The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  Vaulderie gave a defeated sigh. ‘I say we do it too.’

  3

  At first, after leaving the train, the boys worked in a zigzag formation behind the inspector’s back. That way, if the man had a car, one of them could break away from the stalk and procure a vehicle, whilst the other could mark the direction taken and keep in touch via his cell phone.

  But the inspector didn’t have a car. It soon became obvious that he lived within walking distance of the station – a railwayman through and through. Instinctively, intuitively, the boys decided not to take him en route. Far more sensible to deal with him at home, well out of the eye of the storm. Far more fun to wait.

  At one point the man stopped. He cocked his head downwards and to one side, as though he were listening to something passing underneath him. The boys froze in their respective positions, visible, but not visible, maybe fifty metres behind him. In their experience, marks never turned around. People simply didn’t expect to be followed – not on a suburban street, mid-afternoon, in la France profonde, with mothers collecting their children from school, and yellow postal vans busy on their last collection of the day.

  The boys converged again when they saw the inspector hesitating at the communal door to his apartment block – feeling for his keys – tapping his pockets for cigarettes. Would he turn at the very last moment and head for the Bar/Tabac on the corner? Have himself a quick snifter before facing his wife? In that case both twins knew that they would be forced to abandon the hunt and head back towards the station.

  For despite all their bravado, each, in his own way, feared Madame, their mother, as they feared nothing else on earth. She was like Agaberte, daughter of the Norse god Vagnoste, who could transform herself from a wrinkled old crone into a woman so tall she could reach up and touch the sky – a woman who could overturn mountains, rip up great trees, and dry up the swollen beds of rivers. Abi and Vau’s childhood had been spent entirely in her thrall, and no power on earth could entirely break her dominance of them.

  The inspector reached forward and unlocked the door. Now the boys were hurrying, not wishing to be faced with an unknown, untested lock. Vau caught the door just before it clicked to, and Abi slid through the crack his brother made for him, one eye fastened on the stairs above him.

  Shoes in their hands, they padded up the concrete stairwell behind the inspector. How could people bear to live like this? Money and power were there to be taken. All you needed was the nerve.

  The inspector was stepping into his apartment – calling out to his wife.

  Abi reached out and touched him on the arm. ‘Colonel. A word.’

  4

  Some years before, the brothers had had a series of telescopic, lead-weighted, fighting batons designed and made for them. Eight inches long, the batons fitted comfortably inside the forearm sleeve of a jacket, where they were secured in place by the simple expedient of a loop and a double button.

  Although principally made of rubber, the batons were not able to pass through a metal detector by dint of their lead content, and therefore had to be transported separately on an aeroplane as part of hold baggage – or secreted, for instance, inside a travelling fishing-rod case, where they could be passed off as fisherman’s priests. By train and by car, however, they were perfection itself. Once liberated from their housings, the batons extended with a simple flick of the wrist to a total of two feet in length, retaining more than enough rigidity to guarantee a quite remarkable hand-to-target action.

  They would kill, of course, if used aggressively, but their principal function was defensive – they were designed as pacifiers. In ten seconds a man could be crippled, his legs worse than useless, by the simple expedient of a scything stroke behind the knee. The twins, being two, found this the best resort in all but the most extreme of circumstances. One would monopolize the target’s attention whilst the other struck him from behind. It had never failed them. A frightened man on the floor, one leg unmarked but useless, was a very different animal indeed from an angry man in possession of all his physical faculties.

  The inspector curled up in the foetal position at the entrance to his apartment and began to dry retch, like a cat attempting to bring up a fur ball. His wife came hurrying out of the kitchen, where she had been preparing their supper. Vau gave her two for good measure, one behind each knee. She dropped to the floor and then stretched out, like a postulant at some Easter confraternity ceremony.

  Abi closed the door. He and Vau dragged the couple through into the lounge.

  Vau switched on the television. ‘Gas explosion or double suicide?’

  The inspector tried to raise himself from the floor. Vau flailed him behind the other knee. ‘Silence. You will both remain silent, faces to the ground. Do you understand me?’

  The woman was unconscious – shock, probably. The boys were used to people responding in disparate ways. Women were particularly vulnerable to sudden explosions of violence, whereas men would often struggle, requiring further pacification.

  Abi snapped his fingers triumphantly. ‘No. No. Listen. I’ve got another idea. Kill two birds with one stone.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Wait for me here. I won’t be more than ten minutes. A surprise.’ Abi was staring out of the window now, his expression speculative. He snapped the baton shut and secreted it back inside his sleeve. He had scarcely even broken into a sweat.

  5

  Abi had passed the Jaguar Sports on their way in from the station. The car had captured his attention even then, as It had seemed so out of place in a street full of Peugeots, and Renaults, and six-seater Fiat run-arounds. A pimp’s car, probably, or the vehicle of some chancer who had made it good and couldn’t tear himself away from the old neighbourhood. Perhaps the owner was visiting his elderly mother?

