Hemingway's Notebook Read Online Free PDF

leave from London.”
    Ready smiled. “You see, you always remember how to cover your trail. Instinct.”
    “I don’t want to leave footprints,” Devereaux said in the same soft and uninflected voice.
    And Rita had stared at Devereaux as he made the plan with Colonel Ready and her face grew very pale and when she spoke at last, her voice sounded detached: “Kill him, Dev. Just kill him now.”
    Devereaux looked at her. His eyes were flat, without emotion. Ready looked at him and saw what the look in his eyes meant and felt contempt for Devereaux. He got up from the table and dropped a fat envelope of documents. “Visas,” said Colonel Ready. “Press credentials. I expect you in two days, Miss Macklin. I know I won’t be disappointed. Will I?”
    “No,” said Devereaux.
    “There will be a reception in the palace. You can meet the president of St. Michel. His name is Claude-Eduard. And his charming sister. Keep away from the president, Rita, especially in dark rooms—he’s reputed to have a three-foot cock.”
    Rita said, “Kill him now.” Her voice was dead. “It doesn’t matter. We can get away. We did it before. We can get away from him. If you won’t kill him, give me the gun, I’ll kill him. I know you brought a gun. I’ll kill him and I’ll run and it’ll give you time.”
    But Devereaux only stared at the redheaded man and felt the impotence of the pistol in his belt.
    “Damn you,” Rita said. She was crying. “Kill him now.”

4
K ILLERS
    Flaubert’s chicken waited at the door of the café for a long moment and then minced inside. With each step, the hen stopped and seemed to stare at Harry Francis.
    It was hot and bright. Humidity lingered on the walls of this café on the main road four miles south of the capital of St. Michel. It was the middle of the afternoon and nothing was moving on the road and Flaubert had gone back into his living quarters at the rear of the café.
    Harry Francis had warned Flaubert many times about letting the chicken roam into the dining room. He had told Flaubert that it wasn’t sanitary, that the chickens left droppings that carried disease. Flaubert always listened politely to Monsieur Harry during these lectures and then shrugged at the end of them. But this time, Flaubert was in the back and Harry Francis was drunk enough to do what he had always threatened to do.
    The hen was scrawny and unevenly covered with worn red and white feathers. She was probably very old. Flaubert had no system in raising chickens, just as he had no discipline in keeping them out of the café. He killed the hens when he was hungry or when he served chicken to the customers. But a lucky fowl could live to an old age if Flaubert did not notice, because he always killed the chicken nearest at hand.
    Harry Francis was drunk because he had been drinking with Cohn for two days in the café. Harry had known from the beginning who Cohn was and where he came from and why he had been sent to St. Michel.
    The café was across the road from the long sand beach which stretched from the edge of St. Michel all the way south down the quarter moon of the island to Madeleine, at the southern end.
    The sun was setting very quickly. The Caribbean was blue close to the land and farther away, in the Gulf Stream, it was green. Harry Francis yawned. His eyes were red from too much vodka and too little sleep. The hen was backlit by the dying sun in the open doorway.
    Harry Francis decided.
    He bumped the legs of the chair across the floor and stood up. He pulled out an ivory-handled knife from the worn leather sheath on the wide black garrison belt that was hidden partially beneath the blouse of his bush shirt. The shirt opened across an expanse of leathery skin that was cracked and burned and weathered by a life in the sun.
    The hen paused, took a step, paused, and cocked its head to focus one unblinking eye on Harry Francis.
    “She’s inside, Cohn. You’d have to say she’s inside,” Harry Francis