”
“Charles?”
“I think we lost him,” I said bitterly.
Bud hung his head. Said, “And Höttl?”
“He got away, goddamn it.”
Quiet, Bud twisted and turned the motorcycle around on the path, got it pointed back toward the house. As I slid onto the seat behind him and wrapped my arms around his torso, Bud said, “Jonny’s cleaning up back at the house with Jésus. Mopping up the last of them.”
“We take any prisoners?”
Bud scoffed. “With Jésus and Jonny on the job? Are you joking?”
65
Jésus and Jonny had indeed “cleaned up,” as Bud said. They had killed Höttl’s guards to a man, then pulled their bodies into the garage and doused the bloody corpses with gasoline. “Thought we’d put the torch to this place,” Jésus said.
“A fine notion,” I said, “but first I want to go through Höttl’s place. Might be something useful in there in terms of picking up his trail again.”
But there wasn’t.
Bud and I searched the house, careful to look for more booby-traps like the one Höttl had set in his apartment back in São Paulo. While Bud and I tossed Höttl’s hovel, Jésus and Jonny went off again in search of Charles.
It seemed a pointless mission, to me, but I let them go and turned my attention to that other search.
If his apartment was impersonal, Höttl’s house was the opposite, almost like a hellish glimpse into his interior landscape. Nazi flags and memorabilia were strewn throughout the warren of a house.
His version of wall art was decidedly macabre, too—giant framed prints of historical black-and-white photos. There was Lee Harvey Oswald being shot. The was the image of that communist guerilla in the checked shirt, his arms secured behind his back, as he was killed by a pistol shot to the head in Cholon, Saigon.
There was Bobby Kennedy, bleeding on the floor of that L.A. hotel kitchen. There was that famous shot of a sniper hanging dead in a tree in Spain circa the Civil War. And speaking of the Civil War, several blowups of Matthew Brady’s photographs of Union and Rebel dead proliferated.
One room was filled with tins filled with prints Bud had theorized Höttl might have struck from the negatives we’d destroyed back in São Paulo.
Bud fetched more gasoline tanks from the garage and we doused the interior of the house. We went outside to await Jésus and Jonny. When they returned an hour later, I could tell from their expressions they didn’t bring good news.
Jésus said, “Nada. He might have gone in the river. On the other hand, he might still be chasing them. Either way, he’s gone.”
Jonny said, “We think there might be some men coming in on foot from the direction Höttl ran. Lots of men. We need to leave, fast.”
“Right,” I said. “Let’s set fire to all this and head for the boat.”
***
As we saw to the destruction of the house and garage, I kept looking back up the path, hoping for sight or sound of Charles returning, but nothing like that happened.
66
We reached Rio de Janeiro in the midst of an unseasonable rainstorm.
That last address of Höttl’s we’d found for a small house on the outskirts of the city was the obvious next place for Höttl to run to.
But the joint looked abandoned. I got out my lock-pick tools, said, “Let’s be extra careful boys. This bastard has had time if he’s returned to studiously lay traps throughout this sorry bitch.”
But Höttl’s Rio hideout was more in the vein of the one he maintained in São Paulo, anonymous and vanilla.
There were no negatives or film prints in this place, though we did find a newish looking camera and tripod… and some unused film.
Those gave me this sudden, wicked inspiration. “We’ll take these along,” I said.
***
We stepped out into the warm drizzle. A black ’67 Impala whipped in behind our rental car. My arms were still full of camera equipment; Bud, Jésus and Jonny drew down on the Chevy.
The driver lumbered out, hands in the air. He was grinning. I shook my head, smiling.
Charles said, “Grand Capitaine! You’re alive!”
“You, too,” I said, putting down my load and clapping his back. “But how?”
***
Seems when the sidecar and motorcycle parted company, Charles had stayed upright and continued his pursuit, “I did that competent you would survive and would want me to stay on Höttl, Grand Capitaine.”
