Age of Aztec (10 page)

“Granted,” Mal sighed.

“You need to be here. You need to put on a brave face and bluff it out. Better that than skulking at home, hiding. It’ll look bad if you don’t show, however much you’d like not to.”

“Okay, Aaronson. Thanks for that. And thanks again for what you did at the theatre. Taking the dart for me. I... I really appreciate it.”

“Too bad the Conquistador still got away. Who were those people, boss? Why did they save him?”

“Not the foggiest. But I aim to find out, and when I do, the bastards are dead meat.”

“That’s the spirit, boss. That’s the Mal Vaughn I know and fear.”

M
AL COULDN’T REMEMBER
a time when she hadn’t dreamed of becoming a Jaguar Warrior. As a child, she had loved the formal uniform, especially the cat-head helmet that gleamed and snarled, with jade-like eyes that flashed in the sun.

Her brother Ix used to laugh at her whenever she admitted her ambition to join the force. At first, when they were little, he laughed because she was a girl, and a puny one at that, and he couldn’t believe she would ever grow tall enough or brawny enough to look like the Jaguars they saw out patrolling the streets.

Later, when they were in their teens, Ix’s laughter became more cynical. “Yeah, sis, great idea,” he would say. “Be a paid thug. Carry a
macuahitl
and an l-gun. Beat up innocents and enforce the status quo. You go right ahead.” By then Ix was running with a gang, petty crooks committing petty crimes, and his anti-establishment posturing was a self-justifying rationale for his delinquent behaviour. The Empire, the hieratic caste, the Jaguars, they were all parts of a machine designed to suppress the freedom of the individual – by which Ix meant the freedom of the individual to shoplift, vandalise, drink underage, and mug pensioners. He believed, although perhaps not as wholeheartedly as he might have liked, that by hanging out with his cronies and causing trouble he was somehow striking a blow against the system.

Whereas to Mal, and other right-thinking types, he was simply being a mindless twat.

They stopped talking, the two of them, the day Mal sent in her Jaguar Warrior application form. She had just turned eighteen, the minimum required age. She had filled out, too, no longer the stick insect she had been when little, now a sturdy young woman who had captained the school’s senior girls
tlachtli
team and gained a reputation as the toughest player in the south London education authority leagues, with a string of broken opponents’ noses and ankles to her credit.

“You disgust me,” were Ix’s last words to her before he turned his back on her for good. “Go be the Empire’s whore. See if I care. You’re fucking scum, that’s what you are.”

Brother and sister weren’t to see each other again until a year after Mal finished her training and made constable. She knew from her parents that Ix had gone completely off the rails. He would turn up at their house now and then, usually after dark, looking wretched and demanding cash. He would become abusive if they didn’t cough up, and there was that time he threatened their father with a knife. The old man was whisked to hospital the next day with a suspected heart attack. He recovered, but from then on was never the same. Weakened and sad. A shell of himself.

Eventually Ix’s and Mal’s paths crossed again, as she had somehow known they would. Ix had started working for a mob boss, Davey Furman, whose gang, the Battersea Batterers, ran most of the rackets south of the Thames, from Putney to Camberwell. Ix made himself useful shaking down shopkeepers for protection money, intimidating would-be grasses, and defending Batterers turf against incursions from rival gangs. At least he was earning a decent wage now, so that he didn’t have to go terrorising their parents for handouts any more.

Furman had several people high up in the Jaguar Warrior ranks in his back pocket, and it was informal policy to turn a blind eye to his gangster activities unless they were unusually egregious. Then the incumbent High Priest died and a new man was elevated to that position, the current holder of the office, His Very Holiness Seldon Whitaker. Whitaker fancied himself a hardliner, with zero tolerance for criminality of any description. One of his first edicts, issued with new-broom zeal, was that organised racketeering in Britain’s cities must come to an end.

