Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,78

beyond thought or caring.

Suddenly, Jackie felt Emiliano draw back from her and snap his head away. “¡Jesucristo!” he muttered angrily.

Her eyes blinked open, and she saw him leap up and yank a large branch from a tree. “What is it?” she asked, terrified that he had seen a snake. Her body began to tremble uncontrollably. Then she heard the noisy chugging… chugging… chugging sound of the boat’s motor starting up in the bay.

“It’s those kids who were fishing on the reef. They’re taking the yacht,” Emiliano cried, brandishing the tree limb like a club and shouting “¡Vete! ¡Vete!” as he ran toward the bay.

Jackie jumped up and ran after him. She stood on the beach and watched, ready to help Emiliano if he needed her. But luckily, the boat was still anchored, and the three boys, who looked like Cuban guajiros who had snuck onto the island illegally, jumped into the water and began swimming away when they saw Emiliano coming after them. They were probably pranksters, Jackie thought, who had just wanted to take the boat for a joyride. A rueful sigh escaped her. Little did they know that the joke had been on her.

XVIII

Dressed in Stephanie Mitchell’s exquisite white chiffon gown was like being swathed in Queen Anne’s lace, Jackie thought, but she felt like an imposter. Wearing someone else’s dress was only half the problem. The other, more troublesome part, was keeping up the pretext Emiliano had concocted to explain their unexpected presence at the estate. Mrs. Mitchell had accepted their story of a car accident on blind faith, but what if her husband or one of the guests started probing for details? Jackie would have to employ her imagination and dissemble convincingly or the ruse would blow up in their faces. But deception, she had discovered, was a sine qua non for this CIA job, and she was surprised at her growing proficiency in it. She just hoped this talent wouldn’t carry over into her personal life.

Emiliano, too, was becoming quite adept at skullduggery. When Jackie went upstairs to get dressed, he asked her to give him the pouch with the Dracula reel in it so he could hide it in the screening room. “It’s too big to fit in an evening purse, so I’ll stow it away until we’re ready to see what’s on it,” he told her, looking around to be sure that he could not be overheard by anyone. “After dinner, when the dance starts, no one will notice if we disappear from the crowded ballroom.”

The cocktail hour was in full swing when Jackie entered the party. Her eyes swept over the crowd of elegantly dressed men and women, mostly middle-aged American industrialists and their wives, interspersed with a sprinkling of upper-class Cubans. A squadron of butlers in white jackets and black bow ties circulated among them, bearing trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Emiliano was nowhere in sight, and Jackie assumed that he was in the screening room, surreptitiously finding a hiding place for the reel.

Unable to shake the feeling that she was a gate crasher, Jackie hung back uncertainly on the fringe of the crowd, nursing a glass of champagne and nibbling on flaky, cheese-filled pastelitos and caviar on toast points offered on passing trays. What was keeping Emiliano? she wondered. She hoped he hadn’t been caught in the act.

Finally, Mrs. Mitchell, her ample figure concealed in a voluminous red gown and a jaunty gardenia nestled in her hair, sailed up to Jackie and took her by the arm. “Jacqueline, dear, I almost thought you were my daughter in that dress,” she gushed. “Let me introduce you to some of our guests.”

With whirlwind speed, Mrs. Mitchell presented Jackie as a visiting American journalist to one guest after another and didn’t give her time, thankfully, to exchange more than a few words of innocuous small talk with each one. The names all went by in a blur.

It was only when Mrs. Mitchell introduced her to a short, slim, dark-haired American man who was walking toward them with the studied ease and aplomb of a performer that Jackie experienced a shock of recognition. “Jacqueline, this is George Raft,” Mrs. Mitchell said. “George is famous for all the Hollywood movies he’s starred in, and now he’s a part owner of the Capri casino and one of Havana’s most popular men-about-town.”

“What a thrill it is to meet you,” Jackie said in a girlish voice. As a film buff, she knew of George Raft’s star-making gangster