‘And then you would have Lamia for yourself? Is that it?’
Calque thrust himself up from the table. Sabir did the same. One of the waiters had been just about to ask them for their drinks order, but, sensing their lack of attention to the menu, he veered towards another table like a liner changing tack mid-ocean.
‘I don’t believe this.’ Lamia was heading towards them from the direction of the restrooms. ‘Are you two arguing again? I could hear you all the way across the restaurant. Must this happen every time I go away? It is impossible. I know you like each other. Why can’t you simply acknowledge it, and stop competing all the time? What were you arguing about this time?’
Calque made a sheepish face, and sat back down to finish his cigarette. Sabir shrugged, and pretended to watch the marimba trio.
‘Were you arguing about me? Is that it?’
‘Of course not. Why should we do that?’
Lamia sat down beside them and signalled to the elusive waiter. ‘Why indeed?’
45
Abi left it until well after Veracruz to put his plan into action. The trio were approaching Lake Catemaco on the coast road when he told Dakini to dish the baseball cap and sunglasses, and make her presence felt. Athame, Nawal, and Aldinach – who had chosen to join the other de Bale women as a female for the duration – were hunched down out of sight in the well of the people carrier.
Lamia was driving the Cherokee, with Sabir asleep on the back seat. Calque was reading a book.
Lamia lurched upright. Then she poked Calque in the ribs with her elbow. ‘I knew it. It was Dakini I saw back in Houston. I’ve just seen her again. With a different car this time.’
Calque threw the book aside. ‘Where?’
‘She was pulled over in the Pemex station getting fuel. That one. Back there.’
‘Was she alone?’
‘Looked like it. But it was a very big car for just one person.’
‘Are you sure it was her?’
‘Don’t you think I know my own sister?’
‘Step on the gas then. We’ve still got a chance of losing her. She can’t leave without paying and giving the guy his tip.’
Lamia threw the Cherokee into the first serious curve she’d encountered since the service station. ‘I knew we should have taken the cuota road out of Veracruz. There’s only one way out of here. They’ll simply be waiting for us at the junction at Acayucan.’
‘Give me the map.’
‘Sabir’s got it.’
Calque stretched over to the rear seat and prodded Sabir’s leg.
Sabir cracked open an eye. ‘What is it? Why are you waking me up? And why is Lamia driving like a maniac?’
‘We have company.’
Sabir jack-knifed into a sitting position. ‘Where?’
‘Back at the Pemex station. They were still tanking up. With a bit of luck, we’ll have a couple of kilometres head start on them.’
‘Forget it. They’ll simply wait for us at Acayucan.’
‘That’s just what Lamia said. But I remember a smaller road on the map. A dirt road that runs through the mountains towards Jaltipan. If we get to the turn-off before they see us, we’ll have a fair chance of giving them the slip. They’ll never expect us to do such a stupid thing as that.’
‘Stupid. Yes. You said it, Calque, not me.’ Sabir blitzed a look at the map and then passed it across the seats. ‘You’re right about the dirt road, though. But I don’t like it. It’s no more than a farm track, really – they even show it as a fractured orange line on the map, and that’s never a good thing.’ He glanced at the empty road behind them. ‘If the Corpus see us taking it, man, we’ll be sitting ducks.’
‘So what’s the difference? We’re sitting ducks already.’
46
‘That’s it. They took the dirt road, just as you expected.’
Abi clapped his hands together. ‘They’ll have tremendous fun going over the Cerro Santa Marta. From sea level to 1879 metres in just under twenty kilometres. On a road that isn’t paved. With drops either side you wouldn’t even want to throw your grandmother over.’
‘Shall we follow them?’
‘What’s the point? They’ll pop out again in three or four hours’ time in Jaltipan. Gasping for breath, probably. We can pick them up with the tracker there, no problem. That’s if they don’t break their necks thinking we’re following them. I love doing things like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘Unexpected things. What the Americans call coming in from left base.’
‘Like what you did with the railway inspector and his wife? Downloading the child pornography?’
