Hungry Ghosts (8 page)

18

The
jinetera
's remains were laid out
on the metal gurney that Hector Apiro used for autopsies.
Remains
was the only word that accurately described what was left of Antifona Conejo.

Apiro and his technicians had removed the woman's clothing. There was no sign of her ghost inside the morgue. Like the other apparitions who visited Ramirez from time to time, it seemed she wanted nothing to do with her further dismantling.

Ramirez slipped into the white overalls visitors were required to wear in Apiro's work space. Opera music played quietly in the background, Carmen taunting Don José, saying if he really loved her, he would go with her to the mountains.

Ramirez looked up quizzically at the fluorescent lights overhead.
“¿Alumbrón?”

Alumbrón
was slang for the unexpected: light. Although the shortages had improved since the “energy revolution,” when Cuban youth were sent by the government throughout the country to
replace light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, Cubans still expected that on most days they would lose power.

“Yes,” said Apiro, grinning. “Not just the lights but the refrigeration units too. They've been running all day. I have to keep pinching myself.”

Ramirez told his friend about his meeting with the minister.

“Interesting that he's loaned you Dr. Flores,” Apiro said thoughtfully. “Do you trust him?”

“I'm not sure,” said Ramirez. “When I worked with him, I sometimes wondered if he was simply very good at predisposing people to believe whatever he told them. He told me he'd studied with an American psychiatrist who developed a profile of the Mad Bomber of New York, right down to his double-breasted suit. I was impressed until I realized it was like predicting a man having a beard during the revolution.”

Apiro chuckled. “I think he probably looks for things so obvious that others don't pay much attention to them. Personally, I have a problem with psychiatry in general. I spent far too many years in the Soviet Union watching dissidents diagnosed as ‘sluggish' schizophrenics and sent off to rehabilitation camps. The psychiatrists deemed that anyone who didn't support Communism was mentally ill.”

“Why did they call them ‘sluggish' schizophrenics?”

Apiro shrugged his shoulders. “Because there was nothing wrong with them. They said they suffered from ‘delusions of reform.' It's all too easy to characterize someone as mentally ill for political reasons.” Apiro looked at his friend sadly. “It's apparently the definition of insanity now to hang a flag the wrong way.”

One of Apiro's medical colleagues, Oscar Biscet, had been sentenced to three years in jail for hanging the Cuban flag upside down. A month after his release, he was rearrested and accused of being a CIA operative, one of the seventy-five dissidents jailed in the crackdown. Then Fidel Castro called him a “crazy little man.” That
designation earned the physician an additional twenty-five years in isolation.

Apiro shook his head, disgusted. “The irony is that Oscar would be better off in a mental institution like Mazorra. They play music in the garden whenever foreign doctors visit. At least he'd be able to interact with other people occasionally.”

At Mazorra, there was a ward set up for foreign visitors. It was like the washrooms constructed at the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague for the International Red Cross to view during World War II, thought Ramirez. They held rows of gleaming sinks and showers but had no plumbing.

“Maybe so,” said Ramirez. “But they'd all be crazy.”

“I doubt it,” Apiro said. “The government only puts the sane ones in institutions.” He shook his head. “I'd be careful around Dr. Flores, Ricardo. He has friends in high places.”

Manuel Flores had fought beside Che Guevara at Sierra Maestra. After the revolution, he headed the Centre for Legal Medicine. That's where Ramirez first met him, in 1997, during the investigation that year into the Havana hotel bombings. The first bomb had exploded in Havana in April at the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Others went off minutes later at the Sevilla and the Plaza. A second attack struck the Meliá Cohiba four months later. In the third wave of explosions in September, an Italian tourist was blown to pieces at the Copacabana; three others were badly injured.

The last Ramirez had heard, Flores had returned to the United States to seek medical care for an aggressive form of cancer. His wife had died years before. Ramirez recalled him mentioning a daughter who had left Havana to find work. He wondered what it was that brought Flores back.

Hector Apiro began, as always, by moving his three-rung stepladder around the body as he performed a visual examination. He stopped
occasionally to take pictures. “I would take more,” he apologized, “but I'm almost out of film.”

“There's none in the exhibit room?”

“Not at the moment.”

Ramirez shook his head. When supplies ran low, the police exhibit room acted as an unofficial warehouse for the Major Crimes Unit. But thanks to the Internet, tourists were becoming more aware of the installations they weren't permitted to photograph. Fewer took pictures of the airport or the police station, and with Fidel Castro hospitalized while recovering from a mysterious illness, there were no opportunities to confiscate cameras from tourists trying to capture his image either. The fact that more tourists were using digital cameras made pilfering film even harder.

Ramirez wished Sanchez were still alive. Remembering his friend, he felt a sharp pang of loss. Sanchez would have decided that something innocuous was illegal, like snapping pictures of mariposas, the national flower, and the shortage would have been temporarily resolved.

“Put this on the counter for me, will you?” Apiro handed Ramirez the camera. “Well, let's see what we have here.” He positioned himself on the top rung of his stepladder and leaned over the body. “She appears to be a normally developed female.”

She was actually rather well-developed, thought Ramirez, thinking of the dead woman who waited for him in the hallway. Although the corpse no longer looked much like her, or any other woman for that matter.

