‘He won the use of it from the brothers? You’re joking?’
‘No. From some other gypsies who had also found it. It’s quite illegal to the gadje way of thinking, of course and nobody else knows about the deal – but with us the thing is set in stone. It’s simply accepted. We sometimes stay there when we go to the festival. There is no road in, only a rutted track. Around there, the gardiens use only their horses for transport.’
‘The gardiens?’
‘They are the guardians of the Camargues bulls. You see them on horseback, riding their white horses, sometimes carrying lances. They know every corner of the Camargues marshes. They are our friends. When Sara-e-kali is carried down to the sea, it is the Nacioun Gardiano who guard her for us.’
‘So they know about this house too?’
‘No. No one knows we use it but us. From the outside it does not seem inhabited. We have a way in through the cellar, though, so that it still seems as if the house is unlived in even when we are using it.’
‘What do we do with the car?’
‘We should leave it somewhere a long way away from the Camargues.’
‘But then the eye-man would lose touch with us. We have an agreement with Calque, remember?’
‘Then we leave it in Arles for the time being. We can hitch a ride into the Camargues with other gypsies. They will take us when they see us. We make a shpera sign on the road and they will stop. Then we get off a few kilometres from the house and walk in, carrying our food with us – for anything else we need I can go out and do the manghel.’
‘Do the what?’
‘Beg from farmhouses.’ Alexi looked up from his driving. He was becoming used to explaining things about the gypsy world to Sabir. His face even took on a particular expression – somewhere between that of a commercially driven television pundit and a newly enlightened spirit guide. ‘Ever since she was a chey, Yola, like all gypsy girls, has had to learn how to persuade local farmers to share their excess food. Yola is an artist at the manghel. People feel privileged to give her things.’
Sabir laughed. ‘That I can well believe. She’s certainly managed to persuade me to do a whole raft of things I would never have dreamed of doing if I’d had even a fraction of my wits about me. Speaking of which, what do we do when we are inside the house and you’ve plundered the local countryside for food?’
‘Once inside, we hide up until the festival. Kidnap Sara. Conceal her. Then we go back to the car and drive away. We call Calque. The police will do the rest.’
The smile froze on Sabir’s face. ‘Sounds awful easy, the way you tell it.’
3
‘I think I’ve got him.’
‘Drop back then.’
‘But I should keep him in sight.’
‘No, Macron. He will see us and spook. We’ll have one chance at this and one only. I’ve arranged an invisible roadblock just before Millau, where the road narrows through a canyon. We let him drive through it. Half a kilometre further on there’s another – this time obvious – roadblock. We let Sabir and the gypsies pass. Then we seal it off. If the eye-man tries to double back, we’ll have him like a rat in a trap. Even he won’t be able to scramble up sheer cliff.’
‘What about the verses?’
‘Fuck the verses. I want the eye-man. Off the streets. For good.’
Secretly, Macron had already begun to think that his boss was losing it. First, the mess-up at Rocamadour, which had resulted in the unnecessary death of the nightwatchman – Macron had long since convinced himself that were he to have been running the investigation, such a thing would never have happened. Then the criminal stupidity of Calque abandoning his post back at Montserrat, which had resulted in Macron taking the rap – it was he, after all and not Calque, whom the eye-man had beaten up. And now this.
Macron was convinced that they could take the eye-man themselves. Follow him at a safe distance. Isolate and identify his vehicle. Position unmarked vehicles front and back of him. Then sweep him up. There was no earthly need for static roadblocks – they were always more trouble than they were worth. If you weren’t careful, you’d end up on a high-speed chase though a rock-strewn field of sunflowers. Then three weeks filling in forms explaining the damage to police vehicles. The sort of bureaucracy, he, Macron, excoriated.
‘He’s driving a white Volvo SUV. It has to be him. I’m approaching a little closer. I need to make sure. Call in the number-plate.’
‘Don’t go any closer. He’ll pick us up.’
‘He’s not a superman, Sir. He’s got no idea we know he’s tracking Sabir.’
