“Don’t talk that way,” said Hemingway. “You know I wouldn’t put Mouse and Gigi in harm’s way. But the project’s gone so far now that I can’t stop it. All the equipment’s tested and signed for. And the crew is terribly excited…”
“That crew would be excited if you promised to toss them a beef bone,” said Gellhorn.
“Marty, they’re all fine men—”
“Oh, yes, fine men,” said Gellhorn, her voice dripping sarcasm. “And serious intellects, too. The other day I found Winston Guest reading The Life of Christ. I asked him why he was reading so quickly, and he said he couldn’t wait to see how it ended.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” said Hemingway. “Wolfer’s a good man, and loyal. Jesus, I’ve never known anyone more loyal. If I were to say ‘Wolfie, jump out of this airplane; I know you have no parachute but one will be provided on the way down,’ Wolfie would merely say, ‘Yes, Papa,’ and go diving out the door.”
“As I said,” came Gellhorn’s voice. “An intellect to be reckoned with.”
“… and Wolfer fits in perfectly,” continued Hemingway in a rising voice. “He’s got plenty of seagoing experience.”
“Yes,” said Gellhorn. “I think Guest’s uncle went down on the Titanic.”
I listened for Hemingway’s response, but there was only angry silence.
“And your Marine radioman,” continued Gellhorn. “My God, Ernest, all he does is sit around and read comic books. And have you noticed, dear? His feet smell something awful.”
“I think Saxon’s all right,” grumbled Hemingway. “He’s got combat experience. Maybe he’s just had too much war… battle fatigue or something. And as for his feet… maybe it’s jungle rot. You know, that fungus they get in the Pacific?”
“Whatever it is, Ernest, you had better have it taken care of before you cram all of your friends into the poor little Pilar. You smell bad enough at the end of these patrols as it is.”
“What do you mean, we smell bad?”
“I mean, dearest, you stink when you come off that boat. All of you, but you the most, Ernest. You smell of fish and blood and beer and sweat, and you’re covered with fish scales, and you’re dirty, Ernest, dirty. Why don’t you take a bath more often?”
I was just about out of earshot at this point, but I could hear Hemingway’s voice. “Look, Marty, fish and blood and beer and sweat are what boats are all about. And we don’t bathe on the boat because we have to conserve the fresh water. You know that—”
Gellhorn’s voice was still quite sharp and audible. “I’m not talking just about on the boat, Ernest. Why don’t you bathe here more often?”
“God damn it, Marty,” shouted Hemingway, “I think you need a vacation. You’ve got battle fatigue worse than Saxon.”
“I’ve got terminal claustrophobia worse than any of you,” agreed Gellhorn.
“All right, Kitten. Cancel that stupid Colliers boat tour of yours. We could go down the coast to Guanabacoa instead, and you could do that other piece you wanted to write for Colliers…”
“What other piece?”
“You know, the one about how the Chinese down there water the human feces they sell to the truck farmers… the one you promised Colliers about how the buyers have to sample the stuff with a straw to decide whether it’s thick enough. I’ll give you a ride down on the Pilar and provide the straws so that you can…”
I heard no more voices as I turned up the road to the dairy. The sound of breaking crockery was clearly audible all the way to Grade A.
FOR A WHILE toward the end of July, it seemed that Hemingway was more interested in entertaining his boys than in running either the Crook Factory or the antisub patrols. From the boys’ point of view, it must have started as one hell of an enjoyable summer vacation. Besides introducing them to the excitement of the shooting competition at the Club de Cazadores del Cerro, the exclusive and expensive shooting club about five miles from the finca, Hemingway would knock off work in late morning—shortly after Patrick and Gregory began to stir—and play tennis with them, or take them fishing off the Pilar, or play baseball.
The baseball team started when Hemingway caught some of the local boys from the village of San Francisco de Paula throwing stones at his mango trees. It had become an obsession of Hemingway’s that his beloved mango trees not be bruised by the boys’ stones.
