The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  113

  Pretty soon Oni could hear someone shouting. It was a man sitting in a director’s chair at the very lip of the cenote. Oni shook his head in disbelief.

  The man and about thirty other men were all clustered in a bunch and staring into the pool. His remaining brothers and sisters must be down there. It seemed obvious to him.

  He raised the Stoner and hitched it under his arm. Oni was nearly seven feet tall. The three-and-a-half-foot long Stoner looked like a child’s toy in his hands.

  The man in the director’s chair raised one of his hands triumphantly.

  Oni began to shoot.

  The first drum was exhausted in a little under twenty seconds. He replaced it with the second drum. He got through that in under fifteen seconds. Then he felt around inside his shirt for the half-used drum.

  Most everybody was dead. The lip of the cenote had crumbled away where they’d all been clustered together. Shooting them had been a little like playing one of those arcade games he’d been fixated on as a child. The one where the cowboys keep coming at you and your only chance of beating them is to keep on shooting.

  He burped the Stoner at a moving man. Then at another. Not much left in the drum now.

  He walked to the edge of the cenote and looked down. The water was littered with bodies. Some were still thrashing around. Others were just floating, face down.

  ‘Abi? Are you down there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Who else is alive?’

  ‘Rudra, Nawal, and Dakini.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad. I thought I’d lost you all.’

  ‘Can we come up?’

  ‘Yes. You can come up now. I’ll throw down the hosepipe for you. Everybody left up here is dead.’

  Oni hurled the Stoner to one side and limped across to where the pump hose was neatly furled at the very lip of the cenote.

  There was a noise behind him. He turned, just a few feet short of the hose.

  Emiliano was on his knees. The morphine had temporarily numbed him to the Stoner bullets that had ripped through his body.

  As Oni watched, Emiliano snatched at a mosquito that was hovering in front of his face.

  Then Emiliano raised his pistol and shot Oni in the head.

  Oni toppled over the lip of the cenote. There was a pause. Then a mighty splash.

  Emiliano smiled. He glanced down into the cenote. Abi, Rudra, Dakini and Nawal were floating fifty feet below him, watching. There was no way out for them now.

  Emiliano looked down at his wounds. There was no way out for him either. He touched the pistol barrel to the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  PART THREE

  1

  Lamia de Bale was feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders. It was as if the futility of everyone else’s life was accruing to – and therefore being encapsulated by – her own. In deciding to leave Sabir without speaking to him, and without any attempt at an explanation, she was aware that she had closed an opened door. Now, three miles above the Atlantic Ocean, she felt the loss of its possibilities without fully understanding why.

  She waited until half an hour into the Iberia flight before getting out of her first-class seat. She had chosen the premium seat to ensure that she both entered and exited the plane after all the other passengers had cleared the terminal – airlines, she knew, made exceptions for their first-class passengers, and catered to their whims. It also gave her access to business class and economy class, without giving either of those two areas access to her.

  She had lied back in France when she had told Calque that Madame, her mother, had confiscated her money and her credit cards, and that only at the last minute had she had the providential foresight to conceal her passport inside her underwear. In point of fact she had hidden her passport, credit cards, and cash money in a traveller’s pouch looped onto the back of her belt and neatly flipped over to lie flush along the inside edge of her slacks – a loose blouse had completed the picture, and had served to protect her from the customary stares men give to young women’s bottoms. Even young women with catastrophic birthmarks.

  She had then, at the first possible opportunity, cached the credit cards beneath the base of her powder compact, and rolled her folding money inside a number of Kotex Super Plus tampon tubes, which she had then re-wrapped and re-glued so that they looked fresh from the shop. If either Sabir or Calque had gone through her things, they certainly hadn’t found either one of her secret stashes. Men had an in-built reluctance to sniff around women’s private knick-knacks – it was as if they didn’t want to know what artifices and grimy little realities lay behind the surface appearance they valued so much.

  And Lamia, of course, knew all about surface appearances. She had spent her life trying to avoid acknowledging the effect of hers on others. It was hard being a woman with a damaged face. People responded to you in one of two ways. They either showed their repulsion by avoiding you – or they overcompensated for something they were relieved not to be suffering from themselves, and sickened you with their pity.

  Madame, her mother, had tried to sweeten the pill a little – financial security counted for a lot when you felt vulnerable in other areas. And Lamia was physically better off, when push came to shove, than all three of her sisters, and at least four of her brothers. So she was in the upper quadrant of the population as regards financial security, and the middle quadrant as regards disabilities. But until she had met Calque, and then, later, Sabir, she had found it impossible to respond to men without suspecting them of hypocrisy – they pretended to want the whole of you, when in reality they only wanted the hormonally charged areas they were hardwired to seek out.

