[TWOAGENTSTOLAND 13/8 LT 21°25′—LG 76°48′30″ 2300 HRS U516]
“God damn,” he said again. “That thirteen/eight must be August thirteenth, less than a week from now. U-516 must be the number of the sub that’s dropping the two spies off. I’ll have to look at my charts, but I would think those coordinates would be near Bahía Manatí, Point Roma, or Point Jesus.”
“They are,” I said softly. “Point Roma. I checked the charts.”
“Why in hell didn’t you tell me this earlier?” snarled Hemingway.
“When?” I said. “We’d decided not to let the others in on this part of things.”
“Yes,” said Hemingway, glaring at me in the starlight, “but… goddammit, Lucas…” He unlashed the wheel and watched the ocean and approaching blackness of coast for a few minutes. “It doesn’t matter. Point Roma would be a perfect place for two agents to infiltrate. There used to be a light there, but it’s been out of order for five years. The bay is shallow, but it’s deep water right up to the point. The Manatí Sugar Mill is abandoned, but they can see the old stack from deep water, and once they land, the infiltrators can follow the old railroad line all the way to the highway.”
I waited for several minutes while Hemingway thought. Eventually, he said, “We’re not reporting this, Lucas.”
I was not surprised.
“Those bastards at the embassy and the FBI didn’t give me any credit last time,” continued the writer, his voice very soft but very firm. “This time, we’ll drag in two prisoners and see what they have to say.”
“What if the two prisoners don’t feel like being dragged in?” I said.
Hemingway grinned at me in the dark. “They will, Lucas, trust me.”
I looked toward land for a while. It was a following sea, rougher tonight, and we were charging down it like a runaway horse on a steep slope.
“What is it?” said Hemingway.
Without turning toward him, I said, “You think this is all a game.”
I could only hear his voice, but I could feel him still grinning behind me. “Of course it’s all a game. All of the good and hard and even bad things in life are just a game. What the hell’s wrong with you, Lucas?”
I said nothing. Toward dawn, we raised the harbor at Cojímar.
IT WAS RAINING and gray in mid-morning when I went up to the finca, walked through the front door, and pounded on Hemingway’s bedroom door. He opened it in his pajamas. His hair was tousled and his eyes were vague. A large black cat—the one named Boise, I think—glared at me from the rumpled bed.
“What the hell…” he began.
“Get dressed,” I said. “I’ll be out front in the car.”
Hemingway was out two minutes later. He had a drink in a cork-lined thermos. I thought that it was tea until I smelled the whiskey.
“Now will you tell me just what the hell you think—” he began.
“A boy came,” I said, driving the Lincoln very quickly down the muddy lane, through the gate I had already opened, down the hill, through the village, and out onto the Central Highway toward Havana.
“Which boy?” said Hemingway. “Santiago? One of the—”
“No,” I said. “A black boy we don’t know. Be quiet a minute.”
Hemingway blinked, noticed how fast I was driving the Lincoln on the rain-swept roads, and stayed quiet.
Six miles toward Havana, just down the long hill where he always told his chauffeur, Juan, to coast, I turned right down an unpaved road. Mud and water splashed by the side windows. The road ended in a tumble of abandoned shacks where a cane field had been left untended. The colored boy was waiting there on his motorbike. I slid the Lincoln to a stop and stepped out into the rain. Hemingway took a drink, left the flask on the front seat, and got out.
The other motorbike was just visible beyond the ditch. Someone had cut some branches in a sloppy effort to conceal it, but the rear wheel glistened wetly in the gray light. No one had made an effort to conceal the body.
Santiago was lying head down in the grassy ditch. His skinny legs looked very pale in the rain, there was some wet grass matted to his right knee, and he had lost his left sandal. The sole of his foot looked white and wrinkled, like fingers that have been in bathwater for too long. I resisted the insane urge to place the cheap sandal back on his foot.
