The Great Pretender: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 4

  Hector raised his glass again, hesitated, then said, “And you? What are you exactly, in terms of all this? Avenging angel? Christian soldier, marching boldly onward?” A smile. “Cassie, are you some kind of Vatican operative, or the like?” He reached out and squeezed her hand. “Hell, maybe British Secret Service?”

  “That last is probably closest. But I’m not working for the British. We’ll come to what I am, in time.” She withdrew her hand from his.

  Hector tried to plumb the depths of her arresting gray eyes. He rubbed his jaw. It had already been a long day; he could feel his five o-clock-shadow-and-then-some as his fingertips rustled across his stubbly cheek. “You saved my life, so I guess you have a right to tell your story anyway you care to. I promise I’ll stop derailing you. Tell me more about Longinus and his spear and what on earth it possibly has to do with me.”

  Watching for his reaction, Cassie said, “Your part in all this, it begins in Ireland, several years ago, during your travels there, when you met the younger Mr. Welles.”

  “Hell, he’s still young,” Hector said. The smoke from his cigarette resting in the ashtray rose in a swirling column between them, twirling into the blue, overhead light.

  “Yes, three years younger than me, in fact,” Cassie said, “though I somehow think of Mr. Welles as much older than I am.”

  “Near or far, Orson has that effect on most, yes,” Hector said. “I met him in Ireland in 1931, I reckon. He was just getting his start on the stage. A plucky teen who talked himself into his first role there in Dublin. I was frankly astonished to find this old soul living in this bombastic young man’s oversized body. Maybe tellingly, even then, Orson excelled at playing old men on stage, even though he was only sixteen at the time.”

  “And in Spain you traveled together, too,” she said. “That was about 1932, wasn’t it?”

  “Somewhere in that range,” Hector said. “We did some traveling together there, yeah. He was alone in Morocco first, then we met again in Spain, mostly chasing the bulls and the festivals. The ferias. We finally came back to the States long about 1933. He was like a mooching kid brother back then. Now? Harder to define the relationship, though I still seem to pick up all of the tabs, despite Orson’s growing fame on the radio and stage. Still, he’s grown up, at least a little, I think.”

  “Just so. What else do you remember about that time, Hector? What do you remember about Ireland, particularly?”

  Because he was the man he was, an author notorious for living what he wrote and writing about what he lived, Hector reckoned he remembered plenty.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE HYPNOTIZED AUDIENCE

  Dublin, 1931

  Young Orson’s name preceded him: Hector had read a notice in one of the daily newspapers that said the teen Welles had “descended on Dublin and taken it by storm.”

  Shopworn clichés aside, that attitude seemed to characterize the reaction of most in the critical theater community in Ireland regarding the imposing, already six feet and-then-some, sixteen-year-old American.

  Still, none of that was really any enticement or inducement for Hector to take in Welles’ act. Hector was never one for the theater, preferring instead the cinema—for which he occasionally wrote—when indulging his very limited leisure time.

  Hector was only going to tonight’s show because a friend’s relative with whom he was staying, a pleasant enough colleen named Teagan Hanrahan, loved to see stage shows but rarely had the money or company to do so.

  Hector’s longtime friend, an Irish ex-pat cop named Jimmy Hanrahan, had pleaded that while Hector passed through Dublin he please try to get Jimmy’s female cousin out and about a bit. Seemed that Cleveland, Ohio-based Jimmy’s clan back home on the Emerald Isle was convinced Teagan was toiling under threat of spinsterhood.

  The night’s play would be the third Hector had endured with Teagan for Jimmy’s sake. On this night, she had selected a show at the still newish Gate, a play called The Dead Ride Fast.

  Orson Welles was to play an American in this production. The play’s plot pivoted on black magic, so in the end the production was just pulpy enough to hold Hector’s attention, something he couldn’t say of the more classical first two productions Teagan had dragged him to.

