The Beggar's Opera (2 page)

“Get along now,” Mike said, and the boy nodded, grinning. The street child stopped for a moment, watching a group of older boys run along the sidewalk on the other side of the seaway. When they disappeared from sight, he finally ran off, clutching his pesos. He weaved between the honking cars like a brightly coloured fish until his yellow shirt disappeared into the deepening shade of a small, high-fenced park near the artists’
market. A Ferris wheel and garish carousels spun slowly behind a wall of palm trees.

“You know goddamn well what I meant,” Hillary said, openly furious now the boy was gone. They were headed for another argument with all the momentum of a suicide jump. She turned away, rigid with anger. Mike leaned against the seawall, waiting uneasily for her next attack.

Mike was entitled to several weeks of holidays after his disability leave. Chief O’Malley had told him to take his time, have a good long mental-health break. Come back to work when he was well-rested. And make sure to bonk that nice-looking wife of his every day they were away. Mike chose Havana as their surprise destination. He no longer remembered why he thought Hillary would enjoy it, or, frankly, why he cared.

All
she
noticed was the poverty. Families piled into devastated apartments propped up with bits of purloined wood; shaking dogs driven crazy with mange. She started complaining the moment they got off the plane.

Seagulls circled above them, screeching. Others bobbed like small white buoys on the dark waves. She shook her head at him, disgusted. “I don’t know why the hell you did that. Gave him more money, after I expressly told you not to.”

Mike shrugged helplessly. “They have so little, Hillary. Why get so angry over a few dollars?” But he knew her anger wasn’t about that, it was about them. More precisely, about him.

“That’s exactly what’s wrong with you,” she said in a voice as brittle as twigs. “You said a few days in Havana and everything would be better. Well, nothing’s going to change who we are, is it? A few more days here isn’t going make a difference. I moved my flight forward. I’m going back to Ottawa tonight.”

An old car backfired like a gunshot. Mike’s heart tightened at the sound. He felt the hard punch of the muscle spasms he’d
suffered since Steve Sloan’s death. Panic attacks, the departmental psychiatrist called them. Anxiety.

For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. He leaned over the seawall and the sharp edges of the rocks pressed into his chest. The water below shone with rainbows of kerosene slick. He swallowed and took a deep breath. He managed to straighten up as the muscle above his heart slowly relaxed. “So you want a divorce? Is that it?”

She evaded his question. “I’m leaving on the nine o’clock flight. You like it here so much,
you
stay.”

“And just when did you decide all this?” He grabbed her by the arm, tried to force her to look at him, but Hillary was stubborn. “When did you call the airline? When I was in the shower this morning, after we made love?”

“What difference does it make?” She yanked her arm away. “Either way, I’m leaving.”

“Leaving me? Or leaving Cuba while you make up your mind?”

“Don’t raise your voice at me,
mister
.” She threw her hair back, indignant. He saw tears in her eyes but wasn’t sure what they meant. “Coming here was a mistake. You know it, and I know it. I’m going back to the hotel now to pack. I’ll call you from my parents’ house once I decide what to do.”

“You mean you’ll have that sleazebag lawyer of yours call me.”

“If that’s how you want it.”

She strode off briskly without a backwards glance. Her silver sandals clattered on the cracked stone. The Cuban men who lined the seawall hissed after her appreciatively.

THREE

The first time it happened, Ricardo Ramirez jumped so high that his head hit the roof of his blue Chinese mini-car. He looked around, but no one in the teeming crowds on the sidewalks seemed to notice the bloodied corpse that sat calmly in the back seat.

Was this some kind of black joke? Was one of his colleagues pretending to be the victim from the crime scene he’d left only moments before?

Ramirez looked up and down the street. He saw nothing out of the ordinary and no one laughed at his confusion. “Is this supposed to be funny?” he demanded. “Who sent you?”

The corpse shrugged his shoulders, conveying his inability to speak.

Ramirez looked at the man more closely for signs of subterfuge. But unless the murder victim had a twin, there was no disputing his authenticity. His neck gaped red where his throat had been slit, and the bruises on his face were identical to those Ramirez had observed on the body just minutes earlier.

“This can’t be possible,” said Ramirez, trembling.

