Voodoo Eyes (24 page)

Teofilo turned on the torch taped to the handlebars. The beam bounced and shimmied around, splashing on partially collapsed buildings, ominous-looking and crooked, jutting out of the ground like the hulls of torpedoed ships stuck in sandbanks. Variations of the Angolan flag were painted on every upright surface: red-and-black horizontal bars with either a gold star or a machete crossed over a half-cogwheel in the middle. A smell of smoke hung in the air, under it a deeper stink of trash and decay.

They pressed on. The streets turned to rubble and dirt. The bike responded with a riot of angry clanks, as if telling Teofilo the effort was all too much and it was only going through this as the last of final favours.

There were people all around them, still and soundless, blank expressions on grimy faces, eyes void, their passage reflected but not registered. Normally Max would have been tense and on edge, expecting to be set upon, but these were defeated creatures, as hollow as the buildings they populated. He saw groups of children in the remains of gutted cars, pretending to drive, two legless men on pallets racing each other down a slope, a platoon of people in ragged fatigues, marching in perfect formation, but on crutches. And at every turn small gatherings of Santeria worshippers, dressed head to foot in white, bowed before candle-ringed altars, their devotions watched by packs of weak and hungry dogs.

It took another half-hour to navigate the ruins, the road sometimes so potholed they both had to get out and carry the taxi.

It was Max who noticed the lights first – a row of small emerald bulbs embedded in a high wall, sparkling like displaced cat’s eyes.

As they rolled down the street, the surface became smooth and intact, and other buildings began to appear – modern, surrounded by high spiked railings topped with barbed wire. They read descending numbers on the walls, even to the right, odd to the left.

‘Is this Calle Ethelberg?’ asked Max.

‘S
i, camino muerto,’
Teofilo muttered.

Apartment blocks followed the gated buildings. There were lights on in the windows.

They reached a crossroads before the numbers went down to double digits. Max told Teofilo to stop.

He got out, took most of the money he had in his wallet and handed it to the driver, who checked and rechecked it, his mouth hanging open before closing around a broad grin.

‘When we go back, I’ll give you more.
Quinientos pesos más,’
said Max.

‘I way for you ’ere.’

30

The apartment block was part of a long stretch of seemingly identical low-rises making up the rest of Calle Ethelberg, as far as Max could see; a slim dark cube with seven pairs of windows and a recessed doorway for a façade. Only its number and the small pale satellite dish fixed to the roof like a defiant boutonnière identified it from its neighbours.

The main door was locked, as expected. He’d brought his tools: an electronic pick gun and a torque wrench. An old snitch of his called Drake Henderson had given him lessons in lock-picking as a twenty-fifth birthday present. Back then they’d used manual tools – wrenches, hammers and metal picks – and the average American lock had taken eight minutes to open. They were the best and the worst of locks, depending on whether you were the picker or the picked. Now the skill was mostly electric, just one principal tool – a battery-powered pick gun – combined with brute force and timing.

It had been a while since he’d broken into a building, but it was a classic pin-tumbler Yale and he knew exactly what to do.

It was pitch dark. He turned on his small flashlight.

He was standing at the edge of a long and narrow lobby, leading to a staircase with small potted palms either side, the tiled floor in between depicting a map of Cuba. No reception desk, no chairs, no cameras.

There was an elevator to his right and, on the opposite wall, a dozen wooden mail slots, in three rows, labels on each pigeonhole. He found the name ‘Vanetta Brown’ at the start of the second row, in typewriter capitals, a number ‘5’ in brackets after it. The slot was empty, as were the others, which meant that technically everyone was home.

He took the stairs up.

On the first floor were two doors on opposite sides of a marble landing, a red Roman numeral stencilled on each, with a peephole right above them. Apartment I was quiet. From II came the sound of canned monologue – a TV playing.

A small party was winding down behind door III on the next landing: cigar smoke, overlapping conversations and faint music. Nothing from IV.

