Hemingway's Notebook

by Bill Granger

  Rita said nothing, trying to think.

  “Celezon. We were children once, brother and sister. And then there was the brotherhood of the true religion, the one of the hills, not the false religion of that fat old priest from France.”

  “Your mother and father—”

  “No, of course not. We were made brother and sister when we shared our blood.”

  She smiled, paused.

  “And our bodies.”

  Smiling still, through the horror of the gray morning room. “You must tell of what Colonel Ready has done, how he has perverted this country from the true ways.”

  “I have to get out of here,” she said.

  “Yes. There’s a way. Four miles south of the town is the café of a man called Flaubert. You will be able to find Harry Francis there. Or you will find a child who can take you to his shack.”

  “Why must I find him?”

  “Because Colonel Ready has the notebook now. Harry’s notebook. It is all he needs. Harry will understand that. Harry will find a way to take you off the island. You have to escape to tell the truth. If Colonel Ready finds you, he will kill you. Remember.”

  “I—”

  “No. Nothing. Now you must flee. I’ll give you francs, a new cloak to wear—you have to go now while most of the soldiers are drunk or sleeping.…”

  21

  TELLING HARRY

  The clouds built high above the island and blotted out the gray sky to the east. The black clouds blustered about rain, and the wind shifted and the waves began to pound at the beach outside the dining room of the Café de la Paix.

  Harry’s bones ached. Philippe watched him at the table. Harry drank coffee laced with rum. Once he said, “Did you miss me, kid?”

  Philippe said nothing.

  Philippe saw that Harry’s face was flushed with drink but that the cuts were healing. They had let him go the night before.

  “When you were in prison, a man came to find you.”

  “What man, little one?”

  “He had red hair.”

  “It was Colonel Ready.”

  “Another man.”

  “What kind of a man.”

  “A white. Like you. And an American. He said he was your friend.”

  “I don’t have any friends.” He tousled the boy’s thick hair. “Except you.”

  “He went to your house.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “He asked me to take him there.”

  “So you took him. What’d he do, bribe you?”

  “You weren’t there. I thought he might be your friend.”

  “I don’t have no friends, I told you that.”

  “The police had been there before. I didn’t think it mattered.”

  “What didn’t matter?”

  “He wanted to find your notebook. I told him you were in the prison.”

  “You’re a regular chatterbox, you know that?”

  Philippe said nothing. It wasn’t right yet.

  “They all want my notebook, Philippe. It’s the thing that keeps them going.”

  “Yes.”

  “Get me another bottle, will you?”

  “Yes,” said the child.

  Then: “Monsieur Harry?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I thought they might kill you.”

  “So did I at the time.”

  “He found the book,” said Philippe.

  Harry paused. He put down the cup. He stared at the child.

  “He found the notebook. In the pit in the toilette.”

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

  “He took a net and took out the box. There was a picture of you, monsieur. And a monsieur named Hemingway.”

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

  “The notebook was full of numbers,” said Philippe.

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph, son-of-a-bitch.”

  And Harry grabbed Philippe by his scrawny neck and squeezed until he felt the breath leaving the body of the boy, felt the muscles straining in the thin body against his hold.

  “Who is it, you whore’s son? Who was this man that took the box, you son of a fucking whore, you black nigger bastard?”

  The eyes of the child bulged.

  Harry meant to kill him all right. Flaubert saw that. Flaubert was at the door of the back room and he had a cleaver and he thought for a moment if he should kill Monsieur Harry because Harry meant to kill Philippe. He stared at the tableau.

  And the front door banged open in the wind.

  Rita Macklin, in dark cloak, stood framed in the gray storming light.

  Flaubert said, “Don’t hurt Philippe.”

  “Who took my book, you little nigger brat?”

  “Devereaux,” she said.

  Harry Francis opened his hand and let the child breathe and Flaubert let the cleaver fall to his side and they all stared at the woman in the doorway. The wind blew into the room and the door banged on its hinge.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Devereaux took your book. And now Colonel Ready has it and Devereaux is dead,” said Rita Macklin. Her face was flushed. She had dodged her way from the Palais Gris through the shuttered town, past the army patrols, down to this place and she thought she had no strength left. She had run for no other reason than to run from the nightmare that Devereaux’s naked body was on a slab in that building, that his brain was splattered gray on a metal tray.

  “Who are you?”

  “I came with him. I’m a journalist. You’re Harry Francis and Colonel Ready is going to kill you and we have to get off this island.”

  “Who was Devereaux, who was I to him?”

  “Like you. An agent in the trade,” she said in a controlled voice that was as loud as the wind. “And he died in the trade and you’re going to die and that’s all there is. I want to escape—”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Yvette.”

  His face blanched. She saw he thought it was true. Yvette would know. He knew about Yvette and he knew that she told the truth. She had the ring in her fist, it was the truth to her that Devereaux was dead, but her words were enough for Harry Francis.

  “He took my notebook.” Slowly and sadly, Harry stood up and there were tears in his dead eyes.

