The Hemingway Valise Read online

  The Hemingway Valise

  Robert Olen Butler

  Hemingway came and got me in the night. With apologies to my wife. A cold week-night in early December. He was supposed to be in Lausanne covering the treaty conference. He took me to a small Left Bank café near the Seine. New to me. Brightly lit, full of incandescent electricity. “For clarity,” he said.

  It was good, the place. Clean. Just the two of us at this hour, except for an old drunk hunched at a far table and a woman in a dark coat sitting at the zinc bar.

  It was only later that the glance registered on me, between Hem and the woman, exchanged when he and I first came in. I recognized it for what it was after I later noticed her watching him in the mirror that hung behind the bar.

  Her face was pretty and it was hardened. She was probably young, technically speaking.

  Hemingway was young. Not far into his twenties, with a soldier’s body and a boy’s face. I was a decade older but it felt like far more.

  He sat me down and ordered Calvados. I followed his lead. More clarity, I assumed. The ardent clarity of brandyfied apples.

  We took a first sip and put our glasses on the table. The Calvados was fiery and tart and something else, like the apples had been lying around for a while in a winter sun.

  Then Hemingway said, “Hadley has done a terrible thing. A killing thing.”

  Hadley, his wife.

  I was surprised at his having trouble with his wife. They were clingingly, cloyingly—but convincingly—tender with each other, even when they clearly didn’t think they were being noticed.

  Though Hem and I had buddied up pretty well and even had a couple of weeks covering the same war, at first I was surprised, as well, that he’d come to me with this.

  I’d met Ernest Hemingway only a few months earlier, in the middle of August.

  In a bookshop.

  I’d come back to the city that was so important to the two Christopher Marlowe Cobbs who’d been kicking around in my head for almost a decade. One Cobb was a war correspondent, one was a spy. Both of them were Americans, and I guess that was what held me together.

  The year was 1922. The Great War was over. The news assignments were intermittent. Silent Cal was President and apparently interested only in the secrets he kept to himself. The dollar was strong and the franc was weak. So there was time for me and Louise, the American nurse I’d started up with here in Paris in 1915, when she was the boss of all the nurses at the American Ambulance Hospital. She was now a fund-raiser for the hospital’s reincarnation in a too-small space to serve the torrent of American tourists and expatriates. We’d gotten married last fall at the Chapelle Américaine off the Champs-Élysée, and we had a little place on the Left Bank. A third-floor walk-up on the Rue Madame.

  I was trying to write a novel.

  Hemingway was too.

  It was a hell of a bookshop. Shakespeare & Company. You stepped in and it felt more like the personal library across from the billiard room in the mansion of some American business tycoon. If such a mug happened to have serious taste in literature. The center of the place was as wide open as a sitting-room, with overstuffed chairs and black-and-white Serbian rugs, but surrounding you, the walls were made up entirely of books, their shelves shoe-top low to ceiling-high, insisting that you browse them. Mostly they were the books of the modern gang, from James and Hardy and Yeats to Stein and Woolf and Fitzgerald and even the boys you had to read one step ahead of the morality police, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. Pyramided on a little shrine of a table in the midst of the sitting space were the few copies remaining of the most dangerous of the modernly immoral books, Joyce’s Ulysses, thick as a randy man would hope his book would be and deceptively serene-seeming in its Aegean blue cover. The one stretch of wall stuck with the room’s fireplace was, in place of books, bespangled with the images, photographic and lithographic, of all these same literary stars, watching us riffle their pages.

  The shop was owned and run by a small, handsome woman who seemed both as tough and as sweet as my own Louise, though my wife was still partial to dresses and wore her hair bunned up beneath her wide-brimmed hats. Sylvia Beach, however, kept her hair full as a boxwood but bobbed jawline-short, and the day I met her she was wearing a man’s-cut velvet jacket and an over-sized parody of a boy’s first bow tie. She and my wife hit it off right away.

  I know they did because after the three of us introduced ourselves and shared a little of our feature-section backstories—including my substantial history as a newsman and insubstantial history as a nascent novelist—Sylvia made a move to take me into the center of the sitting area and introduce me to some regulars. But as soon as she sighted our prey, she abruptly held up. She tucked her hand inside my arm and said, low, “Sorry. The boys are presently occupied.”

  She nodded at two men leaning at each other from facing chairs within easy nose-punching distance, talking volubly. “Ezra,” she said, “is once again telling Ernest how to write. Ex cathedra. Give them a few moments while I resume with your beautiful wife.”

  So I listened to both conversations in fragments.

  The gentlemen before me: “To cut, dear boy. Ravenously to cut.” “Your beard, old man?” The latter speaker, bare-chinned but mustachioed, would turn out to be Hemingway. The other man, who would be Ezra Pound, had a diabolic point to his beard. “Your every unnecessary word,” Pound replied.

  The ladies behind me: “Happy August 18th, Miss Beach.” “Ah, my dear. I somehow knew you would be aware.”

  My wife had already made me aware, immediately upon our arising this morning. Today was the second anniversary of the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment, though my wife had yet to be home during an election.

