Sabir shook his head in despair. It was clear that the world simply hadn’t come that far yet. Forbearance and inclusiveness were as far off the agenda as they had been in Nostradamus’s time. People paid lip service to ideas of colour-blindness, religious tolerance, and fair play, but if ever their own little bailiwicks were threatened, they very swiftly reverted to racial protectionism and national isolationism – ‘strangers out’ still seemed to be the motto in extremis. As a result of this, nothing on earth would ever get Sabir to divulge Yola’s true identity and whereabouts, and through her, the identity of her unborn son. Not to Calque. Not to anybody.
The penultimate prophecy in the cycle went on to describe the Third Antichrist – a being who would, if nothing was done to prevent him, trigger 2012’s final holocaust. That, too, needed to be kept secret.
But Sabir had to have something to sell to his publishers and the public at large. A suitable hook on which to hang his story. Or what old-time comedians would have called a shtick.
The safest bet seemed to consist of the narrative of his search for the unique visionary Nostradamus had spoken of in that year’s prophecy. A person apparently so in tune with the matted web of time that they could disentangle its threads and read the future from them.
If this person existed then Sabir would find him. And to heck with the Countess, the Corpus Maleficus, and the de Bale twins.
8
Sabir straightened up from checking underneath his three-year-old Grand Cherokee. The garage had been locked tight. He didn’t think there had been any way that the twins could have gained access to his vehicle.
Still, forewarned is forearmed. Both Achor Bale and the French police had used electronic tracker systems during their pursuit of Sabir and his friends in France. Sabir had never encountered such systems before that time, but he would certainly not overlook them again. He needed his car to get to the airport, and he needed that car to be clean. The last thing he wanted was for the twins to dog his trail all the way to Saudi Arabia.
He locked and alarmed the garage door behind him and trudged back towards the house. Since the events of the night before he had taken to carrying the shotgun with him wherever he went, trusting that his neighbours wouldn’t think he was partly off his trolley, and call the cops. He’d worked out a possible cover story to deal with that eventuality – something about a rogue opossum that had been eating through his telephone wires – but he hadn’t had cause to try it out on anyone yet, as none of the neighbouring householders appeared to have noticed his new, military-style incarnation.
Once inside the house he flung a few articles of clothing into a carryall, and gathered up his emergency reserve of travellers’ cheques, his credit cards, his passport, and his cell phone charger. Then he stowed the shotgun back on its meat hook in the wine cellar, sealed the house as tightly as he was able, and started back towards the garage.
Halfway there he slowed down, ready to run again. A car was parked outside the garage door, completely blocking the entrance. There was no way on earth the gate could be swung up and over, as it was designed to be.
Sabir looked swiftly behind him. Surely they wouldn’t come at him here, out in the open?
The driver’s door of the car opened, and a familiar face appeared over the lip of the roof-rack.
Sabir dropped his carryall. ‘Captain Calque. Jesus H. Christ. You almost gave me a heart attack. I thought it was the twins again. What the heck are you doing here?’
‘The twins?’ Calque stepped away from the car, his facial expression taking on a new urgency. ‘The twins have been here already? And you are still alive?’
Sabir flashed Calque a look. ‘As luck would have it.’ He picked up his carryall and continued walking. He glanced inside Calque’s car. It was empty. ‘This an official visit of some sort? Tidying up loose ends?’ Sabir was trying hard to make his voice casual. He didn’t want Calque interfering in his plans. Muddying the waters. Queering his pitch for the new book.
Calque allowed his gaze to play up and down the road. He, too, was now busy playing a part. ‘No. I took early retirement. I was invalided out of the service. I’m working on my own time now.’
‘You? Invalided out? That surprises me. I’d have thought they’d have had to tie you to a stretcher and wheel you out of your office in a straitjacket before that ever happened.’ Sabir cocked his head to one side. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? Are you on vacation? Come to see the fall colours, perhaps? And so you just dropped by to see me for old times’ sake?’ He hesitated, frowning. ‘Christ, Calque, you’re not really a leaf peeper, are you?’
