“Rather than doing that, you should really spend some time with Molly tomorrow. Might be time better spent, Hector.”
“Maybe. I’ll try to chisel out some time for her. But first, I want to go to the source…attack the problem at its base. That means confronting Victor Leek.”
“On face, very practical,” Brinke said. “Very logical.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but.’”
Brinke arched a dark eyebrow. “But Leek might be a symptom. The roots of her real problems may reside in Molly herself. Perhaps partly in her feelings for you.”
“Can we not talk about this tonight?”
“Sure, Hector. But I don’t have much more to say on this subject, other than, my jokes and little games with Germaine aside, I’m really not a woman who does well with one man. Never have been.”
“So this may be something new for you. For me, too. What’s your point?”
“What I’m saying now is, I don’t need, and perhaps don’t even want, an exclusive on you.”
“An assertion like that would probably endear you to a lot of men, Brinke. But where are you going with this?”
“I’m just saying, if you think an affair with Molly might pull her out of this, that a few nights in bed with her here or there might anchor her in some way, well, you should feel entitled to pursue that.”
Hector tipped his head on side. “I don’t even know where to begin responding to that.”
Brinke sipped some water, avoiding his eyes. “Whatever comes to mind first.”
“The fundamental problem as I see it,” Hector said, “is my feelings for Molly don’t run that way. I’m not going to bed her out of guilt. But let’s pretend I did. In the end, when she either found me out for having no deep feelings for her, or when I tried to ease out of the restorative or therapeutic ‘little affair,’ Molly might be pushed right over into that abyss she’s only toeing now.”
Brinke nodded, looking out the window. “That’s all quite possible, darling. It was just an option I’m affording you, that’s all. If you’re not inclined that way, that’s fine. I just don’t want to see you have to cope with something very bad if she comes to a dark decision.” Brinke took Hector’s hand. Her black eyes searched his face: “If you do nothing, and Molly does something, you have to know it’s not your fault. You didn’t ask her or encourage her to become infatuated with you. And you didn’t create or help to foster the kind of damaged personality she must have to be drawn to this twisted nihilist poet.”
Hector shook his head. “No more of this talk, please, not here. Not now. This isn’t the evening with you that I envisioned. I saw Romance. Candlelight dinner. You, me and racing hearts, okay? D’accord?”
Brinke smiled. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Tonight, let’s just wallow in our too good and easy life together.”
She sat up straighter and squared her shoulders and pulled his dinner jacket closer around her. She looked around, her brow furrowed. Brinke said, “Now, given the steep prices in this joint, where the hell is our goddamn waiter?”
17
Brinke had insisted on “horses’ power” for the ride back to the Quartier Latin and on to Joan Pyle’s apartment. As they clomped along, Brinke said, “So, tough guy, how did it feel to whip the devil?”
Hector realized then that he’d been massaging his right hand. He said, “Not the heady thrill it sounds. Apart from the fact that I think I broke a knuckle, it was a little like shooting fish in a barrel. Crowley was doped to the gills. Cocaine, maybe opium.”
“Or both,” Brinke said. “Or peyote, laudanum. They say Crowley uses all that, and more.”
“Either way, Crowley never saw it coming. I just let fly.”
“So where does this poet, Victor Leek, live?”
“Leek — or Oswald Rook, which may or may not be his real name — is holed up in some hovel of a hotel not far from Notre Dame.”
Brinke said, “If we cross via the Boulevard du Palais we could take a look at it.”
“I don’t think so,” Hector said. He squeezed her knee. “Besides, when Hem and I do go there, I may well go armed.”
“But we’d just be passing by the front. I just want to see it.”
“It’s a sewer, sleazy.” Hector figured if Crowley said so, it must be truly dreadful.
Brinke kissed him. She smoothed the lapel of his overcoat. “Admittedly, we’re not dressed for squalor, but we’ll just roll slowly by and keep on going. It’s research, perhaps for my crime novel. Grist for Bud, or Jake, or whatever nom de guerre I settle on.”
“How about ‘Russ Crocker’?”
