Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  Herczog shrugged. “You’re wasting time. Don’t make me shoot this actor and cost your producer friends money having to re-film all his scenes.”

  Bob arched an eyebrow at Hector and dared to pour himself some more raki. He did that with a very steady hand. He downed it and said, “Seems my fate is in your hands, Hec.”

  Hector smiled encouragingly and said, “Haven, you should know this man you’ve thrown in with isn’t after this weapon on behalf of Japan. His stand-in whom I indeed killed made it quite clear to me this son of a bitch means to sell the plans for the bombs to any and all who can meet his asking price. He’s no idealist. He’s a terrorist and an opportunist. That’s all. The Black Dragons are essentially a real life version of Ian’s SPECTRE—an outfit dedicated to lining its own pockets at any cost. I believe you’re an idealist, darlin’, But this man is very much the opposite. I’m speaking truth to you, Haven.”

  But to what end are you doing that, Hector asked himself. It was surely the very question now passing through Fleming and Shaw’s minds.

  Even if Haven accepted Hector’s assertion, she was every bit as outnumbered and outgunned as Hector and company.

  Béla Herczog waved a hand dismissively and said. “Well, it looks like Mr. Broccoli will be needing a new villain.” He shifted his aim to Robert Shaw’s head.

  Hector held up both hands, his cigarette dangling from between his lips.

  He’d decided on a course of action. It was unthinkable, yet some selfish small part of Hector’s being—the terrible survivor in him—actually welcomed the outcome he was striving for now.

  Hector slowly reached under the table and picked up the attaché case with his left hand. He pushed aside his glass and plate to make room on the table, then sat the case down flat on the tabletop and, not waiting for approval or permission, deftly opened its clasps.

  As he did that, lifting the lid, he said, “I should at least glimpse my wife’s writings you may or may not deign to send back to me eventually.”

  Herczog said, “So help me, I’ll kill all three of you if you don’t give me that briefcase right now!” He began to move closer to the table, reaching out.

  Hector opened his left hand, took aim, and depressed the actuator on the cigarette lighter given him by the British intelligence quartermaster so many months before.

  He flinched as the long flash of flame burst from the end of the lighter with a terrible hiss, licking the precious papers in the suitcase and setting them ablaze.

  Screaming, Herczog tried to slam shut the lid and extinguish the flames.

  Haven shot the man in the side of the head—a spray of red and a flurry of exploding black wool.

  The contents of the attaché case were fully ablaze.

  Hector didn’t dwell on that—hell, he actually felt some relief for the papers’ destruction.

  Perhaps, he thought in the moment, Brinke’s specter would loosen its suffocating grip on his imagination at last.

  Even as he thought all this, Hector drew his gun from under his sport coat and took aim at one of the two masked, armed men who’d remained behind with their boss. Haven downed one; Hector the other.

  Ian scooped up Bela Herczog’s discarded gun and turned in his chair, shooting the first of the armed men to enter from the back room.

  That left two who escaped through a back door.

  The writers looked around at the shambles and bloodstained mess of the dining room. The scorched attaché case’s contents were now black, curling ash—nothing to be salvaged. . .not a scrap.

  Haven gave Hector a desolate look, then, shaking her head and keeping aim at his right eye, she backed out the front door and quickly lost herself in the crowd.

  Ian looked from the charred contents of the briefcase to Hector. His eyes said it all: Ashes, dear boy. Ashes.

  Bob said, “Gents, I really think it’s best we leave here before those folks in back find their backbones and get a better look at us.”

  Sound logic.

  The trio hurried from the bloody ruins of the restaurant to also lose themselves in the crowd gathering out front, some of those cupping hands to glass to better glimpse the carnage inside.

  ***

  Circumstances required that the actors share a dinner with the crew that night.

  Ian was scheduled to fly out the next day. Hector was planning to stay on another day or two, but he was already rethinking that strategy.

