The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  36

  Vau could hear every word of their conversation from his prone position on the increasingly hostile concrete surface of the motel parking lot.

  He was starting to feel the cold in his back, and imagining all sorts of scenarios, like him sneezing, or him dozing off and then sitting up and bashing his head against the Cherokee’s undercarriage and having to stifle his screams. The total nightmare scenario was the one in which the pair of them decided to go off for a sex assignation in the car together – for Vau was perfectly convinced from the sound of their voices, and the intimate way in which they were talking, that there was something more going on than a mere friendship of convenience – more than merely the random companionship of fellow travellers.

  Abi could make fun of Lamia’s face and her near sexless way of dressing all he wanted, but Vau knew that there were men out there who found Lamia attractive. Take that oaf Philippe, for instance. The dead footman. He had been sniffing after Lamia for years, hadn’t he? It was only Madame, his mother’s, complete lack of interest in matters sexual that had allowed the man to continue in his job. And much good it had done him. He was now languishing below six feet of reinforced concrete at a new Catholic girls’ school the Countess was subsidizing at the Couvent des Abbesses de Platilly, near Cavalaire-sur-Mer. Nothing like keeping things cosy and in the family.

  Still, Vau had all but decided that there was no way he was going to try breaking into the car again after this recent little contretemps. He would simply lie through his teeth to Abi and pretend he had planted the tracker in the spare tyre well. Instead he would attach it to the underframe of the car, and hope for the best. He had identified the perfect spot whilst lying prone beneath the Cherokee’s skirts. He would do the deed the minute the two lovebirds stopped babbling and went back inside again, and to hell with the consequences.

  37

  Abi watched his twin brother climbing back into the rental. ‘You’re filthy. What have you been doing all this time? Rolling around in a midden?’

  ‘What’s a midden?’

  ‘A shit heap.’

  ‘Then why don’t you say it the first time, instead of showing off how clever you are?

  ‘Answer my question, Vau.’

  ‘The answer is no. I haven’t been rolling around in a shit heap. If you want to know what I’ve been doing all this time, I’ll tell you. I’ve been lying underneath Sabir’s car, in the parking lot of the motel, listening to his cosy late-night conversation with Lamia.’

  ‘You’re kidding me? You’re not serious?’

  ‘Deadly serious. Plus she recognized Dakini earlier on today, while we were transiting Houston.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘It’s all right. She’s managed to convince herself that she was seeing things. Your trick with the baseball cap and the dark glasses worked a treat. It was so unlikely a disguise, that Lamia thinks she was simply imagining the vision from hell that Dakini represents, and not really seeing it.’

  ‘She is plug ugly, isn’t she?’

  ‘That’s the understatement of the year.’

  Abi laughed. ‘Did you plant the tracker?’

  Vau shrugged. ‘Of course I did. What do you think?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where? In the tyre well of course. Where I usually plant them.’

  ‘Which key did you use to get in?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because I’m not stupid, Vau. You got surprised on the job and you were forced to hide. Then you were constrained to listen to the pair of them yakking on about Dakini for half an hour. You’re lying under the car, at this point, pissed off to the nines. Don’t tell me it didn’t occur to you to take a shortcut?’

  Vau hesitated. He was briefly tempted to try and compound his felony. Then he aimed a frustrated punch at the stowaway compartment. ‘Okay, Abi. Okay. You got me. As you always do. I slipped the fucking thing underneath the chassis, not in the tyre well. Between you and me there was no way in hell that I was going to break into that car with the pair of them wide awake inside their bedroom fantasizing about each other.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Fantasizing about each other?’

  ‘I heard Lamia’s voice. She’s my sister, remember. I’ve never heard her speaking like that to a man before.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like she gives a damn about what he thinks of her.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘I’m convinced she’s got the hots for Sabir.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Yes, it does stretch the imagination a little. When you think of all the millions of women with unblemished faces out there. I mean, why take second best when you don’t need to? Anyway, either she’s kidding herself, or Sabir must have detached retinas.’

  ‘Seriously. Does Sabir have the hots for her?’

  Vau made a face. ‘Sabir hides it better, but I wouldn’t be surprised.’ He grinned at his brother, pleased that he was contributing something of value for once. ‘Can you use that knowledge in some way, Abi?’

  Abi shrugged reflectively. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m sure as hell going to give it some thought.’

  38

  That morning saw the trio crossing the Rio Bravo at the Puente Nuevo, and driving through into Matamoros from Brownsville, Texas. They paid their $2.25 toll, and arranged for their temporary vehicle permit from the CIITEV office. Then they headed south down Highway 101 towards San Fernando.

  Abi and Vau, who had crossed by foot earlier that morning, and secured a new, Mexican registered rental for themselves, picked up the Grand Cherokee about two miles out of town. The tracker was working fine, so they were able to follow the Jeep at a distance of about three quarters of a mile, with no possibility of a surprise sighting. The nine remaining members of the Corpus had been detailed to hire themselves two people carriers, one for the men and one for the women, and to keep in touch with Abi and Vau via cell phone. They would rendezvous every night near whatever motel the trio had chosen for themselves.

