For one brief instant of uncertainty Alexi had been tempted to head back to the tree and retrieve the bamboo tube. But caution finally won out over vainglory. Now, setting the gelding’s reins, he allowed it to follow its head back towards the house.
46
Yola had devised a novel way of hitchhiking. She waited until she saw a likely gypsyowned vehicle approaching, made a snake-like sign with her left hand – followed immediately by the sign of the cross – and then walked out into the middle of the road to where the driver’s window would be. The vehicles nearly always stopped.
Yola would then lean in and discuss where she wanted to go. If the driver was travelling in a different direction – or not far enough – she would wave him impatiently on. The fourth vehicle she flagged down fitted her parameters perfectly.
Feeling like Clark Gable to Yola’s Claudette Colbert, Sabir followed her into the straw-littered rear of the betaillere. He had to admit that even a stinking Citroen H van was marginally better than walking. He had originally tried persuading Yola that they ought to cut corners and take a taxi back to the Maset, but she had insisted that, this way, no one would have a record of where they had gone. She had been ahead of him, as usual.
Sabir leaned against the lath-framed interior of the H van and toyed with the Spanish-made Aitor lock-bladed knife that he was hiding in his pocket. He had bought the knife off Bouboul, twenty minutes earlier, for fifty euros. It had a four-and-a-half inch razor-sharp cutting edge, which latched into place with a comforting click when you swung it open. It was clearly a fighting knife, for it had an indentation for the thumb about half an inch behind the blade – which Sabir presumed was to allow the knife to be stuck into one’s enemy without the disadvantage of cutting off one’s own finger in the process.
Bouboul had been reluctant to part with the knife, but greed – he had probably bought it for the equivalent of about five euros thirty years before – and being on the receiving end of one of Yola’s tongue-lashings, had been enough to force him into capitulate. She had claimed to hold him personally responsible for the loss of the horses – and, anyway, in her opinion, he was far too old to carry a knife. Did he want to end up like Stefan, with his eye hanging out on a string? Best get rid of the thing.
It was late afternoon by the time Yola and Sabir made it back to the Maset de la Marais. Predictably, the place was empty.
‘What do we do now, Damo?’
‘We wait.’
‘But how will we know if the eye-man catches Alexi? Once the eye-man has the prophecies, he will leave. We will never know what happened.’
‘What do you expect me to do, Yola? Wander out into the Marais and yell out Alexi’s name? I’d lose myself in no time. There’s three hundred square kilometres of absolutely nothing beyond that treeline.’
‘You could steal another horse. That’s what Alexi would do.’
Sabir felt himself reddening. Yola appeared to understand how men ought to behave, in extremis, somewhat better than he did. ‘Would you wait here? Would you be prepared to do that? Not go gallivanting off so that I’ve got two people to find?’
‘No. I would stay here. Alexi might come back. He might need me. I shall make some soup.’
‘Soup?’
Yola stood and watched him, a disbelieving expression on her face. ‘Men always forget that people need to eat. Alexi has been on the run since this morning. If he manages to get back here alive, he will be hungry. We must have something for him to eat.’
Sabir hurried around to the outhouse to see if he could find another saddle, a rope and some more tack. With Yola in this sort of mood, he understood exactly how Alexi felt about marriage.
***
Within fifteen minutes of starting his horse hunt, Sabir realised that he was not going to get anywhere fast. He wasn’t trained in the use of the lariat, like Alexi and the horses were becoming more skittish the closer dusk approached. Each time he lined one up it would watch him trustingly until he came to within about ten feet, upon which it would twist around on its hind legs and disappear, farting and kicking, into the undergrowth.
Sabir dumped the saddle and bridle at the edge of the Clos and started back along the trail in disgust. When he came to the junction that led towards the house he hesitated, then struck out to the left, down the track they had all three taken that morning to get to Les Saintes-Maries.
He was deeply worried about Alexi. But there was also something about the man which inspired confidence, especially when it came to managing out in the wild. True – according to Bouboul’s version of the story, the eye-man had been a bare minute’s ride behind Alexi when they had left town at the gallop. But a minute was a long time on horseback and Sabir had seen Alexi dealing with the ponies that morning and the way that he rode… well, suffice it to say that he was a natural. Plus he knew the marshes like the back of his hand. If his horse held up, Sabir would bet good money on Alexi giving the eye-man the slip.
