The Beggar's Opera

by Peggy Blair

  “Some people have special permissions from the government to use private computers. If you need to use one and it is urgent, I might hypothetically have a cousin who might know someone with such an authorization. But it would be expensive, because of the risk. Five years in jail for my cousin. For you, probably a large fine.”

  “I’ll take that hypothetical chance.” She smiled and slipped him a few pesos.

  It was already five o’clock. Artez said he would arrange things after his shift ended at eight and to meet him in the lobby. That left her a few hours to think, to retrace Mike’s steps, and to try to discover who might have seen him with a woman on Christmas Eve, when a small Cuban boy was being violated in unimaginable ways.

  THIRTY - EIGHT

  Inspector Ramirez watched with Ronita Alvarez through a two-way mirrored glass. It seemed to him that Cuba was full of rooms with two-way mirrors. Half the population spent too much time looking inward, while the other half pressed their faces against the glass, desperate for glimpses of the outside world.

  They were observing yet another abused child, from an unrelated investigation, being questioned on the other side of the wall.

  The little girl, no more than nine, held a stuffed bear tightly in her hands as a counsellor asked her gently what happened. A tiny camera in a corner of the room taped the child. As Alvarez explained, two copies of the tape would be kept, one for use in the trial, the other to respond to any suggestions that the child had been led in her evidence.

  “Only the tape will be used in court. This little girl will never have to face the person who abused her,” Alvarez assured Ramirez, reading the question in his eyes.

  Alvarez had established the Centre for the Protection of Children and Adolescents with Ramirez’s help.

  “We dealt with over one hundred cases last year, mostly thanks to you,” she informed Ramirez. “But we had some drop-in complaints as well, like this one. A fraction of the true number, no doubt.”

  Ramirez had pushed for a centre to be created for children who had suffered abuse, providing enough statistics from his department to support its creation. He still hoped that other centres like it would be opened elsewhere in Cuba as well.

  “How many reports of children being raped have you had since you opened? Of young children, like this little girl?”

  “Of actual rape? Just a small number, one or two. It is hard enough for these children to talk about being touched. I would like to think this means that there are only a few victims. But statistically, I’d be dreaming. As in most countries, most child assaults are not reported.”

  “How many complaints involve boys?”

  “As victims? More than three-quarters are girls, mostly between eleven and fifteen.”

  “The rape of boys below that age, is it unusual?” Ramirez assumed this to be so, but wanted to hear it from the expert.

  “I think that reliable figures are hard to find, and we probably only know about a few percent of the abuses that take place. But yes, I would say statistically that it would be highly unusual.”

  “How many assaults involve tourists?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “A much different story. We have heard many stories of children being abused by men who come here thinking that Havana is the same as the Havana of the 1960s. The foreigners who travel to places like Thailand to have sex with young children are now coming here, too. These children are so poor, so hungry. They’ll do almost anything for a few pesos.”

  Five pesos, thought Ramirez. That was how much Michael Ellis had given the boy. Five pesos: the price of a child.

  As Ronita Alvarez was talking, the dead boy appeared to the inspector for the first time. A thin boy in red shorts, his face bruised. He walked over to a hamster cage on a bench under the window and bent his knees so he could watch the small brown animal race around in its wheel. He made a circle with his fingers, tracing its path. He looked at Ramirez and smiled.

  “Do you think these tourists, the ones who come here to assault our children, are isolated individuals?”

  The dead boy walked over to Ramirez. He shook his head from side to side and pulled lightly on Ramirez’s jacket.

  “I certainly hope so,” Alvarez answered. “Why do you ask?”

  Ramirez sidestepped her question as he tried to ignore the dead child. “If I had reason to think that there might be two or more men in Old Havana abusing young boys, what would your reaction be?”

  “I would be horrified, but not surprised. In many ways, it’s only been a matter of time, what with the increase in sex tourism in recent years.”

  “I am not sure, my friend, but I have reason to believe that such a ring may be operating here, preying on the boys of the market.”

  “An organized ring?”

  “Perhaps. I think I’ll be able to identify some possible victims. I don’t know for sure if they have been abused. But we need to find out. If my officers bring the boys to you, can you interview them?”

  “Yes, of course,” she agreed. “But it will be better if we approach them ourselves. They should be with members of their families. We are not supposed to question them alone. Have they complained to anyone?”

  “No,” Ramirez acknowledged. “But this will be difficult. I don’t know for sure that these boys have been molested themselves. I only know that one of their friends was. He was eight years old. He was raped by one or more men, on more than one occasion.” He hesitated, not sure how much to tell her, then decided to tell her everything. “We found his body on Christmas Day. Murdered.”

  Alvarez gasped. “My God. Tell me this isn’t true.”

  “I wish I could,” said Ramirez.

  The boy tugged on the inspector’s hand, trying to pull Ramirez towards the hamster cage. When Ramirez looked at him sternly, the boy stopped. Disappointed, but obedient.

  “But I need to know if there were others,” he continued. “With the dead boy, drugs were used to sedate him first, and so part of what we need to know is if these boys have been given anything like that, if there are moments that they cannot remember, times when it hurt to sit down and they didn’t know why. That kind of information.”

