‘I don’t give a damn about Lamia and the harpies. But I do have to protect Yola.’
‘Then telephone her, why don’t you? Warn her to get away from Samois. Tell her and Alexi to go to a location you all know about and wait for us there. That we’ll meet them later.’
‘They don’t have a telephone. They live in a caravan.’
Calque threw his hands up into the air – it was his usual way of expressing despair. Then he grabbed his left bicep and screwed up his face in agony. He began to keen gently to himself.
Sabir glanced quickly away to prevent himself from laughing.
Calque regained his poise after a moment or two and began ferreting about in the Hummer’s nooks and crannies for a cigarette. ‘What are you trying to tell me? That Gypsies who live in caravans don’t use cell phones?’
‘Not these Gypsies, anyway. And I seem to remember that you aren’t that keen on cell phones yourself.’
Calque let out a cry of triumph. He speared a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and fixed it in his mouth. ‘That’s
beside the point. It’s the height of irresponsibility for Yola not to be contactable. You’re her blood brother, Sabir – or whatever the hell it was you told me they nominated you. You knew the risks. Why didn’t you insist?’
Sabir’s expression darkened. He lit Calque’s cigarette with a gold Dunhill lighter he’d found sliding about on the dashboard. ‘Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I curse myself for my stupidity every damned minute of the day? Don’t you think I’m feeling sick to my soul with every mile that Lamia gains on us? I fell in love with her, man. I was even thinking about asking her to marry me.’ Sabir glowered at the sudden build-up of traffic ahead of them, as if the cars and their drivers were in some way responsible for his predicament. ‘This may come as a surprise to you, Calque, but people like me don’t fall in love that often. In fact, pathetic as this may sound, I can’t honestly remember ever falling in love before. This was a major first for me. I’d pretty much reckoned I was immune. Steamrollering my way downhill towards a lonely middle age. That sort of malarkey. How right I was.’
Calque shook his head. His eyes were troubled. ‘I’m sorry, Sabir. I know how you felt about Lamia. I didn’t mean to make a joke of it. I hold myself personally responsible for bringing her into your life.’
‘Ah, forget it. It wasn’t your fault, Calque. I’m grateful to you, actually. I’ve felt alive again these past few weeks – which makes a welcome change from the stumbling zombie I was before.’ He looked up from his driving. ‘But can’t you do anything for Yola and Alexi? Surely you’ve still got connections in the Police Nationale? Can’t you get someone to go out to Samois and warn them?’
Calque flicked his cigarette awkwardly out of the window. ‘You must be joking. What would I tell them? They’d think I’d contracted post-retirement syndrome. That I’d started to go out of my head. “Someone’s out to
get the Second Coming, comrades. You must intervene before it happens. It’s a bunch of Gypsies you have to save. Only they never use cell phones. The woman’s pregnant, just like the Virgin Mary. Except this time around it wasn’t the Holy Ghost who impregnated her, it was her husband.” “Oh, where are you speaking from, Captain Calque? Pierrefeu? Belleville? Broadmoor? Or some other insane asylum we don’t know about?” “I’m out in Mexico, actually. Blowing up crystal meth factories. I’ll be with you shortly.”’
‘I see your point.’
‘How refreshing.’ Calque reached back with his good hand and fetched the rucksack over onto his lap. He fished out the Mayan codex and began to leaf through its bark-paper pages.
‘Staring at that isn’t going to help us.’
‘Indirectly, it might.’
‘How do you figure that?’
‘Because something’s still bothering me, Sabir. I don’t see how the Chilan and the Halach Uinic connected this man, Akbal Coatl, with Nostradamus. It’s simply too much of a stretch.’
‘That’s the least of our worries.’
‘No. It’s important. There are still too many unanswered questions for my liking. I don’t believe in magic, Sabir. There must be a logical connection.’
‘Ah. Logic. That’s the old Calque speaking.’
Calque fell silent for a while.
