Hemingway's Notebook (14 page)

“It cost me Anthony. It costs me what I been doing on St. Michel, getting in with Ready and those people. It costs me, Frank, don’t think it don’t.”

The white yacht pushed through the waves with authority, rising and falling. In six hours, at Ismaralda Key in the middle of the chain that stretched from the mainland to Key West, Frank Collier would debark and get in his rental car and take the drive back to his rooms at Key West. The first signal would come by the middle of the afternoon. By midnight, it should all be under control. By dawn, it should all be over.

He couldn’t help it. He drummed his fingers on the table and stared out the port.

But no one was on the stormy gulf on the long trip down to Ismaralda Key except for a couple of commercial fishing boats and a peculiar black ship with black hull and deck and a sailing mast pushing down for the keys. The two boats ran parallel for a while about half a mile apart but the black ship was fast and more skillfully piloted. It pulled ahead and before they all reached the keys, it was gone.

“Who’d want weather like this,” Frank asked at one point.

Teddy, playing solitaire, looked up and realized what Frank was talking about.

“Dope runners,” said Teddy Weisman. “I know that boat. I used it a couple of times.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“No, Frank. This is business. I tell you things, you keep that out of mind unless I tell you to remember.”

And Frank Collier, for the first time, caught in a boat with this strange man on a shallow, stormy sea, felt he was not in control.

Rita Macklin awoke and gray dawn surged against the windowpanes. It might rain. She felt very warm beneath the covers and she realized she was naked. She blinked in the darkness of the room and could not see where she was.

She had dreamed of the nuns all night. She had dreamed of the metal tray, gleaming with bone and brain mashed into the bowl of the skull.

She sat up in bed as the door opened.

Yvette wore a silk dressing gown and crossed the large room to her and sat down next to her. Yvette’s face was pale. Her hand was cool to the touch.

“Celezon brought you here,” she said.

“Where am I?”

“In the palace. Colonel Ready wants you detained.”

“I’m a prisoner?”

“No. Celezon brought you here. I told you.”

Rita felt the chill of madness settle around her again. They were all mad. Which only proved that she might be the mad one after all.

“I think he means to kill you. Now that he has your friend. Was your friend an American agent after all, as Celezon told me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Devereaux. It is French, no? He was killed this morning about two in the morning, I think it was. Celezon said the people in the hills brought the notebook.”

She had remembered how it had been for her when she had discovered her brother was dead in Laos long ago, when she had not wanted to believe the words of the telegram or the sympathy offered by the priest who came to the house afterward. And, for a long time, because they never found his body, she believed he was alive. If you believed them when they told you the truth, the bleakness of the truth would twist your heart more than if you lied to yourself for a long time and let the lie replace hurt until the hurt could be measured in small doses into yourself. It was the only way to take truth as a poison so that it did not kill you.

But she wanted to die.

“Who killed him?”

“Manet. In the hills. And then he sent that notebook to Colonel Ready. Colonel Ready has replaced all authority, all decency. Even the faith of the people.” Said with a strange and glittering madness of tone. Yvette’s dark eyes fixed her in the gloom of the unlit morning room. “Celezon brought you here, it was all right until you recovered. But you have to get out of St. Michel, you have to tell someone what is happening here before everything is destroyed.”

“Where is Devereaux? Is he in…”

“The morgue? No. I see you love him. I understand.” She touched Rita’s hand absently. “They buried him in the hills.”

The sob broke the soundless room and Yvette put her hand on Rita’s mouth then and forced her to lie down and she held her hand over Rita’s mouth until the great sob might only be little cries of fear and hurt.

“I’m sorry. But we are hiding you at great cost.”

“Who?”

“Celezon. Me. The patriots. Ready has taken our country and killed the faith of the people.” Said with simple madness.

“I don’t believe any of this.”

“Here,” she said.

And it was the ring that she had given Devereaux once. He would not wear a ring or any jewelry, but he had taken the ring and bought a chain in Ouchy and worn it around his neck like a talisman. “Dogtag,” he said once, smiling to her. They had smiled about the ring. The ring reminded him of her, he once said, in the way of perfume or a remembered evening shared when they both listened to a sad
chanson
.

“Who is Colonel Ready?”

