Hemingway's Notebook (6 page)

“I don’t know,” Devereaux said.

“If you were going to kill him, that would be all right,” Cain said.

“Yes. I knew that.”

“Is that why you involved me?”

“Yes,” Devereaux said.

“Damn you. Both of you.”

“Yes,” Devereaux said.

Rita Macklin wore a blue silk dress that was quiet and very elegant. But when she entered the large reception room she saw that quietness was not a virtue to the women assembled. It was as though the presidential reception needed all the color it could get.

The colors were to erase the face of the large hall in this dreary, gray palace, on a hill looking down on the broken slum that was the capital of St. Michel. The capital surrounded a beautiful natural harbor that had no cruise ships. The realism of the city and the palace gave way in this room to the surrealism of the colorful dresses and gowns of the ladies of the foreign dignitaries.

On the green walls of the high-ceilinged room were huge oil portraits of unknown Frenchmen who had settled St. Michel, tamed it, brought slaves to it, worked its mines, taken its meager wealth, and departed. They had places of honor in the room on the walls but no one could remember all their names.

Fourteen soldiers in khaki uniforms of the army of St. Michel stood at attention around the room.

Colonel Ready grinned at her when she entered the room and came to her with a glass of champagne. His white scar was even whiter because in the two days he had been back in St. Michel, his suntan had deepened.

“I hope you had a good flight,” he said. “Everything is satisfactory?”

She saw a look of amusement in his eyes. And something more, something deeper than the surface glitter of his blue eyes. “This is so bizarre.”

“Everything about St. Michel is bizarre,” he said. “You get used to it after a while. The bizarre seems commonplace. See that gentleman there? Sir Michael Blasinstoke. He’s the British consul. He stutters and he hates the French, an interesting prejudice for someone posted to a former French colony.”

She smiled despite herself. Colonel Ready was trying to charm her. She felt disoriented by the long flight, the time changes, the brief nap in the strange hotel. The hotel was nearly empty. She saw the keys in the mailboxes and she had turned the pages of the register and saw only her name and three others listed. Why had the clerk insisted the hotel was filled? Like everything else she had experienced here in a few hours, the reality of things seemed to exist separately in a compartment apart from the appearance of things.

“And that one is the French consul. Our president is constantly trying to prove his ‘Frenchness,’ but it’s no use when it comes to the French consul because Mazarine went to the École Polytechnique in Paris. Claude-Eduard will always be a hopeless rustic to Mazarine.”

Colonel Ready was very close to her so that his low voice only carried to her. His blue eyes were full of humor and mischief and she felt a warm wave as she realized he was trying to impress her.

“You’re very attractive, Rita,” he said.

“And who is that?”

He turned. “Morgan. The American consul.” Colonel Ready frowned suddenly. “I’ll have to talk to him. You’ll have to excuse me a moment.” His voice became tight.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re a journalist. Report the story of St. Michel.”

“Nobody is interested in St. Michel,” she said.

He paused. “Yes, that’s very true most of the time. And sometimes, it turns out not to be true. You can never be too careful. I mean, trying to make certain that you are always aware of when a thing is true and when it is not.”

“That’s why you want Devereaux.”

“Devereaux.” He stared at her. “Yes. That’s what I told him.”

“It was true, wasn’t it?”

“You have only been in St. Michel a few hours. There are things that are true and there are things that might be true.”

“Like that big excavation. For the museum.”

“Yes. The museum. That’s a good example, I suppose. The hole in the ground is there, the museum is… where? In people’s imagination. I suppose you talked to Daniel.”

“How did you know?”

“I know everything about you, Rita,” Colonel Ready said, and it was not pleasant to hear him say it. He smiled then, to mitigate the words. “This place is full of stories.”

“Nobody cares.”

“Not today, then tomorrow.”

“It is full of tomorrows.”

“Don’t forget Grenada. We have rebels in the hills. All island nations have rebels in their hills.”

She was weakening in her hatred of him. His words were light and airy and full of self-mockery. He was the only thing she was familiar with on the island. “Are they really Communists?”

