Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,15

to pay for when tomorrow’s day dawns. The treasure map I will place elsewhere for safekeeping. May God have mercy on my immortal soul…

Jackie turned the page over. With a chill, she saw that it was blank, an indication that the unnamed diarist’s prophecy had probably come true. She was disappointed to realize that now she would never know what happened to this nameless Civil War soldier and Nicaraguan filibuster, whatever that was. And this William Walker, who was he? He was a historical figure that she was not familiar with.

Carefully, she folded up the diary pages and put them back inside the book. She then rewrapped the book and placed it inside her handbag. Something from those diary entries called out to her. Cuba and Walker’s treasure, and some kind of map showing the location of the treasure. It was like a half century of dust and cobwebs had been shaken off and the dead had come back to life to tap her on the shoulder.

As though a fire had suddenly been lit under her, Jackie leaped off the bench and ran back up to M Street in search of a pay phone. She found an empty booth, picked up the phone, dropped a nickel into the slot, and dialed a familiar number. When the operator answered and said, “Central Intelligence Agency,” Jackie responded, with a note of urgency in her voice, “Allen Dulles, please.”

IV

Jackie stood above the battle. From her vantage point, she could see the soldiers in blue crouched behind boulders and fallen tree limbs or inside depressions dug into the ground with their entrenching tools. They were poised, muskets raised and pointed at the soldiers in gray as they came charging up the hill with barely any cover to protect them. As she observed the scene, Jackie was only too glad that she was a woman and very unlikely to ever find herself in this kind of predicament.

A voice from behind her left shoulder startled her out of her reverie.

“It’s Thursday, July second, the second day of the battle of Gettysburg. About five o’clock in the afternoon. The Twentieth Maine, under the command of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, is taking a stand here at Little Round Top.” The speaker pointed to where the men in blue were hunkered down about halfway down the slope of the hill. “And the Confederate forces, the Fifteenth Alabama, under the command of Colonel William C. Oates, are charging up the hill. But instead of defending his position, Colonel Chamberlain [0]orders his men to fix bayonets and counterattacks down the hill. The result is a complete rout of the Johnny Reb.”

The narrator of this description was tall and reed thin and wore a suit that seemed permanently wilted from the heat. Curly haired and bearded, he spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent that seemed foreign in this southern setting. His name was Charles Grimsby, and he was Tulane University’s resident expert on William Walker. He was also, judging from the tabletop battlefield set up in his dining room, a Civil War buff.

Here, the entire Battle of Little Round Top was being replayed with cast-lead soldiers placed on an immaculate miniature landscape in which every tree, bush, stream, and rock seemed to have been magically shrunk down to scale and transported from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Professor Grimsby’s dining room.

As Grimsby moved around Jackie and began repositioning some soldiers on the field of battle, she thought back on the whirlwind forty-eight hours that had preceded her presence here.

From M Street, after excitedly phoning Dulles to tell him of her discovery of the diary and the map, she had returned to Merrywood, where she made a series of other calls. First, when she found out that Grimsby was the curator of the Walker Collection at Tulane, she phoned him and made an appointment to meet the professor at his home on Sunday.

Then, much as she hated to do it, she called Jack Kennedy and canceled their Saturday night date, pleading a highly infectious virus in a whispery, near-death voice punctuated with a simulated hacking cough. (She prayed that this unplanned thwarting of Jack’s notorious libidinous drive would, like the random appearance of John Husted, make Jack only more eager to pursue her.)

On Saturday, through the auspices of the CIA’s travel department and with Dulles himself to cut through red tape, Jackie flew to New Orleans and checked into a B and B on stately St. Charles Avenue, across from the Tulane campus and next