The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  I could make out Hemingway near the bow of the lead fishing boat. His face was only shadow beneath the low brim of the straw fishing hat, but I recognized the powerful upper body and the massive forearms. The men around him were laughing and tossing whiskey bottles into the rough water of the strait as their boats came out of Havana Harbor between the old fort on the hill and the old fort in the city. Someone fired another skyrocket into the air above the yacht. The officer on the Southern Cross shouted through a megaphone for the fishing boats to stand off, but the sound was lost in the explosions of firecrackers, cherry bombs, and popping skyrockets.

  One of the flotilla’s speedboats began circling the yacht at high speed, staying fifty yards out but drawing the attention of the lookouts and the sentry boat. That is when I saw Hemingway load the flare pistol and aim it at the yacht.

  Two of the boats in the flotilla had men firing off rockets, seemingly at random, but most of the starbursts exploded above the Southern Cross. I could see through the binoculars that the men on the fishing boats were using those stupid bamboo stalks as bazookas. A fiery red blossom exploded just ten yards above the bow of the yacht, and the patrol boat roared out to shoo the careering fishing boat away.

  Hemingway fired the first flare. Its parachute opened twenty feet short of the yacht and it drifted down into the water, sputtering and hissing.

  “Hey! Goddammit!” shouted the bald man on the deck of the big boat. He dropped his cigarette holder in his agitation. “Stop that, you swine!” His voice was almost lost across the water.

  Our fireboat had edged out away from the abandoned slips near the point on the city side, the engine gurgling at lowest throttle, and the eight men and I stood tensely. Our running lights were out.

  Hemingway stood in the bow and fired again. The flare popped open above the stern of the Southern Cross and drifted over its port railing. The lookouts were shouting. The sentry boat roared away from the fishing boat it was herding and accelerated toward Hemingway’s boat.

  Someone fired a skyrocket directly at the bridge of the yacht. The first officer and the bald man ducked. The sound of the piano had stopped, and now men in tuxedos and women in evening dress were coming on deck. The first officer herded them back inside as two more white rockets exploded just above the bow of the ship.

  One of the lookouts raised an automatic rifle and fired three warning shots in the air.

  Ignoring the shots and the bedlam all around him, Hemingway stood on the bow of the advancing fishing boat, disdainful of the patrol boat rushing at them with searchlights flashing, and stood easily against the chop while lifting the heavy flare pistol a few degrees higher. For an instant all the other rocket and firecracker noise seemed to stop as Hemingway pointed, paused, and fired.

  The flare arched in a flat, red streak, hit the mahogany deck of the yacht behind the bow, skittered across the deck—scattering lookouts and watchers—and disappeared under the canvas tarpaulin pulled tight over the crates just forward of the main superstructure. A skyrocket from another boat exploded just above the tarp five seconds later. Flames broke out beneath the canvas.

  The guards on the patrol boat began firing across the bow of Hemingway’s boat. The entire flotilla put hard over and accelerated in different directions, shouting insults in Spanish and continuing to fire rockets and lob cherry bombs at the fast boat. One of the flotilla speedboats lunged toward the yacht in a feint, drew the patrol boat back, and then took off to the west at high speed.

  Our fireboat gained speed, throwing back a white wake at the same time that all of its running lights, searchlights, emergency lights, and sirens came on. It was a real fireboat, Hemingway had assured us, although it had only been used twice: once in 1932 when a freighter had caught fire in the middle of the harbor and burned to the waterline while the fireboat played its low-pressure hoses on the charred hulk, and a second time the previous year when a Cuban navy ammunition ship blew itself to bits eight miles off the coast and the fireboat had arrived in time to poke among the floating wreckage and retrieve bodies. The eight-man crew was made up of volunteers—all friends of the writer—who spent far more time drinking and fishing from the leaky tub of a fireboat than practicing rescue drills.

  Now we leaped forward, the spray threatening to push the fireman’s helmet off my head, the searchlight stabbing over my head and illuminating the yacht in a bobbing white circle. The patrol boat made to cut us off and then roared aside as the man at its wheel realized that our old boat was not turning or slowing. Shouts and curses followed us the final fifty yards to the starboard side of the yacht, where we were greeted by more shouts, curses, and warnings from the deck.

