by Peggy Blair
A terribly sad reality, thought Ramirez. He intended to teach Estella to kick, to gouge, to scream. But also to run.
“What does that mean, Hector? That the boy was raped before?”
“At least once. With sufficient force to tear his rectum. With the first injury, he would have bled immediately and every time he had a bowel movement for several days. That is why it can take so long for such injuries to heal.”
“Señor Ellis and his wife arrived in Cuba a week ago. He could have raped the boy before, too. We’ll have to question the boy’s family and the children he played with to see if any of them noticed Señor Ellis with the child. When will you have a written report for me?”
“I still have combings, oral and perianal swabs, and dry mounts that I need to test. And I want to run DNA tests on the samples we have collected. We are low on the chemicals we need; I am trying to locate more. But as I said, I’m quite sure that the semen samples in the exhibits all came from the same person. That is about all I can tell you for now.”
“That’s more than enough for my purposes. This is a bad one, Hector. Vicious.” Ramirez shook his head. “That could be my son on your table.”
“Yes, it is a very bad one, my friend.” Apiro looked at Ramirez. “May I give you some advice?”
“Of course.”
“I suspect other boys may have been sexually abused by the same man as well. The men who do such things are pedophiles. They do not prey on just one child. Perhaps that is where you might wish to continue your investigation.”
“I’ll speak to Ronita and get her advice. But we will have to be discreet,” Ramirez said, a sombre expression on his face. If he wasn’t careful, there could be serious political repercussions. A pedophile ring in Havana wasn’t something the Minister of the Interior would want to hear about. It would not be good for tourism, at least not the kind Castro still hoped to attract.
The rest of the autopsy would be routine, Apiro assured Ramirez. Mostly weighing organs and labelling exhibits. There was no need for him to stay.
That was good. Ramirez had other things to do to meet his filing deadline. As well as the unpleasant task of notifying the Montenegro family of the death of their young son.
TWENTY - FOUR
A line of laundry swayed on a string hung between a post shoring up the balcony and a curved balustrade. Most of the brightcoloured clothing belonged to children. Small socks and shorts stirred like flower petals. Down the street, a woman washed her clothes in a bucket and wrung them out before hanging them carefully on a similar stretch of line.
The Montenegros lived on a numbered calle in the heart of the slums, in one of the more decrepit of the three-storey buildings that lined the streets. Ramirez stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the decaying exterior. Different colours of paint had been stripped away by the corrosive effects of the salt air, leaving the walls a mixture of peeling layers of turquoise, yellow, and pink, much like a child’s gumball. Entire walls had collapsed on the third floor, which looked like it was held up by little more than hope.
The Americans had developed a bomb that killed people but left buildings standing. Havana must have been the test ground for the failed prototype, thought Ramirez. The Cuban people are still standing, but all our buildings are falling down.
The Montenegros’ flat was on the second floor. Ramirez climbed the single flight of rickety stairs and knocked on their apartment door. The dead man walked close behind.
A woman opened the door with an expectant look that quickly turned to fear. Ramirez could tell she knew instantly who he was. Nonetheless, he showed the trembling woman his badge.
“May I come in?”
She opened the door slowly. The dead man wiped his feet on the floor as if to enter, but Ramirez gave him a look. He walked back down the stairs, dejected.
The apartment Ramirez entered had two rooms. It was very clean, furnished with a bed that doubled as a couch, a table, and some wooden chairs. Sheets were nailed across the windows in place of curtains. There was an icebox, which Ramirez was sure contained neither ice nor food.
“Are you Señora Montenegro?”
“Yes?”
“May I ask if Señor Montenegro is at home?”
“My husband died several years ago. You are here about my son.” She began to cry, anticipating the truth. Two small girls pressed against her skirt as Ramirez expressed his deepest sympathies for her loss. “Is he dead, my Arturo?” she demanded, wringing her hands.
