Hotel Florida
Obispo Street
Havana, Cuba
11:30 a.m., Wednesday
26 September 1888
I could come up with only two methods to sufficiently disguise Rork for his upcoming stroll about the city. One was to dress him as a woman, admittedly a rather large and ugly woman. The large, ugly part would actually be useful to his task, since that would generate far less attraction from the male inhabitants of the place, who are known for their overtly thorough observation of the fairer sex. But at three inches over six feet, his frame dictated female apparel not readily available in Cuba, where most of the ladies are petite and very pretty.
The other scheme was for him to still be a man, the kind of man with whom no one wanted to be in immediate proximity—a leper. The attire could easily be accomplished by what we had at hand: dirty trousers under filthy bedsheets, some of which would be wound around his head for additional camouflage. Furthermore, I decided he would be a speechless leper, the better to hide his badly accented Spanish and norteamericano identity.
The leper colony at San Lazaro, next to the ancient Espada Cemetery, where Colonel Marrón captured Rork and me two years earlier, was out on the west side of the city, several miles from our present location. Lepers did not generally move about inside the city, so that would be a problem Rork would have to overcome on the spot, should he incite the attention of an inquisitive policeman. I thought his muteness might help in that regard.
Two other things were necessary before Rork could set out on his assignment. First, he had to have the appropriate symptoms of the initial stage of the dreaded disease, which features red skin lesions and senselessness in the limbs. His false left hand provided a truly senseless limb and some of my blood, rubbed onto his face and hands, did an approximation of lesions. By necessity, Rork’s transformation was achieved in the corner by the door, out of sight of the spy-hole in the wall.
The second requirement was the most significant, at least from Rork’s point of view. It took him almost fifteen minutes of procrastination and complaining under his breath to shave off his signature walrus moustache. Tired of it, I quietly reminded him, “Quit the bellyaching, Rork. Your unfortunate need for disguise is entirely due to your lack of discipline last night regarding women and rotgut rum while working.”
Rork didn’t appreciate my opinion, which he categorized as, “Naggin’ like an ol’ woman.”
In the end, by half past eleven that morning, an hour after our distinguished visitors had departed the room, Rork was ready, looking nothing like his usual self. Now came the challenge of an exit, for the balcony was far too visible from the street in the busy daytime. That left the hallway, which meant a distraction had to be manufactured for the armed “servant” standing outside the door. Fortunately, Rork and I knew the layout of the hotel, having stayed there in ’85, in the days before I became persona non grata with Marrón.
Therefore, I simply went to the door and tersely ordered the servant/guard to fetch me a jug of orange juice from the table on the other side of the mezzanine, about seventy feet away. The man, having witnessed that I was the honored personal friend of the captain-general, wasted no time in complying. While he was thus preoccupied, Rork slipped off to the service stairs, where he descended to the ground and his egress out the back alley.
His assignment was to deliver messages to the three men with unique skills whom I’d hastily arranged to come down from the United States and meet me in Havana. The time had come for them to learn their duties. They already knew a vague outline of their parts from my telegrams to them from Washington, but my newly hatched final version of the plan required each to perform a crucial function in the operation ahead.
The narrow streets were already baking in Havana’s windless midday heat as Rork made his way toward Hotel Inglaterra, our haunt of old at the city’s central square in the theater district. The square is usually known by its namesake statue dominating the scene: Queen Isabella Park. This is the upper-class section of the city, approximately corresponding to Madison’s Square in New York or Lafayette Square in Washington.
Inglaterra—the Spanish word for England—is a favorite hotel for foreign tourists and businessmen, as well as the location where Cuban revolutionaries gathered at the beginning of their struggle back in ’68. Now owned by a retired Spanish army captain, it has a reputation for excellent food and drink, and the liveliest café overlooking the smartest promenade in all of Cuba, called the Prado. This magnificent, tree-lined boulevard, along which the beautifully adorned ladies and dandies of Havana stroll, runs north from the park to the Audiencia.
Leonard Pots, a fifty-one-year-old locksmith from Washington’s brothel neighborhood near the Capitol building, who possesses suitably adjustable morals and has done other work for me, was, I hoped, lodging at the Inglaterra, having arrived in Havana two days earlier. Rork arrived at the rear of the hotel and found a bellboy to take a scrawled note to Pots’ room.
Ten minutes later, Rork saw him two blocks away, at the corner of San Rafael and Industria Streets. Following the note’s instructions, Pots was apparently looking for one of the two-wheeled, single-horse Havana cabriolets, known there as a victoria and named for some reason after the British queen.
Rork shambled near him and stooped over as if he’d dropped something, murmuring, “Mornin’, Pots, me boyo. Welcome to sunny Havana. Meetin’s tomorrow evenin’ so listen well. Get tickets at yer hotel desk fer the Tacon Theater’s first show on Thursday night. Tacon Theater is right alongside yer hotel. We’ll meet ye at the intermission in the men’s cloakroom an’ give yer orders at that time. Stay low ’til then.”
Rork’s next stop, via a circuitous route along the Prado and the harbor channel shoreline, was Hotel Isabella, right across the Plaza de Armas square from the captain-general’s grand palace itself. Repeating his effort at Inglaterra, Rork got a hotel boy to deliver a note and subsequently met Carlos Mena, the second of our American operatives, at the walkway along the waterfront, overlooking Carpineti Wharf.
Mena was born in the United States to Cuban parents in 1846 and was an actor and writer in New York. He had ties to the Cuban revolutionary movement in New York and was an annual visitor to Havana, knowing the city well and occasionally performing there. I recruited him for his fluency in the Cuban style of Spanish and his ability in role-playing and disguises—two essential skills for our present purposes.
