27
Yola indicated that Sabir and Alexi should sit on the bed above her. She took her place on the floor beneath them, her legs drawn up, her back against a brightly painted chest.
‘Listen. Many, many families ago, one of my mothers made friends with a gadje girl from the neighbouring town. At this time we came from the south, near Salon-de-Provence…’
‘One of your mothers?’
‘The mother of her mother’s mother, but many times over.’ Alexi scowled at Sabir as though he were being forced to explain milking to a dairymaid.
‘Just how long ago would this have been?’
‘As I said. Many families.’
Sabir was fast realising that he was not going to get anywhere by being too literal. He would simply have to suspend the rational, pedantic side of his nature and go with the swing. ‘I’m sorry. Continue.’
‘This girl’s name was Madeleine.’
‘Madeleine?’
‘Yes. This was at the time of the Catholic purges, when gypsies had the privileges we used to enjoy - of free movement and help from the châtelain - taken away from us.’
‘Catholic purges?’ Sabir struck himself a glancing blow on the temple. ‘I’m sorry. But I can’t seem to get my head around this. Are we talking about the Second World War here? Or the French Revolution? The Catholic Inquisition, maybe? Or something a little more recent?’
‘The Inquisition. Yes. That is what my mother called it.’
‘The Inquisition? But that happened five hundred years ago.’
‘Five hundred years ago. Many families. Yes.’
‘Are you serious about this? You’re telling me a story that occurred five hundred years ago?’
‘Why is that strange? We have many stories. Gypsies don’t write things down - they tell. And these tales are passed down. My mother told me, just as her mother told her and just as I shall tell my daughter. For this is a woman’s tale. I am only telling you this because you are my brother and because I think my brother’s death was caused by his curiosity in this matter. As his phral, you must now avenge him.’
‘I must avenge him?’
‘Did you not understand? Alexi and the other men will help you. But you must find the man who killed your phral and kill him in turn. It is for this reason that I am telling you of our secret. Our mother would have wanted it.’
‘But I can’t go around killing people.’
‘Not even to protect me?’
‘I don’t understand. This is all going too fast.’
‘I have something this man wants. This man who killed Babel. And now he knows I have it, because you brought him here. Alexi has told me of the hiding place on the hill. While I am here, in the camp, I am safe. The men are protecting me. They are on the lookout. But one day he will get through and take me. Then he will do to me what he tried to do to Babel. You are my brother. You must stop him.’
Alexi was nodding, too, as if what Yola said was perfectly normal - a perfectly rational way of behaving.
‘But what is it? What do you have that this man wants?’
Without answering, Yola rocked forwards on to her knees. She opened a small drawer concealed beneath the bed and drew out a broad red leather woman’s belt. With a seamstress’s deft touch she began to unpick the stitching from the belt with a small penknife.
28
Sabir held the manuscript on his knee. ‘This is it?’
‘Yes. This is what Madeleine gave one of my mothers.’
‘You’re sure this girl was called Madeleine?’
‘Yes. She said her father had requested her to give it to the wife of the chief of the gypsies. That if the papers fell into the wrong hands it might possibly mean the destruction of our race. But that we should not physically destroy the papers but hide them, as they were subject to the Will of God and held other secrets that may one day become important too. That her father had left this and some other papers to her in his Testament. In a sealed box.’
‘But this is the Testament. This is a copy of Michel Nostradamus’s Will. Look here. It is dated the 17th of June 1566. Fifteen days before his death. And with a codicil dated the 30th of June, just two days before. Yola, do you know who Nostradamus was?’
‘A prophet. Yes.’
‘No. Not exactly a prophet - Nostradamus would have rejected that name. He was a scryer, rather. A seer. A man who - and only with God’s permission, of course - could sometimes see into the future and anticipate future events. The most famous and the most successful seer in history. I’ve spent a long time studying him. It’s why I allowed myself to be tempted by your brother’s advertisement.’
