was only taking about three breaths a minute. His yoga teacher would have been proud of him.
He heard the explosion at the warehouse. Then his cell phone vibrated. He ignored that for obvious reasons. Then he heard the stun-grenade attacks on the cenote. He knew exactly what was happening. He didn’t need them to draw him a picture. The nine of them had bitten off more than they could chew. It was as simple as that.
After a further quarter of an hour, Oni stood up and brushed himself off. There was another flurry of gunfire from over by the cenote. Using his shotgun as a crutch, he limped past the burnt-out remnants of the warehouse and over to where he knew the Stoner had been positioned. It was still there. But Vau had gone. There was blood on the Stoner and sprinkled over the surrounding dirt. He’d liked Vau. He hadn’t been the brightest button in the bag, but then Oni knew that he was no Einstein either.
Oni looked around for his stash of spare magazines. There were two drum belt containers left. He unclipped the existing magazine and replaced it with one of the drum belts. He put the other drum belt inside his shirt – 300 rounds – 150 rounds apiece. It wasn’t a lot, in the circumstances.
He thought for a moment, and then picked up the used drum belt he’d discarded earlier and tapped it against his arm. Maybe another 50 rounds. Better than nothing. He put that inside his shirt too.
He began to limp in the direction of the cenote.
113
Pretty soon Oni could hear someone shouting. It was a man sitting in a director’s chair at the very lip of the cenote. Oni shook his head in disbelief.
The man and about thirty other men were all clustered in a bunch and staring into the pool. His remaining brothers and sisters must be down there. It seemed obvious to him.
He raised the Stoner and hitched it under his arm. Oni was nearly seven feet tall. The three-and-a-half-foot long Stoner looked like a child’s toy in his hands.
The man in the director’s chair raised one of his hands triumphantly.
Oni began to shoot.
The first drum was exhausted in a little under twenty seconds. He replaced it with the second drum. He got through that in under fifteen seconds. Then he felt around inside his shirt for the half-used drum.
Most everybody was dead. The lip of the cenote had crumbled away where they’d all been clustered together. Shooting them had been a little like playing one of those arcade games he’d been fixated on as a child. The one where the cowboys keep coming at you and your only chance of beating them is to keep on shooting.
He burped the Stoner at a moving man. Then at another. Not much left in the drum now.
He walked to the edge of the cenote and looked down. The water was littered with bodies. Some were still thrashing around. Others were just floating, face down.
‘Abi? Are you down there?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Who else is alive?’
‘Rudra, Nawal, and Dakini.’
‘Oh, I’m glad. I thought I’d lost you all.’
‘Can we come up?’
‘Yes. You can come up now. I’ll throw down the hosepipe for you. Everybody left up here is dead.’
Oni hurled the Stoner to one side and limped across to where the pump hose was neatly furled at the very lip of the cenote.
There was a noise behind him. He turned, just a few feet short of the hose.
Emiliano was on his knees. The morphine had temporarily numbed him to the Stoner bullets that had ripped through his body.
As Oni watched, Emiliano snatched at a mosquito that was hovering in front of his face.
Then Emiliano raised his pistol and shot Oni in the head.
Oni toppled over the lip of the cenote. There was a pause. Then a mighty splash.
Emiliano smiled. He glanced down into the cenote. Abi, Rudra, Dakini and Nawal were floating fifty feet below him, watching. There was no way out for them now.
Emiliano looked down at his wounds. There was no way out for him either. He touched the pistol barrel to the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.
PART THREE
1
Lamia de Bale was feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders. It was as if the futility of everyone else’s life was accruing to – and therefore being encapsulated by – her own. In deciding to leave Sabir without speaking to him, and without any attempt at an explanation, she was aware that she had closed an opened door. Now, three miles above the Atlantic Ocean, she felt the loss of its possibilities without fully understanding why.
She waited until half an hour into the Iberia flight before getting out of her first-class seat. She had chosen the premium seat to ensure that she both entered and exited the plane after all the other passengers had cleared the terminal – airlines, she knew, made exceptions for their first-class passengers, and catered to their whims. It also gave her access to business class and economy class, without giving either of those two areas access to her.
She had lied back in France when she had told Calque that Madame, her mother, had confiscated her money and her credit cards, and that only at the last minute had she had the providential foresight to conceal her passport inside her underwear. In point of fact she had hidden her passport, credit cards, and cash money in a traveller’s pouch looped onto the back of her belt and neatly flipped over to lie flush along the inside edge of her slacks – a loose blouse had completed the picture, and had served to protect her from the customary stares men give to young women’s bottoms. Even young women with catastrophic birthmarks.
She had then, at the first possible opportunity, cached the credit cards beneath the base of her powder compact, and rolled her folding money inside a number of Kotex Super Plus tampon tubes, which she had then re- wrapped and re-glued so that they looked fresh from the shop. If either Sabir or Calque had gone through her things, they certainly hadn’t found either one of her secret stashes. Men had an in-built reluctance to sniff around women’s private knick-knacks – it was as if they didn’t want to know what artifices and grimy little realities lay behind the surface appearance they valued so much.
And Lamia, of course, knew all about surface appearances. She had spent her life trying to avoid acknowledging the effect of hers on others. It was hard being a woman with a damaged face. People responded to you in one of two ways. They either showed their repulsion by avoiding you – or they overcompensated for something they were relieved not to be suffering from themselves, and sickened you with their pity.
Madame, her mother, had tried to sweeten the pill a little – financial security counted for a lot when you felt vulnerable in other areas. And Lamia was physically better off, when push came to shove, than all three of her sisters, and at least four of her brothers. So she was in the upper quadrant of the population as regards financial security, and the middle quadrant as regards disabilities. But until she had met Calque, and then, later, Sabir, she had found it impossible to respond to men without suspecting them of hypocrisy – they pretended to want the whole of you, when in reality they only wanted the hormonally charged areas they were hardwired to seek out.
The truth of the matter was that Lamia had secretly craved being sought after and pursued – just like any normal, unmarked, woman – but her face and attitude had either put men off or obviated their interest in her altogether. Lamia shrugged at herself in the powder-room vanity mirror – well you couldn’t have it both ways.
Joris Calque had genuinely seemed to see beyond the surface of her face, however, and Adam Sabir had astonished her with his capacity for blinkered sensuality. She was convinced that Sabir truly believed he loved her, and a part of her sincerely loved him. But she was her mother’s daughter, and she had entered into the
