The Hemingway Thief (3 page)

“Is there a reason you're doing that right here?” I asked wiping the crusts of sleep from my eyes. Digby plucked an emery board from behind his ear and gently swiped it across his big toe.

“I can't find my clippers. I knew you had one,” Digby said, as if we had been clothes-swapping roommates for years. “Boss says you gotta get up. You're gonna miss the race.”

“Why would Butch give a shit about the race?” I said, and remembered Grady had bought the hotel yesterday, which made him Digby's new boss. Digby was a man who adapted quickly. He tossed the clippers aside and ran his hand through his mop of tangled dirty-blond hair.

“Had some excitement last night, didn't you, Mr. Cooper?”

“I've told you, Digby. Call me Coop,” I said. I stretched out until I nearly fell off the bed and reached for the remains of last night's rum. It wasn't nearly enough, but Grady would have a cooler of beer up at the race so it was no tragedy.

“You had some excitement last night,
Coop
,” Digby said. He stood up, leaned against the wall, and shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, looking like a surfer's version of Dillinger.

“There was some commotion,” I said. “What do you know of it?”

“I know there's a guy nearly in a coma over in Doc's room,” Digby said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small pistol with a pearl handle. He tossed it on the bed between my bare feet. “And I know the guys who put him there will be back.”

“I was kind of thinking the same thing,” I said. “And I was kind of hoping I was wrong.”

“No, they'll be back. You shot the guy's toe off. A man doesn't let something like that stand,” Digby said. “Take the gun, Coop. That's my favorite derringer. It only gets two shots, but I figure if you haven't hit anything by then it ain't gonna make a difference.”

“That's what you figure, huh? What if there're more than two of them?”

“You ever a fire a gun before? I mean before last night.”

“Nope.”

“Then if there were more than two, you'd be fucked if I gave you a Uzi,” Digby said, and strolled to the door. As he passed the threshold he turned on his heel, his hands stuck in his gabardine pockets. “Boss is waiting for you up on the bluff. Oh, and the water truck didn't come today. So no showers.”

He left whistling an old tune I couldn't quite place. It didn't surprise me Digby carried around a two-shot pistol in his pocket. It wouldn't have surprised me if he carried a flame-thrower in his sock. What surprised me was how my world suddenly had an abundance of guns in it. Twenty-four hours earlier I had never even held a firearm. Now I was living like somebody found in the pages of Mickey Spillane's wastebasket.

I got up and kicked open the door to my bathroom. Pendira was so far off the map that it didn't have regular running water. Every two weeks a tanker came through and filled up the tower. This meant the people of Pendira practiced a forced form of water conservation made worse whenever the truck was delayed.

My agent, Peter Oxblood, had warned me to pick up a few gallons of bottled water on the way down. I was glad I had taken his advice. I plugged the sink and dumped a bottle in the basin so I could wash my face and brush my teeth. The Hotel Baja had been Ox's suggestion. He had been dragged there once by one of his clients for a bachelor party. He insisted its brand of low-tide charm would help me get my head out of my ass. His words.

After four years of perfecting the art of pretension in a place called college, I was lucky enough to publish my first novel. It was a long literary affair about a bovine veterinarian's encounter with a PETA-like vegan cult. I called it
Madge
, and I have no idea how many copies it sold because Ox never had the heart to tell me.

He couldn't, however, hide the reviews from me. The book critic for the
Washington Post
suggested my novel made a solid case to reconsider book burning. The
Chicago Reader
merely printed the first page with the suggestion it be used to line birdcages throughout the greater Chicagoland area. My favorite of all was the little New England paper, one that did not have a book reviewer nor had it ever in its history printed a book review prior to this one, which described my book as the combined failure of delusional ego and lack of talent. The review ended with the terse yet grammatically suspect sentence: It's no John Grisham.

I fled to the one place that had always been a sanctuary for me: the bookstore. I huddled in the corner of the Romance section, where I wouldn't be confronted by anyone I knew, either in person or on book covers. I sipped on black coffee and wondered if high school kids might respect me enough to let me teach them English. I was about to take a stroll down the Career Help aisle when I heard a scuffle behind me. A seventy-year-old woman was leaning against her walker and slapping a teenaged bookseller twice her size with a trade paperback.

