Hemingway's Notebook (18 page)

The sun rose in the clear sky in the morning and the breeze was fresh and smelled of the cleanness that comes to the world after a storm.

Everything was simple to explain. Every explanation fit precisely into that which was said before, into that which followed.

The journalists were taken from the airport to the palace and given breakfast and explanations. In the late morning, they were taken to the countryside where the battle had raged.

The American journalists, skeptical at first, were won over by the openness of the regime. And by the evidence.

There were the American weapons displayed and the new clothing of Gautier’s “freedom fighters,” who had linked with Manet’s rebels and been fully overcome by the combined forces of the army of St. Michel and the regular security police.

The CIA was behind it all. There were documents on Gautier’s body. And Manet’s body. There was the testimony of the terrified survivors who insisted they had been trained in a secret CIA camp in Louisiana. The journalists were given free access to the prisoners who wished to speak the truth about the long night of fighting in the hills above Madeleine.

Colonel Ready’s face and voice were recorded on videotape and the videotape was airlifted to Miami by midday so that it would be on the evening news.

Colonel Ready explained about the Central Intelligence Agency plot against the regime of President Claude-Eduard. He said there had been two waves of assault troops. He showed the journalists the beached landing craft of the rebels, some of which had been broken up by the storm the night before. He even named the case officer in charge of the operation: Frank Collier.

By the middle of the afternoon, the senior advisor in the White House said that the president would investigate the charges coming from St. Michel. By four thirty in the afternoon, a press conference was scheduled for nine
P.M.
eastern time.

Frank Collier, in Room 236 of the Pier House hotel in Key West, Florida, apparently blew his brains out sometime between two
P.M.
and six
P.M.
It was a stroke of luck for CIA. They had a body and a grieving widow and three lovely children in the battle for hearts and minds of Americans, most of whom did not care about what happened on St. Michel.

The best of all came from Colonel Ready again in the middle of the afternoon. The journalists, already sated with the richness of the story, were given Sister Mary Columbo.

An American nun rescued from the rebel camp by the army of St. Michel after she had survived an ambush nearly four days before on the road to Madeleine.

Hanley spoke. His voice was somber, judicious.

“There was no way to get Calabrese out if his cover was blown,” he said.

“So you let him be killed.”

“I did not kill him, Mrs. Neumann.”

“You didn’t save him.”

“Calabrese came to us through DEA two years ago. We turned him. He had been linked to several drug deals for Mr. Weisman and the branch of the Family that runs such operations on the southwest coast of Florida.”

“I thought that was for the FBI.”

“Not the business offshore. We were interested in Colonel Ready.”

“Why? He belonged to CIA.”

“That was part of our interest. The other involved the operation six years ago before Colonel Ready went to St. Michel. With CIA funding, I might add.”

“What happened?”

“Four years ago, we learned he had been the CIA operative directing traffic against our own efforts in the matter of that priest in Florida.”

“When November met Miss Macklin,” Mrs. Neumann said. “And now you tell me. When they’re dead.”

“Now there is a need to know. You did not need to know then. Devereaux did not need to know.”

“But he did. If he had understood that Colonel Ready had been involved in a case against him—they had tried to stop both Devereaux and Miss Macklin, to kill them—he might have been forearmed.”

She spoke as flatly as he did and it annoyed him. He was attempting to be judicious. She was mocking him.

“Mr. Calabrese was to let us set up Colonel Ready. It would have been a coup for the Section. We don’t have much influence in the Caribbean. Our Caribe desk is thin.”

“Empire building.”

“Yes, Mrs. Neumann. Build an empire and get the funding for it. Act only when you have the funding and you will never get it. It is the way of the government and the world.”

“But Ready was controlled by Langley,” she said.

“No. Langley had given him a long line and he had slipped it. He was playing a lone game. He might have been ours. At least, we might have been able to give him to the director of Central Intelligence. They would have acknowledged our strength and we would have found the resources—”

“Hanley, this is too cynical for me,” Mrs. Neumann said. She got up, wrapped in her sweater. She stared down at him and almost pitied him. “You don’t even understand how cynical this is.”

“It is realism,” Hanley said. He wanted her to sit down. He had been awake all night with the death of Devereaux and Rita Macklin and Calabrese on his conscience. They would stay on his conscience for a long time, until the next deaths took their place.

He wanted his confidante in the Section to stay, to talk to him.

