“You’re Hemingway,” Crowley said, extending his hand to Hem. “I looked over your book at Shakespeare and Company. I recognize you from the woodcut on the jacket.”
Hem shook Crowley’s hand. As he shook Hem’s hand, Crowley nodded at Hector. “And you’re Hector Lassiter. I’ve heard some good things about you. Though I’ve never found anything of yours to read.”
“Hector’s oeuvre is currently restricted to American publication,” Hem said. “We really don’t want to keep you. We came seeking a little information. A friend of ours may be in some trouble. A kind of dangerous state precipitated by her association with a former disciple of yours.”
“Oh?” Crowley suddenly appeared tired…even bored. Hector figured the “Wickedest Man Alive” must get his fair share of such visits from worried spouses, children, or siblings of Crowley adherents. Loved ones worried for the souls of their beloved ones led down the “left-hand” path by Crowley.
“I’m in a delicate state of preparation presently,” Crowley said, waving his meaty hand again. He seemed unsteady on his feet. “Perhaps next month, we could meet over drinks and discuss all this, yes? Then you’ll be going?”
“No, that won’t do,” Hector said, stepping up close to Crowley. Hem moved around behind the diabolist, effectively pinning him between them. “This really won’t take long,” Hector said. He pressed two fingers to Crowley’s chest. “I need to know all you can tell me about Victor Leek. I need to know that now, Al.”
Crowley sighed and gestured at a couple of armchairs. He took one; Hem sat in the other. Hector remained standing. He liked that…preferred towering over the so-called Great Beast of the Pit.
“Simply put, Leek — which isn’t even his real name — was unworthy,” Crowley said. He began picking at something under a thumbnail.
Hector held his tongue. “Aleister Crowley” wasn’t a given name either…just one in a string of aliases deployed over the years by the man born “Edward Alexander.”
“He’s a lost soul,” Crowley said. “Leek, or Oswald Rook, which is his real name, is an inveterate believer feverishly seeking something to believe in. When Leek lost God, he replaced him with Satan. Despite the rumors, that’s not what I believe in. When I realized Leek’s true motivations, I excised him. Back in London…he was Rook, then.”
“Just tossed him like that, eh?” Hector lit a cigarette. “I don’t quite swallow it.”
“Well, he shamed himself, as well,” Crowley said, crossing his hands behind his head.
“How?”
“Poorly executed ritual,” Crowley said. “Comically so. Leek took to cutting himself. Bleeding himself. He embraced scarification rituals…and branding. While branding his testicles with the mark of the beast, Leek contracted a form of blood poisoning…his wound became gangrenous. Surgeons eventually castrated him.”
Hem and Hector both winced. “Sounds to me like he gave his all,” Hem said.
Crowley smiled. “Leek broke down after that. He descended further into drugs and an unseemly state of self-pity.” Crowley slid down low in his chair and interlaced his thick fingers across his belly. “As I said, Leek tried to replace God with Satan. When he lost Satan, Leek embraced nihilism. It’s really quite a fine joke, if you think about it. Leek has to believe in something, so in the absence of something in which to believe, Leek has embraced the void. He’s replaced nothing, with Nothing. Leek fervently believes in Nothing. Nada is his new God.”
Some fine joke all right. Hector said, “Where do we find Leek? Nobody seems to know where he’s living.”
Crowley sat up and then struggled out of his chair. “His life fell apart after the castration. As one might reasonably expect. For a time he was living above Suzy.” A terrible smile. “Given his affliction, the noise from below must have been quite maddening, don’t you think? The last I heard he was living in a squalid little hole…the Hotel des Lions on the Rue des Ursins.” Crowley stretched and yawned and said, “Now I’m quite finished with you both. I have to get back to my meditations.” He turned, then hesitated. “This friend you’re worried about. A woman?”
“That’s right.”
Crowley struggled to his feet. “Well, at least you don’t have to worry about Leek taking any liberties, with her, yes?”
“It’s not her virtue I’m so concerned about at the moment,” Hector said. “It’s her spirit. And the fact this student of yours may be beating the will to live out of her. Out of my friend and out of all the others drawn to this sorry son of a bitch you helped create.”
