Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  “Because your country’s government is vast and not without corruption of its own. You’re a man of good character. A man with connections and a distinguished espionage history in the OSS. I trust you can vet the recipients on your end in a manner that I, as a practical reality, cannot. You’ll see that this terrible thing passes into the safest American hands. I believe that. It’s really that simple, my friend.”

  “Where are Brinke’s writings right now,” Hector asked, trying harder to keep his tone cordial. “Where exactly is my next destination?”

  “Istanbul,” Kaneko said. “I happen to have a trusted friend who will soon be there. Another writer, as it happens. . . At least that’s so when he’s not acting. He’s been cast in the next Bond movie. I know that you were also planning to visit the filming in Turkey with Mr. Fleming. It seemed like a kind of—what is your word?” A smile as he remembered and said, “Yes, kismet. Destiny. And it was the only destination of yours in the near-term known to me, thanks to an aside by our friend Ian.”

  “But that’s months from now,” Hector said. “I’m entitled to my wife’s writings. I can hardly be expected to come all the way here only to be nearly killed several times over and told half-a-year from now I can enjoy the privilege of making this same potentially deadly trek again. And what then? What if the Russians are suddenly all over the scene, or the Chinese?”

  “I was overcome by events and by justified fear,” Kaneko said staunchly. “By the same token, I’m not a cruel man, not at all. And it strikes me you have had no concrete proof of the existence of Miss Devlin’s so-called lost writings—some of her other belongings, clothes and such, I fear, have fallen prey to moths and insects and had to be disposed of. Now only her writings survive, but for such as us, what else is there, really?”

  Reaching into his pocket, the poet said, “I retained this single article as proof of their existence and as a meaningful gesture of trust and agreement. It is also an unabashed enticement, of course. And you may also choose to regard this as an apology of sorts, if you will, for this further inconvenience and terrible, regrettable test of your patience.”

  He slid a small, black notebook across the table to Hector.

  The novelist’s heart raced: He’d seen similar books of its size and manufacture in Key West—it was a favorite notebook brand of Brinke’s. He reached across the table with a trembling hand and slid the book toward himself.

  He opened to a page and—yes, by God! It was Brinke’s handwriting—no doubt about any of that.

  Kaneko said, “Put it away, now, I beg you. Our friend is returning.”

  Hector searched Tiger’s face, and said, “Whose side exactly are you on?”

  He got a shrug in return, then Tiger said quickly, quietly, “Ian and Dikko are my friends. But Japan is my motherland, and this man is one of our finest poets and a man of great conscience and wisdom. Now, hide the journal, Lassiter.”

  Hector did that, feeling like it was the world’s largest sum of found money, and one eager to burn a hole in his pocket. He wanted nothing more than to excuse himself immediately to the restroom to begin reading the book. But he knew instinctively that once he cracked its spine, he’d simply have to read through to its end.

  Kaneko said quietly, urgently. “You will go to Istanbul then? You will meet with my friend, Mr. Shaw, who will give you the other journals, as well as the manuscript for Miss Devlin’s lost novel?”

  Hector’s blue eyes narrowed. He said simply, “Of course. What choice do I have about any of that?”

  ***

  The night dragged infuriatingly on. Ian began pressing the poet harder on the issue of the microfilm’s present whereabouts, and, for Hector’s sake, the present whereabouts of Brinke Devlins’ writings.

  The poet deflected, saying only that he’d placed his trust in a kind of cutout who would make both of these answers known to the poet in the course of time, when things had again convincingly cooled down. Kaneko would, when circumstances at last seemed right, then and only then pass along word to Ian and Hector about where the goods could be collected.

  Clearly angered, Ian turned to Hector and said, “I’m really dreadfully ashamed at how calamitously I’ve quite failed you in all of this old man. I’d trusted this brother writer to be a man of honor, however—”

  Impugning Kaneko’s honor was a bridge too far, so to speak—and a terrible breech of Japanese etiquette. In Western terms, it was roughly equivalent to grounds for a duel.

