Flaubert’s chicken waited at the door of the café for a long moment and then minced inside. With each step, the hen stopped and seemed to stare at Harry Francis.
It was hot and bright. Humidity lingered on the walls of this café on the main road four miles south of the capital of St. Michel. It was the middle of the afternoon and nothing was moving on the road and Flaubert had gone back into his living quarters at the rear of the café.
Harry Francis had warned Flaubert many times about letting the chicken roam into the dining room. He had told Flaubert that it wasn’t sanitary, that the chickens left droppings that carried disease. Flaubert always listened politely to Monsieur Harry during these lectures and then shrugged at the end of them. But this time, Flaubert was in the back and Harry Francis was drunk enough to do what he had always threatened to do.
The hen was scrawny and unevenly covered with worn red and white feathers. She was probably very old. Flaubert had no system in raising chickens, just as he had no discipline in keeping them out of the café. He killed the hens when he was hungry or when he served chicken to the customers. But a lucky fowl could live to an old age if Flaubert did not notice, because he always killed the chicken nearest at hand.
Harry Francis was drunk because he had been drinking with Cohn for two days in the café. Harry had known from the beginning who Cohn was and where he came from and why he had been sent to St. Michel.
The café was across the road from the long sand beach which stretched from the edge of St. Michel all the way south down the quarter moon of the island to Madeleine, at the southern end.
The sun was setting very quickly. The Caribbean was blue close to the land and farther away, in the Gulf Stream, it was green. Harry Francis yawned. His eyes were red from too much vodka and too little sleep. The hen was backlit by the dying sun in the open doorway.
Harry Francis decided.
He bumped the legs of the chair across the floor and stood up. He pulled out an ivory-handled knife from the worn leather sheath on the wide black garrison belt that was hidden partially beneath the blouse of his bush shirt. The shirt opened across an expanse of leathery skin that was cracked and burned and weathered by a life in the sun.
The hen paused, took a step, paused, and cocked its head to focus one unblinking eye on Harry Francis.
“She’s inside, Cohn. You’d have to say she’s inside,” Harry Francis said in a rough, gravelly voice.
“Yes, Harry,” Cohn agreed. His voice had grown rough along with Harry’s from the days and night of vodka and rum. He saw the knife in Harry’s hand and he didn’t care. He was so tired.
“I told you I told Flaubert I’m not going to live like a goddamn nigger with chickens walking and crapping where I eat, didn’t I tell him that?”
“Yes, Harry.”
“So he leaves the door open anyway and he goes in the back because he knows a goddamn chicken is going to walk in finally. He does it to aggravate me. I know these people, I know people like Flaubert. I’ve lived in the islands thirty years. But you know that, don’t you, Cohn.”
“If you say so.”
“And what does it say in my files?”
“I don’t know, Harry.”
“Martinique to Cuba, Windward and Leeward, Bahamas and Jamaica and St. Maarten, I’ve been on them all, worked on them all, I know them and all their fucking little secrets. I know you’d like to know everything I know. Everything I wrote down in the book. You’d like to know about the book.”
“Jesus Christ, Harry.”
“The trouble with these people is they never talk to you directly unless they want to say please or thank you but they don’t mean it. I know what they really think—they have ways of letting you know what they really think. Flaubert wants to piss me off, Cohn, that’s why he leaves the door open. Well, it’s time to piss Monsieur Flaubert off.”
Cohn said nothing.
“We’re going to have chicken for dinner.” Harry Francis crossed the floor. He held the knife in his left hand like a fighter. At the last minute, he rushed for the chicken but it fluttered with a squawk out of his grasp. Harry cursed.
Harry lunged again, moving more quickly than his big-bellied bulk might have indicated. The chicken squawked and flapped onto the tabletop. Its claws slipped on the dirty Formica and in that moment, Harry lunged again and reached under it and grabbed one yellow leg. The chicken made another sound and then was silent, waiting for death upside down, its wings spread. The weight of its feathered wings was too great to move.
“Not in here,” said Cohn, feeling sick. His face was pale. “That’s as bad as the other thing.”
Flaubert opened the curtain that covered the doorway to the back of the café. He was a small, thin black man and his skin seemed oily in the heat. His black eyes glittered red at the edges of the whites. He wiped his hands on a soiled white dish towel.
