Skip ducked under a table, hoping to get a chance to cut someone’s hamstring, but two of the female freaks caught sight of what he was doing and piled chairs and tables on top of him, until he was completely covered by a fretwork of steel tubing.
Aldinach stood by the bar, one eye on the barman, the other on the fight.
‘You with these people?’ the barman said.
‘Never met them before in my life.’ Aldinach glanced towards the main door. Customers were exiting through it in droves. ‘Do you think anyone will call the police?’
The barman shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. But I figure not. Sort of clients we get don’t find cops copacetic.’
‘Are you going to call the police?’
‘What for? How often do I get to see the Skunks getting their hides furrowed?’
Things were quieting down now. Most of the hang-arounds had either fled or were stretched out on the floor or across the bar furniture.
Aldinach minced across the floor towards the mayhem. The eight Corpus members turned towards her as one.
‘Skip,’ she said, in a high, girlie little voice. ‘You under there?’
Oni cleared the tables and chairs that were piled up above Skip Dearborn’s huddled form. He had adopted the foetal position, same as you do when you are attacked by wild dogs.
Skip emerged from beneath the wreckage and stood up. He was holding his switchblade and the can of pepper spray out in front of him as if they were some sort of lucky charm – a string of garlic designed to ward off vampires. He looked around at what remained of his merry band of men. ‘Shit.’
‘You going to use that?’ Aldinach approached closer.
‘This was some kind of set-up, wasn’t it? You’re all in this together? You knew this was going to happen before we even came in. You people suckered us. You ain’t no fucking Desiree.’ Skip raised the pepper spray.
Aldinach snatched a fighting baton from Nawal’s hand. Before Skip was able to respond, she brought the baton down across his knife hand, smashing the bone. Then, as he bent down to grab his wrist, she smashed him across the back of the neck, snatched the can of pepper spray, and blasted him full in the face.
Skip pole-axed to the ground like a discarded shirt.
‘Heck of a date,’ said Aldinach, as she and her siblings started out of the building.
31
Calque, who was driving, and not relishing his silent passengers, turned up the volume on the radio. ‘Listen to this.’
An announcer was describing the previous night’s mayhem at Alabama Mama’s.
Sabir, who was trying to get some sleep after yet another disturbed night, groaned. Lamia, who had somehow managed to curl up and fall asleep on the back seat, didn’t respond.
‘Look what we’ve been missing. We’ve been staying in the wrong part of town, apparently. A gang attack. Two groups of Hells Angels tearing into each other. Fourteen people taken to hospital. Redneck heaven.’
Sabir straightened up. He knew he wasn’t going to get any sleep from here on in. ‘What do you know about rednecks, Calque?’
Calque hitched his chin. ‘I know a lot about rednecks. The Polish man at the motel even told me two redneck jokes.’
Sabir pretended to reel backwards. ‘But you can’t even speak English. How could you possibly communicate with him?’
‘It is simple. He is a Pole. A civilized man. A European. He speaks French.’
Sabir sighed. ‘Can you remember them? The jokes, I mean.’
Calque appeared to be deep in thought. ‘Yes. I think so.’
‘Well tell me them, then. If I can’t sleep, I might as well be entertained.’
Calque pursed his lips, his eyes furrowed against the morning sunlight. ‘The first one goes like this. A redneck from Alabama dies. But fortunately he has left a will. In it he leaves his entire estate in trust for his widow. The only snag is, she can only inherit when she reaches the age of fourteen.’
Sabir stared at him. ‘That’s it?’
Calque shrugged. ‘I thought it was very funny. I laughed when the Polish man told it to me. The other one is better, though. Much better.’
‘Okay, shoot.’
‘There you go again with this silly expression. Why should I shoot? It simply doesn’t translate into French. When you speak French, you should use the French idiom. Not an American one.’
Sabir turned down the radio, which was still blaring the local news at them. ‘I would very much like to hear the second joke, Captain Calque.’
Calque nodded. ‘Very well. I shall give it to you. This is even funnier than the first one.’
Sabir squeezed shut his eyes.
‘Two rednecks from Alabama are approaching each other on the road. One has a sackful of chickens in his hand. The second redneck says, “If I can tell you how many chickens you have in your sack, will you give them to me?” The first redneck thinks things over. “If you can guess how many chickens are in this sack, I will give you both of them.” The second redneck stares down at the sack. “Five?”’
Lamia gave a hoot from the back of the car. Even Sabir had the grace to laugh.
‘You see,’ said Calque. ‘I told you the second joke was better. In France we tell such jokes about you Yankees.’
‘Yeah, well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least,’ said Sabir. ‘We Yankees tell such jokes against you French. I learned dozens of them when I was in the National Guard.’
Calque pointed his finger in Sabir’s direction. ‘You are half French. Don’t forget that, Sabir. You owe a duty to your maternal homeland.’ He was beginning to look slightly nervous.
‘How can I ever forget it? That’s why I was the butt of the damned Frenchy jokes in the first place. However, I figure that any man who can’t tell a good joke against himself doesn’t deserve the claim to a sense of humour. Don’t you agree?’
