Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “Let’s just say I was in that café, sitting behind you a few nights ago when you were talking to your pretty French friend. I heard what you said about Hemingway. About Pound. I think we can help one another.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Wilson Kurtz. I work for an organization back home. A man in our organization—a man named Hoover—is concerned about what effect much of the poetry, painting and writing being done here by American expatriates and increasingly finding its way back home might have on the moral condition of our country—particularly on our youth.”

  Creedy was inclined to agree, but warily said, “This Hoover—he’s some kind of preacher? This organization some kind of church?” If so, Creedy had no patience for the man and prepared to dismiss him. Creedy had dispensed with God as a child, before his family came to America—too many unanswered prayers and myriad wishes not granted; pleas for vengeance against despised rivals ignored. You made your own luck; exacted your own revenge. The world belonged to self-possessed, self-made men.

  Kurtz blew smoke in Creedy’s face and smiling said, “Hardly that. Mr. Hoover was originally in charge of the Enemy Aliens Registration Section. He recently joined the Bureau of Investigation as deputy head. Mr. Hoover’s a brilliant, visionary man. He’s a comer. And he’s fiercely committed to seeing all this bohemian loose living and degeneracy does not find its way back home via ‘art’ produced in this filthy Gomorrah.”

  Creedy gave the man another hard look, trying to decide if he was authentic. Maybe Hemingway and Lassiter were having him on—had set this man up as another of their ceaseless barroom pranks. “I’m not sure I understand,” Creedy said.

  “You will. Unlike the lazy dreamers who populate these cafés, we don’t talk. We act. We have a first task for you—a kind of test. And I think, by the way, it’s something you’re going to savor. This Hemingway—we’ve been watching him for a time. Particularly the fact that he’s a journalist and publishing romanticized articles about all this dreck,”—Kurtz waved his hand as if to indicate and indict the entire Left Bank—“makes him doubly dangerous.”

  Kurtz handed Creedy a cigarette—custom-made from the looks and the distinctive three gold bands at one end—and lit him up with another thumbnail-struck match. The expensive, exotic Turkish tobacco gave Creedy a head-rush.

  “I’ve come into possession of some secret knowledge,” Kurtz said. “Knowledge that lends itself to the performance of a certain type of task. For a certain kind of man.”

  The stranger leaned in confidentially. “In a few hours, Mrs. Hadley Hemingway is going to board a night train at Gare de Lyon station. She’ll be carrying a valise filled with her husband’s extant fiction. If you could fit it into your schedule to be on that train and perform a certain duty, for now, let’s just say that Mr. Hoover would be very grateful.”

  Kurtz sat back and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “It’s a lucky thing, you know, having Mr. Hoover grateful to you, I mean.”

  “One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.”

  — Frank Moore Colby

  3

  THE SCHOLAR

  Hannah looked up from her notebook at the rather rustic, macho mountain restaurant in which they were eating. In her short story, she was writing about Scotland and the village of Glencoe. Hemingway always said it was necessary to be away from a place to really write about it.

  So where would Hannah go in order to write about Idaho? Maybe some café in Paris? The romance of that setting for a writing session certainly appealed to her…the culture…the fine wines. The wine…

  Hannah watched Richard savoring his wine.

  She had been one of Richard Paulson’s best students—he’d told her that and Hannah didn’t think he was just paying lip service to the fact.

  For whatever reason, Richard had focused attention on Hannah. Maybe at first it had been her Scots accent—those juicy r’s everyone called adorable. Either way, from that point on, Hannah hadn’t just attended Richard’s lectures, she’d been privy to the research upon which they were constructed.

  As a lecturer, Richard was partial to audio-visual support. Sitting in the dark next to everyone else, one of forty or fifty invisible faces watching with rapt attention, Hannah had studied Richard’s face in the light of the small lamp set above his lectern as he delivered lectures he had tested on Hannah earlier, making his points as images of Hemingway and his wives and various houses flickered on the screen at the professor’s back.