“No. That’s not what it is. It’s a game when we win and it’s just cynicism when we lose,” she said. “I have work to do.”

They were under way before dawn. When the sun came up in the eastern sea, they were less than two hundred miles from Key West. At first the sun was hidden by a speckled line of clouds and then the clouds broke up near the waterline and the sun, turning from blood red to orange to yellow, rose above the sails.

Her bruised face was turned to the sun. She had a clean shirt from the storage locker and a rolled-up pair of jeans, fastened to her thin waist by a length of rope. She had not thought she would be able to sleep in the crowded cabin. Harry was in one bunk, Calabrese was on the floor. She had the other bunk. Devereaux and Cain had sat in the galley and spoken of matters between them reaching all the way back to Vietnam. She had slept after a while.

There was no one on the deck but her when Devereaux came. He had a mug of coffee. She took it in both hands and dipped her lips to the scalding liquid.

“I’m hurt inside,” she said.

“We should make Key West before night.”

“I want to throw up all the time but I can’t. Just when I think I’ll throw up, it stops,” she said.

He stood next to her and looked at her profile in the sunlight and did not touch her. They held the railing and watched the tranquil sea fall away from the hull. There was foam on the sea in their wake.

“What did he do?”

She told him then, softly, like a reporter reciting another person’s story. It was the only way she could tell him. She told him about the arrest and the cell, the beating and the fire hose torture. She said that after an hour or two, she had been given back her clothes and told to dress. They had watched her dress. They had brought her bag from the hotel and when she chose to put on her jeans, they gave her a dress. It was the blue dress she had worn that night to the reception in the palace, when she had stood at the window and watched Harry Francis led to the cell she was in.

She spoke of “Rita” and “her” and “she” because if she had said “I,” she would not have been able to tell him at all.

“Colonel Ready came then and took her to a guesthouse that’s in the back of the palace. He told her it was a caretaker’s house from the days when the estates were inhabited by landowners. It’s up the hill from the palace. She screamed at him—she told him that she was a reporter. He said she was nothing. That’s when he told her he had the notebook. That’s when he said Manet had killed Devereaux.”

For a long moment, she was silent, intent upon the sea gulls following the air current in the wake of the boat. The sea smelled fresh in morning, made new by the storm that had passed in the night.

“She loved Devereaux,” said Rita Macklin after the pause. And then there was another pause. “Colonel Ready showed her the ring she had given him once. He said Devereaux was buried in a grave on a hill.”

“It was true.”

But she did not look at him.

“He said she had passed to him, from one agent to another. The spoils of war. She hit him then and he laughed at her. They were in the little house and he said he would see how good she was. He took off his pants but he left his shirt on and she knew what he was going to do. He came at her and she hit him with a candleholder on the table and drew blood but it did not stop him. He tore her dress off and she hit him with her fist and that’s when he began to beat her. Until then, he hadn’t struck her. He beat her up badly. He kept hitting her even after she had stopped fighting him. He put her on the table in the front room of the cottage and he stood at the end of the table and forced her legs apart.

Devereaux took the words like blows.

“He said he had been CIA when… when the priest in Florida, when… when she had tried to find out what happened to her brother and got the old priest’s diary and the CIA had tried to kill her. He said it happily. He said he would tell her a lot of stories about CIA now that it was all over, now that he didn’t have to pretend. He said he always intended to kill Devereaux. He said he had brought Devereaux to the island in case his plans blew up. Then he could blame Devereaux and the Section and give CIA and whoever else was interested someone to chase. He said he always planned for an escape. Just in case.”

When you are in a boat running well before the wind, when the sea is empty around you, everything is diminished, including your sense of your own life. It was easier, standing at the rail, to speak of that creature she had been only yesterday, to see that all that had happened to her did not matter a great deal.

“He said he told her everything because she was always going to be on St. Michel. She was going to be his whore now because Devereaux was dead. He asked her if she understood and when she didn’t speak, he hit her again and then she said she understood. She didn’t want to be beaten anymore.”

When you are truly alone on the sea, all the terrors of a crowded world carry no weight. There is only you and this moment of life and the breath you take now; no one can frighten you. But the sea cannot wash away hatred. That always remains, waiting for the land again when it can be used.

“It’s not enough to kill him. Not anymore,” she said. “There has to be something worse than killing him.”

