Hemingway's Notebook (7 page)

“
Mon président
,” began Colonel Ready. “This is Rita Macklin, the American reporter I spoke of—”

“So?” He smiled like a cat licking milk. He inclined his head slightly as though expecting Rita to curtsy.

“And Mademoiselle Yvette Pascon, sister of the president.”

“I’m happy to meet—”

“Colonel Ready, what an extraordinary man you are. You have promised to bring the world’s journalists to St. Michel to record our celebration and you have done so. There are television cameras and reporters. And now, this journalist. She is not only an honor to St. Michel, but to your good taste, colonel. Mademoiselle, forgive me, but you are quite beautiful. Is she not so, Yvette?”

Yvette smiled. “As you say, my dear brother.”

Rita felt her color rising.

“I must insist on giving you an interview, mademoiselle,” Claude-Eduard continued. “A private and an exclusive interview, we two alone—”

“
Mon président
, another time, I will arrange it,” said Colonel Ready, gripping Rita’s arm. “She is too tired—she jetted in this afternoon from Switzerland.”

“Why were you in Switzerland, dear one?”

“An assignment,” she began again. She felt a little embarrassed, even ashamed. The president was so close to her that his body nearly touched her body. Damn it, she thought, it’s not my fault. His breath smelled of sour milk.

She realized suddenly that he was wearing perfume of a strange, sweet scent that might have come from exotic oils. His limp hair shone beneath the chandeliers as though coated with a thin oil.

She felt nauseated.

Colonel Ready said, “
Mon président
, Miss Macklin wanted to see you but she just told me she is feeling unwell. Would you forgive us if I took her back to the Ritz?”

“Colonel, mademoiselle: Permit me. If you are ill, I will have my physician attend you. We have a bedroom at the palace, many bedrooms—”

“No.” The voice was sharp, certain of command. “Can’t you see she is really tired, brother?”

Rita felt naked as they all looked at her.

And then Yvette turned to Colonel Ready and said, “Take her back to the hotel, colonel.”

“Yes, mademoiselle.”

“Claude, we have many other guests to attend to,” she said. “The hour is late. The American consul has gone.”

And then the president did a strange thing. He turned to his sister and his eyes seemed to glaze as though he were falling into a trance; his face was formed into the face of another person. “Who made us late?” The words were bitchy, uttered in a flat near-falsetto and Rita felt very frightened.

Outside the palace a few minutes later, in the still, humid air, she shivered. Colonel Ready understood. He took her arm again.

“They are frightening—”

“They should frighten you.
Mon président
wants you, I’m afraid.” There was annoyance in his voice. “It’s too bad. A complication.”

“You knew this would happen.”

“No. I can’t predict the future. I don’t anticipate the consequences; I act. I leave that for your friend.”

“It would have been better to kill you.”

“Yes,” Ready said. “It would have been better for both of you. But that’s too late now. He will fly in on the day after tomorrow and while we celebrate the anniversary of the republic, he will do what I asked him to do.”

“You could have gotten anyone—”

“I wanted him.”

“Why?”

Colonel Ready said nothing for a moment as he walked with her down the steps to the Rue Sans Souci that would lead back to the hotel. The city was dark and there were restless sounds in the darkness from those who did not sleep. They could hear radios playing and there was the sound of a guitar and the mournful voice of a very bad singer.

“Because I had to have him,” Colonel Ready said.

“That’s a threat.”

“No. I never threaten. Only say what I will do.”

“Then you’re going to expose him in any case.”

“Perhaps,” Colonel Ready said.

She was very afraid in the darkness. She could barely see the outline of the wrought-iron gate that led up the stairs to the Palais Gris. There were sentries on the street. She saw their teeth form a grin, lit from the lights of the palace. Her knees began to buckle under her own weight. Colonel Ready held her arms and she could not move away from him.

“This is a nightmare,” she said. She could barely stand up.

“No, Rita. It is much worse than that. Much, much worse,” Colonel Ready said and his scar was white and as menacing as a knife across his face. And he leaned close to her and pulled her toward him. She felt his lips upon her lips and she felt her feet slip out from under her. The nightmare was upon her.

They kept all the syringes and the needles in a sealed plastic box on the floor of the Jeep. The Jeep growled into a lower gear and the wheels grabbed at the slippery road that ran up the mountain. Beyond this last hill was Madeleine, the second city of St. Michel, tucked at the southern point of the crescent-moon-shaped island. Everyone on St. Michel believed the rebels owned Madeleine, even if there were some government troops billeted there.

