“You didn’t.”
“Yes—well, who wants to be stolen blind—and my eyes got blinky.”
“I don’t think they will do that,” John assured her.
After that she phoned whenever she could to tell him something. Perhaps she made many of the crises up, just to be able to phone. But he could usually tell when she did this.
There were episodes of depression, and a sailboat she gave away.
“To some First Nations fellow—from some First Nations reserve—to do some First Nations things with,” she explained.
There was an episode where she scratched the face of someone. One where they said they would take Bobby away because they heard her shouting.
“I shout only because I love,” she answered. “Only a social worker or a marriage counsellor would not know that.”
* * *
—
The theory it was arsenic was revealed to the press the next day, and there was arsenic in the storage locker beside her villa; and the boy had tested for it—that is, it was in his system at his death.
“Arsenic,” the paper said.
There had been a hurricane, and people had bought arsenic to take care of rodents at the villa.
Another hurricane will come because the men had died in the mine, they said. And now look what the poison had done!
Mary had been brought into the police interview room twice. Both times they had handcuffed her and put leg shackles on. She walked between two officers: one male, one female. The female officer serious, with a bulletproof vest, and a Glock pistol on her belt.
There in the room was the prosecutor Tallagonga, sitting at one side of a small, dark-oak desk and looking through the files, a heavy-set woman wearing a matronly skirt. Of course she could be great fun when she was not working.
She would ask Mary a series of questions from a printed brief. Why had she come here? What reason did she employ Victor? How long did she know him? Had she slept with him? Et cetera. And with every answer Mary gave, Tallagonga gave a cynical, meaningful shrug—as if to say: You have not convinced me.
So therefore the truth would not convince her.
Now Mary heard how she had killed him.
Arsenic.
“Where is Florin?” Mary asked Tallagonga during the second interview.
“You seem to be quite obsessed about Florin,” Tallagonga said sternly. “He is a Mexican child, my dear—not a Canadian one. Was there something about Florin?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “There was something about him.”
“Oh—what was that?”
“He is a child of God,” Mary said, defensively.
Tallagonga smiled ruefully a second and then closed one brief and opened another with the snap of an elastic, which she manoeuvred backward to her left wrist, looking at Mary as she did so. “Are you penitent now, my lady?”
“More than you might imagine,” Mary said.
Tallagonga, when she was finished her questions, pressed a button and said, “Estoy por aquí,” stood and gathered her material, and a buzzer opened the door.
ARSENIC.
Mary Cyr looked at John with a prisoner’s shocked disbelief, and he could feel the same drafts of hot air that lingered on her skin. She looked at her arms as if inspecting for measles, then up at him, and then looked to the side as she spoke:
“Tell me, where did I get that? Where would I get it—I wouldn’t even know how much to give—”
“It is total nonsense. I know it and so do they,” he said. “But,” he added, “you do have people on your side—a German doctor—or his Dutch wife is a doctor—they are at the villa just down from yours—they both say you are innocent—and they want to prove it. The Dutch doctor saw the boy’s body—he was beaten up.”
“A German man and a Dutch woman,” she said. “Well, there you have it—I always liked them.”
He said nothing.
“Can I see a paper?” she asked.
“No—it’s better you don’t.”
“Why—I suppose they have a terrible picture of me—”
“You look fine,” he said. “But I think—”
“What?”
“I think you need a shower.”
“You mean I smell?”
“A tad,” he said.
He had not wanted to tell her that. But he had to.
So he asked. They said no, unless she used the one outside in the back; the one everyone else had to use.
“Not with so many spectators,” he said.
“There would be no spectators,” Erappo Pole said, astonished at the arrogance of this Canadian.
All this time John was furious, but he knew he couldn’t show it. An hour or so later she was allowed to go back to her villa and shower.
A crowd of women and children followed her there. A policewoman escorted her, and put ankle shackles on her, for another picture. The priest and altar boy came out on the front steps of the church to watch her walk by, the priest’s garments caught up in the wind in, John thought, the intractable moment of defining himself not as a spectator but as one asserting his approval.
8.
BY MID-AFTERNOON OF THAT SAME DAY THE LAWYER HAD COME. He spoke to Mary Cyr for an hour and then went and saw John; it seemed just to be polite; or perhaps Mary insisted. But John did have some questions for him.
Could bail be set? No.
What the lawyer did do is elaborate on the way the Mexican authorities would not rush this case. So he could not rush the case either, so John’s other questions would take time. That is, the case would be carefully researched and could take up to a year before a trial in front of a judge.
“But she won’t be sent to the prison?” John asked.
“Certainly not—at any rate not right yet—they will wait and see—in fact, the case might be dropped,” he said. “I am trying to see if we can’t get the charges dropped so she can go home. We will find that out in a day or so—” He went to say something more about this and then decided not to.
“That would be best,” John said. But there was something in Señor Xavier’s eyes that made Delano less than completely enthused.
