The Poisoned Pawn (20 page)

“Really?” said Jones. “I have to say, Cuba must be one of the most interesting countries on the planet. Tell me more about the
houngans
you mentioned earlier today, Ricardo.”

They were approaching the front doors of the NAC. Inside, a line had formed. Seeing a queue made Ramirez a little homesick.

“Here,” Gonsalves said. “Give me your coats. I’ll take them to the cloakroom.”

He walked away briskly. A nice man, Ramirez thought. Principled, and intense, but also kind and good-humoured. A good match to the Canadian lawyer, who Ramirez had come to like greatly.

“
Houngans
? They’re witch doctors. They practice a form of voodoo.”

“I thought voodoo only existed in Haiti.”

“Vodun came to us from Africa, too, Celia, with the slaves brought to work in the tobacco and sugar plantations. My grandmother was one of them. But she was Yoruba, from Nigeria, so she followed Santería as well.”

“I remember being told about Santería when I went to Blind Alley. I didn’t really understand the beliefs. I remember thinking it was odd that people could believe in it and in Catholic saints at the same time.”

“They did that so they could protect their own religion. They gave each
orisha
the name of a saint. For example, Chango, the god of thunder, is also Santa Barbara. She is a good fit for Chango because she was murdered by her father for worshipping the Catholic god.

“Right after her father killed her, he was struck dead by lightning. Because of this, Santa Barbara is invoked against sudden death. Those who pray to her, or to Chango, believe that they will never die without first receiving the sacraments.”

“Did your grandmother believe in the Catholic god, too?”

Alex Gonsalves returned and handed them each a stub from the coat check. “It won’t be long. They’re going to open the doors in a few minutes.”

“
Gracias
. No. She preferred to worship many gods,” said Ramirez. “She thought it best to keep all channels open. She was often possessed by
orishas
.”

“You’re kidding. Really?”

“The Santería believe that drumming opens the gateway to the
orishas
. If the drummers are good enough, the
loas
, or spirits, of the
orishas
take over the dancers. My grandmother loved to dance.”

“I thought I saw something like that in Blind Alley when I was there,” said Jones. “A woman was screaming while people sang and drummed. When I left, I saw something on the ground. I thought it was red paint. Well, actually, at first I thought it was blood. The whole thing was pretty scary.”

“The
babalaos
draw those pictures on the ground long before the dances, to persuade the gullible that the
orishas
have visited,” said Gonsalves. “When they point them out later, people forget they’ve walked over those same drawings all day. It’s like the doctors in the Philippines—the faith healers—who pretend that bloody chicken livers are tumours they’ve extracted from people’s bodies. People desperate to believe in something will believe in anything.”

“I don’t suppose Cuban voodoo is the same as it is in the movies, is it, Ricardo? With those little dolls that witch doctors stick pins into?” Jones asked as they joined the lineup.

“I don’t know about movies,” said Ramirez. “We so rarely see any new ones.”

The last movie Ramirez and Francesca had gone to was at a theatre across the street from the Gran Teatro. Ironically enough, it was called
Brujas
. A movie starring Penélope Cruz, so old and out of date that Cruz was only seventeen.

“But, yes, sometimes they’ll use voodoo dolls to change someone’s behaviour. To get them to quit smoking, for example. Or to give up a mistress. Some voodoo masters claim they can lure someone’s spirit into water and kill them by stabbing the reflection. The water turns red and the person becomes a zombie.”

“But of course that doesn’t really happen. It’s all a trick,” said
Gonsalves. “There is no such thing as zombies. That’s as silly as believing in ghosts.”

Ramirez smiled. “I can see you are a scientist, Alejandro, like my friend Hector Apiro. But religion is about faith. Hector says that chess is the only endeavour based on pure science.”

“Do you play chess, Ricardo?” said Jones. “I tried to take it up, but I wasn’t that good at it. Alex, on the other hand, is a whiz at it, and crosswords. He can figure out all kinds of complicated clues. I’m just not that good at games that require strategy. I’m more sort of ‘in the moment,’ if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t play well, sadly. But I find its theory useful on occasion. As Hector once explained to me, in chess, tactics is knowing what to do when there is something that can be done. Strategy is what you develop when you lack tactics. And if you have no time to develop strategy, if you do something unexpected it can sometimes confuse your opponent and allow you to win.”

