Hemingway's Notebook (15 page)

The rain washed the ground in the hills.

The rain fell through the trees, broke apart on the branches, fell softly to earth between the trees and soaked the ground and ran down the earth, down the hills, back to the sea.

He lay for a long time awake but with his eyes closed and when he felt the rain, he tried to move his arms. They were heavy, his body was heavy. He moved his arms and they pushed up and then they were free.

Devereaux groaned and tasted earth in his mouth and coughed and pushed up again.

There was less than six inches of dirt over his body; also leaves and branches and clumps of grass. An animal had awakened him from death. It had dug in the earth and found his finger and bit it and he had felt pain. He moved his finger and the animal—he never knew what it was—bit again.

Pain and pain.

Then he felt the curious detached pain in his head and realized he was alive.

He rose from the grave and stood a moment, leaning against a tree. He felt giddy and weak but he was standing and the tree was solid and he did not think he would faint. He closed his eyes and opened them again to see if the world remained.

There was rain above his head. His face was black with dirt, his body was caked with wet dirt, his hands were dark. There was blood on the finger that had told him he was alive.

He touched his head.

There was a wound, of course, but the bullet had been fired carelessly, perhaps as he bent over for the shovelful of earth. It had caused a lot of bleeding and flattened him into the grave and they must have thought he was dead.

Devereaux smiled. His teeth were perfectly white against the darkness of his features; he grinned like an animal. He was very alive and he felt the rain and opened his mouth to wash the taste of earth from his tongue.

It was daylight. He had been dead all night.

And then he realized the waterproof packet was gone. The notebook. The photograph.

And her ring.

“I won’t wear a ring,” he had said.

“I know.” She had smiled. “Just have it anyway.”

They never spoke of it again. He never left it. He carried it with him. Sometimes, when she had been away on an assignment, he would take the ring and hold it like a talisman. He would conjure her in memory.

He blinked again. The pain in his head was not his, as though it belonged to another person. He heard the rain but heard it imperfectly, the sound of rain made on an old-fashioned radio. Everything he heard was curiously flat.

He shook his head and it hurt very much, and he thought he might vomit. He stood still until the hurt stopped, until it went into another person.

“All right,” he said and his voice sounded strange to him. “I’m all right.”

Devereaux could not guess the time. The sky was sullen with clouds, the rain pitched straight down. He had started in the direction of Madeleine and become confused. Now he was on the hill behind Madeleine. At the base of the hill, he had beached the dinghy.

His head throbbed and his ears were ringing. He sat down under a giant pine and huddled against himself. He was wet and tired and dirty and the strength seemed gone from his legs.

All of his guesses about St. Michel and what he would find there had only trapped him. He had been wrong to think there was no notebook; now it was gone. He had been right to believe that the whores of Madeleine knew Manet, had access to him. It was why he had chosen one of them. Something Colonel Ready had said in Evian that afternoon to Celezon: Go and buy some souvenirs for your whores in St. Michel. And Celezon had answered: And the whores of Madeleine. Colonel Ready somehow controlled the rebels—he had been sure of it from the beginning when he read the Economic Review report on the island. The rebels were small in force, disorganized, financed haphazardly. Ready would have been more than a match for them.

He had explained none of these things to Rita Macklin. They were all just guesses based on hunches, guided by everything he could find out about St. Michel in thirty-six hours in London, guided by everything he knew about Colonel Ready.

And because they were guesses, he had confronted Manet and fallen into Manet’s clumsy trap. For the first time in a long while, he felt a wave of self-pity and it disgusted him. He’d end up no better than Cain.

He pushed the pity out of himself with an almost physical effort. He sat very still and let his mind fill with plans and new guesses and an idea of what he had to do next. The self-pity retreated.

There were three problems: Rita. The notebook. Escape from the island.

The trees around him protected him from the brunt of the morning rain. He could look out through the trees at the churning, dangerous waters of the gulf. The Caribbean was not a gentle sea anymore. It heaved for breath like a gray old man, full of impotent rage.

Rita was in the capital and there was nothing to be done until the escape could be arranged. In any case, Colonel Ready would let her go on her own. There were reporters on the island because of the nuns; Manet had said so.

And there were CIA caseworkers and that did not make any sense at all. Unless Ready was still with the Langley Firm.

