The Third Antichrist (10 page)

Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport
6 November 2009

17

The flight from Chihuahua/Genvillalobos to Paris/Charles de Gaulle passed uneventfully. Abi was travelling on one of his many false passports – and they were the best that money could buy. He had used his real passport, though, and his real US green card, when crossing the border from Mexico back into the US at dead of night. One never knew when an alibi might prove useful.

The half-asleep Mexican border guard had proved predictably amenable when Abi had owned up to having lost his exit permit – an instant fine of $50, in small bills, had seen him breezily waved through towards US Immigration.

US border control had no reason to delay a green-card holder – they had neither taken Abi’s fingerprints nor had they conducted an iris scan, which would have necessitated an instant change of plan. Abi was clearly considered a model permanent resident. Madame, Abi’s mother, owned an apartment block in Boston, which Abi managed, and from which he derived part of his income. This he could prove. If the situation changed and anyone quizzed him about his status, he would tell them that he had been away touring, and had paid for his groceries in cash and traveller’s cheques.

Once he had clearly established himself as being in the US, Abi returned across the Rio Grande illegally. US border patrols were watching for people coming into their country – not leaving it. Crossing back into Mexico with a bunch of cash-rich wetbacks had been a cinch. All it had cost him was $200 and a few startled looks. What was a gringo doing smuggling himself
into
Mexico?
Hijole
. These
Yanquis
were indeed crazy. The fact that Abi was actually French had passed them all by, which further muddied his back trail.

Abi collected the Toyota he had purloined from the narco boss and drove straight to Ciudad Juarez, drug capital of the world, and the town consistently voted the most violent place on earth outside of declared war zones. He abandoned the Toyota in a side street in the shabbiest district he could find, and left the locked and loaded Beretta in open sight on the back seat. It would be a miracle if either the M9 or the Roraima were still in place twenty minutes after he had left the area. It was an altogether more effective way of ridding oneself of potentially incriminating belongings than dumping them into a convenient lake and praying there was no drought that year.

Next, Abi took the four-hour taxi ride to Chihuahua airport and boarded the first plane out for Paris. This time he used the fake passport he had originally entered Mexico with, together with the regulation green exit permit that had come with it, and which he’d claimed to have lost passing out of Mexico the first time. Simple and legal. Well, almost.

As far as Interpol and the US Government were concerned, the real Abiger de Bale was staying in an apartment building overlooking the bay in Boston’s Battery Wharf, while the fictional Pierre Blanc was returning to France from a holiday in Mexico to reunite with his family.

Of Abi’s real family, left behind to drown in the cenote, Pierre Blanc thought not at all.

Cenucenca, Orheiul Vechi, Moldova
14 March 1986

18

Dracul Lupei endured his fifteenth birthday on 7 October 1985. Five months later, he enjoyed a belated birthday present.

The old monk who had saved Dracul’s life three and a half years previously died, creating a convenient vacuum in the Orheiul Vechi cave monastery tenant list.

Dracul had visited Orheiul Vechi less often in recent years – he had other irons in the fire. But from time to time he had kept up his old trick of blackmailing anyone dumb enough to wish to visit the monastery. As a result of one of these visits, he had been the first to find the old man. The monk had died in his bed. Of old age. Or so everybody thought.

In point of fact Dracul, fearing that his father was about to throw him out of the house, had crept up one night – whilst his father was in bed with Dracul’s eighteen-year-old sister, Antanasia – and had smothered the old monk with a potato sack. The monk had been due to die anyway, being sick with rheumatism and pneumonia, so Dracul felt that he was really doing the old man a favour by speeding him along to Paradise.

The fact that the monk had saved Dracul’s life, and had, for reasons best known to himself, not handed Dracul in to the authorities for the murder of the man in the astrakhan coat, counted for little in Dracul’s estimation of the situation. It suited Dracul to have the monk die – therefore he made it happen. In this way Dracul felt that he was adhering to the decision he had come to whilst recuperating under the monk’s care. That from henceforth he would decide his own destiny. Manipulate and bend the stupid masses to his will. Act, not react.

After the killing he returned home and laid his game plan on the line to his sister.

But Antanasia was a pragmatic girl. Despite being sexually abused by both her father and her brother – and despite being rented out by her father as a Friday-night plaything – Antanasia still felt that her place was at home. She belonged to a culture where a woman was defined by her family. If Antanasia had left home, it would have meant replacing familial prostitution with the more formal variety, in Chi
ş
in
ă
u, where she would have been at the mercy of Russian gangsters. Instead of the occasional forced encounter, she would have formed part of an assembly line of whores, serving a minimum of two dozen men a day. And if she was really unlucky, she would be sent abroad, to a country she neither knew nor understood, to service men who had no earthly reason to treat her with anymore respect than they would show their dogs.