  Ian seemed to catch himself and immediately began to back-pedal. “That was off-sides,” he said quickly. “I—”

  Tiger quickly raised a hand and said, “The sake has simply drunk the man and claimed his tongue. I’m sure Mitsuharu knows that, too.”

  The poet bowed and said, “It’s late, none of us are young anymore, and so it’s time we took our parting before true offense might be given or taken.”

  ***

  Alone in a cab together, a clearly exhausted Ian said thickly, “I’m so sorry this blew to pieces, Hector. I’m terribly sorry none of this panned out. Part of me thinks we should follow Mitshharu home and use more vigorous means to impel him to cooperation. If you want to do that, it’s the least I can do in penitence. I’m game, dear fellow.”

  Hector restlessly rubbed a thumb over the journal in his pocket.

  He said softly, “I don’t think that poet is any more effectively in control of matters than we’ve ever been, buddy. You had a phrase in Casino Royale I’ve always been taken with—something about being ‘carried away by the gale of the world.’ We shrug and soldier on.”

  “This was a terrible bust,” Ian said bitterly. “Ashes on all fronts.”

  Not from where Hector stood. He was burning to say his goodnight to Ian in the hotel lobby and then spend the night between the covers, so to speak, with Brinke’s writings—whatever their subject.

  ***

  An hour later, after a quick, hot shower and a call downstairs for a bottle of red wine, Hector at last settled down in bed with Brinke’s journal.

  He took a deep, calming breath and then turned the first page.

  It was dated February, 1924. It appeared to be Brinke’s in situ journal of their love affair’s early-going arc. Its first page had been recorded the morning after the night Hector and Brinke met and promptly became lovers.

  It flowed forward from there, ending with her eventual passage into Japan to reunite with her old “friend and kind of spiritual mentor” Kaneko.

  It wasn’t fiction, by any stretch, of course. It was nothing that would ever be publishable in that sense, although it would represent a kind of gold mine if Brinke ever found a worthy biographer.

  For Hector, it was an intimate, wrenching insight into his life love’s view not just of the world, but of Hector Lassiter, the man and emerging novelist—long before the two became twisted up into the same strange thing in the eyes of the reading public.

  For this one slim volume of Brinke Devlin prose, Hector was a most singular audience.

  Throughout the book were studded first impressions of Hector in various settings—social, vengeful. . .passionate. These were the insights Brinke was having into Hector’s character in the heady rush of their budding love affair. She had scribbled down countless bits of phrases of his, myriad casual but pungent asides. . . “Hectorisms” she called them.

  She spent pages recording her impressions, sensations and memories of their early lovemaking. Her words brought Paris and their snowy, sleety first nights together with a terrible vividness that left him shaking.

  The dreams he had that night about Brinke after closing the covers on the thin journal nearly swamped Hector.

  He awakened at four in the morning, panting for breath and bathed in sweat. To put it in Ian Fleming terms, Hector was utterly shaken and stirred.

  He ordered up some more black coffee and tried to write himself out of the inchoately panicked state in which he’d awakened.

  Brinke’s new words seemed to
have returned her to him in a kind of half-life that deeply unsettled her widowed husband.

  He vowed to find some pep pills to keep himself awake on the plane back to the States.

  It would be unseemly waking up screaming on the flight after another too-vivid dream of Brinke.

  Brinke’s journal was constantly in his hand or his coat pocket. He could almost swear that it radiated a pulsing heat against his twitching thigh.

  Goddamn Istanbul now seemed same as a lifetime away to Hector.

  8 / Murder on the Orient Express (1963)

  In the Wasteland, Ezra Pound’s stiff-ass Brit acolyte T.S. Eliot asserted April to be the cruelest of the months.

  It was the very month the James Bond production crew had picked to begin the filming in Istanbul of the second of the 007 films, From Russia with Love.

  Between crowds of gawkers, incompetent local crews and a dying principal supporting actor, Eliot’s April estimations seemed apt enough.