Hem stood, edging a little between Hector and Crowley.
The diabolist, weaving again now that he was standing, winked at Hector. “Don’t you believe in free will, Mr. Lassiter? Don’t you know my maxim? ‘Do what thou wilt shall be all the law.’”
Hem slapped Hector’s arm. “Come on, buddy. Let’s push on, Lasso.”
Crowley said, “For writers, you’re really not particularly cultivated, are you? Either of you. And women? Women are quite expendable and easily replaceable. Women should be brought round to the back door, like the milk. That’s another of my maxims.”
Hector nodded. “You know, I just decided.”
Crowley’s forehead wrinkled. “Decided what?”
“That I wilt.”
Hector swung directly between Crowley’s eyes. Hector felt something crack in his hand. Crowley sprawled backward onto the floor, his head smacking the tile.
“Now we push on,” Hector said, massaging his fist.
16
Hadley heard them coming up the stairs and called through the door, “Tatie, don’t be crude — we have company.”
“I have a guest, too,” Hem called back. “Lasso’s with me.”
Hem keyed them in. Even though it was Sunday, someone was running the buzz saw at the sawmill below, filling the apartment with a low whine.
Brinke rose from her chair as Hem and Hector slipped off their coats. “I couldn’t kill any more time waiting until six,” she said to Hector. Brinke accepted Hem’s bear hug and said over his shoulder, “So I decided to impose on Hadley. Try and learn a little more about my favorite Texan. Talk about our handsome younger men.”
“Uh-oh,” Hector said. She moved to hug him and Hector kissed her forehead. He was surprised to find Brinke was dressed a bit more as she had been the night they’d met — a longish, hound’s-tooth skirt, black leather boots, and a black turtleneck sweater. He said, “God, you feel good. Smell good, too.”
“You feel good, too,” she said. “But that smell?” She wrinkled her nose, sniffing at his collar. “You smell like…incense.”
“From our last stop,” Hem said.
Hadley hugged Hector and kissed him on both cheeks. “Want to hold Bumby?”
Recalling Brinke’s remark about “cloying” domesticity, Hector lied. “Nah, I kind of messed up my hand. In fact, I need to get some ice on it, soon.”
“How about now?” Hem headed for the kitchen. As he did, he said to Brinke, “Lasso took a swing at the devil.”
Hadley said to Brinke, “I thought I knew all Ernest’s euphemisms, but that’s a new one.”
Hector looked at his hand. The knuckles were barked and beginning to swell. “I took a swing at Aleister Crowley,” he said. “Unfortunately for both of us, I also connected. That’s also where we picked up the scent of the incense. Christ only knows what unholy stench that was intended to mask.”
Brinke scowled. “Crowley?” Brinke and Hadley exchanged a look. Hector caught it…wondered about it. Brinke said, “Well, as he is the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast 666 of Revelation,’ Crowley just may put a hex on you, Hector.”
Hem shook his head. “That twisted bastard will never report it. Never let it be known he got knocked on his ass. Crowley has a wicked reputation to protect. It wouldn’t do for the devil worshippers to know their dark messiah got decked by a mere fiction writer.”
Brinke picked up Hector’s leather jacket and tossed it to him. “
Hope you found us a good restaurant, Hector. And I hope it’s a restaurant that won’t let you in dressed that way.”
“We’ll take a cab to my place so I can change,” Hector said. “The day kind of got away from me. Thought I’d have time to change before now.”
“And unfortunately, we’ve had to move our schedule up a bit,” Brinke said. “So you’re going to have to be a bit of a quick-change artist.”
Hector zipped his coat and tied off its leather belt. “Oh? What’s going on?”
“The four of us are invited to Joan Pyle’s, later this evening,” Hadley said, rocking her fat-cheeked son to sleep. “Joan is feeling skittish. She told Brinke she would feel much better, at least for the couple of hours we visit, in the company of you two ‘bruisers.’”