Brinke wrinkled her nose. “That one I don’t like at all. Doesn’t sound like a man who’d know how to throw a punch or please a woman.” She smiled. “So, we’ll do this?”
“We’ll roll on by,” Hector said, rapping the roof of the coach with his good hand to get the attention of the cocher.
***
“My God, I just didn’t know such places existed in Paris,” Brinke said. “It looked like Whitechapel.”
They turned onto the Rue d’Odessa. Brinke looked over her shoulder and out the small, fogged window behind and between them. She squinted against the headlights from a trailing taxi that had been lighting up the interior of the coach for several minutes. She said, “The bastard could go around.”
Hector said, “He certainly could. If he wished to.” Hector fiddled with the door of their coach. “Wait here a minute. If anything bad happens, tell our driver to beat hell out of here. Go to the police and ask for Simon.”
Hector stepped down onto the street. The taxi — a new Ford — was sitting curbside about thirty yards behind their coach, its engine idling. Hector began walking toward the taxi. The engine gunned and headlights flared as the cab peeled away from the curbstone, gears grinding and tires squealing. The taxi whipped around their carriage and tore off down the Rue de la Gaîté. As it passed by him, Hector rushed the side of the taxi, trying to get a look into the back seat. He saw the silhouette of someone turning and ducking down to hide their face. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman; large or small.
***
“Nice monkey suit, Lasso,” Hem said.
Hadley said to her husband, “Hush. You could really do with some of Hector’s style, Tatie.” Hem grunted, rubbing at his unshaven jaw.
Joan Pyle, dressed in a dark pin-striped suit and black silk necktie, said to Brinke and Hector, “You two look like an advert for Vionnet.”
Hector smiled and shook her hand like a man’s. “You think?”
A knock at the door. Joan said, “That’ll be Gertrude and Alice, I think.”
Brinke said, “What?”
Joan said, “Gertrude thought a change of venue was in order. You know, for our next consultation.”
“Whoa, there,” Hector said. “We’ve been warned off this affair by the police. I gave my word to a commissioner we’d butt out.”
“Miss Stein hasn’t given her word about any such thing,” a voice behind him said. Hector turned, looked down: Alice, fuming up at him. He thought about ducking down to kiss her cheek, just to bug her. Then he took another look at her upper lip and decided against it. Alice said, “The last time we checked the newspapers, there was no indication that any arrests have been made in connection with these terrible murders.”
Hector said, “Jesus, but I really need a drink.” Then he said to his host, “Just please please please tell me you haven’t invited Estelle Quartermain.”
“Estelle is indisposed,” Gertrude Stein said, stepping up to Hector. She was wearing her black steerage clothes that reached nearly to her toes, and a heavy black shawl over what Hector took to be a black opera cape.
“You’re looking very dashing,” Hector said.
“And you look like an advert for Arrow shirts,” Gertrude said. “You may simply be too handsome to write, Hector. Now, as I was saying, Estelle is indisposed. Because she is following up on her obligations…continuing her promi
sed investigations.”
Hector nodded and turned his head away from Gertrude to hide the nasty smile he could feel forming. He surveyed the liquor bottles arrayed on a sideboard behind the couch where the Hemingways sat. Hem said, “Pickings are slim, Lasso. We opted for the red wine.”
Hector looked at the bottles with increasing distaste — schnapps, tanqueray, some kind of cherry-flavored vodka, and ouzo.
Brinke, looking over the offerings said, “Make mine du vin rouge.”
“Yeah,” Hector said. “Mine, too. He pressed his hand to the small of her back and whispered in Brinke’s ear, “Please promise me a very short night in this joint.”
Brinke chucked his chin with a gloved hand. “Done. I want you out of that tux.”
“And you out of that dress…what there is of it.”
Her hand strayed between his legs. She said, “My, tu bandes.”
This low voice, following him: “Lassiter! What do you have to show for the past couple of days?”
Gertrude stood close behind him, scowling.
Hector poured Brinke a glass of wine, then another for himself. He said, “Miss Stein, may I make you a Sloe Gin Fizz?”
