Assassin's Honor (9781561648207) (48 page)

Fire Station #2 no longer exists. The spot is currently occupied by the New World Brewery.

Hillsborough Masonic Lodge is the oldest continually operating lodge in Florida, now in its 165
^th
year. Many civic, business, and governmental leaders in Florida's history have been members of this lodge. It is no longer at the location by Fort Brooke. See their interesting website at:
www.hillsborough25.org
.

For details on how José Martí's brother Masons in Cuba helped Wake escape in 1888, read
Honorable Lies
.

Boreau is the Spanish naval officer who tried to kill Wake in a “friendly” saber match turned homicidal at Havana in 1888. The reason? Wake killed Boreau's father, an agent for Colonel Marrón, in New York City in 1886.

A phaeton was a small carriage with a single bench seat that was designed for speed.

General Máximo Gómez (1839–1905) was born in the Dominican Republic, trained and served as an officer in the Spanish Army, then became one of the most famous leaders of the thirty-year Cuban fight for independence against Spain. It was Gómez who taught the Cuban Mambi (farmworker) cavalrymen their most terrifying tactic, the machete charge, which was so effective against the Spanish conscript soldiers. He declined the presidency of Cuba when she became free, saying that a Cuban-born person should have the position. Gómez is still revered among Cubans everywhere.

Lt. General Antonio Maceo (José Antonio de la Caridad Maceo y Grajales, 1845–1896) is my favorite military officer
in Cuban history. Known by Cubans everywhere as
El Titan Bronce
(The Bronze Titan) for his black skin color and large size, Maceo rose through the ranks at a time when even the Cuban independence movement had many supporters who looked down on dark-skinned military officers. Like Martí, Maceo was an accomplished Freemason and believed in their creed of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” He was also a self-educated, sophisticated gentleman. From 1868 to his death in battle in 1896, he fought in over five hundred battles and was wounded twenty-seven times. The mere understanding that Antonio Maceo was present on the battlefield demoralized his Spanish opponents. When he was killed in battle on 7 December 1896, at Punta Brava (southeast of Havana), his bodyguard, General Gómez's son Panchito, defended his dead body and was also killed by Spanish troops.

The fire station, begun in 1888 as the Mirta Hook and Ladder Company (named after the youngest daughter of Vicente Martinez Ybor) doesn't exist anymore, but there is a historical marker about it across the street, commemorating Captain Frank Puglisi and his Cuban volunteer firemen.

Madrileo
(or
Madrileño
) refers to a person from Madrid

José Martí was known by many people around the world, especially by the 1890s, as the “Apostle of Liberty.”

Gideon Welles (1802–1878) was the secretary of the navy from 1861 to 1869. He is chiefly remembered for being a taciturn, demanding, and successful civilian leader of the U.S. Navy, and reviled as the man who abolished the grog issue for enlisted sailors in 1862. Wake didn't like him. President Lincoln nicknamed Welles his “Neptune.” Thus, Wake cringes inside whenever his dear friend Martí calls him Neptune.

The reader will note that Martí, the Cuban, wasn't drinking
rum. He is the only Cuban I know of who didn't (or doesn't) enjoy rum. Martí did like gin, the drink the Brits made famous throughout the tropics as a refreshing antidote to malaria, because they mixed it with quinine. Martí, who was fluent in French from his studies and work there, was a devotee of French food, wine, and philosophy.

Vin Mariani was a very well-known French Bordeaux infused with six milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce. The version exported to the United States had 7.2 milligrams of cocaine per ounce and was widely fashionable with the upper class in America, including former president Grant. In Atlanta, John Pemberton (1831–1888), a morphine-addicted Civil War veteran, created a cocaine wine that became quite successful until the Atlanta temperance laws of 1885 forced him to make a nonalcoholic version. That later became the legendary Coca-Cola, which contained five ounces of cocaine per gallon of syrup until 1903, when all cocaine was removed from the recipe.

The Hahnemann test (discovered by German doctor Samuel Hahnemann in 1787) was the common preliminary test for arsenic poisoning. The Marsh test, a more complicated evaluation, would be done next.

Ipecacuanha is a plant from Brazil used as an emetic to induce vomiting. Many people know it as ipecac. This is not the standard procedure used by doctors nowadays.

Las Nuevitas Hotel is no longer there, nor Teatro Ybor.

One of the symptoms of arsenic poisoning is hoarseness. In Martí's case, it was aggravated by the medicine given to induce vomiting.

The exact identity of the assassins is still unknown, though there
is still some conjecture in Cuba about their names.

To this day, no one knows exactly what José Martí said to his assassin in that room, for neither man ever publicly said. There is some conjecture that after receiving the man's request for forgiveness, Martí, a Master Mason, may have made the man a brother Mason, thereby cementing his loyalty even further. This would not be the normal route for a man seeking membership, of course, but there is a special exemption in the rules allowing it in rare situations.

Saul of Tarsus (approx 5–67 A.D.) was a notorious persecutor of the early followers and apostles of Jesus, even killing them, but later underwent a complete change of faith and converted, becoming known by his Latin name, Paul. As Saint Paul the Apostle, he was one of the most widely known leaders and martyrs of early Christendom. Much of the New Testament is attributed to him. Obviously, Wake's naming the assassin “Pablo” was a tribute to the belief that the very worst can become the very best.

Sean Wake, born in 1865 at Pensacola, was named after Peter Wake's best friend Sean Rork. Unlike his father, Sean Wake graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. Commissioned an ensign in 1890, his career will last over forty years.

This Methodist church still exists at that location. With its beautiful interior woodwork and unusually buttressed exterior architecture, it is well worth a visit. I always go there for Sunday services when in Key West.

