Havana, Cuba
4:30 a.m., Thursday
27 September 1888
Seeing Leo’s mood, I changed our focus to the other man at the table.
“All right, Marco, I need you to charter a boat that can carry ten men. Have it left at the seawall alongside Cortina de Valdez, behind the cathedral, at one o’clock Saturday afternoon. No later than one o’clock. No crew is needed. Just the boat and three pairs of oars. Create a suitable story to explain it, something connected to the Mass. As usual, you will be reimbursed through the sugar company account at the bank.”
“Yes. I can do that.”
“Very well, then, gentlemen, here are your final orders. Three subjects for you to inquire about: First, try to discover anything you can about any significant prisoners Marrón has in his custody. Who are they? Where are they? How long have they been there?
“Second, ascertain the latest on Colonel Marrón and his counterintelligence organization. Are they in a state of heightened activity? Are they concentrating anywhere? What areas, and who are they watching?
“Third, what are the anarchists planning for Saturday and for Sunday? Where and when. As always, inquire subtly, through oblique conversation. Understood?”
They both acknowledged their assignments grimly.
“Very good. Each of you will attend the early performance at the Tacon Theater tonight. I will briefly meet you both in the men’s necessary room on the ground floor directly after the show. That is why I wanted you to meet here, so you would recognize each other at the theater. In the men’s room, I will receive any information you have and pass along any further pertinent instructions.
“You both will be assisting me this weekend. Sunday will be the most dangerous day, but by that afternoon it will be over, and Rork and I and two others will be out of Cuba.”
Marco had been quite pensive, or was it apprehensive? Now he spoke up. “Whose lives are you saving? What will Leo and I be doing?”
“You don’t need to know details on what you’ll be doing. Just follow your orders. Now is the time to earn all the money you’ve been given these last few years.”
Leo stared down at his folded hands on the table. Marco held me in an incredulous gaze, and by the tenor of his next comment, I could tell he thought me a lunatic. “But how? I assume we are rescuing prisoners. Even if we discover where these prisoners are being held, how in God’s good name will you ever get them away from Marrón and then escape Cuba? It is impossible. No one has ever done it!”
“It’s not impossible, and you’ll find out your duties later. After this is over on Sunday, you will both need to lie very low. I can get you off the island, if you want.”
“You ask a lot of us,” said Marco.
“No, I’ve paid you a lot, Marco. For more than two years.”
I waited for a retort, but there was none. Leo still sat there, silently gazing at his hands, and I realized he was probably praying. I found it interesting that in all my dealings with him, Leo was never afraid of the Spanish. His only fear was of offending God. Though he was but a lay bureaucrat for the monastery, he’d always impressed me as a man of God, a holy man, with the attendant serenity and strength of purpose one finds in such persons. I respected him greatly.
“So, for my part,” Leo began suddenly, still looking down. “I will help you and then stay in Cuba, and do what I can for my Church and my people.”
I was about to end our meeting when Rork quickly stepped over to the table, blew out the lamp, and said, “Movement in the alley.”
The dog snarled, deep-throated and menacing—a stranger was in the alley—then gave out a bone-chilling shriek that stopped ominously.
I joined Rork at the door and saw a dark mass in the alley, barely illuminated by the partial moon overhead. The form was bent over the dog. Metal flashed. A big cane knife.
“Go!” I whispered to Leo and Marco, who needed no more encouragement and fled through the interior doorway into the neighboring apartment.
“Shoot ’im?” asked Rork as the man, fifty feet away, slowly came toward our lair with a pistol in his hand. I would’ve said yes, but another form appeared behind him, then another.
“No. We’ll slow them down a bit and run.”
I put a chair against the door, and then run we did. There wasn’t enough time or distance from our enemies to be stealthy. Through a torrent of startled Chinese cursing, we ran through the neighbor’s crowded apartment just as the intruders reached the outer door of the meeting room and tried to burst inside. It wasn’t much of a barricade, but the chair served to retard their progress by a few seconds and increase their caution. By the time they rushed it again, smashing their way inside with a crescendo of commotion that further awoke the area, Rork and I were leaving a side door of the adjoining building and hurrying down a narrow lane to the east. It was a route of emergency egress he and I had scouted out before we’d rented the place three years earlier.
