The Columbus Affair: A Novel

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

BÉNE SAT IN THE CABIN OF THE KING AIR C90B, A SMALL TURBOPROP that he chartered whenever he traveled anywhere in the Caribbean. Luckily, the plane had been available on short notice and he and Tre Halliburton had climbed on board in Montego Bay. Tre had said there might be more information in Cuba, so he’d made a call and gained them access to the country. He regularly did business with the Cubans. They knew him and had been eager to cooperate. The plane could accommodate up to seven passengers, but with just the two of them on board there was plenty of room. What he liked about this particular charter was the service. The galley was always stocked with fine foods, the bar top-shelf liquors. Not that it mattered much to him, he drank precious little, but it did matter to his guests. Tre was enjoying a rum and cola.

“This archive is privately owned,” Tre said. “I’ve always wanted to take a look but could not get into Cuba.”

“Why do you think it would be helpful?”

“Some of what I found last night. There were constant references to Cuba in the Spanish documents left in Jamaica. The archivist and I have talked about this Cuban cache before. He’s actually seen it. He said that there are more documents there from the Spanish time than anywhere he knows of.”

“He doesn’t know what you were after, does he?”

“No, Béne. I know better. I assume we can get a car once on the ground?”

“It’s waiting on us.”

“Apparently you’ve been here before.”

“The Cubans, for all their faults, are easy to work with.”

“When I was in the archives last night,” Tre said, “one of the clerks told me about another clerk who’d gone missing. His name is Felipe. Is he the man who stole those documents for you?”

“Not for me. Someone else.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

He wasn’t going to admit to that. Not to anyone. Ever. “Why would you ask me?”

“The clerk told me that he’s never missed work. Young man. Bright. Now he’s gone.”

“Big leap from there to me.”

“Why do you do it, Béne? Why not just go legitimate?”

He’d often asked himself the same thing. Maybe it was his father’s genes swirling inside him. Unfortunately, the lure of easy money and the power it brought was impossible to ignore, though he wished sometimes that he could.

“Should we be having this conversation?” he asked.

“It’s just you and me here, Béne. I’m your friend.”

Maybe so, but he wasn’t a fool. “I do nothing that harms anyone. Nothing at all. I grow my coffee, and I try to stay to myself.”

“That man. Felipe. He might disagree with that.”

He could still feel the glare of the wife’s eyes as he tossed the money on the bed. He’d destroyed her life. Why? For pride? Anger? No. It simply had to be done. Jamaica was a tough place, the gangs many and strong. True, he was not a formal part of that system—he’d like to think that he’d risen above it—but to maintain that status he had to manage fear. Killing that drug don had been part of that. Felipe? Not so much, since no one would ever really know what happened, except the men who worked for him. But that had been the point. If someone like a minor clerk could lie to him with no consequences, what would they do?

Now they knew the price for that mistake.

“It’s unfortunate that the man is missing,” he finally said.

“I read about your father,” Tre said. “He was quite a man. He may have single-handedly created the entire Blue Mountain Coffee industry.”

He was young when his father died, but he remembered some and his mother had told him more. She seemed to remember only the good. His father saw a need to regulate Jamaica’s most valuable export. Of course, the Rowe family benefited. But what was wrong with that?

“My father wanted to find this mine, too,” he told Halliburton. “He was the one who first told me about it.”

He wanted the subject changed. This trip was about the mine, not his family or his business. But he liked Halliburton enough not to become angry at the intrusion.

“And what will you do if the place really exists?” Tre asked.

A gale of turbulence rattled the plane. They were twenty thousand feet over the Caribbean Sea, headed northeast toward Santiago de Cuba, a populous city on the southeast shore. The flight was short and they’d be landing soon.

“Does it exist?” he asked.

“Two days ago I would have said no. Now I’m not so sure.”

“It is there,” Zachariah Simon said to him. “My family has searched for this mine a long time.”

“Why is it important to you?”

“It is important to my religion.”

That surprised him. “How?”

“Christopher Columbus was a Jew. He converted to Christianity on threat of force. But he remained a Jew at heart.”

He’d never heard that before.

“His real name was Christoval Arnoldo de Ysassi.”

He made no effort to hide his disbelief.

“It is true,” Simon said. “His family took the name Colón after converting.”

“Why does that matter?” He truly wanted to know.

“To my family it matters a great deal. To the Jews, even more. Do you know the story of Columbus’ death?”

“How did Columbus die?” he asked Halliburton.

“Where’d that come from?”

“Something I was thinking about. How did it happen?”

“He died in Spain in May 1506 after a long illness. Nobody knows what killed him. It wasn’t so much his death but what happened after that’s really interesting.”

He listened as Halliburton explained how Columbus was first buried in a convent at Valladolid. Then in 1513, his daughter-in-law requested that the remains be brought to the Seville cathedral. In 1537 the family was granted permission to bring the body back to the New World, and Columbus was interred inside a newly built church in Santo Domingo.

1537.

He knew the significance of that year.

That was when the same daughter-in-law—the widow of one of Columbus’ sons—acquired control of Jamaica from the Spanish Crown.

Columbus stayed on Hispaniola until 1795. When Spain lost control of the island to the French, the remains were transferred to Havana. In the early 20th century, at the end of the Spanish-American War, when Cuba gained independence, the bones were brought back to Seville, where they have remained.

“With just one problem,” Tre said. “They might not be Columbus. Toward the end of the 19th century, some workers digging in the church at Santo Domingo found a lead box full of bones. On the outside was written, RENOWNED MAN DON CRISTOBAL COLON. That made everyone believe that the Spanish might have dug up the wrong grave back in 1795.”

“I’ve been to the church in Santo Domingo,” he said. “There’s a monument to Columbus and a tomb.”

“That contains those bones from the lead box. The government did all that in 1992 to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the first voyage. But there’s also a magnificent tomb in Seville. They’ve run several DNA tests, but nothing has ever been solved. Those bones were moved so much, scattered around, he could be in all of those places. Or none of them.”

“My family is searching for Columbus’ grave,” Simon told him. “We think that the bones were secretly transported to Jamaica and hidden in his lost mine. That location was apparently one the family trusted, since the Admiral himself located it.”

But he’d not believed the Simon then, and still did not now. This wasn’t about finding some grave. No way. Simon was after something else entirely, something important enough to draw the attention of American intelligence agents. He could not care less about the bones of Columbus. That man had been an invader. A destroyer. His arrival meant the deaths of tens of thousands of Tainos, and eventually led to slavery, which wrought even more pain and suffering. Maroons had rebelled against all of that, becoming the first Africans to win their freedom in the New World. If there was a lost mine, it definitely belonged to them.

“What is it, Béne?”

The engine’s angry chorus waned and they began their descent. Out the window he spotted Cuba and the green bastion of mountains that skirted the coast. La Sierra Maestra. He knew that slaves had used its harsh terrain for cover as they escaped the cane plantations. They’d not acquired a name like Maroons, but they were the same nonetheless.

Halliburton was glancing out a window, too. “That’s where the Cuban revolution started. Castro and his men hid in those mountains.”

He knew coffee was grown there. A strong blend that only mildly competed with his prized beans.

“I want to find that mine,” he said, his voice low. “If there be nothing there, fine. But I want to find it. I need you to help me do that.” He faced Tre and asked, “Will you?”

“Sure, Béne. I can do that.”

He saw that his friend sensed the urgency. He also saw something else. Apprehension. He’d never seen that in Halliburton’s eyes before. He hated that his friend might be afraid of him, but he did nothing to ease that feeling.

He would tolerate no more lies, no more mistakes.

Not from foe or friend.