‘Go on,’ said Lamia from the back of the car. ‘Tell us an anti-French joke.’
‘You sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘Okay. How many Frenchmen does it take to screw in a light bulb?’
There was silence in the car.
‘One. He holds it, and the rest of Europe simply revolves around him.’
Calque took both hands off the wheel and made a disparaging motion. ‘That is not very funny at all.’
‘Okay. Try this then.’ Sabir took a preparatory breath. He was beginning to feel a sense of impending doom. Still, for some reason he couldn’t quite figure, he felt unable to stop himself. ‘How do you confuse a French soldier?’
‘How?’
‘You give him a rifle and ask him to fire it.’
Calque slammed the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. ‘That is outrageous. Did they really tell such jokes as this against you when you were in the army?’
‘I wasn’t in the army. I was in the National Guard.’
‘The National Guard, then. Pah.’
Sabir’s jaw was beginning to freeze with the tension of his unwanted position. ‘Yes. All the time. Comes from having a foreign-sounding name. The true joke was really on them, because my father was pretty near 100 per cent pure American – it was my mother who was French.’
‘Tell me another joke. One about women this time.’ Lamia was sitting up straighter in the back of the car.
‘It’ll be about soldiers. Those are the only ones I know.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘What do female snipers in France use as camouflage?’
More silence.
‘Their armpits.’
‘Their what?’
‘Their armpits.’ Sabir knew for certain that he’d gone too far this time.
‘What does that mean?’ Lamia was leaning towards him from the back of the car. ‘I don’t understand that joke. How can a woman use her armpits for camouflage? And anyway, we don’t have female snipers in the French army. Women are not allowed to engage in combat.’
‘It’s a joke.
It’s not meant to be taken seriously. Like the movies, jokes rely on a willing suspension of disbelief.’
Calque turned towards Lamia. ‘Sabir is trying to tell us that the Yankees think French women never shave their armpits.’
Lamia’s mouth dropped open in horror. ‘Where did you see this, Adam? Where did you see French women not shaving themselves?’
Sabir was tempted to say ‘Oh boy’, but didn’t. ‘It’s not me who’s saying this, Lamia. It’s the joke. It’s an archetype. Yanks during the war simply found that French women didn’t shave.’
‘How could one shave during the war? There were no razors.’
‘Good point. Great point. That answers it then.’
‘But that is unfair. How can you blame French women for what happened during the war, when there were shortages, and when it was impossible to shave themselves?’
‘Jesus Christ, people. We’re meant to be having fun here. Cracking a few jokes. Having a laugh.’
‘But you are not being serious, Sabir. For a joke to be funny, it should be based on truth.’
Sabir grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled it over his head like a cowl. ‘If the Corpus comes to get us, don’t bother to call me. I’m fine just as I am.’
32
‘Are you still behind them?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Do you know where they are going?’
‘I think it is to Mexico, Madame.’
‘How do you work that out?’
‘We are near to Houston, in Texas. Draw a straight line between Stockbridge and Houston and it leads you to Mexico. To the Brownsville-Matamoros border crossing in particular. I believe that that is where they are going to enter. If you ask my opinion, I think the eruption of the Mexican volcano triggered this decision of Sabir’s.’
‘I think you are right. But that doesn’t take us much further, does it? Thanks to your failure to force information out of Sabir when you were offered the chance, we have no idea what they are doing, nor why they are doing it. Have you had any trouble along the way?’
Abi flared his eyes. He had been dreading the arrival of this question ever since the start of the conversation with his mother.
‘Abiger?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Don’t lie to me. I can always tell if you are lying. I have been able to do this ever since you were a little boy.’
Abi glanced across at Vau, who was resolutely concentrating on his driving, and pretending that he was not privy to the conversation emerging loud and clear through the rental’s hands-free speakers.
‘Yes, we have had some trouble.’
‘Who caused it?’
‘Aldinach. She got the wind under her tail a little.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s what happens with mares. When they come into season. It’s called “getting the wind under their tail”. They charge around the paddock with their tails cocked to one side, causing trouble.’
‘And this is what Aldinach did?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘And the outcome?’
‘Fourteen people in hospital. Hells Angels, mostly.’
‘Any of our people?’
‘Of course not. The opposition over-faced itself. They did not possess the will to win. They did not realize who they were up against.’
‘Anyone killed?’
‘No.’
‘So there will be no problems with the police?’
‘No. I guarantee it.’
‘Did you join in this fracas?’
Ah. Here was the trick question. Abi had known it was coming, but still it turned his blood to ice. Answer wrongly, and he would be hung out to dry like a strip of biltong. ‘Of course not, Madame. I followed your orders to the letter. Vau and I were watching Sabir’s motel. I had given the others time off to eat and to relax. I had not anticipated Aldinach’s bout of brain fever. She went into that place determined to start a fight involving everybody.’
‘Have you punished her?’
‘What’s the point? Everything turned out well in the end. We didn’t spook Sabir. The police weren’t involved until afterwards, by which time we had all dispersed to different locations. No harm was done. And it allowed everybody to let off a little steam.’
