The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris Page B

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.
    â€œAnything 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.
    â€œThere’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.
    â€œNever heard of it,” Grady said, and swerved to avoid some dead animal in the road.
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€œIs it something new?” Grady said.
    â€œThere 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.
    â€œCheckpoint up ahead. Hide the drugs.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œYou think Hemingway got himself in trouble with gamblers?”
    â€œMaybe,” 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