In every human throat, there is a precious, precarious bone called the hyoid. The little man’s throat was positioned just so as the luggage lid’s edge found the emerging little man’s throat.
Hector lay still atop the case and listened to the dying little person inside—he dearly hoped it wouldn’t prove to be a child, some other innocent like Vannina lured into bloody intrigue.
Sweating, Hector held his breath, awaiting the telltale death rattle of whoever or whatever had hidden inside the big trunk.
When the last rattle came and then quickly went, Hector rose. Vannina sighed and stirred again as the train left the tunnel and the moonlight again lightly illuminated the compartment. Hector fleetingly took a perverse pride in having knocked her out sufficiently to sleep through their tiny intruder’s rough dispatching.
Then he remembered the little corpse still in her suitcase and the smiled died on his lips.
Hector opened the luggage and indeed found a very tiny, very dead little man inside. The tiny corpse looked very much like a discarded ventriloquist’s dummy but it had a five o-clock shadow; at least, he consoled himself, he hadn’t killed a child.
Patting down the little man’s pockets, Hector found a wallet. At first glance, there was nothing terribly useful inside other than a fat roll of currency. Found money.
The train briefly entered another tunnel, then shot out the other side and the dim light again returned. Hector looked the little man over again—he wore a child’s-size black suit and patent leather shoes, but his gun was a man’s-size forty-five. Hector recovered three spare clips from the little man’s left-hand pocket. At least now he would be adequately armed heading into Istanbul, he assured himself.
If the little man had friends on the train—and he surely must—Hector’s advantage against them had just sharply improved.
In another pocket he found several small listening devices that had peel-away adhesive tape strips on their backs.
This, Hector decided, had been the little man’s real aim: to get inside Hector’s compartment, then festoon the cabin and Hector’s belongings—the things he’d be most apt to carry around on his person—with myriad bugs.
The little man’s dead glassy eyes accused Hector. The moonlight through scudding clouds almost gave them a kind of malignant, flickering life of their own.
Disgusted, the author looked around and then tried the window. It wouldn’t open far enough to accommodate the disposal of an adult body, but he decided their would-be assassin would just slide through the gap.
Hefting the little dead man, Hector slid the little spy through the window’s crack, then gave him a hard shove out into the cold night.
Hector made a sour face and tried to keep his imagination in check—trying very hard not to visualize what the little man would probably look like after going under the wheels.
The cold air whipping through the window at last awakened Vannina. Pulling the sheets over her bare chest, she said, “Is something wrong, darling?”
“Just letting in a little fresh air. Feeling like a late night drink. You’ll come?”
***
After a shared bottle of wine, they at last returned to his compartment.
Along the way to the dining car and back, Hector had attached the half-dozen or so little bugs to corridor walls and the underside of a serving cart being pushed along the aisle by a blue-suited attendant. He’d adhered them to the coats of passing fellow riders and, after briefly excusing himself, even to the base of a common-access commode.
***
Just before she once more fell asleep in the bunk under him, a very sleepy Vannina asked huskily, “Do you really think you can find me some work on the new Bond picture, Hector?”
“Back home I can find you work, and for certain,” he said. “As to the new 007 film? Suppose we’ll have to see what pull Ian or I might have with Mr. Broccoli and Mr. Saltzman. You’re beautiful. Bond is about beautiful women. This seems very much within reach to me.”
As Hector was about to drowse off himself, he heard urgent, frantic voices outside the door.
Someone—a train official of some kind, he figured—said urgently, “How could we possibly have lost a passenger in motion? I don’t care how small he is, he’s not a child and so this isn’t some silly game of hide-and-seek. Find him, damn it!”
Hector fell asleep with a wry smile on his face.
For once, blessedly, he didn’t have a single dream of Brinke.