Mena had that rare ability to look extraordinarily memorable, as in portraying a famous historical figure while speaking English, French, German, or Italian; or he could be so nondescript as to blend in with his environs to the point of being almost invisible, such as a servant. There had been rumors he’d been involved in some confidence schemes, though I’d never confirmed it.
Rork positioned himself ahead of Mena. As the man approached, Rork limped out in front of him and held up a twisted right hand for alms. While Mena dropped a coin into his palm, Rork whispered the same instructions he gave Pots regarding the theater on Thursday evening, with an addition: Mena was to go immediately to the city post and telegraph office, check for a letter addressed to Señor Piedra, then get to the Convent of Santa Catalina on O’Reilly Street and place it under the areca palm planter at the southeast corner.
Rork had a second assignment for him. Right after receiving the letter, he was to stop at a livery he trusted and arrange for a silage dray to be at the corner of the park at San Juan de Dios and Habana Streets at three o’clock on Thursday morning. It was to be full of hay, like the many others that came into the city before dawn each day, and be ready for a slight detour from its usual route. Confirmation of the dray arrangement would be a twig laid atop the letter under the planter.
After Mena walked on, Rork stayed at his site, begging from others who came close. None of them donated, but it gave him time to discern any surveillance. Spotting none, he then headed west, away from the government area, along the channel front, en route to his position a block away from the convent.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, Rork observed Mena wander into the exterior garden of the convent and stop for only a few seconds to admire a flowering bougainvillea bush near the planter. Then he walked back to Obispo Street and returned to his hotel.
Rork waited fifteen minutes, watching the pedestrian movements along O’Reilly and Compostela Streets. By then it was the height of the sun’s glaring, white heat and the beginning of the daily siesta period, during which shops and offices close, little work is done, and few people walk the city’s streets.
Seeing no one else watching the locale, Rork shuffled over and retrieved the envelope. A dried hibiscus twig lay over it. Exiting the garden on Compostela Street, he again made a circumnavigation of the neighborhood before meandering back to our Hotel Florida, where the third specialist was coincidently residing. Rork’s route of earlier egress from the hotel building was now deep in shadow, good for his present purposes of reentry. He used the servants’ back stairs to gain the third floor and knocked on the door of our man’s room, one of the cheaper ones in the rear.
The youngest of my entourage at only twenty-five years of age, Stephen Folger was an expert in electricity from New Jersey and, more recently, Washington, where he worked for Western Union. He knew telegraphy well, having done some scientific tinkering for my friend Tom Edison, and was also an amateur practitioner of chemistry—all skills I believed might come in handy in Havana. He looked like a fellow who spent his life in laboratories, reedy and pale and bespectacled, with a nervous demeanor that made him fidgety, probably from that mind of his churning at all times. But the appearance concealed a sense of adventure, for little Folger loved a challenge and was seldom at a loss for a solution.
Rork went into his orders about the Thursday night meeting at the theater. Then he presented Folger with a more urgent challenge: create a diversion to remove the afternoon guard at our room door so Rork could return.
“Simple,” said Folger as he rubbed his hands together in excitement. “Just use a variation on the old standby of yelling ‘fire.’ But let’s give the guard some added incentive. It’ll be more fun.”
Rork embraced the idea wholeheartedly, and soon our boy genius was teaching the grizzled, old salt how to concoct a simple smoke-generating device. His main ingredients were potassium chlorate and sodium bicarbonate, which Folger carried in a special, sealed container in his “goody box,” a repository of various powders and liquids that outwardly appeared to be a common piece of luggage. To this concoction was added an appropriately local touch, several spoonfuls of Cuban sugar from the bowl next to the coffee pot on the dresser. Everything was mixed together and afterward installed inside a glass jar with a perforated tin lid and a long string attached. Folger then dropped a lit match into the jar, igniting the mixture, and handed it to Rork.
Thusly prepared, the pseudo-leper made his way to the northwest corner of the third-floor mezzanine, where a large potted plant provided cover with a view of our room in the southwest corner. Folger, unable to resist participating further in this adventure, stood in plain sight on the east side of the third-floor mezzanine balcony, ready to add his voice to the shouted confusion of the scene once the action began.
Rolling the jar slowly out to the edge of the floor by the railing, Rork carefully let it go off the edge and descend into a large banana tree in the garden patio below, by which time it had a prodigious amount of smoke erupting from the holes in the top. Then he yelled, “Incendio! Incendio!”
Folger gleefully echoed the alarm, which was quickly repeated by others, including some hotel guests and the guard, who called out for somebody to get the bomberos—the firemen—to the hotel. Word spread into the street. Bells began to ring around the neighborhood.
Hearing the tumult beyond my door, I instantly guessed the culprit and emerged from my room to confront the perplexed man stationed there, just as a woman near Folger screamed for someone to rescue her. Torn between his orders to stay at my door and the obvious duty to help the lady, I helped him along in his decision-making by hitting him on the shoulder, pointing to the mezzanine opposite us, and shouting, “Dios mio! Que pasa contigo, hombre? Vaya a la asistancia de la dama. Ahora!”
That did it. Ten seconds of being lectured by a gringo on how he should help a lady was enough. He ran off to be a hero just about the time the smoke began to wane, but it had served its purpose well, for my tall leprous-looking friend dashed into the room and I closed the door.
“I think you rather enjoyed that entrance, Rork,” I commented quietly, remembering our wall’s eyes and ears.
“Aye, sir. Nothin’ like a wee bit o’ fun while gettin’ the job done! Our young boyo knows his stuff,” was Rork’s whispered answer, while he quickly disrobed out of the line of sight of the peephole. “An’ jus’ wait ’til ye reads the letter in me pocket from you-know-who up in New York. Me thick head don’t get the meanin’ o’ it at all, but yer mind’ll make it out.”