Or Harry Francis.

Harry Francis. The name insisted.

Devereaux picked up a blade of grass and broke it off and put it between his teeth and tasted the sweetness. His eyes were staring through the trees at the sea. Harry Francis. The notebook. Everything had to begin and end with Harry Francis. Colonel Ready somehow wanted the notebook badly but not badly enough to kill Harry Francis for it.

Because he needed Harry Francis alive. Or he needed the notebook. Both of them. Or one or the other.

And Manet had a notebook. He could bargain with Ready for it if he knew it was what Ready wanted. Or he could give it to Ready and Ready could kill Harry Francis. Or use Harry to interpret the book.

Devereaux closed his eyes. Guesses and guesses. But everything involved Harry and the notebook, the leverage was in the notebook. That was what Ready wanted from Devereaux, the thing he couldn’t find himself. And Devereaux had given a notebook to him through Manet.

Damn.

He stood up then. It was a matter of finding Harry Francis if he was still alive.

He finished the thought and started to turn and stopped. Something had caught his eye again, something he had not been looking for.

He saw a small flotilla of white boats bursting across the gray, heaving sea, flailing the waters with shallow wakes. The boats bumped over the ridges of waves and each boat was bristling with men. Men with guns.

They were coming in very quickly and he could hear the faint buzz of their engines. Where the hell had they come from? Who were they?

And then he thought of the two dead agents in Mimi’s room. He had understood then the warning found in his London research. He shut his eyes and saw it again verbatim:

Approximately the time Colonel Ready came to St. Michel. And the time that Harry Francis surfaced here.

The first boats were docking and men were wading in the shallow surf at the base of the hills toward the shore. Devereaux watched a moment longer and then turned. He began to thread his way through the forest, down the hill, in the direction of Madeleine.

In under a half an hour he saw the low roofs of the town. With the lights off, Madeleine seemed sullen in the rain, expectant, waiting.

When he reached the streets it became clear that the soldiers were gone. Everyone had withdrawn. Colonel Ready had anticipated the invasion by passively allowing it.

Devereaux found an ancient Renault parked in the Street of the Blue Pleasure. He opened the door and the key was plugged into the ignition. No one stole on St. Michel because there was nothing to steal; no one stole because there was no place to run to and enjoy the stolen wealth; no one stole because the penalty for theft, like the penalties for other serious crimes, was the same.

Devereaux turned the ignition and held his foot on the floor and the 2CV engine whirred into life like a sewing machine. He punched the gas and found first gear and the Renault bucked down the narrow alley, jolting itself over the cobbled streets.

Devereaux was at the top of the hill on the coast road, heading north out of Madeleine, when the first wave of Gautier’s men entered the town.

Radio silence broke at 2:12
P.M.
eastern daylight time. Frank Collier picked up the telephone as soon as it rang. The other end of the line was in Alpha 4, an expensive ship-to-shore hookup that only a government could afford.

“Angel landed at o-nine-hundred hours,” Gautier said very clearly despite the storm and the crackling distance between St. Michel and Frank Collier’s room in Key West.

“At noon,” Frank said. His leg began to jiggle on its own. “Noon.”

“The storm here. Altered…” The radiophone connection faded a moment. Frank pressed the receiver to his ear. “We have Madeleine.”

“Casualties,” Frank Collier said.

“None. Repeat: none.”

His mouth fell open.

“No resistance.”

“Damn.”

“Pardon?” He heard Gautier’s puzzled voice. He stared at a bad painting of sunset in Key West on the wall of his hotel room. The day was evil with rain and darkness and waves of clouds pinning down the flat island to the sea all around. The palms were bending to the force of the wind and the narrow streets of Key West were all empty, the houses shuttered against the blow.

“Where is the army?”

“Gone, vanished.”

“It’s a trap,” Frank Collier said, the fear rising in him like sickness in his throat. He wanted to gag. “Trap.”

“I can’t…” The voice faded. “We proceed against Manet—”

“Trap,” Frank Collier said.

“We will trap them, yes, and—”

“No, no, no, no,” Frank Collier said.

“Hello? Hello? Hello?”

“Trap!”

The radio connection went dead. He put down the receiver. He stared at the painting of the sunset in Key West. It was very beautiful when the sun set in the Caribbean and people went to Mallory Square at the waterfront to celebrate and drink and watch the street musicians and clowns and con men perform on the square for the rich tourists.

