The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  I came back because of the sharp slaps—again—and the demanding voice, Hemingway’s clear tenor this time, saying, “Damn you, Lucas, don’t die on me. Don’t die on me, son.”

  I did my best to obey.

  30

  IN THE END, it was the Herrera brothers who probably saved my life. Roberto Herrera did not have his older brother’s medical skills, but he knew enough to keep me alive until we got back to Cojímar, where Dr. José Luis Herrera Sotolongo was waiting with a surgeon friend. And it was also Ernest Hemingway who kept me alive.

  I remember fragments of the events after Delgado’s death. Hemingway reminded me later that his first instinct was to take the Chris-Craft—it would get us back to Cayo Confites and Cojímar much faster than the Pilar could. But after he had dug out the first aid kit and put sulfa and compression bandages on my wounds, I fainted for a few minutes and came to only when he was lifting me to set me into the speedboat.

  “No, no,” I mumbled, grabbing his arm. “The boat’s… stolen.”

  “I know that,” snapped Hemingway. “It’s from the Southern Cross. That doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” I said. “The Cuban Coast Guard is looking for it. They may shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Hemingway paused. He knew how trigger-happy the Cuban Coast Guard was. “You’re a federal agent,” he said at last. “FBI and whatchamacallit, your SIS. You commandeered the boat for police business.”

  I shook my head. “Not… anymore. Not an agent. Go to jail.” I told him about my middle-of-the-night meeting with Lieutenant Maldonado.

  Hemingway had laid me back on the cushions and sat down. He touched his head. He had wrapped long bandages around his head wound, but the white gauze was already soaked with blood. It must have hurt like hell. “Yeah,” he said. “That could be a problem if we bring you back to the hospital using the stolen Chris-Craft. The Southern Cross people could press charges, and even if Maldonado’s dead, his boss—Juanito the Jehovah’s Witness—probably knew that he was sent out to kill you.”

  I shook my head again, bringing on a blizzard of dancing black spots. “No hospital.”

  Hemingway nodded. “If we take the Pilar, we can radio ahead and have Dr. Herrera Sotolongo waiting for us. Or even put in at Nuevitas or one of the other ports and have a doctor ready.”

  “Didn’t Delgado destroy the radio?” I said. I was content to lie absolutely still on the cushions of the starboard bench and watch the clearing sky. All of the clouds had gone now. The storm was past.

  “No,” said the writer. “I just checked. He must have tried it and found that it wasn’t working.”

  “Broken?” I managed, my thoughts sliding away again. I suddenly remembered that Hemingway had injected me with an army morphine ampule from the medical kit. No wonder I was feeling hazy and lazy.

  He started to shake his head, moaned softly, and said, “No. I took out some tubes and hid them. I needed the space.”

  I squinted at him. Either the wave action here in the bay had grown much stronger or I was getting dizzier. “Space?”

  Hemingway held up a sheaf of papers in a manila folder. “The Abwehr documents. Thought I might tuck them away somewhere before coming into Manatí Bay to meet you. Glad I did.” He gingerly touched the soaked bandage on his head and looked around. “All right,” he said. “We’ll take the Pilar.”

  “Photographs,” I said. “Pictures. And we have to get rid of the bodies.”

  “This place is turning into a fucking Nazi cemetery,” growled Hemingway.

  I dimly remember the writer carrying out the grim task of laying the two bodies out, photographing them from all angles with the Leica, photographing the Chris-Craft, and then setting each of the corpses in a separate cockpit of the speedboat, casting off the speedboat, backing the Pilar away, and firing four shots into the gas drum with my .357. The stench of the gasoline brought me closer to consciousness as the rear cockpit of the beautiful speedboat filled with fuel again, and then Hemingway brought the Pilar closer, used a match to light a gas-soaked rag that I dimly recognized as my old green shirt, and tossed the burning brand onto the boat.

