Sabir stood up. They were still touching along the entire length of their bodies. He undid Lamia’s brassiere and let it fall onto her discarded dress.
She sat down on the bed. Then she allowed herself to fall backwards, like a rag doll. She looked up at him expectantly, laughter in her eyes.
He reached down and drew her panties over her hips – she had to wriggle a little to help him.
Then she was lying naked in front of him. Not covering herself. Confident about her beauty. Wanting him to admire her.
He consumed her with his gaze, and Lamia accepted it as nothing more than her due. Without taking his eyes off her, Sabir discarded his own clothes. Lamia’s eyes travelled quickly over his body as he undressed himself, and then up again to his face.
Sabir slid onto the bed alongside her.
They lay, facing each other, feeling the beat of the fan against their skin.
It was a long time indeed before Sabir bent forward to kiss her.
58
Oni de Bale slapped at the mosquito which was hovering just above his right eye. He flopped backwards against the tree and lathered some more ‘Scoot’ on himself. He wondered if the others were being eaten alive too?
They each had separate cars again now – Abi had taken advantage of Sabir and Lamia’s sex interlude that morning to send them all into Merida, to the nearest Avis drop-off point.
Now that was a strange thing. Never would he have dreamed of Lamia and Sabir getting it on together. Especially with Madame, his mother’s, virginity hangup. What was that junk from the Bible she always used to quote at them in an effort to get them – well, particularly Aldinach, let’s be honest – to behave themselves?
These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth… And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.
Of course in Aldinach’s case the target was both men and women – whichever was the opposite of whatever sex he had chosen to be that day. Convenient, that, when you came to think of it. It doubled the possible catchment area. Mind you, Aldinach wasn’t gay. Oni had to give the little nymphomaniac her due. She only worked on polar opposites. Never own sex. It was a sort of morality, when you came to think about it.
Anyway, much good Madame, his mother’s, virginity imprecations had done them. Rocha had fallen for her line, though, and look what had happened to him. But he was the only one, apart from Lamia – the rest of them rutted like rabbits whenever they could. And now here was Lamia obviously deciding that enough was enough, aged twenty-seven, and reeling old Sabir into her bed. Frankly, he couldn’t blame her. With a face like hers you needed all the luck you could get in the jiggy jiggy stakes.
Oni knew all about it. The size he was, most females ran a mile, scared that he would squash them. All right, he wasn’t a disgusting fat pig like Asson, whom he had once seen consuming four pitchers of Ben amp; Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream at a single sitting, but he was upwards of seven feet tall, and most women reached just about as far as his navel. As a result, Oni had taken to hiring professionals, who weren’t put off by the – what did Aldinach call it? – outsize aspects of his persona.
Now Abi had ordered them all into the forest to watch the site at Kabah, and here was Oni, with his extra- large body surface – wasn’t it the Cathars who said that human skin connected us to the Devil? – serving as dish of the day to a particularly virulent variety of mosquito. Fuck it. Fuck it all to hell.
He reattached his night-vision goggles and focused them on Sabir’s back. The guy was busy counting the masks on the facade of the temple. Each time he came to one he liked, he fetched a sheet of paper out of his backpack and taped it over the mask. He’d covered five sections in this way already – only the single remaining upper section still to go. The paper shone up in the moonlight very well indeed – Oni had to allow the bastard that much.
Oni now reckoned, by dint of careful counting, that Sabir was choosing the twentieth mask in each separate mask section. Must be some significance to that, wouldn’t you say? He punched his cell phone and passed on the information to Abi.
Sabir had snuck in to the Kabah site not half an hour before, just as Abi had said he would, wearing a rucksack and carrying two tyre irons. The policeman had snuck in beside him. Lamia wasn’t with them. Probably recovering from her orgy, out in the car. Oni grinned. Bet she was sore. She’d probably be walking splay-legged for days. Serve the bitch right for leaving it so long to get started.
That footman who got himself squished – Philippe, yes, that had been his name – he’d been dogging her for ages. But Lamia had brushed him off like a cobweb. And now he was dead, propping up the walls of a girls’ school in Cavalaire-sur-Mer. Did people still have sex in hell? Oni shrugged. Only one way to find out. On second thoughts, though, maybe he’d leave that little task to Philippe.
Oni swung around and focused his night goggles back on the Indian. Yes, the man was still hiding behind the tree, watching Sabir’s every move. Next, Abi swung his goggles over to the courtyard on the left of the Temple of the Masks. Yup. The night watchman was still lurking in a doorway there. The guy was whispering into his cell phone like he was making love to it.
It seemed pretty much impossible that Sabir and the policeman weren’t aware that they were being watched by at least three separate parties, but then Oni had to accept that they didn’t have the advantages he had – his night-vision goggles turned the whole of the scene in front of him into a sort of pallid, moonlit playground, where everything took on the surreal shape of one of Salvador Dali’s dream landscapes.
Oni could hardly wait to find out what would happen when whoever the night watchman was calling – cops? museum archivists? eco-warriors? – would come piling in through the front gates like the 7th Cavalry in a John Ford movie. The expression on Sabir’s face would be worth the price of entry alone.
Oni whispered once again into his own cell phone, bringing Abi up to date, and ending up with, ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Stay where you are. Watch. And wait. Don’t – I repeat don’t – interfere.’
Oni grunted, and slapped at another damned mosquito. Easier said than done. He squirted out another palm full of ‘Scoot’ and plastered it all over his face. ‘Fucking buzzers!’
59
You watched the two gringos with a sinking sensation in your heart. What were they doing? Why were they here in the middle of the night? The younger gringo was counting the masks in each section, and then taping sheets of paper over the ones he chose. A strange procedure, surely? And no doubt illegal. Otherwise why would they come here at dead of night rather than during the daytime, when their activities would have been open to the public gaze?
You recognized them both from earlier on in the day. Only now the woman that had been with them, the one with the blood-soaked face, the one the guide had thought had the mal de ojo – yes, you had noticed him making the phallic gesture with his hands to ensure that the mal de ojo did not turn into the more dangerous ojo pasado – this woman had gone away. Maybe, being a woman, she did not approve of what these men were doing?
Earlier that evening, Tepeu had tried to persuade you to travel home with him on his triciclo. Tepeu was an estimable man. A man to honour. You had told him that you needed to stay here, near to the temple, and he had not questioned your motives, or tried to dissuade you. Instead he had arranged for a blanket for you, and also that you would be brought some iguana stew from the wife of the gatekeeper.
This woman and the gatekeeper lived in a hut about half a kilometre from the site. At eight o’clock Tepeu had cycled over and he and you had eaten the stew together, and shared a litre bottle of beer. You had told Tepeu that you could not repay him, but he had brushed your protestations aside like a man who flaps his hand at a
