Spy in a Little Black Dress

XX



They left the camp in a jeep borrowed from Fidel’s extremely limited motor pool. By the time they got to the abandoned leprosarium, it was dusk, which they hoped would give them just enough time before it turned full dark to explore the grounds, locate the cemetery, and find the grave that they thought might hold the treasure.

To Jackie, the treasure had started out as a kind of puzzle, an academic exercise of wading through the bargain basement of history to arrive at the truth. But after the meeting with Fidel, the game had gone from the merely abstract to the frighteningly concrete. Now people would die unless Jackie and Emiliano managed to locate the treasure in time and used it to barter for the safety of the captured rebels whose fates Colonel Sanchez was holding in his murderous hands.

After debating the meaning of the legend printed on the map, Jackie and Emiliano had decided that the leprosaria must be a reference to a leper colony, the campo santo to a cemetery within the colony, and the 57 AD to the date on a particular gravestone. Fortunately, as indicated on the map, there was only one leper colony along this section of Oriente Province’s southern coast.

The abandoned leprosarium was difficult to find at first because it had been reclaimed by nature long ago. The remains of the buildings were overgrown with vegetation so thick that it almost completely camouflaged the structures from view. Finally, after having driven past it three times, Emiliano spotted the entrance, recognizing that it wasn’t a natural rock formation at all, but something built by man that had surrendered itself to nature.

On the ground, partly obscured by jungle vines, was a fallen sign that read:

LA LEPROSARIA DE SAN JUDAS TADEO

Jackie looked at Emiliano. “San Judas Tadeo?”

“Yes. You perhaps know him better as St. Jude.”

Jackie smiled to herself. There were worse things you could name a leper colony after, she supposed, than Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. On impulse, she offered up a silent prayer to him that their mission here wouldn’t prove to be an equally lost cause.

Beyond the front gate, the grounds were impassable by vehicle so Emiliano parked the jeep directly outside. Moving to the back of the jeep, he picked up a rucksack containing everything they thought they might need to locate the treasure. Then he and Jackie passed under the gate and made their way through the undergrowth in search of the graveyard.

Emiliano said, “You have to hand it to your man, Metzger. Whatever this treasure is, he hid it where no one would ever dream to look for it. Think of two places people naturally try to avoid. Cemeteries and leper colonies. And he managed to hide Walker’s treasure in a cemetery inside a leper colony. It’s genius, really.”

“It is,” Jackie agreed. She wondered what this place was like when Metzger had arrived here with Maria Consuela and the buildings were whole and populated by lepers and their nurses. His diary was a total blank for this part of his life. Did Metzger and Maria Consuela work here serving the leper community, he out of his sense of idealism untarnished by his service under the corrupt William Walker, and she out of the values instilled in her as a young novitiate? Or was Metzger afraid that the forces opposed to Walker would come to Cuba looking for Maria Consuela and cleverly thought that the safest place for her would be inside the walls of a leper colony?

In the near darkness, it was easy to let one’s imagination run riot and catch fleeting glimpses of the ghosts of those who had suffered and died here almost one hundred years ago. Perhaps Jackie was walking in the very footsteps taken by Metzger and Maria Consuela back in 1857.

“Do you have any ideas for finding the right grave?” Emiliano asked, breaking into Jackie’s momentary reverie.

“The 57 AD on the map must be the year when Metzger and Maria Consuela landed here from Nicaragua—1857,” Jackie said, having brought her intelligence to bear on this very subject. “So I imagine he hid the treasure in a fake grave with that date on the headstone to make it easy to find. I expect the name on the headstone to be made up, so we should probably look for one with the last name of Walker or Metzger. After all, he wanted to make sure that someone would eventually make their way here and find the treasure.”

Emiliano nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

The overgrown grounds of the leprosarium and the growing dark made walking through the compound slow going. Emiliano gallantly held on to Jackie’s arm to make sure that she wouldn’t slip and fall.

They passed the crumbling, vine-choked remains of several large structures, probably buildings for administration or clinical facilities, as well as individual huts that must have been home to many of the lepers not immediately in need of medical treatment. There was also a small white clapboard building with a steeple on top, obviously a church.

“Let’s look over there,” Emiliano said. “Wherever you see a church, you usually find a graveyard nearby.”

