Hemingway's Notebook (16 page)

Sister Mary Columbo heard the first firing dimly.

She had been asleep on the cot in the tent in Manet’s camp.

She was stronger each hour but the pain held her down. She wondered if the
New York Times
reporter had gotten her story out. It had been raining all night and all day and now it was nearly night again and the rain thudded dully against the canvas of the tent. The tent was soaked with humidity; her face was wet. She opened her eyes when she heard the little pops that were the rain-muted sound of guns.

The sound came very clearly through the clatter of rain and the thudding of wind on the tent sides.

It was the sound of battle joined. The grace of time had never let her forget those things.

The automatic weapons made lines of fire across the camp. The tracers on the bullet tips—to guide the field of fire—raced across the camp yard and defined the perimeters of death.

The bullets scarcely made a sound when they thumped into a body. There were some cries of men and women in the camp but they were muted by the drumbeat of rain.

Sister Mary Columbo crawled off the cot and pulled on a rain poncho and rolled under the cot. A moment later, bullets ripped into the tent canvas where she had lain. For a long time, she lay still and listened to cries and screams. Then she crawled to the tent flap and looked out.

Flares sputtered in the rain. Flares filled the open, mourning sky above the camp. The white flares in the sky caught Manet’s men in freeze frames. She remembered the deer in Pennsylvania; she had driven through the hills and the deer stood at the side of the turnpike, confused by the rows of headlights marching in the darkness.

Grenades shook the ground.

The tracer patterns danced across the ground. Burst by burst, the machine guns defined the ground. Muted by rain and the weight of the storm, the bullets sounded damp, like firecrackers set off by little boys on the Fourth of July when it is raining.

There were kerosene lanterns in the camp but the flares reduced everything in the darkness to whiteness. As the flares would die, one after the other, and fall in the night sky, the darkness would resume the ground, glowing red in the light of the lanterns.

Gautier and his first wave pushed into the center of the camp like the prow of a liner poking into a hostile sea. They shot at everything around them. Manet’s men were frenzied by terror. One threw down his rifle in front of Gautier and Gautier shot his face off.

Everyone shot in madness. They shot at cases of food and at men already torn apart by grenades. They shot at the women huddled at the mouth of the empty bauxite mine.

After Collier had ordered him to trap Manet, Gautier had not waited for his second assault wave, but had moved quickly from Madeleine into the hills. He planned to kill everyone and then to move on to St. Michel tonight and finish the job. Before dawn, St. Michel would be recovered.

The M-17 in Gautier’s hands shook as he drew it slowly, like a child drawing a careful line, across the field of fire, back and forth, so that the bullets did not bunch into a single target but had the effect of making the weapon seem more formidable than it was.

Gautier saw Manet, whom he had known for twenty years. He shot Manet in the belly and Manet said something to him that might have been a word or only a scream. He shot him again.

Then Gautier saw one of his men fall forward next to him. His back was pitted with bullet holes. Gautier stared at him, confused, because the man had been at the edge of the camp, and there was nothing behind him but the trees that encircled the camp. Gautier turned toward the trees and saw soldiers coming toward him.

Sister Mary Columbo, on the muddy ground at the mouth of her tent, saw the soldiers also. Neither she nor Gautier understood; the soldiers comprised the army of St. Michel.

The army surrounded the camp, Manet’s rebels, and Gautier’s freedom fighters. There were two hundred men wearing rain-soaked red berets. They were stationed behind every tree and rock at the camp’s perimeter. When Ready gave the order the slaughter began.

The big machine guns, mounted on tripods, were set at four places around the camp. Two men operated each of them. The machine guns were fed by the loaders, and the gunners simply plowed the field of fire, defined by the tracer tip on every tenth bullet. So far to the right, so far to the left. The machine gunners did not need to see what they hit; they only needed to see the field of fire at the perimeters defined by the tracers.

Each machine gun had so many square meters of ground to cover and everything in that area was to be destroyed. It made death simple.

