***
Yola looked wildly back over her shoulder. She slowed down. What was he doing? He was talking to the waiter. Stupid - so stupid - to run off without paying. She tried to catch her breath but her heart seemed temporarily out of her control.
What if he wasn’t the man? Why had she run like that? There had been something about him. Something about the way he had smiled at her. As if she had known him before, almost. A familiarity.
She halted at the corner of the street and watched his interaction with the waiter. He would drive away. He had nothing to do with her. She had panicked for nothing. And the phone had been ringing. Perhaps Damo had wanted her to call the police? Perhaps he had wanted to tell her that they had killed the eye-man?
The eye-man? She remembered the man’s eyes now. Remembered how they had pierced through her back at the café.
She moaned softly to herself and began to run again.
Behind her the Volvo started to gain speed.
13
At first Yola ran without thinking - away - simply away - from the white car. At one point, however, she had the presence of mind to slip down a narrow alley, where she knew that the big Volvo would find it hard to follow her. The momentary decline of tension calmed her and allowed her mind to dominate her emotions for the first time in the three minutes since she had recognised her assailant.
The Volvo was dogging her now at a slower, more uneven pace - impulsively speeding up and then slowing down when she least expected it. She suddenly realised that he was herding her - herding her like a cow - towards the periphery of the town.
And Damo had telephoned. It had to be him. Which meant that he and Alexi might be coming back to collect her.
She looked back over her right shoulder, towards the town centre. They would be coming in on the hospital road. Her only chance would be to meet them. If the eye-man carried on like this, she would eventually tire and then he could pick her up with ease.
She saw a man exit from a shop - reach down and adjust his socks - stride across for his bicycle, which was tethered to a plane tree. Should she call him? No. She instinctively understood that the eye-man would have no qualms at all about killing him. There was something fatalistic about the way he was following her - as if the whole thing were preordained. She would involve no one - no one who was outside the present hermetic loop.
With her hand on her heart, she ran back towards the centre of town, angling her direction so that she would bisect the incoming road - the road on which Alexi and Damo might be travelling. How long since they had telephoned? Five minutes? Seven? She was panting like a horse, her lungs unused to the dry town air.
The Volvo picked up speed again, as if he was really coming for her this time - as if he intended to knock her down.
She ran into a newsagent’s shop - then immediately ran out again - fearful of being trapped. If only a police car would drive by. Or a bus. Anything.
She ducked down another alley. Behind her the Volvo accelerated away, anticipating her exit.
She doubled back and continued on towards the main road. If he turned back now - turned back before he reached the exit of the alley - she was done for.
Now she really ran, her breath escaping from her lips in shrieks of effort. She remembered his hands on her. His words. The terminal effect of his words. She had known there was no escape. Known that he would do exactly what he said he would do by the river. If he got hold of her now, he would knock her out to silence her. He could do anything to her. She would never know.
She burst on to the main highway, looking to right and left for signs of the Audi. The road was empty.
Should she turn back towards town? Back towards the café? Or head towards the hospital?
She took the hospital road. She was limping now and quite unable to run.
When Bale’s Volvo breasted the corner of the road, she stumbled and fell to her knees.
It was midday. Everybody was having lunch. She was alone.
14
‘It’s Yola. She’s been knocked down.’ Sabir slewed the car across the road and towards the kerb.
‘Damo. Look.’ Alexi reached across and took his arm.
Sabir glanced up. A white Volvo SUV with tinted window-glass breasted the corner at a leisurely pace and then stopped, on the wrong side of the road, about fifty metres from the girl. The door opened and a man got out.
‘It’s him. It’s the eye-man.’
Sabir stepped out of the Audi.
Yola stumbled to her feet and stood, gently weaving, her eyes fixed on the Volvo.
‘Alexi. Go and fetch her.’ Sabir took the Remington out of his pocket. He didn’t point it at the eye-man - that would have been absurd, given the distance between them - but held it fl at against the side of his trousers, as if he had meant to slip it back inside his pocket but had temporarily forgotten that he was holding a gun. ‘Now take her back to the car with you.’
The eye-man didn’t move. He merely stood watching their movements like a neutral observer at a formal exchange of prisoners between warring states.
‘Are you both inside?’ Sabir didn’t dare take his eyes off his eerily unmoving opponent.
‘Is that my pistol?’ The man’s voice was measured - controlled - as if he were conducting a prearranged negotiation between hostile factions.