By then, Leo and Marco were long gone from sight. They knew Havana well, and I wasn’t that concerned about their chances. I was very concerned about ours. As we dashed across Rayo Street, a block north of the passageway our foes had used to approach house number three, the same alley we’d used, I saw a box wagon drawn up to the passageway and several men standing there arguing. One of them appeared in the dark to have the same thin frame as Marrón. The wagon and men negated the one positive scenario that could explain what had happened. Obviously, our uninvited visitors had not been common street ruffians who’d happened upon some lucrative prey in their neighborhood.
No, it was truly the worst scenario. The enemy had known where to find us.
My mind was awhirl as we ran easterly along the buildings, toward the theater district and our hotel beyond. What to do? Obviously, we were compromised, but how? One of the Aficionados? Which one? Leo and Marco appeared to be genuinely terrified. Rogelio, whom we were scheduled to meet next at house number five, knew of house number three’s location but not of the rendezvous there. He was the least reliable of the Aficionados, which was why I kept him away from the other two. Or had Casas been tortured enough into giving it away? Had Marrón simply kept a long surveillance at all our places, waiting for the inevitable gathering to happen?
When we reached the large Havana United Railways train depot, Rork asked where to head next—Hotel Florida, house number five, or the waterfront? Sailors have an instinct to head for water when in trouble ashore. A couple of locomotives were pulling their cars into the station, the first of the morning cargo arrivals. Workers were milling about; the city was awakening. To the east, the sky was discernibly lighter.
Ducking into an alcove, I evaluated our situation. We were four streets away from the dawn meeting spot for Rogelio and ten from our hotel, both on a straight route toward the rising sun. I checked my watch: It was 4:55. The sun would rise in an hour and fifteen minutes, enough time to thoroughly check for any watchers at Rogelio’s rendezvous. I needed to meet Rogelio, to look into his eyes and gauge him. If he was an informer for Marrón, there might be signs of a surveillance, though I imagined they wouldn’t expect us to show up after what had happened at number three. They’d expect us to run to our room at the hotel.
“Albisu Theater, where we can observe house number five.”
Rork smiled. “Ooh, yer getting’ pretty risky in yer old age, ain’t ye?”
Following a serpentine route, we arrived at the theater fifteen minutes later. Across Monserrate Street was house number five, another ruse de guerre, for it was the corner room on the second floor of the Castillo de Farnes, at the intersection of Monserrate and Obrapia Streets. That public moniker was a misnomer too, for it was not a castle but three stories of apartments over a popular restaurant. The whole building was grandiosely named by and for its owners, who were Spaniards from the region of Cataluña.
I explained to Rork what I had in mind. Rogelio, who lived almost a mile to the southeast of house number five, would be approaching the rendezvous from the east along Obrapia or from the south along Monserrate. He would be walking rapidly, because, knowing Rogelio as I did, he would have gotten a late start. Rork suggested that a man like him would not walk but ride a vehicle. No, I countered, he wouldn’t find a carriage this early in the morning. He’d be walking.
But in my plan, Rogelio wouldn’t arrive. Rork would be in position on Obrapia near Villegas Street. I would be on Monserrate near Teniente Rey Street. Whichever of us spotted Rogelio approaching would get him off the street and into an alleyway—without coercion, if at all possible—and then to the back lane running east and west between Monserrate and Villegas.
If Rork got him, he would employ his favorite birdcall, that of the West Indian goatsucker nighthawk, a flickering screech that he can project quite effectively. If I found Rogelio, I would call out an expletive in Spanish as if cursing a wife. We’d meet in the secluded side alley behind the Taverna Gallego, where we would interrogate Rogelio.
Surveying the area from my perch at the theater, I spied a lone man in a linen suit standing at the corner. He watched both streets intently for several minutes, then wagged his head in the negative toward someone in the building across the street.
Marrón’s surveillance was in place.