horseback, spewing blood, in an area bounded by two rarely used roads and a river. Once daylight comes, he will stick out like an ant on a blank sheet of paper. He will be caught – either from the air or in the land net. The area is already ninety per cent sealed off. In under an hour, we will have made it a hundred.’
‘I know that, but…’
‘My assistant is dead, Monsieur Sabir. He sacrificed himself for you and the girl. First thing tomorrow morning I will have to go and explain his death to his family. How it could possibly have happened on my watch. How I let it happen. Are you sure you heard him right? About Montpellier, I mean? And the two hours?’
Sabir held Calque’s eyes with his own. Then he allowed his gaze to slide back towards the house. The distant sound of an ambulance cut through the night air like a lament.
‘You’re right, Captain Calque. I’m just a stupid Yank. My French is a little rusty. Montpellier. Marseille. They all sound the same to me.’
62
‘I’m not going to the hospital. And neither is Alexi.’ Yola watched Sabir warily. She was not sure how far she could go with him – how deep his gadje hood really reached. She had taken him aside for this one purpose. But now she was concerned that his fractured male pride would make him that much harder to convince.
‘What do you mean? You came this close to being strangled.’ Sabir slid one of his hands inside the other and then twisted. ‘And Alexi fell from his horse on to a steel barrier and some concrete. He could have internal injuries. You need a complete medical check-up and he needs intensive care. In a hospital. Not in a caravan.’
Yola modulated the tone of her voice, consciously playing up her femininity – playing on the affection she knew Sabir felt for her. His susceptibility to the distaff side. ‘There is a man at Les Saintes-Maries. A curandero. One of our own people. He will look after us better than any gadje doctor.’
‘Don’t tell me. He’s your cousin. And he uses plants.’
‘He is the cousin of my father. And he uses more than plants. He uses the cacipen. He uses the knowledge of cures that have been passed down to him in dreams.’
‘Oh. Well. That’s all right then.’ Sabir watched as a woman in a plastic suit began photographing the interior of the Maset. ‘Let me get this straight. You want me to convince Calque to let you into this man’s care? To save Alexi from the sawbones? Is that it?’
Yola made her decision. ‘You have not told the policeman about Gavril yet, have you?’
Sabir fl ushed. ‘I thought Alexi was sick. I didn’t realise he had brought you so swiftly up to date.’
‘Alexi tells me everything.’
Sabir allowed his gaze to wander somewhere over Yola’s right shoulder. ‘Well, Calque’s got enough on his plate. Gavril can wait. He’s going nowhere fast.’
‘Calque will blame you for holding out on him. You know that. He will blame Alexi, too, when he discovers who really found the body.’
Sabir shrugged. ‘Maybe so. But why should he ever find out? We’re the only three who know what Alexi stumbled on. And I’m damned sure Alexi won’t tell him. You know how he feels about cops.’
Yola stepped around and placed herself firmly in Sabir’s sight-line. ‘You have not told him because you want to retrieve the prophecies first.’
A rush of outraged virtue triumphed over Sabir’s instinctive sense of moral discretion. ‘What’s wrong with that? It would be madness to lose them at this stage.’
‘Even so, Damo, you must tell the policeman. Tell him now. Gavril has a mother who is still living. A good woman. It is not her fault that her son was a bad person. Whatever he was, whatever he did, he must not lie any longer unmourned – like an animal. The Manouche believe that a person’s wrong actions are cancelled out by their death. For us there is no Hell. No evil place that people go to when they are dead. Gavril was one of us. It would not be right. Do this thing and I will retrieve the prophecies for you. Secretly. While the policeman watches over you and Alexi.’
Sabir threw back his head. ‘You’re crazy, Yola. The eye-man is still out there somewhere. How can you even think of such a thing?’
Yola took another step towards him. She was consciously forcing herself into his space. Making it impossible for Sabir to ignore her – to write her off as a mere woman, braving waters better suited to men. ‘I know him now, Damo. The eye-man has spoken privately to me. Revealed something of himself. I can combat him. I shall take with me a secret. Passed down to the curandero from the snake woman, Lilith, many mothers ago, when she gave the chosen ones of our family the second sight.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Yola. Death is the only thing that will defeat the eye-man. Not second sight.’
‘And it is death that I shall carry with me.’
63
The gelding had quailed at the scent of Bale’s blood. Its legs had splayed as if it did not know in which direction it intended going. When Bale had tried to approach it, the gelding had thrown back its head in panic and dragged against its reins, which were tied in a bunch to a branch of the tree. The reins had snapped and the gelding had backed wildly away, then twisted on its haunches and galloped frantically up the track towards the main road.
Bale glanced back towards the house. The agony in his neck and arm cancelled out the sounds of the night. He was losing blood fast. Without the horse, they would catch him within the hour. Any minute now they would be here, with their helicopters and their searchlights and their infrared night glasses. They would dirty him. Tarnish him with their fingers and with their hands.
Clutching his left arm to his side to prevent it swinging, Bale did the only thing he could possibly do.
He began to retrace his steps towards the Maset.
64
Sabir watched the police car take Yola and Alexi away. He supposed that it was a deal that he had reluctantly cut with Calque but words like ‘rat’ and ‘trap’ kept interposing themselves between him and any satisfaction that he might have taken in its inception.
The only edge that he had possessed with which to counter Calque’s anger at his holding out about Gavril, lay in his by now tacit agreement to keep quiet about Macron’s criminal impetuosity. Ironically, though, he hadn’t dared mention Macron again in case he inflamed Calque way beyond rationality and ended up counting bricks in a jail cell – so that particular bargaining counter had proved less than worthless.
This way, at any rate, he remained useful to the man and capable of maintaining at least some degree of free movement. If Yola did what she’d said she’d do, they would still be ahead of the game. If the gouts of blood left in the Maset salon were anything to go by, it couldn’t be long, surely, before the French police ran the eye-man down and either killed him or took him into custody?
Calque crooked a finger at Sabir. ‘Get into the car.’
Sabir seated himself next to a CRS officer in a bullet-proof vest. He smiled but the offi cer refused to respond. The man was going to a potential crime scene. He was in official mode.
Hardly surprising, thought Sabir to himself – he was still a suspect in nearly everybody’s eyes. The cause, if not exactly the perpetrator, of a colleague’s violent death.
Calque spread himself out across the front seat. ‘I’m right, am I not? La Roupie’s body is lying outside a gardien ’s cabane, twenty minutes north of the Bac, just before you get to the Panperdu? That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That’s where you came across it while you were out searching for the gypsy Dufontaine?’
