The Third Antichrist (52 page)

As Abi watched, Lupei began whipping the woman on her front and chest, using a steady, almost leisurely, action of the wrist. Some of the blows landed close to the woman’s face. Others struck her across the stomach, breasts and upper thighs. It was clear that Lupei was beating her to some sort of design. His entire concentration was focused on the woman in front of him, and on where next to place his lash.

Abi strode up to Lupei and struck him behind each knee with his fighting baton.

Lupei pitched to the ground and began to retch.

Abi kicked away the whip.

Ignoring Lupei completely, he gazed down at the woman on the bed. It was Antanasia, Lupei’s sister. There was no possible way, however, that the amount of blood visible on the bed sheets could have come from the front of Antanasia’s body, which was clearly exposed to Abi’s eye, and as yet largely unmarked. The blood had to have come from her back, which was entirely concealed from him in her present position.

It was also clear that Antanasia was still unconscious. Lupei had been beating an unconscious woman to death.

Abi bent down and struck Lupei across the front of both thighs – this, he knew, would effectively cripple the man, and prevent him using his legs to escape. Abi put some real power into the blows, and found that he enjoyed doing it. He was angry about the woman and what Lupei had done to her. It was a novel experience for him.

Lupei curled himself into a ball and began to keen.

‘Shut up, or I’ll belt you in the teeth.’

Lupei bit off his cries and stared up at Abi.

‘I’ve come to arrange the transfer of the 150 million euros my mother still owes you. The only difference from what we originally agreed and now, is that the transfer is going directly into my account. You will speak to my mother personally, and give her the new account details. If you cooperate with me, I’ll let you live. If you play for time, I’ll cripple you. If you clam up, I’ll kill you.’

Lupei began to weep – deep, racking sobs, which shook his body as if he were suffering from exposure.

Abi took a step backwards. He didn’t know exactly what he had expected to find when he made the decision to break into Lupei’s house, but this wasn’t it.

‘I need to punish her. She has betrayed me. She deserves to carry the mark of the Devil.’

Abi rolled his eyes and glanced back at the bed. ‘Is your sister tranquillized?’

‘She betrayed me.’ Tears were streaming down Lupei’s face. Snot was running out of his nose. His mouth was like a child’s mouth. Wailing. Unconcerned with its appearance.

‘How long have the two of you been in here, man?’

‘She needs to be punished. She deserves to be punished. Will you punish her for me?’ Lupei floundered across the floor towards the knout, dragging his useless legs behind him. He reminded Abi of the beggars one sometimes sees in the Maghreb, propelling themselves around on wheeled platforms, faking amputeeism. ‘Here. You must strike her with this. It is the only suitable tool to use on the Coryphaeus’s sister. I have explained this to her. And that Peter the Great used a similar one on his son, who also betrayed him. He changed knouts every six stripes, so that his son’s blood wouldn’t soften the rawhide and lessen his pain. You must do the same. I have more knouts in the drawer over there. Go on. You will enjoy it. Beat her to death. Then I will do whatever you want me to. Sign over whatever you want me to sign.’

Abi stepped closer to Lupei. He cocked his head to one side like a dog listening for his master’s footsteps, and stared at the man beneath him. The Third Antichrist? What a joke. He put his foot on the knout and shunted it away from Lupei’s hand.

‘You must do this for me. You shall have all my money. Every last cent. I am a rich man.’

Abi shook his head. The man was clearly mad. ‘Don’t you remember who I am, Lupei?’

Lupei shrugged. ‘I don’t care who you are. Who you are doesn’t interest me in the slightest.’ He tried to rise, but his legs wouldn’t answer him.

Abi struck him on the right shoulder with the tip of his baton. He wanted to hurt Lupei. Wanted to snap him out of the fantasy land he was inhabiting. ‘You’re not whipping anybody. That part of your life is over.’

He strode across the room and began unsnapping the leather straps that bound Antanasia to the bed. When he’d freed her from the straps, he attempted to ease her up into a sitting position, but her back was stuck to the sheets. Abi glanced at Antanasia’s face. She was clearly unconscious. Way beyond feeling any pain.

