‘Well, Calque and some of his Spanish cronies have just had a run-in with the maniac who kicked Alexi in the balls. Only guess where it happened? Montserrat. The bastard went back to Rocamadour after we’d left and worked the riddle out for himself. He’s been on our tail ever since Samois, apparently. Tracking our car.’
‘Tracking our car? That is impossible. I’ve been watching.’
‘No, Alexi. Not by sight. With an electronic bug. Which means he can follow us at a distance of, say, a kilometre and never be seen. That’s how he got to Yola so fast.’
‘Putain. We’d better take it out of there.’
‘Calque wants us to keep it in.’
Alexi screwed his face up in concentration as he tried to disentangle the different elements Sabir was giving him. He looked down at Yola. She was filtering the coffee and chicory through a sieve as though nothing had happened. ‘What do you think, luludji?’
Yola smiled. ‘I think we should listen to Damo. I think he has something more to tell us.’
Sabir took the cup Yola offered him. He sat down beside her on the log. ‘Calque wants us to act as bait.’
‘What is bait?’
‘As a lure. For the man who killed Babel. So that the police can trap him. I have told him that I am willing to do this, in order to clear my name. But that you must both be allowed to decide for yourselves.’
Alexi drew his hand across his throat. ‘I am not working with the police. This I will not do.’
Yola shook her head. ‘If we are not with you, the man will know something is wrong. He will be suspicious. Then the police will lose him. Is this not so?’
Sabir glanced at Alexi. ‘He nearly crippled Calque’s assistant back at Montserrat. He also cold-cocked one of the Spanish paramilitaries out on the Sierra. And he killed a security guard back at Rocamadour two days ago. Which serves us damned well right for not checking out the newspapers or the radio during the wedding. Back on the road, before he attacked Yola, he ran over and injured an innocent bystander and half throttled his wife, merely in order to create a diversion. The French police want him and they want him bad. This is a big operation now. And we’re to be a major part of it.’
‘What does he want, Damo?’ Yola had forgotten herself for long enough to be seen drinking coffee with the two men in public. One of the older married women walked by and frowned at her, but she took no notice.
‘The verses. Nobody knows why.’
‘And where are they? Do we know?’
Sabir took a sheet of paper out of his pocket. ‘Look. Calque just gave me this. He got it off the base of La Morenita at Montserrat:
‘L’antechrist, tertius Le revenant, secundus Primus, la foi Si li boumian sian catouli’
Primus, secundus, tertius quartus, quintus, sextus, septimus, octavus, nonus, decimus.
Those are the ordinal numbers in Latin, corresponding to first, second, third, fourth, fifth and so on. So the antichrist is the third one. The ghost, or the one who comes back, is the second one. Faith, is the first one. And the last bit I don’t understand at all.’
‘It means “if the gypsies are still Catholic.’’ ’
Sabir turned towards Yola. ‘How the Hell do you know that?’
‘Because it’s in Romani.’
Sabir sat back and weighed up the pair sitting in front of him. He already felt a powerful sense of kinship with them, and he was gradually becoming aware of what a wrench he would feel at losing them, or at having his relationship with them curtailed in any way. They had become strangely familiar to him, like real, rather than simply notional, members of his family. With a burgeoning sense of amazement at his own humanity, Sabir realised that he needed them - probably more than they needed him. ‘I kept something back from Calque. Some information. I’m still not sure I did the right thing, though. But I wanted us to retain an edge. Something neither side knew about.’
‘What information was that?’
‘I kept the first quatrain from him. The one that was carved on the base of your coffer. The one that reads:
“Hébergé par les trois mariés Celle d’Egypte la dernière fit La vierge noire au camaro duro Tient le secret de mes vers à ses pieds”
I’ve been thinking about it a lot, recently and I think it holds the key.’
‘But you already translated it. It gave us the clue to Rocamadour.’
‘But I translated it wrongly. I missed some of the clues. Specifically in the first - and traditionally most important - line. I had it down as ‘Sheltered by the three married people’, and stupidly, because it seemed to make no sense, I paid no real attention to it after that. If I’m brutally honest, I allowed myself to be distacted by the neat little anagram in line three and my own cleverness in teasing it out and interpreting it. Intellectual vanity has done for far wiser people than me and Nostradamus knew this. He may even have rigged the whole thing to send idiots like me off half-cocked - as a sort of riddle, or something, to see if we were bright enough to warrant taking seriously. Five hundred years ago such a mistake would have cost me weeks of useless travelling. Luck and modern progress have cut that down to a few days. It was something that Gavril said to me last night that made me change my mind about it.’
