The Beggar's Opera (3 page)

The dead man disappeared a few days later, after Ramirez found his killer, and Ramirez never saw that particular vision again.

But a month or so later, another dead man appeared in the hallway outside his apartment. Like the first ghost, this one was silent. He communicated with Ramirez through shrugs, raised eyebrows, and somewhat clumsier charades. He, too, vanished after Ramirez solved his case.

With increasing frequency as his disease progressed, Lewy body hallucinations popped up in Ramirez’s office, his car, and his apartment. The dead people he conjured never spoke, only gestured or made motions in the air. They always disappeared once their killers were identified.

To his surprise, Ramirez managed to get used to them. He even found the products of his dying synapses occasionally amusing, as Apiro said they might be.

His hallucinations looked over his shoulder, grimaced slightly at his mistakes. They were unfailingly polite. They stayed out of the bathroom and the bedroom, and if Ramirez suggested they leave, they left. All it took was a meaningful glance.

Eventually, Ramirez convinced himself that they were simply manifestations of his overworked subconscious. Images manufactured by his tired brain to help him process clues he might otherwise miss. Sometimes he talked to them about his investigations, and they always listened attentively, either nodding in agreement or shaking their heads if they had other ideas.

He didn’t tell Francesca about his illness. He didn’t know where to begin. After all, he felt fine physically, although tired from lack of sleep. If anything, his police work was better, more focused, despite the nights he tossed and turned.

His little Estella was almost five years old, no longer a baby, when Ramirez’s hands began to tremble uncontrollably.

Ramirez knew then that his time was running out.

FOUR

As evening approached, the sky deepened to the same shade of azure as the ocean. Wispy clouds floated above the cooling air.

Cuba was mostly closed to the outside world, a once-vibrant country slowly strangling under an American embargo. Even now, just before the dinner hour, no foreign fishing boats disrupted the radiant surface of the water, only the lazy line of a single tug far off in the distance. It hauled a dark shape that Mike Ellis couldn’t quite make out.

It was the end of another gorgeous day. No portents of disaster, no looming storm clouds, nothing to warn Ellis that the fiction he had struggled to maintain — his marriage — would end right there on the seawall.

The distance between sky and sea slowly disappeared. Only a thin edge of light hinted at the boundary between air and water. Fishermen bobbed in truck tires on the ocean waves, casting night lines from their rubber boats.

A few toughened men with callused hands and bait cans at their feet stood along the seawall holding fishing lines. Hazy rings of cigarette smoke curled around their heads in the light dusk. People laughed, enjoying the fresh ocean breeze. Cars honked
hellos to each other along the Malecón. Ellis felt completely out of place: guilty, wounded, and alone.

A young black Cuban man wearing a T-shirt and shorts, with a striped shirt tied around his waist and his baseball cap on sideways, stood in front of Ellis, blocking his path.

“Hey, where you from, mister?” the man said, smiling widely. “You from Canada? Got some soap?”

“Not now.” Ellis forced his way past the man. “Leave me alone.” “What’s wrong, Señor? It’s a beautiful day; you should be smiling.”

The Cuban looked at him with concern, or perhaps pity. He put his hand on Ellis’s shoulder. Ellis knocked it off. The man took a step or two backwards. He put his hands out in front of him to ward off Ellis’s anger before he turned to follow another tourist.

I need a drink before I lose it, thought Ellis. More than one. A tankful. What the hell; I’m not driving.

He decided to head over to Hemingway’s favourite bar, El Bar mi Media Naranja. It made him feel a little better somehow, knowing that even a macho guy like Hemingway had problems with women.

FIVE

The bartender was burly, with thick ropy arms and a flattened nose. Mike Ellis had finished his second
añejo
, straight, no ice, and the man was generous with the bottle.

The seven-year-old rum tasted like sweet hot water. Ellis downed the next one quickly, tapped the counter again. He took his jacket off and laid it on the stool next to him, felt the warm flush of alcohol begin to calm him down.

So she’s finally done it. She’s really gone.
Ellis had tried hard to rebuild a marriage that was, at its heart, as beyond repair as the collapsed shells of buildings all around him.
Damn her
. Every Christmas from now on would remind him of the way his soonto-be-ex-wife abandoned him in Old Havana.

