Mario Reading - The Mayan Codex

‘I’m afraid that won’t do.’ Calque hesitated. ‘I’ll be frank with you, Macron. I owe you that much. I need to get inside a house. A well-guarded house. I need to retrieve something I left there some months ago. Something that involves your cousin, and the people responsible for his death. It occurred to me that if a fire alert were called in – by a concerned citizen, say – everyone inside the house would be forced out while the firemen were checking around inside. I would pay the man for securing this article for me, of course. And I can assure you that it would not be a case of theft. The article belongs to me already. No one else even knows of its existence.’ Calque’s voice trailed off. Brought out into the open like that, his idea sounded lame in the extreme.

Macron opened a cupboard concealed in a far corner of the workshop. He brought out a bottle and two glasses. ‘Pastis?’

Calque was on the verge of saying that he was on duty, when he realized that he wasn’t. ‘Gladly.’

The two men avoided each other’s eyes as they sipped from their glasses.

Macron allowed his gaze to wander around his workshop. ‘Took me two years to build this place up from scratch. Can you believe that? Summon up a reputation. Get in some regular trade.’ He took another sip of his drink. ‘I’m on the up now. Might even think about getting married. Breeding some hoppers.’

Calque put down his glass and prepared to leave. The game was up, and he knew it.

‘Wait.’ Macron tipped back his head. ‘You see all this?’ He pointed to his carefully tiered stock. ‘Each piece is best-grade hardwood. Over 95 per cent yield. Quadruple A. I get all my lumber from an ex-Legionnaire who lives out near Manosque.’

‘Manosque?’ Calque couldn’t work out where Macron was headed. Was the man deaf? Hadn’t he heard anything Calque had said?

‘Manosque. Yes. The man’s a marvel. He gets me anything I need. Doesn’t matter what sort of notice I give him. Totally reliable.’ Macron pointed with his chin. ‘That’s his card. Pinned up on the wall over there. You can scribble his name down in your notebook. Say you come from me when you speak to him. Tell him Aime L’OM says marche ou creve. Droit au but.’

Calque hunched his shoulders questioningly. ‘Lumber? You get your lumber from this man?’ He wanted more. Some assurance that he wasn’t being led up the garden path.

‘Good luck. I hope you get back what you lost.’

Calque sighed. He wrote down the woodsman’s name in his notebook.

Macron hesitated, still reluctant to commit himself – still reluctant to trust a flic. ‘That cousin of mine, Captain. The one the eye-man shot. Your associate. He was a little Front National shit. That metis fiancee of his is well rid of him.’ He slugged back the remnants of his pastis. Then he looked Calque straight in the eye. ‘But his mother. My uncle’s wife. The one who collapsed into her husband’s arms when you told her the news about her son. She’s a woman in a million, that one. I think the world of her.’

Lamia de Bale glanced out of her bedroom window. It was midnight. The house was finally asleep.

Outside her door she could hear Philippe, the footman, resettling his chair on the tilt.

Her first idea had been to switch on the radio. Get him used to the music. But everybody knew that she never listened to music. The little pervert would come straight in to check what was going on out of sheer curiosity. And then he would probably try to inveigle her into bed, as he’d attempted to do on at least three separate occasions in the past year. And this time she was vulnerable. Not his employer’s daughter any more, but a prisoner, with no rights of her own. It wasn’t worth the risk.

She picked up the bundle of sheets, went into the bathroom, and closed the door.

First, she switched on the shower. Then she took the pair of surgical scissors out of the first-aid kit, and began slicing the sheets into strips.

I can’t believe I’m doing this, she intoned to herself. What if I fall? What if I break a bone? They will kill me.

When she’d finished dissecting the sheets, she began the laborious task of twisting and knotting them together. At one point she switched off the shower, and padded through into the bedroom, making sure to switch on the lamp by her bed and turn off the main light, just as she normally did.

Then she tiptoed back into the bathroom and continued with her task.

When she had the sheets knotted together to her satisfaction, she measured them out against her forearm. Their length came to about ten metres. She hoped it would be enough.

Her room was on the third floor of the house, over the courtyard. Once she was safely down, she intended to make inland for Ramatuelle. She knew where Monsieur Brussi, the taxi driver, lived. She had known him all her life. Even though Madame, her mother, had confiscated her purse and credit cards, surely he would agree to take her somewhere – anywhere – on credit?

She unlatched the window, and sifted the knotted sheets through her hands. She’d taken the precaution of tying a hairbrush to the bottom sheet, and she hoped, in this way, to be able to gauge, even in the dark, how much further she would need to drop if her makeshift rope didn’t stretch all the way down to the ground.

When the sheets had reached their full extent, she began swinging them from one side to the other, as gently as she was able. The hairbrush struck something a glancing blow.

Lamia stopped her swinging, and listened, one hand cupped behind her ear. After a minute’s intense concentration, she relaxed. She had learned two things. The first was that there was no one stationed down in the courtyard. The second was that there was a further potential ten-foot drop between the opened shutter that she had just struck with her hairbrush, and the ground.

She attached the free end of the knotted sheet to the central section of her bedroom window. There. Now she’d lost another foot in length. She’d have to drop down maybe eleven feet in the darkness. She racked her brains as to whether there was anything below her that might fall over and give her away. How stupid she had been not to have checked the whole area over while it was still light.

With a final, bemused glance at her room, Lamia eased herself out of the window. She was about to leave everything she had ever known behind her. Security, family, tradition, and emotional ties. For twenty-seven years she had been living a monstrous lie.

The real truth about her life, together with the true motives of the cabal that had adopted her – a cabal to which she had unwittingly and unthinkingly transferred all her loyalties – had only dawned on her following the publicity surrounding her brother’s death. If what she had been doing was by order of the Corpus Maleficus, then just how damaging had all the pathetic little courier jobs – which were all that Madame, her mother, had seen fit to allocate her over the years since her majority – actually been? How much damage had she inadvertently foisted on a society ignorant of the extent – or even the existence – of its own guilt? Now, at last, she would be able to enter the real world unencumbered by any of the baggage of the past.

Using her feet as clamps, Lamia eased herself gingerly down the knotted line. She was fairly fit in terms of her age – tennis, yoga, and the occasional dance class had been her staples – but she was prone to vertigo, and she found herself thanking Providence that she had been forced to conduct her stunt in the dark.

Once, halfway down her ersatz rope, and feeling herself in danger of freezing in fear, she had twisted the sheets violently around one wrist until the interrupted blood flow had forced her to gather her wits together and continue on with her descent.