Faithful to his given word not to deprive me the kill, confident Charles had just stayed glued to Höttl, tracking him all the way back to Rio, by-passing several chances to kill the bastard himself.
“Followed him right to this place,” Charles said proudly.
‘But he’s not here,” Bud said.
“Not now, no,” Charles said. “The German stayed here only briefly. Now he’s staying in one of those big new hotels overlooking the beach. I’ve been stopping back here three times a day, hoping to find some of you survived and were still hunting.”
Then he hugged each of my boys in turn, all but Jonny, who flatly refused to be touched.
I said, “If Höttl should move from that hotel while you’re here…?”
“No.” Charles shook his head, emphatic. “Not for what he’s paying. He’s checked into this hotel for at least another week, and they are very expenditive commendations. He has a whole floor to himself, with privee elevator service. All that space, it’s just Höttl and the man he escaped the jungle with.” Charles suddenly looked glum. “But the way that place is built, he doesn’t need more men, I think. With all the projections the hotel gives him, Höttl might as well have a regime guarding him.”
Bud looked puzzled: “Regime?”
“I think he means regiment,” I said.
“That’s right,” Charles said, annoyed. “Many men. “That floor is almost impossible to attack. Still, he has to leave sometime.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” I said. “I’ll ride with you, Charles. Show us the way to this place.”
67
The joint overlooked the beach, as Charles had said. Overlooking the hotel was a monstrous statue of our savior—Cristo Redentor—looking more than a little, as Bud put it, “like a giant plastic Jesus on the dashboard of the world.”
Höttl was hiding away on the hotel’s second floor from the top of the hotel; reachable only via secured elevator and equally secured emergency stairs.
His joint had a private balcony that couldn’t be accessed from the balconies of lower floors.
Frustrated, I took my crew into the shaded cool of the hotel’s bar to introduce them to the forgotten glory of the mojito.
Motley crew we were, we drew suspicious looks from the bartender. It was just us in the bar—us and some lonely looking older woman reading a movie magazine with William Holden on the cover. According to the cover blurb, the actor’s longtime marriage was on the rocks.
The woman kept looking from the cover to me and back again, deciding. So it wasn’t just those Asian tourists. Being confused for Holden was something that had started in the 1940s. The older that I—and Holden—got, the more I found myself being mistaken for him. Sometimes I let myself wonder if anyone ever thrust copies of my novels at old Bill and asked him to sign Hector Lassiter’s block-letter scrawl.
“There’s a floor above Höttl’s,” I said. “Looks like another private space to me. It has its own private balcony, directly above Höttl’s. A man could be lowered from one balcony to the other.”
“Oui,” Charles said. “Such a thing might be done.” Then he shook his head. “But that’s not to be. Even all Höttl’s blood monies couldn’t suture that topmost floor for him. It’s the most exclusive space in the hotel. Höttl’s floor can
only be reached with a special key turned in a commoner elevator. That top floor has its own elevator. It’s the presidential suite. They call it a ‘suite’ even though it’s really the whole top floor. It’s for presidents, as the name replies. For kings and the famous movie stars.”
The woman with the movie mag was eyeing me again. I smiled at her. Then I fished out my wallet and skidded off some bills to Bud. “Buy me a couple of suitcases, Bud. If you didn’t pack a good suit, buy yourself one. Something that positively screams Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. Oh, and about that luggage, I want it monogrammed, jiffy-like.”
Scowling, Bud said, “Sure. What? ‘B.D.’? Maybe ‘H.L’ for old time’s sake?”
“No,” I said. “I want the bags to read ‘W.H.’” I squinted at that movie mag again, checking Bill’s hair color. “And get some medium-brown hair dye.”
Jésus said, “What’s this about?”
“We’re checking into that presidential suite,” I said.
68
Bud said, “Mr. Holden will be wanting total privacy. No calls are to be put through to him except from myself. I’m Mr. Holden’s personal assistant, Raoul Bender, by the way. Also, you may put through calls by Messrs. Lightfoot, Delattre and Calderone.”
