Hemingway's Notebook

by Bill Granger

  Approximately the time Colonel Ready came to St. Michel. And the time that Harry Francis surfaced here.

  The first boats were docking and men were wading in the shallow surf at the base of the hills toward the shore. Devereaux watched a moment longer and then turned. He began to thread his way through the forest, down the hill, in the direction of Madeleine.

  In under a half an hour he saw the low roofs of the town. With the lights off, Madeleine seemed sullen in the rain, expectant, waiting.

  When he reached the streets it became clear that the soldiers were gone. Everyone had withdrawn. Colonel Ready had anticipated the invasion by passively allowing it.

  Devereaux found an ancient Renault parked in the Street of the Blue Pleasure. He opened the door and the key was plugged into the ignition. No one stole on St. Michel because there was nothing to steal; no one stole because there was no place to run to and enjoy the stolen wealth; no one stole because the penalty for theft, like the penalties for other serious crimes, was the same.

  Devereaux turned the ignition and held his foot on the floor and the 2CV engine whirred into life like a sewing machine. He punched the gas and found first gear and the Renault bucked down the narrow alley, jolting itself over the cobbled streets.

  Devereaux was at the top of the hill on the coast road, heading north out of Madeleine, when the first wave of Gautier’s men entered the town.

  24

  IN DISTANT PLACES

  Radio silence broke at 2:12 P.M. eastern daylight time. Frank Collier picked up the telephone as soon as it rang. The other end of the line was in Alpha 4, an expensive ship-to-shore hookup that only a government could afford.

  “Angel landed at o-nine-hundred hours,” Gautier said very clearly despite the storm and the crackling distance between St. Michel and Frank Collier’s room in Key West.

  “At noon,” Frank said. His leg began to jiggle on its own. “Noon.”

  “The storm here. Altered…” The radiophone connection faded a moment. Frank pressed the receiver to his ear. “We have Madeleine.”

  “Casualties,” Frank Collier said.

  “None. Repeat: none.”

  His mouth fell open.

  “No resistance.”

  “Damn.”

  “Pardon?” He heard Gautier’s puzzled voice. He stared at a bad painting of sunset in Key West on the wall of his hotel room. The day was evil with rain and darkness and waves of clouds pinning down the flat island to the sea all around. The palms were bending to the force of the wind and the narrow streets of Key West were all empty, the houses shuttered against the blow.

  “Where is the army?”

  “Gone, vanished.”

  “It’s a trap,” Frank Collier said, the fear rising in him like sickness in his throat. He wanted to gag. “Trap.”

  “I can’t…” The voice faded. “We proceed against Manet—”

  “Trap,” Frank Collier said.

  “We will trap them, yes, and—”

  “No, no, no, no,” Frank Collier said.

  “Hello? Hello? Hello?”

  “Trap!”

  The radio connection went dead. He put down the receiver. He stared at the painting of the sunset in Key West. It was very beautiful when the sun set in the Caribbean and people went to Mallory Square at the waterfront to celebrate and drink and watch the street musicians and clowns and con men perform on the square for the rich tourists.

  The painting in the room caught none of these qualities of sunset in Key West.

  Frank Collier got up and went to the window and stared at the storm. He thought of the last sixteen years. He thought of the options they had wanted yesterday. No options. Abort or Go. He pushed for Go.

  No options left at all.

  25

  DEVEREAUX’S RUN

  He came along the coast road slowly, looking for the turnoff into the scrub pines that the child had showed to him. He would try to find Harry Francis first because he had to solve the problem of Hemingway’s notebook to survive. To survive with Rita. To escape this damned place.

  He pushed toward the fishing village, which was midway between Madeleine and St. Michel. The village was three shacks of tin, bits of stucco, wax paper on open windows. The boats were all in the small harbor, old buckets with sails and leaking hulls, patched together by old men who had nothing better to sail in to find the fish that gave enough life each day to wait for tomorrow.

