Franklin stared at the old man expectantly, “Who?”
“The Armenian,” Dingli whispered excitedly, “Oxan Aslanian.”
“But I don’t understand. Oxan Aslanian’s last work was the cache found in Berlin. He died fifty years ago.”
“Not him,” Dingli interrupted. “His grandson!”
But almost as soon as the words had left his mouth, Dingli’s excitement faded and was replaced by a tired, fearful look. He retreated a couple of steps back toward the house and Franklin could see that the man, so long a keeper of secrets and perhaps swayed by the soothing balm of his confession in the workshop, had now revealed too much.
Franklin climbed into his car and started the engine. When Dingli approached hesitantly, he rolled down his window.
“I don’t have much time left, and I'm ready, do you understand me?”
Franklin nodded and waited.
“But the young people of Qurna and Mit-Rahineh and Khan el-Khalili, they still have much life in front of them. So it's better that they do not talk about the Armenian. Much better. And better for you too, Mr. Hunter. This, old Scultore knows for certain.”
33
In the skies over Mexico, anthracite clouds raced overhead, heralding the coming storm. The cold wind seeped into Sixtine's hood and chilled the perspiration that clung to her neck. She shivered but kept walking.
She was lost.
She had been in Mexico City for two days, armed with an itinerary gathered from Seth’s credit card statement. It started with a hotel check-in on May 22nd and ended with the payment for a helicopter ride on May 26th. In between, there had been many luxury shops, a few exclusive restaurants, one museum visit.
In two exhausting days, Sixtine had stayed in the same hotel suite, dined at the same eateries, browsed the same boutiques. She had observed, listened, touched, tasted, smelled, intensely present in every single place, searching some scrap of the familiar, the merest suggestion of a memory. But everything had remained desperately foreign, as if she saw them for the very first time.
And with each new place, she planted herself in front of people, looked at them squarely in the eyes and asked, “Do you remember me?”
Nobody ever did.
After two days, she was forced to admit it: Mexico was a dead end. Now she was lost in its streets, under a foreboding sky.
But she wasn’t afraid. She convinced herself that if her investigation had yielded nothing, then perhaps she should ditch reason and evidence, and instead accept to be guided by instinct, or at least curiosity. What did she have to lose? This is how she left behind the streets with expensive cars, bulletproof windows and velvet display cases and entered the unfamiliar realm of taco vendors, clerks, and pensioners. The real Mexico – what the local chilangos called DF – Distrito Federal.
When she felt the first drops of rain, heavy with the certainty of the deluge that was to come, she increased the pace of her steps. She followed the flow of the crowds as they began to thin out, seeking shelter from the coming storm. Then suddenly, with a thunderous clap, the sky was torn open, and everything in it seemed to come down at once, splashing the parched cobblestones black and turning the dirty drains into fast-flowing rivulets. Sixtine dashed to shelter in a nearby café and shrugged off her hood. Inside, white strips of neon cast a harsh glare on large, gaudy frescoes painted above a bar adorned with bottles that were more empty than full. She felt instantly at home.
A waiter, who could easily have been into his seventh decade, offered her a chair at a small table, the clang of its feet against the tiled floor lost in the hubbub of patrons playing dominoes on the square metal tables. The click-clack of the ivory pieces muffled the conspiratorial conversation of a group of college students sitting in one of the furthest corners of the room. Sixtine ordered a coffee, hoping to warm up. The rain had soaked her through to the skin, and she was shivering. She tried to extract a map of the city from her bag, but wet from the rain, it came apart in her hands. She cursed softly.
“Ah! I win, I win again!” a male voice exclaimed in English.
At the table nearest her, a man played dominoes. Alone. In front of him, stood an empty chair. He was in his late forties, with dirty blond hair, and seemed to be wearing poorly applied makeup, like an old rock star gone to seed.
He was also drunk.
