her impermeable self-belief? Perhaps if you were truly convinced that whatever you undertook was automatically rubber-stamped by God, then you also believed that the rest of the world’s idiots would play along with your fantasy? ‘May I have my tape recorder back?’
‘Perhaps you would like us to indemnify you against the loss of your cell phone, too? There are limits even to my patience, Captain.’
Calque hesitated, still not sure whether the Countess truly intended to let him go free. He took a tentative step towards the door. When no one made a move to stop him, he headed swiftly in the direction of the hall. He was briefly tempted to crook his arm obscenely at the ghoulish footman, but thought better of it. Perhaps this was all some outrageous bluff, and the minute he left the Countess’s presence they would manhandle him down the cellar stairs and start in on him with their rubber hosepipes?
He allowed the thought to fester inside him all the way to his car. Perhaps they’d tricked that up instead? Sawn through the cables? Drained the brake fluid? Set a bomb to go off on a trembler mechanism the moment he broke through the fifty-kilometre-an-hour mark? Christ knows, they’d had enough time. Calque felt like a gallus gladiator, forced to exit through the gates of the Circus Maximus at the tip of a spear in order to appease the bloodthirsty expectations of the crowd.
It was gradually dawning on him that he had pitched himself against an organization so complete in its self- belief – and so hermetic in its identity – that no single man could ever hope to match himself against it.
Puffing with relief, Calque climbed into his car and started the engine. His hand trembled as he put the car into first gear. With his foot still braced on the clutch pedal, Calque reached across for the crocodile-skin cigarette case his wife had given him when they were first married. Miraculously, it had somehow evaded the divorce settlement. He scattered its contents like chaff onto the passenger seat. Palming the nearest cigarette, he speared it between his lips. For some reason he had considerable difficulty matching the tip of the cigarette to the glow of the cigar lighter.
No one followed him out of the courtyard. No one followed him to the junction with the main road. Mystified, Calque turned right, towards Ramatuelle. No. There was definitely no one on his tail.
He pulled over into the first available lay-by and got out. First he lay on the ground and checked the underside of the car. Nothing. No sign of tampering. Then he looked in the engine compartment. Clean as a whistle. He felt around beneath the seats. Then he went around to the back of the car and checked there, paying particular attention to the exhaust pipe. Finally, he eased up the spare wheel cover. If the Corpus had bugged him or booby- trapped him, they’d certainly concealed their work well.
Calque got back in the car, readjusted his seat, and set off again. Twenty yards into the journey his body gave a convulsive shudder, like a horse shucking off rainwater. Calque hammered the steering wheel in sheer frustration at his lack of physical self-control. He simply must pull himself together. He daren’t fritter any more time away appeasing his unfounded fears. He had to retrieve his cell phone at all costs. Adam Sabir’s home number in America was concealed somewhere within its maw, and Calque’s first priority must be to warn the man that the Corpus was still on his case.
For Joris Calque had learned one valuable thing from his conversations with the Countess and with Lamia – and it had come to him more or less by default. The Countess had spoken about everything under the sun during their discussion – everything but Sabir. The man’s name hadn’t even figured. And yet Sabir was the very first person Lamia had asked him about when she’d regained consciousness after her doping.
Calque hadn’t spent the better part of his life interrogating people for nothing. He knew for a fact that the questions people left hanging – and the obvious names that they omitted during formal police interviews – were invariably of more significance than the ones they voluntarily allowed to surface.
The one thing he wouldn’t be doing when he got his cell phone back would be to try to interest any old friends in the Police Nationale about the curious disappearance of Philippe Lemelle – the Countess had figured it right. Jean Picaro had put his neck on the line to help the girl, and later to warn Calque that the Corpus was on to him – and Calque knew a multitude of so-called law-abiding people who wouldn’t have done half so much for a man they hardly knew, or for an unknown woman who had nothing whatsoever to do with the job they were being paid for.
Picaro had asked him to go easy as a personal favour on behalf of his wife and son. And Picaro was a two- time loser – meaning that the next occasion he was sent to prison, he would stay there for good. No parole. No time off for good behaviour.
Though it pained Calque’s soul to let the Countess wriggle off the hook, it was better, sometimes, to let sleeping dogs lie.
30
Calque sat in his car, watching the entrance to the Hotel de la Place at Cogolin. It was twelve o’clock. The lunchtime traffic was just building up. He’d tried to contact Sabir three times on the way back from Ramatuelle, but the phone at Sabir’s Massachusetts’ home simply rang in an endless, useless litany.
What would he have said to Sabir, anyway? Watch your back, man? How would Sabir go about doing that? Hire himself a bodyguard? Call in the FBI? Or he could have advised Sabir to take off on an extended holiday. Which was even more pointless. Calque had the Countess’s measure now – the woman was implacable. When and if she ever decided to revenge herself on the man who had killed her son, mere geography wouldn’t act as a deterrent.
In the event Calque didn’t have a single shred of evidence to place in front of Sabir – just a hunch that Sabir felt the same way as he did about the Corpus. That Sabir, of all men, wouldn’t believe that the Corpus’s ambitions had died down there in that cesspit alongside Achor Bale. No. Calque was convinced that they still wanted what Sabir had. They still wanted the prophecies.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, he realized what a fool he’d been not to trust the girl from the outset. He might at least have got something concrete out of her – some clue as to the Corpus’s true intentions to compensate for his fiasco with the tape recorder. Instead, he’d held back, like the obstinate policeman he still was, and more or less gifted her back to her family. He could feel the frustration eating away at his guts like arsenic.
All Calque’s case notes were up in that hotel room, together with Sabir’s private address, and his detailed annotations about the last conversation they’d had together, including the tantalizing clues Sabir had given him about the 52 lost prophecies – out of Nostradamus’s original 58 – which specifically dealt with the run-up to what may, or may not, prove to be planet earth’s final Armageddon. It had never occurred to Calque to conceal them. He’d been running the show – not the Corpus. Or at least that’s what he’d thought. Now it looked very much as if the hound had become the quarry.
Calque stepped out of the car. His eyes raked the surrounding area. Across the way, a small queue of people was steadily making its way into the adjoining restaurant section of the hotel. Calque felt his stomach turn over with hunger.
He strode across to the hotel entrance and sidestepped through the revolving doors. The concierge wasn’t at his post. Perhaps he, too, was having his lunch? Like any normal person at midday.
Calque scanned the hotel message board. His room key was no longer in place. He had been half expecting that, of course, after the Countess’s hints, but still he found himself having to fight off a strong desire to break into a trot and head straight back out into the street.
Some deep-seated part of Calque’s make-up was still resisting the thought that the prophecies might have any value whatsoever beyond the purely commercial. How could a man born half a millennium ago be expected to predict an accurate series of events 450 years in the future? No rational person could entertain such an idea. Adam Sabir had been in a post-traumatic state, and still recuperating in hospital, when he had told Calque of Nostradamus’s prediction of the 52-year run-up to the Great Change in 2012. Third Antichrists? Second Comings? The whole thing was insane. Calque wondered whether he wasn’t suffering from the early onset of senile dementia. That would explain why he had temporarily suspended all rational judgement and allowed Sabir and the Gypsies to get so deeply under his skin.
But belief or non-belief was no longer the point. Crimes had been committed. People had been killed and injured. Incipient dementia or not, Calque’s sole remaining purpose in life must be to stop the commission of yet
