Age of Aztec (31 page)

A
ARONSON CONSENTED TO
act as her man on the inside at the Yard, and it was he who informed her, two days later, that the Mayans’ van had been located in Woolwich, near the docks. The vehicle had been rolled into a side alley and abandoned. Scavengers had relieved it of everything of resale value, tyres and engine parts mostly, but it was still unmistakably the van used in the Reston rescue. The radiator grille was stove in and the front bumper bore scrapings of paint that matched paint from a paddy wagon.

So Reston had been smuggled out of the country by boat. That was the only conclusion Mal could draw. And where would he go? France was the logical answer. Not only was it closest to hand but it had a longstanding tradition of resistance and subversion. The Louisiens would have clasped someone like the Conquistador to their bosom. He was one of them, as overt in his actions as they were covert in theirs, but no less opposed to Imperial rule.

Mal had neither the jurisdiction nor the resources to go haring round all of France looking for Reston. But she didn’t believe she needed to. He wouldn’t be there for long. It was the Mayans. The Mayans were key to all this. She had Aaronson do some digging, and made a few transatlantic calls herself, and soon she knew everything there was to know about a group of Mayan nationalists who painted skulls on their faces and whose preferred weapons were blowpipes and bolases.

Reston was in Anahuac. Had to be. In the company of the separatist guerrilla faction known as Xibalba.

Aaronson claimed he had a backlog of paid leave due which he would lose if he didn’t use, and he’d always had a hankering to visit the birthplace of the Empire. Call it a pilgrimage, if you will. Mal pointed out that she was currently persona non grata at work. It might hurt Aaronson’s career prospects if he continued to be associated with her, not least when she was busy doing that which Commissioner Brockenhurst had expressly forbidden.

In answer, all Aaronson said was, “What can I tell you, boss? I’m your bitch, and I always have been.”

Mal owned a few gilt-edged Empire bonds, a nest egg for her retirement, which she cashed in. That, along with money in a savings account amounted to just enough to secure two return flights to the Land Between The Seas and cover two or three weeks’ worth of travel and accommodation expenses.

They flew to Teotihuacan and made that city their base of operations. Then next few days all followed the same pattern. They drove out in their hire car to some other city or major town and introduced themselves at the Jaguar Warrior HQ there. They showed pictures of Reston, both in and out of armour, and explained who he was and what he’d done. A few of the Anahuac Jaguars had heard of the Conquistador’s exploits. The majority hadn’t. As far as they were concerned it had been a domestic matter in a small, far-flung outpost of the Empire, no business of theirs. However, they promised to keep an eye out for Reston, in the event that he really was over here and consorting with local rebels.

Mal could tell she wasn’t being taken seriously; she was being patronised. It peeved her but she didn’t let it get to her. She stayed polite. They’d take her even less seriously if she lost her cool. She had to be the consummate professional. Were she to give them the slightest reason to doubt or distrust her they might be seized by the desire to check up on her back home.

Evening after evening, she and Aaronson returned to their hotel in the centre of Teotihuacan. Mal would be despondent, Aaronson would do his best to keep her spirits up. Then she would find some bar and would drown her sorrows in
pulque
while her sergeant cruised the neighbourhood, looking for some action. There wasn’t a thriving gay scene in Teotihuacan, but through instinct and a little bit of luck Aaronson could usually find someone to hook up with. Mal herself got propositioned a few times and was often drunk enough to be tempted but not so drunk as to succumb. It didn’t help that almost every adult male in Anahuac was shorter than her, sometimes by as much as a head. She had a problem with smaller men. Try as she might, she could never bring herself to fancy one. They made her feel gangly and uncomfortable. She preferred a lover she could literally look up to. Someone around Stuart Reston’s height, a shade over six feet, was just right. Although not Reston himself, obviously. Sleep with
him
? Hideous thought. She’d rather stick a
macuahitl
up her snatch.

