Hemingway's Notebook (5 page)

Cohn’s naked body lay on the stone slab in the basement room used as a morgue. His face was blue and serene. The cut across his neck showed dark against the tissues beneath the skin which were already turning black.

Colonel Ready was dressed in his Class A uniform of the army of St. Michel. The light blue uniform was covered with piping and medals. He wore three gold stars on each epaulet.

“Where did they dump him?”

“Left him on the road,” said Celezon, staring at the body with the same serene expression that showed on dead Cohn’s face.

“There’s always hell to pay for something like this,” Colonel Ready said. “What about his papers?”

“Everything was missing.”

“Why was he down there?”

“He spent the night drinking with Harry Francis. He’d been with Harry Francis for a couple of days.”

“We knew that. Fucking Harry Francis, fucking rummy. All right, put on a show. Run him in and throw him in the dry cell until he gets reasonably sober. I’m not supposed to be a policeman, Celezon.”

They had returned to St. Michel two days before. Rita Macklin had been observed by Celezon disembarking from the shuttle flight at Aerodrome St. Michel that afternoon. If Rita Macklin had not bolted, Devereaux would follow the plan outlined by Ready. Ready had been in a good mood when Celezon told him about Rita. It had seemed like a good time to tell Colonel Ready about the American who had been killed on the beach.

Colonel Ready stared across the naked body at his aide. Celezon was the nominal chief of the Special Security Police. The
gendarmes noirs
were the most feared force on the island. Even the voodoo priests in the hills did not venture out at night very often when the
gendarmes noirs
were combing through the villages allegedly looking for drug runners. The voodoo priests feared only the black power of the voodoo but there were those who said that blackness was most concentrated in the blackness of the evil of the
gendarmes noirs
.

“We will discover the perpetrators,” said Celezon.

Colonel Ready did not speak for a moment. His blue eyes were mocking and Celezon met his gaze with the dignity of a judge.

“How do you suppose it went down?”

“I don’t know. Thieves. Perhaps it was one of the rebels—”

“Come on, Celezon. Don’t tell me things like that. You start with Manet killing him and you’ll end up believing Harry Francis did it.”

“Harry Francis has a big knife. He killed a chicken the night Cohn was killed. He killed the chicken in Flaubert’s café—he cut off its head like this.” And Celezon made a slitting noise and drew his finger across his own throat. And smiled at Colonel Ready.

Ready returned the smile. “You tell them that this was not a white tourist—God knows we don’t get many of those. Tell those morons that he was a Heap Big Man, you tell them that.”

“He was a friend of the American consul.”

“Fuck the American consul. Except I will have to hold his hand tonight at the reception for the president. I will have to assure him that Cohn was a victim of the unfortunate underworld of crime that is the only supportable crop on this godforsaken island. Cohn. I knew what Cohn wanted and I wanted him to get it from Harry so I could get it from Cohn. I just wanted to see the fucking book, to see if it existed. And one of your goons went and killed him.”

“There are too many incidents of violence after lights out,” said Celezon with gravity.

“That’s not true and you know it. Even the voodoo priests stay indoors—they’re more scared of your
gendarmes
than they are of the spirit of dead chickens.”

“You don’t understand the voodoo,” Celezon said.

“Because I don’t want to.”

Colonel Ready turned and glanced again at the second slab. It was occupied as well, by the naked body of a young woman who had been raped and killed three nights before, not far from the road where Cohn was found. She had markings on her body, on her belly and breasts. The marks appeared to be geometrical symbols or astrological signs. They had been cut into the flesh and the flesh was dried now and the marks were almost black. Her abdominal cavity was open because the medical examiner from the hospital had wanted to investigate the contents of her stomach; he was preparing a paper on postmortem digestive processes for a journal in Paris.

“Why must we arrest Harry Francis if you tell me that Harry Francis did not kill this man?” Celezon said in his flat singsong patois.

“Because we have to do all the usual things. Because it will give me something to say to the American consul tonight. And the American consul will radio that information to the spooks in the State Department and it will be digested in the intelligence community and there will be another black mark against Harry Francis’s name. Maybe when Harry is in a corner, there will be a way to reason with him. Always think of the angles and make the best of a bad situation, Celezon.”

“I will learn this.”

“And learn this: Harry is the noisiest agent in St. Michel. In the whole fucking Caribbean. He’s been a joke for a long time but that doesn’t mean he isn’t useful. To me. And to you. And to his keepers. The clown can hear as many confessions as the priest. And some of them will be truer.”

“When does the gray man come?”

“In two days.”

