‘That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? For us to fight? Then you would feel wanted.’
Sabir started towards the door. ‘I think I’d better leave you both to it. Something tells me we’re not a long way shy of a quorum here.’
Yola held up her hand. ‘No. You stay. Otherwise I must go. It wouldn’t be right for me to be here only with Alexi.’
Alexi slapped the bed in mock invitation. ‘What do you mean it wouldn’t be right? You spent time alone with Gavril. You let him touch you.’
‘How can you say that? Of course I didn’t let him touch me.’
‘You told him the man in the church bit off my balls. After he punched out my teeth. You think that’s right? To tell someone that? To make a fool out of me? That bastard will spread it all around the camp. I’ll be a laughing stock.’
Yola fell silent. Her face flushed pale underneath her sun-darkened skin.
‘Why aren’t you wearing your diklo, like a proper married woman? Are you telling me Gavril didn’t kidnap you last night? That the spiuni gherman didn’t take you behind the hedge and turn you on your side?’
Sabir had never yet seen Yola cry. Now large tears welled up in her eyes and overran her face, unchecked. She dropped her head and stared fixedly at the ground.
‘ Sacais sos ne dicobelan calochin ne bridaquelan. Is that it?’
Yola sat down on the caravan step, with her back to Alexi. One of her girlfriends approached the door of the caravan but Yola shooed her off.
Sabir couldn’t understand why she didn’t respond. Didn’t refute Alexi’s allegations. ‘What did you just say to her, Alexi?’
‘I said “Eyes that can’t see, break no heart”. Yola knows what I mean.’ He turned his head away and stared fixedly at the wall.
Sabir looked from one to the other of them. Not for the fi rst time he wondered what sort of a madhouse he had stumbled into. ‘Yola?’
‘What? What is it you want?’
‘What exactly did you say to Gavril?’
Yola spat on the ground, then teased the spittle with the point of her shoe. ‘I didn’t say anything to him. I haven’t spoken to him. Except to trade insults.’
‘Well, I don’t understand…’
‘You don’t understand anything, do you?’
‘Well, no. I suppose I don’t.’
‘Alexi.’
Alexi glanced up hopefully when he heard Yola addressing him. It was obvious that he was fighting a losing battle with whatever it was that was eating away at him.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry for letting Gavril take out your eyes?’
‘No. Sorry for telling Bazena about what happened to your balls. I thought it was funny. I shouldn’t have told her. She is hot for Gavril. He must have made her tell him. It was wrong of me not to think how it might harm you.’
‘You told Bazena?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t speak to Gavril?’
‘No.’
Alexi swore under his breath. ‘I’m sorry I questioned your lacha .’
‘You didn’t. Damo couldn’t understand what you were saying. So there was no questioning.’
Sabir squinted at her. ‘Who the heck’s Damo?’
‘You are.’
‘I’m Damo?’
‘That’s your gypsy name.’
‘Would you mind explaining that? I haven’t been renamed since my last baptism.’
‘It’s the gypsy word for Adam. We are all descended from him.’
‘So’s just about everybody, I guess.’ Sabir pretended to weigh up his new name. Secretly, he was delighted at the change in tone of the conversation. ‘What’s your word for Eve?’
‘Yehwah. But she’s not our mother.’
‘Oh.’
‘Our mother was Adam’s first wife.’
‘You mean Lilith? The witch who preyed on women and children? The woman who became the serpent?’
‘Yes. She is our mother. Her vagina was a scorpion. Her head was that of a lioness. At her breasts she suckled a pig and a dog. And she rode on a donkey.’ She half turned, measuring Alexi’s response to her words. ‘Her daughter, Alu, was originally a man but he changed into a woman – it is from her that some gypsies have the second sight. Through her line, Lemec, the son of Cain, had a son by his wife Hada. This was Jabal, father of all those who live in a tent and are nomadic. We are also related to Jubal, father of all musicians, for Tsilla, Jubal’s son, became the second wife of Lemec.’
Sabir was about to say something – to make some pungent comment about the infuriating way gypsies played around with logic – but then he noticed Alexi’s face and it suddenly dawned on him why Yola had started on her discourse in the first place. She had been way ahead of him.
Alexi was transfixed by her story. All anger had clearly left him. His eyes were dreamy, as if he had just received a massage with a swansdown glove.
Perhaps, thought Sabir, it was all true and Yola really was a witch after all?
65
That morning Sabir walked from the encampment into the outskirts of Gourdon. He was wearing a greasy baseball cap he had liberated from a cupboard in the caravan and a red-and-black stitched leather jacket with lightning stripes, a plethora of unnecessary zips and about a yard and a half of dangling chains. If anybody recognises me now, he thought to himself, I really am done for – my credibility is shot for ever.
Still. This was his first time alone and in a public place since the camp at Samois and he felt awkward and nervous. Like an impostor.
