Spy in a Little Black Dress

XXI



They found the second cemetery just as dawn was breaking. It was nestled halfway between the beach and the coastal fortification guarding the pirate inlet, just where the cook had told them it would be. Even though it had been left derelict for many years, Fort Mengues had been so solidly constructed that it could have been occupied today with only the slightest need for repair or restoration. Wreathed in the last of the morning mist, looking both substantial and ethereal, it reminded Jackie of Fort Zinderneuf, the Foreign Legion post manned by dead men in Beau Geste.

“We’re not too far from Guantánamo Bay,” said Emiliano.

“The U.S. Navy has a base there, right?” Jackie asked.

“Right. It was ceded by Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War and originally used as a coaling station for American ships.”

“But navy ships don’t run on coal now, do they?”

“No, but your country likes having a presence in this part of the world,” Emiliano responded pointedly.

They saw that the cemetery was a fenced-in plot of land sloping down to a beach rimming a small cove. In days of old, this must have been perfect for pirates embarking on raiding parties or smugglers picking up or dropping off embargoed merchandise.

Emiliano parked the jeep on the far side of the cemetery from the fort, and he and Jackie got out. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day. The pink and gold sunrise was glorious, and there was an offshore breeze that felt refreshing, while at the same time leaving Jackie’s hair thankfully in peace.

Jackie saw a smudge near the horizon. “What’s that?” she asked.

Emiliano looked where Jackie was pointing. “That’s a small island, close enough to be considered Cuban property. But I’m not even sure it has a name.”

Emiliano toted the rucksack as he and Jackie approached the cemetery. It wasn’t until they entered the graveyard that their optimistic mood was instantly transformed. To their shock, they were greeted by about one hundred wooden crosses planted in neat, orderly rows. As they got closer, they could see that none of the crosses had any inscriptions on them. These were the nameless dead.

Emiliano put his hand to his head as though dazed. “Unmarked graves. They must belong to shipwrecked bodies washed ashore without identification. The soldiers manning the battery above us would have considered it their duty to give them a good Christian burial. But without dates or names, we’ll never be able to figure out which is the right one. There’s just no way we can dig up all the graves.”

He slumped against the fence as though crushed by the enormity of the task. Jackie felt the same weight pressing down on her so hard that she could barely breathe. Somehow she managed to croak out, “This is so damned unfair. Just when we think we’ve gotten somewhere, it turns out we’re really nowhere at all.”

“It’s called running a Red Queen’s race.”

Jackie fixed Emiliano with a brave smile. “Leave it to you to quote Lewis Carroll at a moment like this.”

“He’s not a bad example, you know. He taught mathematics, and Alice in Wonderland is really an essay in logic disguised as a book for children.”

“You think we need to apply logic to this problem?”

“It’s all we have left.”

“Spoken like a true lawyer.” With a sigh, Jackie reached into a pocket and removed the note she had scribbled to herself, ensuring that she remembered the words printed on the map. Once again she examined the puzzle left behind by James Metzger:

LEPROSARIA

CAMPO SANTO

57

AD

“Okay,” she said, “this is a leper colony of sorts, so we’re obviously in the right place. And this is the cemetery attached to the leper colony, so we’ve got that right too.”

She looked up at Emiliano. “Agreed so far?”

“Agreed.”

“Now let’s look at this date again—fifty-seven, the year when Metzger and Maria Consuela arrived here in Cuba.” She stopped and thought. “But wait. What if it isn’t a date?”

“But it has to be,” Emiliano pointed out. “Look at the AD underneath it.”

“You know, that’s always bothered me. They obviously didn’t land in fifty-seven BC. So why bother to put the AD there at all?”

As though in answer to her own question, Jackie said breathlessly, “But wait a minute. What if AD doesn’t stand for ‘anno Domini,’ the year of our Lord? What if it means something else entirely?”

“Like what?” Emiliano asked, sounding as if his renewed sense of hope was catching fire from hers.

