Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series)
By
Head Games
Toros & Torsos
Print the Legend
One True Sentence
El Gavilan
Nonfiction:
Art in the Blood
Rogue Males
Copyright © 2007 by Craig McDonald
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 978-0-615-44110-8
This novel is for
Tom Russell & Andrew Hardin
for supplying the soundtrack.
Dedicated to the memory of William Charles Sipe, Sr.
The strong men keep coming on,
They go down shot, hanged, sick, broken.
They live on fighting.
--- Carl Sandburg
Fifty years ago a man could go to Mexico or Central America and take his pick of a dozen wars, insurrections or marauding expeditions. But the rules changed and soldiers of fortune have to admit that freelance fighting is a thing of the past. The world has gone to hell.
--- Emil L. Holmdahl
Rakish in his eye patch. Pundit when sane ...
A reminder: men were men then.
--- James Ellroy
Dead or alive.
--- George W. Bush
Book One ---
1957: THE LAND OF HOPE AND DREAMS
Book Two ---
1967, THE LAND OF DREAD AND FEAR
Book Three ---
1970: THE WASTELAND
Supplemental Materials/Previews
---
1957:
THE
LAND OF HOPE
AND DREAMS
We were sitting in a backroom of a cantina on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, three drinks in, when Bill Wade reached into the dusty duffel bag he had tucked under our table and plunked down the Mexican general's head.
The skull was wrapped in a Navajo rug. A few patches of mummified flesh clung to the ivory-and caramel-colored bone. Some moustache hair was stubbornly hanging in there. Could have been any Indian's/Mexican's skull --- but for that too-recognizable, too-prognathic jawbone. That famous underbite trumped any of
my
doubts.
I took a swig of bad tequila, winced, and reached across the table, flipping the corners of the Indian rug up and over the severed head.
"For Christ's sake," said Bud Fiske, the too-young poet sent to interview me, "stow that thing, won't you?"
Wade glanced at Fiske and then back at me. I nodded and said, "Bud is right. Get the head the hell back in that bag, you crazy bastard."
Old Wade frowned and bundled up the bandit's skull. He shoved the head back into the duffel bag, then took a shot of whiskey. He shook his own head, pouting. "Jesus Christ, Hector," he said, "I could use your help with this thing. There's real money to be had here. Thought you'd understand if anyone would."
Long memories and thick wallets:
Oh, I understand 'em
.
"I get it, Wade," I said. "But I also know you don't sit on this side of the border, flaunting the stolen skull of General Francisco fucking Villa --- even behind closed doors."
Wade: color him one reckless, wall-eyed cocksucker.
The bandit had been dead for decades. It was something like thirty years since Villa was gunned down leaving a wedding. Yet you could impale Pancho Villa's rotting skull on a pike and drive through El Paso, or, especially, through Columbus, New Mexico and find yourself cheered as a hero.
But dare to display that skull on the south side of the borderlands? Well, that was something akin to suicide.
South of the border, they crucified people on still-standing telegraph poles.
They'd slice off the bottoms of your feet and set you out a few miles in the desert.
Or, in the rainy season, maybe they'd just stake you out over a spiky maguey plant. Those suckers are hard and sharp and they grow several inches in the night. There is no other term for it but "dusk-to-dawn impalement."
But now the bandit's skull sat under our table between the feet of Eskin "Bud" Fiske, aspiring, myopic poet and my latest would-be interviewer; Bill Wade, drunkard, soldier-of-fortune and con man; and me, Hector Lassiter, pulp writer-turned-crime writer, turned-lately-screenwriter.
Bud Fiske, this jug-eared, scrawny kid, had been flown down to New Mexico by
True
to profile me. For four days or thereabouts, he had dogged my heels as drinking companion, sometimes driver, coat-holder and maybe half-assed worthy Boswell.
Wade was a twenty-year fugitive up north. Wade heard word I'd crossed the bridge again. He knew all of my favorite hotels and bordellos on the south side of the border. He found me easily enough.
Wade had this proposition.
So I bit ... mostly just to give young Bud something for his article other than samples of my lavish boozing, brawling and whoring.
I never saw Pancho's head coming, though.
The waitress brought Wade another watered-down whiskey --- he was rationing himself. She frowned at me. I'd known her for maybe thirty years. She used to be something to look at. In her prime, she inspired at least half-a-dozen folk songs, cowboy ballads and
corridos
. But in the last fifteen years every
vaquero
and fruit picker in a fifty-mile radius had had her at least twice. Her black hair was streaked with gray and she was missing an important tooth. Faleena banged down Wade's drink and limped out, slamming the door behind her, closing out the music from the bar --- "Volver, Volver," I think. I shook my head at the waitress' exit, then glared at Wade. If she'd come in when that severed head was sitting on our table...
Through the back window, I heard low moans ... cries of feral cats screwing in the dark ... the
grita
of some old Mexican woman, chilled by
something
.
I heard something else, too --- something that sounded a bit like a shotgun being prepped.
Or maybe not.
It was outside, anyway.
Wade slammed his shot of whiskey. He belched, then said, "Prescott still wants the skull, Hector."
"Prescott" would be Prescott Bush, current United States Senator and the bastard alleged to have engineered the theft of Pancho Villa's head.
Here's a capsule history from your hack writer:
1878: Doroteo Arango was born in Durango, Mexico.
1895: Doroteo's sister was raped. Her brother killed her attacker and became a fugitive.
Five or six years later, Arango rechristened himself "Pancho Villa" and became a Robin Hood-like hero to the Mexican poor, and an eventual revolutionary.
To this day, Villa remains a kind of hero of mine.
Indeed, "General" Villa was an American media darling --- for a time.
In 1913, Black Jack Pershing was sent down south to take Pancho's measure. There's a famous photo of the two standing together at Fort Bliss, beaming. Over one of Villa's shoulders, you get a glimpse of Rodolfo Fierro --- one world-class sociopath and first-rate cocksucker. He hastened Pancho's fall from grace.
But I get ahead of myself.
The Wilson administration, for reasons that at best remain stupefying, eventually elected to piss all over Villa. (The bastards had already executed Emiliano Zapata. "It is better," Zapata said, "to die on your feet than to live on your knees.")
In 1915, Woodrow Wilson and Company crawled in bed with Venustiano Carranza.
I'm a crime writer, so please trust me on this: you do not want to do business with any man who wears blue-tinted lenses and answers to the name "Venustiano."
Villa famously took his American rejection very badly.
Pancho was right to do so.
But just how badly he took that rejection remains a mystery that shapes history to this day.
Maybe --- just
maybe
--- Pancho shrugged it off.
But the so-called "nattering nabobs of negativity" will try to convince you otherwise. They'll make a case that Pancho Villa made the first and only successful foreign military attack against the United States mainland.
I could never make myself believe that Francisco Villa personally raided New Mexico in March of 1916 and killed all those folks in Columbus.
But the slaughter of all those American civilians by whomever?
Well, that triggered the "Punitive Expedition," which I was, shamefacedly, a party to --- a callow kid who caught a growth spurt and lied about his age. They sent Jack Pershing back into Mexico within days of the attack on Columbus, this time to take Villa, "dead or alive."
Okay:
yeah
, sure --- I rode behind Black Jack Pershing.
Sure,
I reluctantly chased Pancho's shadow through the Mexican desert for nearly a year before that pinched-faced politician Woodrow Wilson shut down the show in February 1917 and shipped us over to Europe to be cannon fodder and trench filler.
Here's the thing --- crusades change.
The year was 1923: Long retired and gone to fat, Pancho Villa was gunned down by unknown assassins. Just his continued living, even peacefully, was a presumed threat to someone. Many claim President Warren G. Harding sent a hired gun down to Mexico to take Villa out. Something about oil and American business holdings. Rings true.
