Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  As Creedy rushed to Butiaba, the second plane carrying the Hemingways got off the ground after a bumpy take off, intending to fly to Entebbe. Then it abruptly nosed in and caught fire on impact. Exactly that much went to plan.

  Shortly afterward, Creedy got a radio message: Hemingway had escaped the second burning plane with his life.

  Agent Creedy had hurt his fist pounding on the dash when he got that news.

  They reached Butiaba and Creedy jumped out of the Jeep and hit the ground on the run, stirring up dust and drawing buzzing flies and panhandling locals. A begging black child touched his sleeve; Creedy nearly kicked the bone-thin boy to death.

  Creedy shoved his hand into the pocket of his bush jacket and flipped the safety off his gun, looking for some English speaker who might direct him to the local hospital.

  If he found Hemingway in a hospital room, Creedy had special chemicals and hypodermics he could administer to the author to “help him along” for goddamn Hoover.

  Flustered, the agent finally put the arm on an English-speaking doctor and got the news.

  Damn it to fucking everlasting hell:

  He’d missed them, again.

  Hemingway was on a third plane, now, he was told. Mr. Hemingway’s injuries were bad—much worse than he was letting on, the doctor said, but Papa was expected to live.

  Creedy walked out of the hospital in a daze and found a drinking hole. He ordered a bottle of Tusker beer and listened to the radio playing behind the bar—a shortwave that picked up some English speaking news program.

  The broadcast made it clear how badly he’d missed his opportunity to close the “Hemingway Affair.” Papa was already before the world press, clutching a bottle of gin and a bunch of bananas, grinning and declaring, “My luck, she is running good.”

  According to less sentimental sources, Hemingway was holed up in his hotel room, recuperating and savoring his own erroneous obituaries.

  Creedy ground his teeth.

  Then:

  “In other news, an apparent assassination attempt of incarcerated African independence leader Jomo Kenyatta was thwarted this morning….”

  Creedy went into a rage that got him thrown from the bar. He pulled himself up from the ground, brushed off the dust and found Stapleton…found a plane; headed to Entebbe.

  Creedy had this notion of shooting Hemingway dead in his hospital bed.

  ***

  Hemingway looked bad: bandaged, burned. His eyes didn’t quite track. Probably a concussion, Creedy figured. That gin Hemingway was guzzling wasn’t going to help with that.

  Hemingway looked up at Creedy, then shook his mangled head. “It’s true what they say,” Hemingway growled, voice hoarse with pain. “It’s a small world after all. More’s the bloody fucking pity.”

  Creedy’s hand was wrapped around the .45 in his pocket. The grip was wet with his perspiration. His hand trembled and Creedy took his finger from the hair-trigger, afraid in his shaking rage he might accidently shoot off his own toes.

  “You’re a hard man to kill,” Creedy said.

  Hemingway gave him this strange look.

  “Two plane crashes, I mean. And you survived them both. Amazing.”

  “My luck, she is still good.”

  Creedy curled his lip. “You need a new line. That one’s already in all the papers.”

  Hemingway gestured at the stack of newspapers by his bed. “Been reading them. Bastards and their obits…Jesus. No man should get to read his own obituary, Creedy. The things the cocksuckers chose to dwell on….”

  “Well, they weren’t going to focus on your writing, were they? Your last novel sucked wind. Across the River and Into the Trees: what a piece of shit.”

  Hemingway took another shot of whiskey. “Bad enough to be like this. I don’t need to hear you work your mouth. Get out of here, Agent. Scram.”

  “You cost me something today,” Creedy said. “Cost something important to me.”

  Hemingway managed a grin. “What’s that, asshole?”

  “I…I can’t say.” Creedy wanted to shoot the bastard, but he’d never get out of the building if he tried. And the types around here? The niggers would kill him, ugly and hard. He knew it. He thought of Hoover—fucking Director. Maybe he’d resign his post with the Bureau. Quit, and deprive Hoover the satisfaction of firing him. He said:

  “Hoover remains obsessed with you. All these shots you’ve taken at him over the years have gotten under his skin. He’s a stupid man to provoke, Hemingway. But you do it anyway. I conveyed that message to him, you know. The stuff about the birth certificate. He nearly took my head off. Despite your baiting him, I don’t understand why he hates you so. Why he obsesses over you.”