Two weeks in, just as Mal’s funds were beginning to run out, came some good news. Good-ish. There’d been a sighting of a man matching Reston’s description in the general vicinity of Lake Texcoco. A few days earlier a Jaguar patrol, visiting rainforest villages on a routine stop-and-search expedition, had come across a Caucasian male in a canoe. He was a botanist apparently, hailing from France. Name of René Jolicoeur. He’d shown a valid passport, and there had been someone with him, an Anahuac national acting as his guide, who had vouched for him.

The patrol leader had thought nothing of it at the time. Later, however, having learned that a British Jaguar was over here trying to track down an absconded criminal, he decided to consult the Jaguars in France about Monsieur
le Professeur
. It didn’t take him long to establish that the person he’d met was an impostor. The impostor and René Jolicoeur were roughly the same age, but there the similarities ended. The real René Jolicoeur had a receding hairline, wore thick bifocals to counteract profound myopia, and was about thirty pounds overweight. In addition, he suffered from chronic-progressive multiple sclerosis, which was not disabling but which discouraged him from overseas travel and fieldwork, and meant he was largely restricted to the laboratory and the library. In short, the fine physical specimen of a man who’d pitched up in that canoe that day was not – emphatically not – René Jolicoeur.

The sighting of Reston was too old to be of any immediate practical use to Mal. He wouldn’t be anywhere near that river now, not if he had any sense. The trail there would be stone cold.

It was, all the same, encouraging. It confirmed that Reston was in Anahuac and also that he had, as she suspected, come there via France – hence the passport, furnished by Louisiens no doubt. It suggested, too, that he was up to something. Why else would he be hiding under an alias and venturing along the rivers?

That the river in question fed into Lake Texcoco was also suggestive. After all, what lay at the middle of said lake but Tenochtitlan itself?

Could that be Reston’s objective? Could he really have something so audacious in mind? An attempt on the life of the Great Speaker himself?

It beggared belief. Mal knew the man was arrogant but this took arrogance to a whole new level. This was hubris in the extreme. Almost a kind of insanity.

She didn’t share her suspicions with the local Jaguars, but then she didn’t need to. They were quite capable of drawing the same inferences themselves. Rogue British terrorist spotted at large in Anahuac, not a million miles from the capital? It was cause for concern, at least. So the search for Reston was escalated to a higher priority status. His picture was more widely circulated among the various regional HQs. His name was added to the national Most Wanted list. The word went out. A small reward was being offered for information leading to the capture of this known fugitive from justice. By the same token, anyone found to have been harbouring Stuart Reston or giving him succour or assistance of any kind would be subject to the harshest of penalties. Apprehending him became a matter of relative urgency.

For the first time since arriving in Anahuac, Mal felt able to relax a little. Underlying tension remained. Reston was not in the bag yet, far from it. But her judgement had been proved right. She had taken a terrific gamble and it looked as though it might pay off.

As a reward, she treated herself and Aaronson to courtside seats at a
tlachtli
game. It was a Teotihuacan derby between the Quails and the Wild Boars. Each team had its mob of fanatical supporters, many of whom came dressed in appropriate animal garb. Each team was also solely and exclusively made up of, in the case of the Quails, men with Olmec ancestry and, in the case of the Wild Boars, men with Zapotec ancestry.
Tlachtli
was one of the last bastions of tribalism in Anahuac. In no other walk of life was ethnic derivation allowed to be a distinguishing factor. Officially every inhabitant of the Land Between The Seas was an Aztec, end of story. But an exception was made for the ball game. Here, origins mattered. A player’s bloodline had to be traced and verified before he could join his chosen side. If nothing else, this made for a better contest, especially when rival ethnicities clashed. Those matches were grudge matches, bloodier and more brutal than any other fixture. The animosities were ancient and bone-marrow deep, and the ball court was the only place where parading and venting them was tolerated. Severe injuries were guaranteed, fatalities not unheard of.

Mal and Aaronson, being foreigners and unaligned, opted to root for the Quails. The choice was made on no other grounds than that Aaronson took a shine to one of the Quails’ hoop defenders, a beautiful slender creature whose kilt, as he and his teammates went through their warm-up exercises before the start of the match, rode up to expose a pair of buttocks to die for. “Unless you can think of a better reason, boss,” Aaronson said, and Mal could not.

