The Third Antichrist (59 page)

‘No. Before that. Walking in town. In Albescu. Dressed all in white. Talking to people. One man even fell to his knees in front of you. People came up and kissed your hand. Just like the fucking Virgin Mary.’ Abi’s face turned ugly. It was as though he was disgusted with himself. Nauseated by his true feelings. ‘I don’t know what it was, but the sight of you moved something in me. I didn’t dare acknowledge it at the time. I’m not the sort of man such things happen to.’ He paused. For a moment it seemed as if he wouldn’t go on. Then he drew a long, ragged breath. ‘You could call it a sense of recognition. I don’t know. I don’t think in those sorts of ways. Anyway, when it came to a choice between you and your brother, you won hands down. If I’d known what I know now about him I’d have roasted the bastard in his own stove and transformed him into a block of lard.’

Antanasia lowered her head. Heavy tears fell from her one visible eye. She brushed lamely at her blouse as if she wished to extinguish all sign of their appearance. ‘Dracul was not a good man. Neither was my father. My mother was not a good woman either, although she never abused anybody beyond lashing out at us on occasion with her hairbrush. When people claimed she had conducted a Black Mass – a
Slujb
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– at a willow grove near the town of C
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i, I did not believe them. She was not a witch – she was a healer. What the local people saw as witchcraft was probably just Romani medicine-making. But they killed her for it. And the loss of her sent my father mad. That’s when he started his abuse of me. The lending and selling of me to his friends. And being forced to witness this abuse drove Dracul mad in his turn. Everything is connected in this life, you see. Evil stems from evil.’ Antanasia raised her head. ‘This is why you must not go through with what you are intending to do, Abiger.’

‘Too late.’

‘What if I were to tell you that, as well as transferring the money out of our Lugano account, I would also give myself to you? You say you want me. You can have me. To marry or not, as you wish. But in return for this I would ask you to turn back from what you are intending. To live decently. Without harming people anymore.’

The groan seemed wrenched from the tormented interior of Abi’s soul. ‘I’ve told you, Antanasia. It’s too late.’

94

Abi saw Amoy crossing the Serbian–Romanian border late afternoon on the second day. Grinning, he scuttled back into the main body of the stationary motorhome. He peered at Amoy through the convenient gauze curtains that the original German owners had installed throughout the vehicle for privacy’s sake. Antanasia, who had sat patiently with Abi throughout all the hours of waiting, was fast asleep in the passenger seat.

Earlier, Abi had watched Antanasia sleeping. He had been tempted to stretch across and touch her. To take her in his arms. To carry her back to the double bed in the rear of the Mercedes. Might not a lifetime of enforced submission to the desires of men be habit-forming? Abi had no idea why he felt so protective of her, therefore. Why he didn’t do to her what he would have done to any other woman in similar circumstances. It was a genuine mystery to him.

Once he caught sight of Amoy, however, all that was forgotten. The real game was on again. There would be ample time for the other later.

Amoy was clip-clopping along the far side of the hundred-metre feeder lane separating Abi’s motorhome from his horse and cart. He looked at least ninety per cent asleep. Maybe this new horse he’d procured for himself knew the way back home on his own? thought Abi. Maybe I did the bastard a genuine favour shooting the other one?

Abi gave Amoy a ten-minute head start and then eased the Mercedes into a U-turn and followed after, keeping his speed down to around five miles an hour. After twenty minutes he saw Amoy turn into a Romani campsite and lose himself amongst the caravans there. The campsite was considerably larger than Abi had imagined. There was no way he would be able to get a just perspective on it without being seen, so a recce was out of the question. The ground was as flat as a pancake in every direction.

Cursing, Abi drove the motorhome down a track near the camp and parked 50 metres above a fast-flowing river. He put out an arm and shook Antanasia awake. ‘I need to sleep now. I’m going in tonight. The whole thing’s perfect. I couldn’t have designed it better myself. I can do what I have to do and be across the Serbian border in ten minutes. An hour after that we’ll be over in Hungary and the trail will be dead as a fish. Then we can head across Austria and into Switzerland. Will you wake me up in three hours?’

Antanasia stared at him, her eyes still drooping with sleep. ‘Just like that. You’re going in just like that. What if they are not there?’

‘They’ll be there.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘I can smell them. Plus I’ve just followed the idiot pot maker home. He’s the one who smuggled Radu across the frontier last autumn. I’m willing to bet that he picked him up again straight after we’d gone, and treated his wounds. I’m pleased now that I shot his bloody horse. My mistake was not to burn his cart as well. My imbecile sisters must have overlooked Radu when they conducted their search of the cart. He was probably rammed in there all the time, in some hidden compartment. These Gypsies have smuggling in their blood. Why do you think they live so near the border? Heck, you’re one of them, aren’t you? Or so you claim.’