Directed by a young woman in a burgundy velvet jacket, they found their seats.

“Explain something to me, please,” said Ramirez, as they sat down. “Charlie Pike told me that the internet is mostly used to circulate pornography. If the rest of what’s on the internet is full of misinformation, why do people here rely on it so much?”

“It’s an instant source of news and articles. In a few seconds, you can find out almost anything,” said Gonsalves. “It’s a great tool.”

Ramirez nodded. “In Cuba, when we want to know everything about something, we take the more traditional route.”

“You go to a library?” asked Jones.

“No,” Ramirez said. He smiled. “We ask our wives.”

Inspector Ramirez was tired when he got back to his hotel, although the opera had been a marvellous distraction.

Love, murder, and jealousy. Not a whodunit, as Celia Jones pointed out, since the operatic murder of Canio’s wife and her lover was committed in front of an audience within the opera as well as the real one.

Leoncavallo wanted
Pagliacci
to be a story about the downfall of a complicated man, one who was wrongly viewed as a clown instead of as a person with feelings. Every time Canio spoke of his jealousy, the fictional audience laughed. Even when Canio discovered that the wife he adored had betrayed him, he had to put on his clown face and perform as if nothing had happened.

Each character was flawed and yet human. One could feel sympathy for everyone involved.

Michael Ellis wears a mask, thought Ramirez. Every day, his mutilated face conceals his true thoughts. Did he, like Canio, take out his anger by murdering his wife? And in seeking his revenge, did he accidentally kill two other women as well?

Ramirez opened the small
frigo
and pulled out a tiny bottle of rum. He winced when he looked at the price list on top of the mini-bar. A month’s wages for a single drink. He poured it into a glass he found wrapped in paper on a shelf in the bathroom.

Ramirez sat on the bed and leaned against the plump pillows. He sipped the rum, willing his fingers to settle down, to stop shaking. He tried to concentrate, despite his fatigue after a long day in an unfamiliar setting. If it was hyperthyroidism he suffered from, his condition was getting worse.

The search, he thought. There was something in our search of Señor Ellis’s hotel room that ties into his wife’s death. Something that shouldn’t have been there. I need to remember what it was.

But nothing came to him.

He put down the empty glass and undressed. He crawled beneath crisp, cool white sheets and a warm down comforter.
As he slid into sleep, Ramirez glimpsed a dull blue mist in the shadows of the heavy drapes.

A dignified middle-aged man in a Victorian-style suit with a high-necked collar emerged. A piece of kelp was wrapped around his neck, forming a dark-green cravat beneath his beard. Water dripped slowly to the floor from his sodden clothes. A small girl in a gingham pinafore peeked shyly at Ramirez from behind the man’s jacket. In her small fingers, she held a gladiola.

The man leaned against the wall as the small girl walked out. She kneeled before the mini-bar and gently placed the flower on the carpet, as if it were a grave.

She stood up again. The man nodded to Ramirez as if to wish him well. The little girl raised her hand.

They turned their backs and vanished from Ramirez’s vision as magically as if conjured from Apiro’s Luminol.

THIRTY - EIGHT

Ramirez called Hector Apiro in the morning to find out if he had made any progress. He found the small man at the morgue.

“I’m afraid I have more questions than answers,” said the pathologist, “but at least I was able to sleep for a few hours. Getting some rest has helped enormously. I was becoming a menace. Good thing my patients don’t care,” he cackled. “The poison that killed Rita Martinez and Nicole Caron was fluoroacetate, Ricardo, not cyanide. It’s even more deadly.”

“What is it?”

Apiro explained. “It’s been used in the past here to kill wild dogs and small mammals. It interferes with the citric acid cycle in animals and in plants.”

“You say it’s deadlier than cyanide?”

“Cyanide, depending on the amount, isn’t always fatal, as I mentioned before. But even tiny amounts of fluoroacetate can kill. Three thousandths of an ounce is enough. I have no idea how these two women could have come into contact with it. I checked with the Office of the Historian to see if it had been used in Old Havana for rat control. They tell me it hasn’t been on the island for decades because of the embargo.”