As Bud said all this nonsense to the hotel’s head honcho, I tried to look jaded, but affable, like Old Hollywood going through all the timeworn, tedious motions. Playing to hard-drinking character (not so much of a reach, let’s agree to that up-front), I nodded at the hotel bar and said, “They know how to pour in that joint?”
“It’s excellent, Mr. Holden,” the hotel manager said.
“Great,” I said with a grin, “and for Christ’s sake, do please call me Bill.”
Bud said, “One other is to be put straight through if he calls. That would be Mr. Lean.”
“Mr. Lean,” the manager repeated. He looked like he was trying to connect something.
“Yes, David Lean,” Bud said in a confidential whisper, looking around like someone might care enough to eavesdrop on us. “You know, the director—Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. Mr. Holden starred in the latter, of course.”
The manager wet his lips. “I see. If I may, confidentially of course, are you filming here?”
“More like scouting potential locations for a film,” Bud said carefully. “Tell me, purely hypothetically, could your hotel accommodate a large film crew? Say, three-hundred rooms?”
“With sufficient warning, that would present little problem,” the man said, barely containing his glee over the math he was doing in his head, savoring the prospect of the attendant publicity for his hotel. He was hooked, for sure. Bud reeled him in now:
“Understand,” the poet said, “Mr. Lean is a notoriously painstaking filmmaker. We could be talking about a production schedule here of eighteen, perhaps even twenty-four months.”
***
Riding up in our private elevator to the tippy top floor, Bud said, “God, can you imagine how worked up Höttl will get if he gets wind of William Holden and David Lean mounting a major motion picture from the floor above him?”
I laughed and slapped Bud’s back. “Yeah, I surely can.”
***
Looking down from my private balcony was a hell of a lot more vertiginous than looking up from the beach. This was going to be hell on my fear of heights.
Bud said, “When do you want to do this, Hector?”
“This afternoon. And God help you all if you drop me. I swear I’ll ghost all your bones into eternity.”
***
At four I changed into white pants, a white polo shirt and white tennis shoes—hues that would blend in against the alabaster wall of the hotel.
Bud helped me on with a canvas-colored backpack—sucker weighed at least thirty pounds. The boys followed me out on the balcony, Jésus hauling the coiled up rope; my life was dependent on the quality of his knots.
The sun was winking between the storm clouds. The not-so-nice weather had chased away the beach bunnies: the girls from Ipanema had thrown on some clothes and run for the bars or the beds from the looks of things.
Another break in my favor.
Jésus checked the knots in the rope again, then thrust the ring at one end of the rope over my left fist. I gripped the rope above it in a sweaty palm.
“Remember,” Jésus said. “When you’re ready, put your hand back through this loop, tug three times, then hold on with both hands, Héctor. Close your eyes and we’ll have you back up here rápidamente.”
I nodded. Apart from my damp palms, I had butterflys, overwhelmed by heights as I usually was, and this was the worst case of it I’d had, ever. Still, I swung my legs over the balcony’s ledge, then cast off. I hung suspended above the concrete patio surrounding the pool twenty-two floors below.
Straining against the rope, Bud said over the balcony to me, “Really think we shouldn’t have done this at night?”
“No,” I said, trying not to look down. “The light is important to me.”
***
My biggest risk was that first moment when my feet became visible to anyone who might be standing on—or looking at—the balcony from inside Höttl’s private area. Given the size of the floor Höttl was paying for, I took it as a calculated risk there was little prospect of the two men seeing me come down.
Again, luck was with me. There was no sign of my quarry, and Höttl’s single guard had his back to the balcony, watching William Shatner pitch woo at some busty, green-haired babe in an aluminum bikini on Star Trek.
The balcony door was open to let in a little rain-scented, cooling breeze. I slipped off my backpack, crouched, and got out the rag and bottle of chloroform packed inside.