“Look,” said Patchi Ibarlucia one day while we were typing reports at the guest house, “don’t you want these kids to become good baseball players? Throwing rocks is good practice for them!”
Hemingway decided then and there that playing baseball would be better practice for them. He ordered baseball uniforms for them and bought bats, balls, and gloves. The players’ ages ranged from seven years to sixteen. They named the team Las Estrellas de Gigi—“Gigi’s Stars”—after Gregory, and they immediately began playing other pickup teams in the Havana area. Hemingway drove the team around in the repaired finca pickup truck and acted as their manager. Within two weeks, another fifteen boys had shown up to watch Gigi’s team practice, and Hemingway decided that his backyard league needed another team. Once again he wrote a check, and now there were two uniformed teams playing every afternoon and evening in the empty field on the flat area between the finca and the village. Agent 22—aka little Santiago Lopez—was on this second team, and despite his prominent ribs and stick-thin arms and legs, Agent 22 was a solid place hitter and had a wicked arm when throwing in from left field.
In the evenings, after Gellhorn left on her Collier’s cruise, Hemingway would take his two boys to dinner at the Floridita or to the rooftop Chinese restaurant called El Pacífico. I accompanied them on several of these trips, and I thought that just the elevator ride to the fifth-floor restaurant was an education for the boys. The elevator was ancient and open, with only a sliding iron grille for a door. It stopped at every floor. The second floor was a dance hall with a five-piece Chinese orchestra blaring away in a cacophony not unlike Hemingway’s cats going at it in the moonlight. On the third floor was the whorehouse where Leopoldina la Honesta was working once again. The fourth floor housed a working opium den, and as the open elevator rose past the open doors, I saw the two boys get fast glimpses of the skeletal figures curled around their pipes in the smoky interior. By the time we arrived at the fifth-floor restaurant, one’s sense of adventure was as stimulated as one’s appetite. There was always a special table set aside under a flapping awning, with a fine view of Havana at night. The boys would order shark fin soup and listen to their Papa’s story of how he had eaten monkey brains right out of the monkey’s skull when he was in China with Marty the year before.
After dinner, Hemingway would often take the boys to the Frontón for the jai alai. Both Patrick and Gregory seemed to love the fast-paced game as the players—many of whom they knew well—leaped from the court floor to the walls, catching and firing the hard balls with the five-foot-long, curved wicker baskets—cestas—strapped to their wrists, the balls flying so fast as to be almost invisible and very dangerous. The boys obviously loved not only the game but the betting. The odds change with every play in jai alai, and the crowd wagers all through the thirty-point match. What Gregory and Patrick seemed to enjoy most was stuffing Hemingway’s wager into the hollow tennis ball and throwing it down to the bookmaker, who always threw the receipt back and then waited for the ball to be returned at high speed. Between the leaping players, the high-speed jai alai balls ricocheting, the incessant shouting and bellowing of odds, and the dozens of wager-filled tennis balls in the air at any given second, it was a game to delight children’s hearts and to make anyone a bit dizzy. Hemingway obviously loved it.
I knew nothing about parenting, but I began to think that Hemingway’s affection for the boys sometimes crossed the line into serious indulgence. Both Patrick and Gigi were allowed to drink as much as they wanted on the finca grounds and at restaurants, and both boys showed a willingness to drink. One morning I was reading reports outside the guest house and saw Gre
gory drag himself out to the pool at around ten A.M.
Hemingway greeted him. The writer had finished writing for the morning and was sitting in the shade with a Scotch and soda in his hand. “What do you want to do today, Gig? Lunch at the Floridita? Gregorio says it’s too rough for fishing today, but we could shoot a few practice pigeons in the afternoon.”
The ten-year-old staggered to a chair and collapsed in it. His face was pale and his hands were shaking.
“Or maybe we should just take it easy today,” said Hemingway, leaning closer to his son. “You don’t look so good, pal.”
“I feel like I’m coming up with something, Papa. It almost feels like I’m seasick.”