9 / Something Wicked This Way Comes
Sean Connery, dressed in his immaculate gray Anthony Sinclair-tailored James Bond suit with pale blue shirt and black knit tie, nodded for another bira—a beer—and said to Hector in his juicy, Glaswegian Scots accent, “I’ve read your stuff, Mr. Lassiter. Much of what I’ve read I’ve quite loved. Let’s say I can pry a little money out of these fat producers’ pockets. If so, would you maybe option something to me? I have a novel or two of yours in mind. God knows I don’t want to end up type-cast as this silly character for life. Your characters are much closer to the ground than Mr. Fleming’s.”
Hector tapped bottles of Bomonti with the cinematic version of Ian’s James Bond and said, “By all means. Whenever and whatever you want, Sean. You should know up front, I have a ruthless maxim regarding any and all film options: my book, your movie. If your option money spends, I smile, shake hands, and get the hell out of your way. If the damned thing somehow miraculously comes out okay in the end, I’ll deliriously say so to the press and raise a glass in tribute. If it’s a dog, I maintain a respectful silence.”
Sean smiled and said, “Very good! I do so appreciate a fellow professional. We’re a dying breed.”
Hector had been a week in Istanbul—this now shabby, threadbare ghost of Constantinople, as he thought of it.
It seemed all dust, blast furnace winds, hucksters and dodgy religion to Hector.
He’d hobnobbed with the Bond film producers, done a little uncompensated and un-credited script doctoring just for the hell of it and for free drinks.
He’d also nearly lost Vannina Bello in the very early going after a man with a knife came at them as they were exiting a seafood place along the Bosporus during a sight-seeing blitz.
It hadn’t seemed at the time like anything remarkable—nothing tied to old unfinished business of one sort or another, nor to old enemies.
The attack hadn’t even struck Hector as being credibly tied to the Flea Bomb in any way.
No, it had been—or so Hector had decided in the moment—a simple case of random street crime. It was just dumb bad luck that it was they who had nearly become victims. Happenstance, Hector told himself, that was all.
But Vannina’s candid words in the wake of that attack cut close to bone: “I see now the journalists are maybe right about you and the collision between your life and the page, so to speak,” she said bitterly, her chin trembling in fear. “If this is how things always are for you, then I can see now why you’re still a bachelor. . .and a widower. This was all terrifying, yet you seem to take it almost in stride, even now. That leads me to believe it’s not an uncommon thing for you. Now I fear that maybe you even savor this sort of thing.”
It was an entirely sensible point of view, he had to confess that was so.
But, in the end, he soothed her into staying on with him, sharing his room and bed while waiting for an opportune moment to effect an introduction between Vannina and the Bond producers. He needed to do that much for her in recompense, he told himself.
But if things were somewhat rocky for Hector, they were far more tumultuous for the cast and crew of From Russia with Love.
The beloved Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz—a man who once portrayed Pancho Villa—had been cast as James Bond’s charismatic ally Kerim Bey, a large-living man who expected to “die from living too much.”
He’d been chosen for the Bond film by director Terence Young at the passionate urging of the legendary American film director John Ford. It developed in ti
me that Ford well-knew that Pedro was afflicted with cancer; Ford didn’t know just how ill and he didn’t share that tidbit with Young while angling to get his ailing friend a well-paying job to help see to medical bills.
The fact Pedro was terminally ill emerged only after the crew was deep into filming. The filmmakers rushed to complete the dying actor’s scenes—actually propping Pedro up at later points—so he could finish the film and his family would be left precious money. For some wide shots or those involving walking, others stood in for the actor as a terrible, painful limp became more pronounced.
Doctors on the scene offered their grim opinion the actor had only days—maybe only hours left. It was a grim race against the clock to complete Pedro’s character’s doomed journey. At various points, even the director actually began to fill in for the dying Mexican actor.
Ian, who had arrived in Istanbul ahead of Hector, had purportedly bonded with Pedro, pretty much from the gates.
