Sabir turned towards her, smiling. ‘It’s all right. He’s only trying to smoke us out. We’re safe if we stay inside. I’ve been expecting something like this to happen ever since Alexi showed me his hiding place. Now that he can’t spy on us any more, it’s logical that he should want to drive us out in the open, where he can pick us off at his leisure. But we’ll only go when we’re good and ready.’
‘Go? Why should we go?’
‘Because otherwise he’ll end up by killing somebody.’ Sabir pulled the chest towards him. ‘Remember what he did to Babel? This guy isn’t a moralist. He wants what he thinks we have in this chest. If he finds we have nothing, he will become very angry indeed. In fact I don’t think he would believe us.’
‘Why weren’t you scared when the firing started?’
‘Because I spent five years as a volunteer with the 182nd Infantry Regiment of the Massachusetts Army National Guard.’ Sabir put on a hick country-boy accent. ‘I’m very proud to tell you, ma’am, that the 182nd were first mustered just seventy years after Nostradamus’s death. I’m a Stockbridge Massachusetts boy myself - born and bred.’
Yola looked bewildered, as if Sabir’s sudden descent into levity suggested an unexpected side to his nature that she had hitherto ignored. ‘You were a soldier?’
‘No. A reservist. I was never on active duty. But we trained pretty hard and pretty realistically. And I’ve been hunting and using weapons, all my life.’
‘I am going outside to see what happened.’
‘Yes. I reckon it’s safe now. I’m going to stay here and take another look at this coffer. You don’t have the other one, by any chance?’
‘No. Only this. Someone painted it over because they thought it looked too dull.’
‘I guessed that much.’ Sabir started tapping around the exterior of the box. ‘You ever check this out for a false bottom or a secret compartment?’
‘A false bottom?’
‘I thought not.’
32
‘I’m getting two readings.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m getting two separate readings from the tracking device. It’s as if there’s a shadow on the screen.’
‘Didn’t you test it as I told you?’
Macron swallowed audibly. Calque already thought him an idiot. Now he’d be convinced of it. ‘Yes. It tested fine. I even tried it at two kilometres and it was clear as a bell. We lose GPS, of course, if he goes under a tunnel, or parks in an underground car park, but that’s the price we pay for having a live feed.’
‘What are you talking about, Macron?’
‘I’m saying that if we ever lose him, it might take us a little while to restore contact.’
Calque unclipped his seat belt and began to ease his shoulders, as if, with each kilometre they were travelling away from Paris, he was being relieved of a great weight.
‘You should really keep that on, Sir. If we have an accident, the airbag won’t function properly without it.’ The minute he’d uttered these words, Macron realised that he’d made yet another unforced error in the litany of unforced errors which peppered his ever deteriorating relationship with his boss.
For once, though, Calque didn’t rise to the occasion and administer his usual stinging rebuke. Instead, he raised his chin in a speculative manner and stared out of the window, completely ignoring Macron’s blunder. ‘Did it ever occur to you, Macron, that there may be two tracking devices?’
‘Two, Sir? But I only placed one.’ Macron had begun fantasising about the happy life he could have had working as an assistant in his father’s bakery in Marseille, rather than as dogsbody to a grumpy police captain on the verge of retirement.
‘I’m talking about our friend. The one who likes making telephone calls.’
Macron immediately revised what he had been about to say. Nobody could accuse him of not learning on the job. ‘Then he’ll be picking up the ghosting, too, Sir. He’ll know we planted a device and that we’re running parallel to him.’
‘Well done, boy. Good thinking.’ Calque sighed. ‘But I suspect that that thought won’t bother him overmuch. It should bother us, though. I’m slowly getting a picture here that isn’t very pretty. I can’t prove anything, of course. In fact I don’t even know if this man with no whites to his eyes really exists, or if we are simply summoning up a demon for ourselves and should concentrate our attentions on Sabir. But we must start treading more carefully from here on in.’
‘A demon, Sir?’