Pancho Villa's last recorded words: "Don't let it end like this ... tell them I said
something
."
But that was all that the poor bastard said.
In February 1926, Pancho's grave was robbed and his head was chopped off.
A fabled unfound treasure of Villa's and his missing head became linked in folklore and Tex-Mex myth.
Some claim a map was hidden inside Pancho's stolen skull. Others claim that a map was tattooed on Villa's rotting scalp.
In theory, hell, either could be true.
But there were other myths attached to Pancho's head.
They actually arrested two men for stealing the general's never-recovered skull --- Emil Holmdahl and a fella name of Alberto Corral. Holmdahl told the
federales
the skull was already on its way back to Columbus, New Mexico ... maybe as some kind of morbid recompense.
I vaguely knew Holmdahl way back then. He was an alleged spy, a mercenary, a fleeting captain in Villa's army. But Holmdahl was a turncoat flavor of cocksucker and he'd soon enough flipped sides to serve as a paid guide for Black Jack and the rest of us in our 1916 hunt for Villa.
Men shouldn't turn on men that way. Fight alongside a man and then take money to hunt him? That notion goes down hard and thick with me.
Lean and prematurely white-haired, Emil was more than a little reminiscent of that pussy-whipped communist Dash Hammett, my equally treacherous old
Black Mask Magazine
stablemate.
Holmdahl allegedly stole the skull for Prescott Bush, who purportedly wanted the head to use for dark rituals undertaken by Yale's Skull and Bones Society. They say that many years before, Prescott personally stole Geronimo's skull for more of the Skull and Bones' satanic shenanigans.
Senator Bush was said to have paid evil Emil twenty-five grand to pillage Pancho's grave in Panteon de Dolores.
True or not, Villa's head remained, at least officially,
lost
.
"Inflation being what it is, he'll now pay eighty grand for the skull," Wade said. "I'll give you half. All you have to do is take it back across the border with you. Bush will have train tickets waiting. First class. You just take the skull on up to Connecticut and personally turn it over to Senator Bush. 'Cause, you know, I can't go back ... if the bastards ever got their hands on me..."
Heh
. Very tempting. It would likely be a lark.
And, if Bud Fiske could be persuaded not to get too detailed in terms of the eventual recipient of the skull --- and the skull's true identity? Well, what a hell of a profile
True
would have from young Bud. His resulting article could enhance my already bloated legend as a hell-raising hack writer.
But I played coy ... just trying to keep myself interested. It was a harder task every year, as --- as a wise man said --- "the ground pulled harder" at me.
I sat back in my chair and laced my fingers across my chest. I contemplated the bullfighter's cape and crossed picador's sharp-ended
banderillas
mounted on the wall between flanking
castoreños
.
"Hell, I dunno." As I said this, I glanced over at young Bud. My kid poet was sitting there breathless --- half-fascinated, half-sickened by what he might become a party to --- this dark deal threatening to enfold him. "Me and Bud, we've gotta get ourselves out to California, Wade. I have a meeting with Orson Welles about a script gig. I'm already running behind schedule. And getting that rotting sucker across the border, Wade? Well, 'half' seems hardly fair. Hardly seems commensurate to the risk."
Bill Wade leaned across the table, face and ears red. "Jesus, Hector, why don't you pull that famous old Peacemaker of yours and just rob me outright, you son of a bitch."
I smiled and tipped my chair down on all four legs. I slapped his beefy arm (poor bastard was running to middle-aged flab). "Naw, Wade. Half is actually more than generous. I was just having some sport. How did poor Prescott lose Pancho's head first time around? I thought---"
Crash!
The door slammed open --- suddenly hanging half off its hinges. Four
federales
crowded through. Each of the soldiers was toting a shotgun. Pretty clearly, they aimed --- really aimed --- to shoot first. Shotgun slaughter.
Wade was an old campaigner --- a seasoned soldier of fortune who could take care of himself. So I reached out to push young Fiske to the floor. But Bud, bless him, was already moving. I tipped over our table, crouched low behind it and whipped out my Colt '73 Peacemaker.
The first shotgun blast vaporized roughly half my cover --- splinters of wood peppered my legs and left arm.
Sometimes, in the fog of attack, you don't have the luxury of decision: you're hit, and you swing back --- half-blind and enraged. Sometimes, in that white rage, you don't swing wisely.
I fired twice. The tunic of one of the
federales
blossomed red. He collapsed, falling back against one of his partners, fouling that fucker's shot.
Christ
. Found myself another axiom:
When you murder a federale, you know you're fully committed
.
Wade broke his chair across the face of another of the feds. The chair was hewn from mesquite wood --- really tough stuff --- maybe more than enough to kill the bastard. Wade was reaching for his piece when one of the two
federales
still standing raised his shotgun and rendered poor Wade every bit as headless as Pancho Villa.
I slew Wade's slayer with a single shot between the eyes.
The last of the
federales
was drawing a bead on me. It was looking like lights-out time for Hector Mason Lassiter.
But then the Mexican's arms flew back, spastic-like. The shotgun flew as the
federale
fell to the floor. Bud Fiske, my poet/Boswell, had grabbed one of the picador's spikes from the wall and driven that wicked stick into the Mexican officer's right eye --- straight on through and right out the back.
I patted down what was left of Wade. I grabbed car keys, wallet, a small notebook and Wade's chrome-plated .45. I scooped up the duffel bag and said, "Follow me, kid."
We crashed through the back window, duffel bag first to take the dusty glass. Bud was hard on my heels, toting the impaled
federale's
shotgun. I sent him back in for my half-empty tequila bottle.
The night air was like a tonsil-teasing soul kiss --- the rare scent of desert rain carried on the wind and heat lightning roaming the horizon.
Bill Wade's wheels were easy enough to spot. Wade had always favored Mercurys. But it had been a long time since he could cross the border for a replacement. This one was a vintage '49 Merc, low-slung and pimp purple with red and white candy-stripe upholstery. I checked the glove compartment and thrust arms under the front and back seats, groping. Bud stood there wide-eyed, knees shaking and teeth-chattering.
I popped the trunk and found two identical duffel bags --- dead ringers for the one I'd carried from the cantina. I indulged a hunch and grabbed both bags, gathering them up with the third and stowing them in the backseat of my '57 Bel Air.
Bud was standing there, shivering. It wasn't that cold yet. I placed my callused hands on his sloped and bony shoulders and squeezed. I searched his scared eyes and felt bad for what I saw. I smiled and said, "First man you ever put down, son?" I hedged, "Not to say he was necessarily dead, Bud."
Fiske's eyes were skittish. He said, "First I'm pretty sure of."
I smiled and patted his cheek. "Some compelling ambiguity in your phrasing there, scribe of mine. Just like all good writers. Fair enough. You had my back, son. Saved my life. I won't forget that, Bud. If you'd done anything else, or if you'd done nothing, I'd be dead right now. Sometimes we don't have the luxury of choosing the fights we can win, son --- the fights find us, win or lose. So you fight like hell to stay alive. Instinct. Don't let it eat at you."
Bud was wearing a black tie emblazoned with a busty slut casting a pair of dice. Sucker was swanky. Hated like hell to do it, but there was nothing else for it. I loosened the knot, grabbed the fat end and tugged.
Bud said, "What are you doing?"
I relieved him of the half-empty tequila bottle and wadded in his tie. Now Bud was looking freshly concerned. Fishing my sports jacket's pocket for my Zippo, I said,
"Federales
tend to travel in fifties, Bud. We sorely need a distraction ... and a scorched-earth trail, I think." I flicked the Zippo open one-handed, right to left, nice and slick. I touched off the dice-throwing lady's big breasts, opened the door of Wade's Mercury and cast the bottle at the dash.
There was this big
whoosh!
And it was
adios
to Wade's sweet ride.
