‘Why didn’t you tell me this before, Yola?’
‘You misled me. You said they were three married people. But Sara was a virgin. Her lacha was untarnished. She was unmarried.’
Sabir raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘So what happened when Sara went down to check them out?’
‘At first she taunted them.’ Yola made a hesitant face. ‘This must have been meant as a test, I think. Then one of the Maries climbed out of the boat and stood on the water, like Jesus did at Bethsaida. She asked Sara to do the same. Sara walked into the sea and was swallowed up by the waves. But the second Marie cast her cloak upon the waters and Sara climbed up on it and was saved. Then Sara welcomed them to her town. Helped them to build a Christian community there, after they had converted her. Marie Jacobe and Marie Salome stayed on at Les Saintes-Maries until they died. Their bones are still there.’
Sabir sat back. ‘So everything was already contained in that first verse. The rest was simply waffle. Just as I said.’
‘No. I don’t think so.’ Yola shook her head. ‘I think it was also a test. To check that the gypsies were still Catholic – si li boumian sian catouli. That we were still worthy to receive the verses. Like a sort of pilgrimage you have to make before you can learn an important secret.’
‘A rite of passage, you mean? Like the search for the Holy Grail?’
‘I don’t understand what you are saying. But yes. If, by that, you mean a test to make sure one is worthy to learn something, it would surely add up to the same thing, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yola.’ Sabir took her head in both his hands and squeezed. ‘You never cease to amaze me.’
67
Macron was angry. Deep, seat-of-the-pants, mouth-foamingly, slaveringly, angry. The side of his head had swelled up, giving him an unsightly black eye and his jaw felt as though someone had run a pile-driver across it. He had a blinding headache and his feet, where the eye-man had tenderised them with his sap, made him feel as if every step he took was taken barefoot, over a bed of oval pebbles, in a sandbox.
He watched Calque approaching via the cafe tables, twisting and turning his hips just as if he’d heard somewhere – and believed – that all fat men must, by default, be excellent dancers. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Where have I been?’ Calque raised an eyebrow at Macron’s tone.
Macron backtracked swiftly, with as much dignity as he was able to muster. ‘I’m sorry, Sir. My head is hurting. I’m feeling a little grumpy. That didn’t come out right.’
‘I agree with you. In fact I agree with you so much that I think you should be in a hospital, not sitting here in a cafe drooling coffee out of a grotesquely swollen mouth. Look at you. Your own mother wouldn’t recognise you.’
Macron grimaced. ‘I’m all right, I tell you. The Spanish medico told me I don’t have concussion. And my feet are just bruised. These crutches take some of the pressure off when I walk.’
‘And you want to be in for the kill? Is that it? To get your revenge. Stumping along behind the eye-man on a pair of crutches?’
‘Of course not. I’m detached. A professional. You know that.’
‘Do I?’
‘Are you going to throw me off the case? Send me home? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?’
‘No. I’m not going to do that. And shall I tell you why?’
Macron nodded. He wasn’t sure what he was about to hear, but he sensed that it might be unpleasant.
‘It was my fault the eye-man got you. I shouldn’t have left you alone on the hill. Shouldn’t have abandoned my position. You might have been killed. In my book, that allows you one favour and one favour only. Do you want to stay on the case?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Then I’ll tell you where I’ve just been.’
68
Sabir rubbed his face with his hands, just as though he were smoothing in a squirt or two of suntan lotion. ‘There’s just one snag to all this.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Not only will the French police not know exactly where we are going, thanks to my partially holding out on Calque, but they will still be out to get me – with everything they have in their arsenal – for Babel and the nightwatchman’s murder. With you both along as accessories after the fact.’
‘You can’t be serious?’
‘Oh yes I can. Deadly serious. Captain Calque told me that he is doing this entirely off his own initiative.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Yes I do. He could have taken me into custody this morning and thrown away the key. Claimed all the kudos for himself. I was perfectly prepared to surrender to him without a struggle. I’m no cop killer. I told him so myself. He even held the Remington in his hand and then gave it back to me.’
Alexi whistled.
‘The authorities could have spent months pinning that maniac’s actions on to me, by which time the man they call the eye-man would have been long gone – probably with the verses in tow and ready for sale on the open market. And who could prove where he found them? Nobody. Because they’ve got no DNA evidence – the death of an unknown gypsy doesn’t rate a full police procedural over here, apparently. And anyway, they would already have had me in custody, so why bother with the rest? The ideal suspect. Whose blood is conveniently splattered all over the crime scene. Open and shut, no?’
‘Then why is Calque doing this? They will send him to the guillotine, surely – or exile him to Elba, like Napoleon – if things go wrong.’
‘Hardly that. He’s simply doing it because he wants the eye-man and he wants him badly. It was his fault his assistant got nailed. And he holds himself responsible for the nightwatchman’s death, too. He reckons he should have figured that the eye-man would come back to sort over unfinished business. But he says he got so carried away with his own and his assistant’s brilliance in working out the Montserrat code, that he couldn’t see the light for the trees. A bit like me, really.’
