The Nostradamus prophecies as-1

by Mario Reading

  Calque spread himself out across the front seat. ‘I’m right, am I not? La Roupie’s body is lying outside a gardien ’s cabane, twenty minutes north of the Bac, just before you get to the Panperdu? That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That’s where you came across it while you were out searching for the gypsy Dufontaine?’

  ‘Alexi Dufontaine. Yes.’

  ‘Do you have a problem with the word gypsy?’

  ‘When used in that way, yes.’

  Calque acknowledged the validity of Sabir’s point without actually bothering to turn his head. ‘You’re loyal to your friends, aren’t you, Monsieur Sabir?’

  ‘They saved my life. They believed in me when no one else did. Am I loyal to them? Yes. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t.’

  Calque twisted in his seat. ‘I ask you this only because I am having difficulty in tallying up what you have just told me about your discovery of La Roupie’s body and the fact that you declared quite clearly, when I questioned you earlier, that you went off in search of Dufontaine by foot. The distances involved seem quite unrealistic.’ Calque nodded to the driver, who swung the car away from the Maset and down the drive. ‘Do me a favour and look at this map, will you? I’m sure you will be able to put me right.’

  Sabir took the map, his expression neutral.

  ‘You will see, marked on the map, the only cabane you could possibly mean. I have highlighted it with a large red circle. There. You see it? Are we in agreement that this is the place?’

  The unsmiling CRS officer reached across and switched on the interior light for Sabir’s convenience.

  Sabir glanced dutifully down at the map. ‘Yes. That would seem to be the place.’

  ‘Are you an Olympic sprinter, Monsieur Sabir?’

  Sabir switched the interior light back off. ‘Captain.

  Do me a favour. Just get whatever it is you want to tell me off you’re chest. This atmosphere is murder.’

  Calque retrieved the map. He nodded to the driver, who set the siren in motion. ‘I have only one thing to tell you, Mister Sabir. If Dufontaine does a vanishing act before I have a chance to question him and take his statement, I will hold you and the girl in his place – as accessories before the fact – for as long as I deem it necessary. Do you understand me? Or shall I get on to the radio this minute and tell the car that is delivering your two gypsy friends to the curandero at Les Saintes-Maries to turn around and come straight back?’

  65

  Bale eased himself back through the rear window of the Maset a maximum of three minutes after the sound of his final shot. So far so good. There would be no new blood trails to give his position away. He had merely been going over old ground.

  But from here on in he must be more careful. Any minute now the 7th Cavalry would be arriving and the place would revert to bedlam. Before that happened, he needed to find somewhere safe to lie up and nurse his shoulder. If he was caught out in the open, come first light, he might as well cash in his cards and cry caprivi.

  Clutching his left arm to his side, Bale moved into one of the downstairs bedrooms. He was just about to snatch the coverlet off the bed in an effort to contain his bleeding when he caught the sound of footfalls approaching along the corridor.

  Bale looked wildly around him. His eyesight had accustomed itself to the darkness by now and he was able to make out the silhouettes of all the major pieces of furniture. Not for a second was he tempted to hijack whoever was approaching. His main job now was to avoid the attentions of the police. The rest would come later.

  He ducked in behind the bedroom door and pulled it tightly against his body. A man entered the bedroom immediately behind him. It was Sabir. Bale’s senses were so hyper-alert that he could almost smell him, even in the dark.

  He picked up the sound of rummaging. Was Sabir taking the blankets off the bed? Yes. To cover the girl of course.

  Now he was using a cellphone. Bale recognised the particular timbre of Sabir’s voice. The casually inflected, just so slightly mid-Atlantic, French. Sabir was speaking to a police officer. Explaining what he thought had happened. Telling him about the death.

  Someone called the ‘eye-man’ was on the run, apparently. The ‘eye-man’? Bale grinned. Well, it made sense, in an off-beam sort of a way. At least it confirmed that the police didn’t yet know his name. Which also meant that Madame, his mother’s, house might still be a safe place to retreat to. The only problem would lie in getting there.

