Blood Makes Noise (35 page)

They were not long out of Nîmes on a road headed west when the traffic suddenly came to a stop. Gina got out, walked the line of impatient French drivers, and saw a fireman holding traffic. When she got back in, you could see tufts of ash on the seat. “They’re stopping traffic. There’s a fire.”

“I don’t trust our luck twice in Nîmes.”

“The whole ridge is burning.”

“We can’t stay here. We’ve got to find another road. Someplace to wait this out.”

Gina watched the growing radiance in the sky. “Do you ever think about God, Michael?”

“No. But I’ve always had the feeling he spends a lot of time thinking about me.”

Gina slipped the truck into gear, pulled out of traffic in a U-turn, and started back down the road.

Trapped drivers sat like lemmings on the four western roads, in four barricaded lines, each growing longer with the futile hope that the fire wasn’t that bad.

Alejandro dropped his motorcycle and walked the rows, just another irate driver, and his no-face dipped in and out of shadow from the burning glow. He stopped at any vehicle big enough to carry a coffin, sometimes scaring small children, always looking for Suslov, knowing, in his heart, that the man had more in him than to wait and die at a roadblock.

The police would be shutting down the exits from Béziers or Montpellier, so either they were bottled up in town, in which case the gendarmes would eventually trip over them, or they were up here, between roadblocks, alone with him. Alejandro felt he knew Michael now. And he knew they were close. Each advancing barrier of fire he set shrunk the remaining distance between Alejandro and Michael. Alejandro and Her.

You would return Her for the use of a government that despised Her. I want only to return Evita to those that love Her. Love Her, Michael Suslov.

Like you, I’m starting to think.

Lofton watched the fire from the edge of Béziers. Ridge after ridge consumed silently miles away. The air was still here but you could tell it was devilish at the center of that.

“Your boy does subtle work.” Wintergreen on the radio. He was out there tracking Alejandro south of the fire. “Though I suppose if you’re going to create an international incident, you might as well make it a good one.”

“Where is he?”

“Al? Doing circles up here somewhere. I think. Fire’s playing fuck-all with his tracker. What do you want me to do in this mess?”

Lofton swallowed from his flask. The taste had gone metallic. He keyed the radio. “Wait.”

To get off the barricaded road they took the first gravel path they came on, and it went to dirt immediately, dying altogether in a rumpled field. They backtracked to the road and sought out another path. It was getting hard to see, the smoke thickening and no longer smelling of harvest but of sage and dirt and things wild. The power must have gone down in the few villages, for there were no lights anywhere to orient with.

Gina chose another path, and it finished even sooner on a locked cattle gate. Michael got out and shook it, but the gate held firm. “We’re going to end up in town,” Gina said.

“We can’t.”

“Maybe with all the confusion of the fire—”

“He lit this.”

It began to snow. Millions of dandelions bursting in the heat, their soft white bodies filling the air, like a blizzard. It was getting hard just to see from the truck to the gate. Gina caught a dandelion in her fingers and looked with apprehension at the swirling dark around them. “Would he really do all of this?”

Michael was going to say something pointless when a bloom of heat stung his back and he turned from her instead, faced the current of fleeing dandelions, and watched smoke boil away to reveal a wall of flame marching across the hill toward them. “We have to get out of here.”

They backed down the path, traveled again the main road till it suddenly disappeared in a fiery maw ahead.

“Oh God…” Gina said. He didn’t have to tell her to stop, turn around, run. Neither of them were sure which way to go, but the fire left few choices, reducing even those by the second. Smoke descended on them heavy as soup, and the world went a dull, glowing black.

Gina took a trail—maybe it was a trail—and the Renault shimmied and spun on soft earth as they climbed. Nothing was visible in the headlights but the few feet of dirt directly in front of them. Michael had no idea how far they traveled—it was impossible to judge either time or speed—only that the trail flattened out on a knoll of some kind.

“Stop the truck.” She did. Michael opened the door and it was getting hard to even breathe out here.

“Where’s the fire?” Gina asked.

Michael looked out on what passed for a foggy horizon and saw only murderous red. “Everywhere.”

“Where do we go?”

Fire had already closed over the trail they’d driven up on. Everything was only unfocused scarlet, hot and dark, on every side. “Christ, I don’t know.”

As his eyes clouded at the lashing smoke, a silhouette emerged from the darkness coming resolutely at them. It held a pistol at the end of an arm outstretched and moved without pause till the pistol was in Michael’s face, and it was Alejandro.

“You. Come. Now.”

Alejandro half tugged, half threw Michael into the cab. Gina moved on her own, compliant, and Michael wished she’d run. Alejandro jammed inside beside Michael and they were three upfront, the young Argentine practically in Michael’s lap. He kept the gun aimed both across Michael’s nose and at Gina beyond. “Drive.”

“Where?”

“Straight. Right a little.”

There was only fire everywhere she looked. “Are you sure?”

“This is my fire.”