  The five men around me ignored the noise and the deluge of water from our poorly aimed forward firehose nozzles as they rushed to our port side and made ready the fenders and boarding ladders.

  “Stand off, stand off, stand off, goddammit!” shouted the first officer aboard the Southern Cross.

  “No lo he entendido,” shouted our helmsman, bringing us up alongside. “Tenga la bondad de hablar en español!”

  Three of our “firemen” grabbed the railing with grappling hooks while two more tossed boarding ladders up the side. One of the ladders caught, and instantly two of the men were climbing, fire axes and hoses in hand.

  “Get off, you slime!” screamed the bald man, rushing forward to stop the first of our volunteer firemen. Unfortunately for the bald man, the first of our men aboard was El Canguro, the Kangaroo, the powerful jai alai player. Suddenly the bald man was flying backward while the captain of our squad, an actual fireman, was shouting in broken English for the officers and lookouts and civilians to get out of his way, that the Havana Harbor Municipal Fireboat had authority during such emergencies, and would they please lend a hand in securing that fire hose that had been handed up?

  The fire on the bow was almost out, but the smoke still billowed across the deck and obscured the superstructure. Southern Cross crewmen ran through the dark smoke, carrying fire extinguishers and axes, cutting away the smoldering tarp, hacking through tie-down lines, and pulling heavy crates out of the fire’s way.

  I was the fifth man up. I jogged forward, an ax in one hand, a flashlight in the other, paused at the hatch to the radio shack, waited for two shouting crewmen to run past me, and then stepped in.

  Second door on the left was the radio room. Hatch was open. room dark. I found a fire Klaxon lever just where the wiring diagrams had shown it to be, and pulled it down. Suddenly the interior of the yacht began echoing with the shrill hooting.

  I flashed the light around the radio room: shortwave, ship-to-shore, telegraph, voice transmitters, more electronic equipment than I had seen in a non-naval ship. Only a few books set in a recessed shelf. I stepped closer and ran the light across the books there. Standard radio room reference guides and troubleshooting manuals. A radio log that I flipped through quickly. Kohler would not have logged any covert transmissions or receptions.

  Footsteps pounded in the corridor outside. I switched off the flashlight and waited while several officers and men ran past, undogged the outer hatch, and ran shouting onto the main deck.

  Out the door, left, down the gang ladder. Left. Fans were sucking the smoke down into this corridor. The alarm bells were still echoing through the darkness. Down another short ladder.

  The woman I had seen swimming naked stepped around a bend in the corridor. Her eyes were shining. She wore a long, silk gown, scooped low in the front, that hugged her figure, and a simple string of pearls against her throat.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “What is going on?”

  “Fire,” I growled, lowering my head so that my helmet covered much of my face as I turned and pointed to the gangway up. “Get on deck. Now!”

  The woman took a breath and rushed past, climbing the stairs with a scrape of her slippers.

  I counted doors. Third hatch, galley. Fifth hatch, galley supply room. Sixth hatch, Kohler’s room. I undogged the h
atch and stepped in, ready to shout at anyone sleeping there.

  The berth was small and empty. Three bunks, one table with an inset bookshelf above it, barely room to turn around. The fire Klaxon stopped blaring. I could feel bumps against the hull. The fire was probably out, the “firemen” chased off, the fireboat pushed away. Leaving the light off, I played the flashlight across the books there.

  Only seven titles, four of them more radio reference books. The fifth was a novel, Drei Kameraden by Erich Maria Remarque, the sixth was a copy of Haushofer’s Geopolitík, and the seventh was an anthology of German literature. I picked up the books to be sure that they were all in German, noted the publication dates, saw some pencil checks on different pages, and set them back carefully.

  Then I was back in the corridor and heading up the fire ladder.

  On the main level without meeting anyone, ready to turn right out the corridor I had come in through, then hearing voices and footsteps there. Shadows of men with guns.

