The Beggar's Opera (31 page)

It would fit the profile of these places. Young children, alone, frightened, far away from their families.

“These dinners you describe, it sounds as if the children were being groomed by pedophiles. Am I right? It’s classic behaviour. They usually ingratiate themselves with small gifts, outings. Build up trust, so it’s easier to take advantage of vulnerable children.”

Be understanding. Use active listening. Feed information back so the hostage-taker knows he was heard.

Sanchez snorted scornfully. “Little help to know that now.” He looked down at his feet, traced a line in the dirt with his shoe. He took out a package of cigarettes and lit one. Inhaled deeply, exhaled. The smoke curled above his head like a halo, where it
was caught by the wind and carried away. She saw a shift in his body language, a sign that something traumatic had happened to him.

“Tell me, Rodriguez. You need to tell someone. You can’t carry this burden alone.”

He nodded slightly, his eyes distant. A few long minutes passed before he spoke again.

“You have no idea what we went through. The beatings we suffered, just for talking to each other. Or not brushing our teeth quickly enough or well enough for the priests. Worse. And believe me, we were angry that our families let the government send us here. We missed them at first, then hated them for not coming to get us. But the priests told us to forget our families. Told us only God loved us.”

He looked up at the trees, gathering his words. “I was at the school for less than a month when I was told I would be allowed to sleep at the rectory overnight, away from the dormitories. It was my reward for being good. Can you imagine how thrilled I was? A little boy, alone, separated from his mother and father, from his brothers, from his home.”

He spat on the ground again, his body language even more agitated. Something had happened here, she was sure of it now. Which would relax him the most: talking about it, or not talking about it? If she wanted to survive, she needed to know.

“You can tell me, Rodriguez. I won’t tell anyone.”

He paused, and she saw tears form in his eyes. He swallowed a few times before he spoke.

“There were three of us. After dinner, each of us was taken away by a different priest. Mine led me to a bathroom, to a hot tub. He washed me, made me clean even between my legs. He dried me with a soft towel, told me to put a nightshirt on. I can still feel it. The fabric was soft. All of our own clothes were second-hand,
torn, faded. He took me to the bedroom. He picked me up and put me on my stomach on the bed, then pulled his pants down. He climbed on my back. He was heavy and he put his full weight on me. I remember, I could hardly breathe.

“I lay there, not knowing what was going to happen. Starting to get frightened. He pulled my nightshirt up at the back. He began to thrust himself against me. I remember his sweat dripped on the back of my neck.” His voice cracked. “It hurt. I felt as if I had been torn in half. He moaned and rolled over. There was blood on the sheets. I started to cry. He slapped me and told me to be quiet. He made me get off the bed and kneel on the floor. He told me to beg God for forgiveness.”

“You must have been so scared,” Jones said softly, her eyes wet with tears. “I can’t imagine how frightened and confused you must have been.”
Never become emotionally involved with the hostage-taker. Don’t cross the line.

Too fucking late. So she’d blown it for a second time. That was where she had screwed up before, with the man on the ledge holding a baby. She had watched the child spiral through the air like a football, head down, the baby’s jacket slipping through her fingers
.
And then he jumped.

Pay attention
.

“After that, there was no cake or ice cream for me, or the others,” he said. Tears streaked his cheeks. “Although sometimes, as I grew older, he gave me wine. Or cigarettes.”

“The abuse continued, then? Not just that once?”

“Ah, no,” Sanchez said, spitting out the words. “I was there for seven years, Señora. That is a lot of cigarettes.”

“Were others abused, too?” But she already knew the answer.

Sanchez tossed the butt of his cigarette on the ground; let the gun drop just slightly. “We never spoke about it. Any one of us could be tapped on the shoulder at night and be taken into
the darkness. The ones who were singled out would return later, trying hard not to cry. Sleep after that was impossible. One by one, we all became numbed to what was happening to us. Who could we tell? Our families were far away. These men were God’s representatives. Our families trusted the church with their very lives, with their afterlives, no less. Who would ever believe the things they did to us?”

