The Third Antichrist (38 page)

‘You will. You will.’ Dracul brought his tear-stained face close to hers. ‘I treated your back with salve while you were unconscious. And I’ve injected you with a painkiller. Some morphine. It’s powerful. Very powerful. Soon it will begin to take effect.’

Antanasia could indeed feel her pain diminishing. Her eyelids began to flutter. All the horrors she had undergone in her life seemed to wash across her like an outgoing tide. ‘I want to die, Dracul. I can’t go on living like this. You’ve ruined me.’ She could feel her words meshing together, as if they were coated in molasses. ‘Inject me more. I want to die.’

‘You will not die. I won’t let you. You are mine.’

Antanasia began to laugh. She had rarely laughed since her tenth birthday, which her father had celebrated by declaring that she was finally valuable enough to sell. The laugh turned into a cough, and then to a morphine-fuelled wheezing.

‘How can you laugh? Look at you. Look at what you have made me do to you.’

Antanasia closed her eyes. She could feel her limbs being progressively deadened by the morphine. Why was it that it was always the men in her life who abused her? What was it about being a woman? Were all women treated like this? Did untold women walk the streets with dark horrors like hers tucked away in their hearts? Or had God chosen her as a sacrifice so that all other women might be allowed to walk free? The Eve sacrifice that her father had explained to her when first he had offered her body to his friends? Antanasia could feel her mind degenerating. She knew that she must speak soon, or she would be unable to voice her fears.

‘Dracul, if you are truly the Second Coming, as you declare, perhaps you can cause a miracle to happen? Perhaps you can heal me? Perhaps you can cause to be blotted out everything that has happened to me in the past thirty years? If you can do this, I will truly believe you are a miracle worker.’ She began to cough again, which forced her to open her eyes. As she stared ahead of her, the design on the wallpaper began to crawl up the wall as if it were alive. What did she have to lose anymore? Even physical reality was betraying her. ‘There is an expression the French use. “Don’t ever lower your arms – you might do it just before the miracle occurs.”’

Dracul took Antanasia by the hair and held her face up to his own. She could see the dried tracks of tears upon his cheeks. His eyes were like dark wells within which monsters lurked. She wondered if her own eyes were equally besmirched.

‘If you continue talking in this way, I shall be forced to strike you again.’ He allowed Antanasia’s head to fall back onto the bed.

Just before she lost consciousness Antanasia prayed to God that He would take her now, whilst she was still herself, and not merely the sum total of somebody else’s pain.

Sibiu, Romania
Saturday, 6 February 2010

60

Sabir drove through the night. The way he figured it, the Simca must be known to someone, somewhere, and its number, in consequence, almost certainly flagged up. He also reckoned that, come morning, he and his companions would be that much more vulnerable to police checkpoints and random inspections, and that they clearly needed to have gone to ground by then.

Radu had assured him on numerous occasions that he and Lemma had buried the body of their attacker beneath a pile of bricks and rubble, but Sabir could only imagine the sheer panic that must have suffused them while they were doing it. He knew from bitter experience that murdering someone – even someone who deserved murdering – changed you in some way. Ingrained habits no longer counted. What you thought you had done and what you really did were two different animals entirely.

At around two in the morning it seemed as if Lemma’s baby was finally about to make its appearance. Sabir pulled the car off the road and left the engine running, but it soon became clear that Lemma’s increased contractions had been a false alarm.

As Radu could only see out of one eye, and as Alexi was still recovering from his binge, Sabir agreed to let Calque take over the wheel for a couple of hours. It rapidly became apparent, however, that Driver Calque was having trouble negotiating the snowdrifts, so Sabir shunted across and retook the wheel. His teens and early maturity spent negotiating Western Massachusetts’ often severe winter conditions had prepared Sabir well for February weather in central Romania.

Calque’s driving, on the other hand, had clearly suffered as a result of his having been allocated a personal driver during his time as a senior officer in the French police force – the man drove in an oddly tentative fashion, given his normally decisive temperament, and had a marked tendency to brake at all the wrong moments and then grin stupidly, as though he really had intended for everybody to lurch forward in tandem as if on a rollercoaster.

They passed the old Saxon town of Sibiu at six in the morning, with the Carpathians, and their second highest peak, Negoiu – which they knew they must cross – clearly visible from the twenty-four-hour Romgaz service station they used for tanking up and buying provisions. There were few cars on the roads, and when they turned off through Avrig, in the foothills of the F
ă
g
ă
ra
ş
Mountains, and towards the Transf
ă
g
ă
ra
ş
an road itself, the traffic dropped to a trickle. If people wanted to travel by car between Wallachia and Transylvania, they were clearly using alternative routes.

‘We’re crazy doing this, Radu. We’ll never make it across the pass in the dead of winter. Look at that sign. It says the DN7C peaks at more than 2,000 metres of altitude. Just imagine what it’s going to be like up there. We’ve got to get Lemma to a doctor here and now.’

‘But Driver Kol...’

‘Fuck Driver Kol. You told me once that he drives a modern eighteen-wheeler truck. This car must be a least thirty years old, it has four indescribable wheels, and the snow chains have about rusted through. Plus we have your wife...’ Sabir hesitated, mindful of Gypsy superstition. ‘... indisposed. Are you seriously telling me we should continue across a pass that, even in perfect weather, and at the absolute height of summer, probably forces any vehicle that crosses it to average less than thirty miles an hour? We’re talking the Rockies here, Radu, not the fucking Berkshires.’

