3
‘I like small town Americans,’ said Abiger de Bale. ‘They’re so fucking trusting.’
The twins were sitting in their rental car, watching the outside of Adam Sabir’s house. They had been in the United States for a little less than twelve hours, and already they had identified their mark.
‘What do you mean, trusting?’
Abi wound his seat back to the prone position, so that his silhouette would no longer be outlined against the street lights. He glanced over at his brother. ‘I’m pretending to be a tourist, right? I ask them things, right? In the American idiom. Things like “you got any celebrities in this town?” Then they give me a list. Including Norman Rockwell, and Daniel Chester French, and Owen Johnson, and Mum Bett – oh, and that guy who wrote the bestselling book on Nostradamus’s private life. And because the writer is the only one on the list who isn’t dead yet, they tell me about his private life. That he can’t keep a woman. That he lives alone. That his mother went mad. Stuff like that. And all without me, the tourist, needing to ask anything at all. Try the same thing in France, and it’d be like attempting to crack a stone wall with the tip of your nose. How did you do?’
‘Pretty much the same.’
‘You see? I like these Americans.’
Vau cast a quizzical look at his brother. ‘You don’t think they’ll remember us?’
‘Lighten up, Vau. Nobody ever saw us together. So they’ll just assume we’re one and the same person. And the Amis can’t recognize accents, anyway. They never travel abroad. They’ll think we’re Canadians.’
‘I still think we ought to take him away somewhere. Not do him here.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve got a better idea. Sabir’s been behaving strangely lately. People around here are starting to think he’s taking after his mother. We’ll play on that.’
‘How?’
‘Wait and see.’
4
Adam Sabir’s ‘Berkshire Cottage’ style home was set well back from the Stockbridge Main Street, in grounds totalling a little more than an acre and a half – or roughly the size of a baseball field.
The ultra-discreet street lights cut a fragile arc across the front lawn, but they fell just short of the main part of the house, which was consequently shrouded in darkness. The back garden, in which Sabir’s summer-house-cum-writing-hut was situated, stretched for a further fifty feet towards a thick stand of trees, which marked the extreme boundary between Sabir’s property and next-door’s smallholding. The rear of his demesne was bounded by a small white picket fence, whilst the front of the house lay directly open onto the street, as if its original nineteenth-century occupants had not wished to mar the vista of its rolling lawns with anything as common as an enclosure.
At a little after two o’clock in the morning, Abi and Vau emerged from their car, checked up and down the street, and then moved swiftly across the floodlit lawn until they were swallowed up by the darkness surrounding the main house.
Once at the rear of the house, Abi made his way cautiously up the veranda steps and tested the back door. It was open. He grinned at his brother. ‘Jesus Christ, Vau-Vau. This idiot doesn’t even lock his door at night. Do you think he knew we were coming?’
‘I don’t like this, Abi. No one in the United States leaves their house door open at night.’
‘Well Mr Sabir does. And I, for one, am most grateful to him for the courtesy.’
The twins edged their way through the door. They stood in the back hall, staring up at the main stairs.
Abi covered his mouth with his hand. ‘You saw him earlier, didn’t you? You’re sure of that?’
Vau echoed the movement. ‘Clear as a bell. His bedroom is the last room on the right, below the gable window.’
‘And no one else here?’
‘No. He was alone. And behaving like a lone man. You know. Pottering around. Tinkering with stuff.’
Abi shrugged. ‘Crazy. Crazy to leave your door open. What is the man thinking of?’
The brothers made their way to the base of the stairs. Halfway up the staircase they stopped and listened once again, but the house was silent as the grave.
‘The bastard doesn’t even snore.’
‘Perhaps he’s not asleep?’
‘At 2.30 in the morning? So why are his lights off?’
‘Okay. Okay.’ Vau stopped outside Sabir’s bedroom door, one hand on the handle.
Abi stood a little away from him. Without a sound, he unhitched the telescopic fighting baton from his sleeve. Then he nodded.