“Or at any rate, Mr. Delano—I might be able to make a deal,” Xavier said.
“About what?”
Xavier sat forward on his seat, his face more enthusiastic, his long fingers placed neatly in front of him.
“Well, perhaps she admits to an accident and does three years,” he whispered. Then, lifting his fingers off the glass table, he took out a cigarette and lit it, a white cigarette in a very white lounge, in his immaculately cut sharkskin jacket.
“I don’t think that is very much of a deal if she has done nothing—and how can it be an accident if they are charging her with giving him poison?”
John said all of this very calmly because he was used to speaking clearly and calmly when he felt he was right.
What John was trying to say was he did not believe Tallagonga had any intention of prosecuting this until she found out who Mary Cyr was. Then they filed the charge, called her guilty and looked for a lifelong prison sentence because she was on the board of Tarsco Mining. Which people were now saying was connected to the mining disaster here.
And John realized something else. Depending on what penalties the family would pay, the case against Mary Cyr might or might not proceed. That is why Xavier had said that the case might be dropped. All of this John felt, but he could not say, because Xavier wasn’t quite sure either. And he could not tell John the reason—which was that there was Tallagonga and Judge Gabel here—but in Mexico City there was someone else, and this someone else was preparing a very different case against very important people. Xavier knew something about this but couldn’t for the life of him say it.
Xavier did explain Mary had to pay rent on her cell and pay for her extra food—fruit and vegetables. Pay for clothes, water to take a shower, soap and towel—pay for any luxuries like chocolate—and a beer if she wanted. She was free to ord
er here what she wanted as long as she had money to pay for it. They were not draconian in that regard.
For instance, she had just been charged ninety-five dollars for taking a shower at the resort. If she took a shower at the jail, she would be charged two dollars.
And he said the other prisoners for the most part seemed to taunt her one moment but like her the next—already she had given them cigarettes and chocolates—and twice she was asked for her autograph. But she had to be kept in her cell because they could not risk someone assaulting her.
“Some of them never had anything—nada—if she is kind, they will like her after a while. And it does seem being kind is in her nature.”
John then lost his temper—which he had promised himself he wouldn’t do.
“But she had nothing to do with anything. She will be framed for a crime she has not committed because she sits on a board of a mining company she knows nothing about. The Cyrs had nothing whatsoever to do with the implosion at this mine.”
“Oh, conspiracy? No, that is too ugly a word,” Xavier cautioned. “That is highly unlikely.” Although Xavier knew this was true, he also knew that in order to negotiate her freedom, he could never say it while the very idea of negotiation meant knowing all of this exactly.
* * *
—
John went and spoke to the porter, and asked him about Victor and Florin.
The old porter, who now turned and tried to run away every time he saw John—sometimes he tried to move as fast as he could on his feeble feet, at other times he tried to remain stationary behind a plant—told John many things. Well, a few of the same things in many ways. John knew he was bothering him, and besides, the old fellow was frightened of getting in trouble. But John could not help it. So the porter told him this: The youngster Victor would hobble about in old torn boots, with his young brother by the hand—his look was of a child searching for someone.
“Perhaps his mother?” John asked.
No, his father and mother were both gone.
“Did he have anyone to look out for him?”
Young Ángel Gloton did. They had grown up together, and like most boys who grow up together there is a bond—Ángel looked out for them. For instance, if they were selling trinkets on the beach to the tourists, Ángel and Victor would be inseparable—if there was one, there would be two—and have Florin with them. Then in the last two weeks Victor was alone.
“Why?”
“Ángel wanted him to do something and he wouldn’t. Ángel came and asked me to tell him where he was. I found it strange he wouldn’t know.”
“Do something or see someone?” John asked.
The porter shrugged.
But he said ironically that no one named Isabella Tallagonga ever gave young Victor a second look as she drove her black Fiat up to the courthouse, or passed him on her way to lunch with the judge, Vincente Gabel. That the boy was alone after the bump at the mine. Sometimes you could see him sitting on a bench all hours of the night. At other times they said he went and slept on a coal heap near the head frame. The look was heart-rending—almost incomprehensible—one child holding his brother’s hand, and think of the millions who had this heart-rending incomprehensible look!
What would such a look be? Only one look—John knew it well from the streets in other places. Abandonment. Except for his friend Ángel Gloton, who believed he was helping him when he wasn’t. So that meant to John that those who trained Ángel Gloton, the adults in his life, had something to do with the death of Victor, and Ángel, trusting them, did not know this.
“I am sorry I didn’t pay attention now—” the old porter said. The porter was almost eighty, shaky and unable to bend. His hands trembled slightly.
“All of us always are sorry,” John answered. “I have been sorry over things I did not do or say to my child all my life. But it shouldn’t have been left to you.”
John went to see Mary and told her this. That is, he told her she had picked the right person to help, no matter what happened. That Victor did what he could do to feed his four-year-old brother; to find someone to listen to him, Victor. And perhaps he would be listened to yet.
