The Hemingway Valise Read online

  Hem’s brow had furrowed deeply. “Look. At this point I don’t care about the pervert. I figure they’re tailing me to find out my sources. If I publish it, they’ll be tailing me to put a dagger in my ribs.”

  “It’s not for publication,” I said. “In fact, make the story skeptical. Make it sound like you don’t believe these rumors. The news is fake. You sympathize with the great man. Even take one of those blue pencils of yours and write ‘No story here’ and your initials on the top of the first page. Include all the original notes you can that don’t give away sources.”

  Hemingway brightened. “A trade.”

  “Tris Speaker for Sad Sam Jones,” I said.

  He laughed out loud. We’d talked baseball. The Indians had robbed the Red Sox in that deal.

  “Who’s who?” Hem said.

  “You’re Cleveland.”

  “Damn right.” He laughed again.

  Through this I’d been aware of the woman at the bar. At Hem’s first laugh, her head turned sharply to him. With the second one, as Hemingway lifted his face and took his eyes off me, I glanced at her in the mirror. Her brow was as deeply furrowed as his had been a few moments ago. Her mouth was crimped in distress. I thought: She thinks the laughter’s about her, that he’s talking about her. She’s here to meet him, by arrangement, but she’s not a prostitute.

  When he finished laughing, Hem said, “I’ll leave the envelope with Sylvia in the morning. You think you can find this guy?”

  “I’d shadow you myself and waylay him,” I said. “But when they don’t find what they’re looking for in the bag and don’t understand the stuff that’s there, they’re likely to dispose of it. We can’t wait.”

  “And they don’t even know I’m back in Paris,” he said.

  “Right. So he won’t know to show up behind you.”

  “Damn.”

  “But I have some contacts. And his description.”

  He smiled at me. “I knew I came to the right man.”

  “I hope.”

  “Do you think we have a chance?”

  “They have to translate. That will take them some time.”

  “Not so much for me as some others.”

  I knew what he meant. From what he’d showed me of his work he was more Western Union than Henry James.

  “I’ll do everything I can,” I said.

  And that was that. It was time to end this. I felt sorry for Hem. I felt sorry for his wife. I was keenly aware of the woman in the mirror, still turned our way. He was going to punish Hadley.

  I leaned toward Hem. Lowered my voice. But it was a tricky thing. And it was a buddy thing. I found a way to say it without saying it. “I’ll see if I can help. But we all have to be very careful about what we do now.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  I meant the woman at the bar. But as soon as I said it, I recognized a corollary fear. If the Turks didn’t find the story and the notes, they might decide to dispose of more than the irrelevant manuscripts. There would be the matter of Hemingway himself. The dagger in the ribs would be even more effective if it preempted his story rather than punished him for it.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “Thank you, my friend.”

  “I’ve got Louise waiting for me,” I said. Still trying to remind him of Hadley in Lausanne.

  He took in a small quick breath. “A nurse,” he said.

  I knew, from previous conversations, that the woman in the black coat at the bar could not possibly be his nurse. His nurse had dumped him three years ago for an Italian officer.

  “My wife,” I said.

  He paused. He heard me. “Right,” he said.

  I went out into the night.

  And I found myself thinking not of my wife, my nurse, but of a film actress. A film star I’d met and fallen more than a little in love with the year before I met Louise. At the time, she was a famous name on the screen. Selene Bourgani. We met on a doomed British ship in May of 1915. We would both end up in Constantinople. We each had business there. If Mustafa Kemal had by then already become who he now was, he would have wanted each of us dead, for our separate missions. Instead, at the time, he was simply off embarrassing the Brits at Gallipoli.

  I looked back into the bar. Hemingway was standing before the woman in the dark coat. Explaining away his laughter, no doubt. Commencing a night he would likely never reveal to anyone. I walked away.

