Macron’s snap shot passed through Bale’s neck, puncturing his trapezius muscle, just missing his subclavian artery and shattering his clavicle. Bale immediately felt his left hand and arm go numb.
He twisted towards the danger, his gun arm rising.
There was a crash, as whoever had come in by the back way encountered his barricade. Then a second shot smashed into the ceiling above Bale’s head, showering him with plaster.
Still pulsing with adrenalin, Bale darted towards the shooter. He had seen the man silhouetted in the light of the gun flash. Knew where his head was. Knew what a mess he had got himself into with the barricade. Knew where the man’s pistol was instinctively aiming.
He speared the man’s gun-hand with his knee. Levered the man’s mouth open with the barrel of the Redhawk. Then shot.
Police. It had to be the police. Who else would have a pistol?
Bale ran for the back window, his left arm hanging loose. Civilian clothes. The man had been in civilian clothes – not paramilitary kit. So it wasn’t a siege.
He levered himself backwards through the window and fell to the ground, cursing. Blood was cascading down his shirt. If the bullet had nicked his carotid artery, he was done for.
Once out of the Maset, he cut to the right, towards the stand of trees in which he’d tethered the horse.
No other way out. No other way to go.
60
Alexi was holding Yola up in his arms, taking all her weight. Protecting her from the certain death that her own body mass would inevitably have afforded her.
Sabir felt blindly above her head until he encountered the rope. Then he followed it down with his fingers until he was able to undo the noose that had tightened around her throat. She drew in a great, ragged breath – the very inverse of a death rattle. This was the sound of life returning. Of the body succouring itself after a great trauma.
Where was Bale? And Macron? Surely they hadn’t killed each other? Part of Sabir was still expecting the fourth bullet.
He helped Alexi lay Yola out on the floor. He could feel the warmth of her breath against his hand. Hear Alexi’s sobs of pain.
Alexi lay down beside her, with Yola’s head cradled against his chest.
Sabir navigated his way by feel across to the fireplace. He recalled seeing a box of matches on the left, near the fire tongs. He felt around with his fingers until he encountered them. While he did this, he listened with all his concentration for any alien sounds inside the house. But the place was silent. Only the murmur of Alexi’s voice broke the hush.
Sabir put a match to the fire. It flared into life. He was able, by its light, to focus on the rest of the room. It was empty.
He moved across to the fallen footstool, dried off one or two of the candles and lit them. The shadows played off the walls above him. He was consciously having to control the panic that was threatening to send him at a fl at run back out of the room and towards the welcoming darkness outside. ‘Let’s take her over to the fire. She’s drenched. I’ll get a blanket and some towels from one of the bedrooms.’
Sabir had a fair idea by now of what he would find out in the corridor. There had been blood all over the floor near the stool. Thick gouts of it. As though the eye-man had blown an artery. He followed its trail until he came to the tangle of chairs encircling Macron’s body.
The top of the man’s head had been blown off. A flap of skin covered his one remaining eye. Dry-gagging, Sabir levered the gun out of Macron’s hand. Averting his eyes from the rest of the mess, he felt blindly around for the cellphone he knew Macron kept in the front pocket of his blouson. He straightened up and continued on down the corridor. He stood for a while contemplating the fresh blood trail where it crossed the ledge of the rear window.
Then, glancing down at the illuminated VDU of the cellphone, he walked into the first available bedroom in search of blankets.
61
‘I’ll take that.’ Calque held his hand out for Macron’s gun.
Sabir tendered him the pistol. ‘Whenever we meet, I always seem to be passing you firearms.’
‘The mobile phone, too.’
Calque pocketed the gun and the cellphone and moved towards the corridor. He shouted back over his shoulder. ‘Can we get the electricity reconnected here? Someone call the company. Either that, or hitch up a generator. I can’t see to think.’ He stood for a moment over Macron’s body, playing his torch over what remained of his assistant’s face.
Sabir moved up behind him.
‘No. Stand back. This is a crime scene now. I want your friends to remain by the fireplace until the ambulance comes. Not wash their hands. Not tread in anything. Not touch anything. You, Sabir, will come outside with me. You’ve got some explaining to do.’