“Yes, of course,” said Colonel Ready.

The reception droned on and became more listless, as damp as the muggy evening warmth that clung to the room. A small group of musicians played cocktail party music that recalled tunes played in New York hotel lobbies in the 1940s.

Rita Macklin never finished her first glass of champagne. Colonel Ready disappeared for a while with the American consul and then reappeared alone. The people of the room all seemed to know each other and talked in whispers, like members of a close, large family thrown into an unfamiliar territory. There were a couple of people who said they were reporters, and at the hors d’oeuvres table was the archbishop of St. Michel.

Simon Bouvier had the face and build of a French peasant, which was what his father had been. The archbishop had been standing at the table laden with food and he had been eating and talking for nearly an hour. He nibbled at the sweaty side of salmon, at the melting aspics and the rum-soaked fruit, at the petit fours, at the rolls and crackers and various soft cheeses that were running on their plates.

Rita Macklin asked him about the religion on the island.

“Everyone is Catholic, of course,” he said.

“Is the church very… involved?”

“In what way?”

“There are rebels in the hills—”

“Oh. They are Communists. The hills have many believers in many religions. Unfortunately, few of them believe in our religion.”

“What religions?”

“The voodoo is in the hills.”

“Really? Still?”

“And the Communists. Such a violent religion that is,” said the archbishop and he shoved a cracker full of Camembert into his mouth and chewed loudly on it. He grinned at her. “Oh, yes. We have missionaries as well, but they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. I am quite content with matters as they are.”

“Catholic missionaries.”

“Nuns who do not wear the habits of their order. Radicals and Communists as far as I am concerned. But then, I am a conservative.” The archbishop smiled. “It is a comfort to me to be conservative.”

She started to speak and could think of nothing to say to him for a moment. Here was another one. The bishop took a piece of dark bread and reached for the bowl of Russian caviar. The caviar smelled like rotted fish. The old prelate was sweating but did not seem to notice it.

“Where are the nuns? I mean—”

“I really don’t know. They have no convent. They live like single women. Colonel Ready asked my advice about them but I said they were harmless enough. They want to convert the people in the hills.”

“You said everyone was Catholic.”

“Which means that hardly anyone is Catholic at all. There are no churches in the hills but the hills have many believers.”

“In voodoo.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps in other things. It is difficult to understand what people who stay in the hills believe in. In any case, it is beyond me.” He turned back to the food table and dismissed her.

The evening ground on. Conversations came and went in fragments that mimicked the humid wind that failed to cool her. Once, near midnight, Rita went to a window in the reception room and looked down in the courtyard. She saw two policemen with truncheons prod a large, fat white man across the courtyard. Harry Francis looked up in that moment and saw her in the window and then disappeared behind a large metal door that led to the police headquarters and the cells in the basement near the morgue.

At five minutes after midnight, with nearly half the guests gone, the president of St. Michel and his sister appeared at the door that led from their private quarters. Colonel Ready had stopped once to explain to Rita that they were always late to their own parties; it was a calculated gesture, even as it was rude. Claude-Eduard thought it was sophisticated.

As they entered the room, the tired musicians perked up. The pianist mopped his brow and then began at fast waltz tempo “Begin the Beguine.”

The president was very thin and tall. He seemed a nervous man with a long nose and watery blue eyes. His listless brown hair was combed straight back from his square forehead. His ears were long. He wore white tie and tails and a medal given to him on the day he decided to become President for Life of the Republic.

His sister, Yvette, held his arm as they circled the room. She was fitted in a tight green dress that reached to her ankles. Her eyes were black and glittered with fierce energy, a dark contrast to her brother, whose features were indistinct. Rita was reminded of a hand-tinted photograph before the era of color pictures. That was it, she thought: They were out of time. Everything in this room was out of time.

Colonel Ready was suddenly at her side again as she stared, entranced, at the strange, glittering couple walking slowly around the room, stopping now and then to speak to this consul or that.

“They were orphans—”

“I read a little about them before I came here. About the island,” she said and felt again the threat coiled in Ready’s presence next to her.