  Abi had decided against concealing the existence of the tracker from his brothers and sisters for the simple reason that keeping a close tail on a car you don’t really need to follow is a smart way of asking for trouble. And to hell with Madame, his mother’s, worries about her children feeling she didn’t trust them any more. If the others didn’t tell her and trigger the predictable scene, then he certainly wouldn’t. And who in their right mind trusted anybody anyway?

  Any further cock-ups, and Abi knew that the Countess would take him off the case. Christ, she might even give the job to Brain-of-Europe Vau – or, even worse, to the next man down the list in the seniority stakes. Mr Harelip himself. Bullshitter Berith. The world’s greatest Pseudologist.

  Abi knew that his best bet with the Countess always lay in seducing her into liking him face to face. Alongside Oni and Athame, he was undoubtedly her favourite. But keeping in touch with her by cell phone was a sheer disaster. The Countess hated using telephones, and was always constrained in what she said. She started in on the offensive and stayed there. And wasn’t it always so much easier to cashier somebody when you didn’t have to look them in the eye?

  Abi decided that he would tread very carefully indeed for the next few days. When the perfect moment came to move in on Sabir, he would be ready. He wouldn’t blow things twice in a row.

  39

  ‘I think it’s time you told us a little more about the Corpus Maleficus.’ Calque was luxuriating across the Grand Cherokee’s rear bench. Sabir was driving, and Lamia was beside him on the passenger seat.

  The air conditioning was working at full stretch, and Sabir could feel the deterioration in the car’s power as a result. He was sticking to a steady sixty-eight miles an hour on the assumption that any contact with Mexican traffic cops this close to the border could only lead to tears. This was drug country. Everyone was corrupt in one way or another. It was simply a matter of scale
.

  ‘Why now? Why did you not ask me this before?’ Lamia glanced back at Calque. It wasn’t a suspicious look so much as an old-fashioned one. The sort of look that says ‘You’d better not be trying to spin me a line, matey.’

  Calque straightened up. The expression on his face was that of a man who suddenly means business. ‘We are maybe two, or at the most, three days’ driving away from where we need to be. Sabir has chosen not to share with us the key element of his revelatory quatrain – although I should have thought he would have learned to trust us both by now. It has occurred to me that if you showed good faith, Lamia, in opening up the skeletons in your family’s cupboard, then the ever elusive Sabir might prove more amenable to also confiding in his friends.’

  Sabir rolled his eyes. ‘Artfully done, Calque. Artfully done. I can’t fault you. You got a dig in at just about everybody with that little speech of yours. Hell, you must have been a policeman in a former life.’

  Before Calque could respond, Lamia turned towards both men, fixing first one and then the other with her gaze. ‘I don’t mind you quizzing me. I trust you, even if you don’t trust me. I’m here with you because I’ve got nowhere else to go. And because I don’t want to be alone, now that my family have excommunicated me. It’s as simple as that. To have you both on my side – to be able to share my fears with you – is very precious to me.’

  Chalk one up for the distaff team, thought Sabir. He checked out Calque’s face in the rear-view mirror. The man was as pink as a sand shrimp. Unprecedented. That was the only word for it. He had never seen Calque colour up to an even mildly roseate tinge before. The bastard had seemed impermeable to normal feelings of guilt and embarrassment.

  Sabir realized that he was feeling pretty guilty, too. It was becoming ludicrously obvious that both he and Calque had been holding out on Lamia through some sort of misplaced survival instinct. Maybe now was the time to bring things out into the open a little?

  Sabir cleared his throat. ‘Right. Me first. Cards on the table. I’m sorry I’ve appeared so elusive. The verse you are all feeling hurt and resentful about goes as follows:

  “In the land of the great volcano, fire

  When the rock cools, the wise one, Ahau Inchal Kabah,

  Shall make a hinged skull of the twentieth mask:

  The thirteenth crystal will sing for the God of Blood.”’

  There was a stunned silence. Calque was the first to break it. ‘That’s it? That’s the quatrain?’

  Sabir nodded. ‘Lock, stock, and barrel. What you see is what you get.’

  ‘My God. It doesn’t take us very far, does it?’ Despite his words, Calque’s eyes were fervid with speculation.

  ‘It takes us to the Palace of the Masks at Kabáh, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it, Sabir? How do you read that one?’

  ‘Well. The “of the twentieth mask” bit. That must be the Codz Poop. Or whatever your website called it, Lamia. It ties right in, don’t you see? That’s why I felt such a fool when you sprang the Orizaba eruption on me. Though how Nostradamus came up with this is way beyond me. Perhaps he’s simply sent us all on some sort of posthumous wild goose chase halfway across the world? A final exercise of power from beyond the grave?’

  ‘It wasn’t a wild goose chase in France. Everything he said in his quatrains was true.’

  ‘Yes. But that was in France. Nostradamus knew about France. He lived there for more than sixty years. But what the heck did he know about the New World?’

