The Beggar's Opera (20 page)

She walked three or four kilometres until she caught sight of the towers on the other side of the Malecón. It took her a few minutes to find the spot where the body had been discovered. The bright yellow police tape was still in place, tied between two lampposts. A man with a violin played mournfully nearby, a glass bottle at his feet for coins. She dropped in a few centavos.

She walked to the edge of the wall and peered over, felt a surge of vertigo even at that short height. She forced herself to look down the steep wall to the water. Plastic bags and debris were stranded on the rocks at low tide. Kelp floated in an oily slick. It looked the same as every other part of the Malecón; nothing here to indicate that anything untoward had happened. She took a deep breath and straightened up.

None of the tourists who leaned against the stone wall could
have any idea that a child’s body was dumped here only days ago. But it was unlikely that the boy had just been carried here and thrown into the water without some attempt at concealment. The Malecón would be a popular spot in the evening, when the ocean breeze was cool. Even late at night, she imagined there would be passing cars, taxis, pedestrians, particularly on a busy night like Christmas Eve.

Jones walked slowly back to her hotel, already thinking ahead. She wanted to put together some kind of a brief for the prosecutor and the juridical panel, something formal to file on the record, what Cuban lawyers would call
conclusiones provisonales
. Objections to the police facts, to the specifics of the charges.

She had to think like a lawyer. She needed to protect the chief and herself from liability if Mike ended up shot to death by a firing squad. Or if something terrible happened to him in jail. O’Malley was right, she thought, frowning. Law was a lot like hostage negotiations.

That morning interview with Mike bothered Jones almost more than the evidence Inspector Ramirez had assembled. She sensed Mike had withheld something important from her and the Cuban police, but she couldn’t pin down what it was, or why she felt so uncertain of his truthfulness. Was Mike Ellis the kind of man who would take his wife to Havana for a holiday and then search out a child to have sex with? Was it possible he was a pedophile?

She wondered if his terrible injuries, his undoubtedly damaged self-esteem, could have caused him to seek out children for sex. Children were accepting, non-judgmental, everything it seemed Hillary Ellis wasn’t. Still, she shuddered to think that a colleague could have sexually assaulted and killed a child.

But I’m not a profiler, she thought, just a lawyer.

And there was no way to tell by appearance alone. She was
always horrified when the police broke yet another internet child porn ring and trotted out the accused in handcuffs. Accountants and lawyers, teachers, coaches, even the occasional judge. A lot of priests, too, these days.

Behind those scars on his face, Mike could be
anything
; no one knew what went on behind closed doors.

She and Alex had tried to have a baby for years, then applied to adopt one. But Canadian children weren’t often available for adoption unless they had special needs. She couldn’t imagine caring for a child that was disabled, although Alex was open to it. They had decided to stay on the adoption list and see what happened. Years passed and no children were offered to them. Life had moved on. In her forties now, she doubted she would ever be a mother.

But if she had a child, she would kill anyone who touched it sexually. And she meant it; she knew how.

FORTY

Celia Jones changed out of her suit. She put on a pair of shorts, a light top, leather sandals. Alex had left a message on her hotel phone. He was glad to hear her voice, would be in surgery all day, loved her, missed her too, and hoped she was enjoying the sun. She smiled, played it back several times, couldn’t bring herself to delete it.

She had a quick bite to eat at the upstairs lounge beside the beautiful rooftop pool. She worked on the brief as she munched, stopping occasionally to admire the spectacular beauty of the view around her, careful to avoid looking down. The terrace overlooked the squalor of Havana but also framed the majestic Capitolio Nacional. It was so close she felt she could almost reach out and touch its gleaming dome.

The Capitolio was a knockoff of the Capitol building in Washington, built to scale, but much smaller. It held the fiftyfoot-high Statue of the Republic, reputedly covered in twentytwo-carat gold. The steps of the Capitolio ran the entire width of the building. At the ground level, they were rimmed with 1956 Chevys and lineups of tourists, along with the ubiquitous beggars, stray dogs, cigar women, and young boys. Even the dogs begged.