  Hemingway shrugged, looking at another one of his own obituaries. “Maybe it’s what I know.”

  “What was it you uncovered, Hemingway? What do you think you know about the Director and his parentage?”

  Hemingway drank more gin, smacked his lips. “Back in the 1920s, there was this rumor you know. Tongues wagging about how President Harding might have some Negro blood in him. Hoover came into the Bureau under Harding, you know. Birds of a feather? People I know found proof. Seems the Director’s ancestors were slaveholders. Things got cozy around the plantation. I’m okay with it. I’m broadminded. Folks back home? Not so much….”

  Creedy’s eyes narrowed. He bit his lip. No… Not that….

  Hemingway was still reading his own obituaries. He said, “Anyway, the Director is mulatto. Fancy that, eh, Donnie? America’s most powerful racist, a black man. Little like learning Hitler was a Jew.” Hem looked up and glanced at the door, dismissing Creedy with his unfocused eyes.

  Creedy walked in a daze to the door.

  To his back, Hemingway said, “I’d be real careful talking about it, Donnie. The Director’s threatened his own blood, black and white, with the worst reprisals if they talk.”

  “I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.”

  — J. Edgar Hoover

  25

  INTERROGATION

  According to road signs, they were about five miles from Boise State University. Hector had stayed a couple of car lengths behind Richard since they reached more populated climes.

  Hector was getting ready to further narrow the distance—position himself to grab Richard as he stepped from his rental car; to retrieve all those stolen Hemingway papers—when twin black sedans overtook his Bel Air and then shot around him.

  Bureau cars—Hector was sure of it.

  Hector hit the brakes. He fell far back and then pulled off the road into some high grass. He slid out of his Chevy with his binoculars and watched:

  The first of the black sedans overtook Richard’s car, pulling in front of the professor and then hitting the brakes to slow Paulson down. The second sedan then tapped Richard’s rental car’s rear bumper, sending it into a spin.

  Richard’s car skidded sideways into a drainage culvert, landing on its side.

  The impact had been more than enough to bend the frame of Paulson’s car. Drunk as Hector figured Richard to be, he reasoned the professor might still survive the crash with minor injuries.

  A big man in a black suit pulled out a metal rod and broke the glass in the driver’s side door and hauled Richard out through the broken window.

  As they hustled Richard to their car, Hector, staying low in the grass, made his way to Richard’s twisted rental car.

  There was a suitcase on the floor of the front seat of the car. As the Bureau boys had their backs to him, fussing with getting Richard into the lead sedan, Hector leaned in and grabbed the suitcase. He flipped latches and confirmed it was full of the stolen Hemingway papers. He rolled over the side of the car into the high grass to hide as the FBI agents returned to Richard’s rental and began poking through it.

  On hands and knees, Hector crawled back to his Bel Air with the precio
us suitcase.

  The Bureau boys got back out of the wrecked rental, took another look around, then twisted the cap on what looked like a roadside flare and tossed it through the broken-open window of Richard’s car. Hector covered his ears and opened his mouth, anticipating the fireball and concussion that soon swallowed the professor’s rental car.

  Through the roiling black smoke, Hector watched the FBI men leave. He gave them some distance, then began to follow in his Chevy.

  ***

  The men who had snatched the professor took Hector on a little tour—out of the studied, sculpted environs of the university through sparsely populated neighborhoods and then onto some winding county two lane that took them through vast tracts of empty land and on into some wooded foothills. Bastards clearly had some destination in mind, but Hector wondered what the Bureau might have in the way of a base out here in the sticks.

  The sedans pulled up in front of a log-hewn meeting lodge on the outskirts of town. A sign out front said “International Fraternal Brotherhood of the Bull Moose.”

  Hector knew a little about the lodge: The Lions Club focused fundraising efforts on sight-saving enterprises. The Sertomans were all over hearing-loss. The Bull Moose Lodge Brothers were ostensibly devoted to eradicating some dubious malady dubbed “restless leg syndrome.”

