Xavier offered a tentative deal to pay the families of the bereaved and the Town of Oathoa twenty million. This incidentally did not sit well with Tallagonga, who was placing all her hopes of her future on this case of murder. But she was overruled.
If the deal had been accepted, Mary Cyr was to board a waiting plane that night. Her name was not to be mentioned. She was to be whisked away as so many rich seem to be.
This was signed off on. She had until that moment not been charged with anything more than carrying money into Mexico. She was in protective custody.
All was well; all was certain.
Here is what the deal was: To get Amigo off the hook for suspending the rescue search, Tarsco would pay out twenty million dollars and admit they had been responsible for the disaster. This was the secret deal, which would have allowed Mary Cyr to go home. A plane would be sent, and she would be flown out of Mexico. Perley agreed and called his older, worldlier, cousin, for he had no ability to release the funds.
Greg listened to the conditions and said:
“It’s impossible. Never. We simply cannot take the blame for something that was not in our power to stop. There are negotiations ongoing with both Canada and the States—if we admit to this, how will those negotiations go?”
This very deal would be an admission by Greg Cyr that the mining sector of his empire was careless and dangerous, and did not care for its workers. He would not do it. He could not. To admit to negligence on this scale was political suicide.
When Greg said he couldn’t pay because it would ruin them politically,
Perley said:
“But what will happen to Mary?”
Greg said Tarsco would not pay out twenty million. And he immediately got his lawyers involved. And this immediately looked like he was hiding behind this legal facade. And this did smell very bad. But even if he had not called on the law firm he retained in Mexico, it would still have looked every bit as bad. Somehow not admitting to responsibility made Tarsco look responsible.
“The Cyr Corporation will not pay that amount.”
This made Amigo look very good in the eyes of Mexicans, who now emphatically believed multinationals like Tarsco had devastated their country. So they turned their eyes to the one in the cell. The one they had. And it did look like she was the sacrificial lamb.
However, her cousin Greg had no idea that Mary Cyr would be charged with the murder of a child. But as soon as he said he would not pay, she was—charged with murder.
This confounded him, and Greg then did something worse. He said that he would pay nine million—that is, almost half of what was asked—if Amigo paid the rest, and the charges dropped against his cousin. All talk ceased at that moment.
Xavier had worked very hard and long for nothing. There were moments, John saw, when Xavier’s homosexuality was evident, and though Mary Cyr believed that gays were too self-righteous in their belief that they were the only ones victimized, she certainly relied upon him now. She relied upon him very much indeed.
And he had worked day and night for her for well over a month.
Mary Cyr knew with the Cyr Corporation coming under suspicion over this money that the situation was tenuous at best.
“My good dear friend,” she wrote Xavier, after she realized all he had been doing for her. “Don’t despair, things always have a way of working out—I will be either dead or alive, but the truth will be discovered.”
But of course the police were completely irresponsible. They had no idea how to stop a billion dollars’ worth of drugs flowing across the border, but they could stop a single foreign woman who they suddenly claimed had an ounce of marijuana on her; could look outraged for the sanctity of their country, keep her in jail for days, browbeat her, say it was an insult to their national sovereignty, then finding out it was all a mistake, let her go without an explanation. This is what had happened a year before to an American woman.
In a way this is exactly how things now happened to Mary Cyr.
There was one other thing that might be mentioned, that John would discover without the help of the Mexican authorities. A woman named Little Boots Baron had encouraged whom she could influence to let Mary Cyr go for two good reasons. One, she would inevitably receive some of that money paid out by Tarsco. (She might get as much as half of the nine million that Greg had finally offered.) Second, she was well aware of the international media storm this would create, and was very aware that her own safety might be in jeopardy if people began to seriously look into Amigo accounts. When John heard this name, the sixth day he was in Oathoa, he knew immediately it was the name of a powerful person—clandestine, and perhaps the power behind people like Carlos DeRolfo and Hulk Hernández.
Later he was to find out that he was right.
Little Boots was Hulk Hernández’s employer. She was the overseer of everything that had happened at Amigo Mining concerning the funnelling of money. She was one of the principal overseers of everything that happened in their state. Very few people spoke her name aloud.
5.
ALL THIS TIME SHARON DEROLFO CAME AND WENT, FRIENDLY, positive and hoping for pictures. With a ring in her nose, her short hair and dark eyes, she reminded Mary Cyr of those young women who had disliked her in university for being wealthy—who could in the end burn her at some stake. This is what she thought as she nervously lit a cigarette.
“Those who burn bras will sooner or later burn people,” she had once written in her diary. “And why burn them—just take them off and put them in your third drawer. One might need them when their boobs begin to sag. Burning bras really is an affectation of the young—who want to exploit their sexuality by pretending they will not be sex objects—if that confuses me, imagine how it confuses men.”
“Cyr company Tarsco will appeal Amigo claim, while Cyr doyenne trapped in Mexican jail,” a headline in one of the British newspapers read.
“Charged with murder—the ongoing saga of Mary Fatima Cyr,” read another.
