Age of Aztec a-4

by James Lovegrove

  For the first time since arriving in Anahuac, Mal felt able to relax a little. Underlying tension remained. Reston was not in the bag yet, far from it. But her judgement had been proved right. She had taken a terrific gamble and it looked as though it might pay off.

  As a reward, she treated herself and Aaronson to courtside seats at a tlachtli game. It was a Teotihuacan derby between the Quails and the Wild Boars. Each team had its mob of fanatical supporters, many of whom came dressed in appropriate animal garb. Each team was also solely and exclusively made up of, in the case of the Quails, men with Olmec ancestry and, in the case of the Wild Boars, men with Zapotec ancestry. Tlachtli was one of the last bastions of tribalism in Anahuac. In no other walk of life was ethnic derivation allowed to be a distinguishing factor. Officially every inhabitant of the Land Between The Seas was an Aztec, end of story. But an exception was made for the ball game. Here, origins mattered. A player’s bloodline had to be traced and verified before he could join his chosen side. If nothing else, this made for a better contest, especially when rival ethnicities clashed. Those matches were grudge matches, bloodier and more brutal than any other fixture. The animosities were ancient and bone-marrow deep, and the ball court was the only place where parading and venting them was tolerated. Severe injuries were guaranteed, fatalities not unheard of.

  Mal and Aaronson, being foreigners and unaligned, opted to root for the Quails. The choice was made on no other grounds than that Aaronson took a shine to one of the Quails’ hoop defenders, a beautiful slender creature whose kilt, as he and his teammates went through their warm-up exercises before the start of the match, rode up to expose a pair of buttocks to die for. “Unless you can think of a better reason, boss,” Aaronson said, and Mal could not.

  The game was tooth-and-nail almost from the outset. For the first few minutes both teams did genuinely seem to be vying to win by notching up a greater number of points than the opposition, and there were displays of considerable tlachtli artistry. Players bounced the solid rubber ball off their bodies using every part of themselves except heads, hands and feet. With expert precision they passed it amongst their own teams and nudged it up along the angled side wall towards the hoop. Goals were scored. The crowd roared.

  Gradually, though, the fouling crept in, and then worsened. Leather hip pads and shoulder guards stopped became more offensive weapons than protection. Elbows jabbed. Heads butted. Fists flew. Several times, play degenerated into out-and-out brawling. The referee stepped in and dispensed stern cautions, and for a while good sportsmanship would resume, but never for long. Eventually there was open combat on the court, with no pretence of chasing the ball, and the referee gave up trying to umpire the proceedings and devoted himself to preventing any of the players coming to serious harm. He wasn’t very successful in that endeavour, as on several occasions a stray blow landed on him and he pitched into the fray himself.

  The crowd lapped it up. They bayed for blood. They could hardly contain their glee as fistfight followed fistfight. By the time the final whistle blew, the scoreboard showed 9–4 to the Quails, a convincing victory. In every other respect, however, the team got trounced. The Wild Boars left five of them in need of medical attention, compared with the Quails’ own tally of just two opponents hospitalised.

  Among the Quail injured was Aaronson’s beloved hoop defender, who’d gone down with a gouged-out eye. All the way back to the hotel Aaronson lamented the fact that a potential love affair had been so cruelly nipped in the bud, over before it could even begin. He also bemoaned the ruination of such sublime physical beauty.

  “I think he could really have been The One,” he said.

  “With you they’re always The One,” Mal replied, “right up until they turn out to be The One Night Only. Besides, you didn’t even talk to him. You didn’t even meet him. He’s just someone you leered at from a distance.”

  “It was true love.”

  “True lust, more like.”

  “You don’t have a romantic bone in your body, do you, boss? You wouldn’t know love if it came up and slapped you in the face. No. Correction. With you, love is a slap in the face.”

  “Easy there, sergeant,” Mal warned.

  “I’m just saying, from what I’ve seen you don’t have relationships — you have mutual abuse. You go for men you either feel nothing for or who feel nothing for you, and the more sordid and seamy your trysts are, the better. You know what? I think you don’t like yourself very much. You punish yourself all the time. You don’t believe you’re worthy of love or of anything good. It’s like you’re doing penance, who knows for what.”

