The Third Antichrist (55 page)

The nightmare unsettled him badly. He never had nightmares. He was not a nightmare type. It angered him that he should have one now, just when he needed a clear head. What was it about this woman that affected him so? Was it because she was the first person in his life he had looked after for any length of time? Or was it the fascination mixed with disgust that he felt whenever he thought about her relationship with Lupei?

Abi gave an angry snort. How could someone as upright as Antanasia bring herself to conduct an affair with her own brother? How was it possible? And yet a hidden part of Abi sensed, with the small degree of balance of which he was capable, that with a man like Dracul Lupei, anything was possible. The bastard had been a force of nature. Definitely not the type to take no for an answer. Defy him, and he would cut you down, just as he’d been doing to Antanasia when Abi had stumbled in on them. Peter the Great and his son? Lupei had clearly been suffering from
folie de grandeur
. Abi found that he derived an intense satisfaction from having killed him.

He allowed that positive thought to perambulate through his brain. How did it feel to be the saviour of Europe? Because that was what he was. If Lupei had lived, the man would have brought Armageddon down on all their heads. A nuclear war on European soil would have killed countless more people than Hitler, Napoleon, and even Stalin and Mao Zedong had contrived between them. Lupei would have made a worthy Antichrist cut from the same egomaniacal cloth as the others.

But he, Abiger de Bale, had put a damper on him. And all because he wanted to enjoy the fruits and luxuries of a wealth far beyond the rather too modest dreams of Croesus – a wealth that was even now hovering at his fingertips. One could construe such an act as the final triumph of capitalism over anarchy, thought Abi. The simple fact of feeding one’s belly and getting one’s end away, set against marching off to yet another pointless and destructive war in a litany of pointless and destructive wars. No contest. The money won out every time.

Abi got up and padded out into the hall, all thoughts of Antanasia and her final smile driven from his head. He stood for a long time, his nerves attuning themselves to the noises inside the house. He glanced up the stairs. He wouldn’t be venturing up there. Chances were that Milouins hadn’t been bullshitting when he claimed that he had engineered some fresh traps after the travesty of Abi’s previous midnight visit.

Abi grinned and headed down towards the cellar. He had noticed the propane ‘pigs’ on his last trip through. Each gas tank was designed to hold 1,000 gallons of liquid propane – enough to heat and service a house the size of the Domaine de Seyème and then some. Propane tanks were intrinsically safe. But the fuel itself was intrinsically unstable. Natural gas was a far better bet in most cases, but the Domaine de Seyème was so far off the beaten track that it wasn’t eligible for the town supply. Added to which, the Countess insisted on the house being completely independent. No unexpected winter outages for her. It was for this reason that she kept a large portable generator in the room next to the propane tanks for emergency use during power cuts, together with a 500-litre diesel tank, one further room across, to service it. More grist to the mill.

Abi crouched down and began to set up the ancient three-bar electric heater he had retrieved from an adjacent storeroom. He plugged it into the wall socket and switched it on. He nodded inanely and pretended to warm his hands at the glow.

When the heater was working at full whack, he switched on both of the propane tank bleeder valves. This wouldn’t be enough to cause an actual explosion, but once the gas from the bleeder valves took fire, the relief valves would automatically be triggered, causing an escape of gas from the top of the tank. This escape was designed to lower the pressure inside the tank, and so avoid an explosion.

But with the three-bar heater still on, and with the bleeder valves already burning, this gas, too, would eventually ignite. The regular blasts of flame from the relief valves would then reflect back off the roof of the cellar, heating up the tanks to such an extent that they would eventually blow, creating a fireball that would move through the opened cellar rooms until they encountered the diesel tank used to feed the generator. Then all hell would break loose.

Abi estimated that the whole thing should take about three long minutes from start to finish, once the bleeder valves had ignited. Just enough time for Milouins to stumble downstairs from his bedroom and throw open the main cellar door to create a convenient updraft.

Abi hurried back up the steps, shutting the cellar door behind him. He padded into the study, soaked the blanket in water, tossed the empty Evian bottle into the wastepaper basket, and replaced the used cushions back onto the sofa. Pointless leaving unanswered questions for the investigators.

He opened the sash window and eased himself out, then snapped the window back into place. He flicked the sash shut with the blade of his penknife. Placing the dampened blanket over his head like a shawl, he sprinted for a nearby stand of trees. Behind him he could hear the house alarm begin to sound. Well. That would certainly wake Milouins up if the smell of gas hadn’t.

He was almost to the second stand of trees when the first concussion hit. He was thrown forwards as if he had been ejected out of a fast-moving train. Abi rolled over and over, the wet blanket entangling itself in his flailing limbs. He curled up beneath the blanket and waited, his hands clamped to his ears.

The second explosion was far larger than the first.

Once the shockwave had passed over him, Abi got up and began running again. The diesel tank hadn’t gone up yet. That was still to come. He wanted to be a very long way off indeed for that one.

He was 800 metres from the house when the final explosion was triggered. An immense fireball rose 150 feet into the sky, and a wall of heat bloomed out towards him like the thermal radiation from an atomic blast.

Abi ran on. He didn’t need to look behind him. Nothing human would be able to withstand such a detonation. The countryside was lit up like day in front of him.

He veered towards the road, still holding the steaming blanket over his head. When he reached the Geist he glanced instinctively into the back to see if Antanasia had been awoken by the explosion.

