Voodoo Eyes (19 page)

‘Blood doesn’t wash away blood,’ Lena said.

‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t.’

Max wanted to say something to that, but neither thoughts nor words came to him. He said nothing and neither did they. And that’s how the three of them stayed for a long time.

The sounds of the TV in the living room were coming into the kitchen, louder than those from the set in front of them. Then there were the excited sounds the rest of the family were making. Happy happy sounds. Those of a party without music.

He glanced at the screen and saw talking heads. Behind them the country map was bluer.

The living-room door opened and Ashley came quickly into the kitchen, a big smile on her face.

‘Barack won!’ she said.

Her happiness withered in the room. Ashley looked lost, like she’d done something terrible without realising it.

Lena didn’t react, didn’t turn around to look at her daughter, to look at anyone. She was crying again, very very quietly, and Max couldn’t tell if it was because of what he’d said or because of Joe, or because of the result. Maybe it was because of all these things.

Ashley slunk out, head bowed.

The TV was broadcasting live scenes from Grant Park. Obama was about to make his victory speech. A crowd of over a hundred thousand, then a cut to a single face – that of Jesse Jackson; there on the balcony when Martin Luther King was gunned down, a two-time Presidential candidate, the trailblazer, the instigator, bawling his eyes out while clutching a small American flag: the dream had finally been realised.

Jet got up and turned up the volume as the Obama and Biden families strode across the stage, hand in hand.

The President-elect spoke behind a rain-speckled bulletproof shield, and when the new first families walked away, hand in hand again, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Rising’ played over the PA. Barack and Bruce, Max thought; Joe would have been weeping like Jesse about now. The TV split-screened to scenes of jubilation all around the world. He’d never seen anything like it. He wondered if they were celebrating in Cuba or Haiti. He wondered if they were celebrating in prison. He wondered what Vanetta Brown was thinking.

‘I’d best go,’ said Max. Lena didn’t look at him.

He stood and started walking out of the kitchen.

‘Max … ’ she called after him. He stopped in the doorway and looked back, meeting her puffy but hard eyes. ‘Not in our name, d’you hear?
Not
in our name.’

He parked his car outside the 7th Avenue gym. He hadn’t wanted to stop there specifically, hadn’t wanted to stop anywhere at all, but he couldn’t go any further. The street before him was blocked with a massive surge of people, thousands of them it seemed, bobbing down the road, heading away from him, chanting ‘Yes We
Did
! Yes We
Did
!’ and ‘O! – BAM! –
AH
! O! – BAM! –
AH
!’ He’d never known Liberty City like this – exuberant and vibrant, and so full of people at night.

He walked towards them and was soon deep in the crowd. Hands reached out to shake his. A woman kissed him on the cheek. At least he thought it was a woman. It didn’t matter. He saw young and old, men and women, black, brown and white. Booze was being passed around, joints and cigarettes too. He felt himself swaying slightly from side to side, borne down the street like a cork in a slow-flowing stream. He had no idea where the people were going, and he wasn’t sure they did either. But he let himself go, smiling all the way into the darkness.

PART II
THE OUTPOST
OF TYRANNY

25

Havana.

La Habana.

It was stormy on his first afternoon. Max stood at the edge of the Hotel Naçional’s grounds, looking out across the sea, a roiling, slithering mass of dirty-grey turbulence and delicate white foam. Big waves crashed on the rocks and vaulted over the Malecón wall, drenching the sidewalk and washing right over the wide road, saturating the crumbling infrastructure, seeping through its fissures and holes, getting deep into the foundations, attacking the city from within.

People were out walking; locals, not tourists. They knew the sea, how it was when it got angry. They could tell the waves apart, the ones that would make it over the wall from the ones that wouldn’t. When a jumper was coming, they’d slow down, let the water do its worst and then continue along their way. They never ran. They never retreated. They never ever stopped. They kept on going, in spite of everything. Just like the country itself.