Rounding the corner of the decaying clapboard structure, they did, indeed, come across a graveyard behind the church. It held about thirty tombstones laid out in a haphazard fashion. As they entered the cemetery, dusk gave way to darkness. Emiliano reached into his rucksack, removed two flashlights, and handed one to Jackie.

“We’ll make better time if we split up,” he said. “Just give a shout if you find something you think is it.”

“Will do,” Jackie responded and walked to the headstone farthest from the center of the graveyard. She couldn’t recall ever having been in a cemetery after dark before and didn’t like the feeling. As a child, though, she had never been particularly superstitious and thought that now was not a good time to allow her imagination to go haywire. And a cemetery in the middle of an abandoned leprosarium—it was just too much to think about, really! So she purged all such broody thoughts from her head.

She looked up and could see Emiliano’s flashlight beam at the opposite end of the graveyard and felt instantly relieved. All she wanted to do was find the right tombstone, locate the treasure, and get out of this godforsaken place as quickly as possible.

The jungle had made relatively few inroads here, as though instinctively respecting the sanctity of this last resting place of the lepers. Jackie raked her flashlight over all the headstones in her section of the cemetery but so far had yet to come across a date or name or combination of the two that cried out to her—this is it; this is where the treasure is! The combined effects of wind and rain over time had begun to erode the legends chiseled on the headstones, making many of them difficult to read. She quickly grew disappointed and began to worry that she had read the treasure map all wrong. Maybe her entire premise was faulty and Metzger had done nothing more than accidentally set his descendants up for a wild goose chase.

But just as she reached the end of her section and began to despair that they would never find what they were searching for, Emiliano called out, “Jackie, please come here.”

Jackie pointed the flashlight in Emiliano’s direction and quickly joined him in front of a large tombstone.

“I think this might be it,” he said to her. He aimed his flashlight at the headstone and Jackie did the same. It read:

HERE LIES HIDALGO WALTER

1824–1857

A MAN’S LIFE IS SHORT

MAY HIS LEGACY BE LONG

“The only problem is the name. It’s not one we’re looking for,” Emiliano said.

“No,” Jackie said, looking at the headstone, “but 1824 is the year of Walker’s birth. It could be a coincidence, but I don’t think so. Besides, doesn’t Hidalgo Walter seem like a fake name? Hidalgo could be a hidden reference to Maria Consuela’s Hispanic heritage and Walter to Metzger’s German origins.”

“Yes, and Walter is one letter away from Walker, and the name means ‘army leader’ in German.”

Jackie gave Emiliano a quizzical look.

“I’ve had some German clients, so I’m slightly familiar with the language.”

Shaking her head in further amazement at Emiliano’s many hidden accomplishments, Jackie said, “Well, I examined all of my headstones and didn’t find a thing, so let’s give this one a try.”

Emiliano shucked off the rucksack and removed a shovel from it. While Jackie trained her flashlight on the grave, Emiliano was all set to dig, then stopped himself and put down the shovel. He stood over the grave, looking solemn, and made the sign of the cross, then picked up the shovel and began digging.

As Jackie looked on, Emiliano expertly wielded the shovel, and a mound of dirt quickly grew into a small hill beside the grave. After a while, he stepped down into the hole to continue his digging.

“Let me guess,” Jackie said. “You also worked your way through law school as a gravedigger.”

“Night watchman,” Emiliano admitted, “but I sometimes had to pitch in with a shovel. But only for one semester. I thought I’d be able to get a lot of work done in such quiet surroundings, but who knew the dead need so much looking after?”

Jackie laughed at Emiliano’s idea of graveyard humor. She was immediately silenced as he said, “I think my shovel just struck something solid.”

Jackie moved closer to the edge of the grave and pointed her flashlight into the hole. Emiliano was standing to one side and carefully brushing away the dirt from the top of what appeared to be a wooden lid. He moved more dirt aside, and from the shape of the lid, it was obvious to Jackie that Emiliano was standing on top of a coffin.

“Should I open it?” he asked Jackie.

“It’s the only way we’ll find out for sure.”

Emiliano used the tip of the shovel to pry up one corner of the coffin lid. The wood was visibly rotting, and the nail heads that held the lid down were rusting, so it took little effort to force the coffin into giving up its secrets.

Jackie waited with bated breath to see what the coffin held. Emiliano pushed the lid to one side so that they could get a better look at its contents. She shined the flashlight on the coffin’s interior and caught a glimpse of ivory and deep blue. What she saw caused Jackie to drop the flashlight in horror.

