The Poisoned Pawn (17 page)

He limped over to the fax machine for a second time. He pulled the sheet from the tray and skimmed through it, thankful the fax hadn’t run out of toner, and read through the test results for Nicole Caron.

Startled, he wiped his forehead, his aches and pains forgotten. There were traces of fluoroacetate in her tissues, too. How was this possible?

Apiro sat down so heavily he shook the desk. Coffee splashed everywhere, but he was too distracted to notice. He tried to imagine how a Canadian woman from British Columbia and a Cuban clerk had crossed paths, how they could have been exposed to the same rare poison.

He picked up a pen and began to make a list of possible connections between the two women. Did they share a taxi? Unlikely. Cuban nationals weren’t allowed in tourist taxis.

A bus? Almost impossible, for the same reason.

He needed to find out if Nicole Caron had been questioned or arrested, if she had been in police custody at any time. That
might explain the women’s proximity to each other at police headquarters, but little else.

He thought again about the
jutia
. Had these women perhaps eaten meat from the same source? But if so, what, and where?

Apiro made another note: check to see if any
cederistas
reported seeing a tourist eating at a private restaurant.

And another: check to see if anyone saw Rita Martinez with a foreign woman. If Rita was a
jinetera
, she might not have limited her clientele. Nicole Caron travelled alone; Apiro should not make assumptions about her sexual orientation.

For the moment, he realized, he’d have to leave Hillary Ellis’s death out of his search or he could be easily led down a false path. Her death was the anomaly; she became ill on a flight out of Cuba, not while she was still in the country.

Despite the coffee, his thinking was slow and laboured after two full days without rest. He was no longer a young resident, capable of working for sixty hours on his feet. Age was catching up to him.

But he was the only one who could solve this mystery. Lives depended on it.
Eliminate the impossible
. Apiro thought of the risk to the people he loved so much and pressed on.

THIRTY - THREE

Charlie Pike and Inspector Ramirez waited at the RCMP reception desk for almost half an hour before their contact came downstairs to meet them. Pike, Ramirez noticed, seemed unconcerned by the delay.

“I’m on Indian time,” Pike shrugged.

The RCMP officer introduced himself as Corporal Yves Tremblay. The policeman wore a beige shirt and navy pants with yellow stripes down the sides of the legs.

Ramirez was scanned with a handheld scanner while Tremblay signed them in. A commissionaire, this time an elderly woman, took Ramirez’s passport. She threaded a numbered plastic pass that said “Visitor” onto a metal chain that Ramirez put around his neck.

They took the elevator to the second floor.

Corporal Tremblay spoke with a slight accent which Ramirez assumed was French-Canadian.

“I’m sorry you’ve been waiting so long, gentlemen. I was on the phone with our legal counsel. He reminded me that there are privacy issues to work around. We have to be very careful about the information we share with you, Inspector Ramirez. It’s
nothing personal. We have laws in this country that limit what we can do, even in a police investigation.”

Tremblay took them into an office. The room had four chairs, upholstered in blue fabric, and a computer on a desk. They sat down. Tremblay didn’t offer them coffee, for which Ramirez was grateful. Canadian coffee, he had decided, was toxic.

“We arrested Rey Callendes at the Ottawa International Airport just before midnight on December 29,” said Tremblay.

That was the same day Rodriguez Sanchez killed himself, Ramirez noted.

“Father Callendes had a laptop in his possession when he entered Canada. He admitted it was his.” Tremblay pointed to the desk. “Here, take a look at what was on it, Inspector. Detective Pike has already seen these images. We burned them onto a CD for you.”

Ramirez scrolled through the photographs. Pictures of young boys, some barely older than toddlers. Acts of penetration, fellatio. And in some photographs, the men involved were unmistakably priests, wearing black cassocks.

The children in some of the photographs looked familiar. Ramirez was sure that if he compared them to the Polaroids in his jacket pocket, the ones he had removed from the Michael Ellis file, they would be identical.

“We know that some of these images came from a server in Cuba. That’s why we think that some of the children are Cuban.”

Ramirez nodded. Photographs like these tended to merge together after time, the horror of them supplanting individuality. But Ramirez could prove where at least some of them had originated. Sanchez’s computer. It made him sick to his stomach to think of it.

