by Dan Simmons
“Joseph?” said Mr. Phillips. “May I tell you my true reason for coming today?”
“Sure,” I said. I was thinking about the truth of what Hemingway had just said about my never being able to live in the States again or hold down a job in counterintelligence. It was not a new thought—I had known it since the day I decided to tell Hemingway everything and work for him rather than for my true masters—but it made me sad beneath the morphine hangover and the waves of pain rolling across me.
“Mr. Donovan is very impressed with your… ah… ingenuity in this whole thing, Joseph. He would love to meet you and discuss future employment possibilities.”
“For out of the country somewhere,” I said dully.
“Well, yes,” said Mr. Phillips, smiling. “But that is where our agency does its work, isn’t it? Do you think it would be possible for you to fly to Bermuda in a couple of weeks? Only if your recovery allows it, of course.”
“Sure,” I said again. “Why Bermuda?” That was British territory.
“Actually, dear boy,” said Fleming, “it was arranged that Mr. Donovan would come to Bermuda to speak with you because Mr. Stephenson would also like the opportunity to chat with you before you make up your mind about any OSS offer. It was a bit more convenient for William… our William… to stay on British territory until Director Hoover gets over his inevitable petulance, if you get my drift.”
“Mr. Stephenson?” I said stupidly. “He wants to talk to me?”
“The possibilities are quite exciting, old chap,” said Fleming. “And after the war, after Adolf and Tojo and Benito and all these other aberrations are… as we keep saying today… put back in their boxes, there will be other challenges. And Britain might be a most pleasant place to live for a young American chap on a good salary.”
“Work for MI6?” I said, sounding stunned and stupid even to myself.
Mr. Phillips smiled and tugged at Fleming’s arm. “Nothing to decide today, Joseph. Come see us in Bermuda in a couple of weeks… or as soon as you are fit to travel. Mr. Donovan looks forward to meeting you.”
Hemingway walked them out to the driveway. I sat there in bed, itchy beneath the surgical dressings, half sick with pain, and shook my head at all this. Work for fucking MI6? A few minutes later, Hemingway came back with my pain pills.
“You shouldn’t take these with alcohol, you know,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
He handed me my two pills and a fresh glass of whiskey. He had brought a glass for himself. After I had swallowed the pills, he raised his glass. “Estamos copados,” he said in toast. “But in the meantime—Confusion to our enemies!”
“Confusion to our enemies,” I said. And drank.
31
ON MY LAST DAY at sea with Hemingway, we finally flushed a submarine out of hiding.
It is hard now, so many years later, to remember just how young and tough and resilient one was in one’s youth. But I was young and tough. I healed quickly, even accounting for minor setbacks during the heat of that unusually warm Cuban August and early September of 1942. Every morning, Hemingway would bring several newspapers down to the guest house with him and we would have coffee together and read—Hemingway in the comfortable guest chair, me in the bed most of the time, although by the first of September I was sitting up in a chair for an hour or two a day.
The war news continued to be dismal. Field Marshal Rommel opened the month with a new attack on British forces in Egypt. Hemingway’s old enemy in Spain, General Franco, ousted cabinet members and assumed full, dictatorial, Fascist control of that country, thus making Europe all but complete in the fall into its long night of tyranny. The Germans opened their attack on Stalingrad—waves of Stuka dive-bombers, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of thousands of troops attacking on the ground—and the Russian lines immediately buckled and were pierced. It seemed only a matter of time before Stalingrad and all of the Soviet Union collapsed. In the United States, the Baruch Commission was warning of “a full military and civilian collapse” due to the rubber shortages caused by the Japanese seizure of all sources of rubber in the South Pacific and Asia. As to the war at sea, it was now being revealed that the Germans had already sunk more than five million tons of Allied shipping, that their subs were sinking one of our ships every four hours on average, and that they were building subs faster than Allied navies and air forces could sink them. There would be more than four hundred German submarines in service in the Atlantic before the end of the year.