It was the way theory had been taught before Vietnam changed everything and before guerrilla warfare suggested that death might become an individual business. The theory was the same followed by air force planes on pattern-bombing runs. Define the bomb run north and south, then circle and turn and come east to west, making a cross of death on the ground below.

When one machine gun reached the far point of the pivot, the gunner brought the barrel slowly back on the pivot pin to the second point and then back again, always slowly, like a plow turning the earth. The bullets cut down the stalks of men and plowed the ground.

There were nearly four hundred men and women in the middle of the camp. They ran to the edge of the woods to find escape; they screamed and were cut down. They hid behind tents and boxes and were cut down.

Sister Mary Columbo stared at the horror and waited to be killed. She wanted to be killed, she told God.

Another flare burned white above the camp and then another. Everything was burning. Behind a pile of dead bodies, other men—still alive—were shooting back in the darkness. The machine guns plowed the bodies of the dead and killed the living behind them. Splintering bone and tearing flesh, blinding and gouging, hacking at limbs already stiffened in attitudes of death.

The guns became too hot to fire and the gunners burned their fingers on the metal. Some wrapped their hands with damp cloths to keep firing.

At the end, all the firing ceased. In the lights of the fires, of the lanterns, of the flares were reflected the mad eyes of the soldiers. There was an excitement to making death that is slow to cool in some men. It never cools for many because it is a pleasure they can experience no other place. They go from war to war to go from death to death, to experience the pleasures of it all.

Colonel Ready, who stood at the edge of the camp now in the silence of after battle, was one of them.

He said, in a clear, soft voice: “Cease fire.”

But when some of the men kept shooting into the camp, into the bodies of the dead, he said nothing.

His grin was quite fantastic now in the red glow of the kerosene lanterns and the flares and in the red glow of the burning tents. It was raining as before but the explosions of the night had deafened all to the sound of the rain. He did not feel the warm rain on his face. His face was as open as the door of a furnace. His scar was white as molten metal.

The lust was on him. It had warmed him from the moment he had received the signal from Anthony Calabrese that the invasion force was timed for noon. Although Teddy Weisman thought he was using him, Calabrese worked for Ready. Just as Frank Collier and CIA thought they were setting him up. Just as Celezon thought he had his secret police. Just as Devereaux thought he would trap him. Just as they all used him and ended up being used by him.

Now everything would be made clear. Colonel Ready smiled and looked up at the rain and opened his mouth and let the rain fall down his throat. He felt sated by the stillness of the camp in death and uplifted by the smell of blood on the breath of the suffocating rain. The lust had filled him all morning and into the afternoon, anticipating all this killing.

The lust had been on him when he raped Rita Macklin and the pleasure of it was beyond description.

Harry Francis said, “When I was with Papa in Cuba, he organized games. They were mock wars. He took some of the children along with some of us who hung around with him and he made armies. He led the children across the estates and threw stink bombs to ruin the patio parties of all the rich people because that is what it was like in Cuba in those days. He gave the kids firecrackers. Everyone had a good time.”

“That sounds silly,” Devereaux said.

They stood in the darkness at the perimeter outside the Palais Gris, on the edge of Rue Sans Souci. The street ran down the gentle hill to the darkened city. The rain fell in blackness. They were both soaked. Devereaux had a weapon from Flaubert. It was a little knife with a hook at the end of the blade that was used to scrape the guts out of fish.

“It wasn’t any more childish than this. Than real wars. Except nobody gets hurt.”

“Everybody gets hurt all the time.”

“That notebook was my life and you don’t even understand that.”

“Tell me when we get out of here.”

“It doesn’t matter, the notebook will still be here. He might use it a little but he could use it a lot more with me. And it guaranteed my life.”

“Shut up, Harry, there’s one of them coming.”

The
gendarme noir
came to the edge of the fence and looked down at the town. He was tall and thin in his large shirt and he carried his submachine gun strapped to his shoulder. He looked sad in the rain because rain dripped from the edge of his nose, as though he had a cold. Devereaux reached for his forehead in the darkness in one movement and pulled his head back and cut the young man’s throat as he fell on his back. He did not make a sound. Devereaux slipped the sling of the submachine gun off the thin shoulder of the dead guard and checked the action.

