Hemingway's Notebook (11 page)

She opened the door of her room.

Colonel Ready stood there in his uniform. He smiled at her. She wore a blue cotton dress of rough fabric of the sort that women call “comfortable” to explain why they wear a shapeless garment to hide their bodies.

“It is refreshing to see you again,” Colonel Ready said and he grinned at her, at the room, at the little fan whirring away bravely in the humid, still afternoon heat. “You know about the nuns now.”

“I heard the news,” said Rita Macklin. “Everyone has heard.”

“Everyone has heard and is deeply shocked,” said Colonel Ready. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He kissed her.

She did nothing. She stood very still and when he was finished with her, his face was red and his eyes burned into her. He held her.

“This wasn’t your promise.”

“To him? But he’s going to die,” said Colonel Ready.

She took a step back, toward the window. The fan blew against her shapeless dress and gave it some form.

“It doesn’t matter. Not now,” said Colonel Ready and he did not move toward her again. “I came for you because there was to be an interview with the president in the Palais Gris and—”

“Why do you go on with this? It’s a sham.”

“Everything is. All the more important that we keep playing our assigned roles.”

He sat down suddenly in a side chair near the dresser with the fan. The fan bathed his face with a damp breeze. “I want you to understand.”

She stepped back again.

“You have just heard about the nuns. I have heard other things,” said Colonel Ready. “Devereaux is on the island. He went to Harry’s shack.”

She only stared at him.

“Alive but dead,” said Colonel Ready. “I know everything about him. He even found the notebook, and that’s a very clever thing for him to have done. I sent Celezon down there a dozen times. I even searched that holding tank in his privy once myself and I didn’t find it. And he found it the first time out. He’s a lucky bastard, isn’t he.”

“He’s on the island.” She said it slowly to make sure the words registered.

“But dead. As I said. He’s landed a dinghy at Madeleine. I expected him to find another way to come to the island but I didn’t expect that. The child. The child we talked to. He said the American had red hair. But I knew it was him. And he has the book. What do you think of that.”

She said nothing. Her face was as white as chalk or sand.

“There was a book after all and the bastard has it,” said Colonel Ready. “I wasn’t even sure about that. It’s a small island and it won’t be long until I find him.”

“If you wanted to kill him, you could have killed him in Switzerland.”

“No, not at all. He’s useful to be a dead man still walking around St. Michel. I told him. I told you. I need ways of escape and you are part of it. Did you ever play gin rummy?”

She shook her head.

“You play the cards against your opponent, not for your own benefit. It’s a blocking game if it is played well. You begin to see the shape of the cards your opponent holds. One on one, man to man, hand to hand. Every card is a chance given to you or to him and you have to decide which chance you will take. It’s a blocking game.”

“Don’t kill him.”

“Why? What does he mean now to you? He gave you to me. He let you come here.”

“There’s a plan.”

“Good. I hoped he’d had a plan.” Colonel Ready smiled. “It would have been too easy otherwise.”

She was staring at him now and the fascination of what she saw was filling her cheeks with color again. She was breathing, she was alive, she was trying to think.

“I have him blocked at every point. Except for details like your plan. What was it?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

Colonel Ready waited a long time and then let the moment end with a crooked smile. “Perhaps,” he said. “We’ll talk about it another time.”

“What are you afraid of?”

The question was followed by silence but the smile faded.

“Nothing. Not of you or Devereaux, in any case. Well, you’ll be late for your interview with the president. I arranged it myself. I have a lot of things to do, but I see to the details. If you see to the details, the big things work out.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

“No, I don’t think so. There are games in games here, Rita. There’s the president and there’s Celezon. I thought for a long time that Celezon had found the notebook and was holding it out, but he never mentioned it and he would have. And I thought there was no notebook.”

“You didn’t need Devereaux.”

“Devereaux. Devereaux blocked me three times in Vietnam. Devereaux. And you. Blocked me once again. In the matter of the old priest in Florida. I hold a grudge, it’s my weakness. But I didn’t use it against you until I needed you. I need martyrs and I need victims. I didn’t expect the nuns but their deaths were welcome.”

He was mad, she thought, the island was mad. And it was better to say nothing to any of them because in their madness, they controlled the world she inhabited at the moment. She was Alice, fallen into a wonderland in which nothing was as it seemed. Except—at last—Devereaux was here finally.

“I play six games at the same time and each opponent thinks it is the only game I am playing. It’s useful to put the world into compartments. You and Devereaux, your lover. You thought you were that important to me. But you were only a little important.”

“I won’t go with you.”

“Of course you will. That’s why I came for you myself. You must bring your notebook. President Claude-Eduard has prepared for the interview all morning.”

She stepped back and this time, she touched the sill of the window.