‘I think you need to place a tracker in Sabir’s car.’
Abi mouthed a swearword. ‘Is that wise, Madame? We have Sabir and Lamia and the policeman sewn up. They can’t so much as whistle without one of us hearing them.’
‘How much further do you have to go, Abiger?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Exactly. And how long until the next “wind under the tail” moment?’
Abi swallowed. ‘I can’t say, Madame. It could be any time. It could be never.’
‘Mexico is a country where things happen, Abiger. The police are endemically corrupt. There are drug wars going on all along the border. I don’t want Sabir lost because a maniac like Aldinach gets ants in her pants.’
Abi slapped Vau on the arm to catch his attention and then mouthed ‘ants in her pants’ and ‘maniac’ and raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘No, Madame. Of course not, Madame.’
‘Can Vau get inside their car without triggering the alarm?’
‘Vau can get inside any car. You know that, Madame. You were responsible for having him taught by the best car thief in the business. But it will be tricky. If something goes wrong, we risk stampeding them.’
The Countess sighed melodramatically. ‘Then we must risk a stampede, don’t you think, in view of the greater benefits involved in having a fallback position? But kindly do not tell your brothers and sisters that you have done this thing at my request. I don’t want them thinking that I don’t trust them. Do you understand what I am saying, Abiger?’
‘Perfectly, Madame.’
‘And Abiger?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘This one time I will not hold you personally responsible for what has happened.’
‘Thank you, Madame. You are very kind.’ Abi terminated the connection with one slow-motion finger. ‘Fucking old cow.’
Vau turned towards him. ‘You must not speak of Madame, our mother, that way.’
‘Oh really? Well what is she then? She sits in that spider’s web of hers, with that bastard Milouins and the fragrant Madame Mastigou always on hand to protect her from the real world, and she still thinks she can pull all the strings. Why doesn’t she come out here if she’s so eager to run everything?’
‘Because she’s an old woman. And because she’s rich.’
Abi turned to his brother. ‘Truly, Vau? Is that so? Well you could have fooled me.’
33
During your next two days on the road, you had achieved three lifts. Firstly to Minatitlan, in a brewery truck, then, after a long wait, to Agua Dulce, with a gringo, in his private car.
Agua Dulce was partially off your road, but you accepted the lift nevertheless, on the assumption that anywhere south was good and, on the whole, productive. It was better to keep moving than to remain static, with all the dangers that inactivity entailed, such as losing heart, or spending money that you could ill afford.
But the trip to Agua Dulce proved fortunate in more ways than one, because the same gringo saw you waiting on the road again the very next morning, and gave you a further lift, this time all the way to Villahermosa. The only thing you did not understand was that the gringo asked you, many times, if you had ever dug things up in your garden. Stone carvings. Pottery. Old necklaces. Obsidian knives. You tried to tell him that you did not have a garden – that you worked for your boss, the cacique, in his garden, and that therefore anything that you dug up legally belonged to him. That even in the cacique ’s garden you had never dug such things up in the entirety of your life.
The gringo had seemed very disappointed when you told him this. But still he had taken you on to Villahermosa, and had offered to buy you lunch from a roadside stall, which you had refused,
on account of the gringo’s strange attitude. Were all gringos like this? Plunderers? Like the Spanish? You had only met two gringos in the entire course of your life, but they had not impressed you. A man should always speak directly of what was in his heart. Not come at a subject from the side. Or from on top.
From now on, you decided, you would avoid gringos, and stick to your own people. Peasants. Indios. Mestizos. People who made their living from the land, and not from thievery.
34
Vau waited until 2.30 in the morning before making his move on the Grand Cherokee.
He’d brought his bunch of skeleton keys, with a wedge and a flexible car antenna for back-up in case he couldn’t get inside in the conventional way and needed to break in through a side window. Either way would leave no traces. Sabir’s Cherokee was a few years old, fortunately, so didn’t have the most up-to-date remote keyless entry and remote start and alarm. That made things a lot easier.
Still, it stuck in Vau’s craw that he was expected to go to all the trouble of breaking into the car when it would be just as easy to attach the tracker to a protected piece of the underbody – he could have been in and out in two minutes, with no one any the wiser. Instead, here he was having to risk himself, in a well-lighted place, where anybody could decide to exit their motel room in search of the ice dispenser or a bag of potato chips from the vending machine.
He hunched down by the driver’s door, with the car between him and the trio’s motel room, and set to work. As he was inserting the fifth key out of a total of fourteen possible keys, the door to Sabir’s room opened, and the man himself came out.
Cursing, Vau ducked down beside the Grand Cherokee and stretched himself flat on the ground. Then he eased himself underneath the chassis skirt, using his back and buttocks as leverage.
I wished this on myself, Vau muttered under his breath – bloody wished it on myself. It’s not even the fucking crack of dawn yet. Please God the bastard doesn’t go for an early morning spin. Those sixteen-inch whitewalls will squish me like a rotten tomato.
The Mayan Codex as-2 Page 19