Calque sighed. It had been deeply stupid of him to grant the single favour to Macron. But that’s what guilt did for you. It made you soft. The man was clearly a bigot. With every day they remained on the road together, his bigotry became more pronounced. First it was the gypsies. Then it was the Jews. Now it was his fiancee’s family. They were metis. Mixed race. Macron accepted that in his girlfriend, apparently, but couldn’t abide it in her family.
Calque privately supposed the man must vote for the Front National – but he, personally, was of a generation which considered it impolite to question another man about his political affiliations. So he would never know. Or perhaps Macron was a communist? In Calque’s, opinion the Communist Party were even worse racists than the Front National. Both of the parties switched their votes back and forth to each other when they found it expedient. ‘That’s close enough, I tell you. You forget how he outsmarted us all on the Sierra de Montserrat. Villada thought it impossible for a single man to make it off the hill before he was surrounded and swept up by the police cordon. The bastard must be able to move like a cat. He must have been outside the line before the Spanish even began their operation.’
‘He’s speeding up.’
‘Let him. We have thirty more kilometres to go before we can slip the noose around his neck. I have a helicopter on standby at Rodez airport. CRS at Montpellier. He can’t escape.’
Calque looked as though he were competent, thought Macron – sounded as though he were competent – but it was all bullshit. The man was a dilettante. Why pass up an opportunity to nail the eye-man now in favour of a pie-in-the-sky plan that would probably cover the lot of them in even further ignominy? One more mistake and he, Paul Eric Macron, might as well write off any chances he ever had of further promotion and vote himself straight back on to the beat as a sort of eternal pandore.
Macron eased his foot down on the throttle. They were on winding country lanes. The eye-man would be concentrating all his attention ahead. It wouldn’t occur to him to check the road half a kilometre behind. Macron inconspicuously popped the button on the holster he had slid in under his seat that morning.
‘I said slow down.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
Calque brought the binoculars back-up to his eyes. The road was so winding that looking through them for more than a few seconds at a time made him feel nauseous. Yes. Macron was right. The Volvo SUV had to be the car. For twenty kilometres now it had been the only vehicle between them and Sabir. He felt a dryness in his mouth – a fl uttering in the pit of his stomach – that he usually felt only in the presence of his ruinous-to-maintain ex-wife.
When they breasted the next corner, Bale was standing eighty metres away in the centre of the road. He was holding the Star Z-84 sub-machine that he had liberated from the Catalan paramilitary at porte armes position: 600 rounds a minute; 9mm Luger Parabellum in the canteen; 200-metre effective range.
Bale smiled, braced the Z-84 against his right shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
4
Macron threw the wheel violently to the left – it was an instinctive reaction, without any basis whatsoever in driver training or in ambush coordination. The unmarked police car began to tip. He threw the wheel in the opposite direction to counterbalance it. The police car continued on its original path, but this time in a series of violent somersaults.
Bale glanced down at the weapon in his hand. Incredible. It worked even better than he had hoped.
The police car settled on its side, accompanied by a tinkling and a groaning of metal. Glass, plastic and strips of aluminium littered a fifty-metre swathe of the road. A thick oil slick was forming beneath and beyond the car, like a blood haemorrhage.
Bale glanced quickly up and down the road. Then he crouched down and swept up the discarded shell cases and put them in his pocket. He had aimed the gun high on purpose, with its trajectory towards an open field. It amused him to think that the two policemen – if they had survived the crash – would have no way of proving that he had actually been there at all.
With one further, almost idle, glance behind him, he climbed back into the Volvo and continued on his way.
5
‘What’s to stop the eye-man from simply attacking us and making us tell him where the verses are?’
‘Because we don’t know where the verses are. At least not as far as he’s concerned.’
Alexi made a puzzled face. He glanced questioningly at Yola, but she was sound asleep on the back seat.
‘Think about it, Alexi. He only knows what Yola told him. No more. And she wasn’t able to tell him about the Three Maries because she didn’t know about them herself.’