Ellis could still hear Steve Sloan’s voice, could feel the big arm Sloan threw around his shoulder the night before he died. He could almost taste the cold beer Sloan shoved in his hand in the smoky, noisy bar when Ellis said he didn’t know what to do.

“We’ve all been there, buddy. I’m a serial offender.” Sloan was only thirty but already married and divorced twice. “I shouldn’t have married either of them. Just be glad you two never had children.”

But Sloan didn’t know then that Hillary was pregnant.

Even in a short-sleeved shirt, Ellis was hot. A mahogany ceiling fan gently moved the air above the bar. A row of framed photographs hung on the wall. Beneath it, a large mirror ran the length of the counter. He looked at his reflection, watched the other patrons pretend not to stare at his thick scars.

“What’s your name?” Ellis asked the bartender.

“Fidel,” the man answered, smiling. “Like him. Castro.” The bartender put another drink in front of Ellis and inclined his head to a faded brown-and-white photograph of the young Castro. Bearded, tall, craggy, almost handsome in his flat-billed hat and khaki jacket. The heroic populist had vanquished a dictator, thought Ellis, only to become one. Castro had either saved Cuba or destroyed it, depending on your perspective.

“
Gracias
, Fidel.” Ellis toasted the bartender and emptied the glass.

Fidel pointed with his shoulder to the row of bottles behind him. He raised his eyebrow. Ellis nodded.

Fidel brought over a dark-brown bottle of Havana Club. The bartender hadn’t asked him about his injuries, but he could see the man eyeing him discreetly from time to time, wondering what happened to his face.

Fidel busied himself washing glasses behind the bar, lining them up beside the ones he’d already prepared with lime juice and sugar. Waiting for the tourist onslaught.

Six o’clock. Lots of time to get drunk. Ellis had in mind
shitfaced
, as Sloan would say. He wanted to obliterate the past, erase it from his memory. Forget about the shooting, and how badly he’d screwed things up.
Fuck Steve
.

The departmental shrink said he suffered from survivor’s guilt. The psychiatrist had no idea what it was like that night in that hallway, what really happened.

Anxiety.
Well, that was one word for it. Just not the one Ellis would choose. He stared at his empty glass and ordered another bottle.

“I’ll have a mojito, please, Fidel,” the woman said.

The bartender smiled, admiring her looks, her streaked blonde hair and her low-cut blue top. She wore a tight beige skirt that accentuated her long, shapely legs. Ellis watched her skirt ride up as she pulled herself on the stool next to his. She wore silver strappy sandals with very high heels.

The bartender wiped down the bar in front of her. The woman was tall and slim, dressed a little like his wife, Ellis realized. The resemblance depressed him.

Fidel crushed some fresh mint leaves into a glass full of ice and lime juice, added more sugar, poured in the rum, and passed the drink to Ellis’s lovely neighbour across the wide brass rail. She put it on a cork coaster that said “Home of the Famous Hemingway Mojito,” where it left a ring of condensation.

“
Gracias
, Fidel.” The woman turned to smile at Ellis. She hadn’t seen the scars, couldn’t see them, sitting as she was, on his good side, where everything looked normal.

Ellis glanced at himself in the mirror. His mouth was pulled to the side, perpetually sardonic, the scar on his forehead a fine white slash below the hairline where the knife had caught. He remembered the warm blood running down his chin, how it mingled with his tears. He drained his glass.

Black-and-white photographs of Hemingway hung above his reflection, along with the iconic photographs of Castro. In the early shots, Hemingway was still handsome, not yet bloated with booze. Later on, he had a trim white beard. He often stood beside a younger, thinner Castro.

Nothing in the photographs gave away Hemingway’s lost
battle with depression or the voices he’d already started to hear by the time those pictures were taken. Hemingway’s scars were inside, where no one could see them. Ellis wasn’t sure if that worked better.

Fidel refilled his empty glass: the amber liquid glowed in the light. Ellis looked in the mirror again. Sometimes women told Ellis he looked sexy, that the injuries added character to his face. But he knew better. He saw the fear in his wife’s eyes whenever she looked at him. Hillary was scared of him. He felt it that morning when they finally, reluctantly, made love. She was afraid he knew about the affair.