  After the performance, Hector presumed to take a clearly smitten Teagan back stage to meet Orson. He figured as a fellow American working in the field of the arts, a possibly homesick boy-wonder might welcome the unexpected visit from a Texas-born novelist of some small renown of his own.

  As it happened, Orson’s ego was such Hector could have been from Mongolia or Galway for all that the teen actor cared. Welles was still early in his career, and eating up any and all admiration from any source.

  Bent before a dusty mirror, Orson finished removing a false nose with some alcohol, then stood and shook Hector’s hand. He bowed and kissed Teagan’s hand.

  Up close, young Orson was a charismatic figure with intense eyes, an unruly mop of hair and this voice that didn’t at all fit his age or face. The kid was also the near giant everyone went on about, standing perhaps six-two and looking Hector straight in the eye or a bit better as he pumped his hand and, to Hector’s pleasant surprise, praised his novels. Orson correctly rattled off the titles of three or four of Hector’s books the young actor declared to be personal favorites.

  “I’ll confess I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing stuff similar to what you publish,” Orson told Hector. “You should give me writing tips and I’ll trade you acting lessons.”

  It would have been a one-sided exchange, as Hector harbored no theatrical ambitions whatever. But then he saw how Teagan was basking in the young actor’s presence. “Maybe we should talk those terms out over a pint,” Hector suggested, just trying to stretch out their meeting for Teagan’s sake.

  Combing his hair and studying Hector in a mirror, Orson said, “Your treat?”

  “Certainly,” Hector said. “I—we—invited you.”

  “Delighted to come then,” Orson said. “Just give me a moment to finish becoming myself.”

  ***

  They claimed a snug in the pub a block’s walk from the Gate. To Teagan’s disappointment, Orson confessed he was contemplating leaving Dublin soon. He’d come to Ireland with romantic misconceptions about the country and about Dublin’s theater scene—talking himself into his first role by exaggerating his prowess and experience, as well as lying about his age.

  Local fame had virtually followed Orson’s first curtain call. The kid actor already felt he’d crested some hill as rave notices had also been published back in the States in key newspapers. Orson increasingly felt it was time to move on before he began to slide down the other side of the pinnacle in “increasingly claustrophobic” Dublin.

  “Where will you go, then?” Teagan asked.

  “New York, of course,” Orson said. “Or maybe Chicago first. My notices here have reached both those places, I’m told. I should now have a solid foothold in either city.”

  Orson turned his attention to Hector. Over the rim of his pint of Guinness, the actor said, “I came here to make my name. What brings you to Ireland, Hector?”

  The novelist tried for something glib. “I live in the Florida Keys. Just ducking hurricane season.”

  Orson swatted that aside. “Absurd. Why are you truly in Ireland, old man?”

  Old man. Even though was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, there was something about Orson that almost convinced you he was vaguely British by birth. Hector said, “Just flirting with a change. Needed distance from the island.”

  It was six years since Brinke’s death, and Key West still felt strangely empty to Hector. His friend Hemingway’s now permanent presence on the last Key only drove it in harder, evoking memories of 1924 Paris, when Brinke, Hem and Hector had potently roamed the City of Light as a trio of sleek and ambitious, experience-hungry up-and-comers.

  “We should go back to the States together,” Orson said. “Gentlemen of the road, so to s
peak. I don’t think they even have hurricanes in New York City.” He blinked, contemplating, then said, “Certainly they don’t in Chicago.”

  “When were you thinking of going back?” Hector nodded for another Guinness for himself.

  “End of February,” Orson said. “My stage commitments will be complete then.”

  Hector couldn’t explain why he was congenial to traveling with this young near stranger, but he felt something immediately clicked between them.

  Orson’s brown eyes glistened. “Can this schedule be made to work for you?”

  Hector accepted his fresh pint with its faint impression of a four-leaf clover floating in the foam. “Gives me more that a month to see more of Ireland,” he said. “Maybe I’ll even bump around Scotland a time. Fish a bit in those lochs.”