“Why do we need to meet with a man like that?” Sister Agnes Kozowski had asked in St. Michel town, before the journey. She always asked the obvious questions.

“Because the mission is in the mountains again. And he has control of the hills.”

“They aren’t real mountains. Not like in Colorado.”

“As you’ve told us many times.” Sister Mary Columbo gave Agnes short shrift because Agnes, for all her generosities, had a sometimes whining nature. She had acquired it as an only child in a rich family.

The third nun in the Jeep, dressed like the others in simple khaki trousers and a cotton blouse, was Sister Mary St. John of God. She was the oldest of the three women but was not the leader. Sister Mary Columbo thought that she was probably a saint.

Sister Mary Columbo was sure that sainthood was not very close to her. She had been a nurse and skilled field medic in Vietnam. She had worked with a MASH unit in Vietnam more than fifteen years before. She was forty but she felt so old and despairing at times that she prayed herself awake all night. She was a practical woman. Sometimes, it frightened her to think that everything she did in the world did not matter.

Sister Agnes, on the other hand, knew she was making a difference by her actions and that she was saving lives. Which is why Sister Agnes was impatient about making the trip down the coast from St. Michel town to Madeleine to seek out permission from the rebels to cross into the hills that followed the line of the island on the windward side above the coastal road.

The nuns had medical supplies: penicillin and vaccines against scarlet fever and whooping cough—both diseases currently prevalent on the island among the children—and polio vaccines. There had been a polio epidemic in the hills the previous summer and more than a hundred children had died and many more had been crippled.

There were also books that contained prayers and stories. There were many rosaries as well because the people in the hills prized them and wore them as jewelry, which annoyed the archbishop down in the capital. Still, thought Sister Mary Columbo when she thought of it at all, bringing all those rosaries was a useful defense against the habit of ritual marking and the piercing of nostrils, earlobes, and sexual parts that was still practiced for ornamental reasons among the most backward of the hill people.

“It is too horrible sometimes,” Sister Agnes had confessed one night during the summer, on their last mission in the hills, after another baby had died of polio.

“God is with us,” Sister Mary Columbo had said. She had grown up in New York City, in the section called Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side. The remarkable thing was that when she spoke of God, she believed all she said.

The Jeep was covered with dust so that the windshield was opaque save for the half-circle cleared by the wipers. The Jeep followed the last long blind curve to the summit. It was necessary to drive slowly here because a driver could not see a car coming from the direction of Madeleine; on the other hand, if you drove too slowly, there was a risk of stalling out the engine. Dense forests lined either side of the road. The tropical pines smelled sweet in the mountain air, and it was not so humid here. The road had been asphalt when it was built, but in too many places the asphalt had been broken up by neglect and the rains and the binding had dried up and the cinders broke away so that it was as treacherous as a gravel road. As the Jeep neared the summit of the hill that overlooked Madeleine, the road grew very narrow.

“Be careful,” said Sister Agnes, who always said such things at moments like this.

Sister Mary Columbo bit her lip. She shoved the gear down the last notch and popped the clutch. The wheels spun and bit at the sliding asphalt base and nearly lost it and bit again and this time, they dug in. The Jeep protested the incline. The Jeep climbed the last hundred yards to the top of the hill, whining against the strain. The sound of the motor was so loud that they did not hear the first burst of the automatic weapons.

Sister Mary St. John of God, who had been sitting next to the supplies in the rear jump seat, saw the top of Sister Agnes’ head blown off in a bloody clump. She saw this and was puzzled for a fraction of a second and then she could hear the sound of the weapons and she understood.

The bullets smashed the old nun’s face and she fell sideways, still gripping the roll bar, still staring with sightless eyes now at the bloody bowl of Sister Agnes’ head.

Sister Mary Columbo flinched at the firing because she had flinched for two years in Vietnam and even when she got home, she flinched at every sudden, sharp report. She did not look at Sister Agnes but pushed at the pedal and urged the engine up. The Jeep bucked and slipped again on the asphalt and then smashed sideways at a very slow speed into the soft wood of the pine trees at the side of the road. Sister Mary Columbo was slammed forward and cut her head on the windshield.

“I’m all right,” she said in an odd voice to her dead companions. “I’m all right,” she repeated and her voice was detached from her body. She felt no pain. She heard no sound, not even the firing that came from the men who were in the forest. She felt very calm. She stared at the trees.

