Hemingway's Notebook

by Bill Granger

  “Who are you?”

  “I escaped from St. Michel. I was a reporter. I was his prisoner. I saw what had happened there.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Everything. You have to speak up. To me. The church is being blinded by the archbishop of St. Michel. He tells them all is well. He paints a picture for Rome that’s not true.”

  “And I should tell the truth?” The nun smiled then.

  “I was on St. Michel and when he made me a prisoner, he beat me. Had me beaten. In the cells. He raped me.”

  Sister Mary Columbo put her fist to her mouth then and bit her knuckle and stared at the thin woman and believed her. “Why should I tell?”

  “Because Colonel Ready is taking the church funds going into St. Michel.”

  “Is that true?”

  “What happened in Ethiopia? The food and money came in and the government used it to wipe out its enemies. He’s doing the same thing. He ambushed you, his men did, and you know that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “At least you know it was not Manet.”

  “It doesn’t matter for Manet. He’s dead.”

  “But those people in the hills aren’t dead.” Rita stared at her with bright burning eyes. “He is evil. That’s important to you still, isn’t it? Colonel Ready is evil and all the evil in St. Michel is tied to him like a bell on a cat.”

  “I didn’t tell the story because it was a condition to get out alive. Colonel Ready has a long reach. As you said, the man across the street.”

  “Who wants to kill Anthony. Or kill you.”

  “And you think this will carry weight. What I have to say? With the church?” She smiled at Rita. “You’re not a Catholic.”

  “I am,” Rita said. “I know what you mean.”

  “Archbishop Bouvier tolerated us in St. Michel. Radical nuns. Giving out rosaries and penicillin. As long as we didn’t bother him or interrupt his meals, he didn’t care.”

  “I want you to tell me the truth. And I will write the story.”

  “And we’ll both be threatened,” said Sister Mary Columbo. “By Colonel Ready.”

  “Yes.”

  “It won’t make any difference. In Rome, I mean. Nuns do not have a voice loud enough to stand against a bishop’s whisper.”

  Rita smiled. “You’re a poet.”

  “A realist,” said Sister Mary Columbo. “I’ll go with you to see Anthony. It’s chilly, isn’t it? Can I get my shawl?”

  “Yes.”

  Sister Mary Columbo touched her arm. “Are you married, Rita?”

  “I have someone.”

  “That’s good. He knows about…”

  “Yes.”

  “You told me and that is such a terrible thing to tell—”

  Rita stared at the face of the woman and saw her clearly and saw that she had been a nurse in war as Anthony had said and that she had survived all of life’s horrors and that she was still not so scarred that she could not be hurt or that she could not comfort another person. Rita smiled at her, sadly.

  “It’s all right then,” said Sister Mary Columbo. “I suppose I can be brave as well.”

  They were inside the McDonald’s on Broad Street in the southern part of the city. They were talking animatedly. They had been inside for nearly an hour.

  The man with the nine-millimeter Beretta automatic shoved in the pocket of his coat waited impassively across the street for them. His name was Costello; he had followed the nun and the other woman to the McDonald’s. Bingo. Anthony Calabrese was inside.

  He could have walked in and finished them but it might have been dirty. He had a compunction about shooting nuns. Women, for that matter.

  He waited in the doorway of a jewelry store.

  He didn’t see the police car until it was at the curb in front of him and then he didn’t know what it meant. The two men in blue uniforms got out of the car in a funny way.

  As though they were being careful.

  Costello stared at them as though he were looking right through them.

  “Hey,” said the second one. He had the police-car door open and seemed to be using it as a shield. His holster was unsnapped and the gunmetal gleamed in the bright overcast light. “You want to come over here a minute.”

  Costello stared at him and then shrugged. He walked across the sidewalk to the policeman and stood five feet away.

  The first one put a pistol in his hand and laid his hand on the hood of the squad car.

  “You want to tell us your name?”

  “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “We got a report of a man with a gun in the entrance of the jewelry store.”

  “We got a call that someone was casing a jewelry store.”

  “You got a gun,” said the first one.

  “I got no gun.”

  “Pat him down, Frank.”

  Costello took a step back.

  The first one raised his pistol in one motion. “That’s it. Hands against the car.”

  “Jesus, you guys are getting excited—” said Costello in a rising voice. He looked across the street. The three of them, they were getting up, they were moving toward the door.…

  “He’s got a piece, he’s got a piece,” said the second one when he felt it and the first one put the pistol right next to Costello’s head and held it there. And Costello saw them walking out of the restaurant across the street and the nun was turning to go away and Anthony was looking right at him with the woman.

  Anthony was smiling right at him.

  38

  A PUBLISHING EVENT

  The Central Intelligence Agency—through its headquarters, its case officers in the field, stringers in foreign countries who submit quarterly expense accounts—subscribes to nearly every magazine sold in the world.

  But not every article in every magazine is read. The gathering of intelligence through intelligent reading is still a haphazard business. Machines cannot read and cannot analyze what they read.

