‘ Malos mengues! ’ Alexi slapped himself on the forehead with his flattened palm. He reared up, prepared for flight. ‘Are they already in the camp?’
‘Sit down, you fool. Do you think I’d still be here if they really intended to take me?’
Alexi hesitated. Then he dropped back on to the tree stump he had been using as a seat. ‘You’re crazy, Damo. I nearly threw up. I thought I was going straight to prison. It’s not funny to joke that way.’
‘I wasn’t joking. You remember that guy who came to talk to you in the camp at Samois? With his assistant? About Babel? While I was in the wood-box?’
‘The wood-box. Yes.’
‘It was the same guy. I recognised his voice. It was the last thing I heard before I blacked out.’
‘But why did he let you go? They still think it was you that murdered Babel, don’t they?’
‘No. Calque doesn’t. That’s his name, by the way. Calque. He was the police officer Yola saw in Paris.’
Yola nodded. ‘Yes, Damo. I remember him well. He seemed a fair man – at least for a payo. He accompanied me down to the place where they keep the dead to make sure that they allowed me to cut Babel’s hair myself. That they didn’t give me somebody else’s hair. Otherwise Babel wouldn’t have been properly buried. He understood this, when I told him. At least he pretended to.’
‘Well, Calque and some of his Spanish cronies have just had a run-in with the maniac who kicked Alexi in the balls. Only guess where it happened? Montserrat. The bastard went back to Rocamadour after we’d left and worked the riddle out for himself. He’s been on our tail ever since Samois, apparently. Tracking our car.’
‘Tracking our car? That is impossible. I’ve been watching.’
‘No, Alexi. Not by sight. With an electronic bug. Which means he can follow us at a distance of, say, a kilometre and never be seen. That’s how he got to Yola so fast.’
‘ Putain. We’d better take it out of there.’
‘Calque wants us to keep it in.’
Alexi screwed his face up in concentration as he tried to disentangle the different elements Sabir was giving him. He looked down at Yola. She was filtering the coffee and chicory through a sieve as though nothing had happened. ‘What do you think, luludji?’
Yola smiled. ‘I think we should listen to Damo. I think he has something more to tell us.’
Sabir took the cup Yola offered him. He sat down beside her on the log. ‘Calque wants us to act as bait.’
‘What is bait?’
‘As a lure. For the man who killed Babel. So that the police can trap him. I have told him that I am willing to do this, in order to clear my name. But that you must both be allowed to decide for yourselves.’
Alexi drew his hand across his throat. ‘I am not working with the police. This I will not do.’
Yola shook her head. ‘If we are not with you, the man will know something is wrong. He will be suspicious. Then the police will lose him. Is this not so?’
Sabir glanced at Alexi. ‘He nearly crippled Calque’s assistant back at Montserrat. He also cold-cocked one of the Spanish paramilitaries out on the Sierra. And he killed a security guard back at Rocamadour two days ago. Which serves us damned well right for not checking out the newspapers or the radio during the wedding. Back on the road, before he attacked Yola, he ran over and injured an innocent bystander and half throttled his wife, merely in order to create a diversion. The French police want him and they want him bad. This is a big operation now. And we’re to be a major part of it.’
‘What does he want, Damo?’ Yola had forgotten herself for long enough to be seen drinking coffee with the two men in public. One of the older married women walked by and frowned at her, but she took no notice.
‘The verses. Nobody knows why.’
‘And where are they? Do we know?’
Sabir took a sheet of paper out of his pocket. ‘Look. Calque just gave me this. He got it off the base of La Morenita at Montserrat:
‘L’antechrist, tertius Le revenant, secundus Primus, la foi Si li boumian sian catouli’
Primus, secundus, tertius quartus, quintus, sextus, septimus, octavus, nonus, decimus.
Those are the ordinal numbers in Latin, corresponding to first, second, third, fourth, fifth and so on. So the antichrist is the third one. The ghost, or the one who comes back, is the second one. Faith, is the first one. And the last bit I don’t understand at all.’
‘It means “if the gypsies are still Catholic.’’ ’
Sabir turned towards Yola. ‘How the Hell do you know that?’
‘Because it’s in Romani.’
Sabir sat back and weighed up the pair sitting in front of him. He already felt a powerful sense of kinship with them, and he was gradually becoming aware of what a wrench he would feel at losing them, or at having his relationship with them curtailed in any way. They had become strangely familiar to him, like real, rather than simply notional, members of his family. With a burgeoning sense of amazement at his own humanity, Sabir realised that he needed them – probably more than they needed him. ‘I kept something back from Calque. Some information. I’m still not sure I did the right thing, though. But I wanted us to retain an edge. Something neither side knew about.’
‘What information was that?’
‘I kept the first quatrain from him. The one that was carved on the base of your coffer. The one that reads:
“Heberge par les trois maries Celle d’Egypte la derniere fit La vierge noire au camaro duro Tient le secret de mes vers a ses pieds”
I’ve been thinking about it a lot, recently and I think it holds the key.’
‘But you already translated it. It gave us the clue to Rocamadour.’
‘But I translated it wrongly. I missed some of the clues. Specifically in the first – and traditionally most important – line. I had it down as ‘ Sheltered by the three married people ’, and stupidly, because it seemed to make no sense, I paid no real attention to it after that. If I’m brutally honest, I allowed myself to be distacted by the neat little anagram in line three and my own cleverness in teasing it out and interpreting it. Intellectual vanity has done for far wiser people than me and Nostradamus knew this. He may even have rigged the whole thing to send idiots like me off half-cocked – as a sort of riddle, or something, to see if we were bright enough to warrant taking seriously. Five hundred years ago such a mistake would have cost me weeks of useless travelling. Luck and modern progress have cut that down to a few days. It was something that Gavril said to me last night that made me change my mind about it.’
‘Gavril. That pantrillon. What can he have said that would enlighten anybody?’
‘He said that you and he would sort out your disagreement at the feet of Sainte Sara, Alexi. At the festival of Les Trois Maries. At Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargues.’
‘So what? I’m looking forward to it. It’ll give me an opportunity to free him up a little space for a few extra gold teeth himself.’
‘No. It’s not that.’ Sabir shook his head impatiently. ‘Les Trois Maries. The Three Marys. Don’t you see it? That acute accent I wrote down in the quatrain – the one over maries, which turned it into maries – that was simply Nostradamus’s way of covering the meaning with soot. We didn’t read it right. And it skewed the real meaning of the quatrain. The only thing I still don’t understand is who the mysterious Egyptian woman is.’
Yola rocked forwards. ‘But that’s simple. She is Sainte Sara. She, too, is a Black Virgin. To the Rom she is the most famous Black Virgin of all.’
‘What are you talking about, Yola?’
‘Sainte Sara is our patron saint. The patron saint of all the gypsies. The Catholic Church does not recognise her as a true saint, of course, but to gypsies she matters far more than the other two real saints – Marie Jacobe, the sister of the Virgin Mary and Marie Salome, the mother of the apostle James the Greater and also of John.’
‘So what’s the Egyptian connection, then?’
‘Sainte Sara is called by us Sara l’Egyptienne. People who think they know things say that all gypsies originally come from India. But we know better. Some of us came from Egypt. When the Egyptians tried to cross the Red Sea, after the flight of Moses, only two escaped. These two were the founders of the gypsy race. One of their descendants was Sara-e-kali – Sara-the-black. She was an Egyptian Queen. She came to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer when it was a centre for worship of the Egyptian sun god – it was called Oppidum-Ra in those days. Sara became its Queen. When the three Maries – Marie Jacobe, Marie Salome and Marie Magdalene, together with Martha,