  A flash of lightning. Thunder rumbled and shook the glass. Orson grumbled, “My God, the weather here I surely won’t miss.”

  Teagan nodded in commiseration, looking as though the young man’s remark upon the weather came as a revelation, apparently not realizing she would be left to endure that weather long after the two Americans had moved on.

  Orson smiled at her and said, “Dublin’s fair ladies on the other hand? They will be much harder to part with.”

  ***

  “So, it went like that,” Hector said to Cassie. “We came home in the early spring after some time in England, and a brief time in Paris, which is still my favorite city in the world.”

  Cassie bit her bee-stung lower lip. “Almost sounds like a romantic idyll, the way you paint it. I mean, if you clearly weren’t such a legendary skirt-chaser.”

  “To be sure, I don’t have tendencies in that other direction,” Hector said. “Orson either. Anyway, things didn’t go as Orson had envisioned for him back then. All those theater doors here or in Chicago were anywhere near as open to him as Orson anticipated. So, after a few months, Orson got the itch to travel abroad again. I was pretty flush at the time and I’ve always liked to wander, to mosey. He went ahead to Morocco while I finished a novel. I met up with him a bit later, in Spain, like I told you. Hemingway had just published his bullfighting bible, Death in the Afternoon. Orson had the bullfighting bug from that book. Young Welles had it bad.”

  “So you two rogues went to Spain,” she prompted, seeming to sense some other tangent might otherwise loom.

  “So we went to Spain,” Hector said.

  “And there you met Mr. Rosenblum, and you took possession of the medallion,” Cassie said. “Tell me about that. It’s really what matters in the end, you know.”

  ***

  The young actor and elder author met up in Seville; they settled in Triana.

  Orson, eager to immerse himself in the culture, “to live among the common people of Spain” as he phrased it, put up in a little place above a brothel or “fuzz castle,” as he termed it.

  Hector had first chosen a slightly smarter hotel on the edge of the pottery district. There he took up with a dusky beauty with blue-black hair, named, of all things, Carmen. In Spain, between bars, bullfights and time lost lolling in the arms of his tempestuous, back-scratching Gypsy lover, Hector honored his pledge of tutoring Orson in the dubious art of fiction writing for the pulp magazines back in the States.

  Orson’s resulting sales were fewer and farther between than Hector’s, but they generated sufficient scratch to oil Orson’s working-class lifestyle. Incidentals beyond that Hector still covered for young Welles, an intimation of years of check covering on Hector’s part seemingly yet to come.

  They were in the city’s Gypsy quarter, sitting in a barra not far from Orson’s place above the brothel, savoring a sweating pitcher of sangria and plotting a path through the coming season’s bullfighting circuit to points further out in Spain when a haggard and panting old man collapsed onto the bench next to Orson.

  The sweating old man identified himself only as “Rosenblum.” He had gray-streaked black hair and olive skin; a prominent nose and skittish yet penetrating anthracite eyes. He said in Spanish, “What are your names you two young fools? Quickly! We have hardly any time, you know!”

  Confused but somehow game, Hector readily supplied his real name; Orson did likewise. Commotion at the entrance of the bar: the old man urged something wrapped in a paisley handkerchief into Hector’s hands. It felt like a metal disc, roughly the size of a baseball. It was heavy.

  “You must keep this safe,” the old man said. “I’ll make it more than worth your while. Meet me at noon tomorrow in front of the Giralda. Return this to me then and there. Do that and I’ll pay you both. I’ll make it well worth your trouble.”

  The old man didn’t wait for an answer. He rose unsteadily and said, “I’ll go out the back. When the men after me leave that way too, you should dash out the front. You run too, but the other way. Questions might be asked of others here. Then they will look for you like they do for me. Believe me—you don’t want to be identified or caught by the men chasing me.”

  As predicted, a band of strangers—five of them—swiftly passed by Hector and Orson. All of the men were blond and blue-eyed. One of them, very broad-shouldered and with closely cropped yellow hair, stood at least six-six.