  And now, here she was, actually in Hemingway’s Idaho, in his favorite restaurant and perhaps sitting in a chair Papa had sat in many times himself. Living in a slide, so to speak.

  As a child, an avid reader, Hannah had believed books just existed somehow…came into the world whole. When she’d learned they were written by men and women, little Hannah envisioned some exotic or special race of storytellers.

  Exposure to Richard, and academia in general, had demystified much of that—reduced her sense of wonder and left her feeling a bit bitter for the wisdom.

  She remembered the night it started: that invitation by Richard for a coffee that had stretched into a bottle of wine; a romance and marriage. And somewhere along the way, she had crossed some other line and lost even more wonder for the writing life. At least as it was embodied by Richard. He made the literary world seem somehow smaller, less romantic.

  Hannah considered her husband across the table. He was browsing over the Hemingway conference program. He had his pen out and was making occasional notes across the faces of the other scholars depicted there, writing things like “asshole” or “faker.”

  Maybe, in the end, professors were really just hucksters. You might pick up some wisdom from them here and there, but they literally extracted a fee for their lessons, all the while warping writers’ words and works through their own tunnel-vision prisms that could be scaled down to enticing course catalogue listings or monograph titles. Many writers hated critics and academics and now Hannah understood all that a little better. Critics, it now seemed to Hannah, too often looked at everything but the passion inherent in a good piece of writing; those critics intellectualized it all and sucked it dry of life.

  But for all the “academic” things Hannah now knew about Hemingway and his works, Papa still loomed large, and although she knew no room in which he once sat could make her a better writer or grant her a wonderful opening line, the thought that Papa might have drawn inspiration from these very surroundings excited Hannah to the possibility it might do the same for her.

  She realized, then, that she had stopped writing some time ago. Hannah closed the blue notebook containing the short story she had struggled all morning to shape and sipped her ice water. She contemplated the restaurant’s cathedral ceiling from their corner table. The ceiling was pitched like most of the roofs in town—sharply slanted to shed the snows that made the Sun Valley portion of the Sawtooth Mountains a skiers’ destination from the day of its Papa-assisted launch in the mid-1930s.

  Richard topped off his glass of wine though it was still two-thirds’ full.

  “Looks more like a church than a club,” Hannah said, frowning as Richard freshened his drink. “So this is where the self-condemned man ate his last meal?”

  Hannah stared back at a thin, tall man in a blue blazer who had been stealing glances at their table for the past hour.

  Richard chewed his porterhouse steak, oblivious to Hannah’s growing preoccupation with the stranger on the other side of the restaurant—a man who, she was increasingly certain, was watching them.

  Richard shook his head. “‘Self-condemned?’” He sighed. “I told you how I think it was.” He poured himself more red wine, the house cabernet, from the carafe at his elbow. “But, yeah, he ate here with Mary at that small table in the southwest corner there, his table, on July first. The night before the shooting.”

  “What did Papa eat?”

  Hi
s fork hung in the air. Richard scowled and sat back, his brow furrowed. “Jesus Christ. You know: I don’t know. Nobody has ever gotten around to reporting that so far as I know.”

  Well, at last! She’d found something in Hem’s biography that had eluded the academics with all their digging and amateur psychoanalysis. Hannah would never deign to compare herself to Hemingway, but wouldn’t it take another fiction writer to find it?

  Richard pulled his hand away and scratched the back of his neck. “Gotta think one of us has gotten ’round to looking into that. Just because I don’t know it, doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t.”

  It was a remarkable statement, coming from Prof. Richard Paulson—the twice-awarded Hemingway scholar.

  Hannah stirred her food with her fork. She was afraid that Richard’s rare instant of self-effacement was fired by wine. She said, “Oh, aye, rob me of my discovery.” Then she shook her head. “No, I’m first to this, Richard. It’s too obvious a question to have ever occurred to the scholars.”

