The Nostradamus Prophecies (40 page)

‘What does he know? Why would he tell you such a thing? What gives him the right?’

Yola looked at Sabir in shock. ‘Oh, the curandero knows. He is taken away in his dreams by an animal spirit. He is shown many things. He may not influence events, however, but only prepare people to accept them. That is his function.’

Sabir masked his bewilderment with inquiry. ‘Why did he touch you like that? Along the hairline? It seemed to hold some significance for him.’

‘He was cementing both halves of my body together.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If I am to succeed in what I have been chosen to do, the two halves of my body must not be split one from another.’

‘I’m sorry, Yola. But I still don’t understand.’

Yola stood up. She glanced uncertainly towards Sergeant Spola, then allowed her voice to drop to whisper. ‘We are all made in two halves, Damo. When God cooked us in His oven, He fused the two parts together into one mould. But each part still looked in a different direction – one to the past and one to the future. When both parts are reversed and brought back together – by illness, perhaps, or by the actions of a curandero – then this person, from that moment onwards, will look only to the present. They will live entirely in the present.’ Yola searched for the right words to convey her meaning. ‘They will be of service. Yes. That is it. They will be able to be of service.’

Sensing that they were finally aware of him once again, the ever-courteous Sergeant Spola raised his shoulders quizzically from over by the road. He had long acknowledged that he was way out of his depth with these gypsies, but as time trickled past, he was increasingly dreading the somewhat inevitable call from Captain Calque about his charges.

For Sergeant Spola had belatedly realised that he could never satisfactorily explain how he had allowed the girl to persuade him to abandon Alexi to his sickbed in favour of this visit to the curandero . Not even to himself could he explain it.

As he stood by his car, willing the gypsies to give up what they were doing and hurry back to him, he experienced a sudden desperate urge to return and check on his other charge in case someone, somewhere, had taken advantage of his good nature and was planning to land him in the horseshit.

Sabir raised a placatory hand. Then he turned his attention back to Yola. ‘And these things around our necks?’

‘They are for killing ourselves.’

‘What?’

‘The curandero fears for our lives against the eye-man. He senses that the eye-man will hurt us simply out of anger if we fall into his hands again. Inside this vial is the distilled venom of the Couleuvre de Montpellier. That is a poisonous snake that lives in the south-western part of France. Injected into the bloodstream, it will kill in under a minute. Taken by the throat…’

‘Taken by the throat?’

‘Swallowed. Drunk like a liquid. Imbibed. Then it will take fifteen minutes.’

‘You can’t mean it. Are you seriously telling me that the curandero has provided us with a poison? Like the sort they used to give spies who risked torture by the Gestapo?’

‘I don’t know who the Gestapo are, Damo, but I doubt very much that they are as terrible as the eye-man. If he takes me again, I will drink this. I will go to God intact and with my lacha untarnished. You must promise me that you will do the same.’

Joris Calque was a deeply unhappy man. Only once in his life had he been responsible for breaking the news to a family of the death of their only son and that time he had been covering for another officer who was injured in the same engagement. He had been in no way responsible. Far from it, in fact.

This was another matter entirely. His proximity to Marseille, Macron’s home town and the fact that Macron had died violently, at the hands of a murderer and on his watch, made Calque’s job all the harder. It had somehow become a priority for him personally to deliver the news.

By mid-afternoon on the second day it was obvious to everyone that the eye-man had somehow escaped the net. Helicopters and spotter-planes had criss-crossed the entire area below the N572 Arles to Vauvert road – including the vast span of country delimited by the Parc Natiurel Regional de Camargue – and they had found nothing. The eye-man appeared to be a wraith. CRS units had inspected every building, every bergerie and every ruin. They had stopped every car going either in or out of the Parc Naturel. It was an easy place to seal off. You had the sea on one side and the marshes on the other. Few roads bisected it and those that did were fl at, with traffic visible for miles in every direction. It should have been child’s play. Instead, Calque could feel his position as chief coordinator of the investigation becoming more precarious by the minute.