  It took Abi less than a minute to bypass the alarm system. He had been breaking into cars ever since his early adolescence, and considered it one of his primary skills. During their teen years, Madame, his mother, had arranged for him and Vau to serve as apprentices to one of the best auto thieves in the business. It was something he was infinitely grateful to her for. It had given him power.

  He drove the car to the front of the inspector’s apartment building and triggered the trunk mechanism. Vau was watching from the inspector’s window. Abi mouthed a few words and pointed to the trunk. Vau nodded his head.

  He emerged, less than a minute later, supporting the inspector like a man will support his drunken friend after a night out on the town.

  Abi had closed the trunk by this time, and was holding the passenger door open, with the seat pulled forward. He checked around, then nodded. Speed was of the essence in such cases – any hesitation could prove fatal. Neither he nor Vau appeared on any police records, and he intended to keep it that way. ‘Get in there. Keep your head down.’

  The inspector stretched himself flat down across the well. ‘What about my wife? What are you doing with my wife?’ His voice shook. One hand snaked down as if to feel for any damage to his knees.

  ‘Don’t worry, Colonel. She’s coming along for the ride too.’

  Once they were safely out of town, Vau stopped the car, and they transferred the inspector and his wife to the trunk. It was a tight fit, but it seemed unlikely the pair would actually suffocate. Both parties had wet themselves, which saved the brothers the trouble of having to stop somewhere en route for a leak break.

  Vau caught his brother’s eye. He gave a speculative chuck of the head. ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking. But we’ll never make it. You can’t beat a TGV. Those things average more than three hundred kilometres an hour.’

  ‘Three stops. They have to make three stops. Then they have to cut their speed radically along the coast. I’ll give you a thousand Euros if we make it to Madame, our mother’s, twenty minutes before our allotted time.’

  ‘Done. You want to take the wheel?’

  ‘No. You’re a better driver than I am.’

 
Vau fishtailed the car out onto the highway, in the direction of the nearest autoroute toll booth.

  6

  They made it to the Cap Camarat lighthouse with fourteen minutes to spare. Below them the rocks loomed white in the glow of the waxing moon.

  ‘Jesus, Abi. You don’t mean to bung them off here? We’re only a few kilometres from the house.’

  ‘Look.’ Abi held out an unfamiliar cell phone. ‘It probably belongs to the pimp who owns this car.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So what? So everything. We get them out of the trunk, give them the keys, and let them take off.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘But not before we’ve phoned a place in South Africa I know of and arranged a movie download – the damned thing will take hours and cost thousands. Then we bury the cell phone down the side of the seat. After that we phone the flics back in Saint Evry, and check up on what we claim is our stolen car – the one that we called in a few hours ago. Don’t they remember taking the call? Maybe it was someone else on duty? There’ll be a record of it, anyway. Then we tell the flics that we just remembered that there’s a cell phone in the car, and give them the number and the server. Then we leave the rest to them.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Come on, Vau. The flics check on the cell phone. They find that the line is conveniently open. They can then pinpoint the car to within about three metres, give or take. So they swoop down and reel these two losers in.’

  ‘But then they’ll tell the flics about us.’

  ‘Oh really? That they were kidnapped and forced to drive three hundred kilometres by two guys the inspector talked rough to on the train? That they were then calmly handed back the stolen car keys, and, to celebrate, they began to download a child porn movie? When the flics get through with them – if they ever get through with them – Monsieur et Madame L’Inspecteur will still have the pimp to reckon with. And his dear old mother lives just down the road from them, remember? And they’ve just run up an uninsured bill of three thousand Euros on the pimp’s cell phone, and got him branded a paedophile to boot.’

  ‘Christ, Abi. That’s genius.’

  Abi used his own cell phone to call up a local taxi. ‘You’re right. It is. Why bother to kill people when you can simply ruin their lives with a little creative imagination?’

  7

  Geneviève de Bale, dowager Countess of Hyères, stood on the steps of the Chateau de Seyème and watched as her adopted twin sons descended from their taxi. They were the last of her children to arrive, and she was marginally displeased.

  ‘You were due in at 8.10.’

  She leaned towards her personal assistant, Madame Mastigou, who consulted her brooch watch and mouthed the correct time to her.

  ‘Abiger, you are twenty-five minutes late. I had expected you to join me on the steps to greet your brothers and sisters. You are the new Count now. As I am a widow and you are still unmarried, it would have been proper for you to have welcomed the family at my side. Instead, I have had to stand here alone.’

  Abi kissed Madame, his mother’s, hand, and touched it to his forehead. Then he took up position a step or so below her on the stairs. ‘Vaulderie and I had a little business to attend to. You would have approved, I promise. Please forgive me.’

  On the opposite hillside, Joris Calque fiddled with his night glasses, cursing the gibbous moon and the clouds that were obscuring it.

  The Countess bent over and kissed her eldest son on the crown of his head. Vau hurried expectantly towards her, but was rewarded by a simple one-handed cupping of the face. He gave his brother a ‘nothing ever changes’ look, and hurried inside.

  ‘Of course I forgive you, my darling.’