“One down, fifty to go.”

“They won’t all be here.”

“Where are they?”

“Killing people in the hills.” Devereaux understood everything, even understood how his plan might have worked, but he did not understand about the notebook. Hemingway’s notebook. It was all tied in to Harry and Harry kept making it more mysterious, as though he was slipping in and out of a lie. Was Harry the author of the notebook? Was that the reason he had called it Hemingway’s book? But the pages were old; he had had the book for a long time. Harry wouldn’t have kept his memoirs written down for so long, kept them so close to him so that they might have been discovered.

“You’re going to tell me about the book when we get out of here,” Devereaux said.

“Is that the price?”

“Yes. That’s the price, Harry. And you’ll pay.”

“Ready couldn’t get me in six years.”

“But Ready has the notebook now. And I’m not him.”

“You look like him. Vaguely.”

“No,” said Devereaux. “You’re not Hemingway and I’m not Ready and there aren’t any charades played anymore. Not anywhere. You will tell me everything and I’ll help you get off this island, and then you can live and that’s all you get in the bargain.”

They spoke and then ran across the dark ground to the edge of the palace. Devereaux carried the M-17 in his right hand, his fingers and palm around the stock in front of the trigger guard where there was balance in the piece.

Harry ran his fingers along the wall and found the place where the cable ran down from the generator outside the gate. He nodded to Devereaux and cut the negative ground on the electrical line and held it in his bare hand in the darkness and stared at the luminous dial of his old Seiko and waited.

They had fifty seconds.

Devereaux sprinted into the shadows along the palace wall to the door to the cells. The submachine gun was on automatic fire and was cocked. He waited, he had no watch, everything had been stripped from him when the guerrillas dumped him in the grave. He watched the lights of the windows above the courtyard.

Fifty seconds.

Harry crossed the negative lead to the generator and touched it and the lights of the Palais Gris blew out with a pop that shattered some bulbs in the chandeliers.

Devereaux kicked open the unlocked door to the cells and fired into the darkness. He followed the shots into the room and pushed his back against the damp wall and waited for the reverberations to cease. He could see nothing. He heard cries in the darkness and other sounds coming from the back where Harry said the cells were located.

Then Harry Francis was beside him in the doorway, illuminated by a stroke of lightning. They saw each other at the same time they saw the
gendarmes noirs
in the interior door. Devereaux fired six quick shots and the bodies of the policemen were jammed in the door.

Harry breathed hard next to him.

“Get their pieces.”

In the next room a policeman lit a kerosene lantern and bathed himself in the soft yellow light. Harry threw the knife. It thudded into the chest of the policeman and he fell across the threshold to a third room. The light still flickered.

“There,” said Harry and he nodded to the door of the third room, a room Harry knew had a tile floor and walls.

Devereaux pushed the door open. It frightened him that it was unlocked. Harry had said they did not need locks in the cells of St. Michel. There was no escape from the cells except by dying.

She was on the floor, huddled in a blanket, staring at the door with dull, dead eyes. The cell was damp. Her hair lay wet on her head. Her eyes were dead.

And then he saw how she had been beaten and that her green eyes were blackened and her cheeks were bruised and her mouth was swollen and cut. There were marks on her arms and purple blotches on her body.

“Rita,” he said, as though he were breaking a beautiful fragile dish in a large, silent room.

She stared at him and did not move.

“Come on, Rita.”

“No,” she said. “You died. You’re too late. You’re dead.”

“Rita.”

“No,” she said. She once had dreamed of her brother in Vietnam and spoken to him like this. Just as she spoke to this dream.

He took her hands and pulled her to her feet.

“He said you were dead,” she said. “I told you. I told you to kill him.”

“I should have killed him.”

“I told you.” She was crying suddenly, as though she had found tears. Her voice changed in that moment. “I told you to kill him and you let him live.”