Hemingway's Notebook

by Bill Granger

  Anthony Calabrese ran down the road that skirted the harbor, away from the center of the city.

  He was nearly struck by the taxi in the street.

  The man smiled at him.

  Daniel, the schoolteacher. That fucking fool.

  “Monsieur Anthony,” Daniel called cheerfully, a schoolteacher calling his happy class in from recess. Daniel waved out the side window of the cab. The dirty snitch Daniel who traced Monsieur Harry through the boy, Philippe; the informant for Colonel Ready who greeted all the guests at the airport and took them to the right hotel. The hotel that was always full unless it had been arranged to make room for someone Colonel Ready wanted to watch.

  Anthony smiled, ran across the road, and put the gun into the side window, next to Daniel’s head.

  “Do you want to die, you fucking snitch?”

  “No,” said Daniel with happiness. He smiled to make Monsieur Anthony understand it was not his wish to die.

  “Get out.”

  Daniel was sweating or perhaps it was only the rain.

  Anthony Calabrese had no reason to hit him. He had not struck the guard at the telephone exchange or the operator. But Daniel was his brother, his fellow betrayer. He struck himself and knocked Daniel to the pavement instead.

  There was no escape, but he pushed the car into gear and went through the narrow streets and turned south on the old coast road toward Madeleine.

  30

  FOOLS

  Devereaux held Rita’s hand as they ran. They ran along the edge of the road away from the woods that reached from the palace to the suburbs of St. Michel. Her feet were bleeding from sharp stones and fallen branches. She felt no pain.

  Harry Francis ran behind them, puffing, the M-17 gripped firmly in his fleshy hand. He did not feel its weight. He felt as light as he had felt twenty-five years before, running behind the big man in Cuba, throwing firecrackers at the swells on their patios, assaulting the bastions of the rich.

  She was dazed, running from instinct.

  “I can carry you,” he said when they were away from the town and they saw that no one was following them.

  “No,” she said. “I can do it alone.”

  It had been raining for thirteen hours. The mud was everywhere, rivulets of rain fell from the hills down to the coast road. The road was covered with water. They ran on the road for a while and the water cooled her wounded feet.

  “Where?” she said once.

  “The fishing village. Another mile.”

  “I can run another mile.”

  She took her hand away from him and shrugged out of her blanket. She ran naked. She was beautiful running in the rain, in the storm, naked in the middle of the blackness. He saw her in the cracks of lightning that flared over the terrain.

  They ran past the Café de la Paix, darkened by the blackout or perhaps, by the storm. Philippe stood at the door. The boy made no sign to them. He did not make a sign to the boy.

  “All his fault,” Harry gasped.

  “You’re a fool, Harry,” Devereaux said.

  She heard none of this. She ran ahead of them. She thought she was running on the beach. She thought of the pain and the pace. Her body ached with blows given her; her bowels felt strangled. Her groin ached and she ran until her legs ached as her body ached. She ran with her head up, free in the rain that beat on her.

  And then they saw the lights of the car behind them and Harry waved and they went to the side of the road and waited for the car to pass, thin lights stabbing at the rain and darkness.

  The car whooshed past, splattering water on the roadside. In that moment, crouched next to her nakedness, Devereaux saw her face clearly. She was crying but her eyes were as empty as Cain’s eyes had been on the boat.

  In a few minutes, the village was ahead of them. The shacks were darkened. The car that had passed them was parking at an angle in front of one of the shacks.

  Devereaux and Harry glanced at each other.

  “Someone from the palace beat us,” Harry said.

  “In one car?”

  “Then who the hell is it?”

  They were on the beach, running across the sand. The surf was high now and the tide had pushed the water almost to the edge of the shack closest to the water. The harbor was cut naturally into the sand at this point. There were rocks on either side but the harbor was shallow, no more than an odd indentation in the perfect flow of the beach along the nine miles between St. Michel and Madeleine.