“We shall have coffee,” Gertrude said. Hector tried to judge whether she was employing the royal “we” or meant coffee for Alice, too. Then Alice pushed Hector aside to make the coffee.
Hector sipped his wine, a Bordeaux, and said, “I have no progress. I had to beg off this campaign of yours in order to see a friend released from custody by the police.”
Half-distracted, Gertrude looked around the room, then eyed the room’s largest chair — one arranged to command the sitting room. Joan’s partner, Nicole Voivin —blond, rather plump…very feminine — immediately vacated the chair.
Gertrude sat down in it, settling in and resting her forearms on her knees. “A friend was arrested? In connection with these crimes? Who?”
“Irrelevant,” Hector said. He sensed he was forever burning a bridge with Gertrude, but he didn’t particularly care. He wasn’t a fixture at Gertrude’s salon. Hector figured Alice actively despised him. And the Great Woman was in no position to help Hector as a crime writer.
Most compelling of all, Hector wasn’t about to confide Hem’s detainment by the police to Gertrude or Alice.
“The reality is the police have a full sense of the case and have made the connections you feared they hadn’t,” Hector said. “The man in charge of the investigation, a man who seems smart and good, ordered me to tell you to desist.”
Gertrude curled her lip. She said, “Joan, please give us a cigar.” Then, to Hector, she said, “This police has not told me anything directly. Therefore, I will proceed along as I please until such time as this police does that.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Hector said. “If you — or goddamn Estelle — get in this man’s way, or interfere with his investigation, this police could arrest you.”
“Nonsense,” Gertrude said. “I’ll not be scared off. I’m not yellow.”
The room grew quiet.
Hem said, “I was the one in jail. And if anyone ever breathes a word about that, man, or woman, or in-between, they won’t ever have to worry again about who is or isn’t yellow.”
Gertrude blew out her lower lip. “You were arrested, Hemingway? On what grounds? What on earth for?”
“Suspicion of murder,” Hem said.
“That’s absurd,” Gertrude said.
“Exactly, and that’s why you don’t fuck around the fringes of something like this murder investigation,” Hector said.
“That crude language isn’t necessary, Mr. Lassiter,” Joan said.
Brinke shrugged. “Frankly, to my mind, the word ‘fuck’ pales next to ‘yellow’ or ‘coward.’”
There was another silence, then a soft grunt. “We apologize,” Gertrude finally said.
Hector couldn’t let Gertrude have it that easily. “Are we apologizing, or are you apologizing, Miss Stein?”
Alice handed Gertrude her coffee. As she did that, the dark-haired little woman glared at Hector. Gertrude waved her fat hand. “I apologize.”
Hector smiled at Alice.
Hem said, “I got pinched simply because I was too close to one too many dead men,” Hem said. “That’s all it took.”
Gertrude said to Hector, “So you’ve done nothing? You haven’t looked into Lloyd Blake’s murder, as we agreed?”
“That’s right,” Hector said. “And something else came up. A dear friend is in some trouble. Something involving the nihilist poet, Victor Leek. He’s trying to foster some kind of literary movement, literally built on nothing, and a friend is being drawn in, and at considerable peril. Members of this movement, they don’t last long. They tend to suicide.”
“We’ve not heard of this Leek,” Gertrude said.
“We have,” Nicole said. “He tried to buy our magazine.”
Joan handed Gertrude a cigar. Hector stood ready with a match. Joan said, “Nic’ is being very liberal in her description of the offer. It wasn’t a serious negotiation.”
Brinke said, “Not enough money on the table?”
“No money, at all. More akin to a transfer of title, if title existed.” Nicole fitted a Gauloise to a long ebony cigarette holder. “He seemed to want us to give him Intimations.”
“Give?” Hector sipped his wine. “Did he threaten you?”
“Not in so many words,” Joan said.
Hem said, “So what words, exactly?”
Brinke ran her hands through her black hair. She said, “Hector, why do I get the sense that two of your dilemmas just crossed? That maybe they’re tangled up with one another?”
