The more John thought of this, the more he came to this conclusion.
So he tried to decide if any other scenario worked. No, not really.
8.
HE FOLDED THE MAP OF OATHOA AND PUT IT IN HIS POCKET. IN the late afternoon he found his way over to the back part of town with small haciendas and apartamentos—old stuccoed apartment buildings of three or four storeys, with their windows opened blankly, and grapelike clustered dark wires leading to and from them in the warm late-afternoon air that smelled suddenly of smoke and rain.
He walked his way behind seven streets filled with skinny angry dogs and blind dark windows with small cafés, along back cobblestone streets to the out-of-the-way Calle Republica, where that same sewer that ran by the jail ran too. It was desolate, this street; the buildings were small and haphazardly constructed, with corrugated roofs and fences and on a few roofs large, old satellite dishes.
It was now 85 degrees. Looking back, he could see the jail in the distance. He watched as some people loitered outside the woman’s cell window. John counted five, and more gathering. They gathered there because they were women, and she was a woman who had done a terrible thing, using her womanhood to do so. Often we need people to fall beyond us, in order to refrain from grasping the hand they hold out in order to be saved.
Last evening he had gone into the church to say a prayer. (In fact, he did that often wherever he was.) The church had pictures of the thirteen men from Oathoa who had died in the mine disaster, along the left wall near the fount of holy water. He looked at all the names—there, second from the end, was one Pedro Sonora. A small man with tousled black hair, a weathered face and a grin.
LA MINA HA MATADO A ESTOS HOMBRES, a plaque stated.
The mine has killed these men.
And the priest, who was deeply embedded in the political ramifications of the mine disaster, knew who Mary Cyr was. And though he should have told these women not to go there, he gave them Communion each morning and watched as they traipsed down the street to the jail being led there by Lucretia Margarita Rapone, who, the old porter told John with a slight grin, was “una bromista.”
And John did not know what that meant, but standing off to the side was a German fellow in a wide white hat, with a bandana around his thick neck and a very expensive watch on his right wrist.
“He says she is a—prankster—charlatan—something like that.”
John thanked him.
Something like that.
And then he left to find out what he could.
* * *
—
The farther John got along the desolate road, the less the village looked like anywhere a tourist would ever want to be. The road became narrower and overgrown with weed, and intermittent rocky yards and fields spread out. A small white burro passed him, with a sore on its back. Far away, across a number of small fields, he could see the hills where the Amigo mine had been sunk. He kept walking, looking up at the giant head frame, desolate and peering out like the ghost of some terrible sick giant.
Now and again an SUV raced by, first slowing down, then speeding up after it passed him. The dust was white and came drifting up on his legs, and caused him a kind of spasm, suddenly. But he stopped walking, and waiting until he regained his strength, continued. He took a shot of nitro—just a short one.
A corrugated tin door shut closed. He passed a garage where he noticed some boys, and the man in the white suit jacket he had seen yesterday—the man with the motor, who was now working on a car engine, looked back at John curiously. The SUV pulled into that garage and a man got out. He looked at the man—knew him emphatically as a gangster.
Inspector de operaciones mineras was written large on the back window.
The inspector of mines.
This man, he would come to know as Hulk Hernández. He would begin to see him at various places almost every day. And Mr. Hernández would make sure John saw him.
The idea—or the worry—the corroborating specialist had in Halifax was that if John was working on a case too strenuous, he would have another heart attack, a big one. But he had no idea he would be working on this case four nights ago.
He came to a road—left led back around to the main square and centre of town, and right led to the lower, even dimmer and more cluttered, part of Calle Republica. There was a sign in Spanish, a bronze plaque with a man on horseback. Two legs of the horse were raised, so the soldier had been wounded. A soldier who had fought for the city 180 years before.
He went right.
Here he saw many dark little cubby doors into small white houses with black kitchens burned into the cliffs, the smell of kerosene. Behind all of this was the panorama of the sixteen-acre municipal dump, where bright pieces of cloth moved under the glare, and a man in a tractor pushed garbage ahead of him. John realized these were people scavenging, and he became aware of what the old porter had tried to tell him: that Victor had likely lived in a shelter constructed in the dump itself. Vultures circled high above—still, the night was quiet and it was growing later. From this part of the road he could look down in the other direction and see the enormous villas, and vistas of the rich.
John walked back over the mounds of dirt to the road. Then he walked back along the streets he had come until he came to a familiar-looking fountain. Across the street there was a sign for a bar. Two of the young men who had been at the garage had followed him at a distance of about fifty yards, smiles on their faces, as if they were sharing a joke about his gringo stupidity.
He walked over and stood at the bus stop. A bus would take him back to Los Marinas.
The Sea of Cortez shone in the distance. Glimmered. The doctor told him his years of struggle and intensity had allowed his body to now turn against him, to cause it to fight against itself. This is what caused the illness. The doctor had even predicted another heart attack unless he retired.