“I don’t know. Let me think.” She looked up from the piece of paper to the orderly rows of graves facing them. There was something about those rows, their regularity, that seemed familiar to her, but at the same time their meaning remained frustratingly out of her reach. She thought about the basic cryptography course she had taken at the Farm. She had been shown a pad used for enciphering and deciphering messages, really just a piece of paper made up of printed rows of empty boxes waiting to be filled in with transposed letters. For some reason that made her think about playing Scrabble at home with her family. And then it hit her.

“Across and down,” she said.

“What?” asked Emiliano.

“AD stands for ‘across and down,’ ” said Jackie with rising enthusiasm in her voice. “Like the rows of graves here. They’re orderly, regimented, like a Scrabble board or a crossword puzzle. I bet the grave we’re looking for is the one where row five across meets row seven down.”

Emiliano looked at Jackie with amazement. “I think you’re right,” he said. “If he were here, Lewis Carroll would be very proud of you.”

“Well, let’s hope that when we dig up the grave, it leads to more than just a rabbit hole.”


It took about an hour for Emiliano to dig down into the grave found at the intersection of the fifth row across and the seventh row down. This one had a wooden cross that seemed no different from the others. But he and Jackie were probably now only minutes from discovering whether her hunch was right and the grave would give up Walker’s treasure instead of just another coffin or, more probably, a decomposing corpse in the remains of a shroud. Jackie hoped that they wouldn’t be forced to defile any more graves. Seeing the disinterred bones of Hidalgo Walter had been chastening enough for one lifetime.

Once again, Jackie and Emiliano heard the sound of the shovel striking something hard, and once again, Emiliano shoveled the dirt out of the way until what was underneath was laid bare.

Jackie mouthed a silent “Thank God” when she saw that it wasn’t the lid of a coffin. Instead, it appeared to be the slightly rounded top of a chest. A treasure chest, she wondered to herself. With the melody for “gold doubloons and pieces of eight” playing in her head, Jackie tried to restrain herself until Emiliano had put down the shovel, then used both his hands to lift up the chest and push it up over the rim of the grave. Jackie knelt to inspect it and saw that the chest was made of dark wood held together with brass fixtures. A sea chest most probably.

Not wanting to begin until Emiliano was by her side, Jackie couldn’t wait to find out just what was inside the chest, which she had been chasing down ever since those endpapers had popped open at Au Pied de Cochon and Metzger’s diary pages came spilling out. It had been a very long, emotionally fraught, and physically exhausting journey, and now it looked like it was about to end. She couldn’t help but recall the Robert Louis Stevenson quote, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” Well, given what was now at stake, Jackie needed the reassurance that this arrival would be as hopeful as the road to getting here had been.

A single click broke into her thoughts. She knew that sound—a gun’s hammer being cocked—and it seemed to stop her heart for a beat or two. When she turned around to find where it came from, she could feel her stomach lurch with a roiling sense of fear. For there they stood arrayed once more before her: the Three Stooges. Two of them had guns drawn, while the third, Moe, was still rendered hors de combat by the sling he wore. Instead of a gun, he carried a menacing look on his face.

So it was basically two against two, Jackie thought, assessing the situation. Those were great odds if she and Emiliano had anything to fight back with. Unfortunately, they had left the only weapon Fidel would part with, a vintage Springfield-Lee rifle that looked like it hadn’t been fired since the Spanish-American War, in the back of the jeep, where it would do nobody any good at all.

Just then, Emiliano pulled himself out of the grave and immediately caught sight of the Three Stooges. He instinctively followed Jackie’s lead and put his hands up in the air. The sea chest rested between them. Jackie knew that there was no way she could hide its presence from the East Germans, who had obviously deciphered the secret of the treasure map or somehow lucked onto their trail and had come here to take Walker’s treasure.

Curly motioned with his gun, and Jackie and Emiliano picked up the chest by its side handles and walked in the direction the Stooge’s gun was pointing—to the fort. Moe ran ahead and swung open the gate. A hastily abandoned cooking fire near one interior wall told Jackie that the battery must have recently been used as accommodations for some dispossessed campesinos.

