The Mayan Codex

29

Calque sat on a porter’s chair in the hallway, and waited. Six feet away stood the Countess’s surviving footman. Calque cracked the man a supercilious smile. The footman drew one finger slowly across his throat, and then pretended to gag, with his tongue dangling out the side of his mouth.

Well. It was communication of sorts.

Twenty more minutes went by.

Calque began to speculate on how the Countess would decide to play it. Would she offer him a cup of coffee first, like she did last time? Play the Grande Dame? Or would she calmly order Milouins to smash in his teeth with a matraque?

Calque cursed himself for having played so cravenly into the Countess’s hands. No one but Lamia knew what he was engaged upon. And there was no one else who could be remotely relied upon to explain to the authorities what he’d been up to these past six weeks. Picaro? Aime Macron? Neither one was the sort of man who easily volunteers information to the police. And what did they have to offer, anyway? Hearsay. Pure hearsay.

Calque sensed that he was about to become a victim of the very loi du silence he had striven against all his working life. He hadn’t even had the nous to bring Adam Sabir back into the loop. No. He had wanted to play it smart, and spring everything on Sabir at once. Prove what a clever man he was. Vainglory. That was what was going to do for him. The fatal hubris of the inadequate soul.

Milouins poked his head out of the salon and indicated to the footman that he should bring Calque inside. He was dangling Calque’s tape recorder like a yoyo from his right hand.

Strike one for the Corpus, thought Calque. I hope to hell they don’t torture me. That would be the final straw. It would never occur to them that I know precisely nothing.

The Countess was sitting in her customary seat, near the fireplace, with Madame Mastigou perched at her right shoulder, dictation pad at the ready.

Milouins positioned the tape recorder on the glass-topped occasional table in front of her as though it were a platter bearing John the Baptist’s severed head. Then, with a toss of his chin, he indicated that Calque should sit down.

‘Are you quite recovered from your previous injuries, Captain Calque? Madame Mastigou reminds me that you had been involved in a car accident when last we met. Alongside your assistant, Lieutenant…’

‘Lieutenant Macron. Yes. The man your son killed.’

The Countess’s eyes flared – the effect was like a dying bonfire receiving a sudden rush of cold air. ‘Please leave my son out of this, Captain Calque – my emotions on the subject are still very raw. It might act to your disadvantage.’

Calque could feel the Countess’s anger burning into him from across the room. He had the sudden, discomfiting conviction that the woman might actually be mad, and that no one in her entourage dared make the first move to have her sectioned. Working for the woman must be akin to being a senior Wehrmacht general in the final years of Adolf Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.

The Countess drew herself up. It was clear by her attitude that she intended to cut directly to the chase. She pointed to the tape recorder. ‘You, or one of your associates, broke into my house early this morning. I assume that it was not merely to kidnap my daughter?’

Calque stared at her. What was the point of talking?

‘Milouins, where did you find this tape recorder?’

‘In the Captain’s car.’

‘And what sort of tape recorder is it?’

‘A voice-activated tape recorder, Madame.’

‘Which means?’

‘Which means that it will switch itself on and off according to the volume of incoming sound.’

‘Instantly?’

‘It will respond to any sound whatsoever, Madame, yes. And it is designed to overrun. Meaning that once it has been triggered, it will continue to record for a certain period, even if the sound cuts off.’

‘Have you discovered its original place of concealment?’

‘Yes, Madame. Beneath the table in the Council Chamber. The marks of the electrical tape with which it was attached to the table are still clearly visible. They are also visible on the recorder.’

‘And the tape reel itself?’

‘The cassette, Madame? Nowhere to be found.’

The Countess turned to Calque. ‘That was clever of you, Captain Calque. That idea you had to hide the tape recorder in your car, where it would almost certainly be found. A cynic might go so far as to construe that you wished for it to be discovered. Why would that be, I wonder?’

Calque shrugged. His throat felt drier than a grain extractor.

‘Then I’ll tell you. Milouins has explained your machine to me in all its intricacies. As you can see, we know where it was hidden, and also when it was hidden, for logic dictates that you must have concealed it, illegally, during the search your policemen made of my house in May. Given this limited time frame, we have come to certain conclusions.’

