Free Hemingway's Notebook by Bill Granger

of the city and the palace gave way in this room to the surrealism of the colorful dresses and gowns of the ladies of the foreign dignitaries.
    On the green walls of the high-ceilinged room were huge oil portraits of unknown Frenchmen who had settled St. Michel, tamed it, brought slaves to it, worked its mines, taken its meager wealth, and departed. They had places of honor in the room on the walls but no one could remember all their names.
    Fourteen soldiers in khaki uniforms of the army of St. Michel stood at attention around the room.
    Colonel Ready grinned at her when she entered the room and came to her with a glass of champagne. His white scar was even whiter because in the two days he had been back in St. Michel, his suntan had deepened.
    “I hope you had a good flight,” he said. “Everything is satisfactory?”
    She saw a look of amusement in his eyes. And something more, something deeper than the surface glitter of his blue eyes. “This is so bizarre.”
    “Everything about St. Michel is bizarre,” he said. “You get used to it after a while. The bizarre seems commonplace. See that gentleman there? Sir Michael Blasinstoke. He’s the British consul. He stutters and he hates the French, an interesting prejudice for someone posted to a former French colony.”
    She smiled despite herself. Colonel Ready was trying to charm her. She felt disoriented by the long flight, the time changes, the brief nap in the strange hotel. The hotel was nearly empty. She saw the keys in the mailboxes and she had turned the pages of the register and saw only her name and three others listed. Why had the clerk insisted the hotel was filled? Like everything else she had experienced here in a few hours, the reality of things seemed to exist separately in a compartment apart from the appearance of things.
    “And that one is the French consul. Our president is constantly trying to prove his ‘Frenchness,’ but it’s no use when it comes to the French consul because Mazarine went to the École Polytechnique in Paris. Claude-Eduard will always be a hopeless rustic to Mazarine.”
    Colonel Ready was very close to her so that his low voice only carried to her. His blue eyes were full of humor and mischief and she felt a warm wave as she realized he was trying to impress her.
    “You’re very attractive, Rita,” he said.
    “And who is that?”
    He turned. “Morgan. The American consul.” Colonel Ready frowned suddenly. “I’ll have to talk to him. You’ll have to excuse me a moment.” His voice became tight.
    “What am I supposed to do?”
    “You’re a journalist. Report the story of St. Michel.”
    “Nobody is interested in St. Michel,” she said.
    He paused. “Yes, that’s very true most of the time. And sometimes, it turns out not to be true. You can never be too careful. I mean, trying to make certain that you are always aware of when a thing is true and when it is not.”
    “That’s why you want Devereaux.”
    “Devereaux.” He stared at her. “Yes. That’s what I told him.”
    “It was true, wasn’t it?”
    “You have only been in St. Michel a few hours. There are things that are true and there are things that might be true.”
    “Like that big excavation. For the museum.”
    “Yes. The museum. That’s a good example, I suppose. The hole in the ground is there, the museum is… where? In people’s imagination. I suppose you talked to Daniel.”
    “How did you know?”
    “I know everything about you, Rita,” Colonel Ready said, and it was not pleasant to hear him say it. He smiled then, to mitigate the words. “This place is full of stories.”
    “Nobody cares.”
    “Not today, then tomorrow.”
    “It is full of tomorrows.”
    “Don’t forget Grenada. We have rebels in the hills. All island nations have rebels in their hills.”
    She was weakening in her hatred of him. His words were light and airy and full of self-mockery. He was the only thing she was familiar with on the island. “Are they