Hemingway's Notebook

by Bill Granger

  After a while, the men walked back into the forest, carrying the supplies in plastic boxes.

  After a long, silent time, the birds began to speak again in the trees. In the undergrowth beneath the pines, insects buzzed and whirred and noisily continued the pursuits of their small lives.

  It was the sound of the insects that Sister Mary Columbo heard first when she opened her eyes.

  10

  PHILIPPE

  The boy missed Harry Francis.

  The boy had awakened when the black police came after the blackout had begun. They had made a lot of noise at the door of the café. Harry Francis had answered the door and there had been an argument. His father had gone to the café to see what was the trouble. His mother told him to stay in bed. He had gotten out of bed and gone to the door and watched them take Harry Francis away. One of the black police took a bottle of whiskey from the table where Harry Francis had been sitting and snoring.

  Philippe knew many things. He knew that Harry Francis was a drunk. He did not like Harry when the white man bullied his father. But Harry was the most fascinating man Philippe had ever known in all his eleven years. He studied the white man every day that he came to the café; when Harry did not come to the café, it was as though Philippe had missed school. Now Harry was gone and Daniel, the schoolteacher, was in the capital making money and there was an emptiness to the day.

  Philippe had blue eyes that came from his grandfather who had been a Frenchman working for the copper company that had mined the island at the beginning of the century.

  The copper had run out and the mines were abandoned in the hills. His grandmother had been a whore. That is what Flaubert, Philippe’s father, had said. Her daughter was very beautiful; that was Philippe’s mother. Flaubert had married her to take her away from Madeleine where it was certain she would have become a whore. Perhaps she already had been a whore when Flaubert married her.

  The white man who had been Philippe’s grandfather had gone back to France in the time before the European war. Philippe was told by his mother that his grandfather was a brave man and that he had been killed in the war in Europe. Nobody knew if this story was true but his mother wanted Philippe to believe it. Philippe thought perhaps it was a story for children.

  Philippe was a solitary child because his color was wrong. He was too light and his eyes were blue. On the other hand, he was certainly not a white man, like Harry Francis.

  Harry Francis had been gone two days.

  Philippe thought again about him as he walked south down the deserted beach, away from the café and even farther from the capital. Halfway between St. Michel town and Madeleine was a pier and two shacks where fishermen lived and which smelled of fish. There was a café there like his father’s but not as clean. Harry Francis drank there sometimes when he was angry with Flaubert. Maybe Harry was angry now and had gone there instead. The black police would not keep someone like Harry for very long; when they had arrested him once before, they had kept him only two days and he had come back from the jail very weak and very tired and his skin had been very white.

  He came over a rise of sand and saw the white man sitting on a piece of driftwood, waiting.

  The white man had red hair and dark skin and his gray eyes glittered in the light. He was large but he sat very still with his hands on his knees.

  The beach was brilliant in the sun, the sand white and glistening but the tides threw up the remains of squids and man-of-wars and the beach which was littered with driftwood.

  The white man did not speak.

  “Who are you?” Philippe said. He did not move closer.

  “Gamin,” began Devereaux. His language was not of the island, Philippe saw. “You are Flaubert’s son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is Harry Francis?”

  “In jail.”

  “Why is he in jail?”

  “I don’t know. It is about Monsieur Cohn, I suppose.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Gamin,” Devereaux said again, “I talked to one of the fishermen down at the dock. He said that you were a friend of Harry’s.”

  Philippe blushed. He felt proud that the fishermen would understand that Harry Francis valued him as a friend.

  “Harry was arrested by the gendarmes noirs two days ago. At night. After the blackout.”

  “Why?”

  “They ask him about Monsieur Cohn. No one has seen him since he left my father’s café many days ago. I think six days.”

  “Who was Cohn?”

  “Another white man. He drank with Harry but he wanted something from him.”

  “What did he want?”

  “A book. No. It was in English. A word that is…” Philippe bit his lip. “I don’t remember. A nun-book.”

  “Notebook.”

  “Ah, oui, d’accord. Notebook.”

  “Did Harry give him a notebook?”

  “No. Everyone talks to Harry about his notebook. But I don’t think he has one. I told him once I would like to see it and he said he would show it to me someday. When he was finished with it. But I knew he was not telling me the truth.”

  “How did you know.”

  “Because I could see it in his eye. When he tells me a lie, his eye does not look at me.”

  “The notebook is a lie.”

  “He said it is all the secrets. How could it be all the secrets—there are so many of them?”

  “You heard him talk to Cohn.”

  “When I cleaned the blood. Monsieur Harry had killed a chicken and I had to clean the floor.”

  “Harry is in jail then,” Devereaux said, staring at the sand, his gray eyes distant with thought.

  “If he is not with the fishermen.”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes he goes there when he is angry with my father.”

  “Where does Harry live?”

  “Toward the hills. That way.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Yes. Sometimes I go to see Harry and we talk.”

