Hemingway's Notebook (8 page)

Philippe came close. He stood near Devereaux, who was crouched on the ground. Philippe was overcome by curiosity. He came and looked at the photograph. He said, “This man looks like Harry but it is not him.”

“No,” Devereaux said.

“Who is this man?”

“A writer named Ernest Hemingway.”

“Harry told me about Ernest many times. He said I would like this man, he was a man who knew many children.”

“And this man is Harry when he was young.”

They both saw it. They stared at the young man, thinner, wearing a black mustache, taller than Hemingway, also clad in shorts. The two men standing on a dock somewhere. Perhaps in Cuba, when Harry had worked for the Langley Agency there. The writer and the spy.

Carefully, he put down the photograph on the grass and he picked up the notebook.

It was bound in good calfskin leather. The thin pages were yellowed by the years.

“That is Harry’s book.”

“You know about that.”

“Everyone has heard of Harry’s book. It is magic. But no one has ever seen it. The
gendarmes noirs
came here many times and they never found the book. And that is the book and you have found it.” Philippe was impressed.

Devereaux opened the book and he saw the first page covered with numbers in rows. The numbers were grouped in sets of five. A simple number code. Row after row of numbers. The kind of numbers sent in simple ciphers before the war, before the invention of machines that could invent random codes that could not be broken without another receiving machine.

He turned the pages, kneeling on the grass.

Thirty pages were filled in a methodical way with the numbers, each neatly copied, each set of five followed by a precise space that led to a second set of five.

There could not have been a notebook; Devereaux had thought the notebook was a ruse from the beginning, a fabrication created by Harry or by Ready to use against Devereaux. Devereaux had realized sitting in the café in Evian that Ready meant to kill him and he had not understood why he had not killed him then and there. Why lure him and Rita to this island with an elaborate explanation about Harry Francis and his secrets and about spies and about “operations” about to commence. No one cared about St. Michel.

Except there was a notebook in code and it changed the rules of the game and changed all of Devereaux’s expectations.

The damned thing should not have existed.

“What will you do, monsieur?”

“I don’t know.”

“You will take the book that everyone speaks about.”

“Yes.”

“It belongs to Harry.”

“I’ll give it back to Harry. When he is released. From jail.”

“What if they beat him again as they did before and this time he tells them where the notebook is and it is not here when they come for it? They might kill him.”

“Did he tell you they beat him?”

“Yes. Twice. He showed me the marks.”

Then that part of it was true as well. Ready really had wanted the book, really believed in it. And he had power over Harry Francis but only up to a point. If he didn’t have the notebook, he had to be careful with Harry.

“I could tell them you found the book,” said Philippe and then he was afraid because of what he had said.

Devereaux stared at him a moment, the eyes going cold and dead. “Yes.” And then the color changed in his eyes, as though he had decided something.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell them if you want. They might kill him in that case. But you can tell them.”

“You are not afraid?”

“No,” Devereaux said and it was a lie.

“What is the book? What are those numbers?”

“I don’t know.”

“Harry said once they were looking for the wrong book.” Philippe blurted this out because this man impressed him. This man was not afraid. Even Philippe’s own father, Flaubert, was afraid. But this man did not talk too much as Harry did and even though Harry was white, he was afraid of the
gendarmes noirs.

“There’s another book?”

The boy stood unblinking but a little space away from Devereaux. “He said this and laughed. He pointed to his head. That’s all he said. I said there was no book. He laughed at me and said there was a book but they were all looking for the wrong book. The one that counted was the one that was hidden in plain sight. I did not understand him. He said this in French to me very clearly but I did not understand him.”

Simon Bouvier, the archbishop of St. Michel, felt his stomach growl in protest because the morning had not been full of food. He ignored it for once. He blessed the crowd first with holy water so vigorously that a few droplets clung to the face of the president who stood in the front row at the foot of the steps of the cathedral. And then he raised his right hand again to make the sign of the cross over the multitude. His stomach rumbled and even the president heard it.

The square in front of the white adobe cathedral was filled. All in the square blessed themselves, even the people who had come down from the hills and who bore marks of the voodoo on their bodies. All blessed themselves except two of the American reporters who had flown in from Miami and the reporter from the newspaper in Havana. The Cuban reporter explained to everyone, over and over again, that he was an atheist.

