Voodoo Eyes (40 page)

‘Did he say who by?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But it could only have been related to Vanetta. Although he’d made every effort to be discreet when he came here, he thought that man – Eldon Burns – had him under surveillance.’

‘Eldon was retired,’ said Max. ‘He was powerless.’

‘People like him are never powerless.’

‘Did he
see
anyone tailing him?’

‘He didn’t give any details.’

Joe hadn’t been the paranoid sort. If he’d thought he was being followed, then he was. Max wondered if it hadn’t been Wendy Peck.

‘Did you pass on the message?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t. And I told him. I have no way of reaching Vanetta, even in an emergency. She’s in a secret location. The sort you can’t just … phone.’ She glanced at Benny, drawn to the bulge in his face, her nose wrinkling at the smell of virulent decay.

‘Joe asked me to tell you two things. The first was where to find Vanetta – in case anything happened to him. He didn’t think his life was in danger, but he suspected something. He said it would be best if you heard everything directly from her, so you’d understand why he’d done what he had. Unfortunately, I can only point you in a vague direction.’

Benny finished his tea and put the cup on the table. Max had barely touched his. As an inveterate coffee drinker he’d never understood the point of tea. To him it was like non-alcoholic beer and ultra-light cigarettes. Why bother?

‘Vanetta is being treated in a hospital on a small island in the Windward Passage – that’s the stretch of ocean between Cuba and Haiti. I take it you know what I mean by
camino muerto?’

‘Yeah,’ said Max. ‘A road that doesn’t appear on any official map.’

‘The term applies to more than just roads. It refers to any sensitive location, any place our government doesn’t want the general public to know about. Towns, prisons, storage facilities, military bases, bunkers and even some … islands. Vanetta is on one of them. The hospital doesn’t use names. Patients have numbers – barcodes. It’s very discreet. Fidel is rumoured to have been treated there after he fell ill.’

‘So this is a government place?’

‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘Our government leased the island to the Russians in 1964. They built the hospital. It was exclusive, meant for the Eastern Bloc elite and their allies. Fidel and his inner circle also used the facilities.’

Sarah looked at the photograph on the table for a moment.

‘I thought Vanetta and Castro fell out a while ago,’ said Max.

‘That’s right.’

‘So why’s she there?’

‘When the Russians left, the government was desperate for money, so the island – and other assets – were leased again, on condition that the new buyer kept the hospital open, including paying all the running costs. In exchange, whoever bought it was allowed to build a house and have the full protection of the Cuban army and navy. The identity of the buyer or buyers was never revealed. The sale was arranged at the highest levels. The place has changed hands on at least two occasions,’ Sarah explained.

‘So Vanetta knows the owner?’

She nodded.

‘Who is it?’

‘She never told me his name. Although we’re as good as family, she has her secrets.’

Max looked briefly at Benny, who’d been following every word.

‘I heard she fell out with Castro because of her associations with the Abakuás,’ said Max. ‘Do they own the island?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Sarah. ‘What would they want with it? Not their style. And they don’t deal directly with the government.’

‘Tell me about Vanetta and this owner.’

‘In the 1970s, Vanetta set up Haitian refugee centres in Cuba, similar to the original Jacobin House in Miami. They were fully funded and supported by the government. Haitians came to settle in Cuba. Not a lot, but a steady stream. They were generally welcome because they could work the land, and the Russians always needed labour for their various projects. Vanetta had problems with the arrangement because she felt the Haitians were being exploited. Yet she saw the greater good. The benefits outweighed her doubts.

‘In the Special Period the money wasn’t there for the centres. The government could barely feed the country, let alone a bunch of newly arrived immigrants. Vanetta suddenly had the fate of six hundred people on her hands, people she’d promised a better life to. It was either send them back or find a solution.’

‘The Abakuás?’

She nodded.

‘So she was willing to work with Castro’s sworn enemy, after everything he’d done for her?’

‘Desperate people do desperate things,’ said Sarah. ‘She was truly desperate. And their need was greater than hers.’

‘So what happened?’

