He could not. John asked where would she ever get this poison or even want to? Why would a woman who was in a campaign with Princess Diana to stop land mines suddenly go for the gruesome poison? However, John himself could be cynical enough to know that that was more than possible.
Fey shrugged as if it wasn’t up to him where she got it. Fey became more and more certain of her guilt the more he discovered how infamous she was. Her son had died when he was seven years old.
The Brits had given her the title “Lady” because of her grandfather’s money? So how well would that sit with her many debunkers now? And besides, she went to lay flowers on her British uncle’s grave after the Falklands War. (That too was in the papers filed on her.) That did not sit well with Fey.
Fey made it clear—as he read over her file, sitting behind the large desk—if the situation warranted, and she became too much of a nuisance here, she would be transferred to the women’s federal prison near Mexico City. This of course was not up to him at all. It was up to the federal police. But it did display—even though he tried not to show it—how a conviction was a necessity. And this is what John knew in his gut.
The women who crept up to the cell window at night told her she was going to go to the Prisión del Rayo—and never be seen again. They would kill her in that prison, just to make a name for themselves. One was Lucretia Margarita Rapone. The other was her sister, Principia. John had asked the porter their names, because both their pictures were in the paper. Principia looked the most distraught—but John was unsure of their connection to the boy.
Lucretia was much more sensational. She carried a picture of Victor around her neck. She continually went to the cell to look in, in a kind of nosy, boorish way, as if it was not only her right but also her obligation. Lucretia had been in this excited state for a while now.
It was amazing how many friends Victor had now—one was in fact the local prosecutor who had been briefed on Mary Cyr. Ms. Isabella Tallagonga. She had already met with Lucretia; Lucretia who asked her questions in an inquisitive, combative manner—hoping for restitution for the family. But there was no family left unless she herself claimed that status. Then there might be some money.
“Ah—sí—mi familia,” Lucretia said.
That is, she said Victor was her family. Yet everyone knew Lucretia was childless and Victor’s mother was dead.
All were now caught up in this brilliant farce. That played out in a brilliant way on televised programs across the state.
No one five days ago knew who Lucretia Rapone was.
No one five days ago knew the gravity of the situation.
Now:
“Murder,” Uncle Garnet said. His voice was weak; he was not in good health. “How in God’s name can that be? I mean murder—you know as well as I she’s a pumpkin head, an empty-headed girl—how can that be?”
“I don’t know,” John answered, “We will have to wait to find out.”
Garnet too was ill, and at the last of his life was seeing how wealth and power meant nothing when it came to scandal, and how in fact scandal was enhanced by wealth and power. They could not have trouble now, with the oil pipeline ready to move through from Quebec. Greg, her cousin from the far side of the family, needed Garnet and his son, and Garnet and his son couldn’t have anything untoward happen. The pipeline was a touchy subject with the Micmac and Maliseet, the Cree and the Algonquin. And now Mary might have thrown a wrench into it all.
Empty-headed girl.
“She is innocent of all charges,” John said.
John of course knew much about this empty-headed girl. He had loved her most of his life, like a father she never had and the daughter who had escaped him. Or if he was truthful—a lover he never managed to have. She had asked him to marry her when she was eighteen and went over the embankment in her car:
“Marry me and we will be happier than anyone else in the world, forever—if not, both of us will be miserable and never find love.”
Of course he said no. And when she closed her eyes and pouted her lips to kiss him, he simply kissed her cheek and put her in the patrol car.
“I will never forgive you for saying no,” she said, “never, never, never, never!” And perhaps she hadn’t. No, she hadn’t, and perhaps he was somehow in hindsight at fault.
It was prophetic. For both of them had in fact been miserable most of their lives.
So now he knew these things:
She had been accused of murder.
She did not commit this murder.
She was said to be a sexual predator.
That too was bogus.
The state things were in these charges would be almost impossible to disprove.
He had supper about eight that evening. There was a singing trio in the bar he went to, and he drank four tequilas.
Later on, he followed the road toward the hill, and made way, past the jail, beyond the donkey, to the old mine shaft in the dark.
When he came to the yard, piles and piles of coal lay about him, railcars sat orange or rust-coloured and all of them silent, tarps sat still. The three-storey cement office was padlocked. Someone had planted a cross on the hill beyond the shaft.
He knew he was being watched—he felt it.
11.
PEDRO WAS THE ONE BANGING THE TIN CUP. HE BANGED IT against the tin plate. His fingers were bleeding. It was the plate they placed their coins in, in front of the statue of Our Lady when going down into the tunnel. Now he banged his tin cup, which had been attached to his belt against the side of this plate. His blood fell on the little statue, and ran down her face.
Of course Pedro had written letters that were never answered. And he had shown Victor these letters, about the conditions of the mine and the lie that was in the papers that they had done millions in upgrades. They had wanted rid of Pedro.
Now the others kept telling him to stop banging, there was no use. But Pedro was in something of a trance and could not stop. He even began to sing.
