Voodoo Eyes (35 page)

Max looked up the road and saw the Mercedes had stopped, its chrome and glass glinting in the sun.

He took out his phone. He had a signal. He called Rosa Cruz. Her phone rang over a dozen times before going to voicemail. He killed the call without leaving a message.

He went back to the car with his purchases, flies following him.

‘I no’ hungry,’ said Benny.

‘Suit yourself.’

They set off again, Max watching the rearview. The Mercedes was on the move, trailing a cloud of dust.

‘Who you telephone?’ asked Benny.

‘Ghostbusters.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

Max drained both coconuts and lobbed the shells out of the window as soon as they were back in open country. The Mercedes was a long way behind, but it was following.

Max tried the radio again. Static on every channel.

‘Is country here. Radio no good. Wait when we get close to big town. Ciego de Ávila, Camagüey – place like that,’ said Benny.

They rolled on. They passed a Soviet-era watchtower, a kind of pillbox mounted on a single stilt, poking out of the earth like a fossilised periscope. Vultures were gliding low around it.

‘You got family in America?’ Max asked Benny.

‘No.’

‘Friends?’

‘No.’

‘You got family here?’

‘A sister and two brother. We no’ speak.’

‘What about parents?’

‘My mother, she die. She was kind person. My father, we no’ speak. He shame with me, for be homosexual. He say, I no’ his son.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘Why you sorry? Is no’
you
family,’ said Benny.

‘Figure of speech.’

‘And youself? You have family?’

‘No. My parents are dead. No brothers or sisters,’ said Max.

He assumed his father was dead. He’d split when Max was ten. There’d been a few birthday postcards – from California the first year, Michigan the next, then Buffalo. Then nothing. Max thought of tracking his father down a few times, always after he’d been drinking on his own and listening to mournful jazz – a Chet Baker vocal usually got him to that place. His dad had been a bass player in a jazz band. He’d had regular gigs in hotels, done some radio and spent a year in a TV-studio house band. Max used to wonder if his old man hadn’t turned out like Baker, a decrepit junkie with false teeth and a retinue of hateful ex-wives. The last time Max thought of looking his father up he’d been sober. It was on his thirty-fourth birthday. Sandra told him how ironic it was that he searched for missing persons, when he couldn’t even look for the biggest missing person in his life. So he’d made a few calls and got as far as finding out that Mingus Snr had lived in Portland, Oregon, with a black woman called Janet. He could have gone further, all the way up to his father’s front door or grave marker, whichever it was, but he didn’t know what he’d say to him if he were alive, and he didn’t want to know how he’d died. He’d left it there, hanging, a mystery. He told his wife he preferred it that way, that anything else would be an unnecessary disruption of lives long gone in opposing directions. It wasn’t like Max had really missed his father. He hadn’t hated him for leaving, or even really blamed him. He’d accepted his mother’s side of the story, that his father had had a thing for women, especially black ones, and that he’d been something of a total asshole. They hadn’t even been close: his old man had spent a lot of time on the road, and when he was home he’d been self-absorbed and distant, always locking himself away to practise bass, the deep humming notes shaking the walls of their row house, the only sound Max could remember him making. When he’d gone for good, it hadn’t made any difference, hadn’t changed too much of a damn thing. Now Max couldn’t even remember what his old man’s voice had sounded like, the kind of accent he’d had, whether he’d smoked or drank, how he was built, the colour of his eyes; neither could he recall any particular acts of kindness or cruelty, which, he supposed, wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d grown up with nothing to hate and nothing to miss. Some people never got over their parents. Not him. His father had passed through his life almost unnoticed, leaving a space that Eldon Burns had filled. Eldon Burns had been all the father he’d needed.

‘You have child?’ asked Benny.

‘No.’

‘Why no’?’

‘Never happened.’

‘So after you is no one? When you dead, you
extinto
–
dinosaurio.’

Max laughed. ‘That’s me.’

‘Is no problem for you?’

‘No problem at all.’

Max looked in the rearview mirror. The Mercedes was still there, hanging back, not closing the distance.

‘What you do?’

‘There’s a car behind us.’