  The stern of the Chris-Craft mushroomed into a blossom of flame that scorched some of the paint on the Pilar’s starboard side. Hemingway was up on the flying bridge and now he shielded his face from the heat and pushed both throttles open, getting the Pilar up to speed while taking care to stay in the narrow channel leading away from Cayo Largo. I sat up long enough to look back once. That was enough. The entire speedboat was engulfed in flames, as were the seated bodies of Delgado—Major Daufeldt, I corrected myself—in the forward cockpit, and Sergeant Kruger in the rear cockpit. We were about two hundred feet away when the main gas tank and the rest of the reserve drum exploded, throwing fragments and burning chunks of mahogany and scorched chrome across the bay. Some of the royal palms on the island caught fire, but they were so damp from the recent rain that the flames soon went out, leaving only blackened fronds to rustle in the wind of the bonfire. A few hot shards landed on the deck of the Pilar, but I was too weak to get up to throw them overboard, and Hemingway was too busy piloting from the flying bridge. They continued to smolder until we were through the inlet—which still smelled of German corpses in the sand at the point—and out through the gap in the reefs, cruising west-northwest toward the deep waters of the Gulf.

  Hemingway came down the bloody ladder, used the bloody gaff to hook and toss overboard the burning bits on the deck, put out a small fire on the smoldering side canvas with an extinguisher he kept in the galley, and then came back to check on me. The sea was still rough after the storm and I could feel the waves of pain the pounding was causing, but I felt them only distantly because of the miracle of the morphine. I dimly noticed how pale and shaky Hemingway still was, and realized that the scalp wound must be hurting him enough that he could have used some morphine as well. But he couldn’t use it—he had to drive us home.

  “Lucas,” he was saying, touching my good shoulder, “I’ve radioed Confites that we’ve had an accident and that they should have the big medical kit ready. Roberto’s good at that stuff. He’ll know what to do.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded.

  “… these fucking documents,” Hemingway was saying. I realized that he must be holding the Abwehr papers. “Do you know what Delgado wanted us to do with them? What was it all about?”

  “Dunno,” I mumbled. “But… have a theory.”

  I felt Hemingway waiting there beyond my closed eyelids as the Pilar pounded her way west.

  “Tell you,” I said. “Tell you… if I live.”

  “Then live,” said the writer. “I want to know.”

  THE SURGERY WAS DONE QUIETLY at Dr. Herrera Sotolongo’s home on a hill not too many miles from the finca. Delgado’s first shot from the .22 target pistol had cut a clean little hole through the flesh of my right arm and had exited without creating a fuss or severing any major muscles or arteries. The second shot had caught me in the upper right shoulder, nicked the collarbone, and had ended up as a bump just under the skin above my right shoulder blade. Dr. Herrera Sotolongo and his surgeon friend, Dr. Alvarez, said that they almost could have extracted that slug with their fingers. There had been more internal bleeding associated with the path of this bullet, but nothing life-threatening.

  The third bullet had done the mischief. Entering on my left side and headed directly for my heart, the slug had nicked a rib, been deflected just enough to cut a corner of my lung instead of the heart, and had ended up a millimeter from my spine. “Quite impressive for a twenty-two-caliber bullet,” Dr. Herrera Sotolongo had said later. “If the gentleman had used the Schmeisser you described… well…”

  “He liked to load the Schmeisser with hollow points with notched ends,” I said.

  Dr. Herrera Sotolongo had rubbed his chin. “Then we definitely would not be having this conversation, Señor Lucas. Now lie back and sleep some more.”

  I slept a lot.
Three days after the surgery, I was moved from the good doctor’s home to the guest house at the finca. There I took more pills, received more shots, and continued to sleep a lot. Both the surgeon and the doctor came frequently to approve of their work and to shake their heads at how minimal the actual damage had been considering all of that alien metal in my body.

  Hemingway had also been on bed rest for a couple of days after his friend sewed up his lacerated scalp. The doctor echoed Delgado’s sentiments. “You are one tough son of a bitch, Ernesto. And I say that with all respect and love.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Hemingway as he sat on the edge of my bed in his bathrobe. The three of us—the writer, the doctor, and the ex-spy—were having a “medicinal libation” of straight gin. “I keep getting concussions. Have since I was a young man. A goddamn skylight fell on me in Paris when Bumby was a baby. Saw double for a week. A lot of bumps since, usually on my head. But the worst accident I’ve had was back in ’thirty when I was driving to Billings and rolled our car into a ditch. Your right arm looks like nothing compared to mine after that, Lucas. The inside of my arm looked like the part of an elk you have to throw away as unfit for human consumption when you butcher it out. Sort of like your left rib cage when I poured the sulfa on it in the Pilar.”

