The one called Vau was already in the process of levering off the semi-circular back of his father’s favourite library chair.
‘Drop that chair. You’re not setting fire to anything.’ Sabir kept his back firmly against the door. He had privately decided that if either of the men made an aggressive move towards him, he would simply throw the shotgun at them, turn on his heels, and leg it as fast as possible out of the house.
Both men froze in place. The one called Abi was the first to relax and acknowledge him.
‘I suppose you expect us to put our hands up? To go and stand over by the wall, like they do in the movies?’
‘I want you to lie down on the ground. Then I want you to unhitch your belts, and push your trousers down around your ankles.’
‘Christ, Vau. The guy’s gay.’
‘Just do it. From this range, I can cut you both in half without even needing to switch barrels.’ Adam Sabir raised the shotgun and aimed it directly at Abi’s head. It was becoming increasingly obvious which of the two was in charge.
The twins dropped slowly to their knees. Making a show of their reluctance, they unbuckled their belts, pushed their trousers down, and stretched out on the floor. ‘What are you going to do now, Sabir? Rape us?’
‘The cons at Cedar Junction can do that. In fifteen years’ time you’ll be able to write a book about your experiences. It’ll be a sure-fire bestseller. You can call it Shafted By The Penal System.’
‘You hear that, Vau? This guy’s got a sense of humour. I suppose this means you’re going to call in the cops?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Look. We only came here for information. We’re not even armed. If you give us what we want, we’ll leave you in peace.’
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
‘At least tell us who warned you we were coming? Because somebody warned you. There’s no way you just happened to be out of your room and in possession of a shotgun the exact moment we came by.’
Sabir hesitated. Now that the twins were safely down on the ground, he wasn’t sure how best to finagle himself out of the situation he found himself in. ‘Nobody warned me.’ He edged further into the room and sidestepped towards the telephone.
‘Bullshit. We saw you go to bed. We’ve been watching this place for the past twelve hours. Somebody warned you.’ Abi turned towards his brother. ‘Hey, Vau. I know who it was. It was that pig of an ex-policeman. The one who kidnapped Lamia. The one Madame, our mother, says tried to bug our meeting and failed. But how did he know we were coming over here?’
Vau met his brother’s gaze. Then he looked away.
‘It was that bitch of a sister of ours, wasn’t it? I should have killed her when I had the chance.’ Abi got up off the floor. He pulled his trousers up and tightened his belt as though Sabir were no longer in the room. ‘Get up, Vau. I’ve got all the information I need. This bastard’s not going to shoot us in a month of Sundays. He hasn’t got the balls for it. And I’m not waiting patiently here with my trousers around my ankles while he summons up enough courage to call the cops.’
‘Don’t move another step, de Bale.’
‘Go fuck yourself, Sabir.’ Abi sidestepped towards the door. ‘You saved your house. Be satisfied with that. Shame, though. I enjoy a good blaze. But it’ll have to wait for another day. We’ll take a rain check on this one.’
Sabir stood with the gun still trained on Abi. He couldn’t think what else to do.
Vau went to join his brother at the door.
‘Look. Now you can get both of us again with just one barrel. But you’d have a hard time explaining it away, wouldn’t you? And you’d have an unpleasant bit of rearranging to do before the cops got here. That sort of thing takes a cooler head than yours.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What do you think? The back door was open. You even let us in yourself. No sign of breaking and entering anywhere. And as you can see, we aren’t armed.’ Abi had slipped the fighting baton back inside his sleeve ten minutes before, after finding the bedroom empty. ‘No. What really happened was we travelled all the way out here to the United States just in order to forgive you for our brother’s death. To reach closure on it for our family. The Yanks love all that psycho stuff. But you turned crazy, like your mother, and threatened us with a shotgun. Just think how that would play out in a court of law – especially as it’s common knowledge that you were suspected of murder, and on the run from the French police, just five short months ago. Cops have long memories, Sabir. Shit sticks. And there’s no stink without shit.’
Sabir snatched at the telephone. What else was there to do? Pull the trigger on an empty chamber? If there’d been any slugs in his shotgun he might have let them have it, if only for the crack about his mother. But as things stood, he could only watch them back out of the door while his finger tapped out three random numbers on the telephone keypad.
As soon as the twins were downstairs and he heard the back door safely slam, Sabir pressed down on the receiver button, cancelling the call.
He wouldn’t be calling any cops on this particular watch.
7
Sabir stood at his bedroom window and watched the twins get into their car, fire up the engine, and roar away from the kerbside with predictably screaming tyres.
He turned around and tossed the useless shotgun onto his bed. Then he lay down beside it and closed his eyes. God, if he could only sleep. Instead he lay awake, the adrenalin rush triggered by the implicit violence of the last fifteen minutes slowly leaching out of his system.
One thing he knew for certain. From now on his house would be as good as dead to him. That much was obvious even to an imbecile. Maintaining a fixed station like this, with Achor Bale’s twin brothers on his trail, would make him more than merely vulnerable. It would confirm him as suicidal.
No. The only thing for it was to get on the road and keep moving, taking any information he needed with him in his head. Curiously, the thought of going on the run again didn’t worry Sabir overmuch. In his mind he was a thousand miles away from Stockbridge already.
Much to his surprise, his investigation of the 52 lost Nostradamus quatrains had moved on by leaps and bounds in the past few weeks, to the extent that he was becoming increasingly eager to test out his new theories in the field. Maybe, just maybe, he could squeeze a book’s worth of material out of the thing without giving anything crucial away.
Sabir realized that only by publishing a rigorously expurgated version of the prophecies – with his own tentative suggestions as to their significance – could he protect both himself and the future of Alexi and Yola’s unborn child. He would, in effect, be conducting a damage limitation exercise in expedient disinformation.
When Captain Joris Calque of France’s Police Nationale had visited him in hospital all those months ago, the man had not come bearing a punnet of grapes. He had come on a fishing expedition for reasons as to why the Countess’s eldest son, Achor Bale, had been pursuing Sabir and his two Gypsy friends, Alexi Dufontaine and Yola Samana, halfway across France with such a murderous and single-minded intensity.
At first, Sabir had refused to enlighten him. Then Calque had reminded him of the sacrifices made by his late assistant, Paul Macron, and by the seriously injured Sergeant Spola in an effort to keep Sabir and his friends alive. Sabir had been forced to acknowledge that Calque had played fair by both him and by Yola and Alexi. At least according to his lights.
Reluctantly, he had taken pity on the man. He had begun by explaining how he believed that Nostradamus’s 52 lost quatrains constituted a 52-year rundown towards the date of a possible Armageddon. And that in his opinion the 52-year cycle had begun in 1960, leading to a possible end date circa 2012. And that this end date corresponded as near as dammit to the Mayan Great Change, which was predicted, according to the Maya Long Count Calendar, to occur on 21 December of that same year.