  Devereaux touched the M-17. Harry looked up. His face made a protest but he handed the other man the gun.

  One of the fishing boats had broken up against the rocks and its hull was splayed like broken ribs. The boat had sunk to the bottom of the harbor at the stern; the bow was pointed at a crazy angle to the sky.

  Devereaux ran in a crouch to the edge of the first shack. He waited and listened. He heard a sound from inside the shack.

  He pushed the submachine gun on semiautomatic and clicked the safety. The figure appeared in the doorway; it was holding a handgun.

  Devereaux raised the submachine gun to fire, and a sudden burst of lightning illuminated the figure’s drawn features.

  “Cain,” Devereaux said.

  “Jesus Christ. You got out.”

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s someone around here. I didn’t know what to do except wait. There’s a war going on down around Madeleine. Boats and shooting and soldiers shooting off their fucking rifles. Man, I tried to get in but there’s nothing I can do. They’re burning boats in the harbor. I figure if you were there, you’re dead or part of it.”

  “Colonel Ready. Celebrating victory over the rebels.”

  “The bastard always wins,” Cain said.

  Devereaux said, “I’ve got her. And another man.”

  Cain turned as suddenly as a terrier hearing a secret sound.

  They saw Calabrese at the same time. He had come from the car; he had been between the other two shacks. He was at the edge of the surf and he carried a handgun.

  Cain fired without speaking. The two rounds went wide. The man was down, firing. Rounds slammed into the wall of the shack.

  One of the fishermen was at the door of the second house and he was shouting but it was impossible to understand him above the wind.

  The figure between the shacks fired a third time. Then he rose, running, toward Devereaux.

  Devereaux raised the rifle and tried to see clearly enough to get a good shot.

  Cain fired again and the bullet was wide.

  “No.”

  He heard Rita’s voice next to him. “That’s the American. The one…” Her voice was anxious and confused. “Anthony…”

  “Anthony!” she yelled into the wind.

  The figure stopped.

  “We’re Americans!”

  Anthony was confused. “Who da fuck are you?”

  “Anthony!”

  He heard her voice and lightning revealed her nakedness. In a moment, they were crouched in darkness again, together at the edge of the shack.

  He stared at her. He stared at the bruised face, the blackened eyes. “Jesus Christ, they did that—”

  “Colonel Ready did this,” she said to him.

  And Devereaux felt his finger heavy on the trigger guard. He squeezed it because he wished to squeeze the trigger instead, to kill something.

  “Compass Rose has two sea anchors but there’s no protection, she’s dragging in toward the harbor—”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Snorkel. Over the side. It isn’t so bad underwater,” Cain said. “You took the dinghy, remember?”

  “I can’t see it,” he said.

  “Black against black,” Cain replied. “Look there and wait for the lightning.”

  They saw it, a ghost ship, dragging at the anchors, pulling them toward the harbor.

  “I put it a quarter mile off. Less than a hundred yards now.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “Seven,
eight feet at that distance. She draws five feet.”

  “We can’t get out there,” she said. The rain slid down her body. Then Harry Francis tore off his shirt and draped it over her shoulders. It was so immense that it covered her like a loose smock. Harry was naked to his short trousers and in the flashes of light, they saw he was grinning. He was pleased with the action, with killing, with the raw feeling in his throat from running all the way from St. Michel. His heart was pounding wildly in his chest but he didn’t even think about that.

  Cain said, “I been thinking. They know me here. I told you.” He looked at Devereaux. “I brought them some shit this time, they’re all half conked out. Let’s take one of their boats. One of the dinghies. Compass Rose is dragging and if it gets beached at low tide, I’ll need a half dozen men and a winch and high tide to take her off.”

  They dragged a beached dinghy into the water. One of the fishermen watched from the door of the shack, warmed by alcohol and marijuana. He saw they were stealing the dinghy; he didn’t care. He thought they were going to drown in the storm.

