The Third Antichrist (24 page)

Alexi swooped into view again. ‘Yes, policeman. Yes. But tell me. Tell me about these forces ranged against us. These forces that, according to you, we must run away from.’

Calque rolled his eyes. There were times when Alexi reminded him of Cyrano de Bergerac just before the Siege of Arras. Bumptious. And a master of the bloody obvious. ‘We know for a fact that our enemies, the de Bales, are sworn to protect the world from the Devil. This is their ancient gage. This is why they were made peers of France during the reign of St Louis. The only problem is that their way of fulfilling this gage doesn’t quite tally with the ways of the modern world – and neither does it tally with what passes for rational thought in the Calque household.’ Calque hesitated, belatedly aware that there was no Calque household left to speak of – only him. His wife and daughter had long ago decamped to pastures new. He determined to soldier on regardless. ‘The de Bales are iconoclasts. Throwbacks to the horrors of the Inquisition. Nowadays, their mode of behaviour just doesn’t make sense.’

‘This is true. This is very true.’ Alexi hesitated. ‘How doesn’t it make sense?’

‘Look. I’ll clarify things for you, Alexi. The Corpus believe that only by placating the Devil – that is, by supporting his final earthly representative, the Third Antichrist (the first two being Napoleon and Hitler, according to Nostradamus) – can the Devil be seduced into allowing the world to play out its own manifest destiny. Once the Devil himself is tempted to intervene – once he loses patience with the machinations of his henchmen, the Antichrists, in other words – we are doomed to Armageddon. Preceded, or so we are told in the Bible, by a thousand-year Reign of Terror. It will feel as if we are caught in the middle of an electrical storm – but with no let-up and with no foreseeable end. Hardly a pleasant prospect.’

‘Do you believe this, policeman?’

‘Of course I don’t. But the de Bales believe it. That’s the important thing.’

‘Then who do they think is strong enough to stand against the Antichrist? Who can weaken him? Not us, surely?’

‘To the de Bales way of thinking, the only palpable threat to the Third Antichrist is via the Second Coming, and the influence for good that the Second Coming will have on the world. Because the Antichrist is the evil mirror image of Christ – Christ’s dark shadow, the
antimimon pneuma,
the counterfeit spirit, or what have you – only a true representation of Christ, ergo the Son of God, ergo the Parousia, ergo the Second Coming, can possibly hope to overcome him. The Corpus Maleficus can’t afford to let that happen, because then they will have failed in their sworn duty to the French Crown.’

‘Yes. Yes. I see it clearly. Can this not be explained to them? That the way they are thinking is wrong?’

Calque let out a ragged sigh. ‘Are you going to try it, Alexi? Please. Be my guest. I’ll even introduce you to the Countess myself.’

Alexi rocked his head from side to side. He had clearly reached tipping point. It was time to pay the piper for the vast quantities of
horinca
he had been imbibing since Radu’s arrival.

Yola glanced at her husband out of the corners of her eyes. She gestured anxiously for Calque to continue.

‘As Radu says, these people now have a blood feud with us. They are out for revenge.’

‘They are evil, that is why. They need to be stopped.’ Alexi had yet again succeeded in pulling himself back from the brink. He made a face, as of a man unexpectedly forced to confront the reality of his own body odour. ‘Cannot the police do something about them?’

A twitch appeared above Calque’s right eye. The idea of Alexi Dufontaine blithely calling on the French police to pull his nuts out of the fire was comical in the extreme. ‘For that you need proof of intent, Alexi. And the Corpus cover their tracks awesomely well. If it wasn’t for their mistake in Mexico with the
narcotraficantes
, we would all be dead by now.’ He glanced across the fire. ‘Yola and her unborn baby too. We were handed an absurdly lucky break. We can’t count on that happening in the future.’ He retrieved a burning brand from the flames and lit his umpteenth cigarette of the night. He squinted at Sabir through the smoke. ‘The crazy thing is that the Corpus still think of themselves as the good guys. That whatever they need to do to keep the Devil at bay is justified within the greater scheme of things. All the rest is irrelevant to them.’

