So this was the case that was to prove she was sharper and tougher, smarter and in effect more ruthlessly determined to bring criminals to justice. The woman being innocent was somehow beside the point.
She had Mary Cyr picked up, questioned ruthlessly for hours and put into jail. Despite misgivings she could not now let her go. There were too many things against Isabella Tallagonga if she did so—being a woman was one. She would be looked upon as being weak. It was in a way a blessing that a woman (Mary Cyr) whose nature was revealed every day in scandalous detail was being chastised by a woman (Tallagonga) who had committed herself to truth and the law.
Still, there were a multitude of little problems. She knew that the arsenic table in drinking water for people who lived in the lower end of Calle Republica came because of a chemical spill at the coal mine five years ago. And the Dutch doctor was becoming more and more insistent that this woman, this brazen woman, Mary Cyr, be let go. Van Haut actually had connections in Oathoa, had worked with abandoned children during an earthquake. So she was no one’s fool. And neither was her German husband, who had sent those snippings of hair away. Nor did they go back to Germany—Van Haut went home for a week but came back again, and there was the rumour of an international law expert arriving soon.
That was a tricky thing for Tallagonga to live down. But she was tough enough to live it down. Like a strong stream meandering its way through and over pebbles and windfalls, each obstacle she must go over or around, yet she must keep going.
Besides, reading the files she came to believe Mary Cyr was a very bad woman. Her pleas for adoption were continually refused on grounds of instability. That is, she could not love or care for children.
However, this is what Tallagonga did not know:
Alfonso Bara had files given to him through Xavier’s office. DeRolfo was guilty of gross negligence and embezzlement. And the money trail Bara now had senior administrative accountants following proved it. Señora DeRolfo was in fact the brains behind her husband. Both were immoral transgressors of things more hideous in nature than Isabella Tallagonga could possibly imagine.
Tallagonga was walking into a web with Mary Cyr as the bait. And no one knew this in Oathoa, except perhaps Constable Fey.
But, something had just come to her attention, which is why she had Principia here. Principia had been offered a bribe—that is what she was told by that young female officer standing just outside Mary’s cell. The officer liked Mary Cyr very much, and was engaged to Constable Fey, but she was duty bound to report it. If she did not report it, she would not be doing her duty. And she had to do what her office called upon her to do.
For what reason this bribe was offered did not matter. It was one more bit of evidence. The meeting Principia had dressed for and put on high heels for and was frightened over (1) lest she do or say anything to anger her sister, Lucretia; or (2) lest she do or say anything to implicate herself; or (3) lest she further harm Mary Cyr, who she liked, sat in the chair in front of the desk, her dark hair high on her head, her lips terribly thin and kindly, which gave her the expression, since she was only five feet tall, of a cute gnome, and looked terrified.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” Tallagonga said. “So if she is trying to bribe you to concoct some story, beware of it—okay, señora? There is no story in the world that will save her this time—not one story about why she brought the money down; not one story about why she hired little boys; not one more story about why she was on the plane the morning her victim lay dead. So if she wants you to invent stories, you will only get into trouble—in some way—and you have gone back to church. I am not a great believer myself,” Tallagonga added (to show what state her own remarkably progressive status was and where her support given also ended), “but all this good will toward you could or might be swept away if you lie about something in order to alibi an atrocity. We have one Canadian police officer in town who says it wasn’t arsenic, it was a beating—well, yes, she gave him arsenic and she may have beaten him to hurry the process—so what the method? I will go along with it when we get to court. If Canadians are so backward they think that being beaten is less a crime than arsenic, they are barbaric—murder is murder.”
The words “alibi an atrocity” left Principia so shaken that she put her head down, and tears rushed to her eyes, and she did not hear much else. Then Tallagonga said that Principia’s sister, Lucretia, was known to the police—remember? (Lucretia had been caught impersonating a representative of a chain of jewellery stores in order to get diamond and gold rings.)
Tallagonga then said: “Maybe you and her want to spend ten years in the same jail cell as Mary Cyr.
“Well,” Tallagonga then stated. “Never mind blubbering, llorar mucho. We both know where we stand.”
So Tallagonga excused her, and Principia left and walked back down the cement stairs out into the hot March day. The sky was deep, deep blue. A van with new tourists was pulling up to the gated villas; the fish market, with its signs, was open just down the back street. More reporters had come like wise schoolboys doing a paper. Everything else was the same. Principia turned toward the fish market—you could smell its acrid stench, the flushing water on the floor with its innumerable hoses, just three-hundred metres away.
Coartada—alibi—yes, she was offering one, but not for Mary Cyr. That was the pickle she was in. The picture she had in her mind was not of Mary Cyr in the back of a police car but of a small toy truck Gabriella found under the seat of Mr. DeRolfo’s Mercedes when she cleaned it; a little toy truck with the name Maxwell. First Principia had told her to throw it away, but Gabriella kept it.
And now they had it. And worse, they knew whose toy it was, though even now when they sat together watching soap operas on TV, they pretended they did not know. And the sorriest thing was, on one of those soap operas the plot had a situation where the heroine was charged with murder and a female character they all detested, who Principia and Gabriella loved to hate on this soap—had proof that the good woman was innocent. And they were always shouting at the TV:
“Haz lo correcto—dile a la gente lo que sabes.”