The people had been brought in from far neighborhoods of the capital city as well as from the junkyard-strewn suburbs that led into the hills above the squat roofs of the town. The
gendarmes noirs
had gone out very early in the morning, when there was still fog clinging to the damp coastline and the town, to find enough people to fill the square. They had brought them down in flatbed trucks. The trucks growled through the ghostly, foggy streets for hours, bringing down people and going back empty to find more. Some of the people even came on their own, like the people from the hills. It was a national holiday to mark the independence of St. Michel.

In the center of the square was an obelisk of granite erected in 1919 in memory of the men of St. Michel who had volunteered to fight with the French in the first European war. None of them had ever returned, though not all had died. There were twelve names on the obelisk and some said that at least three of the names were fictitious. But the war was lost in a long ago memory and no one cared that some of the names might not be real.

The square and the memorial were the sites of all official celebrations on the island. The flag of St. Michel, adopted from the French tricolor, was red, white, and blue, but superimposed on the white third was a round orange disk that represented the sun.

The cathedral was Norman with two towers, one of which was finished with a pointed roof, the other of which was flat. Bells in the tower rang. They rang on all forty-one feast days and days of national holiday in the calendar of St. Michel.

The president stood as the French consul general walked stiffly across the square and stopped in front of him. He carried a box containing the medal of the Legion of Honor. He said something to the president and the president nodded and said something else that no one could hear. There were loudspeakers but they continued to play music. The president bent his head and the French consul general hung the award on a silken band around his neck and kissed him on each cheek.

Then there were to be speeches. The music stopped and the first scratchy voice came over the loudspeakers and no one could understand what was being said.

Rita Macklin had gone to a café off the square with a fellow American she had met in the crowd. He was Anthony Calabrese and Rita thought Anthony was a much more fascinating event than the one in the square. She had felt alone and afraid for nearly four days; Ready had not contacted her again after that night he had kissed her in the darkness at the bottom of the hill from the presidential palace. It was as though he had wanted her to feel her isolation. She would have welcomed seeing him if he had called her; she wanted another voice or even the familiar face of a man she loathed to soothe the aloneness.

Because Devereaux had not come.

Anthony Calabrese bought her a beer in the café and ordered a glass of Perrier for himself. He said his stomach didn’t drink before noon, even if he wanted to. He had said a lot of things she thought were funny. Maybe she missed laughing with someone. Maybe she was only very afraid of being alone.

“Come on,” he urged her, taking her arm and leading her to the café. “Nobody is going to do anything until the fat lady sings. Besides, you can fake it in your stories. Everyone does.”

Now he sat across from her. He had olive eyes and dark skin and dark, glistening hair and a golden chain around his neck. His face was broad but not without interesting depths. His cheeks were high and he might have been her age.

“You’re a reporter, huh?”

“Yeah, a reporter, huh.”

He smiled. “You got the wrong story.”

“ ‘Wrong story.’ What story should I have?”

“The nuns. Those are the people you oughta be writing about. Up in the hills, giving medicine to the
tutzons
. That’s the story. Sisters of the Holy Name. Sister Mary Columbo, my cousin for Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know she was here until I was down here a couple of times, my Aunt Rose says your own cousin, the nun, she’s down here in this place called St. Michel, she’s working for the poor. I never even told my Aunt Rose I was down here, I musta let it slip, who talks about St. Michel?”

“You’re a travel agent.”

“A packager.” He smiled. “Hell, maybe I deal dope, you never know. Everyone does.”

“Do you deal dope?”

“No.”

“Is that true?”

“Yeah. But what the hell, how do you know if I’m telling the truth.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“Baby, I love red-haired broads, drive me crazy. Of course I’d lie to you. I’d tell you anything you wanted to hear.
Salut
.” He raised his Perrier and drank a sip. “Frog bubblies. You go in New York, pay three bucks a pop for seltzer as long as it comes from France. People want to be robbed, you know? They walk around with their pockets open and money stuffed in their noses.”

She laughed then and it was in relief, to hear a human, cynical voice of another American cutting through this claustrophobic nightmare on the island. She had dreamed of Ready and it had not been pleasant. She had felt an ache where Devereaux should have been, next to her.

She sipped her beer.

“Girlish figure, you drink beer?”

“I run.”

“Everybody runs. Sickening. You shouldn’t drink outta a glass here.”

“Why?”

“Germs.”

“You do.”

“Honey, I drank tap water in Mexico. I got no feelings inside.”

She stared at him, trying to understand him. He seemed more exotic because he was so much more out of place than anyone else in St. Michel. He was a story, St. Michel was not. She tried to think of a story, not of Devereaux.

