The Poisoned Pawn Read Free Page B

mother-in-law, thought Ramirez. That look of stark disapproval, conveyed with a single raised eyebrow, took years to perfect.
    Ramirez was regularly haunted by the ghosts of crime victims. His Vodun slave grandmother had warned him they would come—messengers sent by Eshu, the Cuban orisha in chargeof the crossroads. It was her gift to Ramirez as the eldest son. Although he sometimes thought it was his curse.
    Ramirez had been raised a Catholic, despite the government ban on Catholicism. His father was Catholic. But his African grandmother had believed in Santería. This had caused consternation on the part of his mother, who had enthusiastically embraced the Cuban policy of official atheism.
    “The true mystery of the world is what we see, Ricky, not what we don’t,” his mother warned him after his beloved mamita died. She placed little stock in superstition, none in ghosts. “Your grandmother’s illness made her believe many things that weren’t true.”
    “But Papi believes in God, and Fidel Castro says God isn’t real either,” the confused boy protested.
    “Talk to your father,” she said. But his father had no satisfactory answer.
    Ricky was only nine when his grandmother passed away. Before she died, she made him promise to keep her ghosts a secret. Young Ramirez liked the idea of secrets, of ghosts. It was exciting, like a sunken pirate ship or a giant squid that washed up on the beach.
    His mamita correctly predicted that he would become a police officer when he grew up. The visions began to appear as soon as Ramirez started investigating homicides.
    At first, he thought they were hallucinations, caused by the same rare dementia that claimed his mamita ’s life. But Hector Apiro ruled that out after he found an old autopsy report that established she’d died of natural causes.
    Hyperthyroidism was the illness Apiro thought might account for the occasional trembling in Ramirez’s fingers and legs and the times he was out of breath.
    After ruminating about it, Ramirez wasn’t entirely convincedthat Apiro was right. After all, Apiro had attempted a diagnosis without full patient disclosure. Ramirez had not told Apiro, or his own wife, for that matter, that he saw ghosts. He wasn’t sure how they would react, not to mention his mother. Apiro had also mentioned that some other illnesses, like tumours and strokes, could cause hallucinations.
    Until Ramirez could see a specialist, which might take months, he’d decided it was best to treat the ghosts as if they were real.
    After all, his grandmother’s final words were a warning: “Do nothing, Ricky, to anger the gods.”

FIVE
    Inspector Ramirez parked his car and walked briskly down the cracked concrete path to the government offices at the Plaza de la Revolución. The dead woman trailed behind.
    The landmark building that housed the Ministry of the Interior was decorated with a huge outline of Che Guevara’s head and the words Hasta la victoria siempre . Che had used the phrase to end his last letter to Fidel Castro. But like everything else in Cuba, it was nuanced. Without punctuation, it could mean either “We will always fight until victorious” or “Wait for me until I come home.”
    The old woman tagged along as Ramirez entered the building. He strode past a long row of black-and-white photographs hanging on the wall. She stopped in front of one of them and scrutinized it closely. Ramirez glanced at the image as he nodded to the minister’s clerk, who was seated behind a scratched wooden desk.
    Raúl Castro had been photographed with a priest and two prisoners in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the thick of the revolution. Fidel Castro’s younger brother wore camouflage pants and a khaki hat. The prisoners were counter-revolutionaries,supporters of Fulgencio Batista, on their way to the firing squad, if they had survived that long.
    “ La China roja ,” Raúl Castro’s men had called him. It was a play on words—“Red China.” But