Midnight in Havana

by Peggy Blair

  “I’m under arrest for sexually assaulting a child, Chief. And maybe for murder.”

  A moment’s silence, then O’Malley’s outrage. “Murder? What the hell is going on down there? What kind of sexual assault?”

  Ellis took a deep breath and described the nightmare he was trapped in. “I’m being held by the Cuban police. There was a young boy who was raped and killed last night. They said I could be charged with murder. Chief, I’ve been framed. I don’t know by who. The police found the body this morning. I lost my wallet last night; they found it in his clothing. He was drugged with some kind of date-rape drug. They found the same drug in my hotel room along with some photographs. Child porn. I didn’t put them there and they aren’t mine. But it looks pretty bad.”

  He didn’t mention the woman, not sure how O’Malley, who was happily married and thought Ellis was too, would respond.

  More silence on the end of the line. Ellis imagined O’Malley’s thick black eyebrows knit together, his forehead furrowed with concentration as he tried to understand what Ellis was telling him.

  “Jesus Christ, Mikey. You’re in a bit of a state, now, aren’t you? You’re in a fucking dictatorship there. Do they want money? Is that what this is all about?”

  “I don’t think so. But Chief, they have the death penalty here for crimes like this. They still use firing squads.”

  “Christ, Michael, forget a firing squad, you’ll be lucky if you survive the night. A policeman in jail on a kiddy rape and murder? You didn’t do it, of course.” A statement.

  “Of course not.”

  “Good. I knew you’d have nothing to do with such a thing. How can I help? What do you want us to do? Have you called the Canadian embassy yet?”

  “It’s closed today and probably tomorrow. The police won’t let me talk to a lawyer; I was surprised they let me call you. This whole thing is insane. I don’t have any idea what my rights are here.”

  “Then let’s work on getting you a lawyer. Let me think on that for a moment.” O’Malley paused. Ellis could almost hear his brain ticking over.

  “Do you trust them with their investigation, Michael? Are they corrupt? Are they the ones that framed you?”

  Ellis’s hand shook as he held the phone. “I don’t think so, but who knows? It’s a damn poor country, Chief. Anything is possible. But no one’s beaten me or anything, and no one has asked me for money. And they let me call you.”

  “Ah, Christ, Michael. Alright then. Let me make some calls. We’ll get the consular services involved. To make sure that no one tortures you or anything.” He laughed lightly, but Ellis knew he wasn’t joking.

  “I’ll send someone down to keep an eye on things. I can’t imagine that the Cuban government can say no to us if a departmental representative asks for copies of their reports in a capital case. We’ll offer cooperation, approach things that way.”

  “I really appreciate it, Chief. You have no idea.”

  “We’ve helped the Cubans with some of their investigations in the past; they may need us again in the future. And they like us up here in Canada. They won’t want a political situation. But we’ll have to pull some strings on this. Shit, man, this is a mess you’ve gotten yourself into, for sure. You understand, Michael, that taking this approach has risks. If I send someone there and it turns out you’ve done anything wrong, you understand ...”

  “I didn’t do it. I never laid a hand on that boy.”

  “I believe you. You’re not that type.”

  “Can you get someone down here?”

  “Well, it’s Christmas Day, Michael, so it’s going to be bloody hard to arrange things quickly. But I’ll see if I can send Celia out on a flight today or tomorrow if she’s willing. Her husband won’t be happy about it, but she’ll know where to look and she’ll figure out quickly how things work there. She’s the only person I can think of in the department who speaks Spanish well enough to go. And she’s wicked smart.”

  Celia Jones was the departmental lawyer. She had been a police negotiator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for several years before she quit and went to law school. She had worked as a prosecutor for a while, too, before joining the Rideau Police. Ellis didn’t know she spoke Spanish.

  “Thanks again, Chief.” He realized he had been holding his breath, felt his lungs finally release as the muscle in his chest uncoiled.

  “You watch your back there, Michael. I’m not joking. And don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise you. What hotel are you staying at? Or rather, where were you staying before all this happened?”

  Ellis gave him the information.