The mine was open seven months when Pedro Sonora left his donkey in the hovel by the jail and went to help his friend fix his outboard motor. His friend worked as a mechanic at the local garage, and told Pedro that he could work there too if he wanted.
As Pedro was helping take the housing off the engine, his friend’s wife said they were hiring men at the mine. She brought her husband’s coat to him, with the button she had just sewn on with black thread.
So after Pedro fed his donkey a big juicy carrot he walked up the hill toward the mine office. His friend started to, but then got to the top of the hill and for whatever reason turned back.
“I don’t like those people, the DeRolfos,” he said. “Besides, I have a job.”
So Pedro went on alone.
And that is how Pedro became a miner, in a cumbersome hat and a pair of big yellow-and-black rubber pants, walking around 300 metres beneath the ground—right into the deepest part of the hill.
That day, as he banged his tin cup against the Virgin’s plate, he could hear men shouting far away. Those near him spoke of other disasters, where people sent a pipe down and water and food—and then a two-way radio.
But up on the surface things were very different.
Knowing they had done nothing to implement safety measures, Carlos and his wife were panicked. If they tunnelled down, the safety regulators out of Mexico City would certainly find out. There would be dead bodies and a structure that had not been secured in thirty years. The money they had stolen would somehow become known. Besides, Pedro, who they detested for complaining about conditions, was one of those trapped miners.
So he and his wife—pretty but a little obese—devised a plan. And they believed it too. They talked themselves into it, fidgeting and muttering and eating croissants. Pondering too, and eating steak and eggs.
And then they came up with an idea.
“They are dead,” Señor DeRolfo said. He wanted to close the mine, cover it all over twenty-one hours after the bump, because
they had been digging up to 175 tonnes of coal a day—much more than they should have—for the profit. And they had lied to Tarsco about this. They had done upgrades to the front of the mine.
Not a timber or a light had been replaced deeper down. But it wasn’t his idea to call off the search. No, Mr. DeRolfo got a call.
“Close the mine off—they are dead—that’s all there is to it. We don’t want investigators poking around down there.” The man who called them was Hernández. A nice-enough man, sweet and gentle for the most part; but a killer, of men, women and children.
No queremos husmear por ahi.
Instructions like this are always said with a certain amount of clever principle.
* * *
—
Two days after the bump DeRolfo truly felt the men were dead anyway. He had talked himself into it. No one could have survived such an explosion.
His wife stood beside him wringing her hands, a silver cross on her neck and big diamond on her fat left hand, and looked suspiciously at the cameras.
“They are all gone,” she said to the priest. “They must be—so pray for them, Father!”
Pedro was banging his tin cup for another six days.
The owner spoke to his daughter about his nightmares, and his loss of appetite.
But the wife was not satisfied. She did not feel safe at all—not with a boy who said he had a tape recording from his new tape recorder with sounds from below.
“Send that boy of yours, Ángel, to search for him,” she said. The idea of federal prison was terrifying.
But Ángel said he could not find him.
She and her husband drove around in their two Mercedes, and found the child and his little brother. Victor made a mistake—he did not think that anyone would harm him if a woman was with him.
“We have come to get the tape,” Gidgit said, with surprising assurance, “and take it to the police.”
He edged toward her as she smiled at him, the car idling almost silently, and as he moved toward her, Carlos came up behind him.
It was Carlos who killed Victor, by crushing his windpipe, but it was Gidgit who much later in the evening, not knowing what to do, finally in a fit of exasperation stabbed the little child. They put Florin in the dump—wrapped him in two garbage bags, and said a prayer. That he would not be found.
With Victor it was different. They threw him from the car, thinking he was dead and thinking he would be found in the morning on the road. But he managed to crawl away. And managed to get into that woman’s villa and into the spare bedroom, where he died.
Now Victor was dead, and who would feed his donkey? Maybe Gabriella. Ángel Gloton, the young junior lightweight with the incredibly heavy punch, couldn’t—he was too busy, he thought, working for Mr. DeRolfo, trying to solve the murder of Victor and trying to find little Florin.
12.
VICTOR WAS IN THE MORGUE. BUT JOHN WAS NOT ALLOWED TO see the boy’s body. He was allowed to see the doctor if he went and requested it.
She was there when he entered. Her dark hair was long and clasped with a brown plastic hair broach behind her, and her face was exquisitely dark. She wore a small golden crucifix on a chain around her neck. She waited with her hands behind her back and said nothing to him. She was short and her white coat came down to her ankles. She was wearing sneakers. When he glanced at her, she maintained a professional inexpressiveness, yet her eyes caught his once and were slightly mirthful. Then she handed him the autopsy results.
The preliminary test said arsenic, she told him.
“Was there anything else—any sign of a struggle?” he said.
“It was poison,” she said, more certain than defensive. And then, “Mexico has always been blamed, but not this time.”
“No one is meaning to blame Mexico—”
“Ahhh,” she said.
