‘You look fantastic. Like a gypsy. If you didn’t have that payo mug of yours, I’d want you for a brother.’
‘How do you keep a straight face when you say things like that, Alexi?’
‘My jaw is broken. That is how.’
Despite all Yola’s protestations to the contrary, Sabir still felt that he stuck out like an albino. Everyone was watching him. Wherever he went, whatever he did, gazes slid off him and then back on again as soon as his attention was diverted towards somewhere else. ‘Are you sure they’re not going to turn me in? I’m probably still appearing nightly on TV. There’s probably a reward.’
‘Everybody here knows of the Kriss. They know you are Yola’s phral. That the Bulibasha at Samois is your kirvo. If anyone denounced you, they would have to answer to him. They would be exiled. Like that arsehole Gavril’s uncle.’
Gavril was watching them from the periphery of the camp. When he saw that Alexi had noticed him, he raised one finger and plunged it inside a ring made out of the thumb and index finger of his other hand. Then he stuck it in his mouth and rolled his eyes.
‘A friend of yours?’
‘He’s after Yola. He wants to kill me.’
‘The two things don’t necessarily tally.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I mean if he kills you, Yola won’t marry him.’
‘Oh yes. She probably would. Women forget. After a while he’d convince her that he was in the right. She’d get hot in her stomach and let him kidnap her. She’s already old not to be married. What’s happening tonight is bad. She will see this wedding and start thinking even more unwell of me. Then Gavril will look better to her.’
‘She’s old not to be married because she’s keeping herself for you, Alexi. Or hadn’t you noticed that? Why the Hell don’t you just kidnap her and have done with it?’
‘Would you let me?’
Sabir aimed a playful slap at Alexi’s head. ‘Of course I’d let you. She’s obviously in love with you. Just as you are with her. That’s why you argue all the time.’
‘We argue because she wants to dominate me. She wants to wear the trousers. I don’t want a woman who nags me. Whenever I go away, she’ll get angry. And then she’ll punish me. Yola is hexi. She’ll put spells on me. This way, I’m free. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. I can fuck payo women, just like she said.’
‘But what if someone else took her? Someone like Gavril?’
‘I’d kill him.’
Sabir groaned and turned his attention back to the bridal party, which was fast approaching the centre of the camp. ‘You’d better tell me what’s happening.’
‘But it’s just like any other wedding.’
‘I don’t think so, somehow.’
‘Well. Okay then. You see those two over there? That’s the father of the bride and the father of the groom. They will have to convince the Bulibasha that they have agreed on a bride-price. Then the gold must be handed over and counted. Then the Bulibasha will offer the couple bread and salt. He’ll tell them, “When the bread and salt no longer taste good to you, then you will no longer be husband and wife.’’ ’
‘What’s the old woman doing, waving the handkerchief?’
‘She is trying to convince the father of the groom that the bride is still a virgin.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘Would I kid you, Adam? Virginity is very important here. Why do you think Yola is always going on about being a virgin? That makes her more valuable. You could sell her for a lot of gold if you could find a man willing to take her on.’
‘Like Gavril?’
‘His cellar is empty.’
Sabir realised that he would get no further along that route. ‘So why the handkerchief?’
‘It’s called a mocador. A pañuelo, sometimes. That old woman you see holding it - well, she’s checked with her finger that the bride is really a virgin. Then she stains the mocador in three places with blood from the girl. After that has been done, the Bulibasha pours rakia on the handkerchief. This will move the blood into the shape of a flower. Only virgin’s blood will do this thing - pig’s blood wouldn’t behave in that way. Now look. She’s tying the handkerchief on a stick. This means that the father of the groom has accepted that the girl is a virgin. Now the old woman will carry the stick around the camp so that everyone else can see that Lemma has not had her eyes closed by another man.’
‘What’s the bridegroom called?’
‘Radu. He’s my cousin.’
‘Who isn’t?’
***
Sabir caught sight of Yola on the other side of the square. He waved a hand at her, but she lowered her head and ignored him. He idly wondered what new faux pas he’d just committed.
Over by the wedding party, the Bulibasha raised a vase and brought it down with all his force on the bridegroom’s head. The vase splintered into a thousand pieces. There was a communal gasp from the assembled crowd.
