The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  Calque saw some of the early morning regulars watching her. Despite the catastrophic blemish on the side of her face, she was still a self-evidently handsome young woman.

  Calque stood up as she approached his table. ‘I thought you might have run away. Or gone to call the police. You would have been perfectly within your rights to do so.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  Lamia sat down. She stared at Calque, her eyes unwavering. ‘Because you offered me your jacket when you thought I might be cold.’

  The waiter interrupted to bring them their café-crèmes and a metal basket of croissants.

  Lamia looked up at him. ‘Do you have any aspirin?’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  She pinched two of her fingers together. ‘Two? With a glass of water? I’d be eternally grateful.’

  Calque saw the waiter’s eyes hovering anywhere but on the woman’s strawberry birthmark. He felt an unexpected rush of pity for her – almost as if she were his daughter, instead of the pathetic, alienated girl who truly fulfilled that role, and who, terminally brainwashed by her termagant of a mother, hadn’t been able to bring herself to speak to him for the past fifteen years.

  Lamia pecked at her coffee. ‘I suppose you’ve got everything on that tape machine of yours? The full record of what took place in the Corpus chamber? Or did you hide your recorder in the kitchen by mistake?’

  Calque thrust his sentimental nature resolutely to the back of his mind, where it belonged. He took a preparatory breath – something he always did when he was about to tell an untruth to someone he was questioning. ‘To answer your questions in reverse order, Mademoiselle – no I did not leave my recorder in the kitchen. And yes I do have a full record of what went on.’ The lie sat uneasily with him for some reason, and he could feel the strain telling on the muscles below his eyes.

  For Joris Calque had always been susceptible to women – it was a fact that he had been obliged to live with during his thirty years as a police officer. But he was not so naive that he didn’t realize that women, at their worst, could be just as lethal as men. Look at the Countess. And here he was, calmly chatting away to the woman’s daughter as if she were a work colleague – or his next-door neighbour.

  He forced himself to remember that he was still dealing with a potential accessory before the fact. A woman who might even be a joint principal in the actus reus committed by Achor Bale against his subordinate, Paul Macron.

  ‘So I’ve no need to explain anything to you, Captain?’

  ‘No.’

  Lamia prodded at her croissant, but didn’t make any further stab at eating it. ‘So what are you planning to do about it?’

  Calque dipped his croissant in his coffee and transported it to his mouth, one hand automatically protecting his shirt from drips. ‘What do you suggest?’

  Lamia took the glass of water and the two aspirin from the saucer the waiter was offering her. Still watching Calque, she tossed back the pills and swallowed the water. ‘You could alert the police, for a start.’

  The waiter flinched, then backed away, as if he had inadvertently wandered too close to an open fire. Lamia gave him an absent-minded smile of thanks.

  ‘The police?’ Calque laughed. ‘I’m something of a persona non grata with my ex-colleagues at the moment. And you must know that tape recordings do not constitute evidence. They can be doctored too easily.’

  Lamia massaged her temples, as if she felt that this might serve to speed up the aspirin’s effects. ‘But you knew that before you started, Captain Calque. You must have made some contingency plans?’

  Calque sat up straighter in his chair. ‘Contingency plans? How could I make contingency plans when I didn’t know what I was about to hear?’

  Lamia stared at him quizzically. ‘And Adam Sabir? What are you going to do about him?’

  Calque could feel his fragile house of cards beginning to topple. ‘I’m going to phone him up, of course, and bring him up to date.’

  ‘Phone him up? Bring him up to date? Are you quite mad? Bring him up to date about what?’

  Calque tipped back his head and closed his eyes.

  Lamia sighed. ‘You don’t know anything, do you, Captain? You’re merely grasping at straws. Was there anything on that tape of yours at all?’

  Calque allowed his head to snap forward. ‘Oh yes. I have a good hour-and-a-half’s worth of material.’

  ‘Material? What sort of material?’

  ‘Your meeting. Two days ago.’

  ‘Then you know what I was doing in the room where your mystery associate found me? Why I was doped and tied up?’

  Calque felt as if he were sucking on a lemon and trying to blow through a trumpet at the same time. ‘Of course.’

  Lamia stood up. ‘Then you don’t need anything from me, do you, Captain? I thank you for your frankness. Would you kindly do me a further favour and call me a taxi? And I would appreciate the loan of a few sous until my bank opens and I am able to inform them about the loss of my cards. I will write you an IOU if you so desire.’

  26

  Calque followed Lamia out onto the street. The early morning rush hour had started, and the buzz and swish of passing traffic merely added to his sense of frustration. ‘What are you going to do, Mademoiselle? Where are you going to go?’

  ‘What possible concern can that be of yours?’

  Calque was briefly tempted to come clean and admit that his tape recording was useless. To follow his hunch that the woman was genuine. Perhaps she really had rebelled against her mother and all that she stood for? But thirty years of ingrained caution, in which Calque had lived by the rule that you never, ever, offer information to your opponent that he might one day use against you, overrode his better instincts. ‘Please let me drop you off somewhere. It’s the least I can do in the circumstances.’