Even though he was lying with his head down the slope and in a contorted position that looked terribly uncomfortable, Santiago’s eyes were closed easily, his face was upturned, and he was smiling slightly as if he was enjoying the cool rain on his face. His hands were open and palms up and slightly curled as if he were trying to catch some of that rain. His throat had been cut from ear to ear.
Hemingway made a noise from deep in his throat and took a step back from the ditch.
I nodded at the black boy and he started his motorbike and headed back toward town, taking care not to slide on the rutted, muddy road.
“When?” said Hemingway.
“His friend found him during the night,” I said. “About the time we saw the harbor lights.”
Hemingway stepped into the ditch, ignoring the mud that squelched around his boots, and went to one knee next to the child. Hemingway’s large, tanned hand touched the dead boy’s small, white palm.
“Do you still think it’s a fucking game?” I said.
Hemingway’s head snapped around and he glared up at me in pure hatred. I returned the stare. After a moment, the writer looked back at the boy’s face.
“Do you know what comes next?” I said.
For a minute there was only the sound of the rain on the grass, on the puddles on the road, on our backs, and on the boy. Then he said, “Yes.”
I waited.
“First we bury our dead,” said the writer. “Then we find Lieutenant Maldonado. Then I kill him.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not it at all.”
20
CONFIDENTIAL MEMO
FROM FBI/SIS AGENT J. LUCAS
TO FBI DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER
AUGUST 9, 1942
Your charge to me upon accepting this assignment was to observe and report on the “true nature” of Mr. Ernest Miller Hemingway, an American citizen, age 43. This memorandum will attempt to summarize my observations on the subject to this point in time.
Ernest Hemingway is not, this observer is certain, an agent, willing or unwilling, of any foreign government, agency, power, or group. He is, however, a man living the life of a deep-cover agent—one of those dedicated, tormented, paranoid, and persistent moles of whom all counterespionage professionals live in fear. Why he has given up the flesh and bones of his identify to live in the shell of a self-made persona is difficult to understand.
Ernest Hemingway is a man addicted to words and thoughts. A man who reportedly glorifies action in his writing and life, Hemingway often confuses action with mere impulse, reality with self-inflicted melodrama. As a man among men, Hemingway makes friends easily and loses them even more easily. He assumes leadership in both senses of the word “assumes,” and leads other men with the naturalness of nobility. As an acquaintance, he is loyal and treacherous. In daily life, he intersperses acts of great generosity with intervals of unremitting mean-spiritedness. In the course of a single day, he can exhibit great compassion and empathy followed by acts of a bone-deep selfishness. As a confidant, he is someone to be relied upon frequently but never fully trusted. As the captain of a small boat, he is skillful and instinctive. As a handler of weapons, he is careful but frequently immature. As a parent, he is deeply caring and frequently reckless. As a writer… but I have no idea what kind of writer Ernest Hemingway is.
I can say that Mr. Hemingway is the most bookish man with whom I have ever spent time. He reads newspapers in the morning, novels while on the toilet, magazines such as the New Yorker and Harper’s while drinking by his swimming pool, books of history while eating lunch, more novels while sitting in the cockpit of his boat when others are at the wheel, foreign newspapers while drinki
ng at the Floridita, letters between breaks in shooting competitions, collections of short stories while waiting for a fish to strike his line far out on the Gulf, and his wife’s book manuscript by oil lamp while his boat is tied up behind a nameless key off the coast of Cuba during antisubmarine patrol. Hemingway is acutely sensitive to memory and nuance. He is also hypersensitive to praise and insult. Such tendencies would—one would think—lead the man to be a college professor or a prisoner of his own ivory tower. But instead we are confronted with the persona Hemingway has built for us—the hairy-chested brawler, the big-game hunter, the heavy-drinking adventurer, and the sexual braggart.
