Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  So Victor was given up, and they saw him hiding under a piece of tin.

  DeRolfo grabbed him about the neck from behind, and the boy gasped for air as DeRolfo lifted him off the ground. His feet dangled, and a sad gasp came from him. Dr. DeRolfo could not stop—he was so frightened of what the boy might say he kept squeezing on the boy’s windpipe. The boy began to pee his pants.

  There was a sound of air trying to escape, like a whistle, and then he realized the boy’s windpipe had been crushed.

  But there was no tape on him.

  The boy simply lay there. His dreams of helping to find his dad, lost in his tousled brownish hair, his little face bronze.

  He and his wife took Victor’s body and drove it to the resort. They threw the boy out where some beautiful flower arrangements sat. It was midnight. Or thereabouts. They suddenly decided to blame it all on Ángel Gloton.

  “There was a big fight between them—I know for a fact,” Gidgit said, and she seemed upset that this fight had occurred. “Ángel is crazy—I know that—he is taking steroids for his punch—I know that for a fact.”

  None of this was true, but they knew this for a fact.

  They left Victor on the ground, and the wind was blowing very hard from the sea, the night’s stars were out. Carlos and his wife were driving home.

  “We have to go back to the mine and look for the tape,” Gidgit said. “Dios mío.”

  She blessed herself and he blessed himself.

  They waited for two hours and drove back carefully.

  His wife looking behind her every few seconds.

  “Tengo miedo, miedo, miedo,” she kept whispering. Then she lit a cigarette. “Sí, tengo miedo,” she said. And then in English, “Scared shitless, Carlos—”

  “Sí, sí,” he kept saying, but she was annoying him.

  He pulled the car over and got out. He searched with his flashlight along the perimeter of the old boxcars, all the way to the shaft and back.

  Still he couldn’t find the tape. He turned around to leave, and a child of four was staring at him, looking at him with large dark eyes, holding a toy truck with the name Maxwell on it. He smiled awkwardly and hopefully.

  “¿Dónde está Victor…dónde está mi hermano?”

  As is sometimes with children, he looked to be not totally aware of the question he had just asked, because his eyes were searching the car and the beautiful woman sitting inside it, looking out at him in shock, wearing a necklace of pearls. She rolled the window down and tossed her cigarette out:

  “¿Quién diablos es él?” she asked. “Car—los—Car—los ¿quién diablos es él?” Who the hell is that?

  “¿Dónde está Victor?” the boy said again slowly.

  Carlos quickly looked around and said:

  “Oh, I don’t know where Victor is—let us find him. Estarás con él esta noche.”

  You will be with him tonight.

  Now both knew exactly how Raskolinkov felt, but perhaps not quite yet. Not yet. They took the boy with them. For two hours they tried to figure some other way as Gidgit spoke to the child. She kept looking at her watch.

  Time was going by.

  “¿Dónde está mi hermano?” the little boy asked. In fact, Florin asked nothing else.

  “Víctor está durmiendo. Ven conmigo,” he said.

  Victor is sleeping. Come with me.

  For two hours Carlos and Gidgit argued, accused each other of many things, and worried about what in the name of God they were going to do.

  “You set our own trap,” is all he said to her, over and over.

  Now furious with the miners who survived, furious with how greedy miners were, furious that they expected a handout, she did nothing but explode in curses.

  “Do you know what will happen if we are caught? Prison for life or Hernández.” This is all she said.

  They gave the boy McDonald’s french fries—and told him Victor would meet him after he ate them.

  Then they stopped the car, and DeRolfo held the gun in his hand. The Beretta they had on them that Hernández had told them to dispose of twelve months before.

  But DeRolfo couldn’t do anything. He knew where this gun came from, knew what it had done—and sighed.

  His wife became more and more impatient. She told him to take the road toward Bruno’s Bar. So the lights of the car reflected off the stone walls and the small patios. It was a sweet warm Mexican night, with the heavy smell of trees, and bats skimming in front of them as they drove.

  The boy looked out the window. He put his left hand on her knee to straighten up.

  He smiled at her and said:

  “¿Donde?”

  And then she simply stabbed him deep into his side. You could even hear a little slice.

  “Cuando no funciona nada más,” she said.

  When nothing else works.

  The little boy, half sitting on her lap, was scratching his knee, and when she stabbed him, he continued to scratch his knee, and then in a delayed reaction he looked up at her and said: “Ou-ouch.” He dropped Maxwell the truck, went to pick it up and then just closed his eyes. The french fries fell to the floor.

  They took the boy to the dump, put him in a garbage bag they found there, doubled it with another garbage bag they had and left him in another pit, far away from the mine. In fact they could hear the rats as they walked back to their sky-blue Mercedes.

  “Mis zapatos están arruinados,” Carlos said.

  My shoes are ruined.

  Because both he and Gidget were nervous creatures, they began to giggle.

  10.

  CARLOS DEROLFO INTENDED TO FIND VICTOR THE NEXT MORNING and do the post-mortem. He would trace the murder back to Ángel Gloton, and that would be it. They would have people at the gym say how much Ángel had changed, how mean he was. That would be the scenario.