“Yes,” he said. “There has to be.”

She looked at him for the first time. Her green eyes were not dead anymore. She had told the reporter’s story and put it in sequence and now her eyes could see again. “This time, you have to do it. You understand that.”

“Yes,” Devereaux said.

Colonel Ready had planned to arrest Celezon when he returned to the capital. Ready had tolerated him when the pretense of the government had to be maintained. Celezon had been Yvette’s choice, not Ready’s, not the CIA’s.

Celezon had rallied the
gendarmes noirs
left in the capital and two of them pointed their M-17s at Celezon and said he was under arrest.

Six others of them killed the two in the square in front of the palace.

Yvette gave him francs and jewelry. Celezon and nine men were in the hills when Ready entered the capital.

Celezon, priest and brother, was welcomed into the shroud of hills as the man they had been waiting for, the people in the hills, the people of the stronger faith.

Two days had passed.

Harry Francis sat on the balcony of the rental condo on Estero Island and read the papers. The balcony was screened and it was exactly like all the balconies on all the stucco condominiums that faced the gulf. Because he had been a spy, he had spent a lifetime reading newspapers and clipping items and making notes and guesses and passing it along to Langley as information. He was never the worst agent nor the best. But he had been in the Caribbean so long that everyone had forgotten how good he once had been.

He wore simple horn-rimmed magnifying glasses purchased from a variety store. They were too small for his full face. He had tilted them on his nose to get the right degree of magnification. The sun was behind the condominium so the balcony was in shadow and Harry squinted as he read of the abortive invasion of the island of St. Michel, an invasion, it was claimed by the St. Michel government, that had been trained and financed and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.

So now Harry was a dead man walking, along with Colonel Ready. And Colonel Ready had Hemingway’s notebook.

Harry dropped the papers on his lap suddenly like a sick man. He contemplated the emptiness he felt; perhaps it had always been there and it had been covered over by all the drinking and gambling and the girls.

He had been a writer. It was all he had wanted to be. They had recruited him because he was a writer. The agency could always use one.

He always gave the stories to the censors at Langley and they would suggest changes before he sent them to the editors. Sometimes they told him to tell more of the truth in a story and sometimes, most of the time, they told him to tell less.

He was not the only writer. Howard Hunt had been one, he had written short stories and novels. Hunt’s stories had been studied by KGB to see if there was any truth or a signal in them that might apply in Moscow Center. Hunt had retired from the agency three times, which meant, of course, that he had probably not retired at all.

Harry Francis was sure he had retired when he quit six years before. They had wanted him to drift down to St. Michel in his retirement and keep an eye on things. An eye on things. Exactly the casual way they had worded it. He had gone and been caught in Colonel Ready’s web from the very beginning. It took a long time for the agency to catch on, to stop asking him for reports. Nearly four years before, they had asked him to do a little writing job, a simple manual of sabotage and guerrilla operations to be used by Spanish speakers in the Caribbean. “Make it very Dick and Jane stuff,” said Frank Collier at the time. He was paid five thousand dollars.

Devereaux stepped onto the indoor-outdoor green carpet of the balcony.

The gulf sparkled in the sun. The gentle surf lapped on the long beach that stretched the length of the island, from the shacks to the bars in Fort Myers Beach town on the north all the way down to Big Carlos Pass.

Harry took off his glasses and put them on the plastic-topped table. “How is she?”

Devereaux said nothing. He sat down.

“She’s tough,” Harry said.

“Nobody is ever as tough as they think they are,” Devereaux said.

They sat across from each other for a long moment and listened to the scolding of gulls floating above the beach. On the sand, Rita Macklin was running along the shoreline, splashing into the water in bare feet, running herself through pain to exhaustion. She had slept for most of two days. She had not eaten. She had lost weight. It showed in her face, in the delicate lines of her cheekbones. When she was awake, he sat with her. He knew it had been his fault, all of it. He should have killed Ready in France that day, on the shore of Lac Leman, and he had not done it because he thought there might have been a way out of it. For him. And, as an afterthought, for her.

Harry brought two cans of Coors from the refrigerator and put them down on the transparent tabletop. Pelicans dove in the shallow tidal pool just beyond the shoreline. The tide was beginning to recede and people walked on a sandbar a quarter mile from shore and watched the sand sharks cruise in the deeper waters beyond.

“I’ve been reading all the accounts. The Company is in trouble again.”