  “Here’s the mark, Aaronson.” Mal held out a hand in front of her, like a meat cleaver. She moved it a couple of feet to the right. “Here’s how far you’re overstepping it.”

  “Look, let’s forget we’re DCI and sergeant for a moment,” Aaronson said. “Let’s just be what we are, which is friends. Good friends, I like to think. That means I can be frank with you if I want, and I do want. You’re a good-looking woman, Malinalli. If I was straight, I’d take a crack at you, definitely. You’re a success in a tough, unforgiving profession. You’re intimidatingly smart and sharp. You’ve got it all. But you’re also a fool to yourself. You’re never happy. Whatever it is that drives you inside so hard, it won’t let you rest, it won’t let you find contentment, it leads you to sabotage everything you achieve. Why can’t you tell that voice inside your head just to shut up every once in a while? I don’t mean deaden it with drink or drugs so you can’t hear it. I mean get it to pipe down and stop nagging so you can actually enjoy life for a change.”

  “That’s rich, coming from you. When I need a lecture in self-restraint and sobriety from the world’s greatest hedonist…”

  “At least I know how to kick back and have fun.”

  “I have fun!” Mal said indignantly.

  “When? When was the last time? Recently? This year? Last year?”

  Mal was all set to answer, but she stalled. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t recall a single occasion, as an adult, when she’d done something for the sheer pleasure of it. Sex with strangers didn’t qualify. There was physical satisfaction to be had, but that was about all. Beyond that, the encounters were brief and meaningless and usually conducted through an alcoholic haze.

  “Tonight,” she said at last. “The game. That was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “It was a bloodbath.”

  “Still, I heard you cheering.”

  “Granted, but did you? Cheer, I mean.”

  “Yes,” said Mal. “I think so. Didn’t I?”

  “Not so’s anyone would notice. You sat there stony-faced throughout.”

  “Inside, I was cheering.”

  “Doesn’t count.”

  They’d reached the hotel. After checking at the reception desk for messages, they crossed the lobby and rode the rickety lift to the sixth floor.

  “Fun’s overrated, anyway,” Mal said as she unlocked the door to their room. “Fun’s for idiots.”

  “Which is unquestionably the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said,” Aaronson replied.

  They got ready for bed in frigid silence, like an old married couple after a tiff.

  It was in the small hours of that night that the call came about Reston’s arrest.

  The town of Mixquiahuala sat perched on a ridge of high ground above a plain. At its feet, chinampas fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Behind it, dark green rainforested slopes glowered.

  The main approach road ran along a causeway, raised between deep irrigation canals in the chinampas. Farmhands were already out amid the maize crop, wrenching out weeds and relieving the vermin traps of their overnight haul of cavy and capybara corpses.

  Past the fields the road snaked upslope to the town and, once inside its environs, branched off a dozen different ways. Mal pulled up alongside a pastry seller who was setting out his wares in front of his shop. He gave her directions to the town’s Jaguar HQ, and she
purchased a couple of meringue-topped sponge cakes from him to placate Aaronson, who’d not stopped whingeing about how hungry he was the entire journey.

  Necalli, the duty officer at the Jaguar HQ, had an amazing shovel-shaped nose, so large that it left little room on his face for his other features. After a few preliminaries he escorted the two British Jaguars downstairs to the holding cells. He told them that the prisoner had been in a disorientated state when he was brought in yesterday evening. He appeared underfed and showed all the signs of someone who’d been in the rainforest for several days: covered in bites, stings and scratches, not properly bathed, hair and clothing unkempt.

  “Also, he’s been babbling, on and off. In English. No one round here speaks it, so we haven’t been able to make head or tail of what he’s saying. We haven’t even been able to process him properly. We’re hoping you’ll be able to help with that, now you’re here.”

  “You took his armour off him, I suppose.”

  Necalli gave her a look: This is Anahuac. You breeze in from a piddling little island colony like Britain and speak to us like we don’t know how to do our jobs?

