One aspect of the fiasco at Rocamadour still irritated him, however. Bale had never lost a gun before – neither during his years on active service with the Legion, nor as a result of the many activities he had engaged in for the Corpus Maleficus after that period. And particularly not a gun that he had been given, in person, by the late Monsieur, his adoptive father.
He had been inordinately fond of the little. 380 calibre Remington 51 self-loader. All of eighty years old and one of the very last units off the factory production line, it had been small and easy to conceal. Hand-milled to reduce glare, it had a particularly effective delayed blow-back, which saw the slide and the breech-block travelling in tandem for a short distance after each shot, powering the slide back over the recoil spring, during which time the breech-block was fleetingly braced in its tracks before continuing on to rejoin it. In this manner the spent cartridge was ejected and the action re-cocked in one and the same process, with a fresh round being chambered on the return stroke. Brilliant. Bale liked mechanical things that worked as they were meant to.
Regret, though, was for losers. The return of the pistol could wait. Now that he had secured his very own copy of the Rocamadour verse he could put all thoughts of failure aside and get on with the job in hand. The most important new factor was that he didn’t need to follow people around anymore, or brutalise them for their secrets. This suited Bale admirably. For he wasn’t by nature a vindictive or a brutal man. To his way of thinking he was simply doing his duty in terms of the Corpus Maleficus. For if he and his ilk didn’t act when they needed to, Satan, the Great Pimp and his hetaera, the Great Whore, would take dominion over the earth and the reign of God would be ended. ‘He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.’
It was for this reason that God had granted adherents of the Corpus Maleficus free rein to unloose, anarchy when and where they wished, on to an imminently threatened world. Only by diluting total evil and turning it into its partial, controllable variant, could Satan be stopped. This was the ultimate purpose of the three Antichrists foretold in the book of Revelation, just as Madame, his adoptive mother, had described to him in her original exposition of his mission. Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, the two previous Antichrists – together with the Great One still to come – were beings specifically designed by God in order to prevent the world from turning to the Devil. They acted as the Devil’s objective correlative – placating him, as it were and ensuring that he was kept in a state of bemused satisfaction.
This was why Bale and the rest of the adepts of the Corpus Maleficus had been given the task of protecting the Antichrists and, if at all possible, sabotaging the so-called Second Coming – which might more correctly be termed the Second Great Placebo. It was this Second Coming that would galvanise the Devil from his interregnum, triggering the Final Conflict. For this purpose adepts were needed who were, in themselves, close to perfection. ‘These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth…And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.’
It was a simple charge and one which Achor Bale had embraced throughout his life with evangelical zeal. ‘And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast and over his image and over his mark a nd over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.’
Bale was proud of the initiative he had used in following up Sabir. Proud that he had spent the better part of his life fulfilling a solemn duty of care.
‘We are not anti-anything, we are anti-everything.’ Wasn’t that how Madame, had explained it to him? ‘It’s impossible to publicise us because no one would believe you. Nothing is written down. Nothing transcribed. They build – we destroy. It is as simple as that. For order can only emerge from flux.’
59
‘Did you know that Novalis believed that after the Fall of Man, Paradise was broken up and scattered in fragments all over the earth?’ Calque eased himself into a more comfortable position. ‘And that this is why pieces of it are now so hard to find?’
Macron rolled his eyes, counting on the rapidly encroaching dusk to mask his irritation. He was becoming used to Calque’s Labyrinthine thought patterns, but he still found the whole process curiously unsettling. Did Calque do it on purpose to make him feel inferior? And if so, why? ‘Who was Novalis?’
Calque sighed. ‘Novalis was the pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. In pre-Republican Germany, a Freiherr was the rough equivalent of a Baron. Novalis was a friend of Schiller and a contemporary of Goethe. A poet. A mystic. What have you. He also mined salt. Novalis believed in a Liebesreligion – a Religion of Love. Life and death as intertwined concepts, with an intermediary necessary between God and Man. But this intermediary does not have to be Jesus. It can be anyone. The Virgin Mary. The Saints. The dead beloved. Even a child.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Sir?’ Macron could feel the words clogging up his throat like biscuit dust. ‘You know I’m no intellectual. Not like you.’
‘To pass the time, Macron. To pass the time. And to try and make sense out of the apparent nonsense we found on La Morenita’s foot.’
‘Oh.’
Calque grunted, as though someone had unexpectedly prodded him beneath the ribs. ‘It was that Catalan police captain. Villada. An extremely well-educated man, like all Spaniards. He got me thinking about all this with something he said about literality and paradox.’
Macron closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep. In a bed. With a goose-down duvet and his fiancee curled up next to him with her bottom tightly spooned against his groin. He didn’t want to be here in Spain on the basis of a five -hundred-year-old message from a dead lunatic, staking out a valueless wooden statue with two erect phalluses sprouting alongside it, in the company of an embittered police captain who would clearly rather be spending his workdays in a university research library. This was the second night in a row they had spent out in the open. The Catalan police were already beginning to look at them askance.
There was a buzzing in his pocket. Macron started and then caught himself. Had Calque realised that he had been dozing? Or was he so bound up with his calculations and his myths and his philosophising that he wouldn’t even notice if the eye-man came up behind him and slit his gizzard?
He glanced down at the illuminated screen of his cellphone. Something moved inside him as he read the message – some fatalistic djinn that lurked in his gut and emerged in times of danger and uncertainty to berate him for his lack of imagination and his endless, ruinous doubts. ‘It’s Lamastre. They picked up the eye-man’s tracker four hours ago. Twenty kilometres from here. Up near Manresa. He must have been checking for Sabir.’
‘Four hours ago? You can’t be serious?’
‘Someone clearly went off duty without reporting forward.’