“And you.”

“And me,” said Harry. He sipped the beer.

“I wrote the goddamn manual for the guerrillas. The Famous Writers’ School of Guerrilla Manuals. Do you think I could make a living that way?”

“You retired from the agency six years ago.”

“Nobody retires. It says so in the contract. It’s like being a priest. You can pretend you’re retired but you’re really a retired priest with full faculties. You don’t turn in your badge at the door.”

“How did you manage to live six years with Colonel Ready?”

“Carefully.”

Devereaux waited.

Harry took another sip of beer and seemed to gargle it a moment and swallowed. “By doing what he told me to do. I was sent down to watch him. A retirement job. Except he was watching me. He had me almost from the beginning. So I told him about the notebook. I told him I had this wonderful notebook from Hemingway that told all about many wonderful things. To know all these things was to have power.”

“What things?”

“I never told him directly. Even when he got more brutal in the last couple of years. The notebook was proof, you might say. I was a witness to the truth, but who was going to believe an ex-spook who might really still be a spook? I was just another guy with a story to sell to
Penthouse
magazine or something and it wasn’t worth telling if I couldn’t back it up. Hardly any sex to it. Unless you count the girl in Santo Domingo when we went in there.” Harry blinked. “Anyway, she was a long time ago.”

“What about Hemingway?”

“You saw the fucking book.”

“Yes.”

“Code. It was a code. I taught him a code.”

“Tell me about Hemingway.”

“No.” He paused again. “But let me tell you about the good colonel. He dealt with anyone who wanted to play cards with him. An equal-opportunity whore. A soldier of fortune.”

“I know about Colonel Ready.”

“Teddy Weisman worked a deal with him and then turned around and worked a deal with CIA to screw Colonel Ready. But that wasn’t all of it. Teddy really was going to double-cross CIA. He told Ready all about it. He wanted to get back at CIA for Cuba, for what they did to Teddy Weisman in Cuba.”

Devereaux said, “How do you know all this?”

Harry said, “I’m a fucking spook, ain’t I?” Then, calmer: “Because Colonel Ready let me know. He was always sucking me in. He told me things I couldn’t do anything about.”

“You could have warned CIA.”

“They thought I was working for Ready by that time. They wouldn’t have believed me. And if they had believed me, what was in it for me? I don’t give a damn about the colonel or about the agency.”

“What did CIA do to the crime syndicate in Cuba?”

“Not the syndicate. Just Teddy Weisman. Teddy Weisman wanted revenge for a long time. The Italians say that revenge is a dish that’s best eaten cold. He waited.”

“You know all about Cuba.”

“I was there. Before and after. I was there in the Caribbean anyplace you wanted to name in the last twenty-five years. I was the agency man in the Caribbean.”

Neither man spoke for a moment. They listened to the sound of sea birds and the sea.

“Ready took over St. Michel as a CIA contractor. CIA didn’t want to be burned by going in directly so they used Ready and got burned anyway. Ready had been freelance by then, he had worked on some business in Florida for them about that old priest… remember the story… about some old priest who came out of Asia and knew where some missiles were or something like that.”

“Yes. I know the story.”

“Ready got burned but he was still valuable goods to them and they put him up in St. Michel and he seduced the whole fucking government in less than eighteen months. And then he started to play games with CIA. He fucked them and they cut off their support, but by then they couldn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s when Ready started dealing with Weisman.”

“Little deals. Everyone has always used St. Michel as a staging area for dope smuggling. The island has two things going for it. Nobody really gives a shit about it, and you can buy the government for thirty pieces of silver. You’d be surprised how difficult countries like that are to find even in the Caribbean. All the big powers have interests and there’s a lot of media pressure and if there isn’t, you can usually get someone like Castro to make a stink about it loud enough to be heard in Miami. What I’m saying is that when you look at St. Michel, you may not see anything at first and that’s the beauty of the place. You can have anything you want there. Anything. Any kind of scenario.”

“I don’t understand about Manet.”

“Manet is a true believer. Was a true believer. And Ready found a way to use him, to get him guns and butter. Manet thought he was taking handouts from Ready and would turn on Ready when the time came and Ready all the time knew he could knock off Manet anytime he wanted. He wanted Manet as a genuine Communist threat to entice a CIA invasion of St. Michel.”