With the Three Stooges walking behind them, Jackie and Emiliano entered the fort. It was basically a hollow square with defensive parapets on the three landward sides and a battery of cannons, now rusting, on the rampart facing the seaward side. The walls, at least twelve feet high and equally thick, held the barracks for the men, the mess hall, and the armory. Stone steps led up the walls to the parapets that ran around the top of the structure.

The dirt parade ground beneath their feet had been beaten into a hard surface by the thousands of boots that had been drilled up and down, back and forth, in this square. It was in the middle of this parade ground that Jackie and Emiliano stopped and put down the sea chest. Curly motioned with his gun for the two of them to step aside. Then, while Larry trained his gun on Jackie and Emiliano, the bald Stooge and Moe moved in to examine the chest.

They heard a shuffling sound from above them and looked up. Jackie and Emiliano did too. One man stood on each of the three landward parapets. It was difficult to see them clearly because they had the early morning sun behind them. But it could clearly be seen that each held a submachine gun in his hands. Even before she heard the voice, Jackie knew who these three men were.

“Drop those guns and raise yer hands.” That Chicago-accented voice could belong to only one person Jackie had met recently—the Mambo King. It looked like the Three Stooges weren’t the only ones to figure out where Jackie and Emiliano had been headed.

As she looked up, the mobster and his two gunsels walked down the stone steps, their machine guns trained at the small grouping surrounding the treasure chest. When they reached the ground, they took up positions around Jackie, Emiliano, and the Three Stooges, who had obeyed the Mambo King and were standing, weaponless, with their hands up in the air. They looked totally out of their depth here. It was almost enough to make Jackie feel sorry for them. Almost.

While one henchman collected their guns from the ground, the Mambo King and his other henchmen approached Jackie and Emiliano.

“Well, look who we got here,” the Mambo King said to his cohorts. “It’s the Black Widow herself. How’s your stinger, lady?” he said to Jackie in what she found to be a most insinuating and insulting tone of voice. She guessed this was what came of associating mainly with strippers, gun molls, and other women of low calling. She resolved to keep quiet so as not provoke the anger of the notorious Mambo King and prompt him into displaying his penchant for machine-gun mayhem.

He pushed his face right into Jackie’s. But if he expected her to flinch, then he must have been disappointed, because Jackie refused to back down. She had his number and knew that the only way to deal with this adult version of a schoolyard bully was to meet force with equal force. Finally, when it became obvious that he was wasting his time, the Mambo King withdrew his face from hers and said, “So what didja find here?”

“I don’t know yet,” Jackie said. “With all these interruptions, I haven’t had the chance to find out.”

“Well, what’re ya waitin’ for? Open the freakin’ thing!” the Mambo King ordered. As an added inducement, he swung the machine gun’s muzzle in Jackie’s direction.

She knelt down in front of the sea chest. There was an ancient hasp lock preventing the lid of the chest from being opened. Fortunately, these old locks were comparatively primitive affairs, easy to open, according to her Picks and Locks instructor at the Farm. Jackie took a bobby pin out of her hair—still the secret-agent gal’s best friend—bent it open, and carefully used one end to probe the opening of the antique lock. A few deft manipulations with the bobby pin and the locking mechanism popped open. The Mambo King and his men looked on with amazed eyes, as though remarking to one another, Maybe this dame really does have moxie.

While the one henchman kept his gun trained on the Three Stooges, the Mambo King and the other henchman looked on as Jackie, holding her breath, opened the lid of the sea chest. Emiliano leaned down too, so he could see what it held.

“What is that crap?” the Mambo King asked before the others had the chance to react.

Jackie reached into the chest, which seemed to be filled mainly with books—old, yellowing, crumbling tomes—and removed them.

“These are called books,” Jackie answered sharply.

“Why, you—I oughta—” An angry Mambo King reversed his machine gun and was about to use its butt end to strike Jackie for her impertinent remark, but Emiliano interposed himself between the two of them.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said.