Sabir gave a twisted laugh. ‘The good guys. Jesus.’

All eyes turned towards him.

Calque hesitated, imagining for a moment that Sabir might be about to speak. But it was a false alarm. ‘Yes. If you take the Bible literally, this crazy belief of theirs makes some kind of sense. The Devil in this scenario becomes God’s evil brother – and the Antichrist bears the exact same relationship to Christ. The one, in both cases, presupposes the existence of the other. Both elements – good and evil – are crucial to the furtherance of humanity. The Antichrist is therefore Christ’s dark shadow or mirror image, and can only be overcome by his opposite number, and vice versa. Anyone that gets in the way of that is expendable. That’s the Corpus’s shtick. That’s their bottom line.’

Calque adjusted the blanket across his shoulders. He accepted a mug of coffee from Yola. She had been listening intently to the conversation over the past few hours, but had chosen not to speak. Calque assumed that this was because of some ingrained Gypsy disparity between men and women. Sabir had endeavoured to explain the subtleties of Gypsy sexual politics to him some months before, but Calque still failed to grasp the hidden dynamic between the sexes. It came as a pleasant surprise, then, when Yola squatted down near the fire and seized the initiative. Calque had a healthy respect for Yola’s intelligence. Of all of them, it was she who saw the clearest.

‘Damo. Look at me.’

Sabir raised his head. Yola was the only person alive who could be guaranteed to lure him away from a too solipsistic descent into morbid self-analysis.

‘You still haven’t explained this new Antichrist figure to us. Why Moldova? What do you know that we don’t? If this person is a danger to me and to my child, I must know about him.’

Sabir squared his coffee mug precisely onto the ground. He gave a slow nod. His face had taken on a corpse’s pallor so that, in the firelight’s refulgence, he resembled nothing so much as a dead man talking. ‘Yes, Yola. You are right. You have been very patient. Let me tell you about this man.’ He was looking at Yola but his eyes were vacant, turned inwards, almost, as if he were communing, not with those around him, but with some internal demon of his own making. ‘But there will come a time, I think – and sooner rather than later – when you will pray that I hadn’t.’

40

Sabir shook himself like a horse emerging from the sea. Then he dragged a series of ragged breaths into his lungs. The sight seemed to mesmerize everybody. It was as if they were watching a freshly buried cadaver emerging from its grave. The return of the zombie.

When Sabir was satisfied that he had stirred himself into something resembling normality, he turned to Calque. ‘Do you remember asking me the same question Yola just asked me, but way back in May? When I was laid up in hospital following my tangle with Achor Bale?’

Calque knew that he needed to keep Sabir focused – knew that he needed to make him feel part of the group again, and not merely a rogue satellite orbiting around it. ‘Yes. I remember it clearly. You told me a lot back then. But you refused point blank to tell me about either the Second Coming or the Third Antichrist. I’m glad you’ve changed your mind now. I think it’s very much the right thing to do in the circumstances.’

The praise washed right over Sabir’s head. In recent weeks it was as if he was only able to concentrate on one thing at a time. ‘Do you remember exactly what I said?’

‘Of course. That you’d isolated the three key Nostradamus prophecies by default. And that these were the ones you thought the de Bales were searching for. One prophecy described the Third Antichrist – the “one still to come” – the one Nostradamus describes as the man who will bring the world to the abyss. Another prophecy described the Second Coming, and his birth via a descendant of the Gypsy woman to whom Nostradamus had vouchsafed the prophecies for safekeeping. And the third described the location of a new visionary who would either confirm or deny the date of the world’s possible Armageddon – that this person would somehow obtain a glimpse into the future and channel the information that he saw there. That only this person could tell us what awaits mankind – regeneration or apocalypse.’

