Rita Macklin awoke and gray dawn surged against the windowpanes. It might rain. She felt very warm beneath the covers and she realized she was naked. She blinked in the darkness of the room and could not see where she was.
She had dreamed of the nuns all night. She had dreamed of the metal tray, gleaming with bone and brain mashed into the bowl of the skull.
She sat up in bed as the door opened.
Yvette wore a silk dressing gown and crossed the large room to her and sat down next to her. Yvette’s face was pale. Her hand was cool to the touch.
“Celezon brought you here,” she said.
“Where am I?”
“In the palace. Colonel Ready wants you detained.”
“I’m a prisoner?”
“No. Celezon brought you here. I told you.”
Rita felt the chill of madness settle around her again. They were all mad. Which only proved that she might be the mad one after all.
“I think he means to kill you. Now that he has your friend. Was your friend an American agent after all, as Celezon told me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Devereaux. It is French, no? He was killed this morning about two in the morning, I think it was. Celezon said the people in the hills brought the notebook.”
She had remembered how it had been for her when she had discovered her brother was dead in Laos long ago, when she had not wanted to believe the words of the telegram or the sympathy offered by the priest who came to the house afterward. And, for a long time, because they never found his body, she believed he was alive. If you believed them when they told you the truth, the bleakness of the truth would twist your heart more than if you lied to yourself for a long time and let the lie replace hurt until the hurt could be measured in small doses into yourself. It was the only way to take truth as a poison so that it did not kill you.
But she wanted to die.
“Who killed him?”
“Manet. In the hills. And then he sent that notebook to Colonel Ready. Colonel Ready has replaced all authority, all decency. Even the faith of the people.” Said with a strange and glittering madness of tone. Yvette’s dark eyes fixed her in the gloom of the unlit morning room. “Celezon brought you here, it was all right until you recovered. But you have to get out of St. Michel, you have to tell someone what is happening here before everything is destroyed.”
“Where is Devereaux? Is he in…”
“The morgue? No. I see you love him. I understand.” She touched Rita’s hand absently. “They buried him in the hills.”
The sob broke the soundless room and Yvette put her hand on Rita’s mouth then and forced her to lie down and she held her hand over Rita’s mouth until the great sob might only be little cries of fear and hurt.
“I’m sorry. But we are hiding you at great cost.”
“Who?”
“Celezon. Me. The patriots. Ready has taken our country and killed the faith of the people.” Said with simple madness.
“I don’t believe any of this.”
“Here,” she said.
And it was the ring that she had given Devereaux once. He would not wear a ring or any jewelry, but he had taken the ring and bought a chain in Ouchy and worn it around his neck like a talisman. “Dogtag,” he said once, smiling to her. They had smiled about the ring. The ring reminded him of her, he once said, in the way of perfume or a remembered evening shared when they both listened to a sad chanson.
“Who is Colonel Ready?”
“An American agent. He is a renegade, I think now, but he was. He was brought here. He took… over… the… country.” Slowly, almost painfully. “Celezon is my brother.”
Rita said nothing, trying to think.
“Celezon. We were children once, brother and sister. And then there was the brotherhood of the true religion, the one of the hills, not the false religion of that fat old priest from France.”
“Your mother and father—”
“No, of course not. We were made brother and sister when we shared our blood.”
She smiled, paused.
“And our bodies.”
Smiling still, through the horror of the gray morning room. “You must tell of what Colonel Ready has done, how he has perverted this country from the true ways.”
“I have to get out of here,” she said.
“Yes. There’s a way. Four miles south of the town is the café of a man called Flaubert. You will be able to find Harry Francis there. Or you will find a child who can take you to his shack.”
“Why must I find him?”
“Because Colonel Ready has the notebook now. Harry’s notebook. It is all he needs. Harry will understand that. Harry will find a way to take you off the island. You have to escape to tell the truth. If Colonel Ready finds you, he will kill you. Remember.”
“I—”
“No. Nothing. Now you must flee. I’ll give you francs, a new cloak to wear—you have to go now while most of the soldiers are drunk or sleeping.…”