  “Just asking,” she said.

  “As it happened, he surrendered the armour quietly. The arresting officers thought he was going to put up a fight, but he just handed everything over when invited to — sword, gun, the works — and went with them meek as a lamb. The funny thing was, he was wearing only a few items of armour, not a whole set. Like he’d dressed in a hurry and not been able to finish. All in all, he’s a queer fish. If it hadn’t been for you distributing round that intel about him, we’d have had a hell of a time figuring out who and what he was. We’d probably have assumed he was some kind of mental case and handed him over to a psychiatric care unit. I doubt any of us would have identified him as a terrorist. More likely a victim of bewilderness.”

  “Bewilderness?” said Aaronson.

  “You know. Civilian heads off for a jaunt into the forest, underprepared, thinks it’ll be just like a meander through the woods, a nice daytrip. He gets hopelessly lost, walks in circles for days or even weeks, and finally finds his way out, but by that time he’s been driven half mad by thirst, hunger and fever. Bewilderness. It happens more often than you’d think. And it’s almost always white foreigners. Some urge they have to conquer nature, challenge themselves, find themselves, maybe have a kind of ascetic spiritual experience, like religious hermits in the olden days. Anahuac natives are far too sensible for that. We know how fucking dangerous the rainforest is. We prefer our towns, most of us, with our air-conditioned buildings and our clean running water.”

  “But the armour,” said Mal. “Wouldn’t that have been a big clue that he was something out of the ordinary?”

  Necalli shrugged. “I’ve seen stranger. This one guy, a few years back, he turned up on the outskirts of Mixquiahuala naked apart from an anaconda skin. He’d killed the snake and cut the skin off and draped it around himself like a sort of cloak. There was plenty of it, too, so the snake itself must have been a monster. He was under the delusion that by wearing it he had become an anaconda himself. He died in custody.”

  “Oh, one of those. Resisting arrest.”

  “No, a genuine accident. There was a rat in his cell — crawled in via the toilet. He caught it and tried to swallow it whole. Choked to death.” Necalli chuckled ghoulishly at the memory. It seemed there wasn’t a Jaguar in the world who didn’t have a streak of gallows humour. It went with the territory. “The forest can do things to a man’s mind. Make him lose it completely, sometimes. I think that’s what may have happened to your Mr Reston.”

  “He’s not ‘my’ Mr Reston,” Mal said, but in a way he was. She felt about him much as a lioness must feel about the carcass of her prey — proprietorial, covetous.

  “Visitors, Reston,” Necalli called out, peering through the spy hole in one of the cell doors. “Up and at ’em.” To Mal and Aaronson he said, “He’s not very lively. All he’s done since he got here is wallow on the bunk. I doubt he’ll give us any trouble, but let’s keep our macuahitl s at the ready just in case.”

  He patted his sword and nodded at Mal’s. She was reminded that she hadn’t yet got round to upgrading to a DCI’s macuahitl yet, the version with the crystal snowflake patterns embedded in its obsidian. She’d been, to say the least, preoccupied.

  The cell reeked of unwashed body. Reston lay on his back on the narrow, mattress-less bunk. He stirred as they entered, blinking groggily and rolling onto his side. His hair was lank and matted and several days’ growth of stubble coarsened his chin. Scabs and swellings stippled his forearms and neck, constellations of infection, and he’d shed several pounds. His clothes were torn and caked in dirt. All in all, he was a far cry from the sleek, groomed businessman Mal had met at Reston Rhyolitic or for that matter the fit, muscular jogger she had run alongside the Thames with. His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked fragile. No, cracked, that was the word. Like a dropped cup.

  “Stuart Reston,” Mal said. “Fancy meeting you here. You should have realised you could never get away. Long arm of the law and all that.”

  At the sound of his native tongue, Reston become more animated. He propped himself up into a sitting position. He peered up at the faces of his three visitors, his gaze alighting last on Mal’s.