‘Then you will be able to tell me why this man wants what you have in your hand. What secrets the paper contains. Why he will kill for it. For I cannot possibly understand it.’
Sabir threw up his hands. ‘I don’t think it does contain any secrets. It’s already well known about and in the public domain - you can even find it on the internet, for Christ’s sake. I know of at least two other original copies in private hands - it’s worth a little money, sure, but hardly enough to kill for. It’s just a Will like any other.’ He frowned. ‘But one thing in it does bear upon what you are telling me. Nostradamus did have a daughter called Madeleine. She was fifteen when he died. Listen to this. It is part of the codicil - that’s a piece of writing added after the actual Will has been written and witnessed, but equally binding on any heirs.
‘Et aussy a légué et lègue à Damoyselle Magdeleine de Nostradamus sa fi lle légitime et naturelle, outre ce que luy a esté légué par sondt testament, savoir est deux coffres de bois noyer estant dans Vestude dudt codicillant, ensemble les habillements, bagues, et joyaux que lade Damoyselle Magdeleine aura dans lesdts coffres, sans que nul puisse voir ny regarder ce que sera dans yceux; ains dudt légat l’en a fait maistresse incontinent après le décès dudt collicitant; lequel légat lade Damoyselle pourra prendre de son autorité, sans qu’elle soit tenue de les prendre par main d’autruy ny consentement d’aucuns…’
‘And he also bequeaths and has bequeathed to Mademoiselle Madeleine Nostradamus, his legitimate and natural daughter, in addition to that which he bequeathed her in his Will, two coffers made of walnut wood which are at present in the testator’s study, together with the clothes, rings and jewels she shall find in those coffers, on the strict understanding that no one save her may look at or see those things which he has placed inside the coffers; thus, according to this legacy, she has been made mistress of the coffers and their contents after the death of the legator; let this testamentary commission represent all the authority the said Mademoiselle may need so that no one may impede her physically, nor withhold their consent morally, to her taking charge of the legacy forthwith;’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s simple. You see, in his original Will, of which this forms part, Nostradamus left his eldest daughter, Madeleine, 600 crowns, to be paid to her on the day that she married, with 500 crown-pistolets each to be paid to his two youngest daughters, Anne and Diana, on a similar occasion, also as dowries. Then he suddenly changes his mind, two days before his death and decides to leave Madeleine a little something extra.’ Sabir tapped the paper in front of him. ‘But he wants no one else to see what he is leaving her, so he has it sealed inside two coffers, just as it says here. But to allay any jealous suspicions that he is leaving her extra money, he constructs a list of what she might hope to find there. Jewels, clothes, rings and whatnot. But that doesn’t make any sense, does it? If he’s leaving her family heirlooms, why hide them? She’s his eldest daughter - according to medieval custom, she’s entitled to them. And if they once belonged to his mother, everybody would know about them already, wouldn’t they? No. He is leaving her something else. Something secret.’ Sabir shook his head. ‘You’ve not told me everything, have you? Your brother understood enough about what Nostradamus had indirectly left your ancestors to mention ‘lost verses’ in his ad. ‘All written down�
��. Those were his words. So where are they written down?’
‘My brother was a fool. It pains me to say it, but he was not in his senses. The drugs changed him.’
‘Yola, you’re not being straight with me.’
Alexi reached down and prodded her with his finger. ‘Go on. You must tell him, luludji. He is head of your family now. You owe him a duty. Remember what the Bulibasha said.’
Sabir sensed that Yola could still not find it in herself to trust him. ‘Would it help if I gave myself up to the police? If I play it right, I might even be able to convince them to switch their attentions from me to the man who really killed your brother. That way you’d be safe.’
