Voodoo Eyes (26 page)

Max thought about it. Again, he had little choice. Maybe even less than in Miami. Whichever way he looked at it, he was already halfway to prison.

‘If I go along with this, will I get access to files, reports, witness statements?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re to proceed as you would have done.’

‘But I’ll be covering the same ground you did, chasing up leads you already know go nowhere.’

‘Weren’t you following? We had no leads. No one saw anything. No one knows anything.’

‘What happens if I don’t find her? Or don’t find out what happened?’

‘You keep looking.’

‘What happens if I still don’t find her?’

‘You keep looking.’

‘Anything you can tell me, a little nugget to get me started – anything at all?’

‘Señora Brown formed some complicated alliances.’

‘The Abakuás? She was in with them. Is that it?’

She didn’t reply. She gathered up everything she’d put on the front passenger seat and got out of the car. He heard her putting things on the roof. Then she opened the passenger door.

‘Step out.’

Max came out and finally saw her face: dark skin, high cheekbones and a strong, almost mannish jaw contrasting with those stunning hazel eyes, which were both piercing and fiery. He would have considered her beautiful, if not for the severe, prohibitive demeanour, and, of course, the circumstances.

‘Turn around,’ she said.

She unlocked the cuffs and slipped them in her pocket.

‘Get your stuff.’ She nodded to the roof where his things were lined up – plus an additional item: a cellphone.

‘My number’s programmed in,’ she said. ‘Call me every night at 8 p.m. exactly. Do not use any other phone to call the number – especially not a landline.’

‘Who are you?’ Max asked again.

She got back in the car.

‘Don’t you have a name at least? If I’m going to talk to you every day, I’m going to have to call you something.’

She looked at him through the window, her features lost to the darkness again.

‘Rosa Cruz,’ she said.

‘Is that your real name?’

He wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard her laugh as she started the engine and drove away.

32

Max sat at his room’s desk at the Hotel Naçional and stared at the photograph of Joe and Vanetta Brown, desperately wanting it to be fake, a piece of digi-optic trickery, familiar heads imposed on convenient bodies – but there was no chance of that. No way. The photograph was genuine, the bond the two shared writ large in their easy, comfortable smiles, the way their bodies leaned slightly one into the other, as if mildly magnetised, Joe’s hand cupping her shoulder protectively, her arm disappearing behind his back. The Joe he was looking at here was slim and muscular, which meant he would have been a street cop when the picture was taken. Before he turned fulltime desk-jockey, he’d been a fitness freak. Well, maybe not a freak, but certainly a devotee: two-hour work-outs and one-hour runs, five times a week without fail. Being ‘job-ready’, he called it. And then there was his diet. That had always made Max laugh – Joe Liston, scourge of suspects and hold-out witnesses, the man who could scare a confession or a rollover with a level stare and a twitch of his biceps, only ate salads or white meat for lunch and drank herbal tea instead of dosing himself alert with the coffee pot. He’d been totally dedicated to his job – in mind and in body.

Max tried to remember ever seeing Joe in the polo shirt he was wearing – a dark-blue Lacoste – but couldn’t. He’d never paid more than cursory attention to Joe’s clothes anyway.

The hairstyle definitely dated the picture, the fade cut Joe’d started sporting to disguise his greying temples. The photograph had to have been taken sometime between 1989 and 1996.

Max homed in on the background detail in the image. They were standing in a street of pastel-coloured buildings with tiled terracotta roofs and blue, white and red-striped awnings, all hung with wooden signs, a bright-green parrot the only one he could clearly make out. Vertical Cuban flags were threaded through the lattice of telegraph wires above the road and a black 1950s Pontiac was parked close by. It didn’t look like Havana: the buildings were understated and modest in size, indicating a smaller town.

He focused back on the two of them, considered them as an item. How long had Joe been in contact with her? How many times had he visited her? It was more than just this one time. He’d been visiting her regularly. When was the first time – and when was the last?

Joe and Lena had married in 1982. Max couldn’t remember Joe so much as looking at another woman after that. Had he and Vanetta Brown been lovers or just really close friends?