  “You like Harry.”

  “Yes. We are friends.”

  “Will you take me to his place.”

  “Do you think he’s there?”

  “I don’t know, gamin.”

  “Why do you want to see him?”

  “To find out about the book.”

  “The nun-book?” Philippe smiled. “Everyone wants the same thing and all leave without it. Even the gendarmes noirs.”

  “They wanted the notebook.”

  “The first time. A long time ago they took Harry to jail and when he came back, they had hurt him. He told me later that they had wanted the notebook and that he would not give it up. That’s when I thought there was none and that Harry was too ashamed to say that he had not written the book.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “He is a writer. He showed me the books he wrote. All of them a long time ago. But he has not written for a long time.”

  Devereaux stood up. “Show me the place.”

  They climbed for a half hour and the house was half hidden in the trees. The place was old and ramshackle. There were two rooms and, outside, a privy. The walls of the shack were very dry. The wood was bleached and the tar paper on the roof was thin and peeling. They had passed a half dozen shacks like this, all of wood, unlike the concrete huts in the town and along the beach.

  Devereaux opened the door of the shack. The boy stood on the porch and watched him. The place smelled of Harry. He had lived there for six years, since he first came to St. Michel.

  The larger room was full of books. They were stacked on shelves and on the floor. There was a large and dirty cotton rug on the floor. There was a big easy chair of cracked vinyl near the window. Next to the chair was a tray with an empty vodka bottle on it.

  The place had been searched not very long ago, Devereaux saw. Some of the books were strewn, some had been replaced on the shelves. Dust had been disturbed and it had been so
recent that a new layer of dust was still in the beginning stages. Perhaps a couple of days, about the time Harry was arrested.

  When Rita Macklin came to St. Michel.

  It was the second thought—the one about Rita—that had filled him from the moment the boy said Harry Francis had been arrested. If Ready did not need Devereaux to find Harry’s secret for him, he did not need Rita Macklin. Why had he involved them at all, why go to Switzerland and set a trap to get Devereaux to this island?

  Rita had asked him the questions that night in Lausanne and he could not answer them. He had to walk in darkness with flat, uncertain treads on uncertain surfaces, hoping that he would eventually have light and a solid foundation to stand on. Ready wanted a spy as good as Ready.

  The boy said, “He has not been here.”

  “No.”

  “He must still be in jail.”

  “Where is the jail?”

  “In the capital. In the basement of the Palais Gris.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The presidential palace. The jail is in the basement. You can hear the prisoners when they are screaming.”

  Devereaux was looking at the books, opening them, closing them, going through the careful routine in the hot, still room. “Why do they scream?”

  “Because they are in pain.”

  “Do the police torture prisoners?”

  “They tortured Monsieur Harry. The first time. They thought they had killed him. Harry said it was why they let him go, they did not want to kill him, they only wanted to frighten him.”

  “Was he frightened?”

  “Some people think he is a buffoon, but Monsieur Harry is not. He is a brave man,” Philippe said of his friend.

  Harry’s titles were few. They were espionage novels all written more than a decade before. The covers of the novels were lurid, with men with guns and women with long legs and frightened faces. “By Harry Francis.” He had been working for the Langley Firm then. They had approved his work, even encouraged it, Devereaux supposed. The intelligence agencies had writers who wrote novels that planted disinformation in the minds of the Soviet agents who read those novels for clues to what the Americans were really doing. Harry was part of a long literary tradition of spies turned writers.

  And he had known Hemingway and he had become “Hemingway.”

  Devereaux spent a careful hour in the two rooms. He worked slowly and tried consciously not to hurry in his task. He touched every object in both rooms. His fingers turned over books and notebooks and canister jars full of caked salt and a Zenith transoceanic radio and bedclothes that were strewn around an unmade army cot. It was the home of a lonely, middle-aged man who had gathered some treasures and comforts and then had abandoned them because they were not enough.

  There was nothing in the house.

  Devereaux walked outside and stretched in the muggy air. The sun was filtered by trees here and it was not so hot as it was down on the beach.

  “You see,” said Philippe with triumph in his voice. “No one can find Monsieur Harry’s notebook.”

  “Because it does not exist.”

  “That is what I think,” Philippe said. But he had lost the attention of the white man, who was crossing the bare, sandy yard in back of the shack to the privy.

  Devereaux opened the door and was assailed by the dank stink of rotting feces in the holding tank.

  “What do you look for?”

  “The same thing the other men looked for.”

  “Commander Celezon.”

  “And Colonel Ready.”

  “Once Colonel Ready came here. I know. Alone. I saw him. He was like you. He looked in the toilet. What are you looking for?”

  Devereaux made a face and stood still until he became accustomed to the smell. Then he took a stick and poked at the underside of the toilet seat, which was a wooden shelf with a hole cut in the middle. There was nothing.