I took the shotgun from Bud, shouldered it and took aim. I put one barrel to the front license plate and another to the back, just to make sure there'd be no tracing of plates. I tossed the shotgun into the smoldering front seat.
I clapped my interviewer's arm. "C'mon Bud, before she blows." I tossed him the keys to my Chevy. "You drive, son ... it'll help take your mind off the bedlam." I didn't volunteer the rest --- lately, my night vision was inexplicably poor.
As Bud drove us north, I checked the spare duffel bags. Two more skulls --- but these lacked that telltale underbite.
Canards
.
Clearly, Wade was playing some marks ... some Pancho-Villa-head version of three-card monte, maybe.
The light was too dim for me to check the notebook for clues to the identities of Wade's intended pigeons.
The compartment of my Chevy flashed with orange light. The Mercury's gas tank must have blown.
Bud split his attention between me and the dusty one-lane trailing on up toward the border. "That waitress, the one with the limp," he said, "I kinda sensed you two have a history. Will she finger you?"
I pushed a button on the dash and the ragtop roof released and commenced its retreat behind the back seat. The desert air was cool across our faces. Could really smell the rain on the wind now. I growled over the wind sheer, "You're sharp, kiddo. Got a good eye on you and that's a necessary writer's trait. Faleena's served me for thirty years, at least --- longer than you've been around. Served me drinks and more --- when she was still pretty --- as you've probably surmised. But she doesn't know my real name. So there's no sweat there, kiddo."
"How do you think those soldiers knew to look for Wade and the head?"
"Well, Bud, that is troubling. That one's got even me wondering. But Wade was an alcoholic. Maybe, in his cups, he talked to the wrong son of a bitch. But there's another possibility. Prescott Bush, the senator up north? He's got himself a lot of ties to U.S. intelligence ... could easily enough divine Wade's unhappy situation --- I mean the federal warrant out on Wade. Bush would learn easy enough --- particularly after Wade made contact --- where to look for him. Why pay eighty-grand for something this hot when you can just take it?"
"What about the border? We gotta get back across."
I winked at Fiske. It was vintage me --- cocky and awash in blarney. "Well, I'm not sweating that and neither should you, Bud," I said. "The Mex' cops will be a few hours sorting out that mess at the cantina. We'll be across the bridge by then, back where they can't fuck with tough gringos like thee and me."
Bud shook his head, palpably dubious. So call my poet/interviewer smart, too. I shook loose a Pall Mall and fired it up. I'd yet to see Fiske smoke, but said, "You want one, son?"
Bud nodded, grateful. "Hell yeah." I passed him mine and lit another. God bless the windproof technology of those geniuses at Zippo --- suckers were doing hero's work.
Bud suppressed a cough, then blew smoke from the right side of his mouth. He asked, "That really Pancho Villa's head?"
"Pretty sure it is."
"I remember in my research for your bio reading that you chased Villa with General Pershing, so I guess you'd know. Those other bags --- what's in 'em?"
"More heads."
"Jesus Christ."
"Yeah, Wade was a schemin', me thinks."
I checked our dust. There was a guttering glow back there. We were probably too far away for the light to be coming from the burning Mercury. But it might be nothing. All the same, I reloaded my Colt.
Bud said, "Trouble, Hector?"
"Naw, Bud. Just being like a good Boy Scout."
That light behind us was vibing menace --- and getting closer.
But so was the border.
Bud kept fretting. I fiddled with the radio. President Eisenhower was going on about something regarding a high school in the old south. Like most, I liked Ike --- but not at this hour. So I found some mariachi music and cranked it up loud.
Just for kicks, to lighten the mood, like Pancho Villa fleeing Columbus, New Mexico, I whooped like some Apache whose blood was up and fired a single shot in the air.
With any luck, maybe the falling bullet would kill the bastard driving the car I was fairly certain was following us.
The border agent was one weary-assed wage-slave. It was all routine and rote with this fella. He asked, "Anything to declare?"
My back was pressed to the passenger seat door and my legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. I smiled and hoisted the duffel bag. "Just the head of Pancho Villa." I blew two perfect smoke rings.
The agent snorted and smiled. "Good one, Slick. Second time I've heard that one this shift. Hope you didn't bring back the spic clap with the bandit's head." He waved us through.
Bud Fiske said, "Where to, chief?"
"My place." I smiled and reached across and feinted one at his chin. "We're in my country now, Bud. Feel free to put your foot to the firewall."
I rarely returned home during that time. There were too many wicked-bad memories crowding my too-empty, haunted house. I had the cash --- paperback reprint royalties, movie money, cock-and bullfighting winnings --- so it was a lot of hotel time for me in those days. But I held onto the hacienda, unable to let go even if I couldn't sleep in it anymore. It remained a beautiful old place --- a posh pad in La Mesillia; two stories of stucco with a wrap-around second floor porch, hard by the Rio Grande.
We rolled up the crushed-oyster-shell driveway; Bud was still at the wheel. I handed Wade's chrome .45 butt-first to my latest interviewer. Bud looked at it, then thrust the rod down his pants. "Expecting more trouble, Hector?"
"Just being careful, Bud." I checked the matching bags, looking for the head with the profound underbite. I popped the trunk, lugged out the spare tire, and dropped the bag with the real bandit's head into the wheel well. I rolled the spare tire out of sight behind a stand of cottonwood. Bud slammed shut the trunk. I handed him one of the two remaining duffels. He handled it just like what it was --- a bag containing a severed human head.
I keyed us in and stashed my duffel in the coat closet. Bud flipped on some lights, then whistled low. "Beautiful," he said.
Bud trailed me through my house to my study. The walls were lined with books. One wall was filled with my various first editions and translations --- French, Spanish, even one in fucking Yiddish. I sometimes wonder how much of what I wrote remains in those non-English versions. How do killers and rats and whores and private dicks "travel" in the Romance languages? But the French seem to love me, just the same. Those suckers have always gotten noir.
I took the third duffel from my interviewer and deposited it behind the leather couch by the fireplace.
Bud zeroed in on the oil paintings over the bar. One was of Dolores, my daughter who never saw four; the other was of her mother, Maria. Both were about a year dead ... Dolores a bit longer. I'd sensed Bud had heard some of the wicked rumors ... that he was burning to ask me about my girls. Fortunately for him, he'd had the good sense these past few days not to press. But I knew for sure that he had heard the whispers when he pointed at my daughter --- and just my daughter --- and said again, "Beautiful."
I met his gaze, bit my lip and nodded. "Thanks," I said. Bud got my unstated message:
Don't you dare go further
. I slipped behind the bar and fetched a couple of big tumblers. "Like the man said," I said, "'You've got to find what you love and let it kill you.' So we drink it neat here, Bud Fiske. What's your poison,
hombre
?"
"I'd kill --- die --- for Scotch," the young poet said.
"Blended or single malt?"
"God, single malt if you've got it."
"Good man." I broke a seal on a fresh bottle of Talisker and poured four fingers apiece. We tapped glasses and hissed together at the burn. I topped off our glasses and said, "Now my faithful Indian companion, we look this over." I slipped Bill Wade's notebook from my blazer's breast pocket and tore it in half. I passed the back half to Bud and started flipping through the remaining portion. I squinted. It was suddenly hard to focus. I moved the notepad back and forth, trying to find a range where I could read it. Bud frowned. "When was the last time you ate?"
"Maybe noon."
"Blood sugar. You should have your sugar checked ... you may be toeing up to diabetes."
Toeing
. Good one. My feet had certainly been hurting enough in recent months.
Great
.
Bud set off in search of my kitchen. "See if I can find something for you to eat," he said over his shoulder. "That'll help."
Yeah
, I thought,
good luck finding anything
. I had fired the help six months before --- probably the last time any grocery shopping was done.
