The Poisoned Pawn Page 24

  FIFTY - SEVEN

  Ricardo Ramirez snapped the book shut and put it back on the shelf. This was a new development: a messenger who could communicate with speech, not merely gestures. Had Ramirez conjured Juan Latapier from the recesses of his memory? If not, and there were others like him, how would Ramirez ever discern who was alive and who was dead?

  He wondered if he was losing his mind. How would he know? Or did mental illness creep up on a person silently, like a pickpocket?

  “How is Señor Ellis?” asked Hector Apiro, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Recovering quickly, from what I hear.”

  “You know, I’ve been thinking more about his wife’s death. The Canadian doctors assessed her levels of luteinizing hormone when they tested her for infertility. They were normal then. But by the time of her death, those levels were grossly impaired. All of this points to anorexia. Her folate levels would have been below normal levels, even below those of most Cubans. That’s probably why she died.”

  “Are you saying she died of starvation, Hector?”

  “Well, indirectly, perhaps. She consumed a relatively small amount of cyanide somewhere and yet it turned out to be fatal, the result of poor nutrition from excessive dieting. It’s ironic, isn’t it? A Canadian woman, surrounded by abundance, starving herself to death. As for her husband, it helped that the Canadian authorities knew so quickly what they were dealing with. You probably saved his life.”

  “I’m not sure how grateful he will be. His career is over. And he may yet be charged with his partner’s murder.”

  “As he should be, Ricardo. He should have killed him in his spare time.” Apiro chuckled. “Given his employment, he took a big risk committing his crime while on the job.”

  Ramirez took a deep breath. He told his friend how he’d stolen money from the exhibit room and then found himself unable to spend it. “I ended up giving it away.”

  Apiro smiled. “You see, my friend? That is your good Catholic conscience catching up to you. That sense of guilt, the belief that there will be recriminations, even when no one is looking. As if a god, if one existed, would have nothing better to do than follow people around, making lists of who has been naughty, like the Christian Santa Claus. I think you are too hard on yourself, Ricardo. Even Castro siphons money into Swiss bank accounts. Rumour is, he uses diplomatic pouches. It’s money for the revolution, he claims. But there is no revolution in Geneva that I know of.”

  Geneva, Ramirez thought. Diplomatic pouches. He hadn’t thought of that. He wondered how many Swiss bank accounts Rey Callendes had opened. And how many secret safety deposit boxes in Geneva were full of CDs loaded with child pornography.

  “It was such a small amount, Hector. I think that’s why I felt guilty.”

  “Would you have felt any better if it was larger?”

  “No,” Ramirez acknowledged. “If I had taken more, there would have been no turning back.”

  “Who did you give the money to?” asked Apiro, as he added a shot of rum to Ramirez’s coffee.

  “A homeless man. An Ojibway. Anishnabe, I believe, is the correct term.”

  The old man was sitting on the sidewalk, wrapped in his blankets, when Ramirez left the hotel to watch for Celia Jones’s car to pull in. He barely looked up when Ramirez dropped the folded bills in his lap. Five hundred U.S. dollars, in fifties and one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “I can’t accept this,” he said to Ramirez softly. He tried to hand the money back. His hands looked like scarred leather, the blue tattoos on the backs of his fingers the same colour as the raised veins.

  “Please, take it. It has no value to me. It is worthless in my country.”

  “God bless you,” the man said to Ramirez quietly. “Miigwetch.”

  His toothless lisp made Ramirez think of his little daughter and how much he missed her. He was moved by the fact that a man so abused by God still believed in one.

  “There’s no need to thank me,” said Ramirez. “Thank the revolution.”

  FIFTY - EIGHT

  It was 11 A.M. when the phone on the wall in Hector Apiro’s office rang. Ramirez tensed. Apiro jumped off his chair and picked up the phone.

  “It’s for you, Ricardo. I think you know who it is.”

  “Welcome home, Inspector,” said the minister’s clerk. “The minister wants to see you in his office immediately.”

