The Poisoned Pawn (16 page)

“If Rita Martinez hadn’t also died, I would think a restaurant was responsible,” said Apiro. “But you know how unlikely that is.”

It was illegal for
turistas
to eat in private homes. But it was also illegal for Cubans to eat at tourist restaurants.

“Besides,” Apiro said, “Rita was working at police headquarters when she became ill.”

Ramirez could see why Apiro was having problems connecting the dots, when one victim was Cuban and the other two were tourists. They occupied parallel worlds, ones that rarely intersected.

“Maybe you can get Espinoza to find out what hotel Señora Caron stayed in, Hector. That might narrow down a geographic area at least. But I hope you are wrong about a connection, my friend. Because if you’re right, there could be more deaths.”

“Not to mention the harm this could cause our flourishing economy,” Apiro joked. The strain in his voice caused him to croak.

Ramirez laughed uneasily. “Something like this could ruin us.”

THIRTY

Charlie Pike exited from the highway onto a wide, busy street called Bronson Avenue. “The RCMP headquarters is about twenty minutes east of here, off the Vanier Parkway,” he explained to Ramirez. “We’re going to have to take a detour through downtown to avoid the Queensway. There’s a ten-car pileup there; traffic’s bumper to bumper all the way to Lees. It’s going to be bad today and tomorrow. There’s a big storm moving in.”

Pike drove north until the road ended at a junction.

“That’s the Ottawa River over there,” said Pike. “On the other side, that’s Quebec. This is all unsurrendered Algonquin territory. Even Parliament Hill.”

“Another First Nation?”

“You’re learning fast,” Pike smiled. “The Algonquins used these lands for hunting and fishing. They never gave them up, never signed a treaty. They have a land claim with the federal government. It’s been in negotiations for maybe ten, fifteen years. The federal and provincial governments have it on a fast track. Might get it settled in a century or two if they can keep up the pace.”

Pike signalled and turned the big truck right on Albert, then
left on Bay. They drove down Wellington, past the Supreme Court of Canada, the Justice Building, and the Parliament Buildings. These were massive structures, strung with bright Christmas lights, as was every tree along the route.

But as they drove past Ramirez’s hotel and through the downtown core, it was the advertising that shocked him. Billboards with signs for Coca-Cola, new cars, laser eye surgery, even women’s lingerie.

In Cuba, there was no advertising for goods or services. The only billboards on Cuban highways were state-owned. Most had cartoon pictures of either Fidel Castro or George Bush. Bush was usually portrayed with a small black moustache, like Adolf Hitler. Sometimes blood dripped from the corners of his mouth, like a vampire.

Edel and Estella would love to see the Christmas lights, the spires of the Gothic churches. Francesca, she of the handmade Christmas bells and stars that still decorated their small apartment, would be amazed at how much energy was spent on Christmas lights when their own electricity supply was so precious, so often disrupted.

There were only a few people walking about. They were bundled up like the Egyptian mummies on display at the Museum of Universal Arts in Havana.

At home, even this early in the day, the streets would be full of people, tourists coming and going from bars,
jineteras
calling softly to potential customers.

Pike turned on the wipers to clear the falling snow. Ramirez was amazed by the flat, intricate shapes. Tiny lace doilies melted on the windshield.

“It must have warmed up,” said Pike. “It was too cold to snow last night. Only minus twenty today, and no wind chill.”

“So this is snow. It is quite beautiful.”

It did feel warmer, Ramirez thought. Cold, it seemed, was a sensory illusion.

“They say that no two snowflakes are the same. I’m not sure how anyone could ever know that without seeing every single one of them. But yes, this is it, alright. You’re here at the very worst time of the year, Rick,” Pike said, as the windshield wipers thwacked back and forth. “We have at least three or four months of really cold weather in the winter. But January is always the worst. Well, that and March. And February can be pretty bad, too.”

Ramirez laughed. “Appreciating your weather may take me a little time. How long have you been with the Rideau Police Force, Charlie?”

“Since 1995. O’Malley talked me into joining up when he got appointed chief. He was with the Winnipeg Police before he came here. That’s in Manitoba. Another province. Believe it or not, it’s even colder there than it is here. O’Malley was a beat cop when I first met him.”

