One True Sentence: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter series Book 1)

by Craig McDonald

  “Excuse me, I want to make a quick trip to my place,” Hector said.

  Brinke’s eyes on him: “What’s up, Tex?”

  “Just checking in with Germaine. Making sure there’ve been no visitors I might have missed.” The name hung unspoken between them: Molly.

  “Probably a good idea,” Brinke said softly.

  Hem: “A very good idea, Lasso.”

  Hector waved down a cab.

  Germaine was behind her desk, working over some papers. Hector kissed her on the cheek and told her he might be away for the night. Then he said, “We’re still thinking about a holiday away for a few days…Italy,” he said.

  “Sounds lovely,” Germaine said. Something in her voice. Hector felt his own pulse quickening. Might that poet or those bastards who followed Leek actually have threatened the dear old lady to get to Hector?

  He said, “What’s wrong? I hear it in your voice.”

  “Nothing, perhaps,” Germaine said. “I just… Some police came by. You’re not in some trouble are you, Hector?”

  “Not directly. I’m actually helping the police with something. Did they ask you questions?”

  Germaine said, “No, they left an envelope for you.”

  Hector figured it would be the pictures of Simon’s men that Hector had been promised — to aid in Hector’s ability to distinguish the cops from other possible tails.

  And that reminded Hector of another problem for Thursday: he’d have to lose his police shadows in order to flee France with Brinke.

  But that was a problem for later.

  “It’s nothing, please believe me,” Hector told Germaine. “Just some information to help me. Please keep them for me, won’t you? I’ll look them over later.”

  “Of course.” Something still there in the old woman’s voice.

  “I really am fine,” Hector said, smiling. He said, “I’m not in any trouble. Not with the police.”

  “I believe you, Hector.” Germaine hesitated, then said, “I may have done something very stupid. Foolishly, I carelessly betrayed a confidence. You had a visitor a short while ago. A young woman, very attractive.”

  “Margaret Wilder?”

  “That’s her name, yes. She was asking after you. Hoping you’d come home from some event you were both present at earlier this evening. She seemed quite urgent about seeing you. I didn’t think and, well, I said you were still out with your fiancée. Mademoiselle Wilder became quite upset then. She ran out, crying. I’m so sorry, Hector. I don’t want to pry into your private life. But I sensed that you and this other woman…well… I’ve created a terrible problem for you. I know that.”

  “Molly’s secretly been harboring an infatuation,” Hector said. “I didn’t know about it until quite recently. You did nothing wrong, Germaine. Don’t worry about it, please. It’s fine. I’ll see you later.”

  Hector stepped back out to his waiting cab.

  Well, that tore it. Hector massaged his temples with his fingertips. He wanted to be in Italy, immediately…before he might have to be confronted with some headline about Molly throwing herself off some bridge or under some train like the doomed heroine of some overheated Russian novel.

  Hector paid the cabbie and slipped back into the warmth of the café. Brinke met him at the door: “What’s wrong, Hector?”

  Hector shook his head. “Germaine accidentally tipped Molly to our engagement. Molly was at my place just a bit ago.”

  Brinke slammed her palm into the wall next to the door. “Oh, Hector…”

  He took Brinke’s arm. “There’s more…this party, let’s go to it — token appearances — but take a coach there, alone. We need to talk. I need to know some things, Brinke. I need to know things about you, right now. I need to know them for my own piece of mind. Before Italy. Before I dismantle my life here to build that beautiful new life with you back home on that island.”

  Brinke’s chin was trembling. “All right, Hector. Of course, darling. We’ll go right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “I need to make a stop first. Want to make certain that Molly hasn’t paid a visit to my place.”

  34

  In the years to follow, Hector would always remember the ride to the party: the sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, the swirl of the falling snow through the coach’s windows, and the smell of fires from the chimney pots.

  There were also Brinke’s sighs…his own mounting frustration at her many evasions. Her hand squeezing his so tightly — as if through her grip’s mere pressure she could make Hector believe, or, at least, dissuade further questions.