I dug around in my desk's center drawer and found a magnifying glass. Like some dipsomaniacal/diabetic Sherlock Holmes, I started scanning pages covered in Wade's cramped handwriting. There were a couple of longish entries on Emil L. Holmdahl, the alleged head thief. Seemed the sucker was maybe still north of the turf. That could be good, or it could be bad. Holmdahl's last known whereabouts: Van Nuys, California.
There were longish notes on some Yale fraternities --- not the Skull and Bones Society, but some Greek outfits.
I retrieved the half of the notebook I'd handed Bud and looked it over. There were several pages covered with notes regarding something called the "Wednesday Group" --- some organization based in El Paso.
I heard breaking glass.
I stowed the notebook's halves under the bar and slipped out my Colt, headed for the kitchen. I didn't quite make the door of my study when Bud flew through, propelled face first.
Three shotgun-toting young guys --- roughly Bud's own age --- followed him in. All three leveled their shotguns at my crotch.
Nodding, I slowly put my Colt down on the bar. Then I raised my hands.
The intruders sure weren't toughs.
Hell, they looked like college kids who had raided their dilettante daddies' gun cabinets.
I've been on the wrong end of more guns than a man has a right to face and remain standing. But you learn some things, staring down the iron at all those eyes of those that have you in their bead.
You just maybe get good at judging.
These young clowns were strictly sad amateur hour, I decided. They wouldn't shoot us. But they sure could be clumsy --- or easily spooked. I carefully bent down to help Bud to his feet. I was relieved to see that they'd stripped Fiske of Wade's .45. I looked at Bud and whispered, "Follow my lead. No goddamned heroics this time, son."
One of the trio was wearing a sweater vest and a bow tie. Two others were wearing jackets emblazoned with Greek letters. I smiled, pointed, and said, "Yale, Class of...?"
One slick winked and tipped his shotgun barrel up against his shoulder, casual-like, as though he was standing sentry at the fraternity house. He had blond hair and world class dimples. He smirked and said, "Class of '59."
Bud sneered back and droaned, fairy-like, "Oh, go
Har
vard."
"Easy," I said to Fiske. I moved to the bar, hands again up, and retrieved my drink. I handed the other glass to Bud. I took a swig and said, "You fellas follow us all the way from Ciudad Juárez?"
Blondie smiled. "Wasn't too hard."
I shrugged and waved a hand. "Well, we didn't try to make it hard, old son. Though I'm shocked you got out of the cantina with pointdexter there in his sweater vest and bow tie.
Chee-rist
on a crutch..."
The scrawny, bow-tied fucker's ears surged red and his feet shifted nervously. I had this epiphany --- he might actually be provoked to shoot me. So it was change-up time. "You lads working for Prescott Bush?"
Blondie again: "Hell no. He's old Skull and Bones Society. They've been after Villa's head forever. We're Sigma Chi. It'll send those S&B's over the edge when they learn we've got Villa's head. And now we get that sucker for free. The dead geezer back in taco land was gonna charge us one thousand dollars for Villa's skull. But we'll just take it from you. Now where is it?"
Bud's started getting into it again: "Don't do it Hector. They're all bluff. 'Specially bow tie there. Fuckin' pillow-biter, I 'spect."
I had furnishings to think about. And I was getting kind of fond of Bud. As bow tie raised his shotgun, pointing it at my interviewer, I stepped between them. "Naw boys, easy now." I looked back over my shoulder: "Ain't worth it, Bud. Win some, lose some. Stand down, Fiske --- I mean that, goddamn it."
I jerked my head in the direction of the leather sofa. "The head is in the duffel bag, behind the couch. Take it and get your frat asses out of my house."
Blondie hurdled over my couch like the track star he probably was. He balanced the bag on the back of the couch, opened it and looked inside. He surely tried to put himself across as some kind of hard case, but I could see him swallowing hard, breathing through his mouth, trying to keep himself from puking all over the mummified head. "It's jake," he squeaked out in a girl's voice. "Let's roll, boys."
The trio backed out. The pointdexter, the last out the door, hollered, "Sigma Chi forever, you fucking assholes!"
I laughed and raised my drink and said, "Go, Sigs." I took a big gulp of single malt. Ah, whiskey --- the milk of short-term mercy.
The front door slammed, then tires squealed in the night.
Bud and I were into our second round of single malt when I heard the door open again.
It was four more college boys. These boys carried baseball bats. I didn't even stand up ... just gestured with my drink and arched an eyebrow. I said, "Zeta Psi?"
The biggest one --- a footballer probably, maybe a linebacker, said, "Hell no: Delta Kappa Epsilon."
"Terrific," I growled. "Don't break anything. It's in a bag in the hall closet, by the front door. Stick it to those Skull and Boners for Hector Lassiter." I toasted their backs.
More squealing tires. This time I struggled up. I pulled my car into the garage and locked it down. I doused the lights and double bolted the front door. Place looked abandoned again. We retreated to my windowless library.
Bud brought me a plate of crackers smeared with tuna fish, mayonnaise and diced pickles and a bowl of tomato soup. He had recovered his new .45 and shoved that sucker back down his pants. "What now, Hector? What do we do with that real head?"
I chewed, talking through my food. "First thing? Push that rod a few inches left. You don't want it to accidentally discharge and blow off your cock. That said, there's eighty grand to be made here, Bud. Maybe more, bard of mine. I'm having a hard time ignoring that. How about you? You in?"
"Gotta make all that back across the border matter for something, I guess," young Fiske said. It was false bravado --- he was visibly shaken from having killed that
federale.
But I loved him for his bluster. Bud said, "Forty grand might do the trick." He was shaping up to be a good lad.
"Then, Bud," I said, "I say we finish this bottle. Then we get some shovels and we head toward Orogrande. There's an old Mex cemetery down there. Migrant farmworkers killed by some long-ago twister, circa 1926. Makes 'em roughly the right vintage. We're suddenly runnin' low on spare skulls. Attrition rate is too fuckin' high tonight and God only knows how many fraternities are angling for Pancho's head. So I'm thinkin' we need a refill. And I think we should be properly drunk in order to see to those dark needs."
I checked Bud's haunted eyes: He was hangin' in there ... even looked game for it. My kind of poet.
We were a quarter mile from
casa de Lassiter
when the stench of burning rubber reached us. There was a strange glow on the horizon. We drew closer and saw black, spiraling plumes of smoke.
It was a car fire --- a ragtop something with its top down.
The side panel of the burning car was riddled with bullet holes --- like someone strafed it to blow out the tires and kill the driver, get the car stopped. Three flaming bodies remained inside. Three smoking mouths were opened wide in final agony.
A too-familiar and now empty duffel bag had been discarded on the roadside. I moved around to the back of the car and peered through the flames. The bumper sticker on the now-blackening rear fender read "Sigma Chi."
Then I saw the discarded, rotting and now half-broken skull. The false head didn't fool the murderous bastard who had killed and torched the frat boys.
Well, well
.
Some machine gun-toting, car-torching headhunter was lurking out here in the sand and sage and saguaro --- a real stone-cold killer --- steadfastly looking for Pancho's real lid. Probably, just like me, he also had eyes on Senator Prescott Bush's eighty grand.
This was all a lark up to now --- like one of my straight-to-paperback, written-for-walking-around money "capers."
But now, maybe, our lives depended on seeing this mess through.
I slapped Bud on the back. "Let's roll,
hombre
. We've got us some graves to rob."
It was starting to drizzle, so we leaned into the shovels --- get that wicked work done before the rain turned the graveyard to soup. Not that it was particularly hard work. These poor Mexicans were buried as cheaply as they could be; blankets for boxes and planted so shallow I was shocked the coyotes hadn't dug 'em up long before us. We got lucky and found one skull with a pretty impressive underbite. We'd save that one for a special occasion.
