30 Empedrado Street
Havana, Cuba
2:14 p.m., Saturday
29 September 1888
We soon heard the soldiers pounding on the house’s door to the alley. A man’s voice, in an Andalusian Spanish accent, answered them and let them inside. The dialogue was muffled by the intervening walls, but the tramping of boots inside the house lasted only a minute before I heard the unknown man wish the soldiers good-bye and good luck. Then there was silence for what seemed a long time.
As we waited for the Huguenot’s return, Rork stood there quietly watching me. His face did not reflect admiration. My plan had decomposed completely, and our escape had become an ad hoc litany of disasters. And now, surrounded by enemies, we’d become dependent upon a stranger. I ignored my friend’s unspoken dissatisfaction and concentrated on how we could get out of our present predicament. A solution was still eluding me when I heard knocking on the door—three slow thumps, followed by two quick thumps.
“One of the main tenets of Freemasonry is to help others less fortunate,” Lafleur explained as he entered the room, carrying a huge bundle of clothes. “Y’all fit that description quite nicely right ’bout now. I got these from our pile of brothers’ old clothes for the poor. They’re hand-me-downs, but they’ll do the job. Some kids’ clothes for the Cubans, since they’re so emaciated. Mr. Pots and Mr. Rork, being big men, were a challenge, but I think I got close ’nuf.
“By the way,” he continued in a somber tone. “The most fantastical rumors are spreading in the city about what has happened at the cathedral. The predominant one is that a group of anarchists attacked the church, several soldiers were killed, and a colonel was wounded, but the lunatics got away.” He looked at me expectantly.
“The colonel was wounded, you say? Not killed?” I asked, ignoring the anarchist reference and Lafleur’s open curiosity.
“Wounded . . . is what I heard just now from a policeman on Empedrado Street.”
Hmm. I’d hit Marrón hard enough to kill a cow.
Rork sputtered, “Anarchists, eh? We’re damned lucky to’ve gotten outta there alive with that lot o’ ruffians runnin’ around, shootin’ any bloody thing an’ anyone in their way. Luck o’ the sainted Irish, Mr. Lafleur. Aye, that it surely ’twas, thanks be to God.”
Lafleur wasn’t deceived in the least but said nothing. My people, still shaken from the ordeal, turned their energies to shedding their disheveled joker outfits and donning the new clothes. All of us got the customary light-colored cotton trousers and shirt. Rork and I got jackets, important for us to conceal our pistols. Lafleur disappeared and returned again, this time bearing shoes and socks. The shoes weren’t a perfect fit, but no one complained, since the only other option was our jester slippers. To be sure, none of us would blend in at a society ball, but I felt we could mingle fairly well in the streets of Havana.
Now we were rid of our comedic attire and clad in something normal, I had another favor to ask our benefactor. I started with genuinely felt gratitude.
“Mr. Lafleur, thank you so much for all that you’ve done for us. Martí may owe you for your brotherly help, but each one of us owes you his life.”
“You are entirely welcome, my friends. Just please live your lives well once y’all get back home. And think kind thoughts about our brotherhood of Freemasons. We’re not the evil cult that some make us out to be, are we, Mr. Rork?”
“Aye, that ye ain’t.”
I replied to Lafleur. “Kind thoughts are an understatement. For my part, you have my personal assurance of assistance to you or any of your Masonic brothers in the future. And now I must be bold enough to request one last thing.”
Lafleur’s brow tightened. “Allow me to guess: transport out of here.”
“How’d you know?”
He looked at my company sprawled about the room. “Because half your men can’t walk, so they’ll need to ride.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “We’ll need a wagon to get out of the city. Any ideas?”
Lafleur picked up a jester’s slipper and regarded it pensively. “Well, maybe I can get a cart or small wagon from the circus.”
Rork, who’d been rubbing his stubbled chin, where his beloved goatee was beginning to reappear, seized upon Lafleur’s comment. “Now there’s a capital idea, sir! Methinks a large circus wagon’d be the very thing for the job—with something big an’ dangerous in it, like a bloody great lion. Them soldiers an’ coppers won’t be searchin’ the likes o’ that real close.”
I thought that an excellent notion, but Lafleur was dismissive. “A lion cage wagon, Mr. Rork? Where do you propose to put your people in it?”
Mena answered for him. “Marco and I can drive it and deal with any roadblocks. The rest can hide inside the frame of the undercarriage and on top, among some supply boxes.”
Lafleur wasn’t convinced. “The circus owner, Cesar Melosa, is a brother and has already helped me—by the way, I have to pay him for these ruined jesters’ costumes—but, gentlemen, he certainly won’t give us a wagon with his one and only lion.”
I countered, “I’ll send you the money for the costumes later, Jacques. We’re not asking he give us the lion and its wagon—we’ll pay to lease it and then see it’s returned to him. We’ll need the lion only for a while.”
I put two one-hundred-dollar gold pieces in his hand, my last large-denomination currency. Naturally, I had no idea of how much it cost to lease a lion but deduced that this was the time to spend the money and dazzle the circus man with a promise of more.
