The Mayan Codex as-2

by Mario Reading

  ‘They won’t all be sleeping in the same room?’

  ‘They’ll be fools if they don’t. And barricade the door to boot. Once they split themselves up and go independent, they are inevitably weaker. They can be picked off one by one.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Nothing. We let them give us the slip.’

  Vau sighed. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Abi glanced across at his brother. ‘By the time they settle in for the night, we will have at least four cars following them – three of which they won’t recognize. So we two stay close up front. Make ourselves even more obvious than we have been doing. When they try whatever trick they eventually decide on to give us the slip, we let them think that they have got away with it. Athame, Berith, and Oni can position themselves on every road leading away from the motel. When Sabir drives past them in his beautifully visible Grand Cherokee, they will follow him, not us. They then tell us where they are going, and we join them. Only we’ll have changed our car by then. With any luck, all nine of us will have met up by that point. We then take it in turns to follow them, jockeying positions every twenty minutes or so, so that they never get to see the same car twice. Madame, our mother, has made it clear that we are not to interfere with them in any way whatsoever until they have reached their final destination. If they take a plane, we follow them. If they continue by road, we follow them.’

  ‘And what about Lamia? What if she recognizes us?’

  ‘From now on everyone will wear baseball caps. Baseball caps and sunglasses. That way we’ll look really American. Oni can pin his hair back under his cap and use some tanning cream – he’ll look strange, but from a distance, he won’t look like an albino.’

  ‘And us?’

  ‘We tag along behind. Way back. So that the three of them never have a chance to see us again. And we keep in touch with the others by cell phone.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re going to try and make a break for it, Abi? Are you certain?’

  ‘Dead certain.’

  19

  Calque climbed back inside Sabir’s Grand Cherokee. He spent a little time adjusting the driver’s seat forwards and upwards to meet his requirements. Then he stared at the gear shift. It was manual. Putain de merde. He had a feel around to work out what trick Chrysler had engineered to protect their reverse gear from inadvertent triggering. When he was satisfied that he had mastered it, he backed the car carefully out of the parking lot.

  Next time, he thought to himself, we must think ahead – place the car facing out. For a possible quick escape.

  No sooner had he formulated the thought than he shook his head wildly to and fro. What am I thinking of? What am I doing? I could be in France now, having dinner at La Reine Margot – cassoulet, followed by cheese and a tarte tatin. Washed down with half a litre of Brouilly and a cafe – calva to follow. Instead, here I am sitting in a strange car, in the northern part of the United States, and all I have inside me is the distant memory of a Wendy’s hamburger and so-called French fries, bought on the trot at a drive-thru so that we wouldn’t be vulnerable for more than six static minutes to the attentions of Lamia’s twin brothers.

  Calque drifted onto the main drag. He looked neither to his right nor his left, counting on his peripheral vision to mark the twins’ car and to warn him of the lights of any oncoming vehicles. Yes. There they were. Parked right across the road from the motel, where they could cover the way out and all three motel rooms from the same tactical spot. Calque told himself that the very next time that he and his friends stopped for the night they must Definitely split themselves up in different geographical locations. That was the obvious answer.

  He slapped the steering wheel in irritation. No. That wasn’t the answer. That wasn’t a clever idea at all. What they should really do is share a room. There was security in numbers. He wondered what Lamia and Sabir would think of that? Calque was aware that he was lamentably prone to snoring. His late assistant, Paul Macron, used to nudge him awake when they were in the car together, solving the problem like that. Maybe, now that no one was looking over his shoulder, he could buy himself a mask? Surely the Americans would have something on the market to deal with his problem? The last thing he wanted to do was to keep on reminding Lamia that he was in late middle-age, and more than a little out of condition. A man could rely on his wit and intelligence to captivate a woman during the day, but a little more finesse – not to mention realpolitik – was required, unfortunately, at night.

  Not that Calque wished to seduce Lamia – far from it. She was thirty years his junior, and very nearly the same age as his daughter – the whole idea was grotesque. But it was clear that she needed protecting from Sabir’s continual litany of gaffes. The man was as unaware of the effect of some of his statements as a six-year-old child. Take that nonsense at the White Horse Inn. No Frenchman would have blundered in like that and drawn attention to the catastrophic blemish on a woman’s face in the first few moments of their acquaintance. No. It would take an American to promote such a faux pas.

  Calque knew that Sabir had had a French mother, but he privately decided that she must have become Americanized very quickly indeed for a rustre such as Sabir to be the end product of her childhood educative influence. When it came down to it the man was as American as apple pie. His maternal French blood was clearly little more than an accident of history.

  When Calque finally emerged from his daydream, it was to the realization that the twins were not following him. They had remained on station at the motel, just as he had anticipated.

  Calque consulted his watch. Yes, the time was right. He made a left, and then another, until he was on the road parallel to that on which the motel was situated. Then he counted four blocks off in his head, following which he hung another left. Yes. This was it. This was the road they had agreed on after consulting the town map kindly provided by the motel management. Lamia and Sabir would be leaving their motel rooms by the back window about now. He was to give them twenty minutes to make their way the four blocks that separated them from the car.

