Voodoo Eyes (20 page)

‘No.’

‘Where you frahm?’ Her accent was pure Tony Montana School of English – with honours. She was light brown and stout, a circumference of belly made a gap between her loose T-shirt and long denim skirt. The woman to his right shot her a foul look: he was the prize who’d gotten away.

‘Canada,’ he said.

‘Nice condree.’

‘You been there?’ Max asked. Very few Cubans were legally allowed to travel abroad. In fact, until recently, Cubans hadn’t even been allowed into the hotels. Times had changed with Fidel Castro’s retirement. The hotel ban had been lifted, but this was purely symbolic. The average Cuban, earning eighty cents a day, couldn’t afford to stay in them.

‘I meet Canada peoples many tyme. Nyce peoples.
Mucho simpatico.
So I teenk – nyce peoples, nyce condree.’ Her teeth reminded him of a shanty town, every one of them grey brown and leaning against the other for balance. ‘You arrybe today, yes?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Firss tyme you com to Cuba?’

‘Yup.’

‘You like?’

‘So far, yeah.’

‘What you name?’

‘John.’

‘Qué coincidencia!
’ She clapped her hands and, in a single move, brought herself, her stool and her food and drink a few inches closer to Max. ‘You name in Espanish is Juan. My name is Juanita.’

‘That’s nice,’ he said. He noticed the barman watching them intently. There was no hint of disapproval on his face. He caught Max staring and broke into a smile.

‘You ’ere wid you wife?’ She was looking right at his wedding ring. He’d put it on before he left Miami, the first time he’d worn it in nineteen years. It still just about fitted.

‘No. She’s dead.’

‘Muy triste.’
She pulled down the corners of her mouth and looked like she was about to cry.

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘But you still sad, yes?’

‘I cry every day,’ he said dryly.

‘You muss no’ cry.’ She patted his forearm, then rested her podgy hand on it, before removing it with a subtle stroke. ‘Is no good to cry.’

The woman and the barman exchanged a look. He raised his eyebrows and she gave him an almost imperceptible shrug.

‘You ’ere wid girlfrenn?’

‘No.’

‘You ’aff girlfrenn?’

‘No.’

‘You come to Cuba to fyne one?’

Max shook his head. He scoped out the bar in the mirror. Nearly every man there was middle-aged, white and in various stages of physical decline. Many looked like him – bald and thickset. Sitting with them, sometimes in pairs, were Cuban women. They were stunning, well dressed, and much younger than their companions. Some might even have been teenagers. He could tell some of them had been paired off for a week or two, because their men were carefully suntanned and they were barely speaking, each in their own universe, each looking for someone better. Watching over this meat market were several of the hotel’s security guards. They wore heavy black moustaches and loose blue blazers that covered paunches and guns. A security man stood in a corner to Max’s left, watching the barman. Max guessed that they were running the hookers, watching who went off with whom.

‘How long you stay in Cuba?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘A long tyme! You can meet girlfrenn.’

‘I don’t want to meet a girlfriend.’

‘No’ fo’ love an’ marry. No’ fo’ serious. Juss fo’ fun, you know. Two week.’

‘Not interested.’

‘So why you come to Cuba? You come fo’ beezniss?’

‘Whatever.’

‘What that? “Whatever”?’

‘It’s not important.’

‘Mysterioso.’
She sighed and shrugged at the barman, this time more obviously. He looked at the security guy and moved his head slightly from side to side. They weren’t sure what Max was there for.

She picked a small morsel of pork out of her teeth and pulled herself as close as she could to Max, so that they were almost touching. He could smell perfume and onions on her.

‘So you no’ want say why you here?’

‘Nothing to tell,’ Max said. ‘I’m a Canadian tourist.’

‘You no’ want to tell me because you are – how you say –
timido?
But I know you ’ere fo’ some fun weev lady. Is OK. Lotta Canada people com ’ere fo’ fun weev lady.’

‘Furthest from my mind.’

She lowered her voice.

‘You no’ like lady?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ He’d finished his coffee and he didn’t want another.

‘You like man?’

‘What?’

‘You like man – you know? Haff fun with man?’

Max laughed at that. ‘No. I don’t like that either.’

‘What you like? You no’ like woman, you no’ like man?’

