The Poisoned Pawn

by Blair Peggy

  The waiter gone, Ramirez removed the cover from the serving tray to reveal an omelette. He hadn’t tasted eggs in years.

  Before Christmas, Sanchez had intercepted a Cubanet report on his laptop. He read it out loud to the members of the Major Crimes Unit. They all laughed at the purple prose. “The scarcity of eggs feels like the parting of a loved one who abandons the house to emigrate.”

  Ramirez remembered the old joke: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The embargo.

  He cleaned every morsel from his plate and looked at the clock. He had to get moving. He pulled on his socks and his thin leather shoes.

  He took the elevator downstairs and walked past a row of meeting rooms. Outside the rooms, all the way down the long hallway, banquet tables were extravagantly laden with fruit and breads, muffins. His nose quivered like that of the airport beagle. He was almost giddy with the smells of cooked sausage, ham, and bacon. Black-suited waiters carried silver teapots and replenished shining coffee urns. There was enough food in that corridor alone to feed his family and his neighbours for months. So much food that people seemed indifferent to it, as if the knowledge that they could have as much as they wanted removed their need for it. They stood around casually holding coffee cups instead of piling their plates full.

  Ramirez watched servers do the unthinkable: scrape leftovers into the garbage. It was all he could do to restrain himself from running over to grab their hands, to plead with them to stop the waste. But it also made him think about Apiro’s frightening news. Something had killed two women. Could it be spoiled food? Recycled leftovers? With all the power outages, refrigeration in Havana was never completely safe.

  Ramirez walked past a gallery shop filled with art and sculptures with price tags so high at first he thought he had misread them. Then he entered the high-ceilinged lobby. He walked around a comfortable-looking sofa and upholstered wing chairs. He cast his eyes about, but there was no sign of the dead cigar lady. But then, with her thin white dress, she wasn’t dressed for extreme cold.

  A doorman with a long overcoat and a beige hat set the revolving glass door in motion, much as doormen would at home.

  Outside, the similarities ended. Ramirez’s breath formed a trail as it left his body. It was extraordinary to see it float on the air, like kerosene on a still ocean.

  Ramirez waited on the marble steps watching pedestrians inch carefully along the icy sidewalks. It was just after 9 A.M. He stood, freezing in his light clothes for a good twenty minutes. He stamped his feet to keep warm.

  Detective Charlie Pike finally pulled up in front. A cloud of exhaust hung in the air behind the big red truck like a giant plume of feathers.

  Ramirez fumbled to open the door, his fingers white and frozen. Once buckled up inside, he slipped his hands into his pockets to try to warm them.

  “Good morning, Rick. Chief O’Malley wants to meet you, so I’ll take you to the station first. Then we’ll go see the horsemen.”

  “The horsemen?”

  “The RCMP. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We call them Mounties sometimes, too. But they don’t wear red coats anymore, except in ceremonies, if that’s what you were expecting.”

  Ramirez shivered. When he lived in Russia, the cars, mostly Ladas, had no heaters. But here, even with a fan pumping hot air full-blast, the inside of the truck was cold. The windshield was covered with ice crystals. Only a small portion of it was clear enough to see through.

  Ramirez wondered how Charlie Pike could drive without gloves; how he could navigate with only a few square inches of glass free of ice.

  “Don’t worry,” Pike said. “The truck will warm up soon. The defrost is on. At least it’s running today; I had the block heater plugged in overnight.”

  Ramirez wasn’t sure what any of that meant. But he was starting to understand that Canadians had their own vocabulary for cold weather, and for the equipment to battle it.

  “By the way, Detective Pike, I meant to ask. Is the tap water here safe to drink?”

  In his own home, the water was sometimes brown, the supply of chlorine to treat it erratic. Francesca would have to search the black market and pay dearly for what she could find.

  “Call me Charlie. In Ottawa? Yeah, it’s fine. But it’s not like that everywhere. Quite a few people died a while back in a town called Walkerton when E. coli showed up in their drinking water. A few months later they found the same bug in Six Nations. That’s the reserve my mom came from.”