“An American agent. He is a renegade, I think now, but he was. He was brought here. He took… over… the… country.” Slowly, almost painfully. “Celezon is my brother.”

Rita said nothing, trying to think.

“Celezon. We were children once, brother and sister. And then there was the brotherhood of the true religion, the one of the hills, not the false religion of that fat old priest from France.”

“Your mother and father—”

“No, of course not. We were made brother and sister when we shared our blood.”

She smiled, paused.

“And our bodies.”

Smiling still, through the horror of the gray morning room. “You must tell of what Colonel Ready has done, how he has perverted this country from the true ways.”

“I have to get out of here,” she said.

“Yes. There’s a way. Four miles south of the town is the café of a man called Flaubert. You will be able to find Harry Francis there. Or you will find a child who can take you to his shack.”

“Why must I find him?”

“Because Colonel Ready has the notebook now. Harry’s notebook. It is all he needs. Harry will understand that. Harry will find a way to take you off the island. You have to escape to tell the truth. If Colonel Ready finds you, he will kill you. Remember.”

“I—”

“No. Nothing. Now you must flee. I’ll give you francs, a new cloak to wear—you have to go now while most of the soldiers are drunk or sleeping.…”

The clouds built high above the island and blotted out the gray sky to the east. The black clouds blustered about rain, and the wind shifted and the waves began to pound at the beach outside the dining room of the Café de la Paix.

Harry’s bones ached. Philippe watched him at the table. Harry drank coffee laced with rum. Once he said, “Did you miss me, kid?”

Philippe said nothing.

Philippe saw that Harry’s face was flushed with drink but that the cuts were healing. They had let him go the night before.

“When you were in prison, a man came to find you.”

“What man, little one?”

“He had red hair.”

“It was Colonel Ready.”

“Another man.”

“What kind of a man.”

“A white. Like you. And an American. He said he was your friend.”

“I don’t have any friends.” He tousled the boy’s thick hair. “Except you.”

“He went to your house.”

“He did, huh?”

“He asked me to take him there.”

“So you took him. What’d he do, bribe you?”

“You weren’t there. I thought he might be your friend.”

“I don’t have no friends, I told you that.”

“The police had been there before. I didn’t think it mattered.”

“What didn’t matter?”

“He wanted to find your notebook. I told him you were in the prison.”

“You’re a regular chatterbox, you know that?”

Philippe said nothing. It wasn’t right yet.

“They all want my notebook, Philippe. It’s the thing that keeps them going.”

“Yes.”

“Get me another bottle, will you?”

“Yes,” said the child.

Then: “Monsieur Harry?”

“What do you want?”

“I thought they might kill you.”

“So did I at the time.”

“He found the book,” said Philippe.

Harry paused. He put down the cup. He stared at the child.

“He found the notebook. In the pit in the
toilette
.”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

“He took a net and took out the box. There was a picture of you, monsieur. And a monsieur named Hemingway.”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

“The notebook was full of numbers,” said Philippe.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, son-of-a-bitch.”

And Harry grabbed Philippe by his scrawny neck and squeezed until he felt the breath leaving the body of the boy, felt the muscles straining in the thin body against his hold.

“Who is it, you whore’s son? Who was this man that took the box, you son of a fucking whore, you black nigger bastard?”

The eyes of the child bulged.

Harry meant to kill him all right. Flaubert saw that. Flaubert was at the door of the back room and he had a cleaver and he thought for a moment if he should kill Monsieur Harry because Harry meant to kill Philippe. He stared at the tableau.

And the front door banged open in the wind.

Rita Macklin, in dark cloak, stood framed in the gray storming light.

Flaubert said, “Don’t hurt Philippe.”

“Who took my book, you little nigger brat?”

“Devereaux,” she said.

Harry Francis opened his hand and let the child breathe and Flaubert let the cleaver fall to his side and they all stared at the woman in the doorway. The wind blew into the room and the door banged on its hinge.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Devereaux took your book. And now Colonel Ready has it and Devereaux is dead,” said Rita Macklin. Her face was flushed. She had dodged her way from the Palais Gris through the shuttered town, past the army patrols, down to this place and she thought she had no strength left. She had run for no other reason than to run from the nightmare that Devereaux’s naked body was on a slab in that building, that his brain was splattered gray on a metal tray.

“Who are you?”