Abi ripped the sheets from her back in one fluid movement, wincing as he did so. He felt a sudden, uncomfortable connection to this woman – as though it was completely natural that she should look to him, a near-total stranger, for succour. He remembered his first sight of her in Albescu. The way she walked. His joke to Rudra that she looked like no nun he had ever seen.

He turned Antanasia over onto her front and gently inspected her back with his fingertips. ‘For pity’s sake, Lupei, how long has this been going on?’

Antanasia’s back was a suppurating mass of weeping flesh. The knout had bitten deeply – at times almost to the bone. It was clear that the main damage had been done some time before, and that her wounds were badly infected.

‘Beat her! Beat her!’ Lupei screamed. He began scrabbling across the floor like a hermit crab, his eyes fixed on the knout.

Abi uttered an incoherent roar. He strode across to where he had kicked the knout and picked it up. His first blow took Lupei on the side of the head, near his right eye. Lupei screamed. He began to froth at the mouth as if he were having an attack of epilepsy.

It was at this point that Abi lost all control. He began to thrash Lupei with the knout – blow after blow after blow. Lupei did his best to avoid the lash, but his legs and right arm were no longer functioning, and he was only able to propel himself in ever-diminishing circles, like water exiting from a plughole.

At one point, Abi kicked Lupei over onto his side and began to work on his back. He had no real intention of killing the man – he needed him far too much for that – but merely of punishing him. Exacting an impartial revenge on him for what he had visited on his sister. But Abi’s bloodlust, never far beneath the surface, now flared out of control.

Abi thrashed Lupei solidly for ten minutes, until the sweat was standing out on his face and neck, and his shirt, beneath his stolen parka jacket, was wringing wet. He thrashed Lupei until the man was so far beyond death that he no longer resembled a human being.

He stopped once, halfway through the scourging, and gazed over towards the bed, where he fancied he had caught the flash of a partially opened eye. But Antanasia was curled up on her side, just where he had left her, her face the colour of calcite.

When the job was done Abi tossed the blood-soaked knout across the room and flicked the blood off his hands like a surgeon ridding himself of excess bactericide. Then he stared down at Lupei’s body, as if he was surprised at what he saw. He struck himself between the eyes with the flat of his hand, leaving the bloody imprint of a palm on the centre of his forehead.

‘There, Monsieur de Bale. Now you’ve really gone and shit your pot full. You’ve just beaten 150 million euros to death.’

Abi stared numbly down at his victim. He hadn’t lost control like that since he was sixteen years old, and taking revenge on a school bully who had been targeting his brother. He’d cornered the boy down an alley, meaning only to mark him. In the end he’d smashed his hands, knees, and feet with a hockey stick. When he realized the boy had recognized him, he’d finished the job by beating in the back of the boy’s head. Then he’d dropped his trousers and reattached the hockey stick to his leg with two luggage straps, so that the shaft fitted snugly inside his boot, and the head looped over his belt and underneath his shirt. When he was certain it didn’t show, he’d limped out of the alley as though he’d wrenched his knee. Later, he’d burnt the wooden hockey stick. It had been Indian style. With a clubbed head. Best mulberry. He’d never found another one like it.

Abi turned and gazed speculatively towards the bed. No. Maybe everything wasn’t lost quite yet. He would still need a fall-back position in case the next part of his master plan didn’t work to order. Maybe Lupei’s sister was it?

Antanasia was stirring fitfully. Abi watched her, caught midway between fascination and horror. He remembered interrogating her. How beautiful he had thought her. How extraordinarily self-possessed. It was rare for any woman to make an impression on Abi beyond the fleetingly sexual. But Antanasia had done so, to the extent that Abi – acting quite out of character – had even formed a halfway concrete plan of contriving to see her again.