‘Of course. Is road, Max. Is for car.’

‘It’s been following us for more than an hour.’

Benny checked in the mirror.

‘That Mercedes. Is no’ cop.’

‘Secret police then?’

‘Is no’ possible. We change car. They no’ know we here.’

Max called Rosa Cruz again. Voicemail. He put the phone back in his breastpocket.

He tried the radio. Same static.

The road ahead turned smooth as they approached a stretch of asphalt cutting through a swathe of pale reeds. It was lined on both sides with white headstone-shaped monuments inlaid with black-and-white photographs. Underneath these, painted in blue, were names and lifespan dates, and at the bottom, in red, the name of countries: Angola, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Grenada, Jamaica. They were memorials to the revolution’s fallen heroes, back when Cuba was exporting guerrillas instead of doctors.

Suddenly they heard thick scrunching and popping sounds coming from under the car, like they were driving over broken glass, and a foul stench of putrefying fish overcame them.

‘What is that?’ Max pulled his shirt hem over his nostrils and Benny held his nose.

One of the back tyres blew out. The car skidded. Max hit the brakes and turned the wheel sharply. The car came to a sliding stop.

‘Look.’ Benny pointed at the empty road. Max saw nothing but a stretch of blacktop, melting and buckling in the sun, the edges oozing into the shallow trenches skirting the road.

Yet when he looked closer he saw that the road surface was actually alive, and on the move. Little round lumps were crawling out from one trench, scuttling along and dropping into the other. It wasn’t asphalt – melting or freshly laid or otherwise disintegrating. The path ahead was completely covered in thousands of small crabs, dark-brown shells and bright red-tipped pincers, doing their sideways-across walk. Further on he noticed gaps in the swarming surface – orangey-white grooves steaming up in the heat – where a prior car had crushed its way through and which the crabs were respectfully circumventing.

Max got out of the car to check the damage. The back-left tyre was flat, pieces of busted-up, broken-off crab sticking out of the rubber like jagged spikes. A thick double-yellow lightning bolt smeared the road immediately behind them where the car had skidded and crushed dozens of ambulating crustaceans into a thick goo, adding to the ammoniac stench.

The crabs were absolutely everywhere, a slow swarm of brown shells inching across the blacktop with sharp, tiny clicks, bright beady little pinpoints for eyes, every last one looking right at him, pincers snapping. They were moving under the car, circling the wheels. They were close to his feet.

Max kicked a bunch of the things out of the way to clear a space for him to change the tyre. In the trunk he found a spare and a toolbox.

The wheel nuts were grime-sealed and it was tough work getting them off. The heat and the smell were killing him. Some of the crabs had stopped moving. They were looking at him through their little orbs of fire as he toiled and sweated and gasped and grunted and cursed. The longer he took, the more crabs stopped and gathered around in a loose circle, leaving only about twenty inches of space, a no-go zone, every one of them clapping their pincers together, until it was the only sound he could hear, a million arid clicks.

When he got the wheel off, one of the crabs began inching towards him. It was slightly larger than the others and had darker pincers, purple instead of red.

As he fitted the replacement, he tracked the crustacean’s slow but deliberate progress. He tightened the first nut, then slotted in the second. The crab was almost at his ankles, its pincers splayed and curving downwards. He stopped what he was doing and stood up.

The crab stopped and looked at him, its eyes shielded by the overhanging shell.

Max recognised the absurdity of his predicament. He’d faced off with killers who’d pointed both barrels of a shotgun at him; he’d been threatened with bottles of acid, petrol bombs and spinning saw blades; one time someone had tried to syringe-spray syphilitic pus in his eye – and that was all
before
he’d been to prison. But here he was now, in Cuba, squaring up to a fucken’
crab.

Then he noticed the Mercedes. It had reappeared at the edge of the crab flow, stationary, the engine idling. He didn’t know how long it had been there.

He looked down at the crab, which hadn’t moved. Then he took in the hundreds of crabs around him, poised in the intense heat, their shells like the shields of a medieval army protecting itself from a hail of arrows.

