Voodoo Eyes (38 page)

Joe once said that Yolande’s death had been the moment when it went bad for him, the start of his slide. Joe was wrong. Joe hadn’t known about the Haitian money. Joe had believed the crap Max told him about Sandra’s insurance policy paying out, about Sandra’s mother leaving him some property he’d sold for a profit. The truth was he slipped up when he decided to keep the money instead of turning it in. The slide kicked in moments later and lasted all of the twelve years it had taken to get here. Even when he thought he’d gained purchase, that the downward trajectory had levelled out, all he was doing was taking longer to get to the next lowest point. He could have stopped all of it from happening if he’d done the right thing, but he’d never done the right thing his whole life – just the wrong thing with the best intentions, over and over again.

But the slide would end, here, and soon.

He could feel it.

45

They reached Santiago de Cuba in mid-afternoon, yet the city was in near darkness. The sky was layered solid with undifferentiated volumes of grey, sunlight straining weakly through them, its essence diluted in shadow. Those street lamps that worked had come on, a bulb burned in every house and office block, and all the cars that had them were driving with headlights on full beam. Those that didn’t made do with flashlights taped to the hoods.

They passed the Antonio Maceo monument, its statue depicting one of the heroes of the Cuban War of Independence sat atop a rearing horse, looking back over his shoulder at the highway, arm extended, fingers beckoning, as if inviting all newcomers into the city. Before it, twenty-three gigantic bronze machete blades stuck out of the ground at acute angles, suggesting offence or defence depending on the opinion and position of the viewer. Tourists were being hurried down the steps of the monument by guides glancing fearfully up at the sky – a look and gesture replicated on the face of every pedestrian on the road, speed-walking along their way, as if expecting more than mere rain to fall.

They drove through the outskirts, navigating streets that twisted between shabby stone shacks with cracked and blistered walls, warped tin roofs and shutters and doors both locked and held upright with twine and wire. A little further on, they navigated through a slightly more upscale area of elegant but decaying Spanish colonial-era houses, the missing segments of the terracotta roof tiles replaced with wood and strips of corrugated iron painted rusty orange.

Cuba’s second city was different from its first. Every single building was low-lying and hurricane humble. People here lived side by side, not one on top of the other. There were no ugly modernistic obelisks to spoil the illusion of a place trapped in perfect amber.

Max tried the radio. It had been dead all the way through the mountains, and it was still silent. Not even static or squeaks came through the speakers.

The first thunderclap sounded like an explosion, the second like the gates of heaven being battered and the third like they’d been breached. The car vibrated with each eruption.

Two fat raindrops pancaked on the windscreen and clung to the glass, thick and globulous, like egg whites, before being shaken apart and splitting into jagged appendages, which shimmied slowly down towards the wipers.

After another eruption of thunder, the rain fell hard and heavy, slashing at the streets with a sound of chains whipping over piles of coins, stomping on the car like a million little lead feet. The streets turned grey to black and began to ooze and then flow.

Lightning came in bunches as they reached the town centre, flash-framing the world about them in dazzling, silvery bursts of colour: grandiose churches and museums and government buildings appeared and disappeared in split seconds, all speared with long white rods of rain.

The downpour intensified. They inched past a cemetery and then a park where leaves were being torn from branches, branches wrenched from trees and bark stripped from trunks. The ground swelled and liquefied; grass and flowerbeds were flooded out of their roots and swept into the street.

They moved deeper into the city, the Firedome filling with the smell of unchecked damp and worn rock. The darkness thickened along with the rain and visibility was cut to inches. They could barely see where they were.

Max pulled over.

They sat there, the storm attacking the car, punching and pushing it, trying to wash it away.

Benny started humming a tune that sounded familiar, a little like a hymn or Christmas carol, his voice high-pitched and tinged with delirium. He needed a doctor, antibiotics and rest. Max didn’t know what he was going to do about him. They had two days to make the boat and the sickness was gaining on him fast. Max could see it, smell it, feel it working its way through his unwanted companion.

He had to find the Dascal family.

He had to find Vanetta Brown.

And
somehow he had to avoid getting caught by the Cuban police and the Abakuás along the way.

