Off the Mangrove Coast (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 20

  Maybe I could have done something. Perhaps I could have reached for him, but there were a dozen innocent people in that café; within gun range. I wanted no one else injured or killed even though I wanted to save myself.

  We paid our checks and stepped out into the cool night air…a little mist was drifting in over the building. It would be damp and foggy along the coast roads.

  We walked to his car, and he was a bare step behind me. “Get behind the wheel,” he said, “and drive carefully. Don’t get us stopped. If you do, I’ll kill you.”

  When we were moving, I spoke to him quietly. “What are you going to do, Rich? I always liked you. Even when you pulled this job, I still couldn’t feel you were all wrong. Somewhere along the line you didn’t get a decent break, something went wrong somewhere.

  “That’s why I’ve tried to help you tonight, because I was thinking of you.”

  “And not because you were afraid to die?” he sneered.

  “Give me a chance to help you…I’d rather die than go through what you have ahead, always ducking, dodging, worrying, knowing they were always there, closing in around you, stifling you.

  “And now, of course, there will be this. Those people in the café saw us leave together. They’ll have a good description of you.”

  “They never saw me before!”

  “I know…but they have seen me many times. I’ve always eaten in there by myself, so naturally the first time I sat with somebody else they would be curious and would notice you.”

  Traffic was growing less. He was guiding me by motions, and he was taking me out toward Palos Verdes and the cliffs along the sea. The fog rolled in, blanketing the road in spots. It was gray and thick.

  “The gas isn’t like this fog, Marmer,” I said, “you don’t see it.”

  “Shut up!” He slugged me backhanded with the gun. It wasn’t hard, he didn’t want to upset my driving.

  “It isn’t too late…yet. You can always go with me to the company.”

  “You stupid fool, I’m not going to turn myself in.”

  “You should, because it’s only a matter of days now, or hours.”

  The gun barrel jarred against my ribs and peeled hide. “Shut up!” His voice lifted. “Shut up or I’ll kill you now!”

  Bitterly, I stared at the thickening fog. All my talking had been useless. I was through. I might fight now, but with that gun in my ribs I’d small chance.

  Suddenly I saw a filling station. Two cars were parked there and people were laughing and talking. I was not going to die! I was…I casually put the car in neutral, aimed for an empty phone booth beside the road, and jerking up on the door handle, lunged from the car. The gun went off, its bullet burning my ribs, the muzzle blast tearing at my clothes. I went over and over on the pavement, the surface of the road tearing my shoulder, my knees, my hands. There was a crash of metal, the sound of breaking glass, and then silence. I rolled over, turning toward the wreck. The people at the gas station stared, frozen.

  Then the car door popped open and after a moment a figure moved, trying to get out of the car, trying to escape. The hand clutching the gun banged on the roof as Marmer tried to lever himself up. The dark form took one step and cried out, his left leg collapsed under him, and he fell to the ground. He rolled on his side, the gun moved in the darkness. There was a shot.

  My hands were shaking and my lips trembled. I picked myself up off the road and staggered toward the car.

  Richard Marmer’s head was back and there was blood on the gravel. He must have put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger a moment after he discovered that his leg was broken…a moment after he had finally realized he was trapped.

  *

  —

  SLOWLY, MY LEGS shaking, I turned and started down the road toward the filling station.

  I was alive…alive…

  The fog drifted like a cool, caressing hand across my cheek. Somebody dropped a tire iron and people were moving toward me.

  WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?

  LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.

  Currently included in the series are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1, published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, which will be published in the fall of 2019. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.

  In 2018 we will release No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.

  Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.

  An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes.

  All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.

  POSTSCRIPT

  By Beau L’Amour

  Off the Mangrove Coast is one of my favorite collections of Louis L’Amour stories. This has a lot to do with the number of references to my father’s actual life that it contains, some of which are more obvious than others. For example, the Oregon locations Louis featured in “Fighters Should Be Hungry”—Portland, St. Johns, and Astoria—were all places with which he was familiar. Louis lived in Portland, worked in St. Johns, and spent a good deal of time in Astoria as a young man. I am also pretty sure that Bickerstaff, one of the tough guys in “The Rounds Don’t Matter,” was named after a man in the garment business who may have taken advantage of my father and a number of other people in Klamath Falls, Oregon…though it must be said that the fault might also have been that of Mr. Bickerstaff’s supplier.

  In “The Unexpected Corpse” we meet Sue Shannon, a Hollywood starlet who was almost without a doubt inspired by Ann Steely, an actress friend of my father’s better known as Cathy O’Donnell. Like Sue, Ann seems to have had an unhappy childhood (though the part about the unmentioned “trouble” with her uncle is almost certainly fictionalized) and dreamed of a life in the theater. Like Jim, the narrator of the story, Dad encouraged her and provided unsparing advice about the dedication required to make her dreams a reality. Though Ann and Louis corresponded somewhat flirtatiously while he was overseas during WWII and she was living in Oklahoma, they saw each other only a few times once Dad moved to Hollywood. I have little doubt, however, given the tone of their letters and Ann’s somewhat dramatic approach to life, that if she had ever gotten in trouble she would have called on him, just as Sue calls on Jim.