  The night proved to be a bit of a hash. Producer Cubby Broccoli put the arm on Hector at the bar. He said the next Bond film was already in the pipeline and would be Goldfinger. He was thinking seriously about offering the role of the titular villain to Orson Welles.

  “You know Orson, right? Could you approach him for me, Hec?” Cubby wrapped an arm around Hector’s broad shoulders. “You know—prime the pump, so to speak?”

  Hector nodded, looking dubious. “I’m not sure Orson and I are talking this year.”

  Disappointed, Cubby said he understood and then made it clear to the bartender all of Hector’s drinks were on the film production’s tab.

  Hector stood at the bar with a vodka martini garnished with three plump, skewered olives, watching Ian. The English author looked bone-weary. Emptied out. He’d tried to beg off dinner in favor of a meal at his hotel.

  When the producers insisted he instead come out for the more formal affair, Ian expressed his sincere hope for a quiet place. Instead, it was all bands and belly dancers this raucous night.

  Co-producer Harry Saltzman ordered food for everyone—some spicy and heart-burn threatening native fare.

  Ian held his head and whispered to Cubby and the lovely Dana Broccoli, “I don’t want any of this food. It’s noisy. I want a Spanish omelet.”

  As Hector watched, worrying after Ian, Cubby Broccoli spent what seemed like a half-an-hour trying to describe a Spanish omelet to their uncomprehending waiter. Cursing softly, Cubby rose and went to make the dish himself. Hector loved the man for that in the bittersweet moment.

  ***

  Hours later, at last back at the Istanbul Hilton, Hector made the decision to leave on the Orient Express back to Paris the next morning. (Ian was flying back to England; the mess and mayhem of this bit of tourism had drained him quite utterly, he said.)

  The film crew still had several weeks to go in Istanbul.

  The authors sat in the hotel lounge—blessedly quiet—and talked about next projects. Ian was tentatively planning a new Bond he intended to call The Man with the Golden Gun. “One way or another, this one,” he said firmly, if a bit direly, “will certainly be the last of them.”

  The British novelist then added, “I still feel quite cross toward you, Hector. Some of what Haven said about Britain is hard to deny just now, but nevertheless. . . .”

  Hector held up a big hand. “Wherever you ultimately land in regards to your feelings about me, buddy, please know this much is gospel: I was never going to give that microfilm to anybody, Ian. I’d decided sometime ago that if I managed to walk out the door with the case intact, I’d come straight back here and up to my room. I’d find that damn film, then I’d have used Hem’s gift lighter to torch that wicked bitch to hell and gone. That was my plan. Nobody should have the goddamn thing. Isn’t that the very definition of détente?”

  “Just so,” Ian said at last. “And I believe that is exactly what you intended. It’s what happened more or less, after all. Though I’m so sorry for you having to have to destroy Brinke’s posthuma. That’s a tragedy.”

  Ian reached over and closed a cold, trembling hand over Hector’s. “But all is now forgiven. Think you might get to England later this year? Or, better, maybe come to Goldeneye when I’m next there? I know Noel would love to see you again.”

  “My best to Mr. Coward,” Hector said. “I don’t know, Ian. Let’s see how the world turns.”

  They tapped glasses and Hector said, “Farewell to old war business, yes?”

  “Last goodbyes, yes, indeed,” Ian said
. “Of course, there’s rarely ever any good about goodbyes.”

  He gave Hector a solemn look. “I know it’s bad for my heart, but we both know I can’t endure a half-life and I’m very much on borrowed time, now. If I listen hard, I hear the Iron Crab’s claws clacking.”

  Ian managed a smile that almost caught the incandescence of younger Ian’s grins of yore. He said, “Please, do get at least a little tight with me tonight, Hec? Won’t you do that?”

  Hector weighed that prospect and all its risks. He said from the heart, “I’d like nothing better, Ian.”