  And the first gendarme was in the door and he hit Rita Macklin across her back with his short baton. She stumbled and he took her by the hair and hit her again, and the pain fell in folds down her back.

  “Allons,” he said to her and pulled her and the second one was in the door with handcuffs. Harry Francis took a step forward. The first policeman hit him in the ribs. Harry grunted. He swung again and Harry went down to one knee. He swung again and Harry cried out. And the third one was in the door and he did not know who to hit so he hit Flaubert because Flaubert had the cleaver in his hand. The cleaver fell on the floor. Philippe screamed and the third one hit him with the baton and Philippe was knocked out. Flaubert said nothing and tried to stand still and the third gendarme hit him again because he was standing still and doing nothing. The first one hit Harry Francis across the back twice and the second one pulled at the handcuffs so that Rita’s arms felt numb and her footing was bad and she slipped and the second one hit her again.

  Harry said, “You bastards.”

  The first policeman grinned and said, in French, that he would probably be back to arrest Harry later but that all they wanted now was the white woman.

  They shoved Rita into the open Jeep. The rain washed down the seats and one of the policemen held her because she could not keep her balance in the open Jeep. The Jeep turned sharply around and headed north back four miles to the center of St. Michel town and then up to the Palais Gris, where the prison and the morgue were in the basement.

  Philippe groaned, rose, ran to the door, stumbled, held the jamb, watched the Jeep.

  He turned to Harry Francis and he said, “I’m glad they have the notebook. Because now they will kill you, too, along with that woman.”
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br />   22

  DEVEREAUX’S GIRL

  They took her down into the cells. She crossed the courtyard of the palace in the rain, crossing from the front to the side basement door as Harry Francis had been dragged across five nights before. She felt the arms push her but felt nothing more. A sereneness had come to her on the road to St. Michel. Thomas More had watched the prisoners led to the execution dock and said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” God’s grace ran out for him in time; and her. She thought these things because they comforted her.

  When she was led into the cells, they took her clothes. One of the men said he had to search her then. He put on a latex glove and he explored her. When he was finished, he looked at her and smiled and she saw he had only blackened teeth. She said he was a bastard and his mother was a whore.

  He hit her and smiled and hit her again very hard. They put her in the cell then with the tile walls and the tile floor and the two drains. They turned on the hose and beat her with the steady stream of water. She thought she was drowning.

  She was inside the cell for an hour. It was raining. She heard the thunder though there was no window in the cell to see the rain. Devereaux was dead. In a little while, she would be dead as well.

  A man came into the room and told her to stand up. She stared up at him. He kicked her below the ribs so that she vomited. He told her to stand up. She stood up. He told her to keep standing. He went out of the cell.

  When you are cold and wet and naked and a prisoner, you lose your defiance because dignity is too heavy a burden to carry. When your body is not your own, there is no dignity. You only want to be what you are not—warm and dry and safe and clothed and free. But the least of these things is freedom. You will give up freedom to have the other things. All of the manuals of interrogation agree on this, whatever their language. The lesson is the same in Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow or in Havana or Salvador or in the little safe houses off the Beltway in Virginia where people are not seen and cries are not heard.

  Pain is useful, the manuals agree, but that is later. The process must begin with humiliation. The process begins with nakedness. In the United States federal prison system, the new men are called fish and are stripped of their clothing first and forced into mass showers and are inspected in their orifices and are issued clothes that do not fit well and then are thrown to the mercy of the general prison population. The prisoner has to understand his situation from the beginning.

  Rita Macklin thought to fall down as though she had fainted as she had fainted the night she saw the naked bodies of two dead nuns in the morgue.

  But the gendarme had been quite specific when he kicked her and made her vomit.

  She was to stand.

  23

  IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD

  The rain washed the ground in the hills.

  The rain fell through the trees, broke apart on the branches, fell softly to earth between the trees and soaked the ground and ran down the earth, down the hills, back to the sea.

  He lay for a long time awake but with his eyes closed and when he felt the rain, he tried to move his arms. They were heavy, his body was heavy. He moved his arms and they pushed up and then they were free.

  Devereaux groaned and tasted earth in his mouth and coughed and pushed up again.

  There was less than six inches of dirt over his body; also leaves and branches and clumps of grass. An animal had awakened him from death. It had dug in the earth and found his finger and bit it and he had felt pain. He moved his finger and the animal—he never knew what it was—bit again.

  Pain and pain.

  Then he felt the curious detached pain in his head and realized he was alive.

  He rose from the grave and stood a moment, leaning against a tree. He felt giddy and weak but he was standing and the tree was solid and he did not think he would faint. He closed his eyes and opened them again to see if the world remained.

  There was rain above his head. His face was black with dirt, his body was caked with wet dirt, his hands were dark. There was blood on the finger that had told him he was alive.

  He touched his head.

  There was a wound, of course, but the bullet had been fired carelessly, perhaps as he bent over for the shovelful of earth. It had caused a lot of bleeding and flattened him into the grave and they must have thought he was dead.