On the table, among the dominoes, sat an almost depleted bottle of mezcal. He poured himself another shot and with a lick of sal de gusano, downed the drink in celebration at his apparent victory. Looking at the bottle, Sixtine at first thought she saw a worm, like the ones she had seen in the tequila bars in New York. But instead, she saw that it was a small sculpture of a faded red heart pierced by a knife.
“I win, I win, I win. Like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, I win. It's worth a drink, not so?” The man beamed at Sixtine.
She gave him a polite smile before returning to her torn map. But the bar-fly was in no mood to abandon the beauty that had appeared from nowhere.
“Are you visiting DF?” he asked gesturing at what remained of the map. “What a beautiful idea. If a man, or a young lady, were to make only one trip in their lives, they should come here.” He stood up suddenly, sending his chair tumbling backward onto the floor and exclaimed with gusto, his arms wide open, “Welcome, my friends, welcome to the city of Death!”
The other patrons seemed to pay no heed; the click-clack of the dominoes and the laughter of the students in the corner continued uninterrupted.
“Are you lost?” the man said as he tried to retrieve his chair on unsteady feet. “Where do you want to go?”
“Zócalo,” Sixtine replied. The waiter, hovering nearby, began to give her instructions in rapid Spanish, but she became distracted as the drunk man pushed his chair towards her, shooing the waiter away and muttering as he came closer, “Zócalo – everyone wants to go to Zócalo. You know why?”
Sixtine shook her head.
“Because everyone is attracted by the blood.”
At that moment, his chair slid out from beneath him, upending his table so that he found himself on the floor, covered with dominoes, mezcal, and sal de gusano. One of the domino players complained loudly without looking up from his game. The bartender joined in from behind his register with practiced threats of reprisals that would never come. The old waiter helped the drunk man up to his seat again, picked up the fallen dominoes and asked him to be quiet.
Sixtine drank her coffee, watching the rain that was still beating against the windows. Other customers entered, dripping, before settling at the bar. But the silence did not last. The drunkard was mumbling to himself, or to the imaginary friend sitting in the empty chair opposite. But then she realized he was talking to her.
“It's the blood that attracts 'em, amiga. The Zócalo is the Great Temple, the Templo Mayor. Ahuitzotl – now he knew how to do things in a big way. And now, look at them wanting more. The inauguration of the Great Temple, amiga, the coronation of the emperor. 1486? No,1487. A festival the likes of which the country had never seen – singing, dancing and all the treasures of the empire. Especially the flowers. Thousands of roses with their intoxicating scent. And yet, pretty lady, it was the smell of the blood that attracted 'em. Long, snaking columns of captives who came from the north, south, east and west. Endless lines of men and women who met at the foot of the Templo Mayor and climbed the steps to the sound of music, drunk on pulque. And who was waiting for them at the top of the steps? The Emperor himself, Ahuitzotl the warrior, who cleaved open their breasts and wrenched out their throbbing hearts.”
An icy chill travelled up Sixtine’s spine.
“And when the emperor was weary,” he continued, “it was left to the priests to carry out the sacrifice. Until nothing was left of those armies of prisoners. Nothing, just ghosts, in rivers of blood. On that day, the gods must have drunk themselves under the table with all that precious liquid, eh, amiga? Eighty thousand bodies. Eighty thousand souls left to haunt Zócalo on hol
y days. The Zócalo, that’s where you want to go, right, pretty lady?”
Sixtine sat silently and stared at the drunk, mesmerized by the horrific tale.
“But luckily,” the drunk said, raising a fist in the air triumphantly, “the conquistadors arrived! And all those good Christian men said, ‘Stop!’” The drunk man’s fist slammed onto the table, making the dominoes jump and eliciting another round of half-hearted complaints. “’Stop these feasts with their sacrifices of men, women, and children. Stop these games, you filthy unenlightened savages, with all your gods and their endless thirst for blood! Stop!’ And to make them stop, what did the Conquistadores do? Hernán Cortés destroyed the Templo Mayor, still stinking of the entrails of those that had been sacrificed. With the very same stones, he built the Metropolitan Cathedral in the exact same place. And then he slaughtered two hundred thousand Aztecs, to civilize their souls.”
