The Mayan Codex (44 page)

Oni de Bale slapped at the mosquito which was hovering just above his right eye. He flopped backwards against the tree and lathered some more ‘Scoot’ on himself. He wondered if the others were being eaten alive too?

They each had separate cars again now – Abi had taken advantage of Sabir and Lamia’s sex interlude that morning to send them all into Mérida, to the nearest Avis drop-off point.

Now that was a strange thing. Never would he have dreamed of Lamia and Sabir getting it on together. Especially with Madame, his mother’s, virginity hangup. What was that junk from the Bible she always used to quote at them in an effort to get them – well, particularly Aldinach, let’s be honest – to behave themselves?

These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth … And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God
.

Of course in Aldinach’s case the target was both men and women – whichever was the opposite of whatever sex he had chosen to be that day. Convenient, that, when you came to think of it. It doubled the possible catchment area. Mind you, Aldinach wasn’t gay. Oni had to give the little nymphomaniac her due. She only worked on polar opposites. Never own sex. It was a sort of morality, when you came to think about it.

Anyway, much good Madame, his mother’s, virginity imprecations had done them. Rocha had fallen for her line, though, and look what had happened to him. But he was the only one, apart from Lamia – the rest of them rutted like rabbits whenever they could. And now here was Lamia obviously deciding that enough was enough, aged twenty-seven, and reeling old Sabir into her bed. Frankly, he couldn’t blame her. With a face like hers you needed all the luck you could get in the jiggy jiggy stakes.

Oni knew all about it. The size he was, most females ran a mile, scared that he would squash them. All right, he wasn’t a disgusting fat pig like Asson, whom he had
once seen consuming four pitchers of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream at a single sitting, but he was upwards of seven feet tall, and most women reached just about as far as his navel. As a result, Oni had taken to hiring professionals, who weren’t put off by the – what did Aldinach call it? – outsize aspects of his persona.

Now Abi had ordered them all into the forest to watch the site at Kabáh, and here was Oni, with his extra-large body surface – wasn’t it the Cathars who said that human skin connected us to the Devil? – serving as dish of the day to a particularly virulent variety of mosquito. Fuck it. Fuck it all to hell.

He reattached his night-vision goggles and focused them on Sabir’s back. The guy was busy counting the masks on the facade of the temple. Each time he came to one he liked, he fetched a sheet of paper out of his backpack and taped it over the mask. He’d covered five sections in this way already – only the single remaining upper section still to go. The paper shone up in the moonlight very well indeed – Oni had to allow the bastard that much.

Oni now reckoned, by dint of careful counting, that Sabir was choosing the twentieth mask in each separate mask section. Must be some significance to that, wouldn’t you say? He punched his cell phone and passed on the information to Abi.

Sabir had snuck in to the Kabáh site not half an hour before, just as Abi had said he would, wearing a rucksack and carrying two tyre irons. The policeman had snuck in beside him. Lamia wasn’t with them. Probably recovering from her orgy, out in the car. Oni grinned. Bet she was sore. She’d probably be walking splay-legged for days. Serve the bitch right for leaving it so long to get started.

That footman who got himself squished – Philippe, yes, that had been his name – he’d been dogging her for ages.
But Lamia had brushed him off like a cobweb. And now he was dead, propping up the walls of a girls’ school in Cavalaire-sur-Mer. Did people still have sex in hell? Oni shrugged. Only one way to find out. On second thoughts, though, maybe he’d leave that little task to Philippe.

Oni swung around and focused his night goggles back on the Indian. Yes, the man was still hiding behind the tree, watching Sabir’s every move. Next, Abi swung his goggles over to the courtyard on the left of the Temple of the Masks. Yup. The night watchman was still lurking in a doorway there. The guy was whispering into his cell phone like he was making love to it.

It seemed pretty much impossible that Sabir and the policeman weren’t aware that they were being watched by at least three separate parties, but then Oni had to accept that they didn’t have the advantages he had – his night-vision goggles turned the whole of the scene in front of him into a sort of pallid, moonlit playground, where everything took on the surreal shape of one of Salvador Dali’s dream landscapes.

Oni could hardly wait to find out what would happen when whoever the night watchman was calling – cops? museum archivists? eco-warriors? – would come piling in through the front gates like the 7th Cavalry in a John Ford movie. The expression on Sabir’s face would be worth the price of entry alone.

Oni whispered once again into his own cell phone, bringing Abi up to date, and ending up with, ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Stay where you are. Watch. And wait. Don’t – I repeat don’t – interfere.’

Oni grunted, and slapped at another damned mosquito. Easier said than done. He squirted out another palm full of ‘Scoot’ and plastered it all over his face. ‘Fucking buzzers!’

You watched the two gringos with a sinking sensation in your heart. What were they doing? Why were they here in the middle of the night? The younger gringo was counting the masks in each section, and then taping sheets of paper over the ones he chose. A strange procedure, surely? And no doubt illegal. Otherwise why would they come here at dead of night rather than during the daytime, when their activities would have been open to the public gaze?

