Hemingway's Notebook by Bill Granger Page A

London and Miami and in Fort Myers Beach. And now there was a secret.
    Devereaux opened the lock with a knife. Inside the tackle box was more oilcloth. He opened this and took out the contents.
    There was a photograph. It was pasted to cardboard to make it stiff. It was a little faded. The photograph showed a large, bearded man with a large belly who wore a white shirt and shorts. He was a handsome man with a straight nose who combed his hair forward to his forehead, as though he might be going bald.
    Philippe came close. He stood near Devereaux, who was crouched on the ground. Philippe was overcome by curiosity. He came and looked at the photograph. He said, “This man looks like Harry but it is not him.”
    “No,” Devereaux said.
    “Who is this man?”
    “A writer named Ernest Hemingway.”
    “Harry told me about Ernest many times. He said I would like this man, he was a man who knew many children.”
    “And this man is Harry when he was young.”
    They both saw it. They stared at the young man, thinner, wearing a black mustache, taller than Hemingway, also clad in shorts. The two men standing on a dock somewhere. Perhaps in Cuba, when Harry had worked for the Langley Agency there. The writer and the spy.
    Carefully, he put down the photograph on the grass and he picked up the notebook.
    It was bound in good calfskin leather. The thin pages were yellowed by the years.
    “That is Harry’s book.”
    “You know about that.”
    “Everyone has heard of Harry’s book. It is magic. But no one has ever seen it. The
gendarmes noirs
came here many times and they never found the book. And that is the book and you have found it.” Philippe was impressed.
    Devereaux opened the book and he saw the first page covered with numbers in rows. The numbers were grouped in sets of five. A simple number code. Row after row of numbers. The kind of numbers sent in simple ciphers before the war, before the invention of machines that could invent random codes that could not be broken without another receiving machine.
    He turned the pages, kneeling on the grass.
    Thirty pages were filled in a methodical way with the numbers, each neatly copied, each set of five followed by a precise space that led to a second set of five.
    There could not have been a notebook; Devereaux had thought the notebook was a ruse from the beginning, a fabrication created by Harry or by Ready to use against Devereaux. Devereaux had realized sitting in the café in Evian that Ready meant to kill him and he had not understood why he had not killed him then and there. Why lure him and Rita to this island with an elaborate explanation about Harry Francis and his secrets and about spies and about “operations” about to commence. No one cared about St. Michel.
    Except there was a notebook in code and it changed the rules of the game and changed all of Devereaux’s expectations.
    The damned thing should not have existed.
    “What will you do, monsieur?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You will take the book that everyone speaks about.”
    “Yes.”
    “It belongs to Harry.”
    “I’ll give it back to Harry. When he is released. From jail.”
    “What if they beat him again as they did before and this time he tells them where the notebook is and it is not here when they come for it? They might kill him.”
    “Did he tell you they beat him?”
    “Yes. Twice. He showed me the marks.”
    Then that part of it was true as well. Ready really had wanted the book, really believed in it. And he had power over Harry Francis but only up to a point. If he didn’t have the notebook, he had to be careful with Harry.
    “I could tell them you found the book,” said Philippe and then he was afraid because of what he had said.
    Devereaux stared at him a moment, the eyes going cold and dead. “Yes.” And then the color changed in his eyes, as though he had decided something.
    “Yes,” he said. “Tell them if you want. They might kill him in that case. But you can tell