‘What?’
‘The curandero fears for our lives against the eye-man. He senses that the eye-man will hurt us simply out of anger if we fall into his hands again. Inside this vial is the distilled venom of the Couleuvre de Montpellier. That is a poisonous snake that lives in the south-western part of France. Injected into the bloodstream, it will kill in under a minute. Taken by the throat…’
‘Taken by the throat?’
‘Swallowed. Drunk like a liquid. Imbibed. Then it will take fifteen minutes.’
‘You can’t mean it. Are you seriously telling me that the curandero has provided us with a poison? Like the sort they used to give spies who risked torture by the Gestapo?’
‘I don’t know who the Gestapo are, Damo, but I doubt very much that they are as terrible as the eye-man. If he takes me again, I will drink this. I will go to God intact and with my lacha untarnished. You must promise me that you will do the same.’
70
Joris Calque was a deeply unhappy man. Only once in his life had he been responsible for breaking the news to a family of the death of their only son and that time he had been covering for another officer who was injured in the same engagement. He had been in no way responsible. Far from it, in fact.
This was another matter entirely. His proximity to Marseille, Macron’s home town and the fact that Macron had died violently, at the hands of a murderer and on his watch, made Calque’s job all the harder. It had somehow become a priority for him personally to deliver the news.
By mid-afternoon on the second day it was obvious to everyone that the eye-man had somehow escaped the net. Helicopters and spotter-planes had criss-crossed the entire area below the N572 Arles to Vauvert road – including the vast span of country delimited by the Parc Natiurel Regional de Camargue – and they had found nothing. The eye-man appeared to be a wraith. CRS units had inspected every building, every bergerie and every ruin. They had stopped every car going either in or out of the Parc Naturel. It was an easy place to seal off. You had the sea on one side and the marshes on the other. Few roads bisected it and those that did were fl at, with traffic visible for miles in every direction. It should have been child’s play. Instead, Calque could feel his position as chief coordinator of the investigation becoming more precarious by the minute.
Macron’s family were waiting for him at the family bakery. A female police officer had gathered them all together, without being allowed to tell them the exact reason for their convocation. This was established practice. Dread, in consequence, laced the atmosphere like ether.
Calque was visibly surprised to find that not only were Macron’s father, mother and sister present, but also a bevy of aunts, uncles, cousins and even, or so it appeared, three out of four of his grandparents. It occurred to Calque that the smell of freshly baking bread would be forever linked in his mind with images of Macron’s death.
‘I am grateful that you are all here together. It will make what I have to tell you easier to bear.’
‘Our son. He is dead.’ It was Macron’s father. He was still wearing his bakery whites and a hairnet. As he spoke he took off the hairnet, as though it were in some way disrespectful.
‘Yes. He was killed late last night.’ Calque paused. He needed a cigarette badly. He wanted to be able to lean over and light it and to use the movement as a convenient means of masking the vast sea of faces that were now focusing on him with the greediness of anticipated grief. “He was killed by a murderer who was holding a woman hostage. Paul arrived a little before the main body of the force. The woman was in imminent danger. She had a rope around her neck and her kidnapper was threatening to hang her. Paul knew that the man had killed before. A security guard, up in Rocamadour. And another man. In Paris. He therefore decided to intervene.” ’
‘What happened to Paul’s killer? Do you have him?’ This, from one of the cousins.
Calque realised that he had been casting his seed on stony ground. Macron’s family must inevitably have heard about the possible death of a police officer on the radio or TV and have come to their own conclusions when the Police Nationale had convoked them. They hadn’t needed his rubber-stamping. All he could reasonably do, in the circumstances, was to provide them with any information they needed and then abandon them to the grieving process. He certainly couldn’t use them to rinse out his conscience. ‘No. We don’t have him yet. But we soon will. Before he died, Paul was able to get off two shots. It is not public knowledge yet – and we would prefer that you keep the information to yourselves – but the killer was badly injured by one of Paul’s bullets. He is on the run somewhere inside the Parc Naturel. The whole place is sealed off. More than a hundred policemen are out there searching for him as we speak.’ Calque was desperately trying to look away from the scenes in front of him – to concentrate on the questions that the peripheral family were firing off at him. But he was unable to take his eyes off Macron’s mother.
She resembled her son in an uncanny way. Upon hearing the confirmation of her boy’s death, she had instantly turned for comfort to her husband and now she clung to his waist, crying silently, the baking dust from his apron coating her face like whitewash.
When Calque was finally able to withdraw, one of Macron’s male relatives followed him out into the street. Calque turned to face him, half prepared for a physical assault. The man looked hard and fit. He had a razor-strop haircut. Indeterminate tattoo-ends burst from his sleeves to scatter out across the backs of his hands like varicose veins.
Calque regretted that the policewoman had remained inside with the rest of the family – the presence of a uniform might have acted as something of a curb.
But the man did not approach Calque in an aggressive manner. In fact he screwed his face up questioningly and Calque soon realised that something other than Macron’s death was foremost on his mind.
‘Paul telephoned me yesterday. Did you know that? But I wasn’t there. My mother took the message. I’m a joiner, these days. I have a lot of work on.’
‘Yes? You are a joiner these days? An excellent profession.’ Calque had not intended to sound abrupt, but the words came out defensively, despite his best intentions.
The man narrowed his eyes. ‘He said you were looking for a man who was in the Legion. A killer. That you thought the Legion would hold back the information that you needed. That they would force you to go through the usual fucking bureaucratic hoops they always use to protect their people with. That was what he said.’
Calque nodded in sudden understanding. ‘Paul told me about you. You are the cousin who was in the Legion. I should have realised.’ He was on the verge of saying ‘because you people get a particular look – like a walking slab of testosterone – and because you use “fucking” every other word’, but he somehow managed to control himself. ‘You were also in prison, were you not?’
The man looked away up the street. Something seemed to be irritating him. After a moment he turned back to Calque. He forced his hands inside his pockets, as if he felt that the material itself might prevent them from rioting – but still the hands thrust themselves towards Calque as if they wished to break through the cloth and throttle him. ‘I’m going to forget you said that. And that you’re a fucking policeman. I don’t like fucking policemen. For the most part they’re no fucking better than the cunts they bang up.’ He clamped his mouth tightly shut. Then he snorted long-sufferingly and glanced back down the street. ‘Paul was my cousin, even though he was a fucking bedi. This shit-heap killed him, you say? I was in the Legion for twenty fucking years. I ended up a fucking quartermaster. Do you want to ask me anything? Or do you want to scuttle back to fucking Headquarters and check out my criminal fucking record first?’
Calque’s decision was instantaneous. ‘I want, to ask you something.’
The man’s face changed – becoming lighter, less enclosed. ‘Fire away then.’
‘Do you remember a man with strange eyes? Eyes with no whites to them?’
‘Go on.’
‘This man may be French. But he might also have been pretending to be a foreigner to get into the ranks of the Legion as a soldier and not an officer.’
‘Give me more.’
Calque shrugged. ‘I know people change their names when they enter the Legion. But this man was a Count. Brought up as an aristocrat. In a family with servants and money. His original name may have been de Bale. Rocha
