The Great Pretender: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Hector found himself focusing on her dimples as Cassie smiled sadly at him. “You’re grasping for a polite way to say no, aren’t you?” She looked away, looked to Billie. “It’s okay. Really it is, darling. I told you before, you have everything to lose, Hector. I know that, I’ve made that clear before.”

  Almost as if it was planned, even on God’s cruel cue maybe, a flashbulb exploded, setting both to blinking. Yet reflexes rose to the occasion: even as the little man with a camera began to dash away, Hector’s hand lashed out and caught coattails.

  Jerking the journalist and his camera back in his direction, Hector growled, “Okay, ace, which part of you should I break this time?”

  The man’s bandaged nose made Hector smile, meanly. The ambushing shutterbug was the same reporter Hector had assaulted at the CBS building the night before.

  “Screw you,” the reporter said. “This is my right. I know who you really are! A noted man like you crossing the color line with this dinge whore? That’s same as cash in the bank for me.”

  Hector still had the man’s coattails gathered in his left hand. The music stopped; other diners were watching. Billie glared. Hector was aware now that Cassie had a napkin gripped in one white-knuckled hand. She was shielding her eyes with her other hand, the one that should reveal her own future. Her cheeks were flushed. “Just let him go,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Aware it had also become a kind of performance now, even a position statement, Hector said to the reporter, said it for the room, “God help you if my being with this woman really constitutes news to anyone. And I’d argue I’m well within my rights to protect my privacy from parasites like you. I’m within my rights to do whatever it takes.”

  The novelist took another look around the room, then Hector tore the camera from the reporter’s hands and smashed it several times against the table until it lay in pieces. That prompted a standing ovation.

  But Hector realized Cassie was trying even harder to hide her face.

  The reporter took a swing at Hector. The author caught the journalist’s much smaller fist in his left hand and squeezed. Knuckles cracked and popped. The little man whimpered, then begged for mercy. Hector said, “You’re getting off light, you rotten bastard. Before I make your smile or your tiny hands match that busted-up nose, you best vamoose.”

  The little man ran backward at first, tripping twice. He scrambled up the stairs to laughter and catcalls.

  More diners applauded. Cassie looked more miserable than she had before. She rose and said, “I’m mortified, as I surely hope you can tell. Please take me away from here. Please do that now.”

  “We’ll find another place,” Hector said thickly. “A better place. I swear.”

  “I guess that would have to be Harlem at this point,” she said bitterly.

  ***

  They indeed ended up back in Harlem, to Hector’s chagrin, at the Cotton Club.

  Some want-to-be Ethel Waters belted out a mediocre take on “Stormy Weather.”

  Kneading her fingers and ignoring her drink, Cassie said, “I may want family, you know, maybe soon. I may want a lot of children. I’m pretty sure that I do. I can’t tell how deep your intentions toward me run. If we go forward from tonight, will you react every time we’re confronted like you did tonight, because you know it will happen, over and over.”

  She didn’t even give him time to respond. Cassie plucked her napkin from her lap and slung it across her still-empty plate.

  She looked him in the eye, and said, “Knowing you such a short time, I already love you, Hector. I truly do. But even those feelings aren’t nearly enough to overcome what I know the world demands of the likes of us.” A sad smile. “Sorry, darling, but there’s simply not enough love in this world to make us work.”

  She showed him her back. Hector watched Cassie go—he watched other men watch her go.

  A few seconds later, Hector realized the torch singer was pointedly singing her song to him. That made him squirm.

  Feeling low, feeling angry, Hector drained his drink, settled his check, then wandered out into a hard cold rain.

  He tapped a window with his knuckles and awakened a sleeping cab driver.

  ***

  Sitting in the back seat of the cab, listening to the slap of the windshield wipers and some radio show festooned with longhairs attempting to analyze the deeper meanings of Orson’s so-called “panic broadcast,” Hector settled on a mean and carnal course to assuage his anger at the world and his bitter, immediate sense of loss.

  He simply didn’t trust himself alone tonight, so he asked his driver take him to the Stork Club.