He had to wait two hours, and then went to see Mary.
“It is unfortunate, but I wasn’t allowed to see the body—they are not going to let me trudge through their investigation, and I did not think they would. Would we allow the Mexican police to do it at home?”
But then she wondered about something:
“I think someone set me up,” she whispered.
“Of course,” he said.
“Who?”
“Well, start with who filled out the autopsy report,” John said.
* * *
—
Already John understood that the reason they had taken Mary into custody—that is, the argument that was overheard a few nights before the boy’s death—had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of the boy if it was from arsenic over weeks. He also knew that saying Victor was poisoned over two weeks was very convenient since she had known him for two weeks.
He knew just by this that she was completely innocent.
When he mentioned this to Constable Fey, Fey simply said:
“Yes, it has to be two weeks—you are right—because that’s how long she knew him—so it stands to reason!”
But of course Constable Fey knew Mary was innocent. So, John suspected, did the prosecution. But that did not matter, for now she was in a cell, and therefore she was guilty. Which was a peculiar flaw in the Napoleonic Code.
The one thing he was beginning to suspect was the subtle nature of the dialogue going on between state and federal police forces, and that so far Isabella Tallagonga was winning because murder was a state crime.
John also suspected that it was important for someone in Mexico City to have her on the case. So that meant she was ambitious and certain people were ambitious for her in the country’s capital. That also meant, quite naturally, that she had enemies. But his main concern was Mary.
She was too small to have beaten Victor to death, so they had to say it was poison. Even if that was ludicrous. That meant if there were marks on him, someone much larger might have killed him. To say poison was in fact to weaken the charge.
This is what John reasoned. It had to be an adult, and he suspected marks on the body. So he suspected within a few hours that it was probably an adult male who had killed the boy.
13.
SHE, MARY, SAT IN THE CELL IN A SMOCK, SMOKING ONE cigarette after the other. For the first time he realized her knees were knobby.
The thing she told him on this second visit, as if it was a secret:
“There are bats that come in at night. And I am thinking—if they can so easily come it, maybe I can get out—hmm?”
He told her he was contacting a lawyer in Mexico City that her family had acquired, and the lawyer might be here in a day or so. He was a Mexican lawyer of Spanish descent, one of the best. Then he whispered this: The American side of her family had been informed, and had informed the American embassy. That was all to the good. For, he said, Mexicans like Canadians but do not fear them. They do not like Americans, but I tell you this—they fear them.
Mary listened to this and nodded quietly. The worse thing she did say was that when she peed, a male policeman sometimes watched her. So she tried not to have to pee.
“Erappo Pole is his name,” she said.
“I see.”
“He is no gentleman,” she said. She had tried to put a blanket over the bars, but he insisted for her own good she be in plain view.
“Suicide,” she sniffed. “There is the idea that I am ready and willing to bludgeon myself, as long as I can find a bludgeon to do it.”
“Keep the blanket over you when you have to go,” John said, “and run the tap water too.”
“Ah, tap water—but where is that?”
What he did love about her, and always knew it, was how restrained she could sometimes be in a crisis involving her own safety.
Suddenly now, out of the blue, she asked John to find Plu. That is, her childhood comforter—her blanket.
“You brought Plu?”
“Of course,” she said, wringing her hands and smiling, and then tears welling in her eyes. “It’s tucked under the bed—so it loo
ks like part of the bed. But tell them you have to go into my room to find it, because—”
“Because what?”
“Because I have hidden my diary in it—you keep the diary, but I want Plu. I just pray to God they do not find my diary—but maybe they have already!”
“Well, I will look.”
She had had Plu (named after Pluto) since she was four years old.
He said he would see to it.
“Yes—I will owe you big-time if you bring me Plu,” she said.
So he went out into the sun and bought himself a Corona beer and sat down to relax.
Mary had asked continually where the little child Florin was, and if she could see him. She had asked the guards, but they did not answer.
“Victor had to take care of him, by himself,” she’d said almost in a daze. “I gave him—he had on him forty dollars—I gave him two twenties the last two days—was that found?” she said. Then she gulped to keep back tears.
John didn’t answer.
Later that afternoon when he spotted the boy he had seen the night before he asked the porter his name.
“Ángel Golon,” the old man said. “Why—do you want to talk to him?”
“No—not if I don’t have to.” John smiled.
“He was Victor’s best friend—really—he wouldn’t have hurt him—”
“Well, someone did,” John said, “and I will tell you one thing.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Mary Cyr.”
PART TWO
1.
MARY CYR WAS THE FAVOURITE GRANDCHILD OF NEWSPAPER baron Mr. Blair Cyr himself, amasser of millions—no, billions—of dollars.
The man who had been on the one oil tanker that made it to Malta, so the Brits and Canadians could fuel their Spitfires in 1940. He walked the open deck when it was under attack.
Blair Cyr was with the Canadian troops on D-Day, and rode with them in Holland. In a way he was Hemingway without having to be him.
Mary Cyr Page 6