  Things weren’t going much better by the time authors Ian Fleming and Hector Lassiter arrived at the troubled film’s set in June.

  ***

  As he packed, Hector decided he should probably go armed from the get-go this time.

  He’d managed to hold onto to his nifty, deadly Rolex and crazy flamethrower lighter, so those went into his much-traveled leather suitcase.

  The CIA gun he’d managed to retain—something he could afford to lose—he hid away in a box of his own books that he shipped on to his intended hotel in Istanbul. The books were gifts to some of the filmmakers and actors with whom Hector was already acquainted.

  Rather than travel directly to Turkey with Ian, Hector instead decided to treat himself to a kind of nostalgic idyll on his way to the Bond film set.

  Ever since her journal fell into his hands, Hector had continued to be a haunted man.

  Brinke was a nearly constant, palpable presence, still costing him sleep and sufficient appetite to result in the need for new notch holes in his belt. The thought of the impact that several more volumes of new Brinke Devlin writing might have upon him left Hector with a deep sense of foreboding. Indeed, a couple of times, he nearly begged off the trip to retrieve the goods, fearing their probable toll on his health and sanity.

  Yet, he couldn’t do that—couldn’t simply leave Brinke’s lost prose dangling in the wind and to be lost when the venerable Japanese poet at last went to his reward.

  So Hector flew first to Paris and spent a week there walking the city, visiting surviving haunts and hanging about spectral landmarks that probably held little or no meaning for anyone on earth now save Hector Lassiter.

  Other, better known cultural and historical sites hadn’t fared so very well, either.

  Hector stood outside the former site of his favorite Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., and nearly wept.

  His dear Sylvia Beach, librarian, bookseller, publisher, postmistress and boyhood crush, had passed in October at seventy-five.

  Oh, Alice B. Toklas was still around at least, but Hector wasn’t remotely prepared to open that uneasy door.

  As he thought more about it, Hector realized hardly anyone from that time other than a certain too-wise Paris detective still stalked the earth. On his last night in Paris, still chasing ghosts and shared memories, Hector rang up Aristide Simon.

  The two met for a pleasant dinner at a newish, smart place called Le Relais de Venise. They reminisced over fine red wine about Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and all the good old, long-gone days and the grand crimes the Frenchman had cracked since he and Hector last significantly crossed paths in the early 1930s.

  Aristide was now frail and hunched and bald. He required the support of Hector’s arm in addition to his cane in order to navigate the rain-slick streets of Paris after dinner.

  As they were returning to the retired inspector’s home, Aristide suddenly paused and gripped Hector’s arm tighter.

  The ancient detective said, “One thing that has haunted me to this day. Maybe you will do me the favor of at last shedding some telling light on this mystery. You insisted to me long ago that your friend—your lover—the Devlin woman, did not die in the Seine as I insisted that she certainly had. I scoffed then, much to my ensuing shame. I’ve long ago come around to your way of thinking about all of that. Please tell me this, Hector—did that woman in fact endure beyond February 1924? I’ll confide that I hope so. She was remarkable, in her way.”

  Hector smiled and nodded. “She did survive. And she was also quite innocent of all you suspected her of having done. We met up again in February 1925 in south Florida.” His smile then dimmed. “Sadly, she didn’t live to see October 1925. She was killed by another. It happened in Cuba. Pardon my French, but fucking life imitated art.”

  A shaking veined hand was pressed to Hector’s heart. Aristide patted Hector’s breast and said, “And that is a terrible something you certainly know much about, this sometimes bloody intersection of life and the imagination.”

  Hector shrugged and said, “Anyway, nobody’s ever really dead so long as we remember them. Isn’t that how we comfort ourselves?”

  Aristide just smiled thinly and shook his head. “Come, come, Hector—you truly ask that of a fellow cynic? Neither of us is that romantically deluded.”

  ***

  The grand old Orient Express—the actual train everyone thought about when confronted with that exotic, storied name—had shut down in 1962.