Why hadn’t he told Wendy Peck to go fuck herself and taken his chances with the US legal system?

If he could have had that moment in Little Havana again, would he have chosen differently?

Of course not.

One look at her and he’d known she would have made good on her threat. She’d have pulled out all the stops, called in favours to make damn sure he went to jail. Once back inside, he wouldn’t have gotten out. The justice he’d evaded before would have caught up with him. He’d have been doing time for more than just money laundering and tax evasion.

Yet it wasn’t only Peck who’d brought him here.

If he was honest with himself, if he squared up to the person he really was, he’d have to admit he would have come here anyway. He couldn’t ever have let this go. If he’d been younger, he’d have been prepared to kill Vanetta Brown for what she’d done. But now what he really wanted to do was talk to her. He wanted to look her in the eye and hear her explain and justify herself and her actions. He didn’t care if she was wrong or right, if he’d feel empathy or hatred after she’d said her piece. His memory of his best friend was already stained with spilled secrets. He just wanted to hear the rest. How he’d react, what he’d do to her, he didn’t know. And that was
if
she was guilty.

A short while later the wind changed direction, coming in from behind them, causing a break in the rain, so they saw exactly where they were for the first time.

It was a wide street. Opposite stood pastel-coloured buildings with recessed doorways and windows, and the same Mediterranean-style terracotta roofs that were all the rage in Coral Gables. The rain began again, cascading off the tiles and crashing loudly on to the sidewalk, slopping out into the road in great dirty washes. They had parked next to a long row of small stores with entrances sheltered and kept dry by red-and-white-striped plastic awnings, the wooden signs, lashed freely by the elements, swinging back and forth in their brackets. A pair of street lights flashed on and then off again at random intervals, as if gauging the storm’s resolve and tenacity. The stores themselves were lit up and Max could see faces in the windows, looking at the downpour.

The street felt faintly familiar. Like everything in Cuba, there was always something here to remind him of home, and this place recalled Key West a little. He was thinking of Captain Tony’s on Greene Street and the old-timer with a parrot on his shoulder who’d told him a story about its most famous patron, Ernest Hemingway. Poppa H used to bring complete strangers – literary groupies and wannabe writers on pilgrimage – to the bar and get them paralytic-drunk. At closing time, when they staggered out, Hemingway would cold cock them with a right hook in full view of passers-by. Max couldn’t recall what the old-timer looked like, but he did remember his parrot and how it could say ‘cocksucker’ in three languages.

The parrot …

He pulled out the photograph of Joe and Vanetta. There it all was, in the background: the colourful buildings, the stores and their candy-striped awnings, the hanging wooden signs, the most prominent and striking of which was the one he could see before him, swinging and twisting under a street lamp. It was green and red and shaped like a parrot.

They’d come to the very same street.

The store was called Discos del Loro, and there were three people inside – a young Asian couple and the manager, who was sat behind the counter, reading a book and smoking a cigarette.

He looked up when Max and Benny walked in, acknowledging them with a nod and a welcoming-enough smile, before going back to his book and smoke. He was a slim black man with grey hair and a wispy moustache. The couple stood soaked through and dripping on the light-green linoleum floor, making a show of searching through the racks, the man appearing interested in a CD he was holding while the woman looked around at the decor.

The store wasn’t large by any means, but the available space was diminished further by a huge inflatable parrot hanging from the ceiling, its back and head, beak and wings coated in thick dust. Triple-tiered wire racks ran along the walls, well stocked with CDs, the genres delineated by handwritten Day-Glo-pink cardboard stars stuck to the ends of the rows: salsa, jazz, merengue, rap, reggae, rock. The plain green walls were hung with black-and-white photographs of Cuban musicians. Most were relics, seated old men and women in three-piece suits or ballgowns, wrinkled hands clasped around battered acoustic guitars. Above the din of the rain, Max could just about hear Miles Davis’s muted trumpet coming through the speakers – or something that sounded very close to it. He couldn’t quite make out the song.

