Sandrine’s only hope was to invoke the traditional voodoos of Guadeloupe to ward off the misfortune that Amadis had brought upon them. It was her only hope against the powerful béké. Hubert, however, decided that the spirits needed some practical assistance. He waited for an opportune moment when Amadis left his Mercedes in the car park at the Casino. He carefully unscrewed the coupling of the break fluid distributor until the fluid dripped rapidly; he then sealed it with quick setting glue, which would give when sufficient pressure was applied.
The roccade at Pointe-à-Pitre was a racecourse for small cars in a hurry to go nowhere and nothing else to do even late at night. At precisely the same moment the aircrew of the Cubana flight struggled to help Mulligan with oxygen, Serge Amadis slammed into the pillar of the flyover at about one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. It was not an excessive speed for the motorway, but at that point it twisted and turned, it was also narrow, leaving no room for error. Adamis had drunk more than his usual amount alcohol and in the rain, under the poor lighting of the motorway, which went from dark to light in a disconcerting fashion, he was surprised by the bend, stamping on the brake, which under normal circumstance have sufficed to slow him down giving him a good fright, but the circumstance were not normal, the glue burst and the brakes failed to respond. He had not fastened his belt and was projected through the windscreen flying into the oncoming traffic where he was crushed to a bloody unrecognisable pulp by an oncoming delivery truck.
The mangled car was transported to a nearby garage and parked in a yard amongst irrepairable wrecks of past accidents that stood rotting under the tropical sun. By the time the Mercedes experts arrived to inspect it several days later the coupling had been tightened and all traces of glue had been removed. The accident was put down to driving with an excess of alcohol in the blood, corroborated by witnesses from the Casino where Amadis had been seen to be drinking late that evening.
With the disappearance of the Marie Galante with all hands in the hurricane, Caribbean Property Development’s projects were suspended. When the new developers took over the project, the purchase of his property was transacted on the basis of an honest valuation that Hubert had taken care to have had carried out during the intervening period.
Chapter 83
A Tourist
Offshore Islands Page 82