  Which is why the item that appeared on page fifty-one of that week’s Publishers Weekly magazine might not have been noted.

  The item was a paid advertisement by a publishing company that the Langley Firm knew well. The item had puzzled the reader who had passed it up through the ranks of the bureaucracy until it was finally analyzed at the fourth level and flagged and bucked to the Committee of Nineteen at the second level.

  “But what on earth does it mean?” said the sixth assistant director of intelligence, who was chairing the meeting on that October afternoon.

  “It means there’s a spy novel to be published in the spring,” said the assistant traffic manager, who had routed the advertisement through computer analysis, records, and interagency security before presenting it to his boss, who, in turn, presented it up the ladder of the organization chart. The assistant traffic manager liked to state the obvious at first, to get everyone’s agreement so that what he said next would not sound as bizarre.

  The sixth assistant director waited and made a tent of his fingers in an attitude of prayer. He closed his eyes.

  The other people in meeting room L stared at the speaker.

  “David Zeno is a nonstarter,” the speaker continued. “But the name of the hero of the new series is Harry Francis. Harry Francis is an agent. Was an agent.”

  “Harry Francis,” said the sixth assistant director. “But what is this all about?”

  “Harry Francis retired six years ago. He’s living in St. Michel in the Caribbean. We’ve kept tabs on him, of course, all the retired agents. But he’s alive and well at last report. He used to write books for us. Commercial. Spy novels. And he wrote the guerrilla manual that was published last year. You know the one.”

  Everyone knew the one. The one that had embarrassed the president during the campaign.

  “Freelance. He did freelance for us. But he didn’t work for us anymore,” said the traffic manager.

  “Did he submit this book?”

  “Sir,
you don’t understand. He’s not writing this book. A man named David Zeno is writing the book.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  “Fiction, sir. A spy novel. A new series, it said, set in the Caribbean involving a ‘hard-drinking, hard-hitting CIA agent’ who—”

  “But that was Harry Francis, wasn’t it?”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean, that describes Harry Francis, doesn’t it?”

  “Sir, his two-o-one file indicates Francis had an alcohol-related problem in—”

  “Damn it, I don’t care about that, I want to know what this book is about.”

  “We made inquiries. The publisher wasn’t very cooperative. They’ve handled sensitive material before.”

  “From us?”

  “And others. The agent was Henry Kaufberger.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “We’ve used Henry. From time to time. Over the past twenty years. Harry would have known about him. He said he received the proposal from David Zeno in St. Michel. He told us he never met him. We tried to explain this might be sensitive—”

  “Don’t even breathe near St. Michel,” said the sixth assistant. “Don’t light a cigarette and don’t make sparks. St. Michel is explosive.”

  “Sir, the book is fiction and the advance paid was one hundred thousand dollars.”

  “That’s absurd,” said the sixth assistant who made $31,983.14 a year.

  “Yes, sir,” said the traffic manager, who was waiting to continue.

  “Go ahead.”

  “The book is called The Hemingway Assignment.”

  “My God,” said the sixth assistant director, who had read the files on Harry Francis before the meeting. Including the file labeled Ultra. “My God.”

  “The novel, according to the agent, is set in Cuba at the time Castro took over and it’s about Ernest Hemingway and—Hemingway was a writer, sir, in that time—and this Hemingway—actually, Hemingway actually existed but this is a novel—and…”

  39

  PREPARATIONS

  Harry Francis was standing in shallow water on the gulf side of the sandbar, watching a shark cruise amiably back and forth in the waters twenty-five feet from where he stood. He held his sandals in his hand. His eyes crinkled in the sunlight; he looked as though he might be smiling.

  “Aren’t you afraid of the shark?” Rita asked.

  He turned, startled from his reverie. He did smile now, deliberately. “Sand shark.”

  “They bite, don’t they?”

  “Everything in nature bites,” he said.

  “And you’re the old man of the sea,” Rita said with an edge to her voice. She had pitied him the night she saw him dragged across the courtyard by the two gendarmes. She had grown to despise him, even after he had helped Devereaux rescue her. There was something so distant and judgmental about him. She had said to Devereaux: He doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like women.

  “Why do you hate me?” he asked her.

  “Because I can see what you are.”

  “All right.” He paused. “What do you want?”

  “I want him. Two days from now, when the operation is over, I want to see him getting off that boat. If I don’t see him getting off that boat, I’ll kill you.”

  He started to smile.

  “Don’t smile or laugh at me,” Rita said. “I won’t kill you the first day or even the second. I’ll figure it out, how to do it, and when I’ve got it figured out, I’ll do it so that you know I did it. You’ll see it coming and you won’t be able to get out of the way. If he dies on the island, then you ought to kill yourself because it’ll be easier to take it from yourself than from me.”

  “ ‘Stronger in the broken places.’ ”

  She waited.

  “Hemingway. I know you hate that, but he said sometimes broken bones heal and become stronger because they’ve been broken.”

