‘But you loved her?’
‘I loved her and I hated her. Does that answer your question?’
Lamia put out a hand and squeezed his arm, but Sabir jerked unconsciously away from her, as if there was something he feared in her touch.
26
The trio drove all of the next day, right along the line of the Appalachian Mountains and down into Alabama. They each took it in turns to share the driving, and both Lamia and Sabir managed to doze a little when it was their turn to take a break.
Calque had attempted to persuade Sabir that civilized people didn’t stuff themselves full of eggs, bacon, and waffles at breakfast time, and then snack their way through the day until they ran up against the stone wall of a gargantuan, seven-o’clock dinner. Instead, they started off in the continental fashion, on the strict understanding that they had a good lunch to look forward to, with a light supper to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion.
‘This time I shall choose the restaurant. We are not being followed. We don’t need to use a drive-thru. It is not required that we sit in the car and stink it up with inadequately fried food.’
Neither Lamia nor Sabir felt it appropriate to draw attention to Calque stinking up the car with his cigarettes – something which he was doing on an ever more regular basis. Neither did Lamia mention Calque’s snoring. She was aware of a certain unexpected fragility in him – a fragility that verged on narcissism – and she was also aware of his susceptibility both to her and to the opinions of her sex.
During lunch – for which Calque had unexpectedly found a family-run restaurant near Knoxville which specialized in hickory-smoked baby back ribs, served with corn bread and pinto beans, but, lamentably, no wine – she questioned him about his wife and daughter.
Calque sighed, and stared down at his plate, as if it held within its purview some symbolical key to the human condition. ‘My wife wished, from the very first moment that she met me, that I had been a businessman and not a policeman. She managed to convince herself – without, I should add, any encouragement on my part – that I would eventually subscribe to her wishes and switch professions. We would then be able to live a comfortable, bourgeois existence, in a respectable Paris suburb, and take our holidays on the Ile de Re, just as she and her family had done for the past two generations. I let her down in this, just as I let her down in everything else. We had a daughter. At first this daughter seemed fond of me. I would take her to the flower market, and to the Jardin du Luxembourg to float her sailing boat. When my wife realized how fond I was of this little girl, she understood that her opportunity for revenge had finally arrived. She spent the better part of twenty years alienating my daughter from me in every way she could contrive. I fought back, of course, but a man who works full time, and long hours, in a sometimes brutalizing profession, has a weakened armoury. Eventually, my daughter married, and left home. Now, when I telephone, her husband speaks to me, but not her. Without the presence of my daughter, my marriage seemed even more of a sham than I had originally suspected. I therefore divorced my wife, effectively ruining myself in the process. This is only justice. If a man is a fool, he deserves to be treated like a fool. I was, and am, a fool. But now that I am older, I can look back on my folly and smile. Before, I could only weep.’
Sabir and Lamia stared speechlessly across the table at Calque. Never, in the time that either one of them had known him, had he opened up even remotely about his private life. He might have been a lay monk for all they knew. Now he had spread out all his dirty linen for them to witness, and they didn’t know quite how to respond.
‘It’s a shame they don’t serve wine here,’ said Sabir. ‘I could do with a glass or two myself.’
Lamia glared at him as if he had just overset a saucepot on her dress.
Sabir swallowed, and tried to redeem himself. ‘Calque, that’s terrible. You mean your daughter won’t even speak to you any more?’
This time Lamia aimed a kick at his shin under the table.
Calque, however, appeared not to have heard him. ‘Everything is fine now, though. I have taken early retirement from the police force. I have become obsessed with the after-effects of my final case. I have spent the past five weeks sitting in a camouflaged hideout on a hillside in southern France. I have ruined myself afresh by bribing a criminal to break into Lamia’s mother’s house and retrieve a tape recorder with nothing on it. I have come to America – a land of which I know nothing, and care to know even less – a land where people seem to subsist on fried food and takeaways – and I have made it my own. I have been pursued by madmen, and I have evaded them. I am surrounded by my friends.’ Calque dipped his corn bread into the baby rib sauce and ate it with every impression of relish. ‘Life is treating me well, in other words. Far better than I deserve.’
Sabir had a quizzical expression on his face. He glanced across at Lamia. ‘Is he joking? Or is he being serious?’
Lamia smiled. ‘He is being serious. Only he has a very French way of making his serious point.’
‘What? A sort of zigzaggy kind of a way? A down-hill-and-over-dale kind of a way? An up and down a few lurching by-ways and around a few blind corners kind of a way?’
‘Yes. That is it. That is it exactly.’
Calque had gone back to eating, seemingly unmoved by the remainder of the conversation.
It was as if he had laid his cards on the table, just as pre-arranged, and now it was up to everybody else to decide just what they were going to do with them.
27
All had been going well for the Corpus until their extended caravan arrived in the small town of Wakulhatchee, just south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at around nine p.m. on an unseasonably hot Friday night.
It had been a long day’s driving for the ten-car, eleven-person ersatz surveillance team. A day whose effects were exacerbated both by the continual need for caution, and by the inevitable wear and tear caused by the obsessive twenty-minute rotas that Abi had insisted upon despite the fact that the trio they were following in the Grand Cherokee appeared to have not the remotest idea that they were still being watched.
Even during the trio’s lunch break – when it might have appeared reasonable for the team to stand down and take it easy – Abi had refused permission for any of his brothers and sisters to take time off for anything more than a snack. ‘You can relax this evening. When they’re static. We’ll only need two people at any one time to watch them then. So the rest of you can go off and get some R amp; R.’
‘Which two are going to watch them?’
Abi could see storm clouds looming. He put on his most placatory voice. ‘Vau and I will take the first four-hour shift. We’re the freshest. And the pressure’s been off us all day. The rest of you can draw lots for who’s next in line. Those four hours ought to give you all the time you need to get some food and drink inside you and lighten up a little. If our trio decide on a late outing we’ll call you and tell you whereabouts they’re headed. We don’t want you all to crash into each other like ninepins. If Lamia catches sight of any of us, we’re done for. They’ll bolt again, and this time they’ll make damned sure they’re not followed. No. We need to keep them sweet and unaware.’
For their part Calque, Lamia, and Sabir had found another of their Olde Worlde – read terminally rundown – motels, on the very edge of town. This one was managed by a Polish family – and they, too, barely raised an eyebrow at their guests’ unconventional sleeping arrangements.