The Third Antichrist (56 page)

He suspected that the saintly Antanasia would simply sign the money over to him pronto, so grateful did she appear for the role he had played in her rescue.

At first Antanasia had refused to take anything from Abi – far less his title. But Abi slowly began to wear her down, aided by the fact that Antanasia was now totally alone in the world, and bereft of family, friends, position, and country. Abi had not been named after Abiger, golden-tongued Prince of Hades, for nothing. He benefited, too, from the distinct advantage of having saved Antanasia’s life.

When first Antanasia had seen the state of her back in a mirror in the master bedroom, she had wept uncontrollable tears, as much for the sins of her brother as for her own dilaceration. Later, she had asked Abi who it was that had treated her back and sutured her wounds. Abi had played down his role just enough to persuade Antanasia to dig a little deeper. When she eventually prised out from him all that he had done, and the lengths to which he had gone to protect her from the endemically corrupt Moldovan authorities, she somewhat inevitably began to feel even more grateful towards her saviour.

Abi, for his part, was gradually coming to realize quite to what an extent Antanasia had embedded herself beneath his skin. He dreamed of her nearly every night now. When he massaged her back with salve, and treated the wounds on her neck and breasts, he received a sexual charge beyond anything he had ever known before. Antanasia was forty-one years old. He was twenty-five. Normal men of his age concentrated their attention on callow young girls with perfect figures and the urge both to please – and to be pleased – at any cost. Such females bored him. They came in cartons, like cigarettes, and provided him with little or no pleasure beyond the purely mechanical.

But there was something about Antanasia that had moved him from the first. Was it her goodness, perhaps, so very different from his own inherent murk? Or her emotional maturity, so far beyond his own that it wasn’t even worth trying to compare the two? Either way, she was the first entirely selfless person that he had ever known. When she touched his arm, or allowed him to support her in the swimming exercises he had designed in order to flex the healing flesh on her back and prevent it contracting, it felt as if he was being touched by the hand of God. The feeling both exalted and irritated him. It was a paradox – and Abi hated paradoxes.

Later, when Antanasia urged him to tell her about himself, Abi experienced not the remotest problem in muddying his back trail. Virtually everyone who knew anything about him was now dead. And Sabir and Calque – those two poisonous smutches in an otherwise immaculate world – soon would be, once Abi had married, and then bedded, Antanasia, sorted out his finances, and brought his life back under some measure of control. For Abi was more and more convinced that he’d called it right in Romania when he’d told Markovich that Sabir and Calque’s self-styled Holy-Mother-of-God party would doubtless be making their way across the Carpathians and back to the very spot where Radu had been looked after following his botched shooting by the girls. Because the bastard certainly hadn’t healed himself, had he? Someone had harboured him and fed him and seen to his wounds.

This had seemed logical to Abi at the time, and he saw no reason to change his opinion now. When the moment came, all he would need to do would be to post himself near the border crossing that he, Rudra and the girls had first used on entering Romania, and wait for the copper-pot maker to come clomping back across from Serbia in his horse and cart – if the fool had managed to find himself a second horse by now, that is, and recovered sufficiently from the shock of tangling with Abi’s freakish sisters.

Apart from lying through his teeth about what he’d done with Radu, the pot man had also blurted out to them that he crossed the border at the same time, and at the same spot, every day. Why should the man change his routine now? What was he? William Randolph Hearst? John Paul Getty? In Abi’s experience, impoverished peasants tended to function more through habit and expedience than through anything remotely resembling free will. There was little reason to hurry, therefore. Added to that, Yola Dufontaine was late-stage pregnant. And late-stage pregnant women didn’t travel if they could possibly avoid it. The entire Sabir-led party would therefore be hiding at the pot maker’s camp – it was a ninety-nine per cent certainty. Abi could feel the sweet bubble of revenge stirring in his stomach.

In the meanwhile, and in order to win Antanasia for himself, Abi was quite happy to extemporize a pretend life in which he, Abi, was the hero, and the Countess, his mother, the villainess. He was gradually coming to realize, though, that the healthier Antanasia was becoming, the less he could count on her taking everything he said at face value. She was beginning to ask questions.

Like many consummate liars, Abi found himself gradually embroidering the stories he was foisting on Antanasia and then immediately forgetting quite how far off-message his fantasy had already carried him. Abi had always been an adept at thinking on his feet, but Antanasia’s persistent questions were beginning to make even his toes curl.

First off, she began to question him about his initial blackmailing of her brother. Then she began having strange visions about her knouting, in which she claimed to have opened her eyes and seen Abi murdering her brother. Beating him to death. But not remotely in the way he had initially described to her. Less than a day after that little revelation, she claimed to remember having lurched awake in the Mercedes campervan at some point during their trip, and seeing a scintillating bright light, accompanied by a rolling noise and a pervasive smell of burning. Abi, who had not told her yet how his mother had died, felt himself turning green.

First he assured her that her so-called ‘recovered memories’ were simply morphine hallucinations. That it was inevitable she should be having nightmares, given what she had endured and the amount of junk that had passed through her body, and that dream logic dictated that he should feature as the butt of her anxieties as he was the most obvious person for her unconscious mind to grab hold of. There was not the remotest foundation to any of her imaginings – she must believe all that he had told her. It was the gospel truth.