  A sign in front of the lodge depicted an outsized thermometer and the legend, “HOW WE DOING?” The thermometer reading stood at $6,200.

  Seemed the Moose members were trying to raise funds for some kind of clinic to treat folks with twitchy limbs.

  Hector thought, These are truly the last of days, then narrowed his eyes as Richard Paulson was hauled out of the back of the lead sedan. There was a black hood over the professor’s head, now. His hands were cuffed at his back. The men in black suits manhandled Paulson around to the back of the timber lodge house. Christ, this didn’t look at all good for the goddamn egghead.

  Hector slipped off his sports jacket and fished the back seat for his black windbreaker. He pulled that on, zipped it up and turned up the collar on his coat. He shucked his Colt from the glove compartment and shoved that down the waistband of his pants, at the back. He slid from his Chevy and followed the men behind the fraternal hall.

  ***

  Donovan Creedy stood in the main meeting hall of the Bull Moose Lodge—the place they called the Rutting Room—and felt as if he was going mad.

  The Boise chapter of the Bull Moose Lodge was peppered with ex-federal types…OSS relics and the like. The Lodge Brothers were predisposed to support the Bureau and the Agency and had agreed to rent Creedy one of their back rooms for his “debriefing” of Richard Paulson.

  But Creedy had wanted the hall to himself. He intended to put the scholar, as well as couple of other men tied to other dark enterprises, through the ringer, perhaps.

  Things might get…loud.

  That was where they had hit this snag: seemed it was “Stag Night”—a quarterly bash that drunken members of the Bull Moose Order positively lived for—a night the boys snapped their leashes and tied it on hard: crazy costumes, lavish boozing, and grainy porn loops.

  They were also entertaining a national chapter president—the so-called Magnificent Buck—and wouldn’t budge at Creedy’s insistence they move to an alternate venue.

  “This is the venue of choice and ours anyway, Agent,” Chester Coleman, president of Boise’s largest bank and currently installed Majestic Moose, said. “I’m happy to give you the room out back, but we ain’t cutting and running from our own place, buddy. Hell’s bells, I’ve flown in some special girls from Los Angeles.” (He said Los Angeles with long e’s, further setting Creedy’s teeth on edge.) “I’ve got a spread of high-end deli food that won’t keep and beer kegs that ain’t getting any colder while I stand here jawin’ with you, Agent. Now, you get to your room, or get out, but either way, you’re not fuckin’ up my party, good buddy.”

  The man showed Creedy his back then, sauntering over to give a mighty back slap to some fat son of a bitch in a fez adorned with felt moose antlers.

  Feeling vengeful, Creedy thrust a hand into the pocket of his black trench coat and fingered one of the spare vials. Okay, then.

  Smiling meanly, Creedy unscrewed the lid and spitefully emptied the LSD into the bowl of spiked punch.

  That’d keep the uncooperative bastards busy now, wouldn’t it?

  ***

  Hector crept back around to the front of the lodge. Men were filtering in now, dressed in antlered fezzes and hairy brown lodge vests. Some wore robes that smacked of Klan togs—purple sheets embroidered with gold. Others wore grotesque Mardi Gras masks. Several of the Bull Moose Brothers arrived with obvious, long-in-the-tooth hookers hanging on their arms.

  Deciding on a reckless course of action, Hector hoofed it back to his Chevy. He popped the trunk and rooted around—found a can of starter fluid.

  He sprayed some of the ether into a rag, then put the arm on one of Bulls as the man hauled himself out of his Olds. The man struggled a few seconds, but the ether quickly put him under. Hector helped himself to the man’s fez and a black domino mask. He rooted the man’s wallet for his lodge card, and then fell in behind a pack of arriving Bull Moose Brothers.

  ***

  Holy God: The party was swiftly descending into an orgy. The Brothers were already three-sheets to the wind. They were humping women in piles of twitching bodies…some were engaged in fistfights. One naked man in an antlered fez was banging his head bloody against a no-longer white wall as a stag film flickered across his bloodied body. Wincing, Hector stepped over a rutting couple and into a darkened hallway.

