The Third Antichrist (30 page)

Antanasia shook her head. ‘There was more than that, wasn’t there? I know you, Dracul. I know when you are hiding things from me.’

Lupei permitted his gaze to drift across the bed and towards the window. The late November sun was edging below the horizon in a seething golden mass. Dracul seemed mesmerized by it. The sunset reflected off his face and turned it yellow, as if he had been afflicted with a case of jaundice ‘Yes. You are right. There was one more thing.’ He hesitated. ‘Understand this. I had already suffocated him. The old man was clearly dead.’

‘Tell me, Dracul.’

Dracul’s mouth dropped open, like that of a child about to gag. ‘So I withdrew the sack, satisfied that I had killed him. Then his eyes opened, and he drew in a terrible, ragged breath, like a man emerging from a near drowning.’ Lupei screwed up his face. For a moment he resembled the artless young boy he had been before he had started his seemingly inexorable descent towards the void. ‘He was old. Perhaps he took only shallow breaths? Yes. That must have been it. They say people who meditate only take one or two breaths a minute. And this monk was a meditator. I had seen him at it. Copied him, even.’ Lupei looked disgusted – as if he had been let down in some way. Cheated of his expectations. ‘Anyway, just as I was raising the sack above his head to kill him for the second time, he cried out “
Eloi
.
Eloi
.
Lama Sabachthani
”. You remember? Exactly like Christ on the Cross. And then – well. It’s absurd. He was dying. Who knows what was going through his head?’

‘What else did he call out, Dracul?’

Lupei hesitated. His face seemed congested. Like a man with a fishbone hooked across his throat. ‘He cried out “Antichrist! Antichrist! You are become Antichrist.”’

Brara, Maramure
ş
, Romania
Friday, 5 February 2010

47

This was the thirty-second village that Iuliu Andrassy, Crusader in the service of the Church of the Renascent Christ, had personally investigated. As one of Mihael Catalin’s chosen apostles, Andrassy, like Antanasia, had been spared having his forehead tattooed with the patriarchal cross. This allowed him to blend in with the surrounding population, and, as an indigenous Romanian speaker – albeit one born in Moldova – to act, to all intents and purposes, as one of Romania’s own.

Each village on Andrassy’s list took a maximum of two days to cover. Each house had to be visited. Each isolated hamlet explored. Every householder quizzed. Already, thanks to near blizzard conditions, Andrassy had had to abandon his car on more than one occasion. On this particular morning he was sick to his heart at the thought of having to trudge through still more ankle-deep snow, on still more uncleared roads. If he didn’t secure the offer of a bed for the night, he knew that he must, yet again, bunk down in the back of his wind-searched Simca and make the best of the three sleeping bags and the dubious paraffin heater that threatened to asphyxiate him if he didn’t leave the windows cracked well open. Which was a clear case, he decided, of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Most of the people Andrassy interviewed did not possess motor vehicles, but still travelled largely by foot – or, if they were better off, by horse and dogcart. Public transportation was non-existent. In the case of such isolated communities, local government did not feel the need to send in snowploughs after each individual snowfall. These people possessed shovels and brooms, did they not? And, anyway, spring would eventually come along and sort out their problems for them, so why hurry things? For centuries Romania’s peasants had been self-sufficient enough to see to their own mess – let them continue, was the motto. Andrassy hoped, even if only briefly, to change this perception of government inertia and entropy.

Andrassy’s cover was as a special representative working on behalf of an office created by Romania’s President, Traian Basescu, tasked with conducting a survey of Moldovans with ethnic Romanian ancestry living illegally in Romania. If such people fulfilled certain criteria – having Romanian as their first language, for instance, and having at least one grandparent who had been born in Romania – the government would grant them Romanian, and in consequence, EU citizenship, together with all its concomitant rights, such as access to the wider EU, including France, Britain, and Germany, and to the lavish state perquisites allegedly accorded to EU citizens by those countries. They would benefit just as Romania’s Saxons had benefited, twenty years earlier, when a newly reunified Germany had opened its borders to them. At least, that’s what the heavily clipboarded Andrassy had been told to tell them.

Already more than 120,000 Moldovans had been vouchsafed Romanian citizenship in this way, he assured the villagers he visited – and President Basescu had promised that 800,000 more who were on the scheme’s waiting list would have their applications expedited at the rate of 10,000 a month. Surely it made sense to register?

After an initial period of suspicion, Andrassy found that most people were only too happy to open up and pinpoint Moldovans living in their villages. When Andrassy concluded his general survey with the seemingly casual question ‘No Gypsies living here, I suppose?’ he nearly always got an answer. Gypsies would then be compared, unfavourably, to people who considered themselves ethnic Romanians, like the Moldovans and certain rogue Transnistrians, and Andrassy would be asked if there was not anything he, or representatives of the government like him, could do to rid the village of such unwanted pests?

‘No. No.’ He would exclaim. ‘Our hands are tied in this matter. But tell me where they are living and I will note down their details on my chart for future reference. We are hearing bad things from France. They are ejecting Roma from the
bidonvilles
in their thousands and sending them back here. Pretty soon, your village will be flooded with refugees. Endlessly breeding refugees. We must all do what we can to protect you from such people. I will go and reason with these Gypsies. Please tell me again where I can find them.’

