Voodoo Eyes (37 page)

‘He’s as good as dead,’ said Max. ‘And we have to get out of here.’

‘They take key.’

‘Get it,’ said Max, pointing at the uniforms.

‘You want me to look in … in
body?’

Benny was borderline hysterical. Shock, adrenaline, fear, confusion: nothing to do but scream.

‘Benny,’ said Max calmly. ‘We have to go. Now. Before anyone sees us here. Otherwise we will be accused of their murders. You understand? These are not just people. They’re
cops.
I really need your help to move the bodies and the cars. And I also really need you to get the keys out of that man’s pocket. OK?’

‘No,’ said Benny. ‘I no’ do that. I no’ go in dead people.’

‘Why?’

‘Is bad luck.’

‘Bad luck?’
Max was incredulous, but he kept his cool. There was no time to argue. ‘OK. Just get in the car.’

Max tossed Freckles’s pockets and found the keys.

He went over to the Lada and opened the doors. The radio was crackling, a female dispatcher’s voice. She was laughing. A small Cuban flag hung from the mirror.

He dragged Freckles off the road by his shoulders and dumped him in the back with his gun. He went over to Zits, who was not quite dead.

Zits was trying to talk, but his words were getting lost in his last gasps.

‘Sorry kid,’ said Max.

He got behind the cop and lifted him half-up by the shoulders. The cop let out something like a scream, but it came over as a giggle. Max dragged him to the Lada and laid him across the front seats, head resting on the passenger side. By the time Max had finished adjusting him in the car, he was dead.

Max put the car in gear and rolled it off the side of the road. The Lada crushed its way through the bushes, but then stopped, its way blocked by two stunted trunks. A quarter of the tail-end stuck out.

Two turkey buzzards had landed on the road. One was already pecking at its dead brother or sister or cousin, trying to get at the meat through the feathers and fake hair. The other vulture was strutting towards the original bit of roadkill.

Max walked towards the Mercedes, ignored by the birds.

He stopped.

Something wasn’t right.

The
guayaberas
were still lying there.

The car hadn’t moved.

But its engine was on.

It was humming, low.

He hadn’t heard it start.

Someone was inside.

It wasn’t Benny. Benny was in the Firedome.

Max ran towards the Mercedes.

The car span its wheels and sprayed gravel. It reversed and turned sharply and stopped again, slanted diagonally, facing him.

Max stepped back towards the edge of the road. If whoever was inside was dumb enough to try and run him down, they’d go right over the edge.

They’d worked that out too.

The Mercedes rolled back and righted itself. And then it shot forward and tore up the road, back the way it came, disappearing around the bend.

Max ran over to the
guayaberas.
The survivor hadn’t made it.

He took their guns – chrome .357 Magnums. He found speedloaders in their pockets and took those as well. He pulled the bodies off the road and rolled them down the slope.

Back in the Firedome, Benny was sitting in the passenger seat, his head down, crying.

Max started the car.

As they drove away, he saw vultures above them, moving towards the roadside.

43

Max floored the gas. The needle tipped between sixty and seventy, but the car didn’t seem to be going fast enough to outrun what had been invoked.

The landscape blended into a blue-green-ochre-grey blur. Up far ahead, the outline of the Sierra Maestra mountains marked out the horizon, running across the junction between sky and earth like a crude rip. Beyond the mountains lay Santiago de Cuba and the ocean.

They screeched through one village after another.

They didn’t talk and didn’t look at each other. Max focused on the road. Benny had stopped crying but his eyes were shut tight and he sat bunched up in the seat, hands clasped together, fingers overlapping in a bloodless weave, gnawing away at his inner lip, looking like he was praying that this was all a nightmare, that he’d wake up back in Havana.

Max slowed the car as they approached a road sign: Las Tunas 28 miles, Bayamo 35 miles, Guantánamo 59 miles, Santiago de Cuba 73 miles.

The Mercedes hadn’t reappeared. Not that he’d expected it to. But he
had
expected police Ladas, and maybe a helicopter. A regular chase. Yet nothing came. The rearview stayed clear of everything except the dwindling road and the growing distance between them and the bodies they’d left behind.

