Wind of Destiny

by Christopher Nicole

  ‘My … ’ Toni looked left and right. ‘ My quarters?’

  ‘Of course. You are a distinguished lady.’ The door was opening again, and an orderly came in carrying a tray, on which there was a plate of hot food, some kind of stew, but it smelt delicious and she had not eaten since dawn, as well as a flagon of cooled white wine and another of water, and two glasses. There was even a folded napkin.

  ‘I expect you are both hungry and thirsty, after your journey, senora,’ Lumbrera said. ‘Why do you not sit down and eat.’

  Toni’s throat, mind and stomach were all summoning her to the table. But she dared not move. ‘Are the others being fed, now?’ she asked.

  ‘I imagine so,’ Lumbrera said.

  ‘But not like this.’

  ‘Well, no, I do not think like this.’

  ‘And you expect me to eat that?’

  He shrugged. ‘If you do not, you will be very hungry. And then you will get sick. As I do not wish you to get sick, I will then have to have you force fed. This is not so nice. Why do you not be sensible, and eat? There is no point in becoming sick, and enduring hardship, when you know you are going to be fed whether you like it or not.’

  ‘But why me?’ she shouted, temptation eroding her will power.

  ‘Because as I have said, you are an important person. You are the Senora Diaz de Obrigar. Besides, you are an American.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And the others … ’

  ‘Are rebellious scum.’

  ‘The real Senora Diaz de Obrigar is down there, very ill. With her daughter. I demand that they be given quarters like this as well.’

  ‘You can demand nothing, senora. You have been given this cell, and here you will remain. You will be fed and looked after.’

  ‘While they are locked up with a hundred others in unspeakable conditions.’

  He shrugged. ‘They are rebels. If I allowed you to share some of their discomforts, briefly, it was to let you understand how fortunate you are.’ He grinned at her. ‘It might be possible for you to be more fortunate yet, were you to be more friendly. I am in command here. I am all powerful. If you were to be nice to me, why, I might even be able to take you out of the prison, from time to time. I have a house, in El Caney. A very nice house. Only half a mile from here. It has gardens, and a soft bed, and the food, ah, the food.’

  She gazed at him in utter amazement, that he could have the nerve to proposition her, so blatantly, at a time like this. The true facts of her situation, that she was going to be neither tortured nor raped, but treated with respect, had not fully sunk in.

  ‘Of course, to protect myself,’ Lumbrera went on, ‘I should need to be able to produce proof you came to me of your own free will. I think a photograph, of us together, with you being affectionate, and smiling at me, would be the best possible proof. I have the photographer here now. Shall I fetch him in? Then I could make you really comfortable.’

  ‘You are unspeakable,’ Toni said. ‘I would rather sleep with a snake.’

  Lumbrera shrugged. ‘Well, maybe one day you will change your mind. You will have a lot of time to do that.’ He went to the door. ‘Eat your food.’

  The door closed. Toni stared at the table. Predictably, there was no knife or fork, just a wooden spoon. She supposed she could shatter the glasses and cut her wrists. But they would be in here long before she could bleed to death, and besides she did not want to die. She had to live, because one day all of this would be avenged.

  She found she had moved closer to the table. Her tongue seemed to be cleaving to the roof of her mouth as she gazed at the water. If she was going to live, and avenge herself, and all the others, she had to remain strong, and healthy. Especially if they intended to see to that, anyway.

  It was an insidious thought. Too insidious for a twenty-one year-old girl. Toni sat down.

  *

  Harold Walkshott gazed at the barbed wire fencing, higher than his head, the solid wooden gates, the towers which contained armed policemen, and then beyond, at the beaten earth of the compound. This was empty, save for a few policemen, but then there was another gate, and beyond that there were people. He could hear them, and even more important, he could smell them. It was incredible to think that this camp existed no more than a couple of miles from Santiago itself. That it could exist at all. But from all he had heard there were now several like it, throughout Cuba.