Lightning slashed across the sky, illuminating young Bud and me against the rickety crosses. Christ, I felt like Colin Clive in Franken-fucking-stein.
I tossed aside my machete and pressed the heels of my hands to the small of my back. Too many bones cracked --- some kind of new, dubious record. "Four heads," I said, stretching and wincing. "That should do it, Bud." We wrapped the heads up in old Indian blankets and set them in the trunk of my Chevy.
Bud presumed to take the wheel seat. I pressed the button and the canopy rose over us. I clipped down the top and we opened up the windows, angling the wings. Big chunky drops of rain peppered my Chevy with leopard-like dust spots.
Bud glanced over at me. "You seeing better?"
"Yeah. Better."
"Definitely blood-sugar," he said.
"I should have it checked."
He nodded. "You should." I knew if I didn't see a doctor soon, Bud would ensure that I did. He asked, "Where to now,
kemo sabe?"
"El Paso, Tonto," I said. I rooted around my pocket and fished out the halves of Wade's notebook. "Something called 'The Wednesday Group' that I want to look into."
We were tooling south on 54, fringing Fort Bliss. Bud saw the signs and said, "Tell me about the Pershing Expedition, chasing Villa. We haven't covered any of that. I'm still on
True's
nickel."
"Hard to take notes when you're driving, Bud."
"I've got a good memory. I'll get the gist of it down in El Paso."
I shrugged and resigned myself to another trip down shitty, old memory lane. "Not much on that front to confide, Bud. It was all a kind of a great waste of time. National pride was at stake --- the first and only successful strike at the mainland U.S. by a foreign power couldn't go unanswered. But it's a hopeless notion, chasing one man in a wasteland in a country not your own --- real Don Quixote stuff. Mostly, it was a practice run for the Great War. Do you know, the Mexicans really made the first extensive use of trench warfare in the revolution? Did you know that, Bud? Airplanes got their first workout down there. Machine guns, too. And, of course, the fuckin' krauts were arming the Mexicans, trying to open up a front on our southern border to keep us out of Europe. It wasn't the show --- World War I was the show. The Pershing Expedition was just a then-unrecognized dress rehearsal."
Bud nodded and glanced over at me. "You keep in touch with any of your old crew?"
"Naw. Hell no. We're talking forty years ago. And a lot of my 'old crew' never made it out of those trenches in Europe. You know, I spent too damned much of my life with Black Jack Pershing. George S. Patton was there in Mexico, too. What a world-class asshole he was." I stretched and massaged my tingling right leg. "There was a fella, name of Lee Ellroy, who I knew pretty well back when. He ended up being Rita Hayworth's business agent. Lives out in California now, I think. Another couple of guys, Frank Weygandt and Cleon Corzilius; they're both back in Ohio, now. But that's about it. Oh, and Holmdahl. He's the guy they arrested for stealing Pancho's head in 1926."
Bud smiled. "Man, I gotta hear about him."
"Not so much I can tell there, either. He's one of those shadowy guys who shapes history and leaves no real footprints. Pure mercenary. Did a tour in the Philippine Islands. Spent some time in the
rurales,
before the revolution. But he's like a windsock, least ways to my mind. When Juárez fell, he jumped ship and joined Madero, the fella who pulled Villa into the Revolution. So Holmdahl served with Villa and later with Obregón, when Obregón was doing better than Pancho. After the attack on Columbus, when we were all dispatched with Black Jack to hunt Villa, Emil turned up as one of our guides. He was arrested in '26 for desecrating Pancho Villa's grave. Some rich Texas friends, they say, got him sprung. But Pancho's skull was never found." I lit a Pall Mall and stared off toward the Rio Grande. "Allegedly, Holmdahl stole Pancho's head for twenty-five-grand paid him by Prescott Bush, that Connecticut senator who they say belongs to that Skull and Bones Society at Yale that all those frat boys are trying to show up."
Fiske chewed his lip. He grinned. "Yeah, the senator with our damned eighty-grand. Why don't we just call him up and do this deal?"
"Well Bud, because someone just fricasseed our frat friends and left the fake skull behind. Someone in the know and with a machine gun, near as I can tell. And, like I said earlier, Prescott has deep ties to the intelligence community. And beyond that, I don't know him from Adam. We'd be best to try to grasp the lay of the land before we make that critical contact, don'tcha think?"
"Makes sense, put that way." Bud's skittish eyes checked the rearview mirror. His caution couldn't hurt, but I'd been watching pretty closely. We had no tail I could spot.
Bud said, nervous-like, "On that note, I wonder how the boys of Delta Kappa Epsilon are doing?"
"Gotta be better than the Sigs," I said.
It went like that to El Paso --- whistling through the graveyard conversation, slapping windshield wipers and the roar of that Turbo-Fire V-8. Just a couple of writers tearing through the desert in a car whose trunk was filled with severed human heads.
El Paso: there was nothing there --- damned near literally.
The Wednesday Group turned out to be some kind of social club of tony Texas Republicans. A feel-good coffee klatch or some such to bolster the spirits of the GOP House minority. Some of its members, a local historian told Bud and me, were reputed to have been among those who leaned on the Mexican government (or paid it, more likely) to release Emil Holmdahl so many years ago. But it was, on balance, a dead end.
On the other hand, we had been asking a lot of questions around town --- and raising eyebrows.
Now, as we moseyed through this shithole town, we began getting looks.
Hmm
.
I indulged a hunch and hit the hardware store where I bought four old carpetbags. We ambled back to my Chevy and snuck a false-Pancho head into one of the bags. I stashed the others in the trunk.
"We'll take this fella with us," I told Bud. "Just in case."
"Where we going?"
"Newspaper office. We're still in border country, so if the stuff is anywhere, it's apt to be here. Let's look up some old clippings. Refresh my memory on that grave robbing."
We found an old tearsheet from
The El Paso Herald Post
dated Feb. 8, 1926.
It was breathless stuff --- the purple prose of some hack writer who'd clearly scented something he thought might be a story to build a yellow-journalism career upon.
Headlines and subheads:
VILLA'S BODY IS ACCUSER IN GRIM CASE
---------------------------------
American Soldier of Fortune
Jailed Following Grave Robbery
---------------------------------------
BANDIT'S HEAD HAS VANISHED
---------------------------------------
Believe Decapitation Was Made
For Sale To Some Institution
1926: Emil Holmdahl strayed across the border for what was termed "a prospecting and hunting trip." He had a crony along for the ride --- some Angelino going by the handle of Alberto Corral.
Feb. 5: Emil and Alberto made a Friday-night sortie into Parral, Chihuahua to crack open Villa's grave. Bad news for Emil and Alberto; their snooping around and the many graceless questions they had posed about Pancho Villa's grave in previous days had not gone unnoticed. A caretaker told all and ID'd the "ghoulish head snatchers."
Emil and Alberto also had it tougher than Bud and me on the grave-robbing front. They had to chip through concrete to do their "wretched work."
The AP article went on:
"No satisfactory explanation has been ascribed for the gruesome decapitation, although a note left with the body said the head was to be sent to Columbus, N.M., scene of the bandit raid in 1916 that resulted in the American Punitive Expedition.
"Many here, however, believe the arch killer's head was filched from the tomb for surreptitious sale to some institution ... Conditions about the grave offered small aid to solution of the mystery except it must have taken a number of strong men to dislodge the weighty concrete covering slab. Liquor bottles and corks smelling of pungent chemicals found near the grave are unaccounted for. The body was left partly exposed to view, apparently having been moved only enough for the decapitators to do their work. Villa was buried here in 1923, following his death at the hands of some disgruntled henchmen."
Bud whistled low. "
Outré
. And some real over-the-top prose there."
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. "Like you said. You know, a part of me thought maybe old Wade was full of shit. But this..." My observation hung there, unfinished.