Vau threw open the door.
Abi sprinted towards the bed, landing with his legs splayed, the full weight of his body concentrated on where he expected the sleeping man to be. ‘Christ, Vau. There’s nobody in here.’
‘You’re kidding?’
Abi disentangled himself from the bed covers and cracked on his torch. ‘This bed’s been slept in, though. It’s still fucking warm. Go and check the bathroom. Then we’ll do the rest of the house.’ Already, without knowing why, Abi was getting the sense that the house was deserted.
‘He’s not in the bathroom either.’
‘Are you sure you didn’t see a car leave while I was sleeping? Are you sure he didn’t see us?’
‘Hell, Abi. Of course he didn’t. I would have told you. His car is still in the garage.’
‘Maybe he went for a walk? Maybe he creeps across the boundary fence every night and porks the next-door-neighbour’s wife?’
Vau shook his head. ‘No. I watched him prepare for bed. I even used the binoculars to make sure it was him. The curtains were wide open all the time. The man doesn’t seem to give a damn that anyone who wants to can look in on him.’
‘Let’s check downstairs, then. Perhaps he’s got a study? Or maybe a dressing room with a spare bed in it?’
Vau made a face. ‘Dressing rooms like that are for men who want a break from their wives. Like Monsieur, our father, remember? Sabir hasn’t got a wife. He lives alone.’
Ten minutes of frenetic searching convinced the brothers that Sabir wasn’t anywhere in the house.
Abi threw his head back and exhaled through his cheeks. ‘Right. Let’s do something constructive. Let’s find if he’s written anything down. At least that way we won’t leave empty-handed.’
‘What are we going to do then?’
‘Burn the place down. That’ll bring him running.’
5
Sabir had almost succeeded in dozing off when he saw the study lights go on in the main house. For a split second he refused to believe his eyes. Then he eased himself out of the hammock and stood, still rocking with tiredness, on the extreme edge of the lawn and just beyond the arc thrown by the lights.
His house was being burgled. That much was clear. At first the thought caused him some bemusement. What was he going to do? Who was he going to call? His cell phone was up in his bedroom, and he was standing in his back garden, in pyjamas and bare feet, on a chill and windy October night. I mean, how dumb can you get?
Weapons? He didn’t have any. What an idiot. He didn’t even have a pair of carpet slippers to hit the burglars with. And he couldn’t see himself bearding potentially armed men with a garden rake.
He was just beginning to move away from the house and towards Main Street when some instinct stopped him in his tracks. Perhaps it was the memory of another night, five months before, when he had huddled down behind a sand dune in the Camargue and watched a similar house, once again in total darkness save for the opalescent glow from a fragile circle of candles.
That time, the candlelight had been outlining the hooded figure of his blood sister, Yola Samana, as she teetered precariously on a three-legged stool with a noose around her neck, whilst a dispassionate Achor Bale sat in the invisible shadows and watched her as he might have watched a staked-out lamb during a midnight tiger hunt.
Either way, the sudden unwanted echo of the recent past was enough to make Sabir pause in his flight
and rethink his position. He edged back towards the summer house wall, hissing nervously through his teeth. He could clearly see the shadows of two men reflected off the ceiling of his study. Burglars? The heck with that. Burglars didn’t walk around their victim’s house switching on the electric lights. CIA? FBI? IRS? Who the hell else gave themselves the right to come visiting honest citizens in the middle of the night?
With a sudden, intense conviction, Sabir knew exactly who the men were, what they were looking for, and why they were looking for it.
It was at this point that he remembered his father’s old shotgun. Ever since his childhood it had been kept in the understairs wine cellar, hanging upside down by its trigger guard on a meat hook. Sabir hadn’t moved a thing in the house since his father’s death three years before – there had never seemed any point. So if the trigger guard hadn’t rusted away in the interim, the shotgun would presumably still be there.