  “In a country as wealthy as Canada?”

  “There are First Nations all over Canada who don’t have clean water. Some haven’t had running water for decades. People use bottled water for everything.”

  “We often don’t have running water in Cuba. Or electricity, for that matter. But Cuba is a Third World country.”

  “A lot of our reserves might as well be.”

  TWENTY - SEVEN

  Hector Apiro had worked through the entire night on Rita Martinez’s autopsy. He was exhausted, but managed to keep awake by thinking about Maria Vasquez and the way she had so unexpectedly returned to his life. Ma vida, he thought. My life. My everything.

  Maria had changed the way Apiro saw himself. He was no longer the small child left behind at the orphanage, confused and wide-eyed, as the big car pulled away, or the misshapen, ugly dwarf that others stared at. Because in her eyes, he was a man.

  Having her at his side was more than he had dreamed possible. But it also meant that for the first time in his life he had something to lose.

  If Maria ate something that killed her, I would be devastated, thought Apiro. I would become a rogue dwarf, like the one in the court of Peter the Great.

  The idea made him smile sadly to himself. Tsar Peter had collected dwarves. When his niece married, he held a parallel wedding for a dwarf couple from his court. Their marriage ended tragically when the small bride died during childbirth. Her husband’s extreme grief and rage at his loss caused his death from a broken heart. It resulted in an imperial edict by the astonished tsar against any more dwarf marriages.

  But what a funeral Peter arranged for the angry, foulmouthed dwarf he was so fond of. There was nothing remotely small about it, except the guests. Seventy-two dwarves assembled in the Winter Palace together with the smallest priest that could be found in St. Petersburg. They took the little man’s body to Iamskaia in a hearse pulled by miniature ponies, accompanied by large guards.

  Yes, that would be me, thought Apiro. I would rage about Maria’s death until Fidel Castro sent giant guards to bury me. The only difference is he wouldn’t wait until I was dead.

  Focus. Apiro tried to shake off his fatigue. Scalpel in hand, he clambered back up his stepladder to the third rung, getting as close as possible to Rita Martinez’s body.

  He held back a yawn, knowing his tired brain was pulling oxygen into its cells, trying to keep his mind awake, alert. Pay attention.

  He leaned over the too-young body. Almost instinctively, he checked for signs of plastic surgery. He noticed that Martinez had recently had her breasts enlarged with saline implants, which he removed. A fine job, with almost invisible scars. Expensive. A credit to her plastic surgeon.

  Apiro wondered how she had paid for the surgery. A police clerk made around eight pesos a month, maybe a little more. Perhaps, like Maria and so many other Cuban women, Rita Martinez had worked as a jinetera, renting her company—and her body—to extranjeros.

  It made him think of the surgery he’d performed on Rubén Montenegro and the firestorm of violence and abuse that Rey Callendes had ignited.

  According to what Sanchez had told Celia Jones when he held her hostage, Sanchez was only eight years old when he was first raped at the boarding school in Viñales. Sanchez was only fourteen himself when he attacked and raped Rubén Montenegro, another student, and almost killed the child.

  Of course, Apiro had no idea then who Rubén’s attacker was. An emergency physician at the children’s hospital in those days, he had painstaki
ngly repaired Rubén’s injuries, and when the child recovered, the authorities returned him to the school and sent his assailant elsewhere for re-education.

  But Sanchez was an adult when he became involved with Nasim Rubinder, the man who had murdered Rubén’s little brother, Arturo, and then callously thrown his small body in the ocean.

  During the investigation into Arturo’s death, Apiro discovered that Rey Callendes and the school principal, James O’Brien, had told Arturo’s parents that their older son, Rubén, died in the mountains. They said he’d run away when he was fifteen and that his body was never found.

  But Rubén didn’t vanish in the mountains, thought Apiro. He disappeared here, in Havana, a few months after he turned sixteen, after he asked me for my help.

  Why on earth had the two priests lied? Apiro shook his head, too tired to make sense of it.

