Harbor of Spies

by Robin Lloyd

  The inventory job, tedious as it was, gave Townsend an idea of how he might escape the scrutiny and prying eyes of the two Spanish watchdogs. He wanted to tell Mrs. Carpenter and her daughter what had happened to Abbott. Townsend realized he was the only person who might give them the sad news that in all likelihood, Michael Abbott was dead. In the back of his mind, he knew there was another motivation. There was no denying he felt an attraction to Emma Carpenter. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop thinking about the young woman. He couldn’t stop humming the melodic strands of Mozart that he’d heard her play on the violin that night.

  7

  Townsend heard a shout from behind him, someone yelling in Spanish, “¡Atención! ¡Atención!” And then the loud clip clop of horses’ hooves and the clattering of wheels getting nearer. Fearful he was being followed, he whirled around to see two fast-moving horses come around a corner, and charge directly at him. The horses were pulling one of the strange-looking Cuban carriages called volantas with their huge six-foot-high wheels and the sixteen-foot-long shafts. With a flash of silver mountings on the open chaise body and the gleam of silver spurs on a black-booted Negro postilion, the carriage swept past him into the old square and clattered by the city’s cathedral. Inside he caught a glimpse of a man in a top hat smoking a cigar next to two well-coiffed Spanish ladies dressed with black lace mantillas over their heads and shoulders. Townsend breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t anybody he knew.

  The captain was headed for Mrs. Carpenter’s boarding house. It was the first time he had left the docks unaccompanied by his two minders, and he walked with a quick light step, enjoying the freedom. He’d told Salazar he had to go to the ship’s chandlery. The Spaniard had been too distracted by the arrival of the 220-foot blockade-running steamship called the Alice that had just come in from Mobile after a fast run of two and a half days. Salazar hadn’t noticed that the normally shabbily dressed young ship captain was wearing a clean pair of duck trousers and a light blue cotton shirt. The new clothes had belonged to Captain Evans, and they hung loosely on his slim frame. They were too big for him, but it was as good as he could do. He’d also shaved and combed his hair.

  As Townsend walked through Havana’s narrow streets and arcades past announcements of lottery drawings and bullfights, he couldn’t help noticing the sharp contrasts. Beggars were on every corner with their hands outstretched. Men in elegant French top hats and formal black dress coats walked side by side with shirtless street peddlers pulling donkeys and mules. It seemed like almost every other person, rich and poor, was smoking a cigar. Townsend met the sharp-eyed stare of one of the Spanish shopkeepers who had picked him out of the crowd as a person of interest. The man, dressed in a rumpled white linen suit, had the lazy gaze of a businessman not overly encumbered by scruples. With a gamy poker smile, the man solicitously beckoned him to come over to his clothing store. To Townsend it was a reminder that in Havana there were always people watching, looking for opportunities.

  Moments later, he heard the whistling of a bamboo cane, the cruel crack of a whip followed by the gruff commands of soldiers. He stopped abruptly, his neck stiffening. These sounds were all too familiar. It was the prison chain gang trudging by on their way to clean out sewage from the street gutters. A small regiment of soldiers armed with pistols and swords surrounded them to make sure they didn’t escape. In prison, Townsend had often heard these poor souls painfully shuffle by his cell, but he’d never seen them from his solitary confinement. Each one of the men had an iron band riveted around his ankles and his waist with chains dangling between them. He pulled his hat down and turned away as he listened to the scraping of chains on stone pass him by. He found himself staring at the doors and windows of the thick stone buildings around him. They all had iron bars. At that moment, he felt as if he were back in the prison, shackled and under interrogation. A sudden panic swept over him.

  Townsend turned to run, but then he heard a shrill whistle and peals of laughter. A pretty coffee-colored woman dressed in a bright yellow blouse with a tray of sweet pastries balanced on her head was laughing at him. He quickened his step to a fast walk until he arrived at an open-air market in the Plaza Vieja. There in the middle of the noisy market he lost himself in a crowd, a dizzy blur of smiling eyes, straw hats, and red and yellow turbaned heads. The shouting and yelling of buying and selling competed with the clanging and chiming of church bells. Flies swarmed everywhere, from the meat counters to the garbage bins to the faces of small barefoot and naked black children picking up scraps on the street.