“You knew him before he took over this police force, then?” “Yeah, I’ve known him since I was fourteen.” Pike turned to look at Ramirez. He grinned. “He caught me breaking into an apartment. That was my lucky break.”

“Lucky? Why?”

“It was his apartment.”

THIRTY - ONE

“I was with my best friend, Sheldon Waubasking. We ran away from school up north, hitchhiked all the way to Winnipeg. We were supposed to be staying with Sheldon’s sister, but we ended up living on the streets.”

Inspector Ramirez looked at Charlie Pike with interest.

“Did Chief O’Malley charge you?” He wondered how someone with a criminal record could become a police officer.

“No. I think he felt sorry for us. He took us under his wing. Although he made me buy him a new radio to replace the one I broke when he hauled me out the window he caught me coming through. Me and Sheldon, we were headed on the wrong path back then; he turned us around. Although back in ’84, when all that happened, he scared the heck out of me. He looked like a biker who stole someone’s uniform. He was even bigger then, if you can imagine. Built like a bull and just as bald. That scared me, too. My mother was Mohawk, but my dad was Ojibway. The Anishnabe only shave their heads when someone dies.”

“Mohawk is another Indian tribe?”

“Part of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee. They’re called the Six Nations, too. Under Confederacy laws,
I’m supposed to be Mohawk, not Ojibway, because my mother was Mohawk. But the Canadian government doesn’t recognize Haudenosaunee laws. We don’t recognize theirs, either. We use our own passports when we travel.”

“It sounds complicated.”

Pike shrugged. “I guess so. It’s always been that way.”

“I like him, your Chief O’Malley.”

“He’s a good guy. He grew up in Northern Ireland. He told me once that even though he was an atheist, the street gangs there used to chase after him. They’d ask him which god he didn’t believe in, the Protestant one or the Catholic one. And then they’d beat him up, whatever he said. I don’t think he was joking.”

Ramirez laughed. “In Cuba, we believe in every god rather than picking only one. The Yoruba slaves who were brought to Cuba to work on the tobacco and sugar plantations gave their
orishas
the names of Catholic saints so that they could practice their religion under the noses of their masters.”

Even Castro was on the fence, thought Ramirez. He was baptized a Catholic. When he marched into Havana as the leader of the revolution in January 1959, he wore a locket bearing the image of the Virgin of Charity. He was excommunicated shortly after he announced his belief in communism.

Pike smiled. “My people did the same kind of thing. When the government said we couldn’t have traditional chiefs anymore and had to elect them, the clan mothers told the hereditary chiefs to run for election, and everyone voted for them. The government never knew the difference.”

“We have no choice but to vote for our government,” said Ramirez. “But it’s not that bad. No one is homeless in Cuba. We don’t eat well, but usually no one starves. On the other hand, all our buildings are falling down.”

“It’s the same here, for First Nations people, anyway. The
Crown owns our reserves and the band councils own the buildings. There’s never any money to fix them up. In a lot of First Nations, particularly up north, people have to use slop buckets, because they don’t have any plumbing. It was a problem when we had the SARS epidemic a few years back. The doctors kept saying ‘wash your hands.’ But they couldn’t.”

“We have problems with our water supply, too. And with our power, which often doesn’t work.”

Ramirez yawned. Pike took a quick look at his passenger. “You look tired, Rick.”

Ramirez’s eyes had started to droop with fatigue. “Forgive me. I didn’t sleep well. And I am worried about events at home but powerless to do anything about them. It is stressful to be so far away from my family in such circumstances.”

“Yeah, I know what that’s like.”

The national police force headquarters showed a Soviet influence, to Ramirez’s eyes. It was a square brown building that sprawled across acres of flat land.

“The RCMP are involved in the Indian residential school files because the schools were owned by the feds,” Pike explained. “They’re the federal police force. When the first complaints about abuse were made, back in the sixties and seventies, they’re the ones that investigated, so they have a lot of files. There are class actions all across the country now by former students who claim they were sexually and physically abused at those schools. Twelve thousand claimants so far. They figure eighty or ninety thousand may file for compensation under the settlement agreement the churches have worked out with the government. I guess you know that Rey Callendes was arrested because of the child pornography they found on his laptop at airport security?”

