The Great Pretender: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “This is not a good idea,” Cassie said. “Not smart at all.”

  Hector shrugged it off. “Well, I’m a staunch non-believer, as you well know.” He held up a hand even as he reached for a refill of his champagne with the other. “I appreciate your effort to ward me, I do. But you were right about me all those years ago. I’m afraid that now I’m even more the cynic and hardheaded maverick than I was back when. Just my nature you might say—a point of view I suspect Orson would support. If I was to let in any doubt about my doubt, if I was to begin to believe as you two do, it would surely damage me, down deep.”

  Cassie was visibly given pause by that admission. He was, after all, essentially throwing her own words and observations about all that right back at her.

  “I remember telling you that,” she said. “But I was maybe wrong. Almost certainly I was in error. When you have a voodoo master coming at you like the one you might be facing—like your friend is certainly up against—then you don’t have the luxury of not believing anymore. I simply can’t indulge your narrow-mindedness this time.”

  Jesus. That set Hector’s teeth on edge. “I don’t accept that,” he said. “And you’re being hurtful, painting me as some naïf.”

  “It’s my life’s work you dismiss, Hector,” she said. “It’s my faith you’re spitting on, that you’re waving away at like it’s just some pesky gnat or the like. Believe me, I wish it was different for your sake, but there’s something terrible coming and you must prepare. You must take precautions.”

  Orson muttered, unable to stop himself, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”

  Welles threw the second bag back to Cassie. She held it out to Hector by its string. “This little nothing in your eyes can protect you. Just maybe. I have powers, but the kind of warlock who did this, I don’t know if I can stand against his kind of power, not for long.” She frowned and placed the back of her hand to Hector’s damp forehead.

  Orson raised his glass. “Believe her, old man. Or don’t believe while still acting like you do. I can give you lessons there: I feign conviction every sorry day. What harm can come from complying with this lady’s wishes? Do it in that context.”

  “Do it because I love you and because you still care for me at least some little bit,” Cassie implored. She took her hand away from his forehead and said, “You’re burning up.”

  Hector took the bag again. If he wore it, it would only be a matter of believing it to be a sham.

  Conceit?

  Arrogance?

  Close-mindedness?

  Maybe it was so from Cassie’s perspective, but Hector didn’t accept any of those possibilities. He was steadfast in his belief that all this supernatural business was so much bullshit.

  He looked to Cassie a last time. A sad smile. “You didn’t actually kill something in order to make these did you?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t killing anything.”

  Hair-splitting and dime-store semantics, the author thought.

  Cassie said, “You should lay down a while. You look terrible.”

  ***

  Director Ratoff seemed to have recovered his stomach for work after lunch. In his thicket of an accent, Gregory made clear, more or less, his intent to push his cast ahead into the small hours of the next morning in order to regain lost ground.

  That enraged Orson. “You’re changing the rules!” Tearing at his makeup, ripping off his false nose, he said in full Shakespearean bellow, “Tickle us, do we not laugh? Prick us, do we not bleed? Wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

  Under his breath, Orson spat out, “You goddamn hack!”

  A long pause, then, he called out in his loudest voice, “Hell is empty and all the devils are already here!”

  Hector endured an hour more of watching the filming, waiting for a chance to put his arm on the film’s regretful lead.

  At last afforded a moment’s aside with Orson between lighting changes, Hector said, “Two alternatives. You give us the medallion and let us push forward a bit while the FBI is apparently still at bay, or you catch up with Cassie and I later in some bar or restaurant along the way. I’m not sitting through a minute more of this wreck. You’re right, Orson. This movie is Grade Z, even now, and maybe headed down from there on the ladder of low art if such a thing is possible.”

  “Tell me.” A hesitant smile, then Orson said, “And, I must be with you for the last of the search, for all kinds of reasons. When I’m done here, regardless of the hour, I’ll find you two and then we’ll get underway starting our search.”