“What it is, my friend?” he began in a singsong French that was part island patois.
“A fucking chicken. In here. I told you.”
“I forgot. It was so hot in here.”
“I know you forgot.”
“You’re going to kill it, Monsieur Harry?”
“Yes.”
Flaubert shrugged and turned his back.
Harry Francis slit the head from the body with one stroke of his ivory-handled knife. It was so sudden there was no drama to it. The head fell to the floor with scarcely a sound. Blood spurted from the severed neck artery onto the floor. When the bleeding slowed, Harry Francis dumped the carcass on the floor.
A final burst of the creature’s nervous system sent the headless body scurrying in a sudden dance across the floorboards.
Cohn felt frightened then; it was not pleasant to see a dead thing still moving as though it were alive.
And then it was over and the carcass collapsed and there was blood all over the floor of the Café de la Paix.
“Flaubert, get your chicken,” Harry Francis shouted. His face was red and his eyes were shining. He wiped the bloody knife on his shorts and tucked the blade in its sheath.
Flaubert turned again, came to the carcass, and picked it up. He picked up the head as well and threw it out the window. “Philippe!” he called sharply and the boy with almond skin and light blue eyes came to the door from the beach. He stared at the bloody floor.
“Monsieur Harry has killed a chicken. Get the mop and wash the floor.”
“Why did you kill the chicken, monsieur?”
Flaubert said, “Because he’s drunk, mon petit.”
“Because your father is an unsanitary slob,” Harry said and grinned and Philippe’s face lit into a smile.
“Why did you do that?” Cohn said when Flaubert went into the back room. The child mopped the floor.
They spoke only English to each other. “I’m not subtle, Cohn. If I meant to give you a message, I would have just as soon stuck you myself.”
“What message?”
“Cut the crap. You’ve been on St. Michel two weeks but you only found me two days ago. There are fifty thousand poor souls on this poor little island and only five thousand whites and we all live around the capital, so what was so fucking hard to find me?”
“Maybe I wasn’t looking for you.”
“Maybe. There are other games on this island besides me, I know that. But I know everyone is interested in my notebook.”
“What about your notebook?”
“What about it, Cohn?” Harry grinned. “What about it is that I know things. Lots of things. Cheers, Cohn, up your ass.” He took the expensive bottle of Smirnoff from the table and drank from the neck and wiped his mouth when he was finished. They had run out of ice long before. The clear liquid burned on the back of his tongue and the edge of his thought.
“I don’t care particularly what you know,” Cohn said.
The laugh filled the room. “Why don’t you come out like a man and ask me what you want to ask me and stop this screwing around?”
“All right, Harry,” Cohn said quietly.
“You’re not even drunk,” Harry said. “I admire that. You turn it on and off.”
“As you did just now.”
“Maybe it’s only an act with me,” Harry Francis said. Their voices were quiet, full of business.
Philippe stopped mopping the blood. He tried not to look at them. He tried to hear what they said to each other.
“You haven’t written for a long time.”
“Maybe I’ve been writing, maybe I just choose not to send the manuscript to a publisher,” Harry Francis said.
“But you used to write letters home,” Cohn said.
“And I’ve stopped. And you want to know why. Maybe because I’m tired of writing to people who don’t read. The illiterate society and the illiterate government agency.”
“We’re very interested in your letters, Harry,” Cohn said. “They were always informative.”
“You thought they were lies. You thought I was making it up.”
“How do you live, Harry?”
“That’s my fucking business, isn’t it?”
“Everyone back home is worried about you.”
“I don’t want them to worry.”
“Can we make you an offer? On your next manuscript?”
“You don’t even know what it’s going to be about.”
“We’d like to look at it, Harry. Whenever you have a few pages ready.”
“I agree with Hemingway.” A sly smile. “It’s despicable for a writer to show pages until he’s finished.”
“We’d like to help you get published.”
“It might be a true story this time.”
“We always thought they were true stories, Harry.”
“But this time, it might be even more true. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth. You know what Hemingway said, don’t you?”
“What did he say?”
“He wrote it in A Moveable Feast. God, he got back at everyone in that book—he didn’t have to do it but he wanted to. That’s what I admire about him. He was a cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch right up to the end. He stuck it to everyone, even the ones who did him some good. It was the way he was going to end up being better than they were.”