  Shortly, Pound flopped backwards in his chair, slid his butt abruptly forward till he was sitting on his spine, grasped the knob on the ebony cane leaning against his chair, and thumped the stick, once, sharply on the floor. Hemingway laughed.

  It must have been a characteristic conversation-pausing gesture from Pound, for almost at once, after a hasty “Pardon me, dear” to Louise, Sylvia was again grasping my arm and now leading me forward.

  As we moved toward the two men, Hemingway said to Pound, “You know I’m grateful. I’ll even supply the blue pencil.” Sylvia slowed us down but kept us going. With a rising twirl of his right hand Pound replied, “Make it half a dozen.”

  Sylvia and I came into the periphery of their vision.

  Both men turned to us.

  Thus I met Ernest Hemingway. And his poet-editor to boot. Hemingway and I picked up the cues from Sylvia’s introduction and we began to talk of newspapers and of war.

  Shortly Pound, whose connection to Hemingway seemed pretty rarified, flourished his way from the chair—he was wearing a cape—and went off to graze Sylvia’s shelves.

  I sat down with my new writer friend. We spoke on, of Paris and fiction writing and our wives. Hem nearly leaped from his chair in admiration at the mention of Louise being a nurse.

  “Did she treat you for a wound?” he asked.

  The answer was complicated. It was tangled up with some nasty wartime secret-service business in this very town. I said, “No.”

  He bounced his head in reply and looked away, his eyes seeing something in his mind.

  In spite of his having said nothing as yet about such a woman, I said, “Did your nurse treat you?”

  He looked back at me and shot me the smile men smile when you realize you know things about each other without having said them.

  But before he shaped a reply, there was a woman’s voice entering the store.

  A
s it turned out, it was Hadley, a plain-faced, plushly huggable woman with bobbed hair.

  Hemingway looked in her direction. How did his face show a keen pleasure at seeing her and, in the same look, a keen reluctance to let go of the nurse who was bending near him in his head? Somehow. Or maybe this wasn’t visible on his face at all. Maybe nurses were just another thing a couple of guys could understand about each other after finding newspapers and war and Paris and writing in common.

  Hemingway and his wife exchanged faint, dreamy head-rolls with covertly puckering lips.

  But in the Left Bank café that December, over our Calvados, Hem reworked the harshest of his words about her. “Truly, Kit,” he said, and he tapped his heart with his index and middle fingers. “Right here. A kill shot.”

  He paused.

  Not for effect. To ponder his own death, it seemed to me in that knowing part of my buddy-brain. But the surface of my mind was assuming it was about Hadley and some other man.

  It wasn’t another man. It was worse. Hem said, “She put every word I’ve ever written into a valise and allowed them all to be stolen.”

  Ernest Hemingway could—how to say it?—exaggerate. About his boxing prowess—he’d said he sparred with Jack Dempsey, and the champ had his hands full. About his war wounds as an ambulance driver—he’d claimed to have been given a Carcano rifle and been asked to help out in a trench raid. I knew some things about boxing and about battle and about wartime ambulance drivers. So I hesitated over this new declaration. “Man, oh man,” I said. “Every word?”

  “Originals and copies,” he said. His voice broke with this. His eyes glistened in the incandescent light. “Three years of work. Poems. Stories. Longer stuff. The novel set at the war, the one I began in Chicago. A long story about fishing. That was a fly cast into a teeming stream, Kit. It was going to be a novel. And the Paris sketches. One of them has haunted me through this long night. Six true sentences. Finally true. Just that. Six of them. But because they were true they came harder and deeper than a novel.”

  His voice gave out over his six sentences.

  He fell silent.

  I offered, gently, “The stream is roiled. But things will settle. In a week or two, with your cahier and pencil at a corner table in a bistro. you’ll catch them again.”

  He shook his head. “No. That’s just it. The true thing happens in the moment you write. Like the first touch of a new woman. I’ve been trying hard to remember. All the way back from Switzerland. But I can’t truly shape even one phrase from one of those six sentences. It’s not about memory.”

  I sat back in my chair.

  Maybe so.

  “Where’d this happen?” I asked.

  “The Gare de Lyon,” he said. “She was taking the express train to join me in Lausanne.”

  “Stolen, not just lost around the station?”

  “I’m convinced of it. I was all over the place this afternoon. Lost and found. Trash bins. But I knew from the moment she told me that it was the Turks.”

  I sat forward again in my chair.

  This was our shared war.

  The Greeks and the Turks. The latter throwing out the former from Anatolia to establish a post-war independent Turkey.

  Though Hem and I were to be a couple of journalistic lone wolves separately on the prowl at the Greco-Turk War—I for the Chicago Post-Express and its syndicate, Hem for the Toronto Star—we’d been happy to share the hundred-hour run from Paris to Constantinople on the Simplon Orient Express and then a few nights of drinking mastika and eating green olives on the roof terrace of the Grand Hôtel des Londres while looking out on Galata and the Golden Horn.

  Not that either of us found it all terribly golden. Hemingway saw the grimy banks and boat-litter of the Chicago River along the banks of the Bosporous. I saw Pittsburg’s smokestacks in the profusion of minarets in Constantinople, similarly emblematic of the big business of the place.

