The Beggar's Opera

by Peggy Blair

  Ramirez took a moment to digest this new information. “Were there other men in this child sex ring, then, that we don’t know about, Hector?”

  “All I can tell you for sure is that neither Nasim Rubinder nor Miguel Artez raped the boy. Their blood types are different from the semen found on the hotel room sheets and in the boy’s body. The science is clear, Ricardo. Where it leads you, I cannot say.”

  “You are absolutely certain someone else raped the child?”

  “Yes.” Apiro looked up at him. “Beyond any doubt.”

  Ramirez pondered this for a minute and then nodded. “Then I have to set aside my previous assumptions. When I think back, Rubinder took photographs, but his attraction for children seems to have involved adolescent girls. There was not a single photograph in his CD collection of any young boys. And it could not have been Artez, in any event. He was working at the hotel until just after midnight, and the boy was drugged and raped before then. My two-person theory was based on an assumption that Señor Ellis was guilty but had no car. But the entire crime could have been the act of one man. Someone with a vehicle.”

  Apiro inclined his head. “You have assumed that everything Miguel Artez told you is a lie. Perhaps you should instead assume that he was truthful. Maybe that will help?”

  Ramirez nodded. “Good idea, Hector. He gave us a written statement. He insists he never met the boy and that he didn’t know the boy was dead. If that is true, then someone else abused the child. Along with a car, that person also had to have access to Michael Ellis’s room. But who? What connections have I missed in the evidence?”

  Apiro pulled over his stepladder and sat on the second rung.

  “I have a theory,” Apiro suggested. “I told you, I have only seen injuries such as the ones Arturo Montenegro suffered once before. It is the only time in my career that I have seen a boy of that age, of any age, beaten so badly.

  “It was a long time ago, almost fifteen years. A case involving another eight-year-old boy, when I was still a surgeon at the children’s hospital. I alluded to it the other day. I have to be careful about what I tell you; there are certain things I cannot disclose. Doctor-patient privilege is very strict. I gave an oath when I became a doctor to protect it. For example, I cannot give you the name of the child. But some of the information you need may be in your own records and who knows, perhaps it will help point you in a new direction.”

  It was January 1992, just after Christmas, Hector Apiro explained. The boy was attacked at a boarding school in the Viñales mountains run by the Catholic Church.

  “Father James O’Brien, the principal, brought him to the children’s hospital,” said Apiro. “Accompanied by a policeman. There were no ambulances in Viñales at the time and only the church vehicle had sufficient fuel to make the trip. He had been raped, with enough force to suffer internal bleeding. He refused to say who attacked him.

  “He would not even speak to us when he first arrived,” Apiro recalled sadly. “His face was swollen purple like an eggplant. The surgery was complicated because the bleeding was intense. But the operation went well and the boy survived. His body began to heal. He spent more than a month in the children’s hospital while he recovered from his injuries.”

  “Did he ever tell you what happened?” Inspector Ramirez asked.

  Apiro shook his head. “I tried to find out. I spent most of my free time reading to the boy, hoping he would eventually open up to me. But he was severely traumatized. Small wonder. His ribs, even his cheekbones, were broken. The policeman eventually told me it was another boy at the school. The offender was a minor himself, a fifteen-year-old boy, too young to be charged, and so there was nothing that could be done.” In Cuba, children under the age of sixteen could not be charged with a criminal offence.

  “I never knew the attacker’s name. And so,” Apiro explained, “I was powerless to do anything. It was not my job to get involved in police matters — not then, anyway — but to offer care. I checked on the injured child several times a day, and then as the weeks passed and the boy improved I became increasingly busy with my other patients and left his care to the ward nurses.”

  “What happened to him?” Ramirez asked. “After he recovered, I mean.”

  “They sent him back to the same school.”

  SIXTY - TWO

  Celia Jones waited outside the hotel for the lemon-coloured bus to pull up. It was a glorious, sunny day.

