Voodoo Eyes (48 page)

Through the glass they could see there was no one inside the dome. In fact, there seemed to be nothing there at all but glass and a wall with a doorway cut into it.

They tiptoed past the guard, Rosa slightly ahead of Max.

She pulled at the door’s grooved brass handle, but it didn’t open. There were no locks. Then she saw the keypad.

Max took two steps back and looked the guard over. He had a photo-laminate clipped to his breastpocket and something tied to a black lanyard around his neck.

Max reached over and gently unclipped the photo ID from the pocket. He studied it. It was just the man’s name and number.

He hooked his little finger around the lanyard and tugged softly. The guard hadn’t shaved and the cord rasped as Max drew the slack across bristles.

Delicately, he edged the lanyard out from under the guard’s uniform, mindful of upsetting the tilted cap, watching him carefully for signs of awakening. The edge of a thick black plastic card emerged from under the guard’s collar. Max bent and carefully pinched a corner between his fingertips and lifted it out.

Rosa came across, stood between the guard’s parted legs and pulled out a switchblade. Leaning over, she cut the card free with a quick side-to-side swipe of the blade.

The guard let rip an operatic fart – a loud, prolonged basso profundo eruption that sounded as if a Harley were going to come flying out of his ass.

Max and Rosa froze.

The man stirred. He moved his tongue around the inside of his lips. He yawned and groaned.

And then he opened his eyes wide.

Rosa was still bent over him, her cleavage hanging close to his face.

Max held his breath, Rosa hers.

The guard’s pudgy young face cracked into a broad smile.

Then, slowly, he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

The hospital’s vestibule more than fulfilled its purpose. It was an uncomfortably bright, almost intense shade of white, suggesting an obsessive dedication to cleanliness and sanitation matched only by its committed anonymity. The floor didn’t appear to have ever been walked on; the glass in the dome was so clear it was invisible; and even the air was strangely odourless – given the proximity of the sea – as if it had been thoroughly filtered and processed before being allowed to circulate.

The only touches of colour were on the concave back wall. Gold-leaf paint filled in the large, sunken capital letters spelling out the person the hospital was named after:

LEONIDBREZHNEV

The letters were bookended by a pair of black-and-white photographs in borderless frames, showing the Soviet Union’s erstwhile premier shaking hands with Fidel Castro outside the dome. They made an odd couple. Brezhnev, sweating through a white safari shirt, scowling in the sun, while Castro, standing a foot taller than his counterpart and ally, was chomping a cigar and smiling, as well he might: the hospital hadn’t cost Cuba a thing.

Cold air enveloped them as they entered the main building. Rosa sneezed and then cussed at herself under her breath.

As they took in the environment they exchanged dumbfounded looks, their expressions mirroring the same two questions – where
exactly
were they and what had they just walked into?

To Max it resembled an exclusive private members’ club, the kind you only get to know about once you reach a certain social echelon and strut a higher plane. It spelled bottomless money, connections on speed-dial, power on tap.

A plum-red carpet covered the floor, so plush and deep it swallowed the soles of their feet and every trace of sound. Light came from a pear-shaped chandelier both fragile and monstrous, like an ogre’s tear. Spotlights in all four corners cast upward beams that splayed across the walls, bestowing an aura of intimacy and warmth. At the back was an impressive convex oak reception desk, the wood diffusing a rich, subdued glow. The wall behind it incorporated a great circular sculpture. From afar the sculpture appeared to be an abstract swirl of white marble, a pointless, sharp-petalled whorl. But closer inspection revealed the design to be a shattering cloud. Floating among the pieces were familiar faces – mini-busts of Communist superstars, the ideologues and the practitioners: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, Tito and, of course, Castro; man-made gods reigning in an atheist heaven.

In the space between desk and entrance were scattered small round tables and deep, overstuffed leather armchairs with wide wings and footrests. There was a large library, as well as an extensive newspaper rack with English, American, French, Spanish and Russian editions. Max half-expected a butler to appear, but there was absolutely no one around. It was utterly quiet. Only the mild smell of institutional antiseptic betrayed the fact that they were in a hospital. They had to be standing in the lobby of the patients’ quarters, he realised: this would be the first thing new arrivals saw after the vestibule.