“Is it something that someone could make? Or perhaps purchase on the
bolsa negra
?”

“No,” Apiro said. “Unless one lived in Africa. It comes from a South African plant called the poison tree. Not very creative, the Africans, when it comes to naming deadly plants.”

“Is this the same drug that killed Señora Ellis?”

“I don’t know yet. But I have found something odd. I can find no link whatsoever between Señora Caron and Rita Martinez, and believe me, I’ve tried. But I
have
found a connection between the two Canadian women, and a strong one at that. Señora Caron stayed in the same hotel room at the Parque Ciudad Hotel that was occupied by Señor Ellis and his wife during their visit. Room 612. In fact, Señora Caron moved into Room 612 on New Year’s Eve, the same day Señor Ellis checked out.”

“That
is
a strong link,” said Ramirez, puzzled.

“I can’t figure it out. We thoroughly searched that room before he was arrested.”

Something nagged at Ramirez even as Apiro said it. The hotel room held the key, he was sure of it. He retraced the room’s contours in his mind.

A king-size bed, an upholstered chair, a chest of drawers, a locked wall-safe in the closet. The hotel staff opened it for Apiro’s technicians after Ramirez and Sanchez left; it was empty. Ramirez sighed. He had no idea. These women’s deaths were giving him a headache.

“At least one good thing will come out of this. Rita Martinez left a signed consent form,” Apiro said. “She carried an organ donor card.”

“Her organs weren’t affected by the poison?”

“No. We have had successful transplants even after poisonings by cyanide and methanol without any hemorrhagic complications. It is not an absolute contraindication, not at all.”

Everyone in Cuba was expected to register in the “voluntary” organ donation program Castro initiated in the early 1980s. “Let’s see if one million citizens will agree and we can deprive the worms of their food,” Castro said, as he became the first volunteer to sign the forms.

Ramirez wondered which lucky Cuban would get Fidel Castro’s kidneys or heart. With the amount of rum he had consumed over the years, it was doubtful anyone would want his liver.

But the program had run into problems. There was often no place to store donated organs, given the chronic problems with electricity and refrigeration. That, and the lack of proper medical supplies, meant little Beatriz Aranas was likely to die young.

Which reminded Ramirez: he had completely forgotten to tell Apiro that Celia Jones and her husband wanted to try to arrange the child’s medical transfer to Canada so she could be treated. He summarized what he had in mind, remembering the promise he’d made to the couple after dinner.

“It might work,” said Apiro. “The embargo has interfered with our ability to get immunosuppressants. Mycophenolate, for example, should be taken daily by transplant patients, but it is hard to find these days. We could argue for a medical transfer on the basis that without the drug she could die. Besides, most transplants are done on
turistas
.

“The real money these days is in foreigners, as you know. The hospitals can charge the
extranjeros
several hundred thousand CUCs for an operation. We had a regional workshop in Holguin last October where participants discussed the ethical issues around it. The consensus was that at the moment the income outweighs the disadvantages.”

Interesting, thought Ramirez. Something about that information tugged at him, something about the dead cigar lady, but it slipped away before he could grasp its importance. He looked
at his watch. “I’m supposed to fly out this evening, Hector. This worries me. That travel advisory could be issued soon.”

“I agree, Ricardo, time is short. And it is much harder to find a toxin in a hotel that has hundreds of people coming and going; there are so many things we need to check, so many items to cross-reference. The Parque Ciudad Hotel is not happy, but I’ve quarantined Room 612 while we search for answers. I just wish that Hillary Ellis’s body had not been cremated. I certainly hope the Canadians tested it for fluoroacetate when they had a chance. The chemical is so rare, the test for it is often not done.”

Ramirez shook his head. Apiro was right. Who in their right mind would be so anxious to cremate the body of a loved one?

As soon as Ramirez got off the phone with Hector Apiro, he called Celia Jones.

“Celia, Hector needs copies of the autopsy and laboratory results from Señora Ellis’s death. We have to find out if they tested for fluoroacetate in her system.” He explained Apiro’s findings. “We don’t have time to work through official channels. The travel advisory is only hours away.”