The Poisoned Pawn

by Blair Peggy

  Even Castro was on the fence, thought Ramirez. He was baptized a Catholic. When he marched into Havana as the leader of the revolution in January 1959, he wore a locket bearing the image of the Virgin of Charity. He was excommunicated shortly after he announced his belief in communism.

  Pike smiled. “My people did the same kind of thing. When the government said we couldn’t have traditional chiefs anymore and had to elect them, the clan mothers told the hereditary chiefs to run for election, and everyone voted for them. The government never knew the difference.”

  “We have no choice but to vote for our government,” said Ramirez. “But it’s not that bad. No one is homeless in Cuba. We don’t eat well, but usually no one starves. On the other hand, all our buildings are falling down.”

  “It’s the same here, for First Nations people, anyway. The Crown owns our reserves and the band councils own the buildings. There’s never any money to fix them up. In a lot of First Nations, particularly up north, people have to use slop buckets, because they don’t have any plumbing. It was a problem when we had the SARS epidemic a few years back. The doctors kept saying ‘wash your hands.’ But they couldn’t.”

  “We have problems with our water supply, too. And with our power, which often doesn’t work.”

  Ramirez yawned. Pike took a quick look at his passenger. “You look tired, Rick.”

  Ramirez’s eyes had started to droop with fatigue. “Forgive me. I didn’t sleep well. And I am worried about events at home but powerless to do anything about them. It is stressful to be so far away from my family in such circumstances.”

  “Yeah, I know what that’s like.”

  The national police force headquarters showed a Soviet influence, to Ramirez’s eyes. It was a square brown building that sprawled across acres of flat land.

  “The RCMP are involved in the Indian residential school files because the schools were owned by the feds,” Pike explained. “They’re the federal police force. When the first complaints about abuse were made, back in the sixties and seventies, they’re the ones that investigated, so they have a lot of files. There are class actions all across the country now by former students who claim they were sexually and physically abused at those schools. Twelve thousand claimants so far. They figure eighty or ninety thousand may file for compensation under the settlement agreement the churches have worked out with the government. I guess you know that Rey Callendes was arrested because of the child pornography they found on his laptop at airport security?”

  Ramirez nodded.

  “After he was taken into custody, the RCMP found his name in the database of those old residential school complaints. And then Celia came back from Cuba with a report that said Callendes was involved in abusing kids there as well.”

  “Yes,” Ramirez said. “He assaulted a child at a boarding school in Viñales. But that was in the early 1990s.”

  Rodriguez Sanchez.

  “Callendes was in Canada long before that,” said Pike. “In the seventies. Up in Northern Ontario. He taught at an Indian residential school. There were lots of claims filed about that school. I’ve heard that every little boy that went there was sexually abused.”

  Charlie Pike pulled the red truck into the wide driveway that led up to RCMP headquarters. He stopped beside a small white booth in front of a large parking lot. He rolled down his window and gave their names to the security guard. The guard checked a list and waved them through. Another elderly commissionaire, Ramirez noticed. Canada was a country confident enough to be guarded by the frail and the old.

  The parking lot barrier arm rose, and they entered the grounds of the RCMP headquarters.

  THIRTY - TWO

  The fax machine in Hector Apiro’s small office beeped. He hopped off his swivel chair and made his way over as a page curled through. He pulled it out of the tray, relieved to discover it was the results of the gas chromatography test on Rita Martinez’s remains.

  Apiro read through the sheet quickly. He was astonished at its contents.

  How could Rita’s body possibly have fluoroacetate in it? The chemical was extremely rare. It was used only where the risk of accidental poisoning of humans was minimal, given its high toxicity. It was a rodenticide as well as an insecticide, one that was quickly absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. Apiro knew of twelve deaths in Brazil caused by the poison after thirsty men drank what they thought was liquor in an old whisky bottle.

  It was the perfect poison with which to commit murder, if one could find it.