He tried to make some sense of it. Joe had been working for the Feds, working against Vanetta Brown, working for the very system she was challenging. The Joe Liston he’d known – now
thought
he’d known – would never have broken the law and travelled to Cuba to meet with a cop-killer, unless it was to extradite them. He never would have associated with criminals, let alone befriended them, and put his career and his family’s livelihood on the line in the process. Joe had always done what he believed in, and he’d had a strong moral sense. He’d never compromised on that. Vanetta Brown had always maintained her innocence. And Quinones had told him that Joe found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Black Jacobins before the raid happened. Maybe she’d been telling the truth, and only Joe, Quinones and a couple of other Feds knew it. Maybe Joe had been working with her to clear her name.

That was some kind of explanation –
if
she hadn’t had him killed. Although he was leaning towards her being framed for the Miami murders – and leaningly strongly – he couldn’t be sure. The photograph showed them as friends – possibly lovers – yet it was an old picture and things often changed between people. There was no worse an enemy than an old friend, and a former lover could be a curse. Had Joe let her down in some way – deliberately or otherwise? Had he broken her heart?

Max was looking for a connecting motive between the murders, but maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe this was a settling of separate scores, Vanetta taking out two people who lived in the same city.

And what exactly was Vanetta Brown into here, in Cuba? Just how complicated were her ‘alliances’?

He’d find out, somehow. He had to. He was stuck here and couldn’t return home empty-handed.

He thought of Wendy Peck and Rosa Cruz, both after the same person. Neither even entertained the possibility that he wouldn’t find her. Maybe they both knew she was in Cuba. They just didn’t know where.

He had Wendy Peck’s angle, but not Cruz’s. He guessed she was secret police, but he didn’t think what she was asking of him was state-sanctioned; otherwise, why tell him not to call her number on a landline, and give him a phone? Cellphones had been banned in Cuba until recently. They were expensive. She was going to a lot of trouble to make sure this stayed between them.

Outside, he heard music – tribal drums, squalling sax and vigorously strummed acoustic guitar – followed by whooping and applause and much splashing in the pool. He got up, stretched, rolled his neck and looked out the window. There was some kind of synchronised swimming event going on. A dozen stick-thin women in white costumes and rubber caps studded with rose-head moulds were swimming with their right legs up in the air. They formed a perfect circle, swam a few turns and divided into two, then three, then four smaller circles, all spinning in time.

Max turned back to the room and looked it over – the faded grey paint on the walls, the narrow twin beds with scratchy sheets, the antique furniture and the odour of stale gravy trapped in the grain, the chairs and their stained cushions, the amateurish painting of a sunflower in a vase. Like the hotel, it was clinging to its grandeur with broken, grubby fingers.

He remembered what Rosa Cruz had told him about American tourists being watched and he wondered where they’d put the listening device. He’d fitted a few when he was a cop, bulky, palm-sized radio transmitters with tiny aerials, adhesive pads and the on-off thumbnail switches that had been at the forefront of seventies snooper-tech. Now the equipment had become much smaller and way more sophisticated, but he was sure the core principle of covert miking was unchanged: fit the device to something so familiar it goes unnoticed. He thought of searching the room, but he couldn’t be bothered. He didn’t care if they were listening to him. What would they hear? Him breathing, yawning, belching, sniffing, pissing, coughing, farting? Tameka had told him he not only snored, but he talked in his sleep too. ‘You’d make a lousy adulterer,’ she’d said over breakfast one morning. Which was funny – in an unfunny kind of way, now that he thought about it.

He took his wallet and lock-picking tools over to the safe. He keyed in the code – the date of his birthday in reverse – and opened the little metal door. He immediately noticed that something was missing. Not his passport. That was still there. Not his money either. That hadn’t been taken. The people who’d entered the room when he was away weren’t thieves and they really didn’t need money. They’d only come for what was theirs: Gwenver’s red and black notebooks.

He stood looking dumbly at the safe, his mind blank, shock and fear scattering his thoughts. He wondered if the Abakuás would come back for him next.

He put the things in the safe and locked it anyway. Then he brushed his teeth and took a hot shower.

