Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel Read online

  PRINT THE

  LEGEND

  A Hector Lassiter

  novel

  Craig McDonald

  Print the Legend was first published in the United States of America by Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group 2010

  This edition published by agreement with Craig McDonald by Betimes Books 2015

  www.betimesbooks.com

  Copyright © 2010, Craig McDonald

  Craig McDonald has asserted his right under the Universal Copyright Convention to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, sold, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, print, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and the copyright owner.

  ISBN 978-0-9929674-7-5

  Print the Legend is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  ALSO BY CRAIG MCDONALD

  The Hector Lassiter Series

  One True Sentence

  Forever’s Just Pretend

  Toros & Torsos

  The Great Pretender

  Roll the Credits

  The Running Kind

  Head Games

  Death in the Face

  Three Chords & The Truth

  Write From Wrong (The Hector Lassiter Short Stories)

  Standalones

  El Gavilan

  The Chris Lyon Series

  Parts Unknown

  Carnival Noir

  Cabal

  Angels of Darkness

  The Daughters of Others

  Watch Her Disappear

  Nonfiction

  Art in the Blood

  Rogue Males

  Praise

  "Ingeniously plotted and executed, Print the Legend is an epic masterpiece from Craig McDonald. Beginning to end, I was riveted by this story of character, history and intrigue." — Michael Connelly

  “The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don't take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and - rarest of the rare - a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next.” — Laura Lippman

  “Hector Lassiter is a compelling character but also a fascinating forum for McDonald's historical, social, and artistic observations. For all the wonderful action, slick dialogue, and plot twists McDonald throws at the reader, he's equally interested in saying something substantial about time and place. Not to be missed.” — Michael Koryta

  “With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance. With Print the Legend, his triumphant third novel in the series, McDonald cunningly blends high, low and pulp American culture at the mid-century. While the scale is immense, McDonald's hand is deft, and we never forget that, at its center, this is a human story, complex and bruising and deeply felt. As big as the scope, we are never far from the novel's true, pulsing center: the sumptuously etched characters of the widow Mary Hemingway, aspiring writer Hannah Paulson and our beloved Hector himself.” — Megan Abbott

  “McDonald skillfully and ingeniously mixes fact with fiction… McDonald’s background as a journalist and crime fiction critic helps him to piece together an intriguing literary thriller.” — Mystery Scene

  “Print the Legend is a landmark book. Lassiter for me is the Flashman/Zelig of the new era, but with a ferocious literary knowledge that is worn so lightly. A book beyond genre, stunning.” — Ken Bruen

  This novel is for

  Betty & James McDonald

  and once again,

  for Debbie McDonald

  “There are never any…

  successful suicides.”

  — Ernest Hemingway

  CONTENTS

  July 2, 1961

  August, 1961

  BOOK ONE: TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

  1 HANNAH

  2 HECTOR

  CREEDY: PARIS, FRANCE, 1922

  3 THE SCHOLAR

  4 THE LONG GAME

  CREEDY: GREENWICH VILLAGE, 1934

  5 CLUES

  CREEDY: SPAIN, 1937

  6 WITH THIS RING

  7 THE THIRSTY MUSE

  8 THE THREAT

  9 THE LOST CHAPTER

  10 COMMAND PERFORMANCE

  11 ECHOES

  BOOK TWO: A MOVEABLE FEAST

  CHRISTMAS EVE AT LE SELECT MONTPARNASSE

  12 INVITATION

  BOOK THREE: DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

  13 POINT OF VIEW

  BOOK FOUR: MEN AT WAR

  14 MINION

  15 SPADE WORK

  16 JACKALS

  17 SENTRY

  18 THE MAN WHO LIVES WHAT HE WRITES…

  19 …AND WRITES WHAT HE LIVES

  20 SHOP TALK

  21 THE ART OF WAR

  22 ART IN THE BLOOD

  23 PUPIL

  CREEDY: CUBA, 1947

  24 HEM’S ROOMS

  CREEDY: AFRICA, 1954

  25 INTERROGATION

  26 BIRDS OF PREY

  27 PRODIGAL

  28 STALKER

  29 TURNABOUT

  30 PURSUIT

  31 DARK DESIGN

  32 BLOCKED

  33 THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING

  34 MISTAKES

  35 FRAME

  BOOK FIVE: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

  36 TILL DEATH

  37 PLOT HOLES

  38 WIDOW’S WALK

  39 GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

  40 AFTER BIRTH

  41 ALONE TOGETHER

  CREEDY: NEW YORK, 1960

  42 THE TRUE GEN

  CREEDY: NEW YORK, 1961

  43 ROAD WORK

  BOOK SIX: HOW IT WAS

  44 COLLABORATORS

  45 SHELL GAME

  46 THE WRITER’S CURSE

  47 A PURSUIT RACE

  48 WRATH

  49 BOTTOMS UP

  50 PREPARATIONS

  51 DEATH IN THE MORNING

  52 LAST MOVES (1966)

  CREEDY: LOS ANGELES, 1969

  BOOK SEVEN: HOW IT WAS

  53 ENDGAME (Washington, D.C., May 2, 1972)

  BOOK EIGHT: IN OUR TIME

  54 R.I.P.

  55 THE BURDEN

  56 NIGHT TRAIN (Winter 2010)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  July 2, 1961

  He rose with the sun as he had every morning since childhood.