Calque shook his head. The sarcastic undertones in Sabir’s voice were unmistakable. He realized he’d have to cut straight to the chase or risk losing him. ‘No. I’m not a leaf peeper, as you so charmingly put it. I came out here to warn you, Sabir. About the twins. And there didn’t seem to be any other way to do it except in person. I assumed, you see, that you would prefer I didn’t contact you through the local constabulary.’ Despite his best efforts, Calque had shifted back into police mode again. ‘Why don’t you leave your damned telephone switched on, man? And why don’t you answer your messages? You must have a death wish.’
Sabir gave a non-committal shrug. Privately, he was more than a little taken aback by Calque’s tone. ‘It’s a long story. Basically, I can’t sleep at night. So during the day I leave everything switched off so that if I do manage to drop off to sleep, the fucking telephone won’t fucking wake me up.’ He hesitated. ‘If this isn’t an official visit, Captain, what is it? And how come you already know about the twins?’
Calque chucked his chin in the direction of his car. ‘Get in and I’ll tell you.’
9
‘The White Horse Inn? You’re staying at the White Horse inn?’
‘Why is that so strange?’ Calque was concentrating on his driving – he was clearly unused to a manual gear change.
‘Don’t you realize you’ll be paying fall rates?’
‘Fall rates? What are those?’
‘Christ, Calque. Didn’t you hear anything I said to you back there in front of the garage? It’s when the inns and guest houses pump up their prices for the leaf peepers coming in to see the fall colours. You pay maybe 75 per cent over the usual odds.’
Calque shrugged. ‘It was not my idea. It was that of my companion.’
‘Your companion? You’ve come out here with a girlfriend?’
‘In a manner of speaking. Yes.’
Sabir shook his head. He screwed himself nervously around in his seat.
‘It’s all right, Sabir. We aren’t being followed.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I’m a professional. I’ve been watching all the way. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’ll stick to the public rooms. We just need to talk, that’s all.’
The two men got out of Calque’s car. The ride to the inn hadn’t taken them more than eight minutes in toto.
Sabir nodded to the desk clerk as they walked through the lobby.
‘They know you here, then?’
‘Calque, I’ve lived here all my life. I was born maybe three miles down the road.’
‘It’s nice to belong someplace.’ Calque’s attention was somewhere else, however. He had seen Lamia seated on one of the lobby sofas, near to an open fire. ‘Come with me. I want you to meet someone.’
When he first caught sight of Lamia’s face Sabir flinched backwards, as though he’d inadvertently stumbled into an electric fence.
Calque turned towards him, shocked. ‘You two already know each other?’
Lamia was staring down at the floor. She was clearly mortified by Sabir’s reaction to her.
Sabir took a deep breath. ‘No. No. We’ve never met. I’m sorry. It was a bit of a shock.’
Lamia looked up. The undamaged part of her face was still flushed from the effect of Sabir’s reaction. ‘I know I’m not pretty to look at, Mr Sabir. But few people respond to me in quite the
way you did.’
Sabir could feel Calque’s critical gaze eating through the small of his back. ‘It’s not your face. Please don’t think that.’
‘Then what is it?’
Sabir shook his head. ‘I’ve seen you in a dream. I know it sounds crazy. But it’s true.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Sabir turned entreatingly towards Calque. ‘Maybe the Captain hasn’t explained to you what happened to me earlier this summer? There’s no reason why, I suppose.’
With a downward thrust of his arm, Calque indicated that Sabir should sit. He was glaring at Sabir as though, given half the chance, he would gladly have smashed one of the hotel chairs over his head. ‘May I introduce Lamia de Bale? Adam Sabir.’
Sabir didn’t sit down. He simply stood and stared down at Calque. ‘De Bale? She’s one of the de Bales? Jesus Christ, Calque. Are you out of your mind?’