“‘Bruisers’? More like bruised,” Hector said, flexing his swollen hand. “But if that’s the plan, we really best get moving on.” Hector kissed Hadley goodbye and slapped Hem’s arm. “Thanks for riding shotgun.”
Hector followed Brinke down the narrow flight of stairs. “You really do look terrific,” he said, watching her from above and behind. “But I guess we’re giving up on fooling Germaine by dressing you like a man.”
“Your landlady is a woman of the world,” Brinke said. “She’s more, well, attuned to your ways than you give her credit for. She trusts a healthy young man to be a man.”
“And how did you divine that, Brinke?”
“I really have been shamelessly inserting myself into your life today, Hector. I paid your landlady a visit earlier today. Ostensibly I went to visit you, figuring you’d be gone after two. So I chatted up Germaine. I told her we’re secretly engaged. She’s delighted. And now there’ll be no more need for sneaking around her like that. She’s quite fine with it all. And the breakfast portions will finally be correct.”
“Hmm.”
“You disapprove? If things don’t last much longer you can simply say I broke the engagement…cast me as the villain.”
“One subterfuge to obscure another? How like a mystery writer.” They hit the ground floor and he wrapped an arm around Brinke’s waist and pulled her to him —pulled her into a slow, languorous kiss.
“That was very nice,” she said.
“Why ‘secret’? Our ‘engagement,’ I mean.”
“I said you wanted to be financially secure as a fiction writer before we made it public. Germaine understands a proud young man’s ego. And she’s frankly quite relieved about ‘us.’ She was growing quite flustered at your ‘womanizing’ and —”
“Jesus, stop, Brinke. Please. Leave me some illusions so I can soldier on with some remnant sense of my sweet and ‘private’ life as it stood ten minutes ago. You really have been busy, haven’t you?”
“You only know the half of it. And it’s just to make the nights and mornings easier. Marriage? Not my cup of tea, Hector. Too much like buying a room with a view.”
Hector’s head was spinning. He finally wrapped his good hand around the back of her neck and kissed her hard. Then he wrapped both arms around Brinke and hugged her tightly for a long time. She felt like home. “It really has been a hell of a day,” he said.
She pulled back a little and her fingers stroked his mouth, wiping off lipstick. “We’ll see if we can end it better for you.”
“A tall order,” he said. “It’s really been pretty dreadful in some ways.”
This strange expression on Brinke’s face…something he couldn’t read. She said, “I know, Hector.”
They stepped outside and Hector waved at a distant taxi. As they waited for the taxi to reach them, Hector saw a silhouette in the lowly lit alcove of an apartment building kitty-corner to the one in which the Hemingways lived.
As the headlights of the taxi washed the facade of the opposing building, the figure stepped further back into shadow. Hector saw only the lower portion of gray, pinstriped pants and black shoes affixed with white spats. He thought he also saw a walking stick. But that was all he saw. Brinke was watching Hector — she squinted as she searched the alcove Hector had been staring at.
“Something?”
“Maybe not,” Hector said.
He held her hand as she backed onto the taxi’s rear seat and swung her long legs in after her. As she scooted over, Hector slid in next to Brinke and slammed the door behind him. He gave the driver his address and then reached across the seat with his undamaged left hand. Brinke smiled and took his hand in hers and rested them together on her lap. She said, “Did you write some today?”
“I started a novel,” Hector said. “I wrote about twenty pages early this morning on the typewriter. But I binned it. A few hours ago, sitting in a church to get out of the weather, I started over, longhand. That one, I think, is a keeper.”
Brinke smiled. “A crime novel?”
“Yes, I’m taking your advice.”
She leaned across the seat and kissed him. “I’m thrilled,” she said. “I know this is what you should be doing. I’m over the moon.”
Hector said, “And you?”
“I finished the next Connor Templeton. It’s set in Paris…Murder in Montmartre. I’m giving myself a few days’ rest, then I suppose I’ll start volume eight.”
Hector nodded. “You don’t sound enthusiastic about that.”
“I’m getting a little bored with Pierce Thorp, if you want to know the truth.”