  On the Rue Madame, at our door at the rear of the third floor, in the dark, I found the keyhole with my finger tip and put the key inside very gently. Louise would be sleeping. I opened the door into what we called our “everything room.” Everything but our bedroom. It was our sitting room, our kitchen, even our bath room, with a steel bathtub hunkered beside the sink. And it was my writing office. Louise had left the secondary gas jet burning low within its mantle. Beneath it was my desk.

  My time tonight with Hemingway was unsettling in more than one way, not the least of which was that his dilemma tapped a fear I did not know was in me until it began to flow. I’d been working on my own novel for months. It sat beside my Corona Portable Number 3. All that I had written—the only form and place and way it existed in the world—was stacked there in original and carbon copy, all the corners neatly squared, as was my custom at the end of each writing day.

  I stepped to the desk.

  I sat down.

  I laid my hand on the twenty thousand or so words. I thought to pick up the first page and begin to read. But I did not. I sensed the writing was not going well. In a way not unlike what I’d seen of Ernie’s work. Mine had similar flaws. A certain voice, mine coming by way of the Chicago Post-Express copydesk instead of the Toronto Star’s. The voice of a guy who’s got his eye on the big picture and knows it all already. And he wants to fill a thirty-inch news-hole that will start as the front page lead.

  I leaned forward, over my typewriter, and took up the photograph that I propped each day against my coffee cup. Bunky took it of me just after the invasion. He had it printed up on postcard stock for me. He’d caught me from behind. I was walking on the street. Dead Mexican snipers lay on the sidewalk. I was passing them without a glance.

  I looked now at the top page of my manuscript.

  The first few sentences spoke of how President Woodrow Wilson, on April 21, 1914, dispatched a thousand American marines and blue-jackets to capture Vera Cruz. I had not consulted my own news coverage from that day in order to begin my novel, but I was only too keenly aware, beneath the pale gas light in our rooms on the Left Bank of Paris, that these first sentences—and the rest of my sentences, as well—were essentially interchangeable, in voice, with my journalism.

  I stood up.

  I extinguished the light.

  I moved to our bedroom and put my hand to the knob and began to open the door. Again slowly, quietly. I expected darkness but there was light.

  Louise was awake. She was shouldered back against the headboard. Her bedside reading lamp was lit. Of her face I only saw her forehead and that her dark hair was let down. Held up before her was a magazine in plain tan covers, its name in red: The Criterion.

  Having snuck in so quietly, I was afraid to startle her. I hesitated. But she said, without lowering the magazine, “I know you’re there, darling Kit. Just a moment.”

  I waited, filled with the awed and vaguely intimidated tenderness I often felt for my wife. She knew I was there. But she did not let on for a few long moments as she was reading and would not yet be disturbed. Reading something heady, I was certain. She had waited up for me though she needed her sleep and though I’d left her bed for the company of a man whose otherwise widely recognized charm was, to her, superficial and self-serving. And I was her darling, declared in a tone both tender and utterly convincing.

  Now the magazine came down.

  He
r dark eyes were vast in the shadows of the lamp light and I wished only to come to her and ask her to close them so that I could kiss their lids. But there was always something about her that made me happy to wait for her agenda. A thing the French called, with a shrug, je ne sais quoi.

  She said, “Sylvia gave me this new magazine. She is so dear and so smart. It has the most wonderful long poem in it by a Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot.”

  She paused and patted the bed beside her. “Do divest yourself of shoes and most of your clothes and come lie here now.”

  This I did.

  She kept hold of the magazine with Mr. Eliot’s poem the whole time, though in her lap.

  When I was settled beside her, she lifted the magazine a little and resumed, “He is a clerk in a bank, of all things. But perhaps such a job can breed this dark view. He says that April is the cruelest month and I know what he must mean. When the external world of rebirthing nature and the inner world of a depressed spirit are so at odds.”

  She paused to let me consider that, and I asked, “Such as the inner life of a fund-raiser for a hospital trying to trade war wounds for the traveler trots?”