“Will he come to the capital?”

“I expect him. There’s no other way except by air unless he wants to swim.”

“I wish you would tell me what you really want from him—”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I am chief of security,
mon colonel
—”

“I made you that, Celezon.” Colonel Ready came around the slab and stood very close to Celezon. “I can make you latrine orderly tomorrow, Celezon, so don’t ever crowd me. And don’t ever tell me that someone like Cohn has been slit by one of your goons.”

“I am certain no member of the Special Security Force—”

But he stopped because Colonel Ready had turned away and was walking across the cement floor to the steps on the far side of the basement room. Above this place of death was the palace of the grand rooms. For a moment, Celezon let the hatred glitter in his eyes. It was only for a moment and only because Colonel Ready had turned his back.

From the bottom of the steps, Colonel Ready spoke with his back turned. “Tell Dr. Jobe to get these stiffs in the ground. I could smell them at the top of the stairs. We don’t want guests at the reception tonight getting sick.”

“
Oui, mon colonel
,” said Celezon and because Ready’s back was turned, he gave a large mocking salute with his big brown hand.

The morgue was in a wing of the gray stucco building called the Palais Gris. President Claude-Eduard and his sister, Yvette, lived in the part of the building that faced on the central court of the palais. In the basement, the
gendarmes noirs
had their headquarters and their holding cells.

Which is why Harry Francis, when he was dragged to the cells around midnight, could hear the party sounds of the presidential reception floating through the open windows of the stately building.

Hanley sat behind the government-issue gray metal desk and folded his white, almost translucent hands together on the desktop in front of him.

Lydia Neumann took her usual chair across from him. She was a large woman with spiky black hair cut in rough wedges. She wore a sweater because the windowless office was sixty degrees Fahrenheit. It was always cold because the temperature matched Hanley’s pale, parsimonious nature.

Lydia Neumann was the computer expert in R Section. She ran CompAn. She had stumbled across November’s trail twenty-three hours before. Now there was corroboration.

Hanley was operations chief of R Section, which was the name of an intelligence agency nominally under the director of Central Intelligence. The agency was coded in budget papers as an agricultural estimation service with an international intelligence mission. The code was not true and everyone knew it, including the Section rivals at CIA and DIA and the National Security Agency.

“Why is November awakening?” asked Mrs. Neumann. The people in Washington always spoke in slang, even the best of them. Agents went to sleep, never to cover or deep cover or even death. Agents rarely awoke independently.

“We don’t know that he is. That is your interpretation of data. There’s no contact with us. Maybe he went to London for a private job.”

“He isn’t freelance.”

“I don’t know what he is anymore. Except dead.”

“Asleep,” she insisted. “He’s waking up.”

“Spooks never die, is that it, Mrs. Neumann?” said Hanley.

“Maybe he went to London to do a research project,” she said. Her voice was very rough and raspy and when she added sarcasm to her words, the thrust was choppy and meant to hurt.

“It may be all coincidence,” Hanley said. He studied his hands. He had studied them often in twenty years in R Section. The hands rarely contained answers. He did not believe in coincidence.

“Rita Macklin went to St. Michel. She went to Frankfurt and took a flight to Miami. She transferred to Air France to Guadeloupe. She transferred to another plane to St. Michel… a local carrier.…” She frowned because she had forgotten the name of the line. “She is a more experienced traveler than that. She drew attention to herself, traveling in such a circumspect way.”

“Yes.”

“As though she knew we would be watching her and she wanted us to watch her very closely now,” Mrs. Neumann said.

“Is that your computer analysis or your instinct?”

“Instinct.”

“And we have a man in St. Michel,” said Hanley.

“A dead man.”

“Cohn. Cohn was pretty good,” Hanley said.

“We have Cohn dead and—”

“Shh,” said Hanley, putting one finger to his lips. Some things should not be said, even in rooms without windows that are cleared daily.

“And November is in London, checking out old friends and resources.”

“Seeking information on the political and economic state of St. Michel,” Hanley said.

“Coincidence,” said Mrs. Neumann. Her voice was full of sarcasm again.

“Coincidence,” said Hanley, staring at his fingers folded into the attitude of prayer.

Mrs. Neumann kept the computers. She filed the data, she did the research, she invented the programs for the one hundred people who worked for her in CompAn within R Section. She lived with the computers and was comfortable in their company. She knew what to look for when the computers spoke to her. They had spoken the day before to a routine GS-9 clerk, who had brought the red flag to her immediately.
NOVEMBER.
But “November” was the nomenclature of a terminated agent. His file was not active; he was asleep, computerized into Archives, the paperwork backup of the floppy disks already grown dusty in the sub-sub-basement storage lockers.

