DEATH IN THE FACE
A Hector Lassiter novel
Craig McDonald
First published in the English language worldwide by Betimes Books 2015
www.betimesbooks.com
Copyright © 2015, Craig McDonald
Craig McDonald has asserted his right under the Universal Copyright Convention to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, sold, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, print, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and the copyright owner.
ISBN 978-0-9934331-0-8
Death in the Face is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by JT Lindroos
ALSO BY CRAIG MCDONALD
The Hector Lassiter Series
One True Sentence
Forever’s Just Pretend
Toros & Torsos
The Great Pretender
Roll the Credits
The Running Kind
Head Games
Print the Legend
Three Chords & The Truth
Write from Wrong (The Hector Lassiter Short Stories)
Standalones
El Gavilan
The Chris Lyon Series
Parts Unknown
Carnival Noir
Cabal
Angels of Darkness
The Daughters of Others
Watch Her Disappear
Nonfiction
Art in the Blood
Rogue Males
Praise for the Hector Lassiter series
“With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance.” —Megan Abbott
“Reading a Hector Lassiter novel is like having a great uncle pull you aside, pour you a tumbler of rye, and tell you a story about how the 20th century 'really' went down.” —Duane Swierczynski
“What critics might call eclectic, and Eastern folks quirky, we Southerners call cussedness — and it's the cornerstone of the American genius. As in: "There's a right way, a wrong way, and my way." You want to see how that looks on the page, pick up any of Craig McDonald's novels. He's built him a nice little shack out there way off all the reg'lar roads, and he's brewing some fine, heady stuff. Leave your money under the rock and come back in an hour.” —James Sallis
“Craig McDonald is wily, talented and — rarest of the rare — a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either.” —Laura Lippman
“James Ellroy + Kerouac + Coen brothers + Tarantino = Craig McDonald” —Amazon.fr
This novel is for Daniel Wells
Contents
Start Reading
PROLOGUE 1967
Part 1/“Every day is a journey. . .”
1. People Dying Who Never Died Before
2. Strangers on a Plane
3. Dead on Arrival
4. Safe Haven?
5. The Man with the Golden Typewriter
6. Ghost of a Flea
7. The Last Mission?
8. No Leg to Stand On
9. Tomorrow Never Lies
10. Trust Dies. Mistrust Blossoms
11. Confessions of a Mask
12. A Hidden Claw
13. Double Agent/Double Cross?
Part 2/“. . .and the journey itself home”
1. Into Japan
2. Company Man
3. Here’s Mud in Your Eye
4. The Root of All Evil
5. Suitcases with Teeth
6. To Hell and Gone
7. Out of Japan
8. Murder on the Orient Express (1963)
9. Something Wicked This Way Comes
10. Brinke of Destruction
11. Every Man’s Death (1964)
12. Coda: Patriotism & The Spy Who Loved Me
HECTOR LASSITER WILL RETURN IN THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“You only live twice;
Once when you’re born,
And once when you look
Death in the face.”
— Ian Fleming
(after Matsuo Basho)
PROLOGUE
1967
The man sat in the packed movie theater in Las Cruces, surrounded by people, yet very much alone. A novelist and screenwriter of some note, he winced and shook his head at the mockery Roald Dahl had made of his British friend’s last, fully realized novel. It was utterly appalling, a goddamn travesty.
The screen villain, a short and portly little man with a scar down the right side of his face, somehow managed to seem fey despite his piratical wound. He was a mincing antagonist a world away from the one described in the superior James Bond novel. The little man hissed, “They told me you were assassinated in Hong Kong.”
Scottish actor Sean Connery, looking bored, even a bit pained to have to say the words, burred back, “Yes, this is my second life.”
The man who sat watching the movie with pale blue eyes had for many years been accused by critics of writing what he lived and living what he wrote.
Indeed, on this dreary October day, the novelist’s life was about to imitate his dead friend’s writings, it could be said. Just like the titular hero had at the beginning of this over-budgeted and over-blown film adaptation, the fiction writer meant to bring off his own false but quite permanent end.
As the film credits rolled, the tall man with the pale blue eyes rose and strode squinting into the New Mexico sun, lighting up a Pall Mall as he made his way toward the turquoise ’fifty-seven Bel Air.
This was the last day that he would ever spend living with his given name—his looming “death” was a long-in-coming gift to himself.
Part 1 / “Every day is a journey. . .”
NEW YORK,
IDLEWILD AIRPORT:
1962
1 / People Dying Who Never Died Before
Hector Lassiter sat in the airport lounge, nursing his second Old Fashioned, and thinking about death.
His corner of the darkened portion of Idlewild’s departure area was quieting for the night, at last settling down save for the rustle of the occasional custodial worker changing a trash bin’s liner, emptying an ashtray stand, and the burr of a vacuum cleaner pushed around here and there from distant somewhere.
