Spy in a Little Black Dress

VII


Havana, Cuba, May 1952


They took her right off the street.

Jackie was walking back to her hotel on the spacious Paseo del Prado, wearing a lightweight raincoat over her summer dress as protection against the light mist coming off of the Malecón, which bordered Havana Bay.

As she walked, she noted with continual openmouthed wonder that while Paris was blue, Rome was ochre, and Madrid was umber, Havana was colored unlike any other city she had ever seen. Everywhere you looked, building lintels and pediments and friezes and frescoes were tricked out in pleasing pastel hues—blue, green, yellow, red—making it the most festive-looking city she had visited.

No sooner had she made this observation than a big gray sedan pulled up next to her with an urgent squeal of brakes. She looked over to see what was happening, but before she could react, two men burst out of the back of the car and rushed over to the curb, effectively blocking her from flight. Then they grabbed her by both arms and forced her into the back of the vehicle, which took off with another squeal of the tires. Unfortunately, this was a quiet time of day, and there were no food vendors, pedestrians, or tourists on the boulevard to come to her aid or raise the call for help. From first squeal to last, it couldn’t have taken thirty seconds for the two men to hustle her off the street and into the sedan.

“Hey,” Jackie protested to the men, “what do you think you’re—”

But before she could get the last word out of her mouth, the man to her left pushed a piece of cloth into it while the man to her right slid another piece of cloth down over her eyes, effectively blinding her. Then, together, they pushed her down on the floor of the car, and each kept a knee on her to make sure she stayed there, where she couldn’t be seen by any passersby.

She recognized these men. They were the same East German spies who had caused her to cut short her intelligence-gathering assignment in New Orleans last year. The trio that she had dubbed Moe, Larry, and Curly after their resemblance to the Three Stooges. Moe was to her left, Larry to her right, and she assumed that must be bald-headed Curly behind the wheel.

Unfortunately, she had barely received any CIA training yet on how to react if kidnapped, but she realized the best thing to do under the circumstances was to try to remain calm. It was always better to make decisions with a rational mind than it was to act out of blind panic, “blind” being the operative word here, as she remained unable to see where the Three Stooges were taking her.

With her face pushed down in the rear rubber floor mat, unable to look at her watch, she tried to keep track of the time the best way she knew how—by counting her heartbeats. This was a little trick her E and E (Escape and Evasion) instructor had taught the class. The human heart beats approximately sixty times a minute, he’d told them, so use your heartbeat as a clock to keep track of the time. Waiting until her heart rate had returned to normal, she placed her right forefinger on the pulse in her left wrist and tried to count her heartbeats as best she could, reckoning that it took the cab approximately 12,600 heartbeats, or three and a half hours, to reach its destination. It took all her concentration to keep track, but counting also distracted Jackie from thinking about what lay in store for her once they reached their destination.

Jackie had also been instructed to be aware of her surroundings. If you were in a position where you couldn’t see, her teacher had told her, use your ears to keep track of where you were being taken. During the drive, Jackie could hear the heavy city traffic give way to a more occasional vehicular sound and could feel the road beneath the tires go from the usual smooth running of asphalt to the bounce of unpaved roads, with the accompanying pings of pebbles bouncing up against the sides of the car. Which led her to surmise that she was somewhere in the country.

So now she was in possession of two rough facts about where she was being taken, good to know should she be fortunate enough to extricate herself from this situation.

Finally, the sedan came to a halt, the rear doors opened, and Jackie was ushered out of the vehicle and into a large, featureless building of some unknown function. From nearby, she thought she could hear the sound of ocean waves crashing and smell the tang of salt air—another important clue to her unknown location.

The blindfold and the gag were removed, much to Jackie’s relief. It took several minutes for her eyesight to come back into focus and adjust to the dim light in the room. It was coming from a bare bulb hanging from the low ceiling.

Larry held Jackie’s handbag. He opened it up and dumped its contents out on the floor. Moe knelt down and sifted through the detritus of Jackie’s daily life—lipstick, keys, handkerchief, address book, old movie and theatre stubs—apparently looking for anything that she might use as a weapon or escape device. He came up with a nail file and took it, along with her hotel key. As he rose, he pocketed the potential weapons and left the rest of Jackie’s things, along with the handbag, lying on the floor. Then he and Larry left the room. She heard a metallic clicking sound from outside and assumed that she had been locked in.

Looking around, Jackie quickly inventoried the furnishings of the room, which appeared to be some kind of empty storage space. It didn’t take long, because the only piece of furniture in it was a rickety wooden chair. Jackie sat down on it. One leg was slightly shorter than the other three, making the chair rock like a ship at sea.

From this vantage point, Jackie saw that the door was metal and thick and, most dismaying, without a doorknob or handle. The walls were made of rough poured concrete, and there were no windows or vents to make even the merest hope of escape possible. She tried to get comfortable in the chair and figure out her options. Unfortunately, there were none that she could think of. She would just have to wait for the Stooges to return and take it from there.

She didn’t have long to wait.

