The Mayan Codex (28 page)

Sabir looked at Calque as if he had taken leave of his senses. ‘It’s eleven o’clock in the evening, Captain. And we’re in the United States. People eat at seven o’clock here. You’ll be lucky to find even a diner open at this hour of the night.’

‘A diner. A diner, then.’ Calque had a sudden mental image of a whole series of 1940s Hollywood films in which either Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart sat in one of these so-called diners, eating homemade pie with coffee.

‘Okay. A diner. But it’ll still mean a burger and fries. You realize that?’ Sabir understood Calque’s recalcitrance only too well, but he had decided to enjoy himself a little at the Frenchman’s expense. He hadn’t entirely forgiven Calque for humiliating him in front of Lamia over the matter of her birthmark, and for being so damned cute with his theories on the land of the great volcano.

‘A burger and fries? You cannot be serious? This is grotesque.’

‘Don’t worry, Calque. Things will pick up when we get to Mexico. You’ll be able to last another three days or so on a typical US diet, won’t you?’

Calque gave him a sickly grin. ‘Three days? On burgers and fries? I might last, but my liver will not.’

At first you had a good run of it. Two lifts in as many hours. The first to Loma Bonita, in a feed truck, and the second as far as Isla Juan. Then the lifts dried up.

You slept that night in a roadside coffee plantation, under a banana tree. You wrapped yourself in your mother’s
rebozo
, which you had brought along in the absence of any other form of portable sleeping cover. You kept your machete clasped tightly to your side, in case
you encountered a rabid dog, a snake, a rat, or a black widow spider.

You slept well, despite the cold. In the early morning, when you woke up, you had no idea where you were, nor exactly how far it was to the Palace of the Masks. Someone you asked had told you six days. But then when you had asked them if that was by bus, or by car, or by horse, they were unable to answer you. All you knew was that you must head south – south all the time – keeping the coast always on your left. When you were near Campeche, then that would be the time to ask. Someone would doubtless point you in the right direction then.

You had grown up believing in a greater power – a power which you served, and which you therefore obeyed, as any servant should. This power would protect you if it chose, and it would allow you to die if that was its will.
Asi es la vida
. ‘That is how life is.’ Pointless to fight against it. Pointless to argue.

What you were doing now was at the behest of this power. Your family had been chosen to guard the codex. Your grandfather told you how the original guardians – the ones who had saved the codex from the vengeful ignorance of the Spanish priests – had ultimately paid the price with their lives. He had told you, too, of how his father had come by the codex from the hands of a dying man. How he had been forced to promise this man, upon pain of damnation, that he would protect the codex, and not give it up to the Spanish. Or else they would burn it, as they had with all the other great books of the Maya priests.

‘But I am not Maya,’ your great grandfather had said. ‘I am part Totonaca and part Spanish. I understand nothing of this. We do not even believe in the same God as you.’

‘There is only one God,’ said the dying man. ‘And everyone believes in Him. It is only the names that differ, and that cause strife.’

‘But when must I take it? And to whom?’

‘You, or your son, or your grandson, or even his son, must wait until the great volcano blooms once again with fire. That will be your signal. Then you must take the codex from this cave and travel south, to the Palace of the Masks. A sign will be given to you there.’

‘But where is this palace?’

‘In Kabáh. Near Campeche. I will draw you a map in my blood. This you will pass down alongside the codex. There is a sign on it. See? I have drawn it here. It will be recognized.’

Now you took out the map and laid it carefully on the earth in front of you. You had finished your remaining tacos long ago, and your stomach felt empty, as if a worm was gnawing away at it.

Sucking on a stone to conserve your saliva, you followed the line of dried blood with your finger. How far were you down the line now? One thumb? Two thumbs? If you were two thumbs down the line, as seemed most likely, then you had eight thumbs left to go. That meant another four nights on the road.

You reached inside your pocket and retrieved your small bag of pesos. You had many coins, but they were almost worthless. Some scrumpled notes. You straightened them out on the map. Three hundred pesos. Five 50s, two 20s, and a 10. It would simply have to be enough.

You leaned forwards and looked at the sign. It was a snake – yes – it had to be a snake. Its mouth was wide open, and it seemed to be swallowing the head of a man.

What sort of person would recognize such a thing?

For the very first time since you had begun your journey, you began to feel fear.

Sabir couldn’t sleep. He glanced over towards Lamia’s bed. Then towards Calque’s. No sound. They were both fast asleep.

The three of them had finally decided that it was better not to split up and make themselves more vulnerable than absolutely necessary. Despite being the one to make the initial suggestion, Calque, for reasons best known to himself, had finished up looking the most uncomfortable with the arrangement, whilst Lamia, who might reasonably have objected to the idea of bundling with two grown men, appeared to have taken the whole thing in her stride.

Sabir had seen the sense of it too, but he had soon become worried that if he underwent another of his nightmares, as he did most nights, he might cry out, or throw himself off his portable camp bed, and thus wake everybody else up. He had allowed this thought to niggle at him for so long now, that he couldn’t manage to doze off at all.