“I’m sorry. He was found in the waters off the Malecón by a fisherman early this morning.”
As he watched tears stream down her face, Ramirez decided to let her think the boy had drowned. He could explain the misunderstanding later. On this Christmas Day, he did not have the heart to tell her how coldly her son was murdered.
“When did you last see him, Señora?”
“Noon yesterday. Christmas Eve. He didn’t come home last night.”
“What was he wearing?”
“A yellow shirt and red shorts with white diamonds. An old pair of blue running shoes with white soles. Size two. A little big for him. Is there any chance you have the wrong boy? Perhaps Arturo is staying with a friend. Is it possible you have the wrong child?” She grabbed Ramirez by the shoulders and shook him, weeping. “You must have the wrong boy.”
“I am very sorry, Señora, but the boy we found was wearing red shorts with a white diamond pattern.”
No question now as to whose son it was. She pulled her hands away, moaning. She rocked softly back and forth, her arms wrapped in front of her, hugging her shoulders.
“Dear God,” she sobbed. “When he didn’t come home, I worried about him all night.”
“I am sorry, Señora Montenegro, but you will need to identify the body later today. I will send a patrol car for you.” Ramirez was sure she had no bus fare.
Señora Montenegro dropped to her knees on the floor, keening in her grief. The younger girl, the toddler, began wailing too. The other stood with her thumb in her mouth. She watched Ramirez quietly. He wondered how much they understood.
Ramirez took the woman’s hands and lifted her up. He pulled a chair over with his foot. She collapsed into it. He leaned over her, willing her to concentrate. “Do you have a photograph of your son we can use? I promise to return it.”
She pulled a hand away and pointed to a framed photograph of a smiling, dimpled boy on the wall. When Ramirez brought it over, she took it from him and ran her fingers over the boy’s face, kissed the glass, then slid it gently into his hand. She pointed to another picture, an older version of the same boy. A teenager. Perhaps fourteen or fifteen.
“Arturo’s brother. Dead too. He ran away from a country boarding school in the Viñales mountains in 1998, when I was pregnant with Arturo. The priests told us he fell down the mountainside trying to get home. They never found his body. It was too far for him to walk and the roads are so steep. Then my husband drowned. A fisherman. Arturo was the head of our household. How will we survive now without him? Why?” she pleaded. “Why me? Tell me. Why is God punishing me?”
But Ramirez had no answer.
Ramirez showed Señora Montenegro the photocopy of Michael Ellis’s passport and asked if she had ever seen the man in the photograph with her son. She shook her head, distracted. She was far too distressed to be questioned further.
The difficult questions could wait. There were no newspapers in Havana to spread any other information; no way for this woman to find out that her son was murdered.
Ramirez would ask her later about the child’s sexual history and see if she would agree to allow the other children in her home to be questioned. They were very young and might not be able to provide much information. For now, given the strength of the evidence, there was no urgency. He gave the woman his card. There was no point asking her to call him; she had no phone and likely no access to one. She could identify the child’s body later in the day. But not too late, thought Ramirez, recalling A
piro’s refrigeration issues.
“I will come back to see you in a few days. It would be very helpful, Señora, if you could think about Arturo’s activities over the past few weeks. Please, try to remember if he mentioned any men he met, anything at all.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“These are the usual questions we ask, in a death like this,” Ramirez lied. “Meanwhile, I will send a counsellor to help meet your needs.”
“I need my son.” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Will a counsellor bring him back? I don’t think so. Will a counsellor put food on our table?”
“No,” Ramirez conceded. These things were beyond a counsellor’s skills. “But she may be able to help you with the arrangements.” There was, after all, a funeral to plan. “Again, Señora Montenegro, I am so terribly sorry for your loss. My son is almost the same age as Arturo. I cannot begin to imagine your pain.”
The two small girls watched him leave, their big brown eyes wide. The oldest, perhaps three, had stopped crying, but now both girls sniffled, frightened by their mother’s anguish. Their lives, Ramirez knew, would never be the same.