  “I’m not that flavor of night owl,” Hector said, struggling against some sense of vertigo that threatened to drive him to his knees. “Got a few years on you, kid, and tonight, I’m feeling every one of them, somehow. I also like a hearty breakfast. So don’t call before eleven a.m. We’ll resume the search at the fountain. Having said that, you do have the medallion some place safe? In case more FBI or some diehard Thule or Vril come looking right here on set?”

  Orson looked horrified at that prospect. “You do know how to cast a pall, how to damage man’s calm.”

  “You’re probably safe enough in a big crowd like this,” Hector said. “But I would take some extra precaution getting back to the hotel.”

  Orson chewed his lip. He checked to see if Cassie was looking, then he hugged Hector.

  The writer felt something slipped into his coat.

  The actor said, “I have been reckless carrying it, curse me for a fool. And I’m trusting you not to do something crazy with that medallion in my absence. Go as far as the next-to-last stop, if you can, I beg you. But save that last step, please, old friend. I want to be there when we get to that big X that marks this particular spot.”

  “I promise. And trust me to handle it all with appropriate caution.”

  Arm-in-arm with Cassie, the medallion secretly in his pocket, Hector escorted her from the ballroom.

  Hector steered his sultry seer from the impromptu movie set straight into the path of a walking corpse.

  CHAPTER 30

  MURDER BY THE DEAD

  Waiting for a lift, Cassie buttoned her coat and said, “You did get to talk to Orson about taking more precautions, about protecting the disc?”

  “I did and I did,” Hector said as they made their way from the ballroom-cum-film set.

  Hector coughed, rubbed his throat and swallowed a few times. He just needed hot tea and some honey, he told himself. That and some solid sleep.

  He said in final answer to her question, “He is and he is.”

  “That’s at least a little relief,” she said. “I know you think me the perfect fool—think it more every minute for all of this—but while you two talked, I consulted the cards. It’s bad, honey. Such threat and terror as I’ve never seen in a reading. This city’s going to become a place of dread and fear before it’s all over, It’s going to happen and soon if we don’t change courses.”

  The elevator door opened and Hector wrapped an arm around Cassie’s shoulders, escorting her into the cage.

  The old elevator operator smiled and said something in Italian. Hector was too many years away from the language to be much good just now, even in a situation as simple as this one. He also felt freshly dizzy, so he just shrugged and pointed down at the old man.

  The elevator operator nodded and smiled and fiddled with his finicky lift and got it going with a shudder that might have terrified Hector if only he were sharper.

  Hector said dully to Cassie, “It doesn’t matter what I think about how you arrive at these premonitions. If you have fears, a sense of something bad to come, I know I best take precautions. You’re at very least attuned to signals and the world in ways most aren’t. Please keep sharing your reservations.”

  “It’s not just observation and deduction,” she said sharply. “I’m not just a kind of Sherlock Holmes or something. It’s also not something as ethereal and insulting as so-called women’s intuition, if
that’s what you were implying.”

  The elevator jerked to a final stop at the ground floor and the door opened before the cage had even settled.

  Three men stood awaiting the cage. One was quite tiny, perhaps a midget or dwarf. His black hair was slicked back from a widow’s peak. The little man was dressed all in black but for a gold chain with a medallion—a lightning bolt imposed over a swastika. He said, “Ah, Lassiter! Just the man I need to talk with… and robustly. How lucky I am, eh?”

  The second man was thin and about six-feet tall. He was brown-eyed and had thick brown hair.

  The third man was the one who most got Hector’s attention. He was a too-familiar, imposingly tall blonde with now opaque eyes—formerly blue eyes but now hidden behind what almost could be taken for a dense layer of cataracts.

  It was the spitting image of the giant Thule, Rune Fuchs, whom Hector had shot between those cloudy eyes a decade before, the author figured, trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out how the man could be standing before him now after that surely lethal headshot.

  To that end, there was no wound to be seen on the giant’s forehead; no scar from that impossible to survive shot.

