Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Taking up his stool at the bar, Hector shook his head: Hem was not yet five year’s dead and they were already writing books about his poorly chosen women.

  Hem’s homes in Cuba and Key West had already been made into museums.

  Hector stared into the mirror behind the bar and sipped his whisky, shaking his head again.

  Hem would have hated it all. He was always focused on his career, on his legacy. Always talking about writing for the “long game”—the career that would extend far past his lifetime. But that attention had all been focused on the writing itself, on the stories and the novels.

  And the notion that sweating tourists would pay money to stare at the bed where he made unsatisfactory, infrequent love to his second wife; at the pool in which he rarely, if ever, swam, and at the desk where he sat in the Key West morning heat, writing? All of that would have angered and unhinged Hem if he’d ever thought to consider the sorry prospects.

  It was just a matter of time, Hector figured, until the Topping House, like it’s predecessors, would be opened to the public; guided tours given of the place where Hem had died. Gawkers stepping over the spot where Hem had fallen, his head blown to pulp.

  Or perhaps not.

  Maybe Mary would surprise Hector: She had once or twice before.

  As Rebecca the Hemingway teacher had said, the crime novelist and Hem had gone back to their days as ambulance drivers in Italy. Hector had known, or at least met, all four Mrs. Hemingways. In Paris, and in Spain, he’d stood by Hadley Hemingway as she watched Pauline undermine her marriage to Hem.

  Later, when Hem had settled in Key West—partly at Hector’s urging—he’d gotten to know Pauline, the second Mrs. Hemingway, though Hector had never really become fond of her.

  Then, in the tumult of the Spanish Civil War, Hector had encountered the soon-to-be-third Mrs. Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn—the only one of Hem’s women whom Hector truly loathed.

  In 1959, after twenty-two years of estrangement, Hector had gone to Cuba to patch things up with Hem. There he had met Papa’s last wife, Mary Welch, journalist turned hausfrau and professional Mrs. Hemingway.

  Hem was already in the throes of a quickening physical and mental decline by then.

  During his few days at the Finca, Hector had been hectored into reading several of Hem’s works in progress—two novels and Hem’s Paris memoir, recently published as A Moveable Feast. Hector had also spent a couple of mornings getting to know Mary. As far back as 1959, Mary had been anticipating widowhood, already formulating strategies for dealing with Papa’s presumptive posthuma. That hadn’t endeared Mary to Hector.

  On the morning that Hem died, Mary had called Hector: Papa’s oldest surviving friend deserved to have the news of his friend’s death broken to him by the widow, Mary had insisted.

  It had been a very strange phone call.

  Mary was admittedly under remarkable stress, but it went deeper than that, and in ways Hector couldn’t yet fathom or characterize. It left him wondering about the full circumstances of Hem’s death. Sometimes, when Hem’s memory ambushed him at odd moments, Hector would wonder if Ernest’s death was indeed a suicide, or something more sinister. Particularly since in Cuba, in 1959, Mary had been champing at the bit to become Hem’s literary executrix.

  Nagged by those occasional suspicions, Hector had elected to stay in touch with Mary during the four years since Hem’s death. Then, quite abruptly, a few weeks ago, about the same time that bookseller alerted him to the sudden surfacing of his own long-lost manuscript, Mary had invited Hector to Idaho to assist in, or at least to provide some input into, the editing of the next of Hem’s unfinished works to be published—a long novel Mary was thinking of titling Islands in the Stream. She also mentioned something about her own memoir.

  Hector leapt at the opportunity: He didn’t much care for Islands—he’d read the manuscript in Cuba and had found it bloated, unfocused, and too reminiscent of To Have and Have Not. And he wasn’t crazy about tampering with another writer’s works—particularly not Hem’s.

  But there seemed to be some sinister confluence swirling around all things Hemingway now.

  Apart from Hector’s recently surfaced short story, word had reached Hector from the academic world that other Hemingway posthumous works tied to Hector were lately being whispered about, including a “lost” or cut chapter of A Moveable Feast that actually focused on Hector.