  She climbed into the bus with twenty or so other tourists, Europeans, mostly. It was about a three-hour drive to Viñales, the guide explained, with all the stops.

  The bus drove past the Gran Teatro de La Habana, and then turned onto Calle San Martín. The tour guide pointed out a collapsed ruin with trees growing on the roof, all that was left of the original theatre. It was sad to see the devastation of what was once a cultural icon in Havana. She took a photograph to show Alex, but realized how heartbroken he would be to see it. She deleted it from her camera.

  The bus drove down the Avenida Simón Bolivar and the Avenida Salvador Allende. They passed the Memorial José Martí, a giant tower with a statue of the hero, poet, and author, founder of the original Cuban Revolutionary Party.

  They stopped for a few minutes at the Necrópolis Colón. It was a forty-acre cemetery, filled with over two million graves, the guide explained. There were gravestones and monuments of every conceivable shape and size. It was a lush green area, blanketed with mariposa lilies — the Cuban national flower — as well as vibrant hibiscus, pale orchids, and bright bougainvillea.

  It was the first cemetery Jones had ever been in that didn’t make her uncomfortable. Most of them were silent, with only the birds singing. This was a place of laughter, colour, scent. If there were spirits wandering around here, unlike the ones in Blind Alley, they didn’t frighten her. She had only a few minutes to take photographs before the tour guide said it was time to get back onboard.

  The landscape changed once they left Havana. Flat farmlands mutated into small bright green hills shaped like pincushions. Mogotes. Then high, jagged cliffs. She hadn’t realized they would be travelling into the mountains. She felt queasy every time the bus lurched close to the edge of the road.

  About two hours into their tour, they stopped for lunch at a town called Soroa. They were taken to a waterfall and an extraordinary orchid garden, fragrant with perfume. Jones had never seen orchids growing in the wild, or so many different ones. She took pictures of every variety. After lunch, a splendid buffet of bright green avocadoes, mangoes, yams, pineapples, and almost unbearably fresh papayas, they got back in the bus.

  The yellow bus chugged along the twisting road. Jones saw the occasional pedestrian doubled over, straining to walk up the steep incline. In the valley below, workers moved like small insects, droning away in tobacco fields.

  She wondered what the altitude was and shivered as the air cooled. The bus climbed higher and higher up the winding road, her stomach churning with the turns. She managed somehow to keep her lunch where it belonged, but she was starting to feel decidedly unwell.

  It was a relief to see the sign for Viñales. The tour guide said it was a friendly place and to expect a warm welcome, despite the colder temperatures. The bus finally stopped on the main street, allowing her to escape.

  They were given a few hours to wander around town and told to meet back at the bus no later than four. Some of her tour mates rented bikes. Chinese ones. Heavy, awkward bicycles that looked as if they were made out of one piece of bent metal.

  Jones asked a man for directions to the veterinary clinic. On the way, she stopped to look at children playing in the yard of an orphanage. One small girl, little more than a toddler, sat in a dilapidated wheelchair. The others pushed her around and around in circles as she squealed with delight. A boy swung the ends of two long skipping ropes tied to a tree while another girl jumped through them, kicking up dust.

  Double dutch. Jones had played it herself as a child. She loved watching them, hearing
their peals of laughter. Her heart ached, once more, at the fact that she and Alex had no children.

  The veterinary clinic was located on the second floor of a building on the main street. Celia Jones introduced herself to the woman at the reception desk and was pleased to discover it was the same woman she had spoken with earlier. Teresa Diaz greeted Jones warmly.

  “I pulled out all our forms for Rohypnol shipments we received, going back almost five years. I made copies for you. As recently as last week, four capsules were missing.”

  Jones saw that the last few pages were hard to read, the toner low, and was immensely grateful that the woman had used the clinic’s scarce supplies to assist with her request. There was great kindness in this country.

  “May I contact you after I return to Canada? Please let me know what supplies you need most urgently; I’d like to help. I’m married to a Cuban doctor. I’m sure we have friends who would make donations as well.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Diaz exclaimed. She thanked Jones profusely and gave her a card with the number and address of the clinic handwritten on it.