  Devereaux smiled. His teeth were perfectly white against the darkness of his features; he grinned like an animal. He was very alive and he felt the rain and opened his mouth to wash the taste of earth from his tongue.

  It was daylight. He had been dead all night.

  And then he realized the waterproof packet was gone. The notebook. The photograph.

  And her ring.

  “I won’t wear a ring,” he had said.

  “I know.” She had smiled. “Just have it anyway.”

  They never spoke of it again. He never left it. He carried it with him. Sometimes, when she had been away on an assignment, he would take the ring and hold it like a talisman. He would conjure her in memory.

  He blinked again. The pain in his head was not his, as though it belonged to another person. He heard the rain but heard it imperfectly, the sound of rain made on an old-fashioned radio. Everything he heard was curiously flat.

  He shook his head and it hurt very much, and he thought he might vomit. He stood still until the hurt stopped, until it went into another person.

  “All right,” he said and his voice sounded strange to him. “I’m all right.”

  Devereaux could not guess the time. The sky was sullen with clouds, the rain pitched straight down. He had started in the direction of Madeleine and become confused. Now he was on the hill behind Madeleine. At the base of the hill, he had beached the dinghy.

  His head throbbed and his ears were ringing. He sat down under a giant pine and huddled against himself. He was wet and tired and dirty and the strength seemed gone from his legs.

  All of his guesses about St. Michel and what he would find there had only trapped him. He had been wrong to think there was no notebook; now it was gone. He had been right to believe that the whores of Madeleine knew Manet, had access to him. It was why he had chosen one of them. Something Colonel Ready had said in Evian that afternoon to Celezon: Go and buy some souvenirs for your whores in St. Michel. And Celezon had answered: And the whores of Madeleine. Colonel Ready somehow controlled the rebels—he had been sure of it from the beginning when he read the Economic Review report on the island. The rebels were small in force, disorganized, financed haphazardly. Ready would have been more than a match for them.

  He had explained none of these things to Rita Macklin. They were all just guesses based on hunches, guided by everything he could find out about St. Michel in thirty-six hours in London, guided by everything he knew about Colonel Ready.

  And because they were guesses, he had confronted Manet and fallen into Manet’s clumsy trap. For the first time in a long while, he felt a wave of self-pity and it disgusted him. He’d end up no better than Cain.

  He pushed the pity out of himself with an almost physical effort. He sat very still and let his mind fill with plans and new guesses and an idea of what he had to do next. The self-pity retreated.

  There were three problems: Rita. The notebook. Escape from the island.

  The trees around him protected him from the brunt of the morning rain. He could look out through the trees at the churning, dangerous waters of the gulf. The Caribbean was not a gentle sea anymore. It heaved for breath like a gray old man, full of impotent rage.

  Rita was in the capital and there was nothing to be done until the escape could be arranged. In any case, Colonel Ready would let her go on her own. There were reporters on the island because of the nuns; Manet had said so.

  And there were CIA caseworkers and that did not make any sense at all. Unless Ready was still with the Langley Firm.

  Or Harry Francis.

  Harry Francis. The name insisted.

  Dev
ereaux picked up a blade of grass and broke it off and put it between his teeth and tasted the sweetness. His eyes were staring through the trees at the sea. Harry Francis. The notebook. Everything had to begin and end with Harry Francis. Colonel Ready somehow wanted the notebook badly but not badly enough to kill Harry Francis for it.

  Because he needed Harry Francis alive. Or he needed the notebook. Both of them. Or one or the other.

  And Manet had a notebook. He could bargain with Ready for it if he knew it was what Ready wanted. Or he could give it to Ready and Ready could kill Harry Francis. Or use Harry to interpret the book.

  Devereaux closed his eyes. Guesses and guesses. But everything involved Harry and the notebook, the leverage was in the notebook. That was what Ready wanted from Devereaux, the thing he couldn’t find himself. And Devereaux had given a notebook to him through Manet.

  Damn.

  He stood up then. It was a matter of finding Harry Francis if he was still alive.

  He finished the thought and started to turn and stopped. Something had caught his eye again, something he had not been looking for.

  He saw a small flotilla of white boats bursting across the gray, heaving sea, flailing the waters with shallow wakes. The boats bumped over the ridges of waves and each boat was bristling with men. Men with guns.

  They were coming in very quickly and he could hear the faint buzz of their engines. Where the hell had they come from? Who were they?

  And then he thought of the two dead agents in Mimi’s room. He had understood then the warning found in his London research. He shut his eyes and saw it again verbatim:

  ECONOMIC REVIEW: ST. MICHEL, REPUBLIC OF: .… In 1979, during the Carter administration in the U.S. (ER 12/79/382), approximately 240 exiles from St. Michel were accepted into the U.S. following a decision of the Pascon administration to expel them for “seditious, traitorous acts” against St. Michel, its government, its people. Henri Gautier organized a paramilitary command (Saviors of the Republic) with evidence (ER 12/80/383) of covert CIA funding.…