  “It’s time,” said Ramirez as he hung up. His heart jumped a little at the risks they were taking. “Do you still think Rey Callendes was the poisoned pawn?”

  Ramirez and Apiro had worked through the evidence together until Ramirez could finally see all the pieces on the board. The possibilities, the counter-moves. They had no tactics left. Only strategy.

  “I think so, Ricardo. But remember this. You have the initiative. Play the man, not the game. Good luck. You know what to do.” But the small man looked worried nonetheless.

  “The statement from Celia Jones. Affirmed and notarized, as you requested, Minister.” Inspector Ramirez put the document on the polished mahogany desk.

  “Well done, Inspector,” the minister inclined his head. “How did you get her to sign it?”

  “I didn’t,” said Ramirez.

  The politician frowned. “Is the signature genuine?”

  “It’s as real as the ones on the Vatican documents.”

  Ramirez hoped Andrew Britton would be able to replace his notary seal, which now sat on Ramirez’s desk. His slide down the ethical cliff had gathered momentum. But then, at least he hadn’t lied about his actions. Whereas the Minister of the Interior had.

  The minister flinched. “Vatican documents? I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “The documents you had couriered by diplomatic pouch to Canada. The ones leaked to the RCMP. Your handwriting is on one of them. I recognized it immediately. That looped y is distinctive. Hard to miss.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Not at all. I had much of this backwards,” said Ramirez. “I thought that Sanchez and Rubinder took photographs for their personal use. But pedophiles don’t do that, do they? They share their photographs. It’s like art to them; they’re collectors. They can never have enough of it.” Like Candice Olefson and her paintings.

  “At first I thought Rey Callendes was stopped at the Ottawa International Airport because of the Indian residential schools claims, but apparently very few priests have been investigated criminally in Canada, much less charged. The crimes are too old. And that confused me. Until I realized you made sure the Canadian authorities knew to stop him. It wasn’t Father Callendes you wanted back. It was his laptop.”

  “I am sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ramirez. But you’re walking on dangerous ground, making accusations like this.”

  “Oh, I think you do. It took me a while to understand the thinking behind it. After all, I’m no politician. May I? This could take a while.”

  Ramirez sat down in one of the minister’s deep leather armchairs. He reached in his pocket for a cigar, the first one he’d dared to light. But his pockets were empty; he had smoked his last cigar in Apiro’s office. He reached for the humidor on the mahogany desk and removed one of the minister’s. Once again, it seemed small compared to the cigar lady’s.

  “I’ve always been partial to Montecristos.” Ramirez struck a match and inhaled. “Ah, the taste of a good cigar. It really is good to be back home.”

  He wondered if it would be inappropriate to ask for a glass of rum. Then again, this was how co-conspirators dealt with each other, wasn’t it?

  “About Rey Callendes. You see, I thought he was on his way to Cuba when he was arrested in Canada. But he was headed in the other direction, for the Vatican. He told me on the flight here that you personally informed him about Sanchez’s death. I think you warned him to get the laptop out of the country before someone in my office thought to look more deeply into Sanchez’s activities. That’s why my authorization was approved so quickly. To distract me.
”

  Ramirez had allowed the minister to divert him from the person he should have been investigating—Rey Callendes—by sending him to Canada, putting him up in a nice hotel, letting him put expensive meals on his tab.

  “But sending Callendes away so quickly after Sanchez’s death was a poor move. The Kotov syndrome, Apiro would call it. It was a bad decision, made under the pressure of time. You realized as soon as he left that you didn’t trust him. He could use the information on that computer to his own advantage. Perhaps to blackmail you, or the government.

  “So you contacted the Canadian authorities to warn them there was a pedophile with a stopover in Ottawa and that they should check his laptop. Normally, they don’t look all that closely; trust me, I was there. But that created a new problem: if the RCMP examined the computer too carefully, they might find the distribution list for all the recipients of those pictures. You realized you needed to get it back. Which meant creating another diversion.”

  Ramirez exhaled. The smoke corkscrewed overhead.