Macron’s family were waiting for him at the family bakery. A female police officer had gathered them all together, without being allowed to tell them the exact reason for their convocation. This was established practice. Dread, in consequence, laced the atmosphere like ether.

Calque was visibly surprised to find that not only were Macron’s father, mother and sister present, but also a bevy of aunts, uncles, cousins and even, or so it appeared, three out of four of his grandparents. It occurred to Calque that the smell of freshly baking bread would be forever linked in his mind with images of Macron’s death.

‘I am grateful that you are all here together. It will make what I have to tell you easier to bear.’

‘Our son. He is dead.’ It was Macron’s father. He was still wearing his bakery whites and a hairnet. As he spoke he took off the hairnet, as though it were in some way disrespectful.

‘Yes. He was killed late last night.’ Calque paused. He needed a cigarette badly. He wanted to be able to lean over and light it and to use the movement as a convenient means of masking the vast sea of faces that were now focusing on him with the greediness of anticipated grief. “He was killed by a murderer who was holding a woman hostage. Paul arrived a little before the main body of the force. The woman was in imminent danger. She had a rope around her neck and her kidnapper was threatening to hang her. Paul knew that the man had killed before. A security guard, up in Rocamadour. And another man. In Paris. He therefore decided to intervene.” ’

‘What happened to Paul’s killer? Do you have him?’ This, from one of the cousins.

Calque realised that he had been casting his seed on stony ground. Macron’s family must inevitably have heard about the possible death of a police officer on the radio or TV and have come to their own conclusions when the Police Nationale had convoked them. They hadn’t needed his rubber-stamping. All he could reasonably do, in the circumstances, was to provide them with any information they needed and then abandon them to the grieving process. He certainly couldn’t use them to rinse out his conscience. ‘No. We don’t have him yet. But we soon will. Before he died, Paul was able to get off two shots. It is not public knowledge yet – and we would prefer that you keep the information to yourselves – but the killer was badly injured by one of Paul’s bullets. He is on the run somewhere inside the Parc Naturel. The whole place is sealed off. More than a hundred policemen are out there searching for him as we speak.’ Calque was desperately trying to look away from the scenes in front of him – to concentrate on the questions that the peripheral family were firing off at him. But he was unable to take his eyes off Macron’s mother.

She resembled her son in an uncanny way. Upon hearing the confirmation of her boy’s death, she had instantly turned for comfort to her husband and now she clung to his waist, crying silently, the baking dust from his apron coating her face like whitewash.

When Calque was finally able to withdraw, one of Macron’s male relatives followed him out into the street. Calque turned to face him, half prepared for a physical assault. The man looked hard and fit. He had a razor-strop haircut. Indeterminate tattoo-ends burst from his sleeves to scatter out across the backs of his hands like varicose veins.

Calque regretted that the policewoman had remained inside with the rest of the family – the presence of a uniform might have acted as something of a curb.

But the man did not approach Calque in an aggressive manner. In fact he screwed his face up questioningly and Calque soon realised that something other than Macron’s death was foremost on his mind.

‘Paul telephoned me yesterday. Did you know that? But I wasn’t there. My mother took the message. I’m a joiner, these days. I have a lot of work on.’

‘Yes? You are a joiner these days? An excellent profession.’ Calque had not intended to sound abrupt, but the words came out defensively, despite his best intentions.

The man narrowed his eyes. ‘He said you were looking for a man who was in the Legion. A killer. That you thought the Legion would hold back the information that you needed. That they would force you to go through the usual fucking bureaucratic hoops they always use to protect their people with. That was what he said.’

Calque nodded in sudden understanding. ‘Paul told me about you. You are the cousin who was in the Legion. I should have realised.’ He was on the verge of saying ‘because you people get a particular look – like a walking slab of testosterone – and because you use “fucking” every other word’, but he somehow managed to control himself. ‘You were also in prison, were you not?’