  Even more worrying in terms of Hector’s own “long game”—his own encroaching “posthumous” career—was the possibility, as indicated by marginalia on the typescript of the lost chapter from Feast, that an entire manuscript of a novel, a roman à clef based on Hector’s decidedly picaresque life, might exist.

  The novel, according to the friendly academic who’d heard about it and who then had confided to Hector, had been composed in the final, crazed months leading up to Hem’s disastrous treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

  Hem knew where too many of Hector’s “bodies were buried” to coin a phrase. Hem knew too-well all of the “skeletons” in Hector’s “closet,” to resort to another cliché.

  And in the last few years of his life, Hem had been frequently deluded, the membrane between fantasy and reality all but annihilated.

  Hector hated to imagine what such a manuscript might contain about him and what it might mean for Hector’s own “long game”—for his own “legacy,” humble as that might be. If it was to be at all.

  So Hector had accepted Mary’s invitation.

  He’d do what he could to help her clean up Islands.

  He’d try to get a firmer handle on Hem’s last days. Maybe learn more about what really happened that terrible morning in July 1961 …set his own mind to rest that Hem’s death hadn’t been something other than suicide.

  Hector would try to figure out how that long-lost story of his had come to light and whether Mary might know something about all that.

  And he would look for that lost chapter of A Moveable Feast—look for that rumored posthumous manuscript centered on Hector.

  And if he found them, he’d destroy them.

  Hector felt quite justified about all that: His life (that sorry affair) was Hector’s own to write about, and Hector’s alone.

  He looked at his drink; looked back in the mirror. Across the lounge, a young dark-haired man was sitting alone with a notebook and pen. He wore the usual suit and tie; had the usual haircut. Hector made a sour face. He signed the check, scribbling down his room number as he sighed and rose.

  After a moment’s wrestling with it, Hector wandered over to the youngish man. “Calling it a night, Andy. You should turn in, too. I might make it an early morning—you never know. What do you say, son? Up for a little fly fishing mañana?”

  The young man didn’t look up. He just sat there, acting engrossed in reading whatever he’d written in his notebook. His cheeks and ears began to redden.

  For about seven months, Hector and his youngish, perpetual shadow—Andrew Langley—had shared similar one-sided exchanges. Hector snorted softly and shook his head. Goddamn FBI… Goddamn J. Edgar. He said, “Night, kiddo. Be sure to write I did something real interesting so the Director will feel he’s getting his money’s worth from you.”

  Hector was turning to leave when he glimpsed the name written there in Andy’s notepad—the name that set his heart beating faster:

  Donovan Creedy.

  “The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.”

  — J. Edgar Hoover

  CREEDY:

  GREENWICH VILLAGE, 1934

  Donovan Creedy hated the Village with its bohemians and Reds and homosexuals: fey or even mincing men who dared hold hands in public on the side streets.

  Everywhere he looked, scruffy painters and leftist novelists freighted their canvases and books with dogma and propaganda…writing in coffee houses; looking just as unkempt and slovenly as all those expatriates back in Paris a decade be
fore them.

  Creedy saw writing as a craft and a calling. He wrote in jacket and tie, sitting in a stiff-backed chair and committed to writing no less than three thousand words at each sacred sitting.

  Writing was a trade for those with passion, dedication and above, all discipline. That’s how it was supposed to be. A meritocracy.

  He checked the address in his notebook again and surveyed the numbers stenciled above the brownstones’ doors. Creedy found the address and squinted at the mailbox in the soft summer rain: The Black Rook Press. Hm…

  He buzzed the bell and was admitted by a dumpy woman with mouse brown hair and pale skin. She was dressed in a badly pilled sweater, threadbare dress and several seasons’ out-of-style shoes. She said her name was Esther.

