Saffire

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Roosevelt gave me the look of a man good enough at poker to hide whether the cards were a disaster or jackpot winners. “Interesting. That wasn’t in the report from the colonel. Proving the existence of such telegrams could lead to some interesting world politics.”

  “Destroyed, I was told.”

  “Shame,” Roosevelt said.

  “There’s another piece of conjecture that I suspect Goethals avoided. That’s why I’m here today. To ask you a question. Did you know?”

  “Did I know what?” He almost glanced at his pocket watch, but caught himself and held my gaze.

  I said, “In all likelihood, Cromwell had hired an unemployed actor to pretend to be a German spy.”

  There was not a prominent politician who wasn’t also a brilliant actor. Roosevelt was no different. He’d chosen to play the role of a gruff, hardy outdoorsman, a man of the people. There was enough truth in the role that it resonated with the voters. His popularity had spilled over onto his chosen successor, who would be at the head of the parade tomorrow instead of a Democrat.

  Roosevelt stilled. “Repeat that.”

  “I believe Cromwell hired an unemployed actor to pretend to be a German spy.”

  It appeared as if he were making the calculations himself and coming to a conclusion that Miskimon and I had shared as he had taken me to the ship for my departure from Panama, a conclusion that would not, and could not, appear on any piece of paper.

  Cromwell had been in danger of being exposed for all his machinations in the first revolution. All Earl Harding needed as a journalist for the World was one or two reliable witnesses among the Panamanian aristocrats involved in the revolution in 1903. To keep those witnesses silent, Cromwell needed leverage. His leverage? A German “spy” to recruit someone like Raoul Amador to engage in acts of sabotage to make the plot believable. After Cromwell’s spy found a way to tempt the sons and daughters of the aristocrats into a new revolution, Cromwell was armed with signatures that proved treason. With this as blackmail, he could hold them all hostage and ensure their silence. This was my theory.

  “It’s just conjecture,” I said. “There is no way to prove Cromwell used Amador to stage a fake revolution unless somebody can link a man named Neale Braden to payments from William Nelson Cromwell, which we both know would be impossible if Cromwell wanted to keep it hidden.”

  “Neale Braden?” he asked.

  “Unemployed New York actor, pretending to be the German spy.”

  Cromwell needed more than Panamanians suckered into committing to a fake revolution, Miskimon and I decided during our conversation on my last day in Panama.

  To get his leverage, Cromwell had needed someone to conveniently expose the fake plot—enter a rancher from Medora. I’d never know if Cromwell would have gone as far as ordering his unemployed actor killed, but he probably knew Amador well enough to guess that would be the end result.

  “This conjecture,” Roosevelt said. “I trust it will never be speculated upon again outside of this office?”

  So. Roosevelt had either come to my same conclusions about Cromwell, or he had known it all along.

  “I’m not interested in politics,” I said. “I only want one thing, and I’ve already asked for it.”

  He leaned forward. I was speaking a language he understood—negotiations. I would save my own moral recriminations for later.

  “The girl named Safrana,” I said, “is an orphan because of the events during my time in Panama. I would like her to be granted American citizenship.”

  There was no point in mentioning that Raquel had no intention of ever abandoning Saffire, her half sister. Or that Saffire was not an orphan in any dire sense whatsoever. Her tito, in death, as during his life, had taken care of her, and his will ensured she would never be destitute. I’d learned all of this through letters sent to and from Panama—the correspondence that Raquel had requested of me during the bullfight.

  Teddy studied me. “That’s it? Citizenship granted to a girl?”

  On the surface, yes. I’d needed an excuse to confront Roosevelt about Cromwell. The negotiation for Saffire’s citizenship had provided me with that opportunity. But more than telling Roosevelt about Cromwell, what I’d needed was to see the president’s reaction.

  Because that was what would tell me if the information I gave him was something he’d already known. And if he’d possibly even been involved in some way.