And in a way if he did not watch it, it might cause something as bad.
“And what is it called?”
“Autoimmune.”
“I have heard of it.”
“I think you might have the beginning of it. Stress will kill you.”
“Thanks for the information. But don’t tell that to anyone else.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to work.”
The bus manoeuvred its way back over the streets in the evening. Lights were coming on; the motor scooters sounded lonelier as the day wound down.
Where he was staying was a sad affair—a derelict resort with one of the two pools closed. Of all the resorts, why had she picked this one?
Of all the towns too, he thought. This was, it seemed, the end of the line for her, in one way or the other.
So why?
To disappear, of course, and to pretend that she was useful, for so many had called her “useless.” She was going to prove herself to the Toronto crowd, or to her family; start an orphanage and “get on The Oprah Winfrey Show.” This is what she told people.
But now—well, it might be true, that she would be mentioned on that show—but not for the reasons she supposed.
Or did she suppose—perhaps there was another game she was playing; perhaps she knew exactly why she was here.
Her family had tried to protect her. But maybe in doing so they were protecting themselves. They had sent her to a physiatrist when she was fifteen, and put her on medication.
She got off medication, and began by seventeen a regimen of something else: gin and tonic. She was a pianist and had a good grasp of the art—so she told John. She held a Stradivarius in her hand, but did not play the violin, and had met those who did hold one in their hand and did play. But then it started—after so many years; her dislike of being followed, and being watched. So she kept sliding away from him.
“I have changed,” she said the last time she saw him, almost four years ago, inviting a dispute, “And you have not.”
She was in with the Toronto crowd; one who was teaching a course cal
led “Diversity Awareness, Societal Change and Sensitivity Training for White Males.” Ah yes—white males needed most to be sensitive. In many white intellectual minds, the only white males allowed in the coalition of the dispossessed were of course themselves.
“No—I have not changed,” he said. She could be filled with a kind of naive intellectual disappointment, and she showed it. She had taken a trip to Africa—or as she said, in a scathing tone, “Almost two trips to Africa—almost two of them—well, I could see Africa from where I was the second time—and I have seen things over there. Little black boys and girls—have you ever seen them?—perhaps not.”
(That he had seen them and had seen them massacred in Rwanda, and had nightmares over it, is something he did not mention. Still, there was a moment when a smart person—and John was very smart—understood that she knew and wanted you to catch on that she was being affecting.)
She was always triumphantly imperial over the smallest things—like the first time she helped hay a field in back of her grand cottage. She telephoned the editor of one of her grandfather’s papers and said:
“Just to inform you—I too have hayed a field.”
And lo and behold it made the front page of the paper. Her grandfather was furious that it had; but the poor editor thought he was supposed to acknowledge the event because she had phoned him. What then was he supposed to do?
They found her in a smelt shed out on the bay when she was sixteen, smelts freezing on the ice about her, and the elderly Micmac Amos Paul helping her learn.
“I have learned,” she said, “how to smelt fish—name ten women who can do the same.”
Now she teetered on the brink of despair, the crust of earth under her feet giving away to where small troubled lanterns shone in the depths below.
The Mexican was just a boy. She was now almost forty-five. If he could get her out of here—and convince her family that she had “retained” herself, she would inherit seventy-eight to eighty million in six months.
“That’s a lot of dill pickles, Mr. Man,” she once said to him about her money. “If you marry me, I will give you some.”
The idea among the population of Oathoa now becoming clear to him was the depraved motivation of a kind of older, wildly sexual predator with hordes of money, coming down to Mexico to look for pleasure—with a young boy.
“This is what you get for not marrying me,” she said to him today, and then smiled as if it was a joke. So, on the blogs that now followed her endlessly, the rumours abounded, and it was now murder. The act was, in the blogs, more and more sordid as more time passed. Though John never read them—and in fact reading anything about her in the past twenty years gave him a shock and pain, a prolonged sense of waste. But now the line “This is what you get for not marrying me” made him realize why. If he had married her—in spite of all objections, his own included—perhaps she would never have found herself in a Mexican jail.
9.
“YES, MURDER—OF A YOUNG BOY.”
So said Constable Fey, who had a grim, determined look when he spoke. And he spoke with a certain moral conditioning that he exhibited toward Americans (and by proxy Canadians), which was reflected in his impeccable demeanour.
Fey’s national pride allowed his mistrust of her, and there was a very delicate encouragement for John as a common man and a fellow policeman to understand why. But John refused to succumb to this psychology, even though it might have brought him closer to the constable.
“I cannot see her killing anyone,” John said, “ever.”
John knew that in Mexico it might have been a dislike based on how she dressed and carried herself. Because Fey must have seen in tourists this same duplicity of warmth and superiority—and Fey was protecting national honour against the conceit of so many from the north.
