Voodoo Eyes (39 page)

‘You too, huh?’ Max laughed. He’d had the Joe Liston-made Springsteen tape experience long before, maybe in 1978 or 1979 – a mixture of studio and live stuff. Joe designed the cover – an outtake from the
Born to Run
cover shoot, with Clarence and Bruce standing side by side – and he typed the inlay, annotating the songs with source albums where they were studio, dates and venues for the live material. Joe’s blind missionary zeal made Max feel guilty enough to listen to the tape the whole way through in his car, but he absolutely hated it. Nothing stuck. In fact, he felt so drained of patience at the end of the compilation that he tossed the cassette out of the window, along with the case. Now he wished like hell he’d kept it.

‘You still got his tape?’ Max asked.

‘Somewhere. I never told him what I really thought, because I like him too much, but Springsteen wasn’t my thing. Too
gringo.
No offence. And the man can’t sing, if you ask me.’

‘None taken. I think he’s kinda crappy too.’

The manager laughed. ‘What sort of music do you like?’

‘These days, not a lot. I used to live for music. Now it’s something I can do without. Whatever’s new, I’ve heard it all before.’

‘Did Joe send you here?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘How is he? It’s been a while since I’ve seen him.’

Max looked outside at the rain pelting the window, buffeting the parrot sign, rivulets running off the beak and claws. ‘Joe’s dead. He died recently.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry to hear that. He was a really nice guy,’ said the manager, and seemed to mean it.

‘Yes, he was. That’s kind of why I’m here. How well do you know Vanetta?’

‘Personally? Not well. First-name terms, though no more than a hello and a how-are-you,’ he said. ‘But she gave my family our start in this country. Twenty-three years ago, I came over from Haiti with my parents. When we arrived, we lived in Caille Jacobinne, the centre she built for us. She helped us find jobs and homes. We got an education. We owe her our lives. She did a lot of good for us – for all of us here. Not many people are like her. Do a lot for you, for absolutely nothing in return. You know we don’t even have to stay in Cuba, if we don’t want to? We can go back any time we want. Not that anybody does.’ The manager was tearing up a little.

‘Joe left me something to give her in person. Do you know where I can find her?’ asked Max.

‘No. But you can try her family.’

‘The Dascals?’

‘Yes. They live on Avenida Moncada. Near the barracks.’

Castro loved bullet holes. Where they were still standing, the façades of every building his guerrillas had shot at in 1958 were left in their post-firefight state – pocked and cracked and full of fifty-year-old shrapnel. They were the revolution’s Stations of the Cross.

The fortress-like Moncada Barracks, with its battlements and pillboxes, was the most sacred building of all, the revolution’s very own manger, the place where the armed struggle against Batista officially started, on July 28, 1953, when Castro led his first raid. The attack failed because of poor planning and inadequate weaponry and manpower. Castro was quickly captured, show-tried and imprisoned. The barracks’ perimeter walls had been badly riddled with gunfire, so the government of the time repaired them. In the 1960s, the walls were personally demolished by Castro, who drove the inaugural bulldozer, and the remaining building was converted to a school. Then, in 1978, Castro had the walls reconstructed exactly as they had been and a portion of the barracks was turned into a museum commemorating the revolution’s baptism. For the sake of ambience and authenticity, the new walls were also shot to hell, until they looked roughly like the originals had after the failed raid. The fortress was then painted mustard yellow and the bullet holes filled in with black and brown paint, so that they would be for ever visible. Cosmetic stigmata: the government now shooting at its memories.

The houses opposite the barracks were Spanish-style bungalows in various stages of shored-up ruin. They’d once belonged to officers and their families but now were the property of the state and inhabited by the regime’s upper tier. The designs were interchangeable, as was the vegetation around them, a stock palm tree and a thicket of colourful, untended bushes affording a degree of privacy. The exception was the house on the corner, a wooden, two-storey, red, white and blue gingerbread, lavish in design, with slate roof and ornate balconies shaped like curled vine branches. It was the Dascal family home.

