The Mayan Codex

18

Ever the professional – and ever mindful of his 3,000 euros – Picaro felt around under the table for the flic’s precious tape recorder. Exactly two metres to the right of the master chair, taped up inside the skirt, at the exact angle of the joist and the cross-brace. Yes. There it was. Picaro pocketed it.

He hesitated, and then made briskly for the door. What business was the woman of his? He’d done what he came here to do. He was already running late because of his previous caution. Why complicate matters? This way, he could get out of the house before daybreak with no one the wiser.

His gaze travelled inexorably back to the woman. What the hell had they done to her? Maybe she was dead, even? But no. He could see her breathing by the light of the torch.

As he played the light across her body, a memory came back to Picaro from his time at La Sante prison. A young lad, mixed race, not more than nineteen years old, who had fallen foul of one of the methamphetamine gangs. One day the gang had waited for him in the showers – for sooner or later, as Picaro had tried to explain to the boy, the bad guys always get you. What the hell else did they have to do with their time? But the boy had been too young and too cocksure to listen to him.

This one they’d condemned to a tournante – a gang rape. When Picaro found the boy, they’d left him tied to a chair, with his head through the seat, his belly over the backrest, and his hands and feet strapped to the legs – that way he would be available for anyone else to use who happened along.

At first Picaro hadn’t understood what he was looking at. It was like when his son had emerged, balls first, from his mother’s womb. Picaro had fallen back, his face ashen, shouting, ‘Christ, what’s that?’

‘It’s his testicles, Monsieur,’ the midwife had told him. ‘They swell up in a breech birth, because the legs are stretched back over the head.’

When he’d seen the state of the young man’s anus, Picaro had vomited. Then he’d untied the boy, straightened him out as best he could on the cold floor of the shower room, and gone to fetch the toubibs.

They’d stitched him up good, but the boy had never been right again after the attack. One day, about six months later, he’d cut off his own balls with a piece of broken glass.

Sighing, Picaro moved back to the table. Taking out his Opinel, he cut the cords binding the young woman to her chair, eased her towards him, and let her fall across his right shoulder.

With a hitch of his arms, he settled her weight more squarely. Then, feeling all kinds of a fool, he started back across the hall.

No point closing the door behind me now, he thought to himself. I might as well leave a fucking paper trail.