by Bill Granger
Each machine gun had so many square meters of ground to cover and everything in that area was to be destroyed. It made death simple.
It was the way theory had been taught before Vietnam changed everything and before guerrilla warfare suggested that death might become an individual business. The theory was the same followed by air force planes on pattern-bombing runs. Define the bomb run north and south, then circle and turn and come east to west, making a cross of death on the ground below.
When one machine gun reached the far point of the pivot, the gunner brought the barrel slowly back on the pivot pin to the second point and then back again, always slowly, like a plow turning the earth. The bullets cut down the stalks of men and plowed the ground.
There were nearly four hundred men and women in the middle of the camp. They ran to the edge of the woods to find escape; they screamed and were cut down. They hid behind tents and boxes and were cut down.
Sister Mary Columbo stared at the horror and waited to be killed. She wanted to be killed, she told God.
Another flare burned white above the camp and then another. Everything was burning. Behind a pile of dead bodies, other men—still alive—were shooting back in the darkness. The machine guns plowed the bodies of the dead and killed the living behind them. Splintering bone and tearing flesh, blinding and gouging, hacking at limbs already stiffened in attitudes of death.
The guns became too hot to fire and the gunners burned their fingers on the metal. Some wrapped their hands with damp cloths to keep firing.
At the end, all the firing ceased. In the lights of the fires, of the lanterns, of the flares were reflected the mad eyes of the soldiers. There was an excitement to making death that is slow to cool in some men. It never cools for many because it is a pleasure they can experience no other place. They go from war to war to go from death to death, to experience the pleasures of it all.
Colonel Ready, who stood at the edge of the camp now in the silence of after battle, was one of them.
He said, in a clear, soft voice: “Cease fire.”
But when some of the men kept shooting into the camp, into the bodies of the dead, he said nothing.
His grin was quite fantastic now in the red glow of the kerosene lanterns and the flares and in the red glow of the burning tents. It was raining as before but the explosions of the night had deafened all to the sound of the rain. He did not feel the warm rain on his face. His face was as open as the door of a furnace. His scar was white as molten metal.
The lust was on him. It had warmed him from the moment he had received the signal from Anthony Calabrese that the invasion force was timed for noon. Although Teddy Weisman thought he was using him, Calabrese worked for Ready. Just as Frank Collier and CIA thought they were setting him up. Just as Celezon thought he had his secret police. Just as Devereaux thought he would trap him. Just as they all used him and ended up being used by him.
Now everything would be made clear. Colonel Ready smiled and looked up at the rain and opened his mouth and let the rain fall down his throat. He felt sated by the stillness of the camp in death and uplifted by the smell of blood on the breath of the suffocating rain. The lust had filled him all morning and into the afternoon, anticipating all this killing.
The lust had been on him when he raped Rita Macklin and the pleasure of it was beyond description.
27
A CHILDREN’S GAME
Harry Francis said, “When I was with Papa in Cuba, he organized games. They were mock wars. He took some of the children along with some of us who hung around with him and he made armies. He led the children across the estates and threw stink bombs to ruin the patio parties of all the rich people because that is what it was like in Cuba in those days. He gave the kids firecrackers. Everyone had a good time.”
“That sounds silly,” Devereaux said.
They stood in the darkness at the perimeter outside the Palais Gris, on the edge of Rue Sans Souci. The street ran down the gentle hill to the darkened city. The rain fell in blackness. They were both soaked. Devereaux had a weapon from Flaubert. It was a little knife with a hook at the end of the blade that was used to scrape the guts out of fish.
“It wasn’t any more childish than this. Than real wars. Except nobody gets hurt.”
“Everybody gets hurt all the time.”
“That notebook was my life and you don’t even understand that.”
“Tell me when we get out of here.”
“It doesn’t matter, the notebook will still be here. He might use it a little but he could use it a lot more with me. And it guaranteed my life.”
“Shut up, Harry, there’s one of them coming.”
The gendarme noir came to the edge of the fence and looked down at the town. He was tall and thin in his large shirt and he carried his submachine gun strapped to his shoulder. He looked sad in the rain because rain dripped from the edge of his nose, as though he had a cold. Devereaux reached for his forehead in the darkness in one movement and pulled his head back and cut the young man’s throat as he fell on his back. He did not make a sound. Devereaux slipped the sling of the submachine gun off the thin shoulder of the dead guard and checked the action.
“One down, fifty to go.”
“They won’t all be here.”
“Where are they?”
“Killing people in the hills.” Devereaux understood everything, even understood how his plan might have worked, but he did not understand about the notebook. Hemingway’s notebook. It was all tied in to Harry and Harry kept making it more mysterious, as though he was slipping in and out of a lie. Was Harry the author of the notebook? Was that the reason he had called it Hemingway’s book? But the pages were old; he had had the book for a long time. Harry wouldn’t have kept his memoirs written down for so long, kept them so close to him so that they might have been discovered.
“You’re going to tell me about the book when we get out of here,” Devereaux said.
“Is that the price?”
