Harbor of Spies

by Robin Lloyd

  At the sound of cannons being fired from El Morro he jumped. He scanned the harbor entrance and saw a funnel with billowing black smoke. No doubt another blockade runner arriving with more cotton. He shook his head as he realized just how easily he became startled. Never far from his mind were the menacing voices of his interrogators as they kept asking him about Michael Abbott, their probing, accusatory stares, the fusillades of rifles. Some nights he would wake up in a cold sweat. It was always the same dream. He was back in prison, walking barefoot with a hood over his face, his heart racing at the roll of drums, the blare of bugles. Then he would wake up with a shout, and lie there in his bunk breathing shallowly, his body drenched in sweat, trying to be calmed by the rhythmic sounds of the rigging slapping against the masts.

  Townsend didn’t understand why Michael Abbott was so important to the Spanish authorities. He couldn’t imagine how this Englishman could be a threat to the island’s security. He needed to find out more about Abbott and why he came to Cuba, if only to protect himself from whomever the Englishman’s enemies were.

  He thought about going back to the cathedral where Abbott had sought assistance. He hoped that after being stabbed, the Englishman had been able to drag himself there. But then Townsend remembered the frightened face of the robed man looking at him through the barred window. The religious man had turned away when Townsend had beckoned to him. No, it would be too risky to go there. Far better to find out what more he could from the Carpenters, mother and daughter. Mrs. Carpenter clearly had not wanted to reveal much, but that was understandable. Emma seemed to care a great deal about Michael Abbott. She might know more. He would have to go back to the boarding house. That thought brightened him.

  The grinding whirr of saws and the banging of mallets brought his attention back to the ship up on the rails. The other workers, most of whom were from the Canary Islands, were beginning to scorch the bottom of the hull with blazing torches to kill any sea worms that had penetrated the wood. Townsend thought about the changes that would soon be made to the schooner. He and Don Pedro had met at Cabarga’s ship chandlery to discuss them. While the chandlery’s clerks carefully measured out lengths of rope for sheets and halyards for the Gaviota, Don Pedro had introduced him to one of the old grizzled men there who sat at a corner table, an American by the name of Thomas Godfrey, originally from Newburyport. Godfrey had been a slave captain, a coal trader operating from Havana. Townsend marveled at the number of connections Don Pedro seemed to have, everyone from high-ranking Spanish officials and diplomats to slave traders.

  The old captain had given Don Pedro and Townsend a list of ways to camouflage the ship. Some of the tricks of the ebony trade, he’d said, would apply just as well to running the blockade. It was all about eluding capture. The tops of the masts should be painted a dark green-black to make them look like the tops of pine trees. The white canvas sails should be soaked in a black coal ash slush to turn them a dusky dark color, difficult to spot at night. And most importantly, as soon as the scraping and burning of the worms was done and the hull re-caulked, the ship should be repainted gray to make it less visible at sea. All that needed to be done before the schooner would be ready.

  The sound of women chanting in the distance caused Townsend to stop his chiseling and look up. A procession of black women with their bright-turbaned heads sang and wailed as they marched from the road and waded into the sea. He asked the man working next to him what these women were doing. The Spaniard looked at him with a pair of deep-set, sorrowful eyes.

  “Quieren regresar a África,” he said in the quick-fire Spanish that was common among the Havana boatmen. The man laughed drily and went back to scorching the wood. “Puras tonterías de los esclavos, just slave nonsense. They are asking Yemayá, the African Goddess of the Sea, to take them home, back across the ocean, back to Africa.”

  Townsend lingered as he pondered this poignant sight, admiring the harmony of their voices. The women were waving their arms back and forth as they sang and swayed. Like him, he thought to himself, these Africans had no way back. Yet they sang and they prayed. They held onto some distant hope. They were trying to keep alive their memories. Next to the women, a familiar profile of a man stood stiffly erect at the wharf’s edge. From the slender, stiff shape of the body he knew who it was. Salazar.

