Grinning to himself, Calque leaned back in his blow-up armchair and focused his binoculars onto the front entrance to the Countess’s house. He had been watching the place, day in, day out, for five weeks now. The routine had become a way of life for him. He had banked everything on his belief that the Countess would quite naturally have sought to maintain a low profile for a month or two after her adopted son’s death. No muddying of the waters. No gathering in of the clan. And so far he had been proved right.
But Calque had known that it wouldn’t last. The woman was reptilian – as cold-blooded as a coral snake. It was inconceivable that she shouldn’t contrive some sort of revenge on Adam Sabir for the killing of the demented Bale. And Sabir had proved on more than one occasion how blind he was to any potential danger.
So Calque had decided to spend the early part of his unanticipated retirement doing what he had always done best – protecting the public. Except in this case the public consisted of precisely one individual, the errant American writer Adam Sabir. And the forces of law and order were no longer officially sanctioned, with the full panoply of the State’s legal mechanisms backing them up, but merely consisted of one overweight, overeducated, and terminally underfunded former policeman.
Why was he doing it? Boredom? Sour grapes? Resentment at the truncation of his decreasingly high-flying career? None of that. The truth was that Sabir had touched a surprisingly sensitive nerve in the usually unsentimental Calque with his mysterious tales of the Second Coming and of the rapidly approaching Armageddon predicted in the 52 lost verses of Nostradamus – verses that Sabir had managed to memorize before his final reckoning with Achor Bale. Calque’s intellectual vanity had been aroused – and his latent republican ire had been triggered – by the Countess’s inbred assumption that she and her aristocratic ilk would always win out in the end.
This new, knight-errant version of the formerly cynical Joris Calque had attended Achor Bale’s funeral, therefore, and had noted with satisfaction the absence of Bale’s twelve remaining brothers and sisters. Only the Countess and her near-ubiquitous personal assistant, Madame Mastigou, had bothered to turn up.
But the Countess would have to convoke them at some point. Bring them up to scratch. And the telephone or the internet just wouldn’t do – far too many loopholes and opportunities for covert surveillance. That meant that her children would have to return to the domaine de Seyeme – and to the secret room one of his officers had unexpectedly discovered behind the library – in person. That was where the Corpus Maleficus held its meetings, wasn’t it? That was where they hatched their schemes?
And that was where Joris Calque had illegally hidden a voice-activated tape recorder whilst he was busy conducting his entirely legal search of the Countess’s house nearly eight weeks before.
2
The recently entitled Abiger de Bale, Chevalier, Comte d’Hyeres, Marquis de Seyeme, Pair de France, primus inter pares, bundled his twin brother ahead of him up the steps of the TGV. ‘Go on, Pollux. Move your arse.’
‘Stop calling me Pollux. My name is Vaulderie.’
‘All right then. I’ll call you Vaulderie from now on. Vicomte Vaulderie. How’s that? Now you sound like a sexually transmitted disease.’
The twins threw themselves down in opposing seats in the first-class carriage. Vaulderie kicked out at a cushion. ‘Why should I be a mere vicomte when you’re a fucking comte? Why should you be the one to snaffle Rocha’s title?’
‘Because I was the last one to emerge from our mother. That’s the Napoleonic Code for you. Last out, first conceived. Enlightened primogeniture, mon pote. Christ. Just think. If it wasn’t for King Clovis, our fallen angel of a sister would have inherited instead of me. She’s two years older. Maltho ti afrio lito.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Salic Law, dummy. Male primogeniture. It’s what saved our bacon.’
‘No. The other bit.’
‘It’s the only full sentence left in Old Frankish. “I tell you. I free you. Half free.” Complete gobbledegook, of course. Be thankful you’ve got a title at all. If Rocha hadn’t let that pig of a policeman loose off a shot at him, you’d have remained a commoner all your life. Now you’re a real vicomte you can flash your chevaliere ring at all the girls and their pants will automatically fall down. Just like I’ve been doing for years.’
Vaulderie launched another kick at the seat cushion, but harder this time. ‘It’s not fair. If we’d been born in England, I would have been the senior of us two. First out is considered the eldest there.’
‘Lucky for me we weren’t born in England, then. We’d have had an idiot as head of the family.’
The brothers, despite the fact that they were all of twenty-five years old, began to wrestle. Watching them, the off-duty railway security inspector – who was availing himself of his free first-class travel privileges – thought yet again how lucky France was to have a Republic. It was always these young blue bloods, off for the weekend, who caused the most trouble on his trains. He could see their signet rings flashing as they fought for control of each other’s throats.
‘That’s enough. I’ll have no rough-housing here.’ He eased his way up the central aisle and flashed his badge at the boys.
Both young men straightened up and smoothed back their hair. ‘Sorry, Colonel. It won’t happen again. We were only mud-larking.’
The inspector was rather taken aback. He had expected trouble. These two had all the earmarks of their class. Absurdly well-cut hair. Double-breasted grey flannel suits that fitted them like a second skin. Not an ounce of excess fat on the pair of them – fencing, probably, or some exclusive tennis club with a five-year waiting list. When he looked at them more closely, he was astonished to realize that they were identical twins.