“Like you, Harry?”
Harry Francis smiled. “You’re all so damned worried, aren’t you? You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”
“What did Hemingway say?”
“You’re patronizing me, but I won’t be patronized. I knew him. I knew him in Cuba at Finca Vigía. I was in his army—we attacked the estates with an army with firecrackers and stink bombs. It was damned silly but it seemed fine at the time.”
“What did Hemingway tell you?”
“He knew. He knew I was working for Uncle.”
“Did you tell him?”
“You never saw him. You never got close to him. You couldn’t lie to him. He saw right through you. He was like a surgeon. He could cut so easily it wouldn’t even cause any pain, even if he didn’t put you under first. Like a chicken waiting for slaughter. We just hung there with our wings out and if he wanted to kill us, he could kill us.”
“What did he write?”
“Oh. It’s not that, it’s what he told me. I said I was going to write and he said the only things worth writing were true things and that when I started lying, I would never be able to stop. He said you had to write true things even if no one else would believe you. I did. I did that. I told them what would happen in Cuba. I told them that Castro knew but they went ahead and when it was over, they had to get rid of me. Hemingway knew it was going to turn out that way. That’s why he killed himself.”
“Is it?”
“I always thought that. He didn’t want to be ruined. Like his father who killed himself.”
“What about you, Harry? Are you going to kill yourself?”
Harry stared at him for a long time and did not speak. When he spoke, his voice was soft and almost purring.
“I can’t, Cohn. There’s the notebook to finish with.”
“Would you like a publisher?” Cohn said carefully.
“I don’t think I would have any trouble getting a publisher,” said Harry Francis.
“I think we’d be the one for you, to give you the best audience, I mean. We have the resources, you know.”
“I’ll keep you in mind.”
“Yes. Do that, Harry,” Cohn said.
Philippe, who understood some English, listened very intently. He leaned on the mop and waited and it was as though he was not in the room with the two white men.
“You tell them I’m finishing the manuscript. You tell them that when the manuscript is finished, I’ll keep them in mind. You tell them that.”
“I will.”
“You tell them about the line in A Moveable Feast as well.”
“What line is that?” Cohn said.
“The one you’ll have to look for,” Harry Francis said.
The road from the café to the edge of the capital was dark. The street lamps in the south end of the capital usually went off at ten, and then the darkness belonged to the moon and the stars that littered the clear Caribbean sky. The night also belonged to drunken white men, thought Cohn, who could not summon the strength any longer to be sober. He had been too long with Harry Francis and it was too late.
People here did not go out at night because it was dangerous. The danger might come from thieves and killers, from those who dealt in drugs and moved drugs about. It might come from the secret police whom the people called the gendarmes noirs. But Cohn was not afraid of them. He was an American. He was protected by the consulate.
Cohn had not said good night to Harry. He left him in the café asleep, snoring, his head down on the table still littered with the remains of dinner, including the chicken. The chicken had survived Flaubert’s slaughter for so long it had become old and tough and tasteless, and even Flaubert’s sauce could not hide that.
It was past eleven. Flaubert had been in his underpants when he came out of the living quarters at the back of the café to unlatch the door for Cohn. He told Cohn Harry would sleep until four in the morning, that he would awake and drink anything that was left from the dinner, that he would stagger away and leave the door open. Flaubert said Harry always left the door open.
Cohn stumbled across a piece of driftwood and cursed it. He was walking on the beach. He felt terrible but he was glad to be away from Harry Francis.
The night was still and cool, and the sand was damp. Half of the moon sparkled on the water. Gentle waves lapped at the beach. Cohn walked along the beach instead of the main road because it was safer. Every now and then, someone would be reported killed on the road at night, struck by a car speeding north from Madeleine to the capital. The road was narrow and dark. Everyone in St. Michel deplored the state of the road, but the island seemed gripped by a fatal inertia and the road was the symbol of it. It ran from a small capital of slums and a few grand buildings to a second city of slums and whores and dealers nine miles south. It had always been like this. It would be this way tomorrow. Only Manet’s soldiers in the hills above the long road did not accept the way it was.