He felt the wind on his face, the warmth then the chill then the warmth again; the brine on his tongue worming its way to the back of his throat, the aftertaste reminiscent of stale tears. Above him the Cuban flag flapped in the air with a sound like muffled slaps. Lone star on red, blue stripes on white. It reminded him a little of the Texan flag, just like so much here reminded him a little bit of home. Those vintage American cars in particular. A few were well preserved, but most were held together by wire, tape, hope, rust and mismatched licks of paint – Bel Airs, T-Birds, DeSoto coupes, finned Caddies, Willys trucks, four-door Plymouths, Super 88s, Skylarks – a clanking, creaking, backfiring, smoke-belching, wobbly-wheeled parade of the bygone.

To the right Havana’s skyline stretched out in a claw-like curve, ending at the Castillo El Morro lighthouse. The buildings were mostly low-rise and solid, with a few flimsy-looking, garishly painted high-rises breaking the uniformity.

To the left was the US Interests Section in Havana – the US’s embassy without an ambassador. It was an unremarkable concrete-and-glass building ringed with a high steel fence and a permanent guard of Cuban cops. Here the Cold War was alive and well and being fought out daily and especially nightly. When the sun went down – as it was doing now – the building became an electronic billboard. Big red digital letters scrolled across a black strip under the windows of the upper floors, spouting anti-Castro slogans and quotes. The regime had retaliated by planting a small forest of gigantic flagpoles opposite the building. The poles flew black flags with a single silver star on them – meant in part to commemorate the victims of the Bay of Pigs, the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing, and the hotel blasts of the 1990s, and also, more practically, to obscure the enemy propaganda and keep it from the people. If that wasn’t enough, the cops used whistles to warn passers-by from looking up too long and too hard. The whistle hoots were frequent and shrill, louder than the sound of the shattering waves, the wind and the cars.

It was a mere ninety miles to Key West.

A week before, he’d attended two funerals in as many days.

Eldon was cremated. No family. No friends. Just Max and a man he didn’t recognise – Latin, fifties, grey hair and a snow-white goatee offset by a deep olive complexion.

He knew Max. He introduced himself with a handshake and a card.

Sal Donoso, Eldon’s lawyer.

‘We’ll have some things to talk about in a week or two,’ Donoso said.

‘I’ll be out of the country for a while.’

‘I’ll be in touch,’ the lawyer said.

Joe was buried the next day. The funeral was a media circus, which meant the Mayor came and the Chief spoke. There was a rifle salute, a crisply folded flag and every cop turned out and sweated in their dress blues.

At the wake, all but the family avoided him. The Chief looked through him. He felt like the cork stopping a release. He made his excuses and left as soon as he decently could.

Four hours before, he’d landed in Havana from Montreal.

Terminal 2, José Martí International Airport: flags from every nation hanging from the rafters, dusty and a little worn. He’d looked for the America flag and found it. The message, clear and simple: everyone was welcome – no exceptions.

There were plenty of Americans with him; by his reckoning at least a third of his fellow travellers. Couples mostly – white, between thirty and fifty, educated, comfortably off – the kind who travelled regularly all their adult lives and wanted to broaden their horizons. The single travellers were all male. Some were business types, but the majority were the sort you got on every flight to an impoverished Third World country: overweight middle-aged droopers out for some cut-price pay-to-play. None of his countrymen spoke too loudly or made eye contact for too long. They didn’t draw attention to themselves. He found that ironic, and sad and funny too. Here they were, citizens from the Land of the Free, travelling to the home of that blood-drinking repressive commie Castro – for some sight-seeing and bragging rights in the Axis of Evil – and they were scared of their own government finding out and locking them up.

The customs official had looked from his passport to his face, checked his ticket and let him through. No big deal.

‘Bienvenido a Cuba.’

‘Gracias.’

At baggage reclaim, female security guards stood around in tight beige uniforms – short skirts, high heels, fishnet stockings, gunbelts and full make-up. Their faces were hard – not-enough-money-hard, too-long-hours-hard; beauty etched in granite.

Max couldn’t help himself. He smiled at one. She smiled back.

He wished for a second that circumstances had been different. Or that he’d come here sooner.