Sabir’s sudden focus on the shotgun and on the sanctity of his family home served to pull him together and renew his courage. If these men came from the Countess, as he suspected they did, he had no choice but to confront them. They were his problem and his problem alone. He was damned if he would scuttle off down Main Street in his pyjamas at three o’clock in the morning and go wake up his neighbours.
Sabir had one ace up his sleeve, however. He knew from his time as a journalist on the New England Courier that Massachusetts had draconian burglary laws – armed burglary carried a minimum fifteen-year jail term, and even unarmed breaking and entering could fetch you five. And he was willing to bet that whoever the Countess had sent would have come armed.
As he headed for the cellar he began to rehearse in his mind just how the thing might conceivably play out.
6
Vau straightened up from his perusal of Sabir’s study and turned towards his elder brother. ‘Sabir must keep everything locked away in his head. There’s nothing of any interest in here.’
‘Did you really think there would be?’
Vau shrugged. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think anything. As far as I’m concerned, we just came here to revenge ourselves on Rocha’s killer.’
‘Ever the foot soldier, never the captain, right?’
‘You can laugh at me all you want, Abi. But I know where I stand in the general scheme of things. I’m grateful to Madame, our mother, and to Monsieur, our father, for adopting me. I’m grateful for the title I’ve inherited, and even more grateful for the money that goes with it. Cleverer people than me can work out strategies and interpret prophecies and delay the coming of Armageddon – or whatever the hell it is we’re meant to be doing. Me, I just obey orders.’
Abi sprawled back against Sabir’s desk, his arms spread to support his weight. He looked his brother up and down, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now that you’re a happy and contented man?’
‘Happy? Contented? I don’t know about that. But there’s one thing I do know.’ Vau hesitated briefly, as if gathering his thoughts together after a long hiatus. ‘I’m going to confess something to you, Abi. Something that you may not give a damn about. But I’m going to tell you nonetheless.’
Abi cocked his head to one side encouragingly. He was clearly enjoying himself.
Vau snorted in a lungful of air, as if he was readying himself for a hundred-metre free-dive. ‘You are the only person I truly care about in this world, Abi. The only one. And that’s not because you’re anything special – don’t ever think that. But because we’re viscerally linked. You’re my twin. We were even connected together, or so they tell me, when we were born. Plus you’re brighter than me, Abi, I give you that. And quicker. But you won’t ever find anyone else truer to you than me, if you were to search for a thousand years.’
‘The master of the nonsequitur strikes again.’ Abi mimicked being squashed up against a wall by an unwanted admirer. Then his face became more serious. ‘Why are you telling me this, Vau? And why here?’
‘Because I worry about you, Abi. I think you’re beginning to like all this too much. I think you’re really beginning to believe that you’re something special – something over and above the norm. That moral laws don’t apply to you any longer. You’re becoming like Rocha, in other words. You’re becoming a freak. I mean look at us. We’re standing here in a foreign country, in someone else’s house – a house that we’re on the verge of torching, for pity’s sake – lit up like fucking Christmas trees. And you seem to think it’s all fine. That there’s something normal about this.’
Abi made a full circle on the spot – widdershins – his hands flapping in mock veneration like a cartoon guru. ‘But it is normal, Vau. Can’t you see the beauty of it?’
‘Beauty?’
‘Yes, beauty. Let me lay it out for you, pendejo. Let me read you a lesson from the Good News Bible.’ Abi mimicked flicking open the pages of a book. ‘Monsieur, our father’s, distant ancestors were given a holy gage by France’s greatest and most venerated king – a king the Vatican later turned into a saint by popular acclamation. This gage was to protect the French realm from the Devil. So far so simple, no? But the gage wasn’t designed to stop with the king’s death. No. It continues on to this day.’
‘According to who?’
