The Mayan Codex (6 page)

‘Yes. We noticed those.’ The boys grinned at each other, as if in echo of some telepathic joke.

The inspector hesitated, tempted to say more – to make his mark on these gilded hooligans. Then he shrugged a second time and moved back down the aisle. He was due off at the next station anyway. In twenty minutes’ time he would be home with his wife. Why complicate matters?

‘Shall we?’ Abiger gave his brother a playful nudge with the toe of his shoe.

‘Are you crazy? We’d be forced to change trains. We’d be late for Madame, our mother. She might even ask us what we were doing that was so important we missed the beginning of her gathering.’

‘Oh come on, Vau. Live dangerously for once. We’re too old to be thrashed with a wooden clothes hanger anymore. Anyhow, I’m head of the family now.’

‘Madame, our mother, is head of the family. You’re merely its technical figurehead. And a plug-ugly one at that. That much I’ll acknowledge.’

Abiger de Bale lurched forwards as if he intended to trigger a rematch of their wrestling competition – but then, with the movement only half-completed, he changed his mind. Grinning, he allowed his gaze to slide away from his brother and follow the line of the inspector’s retreating back. ‘That worm insulted the CM, Vau. I say we do it.’

For twenty-five years Vaulderie had followed his brother’s lead in everything. Gone everywhere he had gone. Even taken his punishments for him. It was far too late to turn back now. With the death of Rocha de Bale, their adopted brother – the man now known to the outside world as the murderer, Achor Bale – everything had changed. What had been hidden was now open. What had been obscured was now set to be revealed.
The Corpus Maleficus would finally be taking its rightful place as the driving force behind a new order.

Vaulderie gave a defeated sigh. ‘I say we do it too.’

At first, after leaving the train, the boys worked in a zigzag formation behind the inspector’s back. That way, if the man had a car, one of them could break away from the stalk and procure a vehicle, whilst the other could mark the direction taken and keep in touch via his cell phone.

But the inspector didn’t have a car. It soon became obvious that he lived within walking distance of the station – a railwayman through and through. Instinctively, intuitively, the boys decided not to take him en route. Far more sensible to deal with him at home, well out of the eye of the storm. Far more fun to wait.

At one point the man stopped. He cocked his head downwards and to one side, as though he were listening to something passing underneath him. The boys froze in their respective positions, visible, but not visible, maybe fifty metres behind him. In their experience, marks never turned around. People simply didn’t expect to be followed – not on a suburban street, mid-afternoon, in
la France profonde
, with mothers collecting their children from school, and yellow postal vans busy on their last collection of the day.

The boys converged again when they saw the inspector hesitating at the communal door to his apartment block
– feeling for his keys – tapping his pockets for cigarettes. Would he turn at the very last moment and head for the
Bar
/
Tabac
on the corner? Have himself a quick snifter before facing his wife? In that case both twins knew that they would be forced to abandon the hunt and head back towards the station.

For despite all their bravado, each, in his own way, feared Madame, their mother, as they feared nothing else on earth. She was like Agaberte, daughter of the Norse god Vagnoste, who could transform herself from a wrinkled old crone into a woman so tall she could reach up and touch the sky – a woman who could overturn mountains, rip up great trees, and dry up the swollen beds of rivers. Abi and Vau’s childhood had been spent entirely in her thrall, and no power on earth could entirely break her dominance of them.

The inspector reached forward and unlocked the door. Now the boys were hurrying, not wishing to be faced with an unknown, untested lock. Vau caught the door just before it clicked to, and Abi slid through the crack his brother made for him, one eye fastened on the stairs above him.

Shoes in their hands, they padded up the concrete stairwell behind the inspector. How could people bear to live like this? Money and power were there to be taken. All you needed was the nerve.

The inspector was stepping into his apartment – calling out to his wife.

Abi reached out and touched him on the arm. ‘Colonel. A word.’

Some years before, the brothers had had a series of telescopic, lead-weighted, fighting batons designed and made for them. Eight inches long, the batons fitted comfortably inside the forearm sleeve of a jacket, where they were secured in place by the simple expedient of a loop and a double button.

