The Poisoned Pawn (3 page)

“Talk to your father,” she said. But his father had no satisfactory answer.

Ricky was only nine when his grandmother passed away. Before she died, she made him promise to keep her ghosts a secret. Young Ramirez liked the idea of secrets, of ghosts. It was exciting, like a sunken pirate ship or a giant squid that washed up on the beach.

His
mamita
correctly predicted that he would become a police officer when he grew up. The visions began to appear as soon as Ramirez started investigating homicides.

At first, he thought they were hallucinations, caused by the same rare dementia that claimed his
mamita
’s life. But Hector Apiro ruled that out after he found an old autopsy report that established she’d died of natural causes.

Hyperthyroidism was the illness Apiro thought might account for the occasional trembling in Ramirez’s fingers and legs and the times he was out of breath.

After ruminating about it, Ramirez wasn’t entirely convinced
that Apiro was right. After all, Apiro had attempted a diagnosis without full patient disclosure. Ramirez had not told Apiro, or his own wife, for that matter, that he saw ghosts. He wasn’t sure how they would react, not to mention his mother. Apiro had also mentioned that some other illnesses, like tumours and strokes, could cause hallucinations.

Until Ramirez could see a specialist, which might take months, he’d decided it was best to treat the ghosts as if they were real.

After all, his grandmother’s final words were a warning: “Do nothing, Ricky, to anger the gods.”

FIVE

Inspector Ramirez parked his car and walked briskly down the cracked concrete path to the government offices at the Plaza de la Revolución. The dead woman trailed behind.

The landmark building that housed the Ministry of the Interior was decorated with a huge outline of Che Guevara’s head and the words
Hasta la victoria siempre
. Che had used the phrase to end his last letter to Fidel Castro. But like everything else in Cuba, it was nuanced. Without punctuation, it could mean either “We will always fight until victorious” or “Wait for me until I come home.”

The old woman tagged along as Ramirez entered the building. He strode past a long row of black-and-white photographs hanging on the wall. She stopped in front of one of them and scrutinized it closely. Ramirez glanced at the image as he nodded to the minister’s clerk, who was seated behind a scratched wooden desk.

Raúl Castro had been photographed with a priest and two prisoners in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the thick of the revolution. Fidel Castro’s younger brother wore camouflage pants and a khaki hat. The prisoners were counter-revolutionaries,
supporters of Fulgencio Batista, on their way to the firing squad, if they had survived that long.

“
La China roja
,” Raúl Castro’s men had called him. It was a play on words—“Red China.” But because of the female article, China could also mean “Chinese woman” or “painted china.” This resulted in much gossip and speculation about the clothes Raúl wore in private.

“The minister will see you now,” the clerk said, to Ramirez’s surprise. She waved him straight through to the minister’s office for the second time in less than a week.

He opened the heavy door, allowing the dead cigar lady to precede him. The old woman coyly held her fan to her face and fluttered her lashes. For a moment, the years slipped away, and Ramirez glimpsed the passionate young woman she once was.

The minister sat behind a massive mahogany desk. He tapped a cigar on its smooth surface. His desk was almost the same size as Ramirez’s car.

“Happy Liberation Day, Minister.”

The politician nodded impatiently. “Your travel authorization to Ottawa has been approved,” he said. He seemed distracted. “You will leave Wednesday. Two days should be enough. The travel costs will come from your department’s budget.”

The minister placed a
tarjeta blanca
, an exit permit, on the desk’s polished top. “As you know, the Canadians have arrested Rey Callendes. We want him brought home.”

Home
. It was a strange word, thought Ramirez, to use in relation to a foreign national. He lowered himself into one of two soft brown leather armchairs. He glanced at the signature on the permit. The minister’s scrawl was readily identifiable by the looped
y
that circled beneath his surname.

This was a complete departure from the rules. Special travel authorizations, even the urgent ones, usually took months. Normally, in these circumstances, a letter of invitation would be required from the Canadian government, as well as a declaration that it would pay all costs.