‘What the Hell was all that about?’
‘The more pieces the vase breaks into, the happier the couple will be. This couple will be very happy.’
‘Are they married now?’
‘Not yet. First the bride has to eat something made with herbs taken from above a grave. Then she must have her hands painted with henna - the longer the henna stays on, the longer her husband will love her. Then she must carry a child over the threshold of her caravan, for if she doesn’t produce a child within a year, Radu can throw her out.’
‘Oh, that’s great. That’s very enlightened.’
‘It doesn’t often happen, Adam. Only when the couple fight. Then it is a good excuse for both parties to end an unhappy state.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘No. In a few minutes, we will carry the bride and groom around the camp on our shoulders. The women will sing the traditional yeli yeli wedding song. Then the bride will go and change into her other costume. Then we will all dance.’
‘You can dance with Yola, then.’
‘Oh no. Men dance with men and women with women. There’s no mixing.’
‘You don’t say. You know something, Alexi? Nothing about you people surprises me anymore. I just figure out what I expect to happen, turn it around on its head and then I know I’ve got it right.’
58
It had taken Achor Bale three hours to foot-slog his way over the hills behind the Montserrat Sanctuary and he was starting to wonder whether he wasn’t taking caution to ridiculous extremes.
Nobody knew his car. Nobody was following him. Nobody was waiting for him. The chances of a French policeman making a connection between the Rocamadour murder and the death of the gypsy in Paris were thin in the extreme. And then to extrapolate from there to Montserrat? Still, something was niggling at him.
He had turned on the tracker twenty miles from Manresa, but he had known that the chances of picking up Sabir were pretty slim. Frankly, he didn’t much care if he never encountered the
man again. Bale was not one to harbour grudges. If he made an error, he rectified it - it was as simple as that. Back at Rocamadour he had made an error in not giving the Sanctuary the once over. He had underestimated Sabir and the gypsy and he had paid the price - or rather the new watchman had paid the price.
This time he would not be so cavalier. Barring the train, which was too limiting, there was only one effective way into Montserrat, which was by road. Having left his car suitably concealed on the far side of the ridge, therefore, he would come in over the mountains, on the understanding that if the police had, by some miracle, been forewarned of his arrival, they would be monitoring the two obvious incoming routes and not those people exiting in the opposite direction by train, or hijacked vehicle, early in the morning.
One aspect of the fiasco at Rocamadour still irritated him, however. Bale had never lost a gun before - neither during his years on active service with the Legion, nor as a result of the many activities he had engaged in for the Corpus Maleficus after that period. And particularly not a gun that he had been given, in person, by the late Monsieur, his adoptive father.
He had been inordinately fond of the little.380 calibre Remington 51 self-loader. All of eighty years old and one of the very last units off the factory production line, it had been small and easy to conceal. Hand-milled to reduce glare, it had a particularly effective delayed blow-back, which saw the slide and the breech-block travelling in tandem for a short distance after each shot, powering the slide back over the recoil spring, during which time the breech-block was fleetingly braced in its tracks before continuing on to rejoin it. In this manner the spent cartridge was ejected and the action re-cocked in one and the same process, with a fresh round being chambered on the return stroke. Brilliant. Bale liked mechanical things that worked as they were meant to.
Regret, though, was for losers. The return of the pistol could wait. Now that he had secured his very own copy of the Rocamadour verse he could put all thoughts of failure aside and get on with the job in hand. The most important new factor was that he didn’t need to follow people around anymore, or brutalise them for their secrets. This suited Bale admirably. For he wasn’t by nature a vindictive or a brutal man. To his way of thinking he was simply doing his duty in terms of the Corpus Maleficus. For if he and his ilk didn’t act when they needed to, Satan, the Great Pimp and his hetaera, the Great Whore, would take dominion over the earth and the reign of God would be ended. ‘He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.’
It was for this reason that God had granted adherents of the Corpus Maleficus free rein to unloose, anarchy when and where they wished, on to an imminently threatened world. Only by diluting total evil and turning it into its partial, controllable variant, could Satan be stopped. This was the ultimate purpose of the three Antichrists foretold in the book of Revelation, just as Madame, his adoptive mother, had described to him in her original exposition of his mission. Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, the two previous Antichrists - together with the Great One still to come - were beings specifically designed by God in order to prevent the world from turning to the Devil. They acted as the Devil’s objective correlative - placating him, as it were and ensuring that he was kept in a state of bemused satisfaction.
