The Mayan Codex as-2

by Mario Reading

  She had never killed anyone before in her life – far less a pregnant woman and her unborn child. That prospect, although a necessary one, still caused her some distress. But she was confident that she’d get over it.

  3

  Yola Dufontaine had spent most of the previous day fighting off a relentless migraine. She had no idea what had triggered it, but it had been accompanied by repeated images of her honorary blood brother, Damo Sabir, wedged inside the cesspit at the Maset de la Marais, just as she had found him, five months before, when she and Sergeant Spola had broken in to rescue him.

  In her waking dream, Sabir had once again been dying from the distilled snake venom he had secreted in his mouth to kill Achor Bale with. But this time around, Yola was unable to force him to vomit by drenching him with mustard powder and salt water, just as she had done in real life. Instead, she knew for a certainty that he was going to die. But the curious thing was that in this new, fanciful version of events, it wasn’t Sabir who was taking his leave of her, but rather she of him.

  When she told her husband, Alexi, about the migraine and the waking nightmare he had said, quite simply, ‘You are three months pregnant, luludji. The morning sickness has stopped. Maybe hallucinations is the next thing you women get? Nothing can possibly surprise me about pregnancy any more.’

  Yola hadn’t known exactly what she had wanted Alexi to say, but it hadn’t been that. Now she wished that she could get back in touch with Sabir and reassure herself that all was well with him. He and the curandero were the only two people on earth who knew her secret – not even Alexi was privy to it, for reasons that still eluded her, but which were probably related to her fears about his occasional proclivity for binge drinking, and the tearaway tongue that ensued. If Alexi even once blabbed in the camp about her being the mother of the Second Coming, the cat would really hit the skylight, showering them all with broken glass. Best not.

  The curandero was, as always, on the road to somewhere, and therefore impossible to contact – he would either turn up or he wouldn’t. Sabir, on the other hand, lived a more static life.

  Now, still unable to sleep, Yola rummaged around inside her and Alexi’s caravan until she found where she’d hidden the piece of paper Sabir had scribbled his telephone number on. Then, well before dawn, she started down through the woods for Samois and the nearest public telephone booth. Sabir had explained to her that New England was many hours behind France in terms of time, and she wanted to try to catch him before he went to bed.

  4

  Athame and Aldinach had waited at Paris’s Orly Airport from 16.10 in the afternoon until an hour after the final Iberia flight of the evening arrived in from Madrid at 22.35. In this way they missed both Lamia’s entry into France, via the ‘Talgo Night’ train and the Franco-Spanish border, and also that of Calque and Sabir, who had secured themselves last-minute seats on Aero Mexico’s Cancun to Roissy/Charles de Gaulle flight, which touched down at 23.10 the same evening, but at a different airport altogether.

  When they were convinced that Lamia wasn’t going to make a belated exit from the arrivals lounge, the pair tried and failed to contact Abi’s cell phone number for the fifteenth time that day. They then debated for a moment or two about whether to call Madame, their mother, for news, but their upbringing had been so strict, and their sense of hierarchy, in consequence, so acute, that they decided to leave things well enough alone for a further twenty-four hours. They had their orders from Abi. They knew what they must do. Lamia must simply have decided to fly the coop once and for all. And the temporary breakdown in telecommunications must be because Abi and the rest of the Corpus, having milked Calque and Sabir of whatever secrets they had left to give, were already on their way back to France, and therefore temporarily off air.

  The pair then hired themselves a rental car from Avis and drove the eighty kilometres separating Roissy from Samois, arriving in Samois village square at a little after two o’clock in the morning. Then, exhausted from their journey and the fruitless wait at the airport, and dead certain that they weren’t going to find either a hotel room or the Gypsy camp at that unholy time of the night, they settled down to sleep in their car.

  5

  Calque and Sabir had also hired themselves a car. But they had one major advantage over the others – they already knew the location of the Gypsy camp. Furthermore, they were acting on the assumption that Lamia must already be well ahead of them, which provided them with an extra vested interest in hastening to their destination.