But November was awake, the computer insisted. Awake and stirring.

“He had access to his friends in London,” Hanley said for the sixth time that morning. “He could have used any name when he retrieved information from Economic Review. He wanted to signal us. That’s why he used November.”

“He didn’t use the passport we fitted him with when he entered Britain.”

“The bastard even had Economic Review bill us for the information he got. Effrontery.”

“He put out all the flags.”

“We’re not under sail,” Hanley said. “Hasn’t he heard of safe phones? He could have called. Why not come here? He became a Sleeper through choice, his own choice.”

Fourteen months before, to save his life, Devereaux had faked his own death. Hanley knew; Mrs. Neumann knew; the Old Man knew. And that was all. The file was filed in Archives and November was put to sleep.

Economic Review was one of those quasi-private companies that researches political and economic backgrounds of countries in the world. ER had 231 countries under constant monitor. Its service was expensive. The bill flashed forward to R Section in Washington was $7,312.14, authorized by November’s old account number.

All of the strands of information had become confused in the last hour. Lydia Neumann had pushed her computers back and forth, scanning for confirmation of her hunches, of her instincts. Where was November going?

But it was obvious to her.

At 3:10
P.M.
eastern daylight time, a Pan Am jumbo jet had touched down at Miami International on a routine flight from London. Two Watchers from R Section had been waiting at the customs shed. They knew who they were looking for but they did not know why. Mrs. Neumann had guessed correctly.

“Colonel Ready,” she said now to Hanley.

“I don’t understand it. It’s like a masquerade inside a masquerade.”

“A charade,” she said. “He’s signaling to us and to someone else. It’s all sign language.”

“He entered London with an American passport. Made out to Ready. But it’s him, it’s not Ready.”

“And entered the United States with the same passport.”

“And his hair. His hair.”

“Perhaps he’s become touched by vanity,” she said, smiling because the sarcasm always upset Hanley. She liked to tease him.

“He dyed his hair red. I don’t understand that at all,” he said. “And then he disappeared after Miami. What is the game? He’s going to St. Michel but I don’t understand what this is all about.”

“Neither did Cohn.”

“Colonel Ready was CIA. Maybe he still is. Nobody ever seems to quit the old game.”

“Like November,” she said.

“Yes.” He opened his hands and they were empty. “Like November. Except what side has he come in on?”

The shrimp boats and charter fishing boats sat deck to deck in the crowded deep harbor of Fort Myers Beach. The harbor lies on the east side of Estero Island, which is connected to the mainland by a steep concrete bridge directly over the harbor. The shrimp boats go out to sea down the channels east of the island to Big Carlos Pass at the south tip where the water is deep enough for them to make it out to the Gulf of Mexico on the west shore of the island.

It was late afternoon and the blood-red sun was shimmering across the gulf sea, painting red colors on the lines and masts of the shrimpers in the harbor.

The
Compass Rose
was overshadowed on one side by a sleek seventy-eight-foot charter fishing yacht with staterooms and on the other by a rust-stained old shrimp boat with peeling paint and the stench of the fish hold. The shrimp boats ranged the gulf all the way to Mexico from this spot on the west coast of Florida. Sometimes, they were gone for weeks and even months. Sometimes, when the shrimp were not plentiful, the boats found other cargoes, which is why the Drug Enforcement Administration kept at least two agents on full-time duty in the triangle of Estero Island, Sanibel, and Captiva islands.

The
Compass Rose
rode high in the water. Her wooden decks and hull were painted black, her cabin was low and close to the narrow deck. The boat was longer and deeper than it appeared because of the coloring. She carried a sailing mast and riggings as well as two inboard engines.

Devereaux, who only knew a little about boats, had learned this much from one of the yard workers in a boat repair shop behind the sea wall on the east side of the harbor. She’s a good one, the sun-blackened worker had said, sweat across his brown forehead, but she’s a bastard, like the one that owns her. Neither fish nor fowl. Not big enough for a commercial fishing boat, not fancy enough for a long-distance charter. But she had too much power for day cruising. The worker had stared at Devereaux for a long moment after offering these criticisms. He had meant to imply something about the boat and the owner.