  Looking carefully at “The Cross and the Candle,” I believe that the café my father describes in the opening paragraphs is a quainter and quieter version of La Vie Parisienne, the Paris nightclub owned by the celebrated singer and actress Suzy Solidor.

  Here are a couple pieces extracted from letters Louis wrote to his parents from France during the waning days of the war:

  There seems some evidence that part of the family [the L’Amour family] either were connected with Surcouf, the cordair [corsair] and great Breton hero, or were with him on his ships. So, I’m going
down tomorrow evening to see Suzy Solidor, a great grand daughter of his who owns the Chez Suzy, a night club on the Rue St. Anne, near the Louvre…It seems she was a few years ago one of the great beauties of Europe; that she was also a famous model; that she is still striking and attractive…I dropped by the night club last night but it was full to the doors and not a place anywhere, but I told the doorkeeper I was a writer, and came of an old Breton family…So I have an appointment with Suzy tomorrow night at ten.

  And…

  The place has over a hundred portraits of her done by all the famous artists of the past thirty years. She is about fifty, or perhaps a few years younger, and still something of a woman.

  Many of these portraits were indeed painted by significant artists like Picasso, Braque, and Tamara de Lempicka. It is interesting, given the subject of Louis’s story, that Suzy herself was convicted of being a collaborator. I am unaware of the exact charges but I suspect this was more related to the popularity of her club with Nazi officers than to her having possibly betrayed beautiful resistance fighters or secret societies of crusaders.

  Out of all these stories the one that is the most personal and true to Louis’s life is “It’s Your Move.” Though it wasn’t published in the 1980 collection Yondering, I consider it part of that same continuum. These stories were Dad’s reminiscences of the men (and women) who, as Robert Service put it, “don’t fit in,” the disenfranchised wanderers of the 1920s and ’30s: hobos, itinerant laborers, refugees, sailors, and soldiers of fortune.

  The Yondering series is incomplete, but it set out to present this world and these people in a selection of short stories set in three different cities; San Pedro, California, in the 1920s (“Old Doc Yak,” “It’s Your Move,” “And Proudly Die,” “Survival,” and “Show Me the Way to Go Home”); Shanghai, China, in the 1930s (“The Admiral,” “Shanghai, Not Without Gestures,” and “The Man Who Stole Shakespeare”); and Paris in the 1940s (“The Cross and the Candle” and “A Friend of the General”). Other stories, like “Death Westbound” and “Thicker Than Blood,” and Louis’s first novel, No Traveller Returns, told the tales of the ships and trains, the treks and voyages, that connected the world in the era between the great wars of the twentieth century.

  A good deal of the action in “It’s Your Move” takes place at the Seamen’s Church Institute in San Pedro. Many men “on the beach” (out of work) used the Institute as their meeting place, living room, clubhouse, or office. Sometimes, when he could spare the change, Dad would shower and sleep there. Here he is describing it in a recorded interview:

  …the Seamen’s Institute was a place like a YMCA but for sailors. The Seamen’s Institute, which was very well conducted, they had beds which you could get for fifty cents a night. They had showers and whatnot and they also had a library there and a big room where there were a lot of checker tables and we had some of the finest checker players, I think, there ever was anywhere would come into that room.

  The character of Sleeth, whom Louis, in the same interview, indicates was based on a real person, also shows up in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1. In Samsara, a mysteriously personal set of story fragments dealing with reincarnation, Sleeth recognizes the young hero as a man he has known in a past life and provides him with the connections to continue his enlightenment once he arrives in the Far East. Sleeth also tells the protagonist of a hidden archive, the stored memories of those reborn, going back to the dawn of time.

  This archive is located in western China, and it is just possible that another fragment, also in Lost Treasures: Volume 1, titled “Journey to Aksu,” might have been planned as a continuation of that unfinished novel. One draft out of many briefly connected the two. In Samsara, Sleeth provides the hero, a young man who shares a good deal of my father’s history, with connections in Shanghai, while “Journey to Aksu” deals with a mercenary soldier who discovers a city in China’s Xinjiang region that contains some sort of ancient and mysterious secret. A fascinating series of connections, and all stemming from a character who may have been a real person!