  The sergeant saluted. ‘The commandant will see you now, senor.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Walkshott stepped inside, was escorted across the outer compound towards the command house. To get there he had to pass a portion of the inner fencing, and he saw three little boys staring at him from behind the wire. They were terribly thin, and had open sores on their arms. ‘Hey, senor,’ one shouted. ‘You got food?’

  The sergeant flicked at them with his whip, and they ran away, screaming and shouting.

  ‘Those lads should be in hospital,’ Walkshott commented.

  The sergeant grinned. ‘They are in hospital, senor. This is one vast hospital.’

  The door was opened for him, and he stepped into an office. Colonel Lumbrera held out his hand, but Walkshott preferred not to shake it. Lumbrera shrugged, and sat down behind his desk. ‘You have come to see Senora Diaz? This is very irregular. The inmates of this camp are not to be visited.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I have a permit signed by General Linares,’ Walkshott pointed out. As it had taken him several months to obtain the permit, he was not being faced down now.

  ‘General Linares,’ Lumbrera sneered. ‘I take my orders from Captain-General Weyler, direct.’

  ‘I have a permit signed by General Linares, who commands Santiago Province, in which this camp stands, Colonel,’ Walkshott repeated patiently. ‘Now, do you intend to allow me to see Mrs Diaz, or do I have to return to General Linares and tell him his order has been disobeyed?’

  Lumbrera snorted. ‘I will take you to the senora. She is going to complain. You understand that?’

  ‘I would be surprised if she didn’t,’ Walkshott observed.

  Lumbrera pointed at him. ‘What she will tell you is that her being here at all is entirely the fault of her husband and his people, who are ruining the economy of this country, which they pretend is their country, preventing proper food supplies from being obtained, looting and murdering the length and breadth of the island, forcing us to place these women here for their own protection. She will not tell you that when the rebels attacked Obrigar she was nearly killed. By men fighting for her own husband. She will not tell you these things.’

  ‘Well,’ Walkshott said. ‘I’ve heard all of that already, Colonel. Now I would like to hear what Senora Diaz does have to tell me.’

  ‘Ha,’ Lumbrera said. ‘I will take you to her, even if it is irregular. You may have ten minutes with her. Not a second longer. Come.’

  He led the way along a corridor, while Walkshott, following, reminded himself that he was not here to prejudge the situation, or make any snap evaluations. When this camp had first been set up, Captain-General Weyler had called a meeting of the various consuls and explained what he was doing, and why. It had sounded quite plausible, and most people had been satisfied; if there was a good deal of sympathy for the rebels outside of Cuba, those on the island, and this included non-Cuban businessmen as well as the local merchants, were becoming heartily tired of the continued fighting which appeared to be solving nothing, and was indeed, as Lumbrera had claimed, disrupting trade. But then had come the ominous rumours about conditions in the camps, and urgent wires from the State Department for him to find out the truth, urged on by private wires from the McGanns, urging him to get their daughter out of there. Always the McGanns! As if he could work miracles. Why the God damned woman couldn’t have taken his advice and left the island while it was still possible to do so, he just could not understand. Now she had burned her boats — as a result of which his life was being made a harassed misery.

  Lumbrera opened a door, ush
ered him into a surprisingly large room. In fact, but for the bars on the window, Walkshott would not have supposed he was in a cell at all, but rather a spartan but not uncomfortable hotel. While as for the woman who had risen at their entry … he had been told the most awful tales of dirt and squalor and starvation, but Senora Diaz looked clean, and healthy, and well fed.

  ‘Mrs Diaz,’ he said in English. ‘I am glad to see you.’

  Only her face had changed. It was harder, more angry than he remembered it. ‘Are you, Mr Walkshott?’ she asked. Her voice, too, had hardened, he thought. And she was looking at Lumbrera, rather than him.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ the colonel said, and left the room. ‘The door will remain open,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry it has taken so long to get in here,’ Walkshott said. ‘But you know what these people are like, with their manana philosophy. And then, these camps are being held absolutely incommunicado. I had to invoke all manner of higher authorities to get permission for even this brief visit. However,’ he hurried on as she would have spoken, ‘I have letters here for you from your parents, and one from your brother Joe, and I am also to relay any complaints you may have about your treatment. I’m afraid I have not been able to secure your release, although I am working on it. But the authorities feel that keeping you here is the only way they are ever going to bring General Diaz to heel, and frankly, he is proving quite a thorn in their flesh. Of course this worries your family, especially when all manner of rumours about what goes on in these camps have been circulating. But when I tell them that you are fit and well, oh, they will be so relieved.’ He paused for breath.