“Vixen with her fixin’s,” read a third, superimposing a bottle of arsenic in her hands.
In the News of the World her face was turned toward the flash in the hot night air. Her eyes were large and beautiful.
All papers carried the same picture of the little waif Denise Albert—the child of the convent, lost long ago, who had once helped Mary Cyr escape.
ESCAPAR A UNA MUERTE SEGURA
Because she had trusted Mary Cyr, little Ms. Albert only:
Escaped to certain death.
“A black widow never had a more enticing web.”
* * *
—
Suddenly on March 15—people marched against Tarsco on Parliament Hill. It was led by Ms. Rory Cruise’s protege Ned Filmore. Snow fell down on him. He wore a large parka, with the hood up, his face covered, and you could see his breath on the cold air. He was carrying a sign—and there were about sixty people, but she couldn’t be sure. She kept trying to understand what it was they were shouting:
“The oil flow has got to go.”
And:
“It’s not who Cyr employed. It’s what their industry has destroyed.”
That was it. She suddenly looked pleased with herself that she had figured it out.
Yes, yes, she thought, that’s it!
Mary saw it on Mexican TV. Black bean soup and bread were in front of her, but she had not touched a meal in days. At first she had wanted to eat and couldn’t, and now she couldn’t eat.
She was in fact slowly drifting away from every one of them.
She looked up at this Ned, saw some ice on his beard, and his wide, accusing eyes. He was very good at accusing.
“I knew you when you were young,” she said to the slouched dark figure far to the north of her. She could have been Cato three thousand years before. Perhaps she did not know this.
She was exhausted, hot and tired. Nor had her nausea or diarrhea stopped. She found it difficult to breathe and she asked for a puffer. But as yet they had n
ot given her one.
“It’s snowing there—look, we’re having a late-winter storm. ¡Nieve!” she exclaimed like a child, looking around, beaming in pride at how inexhaustible Canadian snow seemed to be. Wanting to share it with the whole world and realizing she was alone in her delight. Just like the time she was in Morocco and tried to get the Stanley Cup final on TV.
But she was sick and one of the other women said she smelled. She did not complain at all to Mary Cyr; she complained to the guards, and taunted Mary when she could—though Mary did not know what this taunting was about. But a couple of the guards smiled at the naughty things this woman said.
Mary was not faring well. So something had to be done. And a ruling came from Tallagonga that she should have a bigger cell with a larger cot—for they did not want any recriminations. There was one cell that was indeed larger. It was the cell people had been put into years ago, before they were hanged. It was larger because they usually hanged more than one person at a time.
They could place a small fridge in it, which she had said she could pay for. Then she would be allowed to shower across at the villa, which in fact she was still paying for.
So at five the next morning she was woken by two guards. One was Erappo Pole.
“Yes,” she said, “what is it—am I going to go home?”
She had been dreaming of snow, on a little lake, just beyond the cottage, and all was white and pure, and snow fell on her white hat.
But she was woken from this dream. They did not speak. Both of them wore gloves and white plastic bibs. They grabbed her, one under each arm, and dragged her along the hallway, with the other prisoners still asleep, and then out beyond the room where she had last met John Delano. (Her heart was glad.)
She was taken to another cell—it was slightly larger and more solitary. It had its own table, a bigger cot. And looking out into the hallway, she could see the television easier.
That afternoon she was once again taken out and allowed to shower in private at the villa.
Then she was brought back, her hands cuffed before her, shackles on her feet.
“It’s strange—I often think of Bob Dylan,” she wrote. “He could make a pretty good song out of all this, I bet.”
6.
ONE LIFE TO LIVE, HER FAVOURITE SOAP, WAS ON IN SPANISH, SO she watched it every day if she could. She never knew if she liked John Zak or Danielle Faraldo as directors. But she liked Tanya Clarke and Nurse Betty, and Chris Cardona as Carlo’s thug—and all the main actors and actresses.
The bed here was larger. And there was a window. She could still see the blind donkey that had become her only friend. Though her view of it and the paddock had altered so much it was almost as if she was looking at a brand-new donkey. However, within five or ten minutes she realized it was the same one.
One wall of this cell was painted green, one was painted red. And there on the red wall, halfway up, was ¡Viva Cristo! painted in green, as if the damn thing was following her about.
The little woman guard told her that she had heard that this was the cell Father Ignatius had been taken to an hour before his execution, to be fed his last meal.
“Ah,” Mary said, “they killed him bit by bit—the world is very good at doing that.”
“Muy malo,” the guard said, and she blessed herself. The guard did like Mary Cyr.
Looking through the bars, Mary could see the blessed women loitering around her former cell, yelling insults to her—looking perplexed, then speaking to each other—then looking into the cell again. She found this very funny and began to laugh. Soon one of them heard her, and they all rushed over and across a little patch of grass. They all gathered about the cell window. Looking in. They all took turns patting her still-damp hair.
Lucretia said:
“Mi amiga ¿puede consigo mi foto contigo?”
My friend, can I get my photo taken with you?