Even corrupt police officials could not soft-pedal a direct and unequivocal order like that, so a clampdown got under way. In London that meant Battersea Batterer haunts were raided and ransacked. Known associates of Furman were brought in for interrogation, which many of them did not survive. Underlings were snatched off the streets, never to be seen again, except for those who ended up doing hard time in one of the Empire’s notorious subterranean jails, and they were broken ghosts of themselves when they finally returned home. The gang was dismantled piecemeal, and its worst, most notorious felons were convicted of offences ranging from GBH to first degree murder, all of which carried the death penalty. The months after Whitaker took charge were not good ones for the urban mob fraternity, and the Batterers bore the brunt.

Which was why Mal was less than shocked when her brother appeared on her doorstep in the small hours one night. She had been expecting it. That or finding his name on the list of death row inmates, awaiting execution.

“Help me,” Ix begged. “Please. Only you can.”

He looked a mess, grubby and unshaven, his expensive suit wrinkled and creased. He had been on the run for several days, he told Mal, sleeping rough or on friends’ floors. The net was closing in around him. He’d gone to visit Furman but the Batterers’ leader was nowhere to be found; word on the street was that he’d fled the country. The whole enterprise was falling down around the gang’s ears. It had all turned to shit. There were Jaguars on every corner, hunting. Nowhere to hide.

“But you’ll do right for me, won’t you, Mal? I mean, I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but we’re still brother and sister, still blood, beneath it all. And blood helps blood, yeah? If I’m caught, I’m dead, simple as that. But you can see that that doesn’t happen, can’t you?”

“How, Ix? What am I supposed to do? Put in a good word for you somewhere? Ask my colleagues to just sort of step around you? How exactly can I help? You got yourself up shit creek. I don’t have the paddle.”

He looked so crestfallen then that it nearly broke her heart. He became the little boy she remembered, two years older than her and often cruelly dismissive of her, but sensitive, too, at times, easily hurt if
she
rejected
him
. She recalled how he could be her mortal enemy at home but was ever ready to leap to her defence at school if she got bullied or was in trouble. She hated to see him crushed in this way. He regarded her as his last and only hope.

“Look,” she said, “come in. I’ll put you up for the night. I’ll do right for you.”

“Oh, thank you, Mal! By all the Four, thank you! I don’t know what to say. You’re the best,” and he hugged her, hard, as he had never hugged her before. Mal made up a bed for him on the sofa, and Ix dropped straight off, snoring soundly in what was probably the deepest, sweetest sleep he had had in ages. She stayed up watching him for a long while, and then she did what was right for him. And for her.

Jaguar Warriors came at dawn. Mal let them in. Ix awoke to find himself surrounded by drawn
macuahitl
s. The Jaguars handcuffed him. He went quietly, too overwhelmed by her betrayal to resist or even to speak. At the last moment, as he was being manhandled out through the door to the waiting squad car, he turned and shot his sister a fulminous look. His eyes seethed with rage and outrage and, beneath that, sheer despairing agony.

Mal was invited to attend his beheading. She chose not to. Likewise their parents. Ix Vaughn was consigned to Mictlan alone, unwitnessed, sobbing his eyes out.

In return for having done her duty, Mal was promoted to acting sergeant, transferred to the CID and put on the fast track to an inspectorship. Loyalty to the Jaguars had outweighed loyalty to family, and that was truly laudable and deserving of reward.

Mal of course had not shopped her brother for personal gain. Her motive had simply been a desire not to see bad deeds go unpunished. That, to her, mattered more, far more than kinship.

She would never again feel the same way about being a Jaguar Warrior, however. Like her father after the heart attack, she had lost something vital. There was a taint on her life. Where before she’d had the courage of her convictions and an ability to keep the shadows of doubt at bay, now all that was gone. A single decision – a taking of sides – had changed her utterly and irrevocably.

In the years that followed, Mal advanced professionally in leaps and bounds, fully repaying the force’s faith in her abilities. She was not quite the youngest person ever to be appointed detective, but close. She set about racking up an enviable tally of arrests and commendations. She earned a reputation as a harsh but fair taskmaster. She had the kind of career that parents would boast about, especially parents who were staunch Empire loyalists and showed it by giving their children Nahuatl forenames such as Ixtli and Malinalli, and even more especially parents whose other child had proved such a disappointment.