  But there was something else that was off about the man. And then there was this smell… No, Hector thought, not just a smell, a stench.

  Cassie gasped, rooting her pocket for the gun Hector had given to her.

  The brown-haired stranger was clearly reaching for a gun of his own.

  The elevator’s accordion cage door was still closed and latched from the inside. Hector accepted the gun Cassie handed him. Raising it, he snarled at the old operator, “Close that damned door! Do it now and get this thing going back up!”

  Hector’s tone of voice seemed to overcome any language barrier. The brown-haired man was taking quickest aim from the other side of the cage door. Hector fired first and the stranger’s face caved in. Blood-sprayed the faces of the little man and the big blond man.

  The tiny man screamed and bolted.

  Expressionless, the blond man jammed an arm through the mesh of the cage, fouling Hector’s aim at the retreating little man.

  With his other hand, the giant Thule grasped at and tore open the old elevator operator’s throat. The old man crumpled to the cage floor, blood gushing from his ruined neck.

  Cursing, Hector put two shots into the giant’s chest. The big man staggered back a step or two, but didn’t fall. He reached for Hector’s throat next.

  “What the hell,” Hector muttered. “What’s it gonna take to put this sucker down?” He was taking fresh aim at the giant’s forehead this time.

  Cassie got the door closed and threw the elevator into upward motion. One of the giant’s fingers was sheared off before he could pull his arm back out of the rising cage; the digit fell to the floor and lay there. There was no blood coming from the severed finger, Hector noticed.

  “Think your bullets might have to be silver to stop that thing,” she said. “Which floor?” Cassie didn’t say it like it was a joke.

  “Any floor,” Hector said, leaning back against the cage wall and staring at his gun, trying to figure out how the giant blond Nazi could have sustained two shots to the chest, let alone that long-ago shot to the face.

  But then, like the severed finger, there’d been no blood from his most recent chest wounds, either. “Go higher, all the way to the top,” Hector said.

  “What, you mean we’re heading to the roof from up there?”

  “Yes, exactly that,” Hector said. “We can get up there much faster than those bastards can climb all those stairs.”

  He jammed a fresh clip into his automatic with a trembling hand. “I swear I killed that man ten years ago,” Hector said. “And his eyes? They looked very strange to me. Still, his surviving those shots to the chest just now? He must be wearing a vest of some kind. You know, bullet-proof. Surely it was like that.”

  Cassie wasn’t having it. “After all the wars, all the combat zones and all the hospitals, after your recovery efforts in the Great Keys hurricane, you’re telling me you really don’t recognize the tell-tale smell coming off that man?”

  Hector took over operation of the elevator. He indeed meant to go all the way to the top. From there they’d make their way to the roof of the old hotel, he’d decided. They’d move across adjacent rooftops Hector figured, finally descending street level from some other building several-doors-down from the hotel. “Smell,” Hector said, resisting the memory of that odor coming off the blond giant. “What are you saying?”

  “He is dead already,” Cassie said. “I’ve heard of this, but never seen it in person until now. Might not have believed it possible myself if I hadn’t just stood witness. That little man, the midget, he’s a Houdon—the operator or string-puller of the z—”

  “Christ, don’t say it,” Hector said.

  “Of the giant Thule’s zombie,” Cassie insisted. “You still don’t believe, not even after what we just escaped?”

  “Less than ever,” Hector said. He bit his lip. “Still, the bastard is below us, and Orson’s here, too. We need to drag Orson away from this set for his safety. We need to finish this search for the spear. We need to do that tonight. This was looking like a heady lark, but now people are dying again.” Hector stopped several floors below the top in order to fetch Orson.

  ***

  Soaked through from traveling over rooftops and climbing down staggered walls in the driving rain, Hector, Orson and Cassie shivered in an upstairs hallway of a wholly different hotel, awaiting another elevator. Orson’s dripping black greatcoat obscured the costume of the black magician that he still wore underneath.

  To Hector’s mind, Orson had too readily and too quickly accepted Cassie’s assertion they were running from a supernaturally animated cadaver.

