had known him, had he opened up even remotely about his private life. He might have been a lay monk for all they knew. Now he had spread out all his dirty linen for them to witness, and they didn’t know quite how to respond.
‘It’s a shame they don’t serve wine here,’ said Sabir. ‘I could do with a glass or two myself.’
Lamia glared at him as if he had just overset a saucepot on her dress.
Sabir swallowed, and tried to redeem himself. ‘Calque, that’s terrible. You mean your daughter won’t even speak to you any more?’
This time Lamia aimed a kick at his shin under the table.
Calque, however, appeared not to have heard him. ‘Everything is fine now, though. I have taken early retirement from the police force. I have become obsessed with the after-effects of my final case. I have spent the past five weeks sitting in a camouflaged hideout on a hillside in southern France. I have ruined myself afresh by bribing a criminal to break into Lamia’s mother’s house and retrieve a tape recorder with nothing on it. I have come to America – a land of which I know nothing, and care to know even less – a land where people seem to subsist on fried food and takeaways – and I have made it my own. I have been pursued by madmen, and I have evaded them. I am surrounded by my friends.’ Calque dipped his corn bread into the baby rib sauce and ate it with every impression of relish. ‘Life is treating me well, in other words. Far better than I deserve.’
Sabir had a quizzical expression on his face. He glanced across at Lamia. ‘Is he joking? Or is he being serious?’
Lamia smiled. ‘He is being serious. Only he has a very French way of making his serious point.’
‘What? A sort of zigzaggy kind of a way? A down-hill-and-over-dale kind of a way? An up and down a few lurching by-ways and around a few blind corners kind of a way?’
‘Yes. That is it. That is it exactly.’
Calque had gone back to eating, seemingly unmoved by the remainder of the conversation.
It was as if he had laid his cards on the table, just as pre-arranged, and now it was up to everybody else to decide just what they were going to do with them.
27
All had been going well for the Corpus until their extended caravan arrived in the small town of Wakulhatchee, just south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at around nine p.m. on an unseasonably hot Friday night.
It had been a long day’s driving for the ten-car, eleven-person ersatz surveillance team. A day whose effects were exacerbated both by the continual need for caution, and by the inevitable wear and tear caused by the obsessive twenty-minute rotas that Abi had insisted upon despite the fact that the trio they were following in the Grand Cherokee appeared to have not the remotest idea that they were still being watched.
Even during the trio’s lunch break – when it might have appeared reasonable for the team to stand down and take it easy – Abi had refused permission for any of his brothers and sisters to take time off for anything more than a snack. ‘You can relax this evening. When they’re static. We’ll only need two people at any one time to watch them then. So the rest of you can go off and get some R amp; R.’
‘Which two are going to watch them?’
Abi could see storm clouds looming. He put on his most placatory voice. ‘Vau and I will take the first four- hour shift. We’re the freshest. And the pressure’s been off us all day. The rest of you can draw lots for who’s next in line. Those four hours ought to give you all the time you need to get some food and drink inside you and lighten up a little. If our trio decide on a late outing we’ll call you and tell you whereabouts they’re headed. We don’t want you all to crash into each other like ninepins. If Lamia catches sight of any of us, we’re done for. They’ll bolt again, and this time they’ll make damned sure they’re not followed. No. We need to keep them sweet and unaware.’
For their part Calque, Lamia, and Sabir had found another of their Olde Worlde – read terminally rundown – motels, on the very edge of town. This one was managed by a Polish family – and they, too, barely raised an eyebrow at their guests’ unconventional sleeping arrangements.
After watching the trio check in, Abi and Vau settled down to watch the entrance to the motel from 150 yards down the street. They were driving a different rental from the one they had been using in Massachusetts – a vehicle that had not been within sight of the Cherokee all day.
‘How do you think it’s going?’ Vau asked his brother.
‘In a word? Shit.’
Vau sat silently for a while. ‘I don’t get you, Abi. We’ve still got them under surveillance. The whole family are here to support us. What is there to complain about?’
‘Inactivity. That’s to complain about.’
Vau raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
‘Oh, come on, Vau. You know very well who you’re dealing with here. Our bunch of siblings are used to getting everything they want whenever they want it. They either buy it or they grab it off someone else. That sort of freedom acts like an inbuilt dynamo. Now we’re asking that same bunch of anarchists to rein themselves in and conduct a sort of interminable holding operation. Heck, Sabir could be intending to drive as far as Brazil for all we know. Which is fine for him – he owns his damned vehicle. But what do we do? Somehow, at every border, we’re going to have to dump the rentals and fetch ourselves new ones. Without losing our marks.’
‘But why should we be crossing borders? They might be heading down to Florida.’
‘Florida? Haven’t you looked at your map recently? We’ve just driven along the fucking Appalachian Mountains – we’re heading for Texas.’
‘Well. Texas, then.’
‘What’s beyond Texas?’
Vau thought for a moment. ‘Mexico, I suppose.’
‘Don’t you think they might be heading for there?’
‘Why?’
‘Anything happen there in the past few days? Anything out of the ordinary?’
Vau thought again. Then he shook his head. ‘No. Not that I heard of.’
Abi settled himself further down in his seat and closed his eyes. ‘Jesus.’
28
The place was called Alabama Mama’s, and it was situated on the far opposite edge of Wakulhatchee to the trio’s motel. It was basically a parking lot with a corrugated iron building pitched into the middle of it. The corrugated iron had originally been painted rust red, but over the years the patina had changed until it had now come to resemble a sort of inverted, badly limed-up, coffee pot.
At ten o’clock on a Friday evening the car park was still mostly empty, so the sudden arrival of a phalanx of New York registered rentals didn’t do more than flurry the waters. A few odd looks were cast in the Corpus’s direction – they were, after all, quite noticeable – but nothing untoward either occurred or suggested itself.
Of the nine siblings who entered Alabama Mama’s that night, Athame was a virtual dwarf, with tiny hands and feet, Berith had a harelip, Rudra limped in an extrovert manner on account of his untreated club foot, Alastor was spectre thin from the effects of cachexia, Asson was enormously fat, Dakini had hair which grew down below her buttocks framing a face frozen into a sort of malevolent rictus, Nawal suffered from hirsutism, Oni was a seven- foot-tall albino, and Aldinach was a true hermaphrodite.
Of these, Aldinach was the most ordinary looking, as he/she had decided to be a she tonight, given the heat and the sub-tropical climate that ensured that even at nine o’clock in the evening – and freakishly, even in October – the ambient temperature was well above thirty degrees. Inside the club it was hotter still, with the slowly churning ceiling fans barely ruffling the overheated air.
Aldinach had therefore chosen to wear a thin seersucker cotton dress, cut low to show off her small, but perfectly formed, breasts. She was wearing red patent leather ‘fuck-me’ shoes with five-inch heels, and the