Sabir followed Calque out of the front door. Temporary spotlights were being levered into place outside, giving the area the look of a floodlit, all-weather football pitch.
‘I’m sorry. Sorry about your assistant.’
Calque glanced at the surrounding trees and breathed in deeply. He felt in his pockets for a cigarette. When he didn’t find one he looked temporarily bereft – as if it was the lack of a cigarette he was mourning and not his partner. ‘It’s a funny thing. I didn’t even like the man. But now he’s dead I miss him. Whatever he might have been – whatever he might have done – he was mine. Do you understand that? My problem.’ Calque’s face was a frozen mask. Impossible to read. Impossible to touch.
A passing CRS officer, noting Calque’s search for a cigarette, offered him one of his own. Calque’s eyes flared angrily in the rush of the lighter flame – an anger that was just as suddenly extinguished. Catching sight of Calque’s expression, the man gave an embarrassed salute and passed on.
Sabir shrugged his shoulders in a vain effort to mitigate the effect of what he was about to say. ‘Macron called it off his own bat, didn’t he? Your people were here ten minutes after he moved in. He should have waited, shouldn’t he? He told us the shooters would take two hours. That they had to come from Montpellier and not Marseille. He was lying, wasn’t he?’
Calque turned away, grinding out his freshly-lit cigarette in the same fluid motion. ‘The girl is alive. My assistant secured her life at the cost of his own.’ He glared at Sabir. ‘He injured the eye-man. The man is now on horseback, spewing blood, in an area bounded by two rarely used roads and a river. Once daylight comes, he will stick out like an ant on a blank sheet of paper. He will be caught – either from the air or in the land net. The area is already ninety per cent sealed off. In under an hour, we will have made it a hundred.’
‘I know that, but…’
‘My assistant is dead, Monsieur Sabir. He sacrificed himself for you and the girl. First thing tomorrow morning I will have to go and explain his death to his family. How it could possibly have happened on my watch. How I let it happen. Are you sure you heard him right? About Montpellier, I mean? And the two hours?’
Sabir held Calque’s eyes with his own. Then he allowed his gaze to slide back towards the house. The distant sound of an ambulance cut through the night air like a lament.
‘You’re right, Captain Calque. I’m just a stupid Yank. My French is a little rusty. Montpellier. Marseille. They all sound the same to me.’
62
‘I’m not going to the hospital. And neither is Alexi.’ Yola watched Sabir warily. She was not sure how far she could go with him – how deep his gadje hood really reached. She had taken him aside for this one purpose. But now she was concerned that his fractured male pride would make him that much harder to convince.
‘What do you mean? You came this close to being strangled.’ Sabir slid one of his hands inside the other and then twisted. ‘And Alexi fell from his horse on to a steel barrier and some concrete. He could have internal injuries. You need a complete medical check-up and he needs intensive care. In a hospital. Not in a caravan.’
Yola modulated the tone of her voice, consciously playing up her femininity – playing on the affection she knew Sabir felt for her. His susceptibility to the distaff side. ‘There is a man at Les Saintes-Maries. A curandero. One of our own people. He will look after us better than any gadje doctor.’
‘Don’t tell me. He’s your cousin. And he uses plants.’
‘He is the cousin of my father. And he uses more than plants. He uses the cacipen. He uses the knowledge of cures that have been passed down to him in dreams.’
‘Oh. Well. That’s all right then.’ Sabir watched as a woman in a plastic suit began photographing the interior of the Maset. ‘Let me get this straight. You want me to convince Calque to let you into this man’s care? To save Alexi from the sawbones? Is that it?’
Yola made her decision. ‘You have not told the policeman about Gavril yet, have you?’
Sabir fl ushed. ‘I thought Alexi was sick. I didn’t realise he had brought you so swiftly up to date.’
‘Alexi tells me everything.’
Sabir allowed his gaze to wander somewhere over Yola’s right shoulder. ‘Well, Calque’s got enough on his plate. Gavril can wait. He’s going nowhere fast.’
‘Calque will blame you for holding out on him. You know that. He will blame Alexi, too, when he discovers who really found the body.’