‘The Abakuás provided the centres with food, clothes and basic medicine. But at a high price,’ she said. ‘They had always had a problem selling goods. They couldn’t exactly do it in the open.’

‘So they used the centres?’

‘That was the deal Vanetta made. People used to come from all over to buy. The Abakuás used the Haitians as salesmen. But it ended as soon as the government opened the country up to tourism in the early nineties. The Abakuás didn’t need the centres any longer. They had the hotels.

‘Fidel knew what she’d done. He turned his back on her. She still retained some privileges – like her Havana home – but she no longer had his ear, nor access to the inner circle. She managed to keep Caille Jacobinne running by going to some of Cuba’s friends – the Canadians, Spanish and Brazilians all helped a little here and there. But it was never enough,’ said Sarah. ‘Then in 1997 she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She handed over to her deputy, Elias Grimaud. She was operated on in Havana and made a full recovery. Then she met her new benefactor.’

‘The man on the island?’

‘Yes. Elias had been dealing with him in Vanetta’s absence. He’d got him to agree to fund Caille Jacobinne for a period of time. Maybe ten years.’

‘Why?’

‘The man admired Vanetta,’ said Sarah. ‘When they met, she told me how impressed she was with him. He knew everything about her, what she’d been through, the good she’d done in Miami and in Cuba.’

‘What did he get out of helping her?’

‘Vanetta didn’t say. In fact, she didn’t really say much else about him.’

Sarah glanced again at Benny, who was now sitting back on the couch with his arms crossed.

‘How do I find the island?’

‘Unless you know someone in the government’s inner circle, or you can bribe one of the coastguard to take you there – which is highly unlikely – then I don’t know,’ she said. ‘And for what it’s worth, I’d strongly advise you against going there. The area is heavily patrolled. They’ll either sink your boat with you inside it or they’ll arrest you.’

Max said nothing. His head was spinning too fast to settle. He heard Benny clear his throat.

‘You said there were two things Joe asked you to tell me. What was the second?’ asked Max.

‘He wanted you to see what he’d been doing here. It’s upstairs.’

47

Sarah unlocked the door to Vanetta Brown’s bedroom and switched on the light.

‘Has the power come back?’ asked Max.

‘It was never off,’ she said, frowning. And then she understood. ‘Because the lamps are out downstairs? No. I just like it that way there, when I’m alone. It’s comforting.’

They stood in a wide and spacious room of pale-blue walls and varnished dark wooden floorboards. A pair of framed maps of Cuba and Haiti hung side by side over the bed to the right, and original Haitian paintings took up the adjacent walls, both depicting lush jungle scenes. He’d bought similar pictures for his and Yolande’s office in Little Haiti. Yolande had dubbed that particular style ‘bullshit naif’, the artists depicting their homeland as a tropical paradise populated by every species of wild animal, when in reality the country was deforested and so barren people had to steal soil from the neighbouring Dominican Republic to grow anything.

After the initial view, he caught the smell of the place. Stale sweat, heavy medication, rubbing alcohol. It reminded him of old people’s homes; life curling up in failing bodies.

Max went over to the French windows and opened them wide. Warm rain hit his face, and then the wind carrying it cooled his skin. He breathed in deeply. The street lights had come on and their sodium-orange glow made the pelting rain look like flaming matchsticks and the Moncada Barracks like a gigantic hunk of processed cheese, plastic and faintly rancid.

He turned back to the room, considered it again. It served three purposes – work, rest and play – and was divided and ordered accordingly; the office in the middle, the bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers to the right, and then the space he was standing in, her library.

A tall brass floor lamp with a tasselled shade stood in the corner near an easy chair with a coordinating footstool and a small table on wheels. Behind it was a wide bookcase with knick-knacks on every shelf: snowdomes – Miami, Port-au-Prince, Santo Domingo, Caracas, the Key West buoy with its ‘90 Miles to Cuba’ inscription – and small square mahogany boxes with the names of countries carved on the sides – USA, Haiti, Russia, China, Angola.

Max opened the USA box and found it filled with sand.

‘From Miami Beach,’ said Sarah. ‘Vanetta called it “travelling by proxy”. She was allowed to leave the country, but never did, until recently. For obvious reasons.’

