Hemingway's Notebook (10 page)

Mary Columbo opened her eyes.

The pain was on her and inside her. But she had fallen in and out of consciousness so often that the pain was expected. It did not seem as intense. Perhaps they had given her some of the drugs they had stolen.

They had removed one bullet but the second was near her spine.

She remembered that and tried to move her toes. She could feel them moving. But the pain was all around her.

“If we remove the bullet, it may kill her; if we don’t, then she might be paralyzed.”

The voice, in the rough French patois of the country, had come from above her and behind her the last time she had been conscious. She had wanted to speak and tell them that she did not want to be paralyzed.

Another voice: “Don’t kill her. Even if she’s paralyzed, she’s more useful alive.”

She blinked and saw she was in a tent now.

I’m all right, she told herself. She told Sister Agnes. But Sister Agnes was dead.

She would not be afraid.

For Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.

She dreamed of helicopters clattering down out of the sky, the wounded strapped to the sides of the copters, the wounded on buses. The wounded had torn bodies, the wounded were always asking her if they would die. Sometimes they asked without speaking. No, she said, and didn’t know.

Will I die, nurse?

Yes. But don’t be afraid to die. Fear no evil. God is with you. He comforts you.

It didn’t play, Charlie. Nobody wanted to die. It didn’t play in Peoria, sis.

They wanted to live and listen to Janis Joplin on the Sony box bought at the PX and wanted grass to ease the pain after the lingering, humid, terrifying afternoon. They wanted music to drive the sounds of death out of their heads. They wanted a fox from Saigon in her little itty-bitty to sit on their laps in the stench of a Saigon bar and open those thin thighs again, smelling Brother Jack Daniel’s and Brother Johnnie Walker and they didn’t want to cunt telling them they were going to buy a bag and take the big trip home. Man. Nobody wanted to die.

Fear no evil, said Sister Mary Columbo.

She had prayed to fear no evil.

When she had finished, it was not perfect and she often thought she would drop over the edge of her faith at any moment. But she was Sister Mary Columbo now and there was peace for her, a temporary truce to ward off waiting for death. To stop those hopeless, homesick eyes of Vietnam warriors coming into OR, asking: Am I going to die?

She groaned. She saw the outline of a man in the tent next to her. She asked for water. She asked twice, in English, and then she heard him speak in the French patois and repeated the word in his language.

He left the tent.

She waited a moment or a day. When the flap of the tent opened again, it was another man.

“Water,” she said again.

“Here.”

He lifted her head in a gentle hand and gave her water from a plastic cup. She drank until she choked.

He wiped her lips with his fingers.

He had large, luminous eyes and he was watching her. His hair was dark and cut close to his head. He had one blue eye and one brown eye and a mustache rode above his broad lips.

“Why did you come up here?”

“To see you, Manet. Again. For permission.”

“I told you the last time. Colonel Ready uses you.”

“And you use us and it doesn’t matter if we can save the children at least.”

“Your other nuns. Dead.”

“I know.”

“You’re very tough, sister.”

“Did you ambush us?”

“No. It was someone else.”

“Not Colonel Ready. He gave us permission—”

“Colonel Ready is a man of his word, sister.”

“None of you are,” she said. “The medical supplies.”

“Gone. Everything was gone. Only the Jeep left. We brought you up in the Jeep.”

“Whooping cough vaccine. Polio.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Manet said. “We had nothing before. We still have nothing.”

It was all taken. She felt tears darken her sight. She squeezed her fists and thought of Sister Agnes, who talked too much, and Sister Mary St. John of God, who never spoke at all. How sad it was the supplies were gone.

“Did you bury them?”

“Oh, yes. We buried them and arranged a funeral mass and we took them to the cemetery in St. Michel. We asked Colonel Ready for an honor guard.”

“You bastard.”

“A holy woman should not say such things,” Manet said. He stared at her and did not move. His face never changed expression and his words, covered with sarcasm, were delivered in the same monotone.

“You left them in the road.”

“For the army to bury. Let the dead bury the dead. The army killed them.”

“How do you know?”

“If not the army, it was Celezon and the
gendarmes noirs
. One or the other.”

“Or you?”

“Yes. We killed those two and only wounded you and now we save your life. Why is that? For practice?”

“This cruel place.”

“The world, you mean, holy woman? Or just the people of St. Michel? They cut you on the breasts, there was a small infection. We wasted some of our penicillin on you.”

“Why?”

“Marks of the voodoo? I don’t know. The army knows. Colonel Ready knows.”

“Why do you hate us?”

“I don’t hate you. You’re nothing. You’re a wall to walk through. You save this child so that he can die more easily the next time. If you want to save the world, start in
les États-Unis
. Don’t you have black people there to practice on?”

“Why did you save me?”

