4.

SO THEN TO GO BACK A FEW WEEKS:

Xavier had painstakingly worked something out privately the second night she was in jail. He had had the help of the Canadian ambassador, and he had phoned the one Cyr he could reach, Perley, and had spoken privately. The deal worked out was so secretive no one else knew the details. Pressure was brought to bear on both Tallagonga and the judge, Señor Gabal.

The murder charges were ambivalent. The reports coming in said they were speculative at best, because even before John had arrived, Fey had determined the child had been outside when a struggle had occurred, something that John Delano himself had figured out within a day.

Xavier offered a tentative deal to pay the families of the bereaved and the Town of Oathoa twenty million. This incidentally did not sit well with Tallagonga, who was placing all her hopes of her future on this case of murder. But she was overruled.

If the deal had been accepted, Mary Cyr was to board a waiting plane that night. Her name was not to be mentioned. She was to be whisked away as so many rich seem to be.

This was signed off on. She had until that moment not been charged with anything more than carrying money into Mexico. She was in protective custody.

All was well; all was certain.

Here is what the deal was: To get Amigo off the hook for suspending the rescue search, Tarsco would pay out twenty million dollars and admit they had been responsible for the disaster. This was the secret deal, which would have allowed Mary Cyr to go home. A plane would be sent, and she would be flown out of Mexico. Perley agreed and called his older, worldlier, cousin, for he had no ability to release the funds.

Greg listened to the conditions and said:

“It’s impossible. Never. We simply cannot take the blame for something that was not in our power to stop. There are negotiations ongoing with both Canada and the States—if we admit to this, how will those negotiations go?”

This very deal would be an admission by Greg Cyr that the mining sector of his empire was careless and dangerous, and did not care for its workers. He would not do it. He could not. To admit to negligence on this scale was political suicide.

When Greg said he couldn’t pay because it would ruin them politically,

Perley said:

“But what will happen to Mary?”

Greg said Tarsco would not pay out twenty million. And he immediately got his lawyers involved. And this immediately looked like he was hiding behind this legal facade. And this did smell very bad. But even if he had not called on the law firm he retained in Mexico, it would still have looked every bit as bad. Somehow not admitting to responsibility made Tarsco look responsible.

“The Cyr Corporation will not pay that amount.”

This made Amigo look very good in the eyes of Mexicans, who now emphatically believed multinationals like Tarsco had devastated their country. So they turned their eyes to the one in the cell. The one they had. And it did look like she was the sacrificial lamb.

However, her cousin Greg had no idea that Mary Cyr would be charged with the murder of a child. But as soon as he said he would not pay, she was—charged with murder.

This confounded him, and Greg then did something worse. He said that he would pay nine million—that is, almost half of what was asked—if Amigo paid the rest, and the charges dropped against his cousin. All talk ceased at that moment.

Xavier had worked very hard and long for nothing. There were moments, John saw, when Xavier’s homosexuality was evident, and though Mary Cyr believed that gays were too self-righteous in their belief that they were the only ones victimized, she certainly relied upon him now. She relied upon him very much indeed.

And he had worked day and night for her for well over a month.

Mary Cyr knew with the Cyr Corporation coming under suspicion over this money that the situation was tenuous at best.

“My good dear friend,” she wrote Xavier, after she realized all he had been doing for her. “Don’t despair, things always have a way of working out—I will be either dead or alive, but the truth will be discovered.”

But of course the police were completely irresponsible. They had no idea how to stop a billion dollars’ worth of drugs flowing across the border, but they could stop a single foreign woman who they suddenly claimed had an ounce of marijuana on her; could look outraged for the sanctity of their country, keep her in jail for days, browbeat her, say it was an insult to their national sovereignty, then finding out it was all a mistake, let her go without an explanation. This is what had happened a year before to an American woman.

In a way this is exactly how things now happened to Mary Cyr.

There was one other thing that might be mentioned, that John would discover without the help of the Mexican authorities. A woman named Little Boots Baron had encouraged whom she could influence to let Mary Cyr go for two good reasons. One, she would inevitably receive some of that money paid out by Tarsco. (She might get as much as half of the nine million that Greg had finally offered.) Second, she was well aware of the international media storm this would create, and was very aware that her own safety might be in jeopardy if people began to seriously look into Amigo accounts. When John heard this name, the sixth day he was in Oathoa, he knew immediately it was the name of a powerful person—clandestine, and perhaps the power behind people like Carlos DeRolfo and Hulk Hernández.

Later he was to find out that he was right.

Little Boots was Hulk Hernández’s employer. She was the overseer of everything that had happened at Amigo Mining concerning the funnelling of money. She was one of the principal overseers of everything that happened in their state. Very few people spoke her name aloud.