The Third Antichrist (45 page)

Alexi levered back the shutter with a snow shovel he had liberated from one of the sheds. He smashed the window pane and reached in for the catch. When the window was open he gesticulated for Sabir to enter the lodge ahead of him, while he checked nervously around as if he expected a posse of Keystone Kops-style policemen to come pelting out at him from some hiding place he had overlooked during his reconnoitre.

‘Don’t worry, Alexi. We’re probably the only sentient beings in a radius of twenty square miles from here. Even Father Christmas and his forty elves would have stayed at home on a night like this. I can’t speak for the reindeer, of course.’

Sabir see-sawed his legs through the gap in the window and dropped heavily down into the hallway. The interior of the lodge was as gloomy as a morgue. The shutters were sealed for the winter, and dustsheets covered the furniture, giving a spectral appearance.

Alexi slithered through behind him.

‘Look,’ said Sabir. ‘A paraffin lamp. They were obviously expecting company.’

‘Are you serious? They were expecting us?’

Sabir smacked Alexi’s forehead with his hand.

‘Oh. I see. You were making fun.’ Alexi lit the lamp, adjusting the metal reflector at the back so that a thin shaft of light cut through the gloom ahead of them. ‘What is this place, Damo?’

‘A hunting lodge, probably. At least, judging by the number of deer antlers and bear heads they have scattered about these walls. Shine a light on that photograph, will you?’

Alexi tilted the paraffin lamp so that its light shone upwards.

‘Yep. Just as I thought. That guy in the middle – the guy with the fur hat and the silly earflaps and the rifle, surrounded by all the sycophants – that’s Nicolae Ceausescu. You know. The former Communist President the Romanians took out and shot during the 1989 revolution. This masterpiece of Soviet baronial style must have belonged to him. Maybe they’re keeping it on as a museum of hunting trophies?’

Alexi looked blank.

Sabir shook his head and started down the corridor. It never did to underestimate Alexi’s total lack of knowledge about anything that did not directly concern him. If you’d asked him who the French President was he’d probably have told you de Gaulle.

‘Come on, Alexi. Tear yourself away from the historical tour. We’ve taken far too much time already. What we need to do is to find a stove and light it. Then get back to the others. This storm is not going to let up anytime soon. We need to get them all up here and safely tucked away before darkness falls.’

The two men worked their way through the house until they found a snug room at the back with pitch pine panelling and a wood-burning stove. Dried logs and kindling were piled high in an indented bay behind it.

‘Incredible. There’s enough fuel in here to outlast a siege.’ Sabir was tempted to say that the whole thing was starting to feel like Goldilocks and the three bears, but then thought better of it. There was no point in painting the Devil on the wall. And how would one go about explaining Goldilocks to Alexi?

‘You light the stove, Alexi. And for Pete’s sake make sure the chimney doesn’t go up when you do it. We don’t want to arrive back here to a burnt-out shell. Then we’ll seal the room up. It’ll be as warm as toast by the time we bring Lemma up here. I’m going to see if I can hunt out something we can drag her up on.’

Sabir passed through into the kitchen. As he did so, he checked out a couple of the cupboards. Tinned goods galore. The place was clearly in regular use for part of the winter season. As a ski lodge, maybe? Or perhaps they still hunted here in November and December?

He followed his nose down to the cellar. If they kept skis, that was where they would keep them.

He almost stumbled over the two antique wooden sledges with steel runners that someone had tipped up against a wall. Both were of a size used to transport dead game – deer carcases, maybe – back to camp in winter conditions. He aimed the paraffin lamp at the wall. Yes. Two leather ski harnesses hung there. But how was he going to get the sledges out? True, there was an outside entrance to the cellar through which they would normally have been collected, but this time of the year it would be blocked by about ten feet of snow.

Sabir manhandled both sledges up the cellar steps and upended them near the door. They fit through the gap with about an inch to spare on each side. Maybe his luck really was turning? He went back down the cellar steps and checked out the back rooms.

Skis. Both Nordic and downhill. Boots. Sticks. Goggles. Sabir felt the same excitement in the pit of his stomach as a gambler who suspects he is on an elusive winning roll.

He had already started gathering up a double-armful of the skis when the thought struck him. How many of the party would actually be able to use them? Calque? Hardly. Radu? Forget it. And Alexi?

He edged up the cellar steps. ‘Alexi? Are you up there?’

‘Yes, Damo. I am waiting for you. The fire is lit. I have sealed the room. I have even brought a mattress down from upstairs for Lemma to lie on. There is everything here we can possibly want. We could stay for weeks. Hell. We could even bring up both the kids here until they are teenagers. Come spring, we could pitch a tent outside. Have ourselves a little fresh air.’

‘Have you thought about now? About water? Stuff like that?’

‘Can’t we drink snow?’

Sabir mused a little. Then he shrugged. ‘With the wood-burner running? Yes. You’re right. I suppose we can. As long as it’s not yellow, of course. But tell me something, Alexi. Can you ski?’

‘Ski? What do you think I am? A member of the jet set?’

Sabir sighed. Crazy to have even thought about it. He decided that Alexi was at one and the same time the most predictable and the most unpredictable man he had ever met. Being friends with him was like being trapped in a whirlpool wearing only vintage-style rubber waders.

‘Find me some rope, will you? Then tie these two sledges together. One behind the other. When you’ve done that, climb back through the window and see if you can clear an entrance around the front door. Are you okay with that?’

‘I will do it. Just for you, Damo, I will do it.’

