San Francisco de Paula was a small town with crooked streets, and within minutes I was out of the tumble of buildings and following the only road up the hill. There were several small houses visible on the hill, but the boy had run between two gateposts that led to a longer drive and a bigger building. I walked in that direction.
Hemingway came down to meet me. He was wearing Basque espadrilles, wrinkled Bermuda shorts, and the same sweaty guayabera he had worn to the embassy that morning. He had strapped a thick belt around his waist outside the loose shirt and a .22 pistol was tucked into the belt. He had a drink in his right hand. His left hand was on the boy’s dark head. “Muchas gracias, Santiago,” said the writer. He patted the child, who looked up worshipfully and ran past me down toward the town.
“Welcome, Lucas,” said Hemingway as I came through the gates. He did not offer to take my bags as we turned and continued up the dusty drive toward the house. “What’d you think of the bus ride?”
“Local color,” I said.
Hemingway grinned. “Yeah. I like to take the bus now and again… reminds me not to get too uppity around my Cuban friends and neighbors here.”
I looked at him and caught his eye.
Hemingway laughed. “All right. Hell. I’ve never taken the fucking bus. But it’s still a good idea.”
We had come to the front entrance to the Finca Vigía. A huge ceiba tree grew to the right of the entrance and threw shade across the wide steps. Orchids grew from the rough trunk of the tree, and I could see where the thing’s thirsty roots were heaving up the tiles of the terrace. The house itself was an older limestone villa, solid and sprawling enough in its own way, but it seemed low and unimposing compared to the ceiba tree.
“Come on,” said Hemingway, leading me around the side of the house. “We’ll get you installed in the guest palace and then I’ll show you around.”
We followed a path around the main house, through a gate into an interior compound, down a tiled path past a swimming pool, through the shade of mango and flamboyan trees, and past a row of plantains and royal palms standing like weary sentinels in the afternoon heat, and stopped at a small, white frame house.
“Guest house,” said Hemingway, sweeping open the low door and leading the way in. “Headquarters for the Crook Factory in this room. Bedroom’s back there.”
The “headquarters” consisted of a long wooden table with a large map of Cuba spread out on it—conch shells and stones holding it down—and some file folders stacked nearby. Hemingway gently kicked open the door to the small bedroom and gestured with his drink hand to a low dresser. I set my bags there.
“Did you bring a gun?” he asked.
He had asked me that morning if I had a gun and I had said no. Now I said no again. It was the truth: I had hidden both the .38 and the .357 at the safe house that afternoon.
“Here,” said Hemingway, pulling the .22 from his belt and offering it to me butt first.
“No thanks,” I said.
“You should keep it in a drawer here in the bedside table,” said Hemingway, still holding the weapon by the barrel so that the muzzle was aimed at his belly.
“No thanks,” I said again.
Hemingway shrugged and tucked the little pistol back in his belt. “This is for you, then,” he said, holding out the drink.
I hesitated only a second before reaching for it, but before I could take it, Hemingway raised it, nodded at me, and took a sip himself. He offered it again.
I realized that it was some sort of ritual. I took the drink and swallowed the rest. Whiskey. Not especially good whiskey. It burned behind my eyes. I handed the glass back. It was not yet four-thirty in the afternoon.
“Ready for the two-cent tour?”
“Yes,” I said, and followed him out of the relative coolness of the Crook Factory’s central headquarters.
THE TOUR STARTED at a well where a man had drowned himself.
Hemingway led me up past the tennis courts, past the swimming pool, past the main house, away from the gardens, and through a field of weeds to a small but dense copse of bamboo. In the miniature jungle of bamboo there was a low stone circle with a metal screen across it: An old well, I thought, judging from the cool air and dank scent rising from it.
“Last year,” said Hemingway, “an ex-gardener for the finca threw himself down this well and drowned himself. His name was Pedro. An old man. It was four days before anyone found him. One of the servants saw vultures circling the well. Damndest thing, Lucas. Why do you think he did it?”