Travel documents were supposed to be legalized at the Consultoría Jurídica Internacional. And one could expect to spend an entire day queuing up at a Bank of Credit and Commerce branch to divest oneself of three years’ wages to pay for them.

Which was why so few Cubans travelled.
Salida ilegal del país
was considered treason. Thousands of political prisoners served time because they had tried to leave Cuba without the proper paperwork.

“That’s good news,” Ramirez said, his heart sinking. He could only imagine how angry Francesca would be when she found out he was leaving the island without her. “Do you have any further details about the charges?”

“The Canadian authorities have informed us that his laptop was full of rather indelicate photographs. Small boys. It’s believed some were Cuban. There’s concern his arrest will cause quite an international scandal once word gets out.”

“I can imagine,” Ramirez nodded. A Catholic priest caught travelling with child pornography
would
draw attention.

“About this business with Detective Sanchez,” said the minister, waving his hand dismissively. “His funeral will be held on Thursday. Full military honours.”

Ramirez felt a wave of regret that he would not be able to attend, even if the military honours were a sham. “As his superior officer, I would have liked to be there.”

“There are more important matters for you to deal with in Ottawa. Here,” the minister picked up a second document and tossed it to Ramirez. “The Canadian lawyer, Celia Jones. Have her
attest this while you are in Ottawa. You can assure her, if she is reluctant to do so, that we don’t plan to use it in court.”

“If that’s the case, may I ask why we need a sworn document?”

The minister snorted. “Your job is to carry out orders, not to question them.”

“I’m sure she’ll ask.”

“Tell her there’s a bigger picture.”

Ramirez nodded slowly. He wondered if anyone would paint it for him. The dead cigar lady, he noticed, had removed the fabric flower from her white bandana and held it loosely in her fingers.

The politician gestured, waving his cigar. “I want the contents of that attestation reflected in your final report to the Attorney General about Sanchez’s death. And I want to see that report before you file it.”

“I see,” said Ramirez, starting to understand what was expected of him.

He glanced at the ghost. She began a slow circuit around the room, holding her flower in both hands. A woman with a generous rear end, she waddled behind the minister as he paced back and forth in front of the cracked window overlooking the square.

The politician finally sat down, again tapping his Montecristo on the surface of the desk. The cigar lady pulled out her own hand-rolled cigar. On the point of
machismo
, she won handily; hers was twice the length of his.

Ramirez scanned through the pages of the attestation. It had been prepared by Luis Perez, according to the page at the back of the document. And as was so often the case with the corrupt prosecutor, the document was full of lies.

It stated that Detective Rodriguez Sanchez died on December 29, 2006, in a Viñales boarding school while accompanied by Celia Jones, a Canadian lawyer. It said that Sanchez lost his life bravely and courageously when he fell through a rotten floor while
investigating crimes against children committed by representatives of the Catholic Church.

It was translated into English well enough, although Ramirez hoped the sentence that said Sanchez had been extremely well “licked” by his colleagues was simply a typing mistake.

It was true that Sanchez died in Viñales. The floors in the boarding school were certainly rotten enough to kill someone, as in so many Cuban buildings, even those not abandoned for years. It was also true that when it was open, its students were routinely abused by Catholic priests.

What the affidavit failed to mention was that, two decades earlier, Sanchez was one of them. Rodriguez Sanchez died on the steps of the school, not inside. He blew out his brains with his service revolver as Celia Jones looked on, horrified.

Sanchez committed suicide only minutes before Ramirez arrived on the scene. The inspector was too late for the rescue he’d hoped to effect. Not of Jones, Sanchez’s hostage, but of his protegé. Ramirez was still trying to cope with Sanchez’s death and the fact that he had known so little about his best detective, a superb investigator and a man Ramirez had considered his friend.

“Do you want this statement notarized too?” Ramirez asked.

“Of course,” the minister said indignantly. “It is a legal document. It has to be genuine.”

Ramirez managed not to laugh.
Genuine
evidently meant something other than true to politicians.

The minister lit his cigar and drew on it deeply several times. The cigar lady stood behind his large chair, her flower once again pinned to her bandana. She looked over his shoulder at Ramirez, fanning herself in the heat. She pointed to the attestation.

