The Third Antichrist (43 page)

‘I’m going to jog, Alexi. Do you think you can jog?’

Alexi nodded.

Sabir broke into a ragged trot. He could feel the numbness creeping from his toes back to his heels. Both men were emitting great plumes of steam.

Sabir gritted his teeth. Three more corners, he told himself. I am going to jog round three more corners. Then I’m going to sprint back to the Simca and get warm again. Calque and Radu can build the bloody ice palace while Alexi and I unfreeze ourselves.

Sabir stopped in his tracks. Ice palace? A fucking ice palace? What were they going to build the fucking ice palace with? They didn’t possess a shovel.

He thought back to what they had found in the trunk of the car. Sleeping bags. paraffin heater. Fuel. Spare food. Yes, all that. But no shovel. He’d been so pleased with his brainwave about the ice palace that he’d completely forgotten that everyone carried an emergency fold-up shovel when going on a two-week hut-to-hut Nordic ski tour. You couldn’t build an ice palace or dig yourself a snow grave without one. That, and extra ski tips in case of mishaps.

But no shovel, no ice palace.

Bloody fool.

Alexi stood close to him and pointed down at his watch. His eyes were red-rimmed. Ice was forming in his hair where it wasn’t covered by the scarf. Even his eyelashes were frosting up.

Sabir shook his head and motioned him onwards. He spread out both hands, indicating another ten minutes. Then he put up a tentative thumb.

Alexi hesitated. Then he nodded. Both men were feeling the strain. They were well above the 5,000-foot mark now, and the storm was increasing. The snow was coming at them, not from above, as before, but straight on, in curtains. And it was getting harder to breathe. It was as though the storm was eating up the oxygen and leaving only a vacuum behind it.

Sabir started to jog again, but he soon slowed down. His feet were beginning to hurt. He looked across at Alexi and saw that his friend was suffering too. Alexi had been hitting the bottle of late, and this was telling on his fitness. As Sabir watched, Alexi yanked the scarf away from his face and fought for breath. Sabir realized that if they didn’t find shelter soon, he’d have a crisis on his hands.

‘You go back, Alexi. I’m going to carry on for a bit. You’ll be down again in twenty minutes. Then you can warm up in the car.’

‘No, Damo. We go on.’

Sabir hesitated. It wouldn’t do to waste time arguing. The pair of them only had so much energy to mete out. And when it was gone, it was gone.

He continued up the hill. Alexi followed him.

‘Try and keep in my footsteps, Alexi. That way you won’t fall behind. Just keep your head down and concentrate on each step. Don’t look up. Don’t look back.’

Three more corners, Sabir said to himself. We’ll round three more corners. Then we’ll go back and try to get the car moving again. Maybe we can freewheel down the col?

He shook his head, as though he were thinking out loud before an audience. No. There are too many flat areas between the
lacets
and the zigzag bends, he told himself. We’d never be able to push the car through the snow. We’d simply exhaust ourselves and die. How dumb it had been to agree to move in the space of two hours from being normal, comfortable human beings, futures intact, to facing death by unwanted refrigeration. Truly, thought Sabir, we choose our own fates in this world.

He looked up. At first the lake didn’t seem like a lake. Merely a flatter expanse of colour in a kingdom of white. A field, maybe, or a meadow, that had been protected from the normal process of drifting by the peaks surrounding it. Then Sabir realized what the peaks were. They were the actual summits of the mountains they had been moving towards for such an endless time.

He saw dark water at one end of the lake, where the freezing process hadn’t taken hold. Maybe there was an inlet there? A run-off? Perhaps that kept it clear.

Alexi slapped him on the arm.

Sabir turned his whole body round to face Alexi. It was as if all his separate joints and ligaments no longer functioned, and his torso had become one rigid entity. Hardening. Fossilizing.

‘Look.’ Alexi pointed to the far end of the lake. ‘A house.’

The lodge was draped in snow – there must have been ten feet of it on the roof, and more on the outhouse and veranda. Snow had piled in layers onto older snow until the whole edifice had begun to look like an over-decorated blancmange. Streamers of ice were hanging off the eaves and gables, and the wooden picket fence that surrounded the property resembled a wave, frozen in the very act of breaking.

‘That’s it. That’s what we need.’

Both men broke into a shambling run.

Alexi even started to laugh.

Bistri
ţ
a, Romania
Saturday, 6 February 2010

68

Markovich snapped the cell phone shut. ‘This car of Andrassy’s...’

‘The Simca. Yes.’

Abi was staring out of the window. One of Markovich’s men was driving the Crusaders’ ten-year-old Lada Niva Diesel. Abi was in the passenger seat, with Markovich directly behind him. The two remaining Crusaders had stayed behind in Brara to deal with Andrassy’s corpse.

It wouldn’t do to involve the Romanian police at this stage of the proceedings, thought Abi, so he had ordered the Crusaders to dig a grave inside the ruined house, seal it, and then pile junk on top of it. It was highly doubtful that anyone would bother to renovate the house in the foreseeable future. The grave might lie undisturbed for years. Just like the thousands of graves secretly dug throughout Romania during the Ceausescu era. What did it say in Ecclesiastes? ‘Men come and go, but earth abides.’ Abi’s mouth jerked in the suggestion of a smile.

‘It was seen eight hours ago at a garage near Sibiu.’

‘Why are we only hearing about this now?’

