However, Carlos DeRolfo, his wife and other board members had secretly spent most of that money on themselves—that is, the entire fourteen million—thinking not only that they would not be caught but that what they did would be considered legitimate if they had the right paperwork in place. (They had been robbing this mine, and misappropriating the legitimate offers of financial assistance, for years.)
A man named Hulk Hernández oversaw this transfer of funds for them into certain bank accounts, and became the chief inspector of the mine. The people of Oathoa relied upon him to tell them the truth, and Mr. Hernández did.
What was in their favour was this. The transfer of money had happened a few minutes before 9/11. It was wired from New York, and any record of it was probably lost. Warren, the oldest grandson of Blair Cyr, and the man who had wired these funds, had died in that attack as well. Days and then weeks passed, and no one knew about this transfer, and how much money was actually given.
DeRolfo had a new indoor-outdoor swimming pool and had built his wife her own chapel, where he had the local and quite pious priest come to say Mass. He had a stable of eight Arabian horses.
Once a day, after the implosion, Mr. Hernández held a press conference, where he read from a chart. He showed the routes the rescuers took, the impediments they had to face, the damage that supposedly had been done.
A few weeks after the implosion a safety group was formed to look into the cause of the disaster. It had many people in the town involved. They were to recommend changes to mining and decide who was responsible. They were also going to decide who would receive the majority of the compensation that the mining company said they would offer. Carlos DeRolfo’s wife sat on this board, along with Hulk Hernández. She told them of the amount of safety measures they had installed, the work they had done—and her suggestion was that if anyone was at fault, it was the international company Tarsco, which wanted too much coal extracted from the mine. She blessed herself, and cried when she spoke.
“Thousands of tonnes of coal,” she said.
However, all during this time, all during the days of agony just after the collapse of the mine, during those days of prayers and masses after this implosion, Carlos DeRolfo and his wife were hoping to locate one small boy, a boy about fourteen years of age, named Victor Sonora.
Carlos went to the school to find him, but the boy did not show up there.
“Hijo de puta. Hijo de puta,” he would repeat.
Son of a bitch.
Carlos would tell other children:
“It is not important, but if you see him, and he is available to see me, tell him I am at home.” And he would look rather fatherly at the boys he spoke to. Especially the boy’s best friend, Ángel Gloton, who Carlos had a managerial interest in as a young junior lightweight.
He took Ángel Gloton aside and said:
“Tell our friend Victor I have a lot of money for him—if he wants to see me. I want him to know I am looking out for him—he is an orphan now, and has lost his father, and he has a little brother.”
But the truth was much, much different. Why Carlos wanted to see Victor Sonora was because Victor had recorded something on his new tape recorder. Something that proved the men were still alive when the search was suspended. This would become known, but it would take time. Victor had been sitting on the steps of the old school, playing with this tape recorder, when the accident happened, and like so many he had rushed to the mine. Later that day he turned his tape recorder on, to keep a record of the rescue. And a sound was recorded that proved men were calling for help.
Twice Victor had tried to get this tape to someone who would listen—and twice he realized that the policeman Erappo Pole was waiting for him. Why? He did not know, but he believed something was not right. In fact was terribly wrong. So not able to go to the police he would hide, with the tape recorder and his little brother, Florin, and wonder what to do. When Ángel saw him, and told Victor that Carlos DeRolfo wanted to speak with him, Victor knew he was in trouble, and the tape he had on him was a dangerous tape. He finally decided to take it to a tourist, and believed that would save his father.
Then a strange event happened. Young Victor Sonora was found dead in the bedroom of a Canadian woman’s villa.
And Mary Cyr, the granddaughter of Blair Cyr, found herself in a Mexican jail in that small town of Oathoa; a woman who on paper was partial owner of this mine.
PART ONE
1.
WHEN JOHN DELANO FIRST SAW MARY CYR, IT WAS ABOUT FIVE that evening. She was sitting in the cell. The early darkness seemed uncomfortably solitary, while life echoed down the hall, the smell of coffee and beans and supper. He could see words on the side of the far wall: ¡Viva Cristo! 5 mayo 1922. John later heard some priest named Father Ignatius had scratched them there. This priest was hanged on International Workers’ Day.
For what it was worth to ten thousand prisoners, ¡Viva Cristo! was still legible after eighty-six years.
There was dust everywhere because of the white unpaved road that ran to the north of the jail. A field of scrub bushes was to its left, and here a solitary donkey grazed and now and again looked up at a passerby with its filmed pussy eyes. The dust came up around the solitary donkey as well. Far away huge hills lay quiet and restrained in the silent evening air; hills that were made of grey rock, and bush. A car sped down the hill and disappeared. Across from the jail a confectionary shop that sold tortillas and tobacco and cola and beer. Or at least, that is what John could make out it sold.
A man in a white suit jacket, with big white buttons—one sewn with black thread—walked by carrying some kind of outboard motor toward the garage that John had seen on the way in.
That is, John noticed as much as he could. It was his job.