  “Great,” I said. “Can we change the subject? How is Mrs. Hemingway doing?”

  Hemingway shrugged. “There was a brief note waiting for me. She’s seen Paramaribo in Surinam. Nothing there but sand chiggers, heat stroke, and bored GI’s, she says. She’s seen the sights of Dutch Guiana and the penal colony that’s French Guiana and was thinking of heading home, but then she bought a map of the region and that changed her mind.”

  “What was on the map, Ernesto?” said Dr. Herrera Sotolongo.

  “Nothing,” said Hemingway. “She says that the map is almost empty except for the capital, a few settlements on the coast, and several rivers. The big river—the Saramcoca—weaves its way up from Paramaribo through green and white space. The green is jungle, she says. The white unknown. The river’s a blue line that winds up through the green and white to a small cross that Marty figures is where the farthest traveler lay down to die. Beyond that cross, she says, even the river is unexplored… it’s just a line of blue dots where they guess the damn thing goes. She’s hired a local Negro named Harold to take her upriver to where the blue dots wind through white space.”

  Dr. Herrera Sotolongo sighed. “So many diseases there, I’m afraid. Everyone has malaria and indigenous dysentery, but it is also a very bad place for dengue—also known as break-bone fever. Very, very painful. Like malaria, it recurs for many years.”

  Hemingway nodded tiredly. “Marty’ll catch it. She catches everything, sooner or later. She ignores mosquito nets, drinks the local water, enjoys the local produce, and then wonders why the hell she gets sick. I don’t catch anything, I’m afraid.” He gingerly touched his professionally wrapped head. “Except concussions,” he added.

  Dr. Herrera Sotolongo held up his glass of gin. “To Señora Gellhorn, Mrs. Hemingway,” he said in toast.

  We all lifted our glasses.

  “To Señora Gellhorn, Mrs. Hemingway,” said Hemingway, and tossed back the gin in one gulp.

  EVERYONE WANTED TO KNOW what had happened, of course. Only Gregorio Fuentes never asked a question about our wounds, the disappearing Chris-Craft, the destruction of the Lorraine, and the mysterious radio message setting up our rendezvous. Evidently the tough little Cuban had decided that if his boss wanted him to know any of this, the writer would tell him. The others on the crew and back at the finca pestered us with questions. “It’s classified,” Hemingway had growled that first day, and that is the answer we stuck with. The others—including the two boys—were sworn to secrecy about everything, especially the Chris-Craft, and they grumbled but complied.

  “What the hell am I going to tell Tom Shevlin when he gets back?” said Hemingway that last week in August. “If he makes me pay for that speedboat, I’m fucked. I wish we could send the bill to the navy or the FBI.”

  We had discussed reporting everything to Braden or Colonel Thomason, and then decided to say nothing to anyone. The puzzle of Operation Raven and the Abwehr documents still bothered us. “Swear Shevlin to secrecy and tell him everything,” I suggested. “Maybe he’ll be proud to have served his country.”

  “You think he’ll regret that he had but one modified twenty-two-foot speedboat to give for his country?”

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully.

  Hemingway held his head. “Fuck, that was a beautiful boat. You remember how her bow light was integrated into the bow cleat? And the little sculpted mermaid bow ornament? And the instruments, all crafted by the same designer who did those beautiful ’twenties Gar Wood boats? And the Deusenburg steering wheel and the—”

  “Enough,” I said. “I’m getting a little queasy.”

  Hemingway nodded, still holding his head. “Well, Tom’s a generous man and a patriot. And if we can’t convince him to forgive us on those grounds, we’ll just have to shoot him.”

  ON MONDAY, August 31, I was sitting up in the guest house bed eating some cold soup when Hemingway came in and said, “You’ve got two visitors.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “A fancy Brit and a dwarf in a two-hundred-dollar suit,” said the writer. “I told them that they could talk to you, but only on the condition that I be allowed to sit in on the conversation.”

