Voodoo Eyes (25 page)

‘Where’s Vanetta? If you know, please tell me. I have to find her.’ Max had raised his voice too.

‘’Ow
you get key?’

‘I have to find her. This is
very
important.’

‘’Ow
… you … get …
key?’

She said the last slow and loud. Her voice echoed around the stairwell.

Upstairs a door opened.

‘Please—’ Max began but stopped when he heard voices – male and female – downstairs. They were saying their goodbyes and there was laughter.

‘’Ow
…?’ the woman screamed. Max clamped his hand over her mouth, grabbed her in a headlock and started pulling her back to her apartment.

A voice below asked what the noise was, if everything was OK.

A man in a faded purple T-shirt and tartan boxer shorts appeared at the top of the stairs leading to the floor above. Stocky going to fat, clouds of dark fluffy hair on his upper arms, a thick moustache, no hair on top of his head, bar a few stray tendrils, the man looked like he’d just got out of bed and was trying to work out if he was dreaming.

Max saw the man and stopped. The old woman slapped at his arms and stamped on his feet, screaming under his hand, her throat making a sound like a drag car stuck in mud.

Max and the man on the stairs eyeballed each other, neither moving.

The old woman was now making wretched, caterwauling noises. She shook one fist at her neighbour and punched Max with the other.

The man on the stairs woke up in a snap. He took two steps down. Then he leaned over the banister and scooped a hand back and forth towards his shoulder: the universal come-up-here-fucking-quick sign.

The old bat bit Max’s hand. She got her teeth into the flesh at the base of his thumb, dug in and clamped down unbelievably hard, breaking the skin, drawing blood.

Max cried out and yanked his hand away, spinning the woman around in a full circle. The woman tottered forward, then sideways, grabbing out at the wall for support, before falling flat on her back with a yelp.

Max bolted down the steps. Four people – two men, with two women behind – were rushing up. He bulldozed his way past, nearly knocking one over the banister. A woman screamed. The old woman splutter-yelled:
‘Aaa-se-sino! Policiá! Policiá!
’

On the first floor, someone tried to get in his way. He pushed them over.

He sprinted across the lobby, outside and down the street, back to his last point of reference: Teofilo and that useless junk-heap bike. How the fuck was he going to get away on
that?

But it was no longer an issue.

Teofilo was gone from the intersection.

In front of him in the dark was nothing but an empty road with a small twister of stray trash dancing in the middle.

In the breeze he caught a hint of perfume – a scent he recognised. He tried to place it: classy and expensive, old-fashioned. He remembered buying his wife perfume – a bottle of Ysatis by Givenchy.

Then something cool and hard was pressed up behind his right ear.

‘Manos arriba.’

It was a woman’s voice. Max did as he was told and put up his hands.

31

He didn’t know how many people were behind him. The woman cuffed his wrists behind his back, clamped her hand on top of his head and forced him down like a plunger, before pitching him face-forward with a kick to the back, her every action underscored with a whiff of perfume. He landed heavily on the sidewalk, his chin bouncing off cement.

She spread his legs and frisked him, tossing out the contents of his pockets – the lock-picking tools, torch, wallet, the photograph, Zofran tub and the publisher’s note. He saw her in glimpses: feet shoed in flat polished loafers with rubber soles, black-stockinged calves, a hint of skirt, dark hands patting down his shirt, manicured nails, a flash of pinkie ring, a thin silver ID bracelet, the shade of her pale-blue blouse coordinating with that of her nail polish.

‘Stand,’ she ordered. He dragged himself to his knees, but couldn’t make it to his feet. She grabbed him by the arm and lifted him upright. She was slightly taller than him and almost as broad about the shoulders. He couldn’t see her face.

She’d come alone. He thought about how far he’d get, how fast he could go with his hands chained behind his back and his balance off. Not far or fast enough. Plus she had a gun. So he thought instead about what would come next, and how he’d explain breaking into someone’s apartment. Maybe trying to run wasn’t such a bad idea.

She shove-walked him down to the bottom of the road to where a white Suzuki was parked. It had tinted windows and no markings of any kind. She opened the back door. He dipped down and clambered inside. She got in behind in the wheel.