The game was tooth-and-nail almost from the outset. For the first few minutes both teams did genuinely seem to be vying to win by notching up a greater number of points than the opposition, and there were displays of considerable
tlachtli
artistry. Players bounced the solid rubber ball off their bodies using every part of themselves except heads, hands and feet. With expert precision they passed it amongst their own teams and nudged it up along the angled side wall towards the hoop. Goals were scored. The crowd roared.

Gradually, though, the fouling crept in, and then worsened. Leather hip pads and shoulder guards stopped became more offensive weapons than protection. Elbows jabbed. Heads butted. Fists flew. Several times, play degenerated into out-and-out brawling. The referee stepped in and dispensed stern cautions, and for a while good sportsmanship would resume, but never for long. Eventually there was open combat on the court, with no pretence of chasing the ball, and the referee gave up trying to umpire the proceedings and devoted himself to preventing any of the players coming to serious harm. He wasn’t very successful in that endeavour, as on several occasions a stray blow landed on him and he pitched into the fray himself.

The crowd lapped it up. They bayed for blood. They could hardly contain their glee as fistfight followed fistfight. By the time the final whistle blew, the scoreboard showed 9-4 to the Quails, a convincing victory. In every other respect, however, the team got trounced. The Wild Boars left five of them in need of medical attention, compared with the Quails’ own tally of just two opponents hospitalised.

Among the Quail injured was Aaronson’s beloved hoop defender, who’d gone down with a gouged-out eye. All the way back to the hotel Aaronson lamented the fact that a potential love affair had been so cruelly nipped in the bud, over before it could even begin. He also bemoaned the ruination of such sublime physical beauty.

“I think he could really have been The One,” he said.

“With you they’re always The One,” Mal replied, “right up until they turn out to be The One Night Only. Besides, you didn’t even talk to him. You didn’t even
meet
him. He’s just someone you leered at from a distance.”

“It was true love.”

“True lust, more like.”

“You don’t have a romantic bone in your body, do you, boss? You wouldn’t know love if it came up and slapped you in the face. No. Correction. With you, love
is
a slap in the face.”

“Easy there, sergeant,” Mal warned.

“I’m just saying, from what I’ve seen you don’t have relationships – you have mutual abuse. You go for men you either feel nothing for or who feel nothing for you, and the more sordid and seamy your trysts are, the better. You know what? I think you don’t like yourself very much. You punish yourself all the time. You don’t believe you’re worthy of love or of anything good. It’s like you’re doing penance, who knows for what.”

“Here’s the mark, Aaronson.” Mal held out a hand in front of her, like a meat cleaver. She moved it a couple of feet to the right. “Here’s how far you’re overstepping it.”

“Look, let’s forget we’re DCI and sergeant for a moment,” Aaronson said. “Let’s just be what we are, which is friends. Good friends, I like to think. That means I can be frank with you if I want, and I do want. You’re a good-looking woman, Malinalli. If I was straight, I’d take a crack at you, definitely. You’re a success in a tough, unforgiving profession. You’re intimidatingly smart and sharp. You’ve got it all. But you’re also a fool to yourself. You’re never happy. Whatever it is that drives you inside so hard, it won’t let you rest, it won’t let you find contentment, it leads you to sabotage everything you achieve. Why can’t you tell that voice inside your head just to shut up every once in a while? I don’t mean deaden it with drink or drugs so you can’t hear it. I mean get it to pipe down and stop nagging so you can actually enjoy life for a change.”

“That’s rich, coming from you. When I need a lecture in self-restraint and sobriety from the world’s greatest hedonist...”

“At least I know how to kick back and have fun.”

“I have fun!” Mal said indignantly.

“When? When was the last time? Recently? This year? Last year?”

Mal was all set to answer, but she stalled. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t recall a single occasion, as an adult, when she’d done something for the sheer pleasure of it. Sex with strangers didn’t qualify. There was physical satisfaction to be had, but that was about all. Beyond that, the encounters were brief and meaningless and usually conducted through an alcoholic haze.

“Tonight,” she said at last. “The game. That was fun, wasn’t it?”