The Third Antichrist (26 page)

Following his military service, the Count had sent Milouins off to a dojo in Japan to perfect the art of unarmed combat. Milouins had become, in consequence, a red belt at both judo and karate and a black belt at tae kwon do, disciplines which he had kept up assiduously ever since. He had graduated to become the Count’s bodyguard, aged just twenty-three, and, now that the Count was dead, he was fulfilling the same role for the Countess.

Over his many years of devoted service, Milouins had developed certain opinions about the Countess’s adopted children, which did not necessarily tally with those of his mistress. He had even been party to the actual arrival of the children into the de Bale household. Firstly Rocha, who had been adopted as a teenager. Then Abiger and the rest of the rabble.

Milouins was privately convinced that the Countess had been wrong in farming the children out from such an early age into other people’s hands. In this way, in his opinion, she had lost the children’s affection, whilst securing the lesser asset of their undoubted respect. But he both sympathized with and understood the Countess’s motivation. Her relationship with Madame Mastigou had to be kept secret at all costs, and this Milouins had ensured to the best of his ability over the years. It simply wouldn’t have done for the Countess’s private predilections ever to receive a public airing. Within the conservative – not to say reactionary – circles in which the Countess conducted the more visible aspects of her life, such a thing would have been tantamount to social suicide. Tolerance of a sort existed in those spheres – but it was a tolerance fuelled by the most exquisite discretion.

Milouins had decided very early on that the Count and Countess’s eldest adopted son, Rocha de Bale – later to be known as Achor Bale – was a loose cannon verging on the psychopathic. It wasn’t Milouins’s place to comment on such things, but when Bale had been killed by Adam Sabir earlier that summer in the Camargue, Milouins had heaved a metaphorical sigh of relief that a potentially rogue element in the de Bale family – and one who had single-handedly condemned his mistress and her entourage to the attentions of the French police – was formally out of the picture.

The ensuing deaths of a further eight of Bale’s siblings in Mexico and France had been an unmitigated disaster. If Milouins had been a religious man, he might have suspected that God was trying to tell the Countess something, and that she was resolutely failing to listen. The only shaft of daylight had occurred when Milouins learned that Abiger de Bale had also managed to get himself killed somewhere in the Yucatan. Abiger, and his twin brother, Vaulderie, had been the banes of Milouins’s life. Abiger, in particular, was permanently attempting to ingratiate himself with the Countess at the expense of anyone who happened in his way. Abiger’s inheritance of all the Count’s titles, following the death of Rocha, had simply made Milouins’s position even more diplomatically complicated.

Privately, Milouins had always suspected that Abiger’s heart had not been 100 per cent in the Corpus’s work. It was clear that the man was far more interested in money and in the appurtenances of class than in any furtherance of the Corpus’s aims. Milouins, himself of peasant stock, didn’t have much time for class. The Countess and Madame Mastigou accepted him for what he was – a man of the people, with certain useful skills, who was, in consequence, accorded the status of a privileged servant. Such a quality of acknowledgement and accreditation satisfied Milouins, whose nature made it imperative that he work for somebody and be told what to do. But Abiger de Bale had always refused to play by the rules.

To Abiger, Milouins was his mother’s footman, and would always be treated as such. Since his teens, Abiger had made it a point to humiliate Milouins whenever and wherever possible. There had been moments when the Countess had protested at Abiger’s treatment of her manservant, but such moments had not fundamentally altered Abiger’s behaviour.

So the prospect of Abiger’s death in Mexico had delighted Milouins. Rudra de Bale, who would have been next in line to inherit the Countship and Marquisate, was a different prospect altogether. Rudra was manipulable. Insecure. Subdominant. A definite beta male. Whilst Abiger was an alpha of the first degree.

Abiger’s sudden reappearance ten days before had at first disappointed Milouins, and then delighted him. The fact that he had caught Abiger breaking into the inner sanctum of the Countess’s bedroom had been one of the highlights of Milouins’s life. Surely the Countess would order Abiger killed? It was clear that the man had been up to no good. He’d admitted as much himself, when he had described how he had covered his tracks in Mexico and the US. In Milouins’s opinion, innocent men didn’t need to do such things. If he had really tried, but failed, to save his siblings from the cenote, surely he would have headed straight home to inform his mother?

Milouins didn’t believe for one instant that Abiger had been chased the length and breadth of Mexico by a vengeful gang of
narcotraficantes
. No. Milouins was privately convinced that Abiger, imagining the rest of his siblings to be dead, had come back to France to kill the Countess and inherit her wealth. Why else would he have covered his tracks so fastidiously? Milouins had some vague notion of what the Countess was worth, and it was a considerable sum of money. More than enough to kill for.

Milouins still couldn’t fathom, though, why he had not been able to find a weapon of any sort on Abiger’s person. What had Abiger intended to do? Stifle her with a pillow? There were always marks and tell-tale signs after such a suffocation, surely. Was there anything in the bedroom, then, that he could have used and that would leave no clue? Milouins had ruminated on this for days. There was nothing. Nothing that would leave no tell-tale signs. What then? What had the man been intending to do? For he certainly hadn’t been intending to conduct a simple tête-à-tête with his mother at three o’clock in the morning, as he so vehemently maintained. Anyone knowing the Countess even slightly would have realized that such a plan was doomed from the start. The Countess would simply have ordered Abiger out of her room and told him to approach her again at midday, when she formally emerged into public view.