The bullet struck her chest.

She spun around against the steering wheel. She saw Sister Agnes then. Blood covered her face and her dead, open eyes.

“I’m all right,” she said softly.

The second bullet smashed into her back and she jerked like a puppet and fell out of the Jeep onto the soft undergrowth beneath the pines on the side of the road. She tasted blood on her lips.

The men came out of the forest then and took the plastic cases of medical supplies from the back of the Jeep. They had to pull Sister Mary St. John of God’s body out of the Jeep to get all the supplies. One of the men prodded at the body of Sister Mary Columbo at the side of the road and said something that made the other men laugh. Someone fired his automatic weapon again into the trees. The birds were silent. When the firing stopped, there was no sound at all. The engine had died in the soft crash into the trees and made no sound.

“Should we burn the Jeep?” one of the men asked in the singsong patois.

“No. There is no need to destroy it. It’s always good to leave a vehicle like that. You don’t know when it might be useful sometime.”

One of them tore Sister Mary Columbo’s blouse and turned her over. He took out his knife and cut her brassiere. Her wounds were still bleeding and there was blood on her lips. The man used the knife to cut a small mark above her breasts. It looked like a geometric symbol.

After a while, the men walked back into the forest, carrying the supplies in plastic boxes.

After a long, silent time, the birds began to speak again in the trees. In the undergrowth beneath the pines, insects buzzed and whirred and noisily continued the pursuits of their small lives.

It was the sound of the insects that Sister Mary Columbo heard first when she opened her eyes.

The boy missed Harry Francis.

The boy had awakened when the black police came after the blackout had begun. They had made a lot of noise at the door of the café. Harry Francis had answered the door and there had been an argument. His father had gone to the café to see what was the trouble. His mother told him to stay in bed. He had gotten out of bed and gone to the door and watched them take Harry Francis away. One of the black police took a bottle of whiskey from the table where Harry Francis had been sitting and snoring.

Philippe knew many things. He knew that Harry Francis was a drunk. He did not like Harry when the white man bullied his father. But Harry was the most fascinating man Philippe had ever known in all his eleven years. He studied the white man every day that he came to the café; when Harry did not come to the café, it was as though Philippe had missed school. Now Harry was gone and Daniel, the schoolteacher, was in the capital making money and there was an emptiness to the day.

Philippe had blue eyes that came from his grandfather who had been a Frenchman working for the copper company that had mined the island at the beginning of the century.

The copper had run out and the mines were abandoned in the hills. His grandmother had been a whore. That is what Flaubert, Philippe’s father, had said. Her daughter was very beautiful; that was Philippe’s mother. Flaubert had married her to take her away from Madeleine where it was certain she would have become a whore. Perhaps she already had been a whore when Flaubert married her.

The white man who had been Philippe’s grandfather had gone back to France in the time before the European war. Philippe was told by his mother that his grandfather was a brave man and that he had been killed in the war in Europe. Nobody knew if this story was true but his mother wanted Philippe to believe it. Philippe thought perhaps it was a story for children.

Philippe was a solitary child because his color was wrong. He was too light and his eyes were blue. On the other hand, he was certainly not a white man, like Harry Francis.

Harry Francis had been gone two days.

Philippe thought again about him as he walked south down the deserted beach, away from the café and even farther from the capital. Halfway between St. Michel town and Madeleine was a pier and two shacks where fishermen lived and which smelled of fish. There was a café there like his father’s but not as clean. Harry Francis drank there sometimes when he was angry with Flaubert. Maybe Harry was angry now and had gone there instead. The black police would not keep someone like Harry for very long; when they had arrested him once before, they had kept him only two days and he had come back from the jail very weak and very tired and his skin had been very white.

He came over a rise of sand and saw the white man sitting on a piece of driftwood, waiting.

The white man had red hair and dark skin and his gray eyes glittered in the light. He was large but he sat very still with his hands on his knees.

The beach was brilliant in the sun, the sand white and glistening but the tides threw up the remains of squids and man-of-wars and the beach which was littered with driftwood.

The white man did not speak.

“Who are you?” Philippe said. He did not move closer.

“
Gamin
,” began Devereaux. His language was not of the island, Philippe saw. “You are Flaubert’s son.”

“Yes.”

“Where is Harry Francis?”

“In jail.”

“Why is he in jail?”

“I don’t know. It is about Monsieur Cohn, I suppose.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Who are you?”

