Hemingway's Notebook (22 page)

“Sister,” Rita Macklin said.

Mary Columbo nodded, tried a quick smile, sat down in the reception room of the old convent. She had been examined in New York City by doctors who decided it was the best thing not to operate to remove the second bullet, that the second bullet was so close to the spine that there was danger of paralysis if there was a mistake. Sister Columbo said she could live with the bullet in her always threatening paralysis or death; she had lived with death a long time.

At the Aerodrome St. Michel, as they lifted her onto the stretcher to put her aboard the plane, she had turned back, like Lot’s wife. Colonel Ready was smiling at her with such sincerity and good wishes in his face that the look froze her and she could not trust a smile again. She felt isolated from the other nuns, from her own family in Queens, from everyone who wanted to help her. She had withdrawn in silence and prayer because she thought she had lost her faith at last, after all the madness of the world she had seen, after betrayals, deceits, and smiles of perfect insincerity and promises made of lies. Colonel Ready had said that all the killing was necessary to rescue her. She had said that killing was never necessary, that she had not been threatened by Manet, that she had spoken to a New York reporter.…

Colonel Ready had explained to her as she lay in the tent, in the middle of that camp of death, the sounds of dying still in her ears. The man she had spoken to was an American spy and he had been part of the network that had supported Manet. His name was Devereaux, said Colonel Ready, and he was dead and when the colonel so easily showed her how foolish she had been, she had pretended to believe him. She had thought if she did not believe him, he might have killed her and thrown her body among the dead strewn in that butcher’s yard in the hills of St. Michel.

She wanted to live that much. She felt ashamed. She was lifted into the airplane on that afternoon and looked back on St. Michel and knew she would never see the world the same again. She had repeated history for the press in St. Michel as Colonel Ready had told her.

She had wanted to live that much.

Rita Macklin, pale and thinner than she had been three weeks before, said, “I appreciate your seeing me.”

“You said you had been on St. Michel, but I remember all the American reporters. I mean—”

“I was there before. When you were ambushed—”

Sister Mary Columbo stared at her. “You said in your telephone call you knew my cousin. I didn’t know Anthony had been on St. Michel, I didn’t know any of this.”

“Sister,” said Rita Macklin. It was difficult. She had to be used and it was difficult for Rita because she saw the logic of what Devereaux told her but when she saw the woman, her white face and the pain wrinkles around her eyes, she almost could not continue with it.

“What you told the reporters at the airport. It wasn’t true. I think you know it wasn’t true.”

The nun stared at her a long time without speaking. Then she got up and folded her hands into her habit. She wore the oldest uniform of the order now, the heavy robes that fell in woolen folds to the floor, the starched bib, the heavy veil. She sought to diminish herself, in robe and silence, to retreat to a dark corner of herself and wait for faith to return.

“I have to leave now,” she said.

“Anthony,” Rita said quickly and her voice was harder now. She was pushing and the instinct was natural to the part of her that was a reporter. “Anthony Calabrese wanted to come to see you and he would have told you to tell me the truth. But he can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re watching this place. They want to kill him.”

She stared at Rita Macklin’s green eyes and red hair cut severely short, at the pale skin and thin cheeks. “Who are you?”

“I started to tell you,” Rita said.

“Let’s walk in the garden.”

It was October and Rhode Island was closed for the winter. The grass around the convent outside of Providence was dead and brown. The trees were bare. The oaks scrawled crooked branches against the puffy white sky crowded with too many clouds.

They walked down brick paths that wound through bushes that looked like piles of stick kindling.

“What about Anthony? I didn’t know about any of this.”

“Anthony Calabrese was a government agent,” Rita Macklin began. She would not tell her about Anthony’s involvement in the Mafia before that.

“He was on St. Michel, he knew that you were there. He told me you were the only story worth writing about on St. Michel. We met the day you went to Madeleine. The day you said you were ambushed.”

“Yes.”

“Who ambushed you in the Jeep?”

The nun stared ahead of her, seeing not the path but the bareness of nature all around her. “I don’t know. It happened so quickly. And slowly at the same time, I remember that I thought I was all right, I kept saying that I was all right, and I saw Agnes next to me, her head…”

“But did Manet—”

“No. He didn’t do it. I don’t believe he did it.”

“There,” said Rita Macklin.

