Hemingway's Notebook

by Bill Granger

  Bay of Pigs. In 1961, the new president, John F. Kennedy, took the blame for an aborted invasion of Castro’s Cuba. The invasion was planned and executed by CIA. The invasion foundered in the Bay of Pigs on the Isle of Pines in Cuba. The invasion force consisted of Cuban patriots. They were slaughtered in the hundreds. And Harry Francis, who had been the CIA inside man in Cuba, had known that it would fail before it began because he had known that Castro’s intelligence agency had expected the invasion in that place, at that time. And he had not warned his own agency.

  “But why would the book be good now.”

  “Because nothing has changed in twenty-five years. It puts everything the agency did under a cloud. The agency has not changed and if you don’t think that will back the administration into a corner in places like Nicaragua and in Costa Rica and even on relations with Cuba, you don’t understand your politics.”

  “Because the book was proof and it would back up your own memoirs. Your memoirs is the second book. The second Hemingway notebook—because you’re Hemingway as well, aren’t you, Harry?”

  Harry smiled and it was a very sad smile. “Yes. In my own scenario, that’s my role. My own little role.”

  “But you didn’t write it. You told Philippe about the second book. You pointed to your head.”

  “Yes, damn it. I never wrote it.”

  “You’re a traitor to your country twice, Harry. You don’t even have a place to go to ground, do you?”

  “No,” Harry said.

  “But if you had the notebook—”

  “It was my bona fide. It could have been useful.”

  Devereaux put the notebook on the table.

  Harry stared at it and he felt a pain in his chest and he breathed very deeply for a long moment.

  “You had it.”

  “Yes. Cain dropped me off at the fishing village and he waited for me there. I came back when I found the book and I wanted to go to Madeleine, I had to find out about Manet. I didn’t trust Ready’s deal with me. Cain had an unused logbook, I made up a code and put it in the book. I hid the notebook on the Compass Rose.”

  “But Compass Rose didn’t wait for you at Madeleine.”

  “No. Cain had no guts for it. But I wasn’t worried about the book. He wouldn’t find it and I would always be able to find the Compass Rose if I got off the island again. I had to go into Madeleine. I had to find another way off. I had to take Rita off the island. I figured if the worst came, if Ready got me, I could tell him about the book and send Rita to get it for him and let myself be the hostage. It was just a precaution.”

  “You’ve got the book.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s genuine, you know.”

  “Yes. When we landed with Cain in Key West, I found someone at the Hemingway house there who knew about his writing. He studied the book and he said the numbers were all written by Hemingway—there’s a lot about numbers in Hemingway’s correspondence, particularly the way he slanted his letters and the way he did the number seven. Hemingway wrote a lot about money.”

  “I know everything about him,” Harry Francis said and he touched the book as though it was holy.

  “What about Hemingway?”

  “He loved intelligence, it fascinated him. I was in Havana in 1958. He was working then and it was going good, about the days in Paris when he was young. Batista was running Cuba, everyone knew he was finished. Castro was in the hills and he was giving interviews to Americans there. Like me. I was a writer. My vocation and my cover in the agency.”

  “And you became Hemingway’s friend.”

  “Not his friend. The trouble was, he couldn’t have any friends anymore, he was too important for that. He could have pals. I hung around with him. He invited me to the farm south of Havana.”

  “What’s the key to the code?”

  “I taught him the code for fun. He was fascinated by intelligence work. He picked it up. The key was a page in The Sun Also Rises.”

  “When did he write it?”

  “When he was getting ready to kill himself. He was in the Mayo Clinic in early 1961. After the Bay of Pigs. He knew I had known about the invasion, he knew what I was, he had his own sources.”

  “No. You told him. You wanted him to forgive you.”

  Harry was silent again and he stared at the book in his hands. “Yes. I wanted him to understand me.”

  “That you were a liar and a coward and that you betrayed him and betrayed everyone else.”

  There was only silence left after that and the sound of the gulls beyond the building was part of it. Devereaux looked over the sand beneath the balcony and saw Rita running on the sandbar in the water. She might have been running on the water because the illusion was good enough to make it seem there was no sandbar beyond the line of the shore. The pelicans dove into the receding waters of the tidal pool and then rose again like lumbering seaplanes struggling from the glue of the water’s surface.

  “What was the invasion of St. Michel?” Devereaux said.

  “Rehearsal.” He could scarcely be heard above the silence.

  “For a second go at Castro.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Castro knows.”

  “Yes. He’s afraid. And he dealt with Ready. Arms and everything. He wanted the CIA to fail.”

  “And you kept your silence.”

  “Ready wanted to finish off the CIA once and for all. He also wanted to use you, make you a scapegoat, tie a can to your tail. When the invasion failed, CIA would be after your ass as well as Ready’s. You were the R Section man come back to life in St. Michel.”

  R Section. Set up by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs invasion because Kennedy had known that CIA had betrayed him. A rival intelligence agency to check on CIA, a spy to spy upon the spies.