  The stillness of concentration he’d shown convinced me. Roosevelt was absorbing new information, considering if what I was saying was possible and, if so, how it might serve as political leverage for him.

  My gut told me that Roosevelt had not been involved. While he and Cromwell had worked together behind the scenes for the 1903 revolution, sitting across from Teddy now, I believed he had not known of Cromwell’s machinations for a pretended second revolution, and like Goethals, had sent me to Panama simply to have someone discretely investigate what seemed like sabotage at the dig.

  I was glad for this. I liked the man and wanted to believe that he was honorable. Had I sensed otherwise, I would have paid him in full the amount I’d received to remove the mortgage from my ranch. While I now felt I’d earned the second portion of it by working on Goethals’s behalf, my land would not be purchased with blood money.

  “Yes, citizenship,” I said. “Your last day of office. I was running out of time.”

  “You’ll have it by tonight.” He looked as relieved as I felt. “Is there anything else?”

  “How about two tickets to the inaugural ball? I brought my daughter, Winona, with me, and she would be thrilled to attend.”

  “As long as you don’t wear a cowboy hat.” He offered that wonderful grin of his. “Seems like a long way to bring a child, so I hope it’s worth it for her.”

  “This is just a stop on the way. We’re headed to Panama to deliver those citizenship papers in person.”

  “Someone saves your life,” he said. “It feels good to pay them back.”

  He’d meant something double in that, and I was okay with it. With that bank draft, he’d paid me back in full for backing him in the Dakotas and at San Juan. He didn’t know I’d eventually get the first portion of the money back to him as a matter of honor.

  But delivering papers to Saffire as gratitude for her protection of me wasn’t the only reason Winona and I were bound by steamer for Panama. With modern travel, a rancher from the Dakotas could spend a substantial part of the year in the dry season of the tropics, the same way that a woman from Panama could spend the other part of the year—spring through fall roundup—in the Dakotas.

  Because of this, the second and more compelling reason for my return to Panama was nestled in my back pocket.

  A one-word telegram answer. From Raquel.

  YES.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  WHAT WAS T. B. MISKIMON’S FULL NAME?

  Barely a hundred years have passed since the Panama Canal opened; time and progress have blurred how much of a wonder it was that Teddy Roosevelt and the brash Americans were able to overcome all the obstacles it took to join the oceans. I hope that Saffire re-created some of that wonder for you.

  While I did my best to ensure as much of the backdrop of the story is as accurate as possible, I did take liberty with the building of the locks, as concrete did not begin to pour until later in 1909, months after I portrayed it in the novel.

  Also, not until February 4, 1917, did the New York Times run an article with this headline: GERMAN SPIES ACTIVE HERE FOR MONTHS, with the subhead “Hostile agents reported to number 10,000—Espionage Extended to Panama Canal.” Based on this, it is reasonable to speculate, I’d suggest, that in 1909, those living in Panama could legitimately believe German spies to already be at work in Panama.

  As for whether Germany would encourage a foreign country to revolt against the United States, there is the matter of the Zimmermann Telegram, where British cryptographers deciphered a January 1917 message from German Foreign Minister
Arthur Zimmermann, offering US territory to Mexico in exchange for joining the German cause. (Historians cite this as one reason the United States entered World War I by declaring war on Germany on April 6, 1917.)

  The backdrop to Saffire, of course, is based on the history of that time and place, including the 1903 Panamanian revolution against Colombia and a subsequent scandal that involved William Nelson Cromwell, and Theodore Roosevelt’s libel lawsuit against Randolph Hearst. You can find a fascinating look at this in two books: How Wall Street Created a Nation: J. P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Panama Canal, by Ovidio Diaz-Espino, and The Untold Story of Panama, by Earl Harding.

  The historical figures in the novel include Colonel George Washington Goethals, Randolph Hearst and reporter Earl Harding as noted above, and Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show.

  I hope it surprises you to learn that Harry A. Franck, Zone Policeman 88, and T. B. Miskimon are also historical figures I met during my research.