  “No,” said Rita Macklin. “You and Hemingway got it wrong again. You never heal completely. You just learn to live with hurt. You can walk around it, you make it as easy on yourself as you can, but it’s always there. The broken arm never heals. The joints ache on rainy days. You don’t get stronger, you just learn to be tougher because the pain is always with you.” She stared so hard at him that he took a step back into the shallow warm waters.

  “I hate you, Harry, I hate you as much as I hate Ready. Dev made his deal with you because he had to and that’s why I walk around you. I hate you because you were on the island from the beginning, because you were Ready’s puppet, because you kept that absurd book about something that happened a long time ago. That stupid goddamn book that Ready wanted bad enough to bring Devereaux into this. To bring me into it. You’re not even a good traitor, you know that? You sold out your great friend Hemingway and you ended up selling out your country to a two-bit dictator like Ready. I’d kill you without a thought, without looking back. You remember that when you go back to St. Michel with Devereaux. You remember that I want to see him alive and that if he’s dead, it’s your fault. That’s what you’ve got to know.”

  And when Devereaux saw her, it was nearly midnight. He and Cain had been preparing the Compass Rose for the return to St. Michel. Rita was in a chair by the balcony and she was waiting for him.

  “It was your fault. Everything that happened to me,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “No excuses.”

  “No.”

  “You let it happen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Didn’t you love me?”

  “Yes. But I let it happen. You’re right.”

  “You wanted to be safe,” she said.

  “Yes. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted a lot of things and I was willing to take a chance. I was willing to have you take a chance.”

  “I know. I know everything. I wanted to see if you knew everything. I want to tell you something. Before you go to St. Michel.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said.

  “Do you know? I love you. I hated you on the island and I will keep remembering that I hated you for what you let happen. I won’t lie to you. I won’t forget that.”

  “No.”

  “Dev.” She stared at him. “I don’t want you to kill yourself.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I mean, I don’t want anything so badly that you have to die for it.”

  “I won’t die.”

  “I told Harry. I told him that if you died, I’d kill him.”

  “I won’t die.”

  40

  THE MAN WHO WAS NOVEMBER

  Colonel Ready got ready for bed just past midnight in the caretaker’s house. There had been more fighting in the hills during the day. Thirteen soldiers had been killed and three more had deserted to Celezon. He would sleep exactly three hours and be up again.

  The Cuban emissary had kept him from sleep, had threatened and bullied about the notebook, had demanded the money back that the Cuban government had paid for the book. It was tiring but in the end he had accepted Colonel Ready’s refusals.

  St. Michel had worked well for a long time but now it wasn’t working and there was nothing more to take out of St. Michel. In a little while, Colonel Ready would go to Switzerland and find his money and live a life of retirement. It was the last way of escape if all other ways were closed.

  He unlocked his front door, nodded to the two security guards, and locked the door behind him.

  The security personnel at the Aerodrome St. Michel had picked up another American that morning. He was smuggling an Uzi submachine-gun pistol into the country. He had broken easily. His name was Lemont and he had been hired by someone in New York to assassinate the man called Colonel Ready. It was all he knew. He’d been killed in the cells while Ready slept.

  He dropped his pistol and holster on the table and began to unbutton his tunic. He went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Kronenbourg and opened it. He drank the cold liquid, the first of the lon
g day.

  Devereaux said, “You made me wait a long time.”

  The red-haired man turned in the little kitchen and stared at the man in the darkened doorway that led to the living room. The other man had a pistol, a Colt Python with an extremely long black barrel.

  Colonel Ready flushed. His white scar brightened against the blush in his cheek.

  “You shouldn’t have come back,” he said.

  “Your two guards are dead,” said Devereaux. “I didn’t come alone. I brought a friend of yours. Harry Francis.”

  “I still have papers on you. I can still send them to CIA. Remember?”

  Devereaux’s voice was low, very soft. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t do anything with them. There’s no way to escape this time, Ready. It’s not like Nam. It’s not like any other time. Everything is cut off.”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “You can take all your clothes off,” said Devereaux.

  “Pardon?”

  “Strip,” said Devereaux.

  Colonel Ready put down the bottle of Kronenbourg and stared at Devereaux and then, smiling, finished unbuttoning his tunic. He removed the shirt. He wore no undershirt. He took off his shoes and socks. He unbuckled his belt and let his trousers fall. He stepped out of his trousers. He stood still.

  “Strip,” said Devereaux.

  “Want a gander at my cock? Is that it?”

  “Strip,” Devereaux said again in the same cold, uninflected voice that was almost a whisper.

  The smile faded.

  He pulled down his boxer shorts and stepped out of them. He stood naked in the bright light of the kitchen. His face and arms were weathered by sun but his belly and genitals were strangely pale, as though the parts of the body did not fit together or belonged to different people.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Devereaux said.

  “I have enough money to—”

  “To bribe me.”

  And Ready smiled. “You impotent bastard, I fucked your whore for you with this.” He held his penis. “Shoved it good in her and I had a good time. I beat the living shit out of her and fucked her good and I had a good time with her. She liked it. I knew she liked it. When it was over, I asked her if she liked it and she said she did.”