Secondly he told her that he was falling in love with her, and desired to marry her for herself, and not simply in order to give her a name and an identity. Like many men, Abi believed that women were easily blindsided when it came to their emotions – tell them you loved them, and they would happily dwell on that fact to the exclusion of virtually all else.

Antanasia had stared at him intently after his unexpected revelation, and then vouchsafed that if she were ever to consider marrying him, she would need to know just a little more about his background, and the origins of his great wealth.

Slowly, painstakingly, she began to tease out of him what the Countess, his mother, and the society of which she had been the head, were about. She also began to focus her attention on the single-mindedness with which he was aiming to run to ground the group of individuals he had been searching for in Romania, and for which he had enlisted her brother’s help.

The one-on-one nature of Antanasia and Abi’s relationship – the almost hermetic vacuum in which they were forced to live – made it more and more difficult for Abi to elude Antanasia’s questions. Reluctantly he began to avoid her company, pleading pressure of work relating to his mother’s estate. His greatest fear was that his mask might slip after so many years spent succumbing to his own basest desires, and that Antanasia would suddenly recognize the glaring similarities between him and her brother. This he could not allow, as her approval of him still meant the gaining of a large fortune which, given the amount of inheritance tax the French authorities were threatening to deprive him of, was becoming an increasingly significant part of his game plan.

Abi decided, therefore, that he would need to bring forward his showdown with Sabir and Calque, and leave Antanasia to her own devices for a while. If she sat in the villa alone and unable to travel, and with only her own thoughts for company, it might force her to come to terms with the fact that she had nobody and nothing left in her life bar Abi. That he was her lifeline and her saviour and the only means by which she could re-enter the human merry-go-round.

When she broached the subject of the money she knew her brother kept in a joint account in Switzerland, Abi almost pissed himself.

‘Yes. Yes. I’ve been meaning to tell you. My mother did make the final payment on account to your brother. But, strictly speaking, it was made following his death. The money should still, by rights, form part of her estate, and therefore come to me. I’m sure you would not wish to benefit in any way from such a clear abrogation of natural justice? Nor would you wish for the French tax authorities to extort their pound of flesh when the money can perfectly well stay put in Switzerland with only the minutest of tinkerings.’

Antanasia shook her head. ‘The money is yours, Abiger. It is blood money, and I don’t want it. I shall sign it over to you without any need for you to marry me, or to give me your name. I ask only one thing in return.’

Abi gave a sick smile.

‘I wish to travel with you back to Romania when you go there to take revenge on the men who killed your brother.’

91

‘What are you doing?’

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ Abi could feel the anger simmering away inside him. He wrapped the assault rifle in a blanket and stowed it underneath the bunk bed at the rear of the Mercedes motorhome. He felt like a Viking berserker readying himself to rush at the enemy.

‘And what is that?’

‘It’s a Kevlar KM2 interceptor vest. The sort the US military use.’

‘A vest?’

‘I call it my Wolf Pelt. It’s to protect me from bullets. You wear it underneath your normal clothes. It will stop anything short of a rifle round.’

‘And you keep such things at your house as a matter of course?’

‘It’s how I live my life. I love weapons. I love the smell of them. The weight of them. What they can do.’

‘You’re serious about this, then? You’re going to carry these weapons through four border crossings?’

‘Did you ever think I wasn’t? Three of the men I am going up against have pistols. I know this for a fact. Do you want me to get killed?’

Antanasia hugged her arms around her body. ‘Abiger, why are you doing this? You have everything you want in this world. You are a good man.’

‘I am not a good man. You say I have everything I want in this world. You’re wrong. When I said I love you, I meant it. But I know I can’t have you. I’m not a fool. You don’t know the half of what I’ve done. If you did, you’d run down that track screaming. So if I can’t have you, I’ll have the next best thing. I’ll have my revenge. Apart from you, my twin brother is the only person I have ever loved in this world – the only person who never betrayed me. Some people would call him stupid. Backward even. But he was a part of me.’ Abi tore open his shirt. ‘You see this scar? That’s where we were fused together at birth. Him and me. We shared a kidney. The doctors threw it out. One kidney is enough for anybody, they told the Carmelite nuns, as they accepted the sacrificial offering of Vau and me from our mother. Whoever the bitch was.’

Antanasia took a step towards him.

‘Stay away from me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I can’t allow myself to touch you anymore. Because any normal woman would have stepped away from me, and not towards me, when I told them that. You get under my skin, Antanasia. I can’t handle it.’

Antanasia nodded.

Abi raised his head in surprise. ‘You know, don’t you? You understand?’

She nodded again.

‘I’ve spent my entire life taking what I want, whenever I want it. I’ve decided that you’re going to be the exception that proves my rule.’

Antanasia lowered her head. ‘Every man I’ve ever known has taken what he wanted from me without my permission. Why should you be any different?’

‘That’s the reason I can’t touch you anymore.’ The words caught in Abi’s throat. ‘It’s the only thing I can offer you that’s of any value. Call it my love gift to you.’ Abi gave a snort – it came out as a half-choke, half-laugh. It was the sort of sound a man might make who was fighting unexpected tears. He rammed the bunk bed onto its housing and attached the locks with an unnecessary show of force. ‘Do you still want to accompany me to Romania? Think before you speak.’