He shrugged, not a little disarmed by their unanticipated courtesy. ‘I won’t take your names this time, as we’re nearly at my destination. You’re lucky – you’ve both got off more lightly than you deserve. But remember.’ He pointed above his head. ‘There are security cameras on this train.’
‘Yes. We noticed those.’ The boys grinned at each other, as if in echo of some telepathic joke.
The inspector hesitated, tempted to say more – to make his mark on these gilded hooligans. Then he shrugged a second time and moved back down the aisle. He was due off at the next station anyway. In twenty minutes’ time he would be home with his wife. Why complicate matters?
‘Shall we?’ Abiger gave his brother a playful nudge with the toe of his shoe.
‘Are you crazy? We’d be forced to change trains. We’d be late for Madame, our mother. She might even ask us what we were doing that was so important we missed the beginning of her gathering.’
‘Oh come on, Vau. Live dangerously for once. We’re too old to be thrashed with a wooden clothes hanger anymore. Anyhow, I’m head of the family now.’
‘Madame, our mother, is head of the family. You’re merely its technical figurehead. And a plug-ugly one at that. That much I’ll acknowledge.’
Abiger de Bale lurched forwards as if he intended to trigger a rematch of their wrestling competition – but then, with the movement only half-completed, he changed his mind. Grinning, he allowed his gaze to slide away from his brother and follow the line of the inspector’s retreating back. ‘That worm insulted the CM, Vau. I say we do it.’
For twenty-five years Vaulderie had followed his brother’s lead in everything. Gone everywhere he had gone. Even taken his punishments for him. It was far too late to turn back now. With the death of Rocha de Bale, their adopted brother – the man now known to the outside world as the murderer, Achor Bale – everything had changed. What had been hidden was now open. What had been obscured was now set to be revealed. The Corpus Maleficus would finally be taking its rightful place as the driving force behind a new order.
Vaulderie gave a defeated sigh. ‘I say we do it too.’
3
At first, after leaving the train, th
e boys worked in a zigzag formation behind the inspector’s back. That way, if the man had a car, one of them could break away from the stalk and procure a vehicle, whilst the other could mark the direction taken and keep in touch via his cell phone.
But the inspector didn’t have a car. It soon became obvious that he lived within walking distance of the station – a railwayman through and through. Instinctively, intuitively, the boys decided not to take him en route. Far more sensible to deal with him at home, well out of the eye of the storm. Far more fun to wait.
At one point the man stopped. He cocked his head downwards and to one side, as though he were listening to something passing underneath him. The boys froze in their respective positions, visible, but not visible, maybe fifty metres behind him. In their experience, marks never turned around. People simply didn’t expect to be followed – not on a suburban street, mid-afternoon, in la France profonde, with mothers collecting their children from school, and yellow postal vans busy on their last collection of the day.
The boys converged again when they saw the inspector hesitating at the communal door to his apartment block – feeling for his keys – tapping his pockets for cigarettes. Would he turn at the very last moment and head for the Bar / Tabac on the corner? Have himself a quick snifter before facing his wife? In that case both twins knew that they would be forced to abandon the hunt and head back towards the station.
For despite all their bravado, each, in his own way, feared Madame, their mother, as they feared nothing else on earth. She was like Agaberte, daughter of the Norse god Vagnoste, who could transform herself from a wrinkled old crone into a woman so tall she could reach up and touch the sky – a woman who could overturn mountains, rip up great trees, and dry up the swollen beds of rivers. Abi and Vau’s childhood had been spent entirely in her thrall, and no power on earth could entirely break her dominance of them.
The inspector reached forward and unlocked the door. Now the boys were hurrying, not wishing to be faced with an unknown, untested lock. Vau caught the door just before it clicked to, and Abi slid through the crack his brother made for him, one eye fastened on the stairs above him.
Shoes in their hands, they padded up the concrete stairwell behind the inspector. How could people bear to live like this? Money and power were there to be taken. All you needed was the nerve.
The inspector was stepping into his apartment – calling out to his wife.
Abi reached out and touched him on the arm. ‘Colonel. A word.’
4
Some years before, the brothers had had a series of telescopic, lead-weighted, fighting batons designed and made for them. Eight inches long, the batons fitted comfortably inside the forearm sleeve of a jacket, where they were secured in place by the simple expedient of a loop and a double button.
Although principally made of rubber, the batons were not able to pass through a metal detector by dint of their lead content, and therefore had to be transported separately on an aeroplane as part of hold baggage – or secreted, for instance, inside a travelling fishing-rod case, where they could be passed off as fisherman’s priests. By train and by car, however, they were perfection itself. Once liberated from their housings, the batons extended with a simple flick of the wrist to a total of two feet in length, retaining more than enough rigidity to guarantee a quite remarkable hand-to-target action.