  Sabir drove like a demon through the outskirts of Paris. At one uncertain moment, when it wasn’t immediately obvious which side of a concrete bifurcation barrier Sabir intended to make for, Calque had rammed both his feet down onto the floor like Fred Flintstone.

  ‘For God’s sake, man, it won’t solve anything if we get pulled over by the police. Or if we engineer ourselves a head-on collision with a wall. We’re either in time or we’re not. It’s two in the morning. The night duty pandores have nothing better to do than to pick up speeding idiots like you. It’s either that, or pursue real criminals, with all the bureaucracy that that entails. You are doing 200 kilometres an hour in a 130-kilometre-an-hour speed district, Sabir. They’ll throw the book at you and toss away the key with it. You’ll be lucky if they don’t box-flatten the car and charge you for the haulage.’

  ‘You sound just like a policeman.’

  ‘I am a policeman.’

  Sabir had a clear picture in his head of Yola pregnant. The thought of her dying, after all they had been through together, was the stuff of nightmares. She had undoubtedly saved his life back at the Maset de la Marais, just as he had saved hers down at the river, when Achor Bale had tossed her into the ice-cold water like a used rag-doll. She, Alexi, and he belonged to each other. The blood tie that he had inadvertently entered into with Yola’s late brother, Babel Samana, was only a small part of it. He felt responsible for her and for the unborn child to whom he would be serving as kirvo – the Gypsy version of an adoptive godfather. It would be up to him to both christen and baptize the child, and also to support him with money and with mentoring whenever necessary. It would be a lifelong commitment.

  Sabir had been looking forward to all this more than he cared to admit. He had no children of his own, and now that his burgeoning relationship with Lamia had been cut off at the neck, he suspected that he never would have. It was becoming painfully obvious that he wasn’t cut out for the world of conventional relationships.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Sabir gave a small jump. He peered down at the car’s clock. ‘It’s

  2.15.’

  ‘Are you intending to head straight to the caravan?’

  ‘Yes. Do you have you a better plan?’

  ‘No. But I dearly wish we had a weapon of some sort. That hermaphrodite one. Aldinach. He struck me as particularly sinister. He was all set to skewer you back at Ek Balam.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have stopped with me, Calque. He had you in his sights too.’

  ‘Yes. But somehow knowing you were for it first was very comforting to me.’

  Sabir burst out laughing. He let up a little on the accelerator.

  This had been Calque’s plan all along, and he let out a small sigh of gratification. Dying in a car accident on the Paris peripherique had never been one of his ambitions. ‘I still can’t believe that Lamia intends to harm Yola and her child. We can’t have misread her to that extent.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe we simply misunderstood her motives right from the start, and piled error onto error? My father always told me that one isn’t the sum of one’s past actions.’

  ‘But we haven’t misunderstood the other two. They mean Yola harm, and we have to stop them.’

  ‘Whatever it takes?’

  ‘Whatever it takes.’

  6

  Lamia had been counting on the presence of the taxi driver to help convince Yola of her bona fides – if a total stranger asks you to accompany them in a
taxi, it is marginally less threatening than if they appear, out of the blue, and try to inveigle you into their own vehicle. Fifty kilometres short of Samois, however, she changed her mind and ordered the taxi driver to take her to the car rental section at Orly Airport. It simply wouldn’t do for Yola and her to be connected in any way at all in the mind of a third party.

  She rented herself an inconspicuous Peugeot, and then drove the remaining forty kilometres to Samois, arriving in the village at a little after 7.30 in the morning. She intended to ask for directions to the encampment at the bakery – which was inevitably the first shop open in a village, and the font of all gossip – but almost immediately she saw a young Gypsy woman single-mindedly picking her way through the early morning shoppers to the public telephone booth.

  Lamia parked her car in the village square. She got out and stretched. Then she wandered, as if unintentionally, towards the booth.