And then, on top of that, the bastard had somehow managed to talk himself out once again from under the guillotine – at least vis-à-vis his remaining siblings – with his bullshit story about the Mexican gangsters and his heroic sacrifice on behalf of his family. Milouins had stood by the door, while Abiger had been concocting his story, convinced that the Countess and Madame Mastigou and the survivors from the cenote would see right through it, just as he did. But the Countess was an elderly lady now. And she had been badly hit by the death of her children. She didn’t show this vulnerable side of her character to everybody, but Milouins knew that it was there.

So Abiger had inveigled himself back into everyone’s good graces, and was running the show once again. But Milouins wasn’t fooled by him. Thank God, then, that the Countess had decided to take him off formal bodyguard duties and use him more proactively. This, Milouins felt, might afford him the very opportunity he needed to get the goods on the miscreant, Abiger.

The Countess, after all, was his responsibility and his alone. The Count had made that quite clear when he had called Milouins to his deathbed and delivered his final instructions. Milouins had sworn an oath to the Count that he would put the protection of the Countess ahead of anything in his life – marriage and a family of his own, for instance. That he would sacrifice his own future, if necessary, to protect her, and through her, the de Bale family name. One of the Count’s final acts had been to ensure that a considerable sum of money be transferred to a private account in Switzerland in Milouins’s name.

Milouins had appreciated this courtesy very much. The money had been more than enough for Milouins to buy himself a house in Port Grimaud, which he now rented out on a semi-permanent basis to a retired conductor. It would be to this house that Milouins would withdraw following the Countess’s eventual death.

For Milouins sensed, now more than ever, that things were coming to a climax in the de Bale household, and that nothing that was any good lasted forever.

42

Milouins waved the taxi off. He turned to the man who had been waiting for him at the road junction. ‘Are you sure this is the place?’

‘Yes. My people have been watching it for three days now. The man called Sergei Alatyrtsev lives here.’

‘Alone?’

‘He has no family. He is a drunk. He draws a small pension. Enough for vodka, anyway. You’ve caught him just in time. Neighbours say that his liver has shrunk to the size of a golf ball. That when he limps past them they can smell the alcohol leaking through his skin. We have made sure he has not been able to emerge from the house for the past forty-eight hours, just as you asked. The man will be going crazy in there. He has no telephone. He has no means of communication with the outside world. He probably only had enough drink with him to last a day.’

‘Will he talk to me?’

‘By now he will talk to anyone who offers him a bottle.’

Milouins held out his hand.

The Ukrainian handed him a plastic bag with two bottles inside.

‘Will you stay and translate for me?’

‘There is no need. This man speaks English.’

‘My English is not strong.’

‘But it is good enough. I understand you. This man speaks like me.’

‘You do not wish to stay. That is the real truth, isn’t it?’

The Ukrainian drew one hand heavily down his face as if he were scraping it clear of sweat. ‘He is Russian. I am Ukrainian. Stalin starved my grandmother to death in the great famine of 1931. My grandfather was forced to eat human flesh to survive.’ He gave a ragged sigh. ‘What I am saying is that the Russians still have influence here. A lot of influence. And this man was once part of things. He might have friends left in high places. This way, what the eye does not see, the heart does not mourn.’

‘Have you been paid?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then go. You are done here.’

Milouins watched the man hurry down the street. In many ways it was a good thing he was leaving. Milouins had no idea how the interview would go. How Alatyrtsev would respond to what he was about to lay on him. The Countess’s orders had been specific. Milouins had very little latitude for error in the matter.

He stepped up and hammered on the door. ‘Alatyrtsev. Open up. I have vodka for you.’

There was a long pause. So long, that Milouins was briefly tempted to hammer again. But he knew how slowly drunks moved. His own uncle had been an alcoholic. When Milouins was a young man he had been sent out by his father on many occasions to be his uncle’s minder. His uncle had died, aged fifty. Not of cirrhosis of the liver. That was too specific. Milouins’s uncle had died of everything.

There was the sound of shuffling feet. The feet came up to the door. There was another long pause.

‘Vodka?’

‘Vodka. Yes. I have two bottles – 50 per cent proof – for export only. I have the bag here. Let me in.’

Milouins half expected the man to say ‘Who are you? Why have you not been allowing me out of my house?’ But, as with his uncle, all normal forms of human interaction had been jettisoned long since.

The door opened a crack and a hand came out to take the bag.

Milouins threw open the door and stepped inside. The smell that assailed his nostrils made him want to gag. It was a mixture of urine, shit, sweat, cheap cigarettes, and the elusory sweetness of rotting meat. Milouins was grateful when the man turned back inside, leaving the door wide open.

Alatyrtsev made straight for the bottle Milouins was holding.

Milouins snatched it back at the last possible moment, only just avoiding touching Alatyrtsev’s outstretched hand. ‘We need something from you. For every question you answer correctly, I will allow you one drink.’

Alatyrtsev squinted at him. His expression turned cunning. ‘We start with the drink.’

‘No. We start with the question.’

Alatyrtsev stood swaying in the centre of the floor. With a violent jerk, he began scratching his arms.

Milouins flinched. He wondered for a moment whether Alatyrtsev might have mange, but then realized it was probably just a case of early onset DT’s. Either way, the man reeked of death.

‘What question?’ Alatyrtsev sounded constipated. Urine trickled down his leg. His head had begun to shake. There was a ring of white scum around his mouth.