Then he thought of something.

‘You want a drink?’ he asked her.

‘A drink?’

‘Uno más cerveza.’
He nodded at her empty beer bottle.

‘No. Drink is fye peso. That a lot money.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘No. Is no’ OK. Is fye peso.’

‘You don’t want a drink?’

‘Instead you buy drink, why you no’ gi’ me fye peso.’

‘You want five pesos?’

‘Si. Fye
tourist
peso. No’ Cuban money. Cuban money is fo’ toilet, you know.
Papel higienico.’

There were two currencies in Cuba. One for tourists and one for locals. The tourist peso was convertible and worth twenty-five times the local peso. So much for socialism.

Max opened his wallet. He saw her eyes widen at the thick stack of bills. He gave her a ten-peso bill. She took it, looked for the barman, but he was serving a customer. She slipped the note into her waistband.

‘
Gracias,’
she said.

‘De nada.’

‘You haff chil’ren, John?’

‘No.’

‘Me. I haf son. Him birthday tomorrow. I no’ haf money to buy he present.’

‘How old is he?’ Max knew what was coming next.

‘Six.’ Without him asking, she took out a picture from a battered black leather wallet she wore on a thick chain. The kid looked about twelve and didn’t resemble her at all. Plus the picture was old, creased and flaking.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Angel.’

‘Angel?’

‘I need money fo’ present, John.’

‘I see,’ he said and laughed.

She got angry.

‘You tink I prostitute?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But you tink I prostitute?’

‘No,’ he said. If she was a hooker, she was the shabbiest, ugliest one there. Maybe that was her appeal, her hustle, her way of doing things. Or maybe she was the sort who talked money out of people with sob stories, played every note of the First World Guilt Symphony.

‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you money for your son, if you do something for me.’

‘Yes?’

‘I want a phonebook. A Cuban phonebook.’

She frowned.

‘Uno
libro de telefóno,’
he said.

‘Why you want that?’

‘I collect them. I go to a new country, I bring back a phonebook. Souvenir.’

‘Si?’

‘Si.
It’s my hobby.
Es mi mania.’

‘Mania loca.’

‘Whatever,’ Max said. ‘Get me a phonebook. I give you some money.’

‘I see you in fye minute.’

26

In his room he started checking the list of American fugitives against the Cuban phonebook.

Thirty-nine were listed, seventeen of them former Black Power activists. He’d researched them all, memorised their lives. No Vanetta Brown, but he’d been expecting that.

Max began calling. It was a slow process. Some numbers were disconnected. Others rang interminably. Some would be answered and then cut off. All the while he’d hear echoes and clicks, faint fragments of other conversations. The phone was tapped, and crudely so. The state wanted you to know you were being listened in on.

When he did manage to get through he started his spiel. He gave his real name and said he was a freelance writer researching a book about political exiles (his term) living in Cuba in the age of Obama. Would they maybe like to meet up and answer some questions? He was hung up on or told to fuck off. He was accused of being a mercenary, a Fed, or a private detective. He was told he sounded white, despite his black name, so what the fuck did he know about the black struggle?

He felt tired. He was hot and sweaty. The feeble air con whined and the room reeked of stale cigars and cleaning products. He lay down on the bed for a quick rest and ended up falling asleep for an hour. When he woke, he stretched and rolled his neck. He did a hundred push-ups straight off, then splashed cold water on his face. Out the window he could see girls in leotards practising dance moves by the illuminated swimming pool. Beyond the hotel grounds the city was dark, no lights.

He resumed his calls.

He turned on the Russian TV set as a distraction, the volume down low. The satellite channels were relatively clear. The local ones were temperamental and the image alternated between fuzzy and snowy.

He tried the disconnected numbers again, then the dropped calls.

Then he reached Earl Gwenver.