I felt cold steel at the back of my neck. Bud already had his hands up.
Fuck on a bicycle
.
I turned, slow-like. A man in a business suit had a gun pointed at my head. He was some goddamned El Paso Republican, I suspected. He was wearing a virgin-white straw cowboy hat. And, no shit, he had what looked like a starched bandana tied around the bottom of his face, coming down to a triangle point that didn't quite cover his brace of chins. The bandana was too clean and showed iron lines. With the suit and that crisp white hat, the pearl-handled .45 in his shaking right hand ... well, Christ, it was like being robbed at gunpoint by some queer tenderfoot.
Fuck this
.
The "bandit" spoke, a scared quaver in his voice, "The bastard's head --- where is it?"
My God --- he said "bastard" like he was saying "scoundrel," or "bounder."
Jesus
.
"Here," I said. I reached down, lifted the carpetbag and then flung it at him. The gun pointed skyward as he involuntarily tucked his arms to catch the bagged head. With my left hand, I grabbed his gun hand --- kept that sucker pointed skyward. I tugged down his bandana with my right hand. That move seemed to startle him even more, although it really shouldn't have, 'cause I surely didn't recognize him.
I pulled back, then swung hard between his eyes, throwing everything I had. My right knee followed, driven hard into his groin. As he doubled over, I flicked off his cowboy hat, got a handful of hair, and drove his face down into my again-rising knee. He fell to the floor --- already out cold and sporting a brand new face.
Bud was slack-jawed. I shrugged and picked up the carpetbag. I tossed the bag to Bud. I tucked the pearl-handled .45 in my waistband.
Me and my poet, we were swiftly building ourselves an arsenal.
"Just couldn't bear to lose another head this soon, 'specially to the likes of that one," I said to Bud. "We're going through these skulls like a drunken sailor on shore-leave in a whore house on nickel night. I'm feelin' decidedly stingy now." I reached down and picked up the bastard's white cowboy hat. It was too small for my head. (Old man used to tell me, "Hec, you've got yourself a head like a bastard cat." My mother used to make cracks, too, but I figured she'd had first-hand experience with that big old head of mine that my pap hadn't had, so I gave her a pass.)
I planted the hat on Bud and he suddenly had half-assed character.
We strode out into the newspaper's front office.
The receptionist stared at us, open-mouthed under her wicked black beehive. Her eyes were wide behind rhinestone cat's-eye spectacles. "Fetch yourself a camera, sweetheart," I said in my foghorn drawl. "I think there's a breaking news story stretched out cold in back there for you."
It was a very bad night for me.
I had awesomely bad dreams, riddled with strange imagery. Sad thing was, it was all rooted in recent history.
Ice cubes ... so many ice cubes.
Hypodermics.
My little black-haired, black-eyed daughter, squeezing my callused thumb in her tiny hand and whispering "Daddy" as the darkness closed over her.
Her mother --- dark hair, dark eyes, dark heart. "The heart of another is a dark place" ... something like that. Who the hell said it? Turgenev? Ed Murrow? Howdy fucking Doody? One of those wooden cocksuckers, anyways.
More ice cubes and a bathtub. Old needle tracks. My big, beautiful and empty hacienda --- the fucker destroys me.
My girls regularly ambushing me in my dreams, a year on. Sometimes in my dreams --- no, strike that, call 'em "nightmares" --- I pick up my Colt, put that Peacemaker in my mouth and press it to my palate. In his cups, in Key West, Hemingway used to pantomime for me "The Blessed Shot," as he had dubbed it. Papa confided to me tips for doing it right. "Get that thing in your mouth, up against the roof, pointed toward the fontanel," he'd lecture drunkenly. "Press it to your temple or under your chin and you'll just end up disfigured, or a vegetable, or both." That was Papa --- always the teacher.
But in dreams --- and in life --- I can't ever pull the trigger on myself. Too much contrition for that flavor of presumed peace, I reckon.
I awakened with a start, wrenched from my dark dreams by thunder. It was raining again --- desert storm. The windows were cracked on Bud's side and I could smell the sage and the rain. My mouth was dry and my eyes wouldn't focus. My hands were shaking and I felt nauseous.
Bud raised his eyebrows. "You okay, Lass'?"
I nodded and sat up and stretched and felt more bones crack. I was too old to be sleeping in cars. Bud, probably prompted by all the knuckle-digging in my eyes and my blinking, passed me a thermos filled with iced tea. He rifled through a bag on the seat between us, then handed me a Stuckey's Pecan Log and a ham salad sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. "This'll help," he said. It did, though it took some time.
We were rolling west along Rt. 10, skirting the Mexican border. I had slept right through Columbus and adjacent Pancho Villa State Park --- the places where all of this bad juju got rolling so many bloody decades ago. My knuckles were starting to hurt from those shots I had taken at the Texas Republican. I checked my Timex. We should have been on the other side of the Arizona border by now, but we were just fringing the Pyramid Mountains.
"You stop for a quickie while I was sacked out, Bud?"
Fiske glanced at me and turned down his mouth. "Called in a marker," he said. "Old friend of mine is a Yale grad. I wanted some more gen on this Skull and Bones Society."
I grunted and gulped down a half-a-thermos of tea and it didn't touch my thirst. "Just a kind of über fraternity, isn't it?"
Bud lit up a Pall Mall --- must have bought his own pack when he stopped for my grub. He shook his head. "Naw, it goes way deeper than that, Hector."
Marty Robbins was crooning on the radio: "A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation)." I know Marty. I like him. But I prefer his cowboy ballads. I turned down the volume.
I said, "Startle me, Bud."
"This
politician
," --- Bud said "politician" like he was saying "clapped-up cunt" --- "this
politician
, Prescott Bush? He supposedly personally robbed Geronimo's grave and stole the Apache's head for the Skull and Bones Society's secret archive."
"Had heard that. And he supposedly paid Holmdahl $25,000 to steal Pancho Villa's head," I said. "We knew that, too. Or we thought we did. It's all hearsay."
"Actually, my guy told me a guy named Frank Brophy said that he and four others put up $5,000 to have Emil Holmdahl steal the head," Bud said. "But Brophy said it was a Skull and Bones scheme, all the way."
I shook out one of my cigarettes and fished for my Zippo. I fired her up. "That's a big range," I said, "twenty-five-grand down to five-grand? Big gap there, my friend."
Bud Fiske smiled. "Huh-uh. Think about it, Hector. Prescott supposedly offered $25,000 for the head theft. Brophy, who belonged to the Skulls and Bones too, well, he said that he and four friends put up five-grand. Well, what if it was five-grand
each
? Then we're right back to your $25,000. Prescott may just have handed over the collective cash."
It cohered. It felt right. I could roll with it. "Yeah, I can buy it, Bud. But they didn't get the head, near as we can tell."
"Naw," my interviewer said. "Something happened between the time Emil handed it over to his confederate and the confederate was to get it to Senator Bush. That's the mystery that remains to be solved."
"So tell me more about this Skull and Bones bunch. What's the capsule history there?"
Bud fished around the bag and pulled out a short dog. He steered with his knees and used the seat belt handle to pry off the lid. Fiske drained half that sucker at a pull. "Serious kink, Mr. Lassiter," he said, dragging a sleeve across his mouth. "They track back to 1832. They've got their own building on High Street --- looks like a big-assed crypt. No fucking windows. They call it 'The Tomb.' The initiates pass around the same nicknames from class to class. Some of those names are pretty demonic sounding. Prescott's son, George, a WWII hero, was a member. His nickname was 'Poppy' --- admittedly
not
so Satanic sounding. President Taft was a member ... Henry Luce, too. It's rumored the S&Bs are tied to the CIA and something called the 'Trilateral Commission'; the NWO and the Illuminati.
