The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  ‘Would I? Do you really think your family would believe me? Believe that I had published everything I know?’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because they know I know things, Lamia. Things I can’t tell anybody. Things that I can’t publicize.’ He suspected for a moment that she was going to ask him to dot the i’s and cross the t’s – use the unexpected intimacy that had sprung up between them to wheedle information out of him. A woman’s curiosity, and all that twaddle. But she didn’t.

  Instead she stared him straight in the eyes. ‘You want to take this all the way through to the end, don’t you?’

  He pretended to consider her question, but he already knew the answer. ‘I’ve got no choice in the matter. These nightmares. They’re something to do with it. But it’s not only that. I’m changing, Lamia. Changing inside. I can’t really describe it. But something happened to me down there in that cellar in the Camargue. Something that I still don’t understand. I find myself drawn to things. Almost as if I had experienced them before, and now need to revisit them to fully understand their significance.’ He shook his head. ‘No wonder you think I’m crazy.’

  ‘You’re making no sense. Yes. But I don’t think you’re crazy. I was wrong to say that.’

  ‘And you? Why are you tagging along with us? It can’t be for protection. For Captain Calque and I are probably of less potential use to anybody in that department than, well, than Laurel and Hardy.’

  Lamia burst out laughing. ‘Laurel and Hardy. That’s it. That’s who you are. The two of you. Laurel and Hardy.

  ‘Thanks. Thanks a bunch.’

  Lamia’s face became serious again. ‘Why don’t you have a woman of your own, Adam? What are you? Mid-thirties? You’re even quite handsome in an off hand, dean Martin kind of a way.’

  ‘A Dean Martin kind of a way? I look like Dean Martin?’

  ‘Yes. A little. And someone else. Some 1930s film actor I can’t remember. But it will come to me later. I’m certain of that.’

  ‘W. C. Fields?’

  She punched him lightly on the arm. ‘But I’m serious, Adam. Most men have settled down by this time. Started a family. Yet you are living in a far bigger house than you can ever use. With a beautiful garden. In an exquisite part of America. Why aren’t you married? What’s wrong with you, Monsieur Sabir?’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to ask me now if I’m gay?’

  ‘No. I know you’re not gay.’

  ‘Oh yeah? And how do you figure that?’

  ‘By the way you responded earlier this evening when you helped me climb out of the window.’

  Sabir could feel himself flushing. ‘Oh come on. I just hefted you for a split second. You might as well have been a sack of grain.’

  ‘I don’t think so. French women understand such things. I’m not saying you’re attracted to me. Don’t think that. But a woman knows when a man responds to her as a woman. Gay men don’t respond that way. You’re way straight, as the Americans say. So answer my question.’

  Sabir laughed. But he was actually caught mid-way between embarrassment and awkwardness. He wasn’t used to women speaking to him in this way. Part of him liked it, and part of him wanted to be a million miles away. ‘It’s about my mother, I suppose.’

  ‘With men it usually is.’

  Sabir rocked back against the pillar, surprised, once again, at Lamia’s directness. ‘It’s not what you think. Not the usual, I mean. During the better part of my adolescence and through into my twenties, my mother was always ill. I mean mentally ill, not physically. It got so bad sometimes that she had to be taken off to a clinic and tranquillized for weeks at a time to prevent her from committing suicide. It destroyed my father’s life. And I suppose it destroyed part of mine, too. I couldn’t bring anyone home, you see. And somehow it felt like a betrayal if I went with girls my mother would never get to meet. She wanted to be normal, Lamia. Desperately so. But there was something – some short circuit in her brain – that didn’t allow her to be. I went to college like everybody else. Had a few short-term affairs. Minor things, that didn’t mean anything. But I could never hold a woman. There was something detached in me – something damaged. When my father died three years ago, I was a 32-year-old man still living for the better part of the year at home.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Oh, she finally succeeded in what she’d been trying to do for half her lifetime. I was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, when she took the Nembutal and slit her wrists. I was the one that found her. She did it like Seneca the Younger – in the bath. Only she left the taps running. The blood-stained water came cascading down the stairs like a waterfall. A heck of a way to go. As always, she involved everybody.’