  But Victor wasn’t there! Where was he?

  Carlos went along the grand walkway, with its beautiful high-end shops for tourists, and when he arrived at Information, there was already a crowd near one of the townhouse villas. And there was already a doctor on the scene—what bad luck that a Dutch doctor was at the resort.

  “No,” DeRolfo said when he heard. “How long has she been inside? She has no business in our business—I will look at the child.”

  He walked into the dark room, and felt a cold, clammy air on his skin. The child was lying across the bed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. DeRolfo had no idea Victor had still been alive the night before. Now he was in this room.

  “¿Dios mío qué ha ocurrido?” he asked.

  What in God’s name has happened?

  People stepped aside when they saw him. The old porter greeted him with a gentle, approving nod of his head, and extended his hand to the boy as if showing a display

  “Hay demasiada gente aquí,” he said softly. And people were ushered out.

  He could not say it was natural causes because of little Florin, who might be found with knife wounds. He still had to say it was murder for anybody to treat it seriously. But he panicked and could not think of saying it was Ángel’s crime, because Ángel was standing beside him, looking as horrified as anyone there.

  So again as night follows day, things happened.

  He patted Ángel gently on the shoulder and asked the porter who was renting this place.

  They told him that a woman named Mary Cyr lived there, and she had gone to the airport an hour before.

  “So it has to be her,” Ángel said.

  “Sí,” he said quickly. And this set all in motion. Little did Ángel know that if he had not been in the room, he very well might have been blamed.

  “Find that woman,” DeRolfo said, tears in his eyes.

  “Ella hizo algo a él. No estoy seguro de lo que.”

  She did something to him. I am not sure what.

  He knew he could not say she had picked him up off the ground, like he had; he felt he would have to give some other reason. But still he had missed his chance w
ith Ángel. Yes, he still might blame him—but within seconds everyone wanted to suspect the woman. The boy, Victor, was not as strong as Ángel, but he was still a strong young boy—no, it would be hard to say she had strangled him.

  As soon as he did the post-mortem—he insisted he do it—he realized it was arsenic. She poisoned him. This was ridiculous. Showing the DeRolfos for the bumbling cowards they were. In fact certain of their associates laughed uproariously. But, it seemed plausible for a certain kind of woman to do. And when he saw her, he realized it could be got away with. And so Mary Cyr became that certain kind of woman.

  Now, with two little boys dead or missing and the entire town of Oathoa, the entire state, the entire country yelling for her blood, DeRolfo must play the part he had unintentionally created for himself when he decided to allow powerful people to pay him off and launder money at that coal mine.

  One of the persons most outraged over Mary Cyr’s arrogance was the DeRolfos’ own daughter, Sharon. Sharon who was a photographer and had been brought up so privileged she had her pick of eight horses in their stables. She was so liberal he and his wife couldn’t do anything with her, so certain of her anti-religious self-righteousness they couldn’t talk to her more than three minutes without getting into an argument.

  His wife was sure with all her daughter’s liberal views that “El mundo se va al infierno.”

  The world is going to hell.

  So what would she say if he and Gidgit went around confessing to things? Besides, Carlos thought of what Sharon believed about what she called unwanted pregnancy, so he said:

  ¿Qué dos niños importa, si muchos son asesinados a través del aborto?

  What do two children matter when so many are killed through abortion?

  That made him feel a bit better in this day and age. But not much.

  When he told his wife, Gidgit, that he missed his chance at blaming Ángel so had called it arsenic, his face beamed at his own supercilious brilliance. However, she looked at him in delayed shock and, holding a peach in her hand, said:

  “You are a complete idiot—”

  His face darkened, and he started to complain that she never gave him credit for a thing.

  Still they continued on.

  In a week or so one of the policemen he knew, Erappo Pole, would find little Florin, and he had to set that up as well. But as yet, he did not have the tape. Maybe the boy had lost it—and if he did, all was fine. Mary Cyr would be put in jail. What was more incredible is that the police had discovered that she was the Mary Cyr. Had he heard of her?

  No, not at all?

  “So do you want to know who she is?”

  “Sure, you tell me!”

  Well then—la te da, da, da…

  And so the life of Mary Cyr began to be revealed.

  “What is that bitch doing down here!” Gidgit asked quietly when he told her. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Sí, sí,” said Carlos, shaking his head at the scandal. “Sí, sí.”

  11.

  EVERYONE IN TOWN (BECAUSE MEXICO, LIKE ALL OTHER PLACES, has far more good than bad) was trying to find Florin. The young girls texted each other, and the boys set out to look; the schoolboys joined groups to look, and at school there was talk of the awful woman who was killing children. So this was the story on Facebook—and Carlos S. DeRolfo could do nothing about it now. In the height of luxury, in his brand-new Mercedes with the gold leather interior and his custom-made steering gloves, he couldn’t raise his fist against it.

  However, if you thought it over, the design he had created, the web, was rather exquisite. Inimitable, really.

  The streets near the gated beach estates and walled villas were full of people now, corrugated shops suddenly were opened. There seemed to be a great many lights on. People drank in the tapis bars here and there as John Delano walked farther into the town of Oathoa; the sound of two-stroke scooters racing along—somewhere there was a shout. The tourists oftentimes stayed in the walled and gated communities. It was a lot safer. John did not.