  Sabir walked back towards the door behind which Bale was hiding. For a split second Bale was tempted to smash the door into his face. Even with one arm, he was more than a match for a man like Sabir.

  But the loss of blood from his neck had weakened him. And the other gypsy was still out there – the one who had sprinted into the house just a few seconds after Bale had set the girl on the dangle. That had taken balls. If the plain-clothes policeman hadn’t neck-shot him, Bale would have picked off the gypsy a good twenty metres before he reached his target. The man must have a guardian fucking angel.

  Bale waited for Sabir’s footfalls to diminish down the corridor – yes, there was the expected hesitation near the policeman’s body. Then the manoeuvring around the furniture. Sabir would want to avoid stepping in the man’s blood – he was a gringo, after all. Far too squeamish.

  Hardly breathing, Bale eased himself out into the corridor.

  In the salon there was a red glow as the fire in the grate gradually took hold. Now Sabir was lighting more candles. Good. No one would be able to make Bale out beyond the immediate axis of the light.

  Keeping his back tight against the wall, Bale sidestepped towards the rear stairs. He reached down. Good. They were stone, not wood. No creaking.

  A drop of blood plopped on to the step beside him. He felt around and scrubbed it off with his sleeve. He’d best make it fast. Before he left a blood trail any idiot could follow – let alone a policeman.

  At the top of the stairs Bale decided that it was safe enough to risk his pocket torch. Shading the beam with his fingers, he played the torch down the disused corridor and then up along the ceiling. He was looking for an attic or a loft space.

  Nothing. He moved into the first bedroom. Junk everywhere. When had this house last been lived in? Anybody’s guess.

  He tried the ceiling again. Nothing.

  Two bedrooms further down the corridor he found it. A loft hatch, consisting of a hole with a board laid across it. But no ladder.

  Bale shone the torch around the room. There was a chair. A chest. A table. A bed with a distressed, motheaten coverlet. That would do.

  Bale set the chair underneath the loft space. He knotted the coverlet around the spine of the chair and then tied the other end of the coverlet through his belt.

  He tested the chair for weight. It held.

  Bale eased himself up on to the chair and reached up with his one good arm for the loft cover. The sweat began popping out on his forehead. For a second he felt faint and as though about to fall, but he refused to countenance such a possibility. He let his arm drop and took a few deep breaths, until his condition returned to normal.

  Bale realised that he would have to conduct the thing in one explosive movement, or else his strength would leave him and he would be unable to achieve his end.

  He closed his eyes and began, quite consciously, to regulate his breathing once more. He started by telling his body that it was okay. That any trauma that had occurred to it was trivial. Not worth compensating for in terms of weakness.

  When he felt his heart rate return to near normal, he reached up, slid the loft cover to the left and hooked his good arm up over the lip. Using the chair as a fulcrum, he swung himself up and out, taking the full weight of his body on to his good arm. He would have one only chance at this. He had better make it good.

  Upending himself, he swung first one leg, then the other, over the lip of the loft space. For a moment he hung there, his bad arm fl ailing down, his legs and half his upper body eaten by t
he space. Kicking forwards, he managed to get the back of his right upper thigh across the hatch.

  Now he was hanging with the coverlet trailing from his belt and still attached to the chair. He scissored his way further into the loft space, transferring the entire weight of his body on to his thighs.

  With one final twist he launched himself over the edge of the loft hatch and lay there, cursing silently through clenched teeth.

  When he had sufficient control of himself again, he untied the coverlet from around his waist and pulled the chair up behind him.

  For one dreadful moment he thought that he had misjudged the size of the hatch cover and that the chair was not going to pass through. But then he had it. Out of sight, out of mind.

  He shone his torch down on to the floor to check for blood loss. No. All the blood had landed on the chair. By morning, any other spots would have dried anyway and be virtually indistinguishable from the filth already covering the oak boards.

  Bale hefted the plank back across the loft hatch, untied the coverlet from the chair and collapsed.