  He let the engine run. Best be prepared. There was always the chance that the twins would intervene early. In that case he must be prepared to hurry back to the motel and do what he could to save the situation. Call the police if necessary. Interpose himself between the twins and their victims. He laid the cell phone he had borrowed from Lamia carefully on the seat beside him.

  Then he shook his head. What was he thinking of? He had never been a scrapper or a scrimmager – he simply wasn’t cut out for the rough stuff. In fact he found all physical exertion antipathetical in the extreme. Throughout the entire extent of his police career, Calque had never needed to unsheathe his pistol, far less use physical force on anybody. He had always had a plethora of willing – and more or less able – assistants for that.

  Lancelot du Lac he was not.

  20

  ‘Whatever’s going down is going down.’ Vau touched Abi on the shoulder.

  Abi, as usual, was taking his sleep where he could. Ever since they were children he had mastered the art of dozing off in the most extreme of circumstances. Once, even, he had fallen asleep in the midst of a burglary. It had been a test run, engineered by their mentor, Joly Arthault, at the instigation of Madame, their mother. Vau had looked around for his brother, only to find him curled up on a sofa in the corner of the living room of the house they were robbing. He had protected his brother’s back on that occasion, too, just as he had done on a thousand other occasions during the course of their childhood and early adolescence.

  The twins watched Calque get into the Grand Cherokee, adjust his seat, then back out towards them.

  ‘Look at him, Vau. The bastard’s pretending we don’t even exist. His head’s frozen in place. He didn’t even check if there was any traffic coming. If we didn’t know he was planning something, we’d sure as hell know now. Doesn’t he realize that people who are plotting stuff should behave and act normally? Not like rob
ots. You’d think a policeman would have a little more sense.’

  ‘What would we have done? If we hadn’t had back-up?’

  ‘I’d have got out of the car and stayed here, and you’d have followed him.’

  Vau nodded. ‘Oh, I see. That way we could keep them all under surveillance.’

  ‘That’s it. But now we merely stay here and let him think his little plan is working. I’ve just heard from Rudra and Aldinach. So that means we now have five people in place to shepherd them through when they try to make their break for it.’

  ‘What will they do? Climb out of the window?’

  ‘Yes. You saw them checking the place out when they first arrived. They were making sure there was a potential rear exit. As we speak, they are probably bundling their belongings out the back, and dodging and ducking their way out of the rear car park. If I had a warped sense of humour, I’d be tempted to take a turn around the periphery of the motel, just out of spite. See two trails snaking out from underneath a car, and you’d know for certain they’d pissed themselves.’

  21

  Sabir dropped his carryall out of the window, and eased himself through after it. Then he waited for Lamia to do the same thing. He was tempted to reach forward and help her as she struggled out of the window, but something prevented him. He still felt raw about his initial blunder about her face, and he sensed that she was, unsurprisingly, not entirely comfortable with him yet.

  ‘Please. Can you help me?’

  Sabir hurried forward. He put one hand on the small of Lamia’s back to steady her, and then half lifted, half carried her, away from the window. She touched the ground very lightly, almost as if she had flown out of his arms.

  He glanced down at the ground, disturbed at the effect the close physical proximity to a woman was having on him. For the split second that he been carrying her, he had become more than a little aware of the swell of Lamia’s hips, and the ultra-feminine contour of her buttocks beneath her thin cotton slacks. Now his eyes made their automatic tomcat journey back to her breasts. He could feel himself beginning to salivate. Jesus Christ. Who’d be a man? It was like being harnessed to an out-of-control lawnmower.

  Lamia straightened up and smiled at him.

  He felt the smile somewhere in the region of his back pocket. Women, he thought to himself. They always know just how to turn it on. It’s a sort of inbuilt instinct. A ‘look at me, I’m here’ sort of instinct. He smiled back despite himself, more susceptible to the feminine than he cared to admit. ‘Come on, we’d better get out of here before they cotton on to what we are doing.’

  Sabir grabbed Lamia’s bag alongside his own, and started to edge around the parked cars. Now I’m even carrying her bag, he said to himself. Fantastic. Like an on-the-make schoolboy carrying his girlfriend’s schoolbooks.

  They made their way to the outskirts of a nearby motor court, and ducked in between the parked cars.

  ‘We’ll cut through here, and then down a block, so that there’s no chance at all of them seeing us. Then we cross three blocks over and up a block – Calque ought to be waiting for us.’

  ‘My brothers aren’t as stupid as you seem to think they are, Monsieur Sabir.’

  ‘Adam. Please.’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re not, Lamia. But what are they going to do? If they haven’t followed Calque, it means they’re stuck waiting in front of the motel. If they’ve followed Calque, we aren’t any the worse off than we were before. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I know so.’

  22

  The hermaphrodite, Aldinach de Bale, was the first one to see the Grand Cherokee.

  ‘I’ve got them. They’re heading north out of town.’

  ‘Then follow them.’