One part of him now wondered whether his furtive return to Albescu hadn’t partly been on account of her? He found himself struggling to understand how the pair of them had contrived to migrate from the women’s section of Albescu’s public conveniences to here? What ridiculous confection of fate had thrown them together in Lupei’s bedroom, with a dead man lying on the floor between them, and Antanasia beaten half to death on the bed?

Abi tore his eyes away from Antanasia and strode out of the room. He cast around the house until he identified Lupei’s study. He went inside and began going through Lupei’s papers, searching for bank statements. He knew Lupei kept a Swiss bank account in his and his sister’s name – he, and Madame, his mother, had helped set it up through her own bank in Lugano. But just knowing about the account wasn’t enough. He needed the dedicated bank code and account number, otherwise he might as well go home and take up knitting.

He found a locked file beneath Lupei’s desk. He prised the lock open with his penknife. Yes. Here were the bank statements. The account held 49,830,000 euros. Abi punched the air. So Lupei hadn’t had time to take delivery of his weapons of mass destruction after all? Maybe the bastard had had them on advance order, payable in full only when he became President? One couldn’t put anything past a man who would happily beat his sister to death over a series of days, keeping her alive on painkillers and tranquillizers in the interim. At least when Abi had killed his sisters, he had done it cleanly and without excessive gloating – except in the case involving the attempted drownings in the cenote, but that had been unprecedented. A true one-off. The exception, he felt, that proved the rule.

What a fool Madame, his mother, had been to think she could control a nutter like Lupei. There she was, one of the richest women in the world, and instead of relishing what she had, all she could think of to do with her moolah was to arm a maniac with the seeds of her – and her own society’s – destruction. It beggared belief. She didn’t deserve the money.

From the very beginning Abi had never seen the point of the Corpus Maleficus – as far as he was concerned all it had ever been was an excuse to have a good time, paid for in full by somebody else. The remainder of his family, however, had approached the thing with an earnestness verging on the deranged. It was that which had killed them in the end. Well, hadn’t some joker once opined that ‘you are always killed by what you love’? Or was that the name of a song? It almost made you weep.

As well as the bank statements and account details there were two passports at the bottom of the locked file. Lupei’s and Antanasia’s. Abi pocketed Antanasia’s and chucked Lupei’s into the wastepaper basket. He wouldn’t be needing that anymore.

He flicked open his cell phone and dialled Madame, his mother’s, number. It was a calculated risk, this splitting of his eggs into two baskets. If it all turned out badly it could cost him a fortune. But what better alibi? And as far as the authorities were concerned, he was still in America anyway.

‘I have good news, Madame. Catalin has fulfilled his part of the bargain. His Crusaders have killed both the Gypsy girl and her husband. With their help I then found Sabir and the policeman as they were attempting to make off over the Carpathians. In tomorrow’s newspaper you will read of a disastrous fire at one of Nicolae Ceausescu’s old hunting lodges, up near the F
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an Pass. Two bodies in it. Burned beyond recognition.’

There was a long silence at the other end of the line, which Abi chose not to fill.

‘You are suggesting we send him the residue of his money then?’

‘I think he has earned it, Madame. The man is clearly a psychopath of the very first order. I think we can assume he will use it well.’

The Countess sighed. It was as though a great weight was lifting itself from about her shoulders. ‘Abiger, I am very proud of you. I do not say this lightly.’

Abi made a face into the phone. Thank God, he thought to himself, that the damned thing isn’t set up to transmit images. ‘I have only done my duty as a member of the Corpus, Madame. And as your son. And as the proud inheritor of Monsieur, my father’s, titles and appurtenances.’

‘Nevertheless.’

Abi bowed his head. ‘Nevertheless.’ He was tempted to burst out laughing, but managed to control himself. Talk about rampant archaism. Here he was, twenty-five years old, and forced to talk like a dowager duchess at an
ancien régime
tea party.

‘Will you be returning home now? I shall need you to liaise with Catalin for me, as you have first-hand knowledge of the man’s character.’

‘In a week or so’s time, Madame, if that’s all right? I have a few things to clear up here first. But I am at your entire service should you find my absence in any way inconvenient.’