Here we go, thought Calque. Bang goes my chance to bluff my way out of this.

‘Milouins cleans the Council Room at least once a month. No one else goes in there. Just him and a footman. So he conducted a little test while you were waiting outside in the hall. Play the tape, Milouins.’

Milouins retrieved a cassette tape from his pocket and placed it in the machine. He turned the volume to high and pressed play. The sound of a vacuum cleaner resonated throughout the room, followed by voices, and the bangs and crashes of moving furniture. Every now and again the tape would cut off and then start again, following a short period of silence. Madame Mastigou continued busily writing on her shorthand pad.

Calque knew what it felt like to be caught red-handed, with your fingers in the till. He must never again underestimate these people. And the Countess was not mad – that would have been too convenient. She was insane, with a hefty leavening of lunacy.

‘There. Interesting, isn’t it? I merely asked Milouins to recreate the exact sounds he would have made last week, whilst preparing the room for use. It is clear from his demonstration that you will have succeeded in recording nothing of any conceivable interest either to yourself or to the police, Captain Calque, on the ninety minutes of magnetic tape that you had at your disposal. If you had, you would have thrown the entire machine out of the window of your car, rather than just the cassette tape inside it.’

Calque decided to attempt a bluff anyhow. ‘I still have Lamia. And you have a murder you need to hush up. Even you can see that two people from the same household dying in violent circumstances within a few months of each other might stretch the bounds of coincidence. We ought to be able to come to some sort of accommodation, surely? I have considerable influence left on the force.’

The Countess glanced across at Madam Mastigou. Madame Mastigou consulted her brooch watch and nodded.

‘You misunderstand the situation, Captain Calque. My daughter, Lamia, will be back with us very shortly. At this exact moment two of my other children are entering your hotel in Cogolin and demanding to see their sister. She will leave with them, because she is a dutiful girl, and does not wish to vex her mother.’

Calque could feel the colour draining away from his face.

‘I own the main taxi service in the St Tropez peninsula, Captain Calque. In fact I own a considerable part of the peninsula itself. I invested a small part of my fortune in the local economy after my marriage – and very profitable it has been. You forget, perhaps, that my husband’s family have been Counts of this area for nine hundred years? Milouins simply called in the cab number and received an instant reply – the police and the tax authorities require each fare to be routinely logged within a central registration system, as you well know, so the process was a simple one. And Cogolin is hardly Siberia. What did you think? That you were dealing with amateurs?’

‘And the body? Out at Pampelonne?’

‘What body is that, Captain? My footman, Philippe Lemelle, has bipolar disorder. He has already absconded without leave three times during his present period of employment. Once he even sold all his possessions, including his car, to the first man he came across. Milouins came upon him living rough in Mandelieu. We took him back that time. In fact we’ve been very tolerant indeed with him – his family, after all, have been working for us for generations. But he was nevertheless given formal warning that if he absconded again, he would lose his job. That now appears to have happened.’

‘That’s bullshit, and you know it.’

‘Not according to our local doctor. Or to Milouins. Or to Monsieur Flavenot, our company registrar. I can assure you of that.’

‘I have access to the blood-stained car that killed him.’

‘Oh, please, Captain. Whoever drove that car also broke into my house and kidnapped one of its occupants – not to mention killing an innocent man via a hit-and-run. If we wished to pursue this matter, it is you and your associate who would find yourselves caught in the crossfire, not I. I think you will find, upon further reflection, that our interests coincide in this matter.’

Calque’s ears had begun to hum with tension. ‘What are you holding me for, then? You know everything. You control everything. I must be a massive irrelevance to you.’

‘You chose the word “irrelevance”, Captain, not I.’ The Countess stood up. ‘And we certainly aren’t holding you. You came here of your own free will. You may leave here equally freely. We have nothing more to say to one another.’

Calque rose to his feet in automatic echo of the Countess’s movement. What was it about the woman? Was it her impermeable self-belief? Perhaps if you were truly convinced that whatever you undertook was automatically rubber-stamped by God, then you also believed that the rest of the world’s idiots would play along with your fantasy? ‘May I have my tape recorder back?’