“Ahh,” said Hemingway, sounding relieved. “You’ve just got a hangover, Gig. I’ll fix you a Bloody Mary.”
Five minutes later, the writer was back with the drink, only to find Patrick draped across the chair next to Gregory.
“Guys?” said Hemingway, handing the drink to the younger boy and looking at the older one carefully. “You think maybe you should cut down on the drinking? If you don’t”—he folded his arms across his chest in mock seriousness—“discipline will have to be enforced. We can’t send you back to Mother at the end of the summer with the D.T.’s.”
A POLIO EPIDEMIC WAS SHUTTING DOWN public gatherings in Havana that summer, and not long after Hemingway’s birthday cruise, Gregory came down sick with suspicious symptoms. The boy was put to bed with a sore throat, fever, and aching legs. I was sent in the Lincoln to fetch Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, who called in two Havana specialists. For three days, the doctors came and went, tapped at Gregory’s knees, tickled the soles of his feet, consulted in whispers, and then went and came again.
It was obvious that their diagnosis was not optimistic, but Hemingway ignored them and banished everyone from the boy’s bedroom except himself. For almost a week he slept on a cot by Gregory’s bed, fed him, and took his temperature every four hours. Day and night, we could hear the soft murmur of Hemingway’s voice coming through the open windows and occasional laughter from the child.
Later, when Gregory had recovered from whatever the ailment had been, we were sitting on the hillside one afternoon when he suddenly began telling me about his quarantine.
“Papa would lie beside me on the cot every night and tell me stories, Lucas. Wonderful stories.”
“What kind of stories?” I said.
“Oh, about his life up in Michigan as a boy. How he’d caught his first trout and how beautiful the forests were up there before the loggers came. And when I admitted that I was scared that I had polio, Papa would tell me about all the times he’d been scared as a boy, how he used to dream about a furry monster who grew taller and taller every night and then, just as the monster was about to eat him, it would jump over the fence. Papa said that fear was a perfectly natural thing and nothing to be ashamed of. He said that all I had to do was learn how to control my imagination, but that he knew how hard that was for a boy. And then Papa would tell me stories about the bear from the Bible.”
“The bear from the Bible?” I said.
“Yes,” said Gregory. “The bear he’d read about in the Bible when he was a little boy and wasn’t very good at reading. You know, Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear.”
“Oh,” I said.
“But mostly,” said the boy, “Papa would just tell me stories about how he had fished and hunted in the Michigan north woods and about how he wished he could have stayed my age forever and lived there forever and never had to grow up. And then I would fall asleep.”
A WEEK AFTER Gregory had fully recovered, we took the Pilar out to shadow the Southern Cross—just the boys, Hemingway, Fuentes, and me—and when the yacht turned back to Havana Harbor, the writer took the boat out to some coral reefs offshore so the boys could swim around a bit. This day, I was on the flying bridge, Hemingway was swimming near the deepwater reef with the boys, and Fuentes was out in the Tin Kid, taking fish off their three-pronged spears as they speared them. What we did not know at the time was that Gregory had tired of swimming back to the dinghy with his catches and had begun threading them through their gills onto his belt, leaving a trail of fish blood in the water around him.
Suddenly the youngest boy began screaming. “Sharks, sharks!”
“Where?” shouted Hemingway, who was treading water about forty yards from the boy. Fuentes and the Tin Kid were another thirty yards farther in, and Patrick was almost back to the Pilar, where it bobbed fifty yards from the dinghy and almost a hundred yards from Gregory. “Can you see them, Lucas?” shouted Hemingway.
I did not need binoculars. “Three of them!” I shouted back. “Just beyond the reef.”
The sharks were huge, each longer than eighteen feet, and they were cutting toward Gregory in slow S-shaped curves, obviously following the scent of blood from the fish he had speared farther out. Their slick bodies were black against the deep blue of the Gulf Stream.
“Lucas!” shouted Hemingway, his voice tight but controlled. “Get a Thompson!”