  He stopped the car and went inside the shack that was used as a meeting room for the sailors. The room was full of tobacco smoke and the smell of warm beer. He had stopped there the first time, when he had been brought in by Cain, when he had found Philippe and Harry’s notebook.

  He nodded to the half dozen men sitting at the table. They stared at him but did not speak. He was an apparition, in rags, caked with filth, gaunt and bloody. But they were men who had seen many things and they said nothing. They only stared at him.

  “I’ve missed the road. The turnoff to Harry Francis’s place,” Devereaux said in French.

  Nobody moved.

  “Can you help me?”

  No one spoke.

  “I have to find Harry Francis.”

  “Monsieur Francis is not there,” said one finally.

  “Go down to the Café de la Paix. I saw him go there an hour ago when the gendarmes noirs came.”

  “Did they arrest Harry?”

  “No. Only the American woman.” The man smiled. He had very white teeth and a very black face. He was thin and tired and the fishing was not very good, it had not been good for a month. He had his woman and three children and he sometimes thought he should take the old tub and sail north until he either drowned or reached Florida. Even in prison in America, there was food enough to eat. He thought of the white woman and this white man before him.

  Devereaux spoke in a gentle voice. “Who was she?”

  “An American. They struck her, she spoke in English.”

  “All right,” Devereaux said, sickness in his belly. He stumbled at the door.

  “How did you get so dirty, man? You look like a nigger now,” said the thin fisherman. And the other men laughed at that.

  Devereaux stopped at the door. “What about the woman?”

  “She was a white woman. A couple of gendarmes noirs took her. I wonder what they did with her?” He smiled and the others smiled as well.

  Devereaux felt anger for a long moment and then let it pass. These men didn’t mean anything.

  He got back in the Renault and continued up toward St. Michel. Two miles south of the town, in the blinding rain, he pulled up in front of the Café de la Paix.

  He stopped inside the door.

  He stared at Harry Francis.

  For a moment, Harry did not look up. He was staring at the bottle of vodka in front of him. He was staring at it as though he saw his future in it. When he saw Devereaux, he said nothing. Devereaux took off his shirt and dropped it on the back of the chair. Philippe came out of the rear of the café where the family lived. He saw Devereaux and thought he resembled a ghost.

  “Devereaux,” Harry Francis said then.

  Devereaux felt the sickness overwhelm him. He felt as though he would never move from this spot.

  Harry Francis had his name.

  “You killed me, you bastard.”

  “I don’t care about you, Harry. Why did they arrest the woman?”

  “I don’t give a damn why. I had the notebook and you took it and that’s the only thing that could have saved my life.”

  “How did you know I took it?”

  “This traitor.” He nodded to the boy. “And now Colonel Ready has it and we’re all going to die.”

  Devereaux almost saw all the pieces now. The connections were not so blurred.

  “And that includes you,” Harry said and he got up from the table and took out the long knife on his Garrison belt. He held the knife well, away from his body, tentative and yet strong, like a knife fighter.

  �
�You don’t want to kill me,” Devereaux said.

  “You’re wrong, friend. I want to do that very much. Why did you think to look there, in that foul outhouse? The stink is enough to kill you—”

  “Tricks of the trade,” Devereaux said, standing easily flat on both feet, his hands quiet at his sides, ready to move right or left. His head was still ringing but the pain was clear now, localized, not general. He blinked and watched Harry carefully with gray, arctic eyes.

  “What trade is that?”

  Harry took another step.

  “The same one,” Devereaux said.

  “CIA,” Harry said. “He’s going to wring your neck as well. You can’t trust him.”

  “Ready needs that notebook.”

  “Maybe he does and maybe not. He can’t read it, not yet, but that will come in time. There isn’t a code that can’t be broken.”

