The Third Antichrist (41 page)

‘Bullshit, Alexi. He was Italian-American.’

Alexi screwed up his face. ‘Well he should have been a Gypsy.’

Calque – bundled up in as many clothes as he could find, and looking disturbingly like the Michelin Man – was standing beside Sabir smoking a cigarette. At every exhalation, his breath fluttered the descending snowflakes, clearing an eerie track around his face. ‘Actually, Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz, in Budapest, Hungary, and his father was a rabbi. So you are both wrong. And do you know where that expression you just used comes from, Sabir? The one about “abandoning hope”?’

Sabir was giving himself a fireman’s warm. ‘No. I don’t.’

‘It’s from Dante’s
Inferno
. The context is particularly apposite to the situation we find ourselves in.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Do you want me to recite it?’

‘Calque, you will recite it to me whether I want you to or not.’

Calque flicked his cigarette away. He brushed vainly at the snowflakes which had settled in the pleats of his jacket. ‘My translation, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘The original Italian goes:

Calque frowned at the ground. ‘Actually, I seem to have missed a bit out somewhere. But that’s about the gist of it.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Calque. You really are the gloomiest bastard I’ve ever met.’

Calque grinned. It pleased him immeasurably that Sabir was feeling confident enough to start ribbing him again. He decided to push the envelope a little further – it was the only way he would know for certain if Sabir had truly emerged from his three-month post-Lamia depression.

‘So the point I am trying to make is that you were guilty of a Freudian slip, Sabir, when you used this expression so freely. You thought you were being amusing, but it secretly shows that – at least as far as your unconscious mind goes – you are actually in a Dante-esque state verging on total despair. The truth will always out to those in the know.’

Sabir struck himself on the forehead with the flat of his hand. ‘Zounds, Calque! Where did you learn all those big words? And are you sure you still want me to drive? If I’m in total despair, as you suggest, I might decide to end it all on the spur of the moment, and take you guys along with me for the big sleep.’

Calque ignored the implied insult. He breathed a metaphorical sigh of relief. ‘That’s a risk that I’m prepared to take. You’ve seen my driving. And the others are clearly in no condition.’

Sabir shook himself like a dog. He was half aware that Calque was testing him. But whereas the day before he might have cavilled, now, following the mistaken attempt on Lemma’s life, and the consequent threat that that implied for the rest of them, he felt it was no longer appropriate to dwell purely on himself and his own feelings.

He had undoubtedly fallen prey to morbid self-analysis over the past few months. It was high time to shake himself out of it. All Sabir’s life he had felt most comfortable when succouring others. Now that Yola and her baby had clearly become Mihael Catalin’s main target, it behoved him, as her formal blood brother, to place her and her child’s safety before his. It would be a liberation of sorts.

‘Well, come on then. Stop standing there gabbing. The snow won’t wait for us. The sooner we get to the top, the sooner we can start down the other side. You’d better pray that the chains don’t part on your “highway of lost holes”.’

Calque began a slow handclap. ‘Very funny, Sabir. One can tell you are a writer. You have such a way with words.’

As if it had been hearkening to Sabir, the road instantly became much harder to negotiate. It was obvious that the army had been through and cleared at some point during the previous day, as old snow was bunched up at the side of the road in ten-foot piles – but that night’s snowfall had ensured that a six-inch layer of fresh snow had more than made up for the shortfall. On a number of occasions, all three of the male passengers had to get out of the car to push, while Sabir kept the Simca in low gear and tried to get the chains to ground without spinning.

As they crawled up a particularly steep incline near the top of the pass, the car lost all forward momentum and began to slide uncontrollably backwards with everyone still inside.

‘Don’t brake! For God’s sake don’t brake, Sabir!’

Sabir did his best to guide the Simca backwards, bouncing the chassis off the banked snow at the side of the road in an effort to slow its vertiginous descent. Fifteen or so seconds into the slide, however, it became clear that the car was reversing out of control.

Sabir glanced into the rear-view mirror. He could see a corner looming up, 300 metres below them. He realized that if he couldn’t stop the car dead in its tracks before then, he would be faced with a catch-22 situation of either steering backwards into a tree, or risk spinning over the side of the canyon towards certain death.

Radu threw himself across Lemma in a vain effort to protect her from the imminent collision. Alexi twisted in place so that his back was facing the rear of the car, and then pulled Yola in between his legs, so that his body would protect her and the baby from the full force of the impact.

Sabir touched the brakes three times in an effort to slow their slide, but each time the car lurched nearer to the gorge. In desperation, he threw the wheel in the opposite direction to the bank, ensuring that the tail of the car slewed across the road and pitched into the heaped snow at the side of the road, flipping the vehicle around on its axis until it faced forwards again.

Once he had got the vehicle facing downhill and no longer slip-sliding backwards, he touched the throttle and steered directly for the same bank he had just struck with the tail of the car. This time the Simca angled head first into the compacted snow and ground to a stop. Calque was thrown forward against his seat belt, while Sabir managed to brace himself against the steering wheel. The four passengers in the open well behind him slammed into the back of his seat.

The Simca settled deeper into the bank and conked out.

Sabir sat, his hands at precisely ten to two on the steering wheel, and stared at the unfenced corner twenty yards below him. He didn’t want to guess how steep the fall-away was, but it surely numbered in the hundreds of feet. If he had allowed the car to angle out across the corner, the Simca would have behaved like a matchbox full of lead shot – everybody inside would have been stirred around as if by an invisible ladle, eventually to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Silence had never felt so sweet.