Hemingway is physically graceful and imposing, Mr. Director, while at the same time the man can be as clumsy as an ox in a phone booth. His vision is not good, yet somehow he manages to be an excellent wing shot. He hurts himself constantly. I have seen him run a fish hook through the ball of his thumb, split a gaff and ram splinters into his leg, slam a car door on his foot, and slam his head into a door frame. If he has a religion, it is exercise; he urges all those around him to immerse themselves in one violent form of exercise or another—even to the point of ordering his executive officer on the Pilar, a millionaire named Guest, to do road work and run several miles a day with the current Mrs. Hemingway. Yet at the earliest sign of a sore throat or cold, Hemingway will take to his bed for hours or days on end. He is a habitual early riser, yet he often sleeps in until late morning.
I would assume that you are not a boxer, Mr. Director—and if you have ever sparred, it was with a fawning sparring partner from the Bureau, some suckling subordinate who would prefer to have his brains knocked out through his nose than to deliver a serious punch to your bulldog snout—but Ernest Hemingway has boxed. The other week, while Hemingway was drinking by the pool with a friend of his, a Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, I heard the writer spinning some elaborate boxing metaphor about his work: “I tried for Mr. Turgenev first and it wasn’t too hard. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. Maupassant, but it took four of my best stories to beat him. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in the ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or getting better. But I guess that’s not true, because my ultimate goal is to knock Mr. Shakespeare on his ass. Very difficult.”
I know nothing about writing, Mr. Director, but I know that this was—please excuse the term—bullshit.
There is another incident involving boxing that does, I think, describe Mr. Ernest Hemingway much better than his bragging.
Not long ago, when we were out on his boat one night, the writer told me about a time when he was sixteen or seventeen—still in high school in Oak Park, Illinois—and he found an advertisement in a Chicago paper for boxing lessons. Hemingway was eager to learn how to box, so he paid his money and signed up. It sounded, he said, like a good deal, because the instructors included several of the best boxers in the Midwest—Jack Blackburn, Harry Greb, Sammy Langford, and others. What Hemingway did not know was that this was an old con: the students would pay their tuition in advance and then be knocked out in the first lesson. Few ever showed up for the second.
Hemingway’s first lesson went according to their script: he was knocked out by a local pro called Young A’Hearn. (I once sparred with Young A’Hearn, Mr. Director, but he was an old man of almost forty-five then, punchy, and going from gym to gym offering to spar in exchange for a few quarters or a drink.) At any rate, Hemingway surprised the con men by showing up the next Saturday for the next lesson. This time the fighter “teaching him”—someone named Morty Hellnick—ended the bout by punching Hemingway in the pit of his stomach after the bell had rung. Young Hemingway was puking for a week. In the next lesson, Hellnick deliberately hit the boy below the belt. “My left ball swelled up nearly as big as my fist,” the writer told me. But he came back the following Saturday.
The point is, Mr. Director, that this kid finished his boxing course despite all of the punishment. He may have been the only “student” who ever completed the curriculum. He kept coming back for more.
I do not know exactly who or what Mr. Ernest Hemingway is, Mr. Director, or why you sent me here to spy on him and betray him—or possibly kill him—but I feel that I should warn you, the man does not quit or fold or go away easily. Whatever use you expected to put him to, be warned that this man is stubborn, and tough, and used to pain, and amazingly persistent.
That is the end of my observation and analysis to this point.
I SAT AT THE TYPING TABLE in the finca’s guest house and re-read my memo to Hoover. I had no intention of sending it anywhere, of course, and I would not have written it if I had not spent much of the night drinking whiskey and brooding, but it gave me some pleasure to read the words on the page in daylight—especially the part about the director’s sparring only with fawning subordinates too afraid to deliver a punch to his bulldog snout. In the minute or so before I set fire to the sheet of paper and dropped it into the oversized ashtray, I wondered if this was the freedom that Hemingway felt while making up lies rather than sticking to facts when he wrote. Probably not—I had not made anything up in this report.
I put my actual two-page report in a manila envelope, slid the .38 into the back waistband of my trousers underneath a loose vest, and went up to the main house before driving into Havana to meet Delgado.