  “This, I think, is where it gets interesting. Once Callendes was arrested, you realized it would create an international scandal. This was something you could use for other purposes. You created a set of false Vatican documents and had our embassy leak them to the RCMP, with the help of Cuban Intelligence.”

  An oxymoron, Ramirez thought. But he might as well blame Cuban Intelligence, even though the minister’s own clerk had been seconded to the task. She wrote English fluently, but seemed unable to spell some words correctly. The faked memorandum stated that Rey Callendes would “lick” to inform his superiors of events at the school in Viñales. Well, perhaps he had.

  But the minister knew what happened to Sanchez at that school: all of the facts were in Ramirez’s draft report to the Attorney General. The fake memorandum was easy to manufacture once the minister had that information. And the other documents? For all Ramirez knew, they were genuine. Maybe true.

  “It was a good ploy,” said Ramirez. “The Canadians were after the Catholic Church in a civil action for a lot of money. There’s a multi-billion-dollar settlement that the Catholic Church has refused to contribute to so far. They were almost too happy to give us Rey Callendes back if I would only confirm the authenticity of the Cuban documents they’d received. That was easy enough for me to do, once I realized you were the one who gave them the documents in the first place.”

  Ramirez could tell from the minister’s face that he had scored.

  “Rey Callendes shared a lot of information with you over the years, despite his oath of silence. He knew a lot about the cover-up of claims of child abuse, didn’t he? He held a position of considerable power. My fault, I didn’t realize he was a bishop; I thought he was a pawn. Once you had Callendes back in Cuba, it gave you something to trade with the Vatican, because they want him back too.”

  “Complete nonsense. You accuse me of forging documents? I’ll have your head for this,” the minister sputtered.

  “The RCMP officer working on this matter is the one who told me the documents were leaked. He mentioned a Cuban connection. When I realized he meant you, I wondered why you’d done it. It made sense when I learned the Catholic Church is facing an enormous wave of lawsuits. Twelve thousand claims in Canada alone. More legal actions forthcoming, I imagine, once the Dublin inquiry releases its report. The world is like a giant chessboard when it comes to protecting Church assets. But you already knew that. You knew that if the Canadians relied on those documents in their court action, it would frighten the Vatican into moving quickly. I seriously underestimated you. My apologies, Minister. You’re not stupid at all.”

  “Your logic escapes me,” said the minister, ignoring the insult. He pulled a cigar from the humidor on his desk and rolled it back and forth in his fingers.

  “Ah, that’s what Apiro says sometimes, too. That I use faulty logic. But it allows me to be creative. Here’s my thinking. Cuba needs money. The Catholic Church has money. Cuba wants the Catholic Church’s money. Is that logical enough for you?”

  “You think I would blackmail the Catholic Church?”

  “Not blackmail it. But certainly make it think it was about to be torn apart. After all, if the CIA could create an exploding cigar, Cuban Intelligence could create an exploding file. The prospect of the Church being sued for billions of dollars around the world would send it into a panic. All that money at risk. But Cuba would be a safe place for the Vatican to hide its assets. Too harsh? Alright, let’s say protect them. Not only do we have no extradition treaties, but there is no reciprocal enforcement of civil judgments with other countries. Once the money is invested here, it’s safe from foreign judgments.”

  The minister forced his face into a tight smile. “Certainly imaginative. And insubordinate as well, Ramirez. I should have you arrested.” He reached for the phone on his desk.

  “Yes,” Ramirez nodded. “You probably should. But I think you should hear everything I have to say first. I’m sure the distribution list encrypted on that computer is a long one. In fact, I’m quite interested to see just how far it reaches. The internet is a wonderful thing. One of its many uses, I learned in Canada, is for the dissemination of child pornography.”

  The minister collapsed in his chair. “What do you think you know, Ramirez?”

  Ramirez thought back to the old cigar lady, the photograph she had stopped to examine in the hallway. She had given him another clue, he realized. Another one he had misunderstood.

  “Rey Callendes was the priest who administered last rites to the counter-revolutionaries after the revolution, wasn’t he. He’s seventy-six, the same age as Raúl Castro. I should have recognized him in that photograph hanging in the hallway, but forty years does a lot to a man.

