PART TWO
1
Achor Bale felt a deep calm descend on him as he watched the tracker pick out the location of Sabir’s car and follow it, pulsing gently.
And yes. There was the ghost of the police tracker too. So they were still on the job. Too much to hope that they had marked Sabir down for the attack in Montserrat. But there was a fair-to-middling chance that they had him tagged for the nightwatchman killing. Strange, though, that they still refused to pick him up – they must be after the verses as well. Both he and the police, it seemed, were playing a waiting game.
Bale smiled and fumbled around on the passenger seat for Macron’s identity card. He held it up in front of him and spoke directly to the photograph. ‘How are your feet, Paul? A little tender?’ He would meet Macron again – he was convinced of that. There was unfinished business there. How dare the French police pursue him into Spain? He would have to teach them a lesson.
For the moment, though, he would concentrate all his energies on Sabir. The man was heading south – and not towards Montserrat. Now why was that? He could hardly have heard about the attack there. And he had the exact same information concerning the verses that Bale had – the gist of the quatrain burned on to the base of the coffer and the additional verse from Rocamadour. Had the little gypsy girl at the river held something back from him when she had described the coffer-verse’s contents? No. He hardly thought so. You could always tell when somebody was so scared they couldn’t even control their bladder any more – it was impossible to counterfeit a fear as strong as that. It was like a springbok being taken by a lion – all the springbok’s physical mechanisms would close down once the lion had him around the neck, so that he’d be dead of shock even before his windpipe was crushed between the lion’s teeth.
That was the way Monsieur, his late father, had trained Bale to behave – to go forward unthinkingly and with total conviction. To decide in your head the optimum outcome of your actions and to remain true to that outcome regardless of any diversionary tactics on the part of your opponent. Chess functioned in much the same way and Bale was good at chess. It was all about the will to win.
To cap it all, his most recent phone call to Madame, his mother, had been of an entirely satisfactory nature. He had omitted to describe the fiasco in Montserrat, of course and had simply explained to her that the people he was following had been held up by a wedding – these were gypsies, after all and not rocket scientists. They were the sorts of people who would stop to pick wild asparagus by the roadside whilst on the run from the police. Sublime.
Madame, in consequence, had professed herself entirely satisfied with his conduct and had told him that, of all her many children, he was the one she held most dear to her heart. The one she most counted on to do her bidding.
As Bale drove south, he could feel the shades of Monsieur, his late father, smiling benevolently on him from beyond the grave.
2
‘I know where we must go to hide.’
Sabir turned towards Yola. ‘And where’s that?’
‘There is a house. Deep in the Camargues. Near the Marais de la Sigoulette. For many years it has been at the centre of a battle for succession on the part of five brothers, who all inherited from their father – strictly according to the letter of Napoleonic law, needless to say – and then could not agree on what to do with their shared property. None of them will speak to the others. So no one pays for the upkeep of the property, or to have it guarded. My father won the use of this house about fifteen years ago in a bet and it has become our territory since then. Our patrin.’
‘He won the use of it from the brothers? You’re joking?’
‘No. From some other gypsies who had also found it. It’s quite illegal to the gadje way of thinking, of course and nobody else knows about the deal – but with us the thing is set in stone. It’s simply accepted. We sometimes stay there when we go to the festival. There is no road in, only a rutted track. Around there, the gardiens use only their horses for transport.’
‘The gardiens?’
‘They are the guardians of the Camargues bulls. You see them on horseback, riding their white horses, sometimes carrying lances. They know every corner of the Camargues marshes. They are our friends. When Sara- e-kali is carried down to the sea, it is the Nacioun Gardiano who guard her for us.’
‘So they know about this house too?’
‘No. No one knows we use it but us. From the outside it does not seem inhabited. We have a way in through the cellar, though, so that it still seems as if the house is unlived in even when we are using it.’
‘What do we do with the car?’
‘We should leave it somewhere a long way away from the Camargues.’
‘But then the eye-man would lose touch with us. We have an agreement with Calque, remember?’
‘Then we leave it in Arles for the time being. We can hitch a ride into the Camargues with other gypsies. They will take us when they see us. We make a shpera sign on the road and they will stop. Then we get off a few kilometres from the house and walk in, carrying our food with us – for anything else we need I can go out and do the manghel.’
‘Do the what?’
‘Beg from farmhouses.’ Alexi looked up from his driving. He was becoming used to explaining things about the gypsy world to Sabir. His face even took on a particular expression – somewhere between that of a commercially driven television pundit and a newly enlightened spirit guide. ‘Ever since she was a chey, Yola, like all gypsy girls, has had to learn how to persuade local farmers to share their excess food. Yola is an artist at the manghel. People feel privileged to give her things.’
Sabir laughed. ‘That I can well believe. She’s certainly managed to persuade me to do a whole raft of things I would never have dreamed of doing if I’d had even a fraction of my wits about me. Speaking of which, what do we do when we are inside the house and you’ve plundered the local countryside for food?’
‘Once inside, we hide up until the festival. Kidnap Sara. Conceal her. Then we go back to the car and drive away. We call Calque. The police will do the rest.’
The smile froze on Sabir’s face. ‘Sounds awful easy, the way you tell it.’
3
‘I think I’ve got him.’
‘Drop back then.’
‘But I should keep him in sight.’
‘No, Macron. He will see us and spook. We’ll have one chance at this and one only. I’ve arranged an invisible roadblock just before Millau, where the road narrows through a canyon. We let him drive through it. Half a kilometre further on there’s another – this time obvious – roadblock. We let Sabir and the gypsies pass. Then we seal it off. If the eye-man tries to double back, we’ll have him like a rat in a trap. Even he won’t be able to scramble up sheer cliff.’
‘What about the verses?’
‘Fuck the verses. I want the eye-man. Off the streets. For good.’