  Once there, Hector fished his coat pocket and found the very Aryan Amanda Noble’s home phone number.

  The blond, bespectacled siren answered on the third ring. Clearly he wakened her from sleep, but Amanda was quick enough to gather herself.

  Hector said, “Is there any possibility, any at all, that you’re free tonight, angel eyes? I mean, rather, free this morning? I mean right now.” Hector knew he sounded desperate, but so what?

  Amanda hesitated, then said, “I am free, though it’s probably pretty bad strategy to admit that to a man like you. But facts are facts, right? And, anyway, it’s only just Tuesday. Who has dates on Tuesdays at this hour? Good news is, the studio is still kind of closed down after all the mess from Mr. Welles’ crazy Martian broadcast. So I don’t have to go back in until Thursday. That’s a lot of time for… distraction.” A pause, then, “But honey, you frankly sound like twelve-kinds of hell. Maybe we’d both regret getting together just now.”

  “It’s not been my best night,” Hector admitted. “All tricks and no treats. So I’m indulging myself at the Stork. You up to helping me do that, darlin’? Still a few hours until last call.”

  A long pause, then saucy innuendo in her retort. “Day’s still relatively young,” she said. “Maybe it still could be your best night, Mr. Lassiter.”

  That was unlikely, but rotten as he was feeling, Hector wasn’t above indulging that illusion with this pretty blonde. Certainly, he would try very hard to make her think it was wonderful. He said, “Maybe more than maybe.”

  “Don’t be a cynic,” she said. “I’m very much an optimist. We’ll try to make that quality rub off.”

  Right there, Hector committed himself to the notion of burying memory with this lusty, pale-skinned blonde in whose arms and tangle of long and eager legs he proposed to erase thoughts of Cassandra.

  To his shame, and only at their end, had Hector remembered the classical allusion embodied in Cassie’s first name—the beautiful, truly gifted seer cursed by Apollo so that her prophecies would never, ever be believed.

  BOOK TWO

  BLACK MAGIC

  January 1948

  “Robert Houdin was the greatest

  magician who ever lived.

  And do you know what he said?

  ‘A magician, he said, is just an actor,

  just an actor playing the part

  of a magician.’”

  —Orson Welles

  CHAPTER 24

  THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN

  A dreary opening to a new year, another birthday just days behind him.

  Hector had come in with the New Year in 1900; now his own half-century mark loomed closer; it left him feeling… gloomy.

  As this fresh and unpromising year unfolded, Hector found himself wandering the streets of Rome in a chilly rain, chasing a kind of ghost.

  Gusts of wind jerked at his umbrella and bent back his hat’s brim, making it feel far colder than the fifty-six degrees the morning newspaper had predicted.

  From back home came reports of a devastating blizzard that had swept across the northeast. In Manhattan snow drifts were said to be exceed twelve feet. Desperate to dispose of all the white stuff, it was being dumped by the truck-full into always-warm sewers and already swollen rivers.

  A part of Hector still wished he were back there, struggling against the elem
ents with his countrymen in a clean and simple battle for survival instead of stalking his cold trail here, in pursuit of—how to put it?—well, yes, in pursuit of himself.

  Hector was giving chase to some mysterious doppelganger or imposter who had been moving across Europe, seducing men and women, leaving behind staggering bar and hotel tabs and generally threatening Hector’s own standing and reputation in Europe by posing as a financially and sexually profligate—and presumably polysexual—Hector Lassiter.

  This bogus Hector Lassiter had led the real Hector on a far-from-merry chase across Europe for several weeks, his randy trail at last seeming to go cold in every sense in Italy.

  Two days ago, frustrated by his dead-end search, Hector had been contemplating his return to the States when he saw a news item reporting his career-troubled younger friend, Orson Welles, was actually currently living in Rome, starring in some dodgy-sounding project about the black magician Alessandro Cagliostro, some film adaptation of a story or book on the man penned by Dumas, one of Welles’ literary darlings.

  Dumas and Welles were the only names associated with the film that resonated for Hector. The rest of the cast and crew were a mystery to him, and the director—a man named Gregory Ratoff—equally evoked no flicker of recognition from the Hollywood screen scribe.