‘Are you sure it’s not a trap? So they can get both of you? I mean, perhaps they think you are working together?’
Sabir groaned. ‘What the Hell. I don’t know. All I know is that he could have taken me in this morning and he didn’t. That’s one heck of a bonafide in my book.’
‘So what do we do?’
Sabir lurched backwards in mock surprise. ‘What do we do? We head for the Camargues, that’s what we do. Via Millau. That much I have agreed with Calque. Then we lose ourselves for a few days amongst ten thousand of your closest relatives. Always bearing in mind, of course, that the eye-man can track our car wherever and whenever he wants to – and that we are still murder suspects, with the French police hot on our trail, handcuffs and machine guns at the ready.’
‘ Jesu Cristu! And then?’
‘And then, in six days’ time, at the absolute height of the festival of the Three Maries, we steal out of hiding and fi lch the statue of Sainte Sara from in front of a church crammed to the rafters with frantically worshipping acolytes. Without tangling with the eye-man. And without getting ourselves strung up, or hacked to pieces, by a crazed mob of vengeful zealots in the process.’ Sabir grinned. ‘How do you like them apples, Alexi?’
PART TWO
1
Achor Bale felt a deep calm descend on him as he watched the tracker pick out the location of Sabir’s car and follow it, pulsing gently.
And yes. There was the ghost of the police tracker too. So they were still on the job. Too much to hope that they had marked Sabir down for the attack in Montserrat. But there was a fair-to-middling chance that they had him tagged for the nightwatchman killing. Strange, though, that they still refused to pick him up – they must be after the verses as well. Both he and the police, it seemed, were playing a waiting game.
Bale smiled and fumbled around on the passenger seat for Macron’s identity card. He held it up in front of him and spoke directly to the photograph. ‘How are your feet, Paul? A little tender?’ He would meet Macron again – h
e was convinced of that. There was unfinished business there. How dare the French police pursue him into Spain? He would have to teach them a lesson.
For the moment, though, he would concentrate all his energies on Sabir. The man was heading south – and not towards Montserrat. Now why was that? He could hardly have heard about the attack there. And he had the exact same information concerning the verses that Bale had – the gist of the quatrain burned on to the base of the coffer and the additional verse from Rocamadour. Had the little gypsy girl at the river held something back from him when she had described the coffer-verse’s contents? No. He hardly thought so. You could always tell when somebody was so scared they couldn’t even control their bladder any more – it was impossible to counterfeit a fear as strong as that. It was like a springbok being taken by a lion – all the springbok’s physical mechanisms would close down once the lion had him around the neck, so that he’d be dead of shock even before his windpipe was crushed between the lion’s teeth.
That was the way Monsieur, his late father, had trained Bale to behave – to go forward unthinkingly and with total conviction. To decide in your head the optimum outcome of your actions and to remain true to that outcome regardless of any diversionary tactics on the part of your opponent. Chess functioned in much the same way and Bale was good at chess. It was all about the will to win.
To cap it all, his most recent phone call to Madame, his mother, had been of an entirely satisfactory nature. He had omitted to describe the fiasco in Montserrat, of course and had simply explained to her that the people he was following had been held up by a wedding – these were gypsies, after all and not rocket scientists. They were the sorts of people who would stop to pick wild asparagus by the roadside whilst on the run from the police. Sublime.
Madame, in consequence, had professed herself entirely satisfied with his conduct and had told him that, of all her many children, he was the one she held most dear to her heart. The one she most counted on to do her bidding.
As Bale drove south, he could feel the shades of Monsieur, his late father, smiling benevolently on him from beyond the grave.
2
‘I know where we must go to hide.’
Sabir turned towards Yola. ‘And where’s that?’
‘There is a house. Deep in the Camargues. Near the Marais de la Sigoulette. For many years it has been at the centre of a battle for succession on the part of five brothers, who all inherited from their father – strictly according to the letter of Napoleonic law, needless to say – and then could not agree on what to do with their shared property. None of them will speak to the others. So no one pays for the upkeep of the property, or to have it guarded. My father won the use of this house about fifteen years ago in a bet and it has become our territory since then. Our patrin.’
‘He won the use of it from the brothers? You’re joking?’
‘No. From some other gypsies who had also found it. It’s quite illegal to the gadje way of thinking, of course and nobody else knows about the deal – but with us the thing is set in stone. It’s simply accepted. We sometimes stay there when we go to the festival. There is no road in, only a rutted track. Around there, the gardiens use only their horses for transport.’
‘The gardiens?’
‘They are the guardians of the Camargues bulls. You see them on horseback, riding their white horses, sometimes carrying lances. They know every corner of the Camargues marshes. They are our friends. When Sara-e-kali is carried down to the sea, it is the Nacioun Gardiano who guard her for us.’
‘So they know about this house too?’
‘No. No one knows we use it but us. From the outside it does not seem inhabited. We have a way in through the cellar, though, so that it still seems as if the house is unlived in even when we are using it.’