Where Mal’s private life was concerned, things were less rosy. A lot of alcohol abuse went on, and the closest she got to a committed relationship was a short run of assignations with the same person, although that was rare. Usually she preferred the anonymous, no-strings drunken fuck, at the other participant’s place not hers, followed by a bad-breathed but guiltless departure before breakfast. One-night stands with men, ideally much younger men, whom she would never have to meet again. Those and the booze stopped her thinking too hard about anything much. Her conscience was quietened. The shadows shrank.

Shrank but returned. Constantly returned, denser and darker. For almost a full solar year, Mal had felt she was losing the battle with her misgivings. Ix’s words from all that time ago kept recurring to her.
Be a paid thug. Enforce the status quo. Empire’s whore
. Was that all she was? Was that all any Jaguar Warrior was?

She wanted to do good. She wanted to help those who needed helping. And if somebody broke the law, they needed to be caught and made to face the consequences, however drastic. Morally, it was that straightforward.

Wasn’t it?

Why, then, had it become so difficult to face going into work each morning? Why had she written that letter of resignation in her head, and refined and rewritten it, over and over until she had it by heart? Why did almost every punishment the Jaguars meted out, in the Empire’s name, sicken her these days?

While a bus ferried her to Scotland Yard, Mal ran over these questions in her mind, as she often did. By journey’s end she was no nearer answers than before.

The only positive she could glean from the previous night’s spectacular cock-up was that if she carried on handling the Conquistador case as badly as this, the future wouldn’t hold much more worrying for her. A
macuahitl
would soon be putting her out of her misery, and that would be that.

It was always good to look on the bright side.

K
ELLAWAY HARANGUED HER
publicly, in front of the whole department, and she took it on the chin, drawing solace from two thoughts. One: the chief super needed to be seen to be yelling at someone, otherwise people might assume he was going soft. Two: as long as he was tearing a strip off her, he wasn’t going to execute her. The latter was the more significant. It meant she still had breathing space. She was in the last chance saloon but the bartender hadn’t called time yet.

An hour later Kellaway summoned her to his office. He was a whole lot more sanguine, and less red-faced, now, in private.

“Last night was a damn good shot, Vaughn,” he said. “Best anyone’s made to date. The shittest of luck that it didn’t come off. Anything on those fellows with the blowpipes?”

“My guess is Anahuac, sir. Mayan separatists.”

“That would make sense. Recruited by the Conquistador, or maybe employed. Hired muscle.”

“Or possibly sympathisers to his cause. Fellow travellers. He seemed to have no idea who they were when they first appeared. Could be they’re over here and on his side because they’re... well, fans.”

Kellaway rolled his eyes. “That’s just what we need – more of the buggers. Think we can root this lot out somehow? Check the immigration records, for instance?”

“I can have Aaronson look to see if a bunch of Anahuac nationals have passed through customs lately, but we get people arriving from there all the time, and if our guys are on tourist visas, as is likely, they won’t have to have specified a place of residence in Britain.”

“How about shaking a few cheap hotels, see what falls out?”

“Could do.”

“You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”

“With respect, sir, I think the Mayans are a red herring. A sideshow, not the main event. I should really be focusing on the Conquistador.”

“If you say so,” said Kellaway.

“I’m not against exploring other avenues, but it’s the Conquistador who’s at the centre of all this, and catching him might just lead us to the Mayans, too. If I could only figure out who he really is... I mean, he’s a civilian when he’s not playing sociopath dress-up. He has another, discrete existence. It shouldn’t be impossible, based on what we know about him, to narrow down a shortlist of suspects and interview all of them.”

“Interview as in ‘interview’?” The emphasis Kellaway placed on the word was unmistakable. What went on in the basement of Scotland Yard wasn’t pleasant, but it had been proven to work.

“It needn’t be that drastic,” said Mal. “Under duress or not, whichever one’s the Conquistador is bound to give himself away. There’s a vanity about the man. Up on that stage yesterday, he wouldn’t bloody shut up. We prey on that, goad him, prompt him, he’ll reveal his true colours soon enough. Plus, I’ll recognise his voice.”