  ‘But you loved her?’

  ‘I loved her and I hated her. Does that answer your question?’

  Lamia put out a hand and squeezed his arm, but Sabir jerked unconsciously away from her, as if there was something he feared in her touch.

  26

  The trio drove all of the next day, right along the line of the Appalachian Mountains and down into Alabama. They each took it in turns to share the driving, and both Lamia and Sabir managed to doze a little when it was their turn to take a break.

  Calque had attempted to persuade Sabir that civilized people didn’t stuff themselves full of eggs, bacon, and waffles at breakfast time, and then snack their way through the day until they ran up against the stone wall of a gargantuan, seven-o’clock dinner. Instead, they started off in the continental fashion, on the strict understanding that they had a good lunch to look forward to, with a light supper to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion.

  ‘This time I shall choose the restaurant. We are not being followed. We don’t need to use a drive-thru. It is not required that we sit in the car and stink it up with inadequately fried food.’

  Neither Lamia nor Sabir felt it appropriate to draw attention to Calque stinking up the car with his cigarettes – something which he was doing on an ever more regular basis. Neither did Lamia mention Calque’s snoring. She was aware of a certain unexpected fragility in him – a fragility that verged on narcissism – and she was also aware of his susceptibility both to her and to the opinions of her sex.

  During lunch – for which Calque had unexpectedly found a family-run restaurant near Knoxville which specialized in hickory-smoked baby back ribs, served with corn bread and pinto beans, but, lamentably, no wine – she questioned him about his wife and daughter.

  Calque sighed, and stared down at his plate, as if it held within its purview some symbolical key to the human condition. ‘My wife wished, from the very first moment that she met me, that I had been a businessman and not a policeman. She managed to convince herself – without, I should add, any encouragement on my part – that I would eventually subscribe to her wishes and switch professions. We would then be able to live a comfortable, bourgeois existence, in a respectable Paris suburb, and take our holidays on the Ile de Ré, just as she and her family had done for the past two generations. I let her down in this, just as I let her down in everything else. We had a daughter. At first this daughter seemed fond of me. I would take her to the flower market, and to the Jardin du Luxembourg to float her sailing boat. When my wife realized how fond I was of this little girl, she understood that her opportunity for revenge had finally arrived. She spent the better part of twenty years alienating my daughter from me in every way she could contrive. I fought back, of course, but a man who works full time, and long hours, in a sometimes brutalizing profession, has a weakened armoury. Eventually, my daughter married, and left home. Now, when I telephone, her husband speaks to me, but not her. Without the presence of my daughter, my marriage seemed even more of a sham than I had originally suspected. I therefore divorced my wife, effectively ruining myself in the process. This is only justice. If a man is a fool, he deserves to be treated like a fool. I was, and am, a fool. But now that I am older, I can look back on my folly and smile. Before, I could only
weep.’

  Sabir and Lamia stared speechlessly across the table at Calque. Never, in the time that either one of them had known him, had he opened up even remotely about his private life. He might have been a lay monk for all they knew. Now he had spread out all his dirty linen for them to witness, and they didn’t know quite how to respond.

  ‘It’s a shame they don’t serve wine here,’ said Sabir. ‘I could do with a glass or two myself.’

  Lamia glared at him as if he had just overset a saucepot on her dress.

  Sabir swallowed, and tried to redeem himself. ‘Calque, that’s terrible. You mean your daughter won’t even speak to you any more?’

  This time Lamia aimed a kick at his shin under the table.

  Calque, however, appeared not to have heard him. ‘Everything is fine now, though. I have taken early retirement from the police force. I have become obsessed with the after-effects of my final case. I have spent the past five weeks sitting in a camouflaged hideout on a hillside in southern France. I have ruined myself afresh by bribing a criminal to break into Lamia’s mother’s house and retrieve a tape recorder with nothing on it. I have come to America – a land of which I know nothing, and care to know even less – a land where people seem to subsist on fried food and takeaways – and I have made it my own. I have been pursued by madmen, and I have evaded them. I am surrounded by my friends.’ Calque dipped his corn bread into the baby rib sauce and ate it with every impression of relish. ‘Life is treating me well, in other words. Far better than I deserve.’