“Yes. That’s the price, Harry. And you’ll pay.”
“Ready couldn’t get me in six years.”
“But Ready has the notebook now. And I’m not him.”
“You look like him. Vaguely.”
“No,” said Devereaux. “You’re not Hemingway and I’m not Ready and there aren’t any charades played anymore. Not anywhere. You will tell me everything and I’ll help you get off this island, and then you can live and that’s all you get in the bargain.”
They spoke and then ran across the dark ground to the edge of the palace. Devereaux carried the M-17 in his right hand, his fingers and palm around the stock in front of the trigger guard where there was balance in the piece.
Harry ran his fingers along the wall and found the place where the cable ran down from the generator outside the gate. He nodded to Devereaux and cut the negative ground on the electrical line and held it in his bare hand in the darkness and stared at the luminous dial of his old Seiko and waited.
They had fifty seconds.
Devereaux sprinted into the shadows along the palace wall to the door to the cells. The submachine gun was on automatic fire and was cocked. He waited, he had no watch, everything had been stripped from him when the guerrillas dumped him in the grave. He watched the lights of the windows above the courtyard.
Fifty seconds.
Harry crossed the negative lead to the generator and touched it and the lights of the Palais Gris blew out with a pop that shattered some bulbs in the chandeliers.
Devereaux kicked open the unlocked door to the cells and fired into the darkness. He followed the shots into the room and pushed his back against the damp wall and waited for the reverberations to cease. He could see nothing. He heard cries in the darkness and other sounds coming from the back where Harry said the cells were located.
Then Harry Francis was beside him in the doorway, illuminated by a stroke of lightning. They saw each other at the same time they saw the gendarmes noirs in the interior door. Dever
eaux fired six quick shots and the bodies of the policemen were jammed in the door.
Harry breathed hard next to him.
“Get their pieces.”
In the next room a policeman lit a kerosene lantern and bathed himself in the soft yellow light. Harry threw the knife. It thudded into the chest of the policeman and he fell across the threshold to a third room. The light still flickered.
“There,” said Harry and he nodded to the door of the third room, a room Harry knew had a tile floor and walls.
Devereaux pushed the door open. It frightened him that it was unlocked. Harry had said they did not need locks in the cells of St. Michel. There was no escape from the cells except by dying.
She was on the floor, huddled in a blanket, staring at the door with dull, dead eyes. The cell was damp. Her hair lay wet on her head. Her eyes were dead.
And then he saw how she had been beaten and that her green eyes were blackened and her cheeks were bruised and her mouth was swollen and cut. There were marks on her arms and purple blotches on her body.
“Rita,” he said, as though he were breaking a beautiful fragile dish in a large, silent room.
She stared at him and did not move.
“Come on, Rita.”
“No,” she said. “You died. You’re too late. You’re dead.”
“Rita.”
“No,” she said. She once had dreamed of her brother in Vietnam and spoken to him like this. Just as she spoke to this dream.
He took her hands and pulled her to her feet.
“He said you were dead,” she said. “I told you. I told you to kill him.”
“I should have killed him.”
“I told you.” She was crying suddenly, as though she had found tears. Her voice changed in that moment. “I told you to kill him and you let him live.”
28
THE SERPENT
Celezon thought he saw them in a flash of lightning running across the darkened courtyard of the palace. There was the woman Colonel Ready had taken. There was Harry Francis. He smiled at the comical figure of Harry Francis running so heavily in the rain, in the darkness.
And there was a third man he thought he had seen before. In cold Europe. So. He had come. Colonel Ready was certain he would come, was certain he would use him. As he had used Celezon. Colonel Ready was like Fate. He knew everything that would happen, even as those who thought they were free of Ready made it happen the way that the colonel wanted it.
There was another stroke of lightning splitting the raindrops, parting them as a beaded curtain in one of the cafés in Madeleine. But they were gone.
Celezon stood heavily at the tall window, in his uniform, his back to the darkened room. All the lights were gone, there had been shots fired in the cellars.
And in the hills above Madeleine, Colonel Ready’s army was destroying the world.
“Escape,” said the soft voice behind him.
Celezon turned and he was still smiling.
Yvette came next to him. She was clothed in a white garment, her skin was very white, very soft, and damp with the heat of the evening in the torrent.
“Escape,” Yvette Pascon said to him and she clung to him.
“There is no escape, dear one.” Every intimacy had been between them, in words and touch.
“No. You must not. We must escape him and if not us, you must. You have the people.”
“I have nothing, dear one.”
No one would believe Celezon spoke so softly.
But she was his sister. She was his sibling in the voodoo he had shown her as a neglected child. It was true what they said of her in the hills: She slept with her brother. But not Claude-Eduard who was impotent, who was a fool, who was propped by Yvette and Celezon until the day the Americans had come with money and power and placed Colonel Ready in charge of the army of St. Michel. Money corrupted his corrupt brain and corrupted the simple of St. Michel until they did not understand that Ready was a demon who had to be exorcised by fire, by blood on fire, by water on blood on fire. He had slept with her, loved her as a husband would love his wife, but she was his sister. She was of the voodoo, she understood, even imperfectly because her blood was the blood of the whites. But she tried to understand and it was enough for Celezon.