According to Connery—he confided it to Hector over some imported single malt one night shortly after the author reached Istanbul—Ian and the Latino actor had spent a long time talking candidly about Hemingway and the merits of his recent suicide. Their overheard talk deeply rattled those who’d witnessed the nakedly fatalistic exchange.
Armendáriz was quite approving of Papa’s actions. Sean, somewhat frustratingly from Hector’s perspective, couldn’t account for Ian’s take about any of that.
Shortly before Hector’s arrival, Pedro had completed all the filming he could handle, then flew to Los Angeles where he was booked into the UCLA Medical Center for treatment of a rapacious cancer localized somewhere in the region of his hips.
On June 18, Armendáriz fatally shot himself in the chest with a gun he’d somehow smuggled into the hospital.
Upon learning the bitter news, Ian said, “Bravo.”
For his part, hearing of Pedro’s suicide by gunshot, Hector of course thought again of Ernest Hemingway. One way or another, all of Hector’s roads seemed somehow always to lead back to Hem.
And on that grim note, there was also and quite depressingly the matter of Ian. He was dressed more casually this trip, favoring flannel or corduroy slacks and sweaters, but still smoking too much for a man with his damaged, dying heart. He still drank far too much, as well.
Ian looked so much worse to Hector’s eyes than he had in Japan.
Hector kept hearing Dikko’s voice drunkenly slurring the phrase “Death in the face, old boy. You see it, too, don’t you? Don’t you dare lie and say you don’t, you bastard!”
Faced with so much morbidity—and finding Istanbul not so much to his liking—Hector instead focused like a laser on the actor and recently awarded novelist Robert Shaw. The English born but Celt-raised Shaw struck Hector as a kind of dissolute kindred.
It was clear to Hector writing was Shaw’s great love. Acting was a kind of uneasy and perhaps even lamented means-to-an-end for the stocky thespian. The very embarrassment of acting—the need to strip oneself of every scrap of inhibition in order to achieve anything approaching an honest and therefore worthy performance—gave cover for Shaw’s favored excuse to justify his undeniable and profligate alcohol abuse, Hector early decided.
Hector suspected it was also a bit of some tragic genetic predisposition to alcoholism plaguing Shaw. He thought that based on certain things the actor-novelist had confided about his alcoholic father’s death.
Either way, Hector had made a point to ferret out and read Shaw’s first two novels, particularly the recently award-winning The Sun Doctor after the Japanese poet Kaneko had confided that Shaw would be Hector’s next link to Brinke’s lost writings. As a result of that reading of the actor-novelist’s work, Hector found himself—along with a few worthy critics—regarding Shaw as quite a serious fiction writer.
Since their first meeting, Hector had been toeing up to confronting Shaw directly about Brinke’s writings.
But he’d had to wait to do that at a time when he was safely away from Ian.
So far, Hector was still weighing whether to betray his government’s wishes and share the Flea Bomb spoils with Ian—which was, of course, essentially the same as sharing the thing with the British government.
Tonight, the actor and Hector were at last dining alone.
Not for the first time, Hector noted how Bob Shaw tended to draw looks from their fellow diners. Bob had been cast as the evil assassin and moon-driven killer Donovan “Red” Grant.
The producers had made the dark haired actor bleach his hair a ghostly blond-white—probably figuring the better to contrast with dark-haired (and toupeed) Sean.
In opposition to his role as a taciturn stone-cold killer, the real Bob Shaw struck Hector as a warm, smart and genial guy—at least that was so with the proviso that Bob didn’t dive too deeply into his cups. Properly lubricated, Shaw could sometimes border on being an unpleasant companion.
Given Shaw’s skills as a writer, Hector eventually pressed him for an explanation for his more noted acting career.
Bob, good-looking and very present in a brutish way, just smiled and said, “Let’s face it, old man, there are hardly more than a hundred published novelists in England who can get up the price for a decent meal,” he said. “Tell me that’s not so. I’m sure you could say pretty much the same for American authors. You’re in the lucky two percent, I’d wager—you know, the rare ones who can actually live on their writing.”