‘Breeding. Yes. These Romani breed like rabbits. There is one down in our village even now who is pregnant. There will be more, I suspect. I doubt they believe in marriage. Or the sacraments. And they are thieves.’

‘Do you mean they have stolen from you?’

‘From us? No. Not from us. But we know, nevertheless, that they are thieves. All Gypsies are thieves, are they not? Blood is blood.’

In this way, Andrassy discovered the identity of all visibly pregnant women amongst the Gypsy population, without causing suspicion or alerting anyone to what he and the other Crusaders were about. A useful side effect of the fake survey was that the Church of the Renascent Christ would thus be able to obtain the names and addresses of the vast majority of Moldovans living illegally in rural northern Romania – something which would allow their leader, Mihael Catalin, to contact such people at a later date and promise them guaranteed EU citizenship, via Romania, were they, or, more importantly, their extended families in Moldova, to vote for him in the presidential elections to be held later that year.

Political leverage was therefore the main purpose of the survey – or so Andrassy had been told. The Gypsy/Roma question he had been ordered to tack on at the end of every questionnaire was a voluntary adjunct, to be tossed in casually, almost as if one were passing the time of day. But whichever of the Crusaders isolated the particular woman Mihael Catalin was looking for would instantly find himself promoted to Senior Lieutenant. To Andrassy – who had been born a peasant, and whose entire life until the moment he had entered Catalin’s service had consisted of a struggle to feed both himself and his family, the prospect of a status – any status – was akin to nirvana.

When he heard that there was a pregnant Gypsy woman, therefore, living down by the river in the lower part of Brara, and that her name was either Yula or Yola, Andrassy’s pulse quickened. His orders were to pass all requisite details immediately onto his superior in the Crusader hierarchy. But Andrassy knew what would happen then. The man would steal the limelight for himself by transmitting the information to Coryphaeus Catalin personally.

No. Andrassy could not allow this to happen. He would conduct the investigation himself. If he isolated the particular woman his leader was looking for, he would persuade his wife to talk to Antanasia, the Coryphaeus’s sister, and pass on the information through her – for Andrassy’s wife, Georgetta, did much of the washing and ironing for the Catalin household, as well as participating in the house-cleaning rota, and therefore had privileged access to Antanasia, and, via her, to the Coryphaeus. In this way Andrassy would be able to garner all the available credit for himself.

Yes. He could see it now. Lieutenant Andrassy. Soldier – no, warrior, rather – in the service of Almighty God.

48

There were two people living near the abandoned Saxon house – a Roma man and his pregnant wife. Andrassy found it strange that there was not a larger group – in his experience Roma of all persuasions swarmed together like bees. But maybe these were outcasts? Gypsies were primitive beings, in Andrassy’s mind. It was easy to assign to them any number of negative characteristics – particularly as Andrassy had never actually talked to one. He had simply inherited a hatred of the whole race with his mother’s milk, and nothing he had heard since had persuaded him to either change his mind or tailor his prejudices in any way whatsoever.

When the cell phone his superiors had provided him with unexpectedly rang, Andrassy launched himself from his hiding place like a man who has just been stung on the calf by a fire ant. He held the cell phone away from his face as if he had been forced to retrieve it from a particularly pungent waste bin. The caller would almost certainly be his wife, speaking from one of the public telephones in Albescu, and reporting back to him on her meeting with Antanasia Catalin.

Andrassy belatedly remembered what he was meant to be doing and ducked back down into his hiding place. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘Yes, Georgetta. What do you have to tell me?’

‘Andrassy? Crusader Iuliu Andrassy? It is I. Mihael Catalin.’

Andrassy froze. He recognized Coryphaeus Catalin’s voice immediately. For the past five years he had participated, in one way or another, at all of Catalin’s public appearances. As well as developing a marked expertise at crowd control, Andrassy had also, by default, become deeply conversant with Catalin’s worldview. He knew, for instance, that Moslems were agents of the Devil, that Protestants, Baptists, Evangelicals and Copts were antichristian, that Jews were the actual murderers of Christ, that Roman Catholics were followers of a ‘perverted faith’, and that Orthodox Christians were simply confused, and therefore potentially amenable to change and common sense given a raft of favourable circumstances and a little firm persuasion. He also knew that various parties from amongst the remaining Abrahamic idolaters were intent on sabotaging Mihael Catalin’s universal acceptance as the Parousia, and that these parties must be rigorously expunged.

Andrassy had killed before – a few months previously, he and a few of his fellow Crusaders had cornered a Jehovah’s Witness in a town about 15 kilometres south of Albescu. They had questioned the man in an abandoned warehouse and found that he intended to visit Albescu to report on conditions there, and to judge its suitability as a base for a proselytizing tour by the Watch Tower Society. Both the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Coryphaeus’s COTRC held similar views about Armageddon – that only their followers would survive the Rapture. This man clearly felt that Albescu was in thrall to Satan and thus ripe for plundering.