Close by, to the right, was a staircase – a high oak banister encasing broad stone steps, the carpet spilling down the middle, kept in place by brass runners. Beyond it was an elevator with wide brass doors. Six floors in all, four above, and a basement.

They took the stairs.

The walls were hung with black-and-white photographs of the island and the hospital in various stages of development. The first was an aerial shot of the island in its virgin state, fully forested, a dark torpedo in the pencil-grey ocean. Then the building work started. Trees were uprooted from the shoreline by trawlers with chains. Another bird’s-eye shot showed about a dozen whole palm trees floating off the coast, some on their sides, others stuck upright in the shallows, as if trying to clamber back to land. Then came pictures of workmen, all Russian military – bulldozing, sawing, burning, mixing, digging – watched over by men in civilian clothes. The final photograph, near the top of the stairs, depicted the shell of the building, a seagull perched atop an incomplete wall.

On the landing, they faced a long corridor, with numbered doors either side, the light provided by wall-mounted electric candelabra between every other room. To the left they could see an empty office, its glass door painted with a Red Cross symbol.

‘We should split up,’ whispered Rosa. ‘I’ll check the rooms on this floor and the next. You take the others.’

Max went up to the top floor. A nurse in a white uniform sat behind a desk in the medical office, engrossed in a book, her bare feet up. Max guessed there were people staying here.

He headed quickly into the corridor, beyond the nurse’s line of vision. The doors were numbered here too, odd to the left, even to the right. He tried the first door. Locked. He tried the one opposite. Locked as well.

So too were the next three pairs of doors.

Then the ninth opened.

He turned on the flashlight. An old man lay asleep on a bed, hooked up to a heart monitor and breathing through thin plastic tubes fitted to his nose. He was wearing Snoopy pyjamas.

Max heard someone stir in the room and moved the beam away from the bed. A younger man was curled up on a foldaway close by, and a few feet from him, another man was dozing in a chair.

Max left quietly.

The next few doors were locked. He was more than halfway down the corridor.

Door 13 opened, but the room didn’t have anyone in it.

He continued.

Door 14: locked. Door 15: locked.

Door 16: open.

He crept in.

The curtains were half-parted on a view of the ocean: flat and calm, the colour of silvery soot, two speedboats circling in opposite directions, concentric rows of winking marker buoys bouncing lightly up and down in the water.

He turned on the torch. The beam met the bedside table: a swan-shaped vase filled with bright yellow and pink orchids, a bowl piled high with untouched fresh fruit, a glass of water, a white telephone, several bottles and capsules of pills, a box of Kleenex, and jutting over the edge, a book –
The Audacity of Hope
by Barack Obama.

He moved the beam across to the bed. Again, he’d come to the wrong room. The patient – another old man – was sleeping, almost upright, on a high bank of pillows. His head was so shrunken it seemed to be sinking into his yellow nightgown, the collar of which gaped around it like a toothless but expectant maw. His skin clung to his skull, as though it had been drizzled over the bone and left to set, waxen and opaque, the colour of cataracts reflecting a sandy shore. What hair he had clung stubbornly to the front and sides of his scalp in tight white florets. And there was a smell coming from his body, mingling with the sweet perfume of the orchids and fruit. It was an odour of medicated exhaustion, of slow death with the edges blunted and the countdown muddled, of a life close to the finish line.

Max switched off the torch and was about to leave when the patient called out to him.

‘
Quién es usted?’

The voice was groggy, withered and androgynous.

‘Who are you?’ it asked again, clearer this time, bolder.

And it was a woman’s voice – an American woman’s voice.

He flashed the torch back to the bed and found that she was looking right at him.

Vanetta Brown.

