The Nostradamus Prophecies (45 page)

‘What emetic?’

‘She fed you mustard and salt water until you brought up what was left of the poison. She saved Sergeant Spola’s life, too. The eye-man gutshot him. With gutshot victims, if they go to sleep, they die. She kept him talking while she lay with one hand hanging down into the cesspit, holding you upright – out of the sump. Without her, you would have drowned.’

‘I told you she was a special person. But, like everybody else, you distrust gypsies. It’s simply not rational. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘I didn’t come here to receive a lecture.’

‘What did you come here for, then?’

Calque sat back in his chair. He felt around in his pockets for a cigarette and then remembered that he was in a hospital. ‘For answers, I suppose.’

‘What do I know? We were pursued by a madman. He’s dead. Now we get on with our lives.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want to know what it was all for. Why Paul Macron was killed. And the others. Bale wasn’t mad. He was the sanest one amongst us. He knew exactly what he wanted and why he wanted it.’

‘Ask his mother.’

‘I have. It’s like kicking a dead tree. She denies everything. The manuscript we found in her hidden room is indecipherable and my superior considers it a waste of police time to pursue it any further. She’s got away scot-free. She and her aristocratic band of Devil-fanciers.’

‘What do you want from me, then?’

‘Yola admitted to Sergeant Spola that the prophecies weren’t lost. That you had secured them and were translating them at the Maset. I think she has a soft spot for Sergeant Spola.’

‘And you want to know what was in the prophecies?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what if I were to publish them?’

‘No one would listen. You would be like King Priam’s daughter, Cassandra, who was given the gift of prophecy by her suitor Apollo. Only when she refused to go to bed with him, he varied the gift so that, although her prophecies were invariably true, no one would ever believe them.’ Calque held up three fingers to silence Sabir’s inevitable riposte. He began to count off the points he wished to make by gripping each finger in the palm of his free hand. ‘One – you don’t have the originals. Two – you don’t even have a copy of the originals. You burned them. We found the ashes in the fireplace. Five million dollars’ worth of ashes. Three – it would simply be your word against the rest of the world. Anyone could say they found them. What you have is valueless, Sabir.’

‘Then why do you want it?’

‘Because I need to know.’

Sabir closed his eyes. ‘And why should I tell you?’

Calque shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can’t answer that.’ He hunched forwards. ‘But if I were in your shoes, I’d want to tell someone. I wouldn’t want to carry whatever it is you’re carrying to the grave with me. I’d want to get it off my chest.’

‘Why you in particular?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Sabir!’ Calque started up from his chair. Then he changed his mind and sat down again. ‘You owe me. And you owe Macron. You played me for a sucker after I trusted you.’

‘You shouldn’t have trusted me.’

Calque gave the ghost of a smile. ‘I didn’t. There were two trackers in the car. We knew if we lost one, that we could pick you up again with the other. I’m a policeman, not a social worker, Sabir.’

Sabir shook his head sadly. He was watching Calque, his eyes dark in contrast to the pristine white bandage that was protecting the side of his face. ‘Something happened to me in there, Captain.’

‘I know it did.’

‘No. Not what you are thinking. Something else. It was like a transformation. I changed. Became something other. The curandero warned me that it happens when you are about to become a shaman. A healer.’

‘I don’t know what the Hell you’re talking about.’

‘I don’t either.’

Calque sat back in his armchair. ‘Do you remember any of it? Or am I just wasting my time?’

‘I remember all of it.’

Calque’s body stiffened like a bird dog scenting its prey. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I told you that some change had occurred in me. Some transformation. I don’t know what it was or why it happened, but even now I can bring up every word of the French text that I saw. Like a photograph. I just have to close my eyes and it comes back. I spent six hours in that house, Captain. Reading those quatrains over and over again. Translating them. Trying to understand their significance.’

‘Have you written them down?’

‘I don’t need to. And I don’t want to.’

