For Alexi would return. Bale was certain of that. He had seen the gypsy risking his life for the girl at Espalion, when she had collapsed in the road. If she was inside the Maset, the gypsy would home in on her like a wasp to a honey-pot. He had only to kill Sabir, put the girl out as bait and conjure up some creative way to pass the time.
He edged towards one of the main windows. Dusk was falling. Someone had lit an oil lamp and a pair of candles. Thin slivers of light emerged through the closed shutters. Bale smiled. Thanks to the residual glow of the lamps, there was no chance whatsoever of anyone making him out from inside the house. Even as close as six feet from the window and with their eyes glued to the slats, he would be next to invisible.
Bale listened out for voices. But there was only silence. He moved across to the kitchen window. That, too, was shuttered. So Gavril had been right. If this house were conventionally occupied, there was no way the shutters would be closed so early in the evening. One only had to look around at the yard and the outbuildings to see that the house had been abandoned for years. No wonder the gypsies valued it. It would be like a free hotel to them.
For a moment he was almost tempted to enter by the front door. If Sabir and the girl were acting in character, it would doubtless be unlatched. There were times when Bale felt almost irritated by the unprofessionalism of his opponents. Take the case of the Remington, for instance. Why had Sabir agreed to give it back to him? It had been madness. Did he really believe that Bale would have fired at him, with the Redhawk, on the outskirts of a town blessed with only two main exits, and two relatively minor ones? And before checking out the Black Virgin? That single decision of Sabir’s had left the three of them unarmed and without the slightest clue to Bale’s real identity, thanks to his unforgivable – but happily rectified – mistake about the serial number. It had been Slack thinking on Sabit’s part to overlook where the serial number could potentially have led them. Monsieur, his father, would have had something to say about that.
For Monsieur had always abhorred slack thinking. He had taken the cane to slack thinkers. There were days when he had beaten all thirteen children in a row, one after the other, starting with the largest. That way, when he came to the smallest – and factoring into account his advanced age and his medical condition – he would already be tired and the blows wouldn’t be nearly so painful. Now there was consideration for you.
Madame, his mother, had not been so thoughtful. With her, punishment had always been a one-on-one affair. That’s why – after Monsieur, his father’s, death – Bale had run away to join the Legion. Later, the move had proved unexpectedly useful and she had forgiven him. But for two years they had not spoken and he had been forced to carry out the duties of the Corpus Maleficus in isolation – without management or regulation. He had developed tastes, during that anarchic period, which Madame, his mother, later considered at variance with the movement’s aims. That was why he still hid things from her. Unfortunate details. Unavoidable deaths.
Things like that.
But Bale didn’t enjoy causing pain. No. It certainly wasn’t that. As with the horse at the ferry, he loathed seeing the suffering of animals. Animals couldn’t protect themselves. They couldn’t think. People could. When Bale asked questions of people, he expected answers. He might not have been born to his position in terms of blood but he had certainly been born to it in terms of character. He was proud of the ancient title of nobility, Monsieur, his father, had passed down to him. Proud of his family’s record in anticipating – and thereby counteracting – the Devil’s work.
For the Corpus Maleficus had a long and noble history. It had included amongst its rank of central adepts the papal inquisitors Conrad of Marburg and Hugo de Beniols; Prince Vlad Dr culea III; the Marquis de Sade; Prince Carlo Gesualdo; Tsar Ivan Grozny (The Terrible); Niccolo Machiavelli; Roderigo, Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia; Count Alessandro di Cagliostro; Gregor Rasputin; the Marechal Gilles de Rais; Giacomo Casanova; and the Countess Erzsebet Bathory. All had been grossly and continually misrepresented by succeeding generations of cavalier historians.