“I already read this one, idiot,” she wailed. “I want the new one!”

“That is the new one,” the poor clerk replied with surprising calm. He had turned to take the brunt of her tirade with his back. Another clerk, a mousy-looking girl with a ponytail, peeked around the bookshelf. The clerk under fire looked at her pleadingly, but she tilted her head up as if she heard someone call her name and quickly disappeared.

“How could it be new?” the incensed old woman said. “I already read it.”

“It came out last month, ma'am. They can't write them as fast as you read them.”

“I've had it with this nonsense,” the woman said, and threw the book at him. He dodged and the paperback landed next to me. “I want to see your manager.” She didn't wait for a reply and stalked off, walker clanging like a battle staff, presumably to harass the manager. I picked up the book, curious to see what could inspire such an insatiable need in an otherwise-frail old woman.

The cover showed a bare-chested man with abs that could cut glass. He was bending over a woman in a flowing gown as she reached for a wooden stake at the side of her bed. I found that the author had well over twenty books on the shelf above me, all in the same series. I remembered hearing a story about a
Newsday
columnist who'd written a romance novel as a joke and it became a bestseller. At the time I took it as a bitter grad-student yarn designed to deride the low-born genre novel, but looking down the aisle filled with bustiers and cod pieces I was struck with inspiration. I left the store with the complete series, along with the beginnings of several others.

Henry Cooper, for all intents and purposes, was dead to the publishing industry. What better place to reinvent myself than in the polar opposite of literary fiction? I locked myself in my garden apartment and read every romance novel available, of which there was legion. I ate up every convention and every trope. I read and I wrote. I absorbed and I disseminated. After four months locked up like Don Quixote in his attic, my only contact with the outside world being delivery guys and Ox's messages on my answering machine, I emerged just as addled as the man of La Mancha, but my quest was already finished. The first
MacMerkin
novel was complete. I had fallen as Henry Cooper and stood up again as Toulouse Velour. Ox sold the book within two weeks. It became a phenomenon within two months of hitting the shelves. As the ink flowed, so did the money, and things went pretty well for a few years.

About a year ago, I found a fruit basket on my doorstep. An assistant or intern at my publisher sent me a fruit basket, a congratulations on
MacMerkin's Regret
hitting the
New York Times
Best Seller List. It would have been a thoughtful gesture if the basket hadn't been filled with an assortment of fruit wrapped in pink tissue and surrounded by bath gels and scents not meant for anyone with a Y chromosome. The basket was also pink, and the graphic on the card was a silhouette of a woman taking a bubble bath. The caption read “For when you need a day just to be a girl.” It was after the basket's arrival that I started to call my masculinity into question. The doubts continued to creep in until it culminated on the morning after a party at Ox's place. I woke up with a hangover and a brunette. Usually this was something to be happy about, but I made the mistake of taking her to breakfast. A friend of hers had brought her to the party because they were both enormous fans of Toulouse Velour, who was supposed to be there.

“I've read all her books,” she had said between bites of Belgian waffle.

“Toulouse is a man,” I said, realizing she had no idea who I was. Toulouse's identity was not exactly an open secret in the publishing industry. Only I, Ox, the publisher, and a handful of others knew. Knowing Toulouse's real name was like knowing that Carly Simon was really singing about Warren Beatty, or David Geffen, or whoever it was. “It's a man's name.”

“Oh, that's just a pen name,” she had laughed. “Like a joke, you know. A man doesn't write that way. A man can't write that way. At least not a straight man.”

I had called Ox from the cab on the way home from breakfast and asked him if he thought our publisher might be interested in something new. Maybe something edgy or even gritty? A noir tour de force. Maybe I could even publish it under my real name? He informed me that my head was up my ass and suggested a long holiday in Baja.