56

She turned on the bedside lamp and he wished she hadn’t. She was hard to look at, hard to take in, hard to relate to the person whose face he’d memorised from the photographs. Cancer had all but erased her; reduced her to an outline, a faint tracing-paper sketch of someone she used to be, propped up by a stack of pillows and an adjustable bed. She was bone and cartilage dressed up in a loose and crumpled suit of flesh. Yet her eyes, though sunk back in their sockets, still had that defiant, penetrating glare, all haughty rectitude and fury; undimmed, unbeaten, unrepentant.

Max took off his cap and drew closer to her.

‘You don’t know me. My name is Max Mingus. I’m … I’ve been looking for you,’ he said. ‘Sarah Dascal told me you were here.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s well.’

‘And the children?’

‘They’re well.’

‘I’m not going to see them again,’ she said matter of factly. ‘Do you know what that’s like? Knowing you’re never going to see someone you love again?’

‘Can’t say I do,’ he said.

‘It’s like seeing the future. And that’s never a good thing.’ Her voice was an exhausted rasp scratching across a parched throat, sandpaper rubbing on hot stone. Her lips had thinned and become encrusted with dry, flaking skin.

She pointed to a chair near the bedside cabinet and motioned him to bring it over. The gesture was feeble, an approximate move, bereft of motility. The room was far bigger than he’d imagined it would be. There were places the light hadn’t reached, corners screened off by darkness.

She pushed herself up a little, struggling those few inches. He wanted to help, because the effort she was making to accomplish something so simple was painful to watch, but he didn’t.

‘How did you get here?’ she asked.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Where have you come from?’

‘Miami.’

‘That’s a long way.’

‘It’s not that far.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she said looking at him, at his face, at the top of his head. ‘What’s the weather there like?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve been here a while. Looking for you,’ he said.

He’d expected to know what to say. His time was limited and he only really wanted to know one thing.
Did you have Joe killed?
But looking at her, a spirit marking time in a withered, pain-racked body, he was no longer sure what to ask. The question seemed almost pointless.

‘You know I’m dying?’

Max nodded.

‘I don’t have long. Days, maybe … Not too many more, I hope,’ she said. ‘Every time I close my eyes, I expect it to be the last time. Every time I open them I’m … disappointed. Another morning, getting woken up by pain. Pain everywhere. Breakfast is pills. The pain goes away and then I just spend time floating. And waiting. I can’t do anything. I can barely read. I can barely think. What’s the point?’

He didn’t know what to say. He felt awkward, intrusive. He suddenly didn’t want to be here, regretted he’d even come.

She smiled weakly. ‘I’m sorry to be so morbid. Comes with the territory. I’ve been feeling a bit better, lately. It’s strange. It happened to my mother-in-law too … Just before she died. She started talking about going for walks, getting some air. A sudden optimism. She never did. You know what I really want now? I want to go home.’

‘To Havana?’

‘That’s not home.’

‘To America?’

She blinked twice and nodded slightly. ‘I want to be with my family. With my daughter and my husband. When are you going back?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Soon, I suppose.’

‘Can you take me with you?’

‘To Miami?’

‘Yes.’

He almost said no, but caught himself. ‘They’ll arrest you,’ he said.

‘What’s left of me.’ She managed a chuckle. ‘They’re welcome to it.’

‘You don’t want to die in prison.’

‘What difference does it make?’ she said. ‘Can I leave with you?’

‘Why do you want to go back there?’

‘To be buried with my daughter and my husband.’

‘Won’t you be flown home when you … When you go?’ he asked.

‘You know what happens when American fugitives die here, in Cuba? The American government refuses to allow their bodies into the country.’ She smiled.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Never underestimate our government’s capacity for petty vindictiveness.’

He’d found a way into the question he wanted to ask. He’d take the long route, walk her back through her life and then forward, until they came to what he wanted to know.

‘Vanetta,’ he began. ‘Can I call you Vanetta?’

She nodded.

‘I’m a friend of Joe’s … Joe Liston. There are some things I need to ask you. I know all about you – what you’ve been through. I’ve read all the files on those CDs Joe gave you. And I’ve put it together. I understand most of it, I really do.’

‘What do you understand?’ She leaned towards him a fraction, her bones creaking and popping, her body barely registering inside her nightdress.