The interior was a standard prowl-car rig – hard cushioning, no handles on the doors, a thick grille between him and the front seats, shatterproof glass, a radio on the dash – but it was infused with her scent, lilac and a strong hint of rosewood.

They drove off down Calle Ethelberg, where more lights had come on in the apartments. A small crowd had gathered outside number eighty-seven.

‘The penalty for housebreaking here is twenty years, minimum. We don’t have parole or time off for good behaviour. In Cuba, a sentence is a sentence: the time you get is the time you serve,’ the woman said, once they’d got on to the main road to downtown Havana. In conversation her voice was softer and warmer than Max had expected, and she spoke perfect but studied English, her pronunciation and accent fighting to a tight draw. It made what she was saying sound far worse. ‘The penalty for spying is more severe.’

‘I wasn’t
spying.’

‘You entered a restricted area and broke into the home of a government-protected citizen. And you’re American. So that makes you a potential spy,’ she said.

‘Bullshit,’ Max snapped. ‘I didn’t even know it was restricted.’

‘It is.’

‘Well, if that’s your idea of restricted … I got there on the back of a
bicycle.
Anyone can walk in.’ ‘Nobody does – usually,’ she said.

‘What do you mean by “government-protected citizen”?’

‘Señora Brown is a close personal friend of Fidel Castro. They have a long history.’

‘Fuck,’ Max whispered. Just how much shit had he stepped in and how deep did it go? Vanetta Brown would have known Fidel through her former in-laws, the Dascals. They’d been Castro’s fundraisers in Miami. Vanetta had met Ezequiel, her future husband at a talk Castro had given on Flagler Street in the late 1950s. She might even have been introduced to Fidel then. Vanetta’s coming to Cuba wasn’t a simple case of fleeing to a country with no US extradition agreement. She’d had a personal connection here – and a powerful one.

‘What were you doing in Señora Brown’s house?’

‘I was looking for her.’

‘Why?’

‘I need to talk to her,’ he said. ‘That photograph you took off me? The man there is – was – my friend, Joe Liston. He’s dead. He was murdered in Miami a couple of weeks ago.’

‘What’s that got to do with Señora Brown?’

‘She’s a suspect. Miami Police think she had him killed.’

‘Had him killed?’

‘They think she hired a hitman.’

‘Did they send you?’

‘No one sent me.’

Three police Ladas sped along the opposite lane, blue lights flashing. Max thought he saw her shoulders tense a little as the cars approached and relax once they’d passed.

‘What proof do they have?’

‘Her fingerprints were found on bullet casings at the scene,’ he said, mentally parcelling out the information, calculating how much to tell her and how much to keep back. Things didn’t feel right. They hadn’t from the moment they’d left. The trappings of law enforcement were all in place – gun, cuffs, frisking – but there was a notable absence of procedure, of rules: no back-up, no ID shown, no on-the-spot questioning, no talking to witnesses. It was as if she’d been waiting for him, expecting him. And what had happened to Teofilo?

‘You sound doubtful,’ she said.

‘I am,’ he continued. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Is that why you’ve come – to make sense of it?’

‘Yeah. That was the plan, till you showed up.’

She glanced at him briefly in the rearview mirror. She had pretty, hazel eyes. Max felt a smile instinctively coming to his lips but quashed it. What was he thinking?

‘Do you know Vanetta Brown?’ he asked.

‘Let’s keep this simple,’ she said. ‘I ask, you tell. OK?’

‘Sure.’ He nodded. ‘You speak great English, by the way.’

‘Don’t patronise me.’

‘It was a compliment.’

‘Don’t compliment me either.’ She knew what he was trying to do – build enough of a rapport to get her to lower her guard – and she was heading him off at the first pass.

‘Fine.’ He shrugged.

They were in the suburbs, bumping along pitted cobblestone streets whose sidewalks sported smart whitewashed edges, and whose grand post-colonial houses hid dilapidated façades behind trees and wild bushes.

‘You’re not exactly the first person who’s come here to meet with Black Panthers,’ she said. ‘It’s a regular little pilgrimage: reporters, groupies, naive idealists, families of the people they killed.