“Welcome to the black hole,” she whispered to him. Then she said excitedly: “I knew if anyone would come to save me, it would be you. I wouldn’t have anyone else!” Then she added: “All those others are nothing to me now!” This was a comment said to mollify any tension they might have—saying that now the others—those lots of others she flaunted in front of him were nothing to her now. So one might ask, had she flaunted them? Well of course she had.
He had come to save her—but he wondered how to. Though seemingly taciturn and offstanding, believed by the press to be both a misogynist and a misanthrope, he was perhaps as good a detective as there was. Still, he was very aware this was not his playing field, not his country; he had no jurisdiction, not even the right to question people.
Her wonderful eyes looked out at him. Mexican people were wonderful too, as wonderful as anyone. But if you got into trouble real or imagined while down here, you were on your own.
Nothing ever levels the playing field quite as much as sin. And she was taken to be wealthy. That is, they had just realized a day or so before he arrived who exactly she was. They had taken her passport away, and it did not bode well. Some officers looked at her so sternly she shook. Well, they said she did. And smiled about it. But perhaps she did not shake as much as they wanted.
She did not know why this sudden hatred had flared up when her name was revealed. The biggest bullying officer had spit at her. But the idea of even saying this was ludicrous. So she said nothing.
They had closed her cell door with a clatter and walked away.
He had not seen her in over three years. It was, seeing her again, as if he had found an alien sea creature among the shore rocks on an October Sunday afternoon. But she noticed his appearance too, and it was drawn and thin. He was ill and had been for months, and the dust and the heat of the small town had done nothing to alleviate this.
But what struck him too was its beauty—the beauty of the town was almost too much to bear; you came around a nondescript corner and saw a remarkable fountain spouting water against a palm tree square—and yet beyond the fountains and the coloured stones was another world. They had built the railroad across this part of Mexico, from coast to coast, back in the fifties, t
o transport goods for the United States. The track was rusted and torn apart just to the north of the village, but a new line had been made parallel to it for the transport of coal. That too was now unused, yet the rails still gleamed in the sun. A signal to those above about the tragedy that had happened to those below. And life, Carlos DeRolfo said in his statement, would go on.
“Más grande y mejor,” he said.
Bigger and better.
They still had gorgeous festivals—and multicoloured adobes, and small donkeys too. For the turistas and the children. They had some twenty-nine bars along the streets above the jail—and they, being a backwater 145 kilometres off any main route, had no real drug problem. There were some problems, of course, but not in the way of the cartels. John realized this could be a liability for her. That is, at the moment she seemed to be the only game in town.
Her fingers were purple and bruised from having banged them against the metal door when she asked to be let out, because for a long time she had no idea why she was locked up. They told her if she did not stop, they would put her in a straitjacket. And by now the word was out: the crazy rich lady had committed a crime—a terrible crime—and people shuddered at it, and came to stare at her as if she was a trapped animal. Some just gloomily looked at her. Others glibly glanced and looked away. More gathered every day, as who she was became known.
“La mujer es viciosa,” mothers told children. “Señorita Cyr demonia.”
The woman is vicious…demonic.
“Certainly somewhat exaggerated,” Mary said. “At least a little.”
This anger at her had nothing as yet to do with the coal mine disaster—that would come, and build exponentially. This rage had to do with another crime she was accused of.
This is what John had heard before he reached his room on the second floor of the resort. His room, or three rooms, was called una vista de tomar aliento.
A breathtaking view.
It did have that. On one side there was the sea, and to his left mountains. But it was a stale, sad place, really; full of second-hand furniture. Probably the same thing existed in her rooms. Una vista as well.
Mary Cyr was now left staring out at a half-blind donkey.
This was the idea of rumour that he realized had plagued her since she was a child. Now she was just the crazy rich lady—a kind of emblematic old woman (though she was not yet forty-five), with greying hair. Still and all the features were classic. That is, as far as he could ever tell what classic was. How could he even pretend to know one way or the other? It was left to other men to talk about classic beauty. It was up to other men to finish university, take history courses or poli sci. But, my god, she was beautiful.
They had not seen each other in years. And the fact was, she was worth millions only if her family decided. And they were back in Canada. Garnet was the head of her side of the family. The other, more prosperous and even more secretive, side had parted ways with them. There were the newspapers and oil, and lumber, and business ventures of Blair Cyr’s three sons. But her father and mother were dead, and she was in the newspaper section. That is, she and her cousin Perley and her uncle Garnet. Garnet might not be on her side, since she had accused him of many things—including murder, which she later confessed was a slip of the tongue.
Her cousin Perley had spent much of his childhood brought up by maids. His favourite was Flora.
After a while Flora went away. He wrote her a letter, asking if he could go visit, for she was much like his mother. He got an answer, which he kept in his locked toy box at the end of his room. Flora said she would come and see him someday, but she never did.
Mary had herself been left alone, an orphan without being called one. She had flaunted her freedom and her money too often in too many places. John knew this as much as anyone.