“Why? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Harry finished his beer and picked up Devereaux’s unopened can and opened it and began to drink. “It makes all the sense in the world from Ready’s point of view. You have to understand that I think Ready is a little bit crazy.”

Devereaux said nothing. He had not moved in all this time. He sat with his hands resting on his knees. His lazy gray eyes did not leave Harry’s flushed face.

“I did that freelance manual four years ago for CIA. The comic book the president talked about. What do you think that was all about?”

Devereaux waited.

“I’m a great writer, I told you that. But they didn’t pick me for the job just for that reason. They were warning Ready through me. I wrote the manual in Spanish. And they said they were going to make another contract with me. I had to tell Ready, I had to tell him about the second manual, the one I wasn’t going to write for them, the one they told me would be coming up in a few months.”

Devereaux guessed: “A manual in French. A manual of sabotage uniquely suited to the people of St. Michel. Written by someone who knew the island and knew its weaknesses.”

“Yes.”

“So Ready knew the CIA was coming against him from somewhere at some time. He wanted an ally, so he promised Teddy Weisman he could own the island. And he used you, Harry. But how did he use you?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Now we come down to it, Harry. You were in and you were out.”

“R Section sent down a man named Cohn more than a month ago to feel me out. They knew I was feeding information back to Langley again. They wanted to know what was going on. And it made the agency nervous to know that R Section was snooping around.”

“What information, Harry?”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” said Harry Francis.

Devereaux did not move and Harry did not speak. Not for a long time.

“He told me what to say,” Harry said.

“He told you to set up the invasion.”

“Yes.”

“He told you to tell them where to land Gautier and his men.”

“Yes.”

“And you betrayed Langley.”

“Yes.”

“And now you don’t have anywhere to go.”

They said nothing again for a long moment.

“Harry.”

The old man looked up.

“Why is the book important?”

“Which one?”

“There are two books.”

“Yes. One that is written. And one that is not written.”

“Tell me.”

“Castro wants some leverage.”

“Why?”

“He wants to be friends with Uncle again. On his own terms. He wants to come in from the cold, you might say.”

“How do you know this?”

“He told Colonel Ready.”

“Why would the book help?”

“Part of it is proof. An embarrassment to the agency of something that happened twenty-five years ago. How we screwed up a beautiful friendship, betrayed a great man and a great writer, how we lied to presidents and the country. It all happened twenty-five years ago and you might think nobody cares now, but they do. Nicaragua might be a lie, too, one in the making. And maybe there were other lies. Washington has no intention of compromising with Castro or Cuba, but they might have to bend if Castro could use the notebook.”

Devereaux got up and went to the screen of the balcony and looked down on the sand. The red tint in his hair was fading and the gray was sprouting again. A strip of bandage gauze covered part of his scalp where the bullet had furrowed a crease.

“Nobody cares what happened twenty-five years ago.”

“You don’t understand history. Or the Caribbean. It is happening now. What was St. Michel except the same goddamn fantasy played out by CIA?”

And Devereaux understood then and turned and his eyes were cold and his voice surged flat and broken like ice in an arctic sea.

“You. The storymaker.”

And Harry Francis smiled. “I told you you were good. I told you that.”

“You set up the invasion in Cuba.”

“It was the inside man.”

“It was bound to fail.”

“Yes.”

“You set it up to fail.”

“No. I just knew that Castro knew. There was nothing I could do about it. I came in clean and I used that beautiful man and I came out dirty and that’s all. I did all the dirty jobs all around the Caribe for them for twenty-five years. I made my life very dirty. And when it all came down to it again, I was in the same position in St. Michel.”

“CIA never knew.”

“No. And neither did Ready. The only one who knew what I did in Cuba was Papa. He knew. He wrote the notebook and told me he knew. He had it all right and he wasn’t so much mad about it as bitter. And he was a sick man and he killed himself three months after the Bay of Pigs.”

Bay of Pigs. In 1961, the new president, John F. Kennedy, took the blame for an aborted invasion of Castro’s Cuba. The invasion was planned and executed by CIA. The invasion foundered in the Bay of Pigs on the Isle of Pines in Cuba. The invasion force consisted of Cuban patriots. They were slaughtered in the hundreds. And Harry Francis, who had been the CIA inside man in Cuba, had known that it would fail before it began because he had known that Castro’s intelligence agency had expected the invasion in that place, at that time. And he had not warned his own agency.