  Sabir had a quizzical expression on his face. He glanced across at Lamia. ‘Is he joking? Or is he being serious?’

  Lamia smiled. ‘He is being serious. Only he has a very French way of making his serious point.’

  ‘What? A sort of zigzaggy kind of a way? A down-hill-and-over-dale kind of a way? An up and down a few lurching by-ways and around a few blind corners kind of a way?’

  ‘Yes. That is it. That is it exactly.’

  Calque had gone back to eating, seemingly unmoved by the remainder of the conversation.

  It was as if he had laid his cards on the table, just as pre-arranged, and now it was up to everybody else to decide just what they were going to do with them.

  27

  All had been going well for the Corpus until their extended caravan arrived in the small town of Wakulhatchee, just south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at around nine p.m. on an unseasonably hot Friday night.

  It had been a long day’s driving for the ten-car, eleven-person ersatz surveillance team. A day whose effects were exacerbated both by the continual need for caution, and by the inevitable wear and tear caused by the obsessive twenty-minute rotas that Abi had insisted upon despite the fact that the trio they were following in the Grand Cherokee appeared to have not the remotest idea that they were still being watched.

  Even during the trio’s lunch break – when it might have appeared reasonable for the team to stand down and take it easy – Abi had refused permission for any of his brothers and sisters to take time off for anything more than a snack. ‘You can relax this evening. When they’re static. We’ll only need two people at any one time to watch them then. So the rest of you can go off and get some R & R.’

  ‘Which two are going to watch them?’

  Abi could see storm clouds looming. He put on his most placatory voice. ‘Vau and I will take the first four-hour shift. We’re the freshest. And the pressure’s been off us all day. The rest of you can draw lots for who’s next in line. Those four hours ought to give you all the time you need to get some food and drink inside you and lighten up a little. If our trio decide on a late outing we’ll call you and tell you whereabouts they’re headed. We don’t want you all to crash into each other like ninepins. If Lamia catches sight of any of us, we’re done for. They’ll bolt again, and this time they’ll make damned sure they’re not followed. No. We need to keep them sweet and unaware.’

  For their part Calque, Lamia, and Sabir had found another of their Olde Worlde – read terminally rundown – motels, on the very edge of town. This one was managed by a Polish family – and they, too, barely raised an eyebrow at their guests’ unconventional sleeping arrangements.

  After watching the trio check in, Abi and Vau settled down to watch the entrance to the motel from 150 yards down the street. They were driving a different rental from the one they had been using in Massachusetts – a vehicle that had not been within sight of the Cherokee all day.

  ‘How do you think it’s going?’ Vau asked his brother.

  ‘In a word? Shit.’

  Vau sat silently for a while. ‘I don’t get you, Abi. We’ve still got them under surveillance. The whole family are here to support us. What is there to complain about?’

  ‘Inactivity. That’s to complain about.’

  Vau raised his eyebrows in disbelief.

  ‘Oh, come on, Vau. You know very well who you’re dealing with here. Our bunch of siblings are used to getting everything they want whenever they want it. They either buy it or they grab it off someone else. That sort of freedom acts like an inbuilt dynamo. Now we’re asking that same bunch of anarchists to rein themselves in and conduct a sort of interminable holding operation. Heck, Sabir could be intending to drive as far as Brazil for all we know. Which is fine for him – he owns his damned vehicle. But what do we do? Somehow, at every border, we’re going to have to dump the rentals and fetch ourselves new ones. Without losing our marks.’

  ‘But why should we be crossing borders? They might be heading down to Florida.’

  ‘Florida? Haven’t you looked at your map recently? We’ve just driven along the fucking Appalachian Mountains – we’re heading for Texas.’

  ‘Well. Texas, then.’

  ‘What’s beyond Texas?’

  Vau thought for a moment. ‘Mexico, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t you think they might be heading for there?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Anything happen there in the past few days? Anything out of the ordinary?’

  Vau thought again. Then he shook his head. ‘No. Not that I heard of.’

  Abi settled himself further down in his seat and closed his eyes. ‘Jesus.’