  “Even Hemingway’s,” said Devereaux in a very soft voice, as though he wanted to attract attention to what he said. The rain was steady on the roof now, the water dripped from his shirt on the back of the chair onto the floor.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Under the endpaper. ‘Papa.’ The book was old enough. You were in Cuba with him.”

  “Damn you.” And then Harry paused. “Damn you.” He let the knife fall to his side. “You’re good at it, you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn you. You got that and they’d been over my place a hundred times. Never thought to look in the toilet.”

  “Because it stinks.”

  “I kept moving it. I had three places.”

  “I looked in the other two.”

  For a moment, Harry Francis smiled. “I bet you do know where they are.”

  “Are you going to kill me, Harry?”

  “No. I’ll let Colonel Ready do that. After he finishes butchering me. After he finishes with… Come on, sit down, have a drink.”

  Harry waved toward the table like a host. He boomed at Flaubert to get bread and cheese.

  Philippe ran into the back to help his father.

  Warily, Devereaux walked to the table and sat down across from Harry. He waited while Harry poured vodka into the glass. “We don’t have any ice.”

  The vodka had a synthetic, warm taste on his tongue. It burned his throat.

  “Who is she?” Harry said.

  “Rita Macklin,” Devereaux replied. He poured another drink.

  “Do you have a way out of here?”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said.

  “How?”

  “A boat. In the fishing village,” Devereaux lied.

  “Big enough for the two of us.”

  “And Rita.”

  “They took her to the Palais Gris. To the cells.” Harry winced. “You don’t want to know too much about that place.”

  “Goddamn,” Devereaux said, his hand curled into a fist.

  “He had me in there last week. He wanted the notebook.”

  “I didn’t think there was a book.”

  “He tortured me. Electricity. You know the way they do those things.”

  “I thought I could figure out what he wanted and give it to him or kill him and get away.”

  “You’re not CIA.”

  “No.”

  “What are you?”

  “Nothing. I’m not in the old business,” Devereaux said.

  “They’ll kill her now. A reporter from America. Either kill her or let her tell the world about St. Michel.”

  “We get her and then we get away. That’s all.”

  “All right,” Harry said. “It’s the only chance for me. But it won’t last that long, you know. I’m dead. Dead to CIA, dead to everyone. Ready kept me alive because he plays the edges all the time.”

  “Why did he need you?”

  “Me,” Harry said. His eyes stared at nothing. “Or the book. The book proves it. I can prove it. CIA was afraid of me, you know that? Six years ago. They had a contract.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted out of it. I wanted quits for real.”

  “And you knew something.”

  “I know everything,” Harry Francis said.

  “Ready was sent here by CIA,” Devereaux said.

  “Yes. I was his mascot. He said he’d never let anything happen to me. Ready was supposed to flip the island. He flipped it. And then he got rid of Langley. Ready plays the edges, I told you that.”

  That was it, Devereaux thought. Ready was CIA until he had control of the island and then he double-crossed the Langley Firm. And Harry, whatever Harry was, was something useful to Ready. Just as Devereaux had been useful. Just as Rita Macklin was useful. A hostage or a reporter. If one thing happened, she would have been safe; another, she was in danger; another, she would have to be killed.

  “You were killed,” Harry said. “That’s why I didn’t want to kill you a second time.”

  “That’s what they thought.”

  “They buried you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Flaubert has clothes. Give him your rags, he’ll give you pants and a shirt.”

  “How do we get into the palace?”

  Harry Francis grinned then. “That’s never the trouble. Getting out again is the hard part. You don’t have a weapon, do you? And what about me and my knife? That’s not a match for M-seventeens.”

  “The weapons, everything was funded by Langley.”

  “That’s one of the embarrassing things they’d prefer not to tell the world about. That’s one of the edges that keeps Ready where he is. He’s like a cat on glass. If he slips, he grabs at anything. He’s the original man for leverage. Games in games. You have to admire the bastard.”

  Traps in traps, Devereaux thought. And now there was no more time to find a safe way to spring one.