“Offer him this and tell him it’s a down payment for your friends to lease the lion and wagon. He’ll get the lion and the wagon back tomorrow and another hundred dollars in gold on October tenth.”
Lafleur retorted, “The tenth, eh? The twentieth anniversary of the Cuban patriots’ Grito de Yara declaration of Cuban Independence. Nice touch, Commander. Melosa despises the Spanish and loves money, so I think this’ll get his attention just fine. I’ll head over to the circus straight away, and with any luck I’ll be right back with an agreement.”
“One last thing,” I said. “We need the wagon right now. Once you get it from Melosa, take it to Cuba Street, halfway between Tejadillo and Empedrado. There’s a small lane between the buildings on the east side of the street. Do you know it?”
“Yes, I’ve seen that.”
“We’ll meet you there in half an hour. From then onward, we’ll no longer be a burden to you, sir.”
Lafleur asked, “And just how are y’all gettin’ to that alley?”
“The hard way: along the roofs.”
“Very good, Commander. The route to our roof is via the stairs in the back hallway outside this door. Please take care not to be seen when you leave this room. For the protection of my friends, I don’t want them to see any of you.”
His friends. A synonym for Masonic brothers. “Jacques, is this a Masonic lodge?”
“No. There are no dedicated Masonic lodge buildings in Cuba. Lodges must operate clandestinely. If the government discovers a man to be a Mason, he’ll be arrested.”
I’d heard that before. “Why?”
“Quite simple, really. The government is afraid of the brotherhood and our spread across Cuba. Colonel Marrón and his ilk, especially. They consider us heretics and antithetical to the Church, the crown, and the feudal way of life that keeps men in the perpetual darkness of mental slavery. We believe in the light of individual knowledge and in usin’ that knowledge to walk the straight path of honor and a life of decency. Despotic rulers cannot abide by individual reasoning; they demand mental slavery by their subjects. Therefore, they consider us their mortal enemies.”
“Intriguing, to say the least, Jacques. But I’m curious about why you’re doing all this. Obviously Martí and you are friends, as well as Masonic brothers. Did you meet at a lodge in New York, where he lives?”
“We’ve never met. There are layers within layers within our brotherhood. With each layer higher more knowledge is gained, tighter bonds are forged, and more is expected of a man. You do not ascend to that level unless you’re ready to assume the duties that go with it. With knowledge comes the obligation to use that knowledge responsibly. Martí and I are within one of those layers, and we have ways of recognizin’ each other, even within correspondence. He requested I help you. That was all that was needed.”
Lafleur said all this patiently, as a teacher would.
I was curious about something. “And you have Spanish Masons attending your lodges in Cuba? How do you know they aren’t spies?”
With the gravitas of a judge, he said, “Yes, there are brothers here in Cuba who are from Spain. In fact, I have brothers here in Havana who are in the Spanish army, who interact with brothers in the Cuban independence movement. You see, the brotherhood transcends nationality and faith. When among our brothers, rank or position outside Freemasonry counts for nothin’. The true character of a man counts for everythin’. You must understand this also: I will do nothin’ that will compromise or discomfort those who are Spanish and have professional responsibilities outside of the Masonic craft that require them to be adversaries. As for their bein’ spies and usin’ what they know from the lodge against us? Nope. Would not happen. There is much you can’t know, Peter—may I call you that now?—for you cannot comprehend it. Just take my word that trust—true trust—exists among Masonic brothers, even ones who must be foes outside the lodge.”
He pulled a small sheet of paper from a pocket and said, “The lives of many men—some of whom might surprise you—depend on your not bein’ seen by anyone when you leave here. Y’all are gonna have to be careful.”
A look at his expression told me not to inquire further. “We’ll be careful, Jacques.”
He handed me the paper. “And I want you to take this. It’s a code message in symbols set inside an artistic emblem, requestin’ that the reader of it help you. Present it to any man in Cuba you think might be a Freemason.”
I examined the paper. On it was a mosaic design, like the latticework in the windows of Arabic palaces I’d seen in Africa, only with squares instead of curves. Some of the lines within the design were slightly more defined. I never would have noticed them if Lafleur hadn’t told me there was a message in it. Alerted to look for them, I saw in the defined lines a set of vaguely Hebraic-looking script, but I knew it wasn’t Hebrew. I recognized the lines as a code system the U.S. Army used during the war: pigpen cipher. The message was a series of right-angle and squared symbols, some with a dot inside. Each one was a substitute code for a specific letter of the alphabet.
“This is the old army field code. I didn’t know Masons use this.”
“Who do you think taught it to the U.S. Army? Freemasons have used this for well over a hundred years. It’s our simplest code. We have others, but this one is universal.”
It had been twenty-three years, but I did manage to remember the substitutes for the first three symbols in the line: an upside down “U,” a squared box, and an “L” with a dot inside—H, E, L. The second word’s second letter was “H.” The third word’s fourth letter was “E.” Those were the only ones I recalled. I pictured them in my mind and deduced the meaning of the unknown parts.
H E L _
_ H _ _
_ _ _ E _ _
The message was as Lafleur said: Help this friend.
