by Peggy Blair
Espinoza nodded. “I’ll try the Avenida. And the Plaza de Carlos Tercero and the Galerías de Paseo in Vedado.” The Avenida de Italia on San Lázaro had once been a centre for fine apparel. But the stores no longer carried much stock.
“Good idea,” said Ramirez. “This woman is in the system. Get a copy of her photograph to take with you.” He hoped the photocopier hadn’t run out of toner. “The sales clerks may remember seeing her with a client. We need to question the jineteras who work in the areas where she was arrested before. They may know something. This nylon had to come from somewhere. Let’s hope it wasn’t a gift from her elderly grandmother.”
17
Inspector Ramirez dropped Fernando Espinoza off at police headquarters and drove to the Plaza de la Revolución to brief the Minister of the Interior.
The dead man sat in the back seat looking out the window. Every now and then he turned his head to follow an attractive woman with his eyes, rounding his lips, making a soundless whistle.
Ramirez had to agree. As much as he loved his wife, he was acutely aware of how many beautiful women there were in Havana. The young ones were dressed in tight, skimpy clothes and low-cut tops, but even the older ones showed off their legs. He could see them laughing and flirting and gesturing with their hands as they gossiped and haggled with street vendors. There was no doubt about it, as even the ghost in the back seat of his car could see, they were full of life.
Ramirez pulled into the plaza and parked his small blue car beside a row of ministry sedans, easily identified by their olive-green licence plates. He walked up the wide concrete path into the imposing complex that housed the Ministry of the Interior. Its exterior had a huge steel outline of Che Guevara’s head, a gift from the French government.
A stray dog, head down, its skin ravaged with mange, panted lightly on the sidewalk. It was completely indifferent to passersby, even one who stopped to place the remnants of a sandwich beside it on the ground.
Followed closely by the dead man, Ramirez walked down the hallway to the minister’s office, past the familiar black-and-white photograph of Padre Rey Callendes in the Sierra Mountains ministering to the doomed supporters of President Batista. Callendes had collected and distributed child pornography. His crimes had provided Ramirez with a political advantage, one he planned to use as long as he could get away with it.
“I need to see the minister,” he told the minister’s clerk. “It’s important.”
“Do you have an appointment?” she said crisply, knowing he didn’t. “The Major Crimes Unit is supposed to report to General de Soto.”
She emphasized the word General. It was one thing for the minister to contact Ramirez whenever he chose; another for the inspector to appear at his door uninvited.
Ramirez smiled. “I’ll wait.”
He sat in a worn chair and picked up a copy of Granma. He rarely read it; the contents of the Communist Party newspaper were always the same. It focused on Cuba’s great progress despite the embargo and bemoaned the moral depravity of the rest of the world. Today, however, two stories caught his eye.
Twenty-six American CIA agents were about to be tried in Italy for kidnapping and torturing a Muslim cleric in 2003. The ringleader, Seldon Lady, was Honduran-born and linked to Luis Posada. The trial was proceeding in absentia. Lady was believed to be somewhere in Central America, working with the CIA on files involving Cuba.
The second article described the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique at Guantánamo Bay. The American vice-president, Dick Cheney, was quoted as saying its use on prisoners was a “no-brainer.” The story repeated Fidel Castro’s protests that the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay was illegal and that the Americans had no right to torture enemy combatants on Cuban soil in violation of international law.
Guantánamo Bay was a constant source of friction to Castro. It had been leased to the Americans in 1903, but after the revolution Castro refused to cash the rent cheques; he claimed the lease was obtained under duress. The Americans insisted Guantánamo Bay was their sovereign territory and American soil. The uncashed cheques were said to be stuffed in Castro’s desk drawer.
Before Ramirez had a chance to finish reading the article, the clerk waved him into the minister’s office. She looked surprised, wary of his new-found power.
“Come in, come in, Inspector Ramirez,” said the minister. He seemed nervous. Ramirez wondered if the politician was like that normally or whether Ramirez was having that effect on him.