  ***

  Several hours later, his windows thrown open to let in the scent and chill of the Istanbul night, for the first time in many months, Hector dozed and had no dreams of Brinke.

  He awakened for the first time feeling rested and whole. . .if just a slight bit saddled with a faint but nagging sense of guilt for his good night’s sleep and peace, and the implication of their cause.

  And, of course, he had more than a bit of a hangover, too.

  11 / Every Man’s Death (1964)

  On Wednesday, August 12, Hector was in New York City, putting on his game face to endure an afternoon with some hot-shot kid editor who was trying to mess with Hector’s new novel. The kid editor had crazy ideas; personal political notions he wanted to have find form in Hector’s book.

  The wunderkind hoped that perhaps he and the “venerable pulp scribe”—those were the kid’s actual words, ill-advisedly delivered baldly to Hector’s face—could bond and talk through his fresh vision for Hector’s novel at Yankee Stadium as his favorite team hosted the White Sox.

  Somehow, the kid had gotten this wildly mistaken notion Hector gave a damn about baseball, or hell, about any sport.

  Never a happy spectator, Hector liked to think of himself steadily writing and creating while sports fans gawked and fattened their asses as they squandered the precious days of their finite time on earth playing gnoshing voyeurs. Hector had too much work to do, too many books he meant to leave as his legacy and evidence of a life if not well then at least fully lived.

  Apart from his utter disinterest in the so-called “national sport,” Hector’s heart wasn’t in the prospect of the sure-to-be-disastrous rendezvous for all kinds of other reasons.

  The whole damned world seemed to be going through another of its spastic upheavals and, therefore, who of any real value or worth to the sorry world had the time or attention to squander caring about goddamn baseball?

  Hell, even now, there was a race riot unfolding in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

  South Africa had just gotten the boot from the Olympic Games for its racial policies.

  In England, Charlie Wilson—infamous for his role in the so-called “Great Train Robbery”—had somehow escaped from prison in Birmingham, causing a terrific ruckus in the British press.

  Then that other sorriest of the sorry news found Hector. It did that all the way from England—this last, and worst bit of breaking news; an announcement to bury any and all worries about Charlie goddamn Wilson.

  It was, admittedly, hardly unexpected news: Hector had bracing for it for many months, hell, maybe for a couple of years.

  The first published report that reached Hector was datelined from Canterbury.

  It seemed that following a too rich meal and a tragically taxing day at some golf club, Ian Fleming had suffered another heart attack.

  This was the one that at last saw the Iron Crab firmly grab hold of Ian’s diseased heart and give its terrible, final squeeze.

  Ian somehow “lingered overnight” before “succumbing” the following day.

  The last recorded words of James Bond’s creator were piercingly prosaic—allegedly some uttered comfort for his caregivers. Dying Ian was said to have affably apologized to his ambulance drivers, “I am sorry to trouble you, chaps. I don’t know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the road these days.”

  James Bond’s creator was no more.

  In a last, bitter twist of fate, Ian Lancaster Fleming died on his young son’s birthday.

  ***

  Hector sat mourning in an Irish bar just off Times Square, swamped by drunken post-game ruckus and the afterglow of a profanity-laced kiss-off of his would-be kid editor.

  Despite the crowd, Hector was still terribly alone in his head—a near constant reality for any writer when he really stopped to think about it.

  He then remembered a quote from the ill-received Bond novel published the year that Ian and Hector went to Japan. Ian’s rare, female narrator confided, “Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.”

  Only a professional writer could have composed those lines.

  Hector sat with a thrice-read New York Times report of Ian’s death and thought, People dying who had never died before, damn it all to hell.

  Hector settled his tab, binned the newspaper, then went off to find another bar.

  The next one would hopefully be frequented by attractive, available women in whose company one could perhaps forget other things for a time.

  ***

  Months passed; more dubious decisions and a mounting number of career setbacks.

