The Hemingway Thief (7 page)

Chapter Seven

We took the Hummer I'd been renting for the last four weeks. The road to Ensenada was a sidewinding, potholed business cut into the side of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. The edge of each precarious turn was decorated with prismatic flurries of flowers and wooden crosses, memorials for those who didn't have the dexterity or the sobriety to safely complete it. Graveyards of Detroit's finest scrap metal decorated the mountainside below. These harbingers hadn't any effect on Grady, who took each turn as if we were on the Bonneville Salt Flats. I did my best to concentrate on the Hemingway pages while blocking out that I was probably going to die before we reached Ensenada.

I tried to reconcile my memory of
A Moveable Feast
with Milch's new pages. It had been ten years since I'd read Hemingway's Parisian memoir, and the only snippets I could conjure were veiled references to Gertrude Stein's sexuality and a brief appearance by Aleister Crowley. I had read it in college while taking a class on the lives of American novelists. Hemingway had finished the book just before his death in 1961, but it wasn't published until three years and several extensive edits later. His third and final wife, Mary, had edited the book, rearranging the order of the chapters and leaving out an apology to Hemingway's first wife, Hadley. My professor had made a crass joke about catty women that didn't go over too well with the ladies in class.

I looked for the apology first and found it toward the end, written, not typed, in Hemingway's looping, somewhat-feminine handwriting. It was short and the notes on it were sparse with only a few red circles and an occasional
(sp?)
. As expected, Papa didn't lay his soul bare or beg forgiveness from a woman long gone from his life. It read more like regret than redemption. I was about to move on when I spotted a cryptic line that the editor had furiously crossed out:
And I should have never involved her in the business with the man from Auteuil.

“Anything good in there?” Grady said over the dying cigarette in his teeth. His bare elbow dangled out the open window, and his Wayfarers hung off the tip of his nose. He looked like he was on a weekend road trip to catch some waves.

“There's an interesting note here about the Auteuil Hippodrome,” I said, flipping through pages. When an editor goes through a first draft with her red pen, the result usually looks like the aftermath of a grisly battlefield. Two of the chapters in the collection of pages looked like Gettysburg and Antietam respectively. The first was Hemingway's description of the suitcase Hadley lost at the Gare de Lyon, and the second was an extended chapter on his time at the Auteuil.

“Never heard of it,” Grady said, and swerved to avoid some dead animal in the road.

“It's a racetrack in Paris,” I said. My thumb found the chapter heading “End of a Vocation,” and I pulled the pages close to my eyes. The red pen had swept over it with the sanguine focus of Sam Peckinpah. “Hemingway spent a lot of time there when he was in Paris.”

“Is it something new?” Grady said.

“There was a chapter on it in the original,” I said, trying to talk and read at the same time. This Auteuil chapter was much longer than I remembered. “There's a note in here about involving Hadley in something, maybe something bad. It has something to do with someone he knew from the track.”

Grady peered over his Wayfarers. We had crested over a mountain, and the valley flowed out below us like a sandy-green Persian carpet. Grady pointed at a small group of buildings set in the shadow of the next mountain. I could see a red-and-white strip stretched across the road and several people milling around it.

“Checkpoint up ahead. Hide the drugs.”

“You didn't bring any, did you?” I said, snapping my head up from the manuscript. Grady laughed and shook his head but checked his breast pocket anyway.

“You think Hemingway got himself in trouble with gamblers?”

“Maybe,” I said. “It seems like something he'd do.” While the idea of holding the raw material of one of America's greatest writers in my hands was exciting, the only thing I could think of was the note the editor had scrawled on the last page. Something in these pages could have, in the mind of the editor, destroyed Hemingway even after his death. I scanned each sentence with a voracious need to find clues to what that something could be. I began to suspect it was connected with Hadley and the unidentified man from Auteuil.

Auteuil had been a place where the Parisian elite mingled with the lower classes of the day. Rich men of industry rubbed elbows with starving artists and shifty criminals. Hemingway loved watching the people interact as much as he loved watching the horses race. The racetrack was a cornucopia of humanity, and the budding author had soaked it up with gusto.

“It seems he was close with an American thief,” I said. “They were drinking and gambling buddies. I don't remember anything like that from the published book.”

“A thief?”

“Yeah, story says the guy had come over with General Pershing during the war and just stayed in Paris after it was over.”

“Which war was that?”

“World War I,” I said. “The one we never seem to talk about anymore. Apparently the guy was an accomplished cat burglar in the States.”

“No wonder he stayed in Paris. A lot more good shit to steal,” Grady said.

Grady was half right. World War I had been a depressing awakening for a lot of Americans. It had been their first chance to see the world, and it turned out to be a sewer. The leaders of the world had mined humanity's darkest depths for four long years of blood and destruction and never deigned to explain why to the people who had plumbed those depths. But how could they? How could they apply reason to madness? Many of the American soldiers who had fought in the trenches stayed in Europe after the fighting was done. They chose a foreign land over a home that would look just as foreign when they returned. Hemingway had been one of these men. He had turned his angst to the written word and to drink. While one ventured to save him, the other worked its subtle destruction on him for the rest of his life.

“Why would a smart guy like Hemingway hang out with a crook?”

“I suppose he found the guy interesting,” I said. “You gotta remember, everyone he knew in Paris was famous or on their way to being famous. It must have been nice to chat with a guy who didn't give a shit if you were published.”

“Hemingway wasn't famous then?”

