Free Cuba Libre (2008) by Elmore Leonard Page A

those born of Spanish parents."
    Interesting.
    Another one. What about the former captain-general, Weyler, known to one and all as "the Butcher"?
    "He has rather soft blue eyes for a Spaniard."
    "Really."
    "He asked me to leave Rollie and go to Madrid with him. I thought about it--I've never been to Europe."
    "Amelia, the man's a monster, the most bloodthirsty military leader in recent history."
    "I didn't go, did I?"
    Neely would tell her that one of these days she actually would become tired of Rollie and leave him. "Then what will you do?"
    "I haven't thought about it."
    "When you were a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
    "I'm still a girl, Neely. I'm only twenty."
    "How old?"
    "Does it matter? What you're trying to say is, didn't I dream of becoming something more respectable than a courtesan, a rich man's girlfriend? Well, yes, I could see myself married to someone like him, but would I be better off?"
    "Could you see yourself married to an ordinary working man?"
    "Well, not if he's just ordinary. What would be wrong with his having money? The question is, do I want to marry someday and have babies? I don't know. I guess I've never thought about it."
    The feeling Neely had, he wouldn't be surprised to see Amelia step out of some type of cause clbre incident and become world-famous overnight.
    "In the company of a visiting dignitary," Amelia said, "when he's assassinated, shot through the heart by an anarchist, and in the photograph you see his blood all over my white organdy tea dress."
    Neely said he had in mind something more on the order of what Mr. William Randolph Hearst did with Evangelina Cisneros in the Journal.
    "Invented her," Amelia said.
    "Well, she did exist," Neely said. "They found her in prison awaiting trial for rebellious actions against the state." "Or was it for not going to bed with the alcalde?" "Amelia, there was a worldwide petition to get her out, 'the beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter of the revolution languishing in Death's Shadow," Casa de Recogidas, the vilest prison in all Cuba. Julia Ward Howe said, "How can we think of this pure flower of maidenhood condemned to live with felons and outcasts, without succor, without protection'... something about 'under a torrid sky, suffering privation, indignity"
    "How do you remember all that?"
    "It didn't do Evangelina any good at all. Spain wanted to send her to an even worse prison, in Africa. So one of Mr. Hearst's boys helped her escape."
    "You mean," Amelia said, "he paid off the guards and she walked out."
    "They made it look like an escape--it's the same thing. The beautiful Evangelina was escorted to Washington, where she was received by President McKinley..."
    "Julia Ward Howe singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic'?"
    "Possibly. The president, anyway, and one hundred thousand cheering Americans."
    Amelia said she never thought Evangelina Cisneros was that good-looking. Neely said, well, she wasn't bad.
    This evening at the hotel cigar counter Neely said, "You know something? I would rather write about you than Julia Ward Howe."
    "And Clara Barton?"
    "Even Clara Barton, and there's a good story there. The Red Cross has brought in so much condensed milk for the starving children, some of the Cubans are selling it to buy cigars. Oh, and before too long I want to interview that insurgent leader they call Islero, I'm told a very colorful character." "Colorful meaning colored?"
    "That's right, Islero is pure Negro, a slave at one time, before he ran away to become a bloodthirsty bandit and evolved, finally, into a moderately famous insurrectionist. He's known as the Black Death. Or it might be the Black Plague; now I'm not sure."
    "What about the cowboy? He might be interesting," Amelia said. She turned from the cigar counter. "He's right over there as we speak."
    By the dining room talking to his partner and Rollie's man, Victor Fuentes, the cowboy looking this way as Fuentes said something to him. Amelia smiled and watched him