The Mayan Codex (19 page)

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.’

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.

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.