Hemingway's Notebook (24 page)

Harry Francis had waited in the darkness. He had killed the Cuban emissary. He had cut his head off, and had put it on the gate of the Palais Gris and then gone to the caretaker’s house where Devereaux had been waiting for Colonel Ready.

There was no escape for Colonel Ready. It was what everything had been about, the preparations, the meeting with Hanley. The publisher told the agent he thought the book about Hemingway might do well; it didn’t matter to Harry. He had written the truth for a change and it had freed him and he did not care.

The black boat waited a half mile off the shore. Their motorized dinghy was a hundred yards offshore, in three feet of water. They ran down to the beach and crossed it to the water.

Devereaux stopped and turned and looked at the boy standing by the Café de la Paix.

Philippe stared at him a moment and then began to run. He ran across the midnight road to the beach and stopped a little apart from him.

Harry was in the water. Harry turned and scowled. His trousers were bloody.

“Come on,” he said.

“Your father,” Devereaux said in careful French.

“He is disappeared. He is dead. All of them disappeared.”

“Your mother then.”

“None. It’s all right then?”

“Yes,” Devereaux said.

“Jesus Christ, stay there, Philippe,” Harry shouted to the child. “Jesus, we can’t take him. What about Flaubert?”

Devereaux said, “Come on.”

The boy and the man ran into the shallow water and the boy cut his feet on a piece of coral but did not feel the cut.

They waded out to the dinghy and Harry shouted in a hoarse voice, “He’s lying, he’s got people here, he just wants to get away from St. Michel.”

“Like you, Harry,” said Devereaux.

“Damn it, what are you gonna do with a half-black orphan with blue eyes?”

“He loved you, Harry,” Devereaux said. “He wanted to protect you. He worried about you when they took you to jail.”

“I don’t mean that,” Harry said. He looked at the boy and the boy stared at him as though he understood all the English words. “You can’t save the world. Give him some money and tell him to go back.”

“Shut up, Harry,” Devereaux said. He lifted Philippe up into the dinghy and he climbed in and Harry started the motor and the dinghy bucked in the shallow waters toward the
Compass Rose
. There were no storms this evening. The sky was clear. The moon was full and the island of St. Michel looked quite lovely from the water, the way such islands always appear in the expensive brochures given to people who wish to vacation in a warm climate in the middle of a warm sea.

“This is a very colorful family,” Rita Macklin said.

Devereaux smiled. They were on the ferry from Evian to Ouchy across Lac Leman which is also called Lake Geneva. They were on the ferry because it was Sunday and Philippe did not attend private school. It was cold but the ferry to Evian ran across the lake all winter. They had gone to Evian to eat and to look in the shops.

Philippe, who wished to be a sailor, stood on the open deck in his pea coat with his face square to the cold, wet wind. His blue eyes were full of tears because of the wind. He looked very exotic with his dark face and blue eyes and the burghers of Lausanne would stop and examine this strange
famille
as they walked through the narrow streets near the cathedral: a man with weathered face and gray hair and a woman with green eyes and red hair and a smile and a strange black child with skin like burnished wood.

KGB had let out the wet contract again. On November. On the man who was November, who always had been November. Two Turkish killers, hired by the Bulgarian Secret Police, were in Western Europe now, on the trail of November, a man with red hair and a white scar on his face. A man who walked with a cane and a limp, very stiffly and very painfully.

He will leave footprints now.

Anthony Calabrese, who testified wearing a hood as a government agent and informer against Theodore Weisman, was pleased with his new appearance, though he thought he still looked too Sicilian and not Swedish enough.

Sister Mary Columbo had left the order and she was back in St. Michel now, in the hills, a nurse among poor people and she wondered if she was doing any good at all. She had all her doubts and all her prayers and she had taken both burdens with her.

The hell of St. Michel remained.

Celezon had entered the capital after a fierce battle. He had killed many of his enemies, in battle and in execution after. He and Yvette Pascon ruled, there was no doubt of that, and no doubt that the new and ruthless regime would be as bad as all the other regimes had been. Claude-Eduard was executed. A number of soldiers were marched into the square in front of the cathedral and a large crowd gathered to watch the
gendarmes noirs
kill them, five at a time.

There was a promise of aid from Cuba as well as from the U.S. Department of State.

When they made love now, it was different than it had been before, because the rape had changed everything. But it was still all right between them. Perhaps it was better than it had been before. She had no reserve from him now and he had none from her. They had been together in this thing and they shared more than secrets now or their bodies or their words for each other. She never bought him a ring again and he never gave her a ring. They didn’t want to have anything that would remind the other of loss. A ring is only a reminder of everything that can be lost.

Rita stepped from the ferry at Ouchy and the boy came after with Devereaux. They showed their American passports and the man at the control, who knew them, nodded and smiled and said the boy looked more and more like a sailor. It was patronizing in the way of old men speaking of young boys and it was meant kindly.

They passed through the controls and into the building and out of it again onto the dock.

Rita stood still and when Devereaux came next to her, they saw him.

“Did you think this would happen?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why didn’t you tell me.”

“It was the last way of escape. I closed it the night I talked to Hanley. Governments can do things. He talked to the Swiss and they froze the accounts. The money will be recovered for the Section in time. In any case, there’s no money left for him.”

Behind them, on the smoking waters of the long cold lake, the ferry signaled once in the clear, November air. The horn blast was loud and bleak and long. The ferry began to churn the waters again and pull away from the dock.