‘Just a figure of speech.’
33
‘Where are we going?’
‘To where it says on the base of the coffer.’
Alexi leaned forward from the rear seat and clapped Sabir on the shoulder. ‘That’s telling her. Hey, luludji? What do you think of your phral now? Maybe he’ll leave you lots of money when this crazy man kills him? You got lots of money, Adam?’
‘Not on me.’
‘But you got money? In America, maybe? Can you get us a green card?’
‘I can give you a black eye.’
‘Hey? You hear that? That’s funny. I ask him for a green card and he offers me a black eye. This guy must be a Berber.’
‘Is anyone following us?’
‘No. No. I looked. And I keep on looking. We’re clear.’
‘I don’t understand it.’
‘Maybe he didn’t find the car. The boys hid it well. You owe me for that, gadje. They were going to break it up and sell off the pieces, but I told them you would pay them for protecting it.’
‘Pay them?’
‘Yeah. You got to leave them money too, when you die.’ Alexi suddenly sat up higher. ‘Hey. gadje. Pull over behind that car. The one parked down the track.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do it.’
Sabir pulled the Audi across the hard shoulder and down the track.
Alexi got out and began stalking around, his head cocked sideways. ‘It’s okay. There’s no one here. They’re off walking.’
‘You’re not going to steal it?’
Alexi made a disgusted face. He squatted down and began unscrewing the car’s number-plate.
***
‘He’s stopped.’
‘You mustn’t follow suit. Keep on driving. Go past him. But if you see another car pulled over, mark it. We’ll call in back-up.’
‘Why don’t you just pick up Sabir and have done with it?’
‘Because the gypsies aren’t stupid, whatever you might think of them. If they haven’t killed Sabir, it’s for a reason.’ Calque flicked a glance down the side track. ‘Did you see what he was doing down there?’
‘They. There were three of them.’ Macron cleared his throat uncertainly. ‘If I were them, I’d be switching number-plates. Just in case.’
Calque smiled. ‘Macron. You never cease to amaze me.’
***
‘What do you hope to gain by that? The minute they come back to the car they’ll see you’ve switched their plates.’
‘No.’ Alexi smiled. ‘People don’t look. They don’t see things. It’ll be days before he notices anything. He’ll probably only realise we’ve switched the plates after the police pounce down on him waving their machine guns - or when he loses his car in a supermarket parking.’
Sabir shrugged. ‘You sound as if you’ve done this sort of thing before.’
‘What do you mean? I’m like a priest.’
Yola bestirred herself for the first time. ‘I can understand my brother knowing about the first paper. My mother doted on him. She would have told him anything. Given him anything. But how did my brother know what was on the base of the coffer? He couldn’t read.’
‘Then he found someone in the camp who could. Because he used part of the same wording in his ad.’
Yola glanced at Alexi. ‘Who would he find?’
Alexi shrugged. ‘Luca can read. He would do anything for Babel. Or for a handful of euros. He’s sly, too. It would be just like
him to plan all this and then set Babel up to act in his place.’
Yola hissed. ‘That Luca. If I find he did this, I will put a hex on him.’
‘A hex?’ Sabir glanced back at Yola. ‘What do you mean, a hex?’
Alexi laughed. ‘She’s hexi, this girl. A witch. Her mother was a witch. And her grandmother too. That’s why no one will marry her. They think that if they give her a beating she will poison them. Or give them the evil eye.’
‘She’d be right.’
‘What do you mean? A man’s got to beat a woman sometimes. Otherwise, how can he keep her in order? She’d be like one of your payo women. With balls the size of hand grenades. No, Adam. If, by a miracle, she ever finds herself a husband, you’ve got to talk to him. Tell him how to manage her. Keep her pregnant. That’s the best thing. If she’s got children to look after, she can’t nag him.’
Yola flicked at her front teeth with her thumb, as if she were getting rid of a piece of unwanted gristle. ‘And what about you, Alexi? Why aren’t you married? I’ll tell you why. Because your penis is split in half. One bit goes west, towards the payos and the other bit stays in your hand.’