“
Gamin
,” Devereaux said again, “I talked to one of the fishermen down at the dock. He said that you were a friend of Harry’s.”

Philippe blushed. He felt proud that the fishermen would understand that Harry Francis valued him as a friend.

“Harry was arrested by the
gendarmes noirs
two days ago. At night. After the blackout.”

“Why?”

“They ask him about Monsieur Cohn. No one has seen him since he left my father’s café many days ago. I think six days.”

“Who was Cohn?”

“Another white man. He drank with Harry but he wanted something from him.”

“What did he want?”

“A book. No. It was in English. A word that is…” Philippe bit his lip. “I don’t remember. A nun-book.”

“Notebook.”

“Ah,
oui
,
d’accord
. Notebook.”

“Did Harry give him a notebook?”

“No. Everyone talks to Harry about his notebook. But I don’t think he has one. I told him once I would like to see it and he said he would show it to me someday. When he was finished with it. But I knew he was not telling me the truth.”

“How did you know.”

“Because I could see it in his eye. When he tells me a lie, his eye does not look at me.”

“The notebook is a lie.”

“He said it is all the secrets. How could it be all the secrets—there are so many of them?”

“You heard him talk to Cohn.”

“When I cleaned the blood. Monsieur Harry had killed a chicken and I had to clean the floor.”

“Harry is in jail then,” Devereaux said, staring at the sand, his gray eyes distant with thought.

“If he is not with the fishermen.”

“No.”

“Sometimes he goes there when he is angry with my father.”

“Where does Harry live?”

“Toward the hills. That way.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Yes. Sometimes I go to see Harry and we talk.”

“You like Harry.”

“Yes. We are friends.”

“Will you take me to his place.”

“Do you think he’s there?”

“I don’t know,
gamin
.”

“Why do you want to see him?”

“To find out about the book.”

“The nun-book?” Philippe smiled. “Everyone wants the same thing and all leave without it. Even the
gendarmes noirs
.”

“They wanted the notebook.”

“The first time. A long time ago they took Harry to jail and when he came back, they had hurt him. He told me later that they had wanted the notebook and that he would not give it up. That’s when I thought there was none and that Harry was too ashamed to say that he had not written the book.”

“Ashamed?”

“He is a writer. He showed me the books he wrote. All of them a long time ago. But he has not written for a long time.”

Devereaux stood up. “Show me the place.”

They climbed for a half hour and the house was half hidden in the trees. The place was old and ramshackle. There were two rooms and, outside, a privy. The walls of the shack were very dry. The wood was bleached and the tar paper on the roof was thin and peeling. They had passed a half dozen shacks like this, all of wood, unlike the concrete huts in the town and along the beach.

Devereaux opened the door of the shack. The boy stood on the porch and watched him. The place smelled of Harry. He had lived there for six years, since he first came to St. Michel.

The larger room was full of books. They were stacked on shelves and on the floor. There was a large and dirty cotton rug on the floor. There was a big easy chair of cracked vinyl near the window. Next to the chair was a tray with an empty vodka bottle on it.

The place had been searched not very long ago, Devereaux saw. Some of the books were strewn, some had been replaced on the shelves. Dust had been disturbed and it had been so recent that a new layer of dust was still in the beginning stages. Perhaps a couple of days, about the time Harry was arrested.

When Rita Macklin came to St. Michel.

It was the second thought—the one about Rita—that had filled him from the moment the boy said Harry Francis had been arrested. If Ready did not need Devereaux to find Harry’s secret for him, he did not need Rita Macklin. Why had he involved them at all, why go to Switzerland and set a trap to get Devereaux to this island?

Rita had asked him the questions that night in Lausanne and he could not answer them. He had to walk in darkness with flat, uncertain treads on uncertain surfaces, hoping that he would eventually have light and a solid foundation to stand on. Ready wanted a spy as good as Ready.

The boy said, “He has not been here.”

“No.”

“He must still be in jail.”

“Where is the jail?”

“In the capital. In the basement of the Palais Gris.”

“What’s that?”

“The presidential palace. The jail is in the basement. You can hear the prisoners when they are screaming.”

Devereaux was looking at the books, opening them, closing them, going through the careful routine in the hot, still room. “Why do they scream?”

“Because they are in pain.”

“Do the police torture prisoners?”

“They tortured Monsieur Harry. The first time. They thought they had killed him. Harry said it was why they let him go, they did not want to kill him, they only wanted to frighten him.”

