Mario Reading - The Mayan Codex

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 Seyeme 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.

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.

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.

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. The 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.