Sabir shrugged. ‘Maybe so. But why should he ever find out? We’re the only three who know what Alexi stumbled on. And I’m damned sure Alexi won’t tell him. You know how he feels about cops.’
Yola stepped around and placed herself firmly in Sabir’s sight-line. ‘You have not told him because you want to retrieve the prophecies first.’
A rush of outraged virtue triumphed over Sabir’s instinctive sense of moral discretion. ‘What’s wrong with that? It would be madness to lose them at this stage.’
‘Even so, Damo, you must tell the policeman. Tell him now. Gavril has a mother who is still living. A good woman. It is not her fault that her son was a bad person. Whatever he was, whatever he did, he must not lie any longer unmourned – like an animal. The Manouche believe that a person’s wrong actions are cancelled out by their death. For us there is no Hell. No evil place that people go to when they are dead. Gavril was one of us. It would not be right. Do this thing and I will retrieve the prophecies for you. Secretly. While the policeman watches over you and Alexi.’
Sabir threw back his head. ‘You’re crazy, Yola. The eye-man is still out there somewhere. How can you even think of such a thing?’
Yola took another step towards him. She was consciously forcing herself into his space. Making it impossible for Sabir to ignore her – to write her off as a mere woman, braving waters better suited to men. ‘I know him now, Damo. The eye-man has spoken privately to me. Revealed something of himself. I can combat him. I shall take with me a secret. Passed down to the curandero from the snake woman, Lilith, many mothers ago, when she gave the chosen ones of our family the second sight.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Yola. Death is the only thing that will defeat the eye-man. Not second sight.’
‘And it is death that I shall carry with me.’
63
The gelding had quailed at the scent of Bale’s blood. Its legs had splayed as if it did not know in which direction it intended going. When Bale had tried to approach it, the gelding had thrown back its head in panic and dragged against its reins, which were tied in a bunch to a branch of the tree. The reins had snapped and the gelding had backed wildly away, then twisted on its haunches and galloped frantically up the track towards the main road.
Bale glanced back towards the house. The agony in his neck and arm cancelled out the sounds of the night. He was losing blood fast. Without the horse, they would catch him within the hour. Any minute now they would be here, with their helicopters and their searchlights and their infrared night glasses. They would dirty him. Tarnish him with their fingers and with their hands.
Clutching his left arm to his side to prevent it swinging, Bale did the only thing he could possibly do.
He began to retrace his steps towards the Maset.
64
Sabir watched the police car take Yola and Alexi away. He supposed that it was a deal that he had reluctantly cut with Calque but words like ‘rat’ and ‘trap’ kept interposing themselves between him and any satisfaction that he might have taken in its inception.
The only edge that he had possessed with which to counter Calque’s anger at his holding out about Gavril, lay in his by now tacit agreement to keep quiet about Macron’s criminal impetuosity. Ironically, though, he hadn’t dared mention Macron again in case he inflamed Calque way beyond rationality and ended up counting bricks in a jail cell – so that particular bargaining counter had proved less than worthless.
This way, at any rate, he remained useful to the man and capable of maintaining at least some degree of free movement. If Yola did what she’d said she’d do, they would still be ahead of the game. If the gouts of blood left in the Maset salon were anything to go by, it couldn’t be long, surely, before the French police ran the eye-man down and either killed him or took him into custody?
Calque crooked a finger at Sabir. ‘Get into the car.’
Sabir seated himself next to a CRS officer in a bullet-proof vest. He smiled but the offi cer refused to respond. The man was going to a potential crime scene. He was in official mode.
Hardly surprising, thought Sabir to himself – he was still a suspect in nearly everybody’s eyes. The cause, if not exactly the perpetrator, of a colleague’s violent death.
Calque spread himself out across the front seat. ‘I’m right, am I not? La Roupie’s body is lying outside a gardien ’s cabane, twenty minutes north of the Bac, just before you get to the Panperdu? That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That’s where you came across it while you were out searching for the gypsy Dufontaine?’
‘Alexi Dufontaine. Yes.’
‘Do you have a problem with the word gypsy?’