  I jogged down the corridor, took a left, heard shouts behind me, and stepped out through a hatch on the port side, away from where all the action had been. I dogged the hatch behind me and looked around.

  The fireboat had already been pushed away. The smoke had let up. The lookouts would be back any second. I reached up and used the ax to smash the electric lamp above me. This section of deck dropped into darkness.

  I walked to the railing, stepped over, balanced, dropped my ax, heavy coat, boots, flashlight, and metal helmet into the sea.

  “Hey!” Someone coming around from the bow, shouting at the shadow he could just barely make out.

  I dropped into the water, wearing nothing but the swimsuit I had worn beneath the fireman’s coat.

  I dived deep, came up fifteen yards out, dived again, came up farther out, my head low between the three-foot waves. The water was cold. There was noise and confusion on deck, but no shouts, no shots. I dived again, came up on the backside of another wave, and swam hard into the darkness.

  13

  HELGA SONNEMAN IS COMING to dinner tonight,” said Ernest Hemingway. “You’re invited if you buy a new shirt.”

  “Great,” I said, not looking up from the codebook. “Is Teddy Shell coming as well?”

  “Of course,” said Hemingway. “You don’t think Helga would go out for an evening engagement without Teddy, do you?”

  I stopped working numbers and looked up at the writer. “You’re serious? You can’t be serious.”

  “Absolutely serious,” said Hemingway. “Was introduced to Helga this morning when I was visiting the embassy. Liked her right away. Invited both of them.”

  “Mother of God,” I said.

  Helga Sonneman was the woman I had seen swimming naked and then almost run into in the smoky corridor of the Southern Cross. Teddy Shell was her playboy boyfriend. We knew a lot more about them now than we had a little more than a week earlier when we had pulled the fireboat trick.

  “Eight P.M.,” said Hemingway. “Drinks about six-thirty. Do you think we should invite Xenophobia?” Hemingway was amused by all this; I could tell from the firm set of his jaw. Teddy Shell, aka Abwehr Agent Theodor Schlegel, would most certainly like to meet Maria.

  “Maybe you could dress her up and introduce her as an important guest from Spain,” I said, joking. “Have her eat dinner next to the man who has his people out looking for her all over Cuba. The man who would probably shoot her the second he found her.”

  Hemingway grinned, and I realized that he was considering that idea, enjoying all of the ramifications. He shook his head. “Won’t work. Upset the balance. Marty likes to have an equal number of males and females at the table whenever possible.”

  Teddy Shell, Hemingway, and I would make three males. Helga Sonneman and Martha Gellhorn… “Who’s the third woman tonight?” I asked.

  “The Kraut’s coming this evening,” said Hemingway.

  “Which kraut?”

  Hemingway shook his head again. “The Kraut, Lucas. With a capital K. My Kraut.”

  I asked nothing else. Hemingway did not explain. I would find out that evening.

  It had been eight days since the midnight fireworks show in Havana Harbor. The Havana Police and Harbor Patrol had not been amused, but the fireboat’s crew professed innocence of any intent except putting out the fire, the fishing boats and drunken fishermen had never been found or identified, and Mr. Teddy Shell of Rio de Janeiro, the civilian in charge of screaming “Swine” from the scientific ship the Southern Cross, had been such an arrogant swine himself when dealing with Cuban and U.S. authorities that no one wanted to help him too much.

  Finding copies of the suspected code reference books had taken longer than we had thought. Remarque’s Drei Kameraden was new enough and popular enough that we found a copy the next day in Havana’s one bookstore that carried German titles, but Haushofer’s Geopolitík and the 1929 anthology of German literature had taken a while. Finally, almost a week after our escapade, an airmail package had arrived from New York with copies of both books.

  “I knew that Max wouldn’t let me down,” said Hemingway.

  “And who is Max?”

  “Maxwell Perkins,” said Hemingway. “My editor at Scribners.”

  I had only the vaguest idea of what an editor did, but I was thankful that this one had combed used bookstores in New York until he had found the books that Hemingway had cabled him about.

  “Goddammit, shit,” said the writer. He was reading a note that had been in the package with the books.