Ramirez nodded.

“After he was taken into custody, the RCMP found his name in the database of those old residential school complaints. And then Celia came back from Cuba with a report that said Callendes was involved in abusing kids there as well.”

“Yes,” Ramirez said. “He assaulted a child at a boarding school in Viñales. But that was in the early 1990s.”

Rodriguez Sanchez.

“Callendes was in Canada long before that,” said Pike. “In the seventies. Up in Northern Ontario. He taught at an Indian residential school. There were lots of claims filed about that school. I’ve heard that every little boy that went there was sexually abused.”

Charlie Pike pulled the red truck into the wide driveway that led up to RCMP headquarters. He stopped beside a small white booth in front of a large parking lot. He rolled down his window and gave their names to the security guard. The guard checked a list and waved them through. Another elderly commissionaire, Ramirez noticed. Canada was a country confident enough to be guarded by the frail and the old.

The parking lot barrier arm rose, and they entered the grounds of the RCMP headquarters.

THIRTY - TWO

The fax machine in Hector Apiro’s small office beeped. He hopped off his swivel chair and made his way over as a page curled through. He pulled it out of the tray, relieved to discover it was the results of the gas chromatography test on Rita Martinez’s remains.

Apiro read through the sheet quickly. He was astonished at its contents.

How could Rita’s body possibly have fluoroacetate in it? The chemical was extremely rare. It was used only where the risk of accidental poisoning of humans was minimal, given its high toxicity. It was a rodenticide as well as an insecticide, one that was quickly absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. Apiro knew of twelve deaths in Brazil caused by the poison after thirsty men drank what they thought was liquor in an old whisky bottle.

It was the perfect poison with which to commit murder, if one could find it.

It dissipated quickly in water. It was colourless, odourless, and almost entirely tasteless, except for a bit of a salty aftertaste. This was the reason it was used to bait and poison small animals. The chemical was virtually impossible to trace in the human body
unless one knew exactly what to look for: an elevated level of citric acid.

Apiro had decided to test for it after Ramirez’s mention of banana rats and pesticides. This was what Apiro liked best about their friendship. Their back-and-forth, the way one idea fed another. They made a good team, he and Ramirez. Like the paramedics, able to anticipate each other’s moves. Except in chess, where only Apiro could foresee what was coming and develop a strategy.

Perhaps Rita Martinez
was
murdered, then, thought Apiro. But how? It was impossible to obtain the chemical in Cuba. Or to make it.

Fluoroacetic acid was one of the most deadly nerve agents on earth. It was manufactured by men who wore spacesuits like Russian cosmonauts. There was no laboratory capable of producing it anywhere on the island, nowhere safe enough.

Well, here it is, thought Apiro, so it has to be somewhere. But where?

If the poison was in powder form, it could kill through inhalation. But then others would have been exposed to it too.

No, thought Apiro. Rita Martinez was stricken in the police station. She must have consumed something there that had the chemical in it.

Which was why he was so perplexed.

The first symptoms of fluoroacetate poisoning usually appeared within a half-hour of exposure and worsened as time progressed. But Rita was almost at the end of her shift when she collapsed. She had to have come into contact with the chemical somewhere within the police headquarters building the night she died. She’d been drinking coffee from the cafeteria, but no one else who drank coffee from the same machine had taken ill. He’d tested her mug; it was free of contamination. Other than
her desk, which he had already checked, Apiro didn’t know where else to look.

His legs were as heavy as cement. His fatigue was catching up with him. He ran his hands through his greying hair, frustrated.

Apiro sipped his coffee slowly, grateful he’d brewed it to be extrastrong. Another beep drew him back to the present: an incoming fax. He put down his mug and rubbed his legs before standing up painfully.

Apiro suffered from early degenerative joint disease, another symptom of his achondroplasia. It was usually treated with Aspirin, but there was none to be found. Lack of sleep made the condition more painful.