The nun stopped, stared. She saw the same man beyond the iron fence, standing in an alcove of a building. She realized she had seen the man before in different places around the convent but never paid attention to him.

“Why does he want to kill Anthony? Why can’t the government protect him?”

“He’s from Colonel Ready,” Rita said, dropping her words like stones into a silent lake of lies. They made ripples on the smooth water and the ripples touched each other. “Colonel Ready has men here. He wants to kill Anthony. That’s why I came to see you. Anthony is waiting.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can prove it. He’s waiting on Broad Street. Around the corner. In the McDonald’s.”

“Who are you?”

“I escaped from St. Michel. I was a reporter. I was his prisoner. I saw what had happened there.”

“What did you see?”

“Everything. You have to speak up. To me. The church is being blinded by the archbishop of St. Michel. He tells them all is well. He paints a picture for Rome that’s not true.”

“And I should tell the truth?” The nun smiled then.

“I was on St. Michel and when he made me a prisoner, he beat me. Had me beaten. In the cells. He raped me.”

Sister Mary Columbo put her fist to her mouth then and bit her knuckle and stared at the thin woman and believed her. “Why should I tell?”

“Because Colonel Ready is taking the church funds going into St. Michel.”

“Is that true?”

“What happened in Ethiopia? The food and money came in and the government used it to wipe out its enemies. He’s doing the same thing. He ambushed you, his men did, and you know that.”

“I don’t know.”

“At least you know it was not Manet.”

“It doesn’t matter for Manet. He’s dead.”

“But those people in the hills aren’t dead.” Rita stared at her with bright burning eyes. “He is evil. That’s important to you still, isn’t it? Colonel Ready is evil and all the evil in St. Michel is tied to him like a bell on a cat.”

“I didn’t tell the story because it was a condition to get out alive. Colonel Ready has a long reach. As you said, the man across the street.”

“Who wants to kill Anthony. Or kill you.”

“And you think this will carry weight. What I have to say? With the church?” She smiled at Rita. “You’re not a Catholic.”

“I am,” Rita said. “I know what you mean.”

“Archbishop Bouvier tolerated us in St. Michel. Radical nuns. Giving out rosaries and penicillin. As long as we didn’t bother him or interrupt his meals, he didn’t care.”

“I want you to tell me the truth. And I will write the story.”

“And we’ll both be threatened,” said Sister Mary Columbo. “By Colonel Ready.”

“Yes.”

“It won’t make any difference. In Rome, I mean. Nuns do not have a voice loud enough to stand against a bishop’s whisper.”

Rita smiled. “You’re a poet.”

“A realist,” said Sister Mary Columbo. “I’ll go with you to see Anthony. It’s chilly, isn’t it? Can I get my shawl?”

“Yes.”

Sister Mary Columbo touched her arm. “Are you married, Rita?”

“I have someone.”

“That’s good. He knows about…”

“Yes.”

“You told me and that is such a terrible thing to tell—”

Rita stared at the face of the woman and saw her clearly and saw that she had been a nurse in war as Anthony had said and that she had survived all of life’s horrors and that she was still not so scarred that she could not be hurt or that she could not comfort another person. Rita smiled at her, sadly.

“It’s all right then,” said Sister Mary Columbo. “I suppose I can be brave as well.”

They were inside the McDonald’s on Broad Street in the southern part of the city. They were talking animatedly. They had been inside for nearly an hour.

The man with the nine-millimeter Beretta automatic shoved in the pocket of his coat waited impassively across the street for them. His name was Costello; he had followed the nun and the other woman to the McDonald’s. Bingo. Anthony Calabrese was inside.

He could have walked in and finished them but it might have been dirty. He had a compunction about shooting nuns. Women, for that matter.

He waited in the doorway of a jewelry store.

He didn’t see the police car until it was at the curb in front of him and then he didn’t know what it meant. The two men in blue uniforms got out of the car in a funny way.

As though they were being careful.

Costello stared at them as though he were looking right through them.

“Hey,” said the second one. He had the police-car door open and seemed to be using it as a shield. His holster was unsnapped and the gunmetal gleamed in the bright overcast light. “You want to come over here a minute.”

Costello stared at him and then shrugged. He walked across the sidewalk to the policeman and stood five feet away.

The first one put a pistol in his hand and laid his hand on the hood of the squad car.

“You want to tell us your name?”

“I’m waiting for someone.”

“We got a report of a man with a gun in the entrance of the jewelry store.”