“So that you will not blame us. So that you can tell the people in Washington we are not filthy niggers in the hills who rape white women and kill nuns and spread communism to Florida.”

“I never spoke of the rebels.”

“No. You did us no good.”

“And no harm.”

“Damn you, Mary Columbo, sister and holy woman. You do harm when you do not choose. You save their lives and not their souls, these people here.”

“You shouldn’t speak of souls.”

“People don’t know what they want, they do not sacrifice until you show them it is right to sacrifice. You give medicine to babies so they will not die until they can become starving children. Give children food so they can grow to listless, toothless men without hope, so they can have more babies, so that you can save them… You disgust me, you and your order, all you nuns and priests disgust me. You try to make it easy for these people. To accept the world as it is.”

“If you hate me, why save me?”

“To take you to the journalists here, so that you can tell them Manet and his filthy rebels saved your worthless life. So that the engaged ones in the press will ask themselves questions about who kills nuns in the hills of St. Michel. Who will ask the questions in
les États-Unis
in time.”

“For what?”

“Before the Armageddon. It is coming, Sister Mary Columbo.” His eyes were distant. “Perhaps soon or late for the world, but it is not too much longer for poor St. Michel.”

The pain was beneath her. It no longer covered her. She felt the words like ice. Fire and ice, she thought, the end of things.

“When will it come?”

“Very soon. In days.”

“What will happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Manet.

“Death.”

“Yes. Death and destruction and an end to old things.”

She closed her eyes. She thought of herself before she had become a nun. Sitting in the cramped living room in Queens, far from Hell’s Kitchen, where she had been a little girl. Sitting in the living room after she had come back from Vietnam, watching Walter Cronkite describe the continued slaughter of innocents in that land. Her family did not speak when she watched the evening news. It was a religious moment for them. She only watched and wanted to scream because she would be inside that box when the images came on the screen. From Hell’s Kitchen into hell and now into hell again. Wasn’t there ever heaven?

“If war is coming—”

“It is here,” Manet said.

“If the end is coming,” she said, “why did Colonel Ready let us go into the hills?”

“Yes,” Manet said. “Ask yourself. And then tell the journalists when they see you that all these things have happened and that you have no answers. And perhaps the journalists will forestall the end of the world for a little bit longer.”

Devereaux heard about the dead nuns when he got into Madeleine. He went to the Green Parrot, drank, and listened. There were many sailors in town, English sailors and Americans.

He spotted two of the Americans and turned away when he saw them. There should not have been Americans in Madeleine. He knew they were agents and they did not seem to bother hiding themselves. They were enjoying themselves and watching the harbor. For what?

Madeleine was Manet’s stronghold even though it seemed to be in the hands of the government troops who patrolled the streets. He had come to Madeleine to find Manet because he had not believed in the notebook, and he still did not know what it was and what the secret of it was.

Manet might know, Manet might trade for his knowledge. And then he’d have leverage enough against Colonel Ready to hold the trap open until he could remove Rita.

And himself.

“
Encore
,” he said to the bartender in rough French. He put the glass down and let the other man splash in whiskey. He wanted the whiskey to warm him. He had seen himself in Cain, seen himself in that bitter man who had not survived the war after all. He would survive Vietnam finally and all he had done since. Even if it killed him. But he wouldn’t be a man with dead eyes sailing on a shallow sea, waiting for all the bitterness to poison him.

He had seen himself in Cain, or what he might really be. He had been chilled by the vision. And chilled still when he beached the dinghy on the wooded side of the crescent-shaped island. Cain was gone and there was no way to get off the island.

Unless he made a way.

He had found the notebook. He could go to Colonel Ready with the notebook and remind him of the promise and Colonel Ready would release him and let Rita and him leave the island. He could do that if he believed Colonel Ready would let him go.

She had been prepared to play the dangerous game because she loved Devereaux. And Devereaux had let her be the hostage because he needed time to set up a scheme against Ready, to rid himself of the redheaded man for all time.

What did that make Devereaux?

Two Americans were on the island in the rowdy town of Madeleine and they should not have been there, just as the notebook should not have existed.

His way off the island with Rita might lie with Manet. The rebel was in the hills. The whores of Madeleine were all operatives of the
gendarmes noirs
, of Colonel Ready, and they were all in contact with Manet. Manet must be Colonel Ready’s creature as much as Devereaux. Everyone on the island belonged to Ready. But perhaps Manet was reluctant, as Devereaux was reluctant, to serve the red colonel.

It was not the kind of risk they taught you to take in the spy school in western Maryland where they trained the recruits to R Section. But this was not training and there was no clear way to get out.

Devereaux had laid the trail to Ready. Now Devereaux would have to become invisible and jump the trail and get Rita away at the same time.

