He knew he should wait for the captain-general’s soldiers, but he couldn’t hold himself back. What were these men up to? Might Marcita still be alive, trapped inside? He crept to one of the windows and edged open a shutter and looked. In the factory’s single hall, where women once worked rolling cigarettes, a black-skinned body hung from a hook. It was being stripped by one man while two others worked at one of the old rolling tables, turning a grinder. The grinder jammed just as Burke’s gaze fell on it, and one of the men working it kicked at the table while the other shouted. The man stripping the body, cutting meat from the legs, whistled a tune, unbothered. Burke recognized him as the corpulent, red-haired tobacconist from the Gallitos shop.
It took Burke a moment to understand, and once he did he felt his reason trickle away. He couldn’t turn — the ghastly sight held him. Instead, without noticing, he leaned forward. His hand was still on the shutter, and it creaked. At that all three men looked up from their work. Burke let go of the shutter. It creaked again, and now they had seen him.
Burke tried to move, tried to run, but a lightness washed forward from the back of his skull. The men at the grinder had snatched knives from the table, and the one stripping the body had picked up an ax. Burke watched, paralyzed. They’d gone, and he could hear the cannibals’ footsteps, out of the factory now and on the grass. At last Burke beat back the lightness, pulled his feet from the morass that had gripped them, and ran. Just as he made it to the volanta, he heard the trumpets of the captain-general’s troops, and two cavalrymen appeared in the street. Burke didn’t care to see any more. Bent over in the volanta’s seat, he heaved, shut his eyes, and ordered the driver to take him home.
“IN THE SAUSAGE!?” Don Hernán repeated, his face green. He was sitting in Burke’s bedchamber, slumped in a cane chair. “Oh, my poor cinnamon! To think I—” He stopped. It seemed for the moment he could not bring himself to mention the French sausage again.
Burke lay on his cot. When he’d returned to his rooms he’d felt the lightness return, a sickness overtaking him, and he’d not been able to stand or sit. Now, morning having come, he was explaining his findings to the don, detailing how the three men had roamed the outskirts of the city capturing slaves to butcher. Fernandita stood by the door folding and refolding a cleaned sheet as she listened.
“The shop was a ruse. That’s why the price on the cigarettes was so high, to keep people away. Marcita was unlucky. She must have wandered in, looking for new labels for her collection, and that’s when they took her.”
Outside a bell tinkled, a procession of priests bringing the viaticum to a dying man.
“All of Havana eating slave flesh,” the don said. “Horrible!” He sat up, some of the green faded from his face. “But I tell you, I can’t understand why. I’ve thought over the numbers — there couldn’t have been much money in it, not nearly as much as the slaves were worth in the field.”
The ringing had gone, the priests turned around a corner. What he’d seen through the window of the cigarette factory flashed again before Burke’s eyes.
“Don Hernán, who can know the motives of such beasts?”
ONCE THE DON HAD LEFT, Burke called to Fernandita to help him to the window. She held him by the arm, and he pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The sun shone brightly on the harbor ships, ignorant of all that had just passed.
He had been working to save slaves, not trap them, but in the light of the morning his relief had begun to crumble. He’d fashioned excuses, but he’d been willing to hunt Marcita for pay. His mind spun with the thought that he’d become the equal of the men in the factory, that he’d stepped irrevocably away from the goodness he’d once imagined his.
When he turned back from the window, he said to Fernandita, who still held his arm and was smiling uncertainly up at him, “You may tell my next caller that I am taking no more cases.”
The smile vanished. “Don’t be a fool,” Fernandita said. “Not over just the one girl.”
But Burke had learned the truth of his position now. Shaking free of Fernandita’s hand he stepped back toward his cot. “If the caller insists,” he told her, with a glance back toward the masts outside his window, “you may lie and say I am no longer in the city but a lowly crewman at sea.” His legs were still weak, and he was exhausted from his night of work, hollowed and brittled by all he’d seen. At the moment he couldn’t fathom what he was going to do when his money ran out, but he’d decided his work as a detective in Havana was finished, and in that alone he found solace.
BORDEN’S MEAT BISCUIT
In March, during the last weeks before the season of fever returned, all Galveston was filled with talk of conquest. A ship carrying a company of filibusteros from the mainland had just sailed for Haiti with plans of empire, and Colonel Timson, a forceful, charismatic fellow who wore a wide-brimmed hat like a planter and swore off all whiskey and cigars, was making the rounds putting together an expedition to topple the government of Honduras and establish a white republic. He had a sharp face reddened by daily shaving, and his tight lips and dark eyes seemed always to be hiding some secret, or perhaps some fury. The man himself was a mystery. I never learned his past, apart from one year he spent as a gin operator in Burwood, Mississippi, nor how he earned his rank, which I came to believe was self-given.
I first caught his attention while passing out handbills for my meat biscuit in the Strand. I spent most mornings in this fashion, stifling my melancholy, awaiting the steamers from Tampico and Veracruz and keeping an eye out for newcomers: I would press the bill into their hands and tell them that a free sample could be obtained at the warehouse. When I stopped Timson in the street, he was attired in a black frock coat faded to gray and worn shiny at the elbows and cuffs. He inspected the bill, then folded it, put it in his coat pocket, and asked if I had a spare hour. He was the first in months to express an interest, so I said I did. We walked about the square and down to the wharves and, without further introduction, he told me of his plans.
“Do you follow Washington?” he asked.
I told him I did not.
“Well, surely men of understanding like yourself know this nation is founded upon the divine harmonies of slave and free. The Northern abolitionists hope to destroy this harmony, and the only way we can stop them is through expanding our institutions.” He unrolled each sentence by rote — they were well worn from much use — and every few words he prodded me with his finger. “I have studied the matter closely and determined Honduras as our first acquisition. We will sow her with slaves and petition for statehood. Some may cower at the thought of such an enterprise, but I foresee little resistance to our tropic campaign.” Here he took off his hat and drew from inside it a folded sheet of paper, which he opened and showed to me: a newspaper illustration of two campesinos dozing next to a burro. “The enemy,” he said. He then refolded the picture, taking care to make no new crease, and stuck it again in his hat, which he returned to his head.
“Of course,” he continued as we strolled, “there will be a brief period during which I shall preside over a provisional republic, and which my backers will find quite remunerative.” Here we paused as several negroes dressed in finery paraded before us, their masters goading them, showing them off to the city’s wealthy gathered on the courthouse lawn. Timson leaned closer and whispered. “I have been in contact with agents of President Pierce. They have given me assurances.”