  He expected to find nothing. But it was the way you did a search. The way Ready would have done a search.

  He dropped the stick.

  The stick dropped into the filthy holding tank and struck something. The sound was hard, wood on metal.

  He looked at Philippe, who was staring at him with wide blue eyes in a wonderfully old and cynical child’s face.

  Devereaux reached under the seat and pulled at the nails that held it to the support boards.

  The nails screeched and the board came up. The holding tank was open but there was nothing to be seen but the murky filthy water and the bits of paper and leaves and the rotting feces.

  The stick floated on the scum.

  Devereaux made a face. He took the shelving of the toilet bench and poked the surface of the water. He felt a hard object beneath the opaque scum.

  He put the toilet seat back on the boards and stepped out of the privy. He stared at Philippe and the boy returned the stare. The boy knew, Devereaux thought. He had known when he had watched Colonel Ready alone go through the search and miss it. He had known when he saw Celezon and his men tear up Harry’s place and miss it. He had known.

  “How does Harry get it out?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Devereaux shrugged. He walked back to the shack. He found it in plain sight. Fishing poles and bits of tackle and leaders and reels. Also an old net.

  And the net on the pole.

  He went back to the privy.

  The box was wrapped in oilcloth and it was dripping with scum when he lifted it out of the holding tank. He dropped the box on the ground. With the end of a stick, he opened the oilcloth. He took the box and wiped his hands on his trousers and they streaked his trousers with filth.

  He was sweating and the boy was watching him but from a little distance.

  “This is Harry’s secret place isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said and he took a step back.

  “Is that true?”

  “I would not lie.”

  “You would lie to protect Harry.”

  “I would protect Harry anyway.”

  “If I open the box and you see what it is, what will you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You might tell the police.”

  “You don’t ever talk to the police. You don’t know that? But you are white, so you don’t have to know that.”

  Devereaux thought he understood. Besides, what would the boy know?

  My God, Devereaux thought. A secret. Harry has a secret after all. It was the last thing he wanted.

  He wanted only to have enough time to put a finger on Colonel Ready, set the trap he had already baited with his gaudy performance in London and Miami and in Fort Myers Beach. And now there was a secret.

  Devereaux opened the lock with a knife. Inside the tackle box was more oilcloth. He opened this and took out the contents.

  There was a photograph. It was pasted to cardboard to make it stiff. It was a little faded. The photograph showed a large, bearded man with a large belly who wore a white shirt and shorts. He was a handsome man with a straight nose who combed his hair forward to his forehead, as though he might be going bald.

  Philippe came close. He stood near Devereaux, who was crouched on the ground. Philippe was overcome by curiosity. He came and looked at the photograph. He said, “This man looks like Harry but it is not him.”

  “No,” Devereaux said.

  “Who is this man?”

  “A writer named Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Harry told me about Ernest many times. He said I would like this man, he was a man who knew many children.”

  “And this man is Harry when he was young.”

  They both saw it. They stared at the young man, thinner, wearing a black mustache, taller than Hemingway, also clad in shorts. The two men standing on a dock somewhere. Perhaps in Cuba, when Harry had worked for the Langley Agency there. The writer and the spy.

  Carefully, he put down the photograph on the grass and he picked up the notebook.

 
It was bound in good calfskin leather. The thin pages were yellowed by the years.

  “That is Harry’s book.”

  “You know about that.”

  “Everyone has heard of Harry’s book. It is magic. But no one has ever seen it. The gendarmes noirs came here many times and they never found the book. And that is the book and you have found it.” Philippe was impressed.

  Devereaux opened the book and he saw the first page covered with numbers in rows. The numbers were grouped in sets of five. A simple number code. Row after row of numbers. The kind of numbers sent in simple ciphers before the war, before the invention of machines that could invent random codes that could not be broken without another receiving machine.

  He turned the pages, kneeling on the grass.

  Thirty pages were filled in a methodical way with the numbers, each neatly copied, each set of five followed by a precise space that led to a second set of five.

  There could not have been a notebook; Devereaux had thought the notebook was a ruse from the beginning, a fabrication created by Harry or by Ready to use against Devereaux. Devereaux had realized sitting in the café in Evian that Ready meant to kill him and he had not understood why he had not killed him then and there. Why lure him and Rita to this island with an elaborate explanation about Harry Francis and his secrets and about spies and about “operations” about to commence. No one cared about St. Michel.

  Except there was a notebook in code and it changed the rules of the game and changed all of Devereaux’s expectations.

  The damned thing should not have existed.

  “What will you do, monsieur?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You will take the book that everyone speaks about.”

  “Yes.”

  “It belongs to Harry.”

  “I’ll give it back to Harry. When he is released. From jail.”

  “What if they beat him again as they did before and this time he tells them where the notebook is and it is not here when they come for it? They might kill him.”

  “Did he tell you they beat him?”

  “Yes. Twice. He showed me the marks.”