She walked to the edge of the terrace and tried to look below but felt dizzy almost immediately. She’d been fine before the crazy suicide jumper. She recalled looking down to the parking lot, seeing his body flattened into sharp angles in the snow, like a white origami swan with red wings. Now she suffered from all kinds of phobias: heights, claustrophobia, even chionophobia, a fear of snow. Not good for a Canadian. I should have pushed him myself, she thought. It would have been easier to deal with.

Looking straight ahead, she saw the Gran Teatro, one of the world’s largest opera houses. The ocean sparkled on the other side of the flat tops of crumbling buildings that surrounded her hotel. The view was beautiful and ravaged at the same time. She glanced at her watch and realized it was just after eight. It was so much brighter here in the evening than at home; she hadn’t marked the passage of time.

Damn
. She was late.

Jones ran to the elevator, pushed the “down” button several times, then jogged down the four flights of stairs from the terrace to her room when the elevator didn’t arrive quickly enough. She grabbed her laptop and locked the door, flew down the two remaining flights of stairs to the hotel lobby.

Artez was nowhere to be seen. She hoped he hadn’t left. She paced around the lobby for a few minutes before she finally asked the concierge if he knew where Miguel was. He shrugged, apologetic, and said Miguel had finished his shift hours ago.

She might have screwed up badly, but there was nothing she could do about it. She sat at the bar and watched for Artez, while a very good three-member band sang together. The men played guitars; the woman shook castanets, swirled her dress, and stamped her feet as she sang. Jones applauded, but her mind was elsewhere.

She needed Artez desperately. She wasn’t sure what she was
going to do if he had changed his mind. She was stranded as it was, without any other access to the internet and running out of time. But then he strolled in and casually waved at her as if he weren’t twenty minutes late.

“Come with me, Señora Celia,” he said. “My hypothetical cousin is waiting outside.”

FORTY - ONE

It was late, long past dinner. Another missed meal with his family. Francesca would be irritated, but Inspector Ramirez had little choice. He had two problems to keep an eye on: a foreign lawyer determined to poke holes in his evidence, and a politician pushing for a conviction.

“I wish I knew where he got the drugs,” Ramirez remarked to Sanchez as he put down the summary of their evidence. “That part of this case troubles me the most.”

It meant Rohypnol could still be out there, that other children could be drugged and abused as easily as the murdered boy. Ramirez had sent Sanchez to the airport to see if the detective could trace the shipment of Rohypnol through Customs, but Sanchez reported that there had been no deliveries to Havana for years.

“I don’t think we need to know where the Rohypnol came from, Inspector,” said Sanchez. “We have more than enough evidence to charge the Canadian with rape. It doesn’t matter if he brought the drug to Cuba or not: the important thing is that we found it in his room.”

Perhaps Sanchez was right, but Ramirez didn’t like loose ends.

“Well, I am quite sure that the Canadian did not bring any drugs with him. Likely not even prescription ones. I checked the surveillance tapes you picked up for me at the airport. Nothing.”

Ramirez had watched the beagle, the best of the sniffing dogs, walk right past the Canadian man as he stood in the Customs lineup without even a second look, tail wagging. The Canadian had no drugs on him when he had arrived, then, not even small amounts. Not in his luggage, not on his clothes.

The Rohypnol capsule had to have come from within Cuba, from someone who already had it. But Sanchez was right. Ramirez was not trying to indict the Canadian on illegal drug charges or the use of a hypnotic. Instead, in his report, Ramirez asked the prosecutor’s office to indict Michael Ellis on the charges of rape and murder, and to request the death penalty, given the special circumstances of the crime.

The dead man met the inspector’s eyes. He pointed his index finger, thumb up, bent his fingers into the shape of a gun and aimed it at Sanchez. Then he held it to his own head and pulled the trigger.

After Sanchez left for the night, Inspector Ramirez leaned back in his swivel chair. He folded his hands behind his head, thinking back to their conversation.