“And I wouldn’t crowd me if I was you,” the Mambo King said.

Having momentarily deflected the Mambo King’s anger away from Jackie, Emiliano wisely backed off.

At the bottom of the chest, there was a large vellum envelope with red sealing wax over its flap. Very carefully, Jackie removed the envelope from the sea chest and held it in her hand. What could be inside it? A will? A treaty of some kind? A map? Oh, please, Jackie prayed to herself, please don’t let it be another map.

“Well, don’t just sit there; open it,” the Mambo King commanded. Jackie looked up at Emiliano, who nodded his approval.

Taking another deep breath—if she kept this up she would surely start hyperventilating and accidentally lose consciousness—Jackie broke the seal on the flap and opened the envelope. It contained only two items—a piece of foolscap and, inexplicably, one half of a silver locket. She looked at the paper, some kind of document, then bypassed the Mambo King and handed it directly to Emiliano. The Mambo King gave her his most fearsome look.

“It’s in Spanish,” Jackie explained. “And he’s a lawyer.”

Emiliano spent several minutes perusing the document while Jackie, the Mambo King, and the forgotten Stooges and his henchmen looked on. The air was pregnant with a feeling of anticipation. Finally, Emiliano looked up from the document. But his reaction was an unusual one: He started to laugh.

And he kept on laughing. Unfortunately, he chose not to share the source of his humor with anyone, which also served to provoke the Mambo King’s mounting ire. He swung his machine gun in Emiliano’s direction and said, “What’s so damned funny?”

Emiliano looked at the gangster as though seeing him for the very first time.

Without a word, he passed the document back to Jackie, once more bypassing the Mambo King, who didn’t appreciate being ignored in this fashion. She looked it over and started laughing too. Jackie knew enough Spanish to understand that the document attested that, on September 3, 1857, a baby girl had been born to William Walker and Maria Consuela Garcia in the province of Santiago de Cuba, the original name for Oriente Province. The name of the baby girl was Josefina Luisa Walker. And the birth certificate was witnessed by one James Metzger.

At last Jackie understood the true meaning of Metzger’s words from his diary. Walker’s treasure had not been a literal one. No gold or jewels were involved. No, his treasure, according to the poetically inclined Metzger, was the child that a pregnant Maria Consuela was carrying in her belly and transporting from Nicaragua to Cuba. It was all there in the diary entries. All one had to do was read between the lines and Metzger’s meaning became clear. You could easily chalk up this misunderstanding to the man’s nineteenth-century sense of circumspection and rectitude.

“What does that thing say?” the Mambo King demanded.

“It says there is no treasure,” Jackie told him.

“No treasure,” roared the Mambo King. “What do you mean, no treasure? That’s impossible.”

“It’s not only possible; it’s true,” Jackie countered. As proof, she lifted up the sea chest and upended it. Of course, nothing fell out of it save for some clods of dirt and a few stray scraps of yellowed book paper. At the sight of this, the Mambo King’s face turned red, then purple. He looked like he was about to have a stroke. Or explode. He walked off several feet, raised his machine gun, and fired off a one-armed burst into the air. Jackie instinctively winced at the incessant chattering sound made by the weapon.

“No damned treasure,” he roared.

Jackie could well understand his anger. If she were the Mambo King, she wouldn’t know how to offer this bad news to his boss, Sam Giancana, either. She had been in his company only once, but he looked like the type who would be more than happy to kill the messenger for the unhappy news he delivered.

“Just one thing I don’t understand,” Emiliano said, interrupting the Mambo King’s tirade. “Why did Metzger go to all this trouble to bury a birth certificate?”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Jackie said. “I imagine that Walker made many powerful enemies. Cornelius Vanderbilt, for instance. Maybe Metzger figured that Walker’s enemies would try to strike out at him through his child. So, loyal soldier that he was, he decided to keep the birth of Walker’s daughter a secret from the world. But he left clues in his diary so that future generations would know the truth.”