After Detective Rodriguez Sanchez’s death, Ramirez had recovered an encrypted distribution list for child pornography from his laptop computer. Natasha Delgado was working her way through the aliases. But Ramirez believed that at least one of the names belonged to the man seated behind the polished mahogany desk.
The minister couldn’t be sure exactly how much Ramirez knew, and that uncertainty had introduced new vigour into their relationship. The politician no longer saw Ramirez as a mere vegetable in the political food chain, but as a top-line predator.
Blackmail had its privileges, thought Ramirez. It equalized relationships in a way Marxism had never quite achieved.
“You’re lucky I could see you,” the minister said. “I’m extremely busy. Our delegates are in Geneva this week, attacking the Americans for the immunity they’ve given Luis Posada and all the other anti-Cuba terrorists they shelter.”
It was widely believed that Posada, a CIA operative, was behind the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane. He was charged in Venezuela but acquitted after intense pressure by the United States. A new trial was ordered, but before it could be held Posada escaped to El Salvador, where he allegedly built another network as well as more deadly bombs. He really shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble, thought Ramirez. These days Cuba’s buildings collapsed by themselves. No bombs required.
“This won’t take long,” said Ramirez. He described the incident at the museum.
The minister frowned. “I’m surprised I haven’t heard screams from the Italian embassy. Is there anything to link this to Luis Posada?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s a relief,” said the minister. “I think Castro would shut down tourism altogether if he thought Posada’s men were on the island.”
The previous November, one of Posada’s supporters in Miami was found with machine guns and explosives. Rumours had quickly spread that there could be another Bay of Pigs invasion, supported by CIA agents operating out of Guantánamo Bay.
The minister removed a cigar from the humidor on the large polished desk. “Too bad the vandal didn’t spray the abstracts; perhaps no one would have noticed. Have you made any progress in finding out who’s responsible?”
“Not yet. But we’re extremely shorthanded at the moment with Detective Sanchez gone. Detective Espinoza is good but lacks experience.” Ramirez told the politician about the woman’s body and his certainty that it was related to the Prima Verrier murder.
“How can there be a serial killer murdering prostitutes?” said the minister, wrinkling his forehead. “We haven’t had prostitution for years, not since the crackdown.”
Ramirez raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t be so literal, Ramirez,” said the minister. “You know what I mean. El Comandante will never acknowledge a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s like AIDS. We don’t have any here either. He’s very proud of that fact.”
“Yes,” said Ramirez, “but I hope he realizes that’s why so many tourists come to Cuba in the first place.”
The minister frowned again, tapping his fingers on the top of his desk.
Fidel Castro had initially encouraged prostitution. He even invited Hugh Hefner to the island for a Playboy photo shoot called “The Girls of Cuba.” But when the Special Period turned out to be the normal course of affairs, Castro decided that jineteras posed a capitalist threat. He called them pelig
rosas—dangerous—and said they were too aggressive towards foreigners.
Thousands of women were loaded onto buses and sent to rehabilitation camps where the Federation of Cuban Women attempted to deter them from further sexual misconduct by making them muck out barns and pluck chickens. Ramirez sometimes wondered how turistas would react if they knew how much of the meat in tourist restaurants was prepared by prostitutes.
The minister narrowed his eyes. He sat down heavily in his worn leather chair. “What do you want?”
“I need at least one more person to help me investigate these crimes properly.”
The minister chewed on the end of his cigar. He was back in his comfort zone, wheeling and dealing.
“I can’t give you another detective, Ramirez. There’s no money left in your budget. Besides, we have other priorities at the moment. Luis Posada’s trial is about to begin in the United States. The last thing on Castro’s mind right now are jineteras.” The politician snorted. “The Americans insist on sticking a fork in his eye with that stupid ticker display at the Swiss embassy. Billboards. That’s where El Comandante’s mind is these days. He wants Posada convicted.”