  26

  THE BUTCHER’S YARD

  Sister Mary Columbo heard the first firing dimly.

  She had been asleep on the cot in the tent in Manet’s camp.

  She was stronger each hour but the pain held her down. She wondered if the New York Times reporter had gotten her story out. It had been raining all night and all day and now it was nearly night again and the rain thudded dully against the canvas of the tent. The tent was soaked with humidity; her face was wet. She opened her eyes when she heard the little pops that were the rain-muted sound of guns.

  The sound came very clearly through the clatter of rain and the thudding of wind on the tent sides.

  It was the sound of battle joined. The grace of time had never let her forget those things.

  The automatic weapons made lines of fire across the camp. The tracers on the bullet tips—to guide the field of fire—raced across the camp yard and defined the perimeters of death.

  The bullets scarcely made a sound when they thumped into a body. There were some cries of men and women in the camp but they were muted by the drumbeat of rain.

  Sister Mary Columbo crawled off the cot and pulled on a rain poncho and rolled under the cot. A moment later, bullets ripped into the tent canvas where she had lain. For a long time, she lay still and listened to cries and screams. Then she crawled to the tent flap and looked out.

  Flares sputtered in the rain. Flares filled the open, mourning sky above the camp. The white flares in the sky caught Manet’s men in freeze frames. She remembered the deer in Pennsylvania; she had driven through the hills and the deer stood at the side of the turnpike, confused by the rows of headlights marching in the darkness.

  Grenades shook the ground.

  The tracer patterns danced across the ground. Burst by burst, the machine guns defined the ground. Muted by rain and the weight of the storm, the bullets sounded damp, like firecrackers set off by little boys on the Fourth of July when it is raining.

  There were kerosene lanterns in the camp but the flares reduced everything in the darkness to whiteness. As the flares would die, one after the other, and fall in the night sky, the darkness would resume the ground, glowing red in the ligh
t of the lanterns.

  Gautier and his first wave pushed into the center of the camp like the prow of a liner poking into a hostile sea. They shot at everything around them. Manet’s men were frenzied by terror. One threw down his rifle in front of Gautier and Gautier shot his face off.

  Everyone shot in madness. They shot at cases of food and at men already torn apart by grenades. They shot at the women huddled at the mouth of the empty bauxite mine.

  After Collier had ordered him to trap Manet, Gautier had not waited for his second assault wave, but had moved quickly from Madeleine into the hills. He planned to kill everyone and then to move on to St. Michel tonight and finish the job. Before dawn, St. Michel would be recovered.

  The M-17 in Gautier’s hands shook as he drew it slowly, like a child drawing a careful line, across the field of fire, back and forth, so that the bullets did not bunch into a single target but had the effect of making the weapon seem more formidable than it was.

  Gautier saw Manet, whom he had known for twenty years. He shot Manet in the belly and Manet said something to him that might have been a word or only a scream. He shot him again.

  Then Gautier saw one of his men fall forward next to him. His back was pitted with bullet holes. Gautier stared at him, confused, because the man had been at the edge of the camp, and there was nothing behind him but the trees that encircled the camp. Gautier turned toward the trees and saw soldiers coming toward him.

  Sister Mary Columbo, on the muddy ground at the mouth of her tent, saw the soldiers also. Neither she nor Gautier understood; the soldiers comprised the army of St. Michel.

  The army surrounded the camp, Manet’s rebels, and Gautier’s freedom fighters. There were two hundred men wearing rain-soaked red berets. They were stationed behind every tree and rock at the camp’s perimeter. When Ready gave the order the slaughter began.

  The big machine guns, mounted on tripods, were set at four places around the camp. Two men operated each of them. The machine guns were fed by the loaders, and the gunners simply plowed the field of fire, defined by the tracer tip on every tenth bullet. So far to the right, so far to the left. The machine gunners did not need to see what they hit; they only needed to see the field of fire at the perimeters defined by the tracers.