69
I pinched Höttl’s earlobes until he blinked and started to come back around.
He seemed to panic as he realized he was gagged. He became even more alarmed to find his arms tied behind the high back of the heavy hotel chair. Probably figured I was going to go for point-for-point revenge for what he did to me back in Paris.
Certainly I wanted him to think I might do that.
After what he’d done to Marie, and ordered done to Duff, it was all I could do to restrain myself from dissecting the man with my bare hands. I wanted to lay him waste.
But I watched Höttl sitting there, watched his dawning awareness of the terrible scene he’d awakened to.
The Nazi filmmaker had lost more weight. He was a kind of living skeleton now. The scar was a fat welt down the side of his face and his eyes protruded around the veined ruin of his hawkish nose. While stripping him, I’d noticed a tattoo on the underside of his left arm—a permanent mark noting his blood type. Himmler had ordered the tattoos for all SS members. Höttl had tried to burn his away with a cigarette. The tattoo wasn’t very big, hardly a quarter inch, but the sadistic Nazi seemed to have lost his resolve. Must have a low threshold for pain, despite his penchant for dishing it out.
He didn’t have to say it, I could see it in his eyes: “Lassiter!”
I smiled and pointed at the camera sitting on the tripod. “Sorry for the rough awakening, Höttl, but that camera only holds so much film and I don’t want to lose the light.” I pointed out the window at the sunset. “See, I remembered and took the trouble. It’s the golden hour you described, though even its magic can’t really flatter a subject like you, I’m afraid. You look like hell, Werner.”
With a rubber-gloved hand, I patted his scarred cheek. He tried to turn his head. “As a cinema-type, I know you’ll appreciate these touches. It’s been a lot of years and we have a lot of ground to cover and little time in which to do it. I mean, little time if we want to get the best footage and effects. Now you sit tight while I fetch my cinematographer. Don’t let the fella’s black patch throw you. He’s got the eye, so to speak.”
I walked out on the balcony and gave the rope dangling there a single tug. It was pulled up, and a few seconds later, Bud was lowered down to
join me. “Christ, that’s terrifying,” he said.
“Tell me.”
Bud took up a position behind the camera. I pointed at Bud and said to Höttl, “Another friend of Marie’s. Now we’re rolling.” The green light came on. Höttl jerked again at his bonds, raging.
I pointed at Höttl’s guard, now on his back on the floor, said, “That’s right, your demonic man servant is already plumping your pillows in hell.”
Höttl’s strangely bulging eyes got wider. He jerked at his bonds again. Looked like me might be on the verge of choking or gagging.
“Easy there, Werner,” I said. “Too soon to check out, old pal. I’m going to take that gag out of there in a second, because if my suspicions are right, I wouldn’t have you choke to death. I also suspect you don’t have the pipes to scream anymore, which you shouldn’t try to do anyway. Just make it harder on yourself if you do, right?”
I got around behind him and untied the gag. I said, “No blather, now. Like I said, we’re on a tight shooting schedule for this one. Can’t lose that magical light or run out of film before we close accounts.”
He spat out the gag and I got around in front of him. I smiled. Yes, there it was, this strange involuntary movement to Höttl’s bulging eyes. “Although you fancy yourself a filmmaker, you’re not a storyteller, Werner,” I said. “It’s all about image and juxtaposition with you. Set pieces and contrived moments. But there’s no build to an engaging end. No drama or character arc. No reversals and no twist at the end. Probably too late to teach you any of that now. Yet I feel a hankering to try and do just that.”
Höttl was trying to speak, but seemingly struggling to swallow. He finally succeeded in that and then said in a low, reedy voice, “Did you fake your death in sixty-seven because you feared me, Lassiter?”
“Nah, that was the fault of some other miserable cocksucker,” I said. “A countryman of mine named Hoover whose evil even you’d have a time touching in some ways. On that note, how’d you manage to escape that blast back in fifty-seven?”
Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 32