you see. It’s one of those phrases one supposes must signify something, but it’s actually meaningless. Yes, cama is bed in Spanish and duro means hard. But the mention of the Black Virgin gave me the true key. It’s an anagram.’
‘A what?’
‘An anagram. That means when one or two words disguise another word, which can be made out of all the letters. Hidden inside the words camaro duro we have a clear anagram for Rocamadour. That’s a famous place of pilgrimage in the Lot valley. Some say it’s even the true beginning of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. And there’s a famous Black Virgin there, which women have gone to for many generations to pray for success in having children. Some even say that she is half man, half woman – half Mary and half Roland. For the paladin Roland’s phallic sword, Durendal, resides to this day in a vulva-shaped cleft high up in the rock near the Virgin’s shrine. She was certainly there in Nostradamus’s time. In fact I don’t think she’s moved anywhere in eight centuries.’
‘Is that where we’re going, then?’
Sabir looked at his two companions. ‘I don’t think we have much choice in the matter.’
34
Yola set two of the cups of coffee into their holders and gave the third to Sabir. ‘You mustn’t be seen. These garages have cameras. We shouldn’t stop in such places again.’
Sabir watched Alexi winding his way through the shop towards the rest room. ‘Why is he here, Yola?’
‘He wants to kidnap me. But he doesn’t have the courage. And now he is scared that you might do so when he isn’t around. That’s why he’s here.’
‘Me? Kidnap you?’
Yola sighed. ‘In Manouche families, a man and a woman run off together when they want to get married. It is called a ‘kidnapping’. If a man ‘kidnaps’ you, it is the equivalent of marriage because the girl will no longer be – I don’t know how to say this – intact.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Why should I joke? I’m telling you the truth.’
‘But I’m your brother.’
‘Not by blood, stupid.’
‘What? That means I could marry you?’
‘With the Bulibasha’s permission, as my father is dead. But if you did that, Alexi would get seriously angry. And then he might choose to really hit you with the knife.’
‘What do you mean ‘might choose to really hit me’? He missed me cleanly.’
‘Only because he wanted to. Alexi is the best knife-thrower in the camp. He does it at circuses and fairgrounds. Everybody knows that. That’s why the Bulibasha chose the knife judgement. They all realised Alexi thought you were innocent of Babel’s death. Otherwise he would have split your hand in two.’
‘Do you mean that all that theatre was just a put-on? That everybody knew all the time that Alexi was going to miss me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what if he’d hit me by mistake?’
‘Then we’d have had to kill you.’
‘Oh great. That makes sense. Yeah. I see it all clearly now.’
‘You mustn’t be angry, Adam. This way, everybody accepts you. If we’d done it another way, you would have had problems later.’
‘Well that’s all right then.’
Calque watched the two of them through his binoculars. ‘I recognise the girl. It’s Samana’s sister. And Sabir, of course. But who’s the swarthy one using the pissoire?’
‘Another cousin, probably. These people are sick with cousins. Scratch one and cousins fall off them like ticks.’
‘Don’t you like gypsies, Macron?’
‘They’re layabouts. No southerner likes gypsies. They steal, trick and use people for their own purposes.’
‘ Putain. Most people do that in one way or another.’
‘Not like them. They despise us.’
‘We haven’t made life easy for them.’
‘Why should we?’
Calque pretended to nod. ‘Why indeed?’ He would have to watch Macron more carefully, though, in future. In his experience, if a man had one outspoken prejudice, he would be doubly as likely to harbour other, more secret ones, which would only emerge in a crisis. ‘They’re moving. Look. Give them half a minute and then follow on behind.’
‘Are you sure this is regular, Sir? I mean, leaving a murderer to go about his business on the public highway? You saw what he did to Samana.’
‘Have you forgotten about our other friend so quickly?’
‘Of course not. But we’ve nothing against him but your instinct. We have Sabir’s actual blood on Samana’s hand. We can place him at the murder scene.’
‘No we can’t. But we can place him at the bar where the blooding took place. And we have him travelling, seemingly of his own free will, with Samana’s sister. What do you think? That she’s suffering from Stockholm syndrome?’
‘Stockholm syndrome?’
Calque frowned. ‘Sometimes, Macron, I forget that you are quite so young. A Swedish criminologist, Nils Bejerot, coined the term in 1973 after a bank robbery in the Norrmalmstorg district of Stockholm went wrong and a number of hostages were taken. Over the course of six days, some of the hostages began to sympathise more with their captors than with the police. The same thing happened to the newspaper heiress, Patty Hearst.’
‘Ah.’
‘Do you think that Sabir has somehow managed to mesmerise an entire gypsy camp and turn them into his willing accomplices?’
Macron sucked at his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t put anything at all past such people.’
35
‘Do you still feel capable of handling this situation alone?’
Achor Bale was briefly tempted to throw the handset out of the car window. Instead, he gave the woman in the vehicle overtaking him a sarcastic smile, in response to her disapproving look about his use of a cellphone whilst driving.
‘Of course, Madame. Everything is copacetic, as the Americans say. I have Sabir under surveillance. I’ve identified the police car following them. The poor fools have even switched number-plates in an effort to throw off any pursuit.’
The woman’s husband was now leaning forward and gesticulating for him to put down his phone.
Peugeot drivers, thought Bale. In England, they would drive Rovers. In America, Chevrolets or Cadillacs. He pretended to lose concentration and allowed his car to drift a little towards the Peugeot.
The husband’s eyes opened wider. He reached across his wife and honked the horn.
Bale glanced into his rear-view mirror. Alone on the road. Might be amusing. Might even buy him a little extra