  At this, she laid her magazine on her lap, letting it go. She took my nose between her middle and forefingers and not quite gently twisted, saying, “I read more deeply than that, my darling.”

  I rubbed my nose.

  “Did I hurt you?” she asked, not quite concernedly.

  “No.”

  “Good. So what’s Mr. Hemingway’s ailment?”

  I told her the story.

  I omitted the woman in the dark coat.

  Nevertheless, her first words were, “He will make poor Hadley pay.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “One way or another,” she said.

  “It will be undeserved,” I said.

  She lifted her hand to my face. This time she touched my cheek with her palm. Very gently. “I would not be so foolish with your words,” she said.

  “I know,” I said and suggested she close her eyes for a moment.

  The next morning I stepped into a telephone booth at the post office and confirmed what I’d heard, that the State Department’s secret service man at our Paris embassy was now James Metcalf. He was working out of the London embassy when I’d had need of him in the spring of 1915. He dispatched me to Constantinople for my first little adventure with the Turks. His voice boomed at me over the telephone wire as soon as his assistant put me on. “Kit Cobb. Let me take you for food.”

  “Gentleman Jim,” I said, an old nickname he’d confided in me at our first meeting, in Queenstown on the Irish Coast, after they’d fished me out of the North Atlantic. “As long as the final course is some information,” I said. “I’ve got Turk trouble.”

  “Again?” he said. “Food first.”

  The last time I saw him, he’d treated me to a seventeen-course dinner at the Carlton Hotel, whose chef was French. Monsieur Escoffier. Metcalf had his own family money and liked to eat. Now, in Paris, we arranged to meet for lunch in front of the Lapérouse, a restaurant in an eighteenth-century mansion looking from the Left Bank onto the Seine near the Pont Neuf.

  I waited, pondering the neighborhood. The hotel where I’d stayed during the mission that resulted in my meeting Louise was not much more than a brisk five-minute walk away. Sylvia’s bookstore was ten. Before me, in the river, was the Place Dauphine on the western tip of the Île de la Cité, where the head of the French secret service had his low-profile headquarters during the War.

  Then Metcalf appeared. A great, bulging airship of a man. In these seven years he’d gained a hundred pounds upon his gourmand’s body. He was indeed reminiscent of a craft that seemed impossibly lighter than air, for, in spite of his size, he strode quickly toward me and then moored himself upon my extended right hand with both of his, briefly shaking but then holding fast for a few moments more, as if to resist lifting up into the air.

  We soon sat in one of the small parlor dining rooms up a staircase that Metcalf could barely fit through. We ordered, and as we waited, I told him about Hemingway and his Turks. Every detail except the woman in the black coat. Metcalf humphed and turned thoughtful but our food came before he replied, and when it did, he acted as if he hadn’t heard me. Instead, he mixed reminiscences of the Turks’ offenses and Escoffier’s triumphs, with particular emphasis, among the latter, on the ortolan bunting, a mouth-sized bird plucked and legless but otherwise baked entirely whole, then put in the mouth, also entirely whole, and eaten organs, blood, brain, and all.

  I knew to let him set the conversational agenda. He had his own ways. But I was never sure with Metcalf whether the food we shared and he discoursed upon was intended as a metaphor for whatever secret service business was at hand. At this lunch, after he’d waxed rhapsodic upon the cream and cognac and tarragon of the Lapérouse’s langoustines we were then eating, he made clear that you had to kill these small-fry lobsters from Norway just before you ate them or the bacteria under their shells would go after you.

  He closed his eyes to savor the last morsel, and when he opened them again he instantly said, “It sounds as if your friend’s problem needs a quick solution.”

  “Do you know the Turk I described?”

  “Do you want some coffee?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for more indirection.