  It was Sunday and the old man was alone in the house with his wife, Mary.

  George, his ex-boxer pal, was in the cinder block guest quarters next door. He trusted his damaged memory on that much.

  The old man shrugged on his “Emperor’s robe” that draped his wasted frame like a red circus tent. He hardly recognized his own face in the bathroom mirror — his wispy, white flyaway hair was going every which way and his smile back at himself was something terrible to behold. Passionate brown eyes each of four wives praised as his best feature were now as empty and dead as those of the trophy heads gathering dust at his abandoned Cuban Finca.

  He reached for his toothbrush with a trembling hand, then thought better of it: perhaps the funk of morning mouth would mask the taste of the oiled barrels of the shotgun.

  Mary had locked his guns away fr
om him in the storeroom. She left the key to their hiding place resting on the ledge over the kitchen sink. He had seen the key there last night — as she had perhaps intended…left the key just sitting there on their first night back from the Mayo Clinic. The old man’s rattled brain kept wondering at Mary’s reason for hiding the key in plain sight.

  A taunt, or invitation?

  A characteristic half-assed kindness?

  He snorted at the mystery of his last wife’s motive for making this he was about to do possible, and, grimacing, tiptoed down the stairs to the storeroom.

  The old man selected a silver-inlaid, 12–gauge double-barreled Boss bought years before at Abercrombie & Fitch. He broke open the shotgun and cradled it in the crook of his left arm. He pulled open a drawer and selected a box of shells. The old man’s hands trembled so badly he couldn’t draw any from the container. Disgusted, he emptied the shells into the drawer and scooped a handful in a fast reach for his robe’s pocket. Two cartridges — more than enough to do the job — fell true; the rest pinged as the brass tops kissed the floor and they rolled to the four corners.

  The self-declared “former writer” would normally be deep into his morning’s composition at this early hour, but that was in another country, the old man thought bitterly, and his muse was at last dead.

  He trudged back up the stairs, lugging the big English-made gun. He thought of his father, making a similar last climb up a flight of stairs, intent upon effecting a bloody escape from his own intolerable half-life. He now had the answer to the question he had posed so many years before, in a story inspired by his father: “Is dying hard, Daddy?”

  He knew now how easy it could be, denied your desires and the things you are driven, for better or worse, to do.

  He crossed the living room to the foyer directly under Mary’s bedroom, pausing to stare out the window at the cloudless sky and rising July sun glistening on the ripples where the rocks lay thickest on the bed of the Wood River from which two deer now drank.

  Gnats sported in the rapid’s spray in easy reach of the trout that gorged on them.

  Chipmunks darted through the dew-kissed grass, unaware of the old man’s stalking cats.

  Bald buzzards wheeled on the rising vapors.

  It would be a good morning for others to hunt or hike or to go fishing.

  As he turned, he was startled by a reflection in the mirror on the wall—thought he saw a familiar, hated face peering through the window. He whispered distractedly, “Creedy? Creedy, is that you?” He turned but there was no one at the window. He shook his head: What did it matter if he was out there? He was so tired of looking over his shoulder. So tired…

  Seppuku by shotgun: If he could wait nineteen days, he could celebrate his sixty-second birthday.

  The old man’s trembling hand rooted the pocket of his robe for the first shotgun shell. His heart beat faster. Robbed of his own words, he resorted to those of another to whom he had once been improbably compared. He muttered the favorite quote over and over to himself:

  A man can die but once…he that dies this year is quit for the next.

  August, 1961

  Fidel Castro stood behind the Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s Cuban “Lookout Farm,” watching the Widow Hemingway fussing over the boxes stuffed with her husband’s papers and manuscripts she had traded the house and nearly all of its possessions to “liberate.”

  The young Irish woman with the widow had started a fire below the tennis court, and some of the papers — just selected letters and old magazines, Mrs. Hemingway insisted — were being burned.

  What a strange little woman this widow was.

  Castro tried to reconcile Mary Hemingway with the sense of the man and writer he had gotten from reading For Whom the Bell Tolls — one of the books that had actually guided him in terms of his own guerilla warfare he had so successfully waged against Batista — and, much later, with the old but boisterous man he’d met at Hemingway’s fishing tournament.

  Mary Hemingway struck Castro as a bizarre, poorly chosen woman for the great Papa.

  Sensing motion behind him, Castro turned. Smiling at the foreigner, Castro fired up a fresh cigar. He gestured with his cigar at the little blond woman bustling around, supervising the loading of the precious boxes; directing the burning of her husband’s papers. “I suppose you have plans for those containers, too, eh, comrade?”