  66

  He awoke to a fearful, nagging pain in his left shoulder. Daylight had found its way through a thousand inadvertent chinks in the roof and one chink had been shining fully on to his face.

  He could hear voices outside the house – shouts, orders, the hefting of large objects and the firing-up of engines.

  Bale crawled out of the light, dragging the coverlet behind him. He would have to do something about his shoulder. The pain of his shattered collarbone was close to unbearable and he didn’t wish to pass out, with the risk that he might call out in his delirium and alert the police below.

  He found himself an isolated corner, well out of the way of any boxes and bric-a-brac that might be susceptible to a kick or to toppling over. Any noise at all – any unexpected crashes – and the enemy would find him.

  He constructed a pad for himself with the coverlet, forcing it under his armpit and then tying it back around his shoulder blades. Then he lay fl at on the planking, with his legs stretched out and his arms down by his sides.

  Slowly, incrementally, he began inhaling in a series of deep breaths and as he took each breath he allowed the words ‘sleep, deep sleep’ to echo through the inside of his head. Once he’d got a satisfactory rhythm going, Bale opened his eyes as wide as he could manage and rotated them backwards, until he was staring at a point on the ceiling way beyond his forehead. With his eyes fixed in that position, he deepened his breathing, all the while maintaining the rhythms of his internal chant.

  When he could feel himself drifting into a pre-hypnotic state, he began to suggest certain things to himself. Things like ‘in thirty breaths you will fall asleep’, followed by ‘in thirty breaths you will do exactly as I tell you’ – and then, later, ‘in thirty breaths you will no longer feel any pain’ – culminating with ‘in thirty breaths your collarbone will begin to heal itself and your strength will return to you’.

  Bale understood only too well the potential shortcomings of self-hypnosis. But he also knew that it was the only possible way that he could dominate his body and return it to a state bordering on the functional.

  If he was to last out in this loft space – with no food and with no medical attention – for the day or two that it would take the police to complete their enquiries, he knew that he must focus all his resources on the conservation and cultivation of his essential energies.

  All he had was what he came in with. And those assets would diminish with each passing hour, until either an infection, an unforced error, or an unintended noise could bring him low.

  67

  Gavril’s body lay exactly where Alexi had said it would be. Sabir glanced idly towards the woodland – yes, there was the solitary cypress tree, just as Alexi had described it. But it might as well have been on Mars for all the good it would do him at this moment.

  Calque seemed to be deriving keen pleasure from rubbing salt into Sabir’s wounds. ‘Is this how you remembered it from yesterday afternoon?’

  Sabir wondered if he might get away with asking to take a leak? But a fifty-metre walk towards the woods might seem just a little suspicious in the circumstances.

  When it became obvious that Sabir had no intention of responding to his digs, Calque tried a different tack. ‘Tell me again how Dufontaine lost the prophecies?’

  ‘Escaping from the eye-man. On the Bac. He lost them in the water. You can confirm his story with the pilot and the ticket collector.’

  ‘Oh, believe me, Mister Sabir, I will.’ Calque mispronounced the Mister as Miss-tear.

  Sabir decided that Calque was mispronouncing Miss-tear on purpose, simply in order to needle him. The man was obviously sore about Sabir’s breaking their previous agreement over the tracking device. That and the minor matter of the death of his assistant.

  ‘You don’t seem at all disappointed about the loss of the prophecies. If I were a writer, I would be very angry indeed at my friend having mislaid such a potential gold mine as that.’

  Sabir contrived a shrug. It was meant to convey that losing a couple of a million bucks was an everyday occurrence with him. ‘If it’s all right with you, Captain, I’d like to go back to Les Saintes-Maries and check up on my friends. I could also do with a little sleep.’

  Calque made a big show of weighing up Sabir’s request. In reality, he had decided on his plan of action some time before. ‘I shall send Sergeant Spola back with you. Both you and Dufontaine will remain within his sight at all times. I am not finished with you both yet.’