Sabir clattered back down the cellar steps, fished the better of the two harnesses off the wall, and then went to look for some boots. If Alexi couldn’t ski, he damned well couldn’t sledge either. And Sabir didn’t relish teaching him the delicate art of steering and braking with his boot tips in a white-out.

The third pair of leather boots he unearthed more or less fitted him. He checked the catches on the Nordic skis, meshed the skis and the boots together, then worked his heels up and down a few times. Not perfect, but they would do. He helped himself to the longest pair of ski sticks he could find and clumped back upstairs. He was trying hard not to think of what would happen if they were caught inside the house by an itinerant caretaker or a passing army patrol. Deportation would probably be the least of their worries. Breaking and entering. Aggravated theft. Vandalism. Given the time and the inclination, Calque could probably rustle up the names of a whole further raft of crimes they were committing.

On the way back to the hall Sabir passed a conspicuously locked room. He hesitated for a moment, tempted to go on. But curiosity got the better of him. Alexi wouldn’t have finished clearing away the snow yet. And until that was done, they didn’t have a hope of getting both sledges out the front door.

Sabir checked around the lintel and under the floor mat just in case someone had left the key there. No luck. He touched the wood. Not as thick as all that. Well, in for a penny in for a pound, as the Brits would have it.

He took a few steps back and rammed the door with his shoulder. Something gave. He tried a second time. More give. On his third run the door burst open. Sabir went back and collected the paraffin lamp that Alexi had left by the front door. Then he looked inside.

Banks of hunting rifles and shotguns. Cartons of ammunition. And a double-rack stacked with bottles of wine and Kvint brandy.

‘Hey, man. Look at that.’ Alexi was standing open-mouthed behind him. Quick as a flash he fished a penknife out from under his coat and carved the capsule off one of the brandy bottles.

‘Alexi. This isn’t the moment.’

‘If this isn’t the moment, Damo, I don’t know what is.
Salud
,
y força al canut
.’ Alexi upended the bottle and took a long slug. ‘Ha!’ He made a face, considered the bottle for a few moments more, then took a second slug – the expression on his face was that worn by the first ever explorer of a virgin continent. ‘You know what, Damo? I piss on the Corpus. I piss on the Antichrist. I piss on the police. I piss on the Church. Hell. I piss on anyone who doesn’t agree with me.
Na le tjiri kher te lic
̆
hares e pori la sapnjaki
;
punrranges si te lic
̆
hares lako
š
ero
.’ He upended the bottle for a third time, then he corked it with an emphatic gesture, and slipped it into his pocket.

‘Okay, Alexi. Translate.’

Alexi grinned. ‘It’s simple. My grandfather taught it to me when I was a child. It means “You don’t need your boots to crush a serpent’s tail, when you can crush its fucking head with your bare feet.”’

71

Lemma was suffering contractions every two minutes. She had recently passed some pink-tinged mucus which Yola had hidden from the men. Now Yola placed her hand beneath the covers. Lemma’s uterus felt as hard as iron. That, twinned with the rushes, told her that the moment was near. She’d been present at plenty of births in her time. This one was no different. It was only the location that presented something of a problem.

Sabir hammered on the passenger door.

Calque nodded and made a hushing motion with his hands. He backed out from his position on the front seat and closed the door swiftly behind him to conserve the heat inside the car. ‘Well?’

‘Good news. We have a place. A hunting lodge. Twenty minutes or so up the road. There’s a fire going. Food in the scullery. Everything we need.’

‘Tell me you’re not joking?’

‘I’m not joking.’

Calque shook his head. ‘Lemma is just about to have her baby, Sabir. Yola’s not saying anything, but you can cut the tension back there with a knife. Radu looks green. You’d think he was the one that was pregnant.’

‘We can’t let her have the baby here.’

‘What do you mean? What choice do we have?’

Sabir hesitated. ‘Well, I’m no expert at these things. But at some point the engine in this Simca is going to stall. Or overheat. Or simply run out of gas. Then we’ll have a real crisis on our hands. It strikes me that to subject a baby to a white-out, pitch darkness, and minus fifteen degrees of wind-chill straight after its birth is not a recipe for a long life. The baby will be better off inside its mother during the journey to the lodge.’

Calque glanced uncertainly down at the roped-together sledges.

‘Listen, man. I can do most of the heavy pulling using my Nordic skis. We’ve even got the right sort of harness. I got Alexi down here without breaking his neck, so I can sure as heck get you all back up again.’

Calque didn’t look convinced.

‘I come from Massachusetts, Calque. I’ve skied in the Berkshires since I was three years old. And getting back up a slope is simpler than coming down. Take it from me. You just need more muscle. So you three guys can push at the back while I pull the sledge from the front and steer the thing. Yola can ride with Lemma and hold her hand. Or whatever you hold when a baby’s coming.’

Calque gave a grudging nod. The true extent of the cold, after the relative warmth inside the Simca, had shaken him to the core. ‘All right, Sabir. As usual, you make it all sound eminently reasonable. But you be the one to explain all this to Yola, okay? I’ve already got a damaged nose. I don’t want to lose a few teeth into the bargain.’

Sabir nodded. He ducked inside the car. Calque could see him gesticulating with his hands through the windows.

‘What’s it like up there at the lodge, Alexi? Is Sabir exaggerating the comforts? To hear him, you’d think it was the Ritz-Carlton.’

Alexi was jumping up and down to improve his circulation. He felt around in his jacket without interfering with his rhythm and came up with the bottle of Kvint. ‘It’s as good as this tastes.’ He tossed the bottle to Calque.