He tiptoed up the next flight of stairs.

Complete silence on the landing.

He knocked gently on the door of Apartment V and listened. When he didn’t hear anything he knocked again, slightly louder.

She was either fast asleep or she was out.

He went to work on the lock.

He couldn’t see much of the room because the light was faint, barely making it through the window, which was encrusted with dirt and dried rain residue. The apartment was hot and the air smelled stale and slightly chemical, as if the place hadn’t been aired for a while.

There was no one here. He’d known that almost as soon as he shut the door behind him. The apartment felt familiar, so much like his own did whenever he walked in – the same sense of interrupted vacuum, of being in a void with a black hole at its centre.

He torch-panned the room. A bookshelf dominated it, covering the entire left wall, floor to ceiling, even incorporating the space above the side door, where two shelves overlapped the top of the frame. Nearly every title was Spanish. There were histories, biographies, travel books, atlases, encyclopedias, plenty of politics, bound volumes of Castro’s speeches; in between a smattering of fiction, all pulpy romantic novels, which surprised him, but then he guessed even great minds needed diversions. He followed the library to the window. On the bottom shelf, stacked loose, were a dozen copies of
Black Power in the Sunshine State.
He noticed a piece of paper sticking out of one.

It was a compliments slip from the publisher.

‘To Vanetta – With best wishes on this great day! – Antoine’.

Antoine Pinel, he guessed, publisher and owner of Cuban X-Press.

The address was on the paper: Centro de Negocios, Miramar, Habana.

He put the slip in his pocket and carried on looking, the torch beam landing on a small TV and an old VCR on a white stand. Until recently, all video equipment had been banned in Cuba, although that hadn’t stopped people from acquiring it on the black market or from visiting relatives. Raoul Castro had reversed the law and there were now DVD players and video cameras on sale in electronics stores – though with prices starting at a year’s salary, it was just another kind of prohibition. He checked the VCR for an Abakuá marking, but found none.

He looked through the stack of tapes – Cuban soaps, documentaries and cookery programmes mixed in with
The Cosby Show,
episodes of
Oprah
going back fifteen years, some Spike Lee and Denzel Washington films, and virtually everything Will Smith had appeared in, including
Wild Wild West,
which made her a diehard fan. He compared the handwriting on the Cuban and American television tapes. They were completely different: the former was cursive and semi-legible, the latter printed and mostly capitalised – distinctly male writing. Someone had made the American tapes for her and they’d been doing it for a long time, because the print on the older recordings had faded.

When he left the room he found himself in a corridor linking four rooms.

He worked them left to right.

A small, cramped kitchen with barely room for one: refrigerator and cupboards bare, the cooker smelling of cold fat and cleaning products.

The bathroom was completely empty. No toiletries anywhere, no paper in the holder. He checked in and behind the cistern. Nothing hidden there.

The third door led to a study. It was a simple set-up: a desk with a manual typewriter and an unplugged lamp, a wooden chair with a cushion tied to the lower back; above the desk hung a corkboard, its surface sun-bleached with outlines of whatever had been pinned there.

Last of all was the bedroom. The curtains were closed, so he turned on the light. It was small and congested. The four pieces of furniture – a single bed and nightstand, an antique oak closet with double doors and a matching chest of drawers – took up most of the available space.

The chest of drawers was empty, as was the closet, which had a mirror inside the door. No clothes or hangers, no food, no toiletries, no suitcase.

He checked behind and under them. Nothing.

When he opened the nightstand drawer, something white rolled towards his hand: a small plastic pill tub with a childproof cap.

He read the label: Zofran – made by GlaxoSmithKline.

He recognised the name, but couldn’t place it. The tub was empty. He slipped it into his pocket.

She’d moved out. Why? And where to?

As he went to leave the room he paused at the door, looking it over one more time.

Had he missed anything?

Yes, he had. The study: he’d forgotten to check behind the desk.

He went next door, put the typewriter on the floor and moved the desk. On the ground, standing with its face to the wall, was a photograph. He supposed it had fallen off the board.