  “I’ll tell her to register at the same hotel, see what she can find out, try to get you released. But I don’t want any controversy, any allegations of police interference, understand? There’s to be no international scandal. And Michael, if you’re guilty of anything, I’ll tell her to bring the house down on you. You understand me?”

  “I swear I didn’t do this.”

  “I’m counting on that, my lad,” O’Malley said.

  “Tell her to talk to Miguel Artez if she needs anything when she arrives,” Ellis suggested. “He’s the doorman.”

  “You trust him?”

  “I think so. I don’t know anyone else here.”

  “And what about that wife of yours—she must be frantic with worry.”

  “She left yesterday, Chief. She doesn’t know anything about this.”

  “Well, thank Christ for that, then. Do you want me to call her, tell her what’s happened?”

  “No,” Ellis said. “I want her left out of it.”

  “Alright then, man, we’ll leave that for now. Chin up. I’m on it. Try to stay alive overnight, will you? Keep your back to the wall.”

  The phone clicked a second after O’Malley hung up. Oh, Christ, Ellis thought. Someone was listening.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was just after two-thirty. The boy’s small body was stretched out on the metal gurney. An overhead light swivelled to wherever Apiro needed it. It had a longer than usual gooseneck to compensate for his shorter reach. Opera music played quietly in the background. Apiro loved the opera, a passion he and Ramirez shared. It formed the original basis of their friendship, since Ramirez had proven hopeless at chess.

  Apiro had decided to become a plastic surgeon when he was still a child, growing up, to the extent he grew at all, in an orphanage in Santa Clara. He firmly believed his parents had placed him there because of his freakish appearance. He was determined to do what he could to help others correct their physical defects, since there was nothing he could do for his own.

  The Cuban government provided free university education to all of its citizens. Apiro attended the University of Havana, where he graduated from medical school at the top of his class, then took post-graduate studies in cosmetic and reconstructive surgery in Moscow.

  In Russia, Apiro felt almost at home. “Tsar Peter the Great collected dwarves,” he explained to Ramirez when he returned to Havana. “Imagine, a city with enough of us to have a collection.” In Havana, he knew of no others.

  But Russian literature, Apiro discovered, was full of dwarves. His books became a respite, a home he could visit when loneliness gripped him, a place where others like him had been betrayed, hunted, mocked, for no fault of their own.

  “Just think of Pushkin,” he said to Ramirez during an autopsy. “His Ruslan ripped the beard from a dwarf to impress Ludmila. Such courage, the big bully. Ouch, that must have hurt! Or Sinyavsky’s Tsores, a dwarf abandoned not just by his mother, but by his dog. Now that, my friend, is an ugly dwarf.”

  Apiro said that while he studied in Moscow, Chernobyl had increased his kind as well. An unintended bomb, this time an implosion. “Democracies are not the only political systems with the power to destroy a country,” he said to Ramirez sadly, shaking his large head.

  Eventually, Apiro was required to come back to Cuba to put his extensive training to work helping C
astro develop a tourist industry in plastic surgery. He brought with him an appreciation for Russian literature, a stoicism about his circumstances, and a facility for circumventing bureaucracy that had proven useful in navigating their investigations.

  When Apiro was called to the seawall that morning and saw a boy whose face was so familiar, his heart had almost stopped. Once he got over his shock, he looked at the boy more closely. Not the same boy I operated on, he thought, exhaling slowly. All that happened years ago. Before this child was even born.

  Inspector Ramirez hung up his jacket and put on the white lab coat Hector Apiro required observers to wear in his workspace, a precaution against cross-contamination.

  There was no sign of the dead man, but Ramirez had discovered that his hallucinations tended to avoid Apiro and the morgue the way other Cubans avoided bureaucrats.

  Apiro stood on the bottom rung of his stepladder at the end of the gurney. He cut a fine line around the boy’s skull with a bone saw and gingerly removed the brain. He held it in his gloved hands. It glistened in the flickering fluorescent lights as Apiro turned it slowly, delicately, the way a connoisseur might examine a fine glass of claret.