I looked at the writer. Was he serious? Was this some sort of game?
“Did you know him?” I said.
“Met him when we first moved in. Asked him not to prune the plants. He said that was his job. I said that from then on his job would be not to prune the plants. He quit. Couldn’t find other work. Came back a few weeks later and asked for his job back. I’d already hired another gardener. A week or so after I told him that, the old man threw himself down this well.” Hemingway crossed his hairy arms and waited as if this were a puzzle that I would have to figure out if I wanted to work for him and the Crook Factory.
I felt like telling him to go fuck himself, that I already had the Crook Factory job and used to have a better one—a real job in espionage. Instead, I said, “So what’s the question?”
Hemingway scowled. “Why did he throw himself down this well, Lucas? Why my well?”
I smiled slightly. “That’s easy enough,” I said in Spanish. “He was a poor man, no?”
“He was a poor man, yes,” agreed Hemingway in Spanish. In English, he said, “Didn’t have a pot to piss in.”
I opened my hands. “He didn’t have a well of his own to drown himself in.”
Hemingway grinned and led me out of the dim light of the bamboo thicket and back toward the main house.
“Did you drink it?” I said as I followed him back down the path. I could see the slightly ragged ends of Hemingway’s hair just above his collar. He did not go to a real barber; perhaps his wife cut it for him.
“The corpse water?” he said with a chuckle. “The water from the well where old Pedro lay rotting for four days? Is that what you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Everybody wanted to know that when it happened,” he said brusquely. “It’s no big deal to me, Lucas. I’ve drunk from ditches where corpses were rotting. I’d lap water from the hollow of a dead man’s throat if I had to. Doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference to me.”
“So you did?” I persisted.
Hemingway paused at the back door of the house. “No,” he said, opening the door and beckoning me to enter with an angry sweep of his slightly twisted left arm. “That well just provided water for the pool. May have pissed in the corpse water, though. Never can tell.”
“MARTY, THIS IS LUCAS. Lucas, this is my wife, Martha Gellhorn.”
We were in the kitchen—the old Cuban-style kitchen rather than the new electric one. I had been introduced to six or seven of the score of cats that seemed to have the run of the place, and I had already met most of the servants and the Chinese cook, Ramón. Suddenly this woman was there.
“Mr. Lucas,” said Hemingway’s wife, extending her hand in an almost manly way and giving me a quick handshake. “I understand you will be staying at the finca a while to help Ernest play spy. Are your accommodations acceptable?”
“Very nice,” I said. Play spy? I had seen Hemingway’s cheeks and neck redden at that comment.
“We have some company coming tonight,” Gellhorn was saying, “but the gentleman is staying in our extra room here in the main house and the lady has to return to Havana late, so we won’t be needing the bedroom in the guest house. You’re invited to dinner tonight, by the way. Has Ernest invited you?”
“Not yet,” said Hemingway.
“Well, you’re invited, Mr. Lucas. It won’t be a constant thing—dinner here in the main house, I mean. You may have noticed that the guest house has a quite
serviceable little kitchen area, but we thought you might be amused by tonight’s gathering.”
I nodded. She had put me in my place quite nicely—You’re invited to dinner, but don’t get used to it.
She turned away from me as if I had been checked off her list. “Juan’s driving me to town in the Lincoln,” she said to Hemingway. “I have to pick up the meat for dinner. Do you need anything?”
Hemingway did—typewriter ribbon, foolscap, his suit at the cleaners—and while he spoke, I studied the woman’s profile.
Martha Gellhorn Hemingway was, I knew from Hemingway’s O/C file, the writer’s third wife. They had been married a little less than two years, but had lived in sin for at least three years before that. Gellhorn had supplanted Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had taken the place of Hadley Richardson Hemingway.
Gellhorn was tall and had blond hair that was just shorter than shoulder-length and permed to a frizz. Her features were strong and honest-looking in a solid, midwestern way, although she spoke with a pronounced Bryn Mawr accent. This day she was wearing a seersucker skirt cut to mid-calf and a soft blue cotton shirt with a white collar. She did not seem especially happy, but I had the impression that this was her regular demeanor.