Calque made another sharp movement with his hand. ‘Do I look as though I am out of my mind? Do I look as though I am subject to sudden sharp rushes of blood to my brain? Mademoiselle de Bale has been of extraordinary service to me in recent days. She has, as it were, fallen foul of the rest of her family. Her life, like yours, is in imminent danger. So please sit down and make a pretence, at least, of being civilized.’
Sabir dropped onto the chair behind him. He couldn’t take his eyes off Lamia’s face. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve heard of you. Heard your name mentioned. I know who you are now.’
Lamia let an embarrassed hand flutter in front of her cheek. ‘Well that’s all right then. Would you like me to veil myself, perhaps? Like a Muslim woman? Then you wouldn’t have to stare at me quite so hard.’
Sabir shook his head violently. ‘I’m sorry. Desperately sorry. But it’s not what you’re thinking. Ever since early this summer – ever since I was involved with your brother …’
‘Ever since you killed my brother, you mean?’
Sabir glanced away. To a third party it might have looked as though he were searching for an elusive waiter. But Sabir was merely trying to regain his sang-froid. To stop the sudden rush of panic that threatened to overwhelm him. To regain some measure of control over the still visceral memories of what Bale had done to him.
He turned back and met Lamia’s gaze full on. ‘Ever since I killed your brother, yes. That’s technically true. I did kill him. If I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me. Where I come from that’s called justifiable homicide, Mademoiselle de Bale.’
‘My name is Lamia, not Mademoiselle de Bale. And believe me, Mr Sabir, I don’t blame you in any way at all for killing my stepbrother. He was a rabid dog. And I hated him for it.’
Sabir felt as if he were floundering in an unfamiliar ocean, far out of his depth, in a rapidly encroaching riptide. ‘I’m sorry. Really sorry that it had to end that way.’
‘I am not.’
Sabir stared desperately at Calque. He no longer had the remotest idea what was expected of him. Or why Calque had brought him into this mess.
‘Your dream. You were telling us of your dream, Sabir.’
Sabir tried to gather himself together. ‘Yes. Yes I was.’ The words came out explosively, like a sneeze. ‘Ever since I was in the cellar. Or in the cesspit rather. Ever since I thought that I would suffocate to death, in other words, I have been having these dreams. Well, they’re nightmares, really. In which I’m quite literally torn apart.’ Sabir’s voice trailed off. He was making no sense and he knew it. ‘And then my head is eaten by a snake. Then I become the snake.’ He had begun to sweat. ‘It’s crazy. I really can’t describe it. But I have them pretty much every night. They’re so bad I can’t sleep. That’s how come your twin brothers didn’t get me when they broke into my house last night. I get claustrophobic – so most every night I check out of the main house and go over to sleep in the summer house. It’s open out there. I can see the sky. I can breathe.’
‘You mean they entered the house when you were already outside? In the garden hut?’
‘Yes. Crazy, isn’t it? I even left the back door unlocked. Later, when they switched on a light, thinking I wasn’t anywhere about, I managed to get the drop on them with my father’s empty shotgun.’
‘You managed to get the drop on them? With an empty shotgun?’ Calque seemed to be having difficulty conjuring up a sufficiently lurid image of the event. ‘You held up the de Bale twins with an empty shotgun?’
‘You see, no one can tell whether a shotgun is empty or not. It’s not like a revolver, where you can see the shells. Or lack of them.’
‘I understand the constitution of a shotgun, Sabir.’
‘Well, anyway, as part of this dream I see a woman. She has her back to me. You’ve got to imagine that I’m the snake by now, and I’m approaching her. My mouth is hanging open. I’m going to take this woman’s head in my mouth, just like the snake did with me. Then at the very last moment the woman turns around. And she has your face, Mademoiselle de Bale.’
‘You mean exactly? With my birthmark? With my blemish?’