“No, he was a nobody reporter with the
Toronto Star
.” It was this fact, the pages illuminated, that attracted Hemingway to the thief. He was the only one with whom Hemingway could share his true fears, chief among them was the idea that he would fail as a writer. It was a frequent topic of conversation between them at the track. One anecdote in particular, one that had been scrubbed by the editor's red brush, demonstrated Hemingway's supreme angst and the thief's singular advice as Hemingway was about to give up on fiction and accept a life as a correspondent.

“It seems to me that art isn't nearly as important as the artist,” the thief told him one day over a café au lait. “What you need, Ernie, is a story.”

“I got stories,” Hemingway told him and waved a heavy Moleskine notebook in the thief's face.

“No one gives a damn about those,” the thief said. “
You
need a story to tell the editors. Like when you got shot up driving that ambulance. What you need is a story to impress all your friends who are so damn impressed with themselves. And you know what impresses people these days?”

“What?” Grady asked. He was listening to me read the story out loud. Only a handful of people had ever heard it before.

“Suffering and loss,” I said.

“‘Suffering and loss'?” Grady said.

“That's what the story says.”

“Who was this fucking guy?”

“The name's covered with black ink,” I said. We pulled to a stop, and several soldiers came running to the car, a few more than usual, but mostly routine in this region.

“Hold the page up to the sunlight, dumbass,” Grady said, reaching for his license. I held the sheet of paper against the window, and the sunlight illuminated the thief's name. One of the soldiers racked his weapon, but it sounded like a dull echo somewhere far away as all of my senses screwed together to focus on the name outlined in a black-red halo.

“Holy shit, Grady,” I whispered.

“Uh, Coop,” Grady said.

“You're never going to fucking believe this,” I said. “The thief. Holy fucking shit.”

“Coop,” Grady said. “We have bigger problems at the moment.” I turned to see Grady with his hands in the air and the barrel of a machine gun pressed against his cheek. I turned back to the window and let the manuscript page drop. A serious-looking Mexican soldier was pointing his rifle at my head, and he beckoned me out of the car with a nod. I put my hands up and stepped out of the car. Grady got out on the other side and looked apologetically at me over the Hummer's roof.

I would have to wait to tell him the name that had been so determinedly crossed out with black ink, the name of the thief that had been Ernest Hemingway's confidant:

Ebenezer Milch.

They put us in a windowless room in a hut about the size of a Dunkin' Donuts. It smelled of sweat and moldy paper, and we sat in wooden folding chairs that felt like they could collapse under our weight at any moment. The guards had been silent as they shoved us over the narrow footbridge spanning the ditch between the road and the compound. One of them, a stumpy-looking man with splotches of facial hair on his craggy face, tore my wallet from my back pocket. He took my license and my cash, a little under a hundred dollars, and tossed the eviscerated leather back to me. They did the same with Grady, though there wasn't any cash. The stumpy guard pointed to the chairs, and we sat down without further prompting. They didn't tie us up, which I found encouraging, but only a little.

“It's Mexico, Coop,” Grady said, more annoyed than scared. “They expect us to pay them their bribe and be on our way.”

“They already took my money. You got any?”

“In my shoe. Should be enough.”

After an hour, the plywood door shuddered open and a stooped young soldier came in with two cold Jive Cola bottles on a cardboard lunch tray.

“Do you have rum? With or without lime. I'm not picky,” I said. The soldier scuttled out the door without a word, and we were left in the stifling heat. We sat and drank our colas. Mine was flat and had an acidic aftertaste, but I supposed that was what a Mexican Jive Cola tasted like.

When the bottles were empty, a middle-aged Mexican in fatigues stomped into the room and stood in front of us like a teacher about to discipline a pair of unruly boys. He had the hefty well-fed look of a man who had been in charge for quite some time. He held three manila folders in one hand and pushed his slick black hair back across his head with the other.

“
Te llamas Grady Doyle?
” he barked. “
Por que estás en Mexico?
” Grady blinked a few times and shook his head. “
Yo sé que hablas español.
”

“
No sé
,” Grady said. They stared at each other until Grady cracked a smile. Then the Mexican shook his head, held up his hands, and walked back to the open door. He waved his hand at someone outside and waited in the doorway, looking back at us.

The shadow of an ambling, slight man walking with obvious difficulty loomed over the threshold. The shadow stopped and its owner exchanged a few words with the Mexican at the door. The shadow's voice was raised, but not loud enough for me to make out the words. It was clear, however, that he was in charge. The Mexican spoke quickly, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders until eventually he threw up his hands and marched back to the far corner of the room, where he stood with his arms crossed like a petulant child. The shadow took a moment to compose himself before coming in.

He wore a tobacco-colored linen suit, a matching fedora, and round, wire-rimmed spectacles perched precariously on the end of his bony nose. A gold watch fob completed the dandy-on-safari look. He moved across the room with a delicate, waspish grace that belied his tall, gawky frame. He waved the leather portfolio containing the manuscript, dropped it on the metal desk in the center of the room, and leaned against the desktop. There was a moment when the desk threatened to slide across the floor and dump him on his ass, but he adjusted his weight and folded his hands in his lap. He had a thin, Clark Gable–style mustache that made me hate him at once.

His skeletal hand took a bottle of Walgreens-brand pink bismuth from his inside jacket pocket. He slit the thin plastic seal with a manicured thumbnail and tossed the scrap on the ground. Eschewing the dosage cup, he chugged directly from the bottle. There was less than a third of the bottle left when he was done.