Spy in a Little Black Dress

XXIV



Of all the places the raft could have washed ashore, Miami Beach couldn’t have been more inviting. Jackie thought she was dreaming when a handsome lifeguard helped her out of the raft and, after hearing of her predicament, had a beach boy escort her to the magnificent Fontainebleau Hotel. When she contacted Dulles, he was eager to make up for this latest mishap and once again provided her with first-class accommodations.

So now Jackie was swimming laps in the hotel’s gigantic pool. When she counted twenty, she climbed out of the pool and, feeling invigorated from her swim, quick-stepped over to a nearby chaise longue, where she began to dry herself off with a beach towel. Deciding to let her hair dry naturally in the sun, she put down the towel, sat back in her chair, and picked up Papa’s copy of This Side of Paradise (now slightly warped from seawater) and once again immersed herself in Princeton student Amory Blaine’s world of “speeds” and “parlor snakes.”

The book reminded her of her recent ordeal in the Atlantic, two days and nights that she didn’t really want to relive or ever repeat. Unfortunately, Papa’s prediction that she would be picked up by a PBY hadn’t come true. Fortunately, his prediction that she would float back to Florida had come true, although she had bypassed Key West entirely and ended up in Miami Beach instead. Not only had Dulles reserved a room for her at the Fontainebleau, but he had even arranged for a physician on the CIA payroll to see her in her hotel room. The doctor pronounced her healthy, although a little too heavily suntanned. Dulles also wired her money so she could go to the shops in Bal Harbour and buy herself some clothes to replace the ones left behind in Cuba. And now here she was in her new Jantzen swimsuit, poolside at the Fontainebleau, recuperating nicely from her ordeal, and waiting to receive her new orders and return home to D.C. for her debriefing.

As she attempted to read, she heard a familiar-sounding voice and looked up. In the near distance, she caught sight of Arthur Phillips, wearing a crisply pressed Palm Beach suit and looking as at home here as he had in the two places in Cuba where she had bumped into him. She wondered what he was doing here, in Miami Beach, and if it was any coincidence that they were both staying at the same hotel. He was greeted by another man, and the two of them walked to a table under an awning at the far side of the swimming pool, where they ordered drinks and watched pretty young women dive into the deep end from the high board.

It was good that he hadn’t noticed her. In a flash, Jackie gathered up her beach towel, Coppertone suntan lotion, and book and was back in her room. There, she called the front desk and charmed the room number for Arthur Phillips out of the desk clerk. Venturing out into the hallway, she came across a chambermaid and, taking a page from Emiliano’s book, bribed the woman into lending her a spare maid’s uniform and her passkey. She then used the passkey to enter Phillips’s room, where she quickly spotted an open attaché case on a desk near the sliding glass door that led to his terrace. She put down the feather duster she had used to complete her disguise, then began going through the documents Phillips had left unattended in his attaché case.

Returning to her room, she quickly changed into her clothes and neatly folded the spare uniform for the chambermaid to collect. Jackie then went back to the pool area, where Phillips, his meeting over, was now seated by himself, nursing a drink. Jackie sat in the chair across from him and plunged right in.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Phillips said, none of his usual aplomb absent from his voice. She had to hand it to him. If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it.

“Are you enjoying your stay here?” she asked.

“Well, I usually prefer the Eden Roc.”

“But you wanted to stay here so you’d be closer to me—is that right?”

Phillips said nothing.

“You don’t have to worry,” Jackie assured him. “I know you work for the CIA.”

When Phillips didn’t answer, Jackie forged ahead. “The Thorndyke Fund is a CIA proprietary company. It’s secretly owned by the agency, and you run it for them.”

His face remained impassive.

“You weren’t in Cuba looking for investment opportunities. The only one you really wanted was Walker’s treasure. Well, I’m sorry to say, there wasn’t any.”

For the first time, Phillips allowed his face to show some emotion. He seemed impressed with Jackie’s recitation of the facts.

“I was told you were a neophyte agent. How did you come by this information?”

“Let’s just say that I have my ways and leave it at that.”

“It would seem that I’ve underestimated you, Miss Bouvier. You’re right. The Thorndyke Fund is a proprietary company. It finances off-the-book operations for the CIA. What is known in the trade as black ops.”

“And does Allen Dulles know about this?”

“Let’s just say that what Allen Dulles knows and what he doesn’t want to know are two separate things.”