Gina steadied herself and edged the Renault forward. Alejandro’s face nearly touched Michael’s, his free hand a vise on Michael’s arm. The face smelled like rotten cotton and looked like boiled hamburger. “You killed those cops,” he said to the mask.

“I haven’t begun killing.”

Gina stepped harder on the gas toward what seemed to Michael only a sheet of flame. The whirl of heat jumped all over them but was thinner here than elsewhere—a facade—and Michael thought, as they popped through the other side,
This boy knows his fire.

They rummaged a path, squeezing carpets of embers as Alejandro ordered Gina when to turn in the gray-black sameness. Michael found it hard to believe the man had any real sense of where they were. How could he?

“I am curious,” the boy with the destroyed face said, his gun occasionally bumping Michael’s cheek, and the memory was instantly Moori Koenig and a Recoleta closet full of Evita. “Why you do this? I think not for money or patriotism.”

“To finish this.”

“That is important to you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never finished anything before.”

Alejandro gazed at the unstable blackness around them. “You knew Her?”

“I met Her. I’m not sure anyone knew Her.”

Alejandro seemed jealous of the familiarity. “Tell me about Her.”

“She was strong and frightened. Pure and dirty. She suffered badly but died well…”

“She was the light of my life.”

“She was the end of mine.”

Alejandro seemed to think a moment. It was difficult to tell under the mask. “It seems strange we should be on different sides.”

“You serve chaos.”

“You serve murderers.”

“But mostly I serve myself.”

“I serve only Her.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Al…”

Like an errant herd of buffalo, a churning arm of the fire slid over the road behind them and gave chase. “We must go faster,” Alejandro ordered Gina. She drove harder, tires banging furiously the ruts, and the fire stayed on their tail in pursuit.

There was nowhere to go but straight ahead, the fire leapfrogging at unbelievable speed. Gina pushed the Renault to its maximum, the little truck’s rubber-band engine screaming in pain. But the way had turned to steep switchbacks, and like all fires this one liked switchbacks.

Out of the gusting ash ahead emerged the faint shapes of concrete blocks. Spaced one after another along the road, open on one side with rounded, oriental tops, they seemed like guard shacks to a raja. “Where are we?” Michael said.

One of the concrete shacks slid past Gina’s window. Its insides, blackened by smoke, held a sculptural tableau of Christ being crucified by the Romans. “They’re stations of the cross…”

The road ended.

Right at the base of a broad set of stone stairs. It was difficult to see the top, the only things visible being three massive, oversized crucifixes.

The fire, perhaps smelling blood, doubled its efforts and was now a lazy wave of death sloshing up at them. “Drive up the stairs,” Alejandro ordered.

“You’re crazy,” Gina said.

“Do it!”

“It’s impossible!”

Alejandro leaned across Michael and leered the gun at her. “You want to die? To burn? Here? Now?”

Gina exploded. “Stop shouting at me! Stop threatening me! I don’t care, do you understand? I don’t care!”

And to Michael’s surprise Alejandro spoke softly to her. “Please. Gina. Drive up the stairs. I’ll coach you.”

The truck held its traction better than Michael expected, as the insides jostled madly on each step. Unburnable stone gave them a small jump on the flames, now washing up at the stairs’ base, fumbling and yowling like pack dogs.

At the top they reached a flagstone square and climbed out where the three oversize crucifixes loomed in smoky silence: Jesus flanked by Dismas and Gestas.

There’s an inherent gothic horror to crucifixes everywhere, but these…the arms bound instead of nailed—the way the Romans really did it—the stains on Christ’s loincloth, his face not beatific, not accepting, but caught as if in midspasm, lips parted, the human in him dying hard and lonely. It was horrible.

“What is this place?” Gina asked.

Ruins, mostly. Collapsed stone blocks choked by brush lit by the fusillade of embers carried on fire wind. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to protect the truck. Michael felt the lake of flame below watching, waiting for the signal when it would simply move in and consume them.

Alejandro had left them for a stretch of wall. There were two
pops
from his pistol, the sound of chains pulling, and Alejandro was back, gun out, for this was not a discussion.

“Get Her out of the truck.”

Gina shouldered her vet bag. Michael did what he could on his ruined foot, but it was Alejandro and Gina in the end who took most of the casket’s weight.

The chained doorway Alejandro had shot the lock off of led into a musty basement that smelled of rat feces. Michael’s last glimpse behind him, as they descended the steps carrying Evita’s casket, was of fire washing around the crucifixes and licking the ruins’ grounds.

The roof was fractured stone and the firestorm above cast unearthly shafts of red over faded religious mosaics and smashed crypts. They set the casket down, got their breath, and Gina gazed at the mosaics. “
Tot co que’s Dieu
…” she read. “It’s Occitan.”

“Occitan?”

“The ancient language of the Cathar heretics. The King burned the last of their priests in the fourteenth century. This must have been one of their monasteries…”

Alejandro’s gaze was on the ceiling, as it breathed threateningly. His eyes fell to the plundered tombs around them, most smashed and covered in graffiti, but one with a stone lid was still in decent shape. “Put Her in there.”