Patrick had to leave the second week in September to fly to New Milford, Connecticut, where he was entering a Catholic boy’s school called Canterbury. Between the war news, the anticlimax after the summer’s events, Hemingway’s continuing headaches, and this sense of imminent dissolution of his temporary family, the writer was obviously feeling blue. The boys and the men hanging around the finca picked up on Hemingway’s mood, and by the first week in September, it was a gloomy place to be recovering from gunshot wounds. As always, it was Hemingway himself who tried to pick up everyone’s spirits—first by arranging elaborate baseball games at the Club de Cazadores in which Hemingway insisted on pitching several innings, and then by setting up the Operation Friendless Farewell Cruise, in which he would take everyone down the coast in the Pilar for four days, stop by Cayo Confites so the boys could say good-bye to the Cubans there, and fish their way back along the coast.
Dr. Herrera Sotolongo did not think it was advisable that I go along on this trip—the wave action alone could tear my stitches open, he insisted—but I pointed out that I was also leaving the next week and that nothing in the world could keep me behind at the finca during this final voyage.
We left Cojímar early on the morning of Sunday, September 6. I insisted on walking up the gangplank under my own power, but I admit that I was so exhausted when I got on the boat that I was glad to sit down. Hemingway not only insisted that I take the big bunk in the forward compartment during the trip, he had also brought along one of the overstuffed upholstered easy chairs from the living room of the finca, and he and the boys rigged this in the cockpit with lines cleverly tied to the same brass rail to which I had been handcuffed two weeks earlier, so that I could sit back with my feet up on the side bench without fear of sliding across the deck. It was embarrassing to be pampered like that, but I suffered it.
The weather was beautiful all four days. In addition to the boys and me, Hemingway had invited along Wolfer, Sinsky, Patchi, Roberto Herrera, his indispensable mate Gregorio Fuentes, and Roberto’s brother, Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, to make sure that I did not die and ruin the trip for everyone. Still making amends for his error earlier in the summer, Guest loaded so many cases of beer aboard that even the hidden compartments were crammed full of cans and bottles. To add to the sense of holiday, Hemingway, Fuentes, and Ibarlucia had worked all week on building a sub-killing explosive device known only as the Bomb. Using a core of gunpowder triggered by several grenades, all encased in a metal shell with small handles that made the thing look like a diminutive garbage can, the Bomb could and would—according to Hemingway—blow the conning tower off any submarine that came within range. Of course, “range” was a relative term. After several practice throws with rocks and sand simulating the grenades and gunpowder, even athletes like Guest and Ibarlucia proved that they could lob the Bomb only about forty feet on a good day with the wind behind them.
“Fine, no problem,” Hemingway growled. “We’ll close on the sub, get too close for it to use its torpedoes or deck gun, and that range will be perfect.” But in the days before we raised anchor for the farewell cruise, Hemingway and his two boys were seen in the field below the finca working on different variations of a giant slingshot made from large branches and old inner tubes, trying to improve the range for the Bomb.
On the first day out, Fuentes interrupted our lunch by shouting “Feesh, Papa! Feesh on the starboard side!” Hemingway had been munching a sandwich while he steered on the flying bridge, but he tossed the
sandwich overboard and was sliding down the ladder even as the huge fish used its bill to knock the bait out of the outrigger. The writer immediately let the drag off the reel, the line humming a high note as it ran out into the blue Gulf waters, Hemingway chanting as it ran, “One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee…” until he hooked the monster hard on the count of “fifteen chimpanzee.”
He fought the fish for only eighteen minutes, but it was an exciting eighteen minutes. All of us were cheering, and Dr. Herrera Sotolongo had to remind me to sit back and calm down before all of my wounds and incisions opened again. The marlin weighed six hundred pounds, and I watched as Fuentes carved a few fillets out of that great mass of fish and then tossed the rest overboard for bait. Twelve minutes later, Fuentes was shouting “Feesh! Feesh!” again. Hemingway was the first one to the rod, and this time he only counted to “five chimpanzee” before driving the hook home.
This battle lasted much longer, and the marlin broke the surface a hundred times in amazing leaps that had us all gasping at the beauty and the power of the great fish and at its will to survive. When Hemingway finally reeled the huge marlin in, he ordered Fuentes to release the hook.
