The Beggar's Opera (11 page)

Ramirez thought it gave him more authority to enter an interview with an official-looking piece of paper, as if he had strong evidence already, even if the document had no relevance. He had walked into one interrogation with a recipe. He always put the purported report on the table and pointed to it as if it were important. That was usually enough to convince the unsuspecting suspect to talk, but it only worked with
turistas
who spoke no Spanish.

Ramirez explained Apiro’s early findings to his young colleague, which reminded him to check his watch. Two-twenty. Just enough time to get to the morgue. “Can you arrange for the Canadian to make a long-distance call?”

Sanchez raised his eyebrows, but nodded.

Ramirez would not normally allow such access, but there was no reason to create a political controversy by denying the Canadian a call to his employer. Particularly when he worked for a police department in a country with which Cuba had good relations.

The Cuban National Revolutionary Police might need to work with the Canadian police on a future case someday. It was always best to have reciprocity, now that crime had become so global.

TWENTY - TWO

Detective Sanchez took Mike Ellis downstairs to Booking and photographed him. He told Ellis to take off all his clothes and jewellery, then handed him a pair of orange prison overalls. Ellis stripped naked, removed his watch and wedding ring, and handed them to a guard.

After Sanchez itemized and bagged Ellis’s clothes, he put metal handcuffs on his wrists. The guard put thick steel manacles around his ankles and chained his feet together. All Ellis had left were his shoes; even his socks were taken away.

Ellis understood, for the first time, how the people he arrested must have felt. Shock mixed with humiliation, anger, a sense of unfairness. Guilt had nothing to do with it.

Sanchez walked him, hobbled, down the hall from the holding cells to a small room with a metal table, a phone, and one wooden chair. He told Ellis to sit down and removed the handcuffs from his right wrist so he could hold the receiver more easily.

Ellis was surprised Sanchez hadn’t beaten him or anything. The police back home would have already turned the hoses on. “Washing the cells down,” they would say later in response to a complaint. “Didn’t realize there was someone there.” Sanchez
acted instead as if he felt sorry for him, which made Ellis even more afraid of what awaited.

“There will be a short delay while we find an English-speaking operator who can locate your police chief’s home phone number.”

Ellis prayed silently that O’Malley wasn’t off vacationing somewhere exotic himself.

Sanchez dialled the operator and said the call was to be placed person-to-person, collect. He left the room and locked Ellis in.

Ellis waited on the line, fidgeting, while the Cuban operator made the necessary connections with a Canadian operator, who confirmed she had a listing for a Miles O’Malley. The phone rang at least a dozen times before Chief O’Malley finally answered. A tidal wave of relief washed through Ellis as he recognized his Irish brogue. O’Malley had a strong accent, although he had lived in Canada for more than thirty years.

The Cuban operator spoke first: “This is a collect call from Señor Michael Ellis — will you accept the charges?”

Ellis had been afraid that O’Malley might be out; now he had a momentary fragment of fear that he might not accept the charges. But of course O’Malley did. “Michael, my boy!”

“I’m sorry to have to call you at home on Christmas, Chief,” Ellis said, trying to keep his voice strong, “but I’m in trouble.”

“Michael, my lad, I can’t hear you very well. Party going on here. Merry Christmas, son. Where are you?” Ellis could hear people laughing, glasses clinking. Christmas music played in the background. “My wife’s family is over for the turkey. I thought you were on holidays somewhere with that beautiful wife of yours.”

“I’m in Cuba.”

“Well, that’s grand, Mikey. So why are you calling me? What can I do for you?”

“Chief, I need your help. I’m at the Havana police station. In custody.”

“Custody — under arrest for what? Too much to drink? Speak up, lad.” Ellis pictured O’Malley pressing the phone closer to his ear, trying to catch every word over the noise in his living room.

“Be quiet, for a moment, people,” the police chief called out, and the chatter subsided. “One of my men is on the phone, in a spot of trouble.” He lowered his voice so that the others couldn’t hear. “What’s going on down there, Michael?”

“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 Castro 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.