Hector Apiro and his technicians were still at the crime scene, processing this man’s remains. How could he be lying
there, dead in an alley, and yet be here, sitting in Ramirez’s car?

Ramirez blinked several times, hoping the ghost would disappear, but each time he opened his eyes, the dead man was still there. He waved at Ramirez hesitantly. Ramirez didn’t wave back.

The un-dead man followed Ramirez around police headquarters all morning like a stray dog. He vanished from sight only when Ramirez used the toilet. Ramirez walked out, zipping up, to find the ghost waiting in the corridor. He hurried down the hall, the spectre close on his heels.

Apiro had scheduled the man’s autopsy for two that afternoon, only twenty minutes away. Ramirez walked as quickly as he could to the morgue without running, trying not to draw attention to himself, again wondering why no one else noticed the bloodied ghost in his wake.

You’ve been dead for twenty-four hours, thought Ramirez. Apiro is about to cut you up.
What in God’s name are you?

Ramirez darted through the metal door into Apiro’s private sanctuary. The dead man stopped outside, frowning. As Ramirez entered the morgue, there was no sign of the apparition.

Ramirez leaned against the door to make sure it was firmly closed. He peered around the small room anxiously. Only Hector Apiro was inside. He stood on the top step of a threerung stepladder, leaning over a body stretched out flat on the metal gurney he used for autopsies. A proper table would have had runoff areas for blood and other fluids; Apiro made do with metal buckets.

Ramirez hung up his jacket and tried to work his arms through the sleeves of the white lab coat that he was required to wear inside Apiro’s workspace. His hands shook and he kept missing the holes. Apiro, busy, didn’t notice.

Apiro turned his head to greet him. “Good afternoon, Ricardo. My goodness, you’re pale. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s nothing, Hector.” Ramirez swallowed a few times. “I’ll be fine.” But he wasn’t sure if that was true.

“There’s a glass on the filing cabinet, if you’d like to get some water. Autopsies are unpleasant at the best of times, even for me. And if you need to get some air, please, go ahead. This body isn’t going anywhere.”

Ramirez wasn’t so sure of that either.

He approached Apiro tentatively, almost afraid to look in case the body moved.

Apiro had removed the clothes from the cadaver, but it was definitely the same man who had haunted Ramirez all morning. Ramirez half expected the dead man to wink at him, but the eyes that stared at the ceiling were lifeless, waxen.

The thing in the hallway is alive compared to this, Ramirez thought. What in God’s name is it?

“He
is
dead, isn’t he?” Ramirez asked. But the proof of death lay on the table in front of him and in glass jars on the counter.

“If he wasn’t before, he is now,” Apiro said, laughing. “I’ve removed all his organs.”

Ramirez fumbled in his pocket for a cigar. “Tell me something, Hector. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“As a man of science, I don’t believe in much,” said Apiro, holding his scalpel thoughtfully. “Although I am sure such illusions serve a valid social purpose. After all, Catholic priests believe in ghosts, don’t they? The consecrated Host? The Holy Ghost?”

“You don’t believe in them yourself?”

“In priests, Ricardo?” the pathologist asked. He pivoted his large head and cocked a bright eye at Ramirez. “You know what I think of organized religion. You can imagine what I think of any God who would make
me
in his image.”

“But what if someone told you they’d seen a ghost? Someone credible,” Ramirez pressed. “Unlikely to make things up.”

“Ah, now, Ricardo, believing in ghosts is one thing. Seeing them is another. I would suspect that person had developed a medical problem. There are certain illnesses — tumours, toxicities like lead poisoning, for example — that can cause hallucinations. As well as some mental illnesses like schizophrenia and senile dementia. Even a stroke can sometimes have that effect.”

“What about the
santeros
?” asked Ramirez. He pulled a stool over and sat down to steady his legs. “They claim to communicate with the dead. My grandmother was Vodun. On my father’s side.”

Slave traders brought Ramirez’s Yoruba ancestors from West Africa in the 1800s to harvest Cuban tobacco and sugar. The Yoruba followed their own religion, Vodun, as well as the Catholicism forced upon them by their owners.

