The Mayan Codex as-2

by Mario Reading

  With any luck, whoever had been tailing him would be fully taken up with communicating to the Countess that Calque was still tucked cosily away inside the gendarmerie – no doubt spilling the beans about the dead footman. Disinformation. Disingenuousness. Deceit. The three D’s. His late lamented mentor, Maurice Edard – an old-school policeman who had cut his milk teeth in the good old pre-1966 days when the Police Nationale was still the Surete – would have been proud of him.

  Calque grinned as he imagined the bedlam back at the Domaine. The Countess would be ordering the decks cleared pretty fast if she thought the police might be about to pay her an unexpected visit.

  32

  By the time he arrived at the Esposito, Calque was 99 per cent certain that he hadn’t been followed. He had doubled back on himself twice more since his first flurry of activity, confined himself to side streets only, and he had even done a Humphrey Bogart – minus Dorothy Malone, unfortunately – in a second-hand bookshop.

  When Calque reached the restaurant he didn’t linger by the menu board, but plunged straight in. He didn’t really expect Lamia to be waiting for him. In fact it was far more likely that the message was a false trail laid by the Corpus in an attempt to provide themselves with a fallback position – in case he eluded them the first time, say, or in case he had been professional enough to actually bother hiding his notes, rather than simply to leave them in plain view, like the very worst sort of greenhorn. But what else could he do but take the note at face value? It was the only way he could think of to remain in the game.

  Lamia was sitting with her back to him, in one of the private booths. Calque’s heart gave a lurch as he saw her. It astonished him to realize that he had been genuinely concerned for her safety. I must be getting soft in my old age, he thought to himself. First I go into mourning for my racist worm of an assistant, and now I’m acting like a bleeding heart for the sister of the very man who killed him.

  He sat down in front of her, facing the door, his expression studiously immobile.

  Lamia looked up at him. She held his eyes for ten seconds, and when he didn’t respond, she quietly slid a packet of papers across the table towards him.

  ‘My notes?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I didn’t dare to hope.’ Calque’s features relaxed, like those of a Chinese shar-pei dog. ‘How in God’s name did you do it?’

  Lamia shrugged. ‘I knew, the moment you gave the taxi driver the name of your hotel, and mentioned the fictitious Madame Mercier in front of him, that my mother would know all about it within twenty minutes – that we would both be fatally compromised. She owns half of St Tropez, Captain. She has feelers everywhere.’

  ‘I know. I spoke to her.’

  Lamia’s eyes widened. ‘You…’

  Calque reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘The notes, Lamia. How did you manage to get the notes? I can explain all the rest of it later.’

  Lamia’s expression lightened momentarily. ‘The taxi journey gave me time to think things through – to work out where we were most vulnerable. When I got to the hotel I pretended to the concierge that I was your mistress. He didn’t bite at first – I mean, who in his right mind would want someone like me as his mistress?’ She thrust herself back in her chair, as though she were challenging Calque to contradict her – to negate the reality of her face. ‘But then I gave him the rest of your money as a sweetener, and he handed over your key. It’s curious how easily men believe us women when we talk of sex.’

  Calque inclined his head politely. In reality he was desperately embarrassed at the sudden vulnerability she had shown about her birthmark. But he found it impossible, in the present circumstances, to summon up a suitably gallant riposte. ‘And my notes? You read them?’

  Lamia turned quickly away.

  ‘Listen. That was not an accusation. I want you to read them – in fact I desperately need your help.’

  Lamia turned back. ‘So you believe me?’

  ‘Yes. I believe you. I lied when I told you about the tape recorder this morning. I got nothing, absolutely nothing, from that idiotic stunt I pulled – apart from the drone of a vacuum cleaner, and the occasional crash of moving furniture.’

  Lamia snatched one hand to her face, as if she were about to stifle an outburst of the giggles.

  Calque pretended not to notice. ‘In point of fact I’m no further forward with anything. I might as well have spent the past five weeks windsurfing in Hawaii for all I’ve managed to achieve.’

  ‘You? Windsurfing? Surely not?’ Lamia allowed her hand to drop slowly back towards the table. It was a strange movement, akin to the shucking of a veil. Almost as if she were voluntarily revealing herself to him for the very first time. She tilted her head fractionally to one side to indicate that she was no longer jesting. ‘Why should I help you, Captain? Why should I betray my family to someone I only met a few hours ago?’

  Calque sat back in his seat. ‘No reason. No reason whatsoever. You’ve already helped me way beyond any capacity I may have to repay you, simply by keeping my notes from the Corpus. If you were to get up and leave now, I would still be infinitely grateful to you. There would be no blame attached to anything you’ve done.’

  Lamia’s eyes scanned Calque’s face, as though searching for clues to a long-standing and elusive mystery. ‘What are you expecting of me?’

  ‘I want you to tell me what you can of the Corpus’s plans.’

  ‘So you do want me to betray my family?’

  ‘Just as they’ve betrayed you. Yes. I won’t lie to you, Lamia. I believe the Corpus to be evil. And furthermore I believe your mother to be a person with no moral scruples whatsoever. Someone who would not hesitate to use any means necessary, including murder, to get her own way.’