  “Che Guevara was responsible for deciding who were war criminals and who would be executed. He was Argentinean, not Cuban, and therefore extremely efficient. But he was raised a Catholic and probably had a guilty conscience, something I have recently experienced firsthand. The least he could do was let a priest meet with the prisoners to give them the sacraments. Rey Callendes knew just how summarily some of those prisoners were killed, and who fired the bullets. Bullets kill, you know. Another logic tree. People fire the guns. But guns make bullets go very, very fast.

  “I’m guessing some of our leaders were a little overly enthusiastic when it came to sending Batista supporters over to the other side. Rey Callendes kept that information to himself. Which allowed him, once he was assigned to the boarding school at Viñales, to rape little boys with complete impunity. He knew he would never be prosecuted, that the presidential palace would protect him at all costs because of what he witnessed in the mountains.

  “His work allowed him to identify men of like mind. He even brought in his friends, like Father Felipe Rubido, to work with him. When complaints began to circulate about abuse in the Catholic schools, Fidel Castro closed them, but he didn’t close the orphanages. I never thought to ask why Sanchez had maintained such a close connection to Viñales even after he had been sent for re-education to another school.

  “At first, I couldn’t understand why you insisted on making Sanchez a hero when we both knew what he was. I wrongly assumed that Sanchez no longer had any contact with the priest who had molested him. But he didn’t hate Rey Callendes; he loved him. He supplied Callendes with photographs of little boys.”

  “So Father Callendes has certain tendencies,” said the minister. “So what? You already knew that. It was in your report. And so what if Callendes had photographs on his laptop? There’s nothing revolutionary about that.”

  “Good pun,” Ramirez smiled. “I have a friend who would appreciate your sense of humour. But as Orwell said, in a time of universal deceit, even telling the truth is revolutionary. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have realized that a child pornography ring, by definition, involves more than two people. Which brings me back to the information on that computer. With the greatest of respect, Minister, and I m
ean this sincerely, you’ve been juggling a lot of balls.”

  Apiro would have laughed. The minister stiffened with rage.

  “You fool,” spat the minister, banging his hand on the desk. “You have no idea what you’re involved in. Why do you think we sent you to Canada instead of Luis Perez? Because you’re not yet corrupted.” Despite the minister’s intent, Ramirez didn’t feel insulted for not having achieved the prosecutor’s high level of corruption.

  “Yes, we leaked documents to Canada,” the minister continued, “but you’re the one who swore under oath that they were true. The Canadians have already threatened to issue search warrants based on the reliability of those documents. When the story of the Vatican’s cover-up hits the wire services, lawyers across North America and overseas will be signing plaintiffs up by the thousands. The damages will be huge. Our consulate is talking to Vatican authorities about the considerable investments they might make to help our economy.”

  Religion and money, thought Ramirez. There would never be charges against Rey Callendes. The whole thing had been a sham. A passive sacrifice, Apiro would say. The minister had moved Ramirez to avoid giving up his own man.

  “You were afraid that if Rey Callendes was charged in Canada, he might tell the RCMP about the prominent men here who engage regularly in the sexual abuse of children and photograph themselves while they’re at it. And that would shut off the economic tap. The Vatican wouldn’t dare send money to a country run by men linked to a child-sex scandal; that’s what they’re trying to escape.”

  Ramirez leaned back, enjoying the cigar enormously. Despite its small size, it was one of the best he’d ever had.

  Money laundering. Bank accounts in Geneva. Political intrigue. Yes, Havana was returning to the good old days of Batista. And the embargo hadn’t even been lifted. But Catholic money could flow more quickly than American investments. And, even better for the Communist Party, it lacked the taint of capitalism. It didn’t require democratic change.

  “Billions of dollars are involved, Ramirez,” said the minister. “That’s money we need for reconstruction, food, fuel. With that kind of money at stake, you should understand that any one man is dispensable. And we have the laptop now.”