‘Exactly. It makes me sick coming at things straight on. There’s always another way – a roundabout way – to achieve the same end.’
‘Tell me another one you did, Abi.’
Abi relaxed back onto the passenger seat. ‘Okay. Seeing as we unexpectedly have a few extra hours to waste.’ He pretended to be thinking. In fact he’d been rehearsing the story he was going to tell Vau for the past fifteen minutes. Telling stories was the only way you could ever teach Vau anything – he was like a child that way. ‘You remember that bastard de la Maigrerit de Gavillane?’
‘The one who insulted Madame, our mother, over the table placement while I was in hospital with a torn meniscus?’
‘Yes. Him. Because she was a widow, and because she had come without an escort to a formal dinner, he placed her below those upstarts with the Napoleonic title. The Prince and Princesse de…’ Abi shrugged. ‘They’re so insignificant, I can’t even remember their names.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Abi. Tell me about de Gavillane.’
‘He knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard – his father, and Monsieur, our father, had fallen out during the war over the Nazi question. You know how the Count felt about Hitler. Well, the de Gavillanes were enthusiastic fellow travellers to the Third Reich. After the war they hushed it all up, of course, and made out that they were Resistance heroes, but nobody believed them. The de Gavillane name even appeared on denouncements secretly given to high-up Nazi Party members and to the Milice – all the denouncements concerned people who just happened to own land abutting the de Gavillane’s country estate. By the end of the war, they had a 10,000-hectare park around their chateau. People don’t forget that sort of thing.’
‘What do you mean “people”?’
‘I mean we weren’t the only ones who wanted de Gavillane punished.’
‘You mean these other people paid you?’
‘Why would I need paying, Vau? I have more than enough money as it is. No. They simply made it easier for me to do what I had to do. Told me de Gavillane’s habits. What clubs he belonged to. Where he hung out. I finally narrowed it down to his health club, or the Turf. But the Turf is too public. His health club was better. I watched de Gavillane without his noticing it. People have habits, you see. And de Gavillane had one particular habit that amused me no end. He hated people leaving their plastic cups of water in the sauna. Whenever he went in he would throw the water onto the stone furnace, and then dispose of the plastic cups in the bin outside. Made no end of a song and a dance about it to the staff.’
‘I don’t understand, Abi. Why is that interesting? Why were you amused by that?’
‘Because it was a tic. And tics make people vulnerable.’
‘Vulnerable? Vulnerable to what?’
‘I left three full cups in there one day. Just before he came in.’
‘Yes. And so?’
‘I filled them with vodka, Vau. Pure vodka. Bulgarian Balkan 176 degrees proof – 88 per cent alcohol. Clear as a mountain stream. When de Gavillane threw them onto the furnace he started a fireball in the narrow space of the sauna cubicle you wouldn’t believe. Fourth-degree burns. The man came out looking like a peeled tomato. Blind. No ears, lips, or eyelids. His penis stripped like a papaya. He’s still in hospital more than fifty operations later. The man is so seized up with scar t
issue that he can’t even scratch his own arse any more. That’s what I mean by coming at a thing from the side, Vau.’
‘It’s perfect, Abi. And no one can hold you responsible.’
‘The man did it all by himself. Any evidence got burned in the great flame-up. The club talked about nothing else for weeks. A lot of people had been pissed off by de Gavillane’s high-handed behaviour. Funny how someone else’s bad luck cheers people up.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Abi? You usually have a reason.’
Abi inclined his head. ‘Well you’re certainly on the button today, little brother. What I wanted to get over to you is that Madame, our mother, sometimes needs protecting from herself. She’s an old lady now. She’s not as with it as she used to be. If I sometimes seem to go against what she tells us, Vau, you mustn’t be surprised.’
‘Like in the case of de Gavillane?’
‘Exactly. She knew nothing about that. But when she heard what had happened to him, she was extremely pleased. She never asked me if I did it, but we both know she knew.’
‘She must have been really proud of you, Abi.’ Vau took a deep breath. ‘I wonder what that feels like?’
