by Dan Simmons
It was hot. We hauled up two tarps and strung them across the narrow trench, tying them off to roots and rocks, staking them down so they would not flap even in a high wind, letting them sag so as to look like part of the gully, then dumping more soil and branches on top of them as camouflage. From thirty feet away it made our perch damned near invisible in the daylight. At night it should conceal us from anyone coming along the path on the ridgeline.
The sand flies were vicious—their bites raised instant welts—but Hemingway sprayed the area around our covered foxhole with Flit and handed me the bottle of repellent. The writer had not insisted on dragging the BAR up the hill with us—it was too clumsy to carry easily if we had to abandon our position in the night and run for the boat—but he had insisted that we get the long gun out of its wrappings and thread an ammo belt before leaving the Lorraine. I think he was preparing for us to shoot our way free of a trap if we had to.
Along with the tarps, the Thompson submachine guns, a bag of grenades, a bag of extra clips, the binoculars, the Flit gun, knives and personal gear, the sombreros, the first aid kit, pistols in holsters for each of us, and binoculars, we had also hauled a small cooler of beer and sandwiches up the sandy slope to our hideout. In early afternoon we paused to eat—corned beef sandwiches for me, thick fried egg and raw onion sandwiches for Hemingway, washing it all down with cold bottles of beer. I had to smile when I thought of how Director Hoover would react if he learned that one of his special agents was drinking beer in the middle of a stakeout. Then the smile faded when I realized that I almost certainly no longer had a job with Mr. Hoover’s Bureau.
All through that long afternoon and early evening we lay in our gully, taking turns watching the ocean through the glasses and trying not to scream from the sand fly and mosquito bites. Occasionally one of us would scuttle to the top of the ridge and over, checking the bay, the Doce Apostoles, the old road, and the abandoned mill for movement. But most of the time we just lay there.
At first we whispered when we wanted to communicate, but soon we realized that between the surf breaking beyond Point Jesus, the waves hitting against the low cliffs east of Point Roma, and the wind in the cane fields behind us, we could talk in normal tones and not be heard ten feet away.
By late evening, after the sun had set behind the cane fields and the rocky Point Brava far to the west, and with the ocean sounding louder in the gloom, I felt as if we had been hiding there for a week or more. We had taken turns napping so we would be sharp through the night, but I don’t think Hemingway slept ten minutes. The writer was in good spirits, showing no signs of nerves. His voice was easy, his manner relaxed, and his humor evident.
“I heard from Marty before we left,” he said. “She sent a cable from Basseterre on Saint Kitts. Her three Negroes finally got tired of adventure and marooned her on that island. The cable was censored, of course, but I got the impression that she’s been sailing from island to island hunting for German subs and adventure.”
“Did she find anything?”
“Marty always finds adventure,” said Hemingway with a grin. “She’s thinking of heading for Paramaribo next.”
“Paramaribo?” I said.
“It’s in Dutch Guiana,” said Hemingway, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes. I noticed how swollen his ear was and I felt bad about it.
“Yes, I know where Paramaribo is. Why is she going there?”
“Quién sabe?” said Hemingway. “Martha’s idea of adventure is just going somewhere very far away and very uncomfortable and letting things happen to her while she bitches and moans about it. Then she’ll write a brilliant essay that will have everyone laughing. If she survives.”
“Are you worried about her?” I said. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I were responsible for a mate and she was rattling around through jungle and sub-infested waters where I could do nothing to help her if something went wrong. I tried to imagine being responsible for a woman at all.
Hemingway shrugged. “Marty can take care of herself. Do you want another beer?” He used the handle of his knife to pop the cap on another bottle.
“No. I think I should be at least partially sober when the German U-boat arrives.”
“Why?” said Hemingway. After a while, when the shadows were merging into true darkness, he said, “Wolfer may have said a few things to you about Marty. Unkind things.”
I raised the binoculars to look at the dimly lit horizon and said nothing.
“Wolfer’s jealous,” said the writer.
I thought that this was a strange thing to say. I lowered the glasses and listened to the night wind stir the cane.
“Don’t believe anything too outrageous that Winston might have said,” continued Hemingway. “Marty’s a very talented writer. That’s the problem.”
“What is?” I said.
Hemingway belched softly and shifted the submachine gun in front of him. “She’s talented,” he said flatly. “At writing, at least, I’m more than talented. There’s no worse hell on earth than constantly being confronted with genius that you can’t quite attain yourself. I know that. I’ve felt it myself.”
He was quiet for several minutes. He had made the statement so softly, so matter-of-factly, that I realized first that he was not bragging and second that it was almost certainly true.
“What are you going to write next?” I asked, amazed that I was asking that question. But I was curious.
Hemingway also seemed surprised. “You’re interested? You? The once and future fiction illiterate?”
I looked through the binoculars again. The horizon was a dim line. The surf seemed very loud in the gloom. I checked my watch. It was 9:28.