  “¡Naranjas! ¡Naranjas!” cried an approaching toothless black woman who was vigorously sucking on an orange as she pushed her way through the crowd. The oranges were selling for ten cents a half-dozen. Another woman was selling custards made with coconut milk, and a mixture of tropical fruits he had never heard of, guayaba, zapote, and mamey. He shook his head and walked away, swatting the flies that had now discovered him. So this is Havana, he said to himself, the tropical crossroads in the Gulf, one of the few remaining footholds for the Spanish in the New World. He looked inside one of the grated windows he passed. A young woman was seated in a cane chair. She was sewing. He stopped to look at her. For a moment, with her sharp features and thin face, he thought she looked like his mother. But when she looked up at him, he realized it was only the black hair that was similar. He wondered if he would ever discover what kind of life his mother had here in Cuba, or why she had left with such anger.

  Townsend breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped into Mrs. Carpenter’s boarding house. It appeared so different than it had at night. He was immediately struck by how much sunlight filled the high-ceilinged rooms. He looked around the place. The floors were a black and white marble, the rafters some twenty feet above him were painted a light green, and the huge windows were open to the floor. He felt as if it were a refuge from the steamy cauldron of humanity outside. A violin accompanied by a piano played in another room. He followed the music into the central living room, passing a table with bowls of oranges and pineapples. This path took him through wide semicircular arcades that led out to an interior courtyard.

  There on the covered veranda a small group of guests were seated, watching and listening to Emma on the violin and a man next to her at the piano. He recognized the music as a sonata his mother had played. He stood at the edge of the courtyard, enjoying the cool breeze and the music. He didn’t see Mrs. Carpenter. His eyes focused on Emma’s tilted brown head and the fluid movement of the bow as her right arm expressively played the familiar melody. She was a gifted musician. He wondered if she could feel the intensity of his gaze.

  Soon it was over. Amid much polite applause, Emma warmly greeted the audience. They were all the new arrivals who had just come off the English passenger steamship, the Corsica. Men with gray moustaches, women with flowing black silk dresses, an Old World dandy wearing a gold mounted eyeglass—they circled around the veranda taking measure of one another. Emma announced that she would now take the opportunity to play a favorite violin solo of hers, Bach’s Partita #2 in D minor.

  With the precise yet lilting sounds of Bach in his ears, Townsend ambled back inside. He could see that a fine buffet was already being set out in a room adjacent to the covered veranda. An older Englishman with a round, bloated face and a protruding stomach was filling his plate even as a waiter was attempting to refill his glass of claret.

  “I love listening to Bach in the tropics, don’t you?” the Englishman said as he addressed a short woman dressed in a voluminous blue silk dress and a gauzy hat.

  “It is such a relief to hear civilized music,” she replied with a toothy smile as she fanned herself.

  “Quite so,” the Englishman replied. “I am so tired of these Africans with their horrific drum beating. Some believe the blacks now outnumber the whites in Cuba. Imagine that! This could be another Saint Domingue, another slave uprising. It is no wonder the Spanish have so many soldiers
here. Some say as many as forty thousand armed soldiers.”

  “Oh, my,” said the woman in blue. “This certainly is a garrison city.”

  Townsend stopped eavesdropping and turned to go back into the library where he spotted Mrs. Carpenter. She was busy scolding some of her maids, most of whom appeared to be Irish. Townsend noticed that some of the young girls with their light blue eyes and freckled faces were scowling at her.

  At that point, Mrs. Carpenter spotted Townsend, and turned her attention to him.

  “Why, Mr. Townsend how pleasant to see you. These young girls are such a problem. They need so much guidance and training. I pay them seventeen dollars a month, you know when, in fact, they should be paying me. I like to say my small hotel is the best run of any in Havana. Of course, Mrs. Almy down on San Pedro Street might disagree. But then so would some of the other American lady innkeepers like Mrs. Bremer and Mrs. Cutbush.”

  She pulled him off to another room where there was nobody within earshot, and spoke in a hushed whisper.