Max and Benny wandered around the store, Max trying to figure out the best way to approach the manager for information – was he a cash or charm person? – while pretending to browse through the CD cases. Cuban rappers struck the same posse poses as their American counterparts, but they didn’t brandish guns and pit bulls; the reggae artists did that blissed-out, blurry, stoned-in-search-of-spirituality look they’d copied from Bob Marley; the rockers were squeezed into tight jeans and leathers and threw devil signs and scowls, while the salsa musicians all dressed like cruise-liner bands.

While the Asian couple checked out the centre rack, given over to ‘
Ritmos del Santería’,
Max and Benny moved to the right of the store, by the window. The manager’s eyes didn’t leave his book.

The standard Korda photograph of Che took centre place in the right-hand rack, except this one was mounted on white card and had a quotation written at the bottom.

Toda la música del ‘rock-and-roll’ es decadencia imperialista. Toda la música del rock-and-roll es degenerada. Es el enemigo de la Revolución.

Max chuckled. How many Western popstar radicals had worn Guevara T-shirts? The real Che would have burned them on a pyre of their own records. The real Che would have been right at home with the Bible-belt reactionaries who proclaimed rock and roll ‘the Devil’s music’.

The manager put down the book, hoisted his legs over the counter and slid across it, cigarette in one hand, ashtray in the other.

‘Sorry, officer, we’re all out of Bon Jovi,’ he said when he reached Max. His accent was distinctly Haitian, with Cuban flavourings.

‘Did you just call me “officer”?’

‘It’s a little game I play, to keep myself from falling asleep.’ The manager smiled and showed a set of sandy teeth, complete and crooked, but for the left canine, which was missing. ‘You’re American. You’re military. You’re in my store. And a man of your age, I’m thinking, is either a country man or an eighties rock man. Am I right?’

‘What makes you suppose I’m military?’

‘Your build, your bearing, your … disposition,’ said the manager, making a show of looking him up and down, miming a deductive process.

‘What kind of “disposition”?’

‘A man used to being in charge.’ The man puffed on his cigarette. Benny stood by the counter, legs apart, in a defensive posture. ‘How am I doing so far?’

‘You get third prize,’ said Max. ‘I am American but I hate Bon Jovi. Country too. All that drinking and whining and inbreeding. Not for me. As for military, that’s not me either. Besides, how many American soldiers have you ever met?’

‘A lot. They come here all the time. For their rap and their rock music. “R and R” for their “R and R”. What does that mean, when they say “R and R”?’

‘Rest and rehabilitation.’

The man laughed. ‘That’s funny. Your people don’t get much of either here. They’ve got their own bar, you know?’

‘In Santiago?’

‘Yes. By the bay. A place called The Lone Star. That’s where they all hang out. You might want to too, if you’re homesick for a burger and a “Bud”. Is that short for “Budweiser” or “buddy”?’

‘One and the same,’ said Max. The Lone Star: he thought of the group of rogue soldiers Nacho had talked about, the ones who ran the black market with the Abakuás – the Texas Playboys.

‘You can’t miss the place. Just go to the marina and follow the pretty girls. Sooner or later you’ll get there,’ said the manager.

‘How is that allowed, an American bar operating here, on Cuban soil?’

‘I don’t know how it all works.’ The man shrugged. ‘I don’t make the rules. I just follow them – most of them – the important ones.’

He glanced back at Benny, who was looking out the window, and then turned to Max. ‘Are you here for something or are you just keeping out of the rain?’

‘Just passing through,’ said Max. ‘You worked here long?’

‘Ten years. Why?’

‘You know these people?’ Max showed him the photograph of Joe and Vanetta.

The man smiled immediately. ‘Of course. That’s Sister Vanetta and her friend Joe. They both look younger. A lot younger.’

‘Didn’t we all. Did you know Joe?’

‘As well as you know people you see once every two years. He comes in here with Vanetta whenever he’s in town. He loves Bruce Springsteen. He made me a tape a while ago. Remember those things – cassettes?’

‘I even remember eight-track,’ said Max.

‘Well, we got talking music one day. He was curious about Cuban sounds. This was way before that
Buena Vista Social Club
movie. I made him a tape of my favourites. Salsa, soul, jazz, heavy rock, rap, punk. We’ve got all kinds of music in Cuba. He was fascinated. And he made me a tape of his favourites. Except it was nothing but Bruce Springsteen for ninety minutes.’