Gregory, Patrick, Guest, Ibarlucia, and Dr. Herrera Sotolongo started shouting protests, but the writer insisted. As Fuentes worked to release the hook, the boys argued that the marlin be pulled aboard at least long enough for a photograph to be taken. “I’m leaving in three days, Papa,” said Patrick, his voice not exactly rising to a whine but coming close. “I want something to remember him by.”
Hemingway put his huge hand on his son’s shoulder. “You’ll remember it, Mouse. All of us will. We’ll always remember those jumps. Beauty like that can’t be captured in a photograph. I’d rather release him and give him his life back and have him enjoy it, than to ‘immortalize him’ in a grainy photograph. None of the best things in life can be captured. The only way we can immortalize anything is by appreciating it when it happens.”
Patrick had nodded agreement, but he sulked for hours after the great fish swam away. “The photograph would have looked great on the wall of my dorm room,” he muttered at our dinner of marlin steaks that night. Hemingway ignored the comment and passed him the potato salad.
On the second day, the Pilar pulled up alongside a sixty-foot whale shark that seemed to be lazing on the surface, its huge eye rotating to watch the Pilar approach but showing no sense of anxiety or eagerness to move on, even when Fuentes poked it in the side with an oar.
“Christ,” said the first mate, “that thing, she is enormous.”
“Yeah,” said Hemingway. “It’s almost a third the size of the sub we’re going to find on this trip.”
We anchored off Cayo Confites that night. Hemingway and his boys slept in sleeping bags on the deck above my forward compartment, and I could hear them through the open hatch cover, talking about the stars and constellations for a long time before I fell asleep. The writer had bought Patrick an expensive telescope the previous winter, and now the older boy was pointing out the North Star, Orion’s Belt, and a score of other constellations.
The next morning started off badly, with Hemingway driving the Pilar aground somewhere west of Cayo Confites. He backed off immediately, but the sound was terrible, and everyone was in a foul mood as they rushed around the thirty-eight-foot boat, opening hatches and pulling up floorboard coverings to see if the impact had caused the hull to spring a leak. Everything was dry. I watched Hemingway’s face during all of this and saw the sickness there. As little Gregory had said earlier that summer, “I think that Papa loves the Pilar most of anything in the world, after us, of course, and then his cats, and then Martha.”
Things looked up after that when Hemingway called everyone up from breakfast with a shout of, “On deck, amigos! Looks like a schooner on a reef!”
The schooner was not actually in trouble on the reef, but anchored just inside it. It was the Margarita out of Havana and Hemingway was good friends with the captain’s brother. They were seining the reef. The writer immediately brought the boys aboard, introduced them to the skipper, and arranged for Patrick and Gregory to help the crew all day as they encircled the entire reef with a long net dragged by three dories. The rest of us fished from the Pilar and watched the commotion as the men and boys struggled through the afternoon to bring up the endless net, the boys frequently diving to free it from snags on the coral. When the seine was finally lifted out, the water around the reef was suddenly filled with fleeing turtles and sharks, while captured pompano, snappers, jacks, barracuda, and baby sailfish flopped and squirmed in the cooling evening air.
The captain of the Margarita invited the crew of the Pilar aboard for dinner that night, and everyone went except Dr. Herrera Sotolongo and me. The doctor had the habit of turning in early—unusual for anyone in Cuba—and I was worn out from just watching the day’s activities. Falling asleep that night, I listened to the laughter coming from the schooner and many long, formal toasts being offered in Hemingway’s correct but stilted Spanish.
The next morning we were heading home when Winston Guest called from the flying bridge, “Submarine! Submarine!”
Hemingway and his sons were up on the flying bridge in five seconds, and everyone else was on deck and craning to see.
“Where?” said the writer. He was wearing a tattered T-shirt, shorts, and his long-billed cap. He no longer had to wear a bandage on his head, but looking up at him from the rear deck, I could see the patch of missing hair where the doctor had sewn his scalp back on.
“Ten points off the starboard bow and closing,” Guest said, his voice trying to sound cool and military but quavering a bit with excitement. “Approximate range, one thousand yards. She just surfaced.”