Abi punched his brother on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Vau. You’ll know soon enough.’
47
‘Looks like we lost them again.’ Sabir glanced down at the map. ‘We’ve got to decide fast. Do we want to take the coast road to Villahermosa, or do we risk the cuota? Put some more distance between us?’
‘What we do is stop this car right now and check for a tracker.’
‘Oh, come on, Calque. They haven’t been following us with any tracker. They just worked out which direction we were headed in, and spread out like a seine net to trap us. Lamia says that if Dakini’s here, all eleven of them are probably here by now. So they’ve more than enough manpower to do the job. Dakini just happened to luck into seeing us at Catemaco. They probably had her patrolling the coast road while the rest of them watched the cuota.’
‘I still think we should look for a tracker. Achor Bale used one on you and your friends during that trip you took down through France. So did we amateurs at the Police Nationale. The Corpus have doubtless all been trained in their use.’ He glanced at Lamia, but she contrived to ignore his leading question.
Instead, she pulled the car over into a Pemex station, edging it around behind the shop so it wouldn’t be visible from the highway. ‘I need to wash and tidy up. I’ve just been driving for three straight hours over a cattle trail, through a mountain range, with my own family chasing after me, and I’m tired, and I’m irritable, and I probably smell. You both certainly do. If you men want to look for trackers, be my guest. But I’d appreciate it if you washed and changed into fresh clothes afterwards.’ She got out of the car, grabbed her overnight bag, and disappeared into the restroom.
Sabir flapped his hand. ‘Women. It’s probably her time of the month.’
Calque gave him a look.
Sabir caught the look but chose to ignore it. It irritated the hell out of him when Calque grabbed the moral high ground for himself. ‘Come on then, Chief Inspector. Stop all your horse-arsing around. Let’s get this over and done with.’
Calque groaned, and slid out of the passenger seat. ‘I’ll take the rear. It’ll most probably be in there. You take the front.’
‘You seriously think they broke into the car and planted a tracking device? And we didn’t notice or hear anything?’
Calque straightened up from a stretch. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that they allowed us to get away just a little too easily, back there in Carlisle? And that they picked us up again, two and a half thousand miles later, just a little too easily too?’
‘With eleven of them potentially following us, according to Lamia’s calculations? No. That wasn’t the first thing that occurred to me.’
Calque threw open the back hatch and began to feel his way around. Sabir did the same in front.
After fifteen minutes, Lamia came back, holding a takeaway cup of coffee. She perched on the walkway watching them. ‘Any joy?’
Sabir straightened up. ‘There’s no tracker in here. If they hid it, they hid it beneath the actual fabric of the car, and we’ll never get to it like this.’
Calque shook his head. ‘No. They had neither the time nor the facility to do that.’
‘Then how about underneath?’
Calque made a face. ‘People hide bombs underneath cars, Sabir, they don’t hide trackers. It’s not professional. The first major bump, the tracker would probably fly off. It’s just too great a risk. No. They’d have put it inside. And I’m convinced now that they didn’t do that. I think we’re in the clear again. For the time being, at least.’ Seeing Lamia eyeing up his shirt, Calque sniffed at his armpits, then flared his eyes, as if the smell had overwhelmed him. ‘They’ll be spreading out, though. Trying to edge ahead of us. All any of them has to do is look at a map, draw a few straight lines, and you can see which direction we’re headed in. It might as well be lit up by a strobe.’ He started to wipe his hands on his trousers and then thought better of it. ‘We probably should have zigzagged on our way down, but you can’t have everything. It’s taken us far too much time as it is. My view is that we should drive straight through the night and try to get to Kabah in the morning. Lamia is exhausted. I’ll take the first four-hour stint, you take the second. The ones who aren’t driving, try and get some sleep.’