‘Gavril. That pantrillon. What can he have said that would enlighten anybody?’
‘He said that you and he would sort out your disagreement at the feet of Sainte Sara, Alexi. At the festival of Les Trois Maries. At Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargues.’
‘So what? I’m looking forward to it. It’ll give me an opportunity to free him up a little space for a few extra gold teeth himself.’
‘No. It’s not that.’ Sabir shook his head impatiently. ‘Les Trois Maries. The Three Marys. Don’t you see it? That acute accent I wrote down in the quatrain - the one over maries, which turned it into mariés - that was simply Nostradamus’s way of covering the meaning with soot. We didn’t read it right. And it skewed the real meaning of the quatrain. The only thing I still don’t understand is who the mysterious Egyptian woman is.’
Yola rocked forwards. ‘But that’s simple. She is Sainte Sara. She, too, is a Black Virgin. To the Rom she is the most famous Black Virgin of all.’
‘What are you talking about, Yola?’
‘Sainte Sara is our patron saint. The patron saint of all the gypsies. The Catholic Church does not recognise her as a true saint, of course, but to gypsies she matters far more than the other two real saints - Marie Jacobé, the sister of the Virgin Mary and Marie Salomé, the mother of the apostle James the Greater and also of John.’
‘So what’s the Egyptian connection, then?’
‘Sainte Sara is called by us Sara l’Egyptienne. People who think they know things say that all gypsies originally come from India. But we know better. Some of us
came from Egypt. When the Egyptians tried to cross the Red Sea, after the flight of Moses, only two escaped. These two were the founders of the gypsy race. One of their descendants was Sara-e-kali - Sara-the-black. She was an Egyptian Queen. She came to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer when it was a centre for worship of the Egyptian sun god - it was called Oppidum-Râ in those days. Sara became its Queen. When the three Maries - Marie Jacobé, Marie Salomé and Marie Magdalene, together with Martha, Maximinius, Sidonius and Lazarus the Resurrected - were cast adrift from Palestine in a boat without oars, sails, or food, they landed at Oppidum-Râ, driven there by the wind of God. Queen Sara went down to the shore to see who they were and to decide on their fate.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before, Yola?’
‘You misled me. You said they were three married people. But Sara was a virgin. Her lacha was untarnished. She was unmarried.’
Sabir raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘So what happened when Sara went down to check them out?’
‘At first she taunted them.’ Yola made a hesitant face. ‘This must have been meant as a test, I think. Then one of the Maries climbed out of the boat and stood on the water, like Jesus did at Bethsaida. She asked Sara to do the same. Sara walked into the sea and was swallowed up by the waves. But the second Marie cast her cloak upon the waters and Sara climbed up on it and was saved. Then Sara welcomed them to her town. Helped them to build a Christian community there, after they had converted her. Marie Jacobé and Marie Salomé stayed on at Les Saintes-Maries until they died. Their bones are still there.’
Sabir sat back. ‘So everything was already contained in that first verse. The rest was simply waffle. Just as I said.’
‘No. I don’t think so.’ Yola shook her head. ‘I think it was also a test. To check that the gypsies were still Catholic - si li boumian sian catouli. That we were still worthy to receive the verses. Like a sort of pilgrimage you have to make before you can learn an important secret.’
‘A rite of passage, you mean? Like the search for the Holy Grail?’
‘I don’t understand what you are saying. But yes. If, by that, you mean a test to make sure one is worthy to learn something, it would surely add up to the same thing, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yola.’ Sabir took her head in both his hands and squeezed. ‘You never cease to amaze me.’
67
Macron was angry. Deep, seat-of-the-pants, mouth-foamingly, slaveringly, angry. The side of his head had swelled up, giving him an unsightly black eye and his jaw felt as though someone had run a pile-driver across it. He had a blinding headache and his feet, where the eye-man had tenderised them with his sap, made him feel as if every step he took was taken barefoot, over a bed of oval pebbles, in a sandbox.
He watched Calque approaching via the café tables, twisting and turning his hips just as if he’d heard somewhere - and believed - that all fat men must, by default, be excellent dancers. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Where have I been?’ Calque raised an eyebrow at Macron’s tone.
Macron backtracked swiftly, with as much dignity as he was able to muster. ‘I’m sorry, Sir. My head is hurting. I’m feeling a little grumpy. That didn’t come out right.’
‘I agree with you. In fact I agree with you so much that I think you should be in a hospital, not sitting here in a café drooling coffee out of a grotesquely swollen mouth. Look at you. Your own mother wouldn’t recognise you.’