Devereaux stepped onto the deck of the
Compass Rose
as the sun fell low enough to cause deep shadows across the deep, still waters. The day had been long and warm. Long enough for Devereaux to finish his preparations. The most difficult part had been finding the
Compass Rose
. He had flown from Miami to Key West in a twin-engine P.B.A. Douglas and searched for the
Compass Rose
in the old harbor of the old town. Finally, at noon, someone who said he had been a pal of Cain’s said Cain couldn’t afford the fees or lifestyle of Key West anymore, that he had gone up the west coast to Fort Myers Beach, that Cain was probably running stuff now with some of the drug pirates from Mexico into Tampa and north.

Everyone knew so much about Cain, but it was never enough to see him clearly.

Only enough to let Devereaux find him.

“You want something?”

Devereaux turned and realized Cain did not recognize him. It had been twelve years, but Devereaux had made changes in the last twelve hours. He had red hair now, and gray, sick skin, the kind you can get from illness or from swallowing cordite to dull the skin tones. His gray eyes were blue. And there was a scar, a long wide scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

“I want someone named Cain.”

“Yeah? Who’re you?”

Devereaux smiled. “You were in Nam, weren’t you?”

“Everyone was in Nam.”

“It seemed that way.”

There was a pause. Cain was large, he had large hands and cracked, burned skin and large, empty eyes and an earring in his left ear and dark brown curly hair that fit tight over his large head. The empty eyes held the face before him and tried to sort it through the photographs of memory. There was something there.

“You remember Colonel Ready.”

“That wasn’t his name.”

“That’s what he was called.”

Cain wiped his hands on an oil rag. He wiped them over and over. The day was peculiarly breathless and still.

“Are you going to a Halloween party?” Cain said. His voice was soft, too gentle for a big man. But there was strength beneath the cadence of the words.

“I don’t look like him, do I?”

“A nice imitation. Good enough to fool someone who never saw him. But I know you, too, don’t I?”

“Yes,” Devereaux said.

Cain’s puzzled look cleared then and he stared at the other man. He did not smile in recognition but Devereaux saw that Cain knew.

“What do you want?”

“A boat.”

“There’s lots of boats.”

“Do you know St. Michel?”

“I don’t go that way,” Cain said. “I stick to the upper gulf. I go toward Mexico.”

“But I want to go to St. Michel.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“You ever there?”

“A couple of years ago. Think of Haiti on its worst day and then you got some idea of St. Michel at its best.”

“I want to go there,” Devereaux said. “It’s a little business. It will take a couple of days.”

“I won’t go down there.”

“You had to leave Key West. You couldn’t afford it anymore.”

“There’s a lot of coast. And the sea is the same no matter where you start from.”

“You’re a poet.”

Cain stared at him. “That’s the literary influence. Being in Key West all that time.”

“I remembered you were there. When you got out.”

“You never get out. They just leave me alone.”

“Until now.”

Cain’s dead eyes sputtered to life, like a flame lit in a dark wind, on a wet night. The flame died as suddenly as it was born. “Until now,” he said. “What do you want?”

“I told you.”

“You can’t make me,” he said.

“Yes. I can do that. You know that.”

“I might just kill you out there,” Cain said. “There’s a lot of sea between here and St. Michel.”

“Can you make it without refueling?”

“I can take on fuel at Key West. Then there’s enough to get to St. Michel and enough to get back to the keys if we use the sail and get a breeze.”

“I don’t care about coming back,” said Devereaux. “We can take our time. I want to get in quickly and quietly.”

“There used to be a fishing village. Not a village, just a few shacks, on the road between St. Michel town and Madeleine. Halfway down the lee coast.”

“Can you pull in there?”

“St. Michel has an army, but they haven’t discovered a navy yet. Sometimes a smuggler will go in there to rest for a couple of days.”

“That’s what you do. That’s what they say in the boatyards.”

“Everyone knows everything,” Cain said with a dead soft voice to match his dead eyes. “I want five thousand. Your people have it.”

“Yes.” said Devereaux. “I want to leave right away.”

“Where’s your gear?”

“I have it in a car.”

“We could go out after sundown. See those guys on the bridge? There. Just look at them, don’t stare. DEA. They were at Sanibel last week, it’s our turn. If I pull out, I don’t want to come back with any dirt.”

“This isn’t about drugs.”

“I don’t want you planting some shit.”

“This isn’t about you.”

“But you want to use me,” Cain said, each word falling like a body jerked on a hangman’s rope. The words dropped, kicked, were still, swinging back and forth. “This isn’t about me, but it is because you’re here.”

“It’s about Ready. That might interest you.”

“What happened to him? You’re working together now?”

“No,” Devereaux said. “Ready is on St. Michel.”

“Are you going to kill him?” Cain asked the question without any passion except curiosity.