27

A CHILDRENS GAME

Harry Francis said, “When I was with Papa in Cuba, he organized games. They were mock wars. He took some of the children along with some of us who hung around with him and he made armies. He led the children across the estates and threw stink bombs to ruin the patio parties of all the rich people because that is what it was like in Cuba in those days. He gave the kids firecrackers. Everyone had a good time.”

“That sounds silly,” Devereaux said.

They stood in the darkness at the perimeter outside the Palais Gris, on the edge of Rue Sans Souci. The street ran down the gentle hill to the darkened city. The rain fell in blackness. They were both soaked. Devereaux had a weapon from Flaubert. It was a little knife with a hook at the end of the blade that was used to scrape the guts out of fish.

“It wasn’t any more childish than this. Than real wars. Except nobody gets hurt.”

“Everybody gets hurt all the time.”

“That notebook was my life and you don’t even understand that.”

“Tell me when we get out of here.”

“It doesn’t matter, the notebook will still be here. He might use it a little but he could use it a lot more with me. And it guaranteed my life.”

“Shut up, Harry, there’s one of them coming.”

The gendarme noir came to the edge of the fence and looked down at the town. He was tall and thin in his large shirt and he carried his submachine gun strapped to his shoulder. He looked sad in the rain because rain dripped from the edge of his nose, as though he had a cold. Devereaux reached for his forehead in the darkness in one movement and pulled his head back and cut the young man’s throat as he fell on his back. He did not make a sound. Devereaux slipped the sling of the submachine gun off the thin shoulder of the dead guard and checked the action.

“One down, fifty to go.”

“They won’t all be here.”

“Where are they?”

“Killing people in the hills.” Devereaux understood everything, even understood how his plan might have worked, but he did not understand about the notebook. Hemingway’s notebook. It was all tied in to Harry and Harry kept making it more mysterious, as though he was slipping in and out of a lie. Was Harry the author of the notebook? Was that the reason he had called it Hemingway’s book? But the pages were old; he had had the book for a long time. Harry wouldn’t have kept his memoirs written down for so long, kept them so close to him so that they might have been discovered.

“You’re going to tell me about the book when we get out of here,” Devereaux said.

“Is that the price?”

“Yes. That’s the price, Harry. And you’ll pay.”

“Ready couldn’t get me in six years.”

“But Ready has the notebook now. And I’m not him.”

“You look like him. Vaguely.”

“No,” said Devereaux. “You’re not Hemingway and I’m not Ready and there aren’t any charades played anymore. Not anywhere. You will tell me everything and I’ll help you get off this island, and then you can live and that’s all you get in the bargain.”

They spoke and then ran across the dark ground to the edge of the palace. Devereaux carried the M-17 in his right hand, his fingers and palm around the stock in front of the trigger guard where there was balance in the piece.

Harry ran his fingers along the wall and found the place where the cable ran down from the generator outside the gate. He nodded to Devereaux and cut the negative ground on the electrical line and held it in his bare hand in the darkness and stared at the luminous dial of his old Seiko and waited.

They had fifty seconds.

Devereaux sprinted into the shadows along the palace wall to the door to the cells. The submachine gun was on automatic fire and was cocked. He waited, he had no watch, everything had been stripped from him when the guerrillas dumped him in the grave. He watched the lights of the windows above the courtyard.

Fifty seconds.

Harry crossed the negative lead to the generator and touched it and the lights of the Palais Gris blew out with a pop that shattered some bulbs in the chandeliers.

Devereaux kicked open the unlocked door to the cells and fired into the darkness. He followed the shots into the room and pushed his back against the damp wall and waited for the reverberations to cease. He could see nothing. He heard cries in the darkness and other sounds coming from the back where Harry said the cells were located.

Then Harry Francis was beside him in the doorway, illuminated by a stroke of lightning. They saw each other at the same time they saw the gendarmes noirs in the interior door. Devereaux fired six quick shots and the bodies of the policemen were jammed in the door.

Harry breathed hard next to him.

“Get their pieces.”

In the next room a policeman lit a kerosene lantern and bathed himself in the soft yellow light. Harry threw the knife. It thudded into the chest of the policeman and he fell across the threshold to a third room. The light still flickered.

“There,” said Harry and he nodded to the door of the third room, a room Harry knew had a tile floor and walls.

Devereaux pushed the door open. It frightened him that it was unlocked. Harry had said they did not need locks in the cells of St. Michel. There was no escape from the cells except by dying.

She was on the floor, huddled in a blanket, staring at the door with dull, dead eyes. The cell was damp. Her hair lay wet on her head. Her eyes were dead.

And then he saw how she had been beaten and that her green eyes were blackened and her cheeks were bruised and her mouth was swollen and cut. There were marks on her arms and purple blotches on her body.

“Rita,” he said, as though he were breaking a beautiful fragile dish in a large, silent room.

She stared at him and did not move.

“Come on, Rita.”

“No,” she said. “You died. You’re too late. You’re dead.”

“Rita.”

“No,” she said. She once had dreamed of her brother in Vietnam and spoken to him like this. Just as she spoke to this dream.

He took her hands and pulled her to her feet.

“He said you were dead,” she said. “I told you. I told you to kill him.”

“I should have killed him.”

“I told you.” She was crying suddenly, as though she had found tears. Her voice changed in that moment. “I told you to kill him and you let him live.”