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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?”

“It was a bloodbath.”

“Still, I heard you cheering.”

“Granted, but did you? Cheer, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Mal. “I think so. Didn’t I?”

“Not so’s anyone would notice. You sat there stony-faced throughout.”

“Inside, I was cheering.”

“Doesn’t count.”

They’d reached the hotel. After checking at the reception desk for messages, they crossed the lobby and rode the rickety lift to the sixth floor.

“Fun’s overrated, anyway,” Mal said as she unlocked the door to their room. “Fun’s for idiots.”

“Which is unquestionably the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said,” Aaronson replied.

They got ready for bed in frigid silence, like an old married couple after a tiff.

It was in the small hours of that night that the call came about Reston’s arrest.

The town of Mixquiahuala sat perched on a ridge of high ground above a plain. At its feet, chinampas fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Behind it, dark green rainforested slopes glowered.

The main approach road ran along a causeway, raised between deep irrigation canals in the chinampas. Farmhands were already out amid the maize crop, wrenching out weeds and relieving the vermin traps of their overnight haul of cavy and capybara corpses.