In my suite at the Hotel Baja I dragged my toothbrush across my teeth and considered the small pistol sitting at the edge of my bed. I kept my eye on it as I slipped into my jeans and a fairly clean T-shirt. I told myself there was no need for a gun. I am not a gun person. I live a life devoid of guns. If you live by the gun, you die by the gun. You'll shoot someone's eye out. Just say no, and so forth. I was flat out not going to carry a gun.

I almost made it to the door before I turned back and stuffed the derringer in my pocket.

Chapter Three

The race was the Baja 500. Grady was nuts about it. It was his third favorite subject to talk about after women and college football. Few women ever came to the Hotel Baja, and in June with two months until kick-off the race shot up to number one with a bullet. The contingent of trucks, cars, and motorcycles took off from Ensenada to bust through five hundred kilometers of desert, scrub brush, broken roads, hills, valleys, and anything else that was never supposed to support a vehicle. It attracted thrill seekers and hangers-on from all over looking for glory in the small subculture that was into that sort of thing. According to Grady there was little, if any, money in it, but there were enough women in pleather pants and bikini tops to make it worthwhile.

A tiny sliver of the route ran by a spot up on a bluff about a mile away from the hotel. The actual race wasn't until next week, but Grady had been dragging me up there with a cooler of Tecate and sandwiches to watch the practice racers for the last couple of days. He had been trying to educate me on the different models of large bore motorcycles, stock VWs, and all the rest to no avail. I didn't give a shit about any of it. I went because the spot was up on a bluff that overlooked the Pacific. I liked having a brew in the sunshine and watching the surf crash into the cliff. The occasional blast of neon and motor oil that each vehicle brought was really more of an annoyance than anything else.

“Now what was that last one called, Coop?” Grady asked. He leaned back in his canvas folding chair and put his thumb and forefinger under his beard.

“That would be a 1972 Ford Who-Gives-A-Fuck,” I said, and shoved my hand into the icy cooler water. I came up with a can of Tecate and popped the top.

“Wrong,” Grady said. “It was a stock VW. Can you tell me what type of engine it might have had?”

“I can't. Can you tell me what happened to the drunk guy after I left last night?”

“You need to apply yourself, Coop, or else you'll never graduate from Grady's School of Off-Road Racing,” he said, wagging his finger at me. He chuckled and locked his fingers behind his head. “Don't worry about that guy. Doc's got him on a cot in his room. He sedated him, but he should be up for talking by supper time.”

“Digby agrees that the guys from last night will be back,” I said.

“Probably,” Grady said. “He say anything else?”

“No. If they're coming back, then why are we just sitting here?”

“You wanna go up to Ensenada and make a complaint?” Grady said, and tossed his beer can at the orange crate we used for empties. He missed and waved at it with his hand as if it would jump up into the crate on its own power if properly beckoned.

“Yes, goddamn it, something,” I said, getting up and properly disposing of the empty for him.

“OK, fine, but be prepared to spend some time in jail for shooting the guy's toe off. Either that or bring enough cash to pay off every cop from here to there. That's if we even make it to Ensenada.”

“Why wouldn't we make it to Ensenada?” I asked. Grady looked at me as if I were a child who just said something cute and incredibly naive.

“Dell and Andy were dumb, but they weren't stupid,” Grady said, and grabbed another beer. “Ain't much traffic between here and the city. All they have to do is camp out on the mountain road and wait for us to come by. Wouldn't take much to stop a car up there. They take us out and they can take their time getting to the kid.”

“Can't we call somebody?”

“Anyone we call is gonna want you to answer for the guy's toe. Had to shoot him, didn't you? Couldn't handle a little criticism?”

“I'm just a roiling ball of rage, Grady. I can't help it,” I said. “So we're stuck here, is that it?”

“Were you planning on leaving anytime soon?”

“No.”

“Then what do you care?” Grady said, rolling the cold can along his sweaty forehead. “Don't worry about it. I don't want to do shit until the guy wakes up and we can talk to him. We got plenty of supplies and they don't. Water truck'll be here tomorrow. We'll wait 'em out for a couple of days. Sound good?”