The Third Antichrist (58 page)

Calque took the postcard Sabir was holding out to him. He went over to sit beside Yola. They looked at the postcard together.

‘Bronzino was an exact contemporary of Nostradamus’s – born one month before him, near Florence. The portrait you are looking at is Bronzino’s pietà. Painted in 1530, when Nostradamus was twenty-seven years old and Bronzino was twenty-eight. It’s in the Uffizi. In it, the Magdalene holds her left breast in one hand, and the upper right thigh of the dead Jesus in the other. She is a mature woman – poised and beautiful. This is no snippet of a girl. Plus it is she who is the focus of the light. Not the mother of Jesus. Not the face of Jesus. In no other pietà is Christ held in this fashion – at the most, his mother holds his hand. The portrait is unbearably intimate. To hold him like that implies that this woman knew Jesus – knew him carnally. And that she is not afraid to acknowledge this fact in front of his mother. It is not how any normal woman would hold a stranger. Nor even a mother her son. A woman only holds her breast like that if her heart is being torn out of her chest. And if you look closer, you will see that the shawl she is clutching to herself is in the form of a baby. She is cradling a metaphorical baby, therefore, and also the dead father of that baby. It’s so obvious that I can’t understand why nobody has seen it before. The entire portrait is configured in the form of a triangle. These three are bound together. Mother, son, wife. Tell me you can see it?’

‘We see it.’ Calque’s eyes were fixed onto the postcard. He shook his head and handed it to Yola so she could look more closely.

‘When I first met her, Yola construed the female orgasm as “having one’s eyes taken out”. This woman is climaxing with her eyes wide open. It’s categorical.’ Sabir was beginning to look uncomfortable. Like a man who suddenly realizes that he has given away far more than he intended.

‘You’re going too far, Sabir. Are you trying to tell me that in this picture, painted nearly five hundred years ago, we see the woman who is to be the Mother of the Parousia in the very process of impregnation?’

‘Of spiritual impregnation, yes. The true impregnation only comes later, after she has passed through the fire. After she has rid herself of the seven demons – or seven devils, what have you – spoken of in Luke 8:2 and Mark 16:9.’

‘You’ve done your homework, I see.’

‘I’ve tried, Calque. I’ve really tried.’ Sabir placed one hand over his eyes as if he wished to pray.

Calque recognized the movement as a sign of concentration – but also of attempted abnegation. He realized that Sabir was hovering, yet again, at the very end of his tether.

‘Finally we have
Elleuper, effronteux, effondrerie.
More Old French. “Tricked, impudent, demolition.” The last word can also mean a “turn up for the books” – a “surprise”. Something that happens on the “spur of the moment”. This is someone who has had a bad deal in their life. Someone whom others have abused.
Effronteux
can also mean “outraged”.’

‘In the form of a rape?’

‘No. It doesn’t have that meaning.’

‘So. Let me get this straight. A clear reading of the quatrain, taking into account the suggestions contained within it, and the sheer sound of it – what you call euphonic translation in your book, Sabir – would give us:

‘Yes. Something like that. Something along those lines.’

‘And this is the quatrain you decided meant that Yola was to be the mother of the Parousia?’

‘Yes. What’s so strange about that? Achor Bale had outraged and nearly killed her down by the river. He’d even threatened to sever her fallopian tubes so she could never have a child. I saved her. If I’m this Guide person, as you aver, then one could argue that by saving her I gave her life – I allowed her to be reborn. She is a Samana. And also someone of the “middle way” – Yola is no ascetic, if she’ll forgive me talking about her in the third person. She has no sisters. She is of the right age, at the right time, and in the right place. She is pregnant. What do you find wrong with all that?’

‘What do
you
find wrong with it? You’re the one who has convoked us all here. You must have some idea of why you are doing this? Why you’ve changed your mind?’

Yola stood up. ‘It’s not me.’ She handed the postcard back to Calque. ‘I know that now for certain. I’m not tortured and cheated like the woman in the verse. And Alexi is not the Guide. He has never guided anyone anywhere. And I didn’t get pregnant on the spur of the moment. Alexi and I planned my kidnapping. He took me to Corsica. I even planned where he would pluck out my eyes.’

Sabir sat with his head in his hands.

‘You are to be the father of the Parousia, Damo. Just in time for the Great Change of 2012 that the Mayans foretell. And like your shaman-hood, you simply cannot accept it. This is your greatest weakness. As Calque says, you refuse to see what is beneath your eyes.’

Sabir looked up. His face was livid and despairing. ‘So who is to be the mother? Lamia? Maybe she came from Gypsy stock before her adoption and we didn’t fucking know it? Maybe she decided to try and kill you to protect her own baby – a baby that neither of us, incidentally, knew that she was carrying? Either way it seems I’ve rather missed my chance there, haven’t I? Because she’s dead.’ Sabir stood up to go.

‘Sabir. Leave the gun.’

Sabir met Yola’s eyes, his gaze softening. ‘Don’t worry,
luludji
. I’m not going to kill myself quite yet.’

93

Abi parked the motorhome in a lay-by on the far side of the highway, a few hundred metres shy of the Serbian side of the Romanian border. He’d tried to persuade Antanasia to make her base in a nearby hotel, from where he promised to collect her when the whole thing was over. Antanasia refused, just as Abi had known that she would.