It seemed for one moment all of them were thanking God she had been found. Lucretia had staked her life on Mary Cyr paying a huge price. The idea, of course, was that everyone, no matter who they were, now believed they had the right to interfere with Mary, to say something to her, to exploit her fame for their own satisfaction—and Lucretia Rapone did just that.
“Devil,” she would say. Lucretia said it with such a lively tone one never knew if she was joking or not—but behind it there was a hidden thought—devil was what Mary might be or might not be depending on what Lucretia could achieve herself—and that was the idea. Your victim is the devil if you benefit by your victim being one. So she would say diablo and shake her head as if she was joking one moment, and then look balefully about the next depending on who was around. Then she would ask Constable Fey what the charges were going to be, and what were they coming to in this day and age, for a woman like that to be able to just come down to Oathoa and do whatever she wanted with children.
Constable Fey would look at her with a particular moral disgust and tell her to go home. Tell her she should be careful not to become too, too involved. Tell her that she did not know what was actually happening and it was wrong for her to think that she did. But Lucretia would only snap gum and look with brooding eyes at him, and then with complete disrespect spit when John Delano walked by.
“They have sent ruthless people down to protect her,” she would say. “Mark my words.”
But she still wanted her picture taken with Mary; and so she got one with both of them standing side by side.
Sometimes Lucretia would get tired of all this protesting and would sit on the sidewalk with her feet splayed out; smoking cigarettes, and waving to certain men as they drove by.
“Are you taking care of things, Lucretia?” they would yell.
She would stare at them closely to see if they were making fun of her or not. If they were making fun of her, she would throw her finger out at them; if she decided they were not being too rude, she would sigh and nod and say:
“Todo en la ciudad queda a mí.”
Everything in town is left up to me.
Then they would all laugh and catcall, and Lucretia would stand and move away, along the street to some more favourable spot.
One day Lucretia was interviewed by a television couple—who did investigative reports for Mexican daytime programs. This was a married couple, whose three years of investigative reports never strayed into anything too dangerous. And psychologically this particularly gruesome case was a bonanza for them, for the entire world was now furious with this unwholesome woman, and this woman was no Little Boots Baron (who these investigative reporters refused to believe existed, yet who they knew watched their program daily), but she was a childlike woman, spoiled and naive. And a Canadian, to boot—that is, from a country that never exercised too much power.
So they came south with a camera crew to find out about her, and interviewed a woman who was said by the locals to know very much about the case.
Lucretia Rapone.
And suddenly halfway through the interview a feeling overcame her.
She blurted:
“They were my children—both of them.”
“¿Fueron sus hijos?”
“Sí, sí—mis hijos—oh mis, mis hijos.”
Her life was changed from that moment. Her bold face, with her wide earrings and dyed-blond hair, was seen everywhere; in all corners of the world. In fact, if a week after that statement was made you were walking through a street in Nairobi and suddenly looked to your left—to a news kiosk—you would see a picture of Lucretia Rapone, the mother of the murdered child.
The woman who had waited for her husband at the mine. The woman who searched for little Florin every day. The woman who knew what it was like to lose a son already, and who was in agony. Who went to the jail to see her tormentor, to beg her tormentor to tell her where her little child Florin was. This is why she went there—poor Lucretia! Poor Lucretia had no idea that she went there to find out about her child until it was mentioned in the newspapers.
&nbs
p; But Mary Cyr was too cold-hearted. Mary Cyr said nothing.
7.
GREG KNEW WHERE THE COMPANY’S ASSETS WERE—THAT IS, HE knew what ports those ships that flew under Tarsco’s banner were near to—one was off the coast of Newfoundland—another was entering the Panama Canal—and one was heading toward Mexico, off the coast of California, and it was that ship, the Eeekum Seekum, that he felt should change course to its home port of Vancouver. He was right to do so—for as soon as it entered Mexican water, there was a plan by Mexican authorities to board it, and force it to port. His caution, however, was only looked upon not as concern for crew but only for the oil cargo. This was not at all fair, but fairness was not a premium when it came to Mary Cyr.
Which was to say that everything done exacerbated the idea of her guilt, even that which was intended to mitigate it. That is, people might have seen the seizing of a vessel as a condition of her discharge. This only reinforced the idea of Greg Cyr’s heartlessness. And it seemed the captain’s order, hard to starboard, made in simplistic Newfoundland brogue, set the tone for that. Perley, knowing this was to come, was like the man who does not want to witness a combat in the ring, or a tightrope walker. That is, he continued to peek through closed eyes, at the television stories parading her as a monster.
When Greg ordered the turning of his ship, Perley was at a loss over what to do. He simply left his office and sat in the park. Some days he went to the museum and walked by rows of yesteryear’s relics—many artifacts donated by his own family.
And certain people—some who went to our local school with him, and now were down on their luck—knew he was at a loss. And they watched his every move.
Perley went for a drive along the highway, all the way to the cottage on the Miramichi. He stopped into the tavern and ordered a glass of draft beer and a pickled egg. He sat alone and no one there knew who he was.
Mary Cyr Page 21
