‘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.
35
Sabir sat down on the motel walkway. He hunched forwards like a man with stomach cramp and rested his head on his knees. Would he never again manage to sleep a night straight through? The constant waking up and drifting off was draining him of his strength. And yet he feared pills and their effects – he had seen what they had done to his mother.
The temperature on the outskirts of Corpus Christi at 2.30 that morning was a balmy twenty degrees, and Sabir could clearly pick up the scent of the sea on the incoming breeze. When he straightened up he could hear the surf pounding against Padre Island, and the shriek of distant seabirds as they fought over a school of sardines.
He sat for a long time listening to the murmurings of the night, secretly hoping that Lamia would come out and join him, just as she had done two nights before. He regretted having drawn away from her when she had reached out to comfort him, and he was looking for an opportunity – any opportunity – of putting things right with her again.
If only Calque would begin snoring. Or sleepwalking. Or throwing himself around in his bed. But when Sabir had tiptoed out of their communal bedroom, the former policeman had been sleeping like a well-fed baby
As far as the trip was concerned, the three of them appeared to have settled into a comforting routine, sharing jokes and playing car games. Somewhat to Sabir’s surprise, Calque was wildly competitive in anything that involved intellectual exercise, to the extent that he would even bend the rules a little when it suited him. Sabir had decided that this might have something to do with Calque’s previous profession as a policeman, but he kept the thought firmly to himself. One consequence, though, was that there had been no opportunity for any private conversation with Lamia.
Sabir was just about to head back inside and try for a little sleep when the door behind him opened. Lamia edged through it, one hand held up to shade her eyes against the glare of the safety light.
Sabir did his best to mask his delight at her miraculous reappearance. ‘Don’t tell me. Calque has started snoring again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why are we whispering? Nothing will cut through that racket of his and wake him up.’
Lamia laughed. She had brought a blanket out with her, as before, but this time she settled herself on it, with her legs drawn up and to the side, and then folded it across her like a four-leaf-clover. She was wearing an old-fashioned flannel nightdress, and Sabir found himself marvelling anew at her unselficonsciousness. Lamia was unlike any French woman he had ever met in that respect, in that she appeared to have so convinced herself of her fundamental undesirability that, beyond making sure that she was neatly turned out, her fashion sense erred disarmingly on the side of a studied and rather grey neutrality.
‘So what’s new?’ Sabir grinned at her, not really expecting a serious answer to his question.
Lamia shook her head. ‘I haven’t told Calque yet. But this afternoon, as we were driving through Houston, I am convinced that I saw my sister Dakini following us in a car.’
‘You’re kidding me?’
‘I couldn’t be sure, because she was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap.’
‘Dark glasses and a baseball cap?’
‘Yes. It doesn’t sound much like her, does it? I’ve since managed to convince myself that I was wrong. Which I probably am. But Dakini has a face that, once seen, is never forgotten.’ She blushed and turned away, as though fearing that her own face might reasonably be considered to fall within that category as well.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, in addition to having very long hair – I mean really long, falling to well below her waist – Dakini also has a sort of unfortunate rictus to her features, that gives her a malevolent look, as though she is permanently angry.’ Lamia hesitated, uncertain whether to go on. Then she sighed. ‘Sometimes I wonder about Madame, my mother, endlessly adopting children with disastrous tics or disabilities. Why did she never have us seen to? Surgically, I mean? In Rudra’s case she could have had his club foot treated. And in Berith’s case his harelip. I agree that Athame’s near dwarfism is incurable, as is Alastor’s cachexia, and Aldinach’s hermaphroditism. But she could have put Asson on a diet, instead of encouraging and funding his gourmandism – I mean they now say that excess weight is not necessarily genetic, don’t they?’
‘Then why didn’t she? Have you treated, I mean?’
Lamia let out another long sigh. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? She must have wanted us this way. We must have suited her.’
Sabir shook his head despairingly. He glanced over at Lamia, but she was avoiding his eyes. ‘Can’t you have your face fixed now? There have been enormous advances in dermatology since you were a child. Surely there’s something that can be done?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m scared to. Haemangiomas like mine need treating early. The longer you leave it, the more danger there is. If they catch you as a baby, they can sometimes use liquid nitrogen on the discoloration. That is not available later, however. Because my haemangioma did not threaten a vital organ, the nuns simply left it – or so I was told – hoping that it would go away of its own accord. But it didn’t, as you can see. Maybe they even thought that as God had made me this way, who were they to change it? Nowadays, to treat it, they would have to use steroids, or interferon, or a pulse-dye laser treatment. In my case, because of the sheer size of it, they might even have to operate, with all the associated risks. I might end up looking even worse than I do now.’
‘You don’t look bad now. In fact I think you’re beautiful.’
‘Thank you, Adam. But I’m too old to believe in fairytales any
more. I’m twenty-seven. Not eleven.’
Sabir sensed that it was time to change the subject. ‘What about the twins?’
Lamia shrugged. ‘At least Madame, my mother, had the grace to have them surgically parted. Or maybe, come to think of it, that was the nuns too? Either way, I’ve seen the scars on their torsos. I believe they must have shared a kidney or something when they emerged from their mother. Now they merely share an attitude.’
Sabir laughed, although he didn’t really find the twins in the least amusing. ‘Do you love them? I mean, do you love any of them? Your mother? Or your brothers and sisters?’
Lamia appeared to consider for a moment. ‘There was a time when I was close to Athame. She is the one of my sisters who suffers from dwarfism. I mean she isn’t really a dwarf, she is just very small indeed. She suffers from Ellis–van Creveld Syndrome, like some of your Amish people over here. She’s a polydactyl, too.’
‘A what?’
‘She has twelve fingers.’
‘Jesus. And she uses them all?’
‘As well as you or I.’
‘And are you still close to her?’
‘We fell out over my attitude to the Corpus. I’ve been steadily easing back on my commitment for some years now. None of the others suspected, because they were not close to me – but Athame understood. And she couldn’t condone it. She believes the Countess, my mother, to be a sort of goddess figure. She worships her, like the Jews of the Old Testament worshipped graven images – the golden calf, or what have you. She believes the Countess to be a sort of golem. And sometimes I think she’s right. My mother is not entirely human. It is perfectly feasible that some force created her out of primeval clay, and simply gave her the face and body of a normal human being. To trick people.’
‘To trick people? How?’
Lamia met Sabir’s eyes straight on for the first time. ‘Into believing that she was like them.’
The Mayan Codex Page 20