“Do you know when these pictures were taken?” asked Ramirez.

Tremblay shook his head. “No, only that some of them were downloaded about two weeks ago. Since then, they’ve probably made their way around the world.”

“I have seen photographs like these before, Corporal Tremblay. We monitor the internet in my country for such things.” Telling the Canadian police officer the truth, but only part of it—not that the detective who Ramirez had authorized to monitor traffic on the internet had used it to share child pornography.

“There are several hundred images on this CD, Inspector. All of them are equally disturbing. But we can only charge Rey Callendes with unlawful possession of pornography, not the abuse that’s depicted in them. And maybe not even that, given his position.”

“What position is that?” Ramirez asked.

“He says he is an apostolic delegate. So far, the Vatican hasn’t responded to our request to either confirm or deny that assertion.”

“What does that mean?” asked Charlie Pike.

“If he’s telling the truth, he’s a kind of Church envoy. The Catholic Church usually sends apostolic delegates to countries where it doesn’t have missions. That would give him the same ecclesiastical rank as a papal nuncio, but without formal diplomatic status. It would make prosecuting him difficult. The Vatican will claim immunity.”

“We know that Rey Callendes sexually abused at least one boy at a boarding school in Viñales in the 1990s,” said Ramirez, remembering what Sanchez had told Celia Jones. Some of it was recorded on the tiny tape recorder Sanchez had with him while he held Jones hostage. Jones said he had clicked it on and off while she begged to leave a message on it for her husband before she died.

“He always used the same methods,” Ramirez went on. “The
children were brought to the rectory, to what they were told would be a special dinner and a sleepover. A bath was followed by a brutal sexual assault. After it was over, he forced his victims to kneel on the floor and pray for forgiveness. It doesn’t matter what his religious position is in my country, Corporal Tremblay. Children have special protection under the Cuban Penal Code. My government wants to bring him back to prosecute him for his crimes. And we need only meet the test of probability for an indictment. He could be sentenced to up to twenty years for committing homosexual acts with boys. As well as barred from teaching children or exercising authority over children. Another five years for the pornography.”

“That’s about what a murderer in this country gets,” said Tremblay. “But I doubt he’ll be teaching anywhere again. He’s seventy-six years old.”

The same age as Raúl Castro, thought Ramirez. Another coincidence?

He shook his head. “His age is unimportant in Cuba. We still have the firing squad for crimes like this, if the juridical panel decides special circumstances apply, although that penalty hasn’t been applied in the last two or three years.”

“And that compounds our problem, Inspector Ramirez. We can’t return Rey Callendes to a country that could even possibly execute him. When it comes to prisoner transfers, capital punishment is against our government’s current policy. That may change, because the new Conservative government has a different perspective on crime than previous ones, but for now, that’s the way it is. The other problem is that we have Father Callendes in custody because he’s obviously a flight risk, but there’s a limit to how long we can hold him. His lawyer has arranged a bail hearing for next week. If we can’t get him transferred in the next few days, he’s likely to be released. We’re not sure he’ll stick around.”

Ramirez nodded. “Then we have the same interests.”

Tremblay looked at Pike. “Can I speak to the inspector in private, Detective, so we can work out some intergovernmental issues? This may take a little while.”

“Sure,” Pike said. “I’ll wait downstairs in the canteen.”

THIRTY - FOUR

Charlie Pike sat in the cafeteria in the basement of the RCMP headquarters, nursing a cup of coffee. He thought of the abuse the old man in the alley had suffered in Indian residential schools, and how closely his story fit with the Cuban inspector’s revelations.

“I remember that residential school like it was yesterday,” the old man had said, sipping his bowl of soup in the cold air. Steam rose from it, like smoke from a campfire. “My father”—he used the Ojibway word
nimbaabaa
—“was on the trapline. Me and my three brothers, we were all by ourselves when they came to get us. Just our auntie looking after us. My mother died when my little brother was born.