  The small doctor worked methodically. He removed Rita Martinez’s lungs. The right one weighed one thousand grams and the left one nine hundred and fifty. Both had dark red pleural surfaces. The cut surfaces, as he had suspected, showed edema and congestion. No evidence of tumour or thromboembolism. There was nothing to suggest bronchial asthma. Not an allergic reaction, then. He stopped, removed his gloves, and clambered down the stepladder to make a note of this for his report.

  He planned to examine gastric washings for heavy metal poisoning. Besides common drugs and poisons, Apiro would check for selenium. It was sometimes found in toxic levels in corn grown in carbonaceous shale. But he knew it would be days before he would have complete results.

  He climbed up the stepladder again, pulling his gloves on. He took out Rita’s kidneys, the body’s filters, for testing. He collected parts of the dura, brain, and cerebellum, a portion of the liver and pancreas, and a small amount of bone marrow. He retrieved segments from the large and small intestines and a portion of the spleen. In each case, he made sure to get additional tissue samples as well as blood. Samples sometimes went missing in the hospital due to the shortage of labels.

  Apiro shook his head. He dropped the gloves in a container for sterilization and re-use and folded up his stepladder. There was so little time.

  He had to find the toxin before someone else died.

  TWENTY - EIGHT

  Charlie Pike dropped Inspector Ramirez off in front of the Rideau Regional Police station.

  “I park at the back. I don’t want you walking through the snow with those shoes of yours: you’ll freeze up like a Popsicle. I’ll see you in there later, Rick. You can phone Celia from reception. She’ll sign you in. Get someone to give me a call when you’re done with Chief O’Malley and we’ll drive over to see the Mounties.”

  Ramirez rang Señora Jones’s extension from the front desk.

  Once again, he was asked to register and produce his identification. He paced around the small lobby of the police station, looking at pictures of dead police officers on the walls. One of them was Constable Stephen Sloan. He was a handsome young man, clear-eyed, with even features. Ramirez shook his head. Sloan’s death was tragic for everyone involved.

  Behind him, Ramirez heard a voice he recognized. He spun around.

  “Inspector Ramirez,” Celia Jones exclaimed. She walked over and shook his hand.

  “¿Que bola?” said Ramirez, smiling. How are you?

  “Welcome to Canada. It’s good to see you again. Chief O’Malley is waiting for you upstairs. Here,” Jones said to him, grinning, as they walked to the elevator. She handed him a plastic bag. Inside, there was something that looked like a giant red condom made out of wool. “CANADA” was spelled on it in white letters. “This is for you.”

  Ramirez gave her a quizzical look, not exactly sure what to do with it.

  “It’s a toque,” Jones said. “A hat. I have a parka for you in the car that you can use while you’re in Ottawa, too. As well as some warm mitts. Alex is about the same size as you. We were pretty sure you wouldn’t have any. I’m working on finding you some boots.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  Ramirez tried it on, wondering what exactly a parka and mitts were. The knitted hat fit comfortably over his ears, but he felt clumsy wearing it.

  “A toke?” he asked. “Is that how you pronounce it?” It would make a particularly effective contraceptive, he thought. A hat like this would deter almost any Cuban woman who saw him wearing it from ever wanting sex again.

  “No, toque. T-O-Q-U-E. The quintessential garment for the Canadian winter. Maybe that and long johns, depending on how far north you are. You know, I think the original word is Spanish. We all wear them here. We pretty much have to.”

  “Ah, toque. It has other meanings which are more familiar to me,” said Ramirez. “For example, it can be used to refer to the tambour ceremony in which the Santería gods assume human shapes.”

  “You’ll have to tell me all about that. It sounds fascinating. Maybe at dinner tonight?”

  “Of course. Before I forget, what are long johns, Señora Jones?” Ramirez wondered if his English, of which he’d always been so proud, would be adequate in Canada.

  “You are here for two days, Inspector? My God, you have so much to learn.”

  As they rode up in the elevator, Ramirez told Celia Jones about Rita Martinez’s death. He explained Hector Apiro’s concerns. “He needs to find out what killed Señora Ellis, in case others in my country are at risk too.”