  When they had passed, Orson wet his lips and said, “At the risk of sounding cowardly, I feel compelled to follow the old man’s urgings that we leave, Hector. I think we should do that and with real haste, just as he said.”

  Hector nodded. “No argument here.” They slipped out into the harsh afternoon glare, losing themselves in the crowd.

  ***

  Back in Orson’s room above the brothel, they at last got a look at the clunky metal disc the old man entrusted to them.

  CHAPTER 6

  DON’T CATCH ME

  Hector contemplated Cassie. He waved a hand, trailing cigarette smoke. “Anyway, we kept our promised noon appointment next day in front of the minaret. As you’ll probably have guessed, the old man didn’t show. So we tried again the next day and even the day after that. We looked for any word of the codger in the local papers. Then we simply stopped being stubborn. Orson and I pushed on from the city, chasing those bulls, just as we’d planned. Long about the summer of 1933, we at last came home. Orson and the medallion—this hunk of metal he thought theatrical looking—went to Chicago. I finally settled in again in Key West before moving to another island a while back. I live out Seattle way these days, more or less.”

  Cassie took a slow deep breath. She stroked a wave of dark hair back from her beaded forehead. The place was feeling a little close, Hector thought. The posh club was certainly more crowded than it had been when they arrived.

  They were also starting to draw stares from neighboring tables, Hector noticed. There was something about the quality of the amber stage lights as they further bronzed Cassie’s flesh, something about her own dewy sheen from the heat that burnished her skin, drawing stares and narrowed eyes.

  Back in the lobby, under the brighter, whiter lights, it seemed to Hector she’d easily enough passed for Caucasian. But here in candlelight and the reflected, many-hued footlights, tawny Cassie looked just possibly something else, even in Hector’s far gentler estimation. She was too exotic; too bronze for the lily-white bluebloods.

  He figured he was of-a-sudden flirting with some misperception of miscegenation and therefore near certain trouble with the club’s strapping bouncers. His sultry companion seemed to read his mind as she scanned their neighbors’ accusing eyes. She said softly, “I don’t want to cost you a haunt, cowboy. We should move on from here. I hate this joint, anyway. We’ll pick up the tale at my kind of place, okay?”

  “Your kind of place? Where would that be?” Hector refrained from testing an unworthy theory by guessing at possible nightspots elsewhere in the city, Harlem for one.

  She rose and took his hand. “It’s a new place, in Greenwich Village.” She flashed him that dimpled smile to which he feared he was already growing dangerously accustomed.

  And her mov
e to take his hand in hers, now that they were departing? That also set his mind to work on it all. But maybe she just wanted to rub their neighbors’ faces in their racist perceptions a little, Hector thought. If so, he gamely cooperated, wrapping an arm around her trim waist and pulling her closer.

  Another part of Hector wondered despite her dismissal of him as a “lady’s man” if she wasn’t perhaps actually taking an interest in him in that way.

  She said, “Come on, Mister Hector Lassiter. Let me broaden your horizons. Maybe I’ll at least give you something or someplace new and fresh to write about.”

  ***

  She gave their second cabbie of the night, a gruff and beetle-browed man named Moe, an address at number one Sheridan Square.

  Looking back through the rear window of the cab as they merged into traffic, Hector said, “Fairly certain we’re being followed. See that Chrysler Imperial, three cars back?”

  “I did,” Cassie said, “and I’m all but certain you’re right. But here’s the good news. Broad-minded as the place we’re going to is, even would-be Aryans will stand out in there like a tarantula on a fig leaf, so I think we’ll be just fine. At least until we eventually have to leave this next club.”

  This next club proved to be “Café Society,” a hot-spot just a few months old that featured decidedly non-white musicians performing for a mix of white and black clientele as well as a hearty contingent of lefty theater types.

  As they rolled up out front, Cassie squeezed Hector’s arm and said, “I already love this place, though it’s hardly been around any time at all. They tout it as ‘The Wrong Place for the Right People.’”