  In autumn 1967, after many years of intensely flirting with the notion, Hector Mason Lassiter at last set out to “kill” himself.

  Oh, he’d played with the idea many times and at many stages of his life since the age of forty, or so.

  In 1958, Hector had actually briefly assumed another man’s identity, trying the concept out—a dry-run that tellingly didn’t kill Hector’s obsession with an eventual radical reinvention of self.

  But it had seemed too soon, then.

  Hector thought that he still had some important books to publish under his own real name—novels to secure Hector Lassiter’s literary long game.

  So he stalled. . .kept his head down and wrote about that other Hector.

  Of course Brinke’s 1924 staged self-murder loomed somewhere in the back of his mind every time Hector entertained undertaking what amounted to his faked murder-suicide.

  Feeling she’d all but played out her string as the mystery writer Connor Templeton—and faced with unwarranted but mounting French police interest—Brinke had impulsively, yet effectively faked her death in Paris.

  A few months later, she’d settled in Key West with Hector. On Bone Key, over the astonishing period of just a very few months, Brinke composed three very different sorts of novels under a different name, essentially enjoying a second life as a writer.

  Hector came to see Brinke had been an instinctive survivor—a model for artistic and actual self-preservation until capricious fate ended the lucky streak she was enjoying through the fall of 1925.

  Hector wanted to think he could be the same—a survivor and a noted male author but one who would not stagger down quite the same destructive path that had swallowed up Hem and Ian.

  Mired in a well-intentioned but foundering marriage to a pretty young Scottish widow for whom he too belatedly saw he was completely unsuited, Hector began to lay the groundwork for his own death and resurrection with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Hannah’s actual cooperation.

  He called in favors from local New Mexico cops, coroners and drinking buddy reporters.

  Hector devised for himself a La Frontera-style staged murder-suicide and a concomitant and very quiet Tijuana divorce.

  This last came with heavily buttressed but cheerfully offered alimony settlement thrown in.

  Palms were greased and last favors called in.

  The stage was set and the trigger at last was pulled on a venerable old Peacemaker.

  October 1967:

  Thurgood Marshall was sworn-in as the first black Supreme Court Justice.

  A Disney cartoon of a Kipling work was released.

  Three Apollo astronauts were killed in a launch pad test gone terribly awry.

  Elvis got himself married, and the film adaptation of You Only Live Twice—a mess of a movie bearing no resemblance to Ian Fleming’s tort
ured, haunted novel—was still burning up the box office.

  Its star, Sean Connery, declared the movie to be his last Bond.

  In October of that same wicked year, Che Guevera died before a firing squad—rumor had it Hector Lassiter’s old German nemesis, Klaus Barbie, might have played a role in Che’s capture and extinction.

  As for Hector Lassiter himself, the novelist was declared dead to the world in late October, the victim of an apparent death-bed interview gone horribly crossways for interviewer and interviewee.

  Obituaries were written; vexing opinions on the Lassiter career were proffered.

  All of the author’s known works were briefly, gloriously brought back into print in snappy, uniform editions.

  Then, just a few short months after, a new and enigmatic—an even reclusive author, some would say—made his acclaimed debut.

  Novelist Beau Devlin and his striking, much younger Latina wife, Alicia, took the money from his first novel’s sale—as well as its attendant lucrative film right’s option—and purchased a pretty house set high above a cliff side on Hawaii’s largest island.

  For a fleeting time, it seemed that life for Hector had renewed itself.

  With nearly all of his best friends dead and his thinly fictionalized world passing into history, there seemed a chance for a true, new beginning for the author and the man, a world full of possibility, and, God willing, one devoid of shadow.

  For three years, more or less, that all proved to be true enough.

  12 / Coda: Patriotism & The Spy Who Loved Me

  In November 1970, three years and a few days into his new, sweet life, the seventy-year-old novelist “Beau Devlin” suffered a short, sharp flurry of rabbit punches.