Someone was pounding at the door.
Hector said, “Christ, don’t let it be Estelle Quartermain.”
Hem handed his glass to Hadley and rose. “I can get it.”
Joan balanced her cigar on an ashtray. “That won’t do — we’re the hosts.” She motioned Hem back to his chair and went to open the door.
Turning, Hem said to Brinke, “What did you mean, ‘two dilemmas’ have ‘crossed’?”
Brinke said, “These murders, and Molly. I think that—”
At first, Hector thought it was some pet of some neighbor’s that had been horribly injured. There was a high-pitched, inhuman-sounding squeal…like that of a dog rolling under the wheels of a car, perhaps.
Brinke said, “What in hell?”
Hem dropped his glass and ran to the front door. Hector realized then it was a human’s squeals…Joan Pyle’s screams.
Joan backed into the room, her hands reaching for her face. Wisps of smoke trailed from Joan’s blistering face.
Racing past her, Hector said, “It’s oil of vitriol — don’t let her touch her face or she’ll burn her hands, too.”
As he cleared the door, Hector heard Hem: “Hash, a jug of water, right now…towels! And Brinke, start banging on doors, find us a damn doctor.”
Hector heard feet pounding on stairs. He ran halfway down the first flight, then rolled over the banister, dropping down to the midpoint of the next flight of stairs. As he landed, Hector caught sight of gray pin-striped slacks and the hint of white spats, just rounding the corner to the second floor landing. Hector vaulted over the railing again. As he fell, his foot struck the leg of his quarry, sending the man sprawling across the ground floor landing.
The man twisted around and poked at Hector with his walking stick. Hector heard a click, then saw light on metal — realized the man had a sword cane. Hector threw himself to one side as the man hurled his cane like a spear, aiming at Hector’s head.
The point of the sword cane shallowly embedded itself in the plaster wall, quivering there a moment before clattering to the floor. The man scrambled through the door onto the street, slamming the door shut behind himself.
Hector hit the door with his shoulder, knocking it free from its hinges. The man was running across the slick, cobbled streets. He lost his footing and went
sprawling again, nearly sliding under the wheels of a passing Model T delivery truck.
Hector finally got a look at the man’s face — swarthy, a thick black mustache and a gold front tooth and a long scar down one side of his face.
The man saw Hector approaching. He crossed himself. Hector heard the man say, “Hail nada, full of nada…nada is with thee.”
Then the stranger threw himself head first into the path of a passing taxi.
PART II
lundi
18
“Vitriol pitching, that’s a shade Victorian, isn’t it?” Commissaire Simon pulled out a pack of Gauloises and offered them around. He didn’t find any takers.
Hadley and Alice were in the bedroom with Nicole, trying to comfort her. The doctor who initially treated Joan was with them, preparing sedatives for Nicole.
Joan had been taken away with severe burns to her face and neck and scalp. Hem was convinced Joan might also be left blind as a result of her burns.
Hector said, “You’d likely have to dig back to a Victorian novel to find a ‘vitriol pitching’ by name. Most back in the States call it sulfuric acid now.”
“There’s at least one acid pitching in Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories,” Hem said.
“Estelle Quartermain included one in The Mitre Square Menace,” Brinke said.
Simon said, “Yes. And all of you are gathered here, despite my instructions to the contrary. But where is Mrs. Quartermain?”
Hector looked to Gertrude. She shrugged and said, “Otherwise engaged.”
“Monsieur Lassiter seemingly wasn’t able to impress upon all of you the illegality of inserting yourselves into an official police inquiry. Is that a proper inference on my part?”
“This was supposed to be a social gathering, Commissaire,” Brinke said. “Hector and I came expecting only the Hemingways to be here.”
Hector said, “This man who pitched the acid at Joan, who is he? Have you been able to identify him?”
Simon nodded. “A Spaniard named Paco Sánchez. He is a poet. Or rather, he was.”
Looking flustered, Gertrude asked, “An actual poet?”
One True Sentence: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter series Book 1) Page 11