Do the right thing—tell people what you know.
But yesterday Gabriella did not want to watch. Principia insisted. Yet when they watched, they were suddenly ashamed—and it felt like a thousand tonnes of coal sitting between them in the room.
8.
FOR DAYS AFTER THE DISASTER VICTOR WOULD CARRY FLORIN on his back along the street at seven in the morning, heading to the mine to help find his dad, his eyes searching the faces of the adults, like one of the hundreds of thousands of millions of homeless desperate children in the world.
“Tell the truth and shame the devil,” Tallagonga had said.
Victor had tried to tell the truth and the devil had shamed Oathoa.
But not many knew it yet. Soon, however, the world would.
They would know, this unconscionable world, of every step he took in his worn boots, with his tiny brother on his back. That he bought his brother the toy truck because Florin was frightened, and he told him, still with all his innocent faith:
“Tomorrow I am giving the tape to Mary Cyr and then they will start the search again—and Papá will come home—then he will take a job at the garage—hermanito—here—are you cold—don’t be scared—no one will hurt a little boy like you—adults would never do so.”
* * *
—
Administratively Tallagonga was doing only what she was given to do. The file built up so far against Mary Cyr was fat and noble, tied with a big blue ribbon and weighing at least ten pounds. When she looked through this file, she was outraged. Most of these lurid clippings would be compiled in a book, due to come out in the next few months. Sharon DeRolfo had staked her claim to it, but so too did a man—a Canadian who lived now in Milwaukee. He had come down last week, saying he was writing a book. He had the soft hands and the ingratiating look of a pudgy, toupee-wearing gambler. He said he knew her, loved h
er once and his name was EL.
But he was the fourth man so far who said he was writing a book. They had come into town, looking suspiciously at each other—pretending they all knew her, and that they alone could do justice to the truth.
Still, what people had gleaned so far was in Tallagonga’s big, fat, blue-ribboned file, which was supposedly top secret. The tossing of a hundred-thousand-dollar bracelet into Niagara Falls was the thing that made Tallagonga sit up and take notice the first night Mary Cyr was under arrest. That was the very first thing she had time to read before she came into the room to look at her.
“Fijó el tono,” she said, to anyone who would listen.
Yes, it set the tone.
The decision to formally charge Mary Cyr with first-degree murder was not only not hard it was required. It was not only required but she was compelled by some strange alignment to do so. The idea of church might not be in her philosophy, but luck and premonitions were.
This great case came on the fourth anniversary of her being made a prosecutor. It came on the eighth anniversary of her graduation from law school, and the exact day she was notified that she was in the running to become one of the five or six under attorney generals of Mexico. She would have an immense office, staff and power. Then a lonely-looking little waif was sitting in the interview room at the jail, and she went to see the chief of police and spoke to him about her. He lifted up her passport and showed her the name, with an intense, knowledgeable smile.
“Oh,” Isabella said. “Mary Fatima Cyr—sí—oh—SÍ,” and she too smiled.
That smile was to become not only Mary Cyr’s downfall; it would in time become Tallagonga’s as well.
Besides, over the past eight years all of these great things happened on her birthday, which was a leap year, February 29. It was designed by some great magnetic confluence—however, on two of these occasions it wasn’t the twenty-ninth, twenty-eighth or first—once, it was March 3. However, it seemed like it was very much preordained.
All of a sudden it was like grabbing on to a carriage and taking the reins and pushing the horses forward along a road toward some great charmed life. In that carriage Mary Cyr sat in chains, and behind them the roadway burned.
Still, Tallagonga said, it was a terrible decision to have to make.
9.
PRINCIPIA TOO HAD A TERRIBLE DECISION.
She must give the toy and the tape to the authorities. Why had she been offered a reward—because in a strange way that made it all much worse. Now it was as if she was doing everything by design.
She might face jail herself, Tallagonga said, if she took a bribe from that woman, “puta,” to try to find an alibi. It would be very destructive to the Mexican people. She would be considered a traitor—and for Tallagonga this is exactly what it came down to. Betrayal of the Mexican people.
Principia nodded, too scared to say anything.
“It is up to women to change the world,” Tallagonga told her. Principia knew, even in her despair, that this was true.
That afternoon Principia went back to the church, just as every one of the women who were keeping a vigil at the cell did.
How strange it was that they bought little Florin french fries when he was in the car, and then Señorita DeRolfo said she wanted the car so clean she did not even want a french fry to be found—so Gabriella, in trying to extract any leftover french Fries, saw the toy truck. How strange that a french fry pointed to a murder.
And how strange that Principia now hated the sight of a french fry.
* * *
—
Principia knelt and looked at the gaudy altar that looked, with its Christ on the cross and its tribute to martyrs, to be too bloody as well. Candles burned and burned. She blessed herself and kissed her dark-pink beads. Her little lips pressed down as she rubbed her nose, her narrow eyes blinked cautiously, as if she was listening, and she moved her head slightly right and left, looking here and there, noticing the little shrine to Father Ignatius, the priest who had been martyred in 1922 and whose last hours were spent in the cell now occupied by Mary Cyr.