“Yes, yes, where is he?” she asked again about Florin.
“Victor was worried about him too—did you know that?”
“Yes—well, no—I mean I don’t know anymore!”
“When it rained, he took Florin to the dump at the far edge of the Calle Republica and slept there because they no longer had their father’s rooms. They were frightened to go there because someone was watching them or trying to find them.”
“Oh my God Jesus Christ,” Mary said quietly. “Oh my God Jesus Christ.”
“Yes,” John said, looking up at Father Ignatius’s “¡Viva Cristo! on the wall; Oh my God Jesus Christ.
“The flowers of abandonment on the city streets of the Old World,” Mary said, looking up at him with a kind of melancholy love.
“Or is this the New World?” Mary Cyr asked, “I sometimes forget what world it is.”
* * *
—
She was not allowed to walk back and forth in the hallway as some other prisoners were. At first a couple of them threw shit at her, to show their restrained disapproval. Then they would walk back to their cells gaily laughing and moving their hips with the comfort of women who knew where they stood.
After a time, however, throwing shit on her stopped. Then other prisoners were coming up to the bars of her cell, asking for cigarettes, and hand lotion and things Mary tossed their way without thinking. (Some of them—well, most—were going to save them to sell as souvenirs—some of them already had.)
9.
DEROLFO WAS AN IMPORTANT MAN. IN HIS YOUNGER YEARS HE was a doctor who warned of a flu epidemic in his state; afterwards he was promoted to the department of the secretary of health. Then he ran for governor. He served a term and was defeated when he re-offered. Still, he became quite rich as governor. Then one of his friends got him into business as an important figurehead. Now he was on the board of governors of Amigo, part owner and CEO.
By yesterday afternoon he would have given it all up to be a country doctor, which is what he wanted to be. He had stolen over four million dollars in money allotted for refurbishing the mine, plus hundreds upon hundreds of thousands more in laundered money to keep him quiet. He never thought there would be a bump—a disaster beneath his feet. His colleagues told him his mine was safe. But he himself had never been more than a hundred feet into it.
He had earned, besides all that he embezzled, four hundred thousand a year.
When Tarsco sent the money in order to refurbish the deeper runs where the men had to work, and people began to greedily divvy it up among themselves, he asked if the mine was safe.
It was the day after 9/11. The money had come in, and no one was alive on the other end to let people know that the transaction had even taken place. That was awful, of course—but it was also the beauty of it.
DeRolfo felt bad about this, so he said, after asking if the mine was safe:
“Ahora los chicos me dicen que la mina es segura.”
“Too safe,” a colleague said brashly. “Yes, it is almost too safe—the men are getting lazy—because it is too safe. If they were a bit more worried, they would work a bit harder.”
Gidgit, his wife, looked at them all with a kind of clever insatiability that was almost perversely sexual.
“Besides, we have done the refurbishing,” she said, “So all is well.”
DeRolfo knew this was a complete lie, but said nothing.
He actually thought the men had perished, when he ordered a halt to the search. Still, he knew what a search would do: it would reveal that all the catalogued improvements he had given to the country’s minister of mining were bogus—not one of the major implementations had happened. So he was glad they were all dead and he could stop the search. If they reopened, it would be easy to say such implementations had been destroyed.
Then out
of the darkness, a boy, almost as black as pitch, because he had been sitting on coal heaps, brought him a tape, and begged him, with tears running down his dirty face, to start the search again.
Confounded by all of this, he had no idea what to do. When the boy turned the tape on, however, he heard the unmistakable tap from three hundred metres beneath his feet. At first he said he couldn’t hear the sound. But he could. It had come drifting up from underground through a series of open pipe work that for some reason allowed the faint tap to be distinctly heard at that spot on the surface. The men were calling them, begging them to listen.
So he went and told his wife. His wife was furious.
“Tell him we need the tape—dile que necesitamos la cinta.”
So he got a policeman he sometimes paid, Erappo Pole, to go and tell the boy he, Carlos DeRolfo, as head of the mine, needed that tape. That they would be able to tell if the men were still alive. The boy started to go and get it, but suddenly decided something was wrong. A terrible, horrid feeling washed over him at that moment.
So the boy, Victor, said he had lost it.
“But,” his wife said, “we cannot believe him—we have to get the tape!”
So they sent Erappo Pole out again.
Victor, now scared to death, took his little brother and went to the back end of the mine, and hid there.
He sat down and looked up at the stars, and every time he heard a sound, he would get up from his hiding place and look for the source of that sound.
Unfortunately a week or so later he was careless and they saw him. DeRolfo had driven there with his wife, who under her gloves had brought a pistol that Hulk Hernández had given them. Ángel had told them earlier that evening:
“He is frightened, he don’t trust you—but I think he is up near the old head frame—that’s where he started out for.”
“We only want to help him—” DeRolfo said. “Before something terrible happens to him.”
Ángel smiled, as if to say: You don’t have to tell me.
Mary Cyr Page 9