He turned and looked at Sixtine, his bloodshot eyes burning with a strange fire – as if he was angry with himself for being ravaged by incurable sadness. “If you are looking for the Zócalo, pretty lady, you don’t need a map,” he said, raising an unsteady hand and tapping the side of his nose. “You simply need to follow the smell of blood.”
34
The rain had softened to a dull patter, and outside the café, people rushed past, anxious to get home. Sixtine couldn’t take her eyes off the drunk man at the table next to her.
“You see, all these people are in such a hurry,” he said. “They go to work at the office, they have Internet, and they dress in branded clothes, they look at the weather app on their iPhones. They are civilized. And these old stories of Aztec gods that had to be nourished with blood, or the sun would not rise the next day – they just laugh, right? ‘Old stuff, stupid folklore’ they’d say. But is it really, amiga? Oh oh, and yet, you don’t have to go so deep within us all, to find those extinct beliefs beating like a savage heart.”
The man paused, slopping as much alcohol onto the table as he managed to pour into his glass. “After they ripped the hearts from the chests, they would cast aside the bodies so that they rolled back down the steps of the Great Temple. But the hearts would still be beating, ba-boom, ba-boom. The time will come for each of us, everyone of us until the last one – yes, even you over there, wannabe revolutionaries”, he bellowed towards the group of students in the corner, who paid him no attention. “The time will come when we are brought to account for the only things that matter on this earth. Life, love and death. And then, amiga, the invisible catches up with us. And the old beliefs that we thought were dead, well, they come back to haunt us. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.” The man toasted the empty chair opposite him and he gulped down his drink, not bothering to wipe away the drops that ran down his chin.
Life, love, death. Thaddeus’ voice the morning of the wedding rushed back into Sixtine’s mind as if he was right behind her, whispering.
“Do you play dominoes?”
The café spun around her, but the man’s antics brought her back to reality. He was toying with a domino, rolling it between his fingers.
“Excuse me?”
“Dominoes. You play, amiga?”
Sixtine shook her head.
“Too bad. Although, I'm sure that today she would have let you win,” he said, pointing to the empty chair opposite him. Then he leaned over to Sixtine and whispered, checking that nobody else would hear, “I guess you are wondering who I'm playing against?”
Sixtine did not answer but just stared at the dominoes that lay scattered on the table.
The man raised his eyebrows, smiled at her and whispered, “La Muerte, amiga. Death herself.”
He cocked his head. “See, every day, we play. For now she lets me win, but...”
The focus of his blood-shot eyes was no longer faltering, lost in an alcoholic delirium – it was aimed straight at Sixtine. For the first time, she noticed that their iris was the same shade of green as hers. He was struggling to steady his gaze, squinting often, and his expression oscillated between fear and yearning. He bent forward to get closer to her. Sixtine recoiled.
“Well,” she said, “I hope La Muerte lets you win for as long as–”
“You look like someone I know, or used to know. How old are you, like, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-three actually, I–” Sixtine stopped short, her stomach contracting.
It was her birthday today.
She had been willing herself to ignore it since the morning, and, with everyone in her past life no longer able to contact her, it had been rather easy.
But she soon forgot about it: the drunkard had stood up and was coming nearer, still staring at her. She would have taken a step back, but for the briefest of moments, she thought she recognized something in him that she hadn’t noticed before.
Something about his face.
Hidden deep within its battered traits, reluctant to come to the light, there seemed to be something that belonged to them both, like some secret shared knowledge.
Her heart started to pound. Had she met this man? Was a memory from her forgotten past coming back?
Throat tightening, voice shaking, she uttered, “Do you remember me?”
His eyes widened at the question. When he opened his mouth to speak, Sixtine held her breath, but no words came out. His stare was suddenly glistening with tears. He extended his hand towards her to steady himself on her shoulder. But in a second, the old waiter was between them, pushing him back.