  The man, this “Creedy,” smiled and said, “In time, certainly, Jefe. Papa loved your country very much. It’s important his readers see some of his writings in those boxes, so they, too, can see how much Papa loved Cuba. Particularly how much he thought of you, Jefe.” Inside, Creedy was cursing himself. If he’d only gotten here sooner—gotten first access to all these manuscripts squirreled away in various Cuban safe deposit boxes.

  Castro grinned and hefted the ornate shotgun Mary had gifted him. He said, “She is nice, sí?”

  Creedy didn’t really know guns — not his weapons of choice. Winking, Creedy accepted a cigar. He leaned in for a light from one of Castro’s lice-ridden stooges. It grated to have to be deferential to this son of a rich plantation owner now playing the role of revolutionary, but Creedy managed a short, “It’s swell, Jefe.”

  ***

  Standing on the tarmac of the Miami Airport, Creedy wiped fresh sweat from his forehead. Like Cuba, south Florida was sweltering. Creedy cursed and waved his men away.

  Airports were a vexed fixture in his life: More gambits and schemes had been saved by a hasty flight out of some theatre of operation or blown to pieces on tarmacs, runways and concourses than he cared to count. Seemed he was forever checking mirrors and over his shoulder every time he crossed a frontier, his stomach in knots; always waiting for some ticket taker to say, “So sorry, Mr. Creedy, but there seems to be a problem….”

  And how many running from him had Creedy managed to ensnare at passport desks and ticket counters? Dozens, at least. There’d be dozens more, he was sure.

  This time, the system was working against Creedy, threatening to slide this gambit over into his airports-of-the-world loss tally.

  Creedy had hoped to get some time alone with the Hemingway manuscript boxes when they reached Miami, but the indomitable little widow was standing guard over them like some goddamn bottle-blond sentry, ordering around airport staff and staying constantly in sight of the precious containers as they were loaded in the plane’s cargo hold.

  Mary might have unwittingly beaten him in Cuba, and beaten him in Miami, but if that toad Hoover back in D.C. went for Creedy’s pitch, he figured he’d yet carry the day. After all, what was this boozy widow really when ranged against a man of his talents and dark imagination?

  ***

  The Topping House was bound in the season’s first mountain snow.

  In the storeroom of the Idaho house where Papa had found the shotgun that killed him, Mary stared at the boxes and shopping bags full of priceless manuscripts arrayed around her.

  She fingered the key to the storeroom, now worn on a chain around her neck where it would always be safe. Mary looked around at the small room — its locks fortified at a time when she was still trying to keep her suicidal husband from his guns.

  It was a good and safe place.

  Mary turned her attention back to the manuscripts, thinking of the enormous job and responsibility before her. Knuckling down to the grand task, the thought made her smile — she’d been preparing for this for years.

  BOOK ONE:

  TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

  (Idaho, 1965)

  “God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They’re all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they’re all camp followers.”

  — Ernest Hemingway

  1

  HANNAH

  “The house where he died. Call it the scene of the crime.”

  The scholar and his pregnant, newlywed
Scottish wife walked along the berm, spooking some crows pecking at the bloated carcass of a black dog killed crossing U.S. Highway 75.

  The scavengers scattered in a flurry of wings and reeling shadows and high-pitched shrieks, beaks dangling remnants of rotting flesh and pelt matted with dried blood. The big blue-black crows came to roost on a wire, cawing and flapping their wings at the academic and his bride peering at the house.

  Richard Paulson pointed at the brown house with the three green garage doors. The home that was once known as the Topping House was surrounded by pines and fronted a bare, cloud-shadowed hill and another dense with pine trees.

  “It’s attractive,” Hannah Paulson said, her voice a husky burr. She pushed her sunglasses back on her head. “Seems right for him. Rugged and handsome; built from the materials at hand.”

  Richard shook his head at his wife’s assessment. “From here it looks good enough, sure. By all accounts, it’s something else up close.”

  Hem’s house that looked like alpine wood construction was actually fabricated from poured concrete, stained brown and molded to resemble timber. They were the same construction techniques used at the Sun Valley Lodge, where the Paulsons had had lunch. One of Hem’s sons, Gregory, bitterly described the concrete house as a fortification fit for the paranoid man Greg’s father had allegedly been at the end.

  Hem’s last wife, Mary, declared the house “depressing” shortly before she and Hem moved in during an October day in 1959.

  “They say Mary will be moving soon,” Richard said. “Mary’s lived here on and off since the day he died. Aaron says she may move to New York. Word is she’s mostly drunk these days. She talks of leaving the property to the Nature Conservancy. The home and 14 acres of surrounding ground would be declared a preserve in Papa’s name if Mary did that.”

  Hannah stroked her blond hair behind her ears and wrinkled her nose. “How can Mary stand to live there after…? To have to step over the spot where he blew his brains out every time she passes through that entryway? It’s unthinkable.”

  “For you, sure. You’re using yourself as a yardstick for Mary. The two of you are nothing alike.”