Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner Read Free Book Online

hundred-dollar bills. I hurried back to Twenty-One, but as I came in, Jack pulled me to one side. 'Listen, Ernie,' he said, 'you better lay low for a while. I should have warned you—that was Legs Diamond's girl, and he's due back in town at five o'clock.'"
    We made reservations at "21" and then Ernest led me into the bedroom, where he opened his old, battered leather briefcase and took out the manuscript of the book. "Christ, I wish you were coming along," he said. "This is going to be a jolly autumn. One of my Venice girls has written she is coming to Paris. It will be necessary to maneuver and if you were there with the proofs, we could always go into conference. And when we weren't in conference with the proofs, we could be in conference at Auteuil. Georges could keep track of the form—not this George, Georges the Ritz barman. You know him? Well, he's very classy on form and we could do the field work and I would brain and watch what happens and we could set up a bank and work out of that. Hell, the more I think of it, the more depressed I get that we'll be off on this absolutely jolly autumn and there you'll be behind a desk on Eighth Avenue, and a Hearst desk at that." He pulled at his mustache thoughtfully.
    "Well, Papa," I said, "like Mr. James Durante says, 'It's the conditions that prevail.'"
    "Conditions are what you make them, boy. Now here's what we do." He picked up the manuscript and removed a sheaf of pages from the end of it. "Now you take this to your editor and tell him that it's all there except for the last few chapters, which I'm taking with me because they need more polishing."
    When I handed the manuscript to Herbert Mayes and told him that, he practically leaped out of his chair. "The last few chapters! My God, you know how unreliable he is! The way he drinks! There we'll be, going to press with the third installment and we won't have the ending! You'll have to go with him! Keep after him! Don't let him out of your sight! We must have these chapters by the first of January!"
    When I went back to the Sherry-Netherland later that evening, Ernest was sitting in an armchair, wearing a white tennis visor and reading a book. As I walked into the room, without looking up he said: "When are you leaving?"

Chapter Three
    Paris ♦ 1950

    Ernest and Mary stayed in their favorite room on the Vendome side of the Ritz. Jigee had a room two down from them, but I, out of a sense of bizarre nostalgia, stayed at the Hotel Opal, a small, cheerless establishment on Rue Tronchet, where I had been briefly quartered during the war, and whose intense discomfort had not registered at the time. They had traveled on the lie de France and I had gone by air a few days later, so we arrived simultaneously. Ernest was delighted to discover that the fall steeplechase meet at Auteuil—the emerald race track in the heart of the Bois de Boulogne—was to start the following day, and he suggested that we do something he had always wanted to do but never had—attend every day of an entire meet. "You get a wonderful rhythm," he said, "like playing ball every day, and you get to know the track so they can't fool you. There's a beauty restaurant at the top, hung right over the track, where you can eat good and watch them as though you were riding in the race. They bring you the cote jaune with the changing odds three times for each race, and you can bet right there, no rushing up and down to the bet cages with your unsettled food jiggling. It's too easy, but wonderful for scouting a race." We each contributed a sum of money to form what Ernest called The Hemhotch Syndicate, with the understanding that we would maintain the syndicate's capital at its inception level. (In later years, when our activities became more diversified, Ernest had us formally incorporated in New Jersey as Hemhotch, Ltd.) To commemorate this liaison and to conform to the European custom of carrying calling cards in one's billfold, we had the following card struck