Hemingway's Notebook

by Bill Granger

  She took out a fistful of French francs—the currency of St. Michel—and chose two notes and then remembered that the schoolteacher named Daniel drove the taxi because he did not make sufficient money teaching school.

  “What do the children do when you do not teach?”

  “They wait for me,” said Daniel. “I promise never to be away from them for too long. It is just long enough to make a little money.”

  Rita Macklin gave him four notes and climbed out of the Renault. Daniel had her bag and he carried it across the threshold of the hotel. He wore shoes and long pants and his beautiful shirt from Miami. He put down the bag at the lobby desk and waited for the clerk.

  After a moment, a pale man with light blond hair appeared from the alcove. He looked at Daniel and at Rita and said in French, “Complet.”

  “I have a reservation.”

  “There is no room.”

  “I have a reservation.”

  “It is impossible. Complet! Complet!”

  “From Colonel Ready.”

  “Complet,” said the bored young man and then his eyes opened wider and he took the proffered reservation form and looked at it as though it might be a forged bank note. He turned it over.

  Rita looked at the lobby. The leather chairs looked old and unused but the lobby was clean and spare. There was a small bar off the lobby. A couple of men stood at the bar drinking with each other and speaking in soft French.

  “Madame,” said the young man. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Yes.”

  “We are expecting you, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He rang the bell for the boy. He looked at the mail slot and found a card. He rushed around the front desk and shooed Daniel away. He picked up her bag. He waited for the boy who emerged from another alcove rubbing his chin.

  The clerk spoke to the boy in imperious French. After a year in Switzerland, Rita Macklin had begun to understand the differences in the foreign language.

  “We have your suite, Madame Macklin, and after you are refreshed, there is to be a reception for the friends of St. Michel—our foreign guests—at the Palais Gris—”

  “I thought it was tomorrow night.”

  “No. It was changed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It was changed.”

  “When?”

  “I’m not certain, but it was changed.”

  “I’m exhausted.”

  “Garçon, take the madame to her suite.” The boy hefted the bag with thin arms and led her to the elevator cage. The cage was open. He pushed back the gate and they got on board and he pushed the button marked two. In the European style, it took them to the third floor.

  The room was not a suite. It was a room furnished in an imitation French style with white painted tables and Louis XIV chairs that were actually fabricated in Mexico. The bed, she saw, had an elaborate headboard though no footboard at all.

  She took a long, hot shower to stop her tiredness. The water had only a little pressure but it was enough. And it was hot.

  There was no air conditioning in the room. It was muggy. She wrapped herself in a towel and pushed open the large windows and caught a breeze from the harbor that smelled of sea and fish. It was a sweet rotting smell. She stared at the squat capital beyond her window.

  There was a knock at the door. The clerk opened it without waiting for a reply. He was followed by the bellboy.

  “Madame, my pardon,” he said.

  The towel covered her sufficiently but she did not move. The bellboy had a large oscillating fan on a silver tray. He placed the fan on the dresser and plugged it in. It whirred to life. The clerk carried a bottle of chilled Moët and a glass. “Madame Macklin, welcome to St. Michel.”

  She could only stare at him, at the fan blowing back and forth, at the bellboy waiting in attendance.

  “Unfortunately,” said the clerk, clearing his throat, “money for air conditioning was not included in the budget of the Ritz, which is only two years old and the most modern hotel in St. Michel.” The clerk folded his hands in front of him. “There is every intention in the next budget to equip each room with air conditioning by the time the new cruise ships arrive at the new docks.”

  Everyone in St. Michel seemed obsessed with explanation, all delivered with cheerful regrets and an acceptance of perpetual failure.

  When the two left, with more francs in their pockets, Rita sat in front of the fan and let it blow on her naked body and she drank a glass of champagne and tried to feel better.

  Why had she come here?

  Because she loved him. It was why she had done any of it. Devereaux had met her and used her and left her; then Devereaux had crossed her path a second time. They had fallen in love and had tried to run away once from his old life but there had been a contract against him from the KGB. Only when it seemed he had died in the hotel room in Zurich on the last business—only when R Section was willing to bury his file—did it seem they were safe. He had relished his safety. He had lived with her and never wanted anything more. And one day, Colonel Ready had come down a hill in Lausanne and awakened him to his old life and now he said he thought he knew a way out for both of them. But it would take time. And she would have to play Ready’s game.

  “Ready is death,” she told Devereaux.

  But he had waited, he had not wanted to run again. The old dreams that had made him groan in his sleep when they first slept together and which had been banished by the peace of his dead life in Switzerland came back on those last two nights. He groaned and saw ghosts of dead men in sleep. He heard the chains of all the dead he had known and all the dead he had killed and all the dead he had tried to keep alive. The old life was in him again, cold and unfeeling and she had become a hostage for his life, for the chance he might be able to be dead again. He had said he had a plan. He was enacting it now… she would be patient.

  The air from the fan felt cold on her naked body.

  She put down her glass of champagne.

  She pulled down the coverlet on the bed and felt the cool linen next to her skin. The sun sank inexorably. She fell asleep and did not dream; she had no old life to relive. He was her life. She slept until the evening when there was a knock at her door.