Yola pretended to spit. ‘You really think they would do that? Once they have you in their hands they will let you dig your own grave with the key to your cell and then they will shit inside the hole. When you give yourself up, they will throw us to the winds, just as they would like to do now. Babel was a gypsy. The payos don’t care about him. They never have. Look what they did to us in the gherman war. Before it even began, they hurried to intern us. At Montreuil and Bellay. Like cattle. Then they allowed the ghermans to slaughter one finger in three of our people in France. One madman makes many madmen and many madmen makes madness. That’s what our people say.’ She clapped her hands together above her head. ‘There is no gypsy - none - Manouche, Rom, Gitan, Piemontesi, Sinti, Kalderash, Valsikané - still living, who did not have part of his family massacred. In my mother’s time, every gypsy more than thirteen years old was forced to carry a carnet anthropométrique d’identité. And do you know what they put on this card? Height, breadth, skin pigmentation, age and the length of the nose and right ear. They treated us like animals being stamped, registered and sent to the slaughter-house. Two photos. The prints from five separate fingers. All to be checked when we arrived or left from any commune. They called us Bohémiens and Romanichels - insulting names to us. This only stopped in 1969. And you wonder why three-quarters of us, like my brother, can neither read nor write?’
Sabir felt as if he’d been run over by a herd of stampeding buffaloes. The bitterness in Yola’s voice was uncomfortably raw - unnervingly real. ‘But you can. You can read. And Alexi.’
Alexi shook his head. ‘I left school at six. I didn’t like it. Who needs to read? I can talk, can’t I?’
Yola stood up. ‘You say these two coffers were made of walnut wood?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that you are now my phral? That you willingly accept this responsibility?’
‘Yes.’
She pointed to the brightly painted chest behind her. ‘Well, here is one of the coffers. Prove it to me.’
29
‘It’s the car, all right.’ Captain Calque let the tarpaulin fall back over the number-plate.
‘Shall we have it taken in?’ Macron was already unsheathing his cellphone.
Calque winced. ‘Macron. Macron. Macron. Think of it this way. The gypsies have either killed Sabir, in which case bits of him are probably scattered throughout seven départements by now, slowly investing the local flora and fauna. Or, more likely, he has been able to convince them of his innocence and that is the reason why they are hiding his car for him and have not already repainted it and sold it on to the Russians. We would do better, would we not - as spying on the main camp does not seem to be a practical option - to stake it out and wait for him to return and claim it. Or do you still think we should call for the breakers to come with their winches, their sirens and their loudhailers and have it, as you say, ‘taken in?’’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Tell me, lad. What part of Marseille are you from?’
Macron sighed. ‘La Canebière.’
‘I thought that was a road.’
‘It is a road, Sir. But it is also a place.’
‘Do you want to go back there?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Then get on to Paris and order a tracking device. When you have the tracking device, conceal it somewhere inside the car. Then test it at five hundred metres, a thousand metres and fifteen hundred metres. And Macron?’
‘Yes, Sir?’
Calque shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
30
Achor Bale was profoundly, systematically, indisputably, bored. He had had enough of surveillance, spying, lying in thickets and skulking under gorse bushes. For a few days it had been amusing, watching the gypsies going about their daily business. Dissecting the stupidity of a culture that had refused to keep pace with the rest of the twenty-first century. Watching the absurd behaviour of these ant-like creatures as they argued, cheated, fondled, shouted, swindled and duped each other in a failed attempt to make up for the dud hand that society had dealt them.
What did the fools expect, when the Catholic Church still blamed them for forging the nails which pierced Jesus’ hands and feet? According to Bale’s reading of the story, two blacksmiths, pre-Crucifixion, had refused to do the Romans’ dirty work for them and had been killed for their trouble. The third smith the Romans approached had been a gypsy. This gypsy had just finished forging three large nails. ‘Here’s twenty denarii,’ the drunken legionnaires had told him. ‘Five each for the first three and five more for the fourth that you will make for us while we wait.’
The gypsy agreed to complete the work while the legionnaires enjoyed a few more tumblers of wine. But the moment he started forging the fourth nail, the ghosts of the two murdered smiths appeared in the clearing and warned him not, under any circumstances, to work for the Romans, as they were intending to crucify a just man. The soldiers, terrified by the apparition, bolted, without waiting for their fourth nail.