  It dissipated quickly in water. It was colourless, odourless, and almost entirely tasteless, except for a bit of a salty aftertaste. This was the reason it was used to bait and poison small animals. The chemical was virtually impossible to trace in the human body unless one knew exactly what to look for: an elevated level of citric acid.

  Apiro had decided to test for it after Ramirez’s mention of banana rats and pesticides. This was what Apiro liked best about their friendship. Their back-and-forth, the way one idea fed another. They made a good team, he and Ramirez. Like the paramedics, able to anticipate each other’s moves. Except in chess, where only Apiro could foresee what was coming and develop a strategy.

  Perhaps Rita Martinez was murdered, then, thought Apiro. But how? It was impossible to obtain the chemical in Cuba. Or to make it.

  Fluoroacetic acid was one of the most deadly nerve agents on earth. It was manufactured by men who wore spacesuits like Russian cosmonauts. There was no laboratory capable of producing it anywhere on the island, nowhere safe enough.

  Well, here it is, thought Apiro, so it has to be somewhere. But where?

  If the poison was in powder form, it could kill through inhalation. But then others would have been exposed to it too.

  No, thought Apiro. Rita Martinez was stricken in the police station. She must have consumed something there that had the chemical in it.

  Which was why he was so perplexed.

  The first symptoms of fluoroacetate poisoning usually appeared within a half-hour of exposure and worsened as time progressed. But Rita was almost at the end of her shift when she collapsed. She had to have come into contact with the chemical somewhere within the police headquarters building the night she died. She’d been drinking coffee from the cafeteria, but no one else who drank coffee from the same machine had taken ill. He’d tested her mug; it was free of contamination. Other than her desk, which he had already checked, Apiro didn’t know where else to look.

  His legs were as heavy as cement. His fatigue was catching up with him. He ran his hands through his greying hair, frustrated.

  Apiro sipped his coffee slowly, grateful he’d brewed it to be extrastrong. Another beep drew him back to the present: an incoming fax. He put down his mug and rubbed his legs before standing up painfully.

  Apiro suffered from early degenerative joint disease, another symptom of his achondroplasia. It was usually treated with Aspirin, but there was none to be found. Lack of sleep made the condition more painful.

  He limped over to the fax machine for a second time. He pulled the sheet from the tray and skimmed through it, thankful the fax hadn’t run out of toner, and read through the test results for Nicole Caron.

  Startled, he wiped his forehead, his aches and pains forgotten. There were traces of fluoroacetate in her tissues, too. How was this possible?

  Apiro sat down so heavily he shook the desk. Coffee splashed everywhere, but he was too distracted to notice. He tried to imagine how a Canadian woman from British Columbia and a Cuban clerk had crossed paths, how they could have been exposed to the same rare poison.

  He picked up a pen and began to make a list of possible connections between the two women. Did they share a taxi? Unlikely. Cuban nationals weren’t allowed in tourist taxis.

  A bus? Almost impossible, for the same reason.

  He needed to find out if Nicole Caron had been questioned or arrested, if she had been in police custody at any time. That might explain the women’s proximity to e
ach other at police headquarters, but little else.

  He thought again about the jutia. Had these women perhaps eaten meat from the same source? But if so, what, and where?

  Apiro made another note: check to see if any cederistas reported seeing a tourist eating at a private restaurant.

  And another: check to see if anyone saw Rita Martinez with a foreign woman. If Rita was a jinetera, she might not have limited her clientele. Nicole Caron travelled alone; Apiro should not make assumptions about her sexual orientation.

  For the moment, he realized, he’d have to leave Hillary Ellis’s death out of his search or he could be easily led down a false path. Her death was the anomaly; she became ill on a flight out of Cuba, not while she was still in the country.

  Despite the coffee, his thinking was slow and laboured after two full days without rest. He was no longer a young resident, capable of working for sixty hours on his feet. Age was catching up to him.

  But he was the only one who could solve this mystery. Lives depended on it. Eliminate the impossible. Apiro thought of the risk to the people he loved so much and pressed on.