  “How is poor Mr. Abbott faring?”

  Townsend relayed to an incredulous Mrs. Carpenter what had happened to Abbott and himself—the attack by the hooded devil figures, and then Townsend’s own imprisonment in the Havana City Prison.

  “Heaven help us. Truly, I am speechless,” she said as she reached for a handkerchief. “Havana is not a safe place. I am so sorry to hear this troubling news, Mr. Townsend. Her voice cracked slightly. “I don’t even want to ask. Is Mr. Abbott . . . I mean is he . . . ?”

  Before he could answer, Emma walked into the room. From the concerned look on her face, it was clear that she had overheard some of the conversation.

  “What has happened to Mr. Abbott?” she demanded quietly.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Townsend said, slightly flustered at the sight of her. She was even prettier than he remembered. He shook his head. “I mean . . . I was just telling your mother—”

  Eleanor Carpenter interrupted and pulled her daughter closer.

  “He was knifed in the street, Emma,” she whispered.

  “Lord have mercy!” Emma clutched her hands to her chest.

  “I am sorry to have to tell you this,” Townsend said softly. “As I was recounting to your mother, he was stabbed. We were surrounded by this mob of costumed street dancers tromping and beating their drums. I was knocked out, and when I came to, there was no sign of him. I woke up on the street in a pool of blood, presumably his blood. That’s really all I know.”

  “Could he have escaped?” Emma asked.

  “I suppose so,” Townsend said with an uncertain shrug. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  Emma turned away, looking at the wall. Her eyes were red and moist. After several seconds of awkward silence, she spoke softly to her mother.

  “Mother, you don’t suppose this could have been the work of—”

  Mrs. Carpenter gave Emma a look of warning.

  “Shush. Sometimes it’s best not to talk about these things. . . .”

  Then she turned to Townsend, speaking in a controlled whisper. “Remember the walls have ears here. May I ask, sir, how did you gain your freedom? Are you a fugitive?”

  “No, I was released, but I will tell you I feel lucky to be alive.”

  Not wanting to upset her or Emma, Townsend said little of his own trauma in the jail. The government had seized his ship and deported the crew. He told them he’d been freed thanks to a Spanish merchant who had purchased his ship from the government and had now hired him as the captain.

  “So that was the condition of getting released?” Mrs. Carpenter asked.

  “Yes, I had no choice. Circumstances obliged me to take the job.”

  Townsend didn’t want to say much else. From her accent, he knew she was a daughter of the North.

  “And who is this merchant of mercy?” Mrs. Carpenter asked with a barely disguised note of sarcasm.

  “Don Pedro Alvarado Cardona.”

  “Alvarado Cardona,” she repeated. “No, I don’t think I know that name, but you should be careful with any of these merchants here in Havana. They are the money lenders, the island’s bankers, an unscrupulous bunch. Not to be trusted.”

  She paused and took a deep breath, trying to collect her thoughts.

  “Do be careful, Captain. You know scarcely a night passes here when a murder or a robbery isn’t committed, and, I might add, never reported. As for Mr. Abbott,” she sighed as she wiped her eyes, “let us hope and pray for the best. We must believe God is looking out for him.”

  Townsend looked from Mrs. Carpenter to her daughter. He could tell from their uneasy expressions that they knew more than they were saying.

  “Mr. Townsend, you must excuse us. I don’t mean to be rude, but Emma and I must see to our guests now.”

  “Yes,” said Emma. “Let me see you out.” As they walked through the house, Townsend looked more closely at Emma. He thought he caught her stealing a glance at him, once or twice. It was her eyes that captivated him, a cinnamon brown color, almond shaped with a slight upward slant. Cat-like, framed by dark eyebrows, they commanded attention.

  “What are your plans? I assume you will be leaving Havana soon?”

  “We are readying the schooner to go to sea.”

  “Oh,” she said with some hesitation in her voice. “You’re not one of those blockade runners are you?”

  Townsend’s face reddened at the directness of her question.

  “No, of course not. I mean . . . I haven’t been told where we will be sailing.”

  Townsend didn’t know why he lied, but he had, and that was that. He looked down and scuffed his feet on the floor.