The ivory was the color of human bones picked clean by the effects of time, and the deep blue belonged to the shards of what was once the clothing in which Hidalgo Walter had been buried.

Jackie was so sickened at the sight of the desecration that she turned away from the grave. The flashlight beam skittered across the ground between headstones. She was frozen in place, unable to retrieve it. She stood there wondering about the life and death of the peculiarly named Hidalgo Walter and hoped that, wherever his spirit now resided, he took no offense at having his final resting place disturbed.

Several minutes later, Jackie was joined by Emiliano as he climbed out of the hole, having first reaffixed the lid to the coffin as best he could. He picked up the flashlight and handed it to her. “I guess it was the wrong grave after all,” he said simply, then went to work refilling the hole with the dirt piled up next to it.

When he was finished, they stood over the grave. Jackie looked down and said, “Rest in peace, Hidalgo Walter.”

Emiliano returned the shovel to the rucksack and placed the bag back on his shoulder. Silently, after checking the remaining graves and drawing a blank, he and Jackie followed their steps back across the abandoned grounds of the leprosarium and through the gate to the jeep. They remained silent until Emiliano started the jeep’s ignition and turned on the headlights.

“I was so sure it would be here,” Jackie said, almost in tears.

“You have nothing to feel bad about, Jacqueline,” Emiliano said in a vain attempt to mollify her. “You did the best you could with the information you had. Professional treasure hunters spend years searching for the objects of their obsessions. I guess it was unrealistic to think you would find what you were looking for on your very first attempt.”

“But professional treasure hunters don’t have the lives of others depending on them.”

He put his hand over hers in a comforting gesture. “I know. We will just have to think of some other way to rescue them. Maybe when we go back to the camp, Fidel will have some ideas.”

As they drove away, Jackie turned back for a final look and caught one last glimpse of the sign over the gate. The name San Judas Tadeo seemed to be mocking her. Feeling chastised by the patron saint of lost causes, she quickly faced forward again as the jeep raced through the night.


They were hungry and stopped for something to eat at a small cantina that was about to close, but the cook took pity on them and stayed open long enough to feed them. “Cantina” was too grand a word for what was basically just an open-air kitchen with a scattering of rough wooden tables and chairs inside a small courtyard. The cook wore a grease-stained apron, but his cooking smelled delicious, and it wasn’t long before he placed two overflowing bowls of ropa vieja on the table in front of Jackie and Emiliano, who dug in with the true gusto of those whose recent labor had caused them to work up an appetite.

As they ate, the cook remained at their table and tried to make polite conversation in Spanish.

“And what brings you to these parts, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Jackie thought about what to say before finally settling on an approximation of the truth. “We came here to explore the remains of that old leper colony.”

“Which one?” asked the cook.

His question took both Jackie and Emiliano by surprise and caused them to pause in midbite.

Jackie felt both a sudden resumption of hope and a fear that it would only be ripped away again, so she paused for an unconscionably long time before asking, “Why, is there more than one leper colony around here?”

The cook wiped his hands on his apron before answering. It seemed to take forever for him to get his words out.

“Of course there is more than one leper colony around here. There is the one you just came from, the leprosarium, and then there is the one at Fort Mengues.”

“Fort Mengues?” Emiliano asked, joining the conversation for the first time.

“Yes. It’s a small coastal fortress overlooking an inlet not too far from here. Used to protect against pirates and smugglers. It was called the leper colony because of its location, so far from civilization. Being sent to serve there was considered a kind of punishment.”

“Let me guess,” Emiliano said to the cook, “you used to be in the army.”

“I was a mess chef. That’s where I learned how to cook.”

“If this is an example of the food you served, then your men were well fed.”

“Gracias.”

“And is there a cemetery there?” Jackie interrupted, hoping against hope that the cook would supply the answer she so desperately needed to hear.

The cook looked thoughtful. “Yes, I believe there is.”

“And is this fort also abandoned?” asked Emiliano.

“Yes, since there’s no more need to be on watch for pirates.”

Emiliano turned to Jackie and gave her a look of relief, which she fully returned.

“I think we had the wrong leper colony,” he said to her in what could have been the understatement of the year.

Jackie couldn’t help but look up, apologize to St. Jude for ever doubting him, then give silent thanks to him for coming through for them in the end.