The painting in the room caught none of these qualities of sunset in Key West.

Frank Collier got up and went to the window and stared at the storm. He thought of the last sixteen years. He thought of the options they had wanted yesterday. No options. Abort or Go. He pushed for Go.

No options left at all.

He came along the coast road slowly, looking for the turnoff into the scrub pines that the child had showed to him. He would try to find Harry Francis first because he had to solve the problem of Hemingway’s notebook to survive. To survive with Rita. To escape this damned place.

He pushed toward the fishing village, which was midway between Madeleine and St. Michel. The village was three shacks of tin, bits of stucco, wax paper on open windows. The boats were all in the small harbor, old buckets with sails and leaking hulls, patched together by old men who had nothing better to sail in to find the fish that gave enough life each day to wait for tomorrow.

He stopped the car and went inside the shack that was used as a meeting room for the sailors. The room was full of tobacco smoke and the smell of warm beer. He had stopped there the first time, when he had been brought in by Cain, when he had found Philippe and Harry’s notebook.

He nodded to the half dozen men sitting at the table. They stared at him but did not speak. He was an apparition, in rags, caked with filth, gaunt and bloody. But they were men who had seen many things and they said nothing. They only stared at him.

“I’ve missed the road. The turnoff to Harry Francis’s place,” Devereaux said in French.

Nobody moved.

“Can you help me?”

No one spoke.

“I have to find Harry Francis.”

“Monsieur Francis is not there,” said one finally.

“Go down to the Café de la Paix. I saw him go there an hour ago when the
gendarmes noirs
came.”

“Did they arrest Harry?”

“No. Only the American woman.” The man smiled. He had very white teeth and a very black face. He was thin and tired and the fishing was not very good, it had not been good for a month. He had his woman and three children and he sometimes thought he should take the old tub and sail north until he either drowned or reached Florida. Even in prison in America, there was food enough to eat. He thought of the white woman and this white man before him.

Devereaux spoke in a gentle voice. “Who was she?”

“An American. They struck her, she spoke in English.”

“All right,” Devereaux said, sickness in his belly. He stumbled at the door.

“How did you get so dirty, man? You look like a nigger now,” said the thin fisherman. And the other men laughed at that.

Devereaux stopped at the door. “What about the woman?”

“She was a white woman. A couple of
gendarmes noirs
took her. I wonder what they did with her?” He smiled and the others smiled as well.

Devereaux felt anger for a long moment and then let it pass. These men didn’t mean anything.

He got back in the Renault and continued up toward St. Michel. Two miles south of the town, in the blinding rain, he pulled up in front of the Café de la Paix.

He stopped inside the door.

He stared at Harry Francis.

For a moment, Harry did not look up. He was staring at the bottle of vodka in front of him. He was staring at it as though he saw his future in it. When he saw Devereaux, he said nothing. Devereaux took off his shirt and dropped it on the back of the chair. Philippe came out of the rear of the café where the family lived. He saw Devereaux and thought he resembled a ghost.

“Devereaux,” Harry Francis said then.

Devereaux felt the sickness overwhelm him. He felt as though he would never move from this spot.

Harry Francis had his name.

“You killed me, you bastard.”

“I don’t care about you, Harry. Why did they arrest the woman?”

“I don’t give a damn why. I had the notebook and you took it and that’s the only thing that could have saved my life.”

“How did you know I took it?”

“This traitor.” He nodded to the boy. “And now Colonel Ready has it and we’re all going to die.”

Devereaux almost saw all the pieces now. The connections were not so blurred.

“And that includes you,” Harry said and he got up from the table and took out the long knife on his Garrison belt. He held the knife well, away from his body, tentative and yet strong, like a knife fighter.

“You don’t want to kill me,” Devereaux said.

“You’re wrong, friend. I want to do that very much. Why did you think to look there, in that foul outhouse? The stink is enough to kill you—”

“Tricks of the trade,” Devereaux said, standing easily flat on both feet, his hands quiet at his sides, ready to move right or left. His head was still ringing but the pain was clear now, localized, not general. He blinked and watched Harry carefully with gray, arctic eyes.

“What trade is that?”

Harry took another step.