  ‘Quite a lot I should imagine.’ Calque held up a restraining hand. He was back in his element again, all thoughts of previous blunders forgotten. ‘The man was born in 1503, remember, just three years before the death of Christopher Columbus. And Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. With Hernán Cortés invading Mexico twenty-seven years later, in 1519. That gave Nostradamus, who died in 1566, forty-seven years in which to find out all he wanted about the new Spanish colonies. He would no doubt have been familiar with Cortés’s own Cartas de Relacíon, which appeared in print during the 1520s. And with the personally written account of the conquistador, Bernal Diáz de Castillo. Also Friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s excoriating description of the Destruction of the Indies. Also Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex. For we know for a fact that Nostradamus both spoke and read Spanish, as well as a number of other languages, including Latin, Greek, Italian, and Franco-Provençal.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, Calque. What were you doing all those years in the police force? You’re a born historian, man.’

  Calque managed to look both pleased and peeved at the same time – as though he had just been surprised, in flagrante delicto, albeit with a particularly beautiful woman. ‘I have indeed been doing my homework over the past few months. Those futile weeks I spent spying on Mademoiselle Lamia’s family were not entirely wasted, you see. I read dozens of books both before and during that period – and everything about Nostradamus that I could find.’

  ‘So …’

  ‘So there’s no reason why Nostradamus should not have shown a keen interest in the New World – the place and its riches were an object of endless fascination for the whole of literate Europe. Remember the myth of El Dorado? And remember, too, that Nostradamus came from an ancient family of assimilated Jews? Just as with the Gypsies, the forcibly ex-Jewish Nostradamus would have known exactly what kind of a threat the combined forces of Spanish Catholicism, the Inquisition, and the Auto-da-Fé posed to a country and culture that they considered pagan – and, in consequence, damned.’

  ‘You mean he would have felt a kinship with the Maya?’

  ‘Exactly. Just as he had previously felt a kinship with the Gypsies. To the extent that he might even have compared the wholesale destruction of Maya culture to similar Inquisitorial threats against the four levels of the Kabbalah. As always, therefore, with Nostradamus, he would have Infibulated his quatrain with hidden codes and meanings to protect it from prying eyes – codes which could only be teased out via the use of gematria.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Calque. “infibulated”? “Gematria”?’

  ‘Infibulated means to interleave, or to lard with a knitting needle – I’m using the word in its figurative sense, needless to say, rather than in its explicit sense of sewing up the labia majora. And gematria is the Hebrew system of numerology.’

  Sabir flared his eyes in quiet desperation. ‘Are you trying to tell us that you have somehow deduced a whole series of hidden codes in the – what? – five whole minutes since you have had access to the quatrain?’

  Calque threw himself back on his seat. ‘No. I am sorry to disappoint you both. But I have deduced no hidden codes as yet. I am merely speculating that they might – no, change that to must – exist.’

  40

  It had been a bad day. Probably the worst day that you had ever suffered in your life.

  At Villahermosa you had been robbed while you were sleeping in the market square. The thieves had taken the two hundred pesos that you had been keeping as a reserve in a pouch tied to your waist. But, far worse than that, they had taken the bag in which you were keeping the codex. You had been using this bag as a pillow, and the thieves’ act of slipping it from underneath your head had woken you up.

  You had identified the thieves and given chase. But you had not been eating well these past few days, and your strength was, in consequence, diminished. But you were still able to shout, and to summon aid from the other Indios who were sleeping in and around the square.

  At first the thieves had seemed certain to escape, but, at the very last moment, two Indios entering the square after a night of heavy drinking had managed to stop them. The thieves did not have machetes, but these two Indios who had been drinking were carrying theirs.

  Quickly, a crowd gathered around the thieves, and you were called upon to explain exactly what had happened.

  You told about the pesos, and about your bag with the book that you were carrying for a friend.

  A policema
n came to join the crowd and to see what was occurring at this early hour of the morning, before the market had begun.

  The thieves pretended to the policeman that they had not been doing as they had done. They were very convincing. You argued against them, but the policeman was not inclined to listen to you, as you were a stranger, coming from Veracruz. At length the policeman took the two thieves aside, and the three of them stood talking together for some time. The two thieves gave the policeman something, the policeman nodded, and the thieves hurried away. Quickly, like mist dispersing on a lake, all the Indios surrounding you also melted away.

  Then the policeman came back. He was carrying the bag in which you kept the codex. ‘Is this your property?’

  ‘Yes, Señor.’

  ‘This is a valuable property no doubt?’ The policeman took out the codex and began to leaf through the folded pages.

  ‘No. It is not valuable.’

  ‘Then you will not mind if I confiscate it?’

  You shook your head. Your heart was as ice in your chest. ‘I would very much mind for it to be confiscated. This thing belongs to another. I have promised to take it to him. I have taken an oath.’

  ‘The thieves gave me two hundred pesos. What will you give me?’

  You opened your hands and turned them upwards. ‘The two hundred pesos the thieves gave you belonged to me. It was the money the thieves stole from me.’

  ‘I am sorry for this. But I can do nothing. If you want your property, you must pay a fine. That is the law.’ The policeman opened the notebook he was carrying at a certain page, and pointed to the text, which you, of course, could not read.

  You reached down and slipped off one of your shoes. In it, you had fifty pesos of your one hundred remaining pesos. You took out the fifty-peso note and placed it in the policeman’s book.