Hemingway's Notebook (21 page)

“That’s blackmail. You don’t blackmail the government.”

“Hanley,” Devereaux said and the voice was very low and flat and cold as Hanley always remembered it. He stared in the dim light and saw the arctic man and was transfixed by him.

“You forgot, Hanley.” The words surged like ice floes. “R Section. It was set up after the Bay of Pigs. You forgot that.”

Hanley blinked.

“ ‘Who will watch the watchers? Who will spy on the spies?’ Kennedy. He set up R Section because he didn’t trust Langley anymore after the Bay of Pigs. One side had to keep the other side honest. Except you forgot that.”

“We had nothing to do with St. Michel.”

“You had agents all over the place,” Devereaux said. “You had Cohn and Cohn was killed. You had Anthony in place, you even broke up a DEA operation with Anthony because you claimed a higher priority. Anthony is cut loose by everyone and you’re going to take care of him because you have to. The way you have to take care of me.”

“That’s still blackmail. The government won’t be blackmailed.”

“You’re not the government,” Devereaux said. “You forgot that once. Anthony wants a new face and some money and a different name. You can fix it.”

“I wanna new nose and different chin—this time I don’t want to look so Mediterranean, you know? Swedish. I wanna be Swedish.”

“You have the accent for it,” Hanley said.

Calabrese smiled at that, struck a pose, lifted his chin, and laughed.

Hanley was silent but his lips chewed furiously on unspoken words. When he spoke, his precise voice was shaken. “I kept the bargain,” he said to Devereaux, “between me and you. And Rita.”

“That I was dead? Yes. There’s no way to go back on that now for you. But there’s the matter of November.”

Hanley did not speak.

“But November isn’t necessarily inactive, is he?”

“What do you want?”

“November is the name of an agent, and the names are never used again, are they?”

“No.”

“All the files save one speak of the agent by the code name,” Devereaux said.

Hanley stared at him.

“There was an agent named November. He worked for R Section. He was used by the Section. He went to cover after a while and everyone thought he was dead. His identity was assigned to a dead agent in Zurich. But November was really an agent on St. Michel whose name was Colonel Ready and R Section alerted him to the invasion operation by CIA and he aborted the invasion. This agent—this agent named November—was the man who raped Rita Macklin on the island of St. Michel.”

Hanley gaped. “He raped her?”

“Yes.” The voice was as distant as thunder on a sunny afternoon in July. “It doesn’t really matter who told Ready about the coming invasion. It doesn’t matter that it was really Cuba because Cuba knew CIA was setting up a dress rehearsal for another invasion of Cuba. It doesn’t matter who told Ready because we are going to get out our version of the truth first. Aren’t we?”

Hanley only stared and did not move. Anthony Calabrese stared as well.

“I don’t want to kill Colonel Ready, but I want to hang a label on him,” Devereaux said. “He is November, once and for all. I was setting that up all the way to the island. I used a passport in that name in London and in Miami. I used my old code when I got information from Economic Review. I am not November; November is an agent of the R Section who double-crossed Castro in Cuba and the CIA and Teddy Weisman and who told Harry Francis everything about everything. And now R Section is going to finance the publishing career of a new writer who will set a series of thrillers in the Caribbean. A book a year. Books about the first invasion of Cuba. Books about the invasion of St. Michel. About CIA treachery in Honduras and about what really happened in El Salvador. All of them clever pieces of fiction with lots of facts and local color. Best sellers. All starring a fictional CIA operative named Harry Francis.”

Hanley did not speak for a long time. He stared at his hands. As usual, they held no answers. He opened his hands and there was nothing.

He looked at Devereaux.

“I wouldn’t want you to hate
me
,” said Hanley.

“No. You wouldn’t,” Devereaux said.

“What else?” Hanley said at last, accepting everything.

“You start with this.” He dropped a Credit Suisse bankbook on the bar. The book that Colonel Ready had given him in Lausanne. The bankbook was canceled; the money had been withdrawn. Devereaux kept the money.

“Colonel Ready gave it to me. He has to have his other accounts in that bank. There are ways between governments, between official agencies, to hold back funds. To put a stop on their withdrawal. Once November needs the money.”

