Free Hemingway's Notebook by Bill Granger Page B

tempo “Begin the Beguine.”
    The president was very thin and tall. He seemed a nervous man with a long nose and watery blue eyes. His listless brown hair was combed straight back from his square forehead. His ears were long. He wore white tie and tails and a medal given to him on the day he decided to become President for Life of the Republic.
    His sister, Yvette, held his arm as they circled the room. She was fitted in a tight green dress that reached to her ankles. Her eyes were black and glittered with fierce energy, a dark contrast to her brother, whose features were indistinct. Rita was reminded of a hand-tinted photograph before the era of color pictures. That was it, she thought: They were out of time. Everything in this room was out of time.
    Colonel Ready was suddenly at her side again as she stared, entranced, at the strange, glittering couple walking slowly around the room, stopping now and then to speak to this consul or that.
    “They were orphans—”
    “I read a little about them before I came here. About the island,” she said and felt again the threat coiled in Ready’s presence next to her.
    “The last children of the colonialists. I think they believe this is still a colony. The president makes up to the French consul… do you see?”
    She stared and did not look at Ready next to her.
    “Yvette is the one with ambition. You can see it in the way she holds herself. A pretty enough package,” Ready said, grinning, trying to distract Rita enough to look at him.
    “Yvette is the reason Claude-Eduard stays where he is,” said Colonel Ready.
    “I thought you were, colonel.”
    “Well, I help.”
    “You have the army. You have the black police.”
    “You are informed.”
    “I wanted to be informed before coming to the enemy as a hostage.”
    “A guest, Miss Macklin. ‘A hostage’ implies a threat. There is no threat.”
    And Rita, no longer tired, remembered where she was and why. “I wish he had killed you.”
    “It would not have been enough. He would have killed me in Evian if that would have ended it. His trouble is that he thinks too clearly. It was always his trouble. You can’t calculate every step you take with an eye on the outcome.”
    Rita turned to him finally and saw the hungry, appraising look in his eyes.
    “But you would have been dead,” she said with a dull voice.
    “And November would have been made alive,” he replied. “And his girl. And if CIA knew it, then KGB would know it and some mechanism would snap in place in some third-level bureaucracy inside the Fourth Directorate and the wet contract would be issued again. This time, perhaps, to include you.”
    “There was no contract.”
    “There is no other reason to explain Devereaux’s ‘death’ and his reluctance to be reborn.”
    “What if he doesn’t come?”
    For a moment, a flicker of uncertainty crossed Ready’s face but it was soon gone.
    “You’re here.”
    “A guest, you said. I covered my tracks as well. I have three assignments from magazines here. Including my friends in Washington. They know I’m here, they know I’m at the Ritz. They know about you.”
    His face reddened a moment and then he grinned. “You are careful, Miss Macklin, but I assure you, no harm will come to you. When you write of St. Michel, I hope you will be brutally honest—but kind to us as well. We are a struggling people in the Caribbean basin, the impoverished of Paradise.”
    “How eloquent.”
    “Take Yvette, the president’s sister. She is beloved of the blacks on the island. They think she is one of them. She makes cause with them and sympathizes with their poverty.”
    “She dresses like it.”
    “The people tolerate Claude-Eduard. But she understands power.”
    “She brought you here.”
    “Many elements… brought me here.”
    “You still work for Langley.”
    “No. I assure you of that. I’m retired.”
    “Honorably?”
    “With a check every month from Uncle,” he said. “Yvette brought Celezon