The Nostradamus Prophecies (20 page)

‘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, Maximinius, Sidonius and Lazarus the Resurrected – were cast adrift from Palestine in a boat without oars, sails, or food, they landed at Oppidum-Ra, driven there by the wind of God. Queen Sara went down to the shore to see who they were and to decide on their fate.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before, Yola?’

‘You misled me. You said they were three married people. But Sara was a virgin. Her lacha was untarnished. She was unmarried.’

Sabir raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘So what happened when Sara went down to check them out?’

‘At first she taunted them.’ Yola made a hesitant face. ‘This must have been meant as a test, I think. Then one of the Maries climbed out of the boat and stood on the water, like Jesus did at Bethsaida. She asked Sara to do the same. Sara walked into the sea and was swallowed up by the waves. But the second Marie cast her cloak upon the waters and Sara climbed up on it and was saved. Then Sara welcomed them to her town. Helped them to build a Christian community there, after they had converted her. Marie Jacobe and Marie Salome stayed on at Les Saintes-Maries until they died. Their bones are still there.’

Sabir sat back. ‘So everything was already contained in that first verse. The rest was simply waffle. Just as I said.’

‘No. I don’t think so.’ Yola shook her head. ‘I think it was also a test. To check that the gypsies were still Catholic – si li boumian sian catouli. That we were still worthy to receive the verses. Like a sort of pilgrimage you have to make before you can learn an important secret.’

‘A rite of passage, you mean? Like the search for the Holy Grail?’

‘I don’t understand what you are saying. But yes. If, by that, you mean a test to make sure one is worthy to learn something, it would surely add up to the same thing, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yola.’ Sabir took her head in both his hands and squeezed. ‘You never cease to amaze me.’

Macron was angry. Deep, seat-of-the-pants, mouth-foamingly, slaveringly, angry. The side of his head had swelled up, giving him an unsightly black eye and his jaw felt as though someone had run a pile-driver across it. He had a blinding headache and his feet, where the eye-man had tenderised them with his sap, made him feel as if every step he took was taken barefoot, over a bed of oval pebbles, in a sandbox.

He watched Calque approaching via the cafe tables, twisting and turning his hips just as if he’d heard somewhere – and believed – that all fat men must, by default, be excellent dancers. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Where have I been?’ Calque raised an eyebrow at Macron’s tone.

Macron backtracked swiftly, with as much dignity as he was able to muster. ‘I’m sorry, Sir. My head is hurting. I’m feeling a little grumpy. That didn’t come out right.’

‘I agree with you. In fact I agree with you so much that I think you should be in a hospital, not sitting here in a cafe drooling coffee out of a grotesquely swollen mouth. Look at you. Your own mother wouldn’t recognise you.’

Macron grimaced. ‘I’m all right, I tell you. The Spanish medico told me I don’t have concussion. And my feet are just bruised. These crutches take some of the pressure off when I walk.’

‘And you want to be in for the kill? Is that it? To get your revenge. Stumping along behind the eye-man on a pair of crutches?’

‘Of course not. I’m detached. A professional. You know that.’

‘Do I?’

‘Are you going to throw me off the case? Send me home? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?’

‘No. I’m not going to do that. And shall I tell you why?’

Macron nodded. He wasn’t sure what he was about to hear, but he sensed that it might be unpleasant.

‘It was my fault the eye-man got you. I shouldn’t have left you alone on the hill. Shouldn’t have abandoned my position. You might have been killed. In my book, that allows you one favour and one favour only. Do you want to stay on the case?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Then I’ll tell you where I’ve just been.’

Sabir rubbed his face with his hands, just as though he were smoothing in a squirt or two of suntan lotion. ‘There’s just one snag to all this.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Not only will the French police not know exactly where we are going, thanks to my partially holding out on Calque, but they will still be out to get me – with everything they have in their arsenal – for Babel and the nightwatchman’s murder. With you both along as accessories after the fact.’

‘You can’t be serious?’

‘Oh yes I can. Deadly serious. Captain Calque told me that he is doing this entirely off his own initiative.’

‘And you believe him?’

‘Yes I do. He could have taken me into custody this morning and thrown away the key. Claimed all the kudos for himself. I was perfectly prepared to surrender to him without a struggle. I’m no cop killer. I told him so myself. He even held the Remington in his hand and then gave it back to me.’

Alexi whistled.

‘The authorities could have spent months pinning that maniac’s actions on to me, by which time the man they call the eye-man would have been long gone – probably with the verses in tow and ready for sale on the open market. And who could prove where he found them? Nobody. Because they’ve got no DNA evidence – the death of an unknown gypsy doesn’t rate a full police procedural over here, apparently. And anyway, they would already have had me in custody, so why bother with the rest? The ideal suspect. Whose blood is conveniently splattered all over the crime scene. Open and shut, no?’

‘Then why is Calque doing this? They will send him to the guillotine, surely – or exile him to Elba, like Napoleon – if things go wrong.’

‘Hardly that. He’s simply doing it because he wants the eye-man and he wants him badly. It was his fault his assistant got nailed. And he holds himself responsible for the nightwatchman’s death, too. He reckons he should have figured that the eye-man would come back to sort over unfinished business. But he says he got so carried away with his own and his assistant’s brilliance in working out the Montserrat code, that he couldn’t see the light for the trees. A bit like me, really.’

‘Are you sure it’s not a trap? So they can get both of you? I mean, perhaps they think you are working together?’

Sabir groaned. ‘What the Hell. I don’t know. All I know is that he could have taken me in this morning and he didn’t. That’s one heck of a bonafide in my book.’

‘So what do we do?’

Sabir lurched backwards in mock surprise. ‘What do we do? We head for the Camargues, that’s what we do. Via Millau. That much I have agreed with Calque. Then we lose ourselves for a few days amongst ten thousand of your closest relatives. Always bearing in mind, of course, that the eye-man can track our car wherever and whenever he wants to – and that we are still murder suspects, with the French police hot on our trail, handcuffs and machine guns at the ready.’

‘ Jesu Cristu! And then?’

‘And then, in six days’ time, at the absolute height of the festival of the Three Maries, we steal out of hiding and fi lch the statue of Sainte Sara from in front of a church crammed to the rafters with frantically worshipping acolytes. Without tangling with the eye-man. And without getting ourselves strung up, or hacked to pieces, by a crazed mob of vengeful zealots in the process.’ Sabir grinned. ‘How do you like them apples, Alexi?’

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.

‘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.’