  The veterinarian, Dr. Vincent, would contact Señora Jones through the Drugs for Dogs agency. Diaz shook Jones’s hand enthusiastically and thanked her again for her kind offer of assistance. Jones thanked her for her own, and handed the woman a bar of soap before she left. As she walked down the stairs, she scanned through the forms, examining the signatures at the bottom of each page.

  As she reached the bottom step, she looked up. When she saw who was waiting for her on the street, her blood ran cold.

  SIXTY - THREE

  “They sent him back to the same boarding school where he was assaulted?” Inspector Ramirez exclaimed. “The child must have been terrified. And what of his attacker, the older boy? What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know, Ricardo. I often wondered whether he received counselling for his psychological problems, but I had no way to follow up. As a minor, his identity was protected. Reluctantly, I let the matter go.”

  “And you think that boy, the older one, might be involved in this?”

  “He would be a man now, but I think it merits checking into.”

  Ramirez reflected. It was possible Apiro was right. That kind of aggression was unusual. Ramirez had never seen such violence in the hundreds of sexual abuse cases he had investigated, and Apiro had only seen it once before, despite his thousands of patients. The victims were roughly the same age; the attacks took place at the same time of year and displayed a similar type of violence. Perhaps there were other attacks over the intervening years, children too frightened to report their assaults. A common modus operandi could not be excluded simply due to the passage of time.

  “Sanchez searched for similar offences on our databases,” Ramirez said, “but nothing showed up.”

  “The boy had no record,” said Apiro. “He was never charged. And remember, this was years ago.”

  That explained it, thought Ramirez. The reason Sanchez had not been able to track it down. It would never have occurred to Sanchez to check for old files involving young offenders so long ago.

  “We should have the police report in our archives. I’ll call the clerk and ask her to look for it, now that we have some dates to work with.” Ramirez did some quick calculations. “If the young offender was fifteen in 1992, he would have been born in 1977, or thereabouts. That would make him twenty-nine or thirty years old now. It should be easy enough to check for a birth date between, say, 1976 and 1978, and a sexual assault case in our youth offender records for Viñales. What hospital was it that you worked at then?”

  “The Hospital Pediatrico y Cardiocentro Infantil. The children’s hospital.”

  “And the date, you said, was just after Christmas?”

  “Yes. January.”

  Ramirez walked over to the wall phone and called the police archives. He gave the clerk the information. It took only a few minutes before the phone on the wall rang; he grabbed it. The clerk had found the file easily with the information he had provided.

  Ramirez asked her to send a patrol car to the morgue with the file. About twenty minutes later, he held a dusty folder in his hands. Apiro watched closely as Ramirez opened and flipped through it, searching for the name of the assailant.

  And there it was, on the police investigation report, a reference to the fact that the boy’s attacker was a young offender with a date of birth of April 16, 1976, and then, a few pages later, his name.

  “My God,” Ramirez said, astonished. “It was Rodriguez Sanchez.”

  SIXTY - FOUR

  Detective Sanchez stood on the street, his police car parked at the side of the road.

  “What a surprise to find you here,” said Celia Jones as casually as she could. When she saw he was alone, she considered running back up the stairs. But she wasn’t sure how dangerous he might be, and she didn’t want anyone in the clinic to get hurt.

  “I wanted to make sure I got copies of those records,” he said. “We want to wrap things up today with our investigation.”

  But he’d said it wasn’t urgent. “That’s a long trip for you to make; it must have taken you hours,” she said, feigning ignorance. “It really wasn’t necessary.” She looked around. Hoped she might see another police car she could wave down. But there was no traffic, not even a bicycle.

  Teresa Diaz looked out the window and waved at them. Jones had no choice but to wave back.

  “I am afraid it was, Señora.” Sanchez stepped towards her and she felt the hard round edge of a gun barrel press into her side. “Please get into the passenger seat of the car quietly. I am sorry it has to be this way.”