Although principally made of rubber, the batons were not able to pass through a metal detector by dint of their lead content, and therefore had to be transported separately on an aeroplane as part of hold baggage – or secreted, for instance, inside a travelling fishing-rod case, where they could be passed off as fisherman’s priests. By train and by car, however, they were perfection itself. Once liberated from their housings, the batons extended with a simple flick of the wrist to a total of two feet in length, retaining more than enough rigidity to guarantee a quite remarkable hand-to-target action.

They would kill, of course, if used aggressively, but their principal function was defensive – they were designed as pacifiers. In ten seconds a man could be crippled, his legs worse than useless, by the simple expedient of a scything stroke behind the knee. The twins, being two, found this the best resort in all but the most extreme of circumstances. One would monopolize the target’s attention whilst the other struck him from behind. It had never failed them. A frightened man on the floor, one leg unmarked but useless, was a very different animal indeed from an angry man in possession of all his physical faculties.

The inspector curled up in the foetal position at the entrance to his apartment and began to dry retch, like a cat
attempting to bring up a fur ball. His wife came hurrying out of the kitchen, where she had been preparing their supper. Vau gave her two for good measure, one behind each knee. She dropped to the floor and then stretched out, like a postulant at some Easter confraternity ceremony.

Abi closed the door. He and Vau dragged the couple through into the lounge.

Vau switched on the television. ‘Gas explosion or double suicide?’

The inspector tried to raise himself from the floor. Vau flailed him behind the other knee. ‘Silence. You will both remain silent, faces to the ground. Do you understand me?’

The woman was unconscious – shock, probably. The boys were used to people responding in disparate ways. Women were particularly vulnerable to sudden explosions of violence, whereas men would often struggle, requiring further pacification.

Abi snapped his fingers triumphantly. ‘No. No. Listen. I’ve got another idea. Kill two birds with one stone.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Wait for me here. I won’t be more than ten minutes. A surprise.’ Abi was staring out of the window now, his expression speculative. He snapped the baton shut and secreted it back inside his sleeve. He had scarcely even broken into a sweat.

Abi had passed the Jaguar Sports on their way in from the station. The car had captured his attention even then, as
It had seemed so out of place in a street full of Peugeots, and Renaults, and six-seater Fiat run-arounds. A pimp’s car, probably, or the vehicle of some chancer who had made it good and couldn’t tear himself away from the old neighbourhood. Perhaps the owner was visiting his elderly mother?

It took Abi less than a minute to bypass the alarm system. He had been breaking into cars ever since his early adolescence, and considered it one of his primary skills. During their teen years, Madame, his mother, had arranged for him and Vau to serve as apprentices to one of the best auto thieves in the business. It was something he was infinitely grateful to her for. It had given him power.

He drove the car to the front of the inspector’s apartment building and triggered the trunk mechanism. Vau was watching from the inspector’s window. Abi mouthed a few words and pointed to the trunk. Vau nodded his head.

He emerged, less than a minute later, supporting the inspector like a man will support his drunken friend after a night out on the town.

Abi had closed the trunk by this time, and was holding the passenger door open, with the seat pulled forward. He checked around, then nodded. Speed was of the essence in such cases – any hesitation could prove fatal. Neither he nor Vau appeared on any police records, and he intended to keep it that way. ‘Get in there. Keep your head down.’

The inspector stretched himself flat down across the well. ‘What about my wife? What are you doing with my wife?’ His voice shook. One hand snaked down as if to feel for any damage to his knees.

‘Don’t worry, Colonel. She’s coming along for the ride too.’

Once they were safely out of town, Vau stopped the car, and they transferred the inspector and his wife to the trunk. It was a tight fit, but it seemed unlikely the pair would actually suffocate. Both parties had wet themselves, which saved the brothers the trouble of having to stop somewhere en route for a leak break.

Vau caught his brother’s eye. He gave a speculative chuck of the head. ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking. But we’ll never make it. You can’t beat a TGV. Those things average more than three hundred kilometres an hour.’