  Hector said, “I don’t believe as Simon suspects, that you are tied to Leek, or as we now know him to be, Starr.”

  Brinke’s eyes smoldered. “Well, thank God for that.” Pure acid.

  “But these other crimes I’ve been told about,” Hector said, “I need to know more from you about what Simon is accusing you of in these other countries.”

  “Lies, Hector. Coincidences made to appear sinister by a man whose career is built upon suspicion. Innuendos built upon newspaper headlines I drew plot points from. Simon’s theories are insane.”

  “And these other names? Gretchen Pabst? Margaret Walker?”

  Names chosen for places I never meant to stay for long.”

  “What’s you’re real name, darling?”

  “Brinke.”

  “Your given name? What’s that? What’s your birth name?”

  “Brinke. Brinke Sinclair. I’ve come full circle.” She squeezed his hand again. “It’s true, darling. I’ve taken back my first name.”

  “Where were you born, Brinke?”

  “Springfield, Ohio.”

  “Your parents’ names?”

  “Joe and Mildred Sinclair. I’m not from money.”

  “Any siblings?”

  “No, I really am an only child, just as I told you.”

  “Your parents still living? Could I wire them and confirm all this?”

  She hung her head. “I really don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t seen them since I was a child, Hector. I was raised by nuns.”

  “How’d that come to be?”

  Their coach jerked to a stop. “We’re here,” she said unnecessarily.

  “But we’re not finished, Brinke.”

  “Everything, darling. I’ll tell all of it to you, whatever the cost. I’ll tell you what happened with my parents, tell you about my writing and what happened in Germany, in Spain, and in Egypt. I swear, my love, you, and only you, shall have all my secrets. But I have to think about how best to frame it for you. Because, and this is selfish, I don’t want to lose you in giving you all my secrets. They aren’t that bad, Hector. Not like that damned policeman seems to think they are. But the life I’ve sometimes lived isn’t the life a Brinke Devlin would have lived. That’s why I’m her now, I guess.”

  Hector stared into her eyes. “Tonight? Later? You swear to me?”

  “Everything later, yes darling.” She stroked his cheek. “Kiss me now, Hector. Before we go in there, kiss me.”

  She drew slowly away from their long, deep kiss, her lips swollen, her fingertips tracing his lips. “I love you, Hector. You’re the only one I’ve ever said that to, the only one in the world. You’re the man I love. The man I’ll always love.”

  Hector lifted her chin, kissed her again. “I love you. So no secrets, Brinke…not on my side or yours.”

  She smiled sadly and he wiped away her tears with his thumbs. “Why are you crying, Brinke?”

  “It’s you…goddamn wonderful you.”

  ***

  Hector wished they had begged out on the party. He’d rather be alone with Brinke…drawing from her all her secrets between bouts of lovemaking.

  But they rode the elevator in silence to the hotel’s uppermost floor — the grand ballroom.

  The party was a drunken who’s-who of avante-garde Paris — painters, musicians, writers.
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  Brinke clung to Hector’s arm, kissing his neck and telling him over and over how much she loved him.

  Hector saw Estelle Quartermain and her husband chatting with Gertrude and Alice. Estelle had slicked back her mouse-brown hair from her forehead to disguise the damage of her disastrous hairstyle.

  Hem and Hadley were wending their way through the crowd toward Brinke and Hector. Brinke kissed Hector again, passionately, her tongue parting his lips. Hector tried to say, “We have an audience.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “But excuse me now, darling.”

  She nodded at the ladies’ room door. Impulsively, Brinke leaned in for a last kiss. She pressed her palm to his cheek, her fingers fleetingly stroking down to his chin, then she was gone.

  Hem, watching Brinke’s back, said, “You told her didn’t you, Lasso? Told her what Simon told us?”

  “Of course.”

  “Get any answers?”

  “A few honest ones I think.” Hector squeezed Hadley’s hand in welcome. “More are promised later tonight. So I want to make it an early evening. Meet the host and vamoose.”

  Hem said, “You’re still going on to Italy with Brinke, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Hector said. “I wish we were already on our way.”