Max parked close by, and he and Benny dashed through the still pelting rain up to the porch. He knocked on the door. They waited. Raindrops pinged off the windows. Plants had been tipped out of their baskets, and the soil was being washed clean off the roots. A child’s toy horse on wheels was rolling back and forth with the wind.

The door was opened by a tall, black-haired woman with a dishrag in her hands. She had the beginnings of a smile on her face, like she’d been expecting someone else. She lost it when she saw Max and Benny standing there, dripping wet and getting wetter.

Max was about to introduce himself, but she spoke first.

‘He said you’d come.’

‘Who?’

‘You’re Max, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Max
Mingus?’

‘That’s right.’

She grabbed on to the door frame, her head leaning towards it, her whole body subsiding. ‘Joe is dead, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. He is.’

‘What did he die of?’

‘In Miami it passes for natural causes.’

‘He was … murdered?’

Max nodded. She closed her eyes for a second and breathed heavily through her nose.

‘Is Vanetta here?’

‘Come in,’ she said.

46

She closed the door behind them and introduced herself as Sarah Dascal – daughter of Camilo and Lidia. She was Vanetta Brown’s sister-in-law.

Before Max could say anything, she started quizzing Benny. Max hadn’t wanted to bring him to the house, any more than he’d wanted to leave him in the car, in case the police found him. He’d chosen the lesser of two bad options.

Benny reeled off a fake name without missing a beat. What was he doing with Max? Again Benny didn’t falter, plucking a fast yarn out of the air, saying he’d been hitch-hiking outside Ciego de Ávila. What did he do for a living? Waiter. Where was he heading? To Guantánamo to visit his sick father. As he spoke, her smirk deepened, her mouth forming a gradient, half her lips pointing up, the other down.

Pivoting very slightly back and forth on her heels, she looked Benny over, moving from his eyes to his wound, which had now turned borderline purple, checking out his clothes, the T-shirt sticking to his chest in dark patches, the damp jeans and sodden sneakers, before returning to his eyes. She asked what had happened, how he’d got cut. Benny unconsciously took a step back towards the door, as if trying to edge out of a sudden spotlight. He stammered something about an accident. What kind? He didn’t answer. His mouth moved, but his voice was hiding. She snorted derisively. Benny lowered his head like a chastened child, drenched in a bucket of shame.

She turned to Max. She was a couple of inches taller than him, slender going on skinny, whatever curves she had were hidden in baggy brown corduroy slacks and a plaid shirt a few sizes too big. He guessed her to be in her late forties or slightly older. Her face was evenly tanned, but tired and lined, the distress played up by her curly, too-black-to-be-natural hair, which she wore too short to hide her ears. They jutted out like the chipped handles of an old soup cup.

‘Follow me,’ she said.

They walked down the hallway to a large sitting room with two interconnecting doors and wallpaper patterned in thick pale-grey and white stripes, making the place seem cage-like. She showed them to a pair of parallel black leather couches with a long coffee table in between and asked if they wanted tea. Max said yes and she disappeared.

Max guessed the power had gone, because the light was coming from half a dozen oil lanterns placed on the floor, the flames dancing in the room’s natural darkness, the shadows gathering close about them. The place smelled of stale cigars and fresh paraffin. Behind him he heard the ticking of a clock, and in a corner, every few seconds, a drop of water fell into a metal container. He noticed how some of the furniture and all the bookcases were covered in clear, thick plastic sheeting. It reminded him of a murder scene.

She came back with the tea in a large aluminium pot, set on a tray with some cups, and poured them each a cup, dropping in a slice of lemon.

Then she sat opposite Max, took a sip of tea and began talking in perfect English, her accent showing British and Australian roots. She spoke in short bursts, contained monologues, delivering concise bits of information and then pausing for another hit of tea, before going on. The brief silences that followed would be undercut by the clock and the leak dripping into the metal bowl.

Both her parents were dead. Her father had died of pneumonia in the late eighties and cancer had taken her mother in 2001.

Her sister, Kara, had gone to work in Honduras, where she’d met a man and followed him to America, she said distastefully. She thought Kara might be living in California, but she wasn’t sure. So it was now just her, her husband Patrick and their three children, two girls and a boy, aged thirteen, eleven and nine. She’d been expecting them all back when Max knocked on the door. She said she worked for the Department of Reforestation, and spoke a little about how Castro was way ahead of the curve when it had come to protecting Cuba’s environment.