“An RCMP Mountie and the Indian Agent came in a big black car. I was six years old. Never spent a day in school before then. That Indian Agent, he snuck up and grabbed us, one by one, and threw us in the back of the car. The Mountie held my
ninzigo
so she couldn’t run after us.”
Ninzigo
meant “my father’s sister.” “He wrapped his arms right around her, tight, like this.”

The old man put the soup down. He crossed his arms around his shoulders, like a straitjacket.

“She was kicking and screaming, trying to break free,
mahwee
.” Crying. “We were crying too. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my own dad. I don’t know if they told him where they were taking us. If they did, he never came to see us. I didn’t see my auntie again for two years. That’s the first time they let me go home for the summer. I couldn’t look her in the eye.

“I spent eight years in that school. I left in ’61, when I was fifteen. Couldn’t read or write after all that schooling. They put me in junior grades that whole time. I sure knew how to say Jack and Jill went up the hill, though. And how to pray. Oh, my, we had to pray all the time. Over and over again. Or they’d whip us. And we had to pitch hay, us kids, until our backs hurt, every day.

“We had to get up early; go to bed when it was still daylight out. Sometimes I would look out the window and try to see the night sky. They beat me up pretty good for that, those priests, whenever they caught me. Same thing if I tried to talk to my little brothers. Sometimes they used sticks, or those long wooden rulers. But they really liked to use those big old fan belts, the type you get off a tractor. And they hit you hard, those priests. They never held back. You’d be black and blue for days. Made it hard to sit down. We’d try not to cry, to be brave. But it was hard.”

“My grandfather, he went to residential school,” Pike said. “My mother, too. But they never talked about it.”

“We all want to forget, son. I’m so old now, I can’t even remember what I’m trying to forget sometimes.” The old man laughed. “You know, it’s a gift, hearing you use that word,
mishomis
. I love my grandchildren. I never hurt them. I had lots of children with different women, but they all got taken away. I wasn’t good to them. I used to drink heavy, trying to forget those priests and nuns. I was so angry; sometimes I took my anger out on them. I know now that was wrong. I got convicted of manslaughter once. I beat a man to death when I was drunk.
I spent time in Stony Mountain Penitentiary. You know that place?”

Pike nodded.

“That’s where I found the old ways. Funny, eh? To find out who you are in jail. There are gangs in those jails, but the elders try to teach them a good path. About the medicine wheel, the four directions.
Ekinamadiwin
.” The teachings. “The things I’m telling you, they’re all we have left. Did I ever tell you the story of where we came from? The first beings the Great Manitou made were evil serpents. But they were destroyed in a big flood. So the Great Manitou created a new being, a man, and brought him a woman. That’s how we began. We multiplied, had big families. Do you know why those snakes couldn’t multiply?” He laughed, his face lighting up like a beacon. “Because they were adders, not multipliers.”

There was something else the old man finally told Charlie Pike as Pike slowly pulled him in from the cold. Not the details—Pike knew he would never speak of them—but enough that he could guess.

“One of my brothers died at that school when I was nine. They told me he ran away, that he fell through the ice. But I saw the bigger boys out back that same night. Behind the school, digging a grave.”

Maybe that was why the old man told the stories, thought Pike. Four brothers, one who drowned. A mother who died in childbirth. Like Nanabozho and the story of winter.

But the old man said a priest at the school told him to forget he ever had a brother who drowned. He was never to speak of him again.

“That priest, he had an accent. He wasn’t all that old, maybe thirty. Maybe twenty-five. He was nice to me, put his arm around
me when I cried. He gave me chocolate candy the day my brother died. I’d never tasted chocolate before. He told me I had to give up my Indian name or I’d go to hell. And that really scared me, that there could be a place even worse than that school.

“He took me to the rectory that same night. He said we’d have a special meal, just him and me. And after that, I knew there wasn’t nowhere worse than that school. Whatever I did wrong that day, I still don’t know. But I was in hell already. That’s when I knew I’d never go home. I had two brothers still alive. I never spoke to either of them again. Too ashamed, I guess.”

Charlie Pike finally knew why the old man used drugs. And the pain he tried so hard to forget. Someday, Pike promised himself, he’d find out what happened to the old man’s brother, and why a young student in a Catholic school wasn’t taken to a Catholic graveyard or sent home to his family for burial. How the child really died.