  Hem thinking the Turks were after him made sense of his coming to me. A few things he’d told me on that roof terrace gave it possible credence. Following too much mastika followed by too much local Bomonti beer, he talked about a source he’d developed in Constantinople who fed him choice gossip about the Turkish strongman, hero-of-independence, and demigod-in-the-making, Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Hem said he knew the inside dope on Kemal, who was exterminating Armenians and loving young boys. Dangerous things to write about. Dangerous even to know.

  “The Kemal stuff?” I said.

  “I told you about that,” he said, his tone somewhere between an affirming statement and a faintly incredulous question. He’d had way too much Turkish liquor on that particular night.

  “You did,” I said.

  “I haven’t written about it,” he said.

  “But they have reason to think you’re about to?”

  “It’s the only reason they’d have a tail on me.”

  “In Paris?”

  “In Paris. I tried to follow up on the rumors a little more openly than was smart. Look. Kemal is a Muslim Mussolini, what il Duce wants to be in his own country a year or two down the road.”

  “You sure they have a man on you?”

  “He’s not wearing a fucking fez, but yes. Swarthy. Well put together. A middleweight. About five-eight. Tight dark beard. One shoulder a touch higher than the other. The left one. Seen him at least three times since we got back. At Lipp’s. And Le Select. Once on the street, following at a distance.” Hem paused, leaned a little toward me. “You know real well how spies work. Right?”

  He paused again.

  This last was an elbow nudging me in the ribs. Like something already understood between us. I wondered if I’d had too much mastik and beer one night at the Londres myself. I did not recall letting him in on my work for the government. I didn’t do that with anyone. But Hemingway was a real writer, by all accounts. Sylvia certainly thought so. And I knew him to be at least a swell reporter. He could read a man.

  Still, I didn’t take the bait. Didn’t say anything. Let the silence go on.

  He did too, for a few moments, and then he said, low, “There may come a time I’ll do what I’m pretty sure you’re already doing. But for now I bring this up because I think you’re the man who might help me.”

  His eyes had taken on that glisten again. It hurt me to see it.

  “If you’re right about the Turks,” I said, “I might be in a better position to be helpful than most mugs.”

  “Thanks,” he said, the word rasping at the back of his throat.

  But I had instant doubts that I could do anything. I said, “My first thought is how big a leap it would be for the Turks to target that valise.”

  His mouth pinched tight. He knew that. The likely alternative thief—a sneak making a quick snatch—would be impossible to track at this point. A bunch of papers would have been an immediate disappointment to a sneak, but the bag apparently hadn’t been discarded around the station. Without believing it was the Turks, Hem had to face the likelihood that his manuscripts were floating in the Seine, halfway to the English Channel by now.

  He and Hadley were dirt poor. This he’d often made perfectly clear. I said, “I take it the valise didn’t look ripe.”

  “Hell no. It was shabby alligator-embossed leatherette. Hadley left it in a compartment and went back out to the platform, but it was up on a luggage-rack with other peoples’ bags, better bags that didn’t get snatched.”

  He’d clearly interrogated Hadley closely.

  “Somebody was after it,” he said.

  “Were they right?” I asked. “Was there a Kemal story in the bag?”

  “No. But they wouldn’t be wise to that. The only writing they know me for is journalism.”

  “True enough,” I said. “But their ignorance ran far deeper. That’s the big leap of logic for us to think they did this. The content of t
he valise was based on a private decision made by your wife. How would they ever know to steal the thing?”

  Hemingway puffed and sat back in his chair.

  I sat back too.

  I said, “Why’d she make that decision? What moved her to put all your manuscripts into that valise to bring them to Lausanne?”

  “Lincoln Steffens.” He paused for a moment to let the name sink in.

  I nodded. “I’ve met him,” I said. He was a muckraking American journalist I ran into in Mexico when I went down there for the Post-Express in April of 1914 to cover Woody Wilson’s invasion, at Vera Cruz. He and my photographer, Bunky Millerman, became drinking buddies.

  Hem said, “Steff’s been a cheerleader since the Genoa Conference in April. He’s up in Lausanne this week and anxious to see more of my work. I wrote that to Hadley and now she’s put me in this scrape with a lunatic overreaction.”

  His rhetoric had once again heated up over Hadley, and we fell silent for a moment.

  Then he said, “Say. If they’re watching me in Paris, they’ve been watching me in Lausanne. The conference is full of Turks. The hotel bar included. Steff can get voluble in his praise. Maybe between the two of us we said enough to give the thugs a lead.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “At least enough to get them watching Hadley. The valise didn’t have to be a target. If your Paris Turk followed her to the station and found her bags left alone, he might have slipped in just to take a look. Even without any specific expectations. So he sees stories and thinks he’s caught a break. They don’t know literature from journalism.”

  “That makes sense.”

  I thought a moment. Then, “You have to get back to Lausanne?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Are there notes about Kemal?”

  “In the notebooks I carry with me.”

  “How many pages?”

  “A dozen or so.”

  “Do up a Kemal story. Before you go back to Switzerland. Just quick and dirty. Seal it in an envelope and leave it with Sylvia at the bookstore.”