They would kill, of course, if used aggressively, but their principal function was defensive – they were designed as pacifiers. In ten seconds a man could be crippled, his legs worse than useless, by the simple expedient of a scything stroke behind the knee. The twins, being two, found this the best resort in all but the most extreme of circumstances. One would monopolize the target’s attention whilst the other struck him from behind. It had never failed them. A frightened man on the floor, one leg unmarked but useless, was a very different animal indeed from an angry man in possession of all his physical faculties.
The inspector curled up in the foetal position at the entrance to his apartment and began to dry retch, like a cat attempting to bring up a fur ball. His wife came hurrying out of the kitchen, where she had been preparing their supper. Vau gave her two for good measure, one behind each knee. She dropped to the floor and then stretched out, like a postulant at some Easter confraternity ceremony.
Abi closed the door. He and Vau dragged the couple through into the lounge.
Vau switched on the television. ‘Gas explosion or double suicide?’
The inspector tried to raise himself from the floor. Vau flailed him behind the other knee. ‘Silence. You will both remain silent, faces to the ground. Do you understand me?’
The woman was unconscious – shock, probably. The boys were used to people responding in disparate ways. Women were particularly vulnerable to sudden explosions of violence, whereas men would often struggle, requiring further pacification.
Abi snapped his fingers triumphantly. ‘No. No. Listen. I’ve got another idea. Kill two birds with one stone.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Wait for me here. I won’t be more than ten minutes. A surprise.’ Abi was staring out of the window now, his expression speculative. He snapped the baton shut and secreted it back inside his sleeve. He had scarcely even broken into a sweat.
5
Abi had passed the Jaguar Sports on their way in from the station. The car had captured his attention even then, as It had seemed so out of place in a street full of Peugeots, and Renaults, and six-seater Fiat run-arounds. A pimp’s car, probably, or the vehicle of some chancer who had made it good and couldn’t tear himself away from the old neighbourhood. Perhaps the owner was visiting his elderly mother?
It took Abi less than a minute to bypass the alarm system. He had been breaking into cars ever since his early adolescence, and considered it one of his primary skills. During their teen years, Madame, his mother, had arranged for him and Vau to serve as apprentices to one of the best auto thieves in the business. It was something he was infinitely grateful to her for. It had given him power.
He drove the car to the front of the inspector’s apartment building and triggered the trunk mechanism. Vau was watching from the inspector’s window. Abi mouthed a few words and pointed to the trunk. Vau nodded his head.
He emerged, less than a minute later, supporting the inspector like a man will support his drunken friend after a night out on the town.
Abi had closed the trunk by this time, and was holding the passenger door open, with the seat pulled forward. He checked around, then nodded. Speed was of the essence in such cases – any hesitation could prove fatal. Neither he nor Vau appeared on any police records, and he intended to keep it that way. ‘Get in there. Keep your head down.’
The inspector stretched himself flat down across the well. ‘What about my wife? What are you doing with my wife?’ His voice shook. One hand snaked down as if to feel for any damage to his knees.
‘Don’t worry, Colonel. She’s coming along for the ride too.’
Once they were safely out of town, Vau stopped the car, and they transferred the inspector and his wife to the trunk. It was a tight fit, but it seemed unlikely the pair would actually suffocate. Both parties had wet themselves, which saved the brothers the trouble of having to stop somewhere en route for a leak break.
Vau caught his brother’s eye. He gave a speculative chuck of the head. ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking. But we’ll never make it. You can’t beat a TGV. Those things average more than three hundred kilometres an hour.’
‘Three stops. They have to make three stops. Then they have to cut their speed radically along the coast. I’ll give you a thousand Euros if we make it to Madame, our mother’s, twenty minutes before our allotted time.’
‘Done. You want to take the wheel?’
‘No. You’re a better driver than I am.’
Vau fishtailed the car out onto the highway, in the direction of the nearest autoroute toll booth.
6
They made it t
o the Cap Camarat lighthouse with fourteen minutes to spare. Below them the rocks loomed white in the glow of the waxing moon.
‘Jesus, Abi. You don’t mean to bung them off here? We’re only a few kilometres from the house.’
‘Look.’ Abi held out an unfamiliar cell phone. ‘It probably belongs to the pimp who owns this car.’
‘So what?’
‘So what? So everything. We get them out of the trunk, give them the keys, and let them take off.’
‘Are you crazy?’
‘But not before we’ve phoned a place in South Africa I know of and arranged a movie download – the damned thing will take hours and cost thousands. Then we bury the cell phone down the side of the seat. After that we phone the flics back in Saint Evry, and check up on what we claim is our stolen car – the one that we called in a few hours ago. Don’t they remember taking the call? Maybe it was someone else on duty? There’ll be a record of it, anyway. Then we tell the flics that we just remembered that there’s a cell phone in the car, and give them the number and the server. Then we leave the rest to them.’
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘Come on, Vau. The flics check on the cell phone. They find that the line is conveniently open. They can then pinpoint the car to within about three metres, give or take. So they swoop down and reel these two losers in.’
‘But then they’ll tell the flics about us.’
The Mayan Codex as-2 Page 3