In Bale’s view – imbrued from countless hours of history lessons learned at the feet and at the behest, of Monsieur and Madame, his parents – Marburg and de Beniols had been falsely labelled as sadistic and vainglorious persecutors of the innocent when they had simply been carrying out the orders of the Mother Church; Vlad ‘the Impaler’ had been incorrectly accused of turning torture into an art, whilst he had, in reality, been defending – in whatever way was deemed expedient at the time – his beloved Wallachia against the horrors of Ottoman expansion; the Marquis de Sade had been unfairly charged by his detractors with libertinism and the fomentation of sexual anarchy, whereas, in the view of the Corpus, he had simply been promulgating an advanced philosophy of extreme freedom and tolerance designed to liberate the world from moral tyranny; the composer Prince Carlo Gesualdo had been wrongly castigated as a wife- and child-killer by his no doubt prejudiced accusers, merely as a result of defending the sanctity of his marital home against unwanted interference; history had tarred Tsar Ivan Grozny with the brush of ‘filicidal tyrant’ and ‘The Terrible’, whereas, to many of his countrymen and in the view of the Corpus, he had been the saviour of Slavonic Russia; Niccolo Machiavelli had been described by his critics as a teleological absolutist and a perpetrator of the politics of fear, labels designed to detract from the fact that he was also a brilliant diplomat, a poet, a playwright and an inspirational political philosopher; the entire Borgia family had been branded as both criminally corrupt and morally insane, whereas, in the Corpus’s view, they had (bar a few trifling infelicities) been enlightened popes, mighty lawmakers and inspired art lovers, deeply concerned with the supranational promulgation of the glories of the Italian High Renaissance; Count Alessandro di Cagliostro had been called both a charlatan and a Master forger – in fact he was an alchemist and a Kabbalist of the highest order, desperate to illuminate the as yet largely unplumbed depths of the occult; naturopath healer and visionary mystic Gregor Rasputin had been described by his critics as a lubriciously prepotent ‘mad monk’ who was single-handedly responsible for the destruction of the entrenched and moribund Russian monarchy – but who, Bale felt, could blame him? – who, in retrospect, would dare to cast the first stone?; Le Marechal Gilles de Rais had been called a paedophile, a cannibal and a torturer of children, but he had also been an early supporter of Joan of Arc, a brilliant soldier and an enlightened theatrical promoter whose hobbies, in certain specific and unimportant spheres, might occasionally have got the better of him – but did that discount his greater acts? The larger lived life? No. Of course not – and neither should it; Giacomo Casanova was considered by posterity to be both spiritually and ethically degraded, whereas he had, in reality, been an advanced liberal thinker, an inspired historian and a diarist of genius; and Countess Erzsebet Bathory, judged a vampirical mass murderess by her peers, had in fact been an educated, multilingual woman who had not only defended her husband’s castle during the Long War of 1593-1606, but had also frequently intervened on behalf of destitute women who had been captured and raped by the Turks – the fact that she had later exsanguinated certain of the more severely traumatised of her charges had been deemed by the Corpus (although largely with tongue firmly thrust into cheek) to be empirically necessary for the furtherance and secure propagation of the now all-consuming twenty-first century science of cosmetic enhancement. All had been ‘people of the fly’, inducted by their parents, grandparents, teachers or advisers, into the secret hermetic cabal of the Corpus – a cabal designed to protect and insulate the world from its own misguided instincts. As Monsieur, his father, had put it: ‘In a world of black and white, the Devil rules. Paint the world grey – muddy the boundaries of accepted morality – and the Devil loses his finger-hold.’
Later, what Monsieur, had called the ‘natural’ adepts had come along – those with an innately destructive gene, but who would not necessarily have recognised that what they were doing was in any way a part of a larger or more significant whole. Men and women like Catherine de Medici, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Ranavalona, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin Dada and Pol Pot. Each, in their turn, had been a diminisher of the status quo. A challenger of moral precepts. A shaker of the tree of civilisation. Natural adepts of the Corpus, fulfilling its aims despite – or perhaps even because of – their own self-styled agendas.
Such tyrants drew acolytes to them like a bug-zapper draws flies. They acted as recruiting grounds for the weak, the halt and the morally insane – just the category of people the Corpus needed in order to fulfil its aims. And the greatest and most successful of these – thus far at least – had been the first two Antichrists predicted in Revelations: Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. Unlike their predecessors, both men had acted globally and not merely nationally. They had functioned as catalysts for a greater evil – one designed to placate the Devil and keep him from permanently investing the earth with his incubi and succubae.
Bale knew instinctively that the Third Antichrist spoken of in Revelations – the ‘One Still To Come’ – would easily outdo both his predecessors in the grandeur of his achievements. For chaos, the Corpus believed, was in everyone’s best interests – because it forced people to conspire against it. To act communally and with dynamic creativity. All the greatest inventions – all civilisation’s mightiest leaps – had occurred during periods of fl ux. The