  “Fine with me,” I said, setting the tray on the bedside table.

  Introductions were made, extra chairs were fetched, and Hemingway sent one of the houseboys for whiskeys all around. We made small talk until the drinks arrived and the boy was gone. I saw Hemingway taking stock of the fancy Brit and the dwarf in the two-hundred-dollar suit, and I watched Commander Ian Fleming and Wallace Beta Phillips doing the same with the writer. The Brit and the dwarf seemed satisfied with what they saw and heard; Hemingway appeared to remain dubious.

  “So glad you survived everything, dear boy,” said Fleming for the third time. The topic of my wounds was getting old.

  “So can we talk about why these wounds and everything else happened?” I said.

  Fleming and Phillips glanced at Hemingway.

  “It’s all right,” said Hemingway in a stern tone. “I’m family. Besides, I came away with a few bruises of my own.” He touched his still-bandaged head. “I’d like to know why.”

  The visitors looked at each other and nodded. It was a hot day, I was sweating in my pajamas. Hemingway was wearing a loose guayabera, shorts, and sandals, but he was sweating freely. Ian Fleming was sweating politely in a tropical wool blazer that looked to be more wool than tropical. Only Wallace Beta Phillips seemed cool. The little bald man looked so trim and contained in his perfectly tailored suit that it could have been a dry seventy degrees in the room, rather than a humid ninety.

  I decided to do a second round of introductions so Hemingway would better understand the ground rules. “Ian works with the British MI6 boys,” I said. “He’s done some work with William Stephenson’s BSC in this hemisphere.”

  The long-faced Brit nodded politely in Hemingway’s direction and lighted a cigarette. I saw Hemingway frown at the affectation of the long cigarette holder.

  “Mr. Phillips used to work with the Office of Naval Intelligence in this hemisphere,” I said, “but now he’s with Bill Donovan’s COI.”

  “OSS now, Joseph,” Phillips said softly.

  “Yeah. I stand corrected. But I thought you’d gone on to a posting in London, Mr. Phillips.”

  “I have, actually,” said the small man. I found his smile had just the opposite effect on me that Delgado’s had—it relaxed me and made me want to like Phillips. Delgado’s smile had made me want to kill the man.

  Hemingway took care of that for you. I shook my head—the painkillers made me a little fuzzy about this time of day.

  “I came back to chat with you,” continued Phillips. He nodded in Hemin
gway’s direction. “With both of you.”

  “So tell us about it all,” said Hemingway. “Or do you need to know what happened last week?”

  Ian Fleming removed the long cigarette holder from his mouth and tapped ashes into the guest ashtray next to my dinner tray. “We have a pretty clear idea of that, but we would be delighted to hear the details of Major Daufeldt’s demise.”

  Hemingway glanced at me. I nodded. He told them briefly and succinctly.

  “And Lieutenant Maldonado?” said Wallace Beta Phillips.

  I described the meeting in the Cementerio de Colón.

  “But the lieutenant survived?” said Fleming.

  I nodded. The Crook Factory had been busy bringing us information on this detail. “Some women bringing flowers to Amelia Goyre de la Hoz’s grave heard him shouting in the mausoleum late the next day. They rushed Maldonado to Havana Hospital, managed to save his leg, and put him under twenty-four-hour guard.”

  “Why?” asked Mr. Phillips.

  “To hear him tell the story,” said Hemingway, “the lieutenant surprised ten Falangist criminals who were intent upon defacing the Monument to the Medical Students. He fought them off, but the Cuban National Police fears reprisals. Maldonado’s quite the hero in Havana this week… at least to anyone who doesn’t know him.”

  “Do you think he will seek revenge, old boy?” said Fleming, looking at me.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Maldonado was an errand boy in all this, not a major player. He’s got his money from both the FBI and the SD. He just failed in one of his errands. There’s no reason he should pursue it further. Besides, the word is that he’ll be on crutches for some months to come.”

  “All right,” said Hemingway. “Let’s hear some explanation of all this. Lucas has been saying he understands most of it, but he refuses to talk.”