Gwenver had been a Black Panther. He fled the US when he was twenty-two. He’d shot a night clerk in a liquor store in Encino and was making his way to Mexico via Texas with his on-off girlfriend, a white med-school dropout. They were both high on reefer and the booze they’d stolen, when they stopped off at a gas station. There, an off-duty state trooper was cleaning the remains of a coyote off his car. According to the attendant, the trooper smelled the reefer and asked Gwenver and the girl to step out the car. Gwenver pulled a gun and shot him in the chest. The trooper fired back, hitting the girl in the stomach. Gwenver later claimed she shot the trooper after he called her a nigger-loving whore. According to Gwenver, his girlfriend had also held up the liquor store and shot the clerk because she was ‘on some Patti Hearst trip’. He’d tried stopping her, he said. She was later found at the side of the road, a few miles from the gas station. The police reported that her body had additional wounds, fractures consistent with having been pushed out of a moving car. Again Gwenver cried foul and insisted he’d driven her to a nearby hospital.

‘What you say your name was?’ Gwenver asked him.

‘Max Mingus.’

‘Any relation to Charlie Mingus, the jazzman?’

‘Not by blood. My father was a jazz musician. He changed his name to Mingus. As a tribute, I guess.’

‘And you never changed it back?’

‘No.’

Silence.

‘We have a pie meetin’ every Thursday – as in tomorrow. Why don’t you come along?’

‘What’s a pie meeting?’

‘P-I-E. “Panthers in Exile”. We got our own support group.’

27

If he’d taken them all in and turned them over to the FBI, the thirteen men and women in the room would have netted him close to one and a half million dollars. Each and every one of them had shot and hijacked their way out of America. A few had killed more than once, and all but one of that number had killed a cop. The FBI knew exactly where they were, but hadn’t gone after any of them. Every year the Bureau put in formal requests for extradition through US Interests, and every year the Cuban government turned them down.

The Panthers in Exile were gathered around a big wooden table with a jug of ice water in the middle and a ring of upturned glasses. They were dressed in black T-shirts, fatigues and boots. Some wore matching berets. They were close to unrecognisable from their mugshots. Age had atrophied or bloated them, made them bald and grey, bent their backs, frozen their hands, and shattered their features. Thirty-plus years in Cuba had applied the finishing touches. Their expressions were the same as those of their adopted countrymen – that look of knowing disillusion worn by old and young alike, the certainty that the pot they’d find at the end of the rainbow wouldn’t even be fit for pissing in.

Earl Gwenver was the exception. Earl Gwenver looked good. Medium height and build, head shaved and gleaming, face thin and hard. He was the youngest at the table, pushing sixty but looking ten years younger. It wasn’t good genes. They counted for nothing in a poorhouse country. Gwenver was making plenty of money at something – a lot more than the average official salary of peanuts and change. His Panther garb was made by Nike, the white swooshes on his breast and thigh mirroring the furry ticks he had for eyebrows. The twinkle in his eye matched the gleam of the gold studs in his earlobes. Instead of boots, he wore black-and-red Nike Shox, offsetting the black-and-red bead bracelet on his right wrist.

He’d met Max at the entrance of a three-storey building close to the Grand Theatre on the Prado, the main drag running through the heart of Old Havana. The building had once been painted pastel blue, but the façade had cracked years before and parts of it had fallen away, exposing big patches of grey and brown. Flower baskets and trays hung from the balconies on each floor, possibly to distract from the sagging clothes lines and the warped and rusty metal balustrades whose fittings were pulling from the stone.

Gwenver led Max inside, where it was peeling hot and crowded, families crammed into every space, businesses being run through the gaps. All the doors were thrown wide open for ventilation. He passed a makeshift art gallery cum studio – unframed bright and gaudy canvasses fixed to the walls with small nails. In the middle, three women sewing garments, children eating, and an old man watching television. The first floor was noisy – two bands were rehearsing in adjoining rooms; a salsa ensemble whose musicians were spilling out into the corridor and a teenage rock group doing ‘Smoke on the Water’ in Spanish. In an adjacent room, a man and woman were working on a car engine, while three children sat on the floor rolling a toy car to each other with accompanying sound effects.

Gwenver was explaining the history of the group as they walked.

‘We started up around seventy-three, seventy-four. It was like a support group. We looked out for each other. Taught each other the ropes and the lingo, talked about shit back home. It was strictly for militant black folk, mind. We didn’t let none o’ that common criminal element join, you dig? Castro took to lettin’ in all kindsa riff-raff, anyone who could jack a plane and spout some Marx simultaneously. He had a real soft spot for fraudsters and conmen too. White-collar thieves. Ain’t much left of our group now. A few dead, a few as good as, a few just stopped comin’.’