“The same one,” Devereaux said.

“CIA,” Harry said. “He’s going to wring your neck as well. You can’t trust him.”

“Ready needs that notebook.”

“Maybe he does and maybe not. He can’t read it, not yet, but that will come in time. There isn’t a code that can’t be broken.”

“Even Hemingway’s,” said Devereaux in a very soft voice, as though he wanted to attract attention to what he said. The rain was steady on the roof now, the water dripped from his shirt on the back of the chair onto the floor.

“How did you know that?”

“Under the endpaper. ‘Papa.’ The book was old enough. You were in Cuba with him.”

“Damn you.” And then Harry paused. “Damn you.” He let the knife fall to his side. “You’re good at it, you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Damn you. You got that and they’d been over my place a hundred times. Never thought to look in the toilet.”

“Because it stinks.”

“I kept moving it. I had three places.”

“I looked in the other two.”

For a moment, Harry Francis smiled. “I bet you do know where they are.”

“Are you going to kill me, Harry?”

“No. I’ll let Colonel Ready do that. After he finishes butchering me. After he finishes with… Come on, sit down, have a drink.”

Harry waved toward the table like a host. He boomed at Flaubert to get bread and cheese.

Philippe ran into the back to help his father.

Warily, Devereaux walked to the table and sat down across from Harry. He waited while Harry poured vodka into the glass. “We don’t have any ice.”

The vodka had a synthetic, warm taste on his tongue. It burned his throat.

“Who is she?” Harry said.

“Rita Macklin,” Devereaux replied. He poured another drink.

“Do you have a way out of here?”

“Yes,” Devereaux said.

“How?”

“A boat. In the fishing village,” Devereaux lied.

“Big enough for the two of us.”

“And Rita.”

“They took her to the Palais Gris. To the cells.” Harry winced. “You don’t want to know too much about that place.”

“Goddamn,” Devereaux said, his hand curled into a fist.

“He had me in there last week. He wanted the notebook.”

“I didn’t think there was a book.”

“He tortured me. Electricity. You know the way they do those things.”

“I thought I could figure out what he wanted and give it to him or kill him and get away.”

“You’re not CIA.”

“No.”

“What are you?”

“Nothing. I’m not in the old business,” Devereaux said.

“They’ll kill her now. A reporter from America. Either kill her or let her tell the world about St. Michel.”

“We get her and then we get away. That’s all.”

“All right,” Harry said. “It’s the only chance for me. But it won’t last that long, you know. I’m dead. Dead to CIA, dead to everyone. Ready kept me alive because he plays the edges all the time.”

“Why did he need you?”

“Me,” Harry said. His eyes stared at nothing. “Or the book. The book proves it. I can prove it. CIA was afraid of me, you know that? Six years ago. They had a contract.”

“Why?”

“I wanted out of it. I wanted quits for real.”

“And you knew something.”

“I know everything,” Harry Francis said.

“Ready was sent here by CIA,” Devereaux said.

“Yes. I was his mascot. He said he’d never let anything happen to me. Ready was supposed to flip the island. He flipped it. And then he got rid of Langley. Ready plays the edges, I told you that.”

That was it, Devereaux thought. Ready was CIA until he had control of the island and then he double-crossed the Langley Firm. And Harry, whatever Harry was, was something useful to Ready. Just as Devereaux had been useful. Just as Rita Macklin was useful. A hostage or a reporter. If one thing happened, she would have been safe; another, she was in danger; another, she would have to be killed.

“You were killed,” Harry said. “That’s why I didn’t want to kill you a second time.”

“That’s what they thought.”

“They buried you.”

“Yes.”

“Flaubert has clothes. Give him your rags, he’ll give you pants and a shirt.”

“How do we get into the palace?”

Harry Francis grinned then. “That’s never the trouble. Getting out again is the hard part. You don’t have a weapon, do you? And what about me and my knife? That’s not a match for M-seventeens.”

“The weapons, everything was funded by Langley.”

“That’s one of the embarrassing things they’d prefer not to tell the world about. That’s one of the edges that keeps Ready where he is. He’s like a cat on glass. If he slips, he grabs at anything. He’s the original man for leverage. Games in games. You have to admire the bastard.”

Traps in traps, Devereaux thought. And now there was no more time to find a safe way to spring one.