  “If St. Michel worked, it would work against Cuba. The money would come for it, CIA would get a green light,” said Harry Francis. “Hemingway’s notebook was a proof it had been done once. Hemingway named me in the book, told how he had been used by me, told about the secret negotiations between Castro and President Eisenhower in 1960 to set up normal relations. Langley sabotaged those talks. Hemingway knew about it, hated it, was afraid of it, of what was going to happen to him, to the farm in Cuba. He loved Cuba. He loved the United States.”

  “And who did you love, Harry?”

  “Hemingway. He was everything I wanted to be, everything I saw in myself.”

  “The book would tell about you and Cuba and then you were there to back up the book. Why didn’t you give it to Ready? You gave him everything else.”

  “I was afraid. Once he had the book, he didn’t need me that badly.”

  “You stink, Harry.”

  Harry sighed. He opened the pages. “Hemingway killed me in the book, he killed me in code the way he could do. It was the last thing he could do to me because he was going to have to kill himself because things were very bad for him and he was depressed.”

  Devereaux said nothing. He stared at Rita Macklin running in the surf of the gentle gulf.

  And Harry began to speak, to recite the first page of the notebook, a man who had learned hard words by heart.

  Harry Francis liked to play games. Once we went down to Havana together and we played at being spies because everyone knew the government was going to fall. The difference between playing spy and being a real spy is in the stakes of the game, because the game is always the same. Harry was a real spy as well as one who played at it; but he never wanted to play for the high stakes. The stakes make the game serious and that is how you tell whether the game is worth playing.

  Harry played football in college and he was built well. He had big hands and sandy hair and the women liked him. He told me he was doing some writing and that he wanted to be a writer. It told him what I knew about it and he showed me some of his things and this was while we were down at the farm. That’s when I knew he would not make it because he thought that writing was a kind of trick. He wasn’t willing to
play the game for the big stakes and I suppose that is what was wrong with him. He broke his nose playing football in college and he said it had hurt like hell. He had paid for an expensive operation to get it straightened out and he never played football again. Harry said he hated the pain and I believed him. He talked a lot about pain. He talked about writing a lot when he got drunk at the harbor in the afternoons, when I was not writing and I went down to see the fishermen and have a glass of good wine with them.

  But Harry was fun once and he taught me this code. He was fun to be with the time we went down to Havana to spy on Batista. I didn’t take Harry seriously before we began to play the big game together. After that, I took him more seriously but I hated him enough to kill him if I had not been ill.

  Devereaux turned after a long moment and stared at Harry. “I can save your life,” he said.

  “I don’t want to live,” said Harry.

  “Yes, you do. You don’t have the guts to die,” said Devereaux. “But you’ll live under sentence—you’ll have terms and they’ll all be observed, all the rules. You understand?”

  And Harry nodded.

  And Devereaux began to tell him the way he was going to be used.

  34

  STRONGER IN THE BROKEN PLACES

  She was in pajamas, lying on the bed beneath the coverlet. She had bought pajamas when they came back and they had said nothing about it. He slept in the living room of the condominium, on the couch, and they said nothing about that arrangement either. Devereaux entered the bedroom and thought she was sleeping. It was late afternoon and the rooms were full of golden light. Harry Francis had told him everything that was written in Hemingway’s notebook.

  He sat in a chair near the double bed and looked at her for a long time.

  Her breathing was regular, her cheek was against the sheet at the corner of the pillow. Her eyes were closed very tight so that there were wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her right hand was near her mouth and it was balled into a fist. Her body pressed flat against the sheets. She slept very hard, he thought.

  She opened her eyes and it was still afternoon.

  She did not start or make a sound. She turned on her side and looked at him.

  “Did he tell you?”

  Her voice was soft and flat.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can we use it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Harry?”

  “Harry did something bad. A long time ago. And more recently. I don’t know about Harry but I have to use him.”

  “But he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that you’re not sure of him. Of what you’re going to do with him.”

  “He knows now. He has to know.”

  “Are there any secrets?”

  She meant from her; he understood she meant that. “No. I’ll tell you everything about it.”

  “How can you use it?”

  “I’m not sure of all the parts of it, but I can use it. And Harry. I can use him. And Anthony. Anthony will be very useful.”

  “I’m as cold-blooded as you are,” she said. “I don’t care about any of them. I really don’t care.”

  “No, Rita.” He wanted her very badly. He wondered if she would ever heal. She had been broken and it had been his fault and she did not accuse him. If she had accused him, it would have been easier.

  He had no feeling about Harry Francis until the last moment on that long afternoon as Harry told him about the secrets of the notebook.

  Harry had become very emotional. He had wept and he had gotten a little drunk in telling the story. But at the last moment, he had said that Rita would be all right. He had said that because he said he knew that Rita was what had mattered to Devereaux. He said that sometimes a broken limb heals and it is stronger in the broken places. He said Hemingway had written that.