He picked it up and turned it around.

At first it didn’t make sense, what he was looking at. A blankness came over him. A complete absence of thought or feeling, a numbness of mind.

He sat down at the desk, torch in hand, the image in the spotlight. The photograph was of two people, a man and a woman. They were standing in a street, both smiling, their arms around each other’s shoulders. The woman was Vanetta Brown – much older than the proud, defiant woman whose face he’d memorised, but time had spared her its worst. She was dressed in a denim skirt and black blouse, her grey-streaked hair worn in cornrows. The man at her side was taller and darker than her, and also twelve years younger. Max knew their age difference, because he knew when they were both born – and because he also knew who the man was. He’d known him well, or so he’d thought.

Joe Liston.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and looked again, the light he held quaking like nudged jelly.

The photograph had been taken over a decade before: Joe was younger and far slimmer, his hair styled in the sharp fade cut he’d sported when he still had enough on top to flirt with baldness.

Now nothing made sense.

Joe had come here, to Cuba, to visit Vanetta Brown.

Why? Had they been friends?
Lovers?

Max went back to their final conversation. He remembered the look on Joe’s face when he asked him if he’d been to Cuba, the way he’d changed the subject abruptly.

He spotted a small pinhole in the photograph’s border. He turned the picture over, looking for an inscription or a date, but there was nothing.

His mouth had gone dry. He couldn’t swallow. He wanted to search the apartment over again, pull all the books out of the library, but he knew he couldn’t. He didn’t have the time.

*

He switched off the light and opened the front door a crack to check that the landing was empty.

It wasn’t.

An old woman in a dark-blue dressing gown was standing in front of the door, looking right at him. They both got a shock. She gasped and took a step back.

‘Quien son usted?’
she whispered. The door of the opposite apartment was ajar and light was spilling on to the landing. He thought he’d been quiet.

She was short; her dressing gown completely covered her feet and the back hem trailed her by a few inches. Her curly hair was grey going into white and framed tiny, skewed features set in chalky, lined skin that sagged about her cheeks.

‘Quien son usted?’
she asked again, louder. Her voice was clear and strong and seemed to belong to someone much taller and bolder.

Max stepped out and closed the door behind him. She retreated two steps.

‘Soy
un amigo,’
he said, as quietly and as gently as he could.

‘Americano?’

‘Si.’

‘Policiá Americana?’

‘No, no señora. Soy un amigo.’
Max edged towards her, making her back away towards her own apartment. She was standing between him and the stairs.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘
Usted no es su amigo. No le conozco.’
Her voice rang around the landing, the echoes sharp and metallic.

‘Hablas Inglés?’

She nodded, clasping the edges of her gown together tightly.

‘I’m a friend of Vanetta’s.’

She cleared her throat.

‘’Ow you fine dis place?’

‘She gave me the address.’

‘No’ true,’ she said, wagging a finger at him. ‘She
no’
do that. She
no’
have visit. She never
have
visit.’

‘She gave me her address,’ Max repeated, shrugging, palms out, pantomiming innocence while sneaking a look down the stairs. He knew he had to go, but he’d have to get past her. She was frail and easy to push past. She’d call the cops. Teofilo’s bike couldn’t outrun an elephant if the elephant was standing still. Best to try and salvage the situation, convince her that he was telling the truth.

‘She
no’
give you dis a’ress,’ she said. ‘She no’ tell no person. ’Ow you come here?’

‘Car.’

‘Is no car ou’side.’

‘It’s parked behind the building.’

‘You
lie.’

‘No.’ Max advanced a step, thinking she’d move back, but she didn’t budge. She wasn’t scared of him.

‘’Ow you get key?’

She’d doubled up on the volume and aggression. People were going to hear her, for sure. People were going to come.

‘No es importante,’
he said.

‘No,
señor. Es muy importante!
’ She took a step forward. Max held his ground. They were almost touching.