  As he sat in the waiting area, leafing through some of Black Rook’s other publications, Creedy realized he’d never heard of any of the novels. He turned a book edgewise and checked the spine: the Black Rook logo was new to him. Amateurish. He was fairly certain he’d never seen any of the independent publisher’s titles in a single bookstore, not even a public library.

  Creedy sighed and thought about leaving. Just then, the woman put down the book she was reading—Hemingway’s Winner Take Nothing—and checked her watch. “Mr. Sapperstein will see you now.”

  She led him back through a warren of dingy offices and corridors. Creedy thought he smelled the stench of decomposition, then saw the dead and swollen mouse rotting in a trap—its skull flattened by the metal spring bar.

  Esther led him to the end of the hallway and opened a door, said, “Mr. Donovan Creedy, for you, Mr. Sapperstein.”

  A short, portly bald man rose and spread his arms, waddling around his battered desk. His suit jacket was off and his sleeves rolled up. Sapperstein had his office window open and an oscillating fan drifted left and right across his desk—the papers there weighted with staplers, unwashed coffee mugs and other odd-and-ends to keep it all from blowing away.

  Frowning at the dark sweat stains under the publisher’s arms, Creedy quickly thrust out a hand for a damp shake.

  Creedy rubbed his now slick palm down on the fabric of the chair he was offered and sat down across from his prospective publisher. Creedy had already just about determined to walk away from this publishing “opportunity.”

  He could tell already the Black Rook Press wasn’t going to be his ticket to success as a novelist—not the horse that would carry him to the kind of financial writing success that would at last let him shake free of intelligence work.

  “Let me say up front, Donnie—I can call you Donnie, can’t I?” Not waiting for an answer, Maurice Sapperstein said, “I looove Cold Black Rain. That intelligence stuff in there strikes me as very convincing. The novel is near perfect. Just some tweaks here and there. All that anti-Semitic stuff, for instance. We need to lose that. Also, we need some romance in there for the skirts who really buy the books now. So I had this notion: this partner of your hero—you know, Artemis Stryker’s sidekick, Bill Foster? I really think—just thinkin’ out loud here—Bill needs to be a dame. I’ve even got a name. We’ll call her Constance Faith, a beautiful Jewess who…”

  ***

  Creedy sat in his apartment in front of his typewriter, staring at the publishing contract. His feet hurt from the long walk back from the Village; he felt like kicking off his shoes, doffing his jacket and loosening his tie. Instead, he sighed, set out the handwritten notes given him by Sapperstein, then scrolled in some paper. Looking down at the notes, at the scrawls that passed for the hack editor’s comments, Creedy thought of a controller he’d once had in Berlin…an obsequious little man who later was rumored to be a mole and then abruptly “disappeared.” Creedy shook his head and began to revise his novel to the notes.

  He abhorred the notion of incorporating Sapperstein’s suggestions…of twisting his work to conform to the man’s dubious notions. But it was the literary way: The relationship of author and editor was sacred. And some writing-editing teams passed into canon history. Now, with a contract in hand, Creedy was officially and meaningfully a part of that sacred literary tradition. He was to be a published author, and authors, the professional ones, submitted to editing.

  Creedy could adjust. Adapt. His parents had told him stories about the ones back home who were too weak, or too proud to thwart fate. They died in flames, bullets…worse. His parents remembered for him the ones literally starved under the Romanovs, the ones who hadn’t resorted to cannibalism as their village sank into starvation that last hard winter before they fled for America.

  Creedy had immediately resented the fact he’d been far too young to be tested by making his own choice on that front. His parents had decided for him, and only told him much later what had saved his life, and their own.

  He had a vague memory of them hovering over the body of a cousin who’d decided the other way. But he hadn’t seen what they were doing to the half-frozen body.

  Creedy hesitated, looking up at the shelves above his writing desk—burdened with stack after stack of unsold manuscripts. Sighing again, Creedy bent his head low over the typewriter and began banging the keys.