“We got a call that someone was casing a jewelry store.”

“You got a gun,” said the first one.

“I got no gun.”

“Pat him down, Frank.”

Costello took a step back.

The first one raised his pistol in one motion. “That’s it. Hands against the car.”

“Jesus, you guys are getting excited—” said Costello in a rising voice. He looked across the street. The three of them, they were getting up, they were moving toward the door.…

“He’s got a piece, he’s got a piece,” said the second one when he felt it and the first one put the pistol right next to Costello’s head and held it there. And Costello saw them walking out of the restaurant across the street and the nun was turning to go away and Anthony was looking right at him with the woman.

Anthony was smiling right at him.

The Central Intelligence Agency—through its headquarters, its case officers in the field, stringers in foreign countries who submit quarterly expense accounts—subscribes to nearly every magazine sold in the world.

But not every article in every magazine is read. The gathering of intelligence through intelligent reading is still a haphazard business. Machines cannot read and cannot analyze what they read.

Which is why the item that appeared on page fifty-one of that week’s
Publishers Weekly
magazine might not have been noted.

The item was a paid advertisement by a publishing company that the Langley Firm knew well. The item had puzzled the reader who had passed it up through the ranks of the bureaucracy until it was finally analyzed at the fourth level and flagged and bucked to the Committee of Nineteen at the second level.

“But what on earth does it mean?” said the sixth assistant director of intelligence, who was chairing the meeting on that October afternoon.

“It means there’s a spy novel to be published in the spring,” said the assistant traffic manager, who had routed the advertisement through computer analysis, records, and interagency security before presenting it to his boss, who, in turn, presented it up the ladder of the organization chart. The assistant traffic manager liked to state the obvious at first, to get everyone’s agreement so that what he said next would not sound as bizarre.

The sixth assistant director waited and made a tent of his fingers in an attitude of prayer. He closed his eyes.

The other people in meeting room L stared at the speaker.

“David Zeno is a nonstarter,” the speaker continued. “But the name of the hero of the new series is Harry Francis. Harry Francis is an agent. Was an agent.”

“Harry Francis,” said the sixth assistant director. “But what is this all about?”

“Harry Francis retired six years ago. He’s living in St. Michel in the Caribbean. We’ve kept tabs on him, of course, all the retired agents. But he’s alive and well at last report. He used to write books for us. Commercial. Spy novels. And he wrote the guerrilla manual that was published last year. You know the one.”

Everyone knew the one. The one that had embarrassed the president during the campaign.

“Freelance. He did freelance for us. But he didn’t work for us anymore,” said the traffic manager.

“Did he submit this book?”

“Sir, you don’t understand. He’s not writing this book. A man named David Zeno is writing the book.”

“What’s the book about?”

“Fiction, sir. A spy novel. A new series, it said, set in the Caribbean involving a ‘hard-drinking, hard-hitting CIA agent’ who—”

“But that was Harry Francis, wasn’t it?”

“Sir?”

“I mean, that describes Harry Francis, doesn’t it?”

“Sir, his two-o-one file indicates Francis had an alcohol-related problem in—”

“Damn it, I don’t care about that, I want to know what this book is about.”

“We made inquiries. The publisher wasn’t very cooperative. They’ve handled sensitive material before.”

“From us?”

“And others. The agent was Henry Kaufberger.”

“And what does that mean?”

“We’ve used Henry. From time to time. Over the past twenty years. Harry would have known about him. He said he received the proposal from David Zeno in St. Michel. He told us he never met him. We tried to explain this might be sensitive—”

“Don’t even breathe near St. Michel,” said the sixth assistant. “Don’t light a cigarette and don’t make sparks. St. Michel is explosive.”

“Sir, the book is fiction and the advance paid was one hundred thousand dollars.”

“That’s absurd,” said the sixth assistant who made $31,983.14 a year.

“Yes, sir,” said the traffic manager, who was waiting to continue.

“Go ahead.”

“The book is called
The Hemingway Assignment
.”

“My God,” said the sixth assistant director, who had read the files on Harry Francis before the meeting. Including the file labeled
Ultra
. “My God.”

“The novel, according to the agent, is set in Cuba at the time Castro took over and it’s about Ernest Hemingway and—Hemingway was a writer, sir, in that time—and this Hemingway—actually, Hemingway actually existed but this is a novel—and…”