“These people are filthy. They wash once, when they get baptized. They want tourists here, they gotta shape up. People don’t want filth coming off a cruise ship. They want local color like they see in a movie, they don’t want to smell it. They’ll take niggers but they don’t want dirty. Even French niggers. The best of both worlds.”

“Why are you here?”

“I told you. Travel.”

“No ships come here. A cabdriver said they don’t have a deep harbor.”

Silence for a moment. She waited.

“Fucking want to build a new pier, dredge the harbor, bring in cruise ships. So they pop for me to see what they’re doing. They do nothing. See that hole in town? The museum. Shit. I’ll build a museum before they do. Besides, what do people want with a museum?”

“Cruise people.”

“Right. This is free port? They got whores? So what? Whores are on the ship, pardon me.”

“Gambling,” she guessed.

“Gambling,” he said. “You see the program.”

“You represent someone?”

“I represent me.”

“No. Gambling interests,” she said, interested.

“Always a possibility, you gotta say that. But you gotta have a clean act. Go down to the Bahamas, they play that English kind of craps, different rules, pisses people off. American craps, American tables. I mean, these mopes think they’re gonna get frogs coming here?”

“I don’t know about gambling.”

“Take Atlantic City,” he said. “They clean it up. Atlantic City, pardon me, is for shit. I gotta cousin lives there, gotta be the last white man in a hundred blocks. For shit, all of it. The best thing ever happened to that town since Monopoly is gambling.”

“I know.”

“But you keep it clean even when the city is for shit. They keep the garbage tucked away from the casinos. You go to Atlantic City, you don’t even have to see the town for Christ’s sake. You eat inna hotel, gamble inna hotel, drink inna hotel, get laid inna hotel, and bam, you’re back on the bus and home before you know it, explaining to the old lady how you blew ten dimes in two days.”

“I know. You’re going to do the same thing for St. Michel.”

“Me? I’m a small fish,” said Anthony Calabrese. “People want to listen to me, I tell them things. I scrounge up tours, I take freebies to get my own tan. I booked the Caribbean by now for the season, I take a few days off. But nothing is going to happen in St. Michel.”

The words echoed oddly to her. She sipped her beer. From the bottle this time.

“Why’d you come to do this story?” he said suddenly. He was very alert. She felt tension between them. She put down the bottle and lied to him with her eyes.

“I do what I can get paid for. That’s freelance work.”

“You must not be very good to have to work a story like this.”

“And you must be a crackerjack travel agent to be here,” she said.

He smiled, leaned back, broke the string. “So I lie. So you lie to me. So it tells us something, right?”

“What?” Her voice was cold.

“We got reason to lie to each other,” he said.

“You work for Colonel Ready?”

“No.”

“You know him.”

“Sure. There’s fifty thousand people on the island and maybe fifteen are worth knowing. Sure, I know him, he knows me. But I don’t work for him.”

“Everyone lies in a place like this after a while,” she said.

“Yeah. That’s right. It’s a haunted island. The French pulled out when the mines went and they’ve got ghosts. And Claude-Eduard is a ghost. And the voodoo—”

“In the hills,” she said.

“Ghosts and spells and chants. All nuts but all ghosts and goblins. You ever meet Harry Francis?”

“Who?”

“Harry Francis. He lives here. He’s an agent.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a spy.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“He’s fun. Everyone knows he’s an agent. The upfront agent, you might say. He’s a ghost, too, you know.” Anthony Calabrese was smiling, twisting his necklace between his index finger and thumb, his olive eyes shining with cynical amusement.

“His own ghost.”

“And Hemingway. The writer. I told you. The only good story here is the nuns. Up in the hills. Not Manet and his rebels, not Ready, not nothing else.” He dropped his chain on his chest and leaned forward again. “You don’t want to write about ghosts. Nobody would believe you. The nuns. That’s what you want to write about.”

“And maybe Anthony Calabrese,” she said. “You’re real, aren’t you? I mean, you exist.”

He smiled. “No. Not really,” he said. “You want another beer?”

But the music was finished in the square and the president’s speech was to begin and Rita declined. She went back to the square and scanned the crowd while the president spoke, and she thought of everything Anthony had told her and wished that she would see Devereaux’s face in the crowd, to have one chance to speak to him now. She felt lost in unreality. She felt trapped by the island heat, by the island mentality, by the shabby poverty around her, by the threat of Colonel Ready against her existence, against Devereaux’s. She would only have done it for Devereaux, she thought at first, but there was her own peculiar curiosity as well. St. Michel had secrets in layers, but which ones were important?

The nuns, she thought, half listening to the speech. Maybe the nuns had the secret worth knowing.