  She slumped onto a couch. The centre was housed in a residence and it was outfitted to look like a home, to make the traumatized children feel more comfortable. There were tears in her eyes. “How awful. Do his parents know yet?” she asked.

  “Not about the rape. There is only the mother, a widow. She didn’t recognize the suspect. I would appreciate it if you could speak to the other children in the household in case they were victims of the same sexual abuse. There are two, both little girls. Very young. Perhaps too young to answer your questions. You must keep this situation discreet, as you can imagine.”

  “Of course,” she breathed. He could see her gathering up her internal strength, although she had not physically moved. “Of course we will help you, Ricardo. Do you have a suspect?”

  “Just one,” Ramirez acknowledged. He handed her a photocopy of the Canadian’s passport picture. “But I am sure that there was someone else involved. He needed help to move the body to where it was found. Plus, there were Polaroids of the child being abused. From the angle of the pictures, someone else took them.”

  The dead boy walked back to the hamster cage. He watched the wheel spin round and round.

  “Very well, then, Ricardo,” Alvarez said. “We will carry out inquiries as you have requested. But I can only deal with one child at a time, understand? If you give me the names, I’ll have a counsellor speak to the families and see if they will consent to have the children brought here.”

  “Gracias, Ronita. I appreciate this.”

  “The children can play with the games or with the rabbits and hamsters.” She pointed to the pets used in therapy. “We will help them to feel as comfortable as we can. I can’t say how long this may take. They may not wish to speak to us. Their parents may not want them to. Particularly if they have been abused. But we will tape all
the sessions.”

  “May I see those tapes once you’re done?”

  “If we reach that point. You can even watch the interviews if you like. But you cannot ask questions, only communicate with the professional working with the child through headphones. That is the rule here, now. The investigation must be second to the child, understood?”

  The dead boy walked back to Ramirez and smiled, revealing his dimples. He likes the animals, thought Ramirez. Is that how Señor Ellis got the boy to come with him? Did he pretend he had a pet he wanted to show him?

  “Is that alright, Ricardo?”

  Ramirez realized he hadn’t answered, distracted by the boy that Ronita couldn’t see.

  “Agreed,” said Ramirez. “And thank you for this, Ronita.”

  “I wish I could say it was my pleasure.”

  THIRTY - NINE

  Celia Jones called home, but Alex was out. She left a message assuring him that she was safe, that the police were being helpful. She assured her husband that he had no cause for concern. That she loved him, missed him, wished he could be there.

  Then she walked down to the lobby and asked Miguel Artez for directions to El Bar mi Media Naranja. “Ah, yes,” he said smiling. “Hemingway’s favourite bar. You understand the pun in the name, yes?”

  “The half orange?”

  “It means the place you go to find your sweeter half.”

  The narrow streets zigged and zagged, but the bar turned out to be only a few blocks away from the Parque Ciudad Hotel. Not nearly as far as Mike had implied, and that made her trust him even less. He was lying about something, she was certain.

  She wanted to find Fidel, the bartender, and see if he could recall the woman Mike insisted was with him at the bar. The bartender told the police he couldn’t remember seeing a woman with Mike. She wanted to find out what he would tell her in exchange for a little financial enticement.

  The famous bar was small. Cozy, a real estate ad would say. There was a lineup for the restaurant, patrons waiting to be seated for an early dinner. She saw an empty stool at the end of the long mahogany bar and sat down.

  It was noisy already, a mariachi-style band playing outside the door. She ordered a mojito and grimaced when she saw the price. Mike had told her it was a tourist trap; he hadn’t exaggerated. She asked the man behind the counter if Fidel was working.

  “Not today, Señora,” said the bartender and shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe tonight.”

  She asked him if he had seen a friend of hers and described the woman Mike said sat beside him.

  He smiled, shrugged again. There were many attractive women in Havana with tight skirts, pink nails, and streaked blonde hair. She was wasting her time looking for that one. Just wait, his shrugs suggested, and you will find others you like here just as much, maybe better. She was mildly offended, then amused, by his assumption that she was looking for a jinetera for herself.

  “It’s important that I find her,” she insisted, and reached into her purse to find a pencil. She tore a sheet of paper from her notebook, wrote down her hotel and room number, and told him that if Fidel or the woman returned, it was worth ten pesos for him to leave a message at her hotel.

  That got his attention.

  Jones finished her drink and left a hefty tip with the payment. She wanted the bartender to remember her as being generous.

  She still had an hour or two before Miguel Artez and his cousin met her at the hotel to get her online. She got directions to the Malecón and threaded her way through the tables to the stillbright outdoors. The police report had not been specific about where the body was found, only that it was in the water near the seawall across from the medical towers. They must be some kind of a landmark.

  She walked up the Calle Obispo to the Plaza de Armas. It was quite incredible: an outdoor market with bookstands that blanketed the entire tree-lined square, like a library without walls. Dozens of vendors displayed thousands of used books for sale. She browsed for a minute, wondering if the sunlight was good for the covers, the pages. The books were all in Spanish and most were either about the revolution or Catholicism, which surprised her. She had thought that Cuba was secular.