  ‘It’s already in process.’

  Aldinach pulled into the stream of late-night traffic heading out of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. At the very last moment, the Grand Cherokee swung across the oncoming traffic flow, and switched its heading to south.

  ‘They’re heading south now. They’ve switched lanes on the highway.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake don’t follow them. Oni’s facing in the right direction. They can’t help but come past him. He can pick them up from there. We must let them believe they’ve given us the slip. We want them relaxed and at ease.’

  Aldinach continued on the way he was going. Only when he was a mile or so down the road, and well out of sight of the Grand Cherokee, did he switch lanes and head south too. He had a sudden, amusing picture in his head of one of those cable-channel helicopter camera shots of an endless trail of cars following the as yet unaware silver Grand Cherokee.

  He wondered idly what sort of journey Sabir had in store for them. It looked like south. And Aldinach liked south. He liked the heat, and the opportunity to dress as a woman. In the north, he stuck to his masculine identity, because it seemed more appropriate. But in the south, he was very definitely a girl.

  23

  ‘That’s it. We’ve lost them.’ Calque was rather keen to pass the driving over to Sabir, but didn’t quite know how to engineer it. He desperately needed a cigarette, and didn’t fancy driving a monster like the Cherokee with only one hand on the steering wheel.

  ‘Do you want me to take over the driving?’

  Calque grinned. ‘That would be excellent. Excellent. And do you think, now that we’re finally clear of the twins, that we could stop somewhere for some real dinner? I don’t know about you, but my stomach is reminding me every instant that it has not eaten since approximately two o’clock this afternoon.’

  ‘Great. We’ll stop at a Wendy’s.’

  ‘No!’ It was almost a scream. A cold sweat had broken out on Calque’s face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. But surely, if we park around the back, we could find a nice little family restaurant, serving local, homemade food.’

  Sabir looked at Calque as if he had taken leave of his senses. ‘It’s eleven o’clock in the evening, Captain. And we’re in the United States. People eat at seven o’clock here. You’ll be lucky to find even a diner open at this hour of the night.’

  ‘A diner. A diner, then.’ Calque had a sudden mental image of a whole series of 1940s Hollywood films in which either Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart sat in one of these so-called diners, eating homemade pie with coffee.

  ‘Okay. A diner. But it’ll still mean a burger and fries. You realize that?’ Sabir understood Calque’s recalcitrance only too well, but he had decided to enjoy himself a little at the Frenchman’s expense. He hadn’t entirely forgiven Calque for humiliating him in front of Lamia over the matter of her birthmark, and for being so damned cute with his theories on the land of the great volcano.

  ‘A burger and fries? You cannot be serious? This is grotesque.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Calque. Things will pick up when we get to Mexico. You’ll be able to last another three days or so on a typical US diet, won’t you?’

  Calque gave him a sickly grin. ‘Three days? On burgers and fries? I might last, but my liver will not.’

  24

  At first you had a good run of it. Two lifts in as many hours. The first to Loma Bonita, in a feed truck, and the second as far as Isla Juan. Then the lifts dried up.

  You slept that night in a roadside coffee plantation, under a banana tree. You wrapped yourself in your mother’s rebozo, which you had brought along in the absence of any other form of portable sleeping cover. You kept your machete clasped tightly to your side, in case you encountered a rabid dog, a snake, a rat, or a black widow spider.

  You slept well, despite the cold. In the early morning, when you woke up, you had no idea where you were, nor exactly how far it was to the Palace of the Masks. Someone you asked had told you six days. But then when you had asked them if that was by bus, or by car, or by horse, they were unable to answer you. All you knew was that you must head south – south all the time – keeping the c
oast always on your left. When you were near Campeche, then that would be the time to ask. Someone would doubtless point you in the right direction then.

  You had grown up believing in a greater power – a power which you served, and which you therefore obeyed, as any servant should. This power would protect you if it chose, and it would allow you to die if that was its will. Asi es la vida. ‘That is how life is.’ Pointless to fight against it. Pointless to argue.

  What you were doing now was at the behest of this power. Your family had been chosen to guard the codex. Your grandfather told you how the original guardians – the ones who had saved the codex from the vengeful ignorance of the Spanish priests – had ultimately paid the price with their lives. He had told you, too, of how his father had come by the codex from the hands of a dying man. How he had been forced to promise this man, upon pain of damnation, that he would protect the codex, and not give it up to the Spanish. Or else they would burn it, as they had with all the other great books of the Maya priests.

  ‘But I am not Maya,’ your great grandfather had said. ‘I am part Totonaca and part Spanish. I understand nothing of this. We do not even believe in the same God as you.’

  ‘There is only one God,’ said the dying man. ‘And everyone believes in Him. It is only the names that differ, and that cause strife.’

  ‘But when must I take it? And to whom?’

  ‘You, or your son, or your grandson, or even his son, must wait until the great volcano blooms once again with fire. That will be your signal. Then you must take the codex from this cave and travel south, to the Palace of the Masks. A sign will be given to you there.’