Jackie shook her head. Once again she had come up against the CIA’s ability to use the end to justify the means. She was in over her head, and she knew it. She should just confine herself to the little picture and leave the big picture to the experts. That way she would never end up with conflicted loyalties.

The waiter came, and Jackie ordered lemonade. She told him to put it on Phillips’s tab. Phillips made no objection. Under the circumstances, it was the least that he could do.

“I’m sorry there was no treasure,” said Jackie with finality.

“As am I,” said Phillips. “I wonder what did happen to all that money Walker looted from the Nicaraguan treasury.”


Gabriela was taking a break and sunning herself. It was siesta time, and Fidel’s camp had gone somnolent in the late afternoon sun, except for some of the men who had chosen up sides for a baseball game (with Fidel pitching for one of the teams, of course). As she watched, Gabriela found, to her surprise, that this new life agreed with her. She felt part of something. What was that forgotten word? Ah, yes, family. So all right, she wouldn’t be a dancer. For now. But maybe, come the revolution, she would once again have her chance to fulfill her childhood dream. If she wasn’t too old by then. The thought made her laugh to herself.

She saw that Emiliano was playing shortstop on Fidel’s team, which also included his brother Raúl and Camilo Cienfuegos, one of Fidel’s top lieutenants. She noted that the lawyer had lost nearly all of his pasty courtroom complexion and was now as brown as every other one of Fidel’s compañeros. It was still only a fledging army, to be sure, but it was gaining new adherents every day, and Fidel spoke of a time, probably only a year off, when they would make their first big move against the Batista government.

In the weeks since saying farewell to Jackie at the pirate inlet, Emiliano had seemed a changed person. He often kept to himself, and he didn’t seem to have a lot to say. He appeared to be on some kind of inward journey, one that had nothing to do with his new situation as a fugitive from justice. Fidel was even thinking about temporarily sending him away, for safety’s sake, to Mexico. She recalled overhearing part of their conversation.

“And while you are there in Mexico City,” Fidel said, “I want you to meet with a man, an Argentine doctor.”

“You want me to go all the way to Mexico to recruit a doctor to treat our troops?” Emiliano asked in confusion.

“No, he is some kind of genius at guerrilla warfare. We could use his expertise here. His name is Ernesto Guevara, but he prefers to be called Che.”

In the past few days, Emiliano had come out of his shell somewhat and seemed interested in spending time with her. She felt flattered by this attention and wondered if it was the beginning of something else.

Idly, Gabriela reached into her pocket and pulled out the two halves of the silver locket. Maybe one day, she would take them to a jeweler and have the two pieces soldered together so the locket was whole again. Even as incomplete as they were now, Gabriela was grateful to Jackie for figuring out the puzzle of Walker’s treasure and restoring her family heritage to her. She seemed to draw a certain amount of emotional sustenance from just having the locket on her person at all times.

Now, putting the two halves of the locket together, she noticed something for the first time. The second locket half also had those indecipherable markings on the inside.

But once the two halves were joined, Gabriela was surprised to see that the markings were no longer incomprehensible. In fact, they now seemed to form something entirely comprehensible—a tiny map of an island. Not Cuba. But a smaller one off the southern coast of Cuba, in Oriente Province. There was a tiny X on the island. You had to squint your eyes to see it. And she was sure that she could view it better with the aid of a magnifying glass. But in the meantime, she felt sure that what she was looking at was a treasure map.

In her mind, she went over the clues Emiliano had told her about. Leprosaria. Campo Santo. 57. AD.

Gabriela began to laugh. She knew that the tiny island, visible from the pirate inlet below the fort, had once been called Isla de Campo Santo, a fact that few people today seemed to know. And that a leper colony had been abandoned there after having been reestablished on the southern coast. Was it possible that there had been a treasure after all, and that Metzger had buried it on the island? Metzger, the former apprentice silversmith who had meticulously etched this treasure map on the inside of Maria Consuela’s silver locket, then deliberately split it in two to prevent just anyone from discovering its secret.

If this were indeed the case, then he was far more ingenious than anyone had given him credit for. Maybe this had been his convoluted way of making sure that his descendants would one day meet Maria Consuela’s descendants. Too bad then that Metzger had died before getting married and having children to fulfill his dream. In the end, though, it had come true in its own fashion, reuniting Gabriela with the family ancestors she had never known.

At the thought of it, she continued to laugh. She laughed so hard and so long that she caught the attention of Emiliano, who was awaiting his turn at bat. He came over to her and asked what was so funny.

And when she told him, he began to laugh too.