But the story didn’t end there. For this gypsy was a sedulous man and figuring that he had already been well paid for his work, he set to once more, ignoring the warnings of the two dead smiths. When he eventually completed the fourth nail and while it was still red hot, he plunged it into a bath of cooling water - but no matter how many times he did this, or from what depth he drew the water, the nail still remained close to molten. Appalled by the implications of what he had done, the gypsy gathered up his belongings and made off.
For three days and three nights he ran, until he arrived in a whited city where nobody knew him. Here he set to work for a rich man. But the first time he laid hammer to iron, a terrible cry escaped from his lips. For there, on the anvil, lay the red-hot nail - the missing fourth nail of Christ’s Crucifixion. And each time he set to work - either in a different manner or in a different place - the same thing happened, until nowhere in the world was safe from the accusing vision of the red-hot nail.
And that, at least according to Romany lore, explains why gypsies are doomed to wander the earth forever, searching for a safe place in which to set-up their forges.
‘Idiots,’ said Bale, under his breath. ‘They should have killed the Romans and blamed it on the families of the dead smiths.’
He had already identified the two men guarding the camp. One of them was slumped under a tree, smoking and the other was asleep. What were these people thinking of? He would have to chivvy them up. Once Sabir and the girl were forced out on to the road, they would be that much easier to pick off.
Smiling to himself, Bale unzipped the fl at leather case he had been carrying in the poacher’s pocket of his waxed Barbour coat and eased out the Ruger Redhawk. The double-action revolver was made from satinised stainless steel, with a rosewood grip. It sported a seven-and-a half-inch barrel, a six-round, Magnum-filled magazine and telescopic sights, zeroed-in for eighty feet. Thirteen inches in length, it was Bale’s favourite hunting gun, with enough power to stop an elk. Recently, at the firing range in Paris, he had achieved a consistent series of three-inch groupings at ninety-six feet. Now that he had live bait to fire at, he wondered if it were possible to remain quite so accurate?
His first slug hit two inches below the heel of the sleeping gypsy. The man jerked awake, his body inadvertently taking the form of a s
et square. Bale aimed his second slug at the exact place the man’s head had been resting two seconds before.
Then he turned his attention to the second gypsy. His first slug took out the man’s cigarette tin and the second, part of a tree branch just above his head.
By this time the two men were running back towards the camp, screaming. Bale missed the television aerial with his first bullet but broke it in two with his second. As he was shooting, Bale was also keeping a weather eye on the door of the caravan through which Sabir, the girl and the knife-wielding man had disappeared some twenty minutes earlier. But no one emerged.
‘Well that’s it. Just one magazine today.’
Bale reloaded the Ruger and slipped it back inside its case and the case back into the poacher’s pocket sewn into the seat of his coat.
Then he headed down the hill towards his car.
31
‘Is that a car approaching?’ Alexi had his head cocked to one side. ‘Or did the Devil sneeze?’ He stood up, a quizzical expression on his face and made as if to go outside.
‘No. Wait.’ Sabir held up a warning hand.
There was a second loud report from the far side of the camp. Then a third. Then a fourth.
‘Yola, get down on the floor. You too, Alexi. Those are gunshots.’ He screwed up his face, evaluating the echo. ‘From this distance it sounds like a hunting rifl e. Which means a stray bullet could puncture these walls with ease.’
A fifth shot ricocheted off the caravan roof.
Sabir eased himself towards the window. In the camp, people were running in every direction, screaming, or calling for their loved ones.
A sixth shot rang out and something thumped on to the roof, then skittered loudly down the outside of the caravan.
‘That was the television aerial. I think this guy’s got a sense of humour. He’s not shooting to kill, anyhow.’
‘Adam. Please get down.’ It was the first time Yola had used his name.
Mario Reading - [Adam Sabir 01] Page 6