The Mayan Codex

39

‘I think it’s time you told us a little more about the Corpus Maleficus.’ Calque was luxuriating across the Grand Cherokee’s rear bench. Sabir was driving, and Lamia was beside him on the passenger seat.

The air conditioning was working at full stretch, and Sabir could feel the deterioration in the car’s power as a result. He was sticking to a steady sixty-eight miles an hour on the assumption that any contact with Mexican traffic cops this close to the border could only lead to tears. This was drug country. Everyone was corrupt in one way or another. It was simply a matter of scale.

‘Why now? Why did you not ask me this before?’ Lamia glanced back at Calque. It wasn’t a suspicious look so much as an old-fashioned one. The sort of look that says ‘You’d better not be trying to spin me a line, matey.’

Calque straightened up. The expression on his face was that of a man who suddenly means business. ‘We are maybe two, or at the most, three days’ driving away from where we need to be. Sabir has chosen not to share with us the key element of his revelatory quatrain – although I should have thought he would have learned to trust us both by now. It has occurred to me that if you showed good faith, Lamia, in opening up the skeletons in your family’s cupboard, then the ever elusive Sabir might prove more amenable to also confiding in his friends.’

Sabir rolled his eyes. ‘Artfully done, Calque. Artfully done. I can’t fault you. You got a dig in at just about everybody with that little speech of yours. Hell, you must have been a policeman in a former life.’

Before Calque could respond, Lamia turned towards both men, fixing first one and then the other with her gaze. ‘I don’t mind you quizzing me. I trust you, even if you don’t trust me. I’m here with you because I’ve got nowhere else to go. And because I don’t want to be alone, now that my family have excommunicated me. It’s as simple as that. To have you both on my side – to be able to share my fears with you – is very precious to me.’

Chalk one up for the distaff team, thought Sabir. He checked out Calque’s face in the rear-view mirror. The man was as pink as a sand shrimp. Unprecedented. That was the only word for it. He had never seen Calque colour up to an even mildly roseate tinge before. The bastard had seemed impermeable to normal feelings of guilt and embarrassment.

Sabir realized that he was feeling pretty guilty, too. It was becoming ludicrously obvious that both he and Calque had been holding out on Lamia through some sort of misplaced survival instinct. Maybe now was the time to bring things out into the open a little?

Sabir cleared his throat. ‘Right. Me first. Cards on the table. I’m sorry I’ve appeared so elusive. The verse you are all feeling hurt and resentful about goes as follows:

“In the land of the great volcano, fire

When the rock cools, the wise one, Ahau Inchal Kabah,

Shall make a hinged skull of the twentieth mask:

The thirteenth crystal will sing for the God of Blood.” ’

There was a stunned silence. Calque was the first to break it. ‘That’s it? That’s the quatrain?’

Sabir nodded. ‘Lock, stock, and barrel. What you see is what you get.’

‘My God. It doesn’t take us very far, does it?’ Despite his words, Calque’s eyes were fervid with speculation.

‘It takes us to the Palace of the Masks at Kabah, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it, Sabir? How do you read that one?’

‘Well. The “of the twentieth mask” bit. That must be the Codz Poop. Or whatever your website called it, Lamia. It ties right in, don’t you see? That’s why I felt such a fool when you sprang the Orizaba eruption on me. Though how Nostradamus came up with this is way beyond me. Perhaps he’s simply sent us all on some sort of posthumous wild goose chase halfway across the world? A final exercise of power from beyond the grave?’

‘It wasn’t a wild goose chase in France. Everything he said in his quatrains was true.’

‘Yes. But that was in France. Nostradamus knew about France. He lived there for more than sixty years. But what the heck did he know about the New World?’

‘Quite a lot I should imagine.’ Calque held up a restraining hand. He was back in his element again, all thoughts of previous blunders forgotten. ‘The man was born in 1503, remember, just three years before the death of Christopher Columbus. And Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. With Hernan Cortes invading Mexico twenty-seven years later, in 1519. That gave Nostradamus, who died in 1566, forty-seven years in which to find out all he wanted about the new Spanish colonies. He would no doubt have been familiar with Cortes’s own Cartas de Relacion, which appeared in print during the 1520s. And with the personally written account of the conquistador, Bernal Diaz de Castillo. Also Friar Bartolome de las Casas’s excoriating description of the Destruction of the Indies. Also Bernardino de Sahagun’s Florentine Codex. For we know for a fact that Nostradamus both spoke and read Spanish, as well as a number of other languages, including Latin, Greek, Italian, and Franco-Provencal.’

‘For pity’s sake, Calque. What were you doing all those years in the police force? You’re a born historian, man.’

Calque managed to look both pleased and peeved at the same time – as though he had just been surprised, in flagrante delicto, albeit with a particularly beautiful woman. ‘I have indeed been doing my homework over the past few months. Those futile weeks I spent spying on Mademoiselle Lamia’s family were not entirely wasted, you see. I read dozens of books both before and during that period – and everything about Nostradamus that I could find.’

‘So…’

‘So there’s no reason why Nostradamus should not have shown a keen interest in the New World – the place and its riches were an object of endless fascination for the whole of literate Europe. Remember the myth of El Dorado? And remember, too, that Nostradamus came from an ancient family of assimilated Jews? Just as with the Gypsies, the forcibly ex-Jewish Nostradamus would have known exactly what kind of a threat the combined forces of Spanish Catholicism, the Inquisition, and the Auto-da-Fe posed to a country and culture that they considered pagan – and, in consequence, damned.’

‘You mean he would have felt a kinship with the Maya?’

‘Exactly. Just as he had previously felt a kinship with the Gypsies. To the extent that he might even have compared the wholesale destruction of Maya culture to similar Inquisitorial threats against the four levels of the Kabbalah. As always, therefore, with Nostradamus, he would have Infibulated his quatrain with hidden codes and meanings to protect it from prying eyes – codes which could only be teased out via the use of gematria.’

‘Jesus Christ, Calque. “infibulated”? “ Gematria ”?’

‘Infibulated means to interleave, or to lard with a knitting needle – I’m using the word in its figurative sense, needless to say, rather than in its explicit sense of sewing up the labia majora. And gematria is the Hebrew system of numerology.’

Sabir flared his eyes in quiet desperation. ‘Are you trying to tell us that you have somehow deduced a whole series of hidden codes in the – what? – five whole minutes since you have had access to the quatrain?’

Calque threw himself back on his seat. ‘No. I am sorry to disappoint you both. But I have deduced no hidden codes as yet. I am merely speculating that they might – no, change that to must – exist.’