Ramirez frowned at the way a smiling boy’s life had been snuffed out by a sexual predator. No one should spend their Christmas Day involved in such matters. He wanted to go home and keep his children close, keep the ugliness of the world away from them for as long as he could.
The poor, devastated woman he left weeping in her doorway had lost so much already. Ramirez would make some calls, see what he could do to help. This was Cuba, after all. People had to support each other. There was no other way to survive.
Ramirez walked back down the stairs. He got into the small blue car and started the ignition. The dead man climbed into the back.
Ramirez drove slowly back to the police station. When he looked in the side mirror, he saw the dead man examining the framed photograph he had placed on the back seat, touching the boy’s face. The man turned his hat upside down in his lap, like a collection plate.
I have no idea what my brain is trying to tell me, thought Ramirez. For the thousandth time, he wished he had inherited his grandmother’s second sight instead of the illness that killed her.
As Ramirez drove by the Ferris wheel, the dead man made a large circle in the air with his index finger. Ramirez saw the big wheel spinning slowly, heard the screams of children at the top. But they were just the usual cries of excitement, nothing serious.
The dead man looked out the car window, his brown eyes sad.
TWENTY - FIVE
The phone rang just as Celia Jones sat down with a glass of eggnog. She was enjoying a lazy Christmas Day, hanging around the house in her bathrobe, reading a book. Her husband, Alex, was doing the New York Times crossword at the kitchen table, the only person she knew who was brave enough to do it in ink. They tended to play the holidays down since it was just the two of them, their days off a chance to spend time comfortably alone together. Neither had family in Ottawa. Hers lived far north in Manomin Bay. Alex’s relatives were still trapped in Cuba.
“I’ll get it,” she said, and wandered over to the phone. Miles O’Malley’s voice surprised her on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry to disturb you on Christmas Day, Celia, but I need you to get your ass down to Havana before someone shafts Michael Ellis. Literally. If that husband of yours can spare you for a few days, that is. Oh, and Merry Christmas to the two of you, by the way.”
“Thanks, Chief. Same to you,” she said. “Havana? What’s going on?”
Alex raised his eyebrows at her. She shrugged.
The police chief gave her all the information he had. She was shocked to learn that Mike Ellis faced rape charges, maybe murder, too.
“I’m still trying to work out details of official involvement with all the different jurisdictions. I thought about sending a police officer down, but it’s complicated. We’re in discussions with the RCMP. They may need to step in quickly if there are any issues around extradition. They’re standing by.”
“Extradition? That’s for people who plead guilty or get convicted. Do you really think he did it?”
O’Malley didn’t respond to her question. “Right now, I just want to make sure his legal rights are respected and that he’s safe. He’s not been the same since the accident.”
O’Malley always called it the “accident.” A police shooting and slashing that cost him one of his best men and might have ruined the other. An accident that left Steve Sloan dead and Mike Ellis mutilated. Some “accident,” Jones thought.
“Chief, I can’t give him legal advice,” Jones protested. “I don’t know anything about Cuban laws. What exactly do you want me to do down there?”
Alex had put his pen down now and listened attentively.
“I want you to find out whatever you can. We can’t be interfering with a police investigation in a foreign country, but I won’t see one of my men shot to death by a firing squad. I don’t care what he’s done. My men need to know I’m there for them. I want you in Havana so I can show how actively we worked to support the Cuban National Revolutionary Police. It could help us negotiate a transfer. I want him out of their prison before someone kills him. Or worse.”
That’s how it would be spun, that she was there to help the Cuban police, not Mike. O’Malley wanted a negotiator, not a lawyer. “And what if he is guilty?”
“I don’t think he is, Celia, but I don’t know how reliable their investigations are. And I need to find out. I can’t have a man on my department cleared of a crime like this because of some technicality.”
