Harry Francis had waited in the darkness. He had killed the Cuban emissary. He had cut his head off, and had put it on the gate of the Palais Gris and then gone to the caretaker’s house where Devereaux had been waiting for Colonel Ready.
There was no escape for Colonel Ready. It was what everything had been about, the preparations, the meeting with Hanley. The publisher told the agent he thought the book about Hemingway might do well; it didn’t matter to Harry. He had written the truth for a change and it had freed him and he did not care.
The black boat waited a half mile off the shore. Their motorized dinghy was a hundred yards offshore, in three feet of water. They ran down to the beach and crossed it to the water.
Devereaux stopped and turned and looked at the boy standing by the Café de la Paix.
Philippe stared at him a moment and then began to run. He ran across the midnight road to the beach and stopped a little apart from him.
Harry was in the water. Harry turned and scowled. His trousers were bloody.
“Come on,” he said.
“Your father,” Devereaux said in careful French.
“He is disappeared. He is dead. All of them disappeared.”
“Your mother then.”
“None. It’s all right then?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“Jesus Christ, stay there, Philippe,” Harry shouted to the child. “Jesus, we can’t take him. What about Flaubert?”
Devereaux said, “Come on.”
The boy and the man ran into the shallow water and the boy cut his feet on a piece of coral but did not feel the cut.
They waded out to the dinghy and Harry shouted in a hoarse voice, “He’s lying, he’s got people here, he just wants to get away from St. Michel.”
“Like you, Harry,” said Devereaux.
“Damn it, what are you gonna do with a half-black orphan with blue eyes?”
“He loved you, Harry,” Devereaux said. “He wanted to protect you. He worried about you when they took you to jail.”
“I don’t mean that,” Harry said. He looked at the boy and the boy stared at him as though he understood all the English words. “You can’t save the world. Give him some money and tell him to go back.”
“Shut up, Harry,” Devereaux said. He lifted Philippe up into the dinghy and he climbed in and Harry started the motor and the dinghy bucked in the shallow waters toward the Compass Rose. There were no storms this evening. The sky was clear. The moon was full and the island of St. Michel looked quite lovely from the water, the way such islands always appear in the expensive brochures given to people who wish to vacation in a warm climate in the middle of a warm sea.