In the 1890s, Delmonico's had several locations in New York City; this was the most famous. This great eatery started in 1837, spawned a number of culinary firsts, and is fortunately still open.
It is currently located on Beaver Street in lower Manhattan. It is one of the iconic dining experiences of the city.

Charles Ranhofer (1836–1899) was a renowned French chef who immigrated to the U.S. in 1856 and helped to make Delmonico's the place to eat, and be seen, in New York City. He wrote
The Epicurean
, which is still the definitive tome on cuisine of the Gilded Age.

James Blount (1837–1903) was a Confederate veteran and Democratic congressman from Georgia from 1873 to 1893. He was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and opposed to adding any territory inhabited by nonwhites to the United States. Blount's report recommended not recognizing the coup and new government, not acquiring Hawaii, and repudiating the actions of the U.S. Consul there. The Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate delivered their own report, which recommended the opposite. President Cleveland ended up taking Blount's (and Wake's) advice and repudiated the actions of the previous administration. The coup-implemented government still stood in Honolulu, however, and Hawaii was acquired in 1898 by the next administration in office, led by President McKinley.

Hilary Herbert (1834–1919) was a Confederate veteran and Democratic congressman from Alabama from 1877 to 1893. He was chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, a great supporter of the navy, and largely responsible for the congressional funding in the 1880s and 1890s to modernize the country's warships. Herbert was secretary of the navy from 1803 to 1897. He died in Tampa in 1919.

Born in 1837, Grover Cleveland was two years older than Wake and lived until 1908, the year Wake will retire. Cleveland's young wife Francis lived until 1947.

What we now call the “White House” was routinely called the “Executive Mansion” in the 1800s. President Theodore Roosevelt
began calling it the White House early in his first term and the moniker stuck.

A “parasymphyseal fracture of the mandible” means Wake broke Gardiner's jaw at the chin. Routine recovery time is six weeks. Due to the state of dental medicine in the late nineteenth century, Gardiner very likely had underbite problems for the rest of his life.

The French and Russian agreement Wake refers to was signed in 1892 and became known as the Franco-Russian Alliance. It was made to counter the Triple Alliance, the 1882 pact between Germany, Italy, and Austro-Hungary. In 1907, France, Russia, and Great Britain, supplemented by Japan and Portugal, formed the Triple Entente as a counterbalance to the Triple Alliance. Thus the basic antagonists of World War I (1914–1918) were formed in bewilderingly complex turn-of-the-century Europe. The reader will note that the United States of America was not a party to any of this, though we got dragged into the war in 1917.

In 1889, President Cleveland promised Wake a promotion for his good work. Wake, jaded soul that he was, never thought that would happen, since it was merely the word of a politician.

Rork joined about two hundred other petty officers in being promoted in April 1893 to the new rank of Chief Petty Officer.

The failed uprising to which Wake refers was led by two brothers, Manuel and Ricardo Sartorius, at Holguín, Cuba. It was not authorized or supported by Martí and the Cuban Revolutionary Party. The Spanish authorities quickly defeated it.

The area of Tift's Wharf has been filled in and paved over. It is now called Mallory Square. Mallory's dock was next to Tift's. The square is named for Stephen Mallory, former U.S. senator from Key West in the 1850s and secretary of the navy for the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865.

Lowe's Dock is now the A&B Marina.

José Martí's poisoning in Ybor City at the hands of Spanish agents is little known by the public and the subject of conjecture by students of Cuban history. Mañach writes that the poison was acid, but does not specify the type. Several of the symptoms listed by Mañach, and those in Martí's letter to Serafin Sanchez a month later, are similar to those of arsenic poisoning, however. Arsenic would also be easier for the assassins to administer. To my uncertain knowledge, 123 years later no one still knows for sure.

In Ybor City, there are some with the opinion that the poisoning occurred in 1893. Martí's letter shows it happened in mid-December 1892, and this is confirmed by the esteemed Centro Estudiantes Martíanos (Center for Martí Studies) in Havana, Cuba, who gave me the date of December 16, 1892. Alfred J. López's exemplary new book on Martí also confirms that it occurred in December 1892, and uses references from Carlos Ripoll's
La Vida Intima y Secreta de José Martí
and Nydia Sarabia's
Noticias Confidenciales sobre Cuba 1870–1895
.

The political situations in Venezuela, Mexico, Germany, Washington, and Florida are described accurately in this novel. The global German Empire was in its ascendancy, and had serious designs on the Caribbean. Drake, Blau, Boreau, Gardiner, and Marrón are fictional.

From the late 1880s, Martí was under constant surveillance and threat of assassination by Spanish agents, even in the United States. This he understood intellectually, but in his focused drive to secure freedom for his people, dismissed operationally. The assassination attempt in Ybor City changed everything. At the insistence of his closest confidants, Martí's subsequent travels incorporated much more attention to security. He was, after all, the voice of freedom.

I am saddened to report that José Julián Martí Pérez was killed in action with the Spanish army on May 19, 1895, at Dos
Rios in Oriente Province in eastern Cuba. If only he had lived, the path of history would have turned out much better for his people.

Still, in the incredibly complex forty-two years of his life, this intriguing visionary of the human condition, advocate of universal freedoms, speaker of truth to tyrants, and compassionate poet of life, managed to change the world's view of individual freedom and responsibility. Amazingly, this triumph has not faded in all these years. To the contrary, Martí's ideas have become the goal of those aspiring liberty everywhere.

To this day he is revered by Cubans everywhere, as well as people from many other cultures, all of whom long for what Martí saw should be, if only mankind could rise above greed, jealousy, fear, and dogma.

His aficionados include me.

Robert N. Macomber
(
hecho en Cuba
)