When Hemingway was done with his list of things for her to pick up for him—he had been in town only hours earlier—Gellhorn sighed and looked at me. “Do you need anything in town, Mr. Lucas?”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“Good,” she said crisply. “Then we’ll see you for dinner around eight. Suit or jacket and tie will be adequate.” She went out the door.
Hemingway watched after her for a silent moment. “Marty’s a writer, too,” he said eventually, as if in explanation.
I said nothing.
“And she’s from St. Louis,” added Hemingway, as if that was the final word on the subject. “Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the house.”
THE FINCA VIGíA WAS one of those large, sloppy, classical one-story, Spanish-style homes that had popped up around Cuba in the last decades of the previous century. The living room was huge—probably fifty feet long—and it sported bookcases and various hunting trophies on the walls and floor. An elk head hung next to an oil painting of a bullfighter at one end, there were the heads of two impalas—or some kind of African ungulates looking startled to be there—hanging on the wall at the other end of the room, and still more stuffed heads above the long row of low bookcases on the window side of the space. The furniture in the living room was old and comfortable-looking and not what one would expect in a rich writer’s home. In the center of the room were two overstuffed armchairs, the one on the left obviously the writer’s favorite—the cushion was sagging, there was a threadbare embroidered footstool within a leg’s reach, and next to it was a small table absolutely filled with liquor bottles and mixers. A table behind these two chairs held two matching lamps and some wine bottles. It would be a comfortable place for reading, I thought. Or for getting stinking drunk.
Hemingway saw me looking at the wall trophies as we left the living room. “Went on safari for the first time in ’thirty-four,” he said brusquely. “Want to go back as soon as this goddamned war is over.”
The library was just off the long living room, and although most of the walls were taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, all crammed with books, bones, and mementos, there were a few more heads of grazing beasts on the small bit of free wall space. The floor was polished tile, but in front of a long, low couch, a lion-skin rug snarled up at me. A wooden stepladder stood to the right of the entrance, and I saw that this was how Hemingway would reach the upper tiers of books.
“I have more than seven thousand books here at the finca,” said Hemingway, his arms folded, his weight balanced lightly on the balls of his feet.
“Really?” I said. I had never heard anyone brag about books before.
“Really,” said the writer, and walked over to one of the lower bookcases. He pulled out some volumes and tossed one to me. “Open it,” he said.
I looked inside. It was titled The Great Gatsby and there was an effusive inscription on the title page signed—“Love, Scott.” I looked up in mild confusion. According to Mr. Hoover’s O/C file, Hemingway had written this book.
“First edition,” said Hemingway, holding up the other volumes in his large hand. With his other hand, he raked his fingertips down the spines of the books on three of the long shelves. “All inscribed first editions. Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Dos Passos, Robert Benchley, Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound. Knew ’em all, of course.”
I nodded blankly. A few of the names were familiar to me. There were thick O/C files on Dos Passos, Pound, and several of the others whom Hemingway was now mentioning, but I had never needed to read them.
He took The Great Gatsby back, roughly shelved it, and led the way through the house to his bedroom.
“Bedroom,” he said. “That’s Juan Gris’s Guitar Player over the bed there. You probably saw the other Gris in the living room, along with the Klee, the Braque, Miró’s Farm, and the Massons.”
It took me a second to realize he was talking about the strange painting over the bed. I assumed the other names were artists or the names of paintings as well. I nodded.
There was a large desk in his bedroom, but it was covered with newspapers, mail, magazines, several unwound clocks, some wooden carvings of African animals, and heaps of other junk. Cups overflowed with pencils. Fountain pens littered a blotter. Stacks of paper littered the floor. The huge head of a water buffalo hung on the wall opposite the bed and seemed to be looking out with a mixture of scorn and anticipation.
“So this is where you write books,” I said, looking back at the cluttered desk and trying to sound impressed.
