The Third Antichrist (46 page)

Calque caught the bottle in one hand, uncorked it, and took a swig. ‘
Foutaise de montalbique!
But that’s good.’

‘There’s more where that came from. Wine too.’

‘Wine? What sort of wine? Don’t tell me it’s Eastern European?’

‘Calque, for crying out loud. Stop boozing and come and give us a hand with Lemma.’

Calque tossed the bottle back to Alexi.

Between them, the four men eased Lemma from the floor of the Simca to outside. Yola side-stepped out of the far door, making sure not to bump her swollen stomach. She bundled the sleeping bags together and constructed a nest on the back of the first sledge. The men settled Lemma onto the sledge and tucked her in. She was whistling and snorting by now, her face bright red against the snow.

Yola hesitated for a moment. She cast a wistful look back at the car and then shook her head like an overweight woman refusing a bar of chocolate. She climbed onto the sledge beside Lemma. ‘You can leave the second sledge behind. I need to stay close to my cousin.’

Sabir bent down and cut the second sledge free. He upended it against the snow wall, and tucked away the rope end. Then he slammed the car door. ‘We’ll leave the Simca running in case we need to get back here in a hurry.’

‘But what if the fuel runs out?’

‘Radu, there’s a fucking palace up there waiting for us. This Simca is never going to go anywhere again. When the army sees it, and finds it’s out of gas, they’ll know someone is up here. Then they’ll come and get us.’ He eased himself into the harness. He wasn’t feeling quite as confident as he made out. ‘Are you all ready?’

There was a muffled reply from the semi-darkness beyond the trail of sledges.

‘Okay. As Jimmy Durante used to say – at least according to my father’s version of events – “let’s went”.’

72

Lemma gave birth to her baby ten minutes into the traverse. The first any of the men knew about it was a loud shriek, followed by silence.

Sabir stopped dead in his tracks. He could feel the short hairs rising on his arms and neck beneath the thick layers of his clothing.

Radu threw up his hands and rushed forwards. ‘What has happened? What has happened? Why did Lemma scream?’

Yola’s head appeared from beneath the nest of sleeping bags. The falling snow settled around her hair like a coronet. ‘Your wife is eighteen years old, Radu. Young women such as her don’t need long labours. You are the father of a daughter.’ She gave a tired grin. ‘Now please stop waving your arms around and get us up to the lodge. We need to tie off the umbilical cord and make sure the placenta has emerged in one piece.’

Radu stood for a moment as if frozen to the spot. ‘The placenta?’

Alexi rolled up a snowball and threw it at him. The snowball struck Radu straight between the eyes. ‘Wake up, Papi. Now it’s your turn to push.’

Radu hardly seemed to notice the snowball. He shook himself like a man roused out of a deep sleep, and hurried back to his place behind the sledge. This time the men really threw their hearts into the work. Radu was desperate to see his child, but he knew that Yola would never forgive him if he stopped the sledge again to satisfy his curiosity about his daughter.

‘I’m going to call her Lenis,’ he shouted. ‘After my grandmother. It means soft-voiced. Because she came into the world without a sound.’

At that exact moment they heard the traditional baby’s bellow.

Alexi shook his head. ‘Just listen to that. Soft-voiced, my arse.’

‘You could always call her Stentora,’ shouted Calque.

‘Stentora? Stentora? What sort of a name is that?’ said Radu.

‘A very loud one,’ said Calque.

73

Abi stood near the snow-gates and watched as Markovich checked the locks.

‘Any tampering?’

‘No. These are still locked.’

Abi shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. Let me look.’ He kicked the Lada Niva’s door shut behind him and strode over to the gates. He took the lock in both his hands and examined both it and its chain as a jeweller might inspect a damaged string of pearls. ‘What’s this then?’

Markovich craned over him. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘These scratches. And look down here. Below the gate. Ruts.’ Abi scooped back the snow like a dog marking its shitting place. ‘Can’t you see, man? The snow has barely had time to cover them back up. A vehicle has definitely been through here within the past few hours.’ Abi ducked under the gates and walked a few yards towards a tree that overhung a corner of the road. ‘Yes. Look at this. Where the tree has protected the road. More tyre marks. The fresh snow hasn’t covered them yet. Did you say Andrassy had snow chains?’

‘I’m almost certain.’

‘Well this looks like snow chains.’

‘But it could be the army. Or the police. Or anyone.’ Markovich looked terminally uncomfortable. ‘Mr de Bale... Count de Bale... I think we are on a wild goose chase here.’

‘Why not phone your boss again and see what he has to say about it?’