  ***

  Much later, he rose and pressed palms to his back, wincing at the crack. He retrieved the old valise from the closet and began sorting through the manuscripts inside again. As he often did, Creedy returned to that particular short sketch set in Paris in the old days…a long ago Christmas drink shared by two friends.

  The sketch was scrawled on old yellowing pieces of paper torn from a notebook.

  Several times he’d been this close to destroying the pieces of paper. But each time he’d cursed and then saved them from fire or the bin, hating himself for relenting…for the envy he felt.

  Jesus, if just once he could catch some of that voice…

  The cold white expanse of blank paper shocked him back to reality.

  Creedy thought more of Paris and of his beautiful, doomed Victoria, then bit his lip, seized by a notion. A scheme.

  Maybe he could make the words there his own, after a fashion. And, hell, he could improve them in the bargain. He saw now how his gambit could serve several ends.

  He took the notebook pages over to his typewriter, scrolled in a fresh sheet and began to transcribe the words from the old, scrawled-over slips of paper.

  “There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy.”

  — Ambrose Bierce

  5

  CLUES

  Not long after lunch—a meal Hannah had picked through but not really eaten—she’d suddenly been famished. It was always the way now—starving, then unable to touch food. Rather than run out and get something for her, Richard had instead insisted upon them both walking to the Atkinson Market—the only grocery in town and purportedly a frequent stop for the Hemingways. Local color for his book, he’d told Hannah.

  Hannah said, “How much further is this place? We should have taken a cab.”

  Ignoring her protests, Richard watched Hannah; looked at what he’d done to her. Women could be such ballbusters. But knock one up and, heh, you reduced them to utter dependence. Richard took nasty satisfaction in the fact his cock had done all that to her…

  Yet…

  Yet…

  Richard was rather surprised she was still keeping up this brisk, pace—still hanging in there. But Hannah always seemed to do that. It was that peasant-stock Celt heredity of hers, he guessed. But even these months without the pills, well, Richard was surprised at how her personality had presented itself. She’d sought psychiatric treatment at his urging. In the early going, when she could still take the medicines, she’d been compliant, puppyish and more pliable in terms of bending to his whims. Then she’d become pregnant and the medications were cut off. Her personality began to change, but Richard preferred docile Hannah.

  So Richard had insisted on her seeing another doctor—one willing to proscribe medications for Hannah during her pregnancy. Hannah had r
efused the second doctor’s prescriptions, staying with her original doctor who had set a prohibition against drugs for Hannah.

  Now that she was free of all such medications, there was an increasing impudence in Hannah—willfulness that exasperated Richard.

  He’d first seen Hannah as his own Catherine Barkley—this dishy, damaged-goods Scots bedmate and perhaps doomed romantic figure. A lover straight out of A Farewell To Arms. But lately, Hannah was reminding Richard of some goddamned distaff version of Harry Morgan, always leading with chin and fists.

  His first wife had been a kind of shrinking violet and fragile mess through her pregnancy…pliant, easily manipulated and cowed. Richard had expected a repeat of that experience with this young woman.

  But there was something indomitable about Hannah—this dynamo drive that perplexed and increasingly unsettled Richard, pushing him farther and farther in his attempts to provoke her—to find some point at which she might finally conform to his vision of her as some quintessential Hemingway heroine—artistic…fragile; pretty and compliant in bed.

  That’s what he thought he was marrying when her pregnancy forced him to a commitment.

  Well, and it had been the other, too—the desire to groom a fiction writer.

  He’d seen in Hannah if not the undeniable talent, at least the enthusiasm of an artist who believed herself on the cusp of great work. A bit like Papa, in the 1920s, there in the City of Lights.

  Richard had felt it an opportunity and interesting experiment to guide Hannah—to shape her as a fiction writer. To—well, yes—to police her, after a fashion.

  It wasn’t enough for a writer to find a mere voice and tell a tale: it was also crucial to conform to some template and formal constructs that would allow for easier categorization and therefore clean analysis by the critical community.