Or at least they pretended to. They cloaked their religion with Catholic rites, but never gave up their own practices. The resulting mix of Catholicism and Vodun — Santería, or Lukumi — included a belief in multiple gods, and regular and animated interaction with the spirit world.

Apiro nodded doubtfully. “Superstition, I think. In that sense, Santería is no different than other religions. I agree with Castro on that point. We were both trained by Jesuits, and we both became atheists. Perhaps there is a connection.”

Ramirez cringed as Apiro probed the neck wound with his gloved fingers, but the body didn’t twitch. Definitely dead, thought Ramirez. No doubt about it.

“Your grandmother believed in ghosts?” asked Apiro. He leaned against the top rung of his ladder as he waited for Ramirez’s response.

Ramirez inclined his head slightly, remembering his promise of secrecy. His grandmother had spoken to him of a gift across
generations, of messengers from the other side. A gift that waited for him outside the door, the bright slash of his wound coiled around his neck like a red bandana.

“My parents said she died from an unusual form of dementia. But she knew where she was, and who we were, right up to the end. I was there when she passed away.”

“She probably had a disease called DLB, then,” said Apiro. “Dementia with Lewy bodies. It can cause extremely compelling hallucinations. Quite often those who have it know their visions are not real; they may even find them amusing. Socks that turn into kittens, for example. Although in Cuba, kittens that turned into socks would be more useful. I personally think it’s more difficult to deal with than Alzheimer’s because of that self-awareness. It’s a terrible illness, Ricardo. I’m sorry to hear she suffered from it.”

“Is that the only symptom of the disease, Hector?” asked Ramirez, his hands shaking as he lit the cigar. “Delusions?”

“Hallucinations and delusions are not quite the same, Ricardo. Hallucinations occur when one sees things that don’t exist. A delusion is when one believes them. But no, there are certainly others as the illness progresses,” said Apiro, turning back to the corpse. “Insomnia is quite common in the early stages. Then tremors in the extremities. The cognitive deterioration comes much later on. Unfortunately, it is impossible to diagnose the illness with certainty until one autopsies the brain, although CT scans and MRIs can be useful if there is a reason to suspect it. She did well to live so long, your grandmother. The disease can be of quite early onset. It often strikes people in their forties and fifties.”

“My God,” said Ramirez. His heart sank. He had suffered from insomnia for months, ever since his promotion. And now apparently from hallucinations, too. “What’s the prognosis?” Ramirez was almost afraid to ask.

“Fatal. Usually within five or six years.”

“Is there no treatment?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid.” Apiro looked up and searched his friend’s eyes carefully. “Are you worried that your father may have it? It is not usually considered hereditary, but I could try to arrange an MRI. It could take months, maybe a year, to get an appointment. There are only two machines in Havana and limited supplies. And like most things, the tourists come first.”

Ramirez shook his head. His father was old but healthy. He didn’t know how to tell Apiro that he was the one seeing ghosts, not his father. And what was the point of an MRI if there was no way to conclusively diagnose the illness, and nothing Apiro, nothing anyone, could do about it anyway?

Ramirez breathed in and out rapidly, deeply stunned. Francesca was four months pregnant with their second child. What should he do? He couldn’t tell his wife that he would probably die before their unborn baby started school. Francesca would kill him herself.

Apiro stepped down and snapped off his gloves. “If you give me your grandmother’s name and her date of birth, I can check our records to see what the autopsy revealed. When did she die?”

“In 1973, when I was nine. She must have been in her nineties by then. But I don’t know her exact birthday, Hector,” Ramirez answered slowly, his thoughts heavy as cement. “She was Yoruba. Born a slave.”

Until the late 1800s, slaves were considered property, and birth certificates were never issued for them. But his grandmother was a free woman when she died. A person, no longer a thing, under Cuban law. “Would they have done an autopsy that far back?”

Apiro nodded. “If they suspected Lewy body dementia, yes. It’s been a matter of medical interest for at least a hundred years. It may take me some time, Ricardo, but I’ll find out, I promise.”

Those old records were Ramirez’s only hope.

But they weren’t computerized, and Apiro called him later that day to say that until they were, he had no way to find a pathology report for a former slave who died more than three decades earlier.