In O’Malley’s world, there was no such thing as reasonable doubt. But he was right. If Ellis got out of jail on charges like these because of a technical legal argument, his days on the job were numbered anyway. Someday he’d need backup and it wouldn’t be there. His career, maybe even his life, was over unless he could conclusively prove his innocence.
Jones hung up and told her husband what was going on.
“Any chance of the media getting hold of this?” she asked.
“I doubt it.” Alex shook his head. “News is tightly controlled in Cuba. There is no information published unless it’s been vetted by the police and the Ministry of the Interior. Which are really one and the same thing. I doubt the government will report this in Granma; it would deter tourists from coming. And attract the ones they don’t want.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess,” Jones said, frowning. “It will help us keep a lid on things up here while I try to find out what’s going on.”
She checked the online airline schedules while Alex hovered unhappily around the computer. She found an almost empty flight on Air Ontario leaving the next day. Apparently, prospective shoppers didn’t travel to Cuba much on Boxing Day.
Alex, Alejandro Gonsalves, was an expatriate Cuban. He had fled Cuba with a wave of refugees in 1994. He didn’t talk much about how he made it to Florida, but she could imagine. The two-hundred-mile trip took eighteen months. Castro had agreed to let the refugees leave just as President Clinton declared there was no longer sanctuary for them in Miami. They were held at Guantánamo Bay. Alex was lucky; he managed somehow to get to Montreal, where he finished medical school.
They met in the Plateau just after he completed his residency. A girlfriend trying to get Jones over her depression dragged her to a party she didn’t want to go to. There he was: a smiling Cuban man still grateful for his escape, ecstatic to be in Canada. It was impossible to be unhappy around Alex. He brimmed with optimism and hope for the future.
He made her laugh for the first time in months, taught her the salsa, helped her forget why she’d quit the RCMP. He persuaded her to start over, to be a lawyer, if that’s what she wanted, apply to McGill. He convinced her she could do anything. When she was accepted into law school, they went out to celebrate. That night, he asked her to marry him.
She was already in her mid-thirties then — never dared to believe she’d fall in love, that she�
�d find the right man. They had been together nine years and were still best friends. They had no children, which made the sudden trip easier. The only upside to the one disappointment in their marriage. One they had finally, reluctantly, accepted.
He briefed her while she packed. He went over a list of things he was afraid she might not remember from their numerous conversations about Cuba. How much Cubans once adored Fidel Castro and why they supported his dictatorship. How they nonetheless hoped for his death.
“Castro abolished racial discrimination in a country where the majority of the population are descended from African slaves. Then he made education, even graduate studies, free for everyone. He did the same for health care. Cuba has more doctors than cab drivers now. The Cuban medical system would be even better than the one here if they could just get the medical supplies they need. Castro has a healthy, well-educated population, and they’re grateful to him for that, but also enraged by the American embargo. Food and fuel are rationed and have been for decades. The average monthly salary is ten American dollars. Doctors might make fifteen. People are poor and enormously frustrated.”
“I knew I married you for your money,” she teased, but he didn’t smile. He wanted her to fully understand the dangers he’d fled. The dangers she could face.
“I’m worried about you going there. If you listen carefully, Celia, you will hear how angry Cubans are. They’ve had enough. They’re hungry and resentful. But Cubans are also resourceful and stubborn. When transportation was paralyzed by oil shortages, Castro imported a million Chinese bicycles. Cubans love him and hate him at the same time. Below the surface, everything is in turmoil.
“No one challenges Castro’s honesty or his personal integrity, but he can’t risk any criticism. He can’t let any dissent rise to the surface or he could easily be overthrown, just as he overthrew Batista. The Americans have tried to assassinate him at every turn, so his paranoia is justified. You won’t be there as a tourist but as someone reporting to the outside world. This will threaten certain people. Be very careful. Trust no one you deal with completely. The Cuban authorities will lie to you. Understand that everyone, everyone, has a second face. And there are cederistas everywhere.”