  6

  THE MORGUE

  Cohn’s naked body lay on the stone slab in the basement room used as a morgue. His face was blue and serene. The cut across his neck showed dark against the tissues beneath the skin which were already turning black.

  Colonel Ready was dressed in his Class A uniform of the army of St. Michel. The light blue uniform was covered with piping and medals. He wore three gold stars on each epaulet.

  “Where did they dump him?”

  “Left him on the road,” said Celezon, staring at the body with the same serene expression that showed on dead Cohn’s face.

  “There’s always hell to pay for something like this,” Colonel Ready said. “What about his papers?”

  “Everything was missing.”

  “Why was he down there?”

  “He spent the night drinking with Harry Francis. He’d been with Harry Francis for a couple of days.”

  “We knew that. Fucking Harry Francis, fucking rummy. All right, put on a show. Run him in and throw him in the dry cell until he gets reasonably sober. I’m not supposed to be a policeman, Celezon.”

  They had returned to St. Michel two days before. Rita Macklin had been observed by Celezon disembarking from the shuttle flight at Aerodrome St. Michel that afternoon. If Rita Macklin had not bolted, Devereaux would follow the plan outlined by Ready. Ready had been in a good mood when Celezon told him about Rita. It had seemed like a good time to tell Colonel Ready about the American who had been killed on the beach.

  Colonel Ready stared across the naked body at his aide. Celezon was the nominal chief of the Special Security Police. The gendarmes noirs were the most feared force on the island. Even the voodoo priests in the hills did not venture out at
night very often when the gendarmes noirs were combing through the villages allegedly looking for drug runners. The voodoo priests feared only the black power of the voodoo but there were those who said that blackness was most concentrated in the blackness of the evil of the gendarmes noirs.

  “We will discover the perpetrators,” said Celezon.

  Colonel Ready did not speak for a moment. His blue eyes were mocking and Celezon met his gaze with the dignity of a judge.

  “How do you suppose it went down?”

  “I don’t know. Thieves. Perhaps it was one of the rebels—”

  “Come on, Celezon. Don’t tell me things like that. You start with Manet killing him and you’ll end up believing Harry Francis did it.”

  “Harry Francis has a big knife. He killed a chicken the night Cohn was killed. He killed the chicken in Flaubert’s café—he cut off its head like this.” And Celezon made a slitting noise and drew his finger across his own throat. And smiled at Colonel Ready.

  Ready returned the smile. “You tell them that this was not a white tourist—God knows we don’t get many of those. Tell those morons that he was a Heap Big Man, you tell them that.”

  “He was a friend of the American consul.”

  “Fuck the American consul. Except I will have to hold his hand tonight at the reception for the president. I will have to assure him that Cohn was a victim of the unfortunate underworld of crime that is the only supportable crop on this godforsaken island. Cohn. I knew what Cohn wanted and I wanted him to get it from Harry so I could get it from Cohn. I just wanted to see the fucking book, to see if it existed. And one of your goons went and killed him.”

  “There are too many incidents of violence after lights out,” said Celezon with gravity.

  “That’s not true and you know it. Even the voodoo priests stay indoors—they’re more scared of your gendarmes than they are of the spirit of dead chickens.”

  “You don’t understand the voodoo,” Celezon said.

  “Because I don’t want to.”

  Colonel Ready turned and glanced again at the second slab. It was occupied as well, by the naked body of a young woman who had been raped and killed three nights before, not far from the road where Cohn was found. She had markings on her body, on her belly and breasts. The marks appeared to be geometrical symbols or astrological signs. They had been cut into the flesh and the flesh was dried now and the marks were almost black. Her abdominal cavity was open because the medical examiner from the hospital had wanted to investigate the contents of her stomach; he was preparing a paper on postmortem digestive processes for a journal in Paris.

  “Why must we arrest Harry Francis if you tell me that Harry Francis did not kill this man?” Celezon said in his flat singsong patois.

  “Because we have to do all the usual things. Because it will give me something to say to the American consul tonight. And the American consul will radio that information to the spooks in the State Department and it will be digested in the intelligence community and there will be another black mark against Harry Francis’s name. Maybe when Harry is in a corner, there will be a way to reason with him. Always think of the angles and make the best of a bad situation, Celezon.”

  “I will learn this.”

  “And learn this: Harry is the noisiest agent in St. Michel. In the whole fucking Caribbean. He’s been a joke for a long time but that doesn’t mean he isn’t useful. To me. And to you. And to his keepers. The clown can hear as many confessions as the priest. And some of them will be truer.”

  “When does the gray man come?”

  “In two days.”

  “Will he come to the capital?”

  “I expect him. There’s no other way except by air unless he wants to swim.”

  “I wish you would tell me what you really want from him—”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I am chief of security, mon colonel—”

  “I made you that, Celezon.” Colonel Ready came around the slab and stood very close to Celezon. “I can make you latrine orderly tomorrow, Celezon, so don’t ever crowd me. And don’t ever tell me that someone like Cohn has been slit by one of your goons.”