“Sorry,” said Hemingway. It was the only time he ever apologized to me. “I don’t know what I’ll write next, Lucas. Maybe, someday, after the war, I’ll write about this confused shit.” I saw him look at me in the gloom. “I’ll put you in it. Only I’ll combine the worst parts of you with the worst parts of Saxon. You’ll have the fungal foot rot as well as your shitty disposition. Everyone will hate you.”
“Why do you do it?” I said softly. The breeze blew a few mosquitoes away from my face. The line of surf was glowing in the late twilight.
“Do what?”
“Write fiction rather than write about true things.”
Hemingway shook his head. “It’s hard to be a great writer, Lucas, if you love the world and living in it and you love special people. It’s even harder when you love so many places. You can’t just transcribe things from the outside in, that’s photography. You have to do it the way Cézanne did, from inside yourself. That’s art. You have to do it from inside yourself. Do you understand?”
“No,” I said.
Hemingway sighed softly and nodded. “It’s like listening to people, Lucas. If their experiences are vivid, they become a part of you, whether or not their stories are bullshit or not. It doesn’t matter. After a while, their experiences get to be more vivid than your own. Then you mix it all together. You invent from your own life stories and from all of theirs, and after a while it doesn’t matter anymore which is which… what’s yours and what’s theirs, what was true and what was bullshit. It’s all true then. It’s the country you know, and the weather. Everyone you know. Only you have to avoid showing off… parading all the things you know like marching captured soldiers through the capitol… that’s what Joyce and so many did, and why they failed.” He gave me a sharp look. “Joyce is a man, not a woman.”
“I know,” I said. “I remember the book on your shelf.”
“You have a good memory, Joe.”
“Yes.”
“You’d make a good writer.”
I laughed. “I could never lie like that,” I said, realizing what I had said as I said it.
Hemingway also laughed. “You’re the biggest liar I’ve ever known, Lucas. You tell lies the way a baby sucks his mother’s tit. It’s instinct with you. I know. I’ve had experience at that tit.”
&
nbsp; I said nothing.
“The trick in fiction is like the trick in packing a boat just so without losing the trim,” he said. “There are a thousand intangibles that have to be crammed into every sentence. Most of it should not be visible, just suggested. Have you sever seen a Zen watercolor, Lucas?”
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand if I said that a Zen artist paints a hawk just by putting a dab of blue for the sky without a hawk.”
“No,” I agreed, although part of me did understand.
Hemingway pointed toward the ocean. “It’s like that goddamn submarine that’s out there right now. If we see the periscope, we know that all the rest of it is down there… the conning tower, the torpedoes, the engine room with all its dials and pipes, the dutiful Germans huddled over their sauerkraut… but we don’t have to see all that to know it’s there, we just have to see the fucking periscope. A good sentence or paragraph is like that. Do you get it now?”
“No,” I said.
The writer sighed. “Last year when I was in Chungking with Marty, I ran into a young navy lieutenant named Bill Lederer. There was almost nothing to drink in that godforsaken hellhole of a country except rice wine with dead snakes and birds in it, but word got out that Lederer had bought two cases of whiskey at a Chinese auction. The dumb shit hadn’t even opened any of it yet… he was about to be transferred and he was saving it all for one big blowout. I told him that not drinking his whiskey was like not fucking a pretty girl when he had the chance, but he was adamant about saving it for a special day. Following me so far in this, Joe?”
“Yeah.” I kept watching the surf.
“I wanted the whiskey,” said Hemingway. “I was thirsty. I offered him real money… dollars… lots of them, but Lederer wouldn’t sell. Finally, in desperation, I said, ‘I’ll give you anything you want for half a dozen bottles.’ Lederer scratches his head and says, ‘Okay, I’ll swap you six bottles for six lessons on how to become a writer.’ All right. So after each lesson, Lederer gives me a bottle. At the last lesson, I said, ‘Bill, before you can write about people, you must be a civilized man.’ ‘What’s a civilized man?’ says Lederer. ‘To be civilized,’ I told him, ‘you have to have two things—compassion and the ability to roll with the punches. Never laugh at a guy who has had bad luck. And if you have bad luck yourself, don’t fight it. Roll with it—and bounce back.’ The way I rolled with your punches, Lucas. Do you see where I’m headed here?”
“No idea,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Hemingway. “But the truth is, I’ve given you more tips to good writing than I gave Lieutenant Lederer. And my last advice to him was my most important.”
“What was that?”
“I told him to go home and sample his whiskey,” said the writer, grinning so that I could see his teeth glowing in the starlight. “The chinks had sold him two cases of lukewarm tea.”
We were silent for several minutes. When the wind came up, the tarp above us barely stirred, but the dry cane stalks rattled like fingerbones in a tin cup.
“Anyway, the fucking trick is to write truer than true,” said Hemingway at last. “And that’s why I write fiction rather than fact.” He lifted his binoculars and peered out at the dark ocean.