  The Gypsy woman was having difficulty coordinating the dialling of a number she had written on a piece of paper, the use of her phone card, and the control of the handset.

  Lamia pretended that she was waiting for the booth to be free. ‘Can I help you? I could hold the piece of paper and call out the number for you while you dial.’

  The Gypsy woman looked Lamia over. Lamia forced herself not to look down, in return, at the woman’s stomach. It was too early yet for much to show, so a glance in the wrong direction would give her away before she even had a chance to establish herself as a potential friend. And maybe her hunch was wrong? Maybe this woman was not Yola, but another person entirely? At least, then, she would be able to find out the location of the camp.

  Yola took in Lamia’s birthmark and the non-assertive clothes. She had seen her pulling up in the Peugeot, and knew that she was alone. A well-meaning payo, then – they turned up all the time. Some even wanted to become Gypsies themselves, and live the so-called romantic life. What a joke.

  Yola nodded, although without smiling. ‘Yes. Please do this.’

  Lamia studied the sheet of paper. It was a 001 number. France to the United States. She decided to take a calculated gamble, even though she had no idea whose the number really was. If the woman wasn’t who she thought she was, then nothing would be lost. ‘But this is Adam Sabir’s number, isn’t it?’ She hesitated, as if unsure of her ground. ‘You must be Yola, then? Yola Samana?’

  ‘I am Yola Dufontaine.’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. You’re married now. To Alexi. Adam told me.’

  Yola frowned. It was early in the morning. In a small village miles from anywhere. It was impossible that she could have been followed – she had only made the decision to walk down to the phone booth at the very last moment. What did this woman with the marred face want from her? Why was she here? ‘You know Adam?’

  ‘I’m his girlfriend.’

  Yola blushed. It was a rare thing for her, but the strawberry birthmark on the woman’s face was so categorical – so impossible to miss – that it was almost as if it spoke to you of its own accord. The birthmark was telling her that, yes, you thought I could not attract the attention of a man. Summon up his desire. Seduce him. But you were wrong.

  ‘His girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve just been in Mexico together. I came back yesterday. I came out here especially to find you. So it’s incredibly lucky we’ve run into each other. I can tell you now that you won’t find Adam at home. He’s still in Mexico with Joris Calque. They are trying to arrange for temporary passports, after their own passports were stolen. But the only place to get such things is in Mexico City, at the American and French Consulates. And the two of them are stuck in Cancun. I still had my passport, so Adam asked me to come out here and find you. I was just on my way up to your camp. But I wanted to buy some croissants first. To bring as a present.’

  ‘As a present?’

  ‘Yes. In the absence of flowers. I have been driving all night.’

  ‘Flowers?’ Yola was feeling nonplussed. Who was this strange woman who appeared to know so much about her? And what extraordinary stroke of chance had brought her here, just as Yola was preparing to contact Sabir for the first time in three months? ‘Why did Damo tell you to contact me?’

  ‘Oh. Damo. That’s your Gypsy name for him, isn’t it? He told me about it.’

  ‘Are you really his girlfriend?’ Yola was staring at Lamia as if she might be able to sense if the other woman was lying simply through some antediluvian, beyond rational, female instinct.

  ‘How can I prove it to you?’ Lamia smiled to hide her uneasiness. Yola’s eyes were stripping her bare. No Frenchwoman would ever have looked at her with such a frank and unremitting gaze. She realized that she would have to dig deep in order to come up with something capable, in and of itself, of breaking through the reserve that one race sometimes feels in the presence of another – that one woman can sometimes feel in the presence of another, when both, without being previously acquainted, are nonetheless intimately connected through their mutual love of a third party. ‘I’ve got it. This will sound silly, I know. But have you ever seen Adam without his clothes on? I don’t mean in the obvious way, of course. I know you two were never involved like that. But casually. Like a brother.’

  Yola shrugged. But her eyes held Lamia’s in a level gaze. Woman to woman. ‘Yes. I have seen him. On a number of occasions. Both sick and well. Once, even, when I was going to castrate him. When I thought he had killed my brother.’