It wasn’t the best of spots, but Abi figured that the Mercedes Geist would blend in with all the container lorries and their resting drivers – many of whom were busy entertaining prostitutes in their hastily converted cabs – and the banks of taxis waiting to be summoned by shoppers overwhelmed with purchases from the very same market the copper-pot maker had no doubt been attending before he clip-clopped back across the border and saved Radu’s life a few months before. It was better than the open road, anyway.

Over the course of the next twenty-four hours there were long periods when neither of them spoke a word to the other. Such lacunae, however, were interspersed with sudden periods of intense questioning by Antanasia.

‘Tell me about the Parousia, Abiger. Tell me about that.’

Abi faked an intense concentration on the road ahead – he had no place to hide, and he knew it. ‘I thought you understood all about that. I thought your brother was the Parousia. That’s what he told everybody, wasn’t it? That’s what the long hair and the beard and the flowing clothes were all about, wasn’t it? Tricking people into believing he was the Second Coming?’

Antanasia stared silently at Abi from the passenger seat. The motorhome was so wide that four people could have squeezed into the gap between the front seats. The distance loomed between them like a no-man’s-land.

‘Okay. That was unfair of me.’ Abi shot a glance at her from over his right shoulder. ‘Jesus. I don’t what it is that you do to me. Now you’ve even got me apologizing to you.’

Antanasia lowered her eyes. She knew not to confront Abi when he was angry – she’d had more than enough of that sort of training from her father and brother.

Abi spat out his words. ‘The murderer Sabir blurted the truth out to my sister, Lamia, when he was ginch-struck and thought that he was in love with her. My older brother, Rocha, told us the same thing a few months before. That one of Nostradamus’s fifty-eight lost quatrains – quatrains that only Sabir has access to – tells when and where and via who the Second Coming will be born.’

‘But this is incredible.’ Antanasia decided that she would try and change Abi’s mood. She wasn’t scared of him – but anger of any sort unsettled her.

‘Incredible, yes, but apposite, given the belief many have that 21 December 2012 is going to mark a Great Change in the human tide. A change for the worse or the better, depending on how we play it. Madame, my mother, and the rest of the Corpus Maleficus were determined to make sure that it was the worst. Your brother was a major part of their plan.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t care either way. The world can go to hell as far as I am concerned.’

‘As long as you get what you want out of it?’

‘That’s pretty much the long and the short of it.’

They were both silent for some time.

‘Has the Parousia already been born?’

Abi shrugged. ‘Not to my knowledge. He’s still a bun in Yola Dufontaine’s oven as far as I can make out. The last sight I caught of her – which was, admittedly, in a pitch-dark hunting lodge in the middle of the Carpathian Mountains – I’d say he’s due within the month.’

‘Are you going to kill him too?’

‘No. I have no interest whatsoever in promulgating my mother’s idiocies. I’m after Sabir and Calque. And there’s a Gypsy called Radu I wouldn’t mind offing too. But him I can take or leave.’

Antanasia shook her head. ‘How does Sabir know that Yola is to be the mother of the Parousia?’

‘Search me. But I think it has something to do with the female line of Gypsies who have been guarding the verses since the sixteenth century – Nostradamus left the legacy to them via his daughter, Madeleine. The theory seems to be that one of this line of women – of childbearing age around the time of the Great Change – will be the mother. Yola seems to be the obvious candidate. Plus she’s pregnant. Plus she’s a Samana.’

‘A Samana?’

‘That’s the family who protected the verses. The Samanas. I know this for a fact because my brother Rocha killed Yola Dufontaine’s brother, and he was called Babel Samana.’

‘But I am a Samana, Abiger. The Samanas are Romani. My mother was a Romani Gypsy. She was called Zina Samana. She was murdered when I was still a child. For being a witch.’

Abi stared at Antanasia. His eyes flicked across her face and body without fixing anywhere. His face was a mask. ‘Are you pregnant? Is that it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

Antanasia raised a hand to her throat. ‘Of course not.’

‘Are you sure your brother didn’t rape you while you were unconscious? That would be the final irony. The fucking Third Antichrist fathering the Second Coming through his own sister. Even the Bible can’t outdo that one.’

Antanasia remained silent for a very long time. ‘He did rape me, yes. But not in a way I could get pregnant, if you understand my meaning. Before that time, I had not had sex with him for three months.’ She covered her face with both hands so that Abi could no longer see her. ‘I did not want to say this to you. To anyone. I am ashamed.’

Abi gripped the steering wheel as if he was about to rip it from its housing. ‘I’m glad I beat the bastard to death with his own whip. I’m glad I made him suffer. My only regret is that I should have taken longer over it. Far longer.’

Antanasia dropped her hands. ‘So you didn’t kill him the way you told me? By accident? When he was threatening you with a pistol?’

‘No. That was a lie too. In fact pretty much everything I’ve ever told you has been a lie. I keep on telling you this and you refuse to believe me. Maybe you think everything’s one great big lie?’ Abi gave a shrug. ‘Maybe you’re right, at that.’ Antanasia’s admission had broken something in Abi. Shattered some invisible barrier that had prevented him from telling her about his true self. ‘Let me lay it on the line for you then. Your brother tried to bribe me to finish whipping you to death after I’d as good as incapacitated him. You’ve got to hand it to the man – if there’s such as thing as evil, he was evil as all hell. And he carried it with him all the way to the countdown.’ Abi’s expression turned bitter. ‘Something he said must have got to me. Some particular thing. Or maybe it was the sight of you lying there, strapped to his bed? I’d seen you once before, you know.’

‘Of course. When your sisters kidnapped me.’