  She did as she was told. He started the car and drove slowly through town until they left the outskirts of Viñales. He held the steering wheel with his left hand and the gun in his right, its muzzle pointed at her. They passed a few cars but there was nothing she could do. She was trapped.

  They drove several miles outside of town before the car left the main road. Sanchez steered it through a gap in the trees and down an overgrown road, the ruts dotted with small shrubs. The car bumped along. There were no houses for miles.

  Sanchez finally parked in front of what looked like an abandoned school. The main building was overgrown with weeds and moss. A second, smaller brick building behind it appeared to have once been a residence of some type.

  He told her to get out. She opened the door and stepped into the shade. She wondered how long she had left before he killed her. She began to shiver. She felt as if she was watching a scene unfold from a distance, was almost surprised at her feeling of detachment. She recognized the early stages of shock.

  “I truly am sorry, Señora Jones,” said Sanchez. “I did not want things to come to this. I told you not to come here.”

  “It wasn’t Nasim who stole the drugs, was it?” she said. “It was you. I thought it might be.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I wasn’t completely sure until this moment. But the thefts from the drugs listed on these forms took place over a period of years, which ruled out Nasim Rubinder. And it’s your signature on those forms.”

  He inclined his head, without releasing his grip on the gun.

  “Very good. You make connections almost as quickly as Ramirez. But that is the problem, unfortunately. Before I joined Ramirez’s office, I worked in Customs. I was the officer who approved the contents of all drug shipments at the International Airport. If Ramirez goes into those records, he will discover that each time I checked a delivery of Rohypnol, some went missing.”

  “And the one last week?”

  “I was at the airport doing something else. The officers in Customs were busy. I offered to take over their duties so that they could have a coffee break. They were delighted.”

  “Did you bring me here to kill me?”

  Jones wondered just who said there was no such thing as a stupid question.

  Sanchez stepped forward. He pointed the gun at
her forehead and took the forms from her hands. He folded them and put them in his jacket pocket. “Thank you, Señora, for helping me to find a paper trail that could have convicted me. I will make sure these are destroyed. I’ve already gotten rid of the ones at the Customs Office.”

  “My disappearance will be a little hard to explain, won’t it?”

  “Oh, I do not think so, Señora. You took a bus tour. You left the group and wandered away from town. No one saw where you went. You did not return to the group when you were supposed to. Perhaps you took a walk to explore the mountains. It is very steep at parts of the road. There have been accidents. They will assume you were struck by a car or a bus. There will be a search; I may even insist on one. But trust me, I will make sure no one finds your body.”

  No one knew she was here, and even the tour guide wouldn’t think to look for her this far from town. It was too far to get to by foot and she hadn’t rented a bike. Besides, it was only around three and no one would miss her at the bus for at least another hour. She would die here, then, most likely within minutes.

  She took a deep breath, savouring the mountain air, thinking the unimaginable. At any second, Sanchez would tire of talking to her. He would pull the trigger, and Celia Jones would cease to exist.

  SIXTY - FIVE

  Rodriguez Sanchez, Inspector Ramirez thought in disbelief. Images from the investigation flashed through his mind.

  Sanchez had access to the Canadian’s hotel room; they had searched it together. It was Sanchez who suggested the search and Ramirez had agreed, despite the weak grounds.

  The reference to the anonymous complaint on Christmas Day about a scarred man approaching boys in the Parque Ciudad had originated with Sanchez. Ramirez had never checked with the dispatcher to validate the complaint. He had trusted Rodriguez, his protégé. His friend.

  Sanchez found virtually all the evidence located in the Canadian’s hotel room. Sanchez must have slipped the photographs and CD under the mattress while Ramirez searched the bathroom. Ramirez had left him alone outside the locked hotel room while he talked to Hector Apiro in the lobby. It was Sanchez who planted his own semen on the sheets, knowing it would match the semen in the boy’s body. He probably exchanged his underwear with a pair from Ellis’s dresser.