  He realized a familiar but more than other times a disquieting feeling, of being known, and being followed. So on his way back to the villa a boy stepped out of a hat shop—sombreros for turistas—and looked him square in the eye.

  “Where is Florin?” he asked. “If you know where he is, tell me now!”

  John knew this boy was Ángel Gloton. He knew he was a boxer just by his stance. “I do not know,” John said gently. “I wish I did.”

  And he passed on, and the boy watched him go.

  “Everyone knows that Lady kills people—” he said in his broken English. And then, for effect: “Todo el mundo conoce a Amigo.”

  * * *

  —

  “The case will be prolonged—this gives us time,” Xavier had said, “to discover a flaw in their case.”

  “The flaw in their case is that they do not have any case at all,” John said. “Someone did something to the boy and he died. The murder might not have been intentional, but there you have it. They were looking for something—evidence.”

  “Evidence.”

  “Of course evidence—about the mining disaster. I do not think they have found it. Could he have seen something, maybe?”

  “What—what would he have seen?”

  “I am not at all sure yet—but I know someone must still be searching for something. Unless he saw something and they killed him for that. Or something about a tape, so maybe he heard someone talking and recorded it?”

  “So—”

  “So,” John said, lighting Xavier’s cigarette, “they have no case—” “The world has no case either. It had no case at all against little Victor, but there you go. It had no case against the miners, but there we are.”

  “I know,” John said.

  “And that is why everyone in town is upset—because she is Mary Cyr, and no one can find Florin—the child.”

  * * *

  —

  And now people in Oathoa had heard that a book about Mary Cyr’s life was about to be published. That she was known in Canada, at least, as a very bad lady.

  Everyone spoke about a book. A book was in the air. All the newspapers were full of her. So a book would have to be the next thing.

  The book was the thing in which to catch the conscience of the queen, John thought—a rather sad thought about her empty life—a life that could have been so full—or was that a lie—that is, John in some way had come to believe her life was full and joyous and she was innocent and joyous, and they were willing to kill something innocent and joyous too, because she had been born into a family with money. He thought of Sharon DeRolfo walking backward in front of her with a camera, disinterestedly snapping pictures in the warm night air, now and then looking up, moving slightly to get a better angle, yelling to onlookers:

  “Copia de seguridad fuera del camino.”

  Back up out of the way.

  And tossing her cigarette down as Mary tried to navigate in her leg shackles, now and again looking up pensively at the camera.

  PART THREE

  1.

  THERE WERE BUILDINGS AND HOUSES MARY CYR HAD LIVED IN and owned, places in the world she had travelled with lovers she no longer knew—there were parties she had given hoping to be liked; and tons of money spent in a thousand ways.

  There was the time off Portage Island when they said they were going to kidnap her. Two drunken young Native men she had trusted—that was when she was eighteen, and believed there were no criminals, just the misunderstood. (Oh, she knew very well there were criminals—what she wanted to let on was that she was liberal; she wanted, needed, to prove this to her friends. To the friends who said, “You don’t know anyone, really.” And to her enemies who said she was a bigot—a charge she would never get rid of. So she went out on a boat to prove them wrong.)

  The two young men had gone out on a lark to steal some lobster traps, to reclaim their Indigenous rights, and she had gone with them for moral
support.

  But then they decided, after drinking hermit wine all afternoon in that treacherously blazing sun off the bay, that instead of lifting lobster traps, they could snatch her. They could hold her, in order to get all of their rights back. So they had a conference, speaking in Miq’maq while Mary sat listening, filing her nails and commenting now and again.

  “I can’t see you getting away with it, my dears,” she said.

  All of them were more than a little drunk, and she as drunk as they.

  The First Nations boys decided they would reclaim and then resell the land her family’s estate was on, and after reclaiming it, they demanded four million dollars. After keeping her for a day and night, Mary finally managed to talk them out of it, by saying it was not really her estate. And if they wanted, she would see to it they did get money if they could get the boat started and take her home.

  When they returned from the island in a little outboard motorboat, she was handling the outboard motor, while the two young men sat up front with their hands on the gunnels, staring at the blue-green water.

  She did not want to charge them, but the police had already become involved, and Nanesse and Garnet made it a point to. That meant it was brought before the courts with Mary Cyr as a witness. And that also meant that she tried to protect them when she was on the stand—which did make it seem as if she was in some way complicit.

  The boys received two years less a day in jail. And then the rumours started—that she had set it all in motion herself, for the money. She wanted to get the money from Garnet and go to Cuba. Garnet actually believed this and asked John to investigate her. John said he would not.

  Sixty days after they had returned in that motorboat the youngest Native boy, Charlie Francis, took his life in the Moncton jail. Was she blamed for that as well? In a way, yes. They said he and the other Native man had been forced into complying with her wishes to steal her family’s money.

  If that supposition was against her when she was eighteen, what would happen to her now?

  He lay on the bed in his room, trying to look at his notes, and to think of her when she was little. He lit one damn cigarette after the other.