  ‘Are you going to listen to me, now, Mr Walkshott?’ Toni asked.

  ‘Oh.’ He went very red in the face. ‘Ah … ’

  ‘Because I think you should. It’s what you came for, isn’t it? I want to tell you that there are women living in this camp, some of them gentle ladies, who are being treated like pigs. They are herded like pigs, they are fed like pigs, and they are being forced to live in conditions which would make a pigsty look like the White House. They are suffering from malnutrition, and any day now there is going to be typhus. When that happens, they are going to start dying, Mr Walkshott. I want you to tell the world that, and tell them that something has got to be done. Now. Do you think my family is going to be relieved to hear that?’

  ‘My dear lady,’ he said. ‘But … ’ he could not stop his gaze wandering from side to side.

  ‘So you look at me. And my little home here. I’m their prize possession, Mr Walkshott. I can’t be allowed to die, or even to starve, because someone might notice and tell the President. So they give me two good meals a day, and once a week a tub of water is put in here for me to bathe, and when my clothes wear out they bring me others. So maybe I should have refused all of that. They told me if I did, they’d force feed me. And maybe I’m not very strong, mentally. I didn’t see what purpose it would serve to starve myself, and allow myself to be manhandled by these things. It wouldn’t have helped the women down there in that yard. I decided one of us had to remain strong, to tell you what’s going on.’

  He gazed at her in consternation, and watched her face harden a little more.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘If it were possible for me to see for myself, what conditions are like in the camp…’

  ‘No one is going to let you do that. You know what you want to do if you require proof of what is happening here? You want to go up into the hills and talk with the insurgents. Because every so often Lumbrera has a photograph taken of one of the women who is sicker than the others, or of the food they are forced to eat, and has the print sent up into those hills, and pinned to trees, so that the men up there can see just what is happening to their women and children.’

  ‘I have seen some of those prints,’ Walkshott said. ‘They have been circulated in the States. But frankly, we are inclined to treat them as forgeries. Propaganda being put about by the rebels.’

  ‘Are you really,’ Toni commented.

  ‘My dear Mrs Diaz,’ Walkshott protested. ‘You are suggesting men like Lumbrera are savages. I mean to say, this is 1895, and we are in a Christian country. In a week’s time we will be celebrating Christmas … ’

  ‘And you think because they celebrate Christmas they are civilised? Mr Walkshott, men fighting a war, especially a civil war, are savages. And Colonel Lumbrera is one of the worst. Do you know what he did to my sister-in-law? She is the same age as myself. My God, you have met her.’

  ‘Why, yes,’ Walkshott agreed uneasily. ‘Christina Diaz.’

  ‘Right,’ Toni said. ‘Well, he held her in his barracks in Daiquiri for three months, without charging her.’

  ‘I’m afraid he was entitled to do so, Mrs Diaz, under the proclamation of martial law.’

  ‘Three months is ninety days, Mr Walkshott. Do you know that she was raped at least one hundred and eighty times in those ninety days? Is that covered by martial law?’

  ‘Really, Mrs Diaz … ’

  ‘Can’t you stomach the truth, Walkshott?’ ‘Well … there have been atrocities committed by rebels as well, you know, Mrs Diaz. Some of the things I could tell you … ’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Mr Walkshott.’ Toni’s voice rasped. ‘Tell Washington. Sure I know there have been atrocities on the rebel side as well. That’s what I was just telling you: they’re all savages. You want to report that back to Washington. But the rebels don’t have anything like this camp. There are people here being treated like animals, and if the United States Government doesn’t get off its ass and do something about it, they are going to die like flies. You tell those top-hatted, peace-loving, moneymaking fools that.’

