‘Oh. So that’s okay then?’
‘I don’t believe Madame, my mother, knew quite how out of control Rocha was. I don’t believe she wanted to have anyone killed. Rocha was working to his own agenda.’
Calque chose that moment to wade back into the conversation. ‘Rocha, or whatever you want to call him – I can’t think of him as anything other than Achor Bale myself – was definitely not working off his own bat. He was working at your mother’s instigation, and doing her bidding in everything.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘Of course not. That has always been my problem. Which is why the Countess got away with her dirty little scheme. In any halfway decent society she would have gone down for at least five years as an accessory before the fact. But she was far too well connected for that, wasn’t she? My Commandant actually admitted as much to my face. Which is one of the reasons why I took early retirement.’
‘Perhaps you were wrong? Perhaps she was innocent all the time? Have you thought of that?’
Calque made a pfaffing sound through his nose, like an irritated horse. ‘I knew it then, and I know it now – she’s guilty as hell.’
Sabir turned to Lamia. He took a deep breath. One part of him felt he needed to pin Lamia down about her family – the other part felt he ought to cut her a little slack. The first part won. ‘And your twin brothers? Were they just out to have a friendly little conversation with me up there in Stockbridge? Just chewing the fat, so to speak? Did I misunderstand their intentions? Maybe they didn’t really intend to burn down my house. Maybe they were just joshing me?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lamia. What’s got into you? Are you regretting coming with us? Would you rather go take your chances back with the Corpus?’
Lamia turned on Sabir. The unmarked side of her face had gone a deathly white. ‘No, of course not. But I don’t want you to demonize my family either. They really believe in what they are doing. They really believe that the de Bales have been tasked with protecting the world from the thousand-year return of the Devil. We have been doing it – not unsuccessfully – for nearly eight hundred years now.’
‘Well thank Christ someone’s been on the job.’ Sabir’s patience was wearing thin. How could an intelligent woman like Lamia act so blindly when it came to her family? He felt like reaching out and shaking her.
‘Just how have you been achieving this?’ This from Calque, who had taken advantage of his companions’ temporary lapse of attention to light a cigarette. As he spoke, he puffed smoke busily out through the open window.
‘All right. I will give you one example. During the French Wars of Religion, the Corpus, being good Catholics, targeted the Huguenots. It was a de Bale who, alongside the de Guises, persuaded King Charles IX to agree to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It was a Corpus member, also, who tried to assassinate Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. This was done specifically to trigger the massacre. In this way, France was spared the greater horrors that would later be visited on the German princely states.’
Sabir shook his head in blank incomprehension. ‘So the Massacre of the Huguenots was a good thing, was it? The way I understand it, out-of-control French Catholics went on to slaughter thirty thousand innocent men, women, and children in the months following the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It was a bloodbath, Lamia. But now you’re belatedly claiming that it was actually done to guarantee peace further down the line. Have I got that right?’
‘But these were devil worshippers, Adam. Cultists. People who thought the Pope was the Antichrist. They had to die.’
‘You can’t be serious?’
‘There are times when innocents must be killed in order to protect the majority.’
‘Oh, so they were innocent?’
‘Innocent in the sense of misguided. Yes.’
Sabir turned to Calque. ‘You’re a Catholic, too, I suppose?’
Calque gave an uncertain nod. ‘Yes. But I haven’t massacred anybody yet, so don’t look at me like that, Sabir.’
‘What do you make of what Lamia is saying?’
Calque hesitated. ‘I think the whole thing is a lot more complicated than it looks.’
Sabir pretended to fall backwards on his seat. ‘Oh, so now you’re in agreement with Lamia? The Corpus did do the right thing after all?’
Calque shook his head. ‘No. They didn’t do the right thing. It’s never right to massacre people, whatever you may think of their religion, or ethnicity, or point of view. But the Corpus thought they were doing the right thing. That’s the point that Lamia is trying to make. And that’s the point I realize we haven’t been taking into account about her mother.’
‘God God, Calque. If you carry on like this I may start suspecting that you have an open mind.’
‘An open mind? Perish the thought. But we do need to understand what actually drives the Corpus – the better, eventually, to defeat it. In my view Lamia has just made her own situation perfectly clear. She respects her mother’s viewpoint, but rejects it for herself.’
‘What are you saying? That we ought to share our information with the Corpus? Bring them into the loop?’ Sabir cradled his head on his hands, and gave Calque a sickly smile. ‘Perhaps you could offer the Countess a friendly hug when next you are passing Cap Camarat? I’m sure she would welcome you with open arms, Captain.’
Calque shrugged. ‘I’m not insane, Sabir. I remember only too well what that maniac Achor Bale was capable of. He killed my assistant, remember. A man no better than he should have been, perhaps. But a man, nonetheless, with a family, a fiancee, and a future. Achor Bale snuffed all that out without even pausing to draw breath.’
‘Then what are you suggesting?’
‘I’m saying that we need to understand exactly where the Corpus is coming from. What they are trying to achieve. Look, Lamia. You have to be considerably more open with us if we’re to have any chance at all of combating this thing. First off, does the Corpus still have the same sort of influence it appears to have wielded when France still had a king?’
Lamia hesitated. For a moment Sabir feared that she intended to duck the question. Then she shook her head. ‘No. All that ended with the Second World War.’
‘The Second World War? Explain yourself.’
Lamia took a deep breath. ‘Marechal Petain, the leader of Vichy France, was almost certainly a Corpus member. He attended both the St Cyr Military Academy and the Ecole Superieure de Guerre in Paris, both of which were hotbeds of Corpus activity towards the end of the nineteenth century. Later, Petain became a close friend of the Count, my father. But he and the Count disagreed bitterly on the Marechal’s policy of appeasement towards Germany. My father did not believe, for instance, that Adolf Hitler was the Second Antichrist. He thought, instead, that this particular distinction belonged to Josef Stalin. He disagreed, also, with the Vichy government’s policy towards the Jews. If he hadn’t been seriously injured in one of the early German bombardments, he might have been able to take all of this much further – made his influence felt behind the scenes in some way.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Very. He was convinced, for instance, that France was a natural ally of Russia, and not of Germany, and that we should never have tacitly allied ourselves with the Nazis against Stalin.’
‘So he was a communist?’
‘No. But he was prepared to use communists for his purposes.’
‘A nice distinction.’
‘My father’s injury put an end to France pursuing that particular line – in a way, you see, his injury paved the way for the eventual disintegration of the Corpus.’ Lamia glanced back at Calque. ‘A bit like the injury suffered by the Fisher King which diluted the power of the Round Table. You understand the parallels, Captain?’
Calque nodded. ‘Succinctly put. I understand you very well.’
‘Before that time we had been strong in the cadet schools, the military academies, and also in the civil service. Like a sort of Freemasonry, really. But the war changed all that. With Monsieur, my father, hors de combat, and taking into account his virulent dislike of the Hitler regime – which he privately believed to be devil-driven – all Corpus influence collapsed. Laval and Petain had their revenge in the end, you see. By the time my father recovered from both the physical and the psychological damage that he had received, France had changed utterly, becoming