Markovich made a face. ‘We did not think it was important to find the car. Of course, I asked our contact in the Romanian police to put out an initial theft report. But I didn’t think that anything would come of it. I thought the pregnant Gypsy woman had probably run away and Andrassy had followed her.’

‘Run away? A pregnant woman run away?’

Markovich swallowed. ‘I expected to hear from Andrassy at any moment. I didn’t expect him to be dead. Do you think the woman killed him?’

Abi gave a snort. ‘No. I think the damned fool allowed himself to be bushwhacked – probably by the husband. It is the sort of lesson one learns only once during the course of a lifetime.’ Abi spread the map out on his knee. ‘Now tell me, Markovich. Where is this place called Sibiu?’

Markovich leaned across the seat. ‘Here.’ He stabbed at the map.

‘Why would they be making for there, do you think?’

Markovich shrugged.

‘What are these mountains shown on the map? Here. Just below Sibiu.’

‘Those are the Carpathians.’

Abi allowed the breath to flutter out from between his lips. He turned to the driver. ‘You. Do you speak English?’

‘Yes. I was a guide before.’

‘Then guide me. How many people were living at this camp Andrassy invaded?’

The man glanced tentatively into the rear-view mirror. Markovich nodded.

‘The villagers were not sure when we asked them. They thought seven or eight.’

‘Describe them to me.’

‘The villagers?’

‘No, the Gypsies, you fool.’

‘Well, there were two pregnant women...’

‘Two, you say?’

‘Yes. One old crone I talked to said that there were definitely two. One about to pop, and the other one a little farther back down the line. Two months to go. Maybe three. Then there were two children.’

‘There were children?’

‘Yes. Young children. A boy and a girl.’

Abi closed his eyes. ‘All Gypsies?’

‘No. Two foreigners as well. Non-Romanian speakers. Both men. The rest were Gypsies. But not native Romanian either. They had accents.’

‘How many women altogether?’

‘Three. At least as far as they remembered.’

‘So we’re talking about the two pregnant women and the mother of the children?’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

‘And the men?’

‘Well, I’m not sure. The crone said they came and went.’

‘But the two pregnant women had husbands with them?’

‘Oh yes.’

Abi looked down at the map. So Radu had survived being shot by the girls after all? Which meant that he’d somehow managed to join up with Calque, Sabir, and the two Gypsies – the carrier of the so-called Second Coming and her husband – after someone, probably the Gypsy with the dead horse, had patched him up again. Abi inclined his head in grudging respect. So the bastard had known the name of the village all along. Well. It figured. He should have skinned the two children in front of him and had done with it. That’s what came of being sentimental. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

But there was one thing he knew for certain. Radu must have been scared shitless when he finally came back to his senses. Petrified that his four kidnappers would head straight back to Samois and revenge themselves on the children now that they’d lost him. Or work on his wife, maybe. Get to him that way. So it made perfect sense that he would call his wife, the two kids, and their parents over to join him. That would explain the number of people at the camp. The whole thing was logical when looked at in that light. Because Radu would be unlikely to involve complete strangers in something he knew could mean life or death.

So maybe it was Radu’s wife who was the second pregnant woman? Yes. Abi remembered Radu pleading with the four of them to let him go back to Samois and tell his pregnant wife that they were taking him along with them to Romania. What had he said? Abi riffled through his mind as if it were a filing cabinet. ‘But I must say goodbye to my wife or she will worry. We married earlier this summer. She is pregnant. It will be difficult for her.’ That had been it. Abi worked it out on his fingers. Yes. Had to be her. He knew for a certainty that Yola Dufontaine wasn’t ready to spawn yet, because he and his mother had gone over the tape recording of Lamia’s final telephone call concerning her with a toothcomb. He had names. Ages. Everything. He just about knew the colour of her underwear.

He dropped his hands onto his lap. So Radu’s wife had been the one about to give birth? That changed things. Because Radu, as the Corpus had found out to their cost, was nothing if not quick-witted. Finding that Gypsy pot-smith – the one whose horse Abi had killed – and persuading him to smuggle him across the border on the spur of the moment was hardly the work of a moron.

Abi ran his finger back down the map and towards the border area where the four of them had originally lost sight of Radu.

The pot-smith drove a cart. So it was hardly likely that he lived far from the border. Probably went across every day.

Abi drew a pretend line from Sibiu to the border crossing. It went plum through the centre of the Carpathians.

‘Andrassy’s Simca. Was it roadworthy?’

‘Oh yes. He slept in it sometimes. When he couldn’t find a place to stay overnight. Just as we do in this. He had sleeping bags. Food. A paraffin stove. It’s impossible to function in this weather without chains or winter tyres – Andrassy would have had snow chains at least. He wasn’t high up in the command structure. So his car was old. But it functioned.’

‘Are all these roads that cross the Carpathians open?’

‘All of them. Except this one.’ Markovich pointed to the Transf
ă
g
ă
ra
ş
an Pass. ‘This is shut in the winter. It is impossible to cross it. So you can discount it. The Simca will travel by the main roads like everybody else.’

‘Why should we discount it? They know very well that we will be looking for them. It is a simple thing to place a watcher on each of the three open roads I see marked here. They would know that too. A vintage Simca is an easy car to recognize.’

‘But it would be madness to attempt to cross the pass in winter.’

‘There would be no police there. No one to register number plates. No danger of being overseen.’