  There was some commotion across the ballroom. A few screams, some laughs. Hector and Hem exchanged a look and then began shouldering their way through the revelers toward the source of the screams and guffaws.

  Hector heard someone ahead of them say, “What is this, some kind of Dadaesque entertainment? How silly.”

  Hector and Hem broke through the lines and exchanged another look. Hem said, “Holy fuck!” Then, “Everyone run!”

  A black-clad man stood with his back to a wall of windows, clutching two sticks of dynamite in either hand. The fuses were cut short and the flames descending down each fuse had nearly reached their terminus. A few partygoers were still laughing and pointing — mistaking it for some piece of theatre.

  The man was reciting a bastardized form of the Lord’s prayer: “…though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, nada is with me…”

  Years before, in a trench on Easter Sunday, a potato-smasher grenade had plunked down in the mud near the feet of Hector and a circle of his spent friends as they were resting between salvos. For an instant, Hector had hesitated, then he had moved to throw his own torso over the grenade in a bid to save his buddies.

  During Hector’s fleeting instant of hesitation, Frankie Moore, a tow-headed, seventeen-year-old boy from La Plata, Missouri, had flung himself over the grenade.

  Having seen the carnage of Frankie’s body, and what the boy endured during the long hour before succumbing to his near total bisection, Hector had wondered if, faced with the same sort of life-or-death choice, he would again make the effort to take that self-sacrificial plunge.

  Hector was running toward the man with the sticks of dynamite in either hand —Hector was running before he knew his brain had sent his legs the signal. He thought he heard Hem behind him, yelling, “Lasso, no!”

  The crazed man looked from Hector to either of his hands — checking the progress of the fuses — then looked back to Hector, snarling. All the while, he continued reciting his crazed prayer, now dropping nadas into the prayer with such frequency it almost sounded like a chant.

  Hector grabbed the black-clad man by both biceps, running hard and using his own size and weight to force the Nadaist backward on his heels, driving him toward a window.

  Hector heard glass breaking, then he watched the man begin to scream, dropping the sticks of dynamite from his left hand in a vain attempt to clutch at Hector’s sleeve.

  So much for the siren song of the void, Hector thought. Look at him, trying like hell to save himself now.

  Then Hector felt glass dig into his thigh and realized his own center of gravity was well beyond the window’s ledge and that he was in fact beginning his own free fall to the pavement far below.

  Behind him, Hector heard a guttural, “No!”

  Hector felt a sharp jerk, his fall temporarily ceased. A hand was gripping at the collar of his coat, choking Hector, and another had gotten hold of his coat tails and belt.

  Below him, perhaps seven floors closer to the pavement, the dynamite exploded. The falling, screaming man was enveloped in a red, orange, and black mushroom cloud, then the explosives in his other hand went off, shredding his body. The swelling fireball was rolling up the side of the hotel toward Hector.

  His own free fall had ceased, but Hector was dangling above a rising ball of fire. Hector had seen burn victims in the war. He didn’t want to become like the ones he remembered: some agonized, blind scab with no ears or nose. Better to dash one’s brains out on the pavement far below. Hector struggled against the hands suspending him above the swift-approaching plume of fire and smoke.

  “Stop fighting, goddamn it, Lasso. Go limp!”

  Hector did that and felt himself jerked back through the window. He felt a sliver of glass slide into his thigh, and another rake his belly, then a smaller ball of flame rolled in through the broken window, setting the curtains on fire. Hector was sprawled on his back atop Hem, who said, “We’ve got to get those curtains down before they set fire to the walls and ceiling!”

  Ford and Fargue each grabbed hold of a flaming curtain and jerked the drapes down and to the floor, stomping out the flames. Grinning, forgetting himself, Hem said, “Atta boy, Master…Fargue!”