“What are you two jabberin’ about?” asked the Mambo King, looking from Jackie to Emiliano, then back again, his machine gun once again trained on them.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said as matter-of-factly as possible. “There’s no treasure here, and that’s that.” She tucked the letter and the silver half locket back inside the envelope, then placed the envelope in one of her pockets.

“Es verdad,” added Emiliano.

“Sorry, Pancho, but I don’t speak the language,” the Mambo King said, thrusting his machine gun in Emiliano’s direction.

“The name’s not Pancho; it’s Emiliano. But that’s only for my friends. And you’re no friend of mine.”

“I could kill you, you know,” the Mambo King said menacingly. “Your companion too,” he said, indicating Jackie, who shrank back from the threat.

“Yes, but you won’t,” countered Emiliano. “I know it, and you know it. And do you know why you won’t kill us?”

“Why?”

“Because we’re not worth it, are we?”

The Mambo King looked momentarily stumped, then said, “That never stopped me before.”

“This time’s different, though,” Emiliano went on. “Too many powerful people know we’re here. Colonel Sanchez will have you clapped in irons in the Presidio Modelo before you can board the next boat or plane off this island.” Jackie knew that Emiliano was referring to the notorious prison located on the Isla de Pinos, which, with its hellish living conditions and dreaded solitary confinement cells, could give Devil’s Island a run for the money.

“So that’s why you’re going to let us live,” he continued. “Because you’ve already calculated the odds, and they’re not in your favor.”

“You should go work at a casino, you know that?”

“I worked my way through law school as a croupier at the casino in the Hotel Nacional. So I know a thing or two about trying to beat the house.”

Jackie looked at Emiliano in surprise. Another part-time career he hadn’t told her about.

“Okay, croupier, you got me. I’m going to let you live. Her too,” he said, swinging his machine gun in Jackie’s direction. “But if I ever see either of you again, you’re gonna wish I had killed you this time. Because next time…”

But the Mambo King had run out of either grisly metaphors or patience, because he just let that last threat sputter out to nothing, like a wet firecracker on a damp Fourth of July evening. With a look of disgust, the Mambo King said to his gunsels, “Let’s blow this joint.”

And without another word or a look back, the gunsels followed the Mambo King across the parade ground and out the front gate of the fort, dropping the Three Stooges’ weapons on the ground as they went. Jackie and Emiliano and the Three Stooges, slowly lowering their hands and recovering their weapons, watched them go. Jackie and Emiliano gave each other a look that said, What now?

Suddenly, there was a stutter of machine-gun fire from outside the walls, causing everyone inside the fort to flinch. The sounds bounced around the battery’s interior, magnifying the racket and making it seem like a small battle was taking place outside. Jackie turned to Emiliano and said with a rising note of fear in her voice, “What was that?”

“I don’t know, but it sounded like someone declared war.”

He and Jackie watched as Larry, Moe, and Curly, with guns drawn and battle-ready looks on their faces, quick-stepped through the gate and promptly disappeared from view.

“I don’t think that was very wise of them,” Emiliano said.

Several seconds later, the truth of his words seemed to be borne out by a second round of machine-gun fire.

Jackie turned to Emiliano. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know, but I’m beginning to regret leaving that rifle in the jeep.”

Jackie put her arms around Emiliano as though afraid of what the next few minutes would bring. Emiliano put his arms around her as though to say that no matter what happened, he would do his best to protect her.

From outside the fort came the sounds of footsteps marching nearer. Jackie and Emiliano turned as one to face this new threat together. Three figures stood framed in the open gateway of the fort: one man and two women. All three carried machine guns with smoke coming out of the muzzles. They walked into the fort in lockstep, and Jackie and Emiliano could see that they were Colonel Sanchez and the sisters Death and Night, the latter two with veils firmly in place to prevent identification. If they had looked intimidating from the train compartment window, they now seemed positively terrifying close up. All three were pointing their smoking machine guns right at them.

The colonel looked at Jackie and Emiliano and said. “I am Colonel Guillermo Sanchez of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar. Now, where is this treasure I have heard so much about?”