Criminals don’t stand a ghost of a chance
Instead of having a chip on his shoulder, like many fictional cops do, Inspector Ricardo Ramirez of the Cuban National Revolutionary Police has ghosts looking over his.
“The dead will come,” rasped his grandmother on her deathbed when he was nine years old. “My gift to you, as the oldest child.”
The ghosts are manifestations of the orisha, messengers from “the other side” in Yoruba mythology and its related New World traditions.
Prophesizing that little Ricky will become a policeman, his mamita promises the orisha will help him.
Indeed, the ghosts do try to give a hand to the grown- up Ramirez, sometimes scaring him half to death when they suddenly pop up at a crime scene, follow him into interview rooms or jump into the cruiser with him, although they tend to avoid the morgue “like other Cubans do bureaucrats,” Ramirez observes. Only when he solves the case do they fade back into the other side.
Oddly, the twist works — if only Ramirez could understand more quickly the clues they try to give him by gesture and expression.
In what’s billed as the first book in a series featuring Ramirez, Canadian author Peggy Blair has written a fast- paced, wellplotted mystery set in Havana, a city falling apart mainly because of United States economic sanctions but still seductive.
She delves into the ugly worlds of sex tourism, pedophilia and date- rape drugs, then sprinkles in prostitutes, transformed genders, homosexuals, adultery and even a dwarf. An exceptionally smart dwarf.
The odds are that the Cuban Tourist Board will never put this book on its must- read list.
It’s a wake- up call, albeit fictional, for naive Canadians abroad, secure in the belief their embassies and consulates can extricate them from legal jams: Sometimes they can’t and sometimes they won’t, even for police officers like Detective Mike Ellis of the ( imaginary) Rideau Regional Police, who’s in Havana to try to cope with his own personal and professional demons — mainly by swilling copious amounts of smooth Cuban rum.
Right off the bat, Ellis’s wife Hillary has a marriage- ending spat with him and huffs her way back to Ottawa. Next, he wakes up from a stupor ( that aforementioned rum) to find himself suspected in the rape and murder of a little beggar boy, Arturo, whose body has been found in the surf off the Malecon by a fisherman. The last admitted sighting of the boy the day before he died had been when Ellis gave him a generous handful of pesos.
While Ramirez and his subordinate, Detective Rodriguez Sanchez, race against their three- day legal deadline for charging Ellis, his police chief back home sends the department’s lawyer Celia Jones to try to find out what’s really happened, even if it means Ellis is guilty. The case certainly seems to be a slam dunk, she quickly learns.
Ellis protests his innocence throughout, even as he admits he cannot recall the events of the ill fated evening beyond staggering back to his hotel with a prostitute he met in a bar.
As his fear mounts, Ellis finds out the policing and legal systems in the two countries are quite different. Canadians who want to bake on Cuba’s hot beaches and wander through old Havana seeking a Hemingway- like experience, beware: Cuba is Communist; Cuba is often corrupt; Cuba still executes prisoners by firing squad, with or without a trial.
The country’s overwhelming poverty is a continual theme: The police lack even pencils and often have to raid the evidence room for basic supplies, like batteries for calculators. Beggars ask tourists for soap as well as pesos. In contrast, despite the hardships encountered by the Cubans each day, “there was great kindness in this country,” Jones observes.
The author’s love and respect for ordinary Cubans is evident. The book jacket says she spent a Christmas in Old Havana “where she watched the bored young policemen along the Malecon, visited Hemingway’s favourite bars, and learned to make a perfect mojito.”
Except for a couple of abrupt plot turns, one can only hope Blair, a lawyer for 30 years and former member of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, continues her career as a crime writer as well as she has begun.