  Townsend had confronted Don Pedro about the two watchdogs, and asked him to call them off. The merchant had shrugged with a resigned but steely look on his face and said, “It is for your own protection and naturally my insurance policy. I don’t want to lose my ship captain, and the authorities don’t always make inquiries about dead sailors.” What was not stated but understood was that Don Pedro didn’t trust him. Townsend turned back to the ship and continued his work with the chisel and the mallet. The afternoon sun felt as hot as a blacksmith’s furnace.

  Tired and dirty, Townsend walked into the bar to the sounds of a slow-picked guitar. A Spanish woman was singing a mournful love ballad. Sailors’ bars in Havana all looked similar, with a labyrinth of small dark rooms. Drunken tars over the years had scrawled notes and scripture on the greasy walls. The words were like sailors’ epitaphs. He stopped briefly to read one in large letters, “May the Lord, Jesus take me from this forsaken, unholy city. Look down upon me with forgiveness for the evil deeds I have done.” The place was called El Toro del Mar, or Bull from the Sea. It was one of Havana’s many fandango taverns. Don Pedro had suggested he start looking for a crew, and this was a rowdy dive in the San Isidro section of the old city, known as a popular watering hole for those who favored the Southern cause.

  Before sitting down, Townsend took a good look around. Grim-faced men slouched over the tables. Sullen and resentful, they looked at him like cornered, kicked dogs. There was a scattering of fleshy women in cheap chiffon perched on the laps of sailors. These women wore low-necked dresses, and high-heeled shoes. Their eyebrows, arched and plucked, only served to make their eyes seem more cold. Besides the Spanish singer, the other voices he heard in the noisy din of the tavern were English. He’d come to the right place. At one of the breaks in the music, a rum-faced ship captain got up on top of a chair and raised his glass. He announced that he was a Scottish veteran of a Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment who was now running the blockade with his own schooner.

  “Dram up lads. Ah have an important toast tae mak’.”

  “Hear, hear. Let’s hear it.”

  “I’m wantin’ ta wish ye all some luck. Let us in the business o’ blockade running toast the Southerners fur producing the cotton.”

  “Hear hear!”

  “The Yankees fur blockading the ports.”

  “Hear hear!”

  “And the English fur keeping th’ price of cotton up!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “Here it is, a toast ta all three. May the war between the North and South continue!”

  The barroom broke out in cheers and calls for more drinks. A group of Southerners began singing “Bonnie Blue Flag.” A heated discussion was going on among some of the more serious drinkers at the bar. Experience told Townsend to move away from the sounds of trouble. He sat down in a shadowy corner. From there he could watch the spectacle. Confederate loyalists at the bar wearing ragged gray uniforms or butternut jackets were giving a few sailors a hard time.

  “Don’t give them a drink, bartender. They’ve just delivered cotton that’s going to supply the Yankees. They’re Yankee spies off that steamer Alice.”

  “All we did is deliver the cargo,” one of the men protested.

  “Liars! You’re getting paid with Yankee money. That cotton you brought in is going to New York. You’re sellin’ cotton to the enemy!”

  It looked like there would be a fight soon. Like the calm before a storm, the music and the singing stopped, and conversation at the other tables went suddenly silent. Townsend noticed there was a contingent of police at the door watching and wait
ing. The noise must have attracted them. His first instinct was to get up and run out the back door, but then he noticed there were police standing there as well.

  “What’s all this about?” Townsend asked the man next to him, a big man with a weathered face, bushy bright red beard, and coarse skin like sand. He spoke with a gravelly Southern drawl that conveyed many years of chewing and smoking tobacco.

  “Case of spy fevah, I reckon.”

  “What’s that?” Townsend asked.

  “Somethin’ that people git during a war when they’re lookin’ for scapegoats. The blockade is tightenin’ up like a prison gate. The Federal Navy has two whole blockading squadrons now covering the Gulf Coast. With N’Orleans in Federal hands, it’s not as easy to get through as it were before. These Southun boys heah are lookin’ for someone to blame.”