Max understood what she was doing. She was testing the waters, warming up for what she really had to talk about. And she was checking him out, that was obvious in the disconnect between her eyes and speech. The eyes took in his every mannerism, from his sympathetic smile to his air of concentration as he listened to her and the way he held his cup – not by the handle, but with his paw clamped around it, as he would a glass. There was a classic trick to putting people at ease: you picked up on their gestures and mimicked them, turned yourself into a mirror. He knew she was sharp enough to see through that. He let her talk, asked nothing, betrayed no signs of impatience and expressed shallow condolences for her losses and smiled politely when she talked about her children. She wasn’t easy to like or even empathise with. She had that natural Cuban hardness, but in her it went deeper still.

She put her cup down, glanced briefly at Benny and then back at Max.

‘What happened with Joe?’ she asked, finally.

He told her the broad strokes, how they’d been having dinner, how Joe had mentioned Vanetta’s name, how he’d been shot seconds later. He didn’t mention the background and he didn’t talk about the killer.

‘Did they catch anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Do they have any suspects?’

‘Plenty,’ he said. ‘Joe was a cop. Put a lot of people away.’

‘Was that the first time he’d mentioned Vanetta to you?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. Everything I know about her, I found out after his murder.’

‘Who told you to come here?’

Max handed her the photograph and told her where he’d found it.

Sarah stared at it for a moment and then put it on the table. ‘I took that with the camera Joe bought me,’ she said, and then frowned. ‘How did you find Vanetta’s address in Havana?’

‘It’s what I do,’ he said.

‘You must be as good as he said you were. Her address is a state secret.’

‘Don’t I know it.’

‘Did you get into trouble?’

‘No,’ Max lied. He felt the sofa dip as Benny repositioned himself. He was sitting perilously close to the edge and leaning forward, nervous as hell, looking like he wanted to bolt.

‘Where’s Vanetta?’ asked Max.

‘She left, two months ago, in September.’

‘Left?’

‘She used to live here too, in this house. Now she’s gone.’

‘Where?’

‘She’s not really in the country any more.’

‘She’s either in Cuba or she isn’t. Unless you’re trying to tell me she’s dead,’ he said. ‘I know she’s got cancer.’

‘She’s not dead. At least I don’t think so. I’d have been notified.’

‘So where is she?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No shit.’

Sarah frowned again. ‘This is my house. The house of my family. The house where I’m raising my children. I invited you in. You’re a guest here. Please don’t be disrespectful.’

They looked at each other, neither yielding. The clock timed the silence. A dozen seconds went by and another drop of water splashed in the bowl.

Max broke the stand-off. ‘How well did you know Joe?’

‘He came here regularly.’

‘Did you like him?’

‘Yes. Very much. His visits were always memorable. He had a way of filling a room with his presence. He always made us laugh. And he was very fond of Cuba, admired much of the way we did things,’ she said, with an inward smile.

‘I liked Joe too,’ said Max. ‘I liked him a lot. He was my best friend, the kind you only get once in a lifetime.’

‘You wouldn’t be here if he’d meant any less to you,’ she said.

‘No, I wouldn’t. I don’t know what Joe told you about me – it can’t have been all good – but know this: I haven’t come here for revenge, I only want answers.’

‘Answers?’ she said. ‘It would’ve been better if you’d come for blood. That’s easy. You pull a trigger and walk away. If you leave it at that and don’t think about it, things have a way of making sense. Answers are complicated. They usually create more questions. How much truth can you handle, Max?’

‘All of it.’

‘So be it.’ Sarah smiled slightly.

‘When did you last talk to Joe?’

‘Right after Vanetta left. Maybe a day or two. He was calling from Canada.’

Max remembered Joe telling him he was going to Vancouver on the department’s dime, some convention on terrorism.

‘Why did he call?’

‘Two reasons: to talk about you and to get a message to Vanetta.’

‘What was the message?’

‘He said he was being followed in Miami.’