  Lamia shook her head distractedly. She was on the look-out for a taxi, and already seemed to have blanked Calque out from her consciousness.

  Calque’s cell phone rang. He received a call so rarely that at first he only looked around vacantly, as if the call belonged to someone else. Then he slapped his jacket, and began to rummage in his pockets.

  Lamia had seen a taxi, and was beckoning it towards her.

  Calque pressed the receive button and raised the cell phone gingerly to his ear, as if he feared that it might be about to explode. ‘Yes? Calque here.’

  ‘It’s Picaro.’

  Calque flinched. What the hell was Picaro doing, calling him up in a public place? Their business was over. The whole sorry fiasco had cost him 3,000 Euros that he could ill afford, and had provided him with precisely zero information, and a resentful woman eager to wipe his dust off her shoes as fast as humanly possible.

  ‘Listen, Captain. Don’t ask me why I’m doing this. But I can’t let you walk into a shit storm with a leaking umbrella.’

  Calque was concentrating all his attention on Lamia. A taxi had stopped directly in front of her. She caught Calque’s eye and made a money movement with her fingers. ‘What? What are you talking about, Picaro? What shit storm?’ Calque raised a placatory hand and started across the road towards Lamia, the phone still clamped to his ear.

  ‘You’ve heard of a shamal, Captain? That’s what the desert Arabs call a five-day, three-thousand-foot-deep sandstorm. The type that’s so fucking powerful it can strip the skin right off your face. Well this is a shamal of a shit storm.’

  ‘Picaro …’

  ‘Listen. On the way out to the main road. After I’d delivered the woman and the tape recorder. A man was waiting for me. An armed man.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You heard me, Captain. I’m not going to repeat myself. This man I’m speaking about. He must have gone to check on the woman, realized she was gone, and followed me from the house. He came at me with a pump-action shotgun. So I had to kill him.’

  ‘You killed him?’ Without realizing it, Calque had switch
ed back into police mode. He patted at his jacket in a vain search for his notebook.

  ‘Look, Captain. I don’t want this coming back at me in any way. I’ve a wife and son to think of. I’ve thought about it, and I think you owe me that much.’

  ‘How did you kill him, Picaro?’ Calque had abandoned the search for his notebook. What was the point?

  ‘I smashed into him with my car. He was going to put out my lights. I had no choice in the matter.’

  ‘And the shotgun?’

  ‘Already disposed of.’

  ‘Where did you leave him?’ The taxi driver was shrugging his shoulders at Lamia, and pointing to his meter.

  ‘In the brush. By the side of the road. Did you see a parked Land Rover when you drove away from the beach?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did. And another car. An empty blue Renault. Parked close up nearby.’

  Picaro froze. ‘Captain. There was no blue Renault parked when I left there. The area was clean. I’m getting off the phone right now. And you. You’d better look to your own arse.’

  27

  Calque reached Lamia in three strides. He held up a placatory hand to the taxi driver, and drew her to one side.

  ‘We have a problem. The man who got you out of the house has just telephoned me. He ran into one of your mother’s people on the way back from the beach. The man came at him with a shotgun, and he was forced to kill him. As a result, we were almost certainly followed here.’

  ‘But that’s impossible …’

  ‘We don’t have time for this, Lamia. I’ll explain later. You know your mother better than I do. You know what she and her people are capable of. Will you do as I ask?’

  Lamia allowed her eyes to search across Calque’s face. She nodded.

  ‘Get into the taxi. Now. I’m going to give the driver the address of my hotel in Cogolin. You must go there. I shall follow along behind in my car. At some point you’ll see me turn off the road. Don’t change the driver’s instructions. I must know where to find you. My hunch is that we are dealing with only one man. He will follow me, because I present the greatest threat to him. And if he doesn’t follow me and follows you instead, I will know where to come to find him. Do you understand what I am saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Calque leaned across and gave the driver his instructions. He handed Lamia some Euros.

  ‘I’ll catch you up. Don’t worry. Take a room at my hotel under the name of Mercier. Then lock your door until I come. Have you got that?’

  He backed off before she could change her mind. Without looking around, Calque made for his car. He got in, started the engine, and pulled into the traffic fifty metres or so behind the taxi. There were three cars between him and Lamia. None of them was a blue Renault. Calque glanced into his rear-view mirror.

  The Renault was five cars behind him.

  Calque’s belly tightened with fear. He wasn’t an action man. Never had been. He had always left that to the young – to people like Paul Macron. Which is why Macron was dead, and he was still alive. The thought ate into him like acid.

  Now his only priority was to protect the woman. It was clearly his fault that she was in this situation, and he must do his very best to extricate her. He mustn’t fail her the way he’d failed his assistant.

  Five kilometres down the road, at the Cogolin Plage roundabout, Calque veered off to the left, onto the La Croix Valmer road. The blue Renault followed him.

  Calque made the sign of the cross. He knew that his only chance now was to use his intelligence. Outflank his opponent. Think laterally. If he couldn’t achieve that, the man would simply force him off the road at a suitable spot and do away with him.

  He must keep the man guessing. Force him to hold back.

  Calque hung a left towards Gassin. That would make the man think. Was Calque heading back towards Pampelonne? Or to the Countess’s house?