  He followed the sound of soft cries to a locked door. Hector tried the door of an adjacent room and found that one unlocked. There was a heating return vent between the rooms, set high up on the wall. Hector doffed his fez and mask and scooted a chair closer to the vent. Through the metal slits, he could just see Richard Paulson, tied to the chair and twisting as a man in a black suit spiked him with a hypo.

  Soon, Richard was frothing at the mouth…wild-eyed and jerking at his bonds.

  Goddamn! Well, if Hector had any lingering doubts about Creedy and Paulson’s ties to one another this certainly put those to rest. But Jesus, talk about falling-outs between conspirators; Paulson looked on the edge of some kind of seizure.

  Hector wrestled with it: Let it unfold? Rush in and try and extricate Paulson from this sorry fix, despite his disdain for the drunken egghead? Or, just sit it out and let Creedy clear the road for Hector with Hannah—let Creedy maybe widow her with this stuff he’d pumped into Dick Paulson?

  Hector leaned in harder to the grill, trying to see more between the slats. Hell, those men in there were Bureau, trained in hand-to-hand combat and firearms, and they had Hector outgunned.

  And Paulson? He was now a twitching madman—there’d be no guiding or steering the professor out of that room. Hell, in his present state Richard certainly wouldn’t make an effective an ally for Hector in a firefight. And anyway, back at the Topping House, faced with that shotgun in Hector’s hands, Paulson had proven himself a coward.

  Richard was rocking back and forth now, spraying spittle. Yeah, no percentage in trying to extricate Paulson now: He was going to require carrying out at the very least.

  Hector cursed under his breath; he was going to have to keep watching for the moment.

  This voice, Creedy’s, Hector guessed: “I appreciate the storage room key impression, Richard. I appreciate you coming back to Boise for this little talk, Richard. But I don’t believe much of what you’ve said to me, Richard. I want to know more about what was happening when you ran screaming from the Topping House. I want to know what Lassiter was doing there when Mary Hemingway confessed to killing her husband. I want to know much much more than you’ve told me so far, Richard. Because you’ve told me very little in the end. I want to know what you might have stolen from the document room you haven’t told me about and where those materials are
now. The temptation of all those Hemingway papers — I just can’t think you’d leave them untouched, Richard… You know you’ve been watched by us, don’t you?”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Creedy said, “What’s the matter with him? Why isn’t he responding?”

  Another voice: “Drunk as he was—compromised as his system is…his liver, for one thing—I don’t think he’s going to respond usefully. He’s just tripping, sir. Flying like a son of a bitch.” A strained pause, then, “I’m afraid he might have a seizure.”

  Richard muttered, “S’true: I drink all the time. S’true. Jug of sangria wine every night through the writing of that Paris book. My so-called masterpiece. Shit. Seven nights of wine a week for a year to pull that goddamn book out of myself.” Richard shook his head, giggling. His giggles turned to sobs. Then he said it: “Fuck you, Creedy!”

  Startled, Creedy leaned in: “How do you know that name?”

  Richard shrugged. “Found a paperback in the lodge lounge, Creedy—The Krushchev Kill. Opened it up and there was your picture, right there in the back. Who’d have guessed you thought you could write.” Richard sobbed again. “So much booze….”

  Creedy shook his head. “No wonder your other fucking books read like gin-soaked nonsense. They read sloppy. Read as if improvised. Too anecdotal and drifting.” Creedy got down in Richard’s face. “I write sober, Richard. I write from the head. That’s the way you write the good stuff.”

  Richard shrugged. “I read your thriller,” the professor said. He said “thriller” like it was something sticky and dirty that had been forced into his mouth. “I read your thriller,” Richard said again. “Then I found another…read it, too.”

  Creedy couldn’t help himself: “Which other novel of mine did you read?”

  “Your Spanish Civil War thriller—Every Man’s Death Diminishes Me,” Richard said. “That Hemingway character you wrote in there—what a fucking riot.”

  Creedy was delighted: “Well, he was supposed to be satirical, and—”

  Shaking his head impatiently, slurring, Richard said, “I didn’t say it was funny, asshole. Jesus, it was a piece of shit.”