The Poisoned Pawn (34 page)

This time, she listened. He observed the deepening pink of her skin as her tissues pulled oxygen from her blood. The carbon dioxide from her exhalations would help her feel better, but only briefly. Up here, so high in the sky, there was no chance of proper treatment.

Well, what more could he do, given his limitations? Eshu could not prevent, he could only warn. Sometimes humans heeded his warnings; sometimes they did not.

It was always interesting, either way. People were so complicated. It wasn’t like a scientific experiment where one could set controls and conditions and expect a consistent result. You could try all of that, and mortals would do whatever they wanted. It was Obatala’s greatest gift. Free will.

Although it was always fun to create patterns and see which mortals glimpsed the connections. Charles Darwin was one of the best, but even he erred by assuming randomness.

He knew she was dying when he smelled the bitter almonds on her breath. It was a classic symptom. He’d inhaled it more than thirty-four thousand times only a decade or so before, when sugar cane farmers tried to make their own
añejo
and nearly blinded the entire city of Havana.

Now
that
had been fun.

The traveller, the people called him, the protector of the crossroads. But he had so many other names: Elleguá, Legba, Santo Niño de Atocha, the Holy Infant of Prague.

And in the country where he was going, Chipiapoos. The keeper of doors. Overseer of the road to self-destruction.

Still, he wondered why this woman had stamped her feet if she didn’t want his visit. It was a dangerous thing to do, to anger the gods.

The airplane landed. Eshu didn’t wait for the metal stairs to be unfolded; he had no need. He retrieved his
garabato
and walked through the metal door. The flight attendant looked through him without seeing him. He tipped his hat at her anyway, polite as always. It was his first visit to this part of the world since he fell through the ice. A very long time since he’d seen snow.

Behind him, a member of the flight crew screamed for an ambulance. He strode merrily into the storm, twirling his cane.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing the second in the Inspector Ramirez series proved so much easier than the first that I became convinced, almost to the point of paranoia, that my editor, Adrienne Kerr, and my Canadian agents, Anne McDermid and Chris Bucci, must have got it wrong. I didn’t believe them when they told me they really enjoyed it and couldn’t find any plot gaps.

The reason, I’m sure, is due to the keen eye of my UK agent, Peter Robinson, who read the manuscript twice and provided me with great advice, as well as to the extremely valuable feedback provided by external readers Bob McColl, Lisa Brackmann, Debbie Hantusch, Thelma Farmer, and Bill Schaper. Guillermo Martinez-Zalce, as always, was a great resource for making sure the Spanish words and phrases I used were accurate.

I am also grateful to my good friends cardiologist Dr. Mark Perrin, pathologist Dr. Greg Flynn, and Dr. Ralph Hollands (the real one), for making sure I got the medical issues and treatments in this book right.

Shortly after I finished writing
The Beggar’s Opera
, which involved the drugging, rape, and murder of a Havana street child, I learned that three Italian tourists had been jailed in Cuba
for an identical crime. Then, long after I’d submitted the manuscript for
The Poisoned Pawn
to Penguin, I discovered that the Pope’s butler had been arrested for leaking information about alleged corruption and money-laundering in the Vatican. And just as the book was about to go to editing, the media reported that two Quebec sisters had died of what appeared at first to be food poisoning at a tourist resort in Thailand.

Talk about life imitating art! Unfortunately, this prescience hasn’t translated into any particular success with the stock market, but it has convinced me that Ramirez and Apiro are out there in some parallel universe, enjoying a glass of rum and each other’s company. I’m grateful for their generosity in letting me eavesdrop on their discussions from time to time.

A final thanks, of course, to Adrienne and all the wonderful folks at Penguin, and to Alex Schultz, my brilliant copyeditor and friend.