The Poisoned Pawn by Peggy Blair

watch. He had only a few hours before his flight. He hoped to find a warm coat in the airport lost-and-found, or, more accurately, the stolen-and-expropriated. His bag was packed with his few belongings, but he still needed supplies.
    He walked down the hallway and nodded to the pretty clerk who sat at a desk outside the exhibit room. Rita Martinez was a young woman who favoured short skirts and low necklines.
    He let himself into the exhibit room and pulled the heavy door tightly closed. The storage room was lined with rows of battered metal shelves, each piled high with numbered boxes. Since so many ordinary activities had been criminalized, the dusty containers held all manner of exhibits, from stuffed toys to machine guns. But like the garbage dump at the city’s edge, the room’s contents had been well picked over. Members of the Cuban National Revolutionary Police Force were highly skilled at recycling.
    He kept digging until he found the box he wanted, one with the exhibits from the Michael Ellis investigation. He removed aplastic envelope full of Polaroid photographs and put it in his jacket pocket. He also retrieved a digital camera that belonged to a foreigner who had snapped a picture of Señor Ellis with Arturo Montenegro before the little boy was murdered.
    Candice Olefson lived in Ottawa; Ramirez planned to return it. Given the dire shortage of cameras, he had briefly considered keeping it, but there was no point. He had no memory cards and they weren’t easy to find. Besides, Celia Jones had promised Olefson the camera would be given back to her.
    He returned the box to the shelf and signed the appropriate forms to indicate these items were in his possession.
    He could not fail to notice, as he rifled through adjacent exhibit boxes, how many held empty plastic envelopes that should have contained money. Euros, German marks, Chinese yen, British pounds, Canadian dollars, all gone.
    He was looking for one box in particular. It contained exhibits from an illegal rum smuggling operation that he and Sanchez had put a stop to. An investigation that continued to provide Ramirez, not to mention the Minister of the Interior, with a reliable source of well-aged rum. Of the twenty-four crates initially seized, only six remained.
    Ramirez finally found the file he was looking for. He retrieved a plastic envelope that contained American dollars. The currency was worthless in Cuba: illegal to use, possess, or exchange. That was the only reason the money was still in the exhibit room and not in some policía ’s pocket. But in Canada, the bills could be of value. If Ramirez didn’t help himself to them, someone else would, as soon as Castro legalized the currency again. He opened the envelope and rubbed the crisp, green bills between his fingers.
    “Give me a ten dollars bill green american,” Castro wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was fourteen years old. “I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would liketo have one of them. Thank you very much. Your friend, Fidel Castro.”
    When the currency had been legal in Cuba, ten American dollars was the difference between children who had milk to strengthen their bones and those who didn’t. In Ramirez’s family, only Estella was entitled to milk rations. When she turned seven, she’d be too old.
    Ramirez’s monthly salary of twenty-five pesos, generous by Cuban standards, was barely enough to cover his family’s basic needs. And Francesca was right, his parents were getting older.
    His mother was Cuban by marriage only. Once his father died, she might not receive any government support. It worried Ramirez. He needed a raise but knew that getting one was as unlikely as Castro calling a democratic election.
    Ramirez looked at the American bills, imagining what he could buy with them in Canada. He ran his fingers over the face of the dead president. The dead cigar lady watched him intently from the shadows.
    “What do you think?” he