Apiro pulled off his latex gloves, climbed down, and moved the stepladder to the front of the gurney. He climbed up again, put the gloves back on, and lifted the corpse's head. He turned it towards him, examining it carefully.

“Look how symmetrical her cheekbones are, her ears,” Apiro said. “That's extremely rare. Most of us are somewhat lopsided. Me
more than anyone.” He let out his staccato laugh, making the sound of a small jackhammer.

Ramirez couldn't see exactly what appealed to his small colleague about the dead woman's features. But he had to admit, her ghost was striking.

“She had pierced ears. Silver earrings.” Apiro removed them. “Gloves, Ricardo?”

“Sorry.” Ramirez retrieved a pair of thin latex gloves and a plastic exhibit bag from the steel counter. He slipped on the gloves and Apiro passed him the earrings. Ramirez looked at them before he placed them in the bag. He initialled and dated the bag and returned it to the counter.

“You know, the way she was lying there in the woods, with her arms folded across her chest, she reminded me of the woman in the Russian children's story,” said Apiro. “The one poisoned with a
manzana
.” An apple. “The dead princess. You know the one I mean. Pushkin wrote a poem about it. He stole the idea from the Grimm brothers, but it came from a Russian folktale.”

Ramirez nodded. Estella had the storybook, a gift from Ramirez's mother to help his little girl learn English. “Of course.
Blancanieves
.”
Snow White
.

“It has a peculiar plot, doesn't it?” Apiro reached up to adjust the gooseneck lamp. It had a longer than usual neck to compensate for his size. “Snow White was already dead when she was kissed by her prince. Most cultures would consider that necrophilia.” Apiro laughed. He looked closely at the woman's neck. “The mark from the ligature runs horizontally, crossing the anterior midline of the neck just below the laryngeal prominence. The skin of the anterior neck shows petechial hemorrhaging.”

He pulled the corpse's mouth open and ran his gloved finger around the teeth. He lowered the lamp, shining its light into the cavity. “Petechiae are present also in the mucosa of the lips and mouth.
No injuries to her teeth or gums. Nothing obstructing her throat. She didn't choke on any apples.”

“Then I guess her prince won't be coming.”

“I don't think he'd want to kiss her this time.” The pathologist pretended to shudder. He stepped down and picked up a small electric saw from the counter. He plugged in the cord and clambered up the stepladder again. “Isn't she the one who lives with all those dwarves? They aren't in the Russian version.”

“Yes,” said Ramirez. “Seven of them. Grumpy, Bashful, Dopey . . . I can't remember all their names.”

Apiro raised a thick eyebrow. “Hardly flattering.”

He carved a line around the top of the skull. As he did, the lights in the room went out. He climbed down again and walked across the room, exchanged the saw for a scalpel, and returned to his original position.

“If you could turn on your cell phone, Ricardo, and hold it up over the body, I'll be able to see what I'm doing. You'd be surprised how many times we have to do this during operations on live patients.”

Apiro had worked full-time as a plastic surgeon before he started doing autopsies for the Major Crimes Unit. For a while, he gave up surgery for a living altogether. But now that Maria Vasquez had moved in with him, Apiro was seeing private patients again. His salary without doing so was not enough to support himself, much less a live-in girlfriend, and a large one at that, thought Ramirez.

Ramirez held up his phone. As the faint blue light illuminated the woman's body, Apiro removed the top and back of the skull and then the brain.

“The Grimms' story that always terrified me was Rumpelstiltskin,” Apiro said. Ramirez knew the pathologist was trying to distract him. Ramirez always found it hard to keep his stomach contents down when Apiro was examining a brain. “He offered to pay
a woman gold to have his child and ended up robbed of his money
and
his progeny. He jumped out a window and was burned to death in a frying pan. I used to toss and turn at night at the orphanage, worried I'd end up deep-fried if I even thought about having children.”

Ramirez wondered if Apiro wanted a family. They had never talked about it. As far as Ramirez knew there was no biological reason to prevent it.

Apiro had soldiered through life stoically, despite the enormous obstacles he faced daily. But he might not want to take the chance on having a child like himself, exposing a child to the ridicule, the taunts. And, of course, Maria Vasquez could never have children.

The lights flickered on again. Ramirez put his cell phone away, swallowing hard as Apiro held the brain gently and turned it towards the fluorescent glare.

“It was Rapunzel for me,” said Ramirez. “My mother told me she was really Santa Barbara and that it wasn't her hair they cut off, but her head. Every time I went to church with my father, I was afraid I'd be decapitated for being Catholic.”

“Rapunzel was pregnant in the original Grimms' story, you know, although you won't see that in the children's edition.” Apiro stepped off his ladder and put the brain on a scale on the counter to weigh it. “Frankly, it's the idea of heaven that I find offensive. The chief of the Taino Indians told the Spaniards when they first arrived here that he'd rather burn at the stake than go to heaven if it was full of Christians. I don't blame him. The whole notion that the dead might be wandering around above us in the clouds somewhere watching us, is silly.”

But Ramirez could easily imagine the dead woman wandering around his apartment, watching him. Disrobing. Lying down. Parting her legs for him. He would enter her smoothly, the way a silk scarf slipped to the floor.

The deadly sin of lust would only be exceeded by that of murder, if Francesca found out he had strayed, even if only in his thoughts.