“Nope,” said Hemingway. He nodded toward the top of a chest-high bookcase near his bed, and I saw the portable typewriter and a small stack of typing paper there. “Write standing up,” he said. “Mornings. Don’t talk about writing, though. No reason to.”
That was fine with me.
As we left the bedroom, I caught a glimpse of Hemingway’s bathroom: as many pill bottles on the shelves there as there had been bottles of whiskey and gin in the living room. A blood pressure cuff hung from a towel rack. On the white walls were scribbled notes that I guessed were daily blood pressure counts, weights, and other medical information. It seemed obsessive to me. I filed it all away for future consideration.
There were eight large rooms in the finca, not counting the two kitchens. The dining room was long and narrow with a few more dead animals staring down at the mahogany table.
“We always set an extra place in case someone shows up unexpectedly,” said the writer. “This evening I guess it’ll be you.”
“I guess it will,” I said. I had the impression that Hemingway was slightly embarrassed at having given me the tour. “Mrs. Hemingway said ‘jacket and tie’?” I asked. It had surprised me, given Hemingway’s careless appearance at the embassy that morning and the dirty clothes he was wearing now.
“Yeah,” he said, looking around the room as if he had forgotten something. “We try to look civilized for dinner.” His brown eyes swept back to me. “Damn, it’s getting late. You want a drink, Lucas?”
“No, thanks. I’ll go settle in and get a bath.”
Hemingway nodded in a distracted way. “I’m going to have one. I generally drink three Scotches before dinner. You drink wine, don’t you, Lucas?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, scratching his cheeks. “We’re having some good stuff with dinner tonight. Special occasion, y’know.”
I did not know, unless he was talking about the go-ahead for his Crook Factory.
He looked up suddenly and grinned. “We’ll have several people over tonight, but the two guests Marty mentioned…”
I waited.
“They’re going to surprise the socks off you, Lucas. Surprise the fucking socks off you.”
“All rig
ht,” I said, nodded in appreciation of the tour, and found my way out the back door and down the path to the guest house.
7
YOU’LL NEED TO CUT YOUR HAIR, Daughter,” said Hemingway. “And show your ears. I hope you have good ears.”
Bergman pulled her hair back tight and tilted her head.
“You have good ears,” said the writer. “Perfect ears, in fact. Maria’s ears.”
“How short, please?” said Bergman. “I read the passage a dozen times before they turned me down for the part, but now I cannot remember how short.”
“Short,” said Hemingway.
“Not as short as Vera Zorina cut her hair,” Cooper said dryly. “She looks like a rabbit caught in a thresher.”
“Hush,” said Bergman, touching Cooper’s arm tentatively but affectionately. “That is a terrible thing to say. Besides, Vera has the part. And I do not. And all this discussion of hair length is silly. Isn’t it, Papa?”
She was talking to Hemingway. It was the first time I heard anyone call him Papa.
From the head of the table, Hemingway frowned and shook his head. “It’s not silly, Daughter. You are Maria. You’ve always been Maria. You’re going to be Maria.”
Bergman sighed. I saw tears in her lashes.
Martha Gellhorn cleared her throat from the opposite end of the table. “Actually, Ernest, Ingrid has not always been Maria. You remember you said that you wrote the description of Maria thinking of me.”
Hemingway frowned at her. “Of course I did,” he almost snapped. “You know I did. But Ingrid has always been the one to play Maria.” He jumped to his feet. “Wait here. I’ll bring the book and read the description of Maria’s hair.”
Conversation was suspended as we all sat at the long table, waiting for Hemingway to return with his book.
I HAD HEARD THE CARS pull up while I was still in the bathtub down in the guest house. It was only six-thirty. Then laughter lilting across the lawn and pool, the sound of drinks being poured. I could hear Hemingway’s clear tenor telling some story and then much louder laughter after the punch line. I sat in my underwear and read a Havana paper until a quarter till eight. Then I dressed in my best linen suit, made sure the knot in my silk tie was perfect, and strolled up the path to the main house.