  THIRTY - THREE

  Charlie Pike and Inspector Ramirez waited at the RCMP reception desk for almost half an hour before their contact came downstairs to meet them. Pike, Ramirez noticed, seemed unconcerned by the delay.

  “I’m on Indian time,” Pike shrugged.

  The RCMP officer introduced himself as Corporal Yves Tremblay. The policeman wore a beige shirt and navy pants with yellow stripes down the sides of the legs.

  Ramirez was scanned with a handheld scanner while Tremblay signed them in. A commissionaire, this time an elderly woman, took Ramirez’s passport. She threaded a numbered plastic pass that said “Visitor” onto a metal chain that Ramirez put around his neck.

  They took the elevator to the second floor.

  Corporal Tremblay spoke with a slight accent which Ramirez assumed was French-Canadian.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been waiting so long, gentlemen. I was on the phone with our legal counsel. He reminded me that there are privacy issues to work around. We have to be very careful about the information we share with you, Inspector Ramirez. It’s nothing personal. We have laws in this country that limit what we can do, even in a police investigation.”

  Tremblay took them into an office. The room had four chairs, upholstered in blue fabric, and a computer on a desk. They sat down. Tremblay didn’t offer them coffee, for which Ramirez was grateful. Canadian coffee, he had decided, was toxic.

  “We arrested Rey Callendes at the Ottawa International Airport just before midnight on December 29,” said Tremblay.

  That was the same day Rodriguez Sanchez killed himself, Ramirez noted.

  “Father Callendes had a laptop in his possession when he entered Canada. He admitted it was his.” Tremblay pointed to the desk. “Here, take a look at what was on it, Inspector. Detective Pike has already seen these images. We burned them onto a CD for you.”

  Ramirez scrolled through the photographs. Pictures of young boys, some barely older than toddlers. Acts of penetration, fellatio. And in some photographs, the men involved were unmistakably priests, wearing black cassocks.

  The children in some of the photographs looked familiar. Ramirez was sure that if he compared them to the Polaroids in his jacket pocket, the ones he had removed from the Michael Ellis file, they would be identical.

  “We know that some of these images came from a server in Cuba. That’s why we think that some of the children are Cuban.”

  Ramirez nodded. Photographs like these tended to merge together after time, the horror of them supplanting individuality. But Ramirez could prove where at least some of them had originated. Sanchez’s computer. It made him sick to his stomach to think of it.

  “Do you know when these pictures were taken?” asked Ramirez.

  Tremblay shook his head. “No, only that some of them were downloaded about two weeks ago. Since then, they’ve probably made their way around the world.”

  “I have seen photographs like these before, Corporal Tremblay. We monitor the internet in my country for such things.” Telling the Canadian police officer the truth, but only part of it—not that the detective who Ramirez had authorized to monitor traffic on the internet had used it to share child pornography.

  “There are several hundred images on this CD, Inspector. All of them are equally disturbing. But we can only charge Rey Callendes with unlawful possession of pornography, not the abuse that’s depicted in them. And maybe not even that, given his position.”

  “What position is that?” Ramirez asked.

  “He says he is an apostolic delegate. So far, the Vatican hasn’t responded to our request to either confirm or deny that assertion.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Charlie Pike.

  “If he’s telling the truth, he’s a kind of Church envoy. The Catholic Church usually sends apostolic delegates to countries where it doesn’t have missions. That would give him the same ecclesiastical rank as a papal nuncio, but without formal diplomatic status. It would make prosecuting him difficult. The Vatican will claim immunity.”

  “We know that Rey Callendes sexually abused at least one boy at a boarding school in Viñales in the 1990s,” said Ramirez, remembering what Sanchez had told Celia Jones. Some of it was recorded on the tiny tape recorder Sanchez had with him while he held Jones hostage. Jones said he had clicked it on and off while she begged to leave a message on it for her husband before she died.