The nuns had been very bad for the people in the hills.
The nuns were holy people but they did not dress as priestesses. They did not believe in the voodoo. Worse, they did not respect it. They made magic from syringes and crippled the faith of those in the hills.
The archbishop respected the voodoo.
He understood there was a religion for the people of the lower world in the town and the stronger religion for the people of the upper world. The archbishop was a wise man to respect the voodoo. He ate well in a strange land and had no enemies.
If the nuns were killed, Celezon had thought that day when he had ordered the killing, it would cause harm to Colonel Ready who was the enemy of the religion of the hills. And Yvette Pascon’s enemy.
And Celezon’s enemy.
“What will you do then?” She hissed like the serpent. She stood behind him and removed her gown and was naked. She smelled of the ripe odors of love. He had only left her a little while ago.
“If I go, they may kill me in the hills. I am the commander of the gendarmes noirs.”
“You are a priest.”
“And what is Colonel Ready?” asked Celezon thoughtfully, staring at her nakedness.
She held him then, pressing her naked body against him.
“Death,” she said.
29
ANTHONY CALABRESE
“Ready killed the nuns. Killed my cousin. He’s killing everyone now.”
Calabrese tried to make the words sound calm but the desperation came in his syntax. He held the pistol to the head of the operator in the St. Michel Exchange. It was the only line open to the outside.
Anthony Calabrese pressed his ear to the telephone. He waited for some voice at the other end and for a long time, there was only static on the line.
He was sweating and his gold chain was glued by sweat to his chest. Everyone was terribly afraid: the operator who saw the pistol in his hand, the security guard who was face down on the floor with his hands behind his neck, Anthony Calabrese. They had left him out too long.
“What about Rita Macklin?”
“Dead, I think.”
There was another pause.
“Christ, I got to get out. Everything is blown. Ready is mad.”
“Yes,” said Hanley. His voice was cool over the lines. “Mad, I suppose. It’s a dramatic term but it might be right.”
“He killed the nuns.”
“As you said.”
“My cousin.”
“And the American agent.”
“Whatever his name is. Dead. In the hills. Manet killed him.”
“All right.” Another pause. The line crackled. The sky was filled with lightning. “Come out.”
“Come out? Come out?” His voice was rising. “Come in and get me, copper. I can’t get out. How the hell do I get out? I’m trapped in here. He doesn’t need me, doesn’t need Weisman, doesn’t need anyone. End game. He beat everyone.”
“Come out,” said Hanley in a quiet voice. “You must have thought of ways of escape.”
“I didn’t think of this happening. I thought… something… was supposed to be pulled back.”
“We never interfered with Langley’s plan,” said Hanley.
“You dirty bastard, you fucking whore,” said Anthony Calabrese. “You’re fucking around with Langley, you get me so screwed up in your own mind about it, you end up fucking me. I’m your fucking agent. I’m in the cold. I want to come in.”
“We can’t help you. I’m sorry, Anthony.”
“You’re fucking sorry? You sorry son-of-a-bitch.” He waited a moment. He tried to let his voice come back to him. He waited, but he knew his old voice, before the events of the day, would not come back.
“I’m sorry, Anthony. Are you certain you can’t get out?”
“Yes. What the fuck am I going to do?” He felt heat rising, he thought his head would explode. “You were going to send in a helicopter, a plane…”
“There’s a planeload of American journalists at the airport. We can’t get them out. How can we get you out?” The voice was calm, reasonable. It was easier to be reasonable sitting at a desk in an office in the bowels of the Department of Agriculture building in Washington where Hanley was. The office of the operations director of R Section.
“I did what you told me.”
“But nothing happened as we expected,” said Hanley. The voice wavered now because the signal was disrupted by the storm on the gulf.
“You wanted Teddy—”
“We have Weisman now where we want him—”
“And Colonel Ready—”
“Ready was not that much our concern. We only wanted to know what Langley would do.”
“Games. Spy games. You people don’t have no fucking sense of morality.”
“And you, Anthony? A member of the Family. You have morality?”
“I know right from wrong.”
“And you were wrong.”
Pointless. Pointless and stupid and he didn’t have time for this. He stared at the black face of the chief operator whose eyes were bulging with terror, whose lips were wet with sweat.
He dropped the phone. He stared at the operator, at the guard. He saw the operator in the guise of his victim. He didn’t want to kill anyone.
“I won’t hurt you.”
He ran from the building and he ran through the rain but no one came after him. There was no escape on St. Michel. It was a large prison, a cage that imitated freedom like some of the zoos that keep animals in natural habitats. They were not free; Anthony was not free. They killed his cousin and it seemed like a sin to Anthony Calabrese. It was night and the capital was dark and quiet; there was rain; there were no soldiers. They were in the hills now, killing.