  Townsend could see a large knife under the man’s old waistcoat. By Spanish law, sea knives were supposed to be left on board ship, but most of the foreign sailors in Havana ignored this regulation.

  “Heh, you sodbusters. Leave them alone!” shouted the man as he tugged at his leather suspenders. “I know those sailors and they ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”

  The silence deepened. One of the Confederate troublemakers flaunting secession insignias walked over to where they were seated.

  “So, you boys traitors too? How much they paying ye to spy on us,” he hissed as he spit a gob of tobacco juice on the floor in front of them.

  “You white-livered, low-flung half-breed,” exclaimed Townsend’s new acquaintance as he jumped up, almost falling when his feet slid on the slimy gob of tobacco juice on the stone floor. At that moment, the police stepped in and hauled the Confederate man outside for questioning. To smooth over the dispute, the bartender called over about a half-dozen of the bar girls who were serving drinks, and motioned for them to mingle with the men.

  Townsend’s new acquaintance was a man of few words at first, but they eventually struck up a conversation. His name was Tom Withers, but he liked to be called Red Beard. He was a native of Texas. He looked to be about thirty years old. He’d started out in a cotton screw gang in Galveston and learned how to load cotton. He had been employed most of his life on cotton packets and then more recently on small cargo schooners and brigs on the Gulf. When the war broke out he became a pilot for the Confederate States Navy on board one of the sea steamers assigned to the Defense Squadron on the Mississippi. He found that after completing his one year of conscription, he didn’t much care for his superior officer or the Confederacy.

  “I guess there are those who might say I weren’t loyal to the Confederit cause,” Red Beard chuckled, running his hand through his whiskery beard. “Truth is, I believe I done my share. I don’t much care beans about this war one way or the other, not a single old red eyed bean.”

  “So what will you do now?” Townsend asked.

  “I’m fixin’ to run the blockade. I’m just lookin’ to make some money. I got no family obligations. No home. I know these waters better than most. I been haulin’ cotton ever since I was a boy in every ragtag cotton hole from Sabine River to the Brazos River on the other side of Galveston.”

  Townsend described the Gaviota, but Red Beard just had one question.

  “What she draw?”

  “Five and a half feet of draft with the centerboard up. Sixteen feet with the centerboard down.”

  He nodded approvingly. “Right pretty shoal draft boat. That’ll do to git into any number of the bayous and bays along the Gulf.”

  Townsend offered him a higher than normal salary for a first mate. Thirty dollars in advance and another thirty dollars when they got back to Havana.

  “I reckon that’s fair dealin’,” Red Beard said as he held out his hand. As he shook the man’s calloused hand, Townsend noticed how strong his grip was.

  “If you’re lookin’ for other sailors, try that fellow over thar. See the one who’s eyeing them dark-eyed sirens.”

  Withers pointed to a husky man at a table surrounded by four young Spanish women who he was busy charming.

  “I ain’t a gamblin’ man, but I’d be willin’ to bet my salvation he would go with you.”

  The man had a big beaming smile and an even deeper baritone voice that cut through the din of the tavern. He looked to be around twenty-five with an angular face and a full beard. His tangled hair was slightly receding, but despite that flaw, he clearly had what some women find attractive in a man, a broad chest with an equally broad, roguish smile.

  “Go on,” Townsend said. “What else can you tell me?”

  “His name is Pierre Bertrand. He goes by either name. I don’t know much about him exceptin’ he’s lookin’ for a berth on a blockade runner. He says he’s American, but he speaks English like one of them Frenchies, you know, zee this and zee that. I can tell you he can speak the Spanish. The bartender told me that fellow had grown up as an orphan boy in one of them N’Orleans cathouses on Bourbon Street in the Vieux Carré. I reckon that’s whar he git his gift with languages, from those handsome Creole gals.”