  ‘And Mademoiselle Samana?’

  Calque made a face. ‘She is free to go about her business. Frankly, I would like to hold her too. But I have no grounds. Something, though, may occur to me, should you and Dufontaine give my subordinate any difficulties whatsoever. But she is to confine herself within the precincts of the town. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Quite clear.’

  ‘We are in agreement, therefore?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Calque flashed Sabir an old-fashioned look. He beckoned to Sergeant Spola. ‘Drive Mister Sabir back into town. Then find Dufontaine. Stay with them both. You are not to let either one of them out of your sight for even an instant. If one man wants to go to the washroom, they both go – with you stationed outside holding their free hands. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Calque glanced at Sabir, frowning. There was something still niggling him about Sabir’s part in the proceedings – but he couldn’t put his finger on it. With the eye-man still on the loose, however, any misgivings about Sabir could wait. The eye-man’s horse had turned up unexpectedly, in a lather, twenty minutes ago, a little less than five kilometres down the road to Port St-Louis. Could the eye-man really have escaped that easily? And with Macron’s bullet still inside him?

  Calque signalled to one of his assistants for a cellphone. As he dialled, he glanced across at Sabir’s retreating back. The man was still holding out – that much was obvious. But why? For what? No one was accusing him of anything. And he didn’t look the sort of a man to be consumed by thoughts of revenge.

  ‘Who found the horse?’ Calque angled his head towards the ground, as if he felt that such a movement would in some way improve reception – transform the cellphone back into its more efficient cousin, the landline. ‘Well put him on.’ He waited, his eyes drinking in the dawn-lit landscape. ‘Officer Michelot? Is that you? I want you to describe the condition of the horse to me.

  Exactly as it was.’ Calque listened intently. ‘Was there blood on the horse’s flanks? Or on the saddle?’ Calque sucked a little air through his teeth. ‘Anything else you noticed? Anything at all? The reins, for instance? They were broken, you say? Could they have been broken by the horse treading on them after it had been abandoned?’ He paused. ‘What do you mean, how can you tell? It’s simple. If the reins are broken at their furthest extent, then it suggests that the horse trod on them. If they are broken
farther up – at a weak point, say, or near the bit – then it means that the horse probably broke away from the eye-man and we still have the bastard inside our net. Did you check this out? No? Well go and check them this instant.’

  68

  Sergeant Spola had never been inside a gypsy caravan before. Even though this one was of the mechanised variety, he looked cautiously around himself, as if he had unexpectedly blundered his way on to an alien spaceship, rocketing towards a planet where intimate experiments were about to be conducted on his person.

  Alexi was lying on the master bed, with his shirt off. The curandero was standing above him, a bunch of lighted twigs in one hand, chanting. The room was suffused with the scent of burning sage and rosemary.

  Spola screwed up his eyes against the acrid smoke.

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  Yola, who was sitting on a chair near the bed, put a finger to her lips.

  Spola had the good grace to hitch his shoulders apologetically and retreat outside.

  Sabir hunched down beside Yola. He looked quizzically at her, but her concentration was all on Alexi. Without looking at him, she pointed briefly to her head and then to that of the curandero, making a circular movement with her hands to encompass both as one entity; to Sabir, she seemed to be implying that she was helping the curandero in some way, possibly along telepathic lines.

  Sabir decided to let her get on with it. Alexi didn’t look good and Sabir made up his mind that once all the mumbo-jumbo was over, he would exert as much pressure as he reasonably could to persuade Yola to allow Alexi to be treated in a hospital.

  The curandero laid his burning twigs aside in a dish and moved to the head of the bed. He took Alexi’s head in his hands and stood silently, with his eyes shut, in an attitude of intense concentration.

  Sabir, who was not used to squatting, could feel his thighs beginning to constrict with the tension. He didn’t dare to move, though, for fear of breaking the curandero ’s trance. He glanced at Yola, hoping that she might somehow deduce his problem and offer him some guidance, but her gaze remained firmly fixed on the curandero.