The arrivals were transported to their respective hotels in a flimsy Chinese bus that was like a mutant plastic toy, designed to be grown out of and discarded. The vehicle creaked and rattled and the windows almost shook themselves free at every bump; the air conditioning was temperamental, and the seats were too hard and too small.

The first glimpses of the forbidden country blipped by the window, monochromatic vistas with sporadic dashes of sharp colour. It was just as he’d imagined it, and then nothing like it at all. The buildings were a mixture of the ancient and the not so new. It wasn’t falling apart exactly, but everything appeared on its last legs, badly in need of repairs and a facelift. The few construction sites along the way looked unmanned and neglected, the machinery ancient and inadequate, so it was hard to tell if something was going up or coming down. Traffic was sparse, most of the cars running slow. He noticed the complete absence of corporate advertising, no one telling you how to spend your money. State billboards proliferated instead. They hailed
La Revolución
and damned
Imperialismo,
but even here they were in thrall to fifties Americana. The propaganda was styled after drive-in movie monster posters: George W. Bush depicted as
Bush-zilla,
spitting fire on Iraqis,
Bush-acula,
the red-eyed, bloody-fanged vampire, or
Bush-enstein,
the flat-headed dollar-green ghoul. The sight of these raised a few laughs and cheers from the non-Americans on the bus, but it made his countrymen uneasy. They stiffened in their seats and pretended not to notice. He found the billboards crude but funny – and impossible to take seriously. He thought they were aimed at children. Catch ’em young, twist their soft impressionable minds into paranoid knots. The only graffiti was state-sponsored, and there was lots of it. Long, carefully painted quotes from José Martí, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro babbled from the tallest, most prominent walls; while elsewhere buildings wore murals of flags and men in berets, beards and fatigues – the conquering heroes as militarised hippies, waving clenched fists instead of peace signs, rifles instead of bongs. Wandering through this rhetorical overload were the people – on foot, on bicycles and mopeds, in the back of horse-drawn carts – skin tones ranging from black to white, a weathered deep olive the commonest shade; a nation of golden brown. They looked exhausted but healthy. He thought back to his first views of Haiti: the potholed roads, the blighted, waterless landscape, the dazed people wandering about, bodies draped in rags, swollen naked feet on sharp stone, the victims of some horrific natural calamity. Cubans may have been breadline poor, but they didn’t seem that desperate, just weary and resigned to a lifetime of state-imposed hardship.

He sat at the counter of the Vista del Golfo, one of the Naçional’s six bars. Photographs of the hotel’s famous guests covered its walls – a hall of fame of actors, politicians, musicians, athletes and ne’er-do-wells, their photographs hanging on frames or arranged in themed montages, set into recesses and bordered in bright pink. A gold Wurlitzer jukebox stood in a corner like a neon sarcophagus and random heirlooms sat proudly displayed behind glass cabinets – a record player that had belonged to Ava Gardner, a crumbling Underwood typewriter long gone green, one of Michael Moore’s baseball caps, Lucky Luciano’s monogrammed shaving kit and Gary Cooper’s cigarette case.

The place was crowded, the air dense with cigar smoke and murmured conversation. The only available seats were at the bar itself, where a set of stagnant-looking red, white and blue cocktails were laid out, with national flags sitting in them instead of umbrellas.

The barman welcomed him with an effusive greeting and a handshake. Max ordered coffee, expecting a Cuban coffee like they served in Miami – an espresso so thick and sweet he could stand his spoon in it – but instead he got a regulation black coffee in a small cup. He was disappointed when he tasted it. Bustelo was better. Bustelo ruled.

Two women sat either side of him, the one on his left eating a pork sandwich and drinking beer from a bottle; the other, in make-up and a tight green silk dress with a tiger and palm tree pattern on it, looked like she was on a hot date. He felt himself being appraised in stereo. He kept his eyes pointed right ahead – except his gaze met a wide slanted mirror hanging on the wall above a row of bottles of Havana Club rum. Both women were looking at him.

The woman eating the sandwich caught his eye first, smiled and said, ‘
Hola.
’

Max turned slightly and nodded.

‘Inglish?’ she asked.