"They are initiated by two older members, one dressed as Don Quixote, the other dressed as the Devil. They bind their members to the order and secure their secrecy by making them strip down and lay in a coffin," Bud said, pressing ahead in the face of my palpable skepticism. "The suckers then have to jack off to orgasm, describing in detail their sexual experiences while the other members stand there, looking on."
Jesus pleading, bleeding Christ on a crutch
. "Well, if true, that'd breed some flavor of silence, I reckon," I said. Suddenly, I was fiercely proud to have never finished high school. I said, "They sound too much like the goddamned Freemasons."
"They're purportedly linked," Bud said. "And some think the sexual confessions have more to do with eugenics than shaming the subjects. You know --- useful for tracking bloodlines."
We were finally drifting into Navajo territory now. Mesas and buttes; cholla, burro weed strangler, fanwood, cottonwood, ironwood and smoke thorn; jackrabbits, Gila monsters, rattlesnakes and loggerhead shrikes. It was merciless, it was vast and it was unthinkingly beautiful.
"Coming up on a crossroads. Where precisely are we headed, Hector? I mean, beyond, 'Keep heading west, Bud.' We still trying to keep this meeting of yours with Orson Welles?"
"We're still Cali-bound, Bud. Emil the head thief is still on the right side of the dirt --- lives out in L.A. somewhere, according to Wade's notebook. And I've got that film stuff to attend to, which makes all of this a business expense and thus deliciously deductible. I owe Orson a face-to-face 'no' on a project. See no reason we can't double up on errands...settle things with Welles and maybe look up Emil."
Destination: Venice, California.
Eight hundred goddamned miles, give or take, from El Paso to the dubiously named City of Angels.
In between: motels --- not
ho-
tels, but
mo
-tels; small towns; county seats; old Victory gardens grown thick with weeds. White picket fences sandblasted gray by wind-driven red dust. Railroad depots. Greasy spoons and all-nite diners. Good coffee, bad coffee ... catastrophic coffee. But we drank it all, just the same, to stay awake for the long cross-country haul.
Doughnuts; pep pills they sell to truckers at cash registers; sugar and more of that coffee, good, bad or indifferent.
I'm really not what you could describe as a man given to nostalgia, but it seems more and more to me that the older things are, the better they were built. The ones who came before fashioned things to last. But in this age of laminated furniture and Naugehyde upholstery ... well, it all just seems to be winding down.
Someday
, I thought, staring out through the bug-splattered windshield,
the highway system will wipe all this out --- smother "the Mother Road" ... strangle Route 66 and the Old National Trail
. It will all look alike then, whipping by at seventy or eighty miles per hour; you won't see details, won't see the citizens.
The graveyards, the towns, the Victory gardens --- hell, you'll never see those. You'll never fucking see 'em. One day, probably one day soon, they would fix it so you could drive from Seattle to the Jersey shore and never see an authentic city or civilian. I smoked my cigarette and shook my head. What will we have then? What will we be? I wondered this, gazing through the bug-splattered windshield of my Chevy as my poet/interviewer drove us through the darkening desert.
I glanced over at Bud. He was sucking down his fifth or sixth cigarette by my calculation. And he was on his third beer. I shook my head at my own terrible influence.
Touch of Evil
.
Picture this: Venice, California standing in for wicked Mexico and the mythical border town of "Los Robles."
There used to be canals threaded through Venice, but they backfilled most of those bastards in '29 when they knew the car was here to stay. Those filled-in canals sucked away nearly all the charm Venice ever held. Oil wells and cricket pumps were now in abundance.
Welles was having a false bridge built --- a phony gateway to the promised land of
El Norte
. The bridge was for Orson's own death scene --- a fat, tragic bastard floating out there dead in the muddy Rio Grande. A great bad man finally called home to Hell or Valhalla ... wherever all the great bastards finally go to be safely out of the way of the herd.
The crafty
auteur
was shooting almost exclusively by night to keep the studio suits and the bean counters at bay.
Orson's directing of the picture resulted from an accident --- an-honest-to-god
mistake
. Chuck Heston signed on as star because he erroneously thought that Orson was to direct the picture. When he learned otherwise, Moses threw around his weight --- and secured weighty Welles the gig.
OW had grabbed a hold of the job with gusto, still chafing from being fucked over
Citizen Kane
; fucked over
The Magnificent Ambersons
;
Mr. Arkadin
; fucked over
The Trial
and
Don Quixote
. You name it. He lost Rita
Lady-From-Shanghai
Hayworth to fucking Ali Khan.
Christ
, the luck of the Irish --- all that getting fucked but never
off
.
Once he was seated as director, over-eager Orson commenced upon an aggressive script rewrite. Heston's gringo cop became a Mexican. Chuck dyed his thinning, sandy hair black and slathered on the skin dye. He grew a pencil-thin moustache --- some greaser lip gravy that looked to have been lifted from Cesar Romero. Heston's gravitas, it was hoped, would offset his falling-short makeup.
Welles next cast busty and lusty Janet Leigh in some quasi-virginal/Joan of Arc role.
Call it more gone-wrong casting.
But Jesus, Leigh's sure something to look at on screen. Her character's handle? Well, that was "Susan Vargas." And with those tight sweaters, she was a Vargas girl, okay.
And Marlene Dietrich --- my favorite Kraut --- Welles had her playing a svelte, cigar-smoking Mexican madam with a mystery accent who drifts in and out of the picture in two or three key sequences.
It all struck me as
insane
.
But some others I trusted who had seen rushes swore to me that the picture cohered and sizzled at some oddball, gut-to-crotch level that bonded with truth. The visuals, always great in a Welles' picture, were said to be stunning. And Welles' rush-job-doctored script? That sucker was mostly cooking, sources said. On the other hand, the original material, a noir potboiler called
Badge of Evil
by "Whit Masterson," wasn't chopped liver.
Orson looked like shit. He had truly packed on the weight, but the special effects crew had added
extra
blubber --- rubber cheeks and chins to make him a mountain. Captain "Hank Quinlan" ... that was Orson's character's name. Hank was conceived as a badly widowed, Borderland "bad cop" who got the job done and usually fingered --- or more often framed --- the right culprits. In the still-in-progress script, Hank was depicted as addicted to booze and candy bars --- layering on more lard. He and Marlene/Tanya went back. Hank had a Jones for the madam, her and her "chili" ... a Hayes Office-fostered euphemism for her pussy.
Orson was doing a salutary job of keeping everyone in a Mexican mood: the dirt-strewn streets were littered with blowing, rolling scraps of paper. Mariachi music, marimbas --- couldn't escape 'em. The crew was half Mexican and drunk on Tecate beer Orson had had trucked in. Orson had always been the undisputed master of atmosphere and it all was working. Christ, I felt like I was on the back streets of TJ. I felt as if I should put the arm on that best boy yonder with his ducktails and untucked shirt draped over chinos and ask him for directions to the donkey show. It felt like there should be street peddlers not just present but prevalent --- pushing contraband Spanish fly, hop and little hand-carved Don Quixote statues.
Bud was just wandering around in a daze, taking it all in. For my part, I watched Welles at work.
Orson was charging through this shoot. He was under intense pressure to bring it in on-time and under-budget; to try and erase his mostly undeserved reputation for cost overruns and spiraling-out-of-control production schedules.
But Mr. War-of-the-Worlds-Panic-of-1938 was not happy with three key scenes he was to film in the next couple of days. Two of those were new scenes; the other was a reshoot. All of them featured Marlene/Tanya --- "Hank's" ex-lover --- who doesn't recognize too
-
fat Hank the fateful night he first returns to her place.
Welles couldn't get the words right in the scene. It wasn't cooking between him and the Kraut. Orson had been friends with Marlene for years. But he's never got her in bed ... same as Hemingway.
But Orson had somehow learned that I had bedded the Kraut. He wagered I could bring some resonant dialogue to the table.