He bent and continued working on the wheel, threading on the bolts and tightening them. He’d got to the last one when the main crab advanced. The others followed, a slow-motion forward-ripple passing through the mass of dull, dark-brown shells, propelling those in the front row towards him.

The lead crab snapped its pincers at his ankles. Max struck at it with the spanner, sending it flying off into the reeds.

Then the Mercedes rolled forward. He heard the wheels and the full weight of the car crushing crabs. He heard the pop and crunch of shells bursting. He heard what he thought were tiny high-pitched screams.

The car passed him by very, very slowly, grinding the crustacean carpet down to a foul mustardy sludge. The windows were almost as black as the bodywork, but he could sense someone looking right at him, and, in the back, he discerned the outline of a head.

After the Mercedes had passed, he looked down at his feet, expecting to be besieged by crabs, but the creatures had mostly disappeared, the stragglers shuffling off the edges of the road.

41

They drove solidly for the rest of the day, covering a hundred and fifty miles by sundown.

At nightfall they stopped for food at Camagüey. Max bought them sandwiches and water, and in a souvenir store he got a pair of cheap sunglasses and a green military cap with a star-shaped patch of the ubiquitous Che Guevara physiognomy sewn on the front. It was a size too big and he looked like a tourist gone drunk native, but it did the trick.

The ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ intro came on the radio as they were pulling out of town. Benny translated.

The news wasn’t good. The police had expanded their search outside Havana and were setting up roadblocks. They were using tracker dogs and doing helicopter sweeps. They’d found where Benny lived and linked him to the stolen Chevy. They’d interviewed the car’s owner, who was heartbroken because the vehicle had been in his family for five decades. The newscaster then went into a rambling rant about how the Chevy was more than just a car, that it was a symbol of Cuba’s proud, dogged resourcefulness in the face of the inhumane imperialist embargo. The newscaster promised that the thief would be severely punished for stealing this national emblem that had been handed down through generations with love and socialism – and for stabbing the spirit of the revolution in the heart.

No mention of Max’s name, only Benny’s. And Benny didn’t look in the least bit worried. He giggled at the propaganda inserts, and stretched and yawned as he translated the rest, wafting the carrion taint of his infected wound about the car.

Max opened the window. He remembered how they’d run manhunts when he’d been a cop, backdating the details they released to the public by a day or more, so their target wouldn’t know how close they really were. He guessed things were done the same way here, maybe with even less information.

How much did the police know and how close were they? They’d hardly seen any cops on the road or in the towns they’d left behind. Not in uniform anyway. But heads always turned their way and when eyes stuck to them a few beats too long, Max would tense up and expect to find the worst waiting for them at the next turn. It never was.

The Mercedes never reappeared. Who’d been driving it? The secret police? They would have pulled them over. The Abakuás? Maybe. Osso and his accomplice? Whoever it was had followed them after they’d changed cars in Trinidad. Which meant they’d tracked them to Savon’s house. The men in the
guayabera
s had been talking to uniformed cops, which told him they were connected to the state in one capacity or another. Someone had been keeping tabs on them – on him. He tried to think if he’d seen the car in Havana. He hadn’t noticed it, but it didn’t mean it hadn’t been there, all along.

Max called Rosa Cruz again. He’d lost count of the amount of times he’d tried to get through to her. He was so used to her voicemail message he practically knew it by heart. He never said anything, just listened in to dead air as he weighed up the pros and cons of letting her know where he was now and where he was heading tomorrow. Sometimes he almost told her, sometimes he didn’t come close. Was his finding Vanetta Brown more important to her than catching a supposed double murderer? He hadn’t spent enough time with her to make an educated guess, so he always killed the call. Then he started thinking about it all over again. It was a good way of taking his mind off the deep shit he was sinking in.

*

After Camagüey the road faded into an arid imprint of a throughway, barely signposted and completely unlit. Max felt himself unwinding involuntarily. His eyelids got heavier and his head kept drooping forward over the wheel. He had hot wiry pains in his legs and back from all the driving and tension. The sticky, warm breeze blowing through the window made him even drowsier. He turned to ask Benny to do some driving, but Benny was asleep, his head bouncing gently in time with the scalloped road.