The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

and knees sharply and minutely, he heard them coming around the house. They had surrounded it.

He crawled steadily, thinking hard, giving no importance to the pain.

“But why the sirens?” he thought. “Why no third car from the rear? Why no spotlight or a searchlight on this field? Cubans,” he thought. “Can they be this stupid and theatrical? They must have thought there was no one in the house. They must have come only to seize the stuff. But why the sirens?”

Behind him he heard them breaking in the door. They were all around the house. He heard two blasts on a whistle from close to the house and he wriggled steadily on.

“The fools,” he thought. “But they must have found the basket and the dishes by now. What people! What a way to raid a house!”

He was almost to the edge of the lot now and he knew that he must rise and make a dash across the road for the far houses. He had found a way of crawling that hurt little. He could adjust himself to almost any movement. It was the brusque changes that hurt, and he dreaded rising to his feet.

In the weeds he rose on one knee, took the shock of the pain, held through it, and then brought it on again as he drew the other foot alongside his knee in order to rise.

He started to run toward the house across the street, at the back of the next lot, when the clicking on of the searchlight caught him so that he was full in the beam, looking toward it, the blackness a sharp line on either side.

The searchlight was from the police car that had come silently, without siren, and posted itself at one back corner of the lot.

As Enrique rose to his feet, thin, gaunt, sharply outlined in the beam, pulling at the big pistol in the holster under his armpit, the submachine guns opened on him from the darkened car.

The feeling is that of being clubbed across the chest and he only felt the first one. The other clubbing thuds that came were echoes.

He went forward onto his face in the weeds and as he fell, or perhaps it was between the time the searchlight went on and the first bullet reached him, he had one thought. “They are not so stupid. Perhaps something can be done with them.”

If he had had time for another thought it would have been to hope there was no car at the other corner. But there was a car at the other corner and its searchlight was going over the field. Its wide beam was playing over the weeds, where the girl, Maria, lay hidden. In the dark car the machine gunners, their guns poised, followed the sweep of the beam with the fluted, efficient ugliness of the Thompson muzzles.

In the shadow of the tree, behind the darkened car from which the searchlight played, there was a Negro standing. He wore a flat-topped, narrow-brimmed straw hat and an alpaca coat. Under his shirt he wore a string of blue voodoo beads. He was standing quietly watching the lights working.

The searchlights played on over the weedfield where the girl lay flat against the ground, her chin in the earth. She had not moved since she heard the burst of firing. She could feel her heart beating against the ground.

“Do you see her?” asked one of the men in the car.

“Let them beat through the weeds for the other side,” the lieutenant in the front seat said. “Hola,” he called to the Negro under the tree. “Go to the house and tell them to beat toward us through the weeds in extended order. Are there only the two?”

“Only two,” the Negro said in a quiet voice. “We have the other one.”

“Go.”

“Yes sir, Lieutenant,” the Negro said.

Holding his straw hat in both hands he started to run along the edge of the field toward the house where, now, lights shone from all the windows.

In the field the girl lay, her hands clasped across the top of her head. “Help me to bear this,” she said into the weeds, speaking to no one, for there was no one there. Then, suddenly, personally, sobbing, “Help me, Vicente. Help me, Felipe. Help me, Chucho. Help me, Arturo. Help me now, Enrique. Help me.”

At one time she would have prayed, but she had lost that and now she needed something.

“Help me not to talk if they take me,” she said, her mouth against the weeds. “Keep me from talking, Enrique. Keep me from ever talking, Vicente.”

Behind her she could hear them going through the weeds like beaters in a rabbit drive. They were spread wide and advancing like skirmishers, flashing their electric torches in the weeds.

“Oh, Enrique,” she said, “help me.”

She brought her hands down from her head and clenched them by her sides. “It is better so,” she thought. “If I run they will shoot. It will be simpler.”

Slowly she got up and ran toward the car. The searchlight was full on her and she ran seeing only it, into its white, blinding eye. She thought this was the best way to do it.

Behind her they were shouting. But there was no shooting. Someone tackled her heavily and she went down. She heard him breathing as he held her.

Someone else took her under the arm and lifted her. Holding her by the two arms they walked her toward the car. They were not rough with her, but they walked her steadily toward the car.

“No,” she said. “No. No.”

“It’s the sister of Vicente Irtube,” said the lieutenant. “She should be useful.”

“She’s been questioned before,” said another.

“Never seriously.”

“No,” she said. “No. No.” She cried aloud, “Help me, Vicente! Help me, help me, Enrique!”

“They’re dead,” said someone. “They won’t help you. Don’t be silly.”

“Yes,” she said. “They will help me. It is the dead that will help me. Oh, yes, yes, yes! It is our dead that will help me!”

“Take a look at Enrique then,” said the lieutenant. “See if he will help you. He’s in the back of that car.”

“He’s helping me now,” the girl, Maria, said. “Can’t you see he’s helping me now? Thank you, Enrique. Oh, thank you!”

“Come on,” said the lieutenant. “She’s crazy. Leave four men to guard the stuff and we will send a truck for it. We’ll take this crazy up to headquarters. She can talk up there.”

“No,” said Maria, taking hold of his sleeve. “Can’t you see everyone is helping me now?”

“No,” said the lieutenant. “You are crazy.”

“No one dies for nothing,” said Maria. “Everyone is helping me now.”

“Get them to help you in about an hour,” said the lieutenant.

“They will,” said Maria. “Please don’t worry. Many, many people are helping me now.”

She sat there holding herself very still against the back of the seat. She seemed now to have a strange confidence. It was the same confidence another girl her age had felt a little more than five hundred years before in the market place of a town called Rouen.

Maria did not think of this. Nor did anyone in the car think of it. The two girls named Jeanne and Maria had nothing in common except this sudden strange confidence which came when they needed it. But all of the policemen in the car felt uncomfortable about Maria now as she sat very straight with her face shining in the arc light.

The cars started and in the back seat of the front car men were putting the machine guns back into the heavy canvas cases, slipping the stocks out and putting them in their diagonal pockets, the barrels with the handgrips in the big flapped pouch, the magazines in the narrow webbed pockets.

The Negro with the flat straw hat came out from the shadow of the house and hailed the first car. He got up into the front seat, making two who rode there beside the driver, and the four cars turned onto the main road that led toward the sea-drive into La Havana.

Sitting crowded on the front seat of the car, the Negro reached under his shirt and put his fingers on the string of blue voodoo beads. He sat without speaking, his fingers holding the beads. He had been a dock worker before he got a job as a stool pigeon for the Havana police and he would get fifty dollars for this night’s work. Fifty dollars is a lot of money now in La Havana, but the Negro could no longer think about the money. He turned his head a little, very slowly, as they came onto the lighted driveway of the Malecon and, looking back, saw the girl’s