He came to her and handed her a notebook. “Do you have a pencil? Or a pen?”

“Goddamn it, I hate the sight of you.”

He kissed her. She resisted this time and pushed at him but he held her for a long time and pressed his lips against her mouth until she could not breathe and she opened her mouth and he put his tongue against her lips for a moment. She tried to bite him. He slapped her then, very hard, across the face.

“Come on.” Voice cold, face pale. “I have to show you a few things. Maybe by the time we go to the morgue, we’ll have your friend on a slab.”

He took her arm and hurt her. Four
gendarmes noirs
waited for them outside the door and they could not hide their smiles.

“Good of you to come,” said the president in English.

She was in a white room with a dirty white carpet on the floor. The ceiling was blue and there were gold cherubs hanging around the base of the chandelier.

On the way to the palace, she had noticed the streets were empty except for soldiers and the police. She sat next to Colonel Ready in the back seat of the Peugeot, which bore no license plates.

“Where is everyone? Where are the reporters? I saw some in the streets before… you came to my room. Where is everyone?”

“The reporters were causing a disruption. We took them back to the airport. And the people had to leave the streets. This is very upsetting to us, that the rebels have killed the nuns—”

“You can’t do this—”

“Rita, in the time after the Second World War, the government of the Soviet Union killed thirty-three million people. Do you understand what I have just said? They killed thirty-three million people for a number of very good reasons. All we have done is inconvenience a few American reporters for a few hours. Do you suppose we can get away with it?”

“This isn’t Russia,” she said.

“No.” He smiled. “We’ll give them their story in a little while. About the dead nuns. About the dead American reporter who was possibly ambushed with the nuns. Do you suppose you would like to be a heroine?”

“He’ll kill you,” she said.

“He had his chance. Now he plays my game and dances to my tune. The trouble with wanting something in this life is that someone else is always able to deny it to you. Devereaux wanted you and he wanted to be left alone. I was in a position to deny both things to him. But I left him an out. I let him have his three or four days to prepare to come after me. I wondered what game he would play against me. But I always had you.”

“I might not have followed.”

“Then I had both of you in any case because the KGB would have been informed of your… existence.”

Now, in the palace, she waited to speak because her voice was dry and not sure. When she found it, the president was next to her on the white couch, staring serenely at her with pale, watery eyes.

“Your colonel brought me here,” she began.

“I asked him—”

“He is working against you. Did you know that? He said he plans a revolution against you.”

Claude-Eduard smiled as though she might be a child or an idiot. “No such thing,” he said. “There is no revolution. Even the rebels in the hills under Manet understand that. Everything is as it is in St. Michel. Nothing will ever change from that.”

“He means to kill me. I’m an American citizen.” Her mouth was very dry and she could smell his cologne and it was as damp and stinking as the heat of the late afternoon. “I want to see the American consul.”

“Of course,” said the president. “Has anyone denied you?”

“You have reporters under guard at the airport. The American government won’t put up with this—”

“The American government is so great and we are so small that I am certain they could not care about our actions. If the Americans come as friends, we are friends; if they come as our enemies, they will be destroyed, just as Manet will be destroyed.”

The voice was so calm, she thought, and it sickened her because Claude-Eduard seemed to be speaking to himself.

“The Communist whores in the streets. They all work for Manet—”

“They all work for Celezon,” said Rita Macklin. “In Switzerland, I heard Ready tell Celezon to buy trinkets for the whores, they all work together, everyone is part of the conspiracy against you—”

“My dear, it is common, I understand, for paranoia to rule American reporters. You have so many conspiracies in your country.”

She couldn’t talk to him. She thought of a nightmare she had suffered as a child in which she spoke again and again to others and they did not understand her, no matter how clearly she spoke, and she was tolerated by everyone, as though she were mad. But she wasn’t the mad one now; the world was.

“Do you know what they say about me, the whores, the Communist whores who work for Manet, in the street of the whores in Madeleine?”

She stared at him. He was changing colors like the sea. He was close to her. He was azure and green and a streak of gold dancing on the water.

“They say I sleep with my sister. To have intercourse with her, I mean.”

It was the horror she could not resist. She dropped her pencil on the white rug.

“It is disgusting and unnatural,” he said. “But I would sleep with you.” He reached his hand between her legs and she hit him and stood up.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I’m much affected by events.”

“The nuns.”

“What nuns?”

“Colonel Ready killed nuns.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken. There are no dead nuns on St. Michel that I know of.”

“They’re in the morgue.”

“In that case, let us go there.”

And she saw Devereaux in front of her eyes. He would be on the slab in the morgue, naked and dead. He was dead. Colonel Ready knew everything, saw everything, he could not be resisted.

Down the halls and stairways. The president tugged at her arm.

She held back like a reluctant child.