Sabir nodded. ‘We’ll go and get washed up then.’ He cocked a finger in Calque’s direction, then picked at his own shirt with a mock sour expression on his face. ‘Lamia, will you buy us some junk to eat on the way? You know the sort of thing Calque likes. The stuff that normal, everyday people snack on. Chocolates, and crisps, and soft drinks with e numbers. Shit like that.’ Calque shuddered as if someone had just wiped their clammy hand down the small of his back. He stood watching Lamia as she made her way back to the tiendita. Then he cocked his head at Sabir. ‘Did you notice that, Sabir? She’s wearing make-up. And she’s put on a skirt and a fresh blouse and the closest approximation to a set of high heels I’ve ever seen her in. They’re called kittens, if I remember rightly. I’ve never seen her looking so feminine.’
Sabir shrugged noncommittally. He was becoming adept at sliding out from under Calque’s elaborate traps. ‘Look. You were dead right to make us look for the tracker, Calque, and I was wrong. We’d have been made to look like complete fools if there was one in there. In fact you’ve been pretty much on the ball all the way along. I’m sorry, too, about what I said to you yesterday. All that shit about Lear complexes and daughter fixations. I don’t know what got into me. I was way out of line.’
Calque gestured towards the tiendita with his thumb. Then he spread his hands expectantly, as if it were about to rain.
Sabir followed Calque’s glance back towards the tiendita, a rueful expression on his face. He knew exactly where the conversation was heading. As usual, Calque had successfully set him up for the coup de grace. ‘I know you think that Lamia’s gone to all that effort just for me. But you’re wrong about us. I promise you that. We don’t hold out anything for each other. Lamia doesn’t even allow that I exist most of the time.’
Calque sighed. ‘Sometimes I think being a young man is the mental equivalent of snow blindness. How old is Lamia, Sabir?’
‘She’s twenty-seven. She told me so herself the other day.’
‘And how old are you?’
‘Thirty-four. Rising thirty-five.’
‘Still young enough to be a fool. Yet old enough to know better.’
‘What are you getting at, Calque?’
‘You have before you a beautiful woman who does not know that she is beautiful, Sabir. She is damaged. All her life she has seen how people look at her, and she has made some deductions about it for herself. And her deductions are these. I am not a normal woman, she says to herself, nor ever can I be. I am not worthy to be desired. If a man desires me it is becaus
e he feels pity for me, and I am a proud person, and I cannot tolerate this. So I will close myself down. Deny my femininity. Work on other aspects of myself that will make me feel valued instead. I shall learn languages. Read books. Study obsessively. Develop my brain. I will take the woman part of me and I will simply kill it off. That way I won’t be vulnerable. That way I can’t be hurt.’
‘Jesus, Calque. Where do you get all this stuff?’
Calque jabbed at Sabir with his finger. ‘I have seen the way she looks at you, Sabir. You will be mindful of this one. You won’t hurt her. You will consider her feelings. It is not enough just to be a man, and follow your hormones, and not bother to feel the need to think. If you don’t care for her, show it. If you do care for her, show it. Or else I shall be very, very angry at you, and our friendship will be at an end.’
‘We have a friendship?’
‘Isn’t that what Lamia said we had?’
‘I guess it was.’
‘Then you would be a wise man to believe her.’
48
By the time you had passed through Santa Elena the hunger was giving you hallucinations. First you saw a small animal that looked like a dog, but which wasn’t a dog. It had a squared-off tail, and was grey all over. This animal watched you from the side of the road as you began walking. Then it followed you, darting in and out of the scrub at the edge of the highway. At one point you took out your machete and brandished it at the beast, but the creature lay hidden, perhaps anticipating your aggressive actions.
Then, later, you saw a snake at the side of the road. It was emerald green. As you watched, it coiled itself back and tried to thrust itself towards you. But the snake didn’t move. This was such a curious thing that you edged closer to see what had happened to the snake. It was then that you saw that a vehicle had at some point driven over the snake’s tail. This had become glued to the road by the blood, leaving the snake both free and not free. It could curl itself and lash out, true, and act in every other way as a snake should. But the blood had long since dried, and the snake was effectively anchored to the asphalt until another vehicle happened by and completed the job that the first vehicle had started.
The Mayan Codex as-2 Page 23