  The truth of the matter was that Lamia had secretly craved being sought after and pursued – just like any normal, unmarked, woman – but her face and attitude had either put men off or obviated their interest in her altogether. Lamia shrugged at herself in the powder-room vanity mirror – well you couldn’t have it both ways.

  Joris Calque had genuinely seemed to see beyond the surface of her face, however, and Adam Sabir had astonished her with his capacity for blinkered sensuality. She was convinced that Sabir truly believed he loved her, and a part of her sincerely loved him. But she was her mother’s daughter, and she had entered into the arrangement to leave all sides in ignorance of where she truly stood – and by that she meant both Laurel and Hardy (aka Sabir and Calque) and the Corpus – with her eyes wide open. The fact that she felt sympathy, affection, and even love for the two men she had always intended to betray, was beside the point. She had a duty to perform, and perform it she would.

  She eased herself through into the business-class section and began a steady perusal of all the passengers. Whenever she reached one of the lavatories she waited until it was vacated before continuing with her search of the plane. It took her a full thirty minutes to convince herself that none of her brothers and sisters were anywhere on board – if they had been, she would have escaped back to the first-class section and relied on the stewards to do the rest.

  She had been made aware, of course, by Madame, her mother, that the Grand Cherokee might at some point be seeded with a tracker, and so she was labouring under no delusions as regards Abi’s eventual ability to pinpoint her whereabouts at the airport. Her only advantage over both him and Sabir had lain in the speed with which she had made her decision to depart from the touj. Madame, her mother, wanted her to remain a free agent, and a free agent she would remain.

  She returned to her seat and adjusted it to the flattest possible position. She needed to sleep. The past ten days had taken their toll on her, and she felt physically as well as mentally wrung out. She closed her eyes.

  She was immediately met by the image of Sabir pushing her gently down onto the bed back at the Ticul motel. Of the feel of his hands on her body. Of the gently invasive pressure as he had first made love to her. Of her response to his lovemaking, at first tentatively, and then willingly, enthusiastically, ecst
atically.

  She shook her head in a violent effort to clear it of the unwanted images, but still they remained, like the fragments of another life.

  2

  Lamia arrived at Madrid Airport in good time for her connecting flight to Paris. She ignored the transit lounge, however, and after purchasing some clothes, a carry-on bag, and a few essential items at the airport shop, she descended to the taxi rank and told her driver to take her to Madrid’s Atocha railway station.

  Whilst on the plane she had used Iberia’s in-flight internet service to book herself a Gran Clas private cabin on the Elipsos Francisco de Goya ‘Talgo Night’ Trenhotel, leaving from Madrid at 6.15, and due to arrive in Paris’s Austerlitz train station at 8.27 the following morning. She was the only one of her brothers and sisters who knew the location and identity of the Second Coming, and she was certain that if she could only evade both them and the French border police – in the unlikely event that Calque had managed to milk some of his old connections for a favour – then she would be home clear. Explanations would come later.

  She knew that the ‘Talgo Night’ train made a short stop at Blois, in the Loire Valley, before reaching its final destination in Paris, so she had decided to alight there and bribe a taxi driver to take her straight to Samois. What was it? A hundred kilometres door-to-door? She’d be at the camp in time for breakfast.

  She had flirted briefly with the idea of using a public telephone box to call her mother and tell her that everything was still on track, but she had just as quickly discarded the idea. The logic behind all her past actions had been that only Milouins, Madame Mastigou, and Madame, her mother, would ever be privy to her hidden agenda. There were numerous other outside-the-loop servants scattered throughout the Domaine de Seyème household capable of listening in to a conversation, and who was to say that the French police, given their notoriously cavalier attitude towards personal privacy, weren’t still bugging the house in unconscious mimicry of Joris Calque?

  No, blanket secrecy and telephone silence were the only way in which Abi, Vau, and the others could ever have been tricked into keeping all their concentration on Sabir and Calque – and for this they truly needed to believe in Lamia’s role as a fellow traveller in the enemy camp.

  Sabir and Calque had had to be won over in the same way. The pair had been justifiably suspicious of Lamia from the very start. Only via the most rigorous self-discipline had it been possible for Lamia to manoeuvre herself into a strong enough position to build up a sufficient reservoir of knowledge about Sabir to be certain of getting the information she wanted – and when she got it, of being able to use it with impunity.

  Lamia allowed herself to relax in the comfort of her ‘Talgo Night’ stateroom. It was nice being able to pamper herself again. She’d order an early supper to be brought directly to her suite, and then she’d take two sleeping pills and attempt to sleep a clear eight hours without ever once thinking about Sabir. She could count on the steward to wake her up well before Blois with her breakfast.

  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. T
he 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.’