The sand was wet under Cohn’s bare feet because the beach narrowed at this point and the tide had gone out at sunset. Cohn carried his shoes in his left hand. A little breeze from the sea plucked at Cohn’s dirty tan trouser legs.
Harry Francis was a sad case. Cohn would put that in his report. It was what they wanted to hear back in Washington.
“Pardon, monsieur?”
Cohn stopped, turned, and was surprised by the flashlight that suddenly blinded him. His face was pinched, fatigued, and he was annoyed. He suddenly wanted to relieve himself.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Monsieur?”
He repeated the question in the singsong French acquired at the Army Language School in California.
“Monsieur,” the voice stated with flat authority.
Cohn thought he saw two of them.
They wore midnight-blue uniform shirts with empty epaulets and blue shorts with high black stockings and dark berets. The people of St. Michel did not call them the Special Security Force as President Claude-Eduard had dubbed them; they were the “black police.” The gendarmes noirs.
“Clowns,” Cohn muttered in English.
“Monsieur. You are English?”
“I am an American.”
“Bonsoir, monsieur.” Politely and without sincerity. “Why are you on the beach?”
“I saw you yesterday in the capital. On Rue Sans Souci. I know you.” He squinted in the light, which hurt his eyes. “You know me. Cohn. With the American consul general.”
“Monsieur Cohn.” The black face was very close. The eyes blinked. He stared at Cohn as though he had never seen him before. “Do you have some identification?”
“What is this about?”
“A woman was raped.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“It happened yesterday.”
The second policeman who held the light smiled.
Cohn took out his wallet with his passport and visa and gave them to the officers. He was a public information officer. The larger policeman opened the wallet and looked at the money inside. He selected a ten-dollar bill. “There is a fine against using the public beaches after they are closed for the night.”
“I’m not using the beach. I’m walking back to St. Michel. It’s safer than the road.”
“The road is very dangerous.” The gendarme still held the wallet. “The woman was raped on the road.”
“Amazing she didn’t get run over.”
“It was brutal,” the policeman said flatly. “There were markings on her body after she was found.”
Cohn shivered because of the slight breeze. The whole country was on edge. The tropical forest would take over tomorrow or the day after tomorrow; it would cover the road and there would be no men left on St. Michel.
No wonder Harry Francis had become crazy. He would say that in his report.
“I want to take a piss.”
“The beaches of St. Michel are not a pissoir.”
“I have to take a piss. I’ll go by the road.”
The large policeman shrugged. He put the ten-dollar bill back into the wallet and closed it. “It doesn’t matter about the fine. You have diplomatic immunity.”
“Even if you were to piss on the Palais Gris of the president, it would not matter,” said the second.
“You could not be fined,” said the first.
“You may even piss on the beach and not be fined because you have immunity,” said the second.
“There would be nothing we could do,” said the first.
Cohn took a step back. “All right then.” He took the wallet and put it in his pants. “All right then,” he repeated. “I can wait until I get back.”
“No, it’s all right. You have immunity,” said the first.
“Yes. You are a guest of St. Michel. Please piss on the beach.”
Had the wind risen? He felt cold.
“No,” Cohn said.
“Please, sir,” said the first. “We will turn away.”
They turned and waited and Cohn felt a strangling sense of panic. He pulled down his fly and urinated on the sand. The sand smothered the sound of his urine striking the ground. When he was finished, he put on his shoes. He would walk along the highway.
The two policemen stood with their backs to him.
“I am finished,” he said.
They turned slowly. They looked at him. The large one said, “Is everything satisfactory then?”
He began to speak.
He did not feel the razor. It cut from left to right, just below each earlobe, in a wide and grinning arc like the smile that children carve on a pumpkin at Halloween. Cohn did not feel any pain. He thought of something that Harry had said about Hemingway. He felt that something had happened that could not be reversed. The panic overwhelmed him.
It would be all right if he said something. He opened his mouth, and it filled with blood. He struggled to remain upright. Blood fell down his shirt and stained it; it soaked the white wet sand at his feet. He blinked because he thought he was going to cry. Perhaps it would be all right if he stood very still.
But he could not stand still.
He blinked again to see the gendarmes more clearly. The whiteness of the flashlight had grown to a whiteness that must have come from the blinding rays of the moon. He was certain of it.