The Beggar's Opera (29 page)

The first thing Inspector Ramirez noticed about the body stretched out on the metal gurney was the coarse dark fur that covered the man’s chest, arms, and legs. Rubinder had been a very hairy man.

“You know, Hector,” Ramirez said, as he pulled up a stool, “I am almost sorry Rubinder killed himself. He would have had an unpleasant time in custody once we arrested him. A quick death was in many ways too good for him. I can say that out loud, now that I am no longer required to be dispassionate about the evidence.”

“I would not give up your professional objectivity quite yet, my friend,” Apiro cautioned. He lit a pipe and drew on it. The smell in the morgue was notably worse, the refrigeration unit still out of order.

Ramirez walked back to his jacket and pulled out his cigar. “And why is that, my friend?”

“Like you,” the doctor said, reaching for his stepladder, “I do not care much for loose ends. But loose hairs are important. That was something that bothered me, once I saw this man’s body. As you can see, he had a lot of hair. He should have shed everywhere. But the one thing we did not find in Señor Ellis’s room, or on the boy’s body, were any hairs matching his. I would have expected some hair to be transferred to the boy or his clothing in the course of an attack. So I took the liberty of checking Nasim Rubinder’s blood type against the semen samples we had taken.”

“And?”

“Rubinder was Type B.”

“But the semen samples we took from the boy and those sheets were Type A, were they not?”

“Exactly. There is no match. And Miguel Artez is Type AB. I confirmed that from blood samples on the shirt he was wearing at the time of his arrest. Apparently, he had a bloody nose when he was brought in. Some kind of street justice?”

“There was some of that, yes. The woman who hit him had quite a right hook,” said Ramirez. “So that rules out Miguel Artez as well?”

“I’m afraid so. Someone else raped the child.”

“
Dios mio
, I have run out of suspects,” Ramirez exclaimed. If it wasn’t Ellis, or Rubinder or Artez, then who was it?

“Perhaps the maids did it after all,” Apiro said, chuckling.

Ramirez took a moment to digest this new information. “Were there other men in this child sex ring, then, that we don’t know about, Hector?”

“All I can tell you for sure is that neither Nasim Rubinder nor Miguel Artez raped the boy. Their blood types are different from the semen found on the hotel room sheets and in the boy’s body. The science is clear, Ricardo. Where it leads you, I cannot say.”

“You are absolutely certain someone else raped the child?”

“Yes.” Apiro looked up at him. “Beyond any doubt.”

Ramirez pondered this for a minute and then nodded. “Then I have to set aside my previous assumptions. When I think back, Rubinder took photographs, but his attraction for children seems to have involved adolescent girls. There was not a single photograph in his CD collection of any young boys. And it could not have been Artez, in any event. He was working at the hotel until just after midnight, and the boy was drugged and raped before then. My two-person theory was based on an assumption that Señor Ellis was guilty but had no car. But the
entire crime could have been the act of one man. Someone with a vehicle.”

Apiro inclined his head. “You have assumed that everything Miguel Artez told you is a lie. Perhaps you should instead assume that he was truthful. Maybe that will help?”

Ramirez nodded. “Good idea, Hector. He gave us a written statement. He insists he never met the boy and that he didn’t know the boy was dead. If that is true, then someone else abused the child. Along with a car, that person also had to have access to Michael Ellis’s room. But who? What connections have I missed in the evidence?”

Apiro pulled over his stepladder and sat on the second rung.

“I have a theory,” Apiro suggested. “I told you, I have only seen injuries such as the ones Arturo Montenegro suffered once before. It is the only time in my career that I have seen a boy of that age, of any age, beaten so badly.

“It was a long time ago, almost fifteen years. A case involving another eight-year-old boy, when I was still a surgeon at the children’s hospital. I alluded to it the other day. I have to be careful about what I tell you; there are certain things I cannot disclose. Doctor-patient privilege is very strict. I gave an oath when I became a doctor to protect it. For example, I cannot give you the name of the child. But some of the information you need may be in your own records and who knows, perhaps it will help point you in a new direction.”