Eventually he got up and padded outside. He sat on the ledge of the walkway outside their room and leaned back against a pillar. The night was cold, but not oppressively so. He breathed in deeply, and then sat looking up at the night sky.

They’d been incredibly lucky to give the twins the slip back in Carlisle. Almost miraculously so. Sabir could imagine the twins at this very moment, checking out every motel within a fifty-mile radius of the town in the vain hope of picking them up again. But the trio had travelled more than a hundred miles further south this time, and had slipped off the main expressway toward Harper’s Ferry in a further bid to muddy the waters.

They had then found themselves a down-at-heel motel run by a Punjabi family, who seemingly hadn’t minded registering them at two o’clock in the morning, and neither had they objected to the fact that two mature men and a considerably younger woman wanted to share a room together. Perhaps such a thing was normal down here in West Virginia? The Punjabis had simply searched out an extra child’s bed and had set it up for Sabir underneath the window.

The door behind him opened, and Lamia emerged, clutching a blanket around her shoulders.

Sabir straightened up. ‘Hi. Can’t you sleep either? Join the club.’

Lamia waved him back down again. She sat down beside him, and snuggled herself further inside her blanket. ‘Calque has started snoring.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s really quite loud. Is he married, do you think?’

Sabir burst out laughing. ‘Divorced, as far as I know. Maybe that’s why?’

She made a face. ‘I thought about nudging him, but then I realized I was so wide awake that it would simply guarantee that two of us would be deprived of sleep, and not just one. Then I saw that your bed was empty too.’

‘Well you know all about me. I was scared I would wake up screaming, and start a riot.’

She laughed. ‘Well. We’re not doing too well so far, are we? As a team?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve lost your brothers. We’re a few hundred miles closer to where we want to be, and we’re amongst friends. Things could be a whole lot worse.’

Lamia glanced across at him. ‘We’ve only lost my brothers for the time being. You realize that?’

Sabir nodded. ‘Yes. I do realize that.’

‘Somehow they’ll find us.’

‘At this particular moment I can’t quite work out how. But I’m more than happy to work on that assumption. At least it will serve to keep us on our toes.’

Lamia began to relax, as if she had abruptly decided to disengage herself from an unwanted weight. ‘Not much worries you, does it, Adam?’

Sabir shrugged. ‘Not sleeping worries me. These nightmares worry me. Offending you worries me. But not much else.’

‘What do you mean, offending me?’

Sabir turned towards her. ‘When we met. What I said. How I said it. My drawing attention to your face. I didn’t mean to do that. That was just dumb of me. Calque was right to call me a hick.’

‘You’re not a hick. I understood what had happened. Why you did it.’

‘Then you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’

‘What? What is that? What is Gunga Din?’ Lamia was cocking her head to one side, like a bird dog, a half-smile on her face.

Sabir noticed, once again, just what a beautiful woman she was. Despite the blemish. Despite her awareness of it. There were moments, and this was one of them, when she seemed to forget all about her face and relate to him person to person, rather than as a wounded woman to a damaged man.

‘It’s a movie. Well, it’s a poem, really, but everyone remembers the Hollywood movie they based on it. Cary Grant is an English colonial soldier, alongside Douglas Fairbanks Junior and Victor McLaglen. They’re on the Indian Frontier, and they get involved in all sorts of shenanigans. Then, at the end, they are all going to die, and their water boy, the lowest of the low, who’s called Gunga Din, saves them, at the cost of his own life. As Gunga din lies dying, Cary Grant says this to him: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” That bit comes straight from the Kipling poem.’

‘You’re a strange man. Do you love movies so much?’

Sabir shook his head. ‘It’s more than that. They’re a passion with me. I guess I had what you might call a lonely childhood. No brothers and sisters. Intellectual father. Crazy mother. Movies and books were what I had in lieu of normal family affection. They defined my life. I could escape into them whenever I wanted. The only thing my father ever did with me was take me to the movies. He wasn’t into baseball, or team sports, or anything like that. But every week, without fail, he would take me along to the Lenox Club for their movie matinee. The old guys that ran the matinee would wheel out a screen. Then they’d set up the old projector, with the giant 16mm reels. We’d watch
Henry V
,
The Charge of the Light Brigade
,
Captain Blood
,
Robin Hood
,
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
. Heck, those old guys were more English than the English. If you looked closely enough, you could see their Harris Tweed coats steaming gently in the afternoon heat.’

‘You’re crazy. You know that, Adam?’

‘What? Crazy for talking to you like this?’

She turned abruptly away. ‘I didn’t mean that.’ Then she accorded him a compensatory glance. ‘But crazy for doing what you are doing. For risking your life this
way. You could be happily roosting back at your father’s house, writing obscure books about the cinema. All you’d need to do would be to publicize what you found out in France. That way you would be safe.’