Markovich ducked his head. He looked disgusted. He hadn’t eaten for ten hours, and he missed his wife. She’d probably be cooking dumplings and meatballs. Plus he had a case of Czech beer which he had won in a recent game of skat. He could almost taste how the beer and the meatballs would melt together in his mouth. Then he would upend his wife and get her giggling, before having sex with her in their favourite position – her on top and facing away from him with her hands on his knees. Sublime.

‘The Coryphaeus has told me not to telephone him anymore. Not to bother him.’ Markovich couldn’t keep the peevishness out of his voice.

‘Oh, really? And did he not tell you to obey my orders before he downed tools?’

Markovich sighed. ‘Yes. He did.’

Abi strode back to the barrier. He took his picklocks out of his pocket and worked the lock back and forth until it snapped open. ‘You see? It’s not rocket science. A child could figure this out in five minutes.’ He threw the gates open. ‘It’s my bet they’ll never make it to the top of the pass in that load of crap they are driving. Hand me one of those pistols. We three have work to do.’

74

‘Someone needs to keep guard from one of the upper rooms.’

‘Keep guard? Keep guard for what?’

Alexi was toasting the newborn baby in a second bottle of Kvint brandy. Radu had joined him. Even Calque had cracked open a bottle of 2007 Romanian Cramele Rotenberg he had found in the cellar and was to be heard loudly proclaiming that it was not unlike a home-grown St Emilion he particularly favoured – not unlike it at all.

Alexi, for his part, was clearly getting into his stride. Drink always made him voluble – too much drink made him vainglorious. ‘Who is going to turn up here in the middle of the night, Damo? A bus-load of tourists perhaps? Or maybe some pilgrims to Voronet who have lost their way in the white-out? The only visitor we’re likely to get is a wolf, attracted by the smell of Yola’s cooking. And I can’t see him knocking on the door and asking to be let in.’ Alexi struck Radu on the shoulder, inordinately pleased with the image he had conjured up for himself. ‘No, Damo, if you feel the urge to go upstairs and stand guard over us like John Wayne, please be my guest. Me and Radu are going to get good and drunk. Maybe Captain Calque will get drunk too?’ Alexi grinned broadly. ‘Hey! Mr Policeman! Are you going to water the baby’s head with us?’

Calque, who was already on his third large glass of Merlot Captura, nodded sagely, as if he had just been asked to encapsulate the essence of Schopenhauer’s determinism in one easy-to-remember sentence.

The birth of the baby had had a strange effect on them all – Calque more than anyone. Sabir could see that his friend was in no mood to take responsibility for anything more that night. Nature, it seemed, had triumphed – for the time being at least – over rationalism. The men were celebrating both the birth of a baby and their own deliverance from evil – the urge was clearly an antediluvian one, shared by a thousand generations of scattergood forefathers. Sabir wondered why he was unable similarly to let go. Then, all of a sudden, he knew.

He shrugged, forcing the unwanted image of Lamia back out of his mind. Normality. Routine. Action. That’s what he needed. The shrug was his way of pretending that the steamroller that had flattened his life was made of cardboard, not steel.

They’d already settled Lemma and Lenis – Radu having drawn the line at the name Stentora despite Calque’s impassioned pleas – into the snugly heated parlour, and fastened the front door from the inside so that the lodge was sealed tight. Sabir, for his part, had located the main fuse box and tried the master electrical switch, but nothing had happened. It seemed that, in the depths of winter anyway, the entire grid for that part of the mountains was switched off.

After cleaning Lemma and the baby and making them as comfortable as possible, Yola had gone off to fire up a second wood-burning stove in one of the unoccupied rooms. This one had a convenient flat top with a couple of removable cooking grids. Now she was busy heating up the contents of some of the cans she had found, and melting snow in a never-ending stream on the second hob. She had also uncovered some old potatoes and a few desiccated apples in a forgotten vegetable tray – she was mixing these with some tinned pork and white beans to make a stew.

In other words everyone had decided on their respective roles bar Sabir.

Sabir understood himself well enough by now to know that he was incapable of winding swiftly down after the exertions of the last few hours. And drink alone had never punched his ticket. He clearly needed to find some other form of displacement activity.

He walked down the corridor and chose himself an exceptionally ugly Romanian-made Dragunov ‘Tigr’ hunting rifle from amongst the ordnance held in the armoury. The chain that ran through the trigger guards was attached to the walls with a set of four simple screws. It took him two minutes to unscrew them with his Swiss Army knife.

He scratched around and pocketed a box of 7.62mm ‘Russians’ that he intended to chamber later. After a moment’s hesitation he isolated three shotguns and two cartons of Brenneke-style shotgun slugs that were probably intended for the dispatch of large game that had not been killed outright by a visiting hunting party’s rifles. He leaned the shotguns up against the door next to the room they’d allocated for the nursery. Then he went upstairs.