  28

  The place was called Alabama Mama’s, and it was situated on the far opposite edge of Wakulhatchee to the trio’s motel. It was basically a parking lot with a corrugated iron building pitched into the middle of it. The corrugated iron had originally been painted rust red, but over the years the patina had changed until it had now come to resemble a sort of inverted, badly limed-up, coffee pot.

  At ten o’clock on a Friday evening the car park was still mostly empty, so the sudden arrival of a phalanx of New York registered rentals didn’t do more than flurry the waters. A few odd looks were cast in the Corpus’s direction – they were, after all, quite noticeable – but nothing untoward either occurred or suggested itself.

  Of the nine siblings who entered Alabama Mama’s that night, Athame was a virtual dwarf, with tiny hands and feet, Berith had a harelip, Rudra limped in an extrovert manner on account of his untreated club foot, Alastor was spectre thin from the effects of cachexia, Asson was enormously fat, Dakini had hair which grew down below her buttocks framing a face frozen into a sort of malevolent rictus, Nawal suffered from hirsutism, Oni was a seven-foot-tall albino, and Aldinach was a true hermaphrodite.

  Of these, Aldinach was the most ordinary looking, as he/she had decided to be a she tonight, given the heat and the sub-tropical climate that ensured that even at nine o’clock in the evening – and freakishly, even in October – the ambient temperature was well above thirty degrees. Inside the club it was hotter still, with the slowly churning ceiling fans barely ruffling the overheated air.

  Aldinach had therefore chosen to wear a thin seersucker cotton dress, cut low to show off her small, but perfectly formed, breasts. She was wearing red patent leather ‘fuck-me’ shoes with five-inch heels, and the sheerest stockings she could find. She had her h
air down – when she lived as a man she commonly wore it in a pigtail – and her fringe now curled inwards to flatter and give weight to her heavily lashed eyes. Aldinach refused to enter the club alongside her brothers and sisters, but came in separately, by a side entrance, and took her place alone, at the corner of the bar.

  The barman did a double take, and then shook his head in amazement. Despite twenty years spent working in clubs and bars and dives of all persuasions, it still astonished him what women were capable of contriving when they were ‘in open season’. He stood for a moment admiring the sight, and speculating which of his regular clients would be the lucky man tonight. Because someone was going to be the lucky man. That much was darned certain.

  ‘I’ll have a margarita.’

  ‘Frozen? Or on the rocks?’

  ‘Frozen.’

  ‘Wise choice. Do you want salt around the rim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The barman busied himself with the makings. ‘You from Louisiana?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew it. I picked up your accent straight away. Lafayette?’

  ‘Lake Charles.’

  ‘Well I’ll be damned. I got close, didn’t I?’

  ‘You’ve got an ear. I’ll give you that.’

  The barman placed a paper mat in front of Aldinach, and set the margarita on top of it. ‘Now you try that. Then tell me if it isn’t the best damned margarita this side of the Sierra Madre.’

  Aldinach sipped the margarita. Then she cocked her head and smiled.

  ‘I told you. I used to work down in Cancun around the Easter break. At the Hotel Esmeralda.’ His expression changed abruptly. ‘Look. Tell me if I’m out of line here. But you do realize what sort of a place this is?’

  Aldinach shrugged. ‘I have a vague idea.’

  The barman glanced towards the main door. ‘Well it ain’t what you’d call genteel, if you take my meaning.’ He hesitated. ‘Look, lady. I like you. Strikes me you’re a cut above the usual sort of moppet props up this bar. Plus you’ve got good taste in booze. If I were you, I’d drink up and head on out again. Try the Hummingbird up the road about two miles. I dearly hate to drive away custom, but you don’t deserve the sort of riff-raff we get in here. Now take a look at that table of freaks over there.’ He nodded towards the far edge of the dance floor, where Aldinach’s brothers and sisters had pushed together three separate tables to make one. ‘There’s trouble if ever I’ve seen it. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The sort of rednecks we get in here on a Friday night will take the mere existence of that bunch as an insult to their manhood. Our clientele ain’t much into “special needs”. I don’t know who they are – an idiot’s works outing, maybe, or escapees from the funny farm – but I wouldn’t want to be in here when the Skunks get through with them.’