  Lamia watched him, one hand splayed across her chest, as if she had temporarily lost control of her heart rate. ‘How much do you already know? About my mother, I mean. About her role in the Corpus Maleficus. ’

  ‘Assume I know nothing.’

  ‘What particular question do you want to ask me?’

  ‘A simple one. What went on in that room when you all met?’

  Lamia still seemed to be weighing him up. ‘The people you saw. Entering the house. You know they are all my brothers and sisters?’

  ‘I deduced that much, yes. And your mother as good as confirmed it to me.’

  Lamia shook her head. ‘I still don’t understand why she let you go. You say you saw her? It seems impossible to me.’

  Calque waved away the waiter. He hunched towards her across the table. ‘I’m a senior ex-policeman, Lamia. Riverbanks collapse when unexpected things happen to senior ex-policemen – islands are washed away. Your mother was convinced she already had you back under her control. She thought she had my notes. Why muddy the waters further? I don’t think she rates me very highly.’

  ‘Then she’s a fool.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to think so – but I don’t believe it for an instant. But if she has made a mistake about me, then she has made exactly the same mistake about you.’

  Lamia turned her face away from him again. It was obviously a well-rehearsed, if entirely unconscious, movement. Almost as if she wished to give her interlocutor a rest from having to look at her blemish – or to give herself a rest from having to bear the weight of other people’s disenchantment. Just for a moment it was possible for Calque to imagine that she was merely a beautiful young woman – that she didn’t have a monstrous birthmark splayed, like a palm print, across the intimate confines of her cheek.

  Then she turned back to him, her eyes challenging him for a reaction. ‘You guessed right about me, Captain. Some time ago I decided that I wanted nothing more to do with my mother’s machinations. The other night it all came to a head. I’d spent weeks building up enough courage to tell her the truth about my feelings. Stupidly, I decided to do it in front of my entire family. At a moment when they were all expecting me to formally renew my allegiance to the cause
the de Bales have been single-mindedly dedicating themselves to for nearly eight hundred years. It wasn’t what you might call good timing.’

  ‘And what is your mother machinating? What is this cause that unites different generations of the same family over centuries of time?’

  Lamia hesitated. ‘The man. Sabir. He’s your friend, is he not?’

  Calque shook his head. ‘I swore I’d be honest with you, Lamia. I’d be lying if I said Adam Sabir was my friend. We connected, briefly, at a low point in both our lives. He took pity on me, after the death of my assistant, and shared some information with me that he is probably now regretting he let slip – probably because he was doped up with morphine at the time. That’s the full extent of our relationship. That’s as far as it goes.’

  ‘Then why are you still interested in him?’

  ‘Because I think he holds the key to something your mother, and through her, the Corpus, wants.’

  ‘And you believe in this Corpus?’

  ‘I think your mother does. And I believe her to be a very rich, very powerful, and very evil, woman. I also believe that it was she who was directly responsible for my assistant’s death. And if she was, I intend to make her pay for it. I owe that much to his family.’ He hesitated, then allowed his gaze to drop. ‘And to myself.’

  Lamia followed him with her eyes. She hesitated for a moment, still watching him. Then she took in a quick breath, which was almost a gasp. ‘You’re right, Captain. You’ve been right all along. My mother was directly responsible for your assistant’s death. She admitted as much to us the other night.’

  Calque lurched forwards, his face alive. ‘I knew it. So I haven’t been wasting my time?’

  Lamia shook her head. ‘Far from it, Captain. But the information won’t help you. And it certainly won’t save Sabir.’

  ‘What do you mean “save Sabir”? What are you talking about?’

  Lamia held Calque’s eyes with her own. ‘My twin brothers left yesterday for the United States. Under my mother’s direct orders.’ She glanced down at her watch. ‘By now, Adam Sabir will be dead.’

  PART TWO

  PROLOGUE

  1

  At first you thought it was simply another earthquake. There had been three in the past few days, and you had become used to them by now.

  It always went the same way. First, your stomach unexpectedly turned over. For a second or two, you were frozen to the spot, wondering what had happened. Then, if you were unlucky enough to be caught inside your hut, you might have the presence of mind to look upwards. If the oil lamps were swinging, you knew it was an earthquake, and you hurried outside, the ground swelling and bloating underneath you, until you could find somewhere safe to sit that wasn’t directly under a tree, a telegraph pole, or any masonry. Then you watched your hut to see if it would fall down.

  When the earthquake was over, you would walk back towards your hut, the aftershocks making you feel ever so slightly nauseous. Then you would remember to thank God that the earthquake was only a small one, and that the epicentre was a few hundred miles away on the other side of the country, and you would force yourself back to work.

  But this was no earthquake. When you concentrated, you realized that the shaking and trembling of the floor of your hut was also accompanied by a deep rumbling sound. You ran outside and you looked across the hills. One hundred and ten kilometres away from where you lived, the great volcano, 5675 metres high, pierced the sky. You had looked at it every day of your life. All through the year, snow coated its pinnacle, despite the near-tropical climate in which you lived. You had heard that it was still active, but everyone knew that it had not erupted for more than a century and a half. The two great volcanoes four and a half hours further west from you regularly smoked, polluting the atmosphere, or so you had heard, with the smell of sulphur, shit, and rotten eggs. But your volcano had always seemed dormant by comparison. Resting. Unhurried.

