‘You managed to get the drop on them? With an empty shotgun?’ Calque seemed to be having difficulty conjuring up a sufficiently lurid image of the event. ‘You held up the de Bale twins with an empty shotgun?’
‘You see, no one can tell whether a shotgun is empty or not. It’s not like a revolver, where you can see the shells. Or lack of them.’
‘I understand the constitution of a shotgun, Sabir.’
‘Well, anyway, as part of this dream I see a woman. She has her back to me. You’ve got to imagine that I’m the snake by now, and I’m approaching her. My mouth is hanging open. I’m going to take this woman’s head in my mouth, just like the snake did with me. Then at the very last moment the woman turns around. And she has your face, Mademoiselle de Bale.’
‘You mean exactly? With my birthmark? With my blemish?’
‘Yes. She has a blemish, if that’s what you want to call it, just like yours. At first I thought it was blood. All along, really, I’ve thought it was blood.’
‘And now you realize it isn’t?’
‘Yes. Now I realize it isn’t.’ Sabir looked down. He understood only too well how badly he had hurt the woman. That he had damaged her in some invisible way. In his head, though, he was still torn between his horror that she was Achor Bale’s sister, and his fascination that she seemed to have rejected the de Bale camp and joined the side of the angels – e.g. him and Calque.
‘And what happens to this woman who looks so much like me? In your dream, I mean.’
Sabir closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and stared directly at Lamia. ‘She opens her mouth – wider even than the snake was able to open its mouth – and she swallows me whole.’
10
‘Saudi Arabia? You can’t be serious?’
Sabir threw himself back in his chair. ‘You bet I’m serious. I’ve looked into this every which way there is to look, and the quatrain seems to point directly there.’
‘Would you be prepared to share your logic with us?’ Twice, now, Calque had reached for his cigarettes, and then replaced them in his pocket after reproving glances from the inn staff.
Sabir glanced at Lamia.
She caught the glance, and made as if to stand up. ‘Would you rather I left the room? I can fully understand if you still don’t feel, despite Captain Calque’s assurances, that I am an entirely trustworthy companion.’
Sabir waved her back down again. ‘Stay right where you are.’ He caught Calque’s eye and shrugged. ‘There’s no way you could possibly know this, but before I got the drop on your brothers, I listened in on their private conversation. A full couple of minutes of it. And together with what they told me later, it soon became clear to me that they think you betrayed them, Mademoiselle de Bale. In fact they think that – via our friend Calque here – you warned me directly about their coming. And that, to put it mildly, they don’t like you for it.’
‘But she did.’ Calque squirmed forward in his seat. ‘That’s exactly what she did do. She told me of her brothers’ mission. In good time for me to warn you. If ever you’d bothered to pick up your phone, that is, or taken an interest in your messages.’
‘ Touche, Captain.’
‘And I’ve not told you how I found her yet. What her family were about to do to her.’
‘You don’t need to. Her brothers’ words were good enough for me. You can’t fake attitudes like that. Mademoiselle de Bale is welcome to sit in on our conversation if she wants to.’ Sabir was aware that part of him was endeavouring, via a studied politeness, to compensate the woman for his blundering faux pas about her face and the disturbing content of his dream. Another part of him recognized that Calque had obviously committed himself to her in some way – heck, didn’t he have an errant daughter hidden away somewhere? Maybe she reminded him of her? – and that he still owed Calque.
‘Why did you let the twins get away? They were in your house illegally. Why didn’t you simply call the police?’
Sabir shook his head. ‘They were playing with me. They knew I wouldn’t shoot. They brazened it out, making it clear there’d been no breaking and entering of any sort. That I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of the cops. Then, when they’d worked out to their satisfaction how I’d managed to avoid their little trap, they left.’
‘You let them leave? Just like that?’
‘What was I going to do, Calque? Toss the shotgun at them? If you ask me, they’re holding fire until they can corner me somewhere private and wring out everything I know. When I haven’t got a shotgun in my hand, maybe.’ Sabir shrugged. ‘Things might pan out a little differently that time.’
11
‘Sabir was warned, Madame. I’m certain of it. The American knew we were coming. He was hiding outside the house with a shotgun. When we switched on the lights, thinking he was no longer there, he knew exactly where to find us.’
‘You think Lamia warned him? Through Calque?’
‘I’m convinced of it.’
‘Why didn’t he involve the police, then?’
‘He was scared to, Madame. We had entered his house through an open door – he slipped up on that one. Given that fact, and the existing relationship between our two families, he would have been hard put to accuse us of robbery. I think we can call this first round something of a stalemate.’
‘What are you going to do now, Abiger?’
‘We’ve flushed him out, Madame. He will go on the run now. We must follow him.’
‘Have you tagged his car?’
‘Impossible, Madame. He has it sealed up tight. And the garage is alarmed. When he leaves, he will leave fast.’
‘And Lamia?’
‘She is here with the policeman. They are all three sitting in the public rooms of the White Horse Inn. We can’t even get close.’
‘Will you be able to follow him?’
‘Of course, Madame.’
‘Abiger, you are talking arrant nonsense. Two men cannot follow a man twenty-four hours by twenty-four. It’s an impossibility. And once you’ve lost him, he is lost for good. I am sending your brothers and sisters over to help you.’
‘But, Madame ‘Be quiet, Abiger. I want to know exactly what he does, and why he is doing it. It’s not enough simply to deal with him any more in the way we discussed previously. There’s more involved. We’ve got Calque to deal with too. So all eleven of you will conduct a full surveillance on the three of them – if they split up, all well and good. If they stay together, even better. I want to know everything they do – everywhere they go. And I shall decide when it is the right moment for you to strike, Abiger, not you. Have I made myself clear?’
There was a brief hesitation.
‘Have I made myself clear, Abiger?’
‘Yes, Madame. But I’m still running this operation, aren’t I? I’m still in charge?’
‘Until I decide otherwise. Yes, Abiger. You are.’
12
At first, you were lucky. The travelling went well. A man taking chayotes down to Veracruz gave you a lift in his truck. Through Orizaba and Cordoba, as far as La Tinaja. He dropped you off there, and you stood on the Tierra Blanca road for three hours, hoping for another lift. But no one stopped. Everyone was going the other way. Towards the volcano. In order to see the free show, you supposed.
It was then you began walking. You had money for food, but not for buses. But there was no hurry. The volcano had done its worst. No one had been killed. A number of villages close to the summit had been damaged, some by lava, some by dust, but the people had had ample time to evacuate, even when on foot. Now the State had promised to rebuild their homes. All this you had heard on the radio of the truck.
The State was indeed a powerful thing, you said to yourself. When things went badly, it was the State which put things right. You did not fully understand this, nor how the State functioned, but you suspected that its benevolence was, as it were, inbuilt. That things had always been like that.