  First, Harry Alverson Franck. He was a travel writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike the overwrought and romantic prose by most travel writers, Franck presented the everyman’s view with a delightful sense of sarcasm. For the material he gave us in his book Zone Policeman 88, Franck worked as an enumerator in the Zone. Because his book is in public domain, it was a lot of fun to use some of his own descriptions in the conversations he shares with Holt, as well as the story about the men mysteriously knocked out along the train tracks. At my website, I give a complete listing of the material used from Harry’s book. Many thanks to Brenda Huettner at www.harryafranck.com for help with this.

  T. B. Miskimon?

  He was indeed an inspector for Colonel Goethals, and indeed Goethals held a King Solomon–type court every Sunday morning, open to any and all, where rank did not matter. That Goethals listened to complaints each Sunday is not entirely new to anyone who has learned about the building of the canal. However, after checking dozens of sources, it wasn’t until I read Julie Greene’s book The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal that I found one of the few references to T. B. Miskimon.

  As Julie Greene notes, “Records maintained by T. B. Miskimon, Goethals’s inspector, provide a world of insight into the Zone’s daily affairs. ICC employees and their wives complained about everything from drunken or adulterous neighbors to fraudulent commissary managers, insulting foremen, cruel policemen, blackmailing supervisors, women of ill repute, gamblers, abusive spouses, salesmen bearing indecent photographs, and a judge who engaged in sexual harassment. Miskimon dutifully investigated each case and recommended a solution to his boss. In one case where Miskimon found fraud involving commissary books, Goethals suspended the men responsible without pay for fifteen days. When a yardmaster of the Panama Railroad was accused by a colleague of working while intoxicated, Miskimon’s detailed investigation resulted in a six-page report for Goethals, in which the inspector concluded that while the yardmaster certainly imbibed, the charge of intoxication on the job may well have been the creation of his jealous and hostile colleague.”

  I learned this before I’d begun to write Saffire, and I was immediately intrigued at the story of a right-hand man sent out by the colonel to investigate complaints. I discovered that one of the only ways to learn more about T. B. Miskimon was through the reports he typed up for Goethals, available for viewing at Wichita State University.

  As a result, I spent hours there, in a quiet room, lost in those letters, letting my mind rove through another time when it did matter if men in uniform smoked on duty, and when a woman’s complaint about holes in window screens was a complaint worthy of investigation.

  A follow-up trip to another collection of T. B. Miskimon letters at Georgetown University gave me more of a look into life in the Zone, as well as a sense of T. B. Miskimon as a person.

  With gratitude for help from Dr. Lorraine Madway, the content of the first four of T. B. Miskimon’s letters in the novel is directly from the Special Collections and University Archives at Wichita State University, with the dates changed to reflect the novel’s timeline. As you might guess, the fifth letter, which refers to Holt, is entirely fictitious.

  Nothing in those letters, however, helped me learn Miskimon’s first or middle name on Holt’s behalf. That involved more research, and I’m happy to share the answer—as well as a complete listing of research sources and a timeline—at www.sigmundbrouwer.com/​saffire.

  An excerpt from Sigmund Brouwer’s

  THIEF OF GLORY

  Christy Award for Book of the Year

  Alberta Readers’ Choice Award

  Lime Award for Historical Fiction

  www.thiefofglory.com

  ONE

  Journal 1—Dutch East Indies

  A banyan tree begins when its seeds germinate in the crevices of a host tree. It sends to the ground tendrils that become prop roots with enough room for children to crawl beneath, prop roots that grow into thick, woody trunks and make it look like the tree is standing above the ground. The roots, given time, look no different than the tree it has begun to strangle. Eventually, when the original support tree dies and rots, the banyan develops a hollow central core.