Hector shrugged and said, “Hell, I can’t deny it. Few enough manage to make a real go of it. So, I guess, I’ll wish you to break a leg on this film.”
Bob laughed and raised his glass for a tap against Hector’s. He said, “This place is rather not to my tastes—Istanbul, I mean. Too busy. Too crowded. I’d prefer to be wandering the Highlands. Touring Ireland on a bike or something.”
“I tend to agree,” Hector said. He looked around and said softly, “When can we talk about Brinke’s writings? When can we make that exchange?” Hector again despised the desperate edge he detected in his own voice.
Bob Shaw studied him with pale, steady blue eyes. He said after a time, “We’ll do that when I know I can safely hand it off to you. I know enough to grasp what I’m entrusted with, old man. I will not have this thing on my conscience. I also know a good bit about all the terrible things that happened to you in Japan. I can’t risk any repeat of that kind of thing and the loss of the goods. You follow?”
“I follow,” Hector said quietly. “When you’re good and ready, of course.”
What else could he say?
Given Ian’s determination to have the damned recipe for animal and plant death placed into British possession, Hector felt it best to test those very waters with the man currently holding the goods. After all, Fleming and Shaw were countrymen.
Hector said, “Have you been tempted to make a copy, or, rather, just to hand the thing over, straight away as the saying goes, to your own government?”
Bob gave him a hard look. Hector couldn’t figure out what was going on behind the man’s eyes. Eventually the actor said, sounding truly perplexed, “My government? Hell, I don’t trust the English as far as I could throw the bastards. But let’s give it a few days and make sure there are no unfriendlies around, okay?”
“Okay,” Hector said. “Makes perfect sense.” Hell, he’d waited this long.
The two men shared some local food and one too many drinks. Nearing the end of their meal, Hector asked, “How’d you come to know the Japanese poet, by the way?”
“Mutual writer friends,” Bob said. “I’m a writer first, really, at least to my own mind if you haven’t already gathered that. The acting, if anything, feels like a somewhat embarrassing way to make a living. It doesn’t come easily or naturally to me, most times. I was talking about this very thing to Sean—he’s a pretty bookish guy, by the way, but more of an autodidact. Sean and I come at it very differently.” A frown. “I mean acting, you know.” Hector knew.
After more talk of wri
ting and acting, they set off back to the Hilton Hotel Istanbul—this modernist, grid-like high-rise hotel that seemed jarringly out of synch with the surrounding old city.
Hector towered over towheaded Bob, and it gave him certain advantages in spotting potential tails—but Hector saw no sign of anything like that as they made their way back to the Bond film company’s present base of operations.
***
The following afternoon, over lunch, Hector at last effected an introduction between Vannina and Cubby Broccoli. Husky and ebullient Cubby promised to see that he would make something happen for the aspiring starlet. “After all,” he said, smiling broadly, “it’s a Bond film, and it’s Bond’s world we’re just lucky enough to live in for a while. Pretty girls only need apply. And, anyway, you’re a fellow paisano.”
Later still, Hector and a now-giddy Vannina decided to walk off their lunch in the only slightly quietening Grand Bazaar, gaining access through the Nuruosmaniye entrance to the enclosed network of shops.
Vannina almost resisted making the trip with him, remembering their near street robbery of a couple days before, but eventually gave in. She was grateful to Hector for what she already regarded “my big break.” Vannina pulled him close and said, “Thank you so much for this, Hector. Meeting Mr. Broccoli was more than a thrill. Perhaps even a life-changer.”
“Window-shopping” as they wandered the Bazaar, they were besieged with myriad offers by peddlers willing to deal. One particularly insistent little man in one of the more luxurious quarters of the place made heroic efforts to interest him in one of his lavish oriental rugs.
It was full-court press on the part of the vendor, and Vannina didn’t help matters by too nakedly fawning over the man’s exotic wares.
Death in the Face Page 21