Calque stood up. ‘Fine. It was stupid of me to even ask. Why should you tell me? What can I do about anything? I’m an old man. I should retire. But I hang on in the police force because I don’t have anything else to do with my life. That’s about the sum of it. Goodbye, Mister Sabir. I’m glad the bastard didn’t get you.’

Sabir watched Calque shuffle towards the door. There was something about the man – an integrity, perhaps – that raised him above the common run of humanity. Calque had been honest according to his own lights during the investigation. He had cut Sabir far more slack than he had any right to expect. And he hadn’t blamed him for Macron’s death or Sergeant Spola’s wounding. No. He had taken those things on himself. ‘Wait.’

‘For what?’

Sabir held Calque’s eyes with his own. ‘Sit down, Captain. I’m going to tell you part of the story. The part that will not compromise any third parties. Will you be satisfied with that?’

Calque returned Sabir’s glance. Then he settled himself cautiously back in his seat. ‘I shall have to be, won’t I? If that’s all you feel you can give me.’

Sabir shrugged. Then he inclined his head questioningly. ‘Secrets of the confessional?’

Calque sighed. ‘Secrets of the confessional.’

‘There were only fifty-two quatrains on the parchment I retrieved from the bamboo tubing. I had initially assumed there would be fifty-eight, because that is the exact number needed to make up Nostradamus’s original ten centuries. But six are still missing. I now think that they are scattered around, like the ones at Rocamadour and Montserrat and designed to serve as clues to the main caucus.’

‘Go on.’

‘As far as I can work out, each of the fifty-two remaining quatrains describes a particular year. A year in the run-up to the End of Days. The Apocalypse.

Ragnarok. The Mayan Great Change. Whatever you choose to call it.’

‘What do you mean, describes a year?’

‘Each one acts as a pointer. It describes some event that will take place in that year – and each event is significant in some way.’

‘So the end isn’t dated?’

‘It doesn’t need to be – even Nostradamus didn’t know the exact date of Armageddon. He only knew what preceded it. So the date becomes obvious the nearer we get to it. In increments.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

Sabir sat up straighter in his bed. ‘It’s simple. Nostradamus wants mankind to escape the final holocaust. He feels that if the world can change its behaviour by acknowledging the Second Coming – by rejecting the Third Antichrist – then we might stand a faint chance of avoiding annihilation. That’s why he’s given us the clues, year by year and event by event. We’re to correlate the quatrains with the events. When each event occurs just as Nostradamus predicted, the quatrains will increase in importance and we can tick them off. The closer we get to Armageddon, the more obvious the starting date and the end date will be, for the simple reason that the events predicted for the last few years in the run-up to the End of Days haven’t happened yet. Then people will start to believe. And maybe change their behaviour. To all intents and purposes Nostradamus was giving us a fifty-two-year warning.’

Calque made a face.

‘Look, the first clue, in what I now believe to be the first quatrain, runs like this:

The African desert will melt into glass False freedoms will torment the French

The great empire of the islands will shrink Its hands, feet and elbows shun the head.’

‘That means nothing. It gets us nowhere.’

‘On the contrary. Look at it again. “The African desert will melt into glass.” In 1960 the French conducted their first ever nuclear test in south western Algeria. In the Sahara Desert. They called it the Gerboise Bleu – the Blue Jerboa.’

‘You’re stretching, Sabir.’

‘Try the next line, then: ‘False freedoms will torment the French.’ In 1960 France granted – or was forced to grant – independence to French Cameroon, French Togoland, Madagascar, Dahomey, Burkina Faso, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Mauritania. But still they persisted with their war in Algeria. “False freedom” is when you give with one hand and you take back with another. Now lines three and four: ‘The great empire of the islands will shrink. Its hands, feet and elbows shun the head.’ Great Britain was always the ‘great empire of the islands’ to Nostradamus. He uses the image on numerous occasions and it was always specific to Britain. In 1960 the British granted independence to Cyprus. Also to British Somaliland. Ghana. Nigeria. These are the extremities. Queen Elizabeth II was the head. By achieving independence, they shun her.’

‘Not enough.’