It was January 1992, just after Christmas, Hector Apiro explained. The boy was attacked at a boarding school in the Viñales mountains run by the Catholic Church.

“Father James O’Brien, the principal, brought him to the children’s hospital,” said Apiro. “Accompanied by a policeman. There were no ambulances in Viñales at the time and only the
church vehicle had sufficient fuel to make the trip. He had been raped, with enough force to suffer internal bleeding. He refused to say who attacked him.

“He would not even speak to us when he first arrived,” Apiro recalled sadly. “His face was swollen purple like an eggplant. The surgery was complicated because the bleeding was intense. But the operation went well and the boy survived. His body began to heal. He spent more than a month in the children’s hospital while he recovered from his injuries.”

“Did he ever tell you what happened?” Inspector Ramirez asked.

Apiro shook his head. “I tried to find out. I spent most of my free time reading to the boy, hoping he would eventually open up to me. But he was severely traumatized. Small wonder. His ribs, even his cheekbones, were broken. The policeman eventually told me it was another boy at the school. The offender was a minor himself, a fifteen-year-old boy, too young to be charged, and so there was nothing that could be done.” In Cuba, children under the age of sixteen could not be charged with a criminal offence.

“I never knew the attacker’s name. And so,” Apiro explained, “I was powerless to do anything. It was not my job to get involved in police matters — not then, anyway — but to offer care. I checked on the injured child several times a day, and then as the weeks passed and the boy improved I became increasingly busy with my other patients and left his care to the ward nurses.”

“What happened to him?” Ramirez asked. “After he recovered, I mean.”

“They sent him back to the same school.”

SIXTY - TWO

Celia Jones waited outside the hotel for the lemon-coloured bus to pull up. It was a glorious, sunny day.

She climbed into the bus with twenty or so other tourists, Europeans, mostly. It was about a three-hour drive to Viñales, the guide explained, with all the stops.

The bus drove past the Gran Teatro de La Habana, and then turned onto Calle San Martín. The tour guide pointed out a collapsed ruin with trees growing on the roof, all that was left of the original theatre. It was sad to see the devastation of what was once a cultural icon in Havana. She took a photograph to show Alex, but realized how heartbroken he would be to see it. She deleted it from her camera.

The bus drove down the Avenida Simón Bolivar and the Avenida Salvador Allende. They passed the Memorial José Martí, a giant tower with a statue of the hero, poet, and author, founder of the original Cuban Revolutionary Party.

They stopped for a few minutes at the Necrópolis Colón. It was a forty-acre cemetery, filled with over two million graves, the guide explained. There were gravestones and monuments of every conceivable shape and size. It was a lush green
area, blanketed with mariposa lilies — the Cuban national flower — as well as vibrant hibiscus, pale orchids, and bright bougainvillea.

It was the first cemetery Jones had ever been in that didn’t make her uncomfortable. Most of them were silent, with only the birds singing. This was a place of laughter, colour, scent. If there were spirits wandering around here, unlike the ones in Blind Alley, they didn’t frighten her. She had only a few minutes to take photographs before the tour guide said it was time to get back onboard.

The landscape changed once they left Havana. Flat farmlands mutated into small bright green hills shaped like pincushions.
Mogotes
. Then high, jagged cliffs. She hadn’t realized they would be travelling into the mountains. She felt queasy every time the bus lurched close to the edge of the road.

About two hours into their tour, they stopped for lunch at a town called Soroa. They were taken to a waterfall and an extraordinary orchid garden, fragrant with perfume. Jones had never seen orchids growing in the wild, or so many different ones. She took pictures of every variety. After lunch, a splendid buffet of bright green avocadoes, mangoes, yams, pineapples, and almost unbearably fresh papayas, they got back in the bus.

The yellow bus chugged along the twisting road. Jones saw the occasional pedestrian doubled over, straining to walk up the steep incline. In the valley below, workers moved like small insects, droning away in tobacco fields.

She wondered what the altitude was and shivered as the air cooled. The bus climbed higher and higher up the winding road, her stomach churning with the turns. She managed somehow to keep her lunch where it belonged, but she was starting to feel decidedly unwell.