  En route to the Malecón, she was repeatedly accosted by beggars of all ages. One grey-haired woman stood in front of her, blocking her way, and held out what she guessed were worthless domestic pesos. The woman wanted her to exchange these for her valuable ones.

  “You see?” the woman said. “These have Che’s head on them. A good souvenir, yes? A peso for a peso, just a trade.” Jones shook her head and walked past the woman, but she was beginning to see why Hillary Ellis became so annoyed.

  Old Havana was gorgeous. Jones passed the San Carlos y San Ambrosio seminary, a beautiful stone building constructed by Jesuits in the mid-1800s. Behind it, on the other side of the harbour, stood the Castillo, a Spanish fortress built in 1589 to guard the entrance to Havana Bay. It reminded her of Old Quebec, cobblestone lanes, curved balconies made of intricate wrought iron. In this area, Havana had been restored to what it must have been like before the embargo: it was stunningly beautiful.

  Between the seminary and the seaway was a market with stands selling art, crocheted women’s tops, coral necklaces, African masks, and brown seed bracelets. Some of the vendors sold African wooden figures. She stopped and bought a pair of silver and enamel earrings for a few pesos, a small silkscreen painting of a mermaid superimposed over the Cuban flag for five more. She thought Alex would like it for his office.

  Jones crossed from the market to the seawall, the ocean turquoise today, a deeper blue than the sky. She noticed the small park with the Ferris wheel and guessed that was where the ride operator gave his statement. She asked a Cuban couple in Spanish where the medical towers were; they asked her for soap.

  They pointed west and told her the towers were a few kilometres down the Malecón, and so she walked beside the seawall, looking across the street at buildings that had fallen down, apartments teetering on the edge of collapse, and the few that had been restored.

  The contrasts were extraordinary. A new hotel was under construction next to a building that was little more than rubble. It had only one complete wall left standing, but nonetheless displayed wet laundry strung between the devastated balconies. The new building was all glass and angles and overlooked the water. It would have looked at home on the waterfront in Toronto or Montreal. The sidewalks beside it were cracked; in the entire block, only the new building had unbroken windows.

  She walked three or four kilometres until she caught sight of the towers on the other side of the Malecón. It took her a few minutes to find the spot where the body had been discovered. The bright yellow police tape was still in place, tied between two lampposts. A man with a violin played mournfully nearby, a glass bottle at his feet for coins. She dropped in a few centavos.

  She walked to the edge of the wall and peered over, felt a surge of vertigo even at that short height. She forced herself to look down the steep wall to the water. Plastic bags and debris were stranded on the rocks at low tide. Kelp floated in an oily slick. It looked the same as every other part of the Malecón; nothing here to indicate that anything untoward had happened. She took a deep breath and straightened up.

  None of the tourists who leaned against the stone wall could have any idea that a child’s body was dumped here only days ago. But it was unlikely that the boy had just been carried here and thrown into the water without some attempt at concealment. The Malecón would be a popular spot in the evening, when the ocean breeze was cool. Even late at night, she imagined there would be passing cars, taxis, pedestrians, particularly on a busy night like Christmas Eve.

  Jones walked slowly back to her hotel, already thinking ahead. She wanted to put together some kind of a brief for the prosecutor and the juridical panel, something formal to file on the record, what Cuban lawyers would call conclusiones provisonales. Objections to the police facts, to the specifics of the charges.

  She h
ad to think like a lawyer. She needed to protect the chief and herself from liability if Mike ended up shot to death by a firing squad. Or if something terrible happened to him in jail. O’Malley was right, she thought, frowning. Law was a lot like hostage negotiations.

  That morning interview with Mike bothered Jones almost more than the evidence Inspector Ramirez had assembled. She sensed Mike had withheld something important from her and the Cuban police, but she couldn’t pin down what it was, or why she felt so uncertain of his truthfulness. Was Mike Ellis the kind of man who would take his wife to Havana for a holiday and then search out a child to have sex with? Was it possible he was a pedophile?

  She wondered if his terrible injuries, his undoubtedly damaged self-esteem, could have caused him to seek out children for sex. Children were accepting, non-judgmental, everything it seemed Hillary Ellis wasn’t. Still, she shuddered to think that a colleague could have sexually assaulted and killed a child.

  But I’m not a profiler, she thought, just a lawyer.

  And there was no way to tell by appearance alone. She was always horrified when the police broke yet another internet child porn ring and trotted out the accused in handcuffs. Accountants and lawyers, teachers, coaches, even the occasional judge. A lot of priests, too, these days.

  Behind those scars on his face, Mike could be anything; no one knew what went on behind closed doors.

  She and Alex had tried to have a baby for years, then applied to adopt one. But Canadian children weren’t often available for adoption unless they had special needs. She couldn’t imagine caring for a child that was disabled, although Alex was open to it. They had decided to stay on the adoption list and see what happened. Years passed and no children were offered to them. Life had moved on. In her forties now, she doubted she would ever be a mother.

  But if she had a child, she would kill anyone who touched it sexually. And she meant it; she knew how.