John had come here on a moment’s notice without thinking much of what he was doing, or how he was going to get her home. It wasn’t even his duty to do so. There were clothes hanging in another cell, and a radio playing. There was laughter farther down the hall, loud and racked by coughing that sounded obscurely fitting for an evening after five. Just as in some places one might think of having a drink before dinner, now coughing and hanging clothes seemed to be entirely appropriate.
There was the smell of cigarettes everywhere; the stench of harsh black tobacco. Along with the smell of cooking oil. There were two women cooking french fries in the corridor between the cells; the back door was open, so the women could easily have walked out.
But Mary could not.
Her family had called on him two days ago.
So he had come carrying his clothes in a black bag. He had gone in the darkness, and in winter, to travel God knows where. If at night a traveller, he thought.
He arrived from Phoenix earlier in the day.
He waited at the small airport, took a car down the inland highway, passed derelict adobes in the sun.
He was let off at Bruno’s Tea Room, a small restaurant up the way from the resort he was to report to. There was a cactus plant against the side wall, and a porch light shone at noon. He stayed there an hour, drank a cold beer, bought another for his journey, picked up his black shoulder bag, and trying to remain focused in the awful heat (it was already 85 degrees) set out on foot, the dust of the roadway coming up his legs. He walked where whitewashed walls towered on his right, behind which dogs would on occasion bark. He walked downward toward a spot of granite that opened at a turn and partially showed the blue sea.
The small town with its wonderful fountain became visible after twenty minutes. The cobbled square, the centre stone laid by a dignitary in 1922, the glass windows of dress shops and antiques—the Bank of Mexico, a local casino, the resort with its colourful flags shining. A dead cat lying in the weeds.
He reached the square and sat near the fountain and milled about in a place he was unfamiliar with, a northern man in the middle of Mexico, until he saw the jail itself. It was at the top of a hill, surrounded by a half acre of dirt. There were nine graves just at its border. Two of them were the priests hanged years ago. The others were the people whose lives John had not heard about. He walked toward the jail and saw just up a side lane a sign that said POLICÍA.
“Sí,” said a youngster he asked.
So he walked toward it.
It was murder; the Mexican policeman told him after he introduced himself as a policeman and a representative of the family in Canada.
He was stunned into silence, though he tried not to show it. He thought it might have been anything, from refusing to pay a bill to a traffic ticket, being inebriated in the square. Anything could land you in jail here.
“Murder,” Constable Fey said, looking down at the indictment as if he was himself surprised by it. He raised his eyebrows and looked up and gave a slightly guilty smile that seemed to become infused within the sunlight. He was tall, thin and young—and the policeman John would end up dealing with. It was as if at this moment he wanted to impart some knowledge, but hesitated. John at least saw something of a hesitation; a Hessian hesitation, he thought.
So after a time, when it was late afternoon, he walked to the jail to visit her. He crossed the road, the dry cement walkway, and could smell sewage from somewhere close by. He was led in through to her by a policeman named Erappo Pole—who seemed slightly amused with him and his demeanour and seemed to be slightly—just slightly—drunk.
Erappo Pole pointed, shrugged, turned and left him.
The jail had long corridors and grey walls. As he walked toward her, he had to keep reassuring himself that he must show a happy face.
The Cyr family had restructured, having sold many of its holdings. Garnet, seventy-seven years old, was the head of her side of it.
Perley, his son, would take over, but people knew he was overshadowed by his cousin Greg, and overshadowed too by Mary Cyr. But a few days ago Perley had told his father that Mary was in trouble again and they had better see to it. So his uncle called the Mexica
n embassy, then the Canadian ambassador, and then decided to send someone down. Perley said he would go; it was his duty. But his father was adamant that they send someone else.
Although Perley in his hapless way had tried to keep it quiet, it had already made the papers—even their own papers, albeit on page eight.
All of this must have made their enemies jubilant. Mary Cyr had lived with them as an orphan. But she had never felt comfortable being called, for appearances’ sake, “Garnet’s daughter.” From the age of eleven she was solitary. She said she was often locked in her room—and left without toilet paper. This was when she was twenty-six and trying to sue them for what she called “her money.” She knew the only friend she had had within the family was Perley, but she had attacked him viciously also, and spread rumours about him. People claimed that she told his girlfriends that he had herpes, and not to try to get to second or even first base with him—unless they wanted it too. Then she would take it all back and tell him she had not spread rumours—it was terribly unlike her to do that. (In the end she admitted that she was trying to protect him from gold diggers—but he said, and in a way rightly, she had no right to do so.)
Garnet had disliked her for how she had attacked his son, and his wife, Nan, calling her French—which she was, but something that if said by Mary Cyr might have meant something else entirely.
“I only said she was French—I said nothing at all—intimated nothing whatsoever about the Frenchiness she displayed to lord over and browbeat and try to destroy my English mother—for instance, I never said a disparaging thing about frogs—or even pollywogs—or losing wars to the Germans on a fairly regular basis—how they all ran away in the Second World War. I simply said—well, she was French. She was French—and she said I was French and that started it—because Cyr can be French—but we are not—she is.”
Mary Cyr Page 2