  Richard shrugged and smiled.

  Hannah smiled back and squeezed his hand. “Could be a fine doctoral thesis: ‘From Apéritif To After-Dinner Mint—Papa’s Last Meal As A Paradigm for Une Génération Perdue.’ That’d do as a working title, eh?” Hannah deepened her voice: “The condemned man made a hearty meal of…”

  Richard half-smiled, raising his glass and trying to steer conversation back to his own track. “May have something there. Work Papa’s dinner order up into some trippy Marxist diatribe and stir in some Wasteland imagery and we might peddle the thing to Barbara and that other menopausal bitch at Northeastern.”

  He winked and nodded at someone passing behind Hannah. She turned, but only caught sight of the person’s back: short, fat, crammed into a too-small black suit. Stringy hair just touched hunched and dandruff-dusted shoulders. Richard had already turned his back to the stranger.

  Hannah said, “Who was she?”

  “He,” Richard corrected. “Berle—another academic.” Richard shrugged. “But more academic than most. Pathetic, really—never has contributed a thing of worth to Hemingway scholarship.”

  Now Richard raised the nearly depleted carafe, holding it at a slight angle over Hannah’s unused goblet. “Sure you won’t have a little, sweetheart? Finish it off?”

  “I’m certain, Richard.” Hannah bit her lip. Dear God, how could he put that question to her when she was adamant about not drinking while pregnant? Then she remembered, and shivered a little: It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to entice her into a drink in her present condition.

  Lamenting it was “no fun”—even “dangerous to drink alone,” Richard had tried to get Hannah to drink with him in “celebration” the night she’d told him she was pregnant. He’d said something about the liquor helping to keep the baby’s birth weight down in case she “wasn’t big enough down there.”

  She’d made a joke about that assertion reminding her of his hero—of Papa’s strange obsession with recording his wives’ monthly cycles in a journal; even resorting in correspondence to having his publisher mediate frictions spinning out of his third wife’s secretive gynecological issues—her resulting barren condition first confided to Hem’s publisher rather than to Ernest himself.

  When Richard didn’t put away the wine, the joke had turned to a remark about him aping Hemingway—even in this odd way—and she soon enough saw Richard found no humor in her gentle barb.

  Hannah stared at her plate, stirring the food around there some more, not hungry at all.

  She wondered if maybe he was kidding this time, but the carafe was still there in his hand, hanging above her empty glass. “Seriously,” she said, “I don’t want any. Maybe you should take it easy, too.”

  In the early days of their romance, Richard had been courtly, charming…reasonably fit. In the past few months, he’d put on nearly as many pounds as Hannah; edging into a build that recalled circa-1950s Hemingway—this formidable drinker’s gut that strained his shirt buttons.

  And where had Richard found that white, Hemingwayesque guayabera shirt he was wearing now? Apart from being inappropriate garb for the region and the restaurant, it was also months out-of-season. Richard used to be more in the “tweedy” academic mold—English herringbone jackets with leather patches at the elbows and a necktie. Now Richard was sporting the very Hemingway-inspired slovenly togs he had once mocked other Papa scholars for affecting.

  Looking away from the carafe hefted in Richard’s hand, Hannah stirred her food around more with her fork. Then there was Richard’s increasingly surly demeanor. Pressed, he would probably cite Hemingway there, too, but it was something else, drawn from some set of deep-seated problems all Richard’s own. And it was getting worse, wasn’t it? Hannah remembered it starting almost from the night he’d learned he’d be a father again. But it seemed to be growing more acidic as they drew closer to Idaho and Richard’s long-planned rendezvous with Mary Hemingway.

  Richard smiled and emptied the dregs into his own glass. “‘Every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor.’”

  Hannah said, “That from something of Papa’s?”

  “The Bible. At least I think so.” Richard stared up at the ceiling. “I wonder what Hem did order that last night?” As he said it, Richard caught himself trying to sip from an empty glass.