Sanchez had raised a good point. Why
was
the Minister of the Interior so involved in this particular file? And if he wanted to ensure the Canadian was sentenced to death, why was Luis Perez assigned as prosecutor? There were too many layers of politics in this case for Ramirez to be completely confident of its outcome, despite the strength of the forensic evidence. He shook his head. There were too many secrets.

His own were becoming harder to conceal. With the stresses of the past week, the trembling in his arms and legs was more
pronounced. He had hoped to exhaust himself by working late so that he could finally fall asleep. But the visions seemed to be coming more frequently.

The time would come when he would have to tell Francesca the truth. He’d left it for so long, he no longer knew how to. What was he supposed to say to her?

He was afraid Francesca would want him examined by a psychiatrist. That’s if she didn’t immediately file for divorce. She would almost certainly insist that Ramirez move out of their bedroom and take his ghosts with him.

That’s what would drive her crazy, he thought. Not his illness, but the fact there were strangers wandering around their apartment without her knowing about it. She wouldn’t care whether they were really there or not. She liked to keep a clean house when visitors came.

And how would Edel react to finding out his father was either dying or insane?

When it came right down to it, Ramirez wasn’t completely sure how anyone he cared about would react to his situation. It wasn’t something he was particularly anxious to find out.

But he couldn’t keep lying to the people he loved. Ramirez shook his head. He had no idea what to do. He held out his hand and watched his fingers tremble like palm fronds in the breeze.

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out the bottle of rum
.

FORTY - TWO

The air was cooling with the evening breeze. An old red car was parked beside the taxis, bleeding diesel. Inside, a statue of the Virgin Mary stood on the dashboard, a string of brown beads wrapped around it. The windows were down, the interior open to the night air.

A woman sat in the driver’s seat. “Come, Señora,” the woman urged nervously. “Get in. Quickly, please.”

Miguel Artez introduced them. “This is my cousin, Juanita.”

“
Hola
,” the woman said and turned the key in the ignition.

The car snaked along the Malecón, then turned left down a side street, then right. The streets were indistinguishable, except the houses, if it was possible, became poorer and more dilapidated.

Jones lost track of their route. She had to trust that they would bring her back safely from wherever they were going. They drove for eight or nine minutes, then Juanita parked the car. They got out and walked up the cracked pavement.

“Where are we going?” Jones asked.

“Not far now,” Artez responded, evasive.

They walked through an archway covered with rocks into a
narrow alley unlike anything she’d ever seen. The housing was the typical three-storey stone-and-wood structures of other parts of Havana, but the back of each building was painted with crazy patterns. Crevices in the stone and bricks were inset with dolls’ heads, urns, parts of gates, light bulbs, and all kinds of other unlikely decorations.

Even in the dusk, she could make out leopard and zebra prints painted on the backs of some walls, intricate mosaic designs inset in others. Red flags hung from posts. Figures of men and women jumped from shadows, crafted out of rock, wood, and iron. Masks glared everywhere.

They walked past a bucket that held a number of live turtles that clambered slowly over each other in the murky water.

“The followers of Santería drink the water,” Artez explained. “They believe the urine will help them to live longer because turtles live a long time.”

“Santería?” asked Jones. It didn’t look to her as if those turtles had a very long life ahead of them, trapped in one small plastic bucket.

“The descendants of African slaves believe in blood sacrifice. They pray to the orishas here. The
orishas
are the Santería gods. This alley is their temple.”

A male drummer with a brilliant white smile thumped African-type rhythms with his hands on a large drum. A small group of Afro-Cuban women sang, swayed, and clapped along. Torches lit the alley.

There was a small open bar and terrace where a few Cubans drank rum in the deepening shade. A white bust of Stalin sat on a red plinth, next to a building painted with bulging eyes. It was completely surreal, the product of either a mad mind or a brilliant one. Maybe both. The women’s singing became louder, climbing towards a crescendo. It was riveting, hypnotizing.

“What is this place called?” Jones asked. For a fleeting moment, it crossed her mind that she had been brought here as a sacrifice.

“The Callejón sin salida,” Artez replied. Blind Alley.