I was already sliding down the ladder and running toward the closest weapons locker. When I emerged, it was not with one of the submachine guns—the range was much too great for those—but with one of the two heavy BARs aboard. The Browning Automatic Rifles, massive, gas-powered automatic weapons had only recently been brought aboard to substitute for the missing .50-calibers.
Hemingway was swimming toward his son. And toward the sharks.
I raised the heavy BAR and propped it on the railing of the flying bridge. There was too much chop. Now both Hemingway and the boy were between me and the accelerating shark fins cutting through the waves breaking against the reef. I had no clear shot.
“Okay, pal,” called Hemingway to the boy, “take it easy. Throw something at them to get their attention and swim to me.”
Looking down the sights of the BAR, I saw Gregory’s facemask go below the waves as he fumbled with his belt. A second later he threw three or four small grunts in the direction of the oncoming sharks and began swimming away from the reef with the speed of Johnny Weissmuller.
Hemingway met the boy halfway and lifted him onto his shoulders, trying to get as much of the child’s body out of the water as possible. Then the writer began swimming back toward the dinghy with strong strokes. Fuentes was pulling hard, but there was still forty or fifty yards of open water between them.
I clicked the safety off the BAR, made sure the short ammo clip was locked in, and sighted just over Gregory’s head. The sharks had stopped just beyond the reef. Water roiled and their fins thrashed as they fought over the grunts. Hemingway kept swimming with his son on his shoulders, looking back occasionally and then glancing at me. When they reached the dinghy, Fuentes helped pull the sobbing, shaking boy into the boat and Hemingway made sure that his son was safely out of the water before he pulled himself up and out.
Later, on the Pilar, Hemingway said softly to me, “Why didn’t you fire?”
“The boy was in the way and they weren’t close enough. If they had come across the reef, I would have opened up on them.”
“The BAR was just brought aboard,” he said. “We never practiced with it.”
“I know how to fire it,” I said.
“Are you a good shot, Lucas?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have killed those three fish?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Not all three. There’s no better barrier to bullets than water, and all they would have had to do to get to you was dive six feet during their attack run.”
Hemingway nodded and turned away.
A few minutes later, when Gregory admitted that he had been keeping the fish strung on his belt, Hemingway began the process of verbally ripping the boy a new asshole. The process continued all the way back to Cojímar.
18
THESE REPORTS AREN’T WORTH SHIT, Lucas,” said Delgado, who was not oblivious to the fact that nothing much had been happening for weeks.
“Sorry,” was all I said. I could not—or would not—allow my sense that something big was about to occur to be expressed in my reports.
“I’m serious. It’s like reading about some goddamned Andy Hardy film. All that’s missing is Judy Garland.”
I shrugged. We were meeting at the end of the dead-end road just beyond San Francisco de Paula. Delgado had his motorcycle. I was on foot.
Delgado stuffed my two-page report into his leather satchel and straddled the motorcycle. “Where’s the writer today?”
“He’s out on the boat with his boys and a couple of friends,” I said. “Following the Southern Cross again.”
“And you haven’t picked up anything from the boat’s radio?” said Delgado.
“Nope. Nothing in the Abwehr code.”
“So why are you here if Hemingway’s at sea?”
I shrugged again. “He didn’t invite me along.”
Delgado sighed. “You’re a sorry excuse for an intelligence agent, Lucas.”
I said nothing. Delgado shook his head, fired up the motorcycle, and left me standing in a cloud of dust. I waited until he was out of sight and then I went into the thick bushes by the abandoned shed. Agent 22 was waiting there on a smaller motorbike… the one he frequently used to follow Lieutenant Maldonado.
“Move over, Santiago,” I said. The boy jumped off, waited for me to straddle the seat, and then clambered on behind me.
The boy put his arms around my waist. I turned to look down at his dark hair and dark eyes. “Santiago,” I said, “why are you doing this thing?”
“What thing, Señor Lucas?”
“Helping Señor Hemingway… risking injury… is this a game for you?”
“No game, Señor.” The boy’s voice was absolutely serious.
“Why then, Santiago?”