He shook my hand. “Now I’ll go arrange your transport. You’re a good man, Peter, and I wish you well.”
After he left, I told Rork to get our men ready. We were going to be moving immediately, by way of the rooftops.
Pots, however, brought to our attention a new problem. His eyes were glistening, his voice full of grief. “My Cuban fella’s dead, Peter. He must’ve been shot at the cathedral, but he never let on. Now I see there’s some blood leaking out of his side. Ah, hell, I never even knew his name . . .”
I didn’t have time for emotion or for a dead body. Damn it all. We couldn’t leave an escapee’s dead body in the building—that would seal Lafleur’s doom. “Clean up the blood from the floor and carry him. We’ll leave the body somewhere on another roof away from here. Now let’s go.”
I guided them out the door and down a passageway, searching for the stairs that would take us to the roof. I could hear voices in boisterous conversation emanating from a door as we passed. It was a dialogue about the cathedral gunfight and who was responsible. One of them said the anarchists.
“Recognize that voice?” asked Rork of me as we crept by.
“Aye, ’tis yer very own Doctor Cobre. Suppose he’s a Freemason?”
“Who knows?”
At the end of the hall, a door led to a back room containing a stairway. On the second floor, I found a scuttle hatch in the overhead, one of those ingenious affairs with the ladder dropping down from a folded position in the hatch. Ascending the ladder—no easy feat while carrying our wounded and debilitated and trying to remain silent—we finally found dazzling sunlight and ovenlike heat on the roof. It was, as I had hoped, connected to the adjacent roofs, a situation with which Rork and I were now quite familiar. Once everyone was up and the ladder hatch below us was secured, all hands were granted a five-minute rest. We fell where we were, not caring that we were baking ourselves lobster-red in the hundred-degree temperature.
Hating to start the exertion again, I made them rise and head across the roofs, keeping below the surrounding bulwarks so that we were relatively hidden from the streets below or observers atop other buildings. Though the rooftops of Havana are lively at night, they are fortunately devoid of people during the height of the day, and so we made it to the roof overlooking our rendezvous safely.
Going down the stairs alone to check for obstacles such as inquisitive inhabitants, I returned to report there were none—everyone was apparently enjoying the daily siesta. We then all descended—a much easier proposition than the reverse—and found our way to a side door that opened onto the lane. After arranging our companion’s body to look as if he had fallen dead while running, my demoralized lot and I situated ourselves behind a mound of rubbish and cast-off orange boxes, and waited.
I heard the main occupant of the wagon even before I saw the vehicle. The sound, rising from a grumbling to a sharp roar, caused me to ponder if the lion had been fed well before beginning his journey. I fervently hoped he had.
When the wagon turned into the lane from Cuba Street, I noted it was well suited for our journey. The thing was one of the ubiquitous, large-wheeled Cuban wagons used for hauling cargo and people. The grossly oversized wheels were necessitated by the abysmal roads through the countryside, which at that time of year were frequently underwater and deeply rutted. The contraption was pulled by two tandems of skinny mules that appeared older than I and less energetic than Pots. The lion, looking more like a motheaten rug than a ferocious example of his species, was stretched out in a rusted iron cage that could’ve come from the Roman Coliseum. It was difficult to believe that the wretched creature in front of me had made such a fierce sound just a moment before.
Our friend Lafleur wasn’t driving. Instead, the fellow atop the driver’s box with the reins was a decidedly shifty-looking sort, massive in size, with a pair of deep-set, beady eyes. Upon closer examination, I was amazed to realize that the driver was in fact a large woman of middle age, devoid of any apparent feminine charms. She registered my obvious surprise, and her guttural greeting, using worse Spanish grammar than mine, was devoid of any goodwill as well.
“Usted consigue mi león, usted me consigue también.”
“What’d she say?” asked Folger, his scared eyes glued to the woman’s stubbled chin, against which Rork’s resurrecting goatee was distinctly in second place.
“Well, loosely translated, Stephen, the . . . ah . . . lady . . . says that if we get her lion, then we get her too. Apparently she is the beast’s owner, and I presume Lafleur made the deal with her.”
“Y donde esta Señor Lafleur?” I inquired pleasantly, hoping to gain something of a rapport, since our escape from Havana depended on this surly new addition to our number.
“No sé. No cuido.”
She didn’t know, and she didn’t care. It wasn’t said with any drama but as a hard-edged fact to the gringos in front of her. Her glare was enough to stop a charging buffalo, but I was determined to melt her attitude with basic human courtesy and kindness.
“Mi nombre es Pedro, y qué es su nombre?” I asked with a smile, hoping to get an idea of what happened to Lafleur.
“Culebra,” she replied without a smile.
How quaint, I thought sarcastically, that we’ve managed to place our fate with a woman named “Snake.”
I tried one last time to discover our Masonic friend’s whereabouts. “Y qué paso con Lafleur?”
Her reply was a short, flat reiteration of her earlier statement: “No sé.”
So much for gaining a rapport.
My men were watching this while still hiding behind the pile of refuse. All attempts at pleasantness having evaporated, I wearily ordered, “Very well, men, let’s get aboard this friggin’ thing.”