  Now there was a train under the approximate brand name that made a twice-weekly run from Paris to Istanbul—the so-called “Direct Orient Express.”

  Hector sat in the dining car of that somewhat more humble train, quite alone and nursing a rum St. James, mostly for more stubborn, sentimental reasons.

  He tapped the ash from his cigarette and drummed fingers on his just completed proof copy of Ian’s You Only Live Twice. The novel’s ending—and a certain contrived obituary for Ian’s long-suffering hero—tantalized Hector.

  Staring at his own ghostly reflection imposed over the darkening passing countryside, Hector braced himself for another nightly visitation by Brinke.

  He thought about how things could flip on a dime. He marveled once again at the fact that where he’d once delighted in the renewed acquaintance, as he drew closer to this rendezvous with more of her writings, he had a mounting sense of dread—also one of profound exhaustion regarding Brinke Devlin.

  He awakened each morning after his sleep-starved nights spent with dream Brinke feeling more depleted than he’d been when he’d crawled between the sheets.

  He was continuing to lose weight and also the concentration critical to his writing because of sleep deprivation. The latter alarmed him the most, of course.

  In a very real sense, this nocturnal Brinke with whom he verbally jousted, flirted with and, inevitably, loved, had become a kind of all-too-literal succubus—an honest to God life-force stealer.

  Yet, it was his beloved Brinke, and so. . .?

  Hector saw his dim and ghostly reflection in the glass reflexively shrug.

  The dining car was nearly empty—just Hector, a couple of solitary drab gray men who looked like business travelers. . .there was a pregnant woman whose red hair spilled from under a rather unremarkable scarf as she sat facing away from Hector. When he looked up again, he saw someone had joined the mother-to-be—presumably her child, as Hector could only see the very top of the head of the little person at her side.

  Yes, just these random, nondescript fellow passengers and a rather boisterous family of Turks who were settling up, and—a blessed turn—at last preparing to leave the dining car-lounge.

  Once the rowdy family was gone, Hector figured on permitting himself a single glass of good red wine and breaking out his notebook to continue work on what he was increasingly coming to view as his last novel to appear under the Hector Lassiter byline—a big book he was toying with calling Toros & Torsos.

  On this first night of his multi-night train journey, Hector calculat
ed a solid two-thousand miles or thereabouts to get that book under something like control.

  And, anyway, given his dread of sleep, he might as well spend that time here as in his private sleeper. Yes, that was the plan now that he thought more on it. He would just sit and watch the scenery roll by, all the while scribbling away and guzzling strong black coffee to stoke the creative fires until the sun came up.

  A shapely shadow fell across his notebook. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. How many times had he lived this same scene? How many times had it ended darkly, tinged with eroticism and death?

  His mind already went in that direction because of the decidedly hourglass proportions of the shadow passing over him.

  Hector closed his just-opened notebook and slid his fountain pen back into his sports coat pocket.

  The woman was tall and wickedly curvy—dark brown hair, dark brown eyes and a full, sensuous mouth. Her cheekbones were high and defined, and the faintest Cupid’s bow up-tilt at the edges of her quite enticing upper lip lent her mouth the appearance a sort of perpetual sexy yet mocking half-smile.

  At first glance, Hector put her age somewhere between forty and forty-five. Thinking of Haven Branch and some others since, doing the math, Hector calculated he was at least a solid five years past being picked up in bars by women who didn’t have some ulterior and inevitably dark motive.

  On the other hand, that daunting notion of time spent alone in a sleeper berth with succubus Brinke left him feeling desolate and, yes, even reckless.

  Yes, if this woman was indeed going to come on to him, it surely was some kind of put-up job, he told himself. But even if that was so, this evening’s edition of reckless and slightly drunk Hector decided he was very much open to that gambit as the rails sang softly under them.

  Game as he was for the game, Hector wasn’t interested or patient enough to engage in the usual, too familiar dance and repartee, not for this trip to the well. This one time, he embraced the old filmmakers’ axiom: “Get in late and get out early.” No exposition, in other words; no dawdling.