Hemingway raised the binoculars for a few seconds, lowered them, and said “Battle stations” in a clam voice. “No rushing,” he added. “Normal movements. Patrick, keep fishing. Reel in whatever you’ve hooked there. Don’t look at the sub.”
“It’s a barracuda on the line, Papa, but—”
“Stay with the fish, Mouse,” said Hemingway. “Gigi will go forward and get your three-oh-three Lee-Enfield. Gregorio, why don’t you break out the niños and then check the oil on the smaller engine? Patchi, Roberto, go below and bring up the bag of grenades and the Bomb, would you please?”
Everyone tried to act casual, but as soon as Gregory was out of sight, we could hear him running and crashing around, grabbing his mother’s old Mannlicher and his brother’s Lee-Enfield, spilling cartridges on the deck down there in his hurry to load the weapons.
“I will go down and get my medical bag,” said Dr. Herrera Sotolongo.
“Jesus Christ!” said Winston Guest, his mouth dropping open as he raised his binoculars. “She’s as big as a battleship. A fucking aircraft carrier.”
I had struggled out of my lashed-down easy chair and was leaning over the starboard gunwale, ostensibly to watch Patrick bring in the barracuda, but also squinting across the diamonds of morning light on the low waves to catch a glimpse of the sub. It did look huge. Water poured from its honeycombed superstructure and dripped from its conning tower in a white spray. Even without binoculars, I could easily see the cover lashed over the single, huge deck gun.
“Lucas,” Hemingway called softly, “why don’t you sit down again? The Germans will have to turn about and board us if they see a skinny guy in a flowered armchair on the stern deck. Even Nazis would be curious about that. Everyone try to make your faces seem calm. We don’t know how powerful their binoculars are.”
Hemingway pressed the throttles forward and let Wolfer take the wheel while he slid down the ladder to help Roberto and Patchi manhandle the Bomb through the cockpit and up onto the flying bridge. Fuentes brought up the submachine guns and hung them on the railing of the flying bridge from the straps on their sheepskin-lined cradles. The bow was turned in the general direction of the submarine now, canvas was laced around the upper bridge, and the Bomb would not be visi
ble to an observer on the U-boat no matter how powerful his binoculars were. The writer and Fuentes fiddled with the explosive device, setting fuses, pulling pins, or somesuch. I had the sudden image of the Bomb’s blowing the Pilar and all of us to kingdom come by mistake.
“My God,” said Guest, studying the sub through the twelve-power binoculars again. “She is big.”
“But she’s not getting any bigger,” said Hemingway, taking the glasses and holding them on the sub for a long minute. “Wolfer,” he said, giving Guest the binoculars, “we’re not closing. It’s heading away from us.” Hemingway’s tone was under control, but I could hear the fury under the surface. “It’s not only heading away, it’s pulling away.” He leaned over the back of the flying bridge and called down to Fuentes, who had opened the hatch cover and was fiddling in the engine compartment. “Goddammit, Gregorio, can’t we get any more speed out of her?”
The little mate held up his hands. “She is doing twelve knots, Ernesto. That is all she can do with so many people and so much gasoline aboard her.”
“Then maybe we need to throw some of the people overboard,” snarled Hemingway. He took back the glasses again. There was no pretense of normalcy aboard now. Patrick and Gregory were near the bow: Patrick on the starboard side with his ancient Lee-Enfield; his younger brother on the port walkway with the Mannlicher Schoenaauer. Both boys were wet from spray and grinning like wolves.
“Goddammit,” Hemingway said softly. “She’s headed directly away from us. Range must be about fifteen hundred yards.” Suddenly the writer laughed and turned to Ibarlucia. “Patchi, can you throw the Bomb fifteen hundred yards?”
The jai alai player showed his perfect teeth in a huge grin. “You give the word, Papa, and I’ll try.”
Hemingway clasped his friend’s shoulder. Everyone began to relax. The submarine continued drawing away from us, its course north-northwest, its white wake the only disturbance on the morning’s smooth sea.