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 Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, 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.’