“Come on dude, that’s enough. Leave the lady alone. Sorry miss. Don’t mind him”
“No, that’s okay. I think I know him.”
But behind the waiter, the man had slipped with unexpected velocity; in no time he was heading towards the door.
“Wait! Sir!”
Sixtine bolted after him, but she was stopped in her tracks by the strong hand of the waiter clasping her arm. He smiled apologetically, waving the check. “Miss, please.”
While Sixtine rummaged through her pocket to find change, a cold draft and the sound of the rain rushed inside the café. It was quiet again. When she glanced at the door, the man was gone. She slapped a bank note on the table and ran.
All she found in the empty street was a scared dog running away from the rolling thunder, his shadow darkening dirty puddles. Something in the sky, just on the edge of her vision, caught her eye. When she focused on it, all she saw were the heavy, billowing dark grey clouds. But her heart had sensed it too, and was beating furiously.
The Prophecy. The pyramid-shaped letter in golden light was still burned in her retina.
When she went back inside, the waiter was chatting excitedly to the bartender, showing him the bank note Sixtine had handed to him. He lost his smile when he saw her coming, silver hair dripping wet.
“Oh. Did you want change?”
She remembered the bank note she had given him. Ten times the cost of the coffee.
“Keep it. But can I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure.” The bank note disappeared in his overstuffed leather wallet.
“Have you ever seen me?”
“I’m pretty certain I haven’t. A pretty lady like you, I would have remembered.”
“And the man who was here?”
“Yeah, he’s been coming here every day for a while. I heard he is a famous poet. Or he was. He can’t write anymore. He just drinks.”
“But he’s not from here.”
“No, I don’t know where he is from, but he sure is not from here. Although he looks like he’s going to stay. It’s a sad story, Miss.”
He glanced at Sixtine, who spurred him to continue.
“He came here to bury his daughter,” the bartender answered.
“How do you know?” Sixtine asked, turning to him.
“He talks when he’s drunk. And he’s drunk a lot.”
“Do you remember when he came here?”
“Oh yeah. May thirty-first.”
“How can you be so sure? That was fi
ve months ago.”
“That was the day before my own daughter got married,” the bartender said. “My only daughter. The guy told me his story, my heart broke. He told me I was lucky to still have a daughter. I promise you, I hugged my girl real tight on her wedding day.” He raised his index and hissed. “And I warned my son-in-law too. If the son-of-a-b–”
“Alright, Raùl, alright,” the waiter interjected, resting a gentle hand on the bartender’s shoulder. “I remember it too. The first time he came, he was with a tall woman, tattooed head to toe, and I mean, head to toe. There was a skull covering all her face, you don’t forget that in a hurry. I can’t say she wasn’t attractive though, but, well… you just don’t forget.”
“Do you know his name?”
They both shook their heads.
“No, we just call him the Poet,” the bartender said.
“But that skull lady, though,” the old waiter said, his eyes shining, “I saw her again, once. Last month, it was. She was coming out of the Gran Hotel, you know, on Zócalo? Wearing a red velvet dress, deep red, tight everywhere.”
When his fingers started to hug an invisible silhouette, his colleague rested his hand gently on his shoulder. “Alright, Javier, alright.”
Sixtine thanked them and hurried out of the café. The rain had begun to fall heavily again. She raised her hood and walked quickly, chin down.
May 31st was five days after their disappearance. They were probably already in the pyramid by then.
Dead end. Again. But in the absence of any trail to follow, the flimsiest of chance sounded like hope. And then there was the Prophecy written across the dark sky above. Was it a sign or a warning? She headed towards the main square in front of the cathedral.
Zócalo.
It was almost deserted. She had no trouble finding the Gran Hotel, on the other side. With her hair dripping wet beneath her hood, she climbed its steps. Life, love, death. Thaddeus’ words were still ringing in her mind, interrupted only by those of the Poet.
The Pyramid Prophecy Page 17