  “Off the Mangrove Coast” is another title that has a connection to Dad’s semiautobiographical Yondering series. In the summer of 1939 Louis related a similar tale as if it were true to columnist Roger Devlin of the Tulsa Tribune. In his column, Devlin wrote:

  Louis condensed four thrilling weeks of treasure hunting into a few agonizingly casual sentences. Happened up in the Malay States, he recalled. Some native ruler had fled a revolution a few years before, loading all his gold and jewels on a river boat. Hurricane came up, ship sank.

  “It was believed to be several million dollars of treasure in the ship’s strong room,” Louis said. “A bunch of [us] obtained a boat and with four weeks’ supply of food aboard, we set out to be wealthy.

  “We charted the currents of the river, figuring just where the ship might have drifted. That took time. But finally, in diving outfits, we found a sunken vessel, and we were fairly certain it was the right one.

  “The only trouble was that it was half drifted over with sand, and it took us a long time to clear that off. Then we found the ship was made of teak, just about the hardest wood going, and even harder after its long immersion. Took a long time to break through the side of the vessel. By then, too, we were running short of food. Had to live on the few fish we could catch.

  “At last we were just about ready to break into the strong room. We felt we already had the treasure in our hands, when—” He paused…

  “When another hurricane came up. We managed to live through it, but by the time it quieted down the treasure ship was completely buried in the sand. Far’s I know she’s still there.”

  Now, the jury is out on whether I really believe all that. Louis himself noted that there were some mistakes in Devlin’s retelling of the story. But while Dad did spend some time—even longer than four weeks—in the Federated Malay States and Netherlands East Indies (today’s Malaysia and Indonesia), and did sail past Darvel Bay, the location for the wreck in “Off the Mangrove Coast,” it is highly unlikely he was able to take time off for treasure hunting.

  But regardless of its potentially fictional aspects and whatever inconsistencies may have been added by the reporter, this tale does form a sort of “first draft” for the short story “Off the Mangrove Coast.”

  In the entire Louis L’Amour catalog, there is probably no story that has existed in so many variations as “The Diamond of Jeru.” It has been both a short story and a novella, a USA Network movie, and a three-hour dramatized audio production. The existence of all these versions seems even more extraordinary when one considers that the story itself was almost never published at all!

  I confess, most of these incarnations are my fault. “The Diamond of Jeru” was a relatively crude pulp story, which as fate would have it, just kept turning into a solution I could use to solve one problem after another. From an initial dislike, my fondness for it has grown exponentially. It’s now a bit sad to think that the following history of its evolution will probably be my final opportunity to explore its many aspects.

  In the summer of 1951, Louis L’Amour pounded out the short story eventually titled “The Diamond of Jeru.” It ran twenty pages, written, no doubt, in just a couple of days. Given its style, I suspect that it was intended for the men’s adventure magazines—publications like Real Adventure or MALE, which were the death rattle of the grand old prewar adventure pulps. These magazines featured frantic “Scorpions Pierced My Flesh!” headlines and even more lurid cover art.

  With their emphasis on “real life” adventure, it might seem that this genre was right up Louis’s alley, but in reality he was never very comfortable with it. However, the traditional pulp magazines were dying like flies, and book publishers had yet to take a liking to his material, so he really couldn’t rule out anything that paid an honest dollar.

  Dad made only one attempt to sell “The Diamond of Jeru,” sending it in June 1951 to a New York
agent who later became notorious for his haphazard business practices. The agent did not place it with a magazine; in fact, he may never have taken it from its envelope. My father’s copy went into a pile that later went into a box…a box that was filled with unpublished stories and was left in the back of a closet, to be discovered forty years later in the months following his death. Most of those stories were eventually published in the 1990s, but “The Diamond of Jeru” almost didn’t make the cut.

  Though “Jeru” was always slated to be included in this collection, partway through the process I removed it, feeling that it was not really good enough. Then I got a call from the editor I was working with; the page count for Off the Mangrove Coast was coming up short. I considered sticking the original version of the story back in. But even that wasn’t a solution—it was only around twenty pages and we needed several times that many.

  The answer to all our problems was for me to rewrite it, reworking the narrative into an eighty-page novella. I didn’t dislike everything about “Jeru” by a long shot: Borneo, the basic configuration of the characters, and the journey up a mysterious river into the heart of the jungle all had classic appeal. I just wasn’t quite sure how all the elements would come together or if I could elevate the story to match the rest of my father’s work.

  The version of “The Diamond of Jeru” that you have read earlier in this volume is very much a combination of my dad’s talents and my own. Although I had previously adapted his work into screenplays, dramatized audios, and things of that sort, this was the first time I had really ever written a story with him, so to speak. I was in my late thirties, and he had been gone for ten years, but the result of that process made me feel closer to him than ever. In a very minor way, I got a brief chance to be him.

  Here is his original 1951 version:

  When Lacklan brought his wife to Marudi, he was looking for diamonds, but when we learned he intended to take her up river with him, we decided he was a fool.