Sabir was silent too. After about five minutes of thinly disguised tension he began unconsciously drumming on the steering wheel. Every now and then he would jerk his head forwards as if responding to an abrupt change in his internal rhythm. He cast a speculative glance at Calque. ‘Don’t tell me you can read Maya glyphs? And Old Spanish?’
Calque shook his head without looking up. ‘No. But I can read Latin. And the last part of this book is written in demotic.’
‘Demotic? I thought that was Greek?’
Calque gave a long sigh and continued with his reading.
Sabir nodded sagely. He gave it another ten minutes. ‘What does it say?’
Calque glanced up. He flared his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you if you promise to stop that damned drumming and light me another cigarette.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ Sabir raised both his hands off the wheel.
‘You can still drive. I don’t object to that.’
‘Come on. What does it say, Calque?’
Calque waited for Sabir to light his cigarette. He took a long drag and allowed the smoke to drift out through his nostrils. ‘It says that when Friar de Landa was called back to Spain in 1563 to answer for his crimes before the Inquisition, Akbal Coatl – or Salvador Emmanuel as he was known to the Spanish – did indeed accompany him.’
‘Jesus. Talk about swimming with the sharks.’
‘Akbal Coatl then went on to assist the Friar in his writing of the
Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán
, which was published three years later as part of a successful effort to disarm the critics of de Landa’s scorched-earth policy.’ Calque shook his head. ‘Incredible. On the surface it makes no sense at all. Can you imagine how assisting de Landa to wriggle out from underneath the Inquisition must have felt to Akbal Coatl? After what de Landa had done to his people and their artefacts? And after what de Landa had made him do?’
‘So why did he do it?’
‘Because otherwise the history of the Maya people would have died with him.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Deadly serious. The fact still remains that Bishop de Landa’s book is the single most important document regarding Maya customs and practices we have left. It formed the backbone to the decoding of the Maya glyphs, Sabir. Even today, anthropologists and historians are forced to rely on it, in the absence of anything else.’
‘So de Landa created a gap in the market by burning all the Maya codices? And then he filled it with his own book? That’s cute.’
‘Which Akbal Coatl probably co-wrote, and which de Landa then claimed as his own work.’
‘You’re fishing, Calque. You can’t prove that.’
‘You’re right. Whoever really wrote it is irrelevant. The key words are “three years later”, Sabir. The book was finished “three years” after Akbal Coatl and Friar de Landa arrived in Spain. Don’t you see what that means?’
‘Not offhand. No.’
‘Nostradamus only died in 1566. It means that Akbal Coatl would have had three years, between 1563 and 1566, in which to hear about, and maybe even meet, the seer.’
‘What? Are you trying to tell me that the Franciscans let Akbal Coatl travel wherever he liked? Gave him
carte blanche
to journey through Europe? That’s one heck of a stretch.’
‘No it’s not. He was Friar de Landa’s private secretary, man. He stayed in Europe with de Landa until 1572, when de Landa returned to the Yucatan as the province’s first bishop, taking Akbal Coatl back with him. The man was de Landa’s major apologist amongst the disenfranchised Maya. His amanuensis, almost. One of the key elements in de Landa’s fight-back from the ignominy of his former position. During the three-year writing and researching of de Landa’s book, Coatl would
have been sent from monastery to monastery, and from abbey to abbey, to conduct research on de Landa’s part, and to garner testimonials from his contemporaries to back up de Landa’s claims in the ecclesiastical court.’
‘Are you making all this up, Calque? How can you be so sure?’
‘Because it’s all here, Sabir, in black and white.’ Calque tapped the book with the heel of his hand. ‘There’s a complete list of Akbal Coatl’s journeys around Spain and southern France during the ten or so years he spent in Europe. With dates and locations. Look. Listen to this. In May 1566 – that’s two months before Nostradamus’s death, Sabir – Salvador Emmanuel, aka Akbal Coatl, travelled down from Avignon to the Franciscan seminary at Salon-de-Provence.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Are you beginning to get the picture?’