“Was he frightened?”

“Some people think he is a buffoon, but Monsieur Harry is not. He is a brave man,” Philippe said of his friend.

Harry’s titles were few. They were espionage novels all written more than a decade before. The covers of the novels were lurid, with men with guns and women with long legs and frightened faces. “By Harry Francis.” He had been working for the Langley Firm then. They had approved his work, even encouraged it, Devereaux supposed. The intelligence agencies had writers who wrote novels that planted disinformation in the minds of the Soviet agents who read those novels for clues to what the Americans were really doing. Harry was part of a long literary tradition of spies turned writers.

And he had known Hemingway and he had become “Hemingway.”

Devereaux spent a careful hour in the two rooms. He worked slowly and tried consciously not to hurry in his task. He touched every object in both rooms. His fingers turned over books and notebooks and canister jars full of caked salt and a Zenith transoceanic radio and bedclothes that were strewn around an unmade army cot. It was the home of a lonely, middle-aged man who had gathered some treasures and comforts and then had abandoned them because they were not enough.

There was nothing in the house.

Devereaux walked outside and stretched in the muggy air. The sun was filtered by trees here and it was not so hot as it was down on the beach.

“You see,” said Philippe with triumph in his voice. “No one can find Monsieur Harry’s notebook.”

“Because it does not exist.”

“That is what I think,” Philippe said. But he had lost the attention of the white man, who was crossing the bare, sandy yard in back of the shack to the privy.

Devereaux opened the door and was assailed by the dank stink of rotting feces in the holding tank.

“What do you look for?”

“The same thing the other men looked for.”

“Commander Celezon.”

“And Colonel Ready.”

“Once Colonel Ready came here. I know. Alone. I saw him. He was like you. He looked in the toilet. What are you looking for?”

Devereaux made a face and stood still until he became accustomed to the smell. Then he took a stick and poked at the underside of the toilet seat, which was a wooden shelf with a hole cut in the middle. There was nothing.

He expected to find nothing. But it was the way you did a search. The way Ready would have done a search.

He dropped the stick.

The stick dropped into the filthy holding tank and struck something. The sound was hard, wood on metal.

He looked at Philippe, who was staring at him with wide blue eyes in a wonderfully old and cynical child’s face.

Devereaux reached under the seat and pulled at the nails that held it to the support boards.

The nails screeched and the board came up. The holding tank was open but there was nothing to be seen but the murky filthy water and the bits of paper and leaves and the rotting feces.

The stick floated on the scum.

Devereaux made a face. He took the shelving of the toilet bench and poked the surface of the water. He felt a hard object beneath the opaque scum.

He put the toilet seat back on the boards and stepped out of the privy. He stared at Philippe and the boy returned the stare. The boy knew, Devereaux thought. He had known when he had watched Colonel Ready alone go through the search and miss it. He had known when he saw Celezon and his men tear up Harry’s place and miss it. He had known.

“How does Harry get it out?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Devereaux shrugged. He walked back to the shack. He found it in plain sight. Fishing poles and bits of tackle and leaders and reels. Also an old net.

And the net on the pole.

He went back to the privy.

The box was wrapped in oilcloth and it was dripping with scum when he lifted it out of the holding tank. He dropped the box on the ground. With the end of a stick, he opened the oilcloth. He took the box and wiped his hands on his trousers and they streaked his trousers with filth.

He was sweating and the boy was watching him but from a little distance.

“This is Harry’s secret place isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said and he took a step back.

“Is that true?”

“I would not lie.”

“You would lie to protect Harry.”

“I would protect Harry anyway.”

“If I open the box and you see what it is, what will you do?”

“Nothing.”

“You might tell the police.”

“You don’t ever talk to the police. You don’t know that? But you are white, so you don’t have to know that.”

Devereaux thought he understood. Besides, what would the boy know?

My God, Devereaux thought. A secret. Harry has a secret after all. It was the last thing he wanted.

He wanted only to have enough time to put a finger on Colonel Ready, set the trap he had already baited with his gaudy performance in London and Miami and in Fort Myers Beach. And now there was a secret.

Devereaux opened the lock with a knife. Inside the tackle box was more oilcloth. He opened this and took out the contents.

There was a photograph. It was pasted to cardboard to make it stiff. It was a little faded. The photograph showed a large, bearded man with a large belly who wore a white shirt and shorts. He was a handsome man with a straight nose who combed his hair forward to his forehead, as though he might be going bald.