‘What do we do with the car?’
‘We should leave it somewhere a long way away from the Camargues.’
‘But then the eye-man would lose touch with us. We have an agreement with Calque, remember?’
‘Then we leave it in Arles for the time being. We can hitch a ride into the Camargues with other gypsies. They will take us when they see us. We make a shpera sign on the road and they will stop. Then we get off a few kilometres from the house and walk in, carrying our food with us – for anything else we need I can go out and do the manghel.’
‘Do the what?’
‘Beg from farmhouses.’ Alexi looked up from his driving. He was becoming used to explaining things about the gypsy world to Sabir. His face even took on a particular expression – somewhere between that of a commercially driven television pundit and a newly enlightened spirit guide. ‘Ever since she was a chey, Yola, like all gypsy girls, has had to learn how to persuade local farmers to share their excess food. Yola is an artist at the manghel. People feel privileged to give her things.’
Sabir laughed. ‘That I can well believe. She’s certainly managed to persuade me to do a whole raft of things I would never have dreamed of doing if I’d had even a fraction of my wits about me. Speaking of which, what do we do when we are inside the house and you’ve plundered the local countryside for food?’
‘Once inside, we hide up until the festival. Kidnap Sara. Conceal her. Then we go back to the car and drive away. We call Calque. The police will do the rest.’
The smile froze on Sabir’s face. ‘Sounds awful easy, the way you tell it.’
3
‘I think I’ve got him.’
‘Drop back then.’
‘But I should keep him in sight.’
‘No, Macron. He will see us and spook. We’ll have one chance at this and one only. I’ve arranged an invisible roadblock just before Millau, where the road narrows through a canyon. We let him drive through it. Half a kilometre further on there’s another – this time obvious – roadblock. We let Sabir and the gypsies pass. Then we seal it off. If the eye-man tries to double back, we’ll have him like a rat in a trap. Even he won’t be able to scramble up sheer cliff.’
‘What about the verses?’
‘Fuck the verses. I want the eye-man. Off the streets. For good.’
Secretly, Macron had already begun to think that his boss was losing it. First, the mess-up at Rocamadour, which had resulted in the unnecessary death of the nightwatchman – Macron had long since convinced himself that were he to have been running the investigation, such a thing would never have happened. Then the criminal stupidity of Calque abandoning his post back at Montserrat, which had resulted in Macron taking the rap – it was he, after all and not Calque, whom the eye-man had beaten up. And now this.
Macron was convinced that they could take the eye-man themselves. Follow him at a safe distance. Isolate and identify his vehicle. Position unmarked vehicles front and back of him. Then sweep him up. There was no earthly need for static roadblocks – they were always more trouble than they were worth. If you weren’t careful, you’d end up on a high-speed chase though a rock-strewn field of sunflowers. Then three weeks filling in forms explaining the damage to police vehicles. The sort of bureaucracy, he, Macron, excoriated.
‘He’s driving a white Volvo SUV. It has to be him. I’m approaching a little closer. I need to make sure. Call in the number-plate.’
‘Don’t go any closer. He’ll pick us up.’
‘He’s not a superman, Sir. He’s got no idea we know he’s tracking Sabir.’
Calque sighed. It had been deeply stupid of him to grant the single favour to Macron. But that’s what guilt did for you. It made you soft. The man was clearly a bigot. With every day they remained on the road together, his bigotry became more pronounced. First it was the gypsies. Then it was the Jews. Now it was his fiancee’s family. They were metis. Mixed race. Macron accepted that in his girlfriend, apparently, but couldn’t abide it in her family.
Calque privately supposed the man must vote for the Front National – but he, personally, was of a generation which considered it impolite to question another man about his political affi
liations. So he would never know. Or perhaps Macron was a communist? In Calque’s, opinion the Communist Party were even worse racists than the Front National. Both of the parties switched their votes back and forth to each other when they found it expedient. ‘That’s close enough, I tell you. You forget how he outsmarted us all on the Sierra de Montserrat. Villada thought it impossible for a single man to make it off the hill before he was surrounded and swept up by the police cordon. The bastard must be able to move like a cat. He must have been outside the line before the Spanish even began their operation.’
‘He’s speeding up.’
‘Let him. We have thirty more kilometres to go before we can slip the noose around his neck. I have a helicopter on standby at Rodez airport. CRS at Montpellier. He can’t escape.’
Calque looked as though he were competent, thought Macron – sounded as though he were competent – but it was all bullshit. The man was a dilettante. Why pass up an opportunity to nail the eye-man now in favour of a pie-in-the-sky plan that would probably cover the lot of them in even further ignominy? One more mistake and he, Paul Eric Macron, might as well write off any chances he ever had of further promotion and vote himself straight back on to the beat as a sort of eternal pandore.
Macron eased his foot down on the throttle. They were on winding country lanes. The eye-man would be concentrating all his attention ahead. It wouldn’t occur to him to check the road half a kilometre behind. Macron inconspicuously popped the button on the holster he had slid in under his seat that morning.
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