  Lamia’s breath caught in her throat. ‘He never told me about that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done. It is something we both have forgotten.’ Yola cocked her head to one side. ‘Why have you asked me this?’

  ‘Because you would know about his scar.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I, too, know about it. For obvious reasons.’

  ‘Where is the scar?’

  ‘There are two. One is the main scar. The other is a drainage scar. From when he lost a kidney in his late twenties thanks to a congenital malformation. The drainage scar is below the main scar. Both are very beautiful.’

  Yola laughed. ‘You finds his scars beautiful? Damo really must have closed your eyes.’

  ‘He finds my face beautiful.’

  Yola gave a slow nod. The expression on her face began to transform itself from one of wariness into one of acceptance. ‘Your face is beautiful. In our tribe, if a person has a mark on their face or body, we say that they have been touched by O Del ’s own hand. That it is a mark of His especial favour.’

  ‘ O Del?’

  ‘It is our name for God.’

  ‘Do you really say that?’

  ‘I promise you.’

  ‘It is nice to hear such a thing.’

  Both women stood looking at each other. Still measuring each other up. Yola was the first to break the silence. ‘Why does Damo want you to speak to me?’

  ‘Can we talk in a less public place? I can drive you somewhere.’

  ‘No. We must talk here.’

  Lamia glanced around. The longer she remained in the public arena, the more likely someone was to remember her – she was not, after all, inconspicuous. She decided that she must get her point across as swiftly as possible – get Yola out of there and into an isolated location without further ado. She had bought herself a lock-knife back at Madrid airport, in a hardware store situated just outside the main departure gates – rather surreally, for an airport shop, the place specialized in locally sourced Toledo steel.

  Milouins had shown her exactly where and how to strike when she, and Madame, her mother, had been preparing their plans. The way he had explained it, it would only take one blow. Both child and mother would be dead in seconds, with very little pain. All she’d have to do would be to curl Yola’s hand about the haft of the knife, and then leave the mess for the police to sort out. Suicide as a result of pre-natal depression? Internecine Gypsy feuds? There was fertile ground for potential obfuscation.

  ‘The Corpus Maleficus are after
you. We encountered them in Mexico. Through a terrible piece of bad luck, they learned who you are and who you are carrying.’ Lamia motioned with one hand towards Yola’s stomach. ‘Adam sent me out here to warn you. To get you away from the camp and to a safe place. He will be over here himself in maybe two days, when he gets the passports sorted.’

  All the colour drained from Yola’s face. ‘What did you say? About who I am carrying?’

  ‘Listen to me, Yola. During a hallucinatory experience in a touj, deep in the Yucatan, Adam inadvertently let slip that you were to be the mother of the Second Coming. He was half crazy with datura at the time. And we had been the subject of a number of extreme experiences in the run-up to the seance, so he wasn’t in his right mind to start with. The drug just made it worse. We thought we were finally amongst friends. That all the people present would be instrumental in welcoming the birth of your child. In promulgating the good news. But a member of the Corpus Maleficus was also in the room. He heard Adam’s words. Now he is coming over here to kill you. I am just ahead of him. I need to take you to a safe place where we can wait for Adam and Calque. You do believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘I believe that you are Damo’s lover. I can see it in your eyes. Women can’t lie about such things. Emotions like that go deeper with us than they do with men.’

  Lamia could sense the blood flushing into her face. She tilted her head a little to one side, in an old habit she had of protecting herself when she felt particularly threatened. ‘Yes. They do.’ Lamia could sense that this was her moment. If she blew this chance, she would be forced to act prematurely, and in a public place. It would be a disaster. It would mean exiling herself for life from everything she knew and cared for – but it would be a sacrifice Madame, her mother, would expect her to make. ‘Will you come with me? We can go back to the camp if you want. Fetch whatever you need. We would only need to be away for a few days.’