  “I hope you will come and visit us again, Captain. Perhaps on Sunday, when we will have fewer guests and won’t be so busy.”

  On his way out, Townsend noticed some pencil sketches of Havana on a side table, all finely drawn with dark and half tone shading, some with colorful splashes of watercolor. One was of a harbor scene depicting the loading of cotton onto a blockade runner. He leaned over to look more closely. The artist had captured a moment of cruelty on one of the ships. A white man with a harsh and ruthless face was kicking one of the black stevedores. But what stood out were the expressions of the onlookers, smiling, leering unsympathetic faces yelling encouragement. At the bottom was the title, “Applause for the Devil.” He noticed the signature at the bottom right. Emma Carpenter. So she was a sketch artist with a sharply observant eye as well as a fine musician. He wondered what more she knew about Michael Abbott, and hadn’t wanted to say in front of her mother.

  8

  It was 7:00 a.m. and the early morning bells were ringing from all sides of the city. Townsend stepped onto a ferry boat that would take him across the harbor from Old Havana to the working class town of Regla. The schooner had been pulled up on a marine railway at a local shipyard there. Townsend was going to oversee the scraping and the painting, and to assess the condition of the ship’s wooden hull. The sun was rising over the land as the small steamer chugged and thumped its way across the bay. The young captain pulled his flat-brimmed hat firmly down on his head. The weather had warmed up considerably, and he could feel it was going to be another hot, windless day. He looked over toward the west side of Regla at the long row of sugar warehouses that lined the deep-water docks there. He’d counted them, some fifty-eight in all. This was where the island’s big-money sugar crop came in by railroad to be loaded onto the ocean-going ships. Don Pedro called it Havana’s Brooklyn. Now the wharves were filled with not only thousands of hogsheads of sugar and sacks of coffee, but mountains of cotton bales brought in from the southern Gulf states by the blockade runners.

  As the ferry boat slid up alongside the main landing at Regla and thudded against the stone, Townsend could hear the screeching of cranes and the rhythmic songs of the Negro stevedores. The
day’s work had already begun. He stepped out onto the wharf and walked by the Confederate sidewheel steamer, Alice, where the stevedores continued to unload the last of its cargo of cotton. The large blockade runner had its steam up, and was clearly hoping to load a new shipment and make another run through the Union blockade. Farther away he could see the large bluff bowed freight steamers from England where the cranes were unloading crates of war supplies. He felt torn and conflicted. Just two months ago, when he was still in the Naval Academy, he would have been repelled by what he was now doing. Now looking at those crates of arms and ammunition headed for the South, he could feel his inner turmoil mounting.

  A broad hot sun was rising over Havana Bay as Townsend joined the other workers painstakingly scraping and chiseling away at the heavy layer of barnacles on the schooner’s hull. Like most schooners, the bottom was not copper sheathed so the wood was vulnerable to sea worms, and even a month in Havana’s murky, polluted harbor left a ship’s bottom covered with sea moss. With each stroke of the mallet onto the chisel head, Townsend felt he was chipping away at himself, layer by layer. It was as if he were a different person. A part of him wondered if inside his skin he was being transformed like the boat—or was he more like a chameleon that only changed colors outside to blend in with his surroundings? He wasn’t sure. The boat was all he had of his previous life now, but with each scrape and chisel of the old paint he felt a pang of unease.

  Townsend took a deep breath of sea air as he surveyed the ship standing upright out of the water. Some of the schooners in the harbor had definite sags at the bow and the stern, and were said to be “hogged,” a sure sign of old age. Fortunately, he didn’t see any obvious signs of that on the ship. Don Pedro had changed the schooner’s name along with the registration. Her new name was Gaviota, which was seagull in Spanish, and her new homeport was Havana. She was now flying the broad red and yellow stripes of Imperial Spain. He touched the schooner’s white oak planking, now exposed wood, and he felt a controlled burn of confidence inside of him. He looked up at the wide loblolly pine masts above him. He and the boat shared the same heritage. They were Chesapeake-born. A different flag and a new name did not change the identity of the boat, he told himself, and the unfortunate circumstances he found himself in did not change who he was.