You recognized them both from earlier on in the day. Only now the woman that had been with them, the one with the blood-soaked face, the one the guide had thought had the
mal de ojo
– yes, you had noticed him making the phallic gesture with his hands to ensure that the
mal de ojo
did not turn into the more dangerous
ojo pasado
– this woman had gone away. Maybe, being a woman, she did not approve of what these men were doing?

Earlier that evening, Tepeu had tried to persuade you to travel home with him on his
triciclo
. Tepeu was an estimable man. A man to honour. You had told him that you needed to stay here, near to the temple, and he had not questioned your motives, or tried to dissuade you. Instead he had arranged for a blanket for you, and also that you would be brought some iguana stew from the wife of the gatekeeper.

This woman and the gatekeeper lived in a hut about half a kilometre from the site. At eight o’clock Tepeu had cycled over and he and you had eaten the stew together, and shared a litre bottle of beer. You had told Tepeu that you could not repay him, but he had brushed your
protestations aside like a man who flaps his hand at a hornet.

Now the gringos were here, and you did not know what to do. Did they intend to steal, as all gringos did? And why would they steal the masks? What could they hope to do with them? Sell them? Impossible, surely. The authorities would discover them, and then they would face prison.

As you watched, the younger gringo retrieved an implement from his rucksack and started to lever at the first of the stones. The older man took a similar implement and began to work at the stone from the other side.

You stood up behind your tree to get a better view of what they were doing. It was nearly full moon, and the two men were bathed in the reflected light off the white face of the temple.

What should you do? Speak to them? Run off and fetch Tepeu? Or the gatekeeper? Yes, maybe that would be the correct thing to do in the circumstances. The man lived only half a kilometre away, and you knew where his hut was situated, thanks to Tepeu’s description.

For some reason, however, you did nothing, and simply watched the gringos as they levered and struggled with the masks.

‘Do you think we’re crazy doing this? I mean, we’re standing here in a foreign country, at night, on a
protected archaeological site, destroying one of their ancient monuments. If they catch us at it, they’ll toss us into prison and throw away the key.’ Sabir’s face had taken on a livid tinge in the moonlight – he did, indeed, look half mad.

‘We’re putting the stones back, Sabir. Nobody will know the difference.’

Calque and Sabir were onto the third of the marked masks. Each time they succeeded in levering one of the stone masks partially out of its sconce, one of them would hold the torch while the other felt around in the space behind the mask, pretending not to be worried about scorpions, biting spiders, and snakes.

‘Maybe Mexico doesn’t have scorpions?’

‘Of course they do. They’re strictly nocturnal creatures, though. And they only get angry when disturbed.’

‘Thank you, Calque. Thank you very much indeed.’ Sabir was feeling around behind one of the sconces with his hand. ‘They’re not deadly, are they?’

‘Just the Centruroides. The rest are okay.’

Sabir snatched his hand out of the hole. ‘Nothing there.’ He shivered, as if someone had just walked over his grave. ‘Where the heck do you come up with this sort of information, Calque? Do you just gen up for the fun of it? Or is it a nervous tic?’

‘Yes to both.’

‘You’re doing the next hole, then.’ Sabir’s cell phone buzzed. He slapped at his pocket as if he thought there might be a scorpion lurking in there too. ‘Yeah?’ He listened. Then he nodded. ‘Okay. Thanks. We’re fine here. No luck yet. Three to go. Then we can all go back home and have a holiday. The Caribbean, preferably. I’ve already got the double-hammock and the rum punches lined up. And there are no scorpions over there to leap out at you.’ Sabir pocketed the cell phone and turned
to Calque. ‘Lamia says the roads in each direction are clear. She’ll continue to run interference for us until we call her in.’

‘The Caribbean is full of scorpions. You really are an ignorant man, Sabir.’

Sabir pointed at him. ‘Okay then, how’s this for ignorant? The Maya write from left to right, just like us. Except that everything’s in pairs with them. Glyph blocks, and suchlike. You told me that yourself, didn’t you?’

Calque gave a cautious nod.

‘What if we miss out the next section and just start at the far corner, which we probably should have done in the first place? Not waste our time here pussyfooting around on the right. In fact, why don’t we treat this whole temple wall as if it’s the stone equivalent of a written parchment?’

‘Why not just toss a coin?’ Calque sighed. ‘If your theory is right, Sabir, we have been wasting our time looking behind the wrong stones. We have been counting the twentieth mask from the right in each of these sections. If we had followed Maya practice, we ought to have counted the twentieth stone from the left. And started from the top. Is this what you are saying?’

‘My point exactly. Only I’m a stupid idiot who doesn’t know there are scorpions all over the Caribbean.’

‘It was a joke, Sabir. If a man is really secure in his intelligence, he doesn’t need to lash out whenever anyone teases him.’

Sabir was only slightly mollified. ‘Okay. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry too. And I’m even sorrier that your theory, much as it pains me to admit it, seems a good one. Let’s go straight to the twentieth mask from the left.’