The Third Antichrist (15 page)

The women then talked amongst themselves, as Dracul had known they would. They even questioned their visiting priests, who soon learned that it was wiser to claim knowledge of the boy at Orheiul Vechi, than to profess their ignorance of such a key topic of discussion amongst their flock.

Slowly, small groups of headscarf-wearing women began to make tentative pilgrimages to the shrine. Dracul played it carefully right from the start. He took his place, daily, on a rocky outcrop overlooking the River Bug, and easily visible from the great stone cross, which was as far as the women dared to venture. Once there, he never said a word. He just sat cross-legged, whatever the weather, and stared out across the vast expanse of plain ahead of him. Occasionally, he would stand up and raise his arms. The first time he did this, and the women copied him, Dracul knew that he was home free.

Soon, large parties of pilgrims would make their way to the monastery every Sunday. Queues would form to stand and see the hermit. In the weeks running up to his first public appearance, Dracul had allowed a small beard to grow on his face. His hair, too, now hung to his shoulders – he had been growing it for nearly a year in preparation for this very moment. He now felt that he comfortably resembled the pictures, icons, and statues of Jesus Christ visible in every church and household throughout the land.

When representatives from the Metropolis of Chi
ş
in
ă
u came to investigate him, Dracul refused to budge from his rocky outcrop, ensuring that it was impossible for the clerical inspectors to reach him. The stand-off continued for five days. From the perspective of the people watching from the great stone cross, it appeared as if the priests had come to marvel at the young man, not to question him.

‘What is his name? What is he called?’

Antanasia would weave in and out of the crowd surrounding the cross, whispering to those she considered the key women. ‘They say He is called Mihael. The “one who is like God”. That He will speak only on the Feast of Theophany. That until then He communes only with God, the Holy Father.’

‘Mihael? That is a fine name. The “one who is like God”, you say? But that is proof, is it not? Proof that this boy is indeed the Second Coming.’

When the first miracle occurred, no more proof was needed. The crowd was there to stay.

Brara, Maramure
ş
, Romania
10 November 2009

24

An off-white Slovenian-built Renault
katrca
containing Adam Sabir, Joris Calque, and Alexi and Yola Dufontaine slid over the Hungarian–Romanian border a few kilometres south of Jimbolia at a little after 3 a.m. on a moonless pre-dawn Tuesday morning in mid-November.

The Hungarian half of the border was unmanned, and the Romanian side had only a token junior customs officer on guard. The last in a steady stream of roiling drunks had crossed over hours before, and the early morning commercial traffic was yet to begin, so the solitary border guard was passing his time downloading porn onto his cell phone for later perusal. He fluttered a weary hand at the
katrca
, and returned to his screen.

Alexi slapped Calque on the shoulder. ‘You see? One man on one side of the border goes to sleep while the other man on the other side watches. This is what my cousin Simu has told me. This is why all the Gypsies cross here.’ Alexi offered the unwitting border guard a Mussolini-style jerk of the chin. ‘The European Union is a mighty thing, is it not? Such an occurrence would not happen in the Ukraine, Moldova, or Transnistria. There, the border vultures will steal your grandmother’s milk to make rice pudding with. But here in Romania? No milk stealing.’

Calque looked pained. Alexi’s endless exuberance had begun to wear him down. He glanced over at Sabir. Sabir had his eyes shut, and was pretending to be asleep – just as he’d been doing, on and off, for the past thirty hours. Calque looked at Yola. She really was asleep, tucked up in a corner of the back seat, her legs folded beneath her – look as he might, he could still see no real sign of her pregnancy as yet, beyond a slight convexity in her stomach, like one of Matisse’s odalisques. Calque sighed. It would have to be Alexi or no one, then.

‘So you’ve been to Romania before, Alexi?’

‘Of course. We are part Roma, Yola and I. Our cousins visit regularly to France, where there is more money to be made than in Romania – that’s why they can all speak French, so you will understand them. We last came here as children in 1992. Just after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Yola’s father and my father wanted to honour the new Romani leader – the
Baro-Sero
. So they took their wives and children with them. And all our cousins. And grandparents. Like in a caravan. Except this time the border crossing cost my father the entirety of his American cigarettes. This was very bad. He and Yola’s father had to steal back the cigarettes from the same crooks who stole them from him. This was only justice. The thief who is not caught is an honest man.’

Calque rolled his eyes. Nothing Alexi said had the power to surprise him anymore. During the course of their seemingly endless journey through Austria, Switzerland, and then on into Hungary, his understanding of the Gypsy mindset had increased exponentially.

First, there had been the matter of the fake identity documents. Thanks to a recent crackdown by the French authorities, the Gypsies in the Samois camp had been forced to tweak their systems to such a degree that each of the four identity cards Alexi now waved at the border guard was in immaculate, if dog-eared, order.

Calque shook his head. Not only was he busy committing felonies – but he was even busier compounding them. With each passing day he was venturing further outside his usual comfort zone. Six days ago he had turned a blind eye to a multiple homicide. And now here he was again, knowingly travelling through Europe on a false French identity card considerately provided by his Gypsy hosts. Insanity. Sheer insanity.

The new identity card setup, however, was an oddly impressive achievement for a group of people Calque had formerly written off as nothing more than a parcel of anarchists. For a start, each fake card was fully interchangeable within the community. When one person had finished using it, the photograph was switched, re-laminated, and re-inked, and the transformed card was then ready for use by the next person in line who most resembled the previous holder in terms of height, sex, and birth date. It was a simple but effective means of communality. Everybody who used one of the cards was, de facto, guilty of deception, so it was in no one’s vested interest to spoil the show by snitching.