  Ramirez was usually uncomfortable when Apiro examined a body, organs particularly, and the smell of decaying flesh was always unpleasant. But he admired the way the doctor knew exactly what he was doing, his uncanny ability to extract secrets from the dead.

  Ramirez sometimes wondered if Apiro was one of Eshu’s manifestations. Eshu was the god responsible for communications between living and dead. He was said to have a hundred personas. Like Apiro, he was very small and dark, with black hair, although Apiro’s was greying. But Eshu carried a staff, not a scalpel. And Apiro was never cruel.

  Apiro turned to speak to Ramirez as if they were of equal height, although he was not much larger than the child on the gurney. “There is some swelling on the contrecoup side of the brain, the opposite side from the trauma, where the brain banged against the skull following impact.”

  “Is that how he died?”

  “Patience, Ricardo. Patience. The skull was fractured in several places: a large hematoma marks the spot of the fatal wound. The boy was either struck or fell. Did he fall from a building? Something one or two storeys high?”

  Ramirez checked his notebook. “His body was found in the Caleta de San Lázaro, on the same side of the seaway where you first saw it. Slightly east of Principe. As you know, all the buildings are across the street. So I doubt it.”

  “He was on the sidewalk when I arrived this morning,” said Apiro. “Soaking wet. I assumed he had been found in the ocean. No rooftop swimming pools for Cuban boys in Havana, after all. But was he on the rocks or in the water?”

  “Señor Rivero saw the body floating and pulled it up the rocks. Another man helped him.”

  “Hmmm.” Apiro’s deft hands probed the glossy white surface of the brain. He climbed down from his stepladder and took the brain to a scale on a filing cabinet on the other side of the room. After he weighed it, he removed his gloves to make a few notes and then walked back to the body.

  He moved the ladder then clambered up on it again so that his short body rested against the gurney. He pulled his gloves back on, and prodded the boy’s body in different places. He turned it towards him and scrutinized the child’s hips, his back, his buttocks, and the palms of his hands. A few minutes passed as the doctor continued his slow examination, then he offered up his opinion.

  “The seawall is only a metre or two above the rocks all along the Malecón. It is possible that the boy died of a fall there, but unlikely. The degree of force—the shattering of the skull—is greater than one would expect to find. Also, the injury is to the left side of the skull. Most people fall forward or backward, but rarely sideways. When they fall, they usually put their arms out in front of them to break the fall or land on their knees. The rocks on the shore are sharp, but this child has no abrasions on his hands or his knees, just scrapes on his side from being hauled up the rocks.”

  “A blow, then?”

  “Perhaps.” Apiro pointed with his gloved index finger to the skull. “There is a coup injury on the left side of the brain. The fracture is discrete. Not caused by a flat surface but by something narrow, with a round circumference. About the width of a piece of rebar. But the contrecoup injury is there as well as the coup injury. You understand what that means?”

  Ramirez nodded. A contrecoup injury resulted from the brain bouncing against the opposite side of the skull after an impact. A coup injury was consistent with blunt force; a contrecoup with a fall.

  “Could he have been struck with something on the head and fallen afterwards, accounting for both injuries?”

  “Possibly,” Apiro acknowledged. “Either someone hit the boy on the side of his head and he fell, or he fell sideways from a fairly good height against such an object, and then hit the ground. Was there a metal post anywhere near the body? Something along the wall or nearby, perhaps submerged in the water?”

  “No,” Ramirez said. “I saw nothing like that.”

  “I think based on what I’ve seen so far that you can be sure he was killed elsewhere and that his body was taken to the Malecón. Whether that points to someone’s guilt, I leave to you to determine, but usually when there is an accident, people call for an ambulance or the police rather than moving the body and tossing it in the ocean.”

  “The body was moved?”

  “He was dead in the water.” Apiro laughed the staccato laugh that increased in frequency, as did his little puns and jokes, the worse the facts of the case. The cackle of a night gull. “Yes, he was already dead. He wasn’t moved for a few hours. There is some pooling of blood, see here?”

  Apiro pushed the boy’s body over. He again showed Ramirez the wide bluish-purple areas on the boy’s back that Ramirez had mistaken earlier for bruising.