  It was such a clumsy, intrusive thing to say. To that moment, Devereaux had not decided about Harry Francis because Harry had done a bad thing a long time ago and carried a bad secret with him for twenty-five years and made it worse all along the way.

  But they had all done bad things.

  “I wanted to save my life,” Devereaux began.

  “No. I don’t need any words,” she said.

  “When he appeared on that street in Lausanne, I wanted to kill him and then, later, when I thought he had so much against me, I wanted you to be his hostage because I wanted time to find a way to get around him. I did it for myself.”

  “And me.”

  “No. That’s not true. I would have died for you. But I wouldn’t run anymore. I didn’t want to die on someone else’s terms. I didn’t think he would do this to you. I didn’t think of that.”

  “I did,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  He had thought about it all afternoon as the sun warmed the screened balcony, as Harry wept and got drunk and told him about what had happened in Cuba a long time ago, about how the island had been lost, about how Hemingway had become ill and killed himself and how Harry thought it was because of everything that had happened on that island.

  He had thought about Colonel Ready and what he would tell Rita. In the end, he decided he would tell her everything.

  “Ready always had a way out. Even in Nam. He always had two or three roads that no one else knew about. He knew that if everything turned bad, he could still retreat.”

  “And you know what the roads are now,” she said. She sat up in bed and pulled her arms around her knees and watched him.

  “Yes. I think I know them all. The first thing we do is cut off all the roads. Blow them up and fill them in. That’s the first thing.”

  She ate for the first time. She even smiled at him as he fed her. He made her eggs and bacon and toast and coffee. He sat across from her and watched her eat. She wore her pajamas and a robe. Her hair was clean and bright again and her cheeks began to fill with color as she ate. It was sundown and they sat on the screened balcony. He watched the bloody sun frame her features in amber colors.

  “I feel like the time we were in Vevey and found that place,” she said. “Steak haché.”

  He smiled. She spoke for the first time of the long summer in Switzerland.

  “I was so hungry all of a sudden. I missed home. I missed hamburgers and fat french fries and baked potatoes.”

  “You asked her if the chopped steak was well done,” he said, still smiling. It was getting better. She smiled at him and kept eating.

  It was a little neighborhood café in the old Swiss town and there were six tables and the daughter served them and the old woman brought them beer from the bar. Chopped steak smothered in onions and gravy and she had eaten it all and taken part of his portion and kept complaining about how hungry she was. She told him that her mother cooked like that, chopped steak in gravy and onions, and she felt like a little girl at home again in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on a summer night in the big country kitchen with the windows open to the last of the afternoon breeze. The breeze always blew through the white curtains and the flow of the curtains had been like themes of unheard music, keeping time.

  When she finished, he took the plates to the kitchen. It was like Lausanne when they would cook for each other as though they were giving gifts.

  When he came back to her, they sat at the table and they did not speak for a long time. Until the sun was down in the sea and the warm night was filled with starlight and the moon was new.

  “What did Harry tell you?”

  “About Hemingway and Cuba. And how Hemingway was the middleman in secret talks between Eisenhower and Castro to work out an accommodation. How the CIA poisoned the talks. How they set up the Cuban invasion. And how Harry knew about it, knew it would fail, and let it happen anyway. Harry can’t be trusted at all, but he’s useful to us.”

  “What about the notebook?”

  “The notebook proves part of Harry’s story and he needs some proof because it is p
retty fantastic. Except it all makes sense. Cuba is afraid of another invasion and they wanted to get the book to expose the truth about what happened twenty-five years ago. St. Michel was the rehearsal for another invasion. Cuba gave Ready arms and aid to help repel the invasion. Harry knows all this. He knows everything about everything and I have to find a way to use him. I made my trail lead to Ready because I wanted to turn him into me, into November. But he was playing a more complex game and I didn’t understand it at all. I found the book and it wasn’t enough to find it. I had to find a way off the island for us, I had to find Manet, I had to find some leverage—but the whole island was like a piece of glass, and you couldn’t get a handhold anywhere.”

  “It’s a fantastic story.”

  “We invaded Grenada and that got everyone’s spirits up. We’re in Costa Rica now training the police there and we have agents with the contras in Nicaragua. Not so fantastic.”

  “Nothing changed in twenty-five years.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly it. That’s what Harry can prove along with the notebook. Except I don’t see how we can use it if we want to get away. You and me.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “There’s the problem of Colonel Ready. That’s revenge. There’s the problem of CIA. I think we can put the problems together but I’m going to have to come awake.”

  “Awake?”

  “Section slang. I’m sleeping. I came awake with November, I started using the code name again, I was going to pin the tail on the donkey with Ready. Now I’m going to have to really come awake for a little while and expose myself with Hanley and the Section to make the thing stick.”

  “What about Weisman? And Anthony Calabrese? And the others? Ready’s screwed everyone.”

  “In the end, that’s the way I want it to look,” said Devereaux. “And I want Harry right where I can find him. He’s going to fulfill himself.”

  She stared at him and didn’t speak.