Carefully skirting the main streets – in which the market was in full swing and law-abiding people were taking their breakfast in cafes, like regular citizens – Sabir was suddenly struck by how detached he had become to the so-called real world. His reality was back in the gypsy camp, with the dusty children and the dogs and the cooking pots and the long dresses of the women. The town seemed almost colourless by comparison. Up itself. Anally retentive.
He bought himself a croissant at a mobile stand and stood eating it on the town ramparts, looking back over the market, enjoying his rare taste of solitude. What madness had he let himself in for? In little more than a week his life had changed tack in its entirety and he was now certain, in his heart of hearts, that he would never be able to return to his old ways. He belonged to neither one world nor the other now. What was the gypsy expression? Apatride. With no nationality. It was their word for gypsyhood.
He spun abruptly around to face the man standing behind him. Did he have time to reach for his pistol? The presence of innocent bystanders in the square decided him against it.
‘Monsieur Sabir?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘Capitaine Calque. Police Nationale. I’ve been following you since you left the camp. In fact you’ve been under continuous observation ever since your arrival from Rocamadour, three days ago.’
‘Oh Jesus.’
‘Are you armed?’
Sabir nodded. ‘Armed, yes. But not dangerous.’
‘May I see the pistol?’
Sabir gingerly opened his pocket, stuck two fingers in and retrieved the pistol by the barrel. He could almost feel the sniper scopes converging on the roof of his skull.
‘May I inspect it?’
‘Hell, yes. Be my guest. Keep it if you want.’
Calque smiled. ‘We are alone here, Monsieur Sabir. You may hold me up, if you wish. You do not have to give me the pistol.’
Sabir ducked his head in wonder. ‘You’re either lying through your teeth, Captain, or you’re taking one heck of a risk.’ He offered Calque the pistol, butt first, as if it were a piece of rotting fish.
‘Thank you.’ Calque took the pistol. ‘A risk, yes. But I think we’ve just proved something quite important.’ He hefted the automatic in his hand. ‘A Remington 51. Nice little pistol. They stopped making these in the late 1920s. Did you know that? This is almost a museum piece.’
‘You don’t say?’
> ‘It’s not yours, I take it?’
‘You know very well that I took it off that guy in the Rocamadour Sanctuary.’
‘May I take the serial number? It might prove interesting.’
‘How about the DNA? Isn’t that what you people swear by these days?’
‘It’s too late for DNA. The pistol has been prejudiced. I simply need the serial number.’
Sabir exhaled in a long, ragged outpouring of breath. ‘Yes. Please. Take the serial number. Take the gun. Take me.’
‘I told you. I’m alone.’
‘But I’m a killer. You people had my face splashed all over the TV and newspapers. I’m a threat to public safety.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Calque put on his reading glasses and took down the serial number in a small black notebook. Then he offered the pistol back to Sabir.
‘You can’t be serious?’
‘I’m very serious, Monsieur Sabir. You will need to be armed for what I am about to ask you to do.’
66
Sabir squatted down beside Yola and Alexi. It was more than obvious that they were on speaking terms again. Yola was roasting some green coffee beans and wild chicory root over an open fire in preparation for Alexi’s breakfast.
Sabir handed her the bag of croissants. ‘I’ve just had a run-in with the police.’
Alexi laughed. ‘Did you steal those croissants, Damo? Don’t tell me you got caught first time out?’
‘No, Alexi. I’m serious. A captain of the Police Nationale just picked me up. He knew exactly who I was.’
‘ Malos mengues! ’ Alexi slapped himself on the forehead with his flattened palm. He reared up, prepared for flight. ‘Are they already in the camp?’
‘Sit down, you fool. Do you think I’d still be here if they really intended to take me?’
Alexi hesitated. Then he dropped back on to the tree stump he had been using as a seat. ‘You’re crazy, Damo. I nearly threw up. I thought I was going straight to prison. It’s not funny to joke that way.’
‘I wasn’t joking. You remember that guy who came to talk to you in the camp at Samois? With his assistant? About Babel? While I was in the wood-box?’
‘The wood-box. Yes.’
‘It was the same guy. I recognised his voice. It was the last thing I heard before I blacked out.’
‘But why did he let you go? They still think it was you that murdered Babel, don’t they?’
‘No. Calque doesn’t. That’s his name, by the way. Calque. He was the police officer Yola saw in Paris.’
Yola nodded. ‘Yes, Damo. I remember him well. He seemed a fair man – at least for a payo. He accompanied me down to the place where they keep the dead to make sure that they allowed me to cut Babel’s hair myself. That they didn’t give me somebody else’s hair. Otherwise Babel wouldn’t have been properly buried. He understood this, when I told him. At least he pretended to.’
‘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:
“Heberge par les trois maries Celle d’Egypte la derniere fit La vierge noire au camaro duro Tient le secret de mes vers a 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 maries – 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 Jacobe, the sister of the Virgin Mary and Marie Salome, 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-Ra in those days. Sara became its Queen. When the three Maries – Marie Jacobe, Marie Salome 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-Ra, 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.’
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