  The two of them – mother and adopted son – stood staring out into the surrounding gloom for a few moments, as though an invisible cine camera were recording them for posterity.

  Then Abi took his mother’s arm and they followed Madame Mastigou back inside the house.

  8

  Calque threw himself back on his inflatable armchair and felt around for his cigarettes. Normally, at this time of the evening, he would never have dreamt of lighting up for fear of giving away his position – but today’s events were just cause for celebration. He was in with a fighting chance again.

  The butler, Milouins, had been the first to emerge from the house at around four o’clock that afternoon. After a short pause to sniff the air, he had begun to rake the courtyard into something approximating Zen spirals. Then one of the footmen had appeared with a bucket and a squeegee mop to wash down the stone steps. Finally the gardener had entered unexpectedly from stage right and had attempted to snatch the rake back from Milouins – an altercation ensued, which the gardener lost.

  The gardener had then retreated without his rake, scuffing the once immaculate gravel behind him as he went. The footman, plainly recognizing on which side his bread was buttered, had jettisoned whatever remained in his water bucket in the direction of the gardener’s retreating back.

  Calque made a swift mental note to ascertain the gardener’s identity as a prelude to approaching him for indiscreet information about the household setup – disenchanted domestic servants, embittered spouses, and disinherited relatives had always formed a major part of his stock-in-trade.

  After the initial flurry of preparatory activity there had been a pause of three hours, during which Calque had dozed off on six separate occasions – he had been on the job since early that morning, and was not in the first flush of youth. At about eight o’clock, during a gap between dozes, the Countess had appeared on the steps with her assistant, the ever-elegant Madame Mastigou, at her side. A certain amount of clock consulting had then gone on. At 8.15 the first of a total of five separate cars had drawn up in the driveway.

  Each car had then disgorged its occupants, each of whom had gone up to the apparently immovable Countess to kiss her hand and to receive a series of four kisses – two on each cheek – in return.

  Then the cars had retreated, leaving the Countess and Madame Mastigou to contemplate the abandoned courtyard like the final guests at a Wagner evening.

  Not long afterwards a local taxi had lurched into view, and two men had emerged from its maw. The deteriorating quality of the light had made it impossible for Calque to make out the men’s faces – either one or both of them appeared to be the exception to the Countess’s rule on stasis, however, for she actually moved a step or two towards them in welcome, implying that they were marginally higher in the pecking order than the other arrivals.

  One of the men had then disappeared inside the house, leaving the Countess and the other man standing in a pool of light halfway down the entrance steps.

  By the time Calque had succeeded in refocusing his night glasses, the pair had turned around and gone inside.

  9

  Madame Mastigou sat with her pen poised over a sheet of finely milled Florentine writing paper and waited for the Countess to break her silence.

  There was a palpable sense of expectation in the hermetically sealed assembly room. This was the first time in five years that all the Countess’s adopted children had been brought together in one place, and Madame Mastigou could sense the tension behind her employer’s otherwise frozen countenance.

  The butler, Milouins, had been delegated for guard duty outside the hidden door in the library, and one of the footmen was acting as outrider in the salon, ensuring that no one could make their way through the household’s cordon sanitaire unannounced. Inside the secret chamber the Countess stood at the head of the table, with her children, in strictly descending order of seniority, taking up the remaining seats to her right and left.

  They ranged in age from a mature twenty-seven, in the case of Lamia de Bale, the oldest girl, to around eighteen, In the case of Oni de Bale, the youngest male – a virtual giant, nearly seven feet tall, with the trademark red eyes and unpigmented skin of the true albino.

  Abiger and Vaulder
ie, being the oldest males present, and therefore in legal receipt of the countcy and viscountcy through agnatic primogeniture, had been allocated the two senior seats, despite being two years their sister’s junior. At the very end of the table, a chair had been left empty. In front of it lay a sword, a signet ring, and a velvet brocade sash in memory of their brother, Rocha.

  To the clinically detached eye it would soon have become apparent that each of the Countess’s adopted children was graced with some defining mark or characteristic that separated them from the herd.

  The oldest girl, Lamia, had a prominent strawberry birthmark that spread across half of her face – seen from one side, she was beautiful, whilst from the other side her beauty was disguised by what, at first glance, appeared to be a piece of blood-soaked surgical gauze. Her younger sister, Athame, was dwarfish in stature, with tiny hands and feet. Berith, the young man sitting below her, had a harelip. Rudra de Bale limped as the result of an untreated club foot, and Aldinach de Bale was a natural hermaphrodite, something which only manifested itself in the marked delicacy of some of his movements – in reality there were times when it suited him to dress as a woman, and other times as a man.

  Further down the line came Alastor de Bale, who suffered from cachexia, a wasting disease that made his near neighbour, Asson de Bale, appear even larger than his 22-stone frame would normally warrant. The 21-year-old Dakini de Bale had preternaturally long hair, which framed a face that seemed frozen in a sort of malevolent rictus, and her twenty-year-old sister, Nawal de Bale, suffered from hirsutism, which gave her the visage of an animal.