Luke shook his head. “I just need to get outside into the fresh air. Please hurry,” he urged Superintendent Castor as the older man unlocked the final door to the lobby.
The moment the door was open, Luke bounded through and headed outside. She sent an apologetic look to the superintendent and followed Luke.
He paced in a tight little square on the prison’s front stoop, still breathing heavily. Every time she’d seen Luke before, hehad been charming and irreverent, but now he looked nervous and sick.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said on a shaky breath. “I’m not a big fan of jails.”
“Any particular reason?” It was a terribly intrusive question, but he was so agitated, and she desperately wanted to know why.
“Your father didn’t tell you?”
“No, he hasn’t told me anything about you.”
Luke wiped the perspiration from his face and kept pacing—three steps forward, half-pivot, then three steps that way. He did the same pattern several times before speaking.
“I did a stint in jail,” he said. “Most of it was in a Cuban jail, but some of it was the American military prison in Havana. I’m surprised your father didn’t tell you that I was a traitor and a spy for the Cuban rebels.”
It took a while to find her breath, she was so appalled. “Were you?”
He shook his head. “I was spying for the Americans, not the Cubans. The mission took a bad turn, and I ended up in jail, accused of treason.”
He pulled her down to sit beside him on the top step and recounted the whole story. He had been sent down to infiltrate a group of Cuban rebels who were being helped by a traitor inside the American military. Luke pretended to be sympathetic to the rebels in order to learn the identity of the turncoat. When he was imprisoned, he couldn’t confess the truth without endangering the entire mission. He was put in jail alongside a dozen of the Cuban rebels and eventually managed to win their trust and learn the name of the American traitor.
“How long were you in jail?”
“Fifteen months, in a six-by-ten-foot cell. I got out in September. This is the first time I’ve been back in any sort of locked facility, and it caught me off guard. The looks and smells aredifferent, but theclangof the locks slamming shut is the same. It was unsettling. I wasn’t prepared for it.”
His hands shook as he spoke. The fact that he had been willing to accompany her into a jail made him even more impressive in her eyes. It was easy to be fearless when a person was ignorant of the danger, but Luke walked back into his personal nightmare to be at her side.
“Look, can you forget everything you just saw?” he asked. “Having an attack of the vapors over a few jarring noises isn’t something I’m proud of. Pretend it never happened. I’ll be myself again shortly. I’m not a coward.”
“I knew that the moment you stepped onto the ice to save Bandit,” she said. “Why do you keep pushing yourself into reckless things? The ice. The Poison Squad. Now walking back into a jail.”
Luke gazed into the bleak landscape while considering his answer. “I don’t know. I’ve got this churning desire to venture out and conquer. I need to accomplish things. It’s what a man does.”
I need to accomplish things. His words resonated, because she felt the same way. Her hands tightened around her camera, and she glanced back toward the jail. She found it unpleasant but not truly frightening, and she needed to get those photographs.
Luke must have noticed her glance toward the door. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll wait for you out here.”
“Are you sure?”
He sent her a semi-scolding look. “Please don’t emasculate me any more than I already have been. Go do your job. I’ll be fine.”
He managed a smile, so she went, but what had just happened lingered the entire time she moved throughout the jail. The superintendent brought her to see the cells, where men were caged like animals and had an exhausted, hopeless lookin their eyes. She asked two men permission to take their photographs, and both agreed. Throughout the afternoon she wondered about Luke’s time in jail. Had he looked like these men? Used the same foul facilities and suffered the same sense of helplessness?
Marianne breathed a sigh of relief as she concluded the assignment. Her supervisor wasn’t going to be pleased with these pictures, but there was no way she could sugarcoat what she’d just seen. Not after knowing that Luke had been locked up in a similar situation.
He was in a better frame of mind when she rejoined him to ride the streetcar back into the center of town.
“You’ll still come to photograph my office?” he asked, a hint of unease back in his face. Maybe he feared she would think less of him for his fit of nerves in the jail, when nothing could be further from the truth.
“Of course,” she said lightly, but inside was the growing fear she was stepping into dangerous territory.
Eight
Luke had to sprint the last few blocks to make it to the boardinghouse in time for dinner. The trip to the jail had taken longer than expected due to his humiliating collapse in the detention hall. He’d known visiting a jail might prove difficult and had braced himself for what he might see, but it was the sounds that caught him by surprise. An overwhelming sense of claustrophobia roared to life the moment he heard that dead bolt clang into place. Even now the memory of that noise made him feel ill.
Well. It was best not to think about it.
