George Washington's Ghost

Undeniably, his word carried disproportionate weight in the high councils of President Hernando de Soto’s Grand Council of State – the equivalent of the British Cabinet – yet to say that other voices were unimportant was a misnomer. True, he could, occasionally dominate discussions in Cabinet; but at the end of the day if he was out-voted, then, that was that. He always went along with the expressed view of the majority. That was what the word ‘democracy’ meant!

“Can we not come to a private arrangement with you, Felipe?” The German Ambassador proposed. “I know you have to pay lip-service to all that nonsense the civilians spout…”

Santa Anna slowly got to his feet.

The Germans, looking askance one to the other, did likewise.

“Gentlemen,” the Minister of Defence declared, “thank you for your time. Our meeting is at an end.”

Chapter 9

Thursday 27th April

Imperial Concession, Guaynabo, San Juan, Santo Domingo

Baron Hans Dieter von Schaffhausen was well aware that he would never have ended up in a place he personally considered to be the rectum of the German Empire, if he had not slept with the wrong woman. Namely, the witty, marvellously sensible, unutterably lovely woman whom, thirty-two years ago, Captain Lothar von Bismarck – then, like von Schaffhausen, just completing his military service – but now and for many years, Foreign Minister of the Reich, had been scheduled to marry in the High Cathedral of Saint Peter in Trier.

Thereafter, Lothar had become one of the great men of world affairs, and von Schaffhausen had eventually, after a middlingly unremarkable career in the Diplomatic Service, ended up as German Minister for the Guaynabo Free Trade Zone, on the easternmost large island of the archipelago of the Greater Antilles.

That said, the German Minister at Guaynabo had no doubt whatsoever that he was the luckier of the two men. Poor old Lothar had spent the last quarter-of-a-century married to a woman he plainly did not care for – and the feeling had been mutual if the gossip was to be believed – wrestling with the impossible problems of the old Kaiser’s infantile grasp of the realities of foreign relations. Whereas, he, the man who had cuckolded the ‘golden boy’ of their generation, had perambulated around the globe with the love of his life and their ever-expanding clutch of offspring.

Even the posting to Santo Domingo had been, until lately, mostly a blissful idyll.

Von Schaffhausen’s fiefdom amounted to Guaynabo, itself a part of the Pueblo Viejo barrio – a term used hereabouts on Santo Domingo to signify a township, a farming community or simply a patch of untamed jungle, of which there was still a lot on Santo Domingo – and the barrios directly to its south, Frailes, Santa Rosa, Guaraguao, Mamey, Rio, Camarones, and Hato Nuevo and Sonadora, straggling eight or nine kilometres into the interior. In all, von Schaffhausen’s little kingdom encompassed some sixty to seventy square kilometres of real estate in which some thirty thousand people, the overwhelming majority Dominicans, lived and worked.

The climate was hot, humid and the capital city of Santo Domingo, San Juan, which abutted on the eastern boundaries of the Concession, and watched over it from the opposite side of Bahia de San Juan, was a dirty, disease-ridden and home to the inevitable collection of religious nut cases one tended to encounter in these parts. The Spanish had never made anything out of Santo Domingo, originally ‘Puerto Rico’, the rich port of the first waves of European interlopers. Subsequently, the Mother Church had achieved nothing but to inculcate an extreme, violent strain of messianic evangelistic Catholicism in the general population.

The revolutionary liberators of the island, and their descendants, had been too busy squabbling amongst themselves for the last hundred years, to do anything about the periodic famines – how bizarre was that on a tropical island that ought to have been a paradise on earth? – or the obscenely high rates of child mortality among their people, let alone done anything to build up their Holy Republic’s economy. Of course, the great men of ‘the revolution’ had always managed to find money for their fine haciendas in the hills, guns for their army and police forces, and even to maintain a rag-tag navy.

Had he been a man so disposed, Hans von Schaffhausen might have long ago despaired and retreated, like so many men in the foreign service of the Empire, into an anaesthetised alcoholic or drug-induced stupor as he saw out the final years of his career. However, he had never dwelt overlong on his misfortunes; whatever people in Berlin thought, he had had a long and fulfilling career and even here, in Guaynabo these last few years, and mostly, he had had a lot of fun.