  Now a massive cloud encircled the familiar peak, blotting out the sun. Even from one hundred kilometres away, you began to catch the smell of sulphur on the air. Soon, you sensed, it would be all pervasive, like the smell of a rotting animal in the underbrush.

  You followed the course of the eruption in bewildered wonderment. And as you stood there watching, volcanic ash and tiny balls of mud, about a quarter of an inch in diameter, began to patter around you like hailstones. In the distance, thick clouds of black, white, and blue roiled up from the vent, shot through with eerily silent bolts of lightning, as if someone had inadvertently switched off the sound on the village television set.

  You had never thought that this would happen in your lifetime. As guardian of the codex – just as your father, and your grandfather, and your great-grandfather had been guardians of the codex before you – you had been preparing for this event for 163 years. Ever since the last eruption. Your family’s only task during that period had been to make sure that no one discovered the location of the cave that housed the codex, or tampered with its contents. That task was completed. Now, your second, and greater, task would begin.

  And that task involved a journey to the south. A journey for which you were terminally unprepared.

  2

  The Tanyard, Stockbridge,

  Massachusetts

  For some months, now, Adam Sabir had been unable to complete a full night’s sleep inside his own house.

  As soon as he began to drift off, the nightmares would return, and with them the claustrophobia that had tormented him since early childhood, when some schoolmates, as part of a Halloween prank, had bound and gagged and then locked him inside the trunk of his professor’s car, in imitation, or so he later learned, of a scene from a horror flick that was currently doing the rounds at the local drive-in movie houses.

  The professor had discovered Sabir three hours later, his gag chewed to a pulp, moaning, hallucinating, and half out of his head with fear. Sabir had spent the rest of that semester at home and in bed, alternately chain-reading for comfort, and then throwing up as a result of the tranquillizers his psychiatrist was forced to prescribe him for whenever the street doors of his parent’s house needed to be shut and bolted.

  In true prep school tradition, Sabir had found it impossible to squeal on his tormentors. But years later, as a journalist, he had taken his revenge on them in a manner reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo – he had built them up, in other words, each man in his turn, and had then proceeded to tear them down again in an avalanche of failed vainglory.

  But the fear of enclosed spaces still lurked in his psyche like a recurring nightmare – only a thousand times exacerbated by what he had experienced earlier that summer, in France, in the cellar of an abandoned house in the French Camargue.

  Over the past few months, Sabir’s cycle of disrupted sleep had always followed the exact same pattern. First would come the hyper-realist dreams, in which he was back in the cesspit again, deep in the cellar below the Gypsy safe-house in the French Camargue. In these dreams he was up to his neck in raw sewage, his head bent backwards to protect his mouth, his forehead tight up against the lid of the cesspit, which Achor Bale was sliding shut across his face.

  Then came the dreams of dreams, in which Sabir revisited the hallucinations he had experienced whilst sealed inside the cesspit. Hallucinations in which his arms and legs were torn off, his torso shredded, his intestines, lights, bowels, and bladder dragged out of his body like offal from a butchered horse. Later in the dream a snake would come towards him – a thick uncoiling python of a snake, with the scales of a fish, and staring eyes, and a hinged skull like that of an anaconda. The snake would swallow Sabir’s head, forcing it down the entire length of its body with convulsive movements of its myosin-fuelled muscles, like a reverse birth.

  Later, Sabir would become the snake, its head his head, its eyes his eyes. It was at this exact point in the dream that he always awoke, his body drenched in sweat, his eyes bulging from his face like those of a startled ca
t. He would throw on his dressing-gown and hurry out into the garden, where he would stand, gulping in fresh air, and cursing Achor Bale and the perniciousness of posthumous effect.

  The rest of the night would be spent in his father’s old Hatteras hammock, in the garden house, with the veranda doors thrown open to the elements, a single blanket draped over his quasi-foetal shape. He had tried switching to a sleeping bag, but the bag’s innate constriction had seen him thrashing around like an emergent chrysalis, desperate to disentangle its body from the pupal shell before serving as some passing bird’s hors d’oeuvre.

  On this particular evening the dream had come to him with more than its usual vigour and destructive force. Sabir was perilously close to hyperventilating by the time he made his way across the lawn and into the garden house.

  Rationally, he knew that it made no earthly sense for him to persist in trying to sleep in the main building. What was the point, when he would simply come rushing out again, three hours later, gasping for air? But some obstinate part of himself refused to give up on the attempt to live an ordinary life.

  He privately feared that once he abandoned all pretence at living inside – once he gave up fighting, in other words – his claustrophobia would enter the obsessive-compulsive stage, dooming him to a downward spiral of psychoanalysis and soporifics.

  For that was the way his mother had gone. A steady, inexorable descent towards drug dependence and enforced hospitalization. It had destroyed his father’s life, and it had come close to destroying his own.

  Recently, Sabir had begun wondering if he wasn’t hellbent on repeating the family pattern?