Yola put her hand on Sabir’s arm. ‘Listen to Radu, Damo. Please. It is no use shouting at him.’

Sabir stopped the car at the exit to the village of C
ă
r
ţ
i
ş
oara. He looked up the valley towards the Transf
ă
g
ă
ra
ş
an pass. ‘Why should I listen to anybody? Take a look up there, all of you. Do you see what I see? The gates to that pass will be locked as tight as a tick’s asshole. We’ll have to turn back anyway. This is utterly pointless.’

‘Please, Damo. Your language.’

Sabir shrugged. He was susceptible to Yola and she knew it. She had saved him from Achor Bale’s clutches in that Camargue cesspit nine months ago, and she was able, in consequence, to cut herself a little slack with him whenever she chose to. Every man has his weakness, and Yola – his blood sister – was Sabir’s. ‘Okay, Radu. Spout.’

Radu was holding himself in with difficulty. The past fourteen hours hadn’t been the easiest of his life, and he was still suffering from the aftermath of Andrassy’s blow to his head. ‘As I told you, Damo, the army keeps the pass open in the winter for its own purposes. I know for a fact that trucks sometimes use it too – if they can make it through unseen, or can find someone to bribe.’

‘But not in an effing snowstorm.’

‘No. No. Driver Kol said that the army has its very own snowploughs, which are kept permanently up near the pass. And this time of the morning all the Special Forces soldiers, the ones they call the Mountain Hunters – the Vanatori de Munte – will still be tucked up in their barracks down in the valley at Curtea de Arge
ş
.’

‘Unless they are finishing a night exercise.’

Radu shrugged philosophically. ‘
Na xanrrunde kaj c
̆
i xal tut
– “don’t scratch where you don’t itch”. Nobody will be looking for us up there, Damo.’

‘You bet they won’t. The army will probably find us and the car gently thawing out in some forgotten ravine come spring. It’ll make one hell of a story. Think how happy the Corpus will be. All their broken eggs in one basket.’

‘Please, Damo. The risk is ours.’

Sabir glanced at the four Gypsies crouching in the well made by the torn-out rear seat. Then he looked across at Calque. ‘What do you think,
mon Capitaine
?’

Calque shrugged. ‘I think we need to find out exactly what we’re up against before we make a decision that we may regret later. As of now, we can still drive out of here. In an hour’s time, with this volume of snow, it may be too late.’

‘Well, how do you suggest we go about doing that?’

‘Radu, did you say you still had the cell phone you took from the man who tried to kill you and Lemma?’

‘Yes.’ Radu dug into his pockets. ‘Here it is. I never used it. I have his wallet, too, and a few other odds and ends.’

‘I don’t want those. Just give me the phone.’

Sabir grabbed his friend’s arm. ‘Calque, you can’t be serious. You can’t make a call with that. They could trace us back via the network.’

Calque shook his head impatiently. ‘Radu, you said that the phone rang while you and Lemma were burying this man’s body?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe whoever rang left a message?’

Radu shrugged. ‘This is possible. I never thought to check.’

Sabir puffed out his cheeks. ‘I must be losing it. That thought had never occurred to me either.’

Calque gave one of his ‘cat-that-got-the-cream’ smiles. ‘None of us is thinking very clearly at the moment.’ He fired up the cell phone, then fiddled with the buttons a little and held the phone up to his ear. He closed his eyes and listened. After a moment’s hesitation he handed the phoned to Yola. ‘The man is speaking Romanian. Can you understand him?’

Yola listened to the message. Then she played it again.

Calque took the phone back, switched it off, and replaced it in his pocket. ‘So? Are we any further along?’

Yola nodded. ‘It wasn’t the Corpus that mistook Lemma for me and tried to kill her. The man leaving the message calls himself Coryphaeus Catalin. In this message he is asking the owner of the phone, the man Radu killed – a man he calls Crusader Andrassy – to phone him back immediately and tell him if he has carried out his instructions to the letter.’

Sabir slapped the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. ‘Catalin is the man I told Lamia about. The man I described to you all a few months ago. The man Nostradamus appears to be describing when he talks about the Third Antichrist.’

Calque’s face was bereft of emotion. ‘Well, it appears that the Corpus have contacted him, just as you feared, and have brought him round to their way of thinking – no doubt via the transfer of large sums of money. That much was inevitable from the moment they learned about his existence from Lamia.’ Calque refused to look at Sabir when he said this. ‘The dead man is clearly one of Catalin’s infamous Crusaders. And where there is one, there will be more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that this changes everything. We are much more vulnerable to a man with the reach of a Catalin, in his own territory, with an extensive network of religious fundamentalists at his command, than we were to four – albeit vengeful – members of the Corpus Maleficus. Radu is right. Our only hope, in the absence of a
deus ex machina
, is to keep clear of the main roads until we can find sanctuary somewhere. Radu tells us that he has some Romani friends who will take us in and look after Lemma – and later, Yola. The safety of the two women must be our priority. That is only just. But to reach this sanctuary, Radu tells us that we need to make for the south of the country. And our safest way to do that is to avoid the main roads and cut straight across the Carpathians. Anyone have any other suggestions?’

Silence greeted his words.

Sabir groaned and slipped the car into gear.