“You made him come to us.”

“Yes.”

“You hate him more than I did.”

“Yes.”

She stared at the gray face, at the patient, waiting eyes. “I’ll take Philippe,” she said.

“Yes. Take the metro. I’ll be along in a little while, back at the apartment.”

“Sir—”

“Take Rita to the metro, Philippe. Go ahead. He doesn’t mean anything anymore. He won’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“Kill him,” said Philippe.

Devereaux looked at him. “No. There’s no one left to kill.”

“He killed my father,” said Philippe.

“He’s nothing, Philippe. Only a ghost. In a little while, even the ghost will be gone.”

And Philippe and Rita walked across the plaza to the park where the grass was frozen and brown. They hurried past the castle and past the Italian restaurant next to the metro entrance. They paid inside the entrance and took the funicular, which rises five stations to the place on the Avenue de la Gare where there is an American hamburger stand. Where Colonel Ready had waited for Devereaux nearly three months before.

Devereaux stared at the ghost before him.

Colonel Ready limped across the square in front of the château. He looked very pale and his red hair was streaked with gray now. There were wrinkles of pain at the corners of his cold blue eyes and they were deepened with each step he took. He did not smile; he never smiled now; there was too much pain.

He removed the Credit Suisse passbook from his pocket and waved it.

“All the money. I can’t get my money.”

“Yes.”

“You robbed me.”

“It’s all there, Ready. You just can’t get it.”

“How could you do all this?”

“I had the time to think about it.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“I’m going to kill you then and kill your whore and the nigger kid.”

“No,” said Devereaux. “The Swiss would put you in one of their prisons. They are tolerant but very tough and they would put you in prison for the rest of your life. A kid in Zurich, I think it was, he got two years in prison for spraying graffiti on buildings. The prisons aren’t very pleasant.”

“I could kill you. I can run.”

“You are running, November,” said Devereaux. “There are two Turks right now who have been hanging around the café over there for a week. You were seen in Geneva. They thought you might be coming up here. They were probably told about a man with a white scar and red hair who tried to take money out of an account in the Credit Suisse.”

“You son-of-a-bitch.”

“I think those are the Turks. Over there. Having coffee in the window. Watching us. Watching you. The Bulgarians do the dirty work for KGB. They tried to get you in Paris, didn’t they?”

“Damn it, man.”

“They won’t kill you in Switzerland unless they have to. I think you should take the metro up, get on a train, get out of the country. Go down to Italy. It’s warmer there.”

“I don’t have anything.”

“We were just in France.” He reached into his pocket and took out a hundred-franc note from the wad and looked at it. He extended it. “The franc isn’t worth what it used to be but it might be enough for a meal.”

Colonel Ready reached into his pocket and Devereaux had the small PPK in his large hand. Devereaux stared at him.

“Shoot me,” Ready said.

“Go away. Go kill yourself if you have the guts for it but I’m not going to do it. Go away, colonel. And don’t come back to Lausanne. There’s no money left for you and they know you’re here. Look, they’re getting up from the table now.”

He turned and saw it was true.

“Bastard,” said Colonel Ready and he was limping away, half running, across the square to the metro station, looking behind him and fishing for a coin in his pocket.

The two men who resembled Turks went out of the restaurant. One stared at Devereaux for a moment and then shrugged to the other. They got in the rental car and drove around the château and saw Ready limp into the entrance. The one in the passenger seat got out. He ran across the street and got on the train before the doors of the funicular closed and the gates were shut.

That night, Rita said to him, “It will be all right now. Everything.” But it was really a question.

He had climbed into the soft bed next to her. The night was full of silence. The windows were open slightly and the cool mountain air shivered into the room but they slept naked beneath the down covers.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s all done now.”

“Will they kill him?”

“I think they’ll get him this winter. He’s good, but it’s a very open trail.”

“We killed him.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I never thought I could hate that well.”

“Yes,” he said because he did not want to talk to her about it.

“November,” she said.

“It’s the thirtieth,” he said.

“The last of November. ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November.’ ”

His eyes were open and he stared at the ceiling in the darkness and smelled the clear gentle breeze that came into the room from the mountains. “Yes. That’s all of it,” he said.

“You’re sure,” she said.

It was still a question.

He didn’t want to answer. He closed his eyes.

“You’re sure.”

He felt the curve of her lean thigh against his. He felt her hairless thigh against his leg and felt the warmth of her body coming next to him.

“Maybe I should close the window,” he said.

“No. I can warm you,” she said.

It was going to be all right. But they did not make love as they had intended. They held each other like exhausted survivors and they fell asleep in each other’s arms and they slept, matching breath for breath, their bodies warming each other beneath the thick, light down.

A clock tolled exactly at twelve because all the clocks in Switzerland are very precise. And that was the last of November.

An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the
Chicago Tribune
, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the
Chicago Sun-Times
, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for
Newsday
—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to
Time
, the
New Republic
, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.

He began his literary career in 1979 with
Code Name November
(originally published as
The November Man
), the book that became an international sensation and introduced the cool American spy who later gave rise to a whole series. His second novel,
Public Murders
, a Chicago police procedural, won the Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1981.

In all, Bill Granger published twenty-two novels, including thirteen in the November Man series, and three nonfiction books. In 1980, he began weekly columns in the
Chicago Tribune
on everyday life (he was voted best Illinois columnist by UPI), which were collected in the book
Chicago Pieces
. His books have been translated into ten languages.

Bill Granger passed away in 2012.