  Calque accelerated up the steep hill towards the village. The road beyond Gassin was a winding one, and little used at this time of year. If the man was to make his move, he would doubtless make it there.

  Calque was counting on the man’s innate curiosity to stay his hand. It was a thin edge to trust your life to, and Calque could feel the anxiety eating away at him. He had no weapon in the car. No possible means of self-defence. His heart was weak, and a lifetime of heavy smoking had ensured that his lungs would be of little use in a crisis.

  The blue Renault closed in on him. They were well out of Gassin, now, and heading into the hills towards Ramatuelle. They couldn’t be more than five or six kilometres from the Countess’s house. Surely the man would hold his fire for a little longer?

  Calque saw a car ahead of him, and speeded up. There was safety in numbers. People instinctively tried not to shit on their own doorsteps if they could possibly avoid it. And certainly not with witnesses present. The man behind him had already had one body to deal with – two would prove something of a crowd, surely?

  The extra company appeared to have put the blue Renault man off his stride. Calque saw the car behind him drop back again. Perhaps he still thought that Calque was unaware of his presence?

  Now they were approaching Ramatuelle. Calque sent up a brief prayer that the motorist in front of him was not intending to stop off for a newspaper or for his morning cup of coffee. He felt an overwhelming affection for the anonymous little man he was following – curious how it was possible to love a complete stranger.

  The man continued on out through the village with Calque clinging to his tail like a pilot fish. They were barely three kilometres from the Countess’s house now, and Calque began to feel an upwelling of confidence in his own judgement. He had called the thing correctly. The man driving the blue Renault had obviously been in touch with the Countess, and she had told him to hold off and see what Calque intended.

  Now it only remained for Calque to keep his head – before inserting it directly inside the tiger’s mouth.

  28

  With one hand still on the wheel, Calque felt inside his jacket pocket and retrieved the tape recorder. He flipped open the lid of the tape compartment and extricated the cassette. He wedged the tape recorder behind the passenger seat cushion, and placed the cassette on his lap. Then he felt around for his cell phone and placed that beside it. He owed that much to Picaro. It wouldn’t do to have the Corpus scrolling back through his recent calls and identifying who it really was who had snatched Lamia.

  The blue Renault was still pulling flotilla duty fifty metres behind him.

  Two kilometres to go until they reached the Countess’s house – had he left it too late? Had fear eaten into his brain and frozen his intelligence?

  Calque saw an S-bend three hundred metres ahead. That was it. This would be his last chance. The man in the blue Renault would almost certainly close up on him as they neared the Countess’s house.

  As he approached the bend, Calque triggered the offside electric window and stepped on the gas. It would take the blue Renault a split second to respond to the move and match his speed. That would be enough to carry Calque into the blind part of the corner, temporarily out of sight of both the car in front and the blue Renault behind him.

  As Calque rounded the crest of the corner, he tossed the cassette and the cell phone through the open window, his eyes searching feverishly for landmarks in the underbrush at the side of the road. Then he punched the window button, and used his engine braking, and a rapid downshift through the gears, to slow the car back down – he wanted no tell-tale flashing of red lights to mark what he had done.

  The blue Renault was sitting directly on his tail now. Calque recognized the butler, Milouins, in the driving seat. So it must have been one of the two footmen that Picaro had killed. Butlers. Footmen. Calque wondered what century the Countess imagined she was in. Hadn’t she heard of the Revolution? Had the woman no shame?

  The entrance to the Domaine de Seyème was fifty metres ahead on the left. Calque fought back a last-minute impulse to accelerate away
from the blue Renault and try to avoid his impending fate – but that would mean overtaking the car in front on a blind corner, and dealing with a vengeful Milouins if he happened to survive the manoeuvre. No. The Countess was a better bet. He might be able to bluff her. Milouins, on the other hand, had always struck him as the sort of man who shot first and asked questions afterwards.

  Calque switched on his indicator and prepared to turn. Marvellous. Here he was, naked and out in the open, voluntarily putting himself in the enemy’s hands. How was it possible? If he’d tried to botch the thing on purpose, he couldn’t have contrived a more humiliating ending for himself. All they had to do now was kill him – in as tactful and non-intrusive a way as possible – then plant him in his car, and deposit the car on top of Picaro’s hit-and-run victim. He could just imagine the Countess’s relish at describing what must have taken place to the police.

  ‘We knew the ex-detective was stalking us. That he somehow blamed our family for the death of his assistant. That it had become an obsession with him. So I sent one of our people out to reason with him – we didn’t want to waste any more police time, you see. But the man must have been mad. He simply drove at my footman in a rage – then, when he saw what he had done, he killed himself.’

  That would tie in nicely with his purported breakdown, wouldn’t it? He could imagine the Nice Matin headlines. EMBITTERED EX-COP GOES BERSERK.

  Talk about an own goal …

  Calque drew up in front of the Countess’s house. Milouins pulled the blue Renault across the entrance to the courtyard behind him, effectively sealing him in. Calque sighed, and rested his head back against the seat restraint. The Corpus certainly wasn’t beating about the bush.