Down and down and the rooms were cooler beneath the ground.

And there was a sweet odor mixed with the damp in the basement and the president pushed open the door of the morgue.

The naked bodies were on the tables and a large portion of Sister Agnes’s skull sat in a metal tray next to her large and flabby body.

Before she fell to the floor, she saw there was one empty table in the morgue.

Frank Collier tried to sit perfectly still, tried not to tap his fingers, tried not to jiggle his right leg which he always did when he was nervous, tried to listen to the words and accept them calmly.

He was in Room 236 of the Pier House hotel near Mallory Square in Key West, Florida. It was 6:34
P.M.
Peter Jennings, the anchor of
ABC World News Tonight
, was speaking in that clear, crisp Canadian accent, almost without inflection, and on the screen there were still photographs of three women.

“… The nuns, all Americans, had been ambushed apparently by rebel guerrillas outside the city of Madeleine on the southern tip of this impoverished Caribbean island. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that correspondents from ABC and the other networks, as well as newspaper reporters dispatched to St. Michel, are being held in custody at the St. Michel airport.…”

Operation Angel was fourteen hours old. It could only be aborted with minimal casualties now. It could not be put on hold; it could not be reversed. Another abortion. Like the Bay of Pigs.

Frank Collier could not help himself.

In the darkness of the room, sitting in his boxer shorts and black socks on the only upholstered chair, he began to jiggle his right leg up and down in a frenzied telegraph. That was when the phone started to ring. He let it ring six times and then he reached for the receiver. Peter Jennings was speaking of London now, where there had been a car bombing.

“You heard,” said the voice from Washington, D.C.

“What do we do?” Frank said. He saw it all wasted, thirteen months of planning, of making deals, of setting up all the actors in all the right spots. And getting the funding through… that had been a miracle itself. No one had a clue to this operation except the principals and six men at the highest level of Central Intelligence. And, of course, the president’s senior advisor.

“That’s what the director wants from you,” the voice said. “He called a session at four
P.M.
We don’t know how this affects us, to tell you the truth. We were aware of missionary work—”

“I know that, I know all about the goddamn nuns—what I want to know is what do we do? All we can do is abort or push on—”

“We want other options, Frank—”

“There are no other options. We’ve got Task Force Alpha in transit, out of radio contact, we have One, Two, and Three set to perform their functions at the right time—I see Two at dawn at Fort Myers, so you tell me—”

“Frank, if we abort—”

“If we abort, we can’t do this again in six months. No one is going to trust us a second time around. We do it now or we lose the chance to ever do it.”

“What does that mean to us? That’s what the director has been asking. What does it matter if we abort?”

“The Company, that’s what it matters. We’ve taken shit for twenty years down here. Nicaragua, Panama, Salvador, Cuba—it started with Cuba.”

“Grenada,” said the man in Washington. The line was very clear and very safe.

“That’s a start.” Jesus. “I’m supposed to get a signal at twenty hundred hours from Nine.” The numbers referred to the principals in Angel. In this case, Nine was an American CIA caseworker (as field agents are quaintly called) who was bleeding to death at that moment on the floor in Mimi’s room off the street of the Blue Pleasure.

“Everything is moving,” Frank said, and he thought he sounded as if he were pleading. Maybe he was. It was the big-bang chance and there wasn’t going to be another one on St. Michel. And maybe not another one for Frank Collier either. He had sixteen years in service and six years in grade. It was time to move up or start thinking about how to squeeze out retirement on GS-12-level pay.

“I’ll be in touch,” said the voice. “After you hear from Nine and I get back to the director. But Frank, who did it?”

“I don’t know. It was Manet but he must have gotten wind of Angel. Somehow, he knew something was coming up and he wanted to stop it—”

“It wasn’t very smart of them to stop the media at the airport—”

“What would you suggest? Send them up to the hills so they can film Angel?” Frank said. “Fuck the
New York Times
. We’ll explain what happened later.”

“Frank.”

He paused before speaking: “Yeah?”

“This has to work. I’m pushing you on this. I took care of you up to this point and now it has to be you alone.” His rabbi was drawing the line; it was bar mitzvah for Frank.

“I understand.”

“I want you to make it.”

“I understand; I will.”

“I think you will, too. But this is all on you, Frank.”

“Don’t worry and I appreciate. Don’t worry, we’ve got too many fires lit for all of them to go out. Believe me.”

He replaced the receiver and shivered in the chill of the air-conditioned room. Peter Jennings was speaking of health-care facilities in Cincinnati. Who cared about the nuns? They were ninety seconds on the news. Send the reporters back to Miami and let them stew there until it was over. They’d take baby food spooned out to them if that was all there was to eat. They’d learn to like it.

“Too many fires,” Frank Collier said aloud, reassuring himself.