“I see,” said Hanley. “But I need a real report. Something that isn’t fiction. For the files.”

“Harry is a quick writer. You will have it in time. But there isn’t time right now. You agree?”

“I agree,” said Hanley.

They did not speak. The bartender came down to them. “Want another round?”

Hanley blinked. He looked like a ghost.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes. The three of us. All around. And put it on my check again.”

The embarrassment of the Central Intelligence Agency in the matter of St. Michel and the aborted invasion there did not end for weeks after the story ceased to fascinate the general public.

There were congressional committee hearings scheduled and the president was asked questions at his press conference that he did not wish to answer. The CIA leaked various stories that blamed everyone from the Soviet Union to Fidel Castro to the Sandinistas. The bloody shirt of the Communist menace was waved again.

Fidel Castro, in a typical two-hour harangue, said he had proof positive that the United States had intended the invasion of St. Michel to be a dress rehearsal for a second invasion of Cuba. He talked the story to death and the public lost interest very quickly.
The New York Times
had planned a magazine cover story on St. Michel and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. At the last moment, it was decided the story was not that important.

CIA disinformation specialists constructed a Colonel Ready who was an American recruited as an agent of KGB. The model was accepted as authentic in a few quarters. The KGB disinformation specialists invented a Colonel Ready who had fascist leanings and that the invasion of St. Michel had not really happened at all. Rather, it was an elaborate hoax constructed by the CIA to give Ready credibility. The story was accepted as authentic as well, in other quarters.

But at the level where it counted—among the information stolen and traded and gossiped about by the world’s intelligence agencies—a third story began to emerge and no one knew where it came from. The story was mostly true and that is what confused everyone above a certain level.

There had been an intelligence agent in Vietnam who was probably Colonel Ready, though he had operated under a different name. He had been with American counterinsurgency operative intelligence in the middle 1960s and he had worked a flourishing sideline in the dope trade from China. He had played both ends against the middle, making money and giving his employers enough real information to make himself valuable.

He disappeared from time to time in the 1970s, reportedly resigned from American intelligence agencies. He worked once for DIA, it was alleged, and another time emerged in the Nixon administration as an operative in the Justice Department, concerned with investigations of American radical subversives. He was reported to have been in Ireland, working against the IRA, in 1979, on behalf of the British intelligence operations arm, SAS.

The story gained currency because it was so elusive, so changeable. The story was formless but seamless. The story never stood still; it changed with each telling; it caught sunlight like a prism, and changed again. And the story would change one more time.

In St. Michel, in October, there were more storms, more than many people recall ever seeing at that time of the year. The island was battered by rain days on end.

Everything had changed in St. Michel; and nothing.

Claude-Eduard Pascon was still president though he was rarely seen outside the Palais Gris. In fact, there were rumors that he was confined to his own rooms on the third floor of the palace. And other rumors that he was mad.

Yvette Pascon had disappeared.

Many people had disappeared in the weeks following what was commemorated as “The Night of Storms.” But she was the most prominent of them. She was in the cells, but even her fellow prisoners might not have recognized her. She had been tortured a long time. Although the
gendarmes noirs
of Celezon had been disbanded, the army now performed all police functions, including the imprisonment of criminals and the torture of prisoners.

She had been quite willing to confess. She had told them how she had permitted Celezon to escape to the hills at the moment Colonel Ready was winning his glorious battle on the Night of Storms. She had confessed that she had been Celezon’s lover and that she had plotted against the government of St. Michel. She confessed she was in the employ of the CIA. Later, she confessed she was also a Soviet agent. She confessed all her crimes against the republic over and over. And it was never enough.

She would have done anything they told her to do; but they asked nothing of her but answers to questions that never ended.

She would plead with the man who operated the electric shock machine to let her see Colonel Ready, to plead with him; to see her brother; to see anyone who would listen to her and would understand that she did not want to hide anything, that she was willing to confess to anything.

The man who knew the machine would tell her that her brother did not want to see her. That Colonel Ready was not available. And then he would turn on the current and watch her.