‘But…’
‘In addition, he’s only got the quatrain from the base of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour to go on. Which sent him to Montserrat. But in Montserrat he failed to get hold of the quatrain hidden at La Morenita’s feet – the quatrain which cements the gypsy connection. And neither does he know about my meeting with Calque, or that Calque gave me the text of the Montserrat quatrain as a token of good faith. So he’s got to stick with us. He’s got to assume we are on our way to somewhere specific in order to pick up another part of the message. Why should he mess with us, then? He doesn’t know we know we’re being followed. And he’s probably so bloody cocksure after eluding the Spanish police at Montserrat that he thinks he’ll be able to take on the whole of the Police Nationale single-handed if they should be dumb enough, or angry enough, to mess with him again.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Simple psychology. And the single look I got at his face in the Rocamadour Sanctuary. This is a guy who’s used to getting what he wants. And why does he get it? Because he acts. Instinctively. And with not one iota of conscience. Look at his record. He goes straight for the jugular every time.’
‘Why don’t we ambush him then? Use his own tactics against him? Why wait for him to come to us?’
Sabir sat back in his seat.
‘The police will fuck it up, Damo. They always do. It was my cousin he killed. And Yola’s brother. We swore to avenge him. You agreed to that. We have this man on a string – he follows wherever we go. Why not tug at the string a little? Draw him in? We’d be doing Calque a favour.’
‘You think that, do you?’
‘Yes. I think it.’ Alexi grinned, sarcasm oozing from every pore. ‘I like the police. You know I do. They’ve always been fair to us gypsies, wouldn’t you say? Treated us respectfully and with dignity? Given us courtesy and equal rights with the rest of the French population? Why shouldn’t we help them for a change? Return the compliment?’
‘You haven’t forgotten what happened last time?’ ‘We’re better prepared this time. And if the worst comes to the worst the police can always act as our back-up. It’ll be like John Wayne in Stagecoach.’ Sabir gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘Yeah. I know. I know. We’re not playing a game of cowboys and Indians. But I think we ought to use this guy’s own tactics against him. It nearly worked last time…’
‘… apart from your balls and your teeth…’ ‘… apart from my balls and my teeth. Yes. But it will work this time. If we plan it right, that is. And if we don’t lose our nerve.’
6
Calque eased himself out through the broken front window of the police car. He lay for a while, spreadeagled on the ground, looking up at the sky. Macron had been right. The airbag did work with the seat belt. In fact it worked so well that it had broken his nose. He put up a hand and fumbled at the new shape, but didn’t quite have the courage to yank it back into place. ‘Macron?’ ‘I can’t move, Sir. And I can smell petrol.’ The car had settled at the exact apex of the corner. Calque had an absurd vision of prising open the boot, taking out the warning triangles and then limping back to set them up so that no one would inadvertently run into the back of them. Health and safety directives insisted that he should also wear a reflective vest when he did this. For a brief moment he was actually tempted to laugh.
Instead, he struggled to his knees and craned down to peer under the wreck. ‘Can you reach the keys?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, switch off the engine.’
‘It happens automatically when the airbags inflate. But I’ve turned the thing off anyway to make sure.’
‘Good lad. Can you reach your cellphone?’
‘No. My left hand is caught between the seat and the door. And the airbag is between my right hand and my pocket.’
Calque sighed. ‘All right. I’m standing up now. I’ll get to you in a moment.’ Calque rocked on his feet. All the blood moved to his body’s periphery and for a moment he thought he would fall down in a dead faint.
‘Are you all right, Sir?’
‘My nose is broken. I’m feeling a bit weak. I’m coming now.’ Calque sat down in the road. Very slowly he lay back down and closed his eyes. From somewhere behind him there came the sudden, distant scream of over-heated brakes.
7
‘How did he get the sub-machine gun?’
‘From the Spanish paramilitary, of course. Villada never got around to telling me that bit.’
Calque was sitting beside Macron in the Accident and Emergency department of Rodez Hospital. Both of them were bandaged and taped. Calque had one arm in a sling. His nose had been reset and he could feel the residual effects of the local anaesthetic niggling away at his front teeth.