‘Earl Gwenver preys on them. He’ll set up a meeting with the Panther of choice – for a fee, of course. Half upfront, half on delivery. He takes them out to a deserted spot, threatens, sometimes beats them, and then brings them back to their hotel rooms and takes everything – except passports and plane tickets. Sometimes, if there’s a national shortage, he helps himself to the toilet paper. They never go to the police. They’re American. They’re not supposed to be here. They just leave, as quickly as possible. This was supposed to have happened to you. Why didn’t it?’

‘Gwenver and I never got round to talking money,’ said Max.

‘Did you hurt him?’

‘He’ll live.’

‘That’s a shame.’ She glanced back at him.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

They were close to central Havana. The traffic got a little heavier, the streets brighter and more built-up. People everywhere. He heard music and singing. They passed half a dozen couples dancing the mambo with frozen smiles and focused eyes, while a group of tourists filmed and photographed them, moving uncoordinated hips and flat feet in imitation, snake-charmed by the beat, oblivious to the three young boys threading through them, dipping quick little hands into bags and back pockets.

‘You were put under surveillance as soon as you arrived,’ she said. ‘All Americans are, for obvious reasons. On your first day you bought a phonebook from a prostitute. You made calls to former Black Panthers, posing as a writer. Then you entered Gwenver’s orbit. Now you’re in my mine.’

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘Before you went to prison, you specialised in finding missing persons. How good were you?’

That completely blindsided him. He suddenly felt himself shrinking as the environment he was in began to reveal its claws. He hadn’t just been watched, he’d been
researched.
How far back had they gone? And how deep? It couldn’t have been too hard a dig. He was on the internet. His 1989 trial had made the news and there were clips of it on YouTube. But what else did they know?

‘It paid the bills,’ he said, keeping his tone on ice. ‘Well, Señora Brown is a missing person,’ she said. ‘I want you to find her.’

‘What do you mean by “missing”?’

‘She’s vanished. On the fourth of April, she was supposed to attend a function – a ballet about the life of Martin Luther King at the Grand Theatre. She didn’t show. We went to her apartment the next day and found it empty – just like you did. Most of her personal effects were gone. No note, no phone call. This is a surveillance state. People don’t just disappear here. Even the ones who escape – they always turn up somewhere, somehow.

‘Out of the blue, we heard about the policemen murdered in Miami. And then you arrived.’

Max looked at her with surprise. She knew about Eldon and Joe. And she knew about him. So she’d already made the connection.

‘We don’t just have eyes and ears here. Miami watches us and we watch Miami.’

‘So who do you work for? The state?’ he asked.

‘Everyone works for the state.’

They drove past the Habana Libre and then to La Coppelia. She found a spot close to a blue trash bin and parked.

‘If you haven’t been able to find her, what chance do you think I’ve got?’ Max said.

‘If things were that simple, you’d be under arrest now.’ She turned and looked at him, the light picking out her profile. She had long black hair, tied back in a ponytail, and appeared to be wearing make-up. ‘You’re to stay here until you either find her or you find out
exactly
what happened to her.’

Max leaned over to the grille. ‘Are you saying I can’t leave?’

‘Not until your job’s done.’

‘Fuck you. You are not allowed to do this to me.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m an American. I’m not one of your fucken’ people.’

She didn’t thaw. She kept every sub-zero ounce of cool.

‘Then you can go to jail with our “fucking people”. And if you think surviving seven years in one of your prisons was hard, you really don’t know what hard is. Here, it’s six to a small cell, if you’re lucky. And you won’t be. The inmates despise foreign criminals, because compared to them, every foreigner has a better life – especially Americans. But the lowest of the low in our jails are the thieves. People don’t have a lot to begin with. Possessions come a very close second to family.’

‘I’m no thief,’ he said.

‘No? Those are thieves’ tools.’

‘I was a spy a moment ago.’

‘What are spies if not thieves?’

Max looked out of the window at the bin. He focused on a pair of roaches scuttling up the middle, heading for a small gap where the lid was warped open.

‘You can either spend a little longer doing what you came here to do in the first place. Or I can drive you to headquarters,’ she said.

God, she reminded him of Wendy Peck. Same shit, different day, different country.