‘Try the next one then:

Germany will be strangled and Africa retaken A young leader will emerge: he will retain his youth Men will raise their eyes towards the battlefield A star will shine that is no star.’

‘According to your theory, Sabir, this quatrain should then refer to 1961. Does it? I don’t see that.’

‘Why don’t you? Take the first half of the first line: ‘Germany will be strangled.’ Nostradamus uses the phrase envoyer le cordon, meaning to ‘send the bowstring’. In other words to ‘order to be strangled’. And what happened in 1961? The border was closed between East and West Berlin and the Wall was built – a concrete cordon, effectively separating and strangling Germany. Now the second part of the first line: ‘And Africa retaken.’ On the 21st of April 1961 rebellious members of the OAS took Algiers, in an effort to stop General de Gaulle from granting Algerian independence. You remember that, don’t you, Calque? You were probably still busy cutting your milk teeth on the beat as a pandore.’

‘Pah.’

‘ “Men will raise their eyes towards the battlefield.’ Does that remind you of anything? On the 12 th of April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first ever man to enter space – in the Vostok I – thereby launching the space race and further aggravating the Cold War between the United States, NATO and the Soviet Union. “A star will shine that is no star.” That’s a pretty damned good description of an orbiting spacecraft, isn’t it? Especially when you figure that Nostradamus was writing 450 years before any such thing had even been envisaged.” ’

‘What about “A young leader will emerge: he will retain his youth?” I suppose you’re going to tell me that describes John F. Kennedy.’

‘Of course it does. Kennedy first took over the US Presidential office on the 20th of January 1961. “A young leader will emerge” – Kennedy became the leader of the Western world when he took the Oath of Allegiance. He will “retain his youth” because he will be assassinated, two years later, on the 22nd of November 1963.’ ‘I suppose Nostradamus calls that one, too.’ ‘Yes. I have it as “The pale carriage of the young King turns black.” The second line goes: “The Queen must mourn; the King’s crown will be sundered.” Kennedy was shot in the head, on the 22nd of November 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Robert McClelland, MD, described the wound in his testimony at Parkland before Arlen Specter on the 21st of March 1964. He said that the brain tissue had been blasted out through the top of the President’s skull. Look. I’ve printed his testimony off the internet. Let me read it to you: “I could very closely examine the head wound and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered… so that the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out…” That seems to me to accord pretty clearly with “the King’s crown will be sundered”. Don’t you think?’

‘No one will take this seriously. You realise that?’ ‘No one will have the chance to take it seriously. Because I am not going to make these prophecies public. You yourself explained why, with your Cassandra parallel. I don’t have the originals. No one will believe me. And there are things in here that the Corpus Maleficus still want to know.’ ‘But Bale is dead.’ ‘So he is.’ ‘There’s more, isn’t there?’

‘The proof of the pudding, you mean? Well that comes next year. And the year after that. And the year after that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Think about it, Calque. We have the starting date to the countdown as 1960. That’s clear. Even you can’t dispute that. And I have forty-eight quatrains moving on from that year, describing an event or events in each succeeding year which pinpoints that year as part of the cycle. They’re not all in order, but when you spread them out, they tally. I’ve got the US defeat in Vietnam. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Arab-Israeli War. The Cambodian Genocide. The Mexico City Earthquake. The First and Second Gulf Wars. 9/11. The New Orleans Floods. The Indian Ocean Tsunami. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of smaller events which seem to tally too. It’s beyond the realms of happenstance. ‘

‘So what are you telling me?’

‘I’m telling you that the Mayans were right. According to the Mayan Long Calendar, they have the Great Change as occurring in 2012. On the 21st of December, to be precise. 5126 years – that’s thirteen baktuns, each comprising twenty katuns – from the calendar’s inception. That tallies precisely with Nostradamus’s own index dates. Except that he starts in 1960, at the exact turn of the Age of Aquarius. And he gives us fifty-two quatrains and a fifty-two-year warning. That’s 2012 too. It couldn’t be clearer.’