The secret was: A case of rape of a Spanish tourist had been reported in this town just two years before—and it cast a dark shadow against the lawns and buildings about the old square, the gated resorts, the mist across the golf courses, and meandered into the conscience of citizens who were told by the foreign press that they were unkempt and brutal. So this now was their turn. That is, John sensed in every fibre of his sick body the hidden—deeply hidden—delight that this now was their turn. It was now their turn to be morally outraged; and they would be. Not to be would be unthinkable for them. This is what he had already seen in Lucretia Rapone.
And in fact this is what Fey now confirmed:
“Why did she come here?” Fey asked. “She is…” Here he hesitated and looked at some papers and held them up, to make the papers launch his remark. “She is a very—well, sexual woman, people say.”
“That is what they say. But I think there is a more innocent explanation, maybe?” was all John said.
The constable paused a moment, and then answered.
“No—she killed him. They overheard the argument.”
“Only one?” John said.
Fey countered with:
“He said to her one night, ‘No más me molestes.’” That is what they do, these fading American beauties—come here looking for boys—you must know that. That’s their new liberation—”
“Well, some of them, perhaps,” John said. “A few, maybe—but not Mary Cyr. And I know why he said that—”
“Oh, you know why he said that?”
“Yes—it was because she was asking about his father.”
“But I don’t believe that,” Fey said. And his refusal to believe was impeccable, and therefore unshakable.
So John shrugged and said nothing.
It was already too hot, and his head ached; his eyes too were sore. So was his throat.
Three days before, he was sitting in a motel room where he had lived after leaving his wife, Jeannie. He had loaded his revolver. What if he had not picked up the phone as he did? In fact over the past year he often had the phone cut off for lack of payment, but he had it reconnected last week, so in a way these things were out of his hands.
Little Mary Cyr was once again sadly enough in them.
That picture of her in the car that said POLICÍA could be spotted here and there on the third page in certain papers of the world. Most of the world did not know her. Yet. The policemen here were so sure of her guilt they had a dismissive but paternal attitude toward him. They were so sure of her guilt they did not mind him asking questions, for they felt (or Fey did) that a Canadian connection in the investigation did add some weight and fair play.
“The coal miner’s daughter,” they joked. This had gone from lip to ear to lip throughout the poorer district of Oathoa, where many of the miners’ families lived. Everyone wanted to line up to see her.
“Ponemos en mejoras de carácter grave, pero no nos dieron dinero para poner más.”
That was the statement from Carlos DeRolfo. John asked at the desk for someone to please translate it for him. It said something like this:
We put in major upgrades, but they wouldn’t give us money to do any more—
He went on to say this is why the bump happened.
When they asked him if those upgrades were actually done, he said solemnly:
“Sí, en la tumba de mi madre.”
Yes, on my mother’s grave.
Besides, he said, you could see them as soon as you entered the mine.
“Then why did you continue to mine if you wanted and needed a better infrastructure?”
“Habíamos planeado para este mes.”
We had planned to stop this month.
So with all of this, and Mary Cyr in a cell, they knew they had a very big fish.
“Tell them I am just a little fish—almost no fish at all. Much like a guppy—only a small guppy at that.”
That is why people were now gathering about the cell. It is why other tourists were sitting in the cafés gossiping. It is why the archaeological expedition was interviewed about a cave Mary had visited. (Did she plan to take the body of Victor there?) And all the statements gathere
d were put into a giant folder tied with blue ribbon and kept in secret, even though everyone knew what was in it. And Constable Fey had this blue-ribboned folder and looked at it with a great deal of concern. As if his expression was not suitable to match his anguish over what she had done. (This folder would be transferred to the prosecutor’s office within the next few days. The well-known, importante Isabella Tallagonga.)
10.
SHARON DEROLFO HAD ALREADY SNAPPED NINE PICTURES OF Mary in the cell, and was trying to sell them abroad. A few weeks ago Sharon DeRolfo had thought of moving to Mexico City with her girlfriend—now it was the most fortuitous thing that she was here. DeRolfo dressed as if she was of the people and poor. But that was not really the case, and even a casual observer would notice the bling of a watch and ring, and a diamond nose stud that glittered when she spoke.
And John had already noticed that when looking at a picture—and he had too noticed her last name was the same as Carlos DeRolfo’s, part owner of Amigo. So, John thought, she went to fine arts school—became a photographer, is rebelling against convention but in a safe, tolerant way. No, there was nothing at all wrong with that, he decided.
But that he knew this already would have somewhat amazed Fey.
In Mexico, Fey gravely reminded John Delano, one was assumed guilty until proven innocent. You could not look upon her as innocent once the cell door was closed. Up until that time she might be presumed innocent—but you see—once the door closed—well—the door closed.
Poison over a number of days, Fey said, raising his eyebrows slightly, as if nothing was more insane or grave. He did not have to add, he simply took it for granted that both knew; women were noted poisoners. The young boy, he whispered, was found without his shoes and socks.
John asked if he could speak to someone else—the captain here.
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