Voodoo Eyes (51 page)

A voice he recognised.

A voice altered with time and age, and … nature.

A voice saying something he’d last heard in 1982, in a Haitian accent – that melodious fusion of African and French, negotiating the hardness of English by stretching and softening its clipped vowels.

It was the voice of Solomon Boukman. His tongue had been forked. Eva Desamours – his lover and fortune-teller – had slit his tongue down the middle and he’d worn a brace to stop it rejoining. It was an image she’d cultivated for him, to make him appear like a voodoo spirit, a demon come to earth; something to scare people into believing he was more than human. The halves of his tongue rejoined when he was in prison, nature healing the breach. According to his medical records, his tongue had thickened in the process, grown heavier, and this affected his speech. When he spoke too loudly, he literally hissed. He’d become his image and his image became him.

‘You give me reason to live.’

Or that’s what Max thought he heard at first.

But no, it wasn’t
quite
that.

That was his memory talking over what he’d actually heard.

Which was:

‘You
gave
me reason to live.’

Past tense.

Things had moved on.

Max felt cold sweat beading on his temples, a colder feeling in his stomach, pains and tremors in his legs. He was almost glad to be sitting down because the chair cushioned the shock.

Then it got worse.

The film had paused. ‘Fabiana’ and ‘Will’ weren’t on the screen any more, and neither was he looking at a hotel room.

Something different was being shown to him.

And yes, he knew the view.

He knew it well.

How many times had he seen that picture? How many times had he looked it over? A million?

He’d defined and redefined its meaning, only to dismiss his conclusions and reappraise the image he was seeing again here. He’d looked at it in different ways, certainty following mystification.

La Coupole bar, Haiti, December 1996. Solomon Boukman stood right behind him, holding a gun to his head, smiling broadly. Max, oblivious, eyes lost in the distance. The gun was his own, a Beretta. Boukman had slipped it out of his holster without him noticing and turned it on him. As if to say: ‘I could have killed you with your own gun.’ Or: ‘Look at me, standing right behind you and you can’t even see me.’ Or: ‘You could die right now and be none the wiser.’ Boukman had made sure he’d gotten the picture before he left Haiti. He’d written ‘You give me reason to live’ on the back of it. As in: I haven’t forgotten about you, I’ll
never
forget about you. The picture had been in one of the bags he carried his reward money home in.

The money …

Baron Samedi’s
dollar-green
eye …

And then Max felt that old fear come back to him. In 1981, Boukman had tortured and almost killed him. Boukman had fucked him up good, fucked him up the way childhood traumas fuck up adults, left him scarred soul-deep.

He started shaking.

This was about to get
way
worse.

The film resumed. The couple were still frolicking. He watched, still unable to switch off the mental soundtrack.

The film slowed to a choppy crawl and then froze as another spliced-in image flashed up.

Max visiting Sandra’s grave, taken from the side with a zoom lens. He’d put some fresh flowers by the headstone and was staring down at them.

The film resumed, but slowly, until it arrived at the next picture.

Someone – Boukman? – pissing on the gravestone and the flowers, the petals flying off the stems as if leaping out of the way in disgust.

And Max tried to jump out of his chair. He was angry. Mad. Mad enough to kill. He pulled and tugged and writhed and struggled. The ropes bit into the skin of his wrists and ankles, and tore. His arms and legs were so numb he didn’t feel the pain.

‘You cowardly motherfucker!
’

The skinflick played on regardless. And the horrors kept interrupting.

Yolande Pétion, his former business partner, freshly dead on the floor of her house, shotgunned in the face.

Max and Tameka. Their first dinner date, at the sushi place on Lincoln Road. Tameka looking over his shoulder, right into the furtive camera, smiling.

She knew Boukman. She’d seen him.

Max’s blood ran cold.

‘
You gave me reason to live.
’

Tameka and him in the Bahamas, on the beach. Tameka lowering her sunglasses and looking at the camera again, smiling conspiratorially, while Max’s back was turned to the ocean.

Vegas. Max asleep in hospital, face bruised, arm in a cast.