  Walkshott stood up. ‘I shall … ah … make a report of this interview, of course, Mrs Diaz. Again, I am pleased to see you looking so well, and I shall report on that too, to your parents. Good day to you.’

  Toni watched his back disappearing down the corridor and wondered if a kick in the backside would accomplish anything. Three minutes later Lumbrera appeared. The colonel was grinning. ‘I don’t think he believed a word you had to say, senora,’ he remarked.

  Toni sighed. ‘Someone will, one day, Lumbrera, and then you’d better pray to the devil to help you, because God sure won’t.’

  ‘One day. One day is a long time. I listened, you know. I listened to what you told him. You are distressed for your friends. My dear Senora Diaz, Dona Antoinette, it distresses me to see you distressed. I would like to help you, and your friends. I really would. And I would, if you would be more co-operative towards me.’

  Toni had been sitting down to speak with Walkshott. Now she got up and turned her back on him.

  Lumbrera caught her arm. ‘If you were to be more friendly, perhaps, and come to see me, as I have invited before, and have your photograph taken with me, smiling … such simple things … your friends would do so much better if you would behave properly towards me.’ Toni turned round to stare at him.

  ‘If you lay dying at my feet, Lumbrera,’ she said, ‘all I would do is step on you as I walked by.’

  *

  ‘Sit down, Lieutenant McGann.’ Navy Secretary Hilary Herbert hailed from Alabama, spoke with a southern drawl, and moved in a similar tempo. It was a measure of the reintegration of the United States in only thirty years since the ending of the Civil War that Herbert, who had fought in the Confederate ranks, now held the senior post in the United States Navy. ‘Now, what are we going to do about this?’ He indicated the sheet of paper lying on the desk in front of him. ‘You know I can’t possibly accept it.’

  ‘Because it would embarrass the Administration?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Well, there is no doubt that the registration of a serving officer with a famous name like yours would cause a certain amount of comment,’ Herbert agreed. ‘What the Hearst newspapers would do with it I wouldn’t like to say.’

  He gave a sudden, disarming grin. ‘And we
’re into an election year. But I’d like to discuss it with you on purely personal grounds. You’re an officer with a great future in this man’s navy. But you want to throw it all away and do what? Go to Cuba and join the insurgents?’ ‘Well … ’ Joe looked embarrassed, because that was exactly what he had planned to do. ‘And maybe get yourself captured and shot?’ ‘That’s an acceptable risk.’

  ‘But what would you be achieving? Even if you stayed alive, what would you be achieving? Those people have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can’t defeat the Spanish regulars.’

  ‘It would be something, sir. Something more than the United States is prepared to do.’ ‘Obviously you made your decision after reading Vice-Consul Walkshott’s report. I sent that to you in good faith, because it concerned your family. You did understand that Mr Walkshott seems to feel that your sister could be exaggerating conditions in their internment camp outside Santiago?’

  ‘With respect, Mr Secretary, my sister is not a liar,’ Joe said.

  ‘I never thought she was, Lieutenant. The word I used was exaggerating. You can’t deny the fact that your sister’s husband is one of the insurgent leaders, and therefore she has to have a vested interest in discrediting the Spanish authorities there in Cuba. There also doesn’t appear to be any doubt that Mrs Diaz is personally being well treated. Even she hasn’t denied that.’

  ‘For reasons she has explained,’ Joe said. ‘But I have seen some of the things you consider exaggerations. Nor can anyone deny that Senorita Diaz was locked up by Lumbrera for three months, as my sister claims.’ He kept his voice even with an effort. It was what Toni had had to relate of Christina that had driven him nearly mad with anger and outrage, had decided him that no matter what the Navy might do, he could no longer sit by and merely observe, and hope that things improved. ‘Can you really suppose she was not raped during that time? Suppose my sister was exaggerating, and it didn’t happen twice every day. If it happened once that is an outrageous crime. And we know for sure it must have happened once.’