Had the
guayaberas
been police? No. Cuban cops didn’t carry American guns – especially not brand-new Smith & Wesson Magnums. He inspected the bullets in the speedloader: full metal jackets. They’d always made him think of model rockets with filed-down points. He popped one out and scanned the brass casing for markings. He barely had to look. The disembodied wings were stamped clearly on the side.

Why go through that elaborate stop-and-search charade? Why not just pull them over and take them away at gunpoint? Had those dead rookies been cops or Abakuás – or both? If that was the case, they were double-fucked.

How long before the bodies were found? He hoped the vultures were plentiful, damn ravenous and fast.

They had to do something about the car. He thought of ditching it but walking was impossible. Plus they’d be exposed, vulnerable and easy to catch. They could steal another, he supposed, but traffic here was becoming a rarity and all the vehicles he’d seen so far were trucks, mopeds and horsedrawn carts.

‘You’ll have to change,’ he said to Benny. ‘Dump the dresses.’

‘All
the dress?’

‘Yeah.’

He couldn’t look at Benny too much right now, because he reminded him of the young men he’d seen in prison, the first-timers. Benny had their expression – terrified, confused, realising that things were going to start off bad and then get a hell of a lot worse.

‘We in big troubles. We should leave country now. Call Nacho.’

‘I can’t do that.’

Benny said nothing. Gnawed his bottom lip. Ruminated.

‘Is because you have to finish you mission, yes?’

‘The fuck are you talking about?’

‘I know why you come here, Max. Is to find someone.
Americana
criminal. Black Panther. The Haiti woman,’ said Benny.

Max hit the brakes and Benny jerked forward so violently that his head almost hit the dash.

‘How the fuck do you know that?’

‘No soy estúpido,
Max. I am next to you always. I see what you do. That man who die – Gwen-e-verre – the one you kill? He was Black Panther. He run from police in Unite State. Yesterday, you stop at the Haiti place. I know who you look for now. Is simple for me to calculate. Like mathematic.’ Benny shrugged.

Max knew he hadn’t exactly been discreet, and a natural-born schemer like Benny, always working out an angle, could easily have figured out what he was doing here.

‘So you know her?’

‘She famous for help the Haiti peoples in Cuba. Is right, yes? Is her you look for?’

Max nodded. ‘What else do you know about her?’

‘That’s all,’ said Benny.

They drove on.

‘Why you look for her? Is for money?’

‘No.’

‘I know America government pay lot of money for her.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Everybody know.’

‘It’s not about money,’ said Max.

Benny lowered his voice. ‘You work for you government?’

‘No.’

‘Then why you do this?’

‘It’s complicated. When we get to Las Tunas, I’m going to give you some money. You’re going to get on a bus to Guantánamo. Call Nacho when you get there to sort out the boat.’

‘You no’ come?’ Benny was surprised.

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘I have to find Vanetta Brown.’

‘Max, is no’ possible.’

‘What’s not possible?’

‘I can no’ leave Cuba on that boat if you no’ there with me.’

Max hit the brakes again.

‘That’s bullshit!’ he shouted. ‘Nacho wanted to get rid of you, not me.’

‘No.’ Benny shook his head. ‘He want you to leave as well. He know if the police catch you, they make you talk. And you will say who help you. Then Nacho is focked. Before we leave him house, he tell me I can only get on boat if I with you.’

Max looked at him.

‘We should go to Cajobabo now, Max. Forget this Van-etta. Save youself.’

The left side of Benny’s face had by now swelled up around the suture in a dull ball, stretching out one half of his features, so that the healthy part seemed squeezed together. Benny’s left eye was bloodshot and glassy, and the smell coming off him was foul.

‘I can’t,’ said Max. ‘I’ll call Nacho in Las Tunas and straighten this out.’

‘You can try. But you have deal with him now. He take you money, you shake hand. With Nacho, when you shake hand is final. No more negotiation.’

‘Are you fucken’ with me?’

‘No.’ Benny held up his hands. ‘I swear is true. I no’ want to be here with you, Max. Is for me too dangerous. But I have no choice. What happen to you, happen to me.’