The fire that had burned down his marital home: his money, taken out of the safe and stuffed into a suitcase, flames close by.

Max lying in the street outside his house, unconscious. Boukman had burned it down, taken his money and saved him. Saved him for another day.

Baron Samedi’s
dollar-green
eye …

Boukman had used the money to pay Milk to make the film.

Boukman had turned his money against him.

His drug-money reward: the money of death.

Boukman had killed Milk and the people at his house, everyone associated with the film. He’d buried the bodies in the garden with the money he’d paid Milk. It was Max’s money – and Max had dug it up, and turned it into the cops.
Just as he was supposed to have done in the first place.

Tameka, lying in what looked like a desert, a hole in her head, blood soaking into the sand, a shadow falling over the body.

Fabiana and Will were done. She was complimenting him on his magic wand and stroking it with a forefinger. ‘
Call me Harry Focker, baby,’
mouthed Will. But Max didn’t hear him. Instead he heard Boukman’s voice on the soundtrack:

‘You gave me reason to live.’

Abe Watson’s .45, covered in dirt and worms.

Will lay naked on the bed and fanned his crotch with a menu, while Fabiana showered.

Eldon Burns coming out of the 7th Avenue gym. Had Eldon seen Boukman before he’d died? Of course he had.

Max and Joe eating together at the Mariposa.

Will left the hotel room in blue workmen’s overalls and a beanie hat.

Every client Max had worked for in the previous five years, posed where he’d last met them. They were all smiling. He wondered if they weren’t dead too. ‘Clients’ Boukman had sent him.

His whole life, from 1996 to the present, had just flashed by him.

‘
You gave me reason to live.’

And the film ended.

The screen went blank.

For a while he was sitting in near darkness, the glow of the candles sucked into the black surroundings, the light they emanated feeble.

The view of Miami Beach returned to the screen.

And Solomon Boukman spoke to him.

*

‘Do you know what I meant when I told you, “You give me reason to live”?’ Boukman’s voice came from behind the TV, but seemed as close as a whisper in his ear. ‘You saved my life then. I wish you hadn’t.’

Up to that moment Max had been angry – and scared – and stunned. Boukman’s presence tipped him into fury. He wanted to get at him and kill him. Kill him for what he’d done to Joe, kill him for pissing on his wife’s grave – just plain fucken’ kill him. He didn’t care about his motives, his reasons. Fuck all that. He just wanted him dead.

He redoubled his efforts to break free. He thrashed and jerked and bucked against the restraints. He pulled and pushed. The flesh on his arms and legs ripped off in raw bloody gashes. The ropes yielded a fraction but no more than that and not nearly enough.

‘I didn’t want to live, but you
made
me live,’ continued Boukman calmly. ‘You gave me the kiss of life. You put your breath inside me. Part of you became me. My life became tied to yours. You gave me reason to live.’

His voice still possessed its erstwhile emotionless, monotonous quality, as well as a threatening sibilance. Yet it was also grainier, a few notes deeper and a little more strained than the one he’d remembered last hearing at his trial. Like him, Boukman had grown much older.

The TV was replaying the Zurich Hotel footage.

‘For thirteen years I was in prison. When I got released, I had a lot of scores to settle.’

The TV began to move slowly left, pushed by someone tall and thin – too tall to be Boukman – an outline, slipping in and then out of the available light.

The TV stopped in a far corner.

Max peered into the dark void in front of him and saw a faint suggestion of a person, couched in the blackness. A pinkish light was coming from the ground. When Max looked closer, he saw the flaps of an open trapdoor and steps leading down.

‘Why didn’t you just … kill me?’ he said.

‘Revenge is never
enough,’
said Boukman. ‘It was too easy to walk up behind you and put a bullet in your brain. I could have done that. I chose not to. How do you follow a murder? Imagine: you’re dead and I’m looking down on your corpse, and I
still
hate you, I still want to hurt you. I want you to come back to life so I can kill you all over again until I’m satisfied. But I can’t do that. Because you’re already dead. So what do I do? How do I
keep on
killing you? How do I get
enough?