Near the window was a hi-fi stack – a record player, cassette deck and radio, one on top of the other, and a glass-fronted cabinet beneath with about fifty LPs inside, taking up most of the free space. He glanced over the album spines: James Brown, Sam Cooke, Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughan, Paul Robeson, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Ella Fitzgerald, Sly and The Family Stone’s
Stand
and Bob Marley’s
Legend.
They liked the same music.

He went to the desk, on which sat a chunky keyboard dwarfed by a computer monitor. Three black-and-white photographs of differing sizes, spaced unevenly apart, were fitted to the wall a few inches above the monitor. He guessed she’d placed them that way so they’d be the first thing she saw when she looked up from the screen.

The last photograph was the largest: a young girl, no older than six or seven, standing in a garden holding a plastic windmill on a stick. Round cheeks, corkscrew curls, a big smile and dark, sparkling eyes.

‘That’s Melody, Vanetta’s daughter,’ sighed Sarah. ‘She’d have been thirty-eight now. She was bilingual in English and Spanish. She laughed in both languages. A bright, happy little girl.’

‘Vanetta have anyone in her life?’ Max asked, looking along to the next picture. It was of Vanetta, Ezequiel Dascal and Melody again. Ezequiel was holding his daughter up to the camera and the little girl was looking straight at it, pointing to the photographer with her toy. Ezequiel was tall and bespectacled, a thin, sharp goatee elongating a round face. He looked something like Sarah, only kinder, gentler.

‘Like a lover, you mean?
Vanetta?’
Sarah laughed. ‘To love someone you need to find a kind of inner peace. Vanetta’s not at peace. She’s at war. Even now. She’ll die fighting. She always said she hoped to live to see Eldon Burns on his knees before her, begging for his life. Just like Ezequiel was, before him.’

‘Didn’t Ezequiel and Melody die in the Jacobin House, when it burned down?’

She looked at him. ‘Like I said – how much truth can you handle?’

‘What do you mean?’ Max grabbed her arm. She winced and stared down at his hand until he let go.

‘Don’t
do that to me again,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, embarrassed.

She rubbed her arm. Her stare flexed into a glare. Then it softened and she looked past him at the wall.

She touched the bottom of the first picture – a group shot of Vanetta, outdoors, seated in front of a gathering of men and women standing around her smiling.

It took him a few moments to place the photograph.

But he did. It had been taken outside the centre he’d visited in Trinidad. In fact, the photograph was as good as identical to the mural.

But there was one major difference.

The child hadn’t been blacked out.

He sat at Vanetta’s feet, one arm curled around her lower leg, either for support or comfort. She was resting her hand on top of his head, as if stroking or patting it. Although the photograph was too small to highlight more than the most perfunctory facial features, the deformity to the child’s mouth was obvious. He seemed to be munching on a large flowerhead, chomping at it from the stem up, his teeth just reaching the petals. The boy had a cleft palate.

‘Who’s that?’ Max pointed to him.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sarah.

‘Did Vanetta ever mention someone called Osso?’

She thought about it, thought hard, but shook her head.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Benny slouching in the armchair, his arms folded over his stomach, his feet up on the rest.

Max studied the rest of the group. He saw the light-skinned man in the middle, dressed in overalls, standing directly behind Vanetta. He remembered how he’d been depicted on the mural, slightly bigger than the others – taller, broader, more prominent. His complexion and clothes aside, the man was almost unremarkable. A little over average height and of medium build. He had soft curly hair, midway between Caucasian and Afro.

‘Who’s this?’

‘That’s Elias.’

‘Can you put me in touch with him?’

Sarah shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen him since he collected Vanetta.’

‘Collected her?’

‘He came to take her to the island.’

‘In September?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe he’s on the island with her. Maybe not. He has family in the Dominican Republic. And the centres have been closed for over a year.’

‘You said he collected her. What was he driving?’

She laughed. ‘Funny you should ask. It was a Mercedes. One of the grand old models. When Vanetta saw it, she said,
“Mi coche fúnebre ha llegado temprano.”
“My hearse came early.” She’s funny like that.’