After the previous day’s long, gray rain, it was a beautiful Sunday—cooler, blue sky, the trade winds blowing steadily from the northeast. The royal palms fluttered as I went by the pool to the house. From down the hill, I could hear the shouts of Gigi’s Stars playing the other baseball team, known only as Los Muchachos. One of the muchachos was missing, but no one had asked about Santiago. One of the other boys had taken his place in the field and the game had gone on.
WE HAD BURIED THE BOY the day before, Saturday, the same day we found him, lowering his crude pine coffin into a grave in a remote part of the potters’ field cemetery between the old viaduct and the smokestacks of the Havana Electric Company. Hemingway and I were the only ones there except for the grizzled old gravedigger whom we had bribed to bring a pine coffin out from the city morgue and to find us a grave plot. Not even Octavio, the Negro boy who had been Santiago’s friend and who had found his body, had come to the hastily arranged graveside gathering.
After the gravedigger, Hemingway, and I lowered the small coffin into the muddy hole, there was an awkward pause. The old gravedigger stepped back and removed his hat. The rain ran down his bald scalp and scrawny neck. Hemingway had an old fishing hat on—he did not remove it—and rain dripped off the long bill. He looked at me. I had nothing to say.
The writer stepped to the edge of the grave. “This boy did not have to die,” he said softly, his words barely audible over the patter of rain on the nearby foliage. “And he shouldn’t have.” Hemingway looked at me. “I let Santiago join our…” He glanced over his shoulder at the gravedigger, whose rheumy eyes were firmly fixed on the muddy ground. “I let Santiago join our team,” continued Hemingway, “because every time I drove down to the Floridita before going to the embassy, a cloud of boys would surround the car, asking for money or begging me to let them shine my shoes or letting me know that they had a sister who was available. They were street boys, urchins, outcasts. Their parents had abandoned them or died of tuberculosis or drunk themselves to death. Little Santiago was one of these boys, but he never thrust his palm at me or asked to shine my shoes. He never spoke. He would hang back until the Lincoln started moving, and then—as the other boys fell away and went back to their begging posts on the corners—Santiago would jog alongside the car, never tiring, never asking for anything, never looking at me, but keeping up until I reached the embassy or we got out onto the main road.”
Hemingway paused and looked up at the tall smokestacks of the Havana Electric Company. “I hate those fucking stacks,” he said in the same tone he had been using for the eulogy, if eulogy it was. “They stink up the enti
re city when the wind blows in over the mountains.” He looked back down into the grave.
“Rest well, young Santiago Lopez. We do not know where you came from nor where you have gone. But we know you’ve gone where all men go, and where we’ll follow someday.”
Hemingway looked at me again, as if suddenly self-conscious about what he was saying. But he continued, looking first at me and then at the narrow grave. “A few months ago, Santiago, another of my sons, John, my Bumby, asked me about dying. He was not afraid to go to war, he said, but he was afraid of being afraid of dying. I told Bumby about when I was wounded in 1918 and how afraid I was—I could not sleep without a night light, I was so afraid of dying suddenly—but I also told him about a very brave friend of mine named Chink Smith who quoted a bit of Shakespeare to me. I liked it so much that I had him write it out. It came from The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, and I’ve learned it and kept it with me since then, wearing it like an invisible Saint Christopher’s medal.
“ ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death… and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’
“You are quit for the next, Santiago Lopez. And you were a brave man, no matter what age you were when you paid God his debt.”
Hemingway stepped back. The old gravedigger cleared his throat. “No, señor,” he said in Spanish. “There must be words from the Bible before we put the earth over this child.”
“Must there?” said Hemingway, his voice almost amused. “Will not Señor Shakespeare suffice?”
“No, señor,” said the old man. “The Bible is necessary.”
Hemingway shrugged. “If it is necesario,” he said. He raised a clump of dirt… mud… and held it over the boy’s grave.
“From Ecclesiastes, then—‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever…. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.” He dropped the clod of mud onto the small coffin, stepped back, and looked at the old man leaning on his shovel. “It is proper now?”