Calque had attempted to engage Alexi in a belated moral rearguard action about the use of the fake cards, but Alexi had overridden him. ‘Captain. Look at us. We are Gypsies. Nobody wants us in their country. Not the French. Not the Germans. Not the Romanians. In some countries, not even the other Gypsies want us. If we try to settle, the authorities move us on. When we agree to move on, they try to settle us. But not where we want to be. So we move on again, but always in secret. This is the way of things. You have asked to come with us. I have agreed. This makes you my guest. But as a married man travelling with his pregnant wife, I am head of this party. You must please allow me to protect Yola and our unborn child in my own way. And the way I have chosen guarantees that there is no official paper trail to guide the Corpus back towards us and to our cousins in Romania. When the Corpus try to find us, they will be talking to their own armpits.’ Alexi flicked his newly made gold front tooth with his thumbnail.

Calque knew when he was beaten. The Gypsies hadn’t actually invited him to come with them to Romania, after all. He wasn’t, in consequence, in the strongest of critical positions.

Calque’s unexpected change of heart had coincided with his final farewells to Adam Sabir at the Samois camp. Without warning, he had been overwhelmed by the conviction that if he abandoned Sabir to the Gypsies, he would never find his friend again. That the Gypsies would spirit Sabir away from the real world and transform him, somehow, into one of them. Either that, or his friend would commit suicide, just as his mother had done before him, taking his secrets with him to the grave. And Calque had far too much invested in his struggle against the Corpus to even consider letting Sabir off the hook as easily as that.

Calque had nothing personal against the Gypsies. Secretly, he rather admired the way they capitulated, body and soul, to the whims of the moment – it was, quite frankly, a refreshing change from the politically correct orthodoxies of his latter days on the police force. But neither did he underestimate the Gypsy capacity for spirited chaos. And in his opinion it wasn’t chaos that Sabir needed after Lamia’s murder – it was peace and quiet.

The unwitting build-up to Calque’s volte-face had occurred at Lamia’s funeral. Or rather, as Alexi had insisted on describing it, at the Wedding of the Dead.

On first hearing the expression – and Alexi’s garbled explanation of it – Calque had thrown up his hands in horror. ‘But, Alexi. Listen to me. How can you hold a wedding ceremony at somebody’s funeral? This is grotesque. It flies in the face of all reason. What are you people trying to do?’

Alexi shrugged. ‘Lamia was unmarried. And she came to Damo a virgin when he kidnapped her – so her
lacha
was untarnished. For a Gypsy woman, Captain, her
lacha
is her essential honour. It is her maidenhood. Her purity as a woman. Yola understood that Damo would wish to see Lamia’s honour in this matter recognized. In the East, where we are going, our cousins believe that when a man or a woman is killed before their time, and they are still unmarried, they should have a wedding nonetheless. That they should not appear before O Del alone. So a bride or a bridegroom is found for them, and the wedding ceremony is held at their funeral.’

Calque grabbed Alexi’s arm. ‘You can’t be serious, man. And what’s this about Sabir kidnapping Lamia? He didn’t kidnap her. She came to him of her own free will. I can testify to that. We don’t allow that sort of thing in France.’

Alexi quietly disengaged himself from Calque’s arm and gave it a friendly pat. ‘It’s not a real kidnap, Captain. It’s just an expression. With us you must learn to look behind the words of things. In this sort of kidnap, the woman comes along willingly. I kidnapped Yola to Corsica in July. She didn’t mind. In fact she was very pleased. I swear this to you on my talisman.’ Alexi grinned, and brandished his gold Sainte Sara pendant in front of Calque’s nose.

‘Look behind the words of things? What the blazes are you talking about, Alexi?’

‘Captain. Captain. Listen to me. It’s like this. Kidnapping is
my
custom. But the Wedding of the Dead is
not
my custom. When we buried my cousin,
u kuc
Babel, we did not find a young woman to marry him at his funeral. No. This is not our way. But Yola, in her wisdom, has told Damo of this custom amongst her
L
ă
utari
relatives of Romania, near the village where we are going. That things are done like this. And when he heard of it, Damo insisted that we conduct such a wedding ceremony at Lamia’s funeral. So that they would be married before God. This we shall do. It is no problem. This is what I am calling “looking behind the words of things”.’

Calque rolled his eyes. ‘But that still won’t mean he’s legally married. His bride is dead, for pity’s sake. The whole thing’s a farce. The pair of them aren’t even Gypsies.’

This time it was Alexi who threw up his hands. ‘Damo is my brother. He is Yola’s brother too. He has the soul of a Gypsy. He has been acknowledged by the Bulibasha. He was
u kuc
Babel’s
phral
. What do you mean he is not a Gypsy?’

‘
U kuc
Babel’s
phral
? For pity’s sake, Alexi, you might as well be talking double Dutch. Speak French for a change. I can’t understand a word of what you are saying.’

‘It means the defunct Babel’s blood brother. This is how we talk of the dead amongst ourselves. We prefer not to acknowledge them. Death is nothing special for us, Captain. Life continues on. It is the living that count. That is why we have the wedding. For the living. For Damo.’

Try as he might, Calque hadn’t been able to shift Alexi’s stance on the matter – in such matters, Yola’s word was law in his eyes. Yet there was still something in what was about to happen that had provoked outrage in Calque’s rationalist French soul. That had nagged at him like a horsefly bite. ‘But why conduct a marriage that isn’t legal in the eyes of the State? Or in the eyes of the Church? It makes no sense. No sense at all.’