His proposition offended me.
But I owed him a favor. Ten years on, and he'd finally called in his marker. So I felt I owed him at least a face-to-face "no" --- even if his request did cross too many lines. If Marlene ever found out what he was asking of me --- what he was trying to exploit --- well, Orson would likely shed some weight at Marlene's hands I'd wager, and
muy pronto
.
Some stooge guided Bud and me to Welles.
That Voice --- like thunder in a cave. Orson intoned, "Hector, my old friend. You made astonishing time." I eyed Fiske --- sucker was instantly star-struck.
Orson patted my cheek. "You must have driven like a bat out of hell, Hec."
I slapped my poet/interviewer/sidekick on the back. "My batman. Drives like a dream. And writes the same. He's the fella you should be hitting up for script doctoring."
Orson glowered. One didn't
rewrite
Welles. No, His Eminence would grudgingly brook
feedback
. Some of that input He maybe deigned to
entertain
... and some of that He even might
implement
. But sans credit --- Christ, go ask Herman J. Mankiewicz or Graham Greene if you doubt me.
The coastal night wind kicked up some strategically scattered newspaper pages. One smacked Orson on his big rubber cheek. He said, "Let's go inside and talk, old friend." Orson had fucked up his leg somehow; he was leaning hard on a cane. Ever resourceful, he was exploiting it for the role, and it worked. And my God, did he ever look huge --- like a blue whale with a seven o'clock shadow. He was stuffed into a rumpled, tan suit that a family of five could live in and never cross paths.
We moved inside. Welles doffed his boxy Stetson and lit up a cigar nearly as thick as Bud Fiske's neck. "Can you believe Bogart is dead?" He said this over his shoulder.
"No," I said, "I can't. Across the river from my place, all the Mexican women are tearing their hair over Pedro Infante." The Mexican matinee star and his famous moustache had recently gone down in an airplane --- the third crash the actor had suffered in his risk-taking life.
The goddamn whorehouse set that Orson had whipped up was almost too perfect. It was the sitting room from a border bordello ripped from my horny imagination. Welles, in the Voice, rumbled, "You aren't still playing with that cock piece for Sam Ford, are you?"
Bud frowned --- probably tripping on "cock." I thought that Bud maybe thought the picture for Ford was something that it was not ... perhaps figured me for scripting skin flicks.
No
. For six months, I'd been sweating various drafts of a film treatment of a pulp novel about cockfighting:
Rooster of Heaven
. I was doing it for the famous, one-eyed director.
I shrugged. "As a matter of fact I am. And I'm humping against a deadline for my publisher ... some introductions owed for a couple of other authors. And some other things, too."
Orson waved a dismissive and meaty hand. "Surely you could stay a couple of nights here, Hector. We'll drain pitchers of sangria and eat good Mexican food and talk frankly and maybe you can help me out a tad. We must do right by Marlene. I know you'll agree with that. She's come out of retirement for this one, just for me. If she knows you're writing for her --- helping me to write for her --- well..."
That sounded suspiciously like an honest-go-God co-writing credit being hinted at. At that point, I figured Orson must be desperate.
Then some flunky flounced in without knocking first. He was holding a severed head in his hands.
I felt my legs go weak; Fiske went white.
The stranger handed the head to Orson who held it up and turned it, then muttered something that sounded Shakespearean through the sudden buzz in my ears.
Then I saw --- it was a mock-up of actor Akim Tamiroff's head. In the rough script I'd been sent, the poor bastard with a bad wig had gotten himself strangled. The head was a prop for his death scene, replete with bulging eyes and a lolling tongue. Damned fine workmanship. Orson thought so, too. He rumbled to the special effects man, "Perfect."
The bastard left, beaming, holding the toy head.
Recuperating, I smiled and gestured at the bar. "This stuff real, Orson?"
"You know me too well, Hector. Yes. Always the transcendent verisimilitude --- the result of studious attention to a thousand small and seemingly insignificant details. Always that, yes?"
"Always. Yes."
Fuck
.
I picked up a decanter and tugged out the stopper. I sniffed. "Brandy?"
Welles smiled. "Perhaps.
Probably
. My stomach is too sour for Scotch these days."
I poured three glasses and passed 'em around. "Frankly, I'm not sure Marlene and me are talking anymore."
The Kraut and me had recently fallen out over a mutual "friend." Hemingway. Orson knew and understood this, I figured. He, too, had had a fight with Hemingway, a real honest-to-God brawl with Marlene, my beloved Kraut, standing as witness.
Orson chuckled in resonant baritone. "I've heard about your gaffe from Miss Dietrich. You're not showing enough concern over Papa's plane crashes, it seems."
Bud looked puzzled; Orson caught it. Ever the eager instructor, he explained, "Papa --- you, know
Hemingway
, lad. Papa went down in back-to-back plane crashes in Africa in, was it '53, or '54?"
I shrugged, muttered, "Search me. Haven't talked to Hem' since 1937, anyway." I caught myself rubbing my jaw.
Orson pressed on: "Papa's never really recovered from the crashes. He's in steep decline now. Marlene wants Hector to patch it up with him. They were fast friends down in the Keys. Birds --- of prey --- and of the same feather."
Enough of this. I took a shot of brandy and slicked back a cowlick. "You had your own falling out with Ernest," I said to Orson. "Did you two ever really patch it up?"
Scenting a scoop, Fiske pulled out a notebook and pen. He sat down next to Orson. That did it for me --- this could go on a good while. I'd heard this story before. I started playing around with this old pianola in the corner. Orson looked over at me and said, "It's so old, it's new again." It sounded like he was reciting from something. Then damned if it didn't start playing, and my favorite tune, too, an old Celtic air, "Tramps & Hawkers." It was evocative source music for Welles' Hemingway tale.
Orson's Voice: "Ernest had assisted in the filming of a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, lad," he said to saucer-eyed Bud. "Propaganda against the fascists. Fund-raising stuff, really. Hemingway wrote the film's narration. I was to read the Papa-penned material. But it went on too much, I thought. Too melodramatic. It needed a trim to be more lean and masculine ... you know, in the vein of the stuff by Hemingway that we all so revere."
The legend went something like this. During a screening, Ernest had made some snide remarks about Orson's delivery. Ernest allegedly said that Orson sounded "queer," or some such. Hemingway probably had a point, there.
Welles said that it was impossible to read the words Ernest had written, that they were written for the page, not the screen. Welles probably had a point, there.
Orson continued as Bud scribbled away. "Hemingway couldn't get past my direction of the Mercury Theatre," Orson said, turning down his mouth. "He thought me some kind of avant-garde, theatre faggot. So Ernest said to me, 'You fucking effeminate boys of the theatre, what do you know about real war?'"
"So you swung on him," Fiske guessed.
"No, no dear boy. He'd have killed me. I played to him. Mincing, complimenting him on his size and strength. The situation swiftly degenerated. And oh so precipitously --- chairs and, finally,
punches
were thrown. All of this struggling was silhouetted against the backdrop of scenes of warfare in Spain. A real Hieronymus Bosch moment. Marlene saw it all. It was quite marvelous really --- two guys like us fighting in front of these images representing people in the act of struggling and dying. We ended up toasting each other over a bottle of whiskey."
I shook my head and poured some more brandy. "Tell Bud the rest, Orson. You two didn't leave it that well. Hemingway later ended up doing that narration. They scuttled your work ... old friend."
"Yes, well..."
Not sure why, but I felt like needling Mr. Mercury Theatre. "I heard Hemingway's version from John Huston," I said. "Hem told John that every time you used the word 'infantry' --- Hem's words, not mine --- that you sounded 'like a cocksucker, swallowing.'"
This could go either way, I figured --- Orson coming for me with his cane, or...?
As I too often am, I was really just trying to keep myself interested.