  Townsend walked over to introduce himself. Bertrand smiled easily and openly. He spoke English with a French accent, frequently mixing the two languages. He told Townsend he had learned the sailors’ trade when he was crimped as a boy and put on board a cotton ship, which sailed from New Orleans rounding the horn to Valparaiso. He was full of bluster and bravado, but at brief moments, Townsend could see a glimpse of someone else. He noticed a dull, fearful look that spoke of pain and hardship. He offered him the job and when Bertrand accepted, they called Red Beard over, and the three of them ordered a bottle of rum.

  It was early in the morning but still dark when Townsend headed back toward the docks. He and his recruits had found themselves in a back room with a second bottle of rum and a cluster of lusty wharf women who wanted to know if they were Confederados. It was the first time Townsend had ever heard the Spanish translation of Confederates. He had left his two new crewmembers passed out in some cubicle in the back area of the bar. He was still pretty drunk, and the past few hours had now blurred into a fuzzy memory of dangling gold earrings, heavy wavy hair, and the strumming of a slow-picked guitar. He dimly remembered talking with one of the women. She was a Chilean actress brought to Havana and then abandoned by her lover. She was trying to get enough money for a passage back to Chile. Hearing this story, Bertrand had lied and told her he was the owner of a tallship bound for Valparaiso, and was the one who could help her. Townsend hoped she wasn’t that gullible. He’d already gotten a good sense of the man’s character. Flattery and falsehoods poured out of Bertrand like stormwater running downhill. He was someone who treated most impediments as opportunities, and that included charming any attractive woman who might resist him.

  Townsend listened to the crunch of his own footsteps on the cobblestone streets. He kept looking over his shoulder, and steering clear of the shadowy figures huddled against the dark walls. Even at this late hour, there were open windows with dimly lit lamps swinging from the ceiling. He could see brightly dressed ladies through the iron bars. From the satin and lacy dresses they wore he guessed these were the higher class of working women. Townsend thought of Don Pedro’s warning that almost every morning in the harbor a body floats by with its pockets turned inside out. He was learning that Havana’s streets had its share of dock rats that drank by day and prowled by night.

  He was headed for the rooming house he had found off Jesús María Street. His simple room just had a bed with a straw-filled mattress, a chair, and a table. It was all he needed. And it was cheap at twelve dollars a month, much cheaper and cleaner than staying at the roach-infested boarding house of Miss Gilbert’s down at the docks where some of the transient sailors booked rooms. The cheapest hotels in Havana cost two dollars a day, and the nice boarding houses like Mrs. Carpenter’s were more like twelve dollars a week.

  Around the c
orner a block away, he caught a glimpse of someone familiar out of the corner of his eye. Whoever it was didn’t want to be seen. The figure had ducked behind a royal palm tree in a small park. He grabbed his sheath knife and walked cautiously over to the tree. There was no one. He couldn’t be sure but he thought the figure he’d seen was Nolo. He may have been followed, or perhaps this was a delusion. He was too drunk to know. A mangy skeleton of a dog, slinking away from a pile of garbage, crossed the street in front of him, growling but with its tail between its legs. Someone had once told him you can judge the cruelty of a culture just by observing how the people treat their dogs. By that measure, Spanish Cuba was not a kind place.

  9

  On Sunday afternoon Townsend eluded his two bodyguards by ducking into a clothing store. He watched and waited until one of the cumbersome volantas negotiated a turn around a street corner with difficulty due to a guajiro poultry vendor on horseback. The man from the country was carrying two dozen live chickens, strung together by their legs and tied to the horse’s neck and withers. The long shaft of the volanta snared the rope holding one batch of squawking chickens, setting the birds free and causing the poultry man to begin hurling threats and accusations. This created a useful distraction for Townsend. He boldly walked out a side door. He turned and got a quick glimpse of Nolo standing outside the front door of the shop. He wanted to make sure he didn’t follow him to Mrs. Carpenter’s boarding house.