  “What?”

  “Oh, that goddamned Garden City Publishing Company wants to reprint ‘Macomber’ and Max wants to give them permission.”

  “What’s ‘Macomber’?” I said. “One of your books?”

  Hemingway looked at me without exasperation, accustomed to my ignorance by now. “ ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ ” he said. “It’s a story of mine. Long short story. Took me as much work and blood to write as a novel would’ve. I used it to head up a collection of my short stuff in ’thirty-eight. That collection has never made money for Scribners or me, and now this Garden City outfit wants to reprint it in a cheap-shit sixty-nine-cent edition.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Es malo,” said Hemingway. “Es bastante malo. It means that my work’s competing with itself—not just with the original Scribners edition but with the Modern Library edition that’s coming out as well. Eso es pésimo. Es fucking tonto!”

  “Could I have them?” I said.

  “What? Have what?”

  “The two German books I need to decode the intercepts,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Hemingway, and handed me the books. He crumpled up the letter from his editor and tossed it into the weeds, where one of the cats went after it.

  IT HAD BEEN A BUSY WEEK for the Crook Factory. As the mean heat of early May settled into the stultifying heat of a Cuban summer, Hemingway’s amateur operatives had begun keeping track of Lieutenant Maldonado, who was heading up an island-wide search for the whore named Maria, suspected of murdering the radio operator from the yacht the Southern Cross. I suggested to the writer that putting a tail on someone who was simultaneously a cold-blooded killer, a member of the National Police, and the chief investigator searching for the woman we were hiding near the finca was risky business, but Hemingway had just stared at me and said nothing. Meanwhile, some of his other operatives were merely lying low—a skill many of them had perfected in Spain and elsewhere—until the flap over the fireworks incident went away.

  The wharf rats and longshoremen reported to Hemingway that the new radio operator for the yacht had arrived—flying in from Mexico City—but that the damage to the bearings and driveshaft was more extensive than first thought and that replacement parts would not arrive for another week at least. Even while the Southern Cross was stuck at anchor in Havana Harbor, Hemingway and his first mate, Fuentes, took the Pilar down to the Casablanca shipyard, where Fuentes stayed with the ship
to oversee its refitting for intelligence operations while I drove the Lincoln down to pick up the writer. Over the next week, we received regular reports from Fuentes and Winston Guest, who drove daily to the shipyard to check on the work.

  The Pilar’s dual engines were overhauled and improved for better speed. Additional auxiliary fuel tanks were squeezed in for longer-range patrolling. The Cuban navy had planned to install two removable .50-caliber machine gun mounts, but the U.S. Navy adviser overseeing the construction agreed with Fuentes that the mounts and guns would be too heavy for the 38-foot boat and the weapons were never actually mounted. Instead, carpenters built hidden closets, cupboards, and niches in which to hide Thompson submachine guns, three bazookas, two antitank guns, some small magnetic mines, a cache of dynamite charges, fuse cord, blasting caps, and several dozen hand grenades. Fancy “glass holders” were built to store the grenades out of sight.

  When Guest returned with the news of these improvements, Hemingway grunted and said, “If the old girl catches fire at sea, then we’ll all have the best Viking funeral the Caribbean’s ever seen.”

  The U.S. Navy provided state-of-the art radio equipment, including direction-finding apparatus for triangulating on ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore, or submarine transmissions in cooperation with shore-based naval bases and Allied warcraft at sea. When Hemingway protested that he did not have time to learn how to use it or train his crew in its operation, Ambassador Braden and Colonel Thomason attached a U.S. Marine to Operation Friendless. The radio operator’s name was Don Saxon; he was about my height, dirty blond, had boxed welterweight division in the Corps; and his résumé included the ability to fieldstrip a .50-caliber machine gun in the dark. Unfortunately, as Hemingway explained to the Marine over dinner at La Bodeguita del Medio, we had no .50-caliber machine guns, but Saxon would be in charge of all radio operations and our codebooks. We did not tell him about the German codebook we were trying to decipher in Hemingway’s guest house.