  “I am certain no member of the Special Security Force—”

  But he stopped because Colonel Ready had turned away and was walking across the cement floor to the steps on the far side of the basement room. Above this place of death was the palace of the grand rooms. For a moment, Celezon let the hatred glitter in his eyes. It was only for a moment and only because Colonel Ready had turned his back.

  From the bottom of the steps, Colonel Ready spoke with his back turned. “Tell Dr. Jobe to get these stiffs in the ground. I could smell them at the top of the stairs. We don’t want guests at the reception tonight getting sick.”

  “Oui, mon colonel,” said Celezon and because Ready’s back was turned, he gave a large mocking salute with his big brown hand.

  The morgue was in a wing of the gray stucco building called the Palais Gris. President Claude-Eduard and his sister, Yvette, lived in the part of the building that faced on the central court of the palais. In the basement, the gendarmes noirs had their headquarters and their holding cells.

  Which is why Harry Francis, when he was dragged to the cells around midnight, could hear the party sounds of the presidential reception floating through the open windows of the stately building.

  7

  THE TRAIL OF NOVEMBER

  Hanley sat behind the government-issue gray metal desk and folded his white, almost translucent hands together on the desktop in front of him.

  Lydia Neumann took her usual chair across from him. She was a large woman with spiky black hair cut in rough wedges. She wore a sweater because the windowless office was sixty degrees Fahrenheit. It was always cold because the temperature matched Hanley’s pale, parsimonious nature.

  Lydia Neumann was the computer expert in R Section. She ran CompAn. She had stumbled across November’s trail twenty-three hours before. Now there was corroboration.

  Hanley was operations chief of R Section, which was the name of an intelligence agency nominally under the director of Central Intelligence. The agency was coded in budget papers as an agricultural estimation service with an international intelligence mission. The code was not true and everyone knew it, including the Section rivals at CIA and DIA and the National Security Agency.

  “Why is November awakening?” asked Mrs. Neumann. The people in Washington always spoke in slang, even the best of them. Agents went to sleep, never to cover or deep cover or even death. Agents rarely awoke independently.

  “We don’t know that he is. That is your interpretation of data. There’s no contact with us. Maybe he went to London for a private job.”

  “He isn’t freelance.”

  “I don’t know what he is anymore. Except dead.”

  “Asleep,” she insisted. “He’s waking up.”

  “Spooks never die, is that it, Mrs. Neumann?” said Hanley.

  “Maybe he went to London to do a research project,” she said. Her voice was very rough and raspy and when she added sarcasm to her words, the thrust was choppy and meant to hurt.

  “It may be all coincidence,” Hanley said. He studied his hands. He had studied them often in twenty years in R Section. The hands rarely contained answers. He did not believe in coincidence.

  “Rita Macklin went to St. Michel. She went to Frankfurt and took a flight to Miami. She transferred to Air France to Guadeloupe. She transferred to another plane to St. Michel… a local carrier.…” She frowned because she had forgotten the name of the line. “She is a more experienced traveler than that. She drew attention to herself, traveling in such a circumspect way.”

  “Yes.”

  “As though she knew we would be watching her and she wanted us to watch her very closely now,” Mrs. Neumann said.

  “Is that your computer analysis or your instinct?”

  “Instinct.”

  “And we have a man
in St. Michel,” said Hanley.

  “A dead man.”

  “Cohn. Cohn was pretty good,” Hanley said.

  “We have Cohn dead and—”

  “Shh,” said Hanley, putting one finger to his lips. Some things should not be said, even in rooms without windows that are cleared daily.

  “And November is in London, checking out old friends and resources.”

  “Seeking information on the political and economic state of St. Michel,” Hanley said.

  “Coincidence,” said Mrs. Neumann. Her voice was full of sarcasm again.

  “Coincidence,” said Hanley, staring at his fingers folded into the attitude of prayer.

  Mrs. Neumann kept the computers. She filed the data, she did the research, she invented the programs for the one hundred people who worked for her in CompAn within R Section. She lived with the computers and was comfortable in their company. She knew what to look for when the computers spoke to her. They had spoken the day before to a routine GS-9 clerk, who had brought the red flag to her immediately. NOVEMBER. But “November” was the nomenclature of a terminated agent. His file was not active; he was asleep, computerized into Archives, the paperwork backup of the floppy disks already grown dusty in the sub-sub-basement storage lockers.

  But November was awake, the computer insisted. Awake and stirring.

  “He had access to his friends in London,” Hanley said for the sixth time that morning. “He could have used any name when he retrieved information from Economic Review. He wanted to signal us. That’s why he used November.”

  “He didn’t use the passport we fitted him with when he entered Britain.”

  “The bastard even had Economic Review bill us for the information he got. Effrontery.”

  “He put out all the flags.”

  “We’re not under sail,” Hanley said. “Hasn’t he heard of safe phones? He could have called. Why not come here? He became a Sleeper through choice, his own choice.”

  Fourteen months before, to save his life, Devereaux had faked his own death. Hanley knew; Mrs. Neumann knew; the Old Man knew. And that was all. The file was filed in Archives and November was put to sleep.