“Pierce,” who had inexplicable and seemingly bottomless reserves of wealth, was Brinke’s dashing, dapper, and dipsomaniacal bon vivant sleuth.
“How about taking my advice,” Hector said. “Treat yourself for a few days and try to write your own crime novel.”
“I told you, they’d never let ‘Connor,’ let alone ‘Brinke,’ publish such a book.”
“You’re in the City of Lights and they’re in the Big Apple. Pick another pen name. Something suitably scrappy. Something like, oh, Bud Grant, or Jake James. Merchant Marine turned author.”
“Those names alone make me want to try,” she said.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I…I think.”
“So do it, Brinke…Bud.”
“All right…I will.”
“Now it’s my turn,” he said, leaning across to kiss her.
***
Germaine was behind her desk as they descended the stairs. She clapped her hands and demanded Hector turn around once…twice. To Brinke she said, “I’ve never seen him in a suit before. I didn’t even know he owned an evening suit.”
Brinke smiled. “He really does clean up quite nicely, doesn’t he?”
Arm in arm, they stepped out into the light snow flurries. Hector waved down another taxi. “We need to stop at my place now,” Brinke said. “You’ve out dressed me, and that just won’t do.”
“Come on, Brinke…you look stunning.”
“People would talk,” she said, shaking her head. “Remember: muse, whore, or ne’er-do-well — take your pick — I have an image to live down to. Where are you taking me, by the way?”
“A place on the Rue Bayard.”
She whistled. “You’re crazy! Did you rob someone today?”
***
Brinke looked into the long, tall mirror hanging on the wall of Chez Savy. She turned a little, pointing one toe…posing. “We look like an advert illustration for Les Arcades des Champs-Elysées,” she said.
“The beautiful and the damned,” Hector said.
“You’ve read Fitzgerald? You like his stuff?”
“Some of it, sure.”
They were given a table by the street. In the low candlelight they could see out the slightly fogged window and onto the street. Heavy flurries flickered in the hazy orange cones cast by the gaslights.
“It’s shaping up to be a very cold and blustery February,” she said. Brinke shivered a little then. She was wearing a black dress with thin straps that bared her broad shoulders and most of her back. Hector slipped off his dinner jacket and rose and draped it over her shoulders a
nd then sat back down.
“At least February is a short month,” Hector said.
Brinke was staring at her untasted drink. Hector said, “What’s wrong, darling?”
“Nothing. Nothing is wrong…and maybe that’s exactly what is wrong.”
“What, you’re too happy?”
“I guess you could put it that way,” she said. “There’s something frightening about us together. We’re like second nature to me. Do you know how much that terrifies me? It’s all too comfortable…too perfectly easy.”
“Sadly, that’ll likely change,” Hector said. “Believe me, we can’t just coast along like this. This world will never let us.”
“Maybe…”
“Try not to sound so hopeful.” Hector sighed. He’d spent his day worrying about a woman who seemed in danger of slipping into some despair-driven void. Now he was confronted with another woman who was too satisfied with her life. He muttered, “De mal en pis.”
Brinke pulled out her cigarette case. She leaned into his match. “What do you mean?”
“A friend of mine is in some trouble.”
“The blonde…the one who is in love with you? Molly Wilder?”
“You know her name?” Hector started to light his own cigarette and said, “And she’s not in love with me.”
“Oh, she is.” Brinke blew a thin stream of smoke at the ceiling. “Or she thinks she is.” Her dark eyes darted to one side. “I really have been intruding into your life, just as I said. I didn’t really go looking, but I learned things. Hadley told me about Molly…and about her recent suicide attempt.”
Hector rubbed his cheeks and jaw. He shook his head. “She’s come under a very bad influence.”
“Someone tied to Crowley,” Brinke said. “Hadley’s heard some things about that, too. Victor Leek.”
“You know him?”
“No. Never heard of him until today. But he sounds quite mad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, to coin a phrase. You’re looking for Leek. That’s why this thing with Crowley happened?”
“I have a possible address now. But that’s for tomorrow. Hem’s going with me.”
One True Sentence: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter series Book 1) Page 10