He was booked on a flight to England scheduled to board in just under an hour. In his present, gloomy state of mind, fifty-nine minutes seemed near on infinity to the novelist.
Plans called for Hector to join an old friend in England. Together they would press on to Japan for a two-week, barnstorming tour of the former Axis stronghold.
The excursion was partly at his chum’s instigation. Ian Fleming—at last gaining dubious fame and significant money for his long-running James Bond thrillers—was heading east on a research trip for a projected Asian-set 007 novel.
Hector, though far longer established as a novelist and occasional screenwriter, wasn’t tagging along for background or a setting for any novel or screenplay of his own, but rather by arrangement on Ian’s part for Hector to cover the British thriller writer’s in situ research for Playboy Magazine.
The notion of writing about a fellow writer’s fact-finding trip tore at Hector, far more than he cared to admit. So he tried again to kid himself it was an endurable excuse to see Ian. It was also a secr
et favor to the author’s wife, Ann, a long-ago acquaintance of Hector’s, pre-dating his friendship with Mr. Fleming.
Ann increasingly feared for her self-destructive mate’s mounting liquor and nicotine binging, as well as an equally alarming spike in Ian’s always-present penchant for sustained melancholia.
Hector consoled himself at least this time he wasn’t going on his own nickel as he had in 1937, the last time he’d agreed to babysit a fellow author bent upon a volatile overseas sortie.
That last lamentable junket found Hector stalking Ernest Hemingway through Civil War-torn Spain. Hector was still living under the shadow of a Francisco Franco-decreed death warrant fostered by fallout from that sorry mess—a standing execution order that had-too long kept Hector from returning to one of the favored countries of his youth.
This time, things would surely turn out differently, he kidded himself.
But there was more: A fellow author memorably declared that after the age of forty, a man should only go to a new place if his freight was fully paid by another. In this instance, at least Hector’s tab was seen to by that impertinent men’s magazine with its nude centerfolds and seemingly deep pockets.
Dwelling on all that, Hector shook his head, staring into the sweet-smelling muddle of his cocktail. The fingers of his left hand drummed a paperback copy of Ian’s From Russia with Love, recently touted as one of President Kennedy’s favorite novels, an eyebrow-raising admission that instantly rocketed Ian’s books to the top of the U.S. bestseller lists.
Ian.
Melancholy.
Self-destructive despair.
A mounting preoccupation with death.
Hell, Hector brooded, still staring into his highball glass, why shouldn’t any of that be? It was getting to be that sorry time of life, after all.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was fifty-four; Hector Mason Lassiter was now sixty-two.
Although there was no denying younger Ian had contrived to put far greater mileage on his face and dealt more palpable punishment to his whippet frame than beefier Hector ever dared contemplate, the elder author felt more the goner on this storm-swept night.
Ian drank far harder and smoked infinitely more, of course. But when it came to friends—or at least contemporaries, if not outright peers—the sharpening arc of attrition was exacting the more pitiless toll from Hector of late; that was undeniable. There was simply no getting around the grim facts: Assessed with a cold eye, the older author figured that sorry mortality rate probably owed mostly to the vagaries of his undeniable, advancing age.
And, hell, it was autumn, after all. Some of the season’s inherent melancholy surely had to contribute to Hector’s present maudlin mood, or so he tried to make himself believe.
Hemingway had memorably declared fall the time of year that unfailingly put fiction writers in piercing awareness of death, the season that so feverishly “made all the scribbling boys put pen to paper like grieving, sorry sons of bitches.”
Hem: Now there was another big one who had recently gotten away, damn it. Jesus Christ, poor Ernest was more than one year dead, yet still a stubborn and profound drag on Hector’s daily morale.
William Faulkner had also died in July, Hemingway’s birth—and death—month, as it happened. Not for the first time, Hector undertook a fast and wrenching rough tally of The Lost: Herman Hesse, e.e. cummings and Karen Blixen—all gone and for keeps in this sorry year of Our Absent Lord. There would be no more words from any of them, not ever. Hell, even ditsy, imminently resistible Marilyn Monroe had passed, and, like Hem, seemingly by her own hand.
Another Hemingway line, one not original to Papa, abruptly crossed Hector’s mind: “People dying this year who’ve never died before.”
You stop that now, Hector scolded himself. You’re already flying across the ocean to babysit a dangerously maudlin writer. For Christ’s sake, don’t you go and turn into one yourself. Don’t you dare do that.
He smiled ruefully and shook his head. This trip wasn’t all about Ian and death, not really.
One of those odd coincidences that somehow contrived to stubbornly typify his picaresque life had also recently sprung itself upon Hector. That development had impelled him to fly East far more than any request from the Flemings or found money from Playboy.
About a week before Ian and Ann and Hugh Hefner came knocking, a man in Japan who ran a venerable inn phoned Hector to say a long-languishing trunk had been discovered in a forgotten corner of his Western tourist-focused hotel. That trunk—perhaps more of a footlocker, judging from the man’s description—was labeled as having been the possession of Hector’s first wife and fellow novelist, Brinke Devlin.