“I came with him. I’m a journalist. You’re Harry Francis and Colonel Ready is going to kill you and we have to get off this island.”

“Who was Devereaux, who was I to him?”

“Like you. An agent in the trade,” she said in a controlled voice that was as loud as the wind. “And he died in the trade and you’re going to die and that’s all there is. I want to escape—”

“Who told you this?”

“Yvette.”

His face blanched. She saw he thought it was true. Yvette would know. He knew about Yvette and he knew that she told the truth. She had the ring in her fist, it was the truth to her that Devereaux was dead, but her words were enough for Harry Francis.

“He took my notebook.” Slowly and sadly, Harry stood up and there were tears in his dead eyes.

And the first
gendarme
was in the door and he hit Rita Macklin across her back with his short baton. She stumbled and he took her by the hair and hit her again, and the pain fell in folds down her back.

“
Allons
,” he said to her and pulled her and the second one was in the door with handcuffs. Harry Francis took a step forward. The first policeman hit him in the ribs. Harry grunted. He swung again and Harry went down to one knee. He swung again and Harry cried out. And the third one was in the door and he did not know who to hit so he hit Flaubert because Flaubert had the cleaver in his hand. The cleaver fell on the floor. Philippe screamed and the third one hit him with the baton and Philippe was knocked out. Flaubert said nothing and tried to stand still and the third
gendarme
hit him again because he was standing still and doing nothing. The first one hit Harry Francis across the back twice and the second one pulled at the handcuffs so that Rita’s arms felt numb and her footing was bad and she slipped and the second one hit her again.

Harry said, “You bastards.”

The first policeman grinned and said, in French, that he would probably be back to arrest Harry later but that all they wanted now was the white woman.

They shoved Rita into the open Jeep. The rain washed down the seats and one of the policemen held her because she could not keep her balance in the open Jeep. The Jeep turned sharply around and headed north back four miles to the center of St. Michel town and then up to the Palais Gris, where the prison and the morgue were in the basement.

Philippe groaned, rose, ran to the door, stumbled, held the jamb, watched the Jeep.

He turned to Harry Francis and he said, “I’m glad they have the notebook. Because now they will kill you, too, along with that woman.”

They took her down into the cells. She crossed the courtyard of the palace in the rain, crossing from the front to the side basement door as Harry Francis had been dragged across five nights before. She felt the arms push her but felt nothing more. A sereneness had come to her on the road to St. Michel. Thomas More had watched the prisoners led to the execution dock and said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” God’s grace ran out for him in time; and her. She thought these things because they comforted her.

When she was led into the cells, they took her clothes. One of the men said he had to search her then. He put on a latex glove and he explored her. When he was finished, he looked at her and smiled and she saw he had only blackened teeth. She said he was a bastard and his mother was a whore.

He hit her and smiled and hit her again very hard. They put her in the cell then with the tile walls and the tile floor and the two drains. They turned on the hose and beat her with the steady stream of water. She thought she was drowning.

She was inside the cell for an hour. It was raining. She heard the thunder though there was no window in the cell to see the rain. Devereaux was dead. In a little while, she would be dead as well.

A man came into the room and told her to stand up. She stared up at him. He kicked her below the ribs so that she vomited. He told her to stand up. She stood up. He told her to keep standing. He went out of the cell.

When you are cold and wet and naked and a prisoner, you lose your defiance because dignity is too heavy a burden to carry. When your body is not your own, there is no dignity. You only want to be what you are not—warm and dry and safe and clothed and free. But the least of these things is freedom. You will give up freedom to have the other things. All of the manuals of interrogation agree on this, whatever their language. The lesson is the same in Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow or in Havana or Salvador or in the little safe houses off the Beltway in Virginia where people are not seen and cries are not heard.

Pain is useful, the manuals agree, but that is later. The process must begin with humiliation. The process begins with nakedness. In the United States federal prison system, the new men are called fish and are stripped of their clothing first and forced into mass showers and are inspected in their orifices and are issued clothes that do not fit well and then are thrown to the mercy of the general prison population. The prisoner has to understand his situation from the beginning.

Rita Macklin thought to fall down as though she had fainted as she had fainted the night she saw the naked bodies of two dead nuns in the morgue.

But the
gendarme
had been quite specific when he kicked her and made her vomit.

She was to stand.