‘Someone will clearly find himself back on the beat next payday. I want you to get me his name, Macron. Then I’m going to run his guts through a sausage machine and feed him to himself for breakfast.’
‘There’s something else, Captain.’
‘What? What else can there be?’
‘There’s been a murder. Back at Rocamadour. Last night. No one told them, apparently. So they didn’t make the connection. Then they weren’t sure how best to contact you, as you refuse to carry a cellphone while on active duty. It was the replacement security guard. Broken neck. Whoever got him got his dog, too. Threw it against a wall and stamped on its head. That’s a whole new technique, in my experience.’
Calque screwed shut his eyes. ‘Is the Virgin gone?’
‘No. Apparently not. He must have been after the same thing as we were. And Sabir. And the gypsy.’ Macron was briefly tempted to crack a joke about the sudden popularity of virgins but decided against it. He glanced up from the phone. “Do you think the eye-man’s been and gone from here already? He would have had time, if he drove straight on here after doing the security man. It’s autoroute all the way down. He could easily have averaged a hundred and sixty.” ’
‘Impossible. There are ten armed men scattered around these buildings and in the shallows of the foothills. The eye-man hasn’t fl own in by microlight and he damned certainly hasn’t secreted himself inside the Sanctuary. No. His only rational way in is by the main road, now that the train has stopped running for the night. I am going down to warn Villada.’
‘But, Sir. This is a stakeout. No one must move from their positions. I can text the Captain. Forward Lamastre’s message to him as an attachment.’
‘I need to talk to him personally, not write him a bloody letter. Wait here, Macron. And keep your eyes peeled. Use the night scope if you have to. And if you suspect that the eye-man is armed, kill him.’
60
Achor Bale fell to his knees behind a rock. Something was moving in front of him. He squinted through the dusk but was unable to make out sufficient detail to satisfy himself. Easing the Redhawk into his hand, he began to inch his way further down the hillside. Whatever was moving was making a meal of it. Small stones clattered down ahead of him and there was even a grunt as whatever it was encountered an unexpected obstacle. Not a wild goat, then, but a man. The smell of sweat and stale cigarette smoke wafted towards him on the lightly heated breeze.
Bale was just ten yards away from Macron when he finally caught sight of movement. Macron was using the night glasses to follow his superior’s tortured attempts at a soundless progress down the hillside. Bale levelled the silenced pistol on the back of Macron’s head. Then, dissatisfied with his view of the front sight, he felt around in his pocket for a small piece of white paper. He balled up the paper in his mouth, covered it in saliva, then wadded it, papier-mache like, over the red-tipped aiming nipple, so that it stood just proud of the silencer. He lined the sight up once again with Macron’s head, then let out a long, disappointed sigh. It was quite simply too dark for accuracy.
He sheathed the Redhawk, and felt around for his leather sap. With this in hand, he began to belly his way over the rocks towards Macron, using the distant clatter Calque was still making as cover.
At the last possible moment Macron sensed something, and reared up from his position, but Bale’s first blow caught him fl at on the side of the head. Macron scythed to the ground, his arms pressed tightly against his flanks. Bale crept forward and squinted into Macron’s face. So. It wasn’t Sabir. And it wasn’t the gypsy. Lucky, now, that he hadn’t used the pistol.
Grinning, Bale felt around in Macron’s pockets until he found his cellphone. He lit up the screen and checked for messages. Then, with an angry grunt, he ground the phone into the earth with his foot. Only a policeman would encrypt his text messages and, once encrypted, make them accessible only with a password – it was like wearing a belt and braces.
He dug around further in Macron’s pockets. Money. Identity papers. A picture of a coloured girl in a white dress sporting an overbite that her parents were obviously either too tight or too poor to have rectified. Lieutenant Paul Macron. An address in Creteil. Bale pocketed the wad of material.
Reaching down, he took off Macron’s shoes and tossed them behind him into the brush. Then, taking first one foot in his hand and then the other, like a mother cat scruffing her kittens, he struck Macron a further sharp blow with the sap against each instep.
Satisfied with his work, he picked up the night glasses and monitored the surrounding hillside. He was just in time to catch sight of Calque’s spectrally pale head disappearing behind a bluff six hundred metres below him.
So what was happening? How much did the police already know about him? He had obviously underestimated them as well, for they too must have had access to the message hidden on the Virgin’s base, thanks to Sabir’s quick thinking in not making off with her when he had the chance.
Bale rather regretted knocking out Macron now. A missed opportunity. To question a man in absolute silence and on a staked-out hillside – that would have been a definite first in his experience. How could he have achieved it? Only one way to find out.
Bale eased himself out of the hide and set off towards the bluff. It was obvious that these idiotic policemen were only looking for him down in the valley – it would have taken far too much imagination for them to imagine him traversing a barren and, to all intents and purposes, impassable mountainside. This meant that he would come up with them conveniently from behind.
Every fifty metres or so he stopped and listened with his mouth open and both hands cupped behind his ears. When he was about two hundred metres from the bluff he hesitated. More cigarette smoke. Was it the same man coming back? Or was one of the paramilitaries sneaking a quick drag?
He eased himself away from the bluff and down towards the final escarpment overlooking the Sanctuary square. Yes. He could make out a man’s head highlighted against the almost luminous backdrop of the stone cladding.
Bale snaked his way down towards the man’s hideout. He had had an idea. A good idea. And he intended to test it out.
61
Calque dropped into the front seat of the control car beside Villada. Villada briefly acknowledged him with his eyes and then continued his scanning of the railway line and surrounding buildings.
When he was satisfied that nothing was moving, he put down his night glasses and turned towards Calque. ‘I thought you were staking out the hillside?’
‘I left Macron doing that.’ He squatted down in the car-well and lit a cigarette, cupping it between his two hands. ‘Want one?’
Villada shook his head.