  All the men were on deck. They heaved the anchors and the engine churned and the props bit the water and the Compass Rose protested and bucked into the storm for a hard-won half mile and the anchors were dropped again and the Compass Rose, on the open sea, faced the storm and bowed to the pressure of the waves and rode up and bowed and rode up and bowed. It was going to be all right, Cain said and they went below, exhausted and wet.

  She sat on a bunk, huddled in a rough woolen blanket, wrapped with towels. She had sat and said nothing while the men had worked on the deck to raise the anchors.

  Now they were together in the cabin, exhausted, quiet. They stared at each other as the boat bucked in the waves and the rain pounded at the deck above them so that all the sea sounds were magnified. The cabin was compact, storage lockers all closed, everything made fast. Cain was a careful sailor and smuggler.

  “I have a bottle of rum,” Cain said but he made no effort to get it.

  Even Harry Francis could not arouse himself from the lethargy of that moment.

  Devereaux sat across from her. None of them sat next to her. He stared at her. After a long while, she stared back at him. They did not speak.

  He got up and went to the pantry and found the rum and put it in a mug. He found sugar and a little lemon and water. There was no question of heating it. He took the mug and gave it to her.

  None of them spoke again for a long time.

  31

  AFTER ANGEL

  The sun rose in the clear sky in the morning and the breeze was fresh and smelled of the cleanness that comes to the world after a storm.

  Everything was simple to explain. Every explanation fit precisely into that which was said before, into that which followed.

  The journalists were taken from the airport to the palace and given breakfast and explanations. In the late morning, they were taken to the countryside where the battle had raged.

  The American journalists, skeptical at first, were won over by the openness of the regime. And by the evidence.

  There were the American weapons displayed and the new clothing of Gautier’s “freedom fighters,” who had linked with Manet’s rebels and been fully overcome by the combined forces of the army of St. Michel and the regular security police.

  The CIA was behind it all. There were documents on Gautier’s body. And Manet’s body. There was the testimony of the terrified survivors who insisted they had been trained in a secret CIA camp in Louisiana. The journalists were given free access to the prisoners who wished to speak the truth about the long night of fighting in the hills above Madeleine.

  Colonel Ready’s face and voice were recorded on videotape and the videotape was airlifted to Miami by midday so that it would be on the evening news.

  Colonel Ready explained about the Central Intelligence Agency plot against the regime of President Claude-Eduard. He said there had been two waves of assault troops. He showed the journalists the beached landing craft of the rebels, some of which had been broken up by the storm the night before. He even named the case officer in charge of the operation: Frank Collier.

  By the middle of the afternoon, the senior advisor in the White House said that the president would investigate the charges coming from St. Michel. By four thirty in the afternoon, a press conference was scheduled for nine P.M. eastern time.

  Frank Collier, in Room 236 of the Pier House hotel in Key West, Florida, apparently blew his brains out sometime between two P.M. and six P.M. It was a stroke of luck for CIA. They had a body and a grieving widow and three lovely children in the battle for hearts and minds of Americans, most of whom did not care about what happened on St. Michel.

  The best of all came from Colonel Ready again in the middle of the afternoon. The journalists, already sated with the richness of the story, were given Sister Mary Columbo.

  An American nun rescued from the rebel camp by the army of St. Michel after she had survived an ambush nearly four days before on the road to Madeleine.

  Hanley spoke. His voice was somber, judicious.

  “There was no way to get Calabrese out if his cover was blown,” he said.

  “So you let him be killed.”

  “I did not kill him, Mrs. Neumann.”

  “You didn’t save him.”

  “Calabrese came to us through DEA two years ago. We turned him. He had been linked to several drug deals for Mr. Weisman and the branch of the Family that runs such operations on the southwest coast of Florida.”

  “I thought that was for the FBI.”

  “Not the business offshore. We were interested in Colonel Ready.”

  “Why? He belonged to CIA.”