The minister waved his cigar in the air. “And now the Americans have the cojones to insult Castro’s leadership. With all this going on, do you really think he cares about a few dead jineteras?”
“The turistas will notice if their girlfriends start disappearing,” said Ramirez. “They’ll ask questions. This could hit the foreign media.” Although the complication for the minister wasn’t when jineteras disappeared, Ramirez realized. It was when they showed up.
The minister looked at Ramirez for a moment. Then he smiled. That unexpected smile made Ramirez extremely uncomfortable.
“I’ll give you Manuel Flores for a few days. He’s working at the Centre for Legal Medicine this month, advising us on issues related to the Posada charges.”
“Manuel Flores?” said Ramirez. “I thought he was dead.”
18
The jinetera’s remains were laid out on the metal gurney that Hector Apiro used for autopsies. Remains was the only word that accurately described what was left of Antifona Conejo.
Apiro and his technicians had removed the woman’s clothing. There was no sign of her ghost inside the morgue. Like the other apparitions who visited Ramirez from time to time, it seemed she wanted nothing to do with her further dismantling.
Ramirez slipped into the white overalls visitors were required to wear in Apiro’s work space. Opera music played quietly in the background, Carmen taunting Don José, saying if he really loved her, he would go with her to the mountains.
Ramirez looked up quizzically at the fluorescent lights overhead. “¿Alumbrón?”
Alumbrón was slang for the unexpected: light. Although the shortages had improved since the “energy revolution,” when Cuban youth were sent by the government throughout the country to replace light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, Cubans still expected that on most days they would lose power.
“Yes,” said Apiro, grinning. “Not just the lights but the refrigeration units too. They’ve been running all day. I have to keep pinching myself.”
Ramirez told his friend about his meeting with the minister.
“Interesting that he’s loaned you Dr. Flores,” Apiro said thoughtfully. “Do you trust him?”
“I’m not sure,” said Ramirez. “When I worked with him, I sometimes wondered if he was simply very good at predisposing people to believe whatever he told them. He told me he’d studied with an American psychiatrist who developed a profile of the Mad Bomber of New York, right down to his double-breasted suit. I was impressed until I realized it was like predicting a man having a beard during the revolution.”
Apiro chuckled. “I think he probably looks for things so obvious that others don’t pay much attention to them. Personally, I have a problem with psychiatry in general. I spent far too many years in the Soviet Union watching dissidents diagnosed as ‘sluggish’ schizophrenics and sent off to rehabilitation camps. The psychiatrists deemed that anyone who didn’t support Communism was mentally ill.”
“Why did they call them ‘sluggish’ schizophrenics?”
Apiro shrugged his shoulders. “Because there was nothing wrong with them. They said they suffered from ‘delusions of reform.’ It’s all too easy to characterize someone as mentally ill for political reasons.” Apiro looked at his friend sadly. “It’s apparently the definition of insanity now to hang a flag the wrong way.”
One of Apiro’s medical colleagues, Oscar Biscet, had been sentenced to three years in jail for hanging the Cuban flag upside down. A month after his release, he was rearrested and accused of being a CIA operative, one of the seventy-five dissidents jailed in the crackdown. Then Fidel Castro called him a “crazy little man.” That designation earned the physician an additional twenty-five years in isolation.
Apiro shook his head, disgusted. “The irony is that Oscar would be better off in a mental institution like Mazorra. They play music in the garden whenever foreign doctors visit. At least he’d be able to interact with other people occasionally.”
At Mazorra, there was a ward set up for foreign visitors. It was like the washrooms constructed at the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague for the International Red Cross to view during World War II, thought Ramirez. They held rows of gleaming sinks and showers but had no plumbing.
“Maybe so,” said Ramirez. “But they’d all be crazy.”
“I doubt it,” Apiro said. “The government only puts the sane ones in institutions.” He shook his head. “I’d be careful around Dr. Flores, Ricardo. He has friends in high places.”