  It sounded like straight-up money work for the now thirty-something Welles, who was still struggling to get his life and career on track after the spiral that had begun in the wake of Citizen Kane, Orson’s one great and fully-realized film as a director to date.

  Orson was purportedly acting in this film about the black magician while somehow also editing his own film adaptation of Macbeth in Europe for looming release back in the States.

  His perceived decision to abandon America and therefore greatly complicate completion of the Shakespeare film was doing nothing to repair Orson’s pervasive image as undependable player in American film studio circles, both as actor and director.

  Indeed, somewhere else, someone who was not Orson was still struggling to put the finishing touches on yet another incomplete Welles film project, The Lady From Shanghai, a film noir whose troubled production Hector had become unexpectedly entangled in earlier in the previous year.

  Yes, looking back, 1947 hadn’t been a banner year for either Hector or Welles.

  After all, the year had begun for the two in exceptionally bloody fashion, with the still unsolved and nightmarish murder of Elizabeth Short, the so-called “Black Dahlia.”

  Beth Short’s savage torture and mutilation murder had changed both men’s lives and sent Welles, still a quiet suspect in her killing, fleeing from the States inches and hours ahead of a flurry of subpoenas, warrants and mounting interest on the part of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI.

  Welles was also running from massive debts and another divorce, too—the final settling of his troubled marriage to ginger-haired Mexican bombshell Rita Hayworth.

  And now, Italy too, was seemingly turning on Orson after an all-too-brief honeymoon with the Italian press after his arrival in Rome.

  Several months into working and living in the city—after being spotted looking heavier in the jowls and disheveled in posh places like Grotte del Piccione, or swilling veritable casks of chilled vino in Tor Fiorenza with a succession of buxom young Italian pretties—Orson was increasingly painted as the quintessential, vulgar “Ugly American” by the post-war Italian press corps.

  Hector reckoned some of that was complicated or even driven by the fact the Italy was still justifiably struggling to overcome its guilt and distress in the rise and fall of Mussolini and its military forces’ pasting at the hands of the Allies.

  Orson’s larger-than-life American persona was just going down too hard and too thick with contemporary Italians still mired in wartime recovery.

  Once again, or so it seemed to Hector, Orson’s timing, formerly seeming to be so effortlessly lucky in his crazy youth, was still badly off, just as it had been since circa 1947. Orson Welles seemed again to be, in Hector’s estimation, in the wrong place at the very worst of times.

  Hell, by way of most-recent proof, at least one Italian journalist had declared Welles in a paper printed the same morning to be no less than “the devil incarnate.”

  Angling his umbrella against the shifting wind and rain, Hector pushed his scarf up a bit higher under his chin—he had the stirrings of a sore throat, of merely a cold, he hoped—and picked up the pace a bit.

  Everyone seemed to put a little hustle in their step as the weather worsened. Cursing, an older, stooped man was racing to collect an array of shoes he’d spread out under a canopy from the rain, but now his footwear was being dampened by the shifting winds.

  So many shoes to collect in this soggy gale—a hot commodity on the black market in a Europe still struggling to find its own footing, so to speak, under the would-be largesse of the Marshall Plan.

  Hector had seen it everywhere on this enforced tour of Italy.

  Between searches for “himself,” Hector had managed to take in a few sights of the country he’d not seen since the Great War and his long-ago stint driving ambulances for the Red Cross after a war injury effectively forced Hector from the field as a reluctant armed combatant. Chasing Pancho Villa in Mexico months before, Hector had already lost his taste for military service.

  As a civilian this time in Rome, he’d already wandered along the Via Sacra, staring up again at the Arch of Titus and at the Colosseum. He’d wandered further on the Sacred Road through the crumbling remains of the Forum, looking about as he remembered them from his youth.

  But in a larger sense, to Hector’s mind, Rome was now a troubling mix of scrambling peddlers, black marketeers, hurt feelings and all that beautiful, crumbling history that predated the equally present war-damage wreaked to its much younger structures.