  “That was part of our interest. The other involved the operation six years ago before Colonel Ready went to St. Michel. With CIA funding, I might add.”

  “What happened?”

  “Four years ago, we learned he had been the CIA operative directing traffic against our own efforts in the matter of that priest in Florida.”

  “When November met Miss Macklin,” Mrs. Neumann said. “And now you tell me. When they’re dead.”

  “Now there is a need to know. You did not need to know then. Devereaux did not need to know.”

  “But he did. If he had understood that Colonel Ready had been involved in a case against him—they had tried to stop both Devereaux and Miss Macklin, to kill them—he might have been forearmed.”

  She spoke as flatly as he did and it annoyed him. He was attempting to be judicious. She was mocking him.

  “Mr. Calabrese was to let us set up Colonel Ready. It would have been a coup for the Section. We don’t have much influence in the Caribbean. Our Caribe desk is thin.”

  “Empire building.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Neumann. Build an empire and get the funding for it. Act only when you have the funding and you will never get it. It is the way of the government and the world.”

  “But Ready was controlled by Langley,” she said.

  “No. Langley had given him a long line and he had slipped it. He was playing a lone game. He might have been ours. At least, we might have been able to give him to the director of Central Intelligence. They would have acknowledged our strength and we would have found the resources—”

  “Hanley, this is too cynical for me,” Mrs. Neumann said. She got up, wrapped in her sweater. She stared down at him and almost pitied him. “You don’t even understand how cynical this is.”

  “It is realism,” Hanley said. He wanted her to sit down. He had been awake all night with the death of Devereaux and Rita Macklin and Calabrese on his conscience. They would stay on his conscience for a long time, until the next deaths took their place.

  He wanted his confidante in the Section to stay, to talk to him.

  “No. That’s not what it is. It’s a game when we win and it’s just cynicism when we lose,” she said. “I have work to do.”

  They were under way before dawn. When the sun ca
me up in the eastern sea, they were less than two hundred miles from Key West. At first the sun was hidden by a speckled line of clouds and then the clouds broke up near the waterline and the sun, turning from blood red to orange to yellow, rose above the sails.

  Her bruised face was turned to the sun. She had a clean shirt from the storage locker and a rolled-up pair of jeans, fastened to her thin waist by a length of rope. She had not thought she would be able to sleep in the crowded cabin. Harry was in one bunk, Calabrese was on the floor. She had the other bunk. Devereaux and Cain had sat in the galley and spoken of matters between them reaching all the way back to Vietnam. She had slept after a while.

  There was no one on the deck but her when Devereaux came. He had a mug of coffee. She took it in both hands and dipped her lips to the scalding liquid.

  “I’m hurt inside,” she said.

  “We should make Key West before night.”

  “I want to throw up all the time but I can’t. Just when I think I’ll throw up, it stops,” she said.

  He stood next to her and looked at her profile in the sunlight and did not touch her. They held the railing and watched the tranquil sea fall away from the hull. There was foam on the sea in their wake.

  “What did he do?”

  She told him then, softly, like a reporter reciting another person’s story. It was the only way she could tell him. She told him about the arrest and the cell, the beating and the fire hose torture. She said that after an hour or two, she had been given back her clothes and told to dress. They had watched her dress. They had brought her bag from the hotel and when she chose to put on her jeans, they gave her a dress. It was the blue dress she had worn that night to the reception in the palace, when she had stood at the window and watched Harry Francis led to the cell she was in.

  She spoke of “Rita” and “her” and “she” because if she had said “I,” she would not have been able to tell him at all.

  “Colonel Ready came then and took her to a guesthouse that’s in the back of the palace. He told her it was a caretaker’s house from the days when the estates were inhabited by landowners. It’s up the hill from the palace. She screamed at him—she told him that she was a reporter. He said she was nothing. That’s when he told her he had the notebook. That’s when he said Manet had killed Devereaux.”