“The last children of the colonialists. I think they believe this is still a colony. The president makes up to the French consul… do you see?”

She stared and did not look at Ready next to her.

“Yvette is the one with ambition. You can see it in the way she holds herself. A pretty enough package,” Ready said, grinning, trying to distract Rita enough to look at him.

“Yvette is the reason Claude-Eduard stays where he is,” said Colonel Ready.

“I thought you were, colonel.”

“Well, I help.”

“You have the army. You have the black police.”

“You are informed.”

“I wanted to be informed before coming to the enemy as a hostage.”

“A guest, Miss Macklin. ‘A hostage’ implies a threat. There is no threat.”

And Rita, no longer tired, remembered where she was and why. “I wish he had killed you.”

“It would not have been enough. He would have killed me in Evian if that would have ended it. His trouble is that he thinks too clearly. It was always his trouble. You can’t calculate every step you take with an eye on the outcome.”

Rita turned to him finally and saw the hungry, appraising look in his eyes.

“But you would have been dead,” she said with a dull voice.

“And November would have been made alive,” he replied. “And his girl. And if CIA knew it, then KGB would know it and some mechanism would snap in place in some third-level bureaucracy inside the Fourth Directorate and the wet contract would be issued again. This time, perhaps, to include you.”

“There was no contract.”

“There is no other reason to explain Devereaux’s ‘death’ and his reluctance to be reborn.”

“What if he doesn’t come?”

For a moment, a flicker of uncertainty crossed Ready’s face but it was soon gone.

“You’re here.”

“A guest, you said. I covered my tracks as well. I have three assignments from magazines here. Including my friends in Washington. They know I’m here, they know I’m at the Ritz. They know about you.”

His face reddened a moment and then he grinned. “You are careful, Miss Macklin, but I assure you, no harm will come to you. When you write of St. Michel, I hope you will be brutally honest—but kind to us as well. We are a struggling people in the Caribbean basin, the impoverished of Paradise.”

“How eloquent.”

“Take Yvette, the president’s sister. She is beloved of the blacks on the island. They think she is one of them. She makes cause with them and sympathizes with their poverty.”

“She dresses like it.”

“The people tolerate Claude-Eduard. But she understands power.”

“She brought you here.”

“Many elements… brought me here.”

“You still work for Langley.”

“No. I assure you of that. I’m retired.”

“Honorably?”

“With a check every month from Uncle,” he said. “Yvette brought Celezon into government—before I came. Celezon is useful to me. He has his own connections. There are rumors, always rumors, about Yvette, about the magic in the hills, about the voodoo—”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

“Brother and sister. Neither ever married. Some say they are lovers, that she has had a child by him…” He was smiling, talking in the same strange way that infected everyone on this island of half-truths, unfulfilled promises, endless tomorrows.

“Try that booga-booga stuff on someone else.”

“Our people,” Ready said. “The people of St. Michel. They live on rumors and scrawny chickens and the voodoo. Up in the hills, I mean.”

“Where the rebels are.”

Ready’s grin was full of contempt. “Sometimes I just pity Manet, I honest to God pity the bastard, living up in the hills with his freedom fighters drawn from the ranks of that rabble, trying to foment a disciplined revolution with the likes of them.”

“Manet has managed to elude you, though.”

“Do you think so, Rita?”

And she realized again how she hated this man and had wanted to kill him that night in Evian because the cruelty in his manner raked her as casually as it raked Devereaux.

“The trouble with having ambition in a country without ambition is that you have to have enemies,” Colonel Ready said.

She stared at him but he had turned.

“Look at Yvette. A magnificent woman. She should have gone to France with that ambition, not stayed here.”

“Are you in love with her?”

Ready said, “What an odd thought.”

But then the president was very close and his sister still held his arm and Colonel Ready was smiling at them. Rita Macklin looked in the president’s watery eyes and saw a hunger that made her ill. She nearly flinched as the president smiled at her. She felt Colonel Ready’s hand on her bare arm.