‘Perhaps you would like us to indemnify you against the loss of your cell phone, too? There are limits even to my patience, Captain.’

Calque hesitated, still not sure whether the Countess truly intended to let him go free. He took a tentative step towards the door. When no one made a move to stop him, he headed swiftly in the direction of the hall. He was briefly tempted to crook his arm obscenely at the ghoulish footman, but thought better of it. Perhaps this was all some outrageous bluff, and the minute he left the Countess’s presence they would manhandle him down the cellar stairs and start in on him with their rubber hosepipes?

He allowed the thought to fester inside him all the way to his car. Perhaps they’d tricked that up instead? Sawn through the cables? Drained the brake fluid? Set a bomb to go off on a trembler mechanism the moment he broke through the fifty-kilometre-an-hour mark? Christ knows, they’d had enough time. Calque felt like a gallus gladiator, forced to exit through the gates of the Circus Maximus at the tip of a spear in order to appease the bloodthirsty expectations of the crowd.

It was gradually dawning on him that he had pitched himself against an organization so complete in its self-belief – and so hermetic in its identity – that no single man could ever hope to match himself against it.

Puffing with relief, Calque climbed into his car and started the engine. His hand trembled as he put the car into first gear. With his foot still braced on the clutch pedal, Calque reached across for the crocodile-skin cigarette case his wife had given him when they were first married. Miraculously, it had somehow evaded the divorce settlement. He scattered its contents like chaff onto the passenger seat. Palming the nearest cigarette, he speared it between his lips. For some reason he had considerable difficulty matching the tip of the cigarette to the glow of the cigar lighter.

No one followed him out of the courtyard. No one followed him to the junction with the main road. Mystified, Calque turned right, towards Ramatuelle. No. There was definitely no one on his tail.

He pulled over into the first available lay-by and got out. First he lay on the ground and checked the underside of the car. Nothing. No sign of tampering. Then he looked in the engine compartment. Clean as a whistle. He felt around beneath the seats. Then he went around to the back of the car and checked there, paying particular attention to the exhaust pipe. Finally, he eased up the spare wheel cover. If the Corpus had bugged him or booby-trapped him, they’d certainly concealed their work well.

Calque got back in the car, readjusted his seat, and set off again. Twenty yards into the journey his body gave a convulsive shudder, like a horse shucking off rainwater. Calque hammered the steering wheel in sheer frustration at his lack of physical self-control. He simply must pull himself together. He daren’t fritter any more time away appeasing his unfounded fears. He had to retrieve his cell phone at all costs. Adam Sabir’s home number in America was concealed somewhere within its maw, and Calque’s first priority must be to warn the man that the Corpus was still on his case.

For Joris Calque had learned one valuable thing from his conversations with the Countess and with Lamia – and it had come to him more or less by default. The Countess had spoken about everything under the sun during their discussion – everything but Sabir. The man’s name hadn’t even figured. And yet Sabir was the very first person Lamia had asked him about when she’d regained consciousness after her doping.

Calque hadn’t spent the better part of his life interrogating people for nothing. He knew for a fact that the questions people left hanging – and the obvious names that they omitted during formal police interviews – were invariably of more significance than the ones they voluntarily allowed to surface.

The one thing he wouldn’t be doing when he got his cell phone back would be to try to interest any old friends in the Police Nationale about the curious disappearance of Philippe Lemelle – the Countess had figured it right. Jean Picaro had put his neck on the line to help the girl, and later to warn Calque that the Corpus was on to him – and Calque knew a multitude of so-called law-abiding people who wouldn’t have done half so much for a man they hardly knew, or for an unknown woman who had nothing whatsoever to do with the job they were being paid for.

Picaro had asked him to go easy as a personal favour on behalf of his wife and son. And Picaro was a two-time loser – meaning that the next occasion he was sent to prison, he would stay there for good. No parole. No time off for good behaviour.

Though it pained Calque’s soul to let the Countess wriggle off the hook, it was better, sometimes, to let sleeping dogs lie.