  “Tissues begin to leak fluid soon after death, Ricardo. If a body is lying flat, the fluid collects, thanks to gravity. These marks indicate the body was left in one position on a hard surface for a few hours.”

  “Will there be any blood at the place where he was actually killed? What are we looking for?”

  “Very little. The skull is an amazing thing. Nature designed it to protect the brain. Unless there is a crushing injury—like a compound fracture, for example where a head is squashed by a truck—there often isn’t any blood at all. This is a depressed skull fracture. The cranial bone is depressed towards the brain, but there’s no wound to the skin. The bleeding was all inside the boy’s skull. His left eardrum shattered on impact, but that would leave only small drops of blood, if anything at all.”

  “If he was killed somewhere else,” Ramirez mused, “how did the Rohypnol capsule end up in Señor Ellis’s hotel room? I suppose he could have picked it up and put it in his pocket so that he wouldn’t leave it behind at the crime scene. Maybe it fell out when he was getting undressed. But I’m still trying to figure out how he smuggled the boy into his room.”

  “I can’t answer that question,” Apiro said. “But you’re right. The doormen would never let a boy like this, a boy who begged, into that hotel. Not if they saw him, anyway. They normally won’t let such a boy even stand near a tourist hotel without threatening to call the police. And then there is the matter of getting the body from the hotel to the Malecón. Based on the forensic evidence, it looks like the boy was raped in the hotel room but died somewhere else and was put in the water much later.”

  “Cause of death, Hector?”

  “Probably a blow to the head with a narrow pipe, post, or club. An inch to an inch and a half in diameter. Perhaps it even was a piece of rebar.”

  “Did he die instantly?” asked Ramirez. “And how do you know he wasn’t alive when he was thrown in the water?”

  “Ah, no signs of drowning, look.” Apiro climbed on the table, nearly straddling the body. He pushed hard on the boy’s chest. Nothing happened.

  “You see? In a drowning
victim, there is always some foam left in the lungs. The presence of foam doesn’t prove drowning; it can be present after electrocution and other types of heart failure as well. The difference is that, in a drowning, if you remove all the foam and then compress the chest, there is always a bit more that comes out. So no drowning. And yes, to answer your other question, the boy died within seconds of his head injury. There was very little swelling in the brain.”

  The doctor climbed down his stepladder and sat on a nearby stool. He knew Ramirez preferred to sit when he was standing, and appreciated Ramirez’s courtesy. But when they both sat, they had an equality that nature denied them.

  “Thank God for that, at least,” Ramirez remarked. “That he died quickly. How long was the body in the ocean?”

  “From the amount of rigour, perhaps five or six hours. No more. That should help you with your timeline.”

  “Still under the influence of that drug when he died?”

  “Yes and no. Rohypnol is relatively short-lived in its acute effects, but as I mentioned, its residual effects linger. For the first four to six hours, the boy would have been almost comatose. After that, awake but clumsy. Later on, still dizzy, but conscious and alert. I would guess he was drugged around 7 P.M. or thereabouts. I think he died sometime between 10 P.M. and midnight on Christmas Eve.”

  “You found batteries for your calculator?”

  “Yes,” Apiro smiled. “Sanchez took some from a camera in the exhibit room for me. There was no film for it anyway.” Apiro had long ago accepted thievery as a necessary part of his job. “Metabolism stops at the time of death, Ricardo, so the levels of the drug remain static. If he was alive any later than that, the amount of Rohypnol in his blood would have been lower. So I think he probably died towards the end of that two-hour range, closer to midnight. But that’s just a guess. I could be off by an hour or more either way.”

  “Anything else?”

  The doctor dipped his head. “Yes. As you saw, the boy’s anus had fresh abrasions. But there is also a laceration that has healed. It extends beyond the anal mucosa into the perianal skin. A second injury, perhaps a week old. We find an injury that serious in less than ten percent of the children with positive findings of sexual abuse. The overwhelming majority of those, I am sorry to say, are girls. I have only ever seen one fissure like it on a boy in my career. Perhaps because boys are more likely to fight back.”