But
he
was the one who got away with murder.

SIX

The woman sipped her drink, then rested the glass on the counter. She wiped her hands dry on her skirt. The deep mahogany wood of the bar displayed her reflection. She had pink nails that matched the sunglasses pushed on top of her thick hair.

Outside, it must have been close to thirty degrees. The sun was an orange tennis ball rolling slowly into the ocean.

“Are you alright, Señor?” she asked with what seemed like genuine concern. She had a deep, husky voice. A whisky voice. There was a faint sheen to her skin.

Ellis took a closer look at her. Early to mid-twenties, he guessed. Astonishingly pretty, with her clear skin and large brown eyes. His type of woman, or at least had been once, long ago.

She smiled at him again and he realized she was a prostitute. One of the thousands of Cuban
jineteras
who looked for foreigners to ease their impoverished lives for a few hours or a few nights. He would have preferred someone attracted to him, not his wallet. But tonight, just this once, he might settle.

“I’m fine, thanks,” he said. He tried to smile at her, to let her see his ruined face, in case she changed her mind.

She didn’t avert her eyes. Instead, she caught his with a look of frank interest. She said softly, when he turned away, “I am sorry. I did not mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”

She spoke with a breathy, seductive tone that hinted at the opposite. That she hoped for discomfort; that what she really wanted was to knock him off his seat and mount him right there on the floor. His mouth felt suddenly dry. He reached for another drink.

She moved her stool a little closer, played with her glass, ran her fingernail around the top. She glanced at him from time to time with a demure smile. Her body language said there was no rush.

“Can you look after my bag for me while I go to the ladies’ room?”

“Of course,” he agreed. He watched her sashay to the washroom at the back of the bar. She left her striped tote behind, planted on her seat like a flag of discovery, so the women in the bar would know he was taken.

Men’s eyes followed her. Even the Hemingways on the wall seemed to trace her slim body with their eyes as she moved fluidly out of sight.

A South Asian man sporting a straw hat pulled up a stool on Ellis’s other side. It was the only empty stool left in the small bar. The man was dark, thickly furred. Hair poked out of his collar.

“Where are you from?” asked the man. He leaned against the bar, facing the washrooms at the back where the woman had disappeared.

“Canada.”

“I’m from London. England, that is. Great place, isn’t it, Cuba?”

Ellis nodded.

“Been here long?” the man asked, as Fidel placed a mojito in front of him.

“About a week.”

“Yeah? Where are you from in Canada?”

“Ottawa.”

“That’s the capital, right?”

“Yes.” Ellis took another gulp, then put his glass down. Something about the man put him off. He answered tersely, giving nothing up freely.

“Cold.” The man pretended to shiver. “Eskimos. Snow and ice. I’ve never been there. What do you do in Canada?”

“Police work.”

“Really,” the man said, clearly interested. “So you’re a copper. You look like one, now that I think about it. What kind of work do you do?”

“Sex crimes at the moment. And child abuse.”

“Ah,” he said. “That must be interesting for you. Busy, is it?” “Very,” Ellis agreed. But it crossed his mind that not many people would describe his line of work as “interesting.”

“I work in the modelling business.”

The man turned around to face the mirror. They watched the woman’s reflection as she languidly made her way back to the front of the bar. “Where are you staying?” the man asked as she approached.

“The Parque Ciudad Hotel.”

“Ah,” the man said. “Beautiful place. Do you like it?”

“The staff is extremely accommodating.”

“There’s a new wing they finished recently. Very nice, I hear.”

“Yes. That’s where my room is.”

The woman slid back on her stool and put her hand on Ellis’s shoulder while she stabilized herself. He thought he saw her eyes
flicker to the South Asian man and narrow, but he wasn’t sure. Her expression lasted only a moment.

“You are very strong,” she said to Ellis, but he thought for some reason that the comment was directed to the other man.

The dark man held her eyes as she slipped her arm through Ellis’s and slid closer. Fidel brought the stranger another drink.

“My turn to go,” said Ellis. “I’ll be back shortly,” he promised, but he felt uneasy leaving her alone.