Calque heard himself mouthing these words with a certain astonishment. What in God’s name had managed to transform him from the cynical, rationalist, world-weary policeman he had been six months before, to a man who now believed that outcomes could be preordained, apocalypses avoided, and Armageddon contained via a process of cosy communal transcendence? Maybe his Commandant had been right to welcome his early retirement? Calque had a sudden nightmare image of the entire criminal fraternity of Paris chortling in glee while he stood above them, clad only in laurel wreath and Druid’s cape like Getafix, in the
Astérix
books, and waving a hawthorn branch.

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. Plenty.’ Calque dragged his attention back to the matter at hand. ‘You were surprisingly voluble, as I recall, at the time. Unlike recently.’ Calque cleared his throat. He hardly dared look at Yola. He knew that she would be watching him like a hawk. That she would be reminding him with her eyes how carefully he needed to tread with Sabir.

How did Sabir manage it, Calque thought to himself? First it was Lamia, endlessly fighting his corner and seeing that no one overstepped the mark with her lover – even to the extent of taking a fatal knife blow for him. And now here was Yola, mothering him again, and riding shotgun for the damned fool. Did these women sense something about Sabir that he, Calque, did not? Perhaps they were unconsciously compensating for Sabir’s tragic relationship with his own mother, who had first disconnected from him and his father through the fragility of her mental health, and then disconnected from the rest of the world through suicide? Or maybe it was because the bastard was so good-looking? What had Lamia called him? A mixture between Gary Cooper and Dean Martin. Christ Jesus. There were moments – and this was one of them – when Calque was tempted to hold up two fingers to the lot of them, and trudge back towards France and the joys of bourgeois rectitude.

‘You then told me that mankind’s survival will ultimately depend on whether or not we are prepared to acknowledge the Second Coming. Recognize him universally. As an exemplar, and not as a representative of any religion. See him as something beyond dogma, in other words – as a universal blessing. You told me that Nostradamus appeared to believe that only by bringing the world together – in the communal, non-denominational worship of one universal entity – might we be saved.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What else did you ask me?’

Calque felt like a pot about to boil over. By a sheer process of will he forced all negative thoughts from his mind. If Sabir wanted him to play along with his little games, he would do so. The accounting could come later. ‘I asked you about the Third Antichrist. Who he was.’

‘And what did I answer?’

‘I can’t remember your exact words. But you said something like “The Third Antichrist is with us now. He was born under the number seven. Ten seven ten seven. He has the name of the Great Whore. He already holds high office. He will hold higher. His numerological number is one, indicating ruthlessness and an obsessive desire for power. Nostradamus calls him the ‘scorpion ascending’.” Yes. That’s what you said. Maybe not down to the very last comma and full stop, but close. I remember answering “But that is nothing.” And you said “Oh, but it is.” Then I said “So you know his name?” You answered “Yes. And so do you.” Then I reminded you that I was a detective. That numerology wasn’t an entirely alien concept to me. That I would try to work his name out despite your intransigence. And you said you expected nothing less of me.’

‘And did you? Work it out, I mean?’

‘No. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t see to whom it might relate. For a while I thought you might be referring to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. I really thought I had something there. His name for a start.
Putain
means whore in French. So that gave me the Great Whore. I then checked out his birth date – 7 October 1952. That’s Sun in Libra with “Scorpio ascending”. Just as you said. And the “ten seven ten seven” bit worked too, as his birthday fell on the tenth month, October, and the seventh day of that month – that’s the first ten seven – of a year that numerologically adds up to ten and seven too, via one and nine equalling ten, and five and two equalling seven. That’s ten seven again. I was pretty sure I was right by this time, especially as Putin already held “high office”, in the sense of being the Russian Prime Minister, and seemed likely to “hold higher” – in the sense of a third Russian Presidency – if he managed, as seemed likely, to persuade the Duma to increase the number of terms one man was allowed to hold the top job. Plus the next Russian presidential election is due in 2012. It all fit together quite beautifully.’