  In a kampong—village—on the island of Java, in the then-called Dutch East Indies, stood such a banyan tree almost two hundred years old. On foggy evenings, even adults avoided passing by its ghostly silhouette, but on the morning of my tenth birthday, sunlight filtered through a sticky haze after a monsoon, giving everything a glow of tranquil beauty. There, a marble game beneath the branches was an event as seemingly inconsequential as a banyan seed taking root in the bark of an unsuspecting tree, but the tendrils of the consequences became a journey that has taken me some three score and ten years to complete.

  It was market day, and as a special privilege to me, Mother had left my younger brother and twin sisters in the care of our servants. In the early morning, before the tropical heat could slow our progress, she and I journeyed on back of the white horse she was so proud of, past the manicured grounds of our handsome home and along the tributary where my siblings and I often played. Farther down, the small river emptied into the busy port of Semarang. While it was not a school day, my father—the headmaster—and my older half brothers were supervising the maintenance of the building where all the blond-haired children experienced the exclusive Dutch education system.

  As we passed, Indonesian peasants bowed and smiled at us. Ahead, shimmers of heat rose from the uneven cobblestones that formed the village square. Vibrant hues of Javanese batik fabrics, with their localized patterns of flowers and animals and folklore as familiar to me as my marbles, peeked from market stalls. I breathed in the smell of cinnamon and cardamom and curry powders mixed with the scents of fried foods and ripe mangoes and lychees.

  I was a tiny king that morning, continuously shaking off my mother’s attempts to grasp my hand. She had already purchased spices from the old man at one of the Chinese stalls. He had risen beyond his status as a singkeh, an impoverished immigrant laborer from the southern provinces of China, this elevation signaled by his right thumbnail, which was at least two inches long and fit in a curving, encasing sheath with elaborate painted decorations. He kept it prominently displayed with his hands resting in his lap, a clear message that he held a privileged position and did not need to work with his hands. I’d long stopped being fascinated by this and was impatient to be moving, just as I’d long stopped being fascinated by his plump wife in a colorful long dress as she flicked the beads on her abacus to calculate prices with infallible accuracy.

  I pulled away to help an older Dutch woman who was bartering with an Indonesian baker. She had not noticed that bank notes had fallen from her purse. I retrieved them for her but was in no mood for effusive thanks, partly because I thought it ridiculous to thank me for not stealing, but mainly because I knew what the other boys my age were doing at that moment. I needed to be on my way. With a quick “Dag, mevrouw”—Good day, madam—I bol
ted toward the banyan, giving no heed to my mother’s command to return.

  For there, with potential loot placed in a wide chalked circle, were fresh victims. I might not have been allowed to keep the marbles I won from my younger siblings, but these Dutch boys were fair game. I slowed to an amble of pretended casualness as I neared, whistling and looking properly sharp in white shorts and a white linen shirt that had been hand pressed by Indonesian servants. I put on a show of indifference that I’d perfected and that served me well my whole life. Then I stopped when I saw her, all my apparent apathy instantly vanquished.

  Laura.

  As an old man, I can attest to the power of love at first sight. I can attest that the memory of a moment can endure—and haunt—for a lifetime. There are so many other moments slipping away from me, but this one remains.

  Laura.

  What is rarely, if ever, mentioned by poets is that hatred can have the same power, for that was the same moment that I first saw him. The impact of that memory has never waned either. This, too, remains as layers of my life slip away like peeling skin.

  Georgie.

  I had no foreshadowing, of course, that the last few steps toward the shade beneath those glossy leaves would eventually send me into the holding cell of a Washington, DC police station where, at age eighty-one, I faced the lawyer—also my daughter and only child—who refused to secure my release until I promised to tell her the events of my journey there.

  All these years later, across from her in that holding cell, I knew my daughter demanded this because she craved to make sense of a lifetime in the cold shade of my hollowness, for the span of decades since that marble game had withered me, the tendrils of my vanities and deceptions and self-deceptions long grown into strangling prop roots. Even so, as I agreed to my daughter’s terms, I maintained my emotional distance and made no mention that I intended to have this story delivered to her after my death.