There was anxiety on the island of St. Michel because of the people who disappeared. But it was suppressed.

The whores of Madeleine and St. Michel disappeared in great numbers and it was rumored that some fled to the hills to join the rebels under Celezon and that others, unlucky, were taken to the army barracks and used by the soldiers and killed. But these were only rumors, like the rumors that the army brought truckloads of the dead out into the town in the dead of night and buried them in the great excavation pit that would one day be the foundation for the Museum of National Culture.

The government of France announced a massive aid program to its former colony and a first shipment of spare parts for Renault cars on the island was made. After that, nothing more was heard from Paris.

The Soviet Union sent emissaries to the island and for a time, in St. Michel, there were seen many white men in ill-fitting heavy suits, drinking in the cafés. But after a while, they left as well and some of the cafés closed because there was no business. It was rumored in some cities—among the diplomatic elite who gathered for their dull parties now in the ballroom of the shuttered American consulate building—that Colonel Ready had offended the Havana government with some bit of trickery and that the Soviets had withdrawn offers of aid to St. Michel.

Colonel Ready said the whores of St. Michel had been arrested because they had been agents of the CIA. He explained this to a reporter from the
Miami Herald
. In time, cartoons appeared in newspapers in the United States and in Mexico that depicted the Central Intelligence Agency as a pimp.

And after a while, Colonel Ready did not speak to the press.

The archbishop of St. Michel, Simon Bouvier, said he was pleased by the morality of the regime since the attempted invasion of St. Michel. He said religion was tolerated and encouraged in St. Michel. He sent that message to the Vatican, where it was analyzed and, in time, some money was channeled into the island.

But money was the problem and the problem deepened day by day.

Colonel Ready announced through the government newspaper that the
gendarmes noirs
had been disbanded, that the reign of terror was over, that fifty-three members of the
gendarmes noirs
would be executed the following morning in the square before the cathedral.

Fifty-three men in uniforms of the dreaded black police were led into the square in the morning. In groups of five—save for the last three—they were shot to death in front of the cathedral and the crowd—a very large crowd—cheered the killings, for the black police had always been very unpopular.

That evening, as he returned to the caretaker’s house where he still lived, Colonel Ready was accosted by three snipers. He received a grazing wound on his left arm and fell. He returned the fire and his sentries, alerted by the shots coming from the edge of the woods behind the house, came to Ready’s aid.

The only survivor confessed, after particularly savage torture that night, that he had been contracted to assassinate Ready by a man in Chicago on behalf of a very highly placed man in the crime syndicate whose name he did not know. Ready killed the assassin with his own pistol. He sent the killer’s index finger by special delivery to Theodore Weisman at Captiva Island in Florida.

Theodore Weisman sent one hundred thousand dollars to a man in New York City who said he would succeed where the man in Chicago had failed. Teddy Weisman explained to Debbi—who was paid to listen to him—that he was an old man and he didn’t give a damn if it cost him a million dollars and that this was a matter of honor and that the government—his own government—had screwed him three times now and that this was the last straw and that he had never spent a night in prison and never would and that Anthony Calabrese was walking around dead and that if Debbi didn’t watch herself, she’d be turning street tricks in Detroit with Dee because Dee didn’t know when she had it good, same as Tone, who was taking up space in a junkyard on the Jersey side of New York Harbor, and that Colonel Ready was going to have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life because nobody, even the U.S. fucking government, screwed Theodore Weisman and got away with it.

Two days later, Celezon and six men entered the cells in the basement of the Palais Gris at four
A.M.
and killed all four army guards and released twenty-three prisoners crowded into six cells. The cell doors had no locks on them because there was no escape from St. Michel. Celezon found a blanket and covered Yvette Pascon with it and took her with him into the hills, where the sister of the voodoo was made welcome by the people who had gathered around the priest called Celezon.

Colonel Ready, his arm bandaged, inspected the cells after the escape. He told the army lieutenant that locks were to be placed on all the cells that day and that locks were to be placed on all the doors of the palace.

The lieutenant nervously agreed and could not explain to Colonel Ready there were not so many locks to be found on the whole island. Colonel Ready would not have been willing to listen to that.