Afterwards he lay down on the bed and stared at his reflection in the cold TV screen. He wasn’t tired. He knew he wouldn’t sleep much. Worrying, thinking. He reached for the remote on the bedside cabinet, but knocked it off. It landed on the floor with a light crack.

As he leaned down to pick it up, he saw that the back had come off, the batteries had rolled out and a coiled wire was poking out. A small white-and-silver transmitter was attached to the exposed end of the wire, seemingly directed straight at him, as if expecting him to say something, make a statement.

He stood, grabbed the remote as if it were a microphone and began to sing loudly, way off-key, a cracked and tuneless voice, aiming for sarcasm, but settling for a kind of snarling, spitting, yet winded rage:

‘While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,

‘Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s
free!

‘Let us be grateful for a land so
fair!

‘As we raise our voices in solemn prayer.’

He cleared his throat and roared:

‘
God Bless America!

‘Land that I
love!

‘Stand beside her, and guide her

‘Through the night with a light from above.

‘From the mountains, to the prairies,

‘To the oceans, white with foam,

‘
God bless America!
–

‘My home … sweet home.’

When he was done, he signed off:

‘That was the voice of the free world wishing you terrible nightmares and bidding you a really bad fucken’ evening.’

He ripped out the bug and threw it across the room. He didn’t hear it land.

33

The next morning Max took a cab to the offices of Cuban X-Press in Miramar. He had his passport and all his money on him, secreted in the thigh pockets of his cargo pants. He hadn’t wanted to chance the Abakuás coming back to his room and making off with it. In any other big city it would have been the dumbest thing to do, but Havana’s streets felt safe, swaddled in an authoritarian net, the cops and secret police waiting to pounce if it stirred.

Miramar was a whole world removed from downtown Havana. Before the revolution, it had been an upscale suburb, the capital’s very own millionaires row, where gangsters, diplomats and the social elite had lived together but apart in magnificent, sprawling mansions. A sheen of exclusivity still clung to the area. The same mansions now housed foreign embassies, government agencies and think tanks, foreign corporations and hotels. There wasn’t a clothes line or camouflaging flower basket in sight, no cracked and paint-stripped façades, no families living eight to a room, no sense of teetering ruin. The streets were wide, clean, well-maintained and almost entirely free of traffic or people. The sidewalks were lined with massive jaguey trees, seemingly supported by aerial roots cascading like dirty water, their branches and leaves so thick they created cool pools of shadow around the trunks. There were pretty, empty parks whose benches were as decorative as their dainty flowerbeds and carefully pruned trees. The only thing wrong with the place was the Russian embassy building, a grim concrete monstrosity with the presence of a cooling tower and the design of a spacecraft that had crashed nose-first to Earth; a jarring and desperate exclamation mark in the babble of history.

When Max reached the Centro de Negocios – a white modern office complex – he walked into the lobby and asked the male receptionist for Cuban X-Press. He was told the company had closed down four years before and that Antoine Pinel had retired. He asked for Pinel’s home address, claiming to be a bookseller from Canada with some outstanding business to conclude.

The receptionist made a few calls and asked him to take a seat. Half an hour later he handed Max the address and directions on how to get there. Pinel lived ten blocks away, off 5th Avenue.

With its rusted bars on the windows and thick, weather-blackened walls, Antoine Pinel’s home had a crude penal aspect to it reminiscent of an old frontier town lock-up, the last stop of a condemned man. The house’s lower-right corner was smothered in dense green ivy, the plant tentatively invading the rest of the building, exploratory fingers reaching up along the wall and under the tiled roof, disappearing into the house itself.

The man who answered the door had probably once been tall, but age had stooped him, made his head hang down, almost unnaturally, as if his brain were too heavy for his neck. He wore a loose and floppy light-blue cardigan, shapeless grey slacks and a yellowed white shirt with maroon rabbits on it. His long white hair covered his ears. His features were those of a St Bernard – droopy and downcast, hanging in tiered folds, dominated by a long, thick nose and dark eyes that seemed to be the tip of a profound and powerful melancholia.