Sabir began to feel light-headed - almost hypnotised. He held up the pistol and looked at it.
‘I’ll give you a ten-minute start if you leave it behind you on the road.’
Sabir shook his head. He felt dazed. In an alternative reality. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I’m deadly serious. If you agree to leave the gun behind you, I shall move away from my car and walk back towards the centre of town. I’ll return in ten minutes. You can go off in any direction you want. As long as it’s not towards the hospital, of course.’
Alexi pushed himself across the front seat. He whispered urgently to Sabir. ‘He doesn’t realise that we know about his tracker. He’s sure he can pick us up again without any problem if we’ve already taken La Négrette. But he’s counting on us not having done that. There are only four roads out of this town. He’ll see which direction we are going in and he’ll follow. We need those ten minutes. Leave him the gun. We’ll ditch the tracker, as you said.’
Sabir raised his voice. ‘But then we’ll have no way of defending ourselves.’
Alexi whispered through gritted teeth. “Damo, leave him the fucking gun. We’ll get another one down in the…” He stopped, as though he thought that Bale might be able to read his lips, or miraculously hear his words from a distance of over fifty metres. “…where we’re going.” ’
Bale reached behind himself and drew the Ruger from its sheath. He raised the pistol and held it in both hands, aimed at Sabir. ‘I can take out your knee. Then you won’t be able to drive. Or I can take out your
front tyre. Same effect. This pistol is accurate to eighty-five yards. Yours is accurate to maybe ten.’
Sabir stepped back behind the protection of the car door.
‘It’ll punch through that, no problem. But it’s in no one’s vested interest to cause a ruckus out here. Leave the gun. Leave my way clear to the hospital. And you can go.’
‘Put your gun away. Inside the car.’
Bale moved over to the Volvo. He tossed the Redhawk on to the front seat.
‘Now step away.’
Bale took three steps out into the road. A blue Citroen camionette drove past them, its passengers busy talking - paying them no heed.
Sabir concealed the Remington behind his back and made as if he was getting back inside the Audi.
‘Do we have an agreement, Mister Sabir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ll leave the pistol by the kerbside, in the gutter. I’m walking away now.’ He triggered the Volvo’s automatic door locks. ‘If you don’t do as you say, I will hunt you down, regardless of what I find in the hospital chapel and make sure you suffer for a very long time indeed before you die.’
‘I’ll leave the pistol. Don’t worry.’
‘And the Black Virgin?’
‘She’s still at the hospital. We haven’t had time to collect her. You know that.’
Bale smiled. ‘The girl. You can tell her she’s very brave. You can also tell her I’m sorry I frightened her down at the river.’
‘She can hear you. I’m sure she’ll be touched by your sentiments.’
Bale shrugged and turned as if to go. Then he stopped. ‘The pistol. It was Monsieur, my father’s, you know. Please place it gently.’
15
‘Do you think he’s mad?’ Alexi had just switched their number-plates for the third time - as usual, he favoured picnic places and scenic stops with broad vistas, which he could easily evaluate for incoming owners.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ He slid back on to the front seat, tucking the screwdriver into the glove compartment. ‘He could have taken us easy. He had that monster of a pistol. All he needed to do was to run at us, shooting.’
‘What? Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?’
‘Now you’re kidding me, Damo. But seriously. We couldn’t have made it away in time.’
‘But he doesn’t want us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re simply a means to an end, Alexi. A means to get to the verses. Start a shoot-out on the outskirts of town and he lowers his chances of getting there before the cops. The whole place is sealed off. As you said, there are only four roads out of here - it would be child’s play for the police to close down all the exits. Then send in a helicopter. Like netting rabbits with a ferret.’
‘Now I know what it feels like to be a rabbit. And all my life I thought I was a ferret.’
‘You are a ferret, Alexi. A brave ferret.’ Yola sat up on the back seat. ‘Thank you for saving me.’
Alexi blushed. He made a face, hunched his shoulders, started to grin and then slapped the dashboard. ‘I did, didn’t I? He could have shot me. But still I ran out into the street and got you. You saw that, Damo?’
‘I saw it.’
‘I got you, didn’t I, Yola?’
‘Yes. You got me.’
Alexi sat on the front seat, grinning to himself. ‘Maybe I kidnap you when we’re in Saintes-Maries. Maybe I ask Sainte Sara to bless our future children.’