‘I do it little by little, piece by piece. I take
everything
away from you. Everything you love, everything you care about, everything you know, everything you’re sure of. I kill your friends, I steal your money, I burn down your house with all your memories, I take away your livelihood. And I watch what it does to you. How the sadness cripples you. How the loneliness eats you up. How the poverty confines you, keeps you captive.

‘And then I start
really
fucking with you,’ Boukman said. His voice was detached from the words, as if he were reading out letters on an eye chart. ‘I could have let you die in your house when I burned it down. But I made sure you got out alive. So you could start over, with next to nothing.

‘I gave you a livelihood. You advertised yourself as a private detective, as I knew you would. What else could you do? I gave you clients. I invented them. I sent you actors playing cuckolds and adulterers. The work was beneath you, an insult to your talents, a humiliation. But you
had
to do it because you needed the money. I was paying them to pay you out of your own pocket. I was using
your
money to pay
your
salary. You thought you were watching them getting cheated on, when really it was you who was being cheated, you who was getting fucked.’

Max had stopped struggling. He felt tired and his wrists and ankles were burning and bloody. All the while, as he’d been watching the pictures flash up – Boukman’s hand offstage, masquerading as bad luck or a cruel twist of fate, fucking up his life – he’d had a winded feeling in his gut, like he was stuck in a downbound elevator, moving too fast. He knew he was beaten. But, really, when he thought about it, he’d lost a long time ago. Ever since he’d decided to keep that money he brought back from Haiti.

He considered Boukman’s will, the will to do all those things – the planning, the choreography and, above all, the patience. Boukman hadn’t acted out of anger. Anger had a definite end, a peak as sharp as its slope. Boukman had acted out of hatred. A hatred so long nurtured, it had become transparent and dispassionate: something he’d indulged, like a hobby.

Somewhere, a small part of him even admired the cruel genius of it, the clinical retribution – even if it had all been directed his way.

‘And then there was Tameka. That whore. I paid her. And you … you almost
married
her.’ Max thought he heard Boukman chuckle. ‘I could have paid her to become the second Mrs Mingus, if I’d wanted to. But that would have been too cruel.’

‘Crueller than killing her?’ asked Max, knowing that the question was as good as rhetorical.

‘You didn’t have to come here, Max. You had a clear choice. Prison or Cuba. But I knew you’d come. Just as I knew you wouldn’t watch the film in time to save Joe Liston. You’re too old, too slow, too blind. I know you well, Max Mingus. You look, but you can’t see. You never could. Because you never wanted to.’

Boukman glanced over at the TV and the person stood next to it.

‘You killed Joe because he was my
friend?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And Eldon? Why kill him? We’d fallen out.’

‘We were almost colleagues once, you and me.’

Max immediately got what he meant. ‘You were working with Eldon all those years ago?’

‘How do you think I got away with what I did for so long?’

‘Figures.’ He’d as good as worked that out from the FBI files he’d read. Eldon had protected Halloween Dan, rendered him untouchable. The only problem was, Dan refused to keep a low profile; he just had to let the world and its mother know who he was. Boukman had been the very opposite – a man with a million faces, none of them his own.

‘Eldon Burns turned on me,’ said Boukman. ‘When you and Liston were investigating me, he had a simple choice. Get rid of you or replace me. He chose you over me. No surprise. You were his heir apparent. He’d corrupted you your whole life, but you didn’t realise it because you never really knew him like I did, saw him like I did. It was all right there in front of you, his evil, his corruption. All you had to do was
look,
Max. But like I said, you can’t
see.’

‘That’s why you had Eldon and Joe shot through the
eyes,
right? Some kind of message to me?’

‘You’re slow, but you always get there … in the end. Which is what this is … the end.’

‘Did you tell Vanetta Brown who you really are?’

Boukman didn’t answer.

There was a stillness in the room. On the TV the dead porn-stars were fucking each other’s brains out.

‘Do you have anything to say, Max? Any last words?’

‘Yeah. I do,’ he said. ‘You know, I thought
I
was fucked up, Solomon. But you … you take that cake and eat it. And you lick your fingers too.’