  He picked up on my hesitation and smiled. “Any help my office can provide will come along with the brew. Just not from me. I send you now to a bistro in the Rue Blondel. They have good Turkish coffee, I understand, though I myself don’t have a taste for it. The Turks, in their barbarism, would have you ingest as much grinds as liquid coffee. But our agent will meet you there. An agent new to us but deep in knowledge of the Turks.”

  Metcalf extracted his watch from a vest pocket, which took some serious effort and great strain on the gold chain. He looked at the time. “You’re due at the bistro within the hour,” he said. “I took the liberty of arranging the meeting as soon as you mentioned your Turk troubles on the phone.”

  “How will I know him?” I asked.

  He smiled. “You’ll be recognized.”

  Metcalf would say no more on the matter, but gave me the Rue Blondel address, near the Porte Saint-Denis in the 10th Arrondissement.

  The street was narrow, the bistro was small, with only two tables outside, unoccupied in the chill of the cloudy December day. Just inside the door I stopped and did a quick scan of the place. It was low-ceilinged and smelled of garlic and onion. Immigrant smells. About half the two-dozen or so small tables still held end-of-lunch patrons. I focused on the three that held solitary men. Two of them were clear working-class types, in overalls. Not likely our agent.

  The third was a man in a brown serge suit. He was sitting at a free-standing table near the center of the place, facing this way, focused on a tightly folded newspaper a little to the side of his coffee cup. He seemed to be the one.

  I waited for him to notice me.

  He wasn’t moving.

  I took a step toward him, and another.

  He looked up. Saw me. Looked back down at once. Not even a flicker of recognition.

  I stopped.

  I scanned the room again.

  The little groups were all engaged with each other.

  My eyes moved toward the back of the place, along the left-hand side, which was lined with a dingy mirror.

  There was one other person, alone there. I’d ignored her the first time around as she sat with her back to the others and she was dressed in widow’s black with a cloche hat and a thick mourning veil.

  Now I realized that her head was lifted a little and the veiled face was reflected in the mirror. From the angle, she was clearly looking at me. But the veil was down. There was no discernible face.

  And now the head nodded at me, once, and waited.

 
I looked around the room. Quickly. Nothing had changed. I was still unanimously ignored. Except by the widow.

  I stepped to her, stopped beside her table, still not sure.

  She inclined her head at the bench seat across from her.

  I sat beneath the mirror.

  I could only dimly make out her eyes. They were large. And suddenly familiar.

  She lifted her hands and slowly raised her veil.

  Part of me had begun to realize already, and then the conscious drama of the gesture made me certain, and yet when I saw that this was indeed Selene Bourgani, I took a reflexive deep breath. A breath the like of which could have been induced if Paris had been secretly sitting on a fault line and the earth had just opened up beneath my feet.

  “Kit,” she said, quite low.

  “Lucine,” I said, also low, using her real name, the one I had finally learned.

  Did I see a flicker of something in her vast dark eyes at this name? Did I feel a flicker of something in myself at how similar were Louise’s eyes? My wife’s. My wife whom I’d first met barely six months after I’d parted, as if forever, from this woman before me.

  The flicker in her faded but was replaced by a faint, one-sided smile that renewed the complex something that had just left her eyes.

  If her real name was not her name now, neither was it Selene Bourgani, for she had not made a film since I last knew her, and that screen name had itself, in those seven years, finally faded from the movie magazines that had puzzled over and then romanticized and then grown bored with her unexplained disappearance, not just from the cinema but from the world.

  I laid both my hands on the table to lean a little toward her. “So then,” I said, almost whispering. “What is your name?”

  Her half-smile gently widened to fullness, though it did not lose its complexity. She too leaned forward, and then I felt her hand cover mine. She said, “You always could see through me, Kit.”

  Whenever I myself had that thought, through our time of professional and personal affairs, she would always find a way to surprise me.

  I did not move my hand, neither to turn its palm upward and take hers nor to withdraw it. “Not this time,” I replied. And then, “So who are you now?”