  Closing and then shaking out his umbrella, Hector ducked from the glistening Via Vittorio Veneto into the Doney Gran Caffé.

  Hector handed his damp coat, hat and umbrella over to a striking hat checker who reminded him more than a little of a younger, bustier Marina Berti, only this pretty thing had a more American nose.

  Hector looked around, taking in the warmth and grandeur of the place, hoping his elusive double hadn’t burned him here, too. It would be consistent with his current flavor of luck if the mysterious bastard had done that very thing.

  Orson was sitting at a corner table near the back. He held up a hand, and gestured with a fat cigar. He hollered across the room, “There he is! Do come sit down and dry off, old man!” Other diners frowned and scowled at Orson’s disruptive, too loud greeting. Hector held up a quieting hand and moved the actor’s way.

  As the press indicated, Orson had put on a few more pounds, but he was hardly what Hector would describe as fat, or, to use the Italian wags’ word for it, “corpulent.”

  Orson had a fresh bottle of pre-war Barolo and a wine glass waiting for Hector. They embraced and Orson said, “Do sit down, my dearest friend. Us crossing paths here and now, why that’s the best kind of luck. Maybe the first good luck in a long time. At least it is for me.”

  Hector sat, poured himself some wine and they tapped glasses. Orson said, “You know a little Italian from the Great War, yes? So you handle the toast.”

  “Per cent’anni,” Hector said. “That means one hundred years of luck to you.”

  “And to you, too,” Orson said, sipping. “You look quite well, old man, despite the horrors of this year.”

  “You look pretty solid yourself,” Hector said.

  Orson nodded and shrugged. “I don’t feel that way. Still the dreaded insomnia. I hardly ever sleep. Every night is a nuit blanche. Don’t think I’ve really slept since 1946. Still the conflicting obligations and horrors of domestic life tearing at me. I’m cutting Macbeth here, and it’s a terror all its own—I confide that only to you. The studio is assuming I’ll once again fail them, leave them with an unfinished work, but they’re wrong. T
he problem is the film isn’t maybe that good, and I say that as its creator. We must never delude ourselves from the fact that our shit is shit, yes, Hector? Some of this film is the best I’ve ever done, but as I cut it together, it just doesn’t cohere. On whole, I fear I’ve missed the mark. Infuriating. Terribly demoralizing.”

  That was chilling news.

  From what Hector had heard from sources back home, the Harry Cohen-guided cut of Welles’ unfinished Lady From Shanghai was looking to be equally uneven. There seemed to be nothing in the immediate cards dealt by fate to change Orson’s flagging fortunes. Unless this Ratoff piece was somehow a sleeper, things looked grim for Orson.

  Sipping his wine, looking over the rim of his goblet, Hector said, “And this movie you’re acting in here, this thing about the black magician. How does it go?”

  “It doesn’t go,” Orson said dully. “It’s a train wreck all its own, but one I’m savoring in a strange way because it isn’t one of my own making for once.” He looked around and dropped his voice a bit. “Not to say I haven’t done a little spot directing on this one, just to improve the thing a bit where I can without bruising egos—I’ve done that as I’ve been asked—but the real director is a disaster and he’s on the edge of nervous collapse, also something that resonates with me, but it’s fascinating to coldly observe it from the outside. The production keeps shutting down for days at a time so he can collect himself, the poor wreck of a man.”

  Hector raised his eyebrows. “You’re talking about this Ratoff character? And, by the by, what an unfortunate surname.”

  “For an unfortunate, if oft-times charming man,” Orson said, smiling. “Born in Russia, so he has many of the same defects of character resulting from such unhappy accidents as wretched Houseman had. Difference is, Houseman has that dreadful but mostly understandable ersatz British accent. Ratoff? Much of what he says is a bewilderment to me. And his directing—that’s truly mystifying. Still, his checks cash, and living here is rather fine, at least in terms of food, wine and the riper pleasures of the flesh. You should stay on a while with me, old man. I know I intend to, despite the brutality of the press here. After all, I can hardly return home yet, can I?”