  “O’Malley says they don’t know yet, and I don’t think all the test results are back. I’ll see what I can do,” Jones said doubtfully. “But I don’t know if the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office will share that information with me. Or even with the Cuban medical authorities, for that matter. Canada has crazy privacy laws. We usually can’t get that kind of information without a warrant.”

  They walked down a long hallway until they came to a middle-aged woman sitting behind a desk, typing on a desktop computer with the largest screen Ramirez had ever seen. The technology in Canada was overwhelming. Tiny cell phones, large flat-screen televisions, and gigantic cars. In Canada, it seemed, size mattered.

  “Inspector Ramirez, this is Clare Adams. Clare is the brains behind O’Malley. He’s really just a puppet. She’s the smart one.”

  Adams smiled. “A pleasure, Inspector. He’s expecting you.”

  They walked to an office at the end of the corridor. The police chief’s door was open.

  “You go ahead, Inspector Ramirez,” said Jones. “I’ll go make some calls and see what I can find out for you. If there’s anything important, I’ll call Clare and ask her to put me through right away.”

  A massive bald man with a thick neck and heavy black eyebrows sat behind an equally large desk. When O’Malley stood up, Ramirez saw how big he really was—easily six inches taller than himself and at least two hundred pounds of hard muscle. A man who would have seemed dangerously intimidating if not for the crinkling laugh lines around his eyes.

  “How are you, Inspector?” O’Malley said. He walked briskly over to Ramirez.

  He took his visitor by the upper arm with one big hand, pumping Ramirez’s hand with the other. A firm, fully engaged handshake. Ramirez liked him instantly.

  “Miles O’Malley. Welcome to Canada. I understand it’s a short stay, but we’re glad to have you with us.”

  Ramirez fingered the small black cassette tape in his pocket. He wasn’t sure how long the police chief would feel that way.

  “Yes, I will be returning to Cuba on Friday. I am happy to be here, to do whatever I can to help.”

  “Would you like a coffee? Nothing like what you’re used to, I imagine. But it should warm you up. Thirty-three below with the wind chill yesterday. Christ, that’s about where it starts to be the same in Fahrenheit. Bloody cold, as you’ve no doubt discovered. But it’s getting warmer today. We’re expecting a storm.”

  “Gracias. Yes, I’m afraid the cold here is something one has to experience personally to fully comprehend.”

  Thirty-three degrees bel
ow zero. Ramirez was surprised his heart hadn’t stopped.

  A few minutes later, Clare brought in two paper cups full of coffee. Despite the heat of the brew, Ramirez was almost sorry he’d accepted. The coffee tasted as if it had been left in a tin can overnight. He cradled his cup in his hands and wondered if it would be rude to hold it against his chilled ears.

  “It’s unusual, isn’t it, for a Cuban to be allowed to leave Cuba so quickly?” asked O’Malley.

  “Very,” Ramirez said. “But my government is concerned about the allegations that children were sexually abused in our boarding schools.”

  “Those goddamn residential schools,” said O’Malley. “We had them in Ireland too, you know. Although no one wanted to talk about it for decades. Schools where the kiddies were worked to death during the day and sexually abused all night long. There’s an inquiry under way in Dublin right now. I think when it’s all out in the open, the Catholic Church will fall down like dominoes. There were thousands of abuse victims at the Indian residential schools here, too. Likely hundreds more in the non-native schools. I’m guessing it happened everywhere in the world those bloody priests were sent.”

  Ramirez wondered if O’Malley had been abused, given his outrage. But it was hard to imagine anyone harming O’Malley, even as a child. There was nothing of the victim about him.

  A phone rang on the police chief’s desk.

  “Damn it,” O’Malley said. “I hate it when people take calls when they’re in meetings. I don’t have one of those bloody BlackBerrys for that very reason. Can’t stand it when people use them to send messages to each other across the table instead of talking face-to-face. But Clare wouldn’t interrupt us if it wasn’t important. Please excuse me for a minute.”