Ramirez nodded. He folded the papers and slipped them into his jacket pocket.

Securing the return of Padre Callendes to Cuba in only three days would be difficult. Cuba lacked a formal extradition treaty with Canada, and with most countries, for that matter. Even foreign judgments from civil courts were unenforceable. But persuading a Canadian lawyer to swear a false affidavit would be next to impossible.

Still, as the minister himself had emphasized, these were not requests but orders from the highest levels. Ramirez would have to think through the practical problems involved in carrying them out. But it seemed to him that he had advanced up the political food chain several levels. He was no longer a lowly vegetable but more of a sheep.

The minister exhaled, sending a cloud of fragrant smoke overhead. He looked relieved. A conspiracy of sorts existed between them now, even if its object was known only to the politician. But Ramirez was sure he would eventually discern what it was. As Hector Apiro once observed about conspiracies, it takes more than one bird to flock.

“Do we understand each other, Ramirez?” the minister asked, standing up. It wasn’t really a question; the meeting was over. The politician had smoking to do.

“Perfectly,” Ramirez lied. He reluctantly pushed himself up from the comfortable chair.

He checked his watch. There was still time to get tickets to the opera. He hoped those, and the promise of Canadian soap, might placate his wife.

But first he had to find Apiro and get his advice on what to do next.

“Oh, Inspector Ramirez? I almost forgot,” said the minister, drawing on his cigar. He smiled unexpectedly, which made Ramirez uneasy. “Happy New Year.”

SIX

Inspector Ramirez looked out the window in Hector Apiro’s thirteenth-floor office in the medical tower, watching a young patrolman slouch against a lamppost on the sidewalk below. Apiro had gone down the hall to get water for coffee. It was the one treat the pathologist allowed himself, and he was always happy to share: fresh beans from the
bolsa negra
, the black market. Rationed coffee was cut with chickpea flour as neatly and efficiently as if the government bureaucrats responsible had been coached by Mexican drug dealers.

The old woman had managed to squeeze her rather large rear end into Apiro’s small swivel chair. She waited impatiently for Ramirez to finish his business with Apiro and start investigating her murder.

If this apparition was real, thought Ramirez, Eshu had certainly lived up to his reputation as a prankster. All his other emissaries had been extremely polite. They willingly disappeared whenever Ramirez needed time alone. They enjoyed riding in his car and wandering around his family’s tiny apartment. They offered whatever silent assistance they could, along with the occasional mute, but gentle, criticism. They never spoke, only gestured.

But this one made it clear that she wasn’t impressed with his inability to decipher her clues. In fact, she gave Ramirez the impression she considered him somewhat clueless.

Apiro opened the door, carrying a kettle in his large hands. He appeared downcast.

“I’m sorry, Ricardo. No coffee today. The water isn’t running. What little trickled from the tap was dark brown. I’ll have to postpone the autopsy I’d planned for this afternoon. Luckily, our refrigeration units are working. Did anyone tell you about the woman’s body that was discovered near Blind Alley this morning? She was elderly, perhaps seventy or eighty.”

The old woman listened intently as Apiro described the crime scene. “What’s interesting is that under her bandana, her head was completely bald. I don’t think it’s from cancer; we have barely any chemotherapy these days, what with supplies being so short. I think she shaved it. Very odd. If I can do the autopsy tomorrow morning, will you be able to join me?”

“I think so. After that, Espinoza will have to handle that file. It looks as if I’ll be going to Canada sooner than I expected.” Ramirez described in detail his conversation with the minister. “He wants to read my report before it goes to the Attorney General. He’s even given me a script to follow.” He pulled out the attestation from his pocket and handed it to the pathologist.

Apiro lit his pipe and nodded thoughtfully as he read through the document. He shook his match to extinguish it.

“Interesting. It’s odd for someone with the minister’s work ethic to be this engaged in a file, isn’t it? And why not let the Canadians deal with Rey Callendes? Why do you think he wants him brought back to Cuba?”