Macron grimaced. ‘I’m all right, I tell you. The Spanish medico told me I don’t have concussion. And my feet are just bruised. These crutches take some of the pressure off when I walk.’
‘And you want to be in for the kill? Is that it? To get your revenge. Stumping along behind the eye-man on a pair of crutches?’
‘Of course not. I’m detached. A professional. You know that.’
‘Do I?’
‘Are you going to throw me off the case? Send me home? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?’
‘No. I’m not going to do that. And shall I tell you why?’
Macron nodded. He wasn’t sure what he was about to hear, but he sensed that it might be unpleasant.
‘It was my fault the eye-man got you. I shouldn’t have left you alone on the hill. Shouldn’t have abandoned my position. You might have been killed. In my book, that allows you one favour and one favour only. Do you want to stay on the case?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Then I’ll tell you where I’ve just been.’
68
Sabir rubbed his face with his hands, just as though he were smoothing in a squirt or two of suntan lotion. ‘There’s just one snag to all this.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Not only will the French police not know exactly where we are going, thanks to my partially holding out on Calque, but they will still be out to get me - with everything they have in their arsenal - for Babel and the nightwatchman’s murder. With you both along as accessories after the fact.’
‘You can’t be serious?’
‘Oh yes I can. Deadly serious. Captain Calque told me that he is doing this entirely off his own initiative.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Yes I do. He could have taken me into custody this morning and thrown away the key. Claimed all the kudos for himself. I was perfectly prepared to surrender to him without a struggle. I’m no cop killer. I told him so myself. He even held the Remington in his hand and then gave it back to me.’
Alexi whistled.
‘The authorities could have spent months pinning that maniac’s actions on to me, by which time the man they call the eye-man would have been long gone - probably with the verses in tow and ready for sale on the open market. And who could prove where he found them? Nobody. Because they’ve got no DNA evidence - the death of an unknown gypsy doesn’t rate a full police procedural over here, apparently. And anyway, they would already have had me in custody, so why bother with the rest? The ideal suspect. Whose blood is conveniently splattered all over the crime scene. Open and shut, no?’
‘Then why is Calque doing this? They will send him to the guillotine, surely - or exile him to Elba, like Napoleon - if things go wrong.’
‘Hardly that. He’s simply doing it because he wants the eye-man and he wants him badly. It was his fault his assistant got nailed. And he holds himself responsible for the nightwatchman’s death, too. He reckons he should have figured that the eye-man would come back to sort over unfinished business. But he says he got so carried away with his own and his assistant’s brilliance in working out the Montserrat code, that he couldn’t see the light for the trees. A bit like me, really.’
‘Are you sure it’s not a trap? So they can get both of you? I mean, perhaps they think you are working together?’
Sabir groaned. ‘What the Hell. I don’t know. All I know is that he could have taken me in this morning and he didn’t. That’s one heck of a bona
fide in my book.’
‘So what do we do?’
Sabir lurched backwards in mock surprise. ‘What do we do? We head for the Camargues, that’s what we do. Via Millau. That much I have agreed with Calque. Then we lose ourselves for a few days amongst ten thousand of your closest relatives. Always bearing in mind, of course, that the eye-man can track our car wherever and whenever he wants to - and that we are still murder suspects, with the French police hot on our trail, handcuffs and machine guns at the ready.’
‘Jesu Cristu! And then?’
‘And then, in six days’ time, at the absolute height of the festival of the Three Maries, we steal out of hiding and fi lch the statue of Sainte Sara from in front of a church crammed to the rafters with frantically worshipping acolytes. Without tangling with the eye-man. And without getting ourselves strung up, or hacked to pieces, by a crazed mob of vengeful zealots in the process.’ Sabir grinned. ‘How do you like them apples, Alexi?’
PART TWO
1
Achor Bale felt a deep calm descend on him as he watched the tracker pick out the location of Sabir’s car and follow it, pulsing gently.
And yes. There was the ghost of the police tracker too. So they were still on the job. Too much to hope that they had marked Sabir down for the attack in Montserrat. But there was a fair-to-middling chance that they had him tagged for the nightwatchman killing. Strange, though, that they still refused to pick him up - they must be after the verses as well. Both he and the police, it seemed, were playing a waiting game.
Bale smiled and fumbled around on the passenger seat for Macron’s identity card. He held it up in front of him and spoke directly to the photograph. ‘How are your feet, Paul? A little tender?’ He would meet Macron again - he was convinced of that. There was unfinished business there. How dare the French police pursue him into Spain? He would have to teach them a lesson.
THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES Page 18