‘Look, Calque. I know for a fact that Nostradamus was buried in the Franciscan Chapel at Salon. He was tight in with the Franciscans by that time. He would have thought of it as an insurance policy against the Inquisition for his wife and children. That much I remember from the book I wrote. It was only later, during the French Revolution, that they dug him up and re-interred him in the Collégiale St-Laurent.’
‘Well that makes even more sense then, doesn’t it? The two men simply must have met. Nostradamus’s reputation as a prophet was Europe-wide by that time. He was at the very height of his fame. Even the French Royal Family stopped off at Salon to visit him. For all practical purposes he was a member of the Establishment.’
‘So you think they hatched this whole thing up together? A member of the Establishment, deep in with the Franciscans, and a Maya renegade? Sorry to play Devil’s Advocate, Calque, but somebody has to.’
‘I think Akbal Coatl asked Nostradamus for help as one member of an endangered species – the Maya – to another member of an endangered species – the Jews. This would have appealed to Nostradamus, whose sympathies were always with the underdog. I’m guessing that Nostradamus then told Akbal Coatl that he’d just had a vision of another member of an endangered species – the Gypsies – one day becoming the mother of the Second Coming. And, hey presto, the dates he’d been given might very well tie in with the Maya dates surrounding the ending of the Cycle of the Nine Hells.’
‘Go on, Calque. Your capacity for lateral thought is enthralling.’
‘So my guess is that the two of them would have pooled their knowledge. Wouldn’t you? And that after Akbal Coatl left, Nostradamus would have taken the precautions we already know he took in protecting his 58 so-called ‘lost prophecies’. Which weren’t lost at all, needless to say – they were merely very well hidden. Then Akbal Coatl decides to fulfil his part of the bargain by backing the whole thing up in his secret book. Only two hundred years later the War of the Castes comes along, and the book is lost. But both of them – Akbal Coatl and Nostradamus – have factored in a failsafe mechanism.’
‘The eruption of the Pico de orizaba.’
‘And two potential catalysts …’
‘Me and the guardian.’
‘Yes. You – or whoever else lucked onto the prophecies’ trail – and the guardian. It’s incredible, isn’t it? But it makes the most perfect sense. Prophet meets protector of the sacred books. The possibilities are limitless. But, as you say, Sabir, in our present situation they take us nowhere. Talking about possibilities, though, is anyone following us yet?’
‘Not so far as I can see.’
‘I thought so. They have other things on their mind, no doubt.’
‘What do you mean “no doubt”?’
‘I think you hit their Big Boss.’
‘What are you talking about, Calque? What Big Boss? And why haven’t you mentioned this before?’
‘I had more important things on my mind.’
‘I didn’t hit anybody.’
‘Yes you did. When you nearly rammed the Toyota. Back there at the warehouse. Didn’t you feel a crunch?’
‘I missed the Toyota by a mile, Calque. I’m not that bad a driver.’
‘Yes. But you hit a very large Mexican holding a walkie-talkie. He had a shiny suit on. The sort of suit only drug lords dare to wear – and believe me, Sabir, I know what I’m talking about. You smashed this man’s foot. Surely you saw him?’
‘I was too busy trying to get us out of there in one piece. And anyway, this thing has a snout the size of a condor’s. Of course I didn’t see him.’
‘Well I think that’s why we’re not being followed. I think you inadvertently took out the enemy’s commander-in-chief. I was going to tell you at the time, but then I got caught up in Akbal Coatl’s book.’ Calque steadied his left arm as they went over a speed bump. ‘It might afford us just enough of an edge to stay in the clear.’
‘I destroyed this man’s foot, you say?’
Calque nodded, still grimacing from the pain in his arm. ‘I love people like you, Sabir. You plough through life leaving a trail of wrecked bodies behind you. Only you never notice them. It must be a sublime knack to have. I only wish I could emulate it.’
‘What about your associate, Macron? Have you forgotten about him so quickly? And who brought me back into this? It was you. And who brought Lamia into
this? You again. Calque, sometimes when I listen to you bullshitting away at me, I get this curious image coming into my brain.’
‘Oh? And what image is that?’
‘Of the pot calling the kettle black.’