In Sabir’s view, therefore, it was only a matter of time before Alexi came riding down the track, the prophecies raised triumphantly in one hand. Sabir would then retire to some quiet spot – preferably near to a good restaurant – to translate them, while the police did what the police were paid to do and dealt with the eye-man.
In due course he would contact his publishers. They would put the prophecies out to tender. Money would come flooding in – money he would share with Yola and Alexi.
And then, fi nally, the nightmare would be over.
47
Achor Bale decided that he would approach the house from the east, via an old drainage ditch that ran the length of one untended field. With Alexi away, Sabir and the girl would be on the lookout – on the qui vive. Perhaps there was even a shotgun in the house? Or an old rifle? Wouldn’t do to take unnecessary risks.
He was fleetingly tempted to return for the horse, which he had left tethered in a clump of trees a hundred metres or so behind the property. The horse would follow him perfectly easily along the ditch and the sound of its hoofes might even mask his approach. Perhaps the pair of them might emerge from the house, thinking Alexi had returned? But no. Why complicate matters unnecessarily?
For Alexi would return. Bale was certain of that. He had seen the gypsy risking his life for the girl at Espalion, when she had collapsed in the road. If she was inside the Maset, the gypsy would home in on her like a wasp to a honey-pot. He had only to kill Sabir, put the girl out as bait and conjure up some creative way to pass the time.
He edged towards one of the main windows. Dusk was falling. Someone had lit an oil lamp and a pair of candles. Thin slivers of light emerged through the closed shutters. Bale smiled. Thanks to the residual glow of the lamps, there was no chance whatsoever of anyone making him out from inside the house. Even as close as six feet from the window and with their eyes glued to the slats, he would be next to invisible.
Bale listened out for voices. But there was only silence. He moved across to the kitchen window. That, too, was shuttered. So Gavril had been right. If this house were conventionally occupied, there was no way the shutters would be closed so early in the evening. One only had to look around at the yard and the outbuildings to see that the house had been abandoned for years. No wonder the gypsies valued it. It would be like a free hotel to them.
For a moment he was almost tempted to enter by the front door. If Sabir and the girl were acting in character, it would doubtless be unlatched. There were times when Bale felt almost irritated by the unprofessionalism of his opponents. Take the case of the Remington, for instance. Why had Sabir agreed to give it back to him? It had been madness. Did he really believe that Bale would have fired at him, with the Redhawk, on the outskirts of a town blessed with only two main exits, and two relatively minor ones? And before checking out the Black Virgin? That single decision of Sabir’s had left the three of them unarmed and without the slightest clue to Bale’s real identity, thanks to his unforgivable – but happily rectified – mistake about the serial number. It had been Slack thinking on Sabit’s part to overlook where the serial number could potentially have led them. Monsieur, his father, would have had something to say about that.
For Monsieur had always abhorred slack thinking. He had taken the cane to slack thinkers. There were days when he had beaten all thirteen children in a row, one after the other, starting with the largest. That way, when he came to the smallest – and factoring into account his advanced age and his medical condition – he would already be tired and the blows wouldn’t be nearly so painful. Now there was consideration for you.
Madame, his mother, had not been so thoughtful. With her, punishment had always been a one-on-one affair. That’s why – after Monsieur, his father’s, death – Bale had run away to join the Legion. Later, the move had proved unexpectedly useful and she had forgiven him. But for two years they had not spoken and he had been forced to carry out the duties of the Corpus Maleficus in isolation – without management or regulation. He had developed tastes, during that anarchic period, which Madame, his mother, later considered at variance with the movement’s aims. That was why he still hid things from her. Unfortunate details. Unavoidable deaths.
Things like that.
But Bale didn’t enjoy causing pain. No. It certainly wasn’t that. As with the horse at the ferry, he loathed seeing the suffering of animals. Animals couldn’t protect themselves. They couldn’t think. People could. When Bale asked questions of people, he expected answers. He might not have been born to his position in terms of blood but he had certainly been born to it in terms of character. He was proud of the ancient title of nobility, Monsieur, his father, had passed down to him. Proud of his family’s record in anticipating – and thereby counteracting – the Devil’s work.