Then as she was staring at the shrine, with its black candle holders and wicks, this answer, which was entirely revolutionary, and went against everything Lucretia had been telling her to do her entire life, came to her:
“Accept no money—take the truck and the tape to Constable Fey. Let that little girl whose life has been filled with mistakes go home. Do it for the Mexican people and for Collette—do it for the memory of what happened to Collette.”
She quickly looked away, put her head down, and then looked back at the shrine of Father Ignatius with some peevish suspicion.
Though she was four years younger than Mary Cyr, she nonetheless thought of her at this moment as a little girl, standing on her tiptoes on an old orange crate, happy to share her cigarettes, smiling in spite of everything, saying that someday she would be free.
Collette was the name of the Spanish woman. She knew, like almost everyone in town, that Erappo Pole, the police officer, and the man named Hulk Hernández, who said he was an inspector of mines, had something to do with her gang rape—and that no one had done a thing. One more thing that Ángel tried to ignore.
Nonsense, a voice is a voice and is nothing at all. Besides, even if she felt it was something otherworldly, she lived in this world, with her half-mad sister, Lucretia.
“Tell them I am his mother,” Lucretia whispered to her one day as some reporters walked toward them. “Tell them I am his mother. I am Victor and Florin’s mother—tell them that.”
10.
ANOTHER PROBLEM WAS THAT TALLAGONGA SUDDENLY HAD A star witness to the crime. Mr. DeRolfo told her to talk to Ángel Gloton—that he knew something.
So she drove to find him.
There was wind and noise as if an early hurricane was coming. When they spoke, it was as if both of them were in a whirlwind. And as if—and this was more telling—Ángel could accuse anyone, and Tallagonga would believe it. Not that he wanted to—he was only doing what his friend DeRolfo told him. DeRolfo must know about the tape; he must know about what really happened, Ángel thought. The idea of fighting in the Golden Gloves in May—Cinco de Mayo—and the idea of turning pro pitched and tossed in his mind as he tried to sleep.
So late last night as he was leaving the gym with his hands still half taped, he was told what to say by Señor DeRolfo:
“You have to see the prosecutor—I know what has happened.”
He went home and asked his mother what he should do.
Principia said she did not know what he should do.
“Decir la verdad y el diablo de la vergüenza,” Lucretia said, piping up as he looked in from her side of their apartment.
Using the exact words Tallagonga had used to Principia.
So Ángel Gloton went to the great building in the square and made his way up the flights of stairs a week after his mom walked down. There he fidgeted and even prayed that what DeRolfo told him to say was the truth.
Meeting Isabella Tallagonga, he told her what it was Victor had said. (Which was what DeRolfo told him Victor had said.) DeRolfo told Ángel he had met Victor twice, but when he asked him to go to the police, the boy was too frightened. He asked Ángel:
“Did he appear frightened of the police to you?”
“Yes,” Ángel said excitedly. “He did—he was frightened of the police.”
“Well,” DeRolfo said, “that’s probably because of that Canadian officer. So we will have to tell the prosecutor what he wanted to tell. We will do it for Victor.”
He said he would go to the prosecutor himself but he was too involved in the case as the examining physician. So he asked Ángel to do this favour.
So Ángel told Ms. Tallagonga what Victor had supposedly told DeRolfo: that he had been pushed and beaten when he went to the crystal cave because he wouldn’t do what Mary Cyr had asked. She choked him and pushed him—that was why he had those bruises on his neck.
; “What did she want him to do?”
“She wanted him—to give her Florin—”
“She wanted Florin—”
“That is what he said. He said he wouldn’t give her Florin—I think she had some money on her,” Ángel said, trying to remember what he had been supposed to say. “She wanted to adopt Florin and take him back—because no one will allow her to adopt in Canada because she is muy mala.”
This is what Gidgit had heard—had told Carlos—and now Ángel had repeated it.
She made Ángel write a statement, and sign it, and let him go.
Tallagonga warned him not to mention this to anyone else. And Ángel went back outside. At first he was happy that he had done his duty and then he became miserable.
After she read the statement over, Isabella went to Señor Gabel, who was in the office just down the hall.
“So,” Tallagonga said to the judge. She feigned the outrage she would have if this were true. “That is what she meant by orphans—she wanted to buy one for herself—she beat Victor because he would not give up Florin, tried to poison him and steal the child. She had at her disposal her own plane. She sees Florin, invites Victor to be her guide, then navigates him into a position of indentured servant—and makes demands because she wants to steal a child. Then she chokes him, pushes him down at the cave. She was the one who beat him. She doesn’t think we are human. She was planning to take Florin away in the plane. God knows where she put that child.”
“Why would she want to steal a child?”
“Bobby,” Tallagonga said, pronouncing the name Booby.
“Ahhh.” Gabel nodded.
“But Victor, poor little soul, tried to defend his brother—we should have done more to help him—sometimes we are all at fault!”
Mary Cyr Page 29