After what could only have been a half hour or so—Jackie had stopped counting her heartbeats when they arrived at this unknown destination—Moe and Larry entered the room and stood on either side of her. They motioned for her to rise; then each took hold of one arm and led her out of the room, down a dimly lit hallway, and into another room, the central feature of which was a shallow, funnel-like depression set in the floor. It was blocked at the bottom by what appeared to be a round hatch. Jackie wondered where the hatch led and whether it could prove viable as an escape route.

For some reason, the room smelled like a butcher shop, although there was no raw meat to be seen anywhere around.

Moe and Larry pushed her down in a chair that, like the one in the other room, likewise had one shorter leg (Jackie wondered if they came from the same set). The two Stooges stood over her, waiting for something to happen or someone else to join them.

After another half hour, during which the two Stooges stood silent and did nothing but occasionally glower down at her, the door opened and Curly entered. At the sight of her, he rubbed his hands together vigorously, as though eagerly anticipating what was to come. He turned to face Jackie and addressed her in English that came filtered through a thick East German accent.

“Hello, Miss Bouvier,” he said. “So nice to see you again. I trust that you enjoyed your visit to New Orleans.”

Jackie tried to keep from acknowledging in any way that this was her correct name. Based on her training, she knew that everything that had happened so far had been done with one purpose in mind—to keep her off balance and lower her resistance. Just knowing this helped her resolve to stay strong and not give in to these men. But at the same time, a small voice at the back of her brain kept repeating the words that her fellow agent Jacques had spoken to her when relating the story of his friend, Henri, tortured at the hands of the Gestapo during World War II: “Henri ended up talking. Sooner or later, everybody does.”

Instantly, Jackie banished that thought from her mind. Instead, she chose to focus on her success during last year’s special assignment in Paris. If she could survive those incidents and live to tell the tale, then she could withstand whatever the Three Stooges intended for her.

Curly said, “So your name is Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, yes?”

Jackie refused to answer either yes or no, although it did bother her that he knew her name.

“And you work for the CIA, yes?”

Jackie worked hard to keep her face blank, not giving away anything that would confirm her status as a CIA undercover agent.

Curly stood in front of her, waiting patiently for her to answer. It was his patience that Jackie found so unnerving. She might have been more comfortable had he done something tangible to show his anger. She decided that playing mute was her best course of action in this situation.

Undaunted, he continued his questioning. “And what, Miss Bouvier, is your current assignment for the CIA?”

Once again, Jackie had to try her best to keep from reacting. It was getting more difficult with each passing question. Curly seemed to know so much about her. At the CIA, she was just a small cog in a very large machine. So why had they kidnapped her in particular? What information did they hope to get from her? And most important of all, what did they plan to do with her once they had this information?

Curly turned away from Jackie and addressed Moe and Larry in their native language. Moe went over to the wall, picked up a long gaff that was hanging there, and used it to reach down and pry open the hatch at the bottom of the funnel. The room was instantly assailed by a fetid and primordial smell, from which everyone recoiled. Then, upon further instructions from their boss, Larry and Moe grabbed Jackie by either arm and dragged her over to the edge of the funnel, where they forced her to look down.

The area below the base of the funnel was dark, but Jackie thought that she could detect movement down there. She heard a slithering, swishing sound multiplied many times and punctuated by some kind of ominous snapping sound. Jackie got the impression of scaly skin and prognathous jaws. And when she finally was able to pierce the darkness, she saw that the room below this one was a pit filled with crocodiles, all of them now snarling up at her with a look of hungry appraisal on their reptilian faces.

With a chill in the pit of her stomach, Jackie realized that it was feeding time at the zoo and the Three Stooges intended to serve her up as the entrée du jour unless she gave them the information they wanted.

Jackie tried to wrestle herself out of Moe and Larry’s grasp to put a little distance between herself and the edge of the funnel. But the floor here was slippery and gave no traction to Jackie’s high-heeled shoes. She found herself slipping off the rim. Moe and Larry held on as long as they could, then let her go so as not to be dragged into the pit along with her.

Jackie slowly slid down the incline toward the hole below. She grabbed on to the lip of the funnel and momentarily arrested her slide, but her fingers could find no solid purchase there. She looked up at Moe and Larry and croaked out, “Help me. Please.”

Moe and Larry looked to Curly, who was suddenly by their side. “Not unless you tell us what you’re doing here in Havana,” he called down to Jackie in a surprisingly reasonable tone of voice. “Does it have anything to do with William Walker’s treasure?”

Jackie couldn’t believe it. Walker’s treasure. She should have known that’s what they were after. Somehow they knew about it. It also explained why they had been after her in New Orleans. But little good that information was doing her now.

Moe retrieved the gaff and held it at the ready, waiting to hook Jackie and pull her back up should Curly give the word.

Her fingers slipped a little bit more, and she knew it was only a matter of seconds before she slid down the funnel into the crocodile pit and was torn to pieces by those ravenous creatures. It would be so easy to save herself. All she had to do was answer Curly’s questions. But that was unthinkable, given the pledge she had made to the CIA and her country. Her life was literally going down the drain.

And as she slid slowly, inexorably, down the slick incline of the funnel, with the Three Stooges waiting impassively above her and the hungry crocodiles waiting impatiently below, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier asked herself, For God’s sake, how did I get myself into this mess?