I knew that the conversation was closed, but I persisted. “The books live longer than you, don’t they?” I said. “Longer than the writer, I mean.”
Hemingway lowered the glasses and looked at me. “Yes, Joe. Perhaps you see the hawk and the submarine after all. The books last longer. If they’re any good. And a writer spends a lifetime alone, facing eternity or the lack of it every goddamn day. Maybe you do understand.” He raised the binoculars again. “Tell me everything again. Everything about this cross and double cross. Tell me everything you can tell me that you haven’t told me.”
I told him everything except the details with Schlegel and about the package in the dairy barn.
“So you think that first transmission was to get us here?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“But not just the two of us. They probably assumed that we’d bring the Pilar and the others.”
“Probably,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s the important part.”
“What is the important part, Joe?”
“That you and I are here.”
“Why?”
I shook my head. “I can’t quite figure that out. Schlegel said that the operation involved the FBI, but he must mean just Delgado. I can’t believe that Hoover’s involved with the Germans. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” said Hemingway. “What does Hoover most fear? Nazis?”
“No,” I said.
“Communists?”
“No. He’s most afraid of losing his power… of losing control of the Bureau or of the Bureau’s losing clout. A Communist overthrow of the United States would be a distant second on Mr. Hoover’s fear list.”
“So how would this confused mess in Cuba fit into your Mr. Hoover’s fear?” said Hemingway. “People are motivated more by fear than any other emotion. Or at least that’s been my observation.”
I thought about this for a while.
THE RAFT CAME IN through the surf precisely at twenty-three hundred hours—eleven o’clock on the nose. Then we saw two dark figures dragging the raft through the shimmering lines of surf onto the narrow sand spit glowing in the starlight, and then the two figures opened a box or chest, removed a shielded lantern, and flashed signals toward the darkness of the ocean.
Ten seconds later, there was the tiniest flash of light from a conning tower or periscope several hundred yards out—two dots, two dashes, one dot. Then there was only darkness again and the sound of surf.
Hemingway and I watched while the two agents collapsed their raft, dragged it up into the closest gully—three fissures east of our own—and buried it with much noise from their shovels and soft cursing in German. Then the agents moved up the hill toward the tree on the ridgeline which had seemed a perfect place for us to hide.
The writer and I crawled backward out of our blind and knelt in the brush to watch the two Germans climb the hill not seventy feet from us. The surf and wind drowned most of their conversation, but because the wind was behind them, we could hear a few words in German. Only their heads and shoulders were visible in starlight above the brush and then those disappeared as they moved into the darkness under the big tree.
Hemingway set his lips next to my left ear. “We’ll have to follow them.”
I nodded.
Suddenly their signal lantern blinked twice again. Thirty yards to our right and on the ridgeline, almost concealed by cane breaks and shrubs, a different light—a smaller one—blinked once.
“Fuck me,” whispered Hemingway.
We began crawling up the hill on our bellies, the Thompsons’ slings around our forearms but the weapons aimed muzzle-first ahead of us.
Then, without warning, the shooting began.
24
THE FIRING WAS NOT COMING FROM where we had seen the second lantern flash, but from near where we had last seen the two German infiltrators. I dug my face in the sandy slope, assuming that the two agents had seen or heard us and were firing on us. Evidently, Hemingway made the same assumption, for after ducking while the first four shots cracked out, he raised his Thompson, obviously preparing to return fire. I slapped his submachine gun down.
“No!” I whispered. “I don’t think they’re shooting at us.”
The firing had stopped. There was a single, loud, terrible moan from the darkness under the tree on the ridgetop, and then silence again. The surf rolled in, mingling with the pounding of my pulse in my ears. The crescent moon was not yet up, and I found myself trying to do as I had been trained for night fighting in very dim light—attempting to sense movement out of the corners of my eyes, using peripheral vision rather than straight-on viewing to get a sense of where my opponents were. Nothing.
Hemingway was tense and ready
next to me, but he did not seem rattled by the gunfire. He leaned closer and whispered, “Why don’t you think they were shooting at us?”
“No sound of bullets overhead,” I whispered back. “No hits on the shrubs above us.”
“People fire high in the dark,” whispered the writer, still hugging the slope and moving his head rapidly from left to right.
“Yeah.”
“You make the weapon that was fired?” whispered Hemingway.
“Pistol or machine pistol on single shot,” I whispered. “Luger. Schmeisser maybe. Sounded like a nine millimeter.”
Hemingway nodded in the dark. “They could be flanking us to the right. Through the cane field.”
“We’d hear them,” I whispered. “We’re okay here.” We were all right for the time being. Even though whoever was shooting now held the high ground, no one could approach us from our left without making too much noise on the fifteen-foot sea cliff or from the right without crashing around in the cane field. The hillside between us and the ridgeline was overgrown with pepper bushes and low scrub oak; both Hemingway and I had found ways to crawl up in the daylight, but at night it would be impossible to come charging down at us without noise.