  “Bullshit,” Hector said finally, not caring what Cassie thought about his crude refusal to back down from his skepticism. “Just bullet proof vests and bad hygiene, that’s all it is.”

  “And that bullet you put in his head years ago,” Orson said. “Explain that away.”

  “That’s tougher, but trust me I’ll be working on it. Hell, you’re a magician, you tell me how the trick is done.”

  “I’m not sure I’m wrong about silver bullets,” Cassie said. “Need to get back to my room, I have some books there on warding against these kinds of creatures and—”

  “Later,” Hector said. “I’m serious that tonight we take this hunk of metal and we follow it to journey’s end. You two can have the damned lance as far as I’m concerned, as I’ve always said. I’m not laying a glove on it. But seeing the deranged types that are still scrambling to lay hands on the Lance, I’ve decided they simply can’t do that. We find it first, then my plan is to push on from this place come morning. Resume the hunt for myself—my double I mean—or cut my losses and head home. I’ve got some deadlines looming, other commitments. And frankly, I feel like hell.”

  “We’re all going to catch pneumonia,” Orson said, patting his sodden coat.

  “Hell, I think I’m already halfway there,” Hector said.

  It was true that he felt even more feverish. His throat was far rawer than before. God, like he needed a cold, or worse, the flu. Having lived through the flu epidemic of 1918, Hector, like most of his generation, still lived in abject terror of the latter.

  God, how he was shaking with the wet and cold. He decided it was best they indeed go back to the hotel. Orson and he were close enough in build the actor could probably make do with some extra suit of Hector’s.

  ***

  Rather than rely on any more cabs, Hector secured a rented, tan Maserati. As Hector drove to their next stop, Cassie read by the light of a flashlight from a book on African Voodou. “Forget what I said about silver bullets,” she said. “We’re going to need salt. It’s like being in purgatory, only here with someone else pulling your puppet strings.”

  Orson seemed to be hanging on her words. Hector just grou
nd his teeth and drove on through the rain.

  ***

  From the fountain, the map led them to the Pyramid of Cestius and on to the foot of the Spanish Steps. From there they were directed to the Trevi Fountain. With her flashlight, Cassie again checked the notched edge of the medallion and said, “Looks like we’re nearing the end. From there, we’ll be counting footsteps again, I think.”

  ***

  The last major location proved to be the Catacombs of San Callisto—home to something like a purported half-a-million corpses.

  Confident they were without tails—alive or “zombified,” and thinking of the latter, Hector couldn’t resist a little dig. He said, “Better hope nobody said any witchy words over all the dead in this joint. Don’t think there’d be enough salt in all the mines of northern Ireland to put all these stiffs back down.”

  Cassie shot him a look. Orson just said, “Let’s this finish this. Clearly we can’t wait to go in with the tourists, so—”

  “So we have to break in,” Hector finished for him. “Holy Christ, breaking into a burial site that holds dead popes? Talk about risking bad luck.”

  False starts; strange sounds. The scuttle of rats and the cloying silence of all those rotting dead around them.

  In 1924, Hector had ventured into the catacombs of Paris, though not by choice. It was where he’d acquired all the whip scars on his back that so appalled Cassie, just as they did all the women before her. He found himself shaking again as they entered the dank cold of the tombs. This time, Hector thought his shivering had nothing to do with the illness he felt insinuating itself in his lungs and bones.

  The medallion map at last led to the room housing a statue of the “incorrupt” and prone body of Ste. Cecilia. Below her right index finger, almost as though her statue were pointing there, they pried at a lose paver and found a void. Unable to stop himself, Orson reached into the shallow hole. As he did so, he said, “There’s no way to hide a spear or anything of length in here.” His famous bass voice echoed eerily off the walls, evoking memories of his early career interval as the mysterious voice of The Shadow, the invisible avenger frighteningly attuned to the evil that lurks in the hearts of men, and presumably of women, too.