It was a relief to see the sign for Viñales. The tour guide said
it was a friendly place and to expect a warm welcome, despite the colder temperatures. The bus finally stopped on the main street, allowing her to escape.

They were given a few hours to wander around town and told to meet back at the bus no later than four. Some of her tour mates rented bikes. Chinese ones. Heavy, awkward bicycles that looked as if they were made out of one piece of bent metal.

Jones asked a man for directions to the veterinary clinic. On the way, she stopped to look at children playing in the yard of an orphanage. One small girl, little more than a toddler, sat in a dilapidated wheelchair. The others pushed her around and around in circles as she squealed with delight. A boy swung the ends of two long skipping ropes tied to a tree while another girl jumped through them, kicking up dust.

Double dutch. Jones had played it herself as a child. She loved watching them, hearing their peals of laughter. Her heart ached, once more, at the fact that she and Alex had no children.

The veterinary clinic was located on the second floor of a building on the main street. Celia Jones introduced herself to the woman at the reception desk and was pleased to discover it was the same woman she had spoken with earlier. Teresa Diaz greeted Jones warmly.

“I pulled out all our forms for Rohypnol shipments we received, going back almost five years. I made copies for you. As recently as last week, four capsules were missing.”

Jones saw that the last few pages were hard to read, the toner low, and was immensely grateful that the woman had used the clinic’s scarce supplies to assist with her request. There was great kindness in this country.

“May I contact you after I return to Canada? Please let me know what supplies you need most urgently; I’d like to help. I’m
married to a Cuban doctor. I’m sure we have friends who would make donations as well.”

“That would be wonderful,” Diaz exclaimed. She thanked Jones profusely and gave her a card with the number and address of the clinic handwritten on it.

The veterinarian, Dr. Vincent, would contact Señora Jones through the Drugs for Dogs agency. Diaz shook Jones’s hand enthusiastically and thanked her again for her kind offer of assistance. Jones thanked her for her own, and handed the woman a bar of soap before she left. As she walked down the stairs, she scanned through the forms, examining the signatures at the bottom of each page.

As she reached the bottom step, she looked up. When she saw who was waiting for her on the street, her blood ran cold.

SIXTY - THREE

“They sent him back to the same boarding school where he was assaulted?” Inspector Ramirez exclaimed. “The child must have been terrified. And what of his attacker, the older boy? What happened to him?”

“I don’t know, Ricardo. I often wondered whether he received counselling for his psychological problems, but I had no way to follow up. As a minor, his identity was protected. Reluctantly, I let the matter go.”

“And you think that boy, the older one, might be involved in this?”

“He would be a man now, but I think it merits checking into.”

Ramirez reflected. It was possible Apiro was right. That kind of aggression was unusual. Ramirez had never seen such violence in the hundreds of sexual abuse cases he had investigated, and Apiro had only seen it once before, despite his thousands of patients. The victims were roughly the same age; the attacks took place at the same time of year and displayed a similar type of violence. Perhaps there were other attacks over the intervening years, children too frightened to report their assaults. A common
modus operandi could not be excluded simply due to the passage of time.

“Sanchez searched for similar offences on our databases,” Ramirez said, “but nothing showed up.”

“The boy had no record,” said Apiro. “He was never charged. And remember, this was years ago.”

That explained it, thought Ramirez. The reason Sanchez had not been able to track it down. It would never have occurred to Sanchez to check for old files involving young offenders so long ago.

“We should have the police report in our archives. I’ll call the clerk and ask her to look for it, now that we have some dates to work with.” Ramirez did some quick calculations. “If the young offender was fifteen in 1992, he would have been born in 1977, or thereabouts. That would make him twenty-nine or thirty years old now. It should be easy enough to check for a birth date between, say, 1976 and 1978, and a sexual assault case in our youth offender records for Viñales. What hospital was it that you worked at then?”

“The Hospital Pediatrico y Cardiocentro Infantil. The children’s hospital.”

“And the date, you said, was just after Christmas?”

“Yes. January.”

Ramirez walked over to the wall phone and called the police archives. He gave the clerk the information. It took only a few minutes before the phone on the wall rang; he grabbed it. The clerk had found the file easily with the information he had provided.