One thing, though, was abundantly clear. The car was no longer in any fit state to take them to the top of the pass.

Sabir looked behind him. ‘Is everybody all right?’

‘Yes. We were able to brace ourselves. Everybody is okay.’

Sabir looked at Calque.

Calque was holding his nose.

‘Are you hurt?’

Calque nodded. ‘That’s the second time this year that I’ve broken my nose in a car accident. First as a passenger with Macron. Now with you, Sabir. Next time, I drive.’

‘Stop twitching. Let me have a look at it.’ Sabir flicked on the courtesy light. It threw out a thin shaft of luminescence – hardly enough to illuminate its own surround. ‘I don’t think it’s broken again. It’s just bleeding. You’ve got a bad gash on the bridge. Hold this against it.’ Sabir handed Calque his handkerchief.

‘What are we going to do now?’

Sabir shook his head. He leaned forwards and tried the engine. On the second turnover, it fired. ‘Bravo, Simca. It’s probably not going to take us anywhere, given what’s just happened to the chassis, but at least we’ll have a little heat.’

‘Sabir?’

Sabir checked that the headlights and all the vanity lights were switched off. Then he turned to his companions. ‘Calque, you and Radu had better stay with the women as you’re both injured. Alexi and I will strike out for the top of the pass. There’s bound to be a hut of some sort up there. If we do find one, we’ll break in and try to get a fire lit. Then we’ll rig up some sort of sled device for Lemma. When we’ve got the place warmed up, we’ll come back down and get you. We’ve got two thirds of a tank of gas. The engine should tick over until we get back. While we’re away you can gather together all the things you think we are going to need. That way we won’t waste any time on the journey back. We’ll have to bundle Lemma up and get her under cover as soon as possible.’ He hesitated, looking at Yola. ‘Have we still got some time?’

‘A little. Yes.’

‘Great. That’s great news.’

‘What if you don’t find a hut?’

Sabir glanced away. ‘That’s not a problem. We’ll build an ice palace over the car – the same sort of emergency ice palace they taught me to build on the Hardangar Plateau in Norway when I went Nordic skiing. We’ve got the bank. We’ve got the snow. We’re already halfway there. We’ll seal the car off like an igloo, with a chimney to let out the foul air. It’ll be ten or fifteen degrees warmer in here than outside. That way at least we’ll survive the rest of today and tonight without freezing. Plus we’ve got a paraffin heater for when the engine gives out. Radu says that the army comes through here on a regular basis. We’ve got food. We’ve got water. We’ll simply hunker down under cover and wait for them. They can’t possibly miss the car – it’s blocking half the road.’

Calque peered at Sabir over the top of his bloodstained handkerchief.

Sabir refused to meet his eye.

Brara, Maramure
ş
, Romania
Saturday, 6 February 2010

65

Crusader Lieutenant Cosmin Markovich, aged forty-four, colour of hair brown with threads of grey, marginally overweight, residual arthritis in his left hand from half a lifetime spent as a steel worker, was proud of his position as one of Coryphaeus Catalin’s top echelon commanders.

Markovich’s life had seemed somehow incomplete until his wife, Florenta, had learned, through a girlfriend, of the Coryphaeus’s existence. He had disapproved at first when Florenta had suggested they attend one of Catalin’s Sunday prayer meetings, and had resented the waste of fuel. But Florenta was nothing if not persuasive, and she and her husband had come to an eventual accommodation which had involved a lot of giggling and numerous visits to the bedroom.

Later, after the prayer meeting, both had admitted to each other how impressed they had been with the Coryphaeus’s single-minded approach to religion. They had moved, two months later, lock, stock, and barrel, to Catalin’s model town of Albescu, where Markovich immediately found work in one of the Coryphaeus’s factories. It hadn’t taken long for Markovich to be marked out as a potential Crusader – and since that time, five years before, the sky had seemed the limit.

As a Crusader – and with all the privileges that ensued as a result of his abrupt elevation from the hoi polloi – Markovich had developed a relish for power and for the better things in life which had totally eluded him for his first forty years. From a poverty-stricken youth he had now graduated to a respected middle age, in which he held both rank and, he believed, the esteem of the majority of junior Crusaders under his command. Florenta, too, seemed happier, now that they could afford the children that, before, he had been forced to refuse her.

All in all, then, Cosmin Markovich felt that he owed Mihael Catalin all the good things in his life – and his loyalty was, in consequence, unswerving. The three-bar patriarchal cross tattooed on his wife’s forehead had afforded him a few confused moments, it was true, but he now realized that it had merely constituted a necessary test of his and Florenta’s steadfastness, and, as such, an upwardly mobile rite of passage towards the inner echelons of the Church of the Renascent Christ.

Now Markovich stood outside the Saxon house in Brara – which his subordinate, Iuliu Andrassy, had marked out as belonging to the apostate, Yola Dufontaine – and tried to work out from the blood markings left in the snow and inside one of the tents exactly what had occurred. Markovich knew that Andrassy had been the proud possessor of a thirty-year-old Simca motor car. What had happened to that vehicle? And what had happened to Andrassy himself? Had he killed the Gypsy woman and then panicked? Or had the Gypsies killed him and then stolen his car? It was hardly likely that a proto-fascist like Andrassy would have developed a sudden soft spot for his victim and eloped with her. Georgetta Andrassy was not what you would call a handsome woman, it was true, but she kept a sparkling home, and her cooking was second to none. The fact that she was built like a brick shithouse was neither here nor there.