Mario Reading - The Nostradamus prophecies

‘Alexi tells me everything.’

Sabir allowed his gaze to wander somewhere over Yola’s right shoulder. ‘Well, Calque’s got enough on his plate. Gavril can wait. He’s going nowhere fast.’

‘Calque will blame you for holding out on him. You know that. He will blame Alexi, too, when he discovers who really found the body.’

Sabir shrugged. ‘Maybe so. But why should he ever find out? We’re the only three who know what Alexi stumbled on. And I’m damned sure Alexi won’t tell him. You know how he feels about cops.’

Yola stepped around and placed herself firmly in Sabir’s sight-line. ‘You have not told him because you want to retrieve the prophecies first.’

A rush of outraged virtue triumphed over Sabir’s instinctive sense of moral discretion. ‘What’s wrong with that? It would be madness to lose them at this stage.’

‘Even so, Damo, you must tell the policeman. Tell him now. Gavril has a mother who is still living. A good woman. It is not her fault that her son was a bad person. Whatever he was, whatever he did, he must not lie any longer unmourned – like an animal. The Manouche believe that a person’s wrong actions are cancelled out by their death. For us there is no Hell. No evil place that people go to when they are dead. Gavril was one of us. It would not be right. Do this thing and I will retrieve the prophecies for you. Secretly. While the policeman watches over you and Alexi.’

Sabir threw back his head. ‘You’re crazy, Yola. The eye-man is still out there somewhere. How can you even think of such a thing?’

Yola took another step towards him. She was consciously forcing herself into his space. Making it impossible for Sabir to ignore her – to write her off as a mere woman, braving waters better suited to men. ‘I know him now, Damo. The eye-man has spoken privately to me. Revealed something of himself. I can combat him. I shall take with me a secret. Passed down to the curandero from the snake woman, Lilith, many mothers ago, when she gave the chosen ones of our family the second sight.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Yola. Death is the only thing that will defeat the eye-man. Not second sight.’

‘And it is death that I shall carry with me.’

The gelding had quailed at the scent of Bale’s blood. Its legs had splayed as if it did not know in which direction it intended going. When Bale had tried to approach it, the gelding had thrown back its head in panic and dragged against its reins, which were tied in a bunch to a branch of the tree. The reins had snapped and the gelding had backed wildly away, then twisted on its haunches and galloped frantically up the track towards the main road.

Bale glanced back towards the house. The agony in his neck and arm cancelled out the sounds of the night. He was losing blood fast. Without the horse, they would catch him within the hour. Any minute now they would be here, with their helicopters and their searchlights and their infrared night glasses. They would dirty him. Tarnish him with their fingers and with their hands.

Clutching his left arm to his side to prevent it swinging, Bale did the only thing he could possibly do.

He began to retrace his steps towards the Maset.

Sabir watched the police car take Yola and Alexi away. He supposed that it was a deal that he had reluctantly cut with Calque but words like ‘rat’ and ‘trap’ kept interposing themselves between him and any satisfaction that he might have taken in its inception.

The only edge that he had possessed with which to counter Calque’s anger at his holding out about Gavril, lay in his by now tacit agreement to keep quiet about Macron’s criminal impetuosity. Ironically, though, he hadn’t dared mention Macron again in case he inflamed Calque way beyond rationality and ended up counting bricks in a jail cell – so that particular bargaining counter had proved less than worthless.

This way, at any rate, he remained useful to the man and capable of maintaining at least some degree of free movement. If Yola did what she’d said she’d do, they would still be ahead of the game. If the gouts of blood left in the Maset salon were anything to go by, it couldn’t be long, surely, before the French police ran the eye-man down and either killed him or took him into custody?

Calque crooked a finger at Sabir. ‘Get into the car.’

Sabir seated himself next to a CRS officer in a bullet-proof vest. He smiled but the offi cer refused to respond. The man was going to a potential crime scene. He was in official mode.

Hardly surprising, thought Sabir to himself – he was still a suspect in nearly everybody’s eyes. The cause, if not exactly the perpetrator, of a colleague’s violent death.

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?’

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.