  “He always used the same methods,” Ramirez went on. “The children were brought to the rectory, to what they were told would be a special dinner and a sleepover. A bath was followed by a brutal sexual assault. After it was over, he forced his victims to kneel on the floor and pray for forgiveness. It doesn’t matter what his religious position is in my country, Corporal Tremblay. Children have special protection under the Cuban Penal Code. My government wants to bring him back to prosecute him for his crimes. And we need only meet the test of probability for an indictment. He could be sentenced to up to twenty years for committing homosexual acts with boys. As well as barred from teaching children or exercising authority over children. Another five years for the pornography.”

  “That’s about what a murderer in this country gets,” said Tremblay. “But I doubt he’ll be teaching anywhere again. He’s seventy-six years old.”

  The same age as Raúl Castro, thought Ramirez. Another coincidence?

  He shook his head. “His age is unimportant in Cuba. We still have the firing squad for crimes like this, if the juridical panel decides special circumstances apply, although that penalty hasn’t been applied in the last two or three years.”

  “And that compounds our problem, Inspector Ramirez. We can’t return Rey Callendes to a country that could even possibly execute him. When it comes to prisoner transfers, capital punishment is against our government’s current policy. That may change, because the new Conservative government has a different perspective on crime than previous ones, but for now, that’s the way it is. The other problem is that we have Father Callendes in custody because he’s obviously a flight risk, but there’s a limit to how long we can hold him. His lawyer has arranged a bail hearing for next week. If we can’t get him transferred in the next few days, he’s likely to be released. We’re not sure he’ll stick around.”

  Ramirez nodded. “Then we have the same interests.”

  Tremblay looked at Pike. “Can I speak to the inspector in private, Detective, so we can work out some intergovernmental issues? This may take a little while.”

  “Sure,” Pike said. “I’ll wait downstairs in the canteen.”

  THIRTY - FOUR

  Charlie Pike sat in the cafeteria in the basement of the RCMP headquarters, nursing a cup of coffee. He thought of the abuse the old man in the alley had suffered in Indian residential schools, and how closely his story fit with the Cuban inspector’s revelations.

  “I remember that residential scho
ol like it was yesterday,” the old man had said, sipping his bowl of soup in the cold air. Steam rose from it, like smoke from a campfire. “My father”—he used the Ojibway word nimbaabaa—“was on the trapline. Me and my three brothers, we were all by ourselves when they came to get us. Just our auntie looking after us. My mother died when my little brother was born.

  “An RCMP Mountie and the Indian Agent came in a big black car. I was six years old. Never spent a day in school before then. That Indian Agent, he snuck up and grabbed us, one by one, and threw us in the back of the car. The Mountie held my ninzigo so she couldn’t run after us.” Ninzigo meant “my father’s sister.” “He wrapped his arms right around her, tight, like this.”

  The old man put the soup down. He crossed his arms around his shoulders, like a straitjacket.

  “She was kicking and screaming, trying to break free, mahwee.” Crying. “We were crying too. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my own dad. I don’t know if they told him where they were taking us. If they did, he never came to see us. I didn’t see my auntie again for two years. That’s the first time they let me go home for the summer. I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “I spent eight years in that school. I left in ’61, when I was fifteen. Couldn’t read or write after all that schooling. They put me in junior grades that whole time. I sure knew how to say Jack and Jill went up the hill, though. And how to pray. Oh, my, we had to pray all the time. Over and over again. Or they’d whip us. And we had to pitch hay, us kids, until our backs hurt, every day.

  “We had to get up early; go to bed when it was still daylight out. Sometimes I would look out the window and try to see the night sky. They beat me up pretty good for that, those priests, whenever they caught me. Same thing if I tried to talk to my little brothers. Sometimes they used sticks, or those long wooden rulers. But they really liked to use those big old fan belts, the type you get off a tractor. And they hit you hard, those priests. They never held back. You’d be black and blue for days. Made it hard to sit down. We’d try not to cry, to be brave. But it was hard.”