Abi sighed condescendingly. ‘According to you and me. The fact that the rest of society is out of step with us – that France is no longer a monarchy – that none of these atheistical idiots believe in the Devil any more – all that is entirely irrelevant.’ Abi was grinning. ‘It’s the others that are the freaks. The people who refuse to act. The walking fucking victims. The sorts of people who have never moved across into no-man’s-land and plundered somebody else’s herd.’ Abi pointed at his brother. ‘We’re the hunters, Vau – you and I. And they are our prey. We’ve been set free thanks to St Louis’s edict. That’s all the moral justification we’ll ever need. Now bust that chair up and stack it over here. We need to get a blaze going.’
Sabir had heard enough. Ammo or no ammo, he wasn’t about to allow these maniacs to set fire to his father’s house.
He had scrabbled in vain through the wine cellar for the remotest sign of a box of cartridges. The shotgun had been in place, though, just as he remembered it. If he wanted to save his family home from destruction, he would simply have to use the empty weapon as a deterrent. The two of them couldn’t exactly stare down the barrels and check to see if they were loaded, now, could they?
He kicked open the study door and brought the shotgun up to bear. He had understood the men to be twins from their conversation, but he was still unprepared for the uncanny resemblance between the two of them. It was like staring into the shards of a shattered mirror.
The one called Vau was already in the process of levering off the semi-circular back of his father’s favourite library chair.
‘Drop that chair. You’re not setting fire to anything.’ Sabir kept his back firmly against the door. He had privately decided that if either of the men made an aggressive move towards him, he would simply throw the shotgun at them, turn on his heels, and leg it as fast as possible out of the house.
Both men froze in place. The one called Abi was the first to relax and acknowledge him.
‘I suppose you expect us to put our hands up? To go and stand over by the wall, like they do in the movies?’
‘I want you to lie down on the ground. Then I want you to unhitch your belts, and push your trousers down around your ankles.’
‘Christ, Vau. The guy’s gay.’
‘Just do it. From this range, I can cut you both in half without even needing to switch barrels.’ Adam Sabir raised the shotgun and aimed it directly at Abi’s head. It was becoming increasingly obvious which of the two was in charge.
The twins dropped slowly to their knees. Making a show of their reluctance, they unbuckled their belts, pushed their trousers down, and stretched out on the floor. ‘What are you going to do now, Sabir? Rape us?’
>
‘The cons at Cedar Junction can do that. In fifteen years’ time you’ll be able to write a book about your experiences. It’ll be a sure-fire bestseller. You can call it Shafted By The Penal System.’
‘You hear that, Vau? This guy’s got a sense of humour. I suppose this means you’re going to call in the cops?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Look. We only came here for information. We’re not even armed. If you give us what we want, we’ll leave you in peace.’
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
‘At least tell us who warned you we were coming? Because somebody warned you. There’s no way you just happened to be out of your room and in possession of a shotgun the exact moment we came by.’
Sabir hesitated. Now that the twins were safely down on the ground, he wasn’t sure how best to finagle himself out of the situation he found himself in. ‘Nobody warned me.’ He edged further into the room and sidestepped towards the telephone.
‘Bullshit. We saw you go to bed. We’ve been watching this place for the past twelve hours. Somebody warned you.’ Abi turned towards his brother. ‘Hey, Vau. I know who it was. It was that pig of an ex-policeman. The one who kidnapped Lamia. The one Madame, our mother, says tried to bug our meeting and failed. But how did he know we were coming over here?’
Vau met his brother’s gaze. Then he looked away.
‘It was that bitch of a sister of ours, wasn’t it? I should have killed her when I had the chance.’ Abi got up off the floor. He pulled his trousers up and tightened his belt as though Sabir were no longer in the room. ‘Get up, Vau. I’ve got all the information I need. This bastard’s not going to shoot us in a month of Sundays. He hasn’t got the balls for it. And I’m not waiting patiently here with my trousers around my ankles while he summons up enough courage to call the cops.’
‘Don’t move another step, de Bale.’
The Mayan Codex as-2 Page 12