He felt the coldness filling his body; he had betrayed Rita to gain the time to set a trap for a red-haired fox.

Two Americans. What did their presence mean?

He found a whore in the Green Parrot and she led him to her room in an old building behind an alley called the Street of the Blue Pleasure. Madeleine was noisy in the last light of day. The sun was down behind the hills above the port. The sky was red and it was streaked with blue but the port was already in purple darkness. There were sounds of dogs barking in the darkness.

Her name was Mimi. She wiggled her behind at him as she climbed the stairs to her room. He gave her money inside the door of the room. He did not touch her. She pressed her shiny dress against him and he went by her to the window and looked down at the alley.

“What is wrong with me?” In the high, insulted voice that only carries its tone in French.

“Nothing.”

“If you won’t fuck me, I have to go out. I don’t have time to wait. Maybe you only want to look at me?”

“Sit down, Mimi.”

“I could open my legs and let you see.”

“Sit down, Mimi.”

“Who are you?”

“Someone who told you to sit down.”

She was skinny and wore a tight dress. Her face was long and quite lovely in the dim light of the room. In the morning, it would look tired. She was seventeen and her lips were broad.

“How about this instead?” she said, coming over to him, kneeling next to him.

“Mimi. I gave you a hundred dollars. Here’s another hundred dollars. Now sit on the bed and be a good girl.”

“You’re a sissy?”

“Yes. I’m a sissy. Now sit on the bed.”

“Even sissies like that.”

“Shut up, Mimi.”

“What are you watching?”

“Shut up, Mimi.”

She sat on the bed and was quiet for a while. It became night. He saw one American pass the lights of the Green Parrot. He took the Python out of the seabag and unwrapped the oil rags carefully, as though he was unwrapping a baby’s diaper.

“Mary, Mother of God, I don’t want that,” said Mimi.

“Be quiet. It’ll be all right.”

“Who do you want to shoot?”

“The American in the alley.”

“He has been here for two days.”

“What else?”

“He came in a boat. Right to the harbor with the other one. It’s there.”

“The white boat?”

“Yes. Fishermen. Sport fishermen. I took care of one. The little one.”

“Good, Mimi. Maybe we’ll take care of the big one first.”

“Why do you want to kill him?”

“So that I won’t have to kill you,” Devereaux said. She was quiet after that.

The American stood by the light of the Green Parrot until the little American came along with a girl in his grip. The girl pointed down the Street of the Blue Pleasure in the direction of the building where Mimi and Devereaux waited in the darkness.

“That’s Elaine. She saw us go in here.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you let them see you?”

“I wasn’t sure. If they saw me, it works just as well to get it over with now. If not, I would go away.”

“Will you kill me?”

“Not if you are quiet, Mimi.”

“I would do anything for you, I would be your slave—”

“Be quiet, Mimi.”

One waited in the street while the little one went up the stairs. The little one waited outside Mimi’s door for a while and then went back downstairs. The two of them talked to each other for a moment. They looked up at the window. Devereaux did not move in all that time.

They decided to go upstairs together.

“If they knock on the door, tell them to go away.”

Mimi’s eyes shone in the darkness. “But I’m not supposed to.”

“I bought your company. Remember, Mimi, I have a gun.”

But they didn’t knock.

They were in the room, one left, one right, and their pistols were out. They had expected darkness but darkness is always a surprise when you find it.

Devereaux fired twice.

The little one wasn’t dead. Mimi was screaming.

Devereaux opened the little one’s wallet and took out a card that meant nothing; an American Express card without raised numbers or letters or expiration date. Everything was printed on it flat. The card was a copy which when inserted into one of 311 machines in the world identified the bearer. R Section knew of them; tried to duplicate them; never had them. Langley still had toys that R Section only dreamed of.

Because the little American was not dead, Devereaux asked him, in English, his name. It was peculiar to ask, Devereaux thought, even as he spoke.

“Felix Summit.”

“Who do you work for?”

“It doesn’t matter. Are you going to kill me?” The voice was nearly choked with blood.

“No, Felix, you’re dead.”

“Who are you?”

“No one.”

Devereaux got up. There was no time at all. If they were here, open like this, there was no time at all left. But he didn’t know what for.

“Mimi, I want to see Manet.”

She sobbed. A woman from an apartment across the hall peered into the darkness of Mimi’s room, saw the bodies, saw the man with the gun standing. The woman said nothing. She watched. The halls were filling with people but none came into the room.

“I don’t know what—”

“Come on, Mimi. I don’t want to kill you.”

“Don’t kill me,” she said. “I’ll do anything for you.”

“I want to see Manet.”

“The soldiers.”

They heard whistles in the streets.

“What do you say?”

“We go in the back, through the Rue Madeleine.” She decided because the whistles were very far away and the gun was very close.