‘Christ,’
whispered Max, again coming close to feeling sorry for Benny but too mired in mistrust to exchange doubt for pity.

Benny tried the radio. Static. He switched it off.

‘Is no’ too late. We can go to Guantánamo now, leave Cuba tomorrow,’ he said, close to pleading.

‘I’m not leaving. That’s final.’

‘Fock you!’ Benny folded his arms and slumped in the seat, pouting, arms folded, in a defeated, infantile sulk.

‘I’d say I’m sorry you got caught up in this, Benny, but if you’d been straight with me from the start, this wouldn’t have happened. You could have stayed in Havana.’

‘
Gringo joputa!’

‘Stay in that zone,’ said Max and started up the car.

Max realised what to do about the car as they drove through Las Tunas.

In the town, teams of two were adding slogans to several wide-wall murals depicting a quartet of men in Moses beards and olive fatigues looking across a Cuban landscape populated by men and women toiling in a field. In between the images ran three-dimensional block capitals in red, white and blue proclaiming the glory of socialism and the revolution.

Max noticed that one of the walls was only half-finished.
Hasta La Vic …
it read, in the same Cuban national colours. The official graffitists were nowhere to be seen and they’d left two state-issued half-gallon paint pots and brushes in the middle of the sidewalk.

Max took the red and blue paint pots and a brush and drove off with them.

They stopped at a riverbank a few miles away.

Benny changed back into the jeans and T-shirt he’d been wearing when they left Havana. He dumped the contents of his case – his best dresses, his shoes and wigs – into the flowing water, watching them float away in the current as if they were lovers on a leaving train.

Max painted the front of the car red and the back blue. He was crude and clumsy in the way he slapped on the paint, and there wasn’t enough to do the sides, but it made the Firedome look like a different car.

When he was done he tossed the paintpots into the reeds and reached into his pocket for the phone. He couldn’t find it. He searched his other pockets and then he looked inside the car. Nothing. The phone was gone. It must have fallen out of his pocket during or after the shoot-out. His immediate thoughts were for Rosa Cruz and what would happen when the cops found it – either on the roadside or in the Lada he’d driven off the road, right next to the body of a dead cop. It was already beyond bad for him, but how much did she have to lose? More or less than he did or just about the same?

44

The further east they ventured, the more Max was reminded of Haiti. The villages were a lot like the ones he’d seen there, mud huts that seemed to have sprouted out of the ground whole, their roofs thatched with wind-blown detritus, the entrances and windows cut by natural erosion. The exteriors and doors were painted in deliberately clashing bright colours – yellows and blues, oranges and greens, pinks and browns. Any state propaganda on the buildings was incorporated into lavish and detailed voodoo paintings, religion dwarfing rhetoric; deities loomed large and smiling from the heavens, releasing the doves that landed on Fidel’s shoulder as he made his Havana victory speech in 1959; deities fought Batista’s troops alongside the revolutionaries; deities helped repel the Bay of Pigs invasion; and deities watched over Cuba as sharks with Star-Spangled fins circled. The message on the walls was as obvious as it was tacit: ‘We’re with you, Fidel, but you
owe
us.’

He’d never shaken off the horrors he saw in Haiti: people eating dirt and cornmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner; the Cité Soleil slum on the edge of the capital, home to half a million people living in clapboard shacks literally propped up on shit – human and animal – for a whole square mile; and all those children, eyes the colour of skull sockets, faces tragic and confused, wondering why in the hell they’d been so stupid as to leave the womb. He’d returned to Miami with a sense of low-watt outrage that this barely breathing calamity of a place was fewer than two hundred miles away, that the richest nation on earth could have allowed things to get so bad in its own backyard.

But he’d also returned to Miami with $20 million dollars.

He tried to do what he could to make things right, in his own way. He set up the agency with Yolande Pétion, half-believing and half-deluding himself that he was giving something back, that he was helping Haitians, that he cared. Some days he even believed his bullshit, but most of the time he believed it was sincere and well-intentioned enough to eventually wash out as truth.

When Yolande was murdered he saw his actions for what they were. The old twisted moral code that had wrecked his life was still setting the pace, guiding the way he did things.