Sabir shook his head in bewilderment. Both of them were smiling, as if they derived comfort from the badinage. Sabir secretly suspected that it reinforced, rather than truncated, their communality. He suddenly felt jealous, as if he, too, wanted to belong to such a light-hearted community. ‘When you’ve both stopped arguing, shall I tell you what was written - or rather burned - on to the base of the coffer?’
They both turned to him as if he had offered, out of the blue, to read them a bedtime story.
‘It’s in medieval French. Like the Will. It’s a riddle.’
‘A riddle? You mean like this one? ‘I have a sister who runs without legs and who whistles without a mouth. Who is she?’’
Sabir was getting used to the gypsy way with a non sequitur. At first, the sudden loss of a train of thought had disturbed his sense of order and he had fought to get back on track. Now he smiled and yielded himself up to it. ‘Okay. I give up.’
Yola hammered the seat behind him. ‘It’s the wind, idiot. What did you think it was?’ She and Alexi erupted into gales of laughter.
Sabir smiled. ‘Now do you want to hear what I found? Then we’ll see if you’re as good solving riddles as you are at setting them.’
‘Yes. Tell us.’
‘Well, the original French goes like this:
‘Hébergé par les trois mariés Celle d’Egypte la dernière fi t La vierge noire au camaro duro Tient le secret de mes vers à ses pieds’
When I first read it, I took it to mean the following:
Sheltered by the three married people The Egyptian woman was the last one The Black Virgin on her hard bed Holds the secret of my verses at her feet’
‘But that makes no sense.’
‘You’re darned right it makes no sense. And it’s not in Nostradamus’s usual style, either. It doesn’t rhyme, for a start. But then it doesn’t pretend to be a prophecy. It’s clearly meant to be a guide, or map, towards something of greater importance.’
‘Who are the three married people?’
‘I’ve not the faintest idea.’
‘Well, what about the Black Virgin, then?’
That’s a lot clearer. And it’s where the key, in my opinion, lies. Camaro duro doesn’t really mean ‘hard bed’, you see. It’s one of those phrases one supposes must signify something, but it’s actually meaningless. Yes, cama is bed in Spanish and duro means hard. But the mention of the Black Virgin gave me the true key. It’s an anagram.’
‘A what?’
‘An anagram. That means when one or two words disguise another word, which can be made out of all the letters. Hidden inside the words camaro duro we have a clear anagram for Rocamadour. That’s a famous place of pilgrimage in the Lot valley. Some say it’s even the true beginning of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. And there’s a famous Black Virgin there, which women have gone to for many generations to pray for success in having children. Some even say that she is half man, half woman - half Mary and half Roland. For the paladin Roland’s phallic sword, Durendal, resides to this day in a vulva-shaped cleft high up in the rock near the Virgin’s shrine. She was certainly there in Nostradamus’s time. In fact I don’t think she’s moved anywhere in eight centuries.’
‘Is that where we’re going, then?’
Sabir looked at his two companions. ‘I don’t think we have much choice in the matter.’
34
Yola set two of the cups of coffee into their holders and gave the third to Sabir. ‘You mustn’t be seen. These garages have cameras. We shouldn’t stop in such places again.’
Sabir watched Alexi winding his way through the shop towards the rest room. ‘Why is he here, Yola?’
‘He wants to kidnap me. But he doesn’t have the courage. And now he is scared that you might do so when he isn’t around. That’s why he’s here.’
‘Me? Kidnap you?’
Yola sighed. ‘In Manouche families, a man and a woman run off together when they want to get married. It is called a ‘kidnapping’. If a man ‘kidnaps’ you, it is the equivalent of marriage because the girl will no longer be - I don’t know how to say this - intact.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Why should I joke? I’m telling you the truth.’
‘But I’m your brother.’
‘Not by blood, stupid.’
‘What? That means I could marry you?’