‘Yes. She has a blemish, if that’s what you want to call it, just like yours. At first I thought it was blood. All along, really, I’ve thought it was blood.’
‘And now you realize it isn’t?’
‘Yes. Now I realize it isn’t.’ Sabir looked down. He understood only too well how badly he had hurt the woman. That he had damaged her in some invisible way. In his head, though, he was still torn between his horror that she was Achor Bale’s sister, and his fascination that she seemed to have rejected the de Bale camp and joined the side of the angels – e.g. him and Calque.
‘And what happens to this woman who looks so much like me? In your dream, I mean.’
Sabir closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and stared directly at Lamia. ‘She opens her mouth – wider even than the snake was able to open its mouth – and she swallows me whole.’
10
‘Saudi Arabia? You can’t be serious?’
Sabir threw himself back in his chair. ‘You bet I’m serious. I’ve looked into this every which way there is to look, and the quatrain seems to point directly there.’
‘Would you be prepared to share your logic with us?’ Twice, now, Calque had reached for his cigarettes, and then replaced them in his pocket after reproving glances from the inn staff.
Sabir glanced at Lamia.
She caught the glance, and made as if to stand up. ‘Would you rather I left the room? I can fully understand if you still don’t feel, despite Captain Calque’s assurances, that I am an entirely trustworthy companion.’
Sabir waved her back down again. ‘Stay right where you are.’ He caught Calque’s eye and shrugged. ‘There’s no way you could possibly know this, but before I got the drop on your brothers, I listened in on their private conversation. A full couple of minutes of it. And together with what they told me later, it soon became clear to me that they think you betrayed them, Mademoiselle de Bale. In fact they think that – via our friend Calque here – you warned me directly about their coming. And that, to put it mildly, they don’t like you for it.’
‘But she did.’ Calque squirmed forward in his seat. ‘That’s exactly what she did do. She told me of her brothers’ mission. In good time for me to warn you. If ever you’d bothered to pick up your phone, that is, or taken an interest in your messages.’
‘Touché, Captain.’
‘And I’ve not told you how I found her yet. What her family were about to do to her.’
‘You don’t need to. Her brothers’ words were good enough for me. You can’t fake attitudes like that. Mademoiselle de Bale is welcome to sit in on our conversation if she wants to.’ Sabir was aware that part of him was endeavouring, via a studied politeness, to compensate the woman for his blundering faux pas about her face and the disturbing content of his dream. Another part of him recognized that Calque had obviously committed himself to her in some way – heck, didn’t he have an errant daughter hidden away somewhere? Maybe she
reminded him of her? – and that he still owed Calque.
‘Why did you let the twins get away? They were in your house illegally. Why didn’t you simply call the police?’
Sabir shook his head. ‘They were playing with me. They knew I wouldn’t shoot. They brazened it out, making it clear there’d been no breaking and entering of any sort. That I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of the cops. Then, when they’d worked out to their satisfaction how I’d managed to avoid their little trap, they left.’
‘You let them leave? Just like that?’
‘What was I going to do, Calque? Toss the shotgun at them? If you ask me, they’re holding fire until they can corner me somewhere private and wring out everything I know. When I haven’t got a shotgun in my hand, maybe.’ Sabir shrugged. ‘Things might pan out a little differently that time.’
11
‘Sabir was warned, Madame. I’m certain of it. The American knew we were coming. He was hiding outside the house with a shotgun. When we switched on the lights, thinking he was no longer there, he knew exactly where to find us.’
‘You think Lamia warned him? Through Calque?’
‘I’m convinced of it.’
‘Why didn’t he involve the police, then?’
‘He was scared to, Madame. We had entered his house through an open door – he slipped up on that one. Given that fact, and the existing relationship between our two families, he would have been hard put to accuse us of robbery. I think we can call this first round something of a stalemate.’
The Mayan Codex Page 14