This was why Bale and the rest of the adepts of the Corpus Maleficus had been given the task of protecting the Antichrists and, if at all possible, sabotaging the so-called Second Coming - which might more correctly be termed the Second Great Placebo. It was this Second Coming that would galvanise the Devil from his interregnum, triggering the Final Conflict. For this purpose adepts were needed who were, in themselves, close to perfection. ‘These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth…And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.’
It was a simple charge and one which Achor Bale had embraced throughout his life with evangelical zeal. ‘And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast and over his image and over his mark and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.’
Bale was proud of the initiative he had used in following up Sabir. Proud that he had spent the better part of his life fulfilling a solemn duty of care.
‘We are not anti-anything, we are anti-everything.’ Wasn’t that how Madame, had explained it to him? ‘It’s impossible to publicise us because no one would believe you. Nothing is written down. Nothing transcribed. They build - we destroy. It is as simple as that. For order can only emerge from flux.’
59
‘Did you know that Novalis believed that after the Fall of Man, Paradise was broken up and scattered in fragments all over the earth?’ Calque eased himself into a more comfortable position. ‘And that this is why pieces of it are now so hard to find?’
Macron rolled his eyes, counting on the rapidly encroaching dusk to mask his irritation. He was becoming used to Calque’s Labyrinthine thought patterns, but he still found the whole process curiously unsettling. Did Calque do it on purpose to make him feel inferior? And if so, why? ‘Who was Novalis?’
Calque sighed. ‘Novalis was the pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. In pre-Republican Germany, a Freiherr was the rough equivalent of a Baron. Novalis was a friend of Schiller and a contemporary of Goethe. A poet. A mystic. What have you. He also mined salt. Novalis believed in a Liebesreligion - a Religion of Love. Life and death as intertwined concepts, with an intermediary necessary between God and Man. But this intermediary does not have to be Jesus. It can be anyone. The Virgin Mary. The Saints. The dead beloved. Even a child.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Sir?’ Macron could feel the words clogging up his throat like biscuit dust. ‘You know I’m no intellectual. Not like you.’
‘To pass the time, Macron. To pass the time. And to try and make sense out of the apparent nonsense we found on La Morenita’s foot.’
‘Oh.’
Calque grunted, as though someone had unexpectedly prodded him beneath the ribs. ‘It was that Catalan police captain. Villada. An extremely well-educated man, like all Spaniards. He got me thinking about all this with something he said about literality and paradox.’
Macron closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep. In a bed. With a goose-down duvet and his fiancée curled up next to him with her bottom tightly spooned against his groin. He didn’t want to be here in Spain on the basis of
a five -hundred-year-old message from a dead lunatic, staking out a valueless wooden statue with two erect phalluses sprouting alongside it, in the company of an embittered police captain who would clearly rather be spending his workdays in a university research library. This was the second night in a row they had spent out in the open. The Catalan police were already beginning to look at them askance.
There was a buzzing in his pocket. Macron started and then caught himself. Had Calque realised that he had been dozing? Or was he so bound up with his calculations and his myths and his philosophising that he wouldn’t even notice if the eye-man came up behind him and slit his gizzard?
He glanced down at the illuminated screen of his cellphone. Something moved inside him as he read the message - some fatalistic djinn that lurked in his gut and emerged in times of danger and uncertainty to berate him for his lack of imagination and his endless, ruinous doubts. ‘It’s Lamastre. They picked up the eye-man’s tracker four hours ago. Twenty kilometres from here. Up near Manresa. He must have been checking for Sabir.’
‘Four hours ago? You can’t be serious?’
‘Someone clearly went off duty without reporting forward.’
‘Someone will clearly find himself back on the beat next payday. I want you to get me his name, Macron. Then I’m going to run his guts through a sausage machine and feed him to himself for breakfast.’
‘There’s something else, Captain.’
‘What? What else can there be?’
THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES Page 15