‘With the Bulibasha’s permission, as my father is dead. But if you did that, Alexi would get seriously angry. And then he might choose to really hit you with the knife.’
‘What do you mean ‘might choose to really hit me’? He missed me cleanly.’
‘Only because he wanted to. Alexi is the best knife-thrower in the camp. He does it at circuses and fairgrounds. Everybody knows that. That’s why the Bulibasha chose the knife judgement. They all realised Alexi thought you were innocent of Babel’s death. Otherwise he would have split your hand in two.’
‘Do you mean that all that theatre was just a put-on? That everybody knew all the time that Alexi was going to miss me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what if he’d hit me by mistake?’
‘Then we’d have had to kill you.’
‘Oh great. That makes sense. Yeah. I see it all clearly now.’
‘You mustn’t be angry, Adam. This way, everybody accepts you. If we’d done it another way, you would have had problems later.’
‘Well that’s all right then.’
***
Calque watched the two of them through his binoculars. ‘I recognise the girl. It’s Samana’s sister. And Sabir, of course. But who’s the swarthy one using the pissoire?’
‘Another cousin, probably. These people are sick with cousins. Scratch one and cousins fall off them like ticks.’
‘Don’t you like gypsies, Macron?’
‘They’re layabouts. No southerner likes gypsies. They steal, trick and use people for their own purposes.’
‘Putain. Most people do that in one way or another.’
‘Not like them. They despise us.’
‘We haven’t made life easy for them.’
‘Why should we?’
Calque pretended to nod. ‘Why indeed?’ He would have to watch Macron more carefully, though, in future. In his experience, if a man had one outspoken prejudice, he would be doubly as likely to harbour other, more secret ones, which would only emerge in a crisis. ‘They’re moving. Look. Give them half a minute and then follow on behind.’
‘Are you sure this is regular, Sir? I mean, leaving a murderer to go about his business on the public highway? You saw what he did to Samana.’
‘Have you forgotten about our other friend so quickly?’
‘Of course not. But we’ve nothing against him but your instinct. We have Sabir’s actual blood on Samana’s hand. We can place him at the murder
scene.’
‘No we can’t. But we can place him at the bar where the blooding took place. And we have him travelling, seemingly of his own free will, with Samana’s sister. What do you think? That she’s suffering from Stockholm syndrome?’
‘Stockholm syndrome?’
Calque frowned. ‘Sometimes, Macron, I forget that you are quite so young. A Swedish criminologist, Nils Bejerot, coined the term in 1973 after a bank robbery in the Norrmalmstorg district of Stockholm went wrong and a number of hostages were taken. Over the course of six days, some of the hostages began to sympathise more with their captors than with the police. The same thing happened to the newspaper heiress, Patty Hearst.’
‘Ah.’
‘Do you think that Sabir has somehow managed to mesmerise an entire gypsy camp and turn them into his willing accomplices?’
Macron sucked at his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t put anything at all past such people.’
35
‘Do you still feel capable of handling this situation alone?’
Achor Bale was briefly tempted to throw the handset out of the car window. Instead, he gave the woman in the vehicle overtaking him a sarcastic smile, in response to her disapproving look about his use of a cellphone whilst driving.
‘Of course, Madame. Everything is copacetic, as the Americans say. I have Sabir under surveillance. I’ve identified the police car following them. The poor fools have even switched number-plates in an effort to throw off any pursuit.’
The woman’s husband was now leaning forward and gesticulating for him to put down his phone.
Peugeot drivers, thought Bale. In England, they would drive Rovers. In America, Chevrolets or Cadillacs. He pretended to lose concentration and allowed his car to drift a little towards the Peugeot.
The husband’s eyes opened wider. He reached across his wife and honked the horn.
Bale glanced into his rear-view mirror. Alone on the road. Might be amusing. Might even buy him a little extra time. ‘So do you want me to continue or not, Madame? Just say the word.’
Mario Reading - [Adam Sabir 01] Page 7