  “Fuck me, it’s you,” he croaked. “My supercop nemesis.” He forced a smile. “Well, welcome to my new abode, Inspector Vaughn. Slightly more humble than I’m accustomed to, but make yourself at home anyway. I’d offer you and your friends seats, except…”

  There was barely floorspace in the cell for the three Jaguars to stand.

  “You’ve been having a hell of a time of it, by the looks of you,” Mal said. “Hard, isn’t it, living rough and on the run? And ending up in this grotty little cell — it must make you regret all the choices you’ve made.”

  “I never had you pegged as the gloating type, but you’re just loving this, aren’t you?”

  “I am feeling a warm rosy glow inside, I can’t deny. You’ve put me through several tons of shit, Reston. It would take a better person than I am to not get some satisfaction out of seeing you in the state you’re in now. The phrase ‘how are the mighty fallen’ springs to mind. That and ‘serves you bloody well right.’”

  “So what now? I’m getting dragged back to England, presumably.”

  “That’s the general idea. A few arrangements have to be made first, but basically you’re coming back with us to face the music.”

  “Any chance we can use Nahuatl?” Necalli interjected. “I don’t like being excluded from a conversation in my own station.”

  “Fine by me,” said Mal, in Nahuatl.

  “If we must,” said Reston, likewise.

  “Ah, bilingual after all,” said Necalli. “I was starting to wonder.”

  “I wasn’t in the frame of mind to co-operate before. Wasn’t in the frame of mind to do much at all, as a matter of fact. But now that the delightful Inspector Vaughn has appeared…”

  Reston accompanied the remark with a gesture in Mal’s direction. Instantly, all three Jaguars’ hands flashed to their sword hilts.

  “Hey,” Reston said. “Easy does it. I’d be crazy to try and take on three of law enforcement’s finest. Especially at such close quarters. I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “But you are crazy,” Mal said, “that’s just it. Haven’t you realised? Nutty as squirrel shit.”

  “In your opinion. Although I must say, there are things I’ve seen recently that have made even me begin to doubt my own sanity.” Reston’s voice trailed off. He became lost in some deep inner musing, grappling with bafflement and despair. “Men as gods,” he said, mostly to himself. “Gods as men. Demigods? Who knows? Where do you draw the line? How do you distinguish?”

  “Nahuatl,” Necalli growled. Reston had reverted to English. “If you please.”

  Mal shook her head in an exaggerated show of pity. “Maybe you aren’t mad, Reston. Maybe
for the first time in a long while you’re lucid and the consequences of your actions are hitting home. The guilt’s catching up. In which case, now is the time to ask if you’ve given any thought to what’s going to become of your company now that its CEO has been unmasked as an anti-Imperial seditionary? Did you even think that far ahead? All those people on your payroll — however many hundreds it is — suddenly their jobs are up in the air, their livelihoods on the line, thanks to you and your psychopathic dog-and-pony show. Do you have any idea how far Reston Rhyolitic stock has fallen since word got out who the Conquistador really is?”

  “I imagine the shares hit rock bottom but bounced back. Some other company has launched a takeover bid and now owns a controlling stake. Am I right?”

  “Well, yes actually, but — ”

  “Who is it? CCMM in Italy? One of the Indian consortiums?”

  “I have no idea, and I care even less. I only know that someone has.”

  “No surprise. Reston Rhyolitic’s too good and too successful that anyone would ever let it fall by the wayside. I made provision, you see. If something untoward were to happen to me — and being arrested and having to flee the country definitely qualifies as that — I arranged things so that the company would immediately be put out to tender, lock, stock and barrel. That way it wouldn’t be broken down and sold off piecemeal but kept as a whole entity, a going concern. My people’s jobs are safe. There may be some restructuring, a handful of compulsory redundancies perhaps, the odd boardroom resignation, but the vast majority of the workforce will still be clocking on as usual, for the same salaries and pensions as before. I’m not a complete idiot, inspector. I’d always assumed the Conquistador would get his comeuppance sooner or later. His lifespan was finite. It was a good run while it lasted. Only now…” His eyes took on that faraway, despairing look again. “Now I really don’t know that it matters. That anything matters.”