Before they had met in Paris in February of 1924, the slightly older Brinke had been a globe-trotting writer of a sort long-ago prefiguring Ian or any of Fleming’s lately burgeoning would-be knock-off scribes.
Throughout the early 1920s, Brinke had restlessly moved country-to-country—hell, continent-to-continent—voraciously soaking up local color and settings for her sexy, clever series of mystery novels featuring the dapper, bon vivant sleuth she’d dubbed Connor Templeton.
It was Hector’s understanding the old trunk contained some of Brinke’s clothes—Hector let himself entertain the prospect they’d still carry her musky, delicious scent—a diary and an unpublished manuscript for a Templeton novel. It seemed an absolute jackpot.
The simple prospect of fresh words recorded in Brinke’s graceful hand—fiction or nonfiction, God, that hardly mattered, not at all—was more than enough to send Hector dashing off to Japan to claim the goods.
Yes, this trip wasn’t all sloppy seconds, not fully a bitter repast of reflected glory and growing sadness.
If that Japanese inn-keeper was on the up-and-up, Hector had a real chance to hear Brinke’s voice in his head again, to savor her intimating new things to him through her precious prose. Here was a chance to have his life’s greatest love freshly restored in a real sense, talking to him and confiding insights through her writing. It was also a chance to further leverage Brinke’s literary long game by perhaps putting a new work out there in her name.
Thinking now of lusty, luscious Brinke inevitably set other notions and urges moving inside Hector, all undeniably animal.
Specifically: his lone companion in the concourse’s quiet, darkened little bar.
Lone companion?
Probably they weren’t anywhere nearly that solitary, of course. Almost always these days, there seemed to be some J. Edgar Hoover minion, furtively watching from the shadows, stalking Hector.
True, he hadn’t yet spotted any of his usual Bureau tails on this damp night, but history being the harshest of teachers, they were almost certainly lurking somewhere in Idlewild this evening, spying on him, relaying Hector’s movements to that evil little frog-faced bastard, John Edgar Hoover.
Sighing, Hector drained his highball glass and fully turned his attention to the pretty, black-haired woman sitting kitty-corner from him at the L-shaped bar. She wore a tailored charcoal suit—the matching jacket was presently off. A silky tan blouse clung to proud breasts and flattered broad, straight shoulders. She’d be tall standing, Hector guessed, probably five-ten, or maybe even an inch better than that, even without those wickedly sharp-heeled, black pumps he’d seen she sported as she first approached the bar.
The stranger’s glistening, raven hair echoed Brinke’s. So did her smoldering eyes. Maybe, Hector kidded himself, that’s a sign.
This woman looked to be perhaps thirty years old on the high-end as he assessed her in the low and undeniably flattering lounge light. Hell, she might be younger, or, maybe even a shade older, he reckoned upon closer inspection.
She was almost certainly European. He deduced that from the way she held her cigarette between thumb and forefinger, clutched at its end.
The brunette had flawless if slightly sunburned skin, not quite yet fading to a tan. Her nails were cut short and unvarnished, and her hair was brushed straight bac
k, disappearing in a heavy fall behind those prideful shoulders that begged caressing and kissing. No sign of hairspray, not given the way her fingers easily streamed through that long, dark mane while pressing open a paperback with her cigarette hand.
Hector had gotten a glance at the cover of that book a drink-and-a-half back—her own spy novel, something new by Eric Ambler. He couldn’t fault the fetching stranger her reading tastes.
At least it wasn’t Ian’s Bond, thank God—commuters now always seemed to be clutching those omnipresent Signet paperbacks just like the one Hector carried, devouring Agent 007’s wild escapades while awaiting trains, planes and buses.
Hector checked his battered old Timex: fifty minutes until boarding likely commenced. More had been started in less with an attractive woman now and again in his time; or at least that had been so when Hector was in his natural prime.
Given the emptiness of their little wing of the usually bustling New York airport bar they now had nearly same as to themselves, they almost certainly were booked on the same flight.
Perhaps if they hit if off there’d be space on the plane to permit moving around of seats. If so, possibly a lounge conversation might stretch into more on the plane, and something still more from there might ensue—during or after a potentially shared London Heathrow landing and a lingering layover.
But he was surely getting far ahead of himself indulging such lusty fantasies about all that.
And, regardless of all that may or may not lay in wait, in the end, Hector simply wasn’t up to being alone in his head anymore, not on this moody, loss-haunted night. Shirley Bassey crooning on the lounge sound system: Burn My Candle. Even the music could be worse—it might as easily have been flavor-of-the-moment Bobby Vinton or the infernally over-played Moon River.
Intent upon rolling those familiar, capricious dice, Hector caught the bartender’s attention, pointed at his glass for a refill, then nodded across the bar, indicating where he expected his fresh drink to be delivered.
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