No. Antanasia knew which side her bread was buttered on. At least, thanks to their sexual interest in her, neither Dracul nor her father beat her, as her father had done to her mother. And she received occasional kindnesses, particularly from Dracul, to whom she was devoted. She was a good cook and a better seamstress. This and her youth gave her a certain status amongst the older local women, and did something to alleviate the damage done to her reputation by her father’s waywardness.

Dracul had tried to explain to Antanasia that he did not intend to remain at home forever. That he would be moving up to the monastery as soon as possible, and that he needed her to accompany him and do certain things for him.

But Antanasia, despite her affection for her brother, said no. She owed a duty of care to their father, and this she would dispatch. He was head of the family. If Dracul became head of the family, and she was still unmarried, matters would change. But until then, she would obey their father.

Dracul had scratched his head in bewilderment. Married? No one would ever marry Antanasia. Didn’t she realize that? Moldovan peasants didn’t marry whores. And certainly not whores whose favours they had shared with their neighbours.

In terms of both affection and sex, Dracul knew that Antanasia preferred him to their father. That much was obvious. So what was her problem? At least Dracul didn’t rent her out to all and sundry in return for drinking money. And whenever Dracul made love to her, he had to thrust his fingers deep into her mouth to stop her from moaning and giving the game away. This moaning never happened with their father or with any of the other men she serviced. At these times Antanasia was silent, allowing the men to have their will of her, yes, but deriving little or no obvious enjoyment from the act. Perhaps their father had broken her in too early? thought Dracul. Or maybe she was just bored?

That night, Dracul watched his father slurping his
rachiu
.

Adrian had recently given up beating his son. The boy was far too strong now, and liable to fight back. And anyway, Adrian was getting older, and didn’t have the drive he once had. Drink and the loss of his wife had seen to that.

But Adrian still took the greatest possible pleasure in fucking Dracul’s sister in front of his son’s eyes. Despite his alcoholism, Adrian was smart enough to realize that Dracul was bitterly jealous of him. That he wanted Antanasia for himself. So Adrian made a point of using her as often and as explicitly as he could – and also of giving away her favours for free to friends and acquaintances when the mood came upon him. He didn’t know why he did this, for he loved his daughter, and would not normally have wished to hurt her. But there were times when Dracul resembled Adrian’s dead wife, Zina, to such an extent that Adrian’s blood would boil, and he would lash out in any way he could to hurt his son. And Antanasia was the prefect conduit.

‘Lie on the table.’

‘What, Papa?’

‘Lie on the table, girl.’

Antanasia lay on the table and raised her skirts. She knew what was coming. Adrian emptied the
rachiu
bottle and upended it. ‘Now open your legs.’ Adrian was aware of Dracul watching him. But the drink had lit a fire inside him, and he no longer cared what Dracul thought.

‘Leave her alone.’

Adrian turned, the bottle still in his hand. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said leave her alone. She is mine. I will not have you touching her anymore.’

Adrian laughed. Then he smashed the bottle against the side of the table, threw back Antanasia’s skirts, and made as if he were about to ram the jagged edges between her legs. ‘Then no one will touch her.’

Dracul plunged towards him from across the room.

Adrian turned and raised the broken bottle.

Dracul swept it away with one hand.

Adrian twisted round and made a grab for his daughter. His face was congested and his eyes were wild. Antanasia looked into those eyes and knew, for a certainty, that her father was about to kill her. She fell back onto the table.

Adrian loomed over her for a moment, and then his head was snatched back.

Dracul ran his father across the room, just as a footballer will bundle an opposing player across the touchline.

He smashed his father into the far wall. Then he squeezed Adrian tight against the wall with his hip. Adrian was far too drunk to put up a fight. He watched his son with lowered eyes, like a bull watches the torero he knows will kill him.

Dracul reached up onto the shelf above him and took down a hammer and a six-inch nail.

Adrian laughed. ‘What are you going to do, you fool? Nail me to the wall?’

‘Yes.’

In one smooth movement, Dracul raised the nail. He brought his forearm against his father’s head, pinning him to the wall.

Then he thrust the nail into Adrian’s ear and hammered it home.

19