For the Corpus Maleficus had a long and noble history. It had included amongst its rank of central adepts the papal inquisitors Conrad of Marburg and Hugo de Beniols; Prince Vlad Dr culea III; the Marquis de Sade; Prince Carlo Gesualdo; Tsar Ivan Grozny (The Terrible); Niccolo Machiavelli; Roderigo, Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia; Count Alessandro di Cagliostro; Gregor Rasputin; the Marechal Gilles de Rais; Giacomo Casanova; and the Countess Erzsebet Bathory. All had been grossly and continually misrepresented by succeeding generations of cavalier historians.
In Bale’s view – imbrued from countless hours of history lessons learned at the feet and at the behest, of Monsieur and Madame, his parents – Marburg and de Beniols had been falsely labelled as sadistic and vainglorious persecutors of the innocent when they had simply been carrying out the orders of the Mother Church; Vlad ‘the Impaler’ had been incorrectly accused of turning torture into an art, whilst he had, in reality, been defending – in whatever way was deemed expedient at the time – his beloved Wallachia against the horrors of Ottoman expansion; the Marquis de Sade had been unfairly charged by his detractors with libertinism and the fomentation of sexual anarchy, whereas, in the view of the Corpus, he had simply been promulgating an advanced philosophy of extreme freedom and tolerance designed to liberate the world from moral tyranny; the composer Prince Carlo Gesualdo had been wrongly castigated as a wife- and child-killer by his no doubt prejudiced accusers, merely as a result of defending the sanctity of his marital home against unwanted interference; history had tarred Tsar Ivan Grozny with the brush of ‘filicidal tyrant’ and ‘The Terrible’, whereas, to many of his countrymen and in the view of the Corpus, he had been the saviour of Slavonic Russia; Niccolo Machiavelli had been described by his critics as a teleological absolutist and a perpetrator of the politics of fear, labels designed to detract from the fact that he was also a brilliant diplomat, a poet, a playwright and an inspirational political philosopher; the entire Borgia family had been branded as both criminally corrupt and morally insane, whereas, in the Corpus’s view, they had (bar a few trifling infelicities) been enlightened popes, mighty lawmakers and inspired art lovers, deeply concerned with the supranational promulgation of the glories of the Italian High Renaissance; Count Alessandro di Cagliostro had been called both a charlatan and a Master forger – in fact he was an alchemist and a Kabbalist of the highest order, desperate to illuminate the as yet largely unplumbed depths of the occult; naturopath healer and visionary mystic Gregor Rasputin had been described by his critics as a lubriciously prepotent ‘mad monk’ who was single-handedly responsible for the destruction of the entrenched and moribund Russian monarchy – but who, Bale felt, could blame him? – who, in retrospect, would dare to cast the first stone?; Le Marechal Gilles de Rais had been called a paedophile, a cannibal and a torturer of children, but he had also been an early supporter of Joan of Arc, a brilliant soldier and an enlightened theatrical promoter whose hobbies, in certain specific and unimportant spheres, might occasionally have got the better of him – but did that discount his greater acts? The larger lived life? No. Of course not – and neither should it; Giacomo Casanova was considered by posterity to be both spiritually and ethically degraded, whereas he had, in reality, been an advanced liberal thinker, an inspired historian and a diarist of genius; and Countess Erzsebet Bathory, judged a vampirical mass murderess by her peers, had in fact been an educated, multilingual woman who had not only defended her husband’s castle during the Long War of 1593-1606, but had also frequently intervened on behalf of destitute women who had been captured and raped by the Turks – the fact that she had later exsanguinated certain of the more severely traumatised of her charges had been deemed by the Corpus (although largely with tongue firmly thrust into cheek) to be empirically necessary for the furtherance and secure propagation of the now all-consuming twenty-first century science of cosmetic enhancement. All had been ‘people of the fly’, inducted by their parents, grandparents, teachers or advisers, into the secret hermetic cabal of the Corpus – a cabal designed to protect and insulate the world from its own misguided instincts. As Monsieur, his father, had put it: ‘In a world of black and white, the Devil rules. Paint the world grey – muddy the boundaries of accepted morality – and the Devil loses his finger-hold.’