Manuel Flores had fought beside Che Guevara at Sierra Maestra. After the revolution, he headed the Centre for Legal Medicine. That’s where Ramirez first met him, in 1997, during the investigation that year into the Havana hotel bombings. The first bomb had exploded in Havana in April at the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Others went off minutes later at the Sevilla and the Plaza. A second attack struck the Meliá Cohiba four months later. In the third wave of explosions in September, an Italian tourist was blown to pieces at the Copacabana; three others were badly injured.
The last Ramirez had heard, Flores had returned to the United States to seek medical care for an aggressive form of cancer. His wife had died years before. Ramirez recalled him mentioning a daughter who had left Havana to find work. He wondered what it was that brought Flores back.
Hector Apiro began, as always, by moving his three-rung stepladder around the body as he performed a visual examination. He stopped occasionally to take pictures. “I would take more,” he apologized, “but I’m almost out of film.”
“There’s none in the exhibit room?”
“Not at the moment.”
Ramirez shook his head. When supplies ran low, the police exhibit room acted as an unofficial warehouse for the Major Crimes Unit. But thanks to the Internet, tourists were becoming more aware of the installations they weren’t permitted to photograph. Fewer took pictures of the airport or the police station, and with Fidel Castro hospitalized while recovering from a mysterious illness, there were no opportunities to confiscate cameras from tourists trying to capture his image either. The fact that more tourists were using digital cameras made pilfering film even harder.
Ramirez wished Sanchez were still alive. Remembering his friend, he felt a sharp pang of loss. Sanchez would have decided that something innocuous was illegal, like snapping pictures of mariposas, the national flower, and the shortage would have been temporarily resolved.
“Put this on the counter for me, will you?” Apiro handed Ramirez the camera. “Well, let’s see what we have here.” He positioned himself on the top rung of his stepladder and leaned over the body. “She appears to be a normally developed female.”
She was actually rather well-developed, thought Ramirez, thinking of the de
ad woman who waited for him in the hallway. Although the corpse no longer looked much like her, or any other woman for that matter.
Apiro pulled off his latex gloves, climbed down, and moved the stepladder to the front of the gurney. He climbed up again, put the gloves back on, and lifted the corpse’s head. He turned it towards him, examining it carefully.
“Look how symmetrical her cheekbones are, her ears,” Apiro said. “That’s extremely rare. Most of us are somewhat lopsided. Me more than anyone.” He let out his staccato laugh, making the sound of a small jackhammer.
Ramirez couldn’t see exactly what appealed to his small colleague about the dead woman’s features. But he had to admit, her ghost was striking.
“She had pierced ears. Silver earrings.” Apiro removed them. “Gloves, Ricardo?”
“Sorry.” Ramirez retrieved a pair of thin latex gloves and a plastic exhibit bag from the steel counter. He slipped on the gloves and Apiro passed him the earrings. Ramirez looked at them before he placed them in the bag. He initialled and dated the bag and returned it to the counter.
“You know, the way she was lying there in the woods, with her arms folded across her chest, she reminded me of the woman in the Russian children’s story,” said Apiro. “The one poisoned with a manzana.” An apple. “The dead princess. You know the one I mean. Pushkin wrote a poem about it. He stole the idea from the Grimm brothers, but it came from a Russian folktale.”
Ramirez nodded. Estella had the storybook, a gift from Ramirez’s mother to help his little girl learn English. “Of course. Blancanieves.” Snow White.
“It has a peculiar plot, doesn’t it?” Apiro reached up to adjust the gooseneck lamp. It had a longer than usual neck to compensate for his size. “Snow White was already dead when she was kissed by her prince. Most cultures would consider that necrophilia.” Apiro laughed. He looked closely at the woman’s neck. “The mark from the ligature runs horizontally, crossing the anterior midline of the neck just below the laryngeal prominence. The skin of the anterior neck shows petechial hemorrhaging.”