The man looked away up the street. Something seemed to be irritating him. After a moment he turned back to Calque. He forced his hands inside his pockets, as if he felt that the material itself might prevent them from rioting – but still the hands thrust themselves towards Calque as if they wished to break through the cloth and throttle him. ‘I’m going to forget you said that. And that you’re a fucking policeman. I don’t like fucking policemen. For the most part they’re no fucking better than the cunts they bang up.’ He clamped his mouth tightly shut. Then he snorted long-sufferingly and glanced back down the street. ‘Paul was my cousin, even though he was a fucking bedi. This shit-heap killed him, you say? I was in the Legion for twenty fucking years. I ended up a fucking quartermaster. Do you want to ask me anything? Or do you want to scuttle back to fucking Headquarters and check out my criminal fucking record first?’

Calque’s decision was instantaneous. ‘I want, to ask you something.’

The man’s face changed – becoming lighter, less enclosed. ‘Fire away then.’

‘Do you remember a man with strange eyes? Eyes with no whites to them?’

‘Go on.’

‘This man may be French. But he might also have been pretending to be a foreigner to get into the ranks of the Legion as a soldier and not an officer.’

‘Give me more.’

Calque shrugged. ‘I know people change their names when they enter the Legion. But this man was a Count. Brought up as an aristocrat. In a family with servants and money. His original name may have been de Bale. Rocha de Bale. He would not have fitted easily into the role of a common soldier. He would have stuck out. Not only because of his eyes, but also on account of his attitude. He would have been used to leading, not being led. To giving orders, not taking them.’ Calque’s head snapped back like a turtle’s. ‘You know him, don’t you?’

The man nodded. ‘Forget Rocha de Bale. And forget leading. This cunt called himself Achor Bale. And he was a loner. He pronounced his name like an Englishman would. We never knew where he came from. He was crazy. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. We’re tough in the Legion. That’s normal. But he was tougher. I never thought I’d ever have to think about the cocksucker again.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In Chad. During the 1980s. The fucker started a riot. On purpose, I would say. But the authorities exonerated him because no one dared to testify against him. A friend of mine was killed during that action. I would have testified. But I wasn’t there. I was at the baisodrome, wasting my pay on porking blood sausage. You know what I mean? So I knew nothing about it. The cunts wouldn’t listen to me. But I knew. He was an evil fucking bastard. Not quite right in the head. Too much interested in guns and killing. Even for a fucking soldier.’

Calque put away his notebook. ‘And the eyes? That’s true? That he has no whites to his eyes?’

Macron’s cousin turned on his heel and walked back inside the bakery.

Bale awoke shivering. He had been dreaming and in his dream, Madame, his mother, was beating him about the shoulders with a coat hanger for some imagined slight. He kept on crying out – ‘No, Madame, no!’ – but still she continued hitting him.

It was dark. There were no other sounds from inside the house.

Bale shunted himself backwards, until he was able to prop himself against a beam. His fist was sore, where he had lashed out to defend himself during the dreamed attack and his neck and his shoulder felt raw – as if they had been scalded with boiling water and then scrubbed with an emery board.

He cracked on his torch and checked out the loft. Perhaps he could kill a rat or a squirrel and eat it? But no. He wouldn’t be quick enough anymore.

He knew that he didn’t dare venture downstairs yet to check out whether any food had been left behind in the kitchen, or to draw some water. The flics might have left a watchman behind to protect their crime scene from ghouls and curiosity seekers – it was comforting to think that such people still existed and that not everything in this life had been relegated to normalisation and mediocrity.

But water he did need. And urgently. He had drunk his own urine on three occasions now and had used the residue to disinfect his wounds, but he knew, from lectures with the Legion, that there was no earthly sense in doing that again. He would be contributing to his own certain death.

How many hours had he been up here? How many days? Bale had no idea of time any more.

Why was he here? Ah yes. The prophecies. He needed to find the prophecies.

He allowed his head to drop back on to his chest. By now the blanket he had been using as a pressure pad had congealed to his wound – he didn’t dare separate the two for fear of starting the blood flow up again.