Weapons? He didn’t have any. What an idiot. He didn’t even have a pair of carpet slippers to hit the burglars with. And he couldn’t see himself bearding potentially armed men with a garden rake.
He was just beginning to move away from the house and towards Main Street when some instinct stopped him in his tracks. Perhaps it was the memory of another night, five months before, when he had huddled down behind a sand dune in the Camargue and watched a similar house, once again in total darkness save for the opalescent glow from a fragile circle of candles.
That time, the candlelight had been outlining the hooded figure of his blood sister, Yola Samana, as she teetered precariously on a three-legged stool with a noose around her neck, whilst a dispassionate Achor Bale sat in the invisible shadows and watched her as he might have watched a staked-out lamb during a midnight tiger hunt.
Either way, the sudden unwanted echo of the recent past was enough to make Sabir pause in his flight and rethink his position. He edged back towards the summer house wall, hissing nervously through his teeth. He could clearly see the shadows of two men reflected off the ceiling of his study. Burglars? The heck with that. Burglars didn’t walk around their victim’s house switching on the electric lights. CIA? FBI? IRS? Who the hell else gave themselves the right to come visiting honest citizens in the middle of the night?
With a sudden, intense conviction, Sabir knew exactly who the men were, what they were looking for, and why they were looking for it.
It was at this point that he remembered his father’s old shotgun. Ever since his childhood it had been kept in the understairs wine cellar, hanging upside down by its trigger guard on a meat hook. Sabir hadn’t moved a thing in the house since his father’s death three years before – there had never seemed any point. So if the trigger guard hadn’t rusted away in the interim, the shotgun would presumably still be there.
Sabir’s sudden focus on the shotgun and on the sanctity of his family home served to pull him together and renew his courage. If these men came from the Countess, as he suspected they did, he had no choice but to confront them. They were his problem and his problem alone. He was damned if he would scuttle off down Main Street in his pyjamas at three o’clock in the morning and go wake up his neighbours.
Sabir had one ace up his sleeve, however. He knew from his time as a journalist on the New England Courier that Massachusetts had draconian burglary laws – armed burglary carried a minimum fifteen-year jail term, and even unarmed breaking and entering could fetch you five. And he was willing to bet that whoever the Countess had sent would have come armed.
As he headed for the cellar he began to rehearse in his mind just how the thing might conceivably play out.
6
Vau straightened up from his perusal of Sabir’s study and turned towards his elder brother. ‘Sabir must keep everything locked away in his head. There’s nothing of any interest in here.’
‘Did you really think there would be?’
Vau shrugged. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think anything. As far as I’m concerned, we just came here to revenge ourselves on Rocha’s killer.’
‘Ever the foot soldier, never the captain, right?’
‘You can laugh at me all you want, Abi. But I know where I stand in the general scheme of things. I’m grateful to Madame, our mother, and to Monsieur, our father, for adopting me. I’m grateful for the title I’ve inherited, and even more grateful for the money that goes with it. Cleverer people than me can work out strategies and interpret prophecies and delay the coming of Armageddon – or whatever the hell it is we’re meant to be doing. Me, I just obey orders.’
Abi sprawled back against Sabir’s desk, his arms spread to support his weight. He looked his brother up and down, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now that you’re a happy and contented man?’
‘Happy? Contented? I don’t know about that. But there’s one thing I do know.’ Vau hesitated briefly, as if gathering his thoughts together after a long hiatus. ‘I’m going to confess something to you, Abi. Something that you may not give a damn about. But I’m going to tell you nonetheless.’
Abi cocked his head to one side encouragingly. He was clearly enjoying himself.
Vau snorted in a lungful of air, as if he was readying himself for a hundred-metre free-dive. ‘You are the only person I truly care about in this world, Abi. The only one. And that’s not because you’re anything special – don’t ever think that. But because we’re viscerally linked. You’re my twin. We were even connected together, or so they tell me, when we were born. Plus you’re brighter than me, Abi, I give you that. And quicker. But you won’t ever find anyone else truer to you than me, if you were to search for a thousand years.’
‘The master of the nonsequitur strikes again.’ Abi mimicked being squashed up against a wall by an unwanted admirer. Then his face became more serious. ‘Why are you telling me this, Vau? And why here?’
‘Because I worry about you, Abi. I think you’re beginning to like all this too much. I think you’re really beginning to believe that you’re something special – something over and above the norm. That moral laws don’t apply to you any longer. You’re becoming like Rocha, in other words. You’re becoming a freak. I mean look at us. We’re standing here in a foreign country, in someone else’s house – a house that we’re on the verge of torching, for pity’s sake – lit up like fucking Christmas trees. And you seem to think it’s all fine. That there’s something normal about this.’
Abi made a full circle on the spot – widdershins – his hands flapping in mock veneration like a cartoon guru. ‘But it is normal, Vau. Can’t you see the beauty of it?’
‘Beauty?’
‘Yes, beauty. Let me lay it out for you, pendejo. Let me read you a lesson from the Good News Bible.’ Abi mimicked flicking open the pages of a book. ‘Monsieur, our father’s, distant ancestors were given a holy gage by France’s greatest and most venerated king – a king the Vatican later turned into a saint by popular acclamation. This gage was to protect the French realm from the Devil. So far so simple, no? But the gage wasn’t designed to stop with the king’s death. No. It continues on to this day.’
‘According to who?’
Abi sighed condescendingly. ‘According to you and me. The fact that the rest of society is out of step with us – that France is no longer a monarchy – that none of these atheistical idiots believe in the Devil any more – all that is entirely irrelevant.’ Abi was grinning. ‘It’s the others that are the freaks. The people who refuse to act. The walking fucking victims. The sorts of people who have never moved across into no-man’s-land and plundered somebody else’s herd.’ Abi pointed at his brother. ‘We’re the hunters, Vau – you and I. And they are our prey. We’ve been set free thanks to St Louis’s edict. That’s all the moral justification we’ll ever need. Now bust that chair up and stack it over here. We need to get a blaze going.’
Sabir had heard enough. Ammo or no ammo, he wasn’t about to allow these maniacs to set fire to his father’s house.
He had scrabbled in vain through the wine cellar for the remotest sign of a box of cartridges. The shotgun had been in place, though, just as he remembered it. If he wanted to save his family home from destruction, he would simply have to use the empty weapon as a deterrent. The two of them couldn’t exactly stare down the barrels and check to see if they were loaded, now, could they?
He kicked open the study door and brought the shotgun up to bear. He had understood the men to be twins from their conversation, but he was still unprepared for the uncanny resemblance between the two of them. It was like staring into the shards of a shattered mirror.