  Hannah half-heartedly smiled, reluctantly following his lead. “May actually bear research, eh? Little something for your fall quarter class to impress the next undergraduate you seduce, make pregnant, marry, and neglect?”

  Across the room, the party seated at the Hemingway table got up to leave. Hannah noticed Richard was no longer paying attention to her; instead, Richard’s gaze was locked on the vacated seats. He had both his arms in the air, waving down their waitress. As the woman approached, he pointed to Papa’s favored table and said, “There’s a draft here. Can we move to that one?”

  ***

  Palms pressed to the wooden surface of the table, Richard looked as if he might mystically summon up some lingering essence of Papa through the veneer. His wedding band glowed in the low light. Hannah remembered the night Richard first tried to escalate their relationship—to move them from teacher and student to lovers. Hannah had pointed to the ring on his finger, said simply, “But you’re married.”

  Richard had held up his hand, considering the ring there. “For me, this is number three. Hem had four wives. So maybe I should keep my options open.”

  Hannah was left to shake her head at that now: It cast her in the role of last wife, with all the attendant, bloody baggage. She looked around some more, then caught that stranger with the widow’s peak stealing looks back at them.

  “That man over there in the sports jacket—no, don’t look,” Hannah said. “He’s been watching us for the last hour. Not in an idle way.”

  Richard’s eyes narrowed, then he rolled them. “I saw that guy come in,” he said, waving a hand. “With that cheap jacket and those shiny slacks, he’s got to be another scholar. Some professor from some cornfield college in the Midwest. Probably hoping trailing around behind me he might overhear something—pick up some scrap he can use to inform his own so-called scholarship. Probably hanging on my every word, the sorry bastard. Probably figures my crumbs will get him his tenure.”

  Richard toyed with his empty goblet. “I mean, look at it from his perspective, Hannah: here he is, in earshot of the man who wrote what’s regarded as the finest treatment of Hem’s Paris apprenticeship, and he’s here with me in situ where our greatest writer’s life ended. Not inconceivable there are several like that guy, dogging my heels, hoping to rob me blind.”

  Hannah rubbed her temples: The man was seedy, a bit slovenly, but not in the careless, eccentric way of an academic. He just looked, well, sleazy. Menacing.

  She glanced at Richard and saw how closely he was looking at her now. She braced for it:

  Richard said, “On the other hand, it could all be in your head. Maybe we
should have gotten another opinion. Maybe there is still something you could take until the baby is born.”

  Hannah bit her lip. She knew well enough what Richard thought was “in her head.” But he was wrong. The man was watching them, with intent. Just because she suffered from an impulse to always brace for betrayal or violations of trust didn’t mean she couldn’t sense a real threat.

  “It’s not like that.” She stole a glance at the man in the dark jacket. His cheeks were wind-burned; high forehead. His thinning dark hair was slicked back from his widow’s peak. He wore bifocals. He might be an academic. But something was a bit off. Maybe it was because he wasn’t scribbling away in a notebook between bites like all the other academics back in the lodge’s lounge. Maybe it was the fact his face wasn’t buried in a Hemingway novel, or a scholarly study about Papa, as he wolfed down his food.

  There was no way, to Hannah’s mind, that the stranger was just a typical local, either: not in those cheap, care-worn dress slacks and those scuffed, wingtip shoes.

  Not a sportsman.

  Not a shopkeeper.

  “It’s not like that at all.” Hannah thought it, but didn’t say it—a quote from a philosophy professor that had resonated all too strongly for Hannah: Even paranoids have real enemies.

  “Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in the mirror which waits always before or behind.”

  — Catherine Drinker Bowen

  4

  THE LONG GAME

  Hector racked the receiver and slipped out of the phone booth. Mary Hemingway had invited Hector up to the house for cocktails with the single academic with whom she’d agreed to meet—some scholar purportedly interested in writing Mary’s biography.