“What happened to you was unspeakably evil,” said Jones. “You were children. They were adults. They were supposed to protect you; that was their
job
.”

Just like it was her job to protect the hostage, to talk the man down, to get him to put down the child. And then he did what she asked, and her police career was over.

Sanchez ignored her, caught up in his own memories. “Years passed. When I turned fourteen and my voice began to deepen, the priest was no longer interested in me. It was the younger ones he wanted. And do you know how I felt?” he asked her, his brown eyes glistening. “Do you think I felt relieved? No, I felt betrayed. You understand? He replaced me with a younger child. Which meant I had no one, that I was completely alone in the world. Abandoned by my family first and then by the priest as well.”

“What did you do?” she asked.

He stamped out the dying embers of his cigarette. “What do you think I did? I was a good student. I became a monster, too.”

SIXTY - EIGHT

“Hector,” Inspector Ramirez called out in English, “get me the number for the veterinary clinic in Viñales, please. It’s probably the only one there. I need to find out if Señora Jones has arrived yet. Stay on the line, Señor Ellis,” he said into the phone.

Ramirez pushed the second button on the wall phone for another line. He dialled the number Apiro handed him and identified himself to the manager of the clinic.

“Señora Diaz, did you see a Canadian lawyer named Celia Jones today?”

“Yes, Inspector, she was just here, actually. She asked about some drug shipments we received.”

“Thefts of Rohypnol?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“What did you tell her?”

“That we’ve had thefts over the years, and that we were short four capsules that should have been in the package in our last delivery. On December 20.”

Ramirez put his hand over the receiver and repeated the information to Apiro. “Four Rohypnol capsules were stolen last week.”

“That was not enough to kill Rubinder,” Apiro said, shaking his head. “He had at least six doses in his system.”

“Then there were more drugs stolen than just those four.”

Ramirez took his hand from the receiver and asked the woman if the clinic had lost any supplies of Rohypnol before then.

“Funny,” the woman declared, “that is exactly the same question Señora Jones asked. She wanted me to check our records going back as far as I could. I went back through all our records. We had several thefts between 2001 and 2005, then nothing until last week. That was the one that Señora Jones was most interested in.”

“Do you have the forms there? The original manifests?”

“Yes, they are right in front of me.”

“Can you check the bottom right corner for the name of the officer who reviewed the manifests at the airport? Was it Rodriguez Sanchez?”

“Yes,” said Diaz, surprised. “How did you know?”

“When did Señora Jones leave your office?” Ramirez asked. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

“Around ten minutes ago.”

“Was she returning to the tour bus?” Perhaps Sanchez would miss her. Ramirez could always have a police car intercept the bus on the road.

“I don’t think so, Inspector. I saw her get into a police car and drive away with someone. He was waiting for her outside. A detective, I would guess from his clothing. She seemed to know him.”

Then Sanchez had her, which meant her chances of survival were non-existent. Ramirez thanked Diaz. He pushed down the button for Ellis, still waiting on the other line.

“Sanchez has her. She found evidence at the clinic that implicates him in these crimes.”

“Then he’s going to kill her,” said Ellis. “For God’s sake, why aren’t you doing something to stop him?”

“I do not know where he has taken her, Señor.”

“Well, where else would he go?” said Apiro, standing behind his friend. “It seems perfectly obvious to me. He will take her to the residential school outside of town that he attended.”

“Why there, Hector? Surely a busy school is the last place Sanchez is likely to kill someone.”

“It is closed down now, Ricardo, so there will be no one there. And the schools were always remotely situated to deter the children from running away. A perfect location for his needs; completely isolated. Do you not remember? Castro closed those schools years ago, after parents complained about how different the children were when they came home, how sullen and unhappy. There were suspicions even then that the children might have been mistreated, maybe sexually abused. The Pope agreed that parents should be free to choose where to send their children for school. Castro closed all the country boarding schools down, including the one outside Viñales.”

A second’s silence as Ramirez considered this information. Then he spoke to Ellis again.

“Did you hear any of that?”

“Yes. I heard everything.”