She was fast asleep. The dose he had given her would be good for five or six hours yet.

Abi slipped the Mercedes into forward shift and headed off in the direction of Cavalaire and Le Lavandou.

90

Abi had owned the house in Mallorca for a number of years now. It was situated on the north-west part of the island, near the small hamlet of Lluch Alcari.

The
finca
itself was located down a long stony track, about halfway between the village of Deia and the turn-off to Lluch. The land through which the track travelled did not belong to Abi, but the fisherman’s stone house was his and his alone, together with the six terraces below it, and the fifty-foot palm tree that towered nearly as high as the
finca
’s third storey.

There was an unobstructed 180-degree view of the Mediterranean in front of the house, which spanned, on the left, as far as the Punta de Deia, and, on the right, to Es Canyaret and the bay of Sa Muleta. Abi had put in a heated swimming pool the previous year, and he intended to use this pool as part of his master plan for bringing Antanasia back to the sort of physical condition he would require of her before she could accompany him to Lugano to access her and her brother’s numbered account.

Abi now regretted his fool idea of getting Madame, his mother, to transfer the remainder of the funds she owed across to Lupei. But at the time he had taken the decision he had not been entirely sure that his plan to kill her would work out – and the near-certainty of getting his hands on a minimum of 200 million euros, had been a whole lot better than getting his paws on nothing. At least now the 200 million would be outside the estate for tax purposes, so every cloud had a silver lining.

The killing had turned out very well, given the circumstances. Abi had received the news about the Countess’s tragic death in a gas explosion via his US cell phone. There had been three fatalities, apparently. The Countess. Her companion, Madame Mastigou. And her manservant, Hervé Milouins. Burned to a cinder. Nothing left but ashes.

Abi had been briefly tempted to say that it couldn’t have happened to nicer people, but he had prudently held his tongue. He had promised his mother’s lawyers that he would fly over from Boston and meet with them within the month – but in Brussels, not Paris. When they had cavilled at this, he had read them the riot act in a most satisfactory manner – he still had business of his own to conduct in America, he claimed, and was not at anyone’s beck and call. Madame, his mother, was dead. There was nothing left of her to bury. Not even a forlorn scrap. Her property holdings and business empire were in good order and under excellent management, and he was her sole remaining heir under Napoleonic law. Where was the hurry? They could busy themselves with probate in the interim, and whatever else lawyers got up to in order to justify their exorbitant fees. He imagined the French State would want its pound of flesh from him too, so they could start negotiating on that straight away.

There followed a period which, in retrospect, was the most puzzling in Abi’s life. Antanasia knew nothing of his past, and he chose not to enlighten her. He was merely the son of the person with whom her brother had had certain financial dealings, and who had happened upon her, in the nick of time, and saved her from an agonizing death. Thanks to being beaten to within an inch of her life, and to the endless succession of tranquillizers and painkillers with which her brother, and later Abi, had dosed her with, Antanasia had no real idea of what had actually occurred back at the house in Albescu, nor did she remember much of what had gone before. So Abi simply made it up.

According to his version of the story, he had entered the house meaning to talk to Lupei, and had heard strange noises emanating from upstairs – imprecations, followed by the screams of a woman. He had then stumbled in on her and Lupei.

Seeing him, Lupei had rushed into his study. He had come out brandishing a pistol. Abi had been forced to strike him with the first thing that came to hand, which had been the heavy ivory handle of the knout, which resembled, in size, a knobkerrie or a shillelagh. The blow had been a lucky one for Abi, but an unfortunate one for Lupei, because it had killed him on the spot.

Abi had then carried Antanasia out of the house under cover of darkness, because he knew that otherwise the Moldovan authorities would arraign her for her brother’s murder, and he wished, at all costs, to prevent such an injustice from happening. He had therefore obtained false identity papers for her, but these were scarcely good enough to fool bona fide customs officials. But they were, however, plenty good enough to fool the mayor of the local town near which they now resided.

Abi had therefore arranged for himself and Antanasia to go through a civil marriage ceremony in Soller Town Hall – when she was physically up to it, of course. He fully acknowledged that this would be a marriage of convenience – he was not remotely suggesting that Antanasia consider herself his wife in more than name only. But only in this way would he be able to protect her from the Moldovan authorities and afford her an entirely new identity.

She would become a French citizen and a countess to boot, with all that that entailed in terms of privileges and appurtenances. It was the least he could do in the circumstances, given the dreadful sequence of events that had led up to their flight, and for which he felt partly responsible. If he hadn’t encouraged Madame, his mother, to grubstake her brother, the man’s latent megalomania might have been limited to the town of Albescu and its environs. The virtually unlimited sums provided by the Countess had clearly gone to the man’s head, however, culminating in his insane attack on his sister.

That was Abi’s story, anyway, and he was content with it. It appeared to answer all Antanasia’s questions, and it placed him in a good light.

Abi, however, forbore to mention that marriage to Antanasia would also give him equal rights to the money in her and her brother’s account, all details of which he had erased from the Albescu house – but there was no point in muddying the waters unnecessarily. Antanasia knew nothing yet of the transfer of the funds, and it was correct that this should remain so until well after the wedding. Abi could then explain to her exactly what had occurred, and how the money, by rights, belonged to him anyway, following the unfortunate death of the Countess in a gas explosion. But that he was more than happy to share the money with her if she so desired.