  William Carlos Williams bent down over Hector, supporting him while Hem slid out from under Hector. Williams focused his attention on Hector’s thigh. The doctor picked up a piece of broken glass, and inserting it into the hole in Hector’s pants, slit the inseam of Hector’s pants leg. Williams said, “Thank God, the femoral artery was missed — just. This will require stitches, however.” Gertrude Stein forced herself into a kneeling position and ripped open Hector’s shirt. She grasped a bloody piece of glass and pulled it out of Hector’s belly. “Only an eighth-of-an-inch penetration, if that,” she said. “Superficial, we’re agreed, Doctor Williams?”

  Williams checked Hector’s belly and said, “It’ll bleed plenty, but I concur…Nurse Stein.”

  Hector said, “I’m fine, really. Just bandage me up.”

  Ignoring him, Williams said, “It’s that head wound that most worries me. The explosion must have blown some glass back up at Hector.” Hector realized then he felt something warm and wet above his hairline. Then Williams’s hand was at Hector’s mouth, forcing in some pills. Hadley handed Williams a glass of water and he urged it down Hector’s throat to wash down the pills.

  Hector felt that familiar feeling of spreading warmth. More morphine, he figured.

  The world receded.

  ***

  In a haze, feeling himself lifted onto a stretcher, Hector heard Williams say to someone, maybe Gertrude based on the context, “A first, eh? A woman’s emergency sewing kit to stitch a severe head laceration. If he keeps his hair in the years to come, the scar should never show.”

  Hector heard Hadley next — she sounded slightly manic — “I’ve looked everywhere, Tatie. There’s no sign of Brinke.”

  Another voice (Estelle Quartermain?): “The bathroom is a shambles…it must have been a terrible struggle. There was some talcum powder knocked off the sink and a shoeprint left in the talc…size 12, maybe…and a woman’s shoeprint, too. On the inside of the stall, written in lipstick, are two letters, an M and a W. It’s clearly a kidnapping.”

  Hem: “Either way, the police are on their way up. Hash, you go to the hospital with Sylvia…stay with Hector there. I’ll see what I can do to find Brinke.”

  ***

  The cold air and sleet against his face briefly brought Hector back around. A man in a white coat was strapping Hector to a bench in the back of an ambulance. Hector saw another man in a white coat was curled on the floor of the ambulance, huddled in a pool of blood. The man’s throat had been slashed down so fa
r that Hector could make out the spinal cord through all the severed soft tissue.

  Across from Hector, sitting on a bench, was a man in a black suit. His black hair was slicked back and he had a pencil-thin black mustache. He smiled at Hector. Somehow Hector just knew. His voice thick from the drugs, Hector said, “Victor Leek?”

  “That’s right. We’ll talk again shortly, Lassiter. Enjoy this last peaceful sleep.”

  35

  Hector was hanging by his wrists from a chain dangling from a ceiling hidden in darkness. His shoulders hurt and he was cold. He realized then that he was also naked. He looked down and saw a good deal of dried blood trailing down from his thigh almost to his ankle. There was dried blood on his belly and matted in his pubic hair.

  Hector blinked a few times, trying to squint into the blackness. In one corner there was a soft glow from a small fire. Hector said to the darkness, “Where’s Brinke?”

  A voice: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And you have other immediate personal concerns you should focus on.”

  The man who had identified himself as Victor Leek — or Jackson Starr —emerged from the blackness, smiling, one arm behind his back. Hector found he could see a bit better now. The walls around him seemed to be covered with skulls and stacks of human bones. “Where in God’s name are we?”

  “In God’s name, indeed,” the poet said. “We’re in the annex of the ancient graveyards of Paris. Les Catacombes. The City of the Dead hidden under the City of Lights.”

  “Your kind of place, Leek,” Hector said. “Or are we going by ‘Starr’ today?”

  The poet scowled. “That’s right, pal,” Hector said, “the police have figured out who you really are. You, and your sister, Lenore. Or should I say Molly?”

  Hector couldn’t read the man’s expression. The poet said, “You’re confusing me, again. I’m Nobodaddy.”

  “Sure,” Hector said. He looked down at himself again. “I’m going to tell you right now, and tell you true, I have no information about anything that matters a damn. So there’s no point in thinking about torturing me…I have nothing to give you.”