“Dr. Apiro is right. That must be where they are.”

“Listen,” Ellis said. “We have to get there before he kills her. I’m going with you. She’s my friend.”

Ramirez thought quickly, then agreed. “Alright, then. Be in front of your hotel in five minutes, no more. We will take my car. It is faster than the patrol cars. I have a full tank of gas, so I probably have more fuel than any of them.”

“Be careful,” Apiro said as Ramirez hung up the phone. “This
is a very dangerous man. Highly organized, highly intelligent. Unpredictable.”

For a moment, Ramirez wasn’t sure which man Apiro was describing: Ellis or Sanchez.

SIXTY - NINE

“You mean you started abusing children.”

Rodriguez Sanchez nodded slowly. “The first boy was Rubén Montenegro.”

“Arturo’s brother?” Celia Jones guessed, drawing on the cigarette he had offered her. She coughed. She didn’t smoke but she was going to die soon anyway; couldn’t really see the downside. Cancer wasn’t the most serious threat to her life at the moment.

“I didn’t realize they were related until this week. Rubén Montenegro ran away from this place when he was fourteen or fifteen years old, many years later. His body is probably in that valley down below, in the fields. He had no way to get home from here. I am sure he knew that when he ran away. We all escaped in different ways. But he was only eight or nine when I first encountered him. He had been in school for about a week. We were both assigned chores in the barn. He was happy, always smiling, singing, stupid boy. He seemed to like the rabbits and the pigs.

“He hummed when he worked. It made me furious that he could be happy here, in this place, after what I was forced to do at his age. Then he told me he was going to have dinner that night
with the priests, in the rectory. He was so excited to be going over to that building for dinner. He thought it would be fun.

“I grabbed him and punched him and threw him on the ground. I would show him what
fun
was. Even then, Rubén was strong and he tried to fight back. He landed a few hard kicks and started to cry. I hit him, told him to shut up. I told him, better me than them. That he should toughen up or he would die here.

“He was doubled over in pain, still crying, when I left. I said if he told anyone, I would kill the rabbits. He missed dinner that night. We all slept in the same dormitory; I saw him curled up in his bed. He did not get up in the morning, not even to go the bathroom. He made no more sounds.”

“But he was alive,” Jones said. Thinking of a lonely boy, hurting so badly, so far away from his family. Frightened, betrayed, abused. And then of the small boy he’d raped.

Sanchez nodded. “At breakfast, the priest who patrolled the boy’s dormitory came to check on him. He was unconscious. That is when I first discovered how badly I had hurt him. I felt sorry, but it was too late. The priest pulled off his bedcovers. The sheets were saturated with blood. The priest told me to run for Father O’Brien and tell him there was an injured boy. O’Brien called the local
policía
. They took him away. A few days later, I was taken to another school for re-education. Rubén must have told them it was me after all.”

“Where did they put you?”

He laughed bitterly. “Santa Clara. Some ‘re-education.’ It was another school just like this one. Did you hear in Canada about the priest who was stabbed and set on fire in Santa Clara in 1998? The same year the Pope came? That, I believe, was in the international news. Back when we still had newspapers with real news in them, not just state propaganda. Students did that.”

She did remember seeing something about it, a few lines,
nothing to convey the anguish of children who had killed a priest to save themselves.

“He was the same as the priests here. He liked little boys. That was the year that Castro finally closed the schools. He had kicked the Catholic Church out of Cuba years before but let some of the teachers stay. He threw them all out that year. These were not unrelated incidents.”

“Castro
knew
?”

He nodded. “I think so. That was the same year Rubén ran away. I always considered it unfortunate, that if he had waited a little longer, he would still be alive today. But who could know that the schools would close? We all believed we were trapped here until we graduated. Or died.”

“So when you graduated, what did you do? Is that when you joined the police?”

“I wanted to have some control in my life,” said Sanchez. “I joined the Cuban National Revolutionary Police Force. I knew no one could hurt me again if I had a gun. I had no criminal record; I was too young to be charged for what I did to Rubén. I was smart, I worked hard, I passed all the tests at the top of my class.