Yola sat up a little higher. ‘Is that a proposal of marriage?’
Alexi looked resolutely forward - an El Cid, riding back into Valencia at the head of his army. ‘I only said maybe. Don’t get your hopes up too crazy.’ He pounded Sabir on the shoulder. ‘Eh, Damo? Start as you mean to go on, heh? That’s the way with women.’
Sabir and Yola’s gaze met in the rear-view mirror. She rolled her eyes in resignation. He hunched his shoulders and tipped his head in sympathetic response. She replied with a secret smile.
16
‘They’ve got rid of the tracker.’
‘What? The eye-man’s tracker?’
‘No. Ours. I think it’s the only one they found. I think they think it’s the eye-man’s tracker. Is that what you told them? That there’s only one?’
Calque sighed. Life was not going exactly as planned. Still. Whenever did it? He had married young, with all his ideals intact. The marriage had been a disaster from the start. His wife had proved to be a scold and he had proved to be a moral coward. A disastrous combination. Twenty-five years of misery had ensued, to such an extent that even these last ten years of court cases, punitive alimony and penury had sometimes appeared as a godsend. All he had left was his police work and a disenchanted daughter who got her husband to return his phone calls. ‘Can we still trace Sabir’s car through the eye-man’s tracker?’
‘No. Because we don’t have the correct code.’
‘Can we get it?’
‘They’re working on it. There are only about a hundred million possible combinations.’
‘How long?’
‘A day. Maybe two.’
‘Too long. How about the serial number of the pistol?’
‘It was first registered back in the 1930s. But nothing before 1980 has been computerised yet. So all the pre-war records - at least the ones that weren’t commandeered by the Nazis - are kept out at Bobigny, in a warehouse. A researcher has to check through them all by hand. Same problem as the tracker code, then. But with fifty per cent less chance of success. ‘
‘Then we need to return to the gypsy camp at Gourdon. Pick up their trail from there.’
‘How do you work that one out?’
‘Our trio were there three days. Someone will have talked to someone. It always happens.’
‘But you know how these people are. Why do you think they will suddenly talk to you now?’
‘I don’t. But it’s as good a way as any of passing the time until your pinhead friends manage to get us back on to these people’s - as you insist on calling them - tail.’
17
Achor Bale took a bite of his sandwich, then refocused the binoculars on the gypsy camp, chewing speculatively. He was up in the church tower, allegedly rubbing brasses and copying memorials. The priest was what the English might have called a ‘good egg’ and had seen no particular objection to Bale’s spending the day up there with his charcoal and his etching paper - the hundred-euro donation towards church funds had probably helped, though.
So far, however, Bale had seen no one he recognised from the Samois camp. That would have constituted his first line of attack. The second line depended on incongruities. Find someone or something that didn’t fit in and make an approach through them. Things that didn’t conform to established norms always represented weaknesses. And weaknesses represented opportunities.
So far he had identified a married girl with no children, an old woman whom nobody spoke t
o or touched and a blond man who looked as if he had stumbled off the set of a movie about Vikings - either that, or straight from the parade ground of the SS training camp at Paderborn, circa 1938. The guy looked like no gypsy Bale had ever encountered. But still they seemed to accept him as one of themselves. Curious. It would certainly bear investigating.
Bale felt no particular rancour about the blind alley of the statue at Espalion. It was a fair cop, as they say. The three of them had played him for a sucker and he had fallen for it. It had been an outstanding set-up and he had been forced to re-evaluate his view of them yet again. Particularly the girl, who had truly led him on - to such an extent that he had been entirely convinced of her terror of him. She had played the wooden horse to perfection and he must never underestimate her again.
Tant pis. He had Monsieur, his father’s, Remington back - before it occurred to anyone to try and trace it - and he had cleared his back-trail of policemen. So his time had not been entirely wasted.
But he was forced to admit that Sabir’s choice of Espalion had been nothing short of inspired. Everything about it had been right. In consequence, he was sure that the real clue to the location of the verses must be in the exact opposite direction to the one in which the trio had allegedly been travelling. That’s what book-learning intellectuals like Sabir always did - think things out in unnecessary detail. Which gave the true Black Virgin a home somewhere down in the south of France. That narrowed the field considerably. Which made Bale’s enforced return north - towards Gourdon - even more irritating. But it had to be.
THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES Page 21