Abi threw himself down on the single cot, leaving the double bed for Antanasia, as was his wont. After a bit, she laid herself down too. Words were superfluous. She felt as if she were frozen in time.

In her heart Antanasia didn’t know exactly what she was waiting for – but she knew that whatever it was, she must see it right through to the end. Of all the men she had known in her life, Abi had come the closest to treating her kindly and with humanity. True, he wanted something of her. But he had saved her life and healed her back. And he hadn’t abused her – at least not yet – although she both knew and recognized those moments when he had been tempted.

He was angry with her now, though, and liable to say things he didn’t mean, so she knew that she must tread carefully. She also realized that the thought of him entering the camp and either killing or being killed made her feel intolerably lonely. Why were all the men she was close to warped in some way? Flawed? Were all men like this? Was it God’s pattern for them?

Antanasia curled herself up on the bed and thought through the main events of her life. Had she truly called all the miseries that had assailed her down on herself? Did she really suffer from the curse of Eve, as both her father and her brother had insisted? Or maybe she had inherited bad blood from her mother, and was cursed that way?

On a number of occasions, and particularly after her mother had first bolted and then come sidling back home a few weeks later, her father had forced both mother and daughter to listen to him reading God’s words to Eve from Genesis 3:16.

‘Pay attention, the pair of you. These are the words God used to Eve directly after cursing the Serpent. I’m not making this up. It is written here in the Holy Bible. Listen, I tell you!’ His eyes had flashed cold fire at them. Even now, Antanasia could feel the memory of her fear of him eating into her stomach. ‘“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire
shall be
to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” There. What do you think of that?’

Next he would read out the section in which God curses Adam on account of Eve, and condemns him to till the earth via thorns and thistles. ‘“Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life. BECAUSE THOU HAST HEARKENED UNTO THE VOICE OF THY WIFE!” You see?’ he would shout. ‘It is because of you women that I sweat in the fields and lose my crops. That the locusts come, and the corn blight, and the rye ergot.’

‘You’ve switched the words around,’ said Zina. ‘I’ve read the Bible too.’ This, as Antanasia knew, was not quite true – her mother never read anything. ‘The words don’t come in that order. You’ve done it to suit yourself, you bastard.’

Then Adrian Lupei would raise his hand to both of them, until he had satisfied himself that they were sufficiently chastened and would obey him in everything. If Dracul tried to intervene, as he sometimes did when this form of behaviour first began, he would be beaten too. Harder than the women, because he was a boy, and he should be able to take it.

Despite all this, Antanasia’s mother never lost her resilience or her sense of humour. ‘He is a small man, your father,’ Zina would tell her daughter. ‘A tiny man. If I didn’t have both of you to worry about, I would leave him forever.’

‘No, Mama. Don’t leave us. Never leave us.’

Now Antanasia wished that her mother had not listened to her pleas. That she had saved herself. That she had run away once and for all and never come back.

For her death had destroyed everything that was good in her children’s world, allowing evil to slip, alongside her unquiet spirit, in through the back door.

95

Amoy saw the Mercedes motorhome almost immediately. He had noticed it first the day before, but parked in a marginally different spot. It was an outrageous piece of German engineering. But Amoy would have liked one anyway.

With a vehicle like that a man could go anywhere. Could take his family anywhere. Odd, though, that its owners would spend two days in succession at the border crossing. Maybe their papers weren’t in order? Maybe they had some deal going with the border officers, and were celebrating with whores and champagne? Although anyone who used the border whores must have a screw loose in their heads – they were drug-ridden and diseased, the whole lot of them, and in the pockets of the police. Amoy thanked God that he had a strong wife who produced many children for him, and who kept him more than exercised in that department, as well as off the streets.

He looked wistfully at the Geist, then continued on his way. Later, from far away, he saw the motorhome do a U-turn and start along the road behind him. He looked forward to taking a closer look at it as it came past him. But the motorhome did not come past him.

Amoy turned round on his seat. The motorhome was keeping pace with him, but about a kilometre back. The countryside was so flat that the Geist was clearly visible, like an oversized dung beetle, against the skyline. Why would anyone drive a powerful motorhome like that at a mere ten kilometres an hour? Amoy felt the cold edge of fear flush along the surface of his skin.

Amoy tied the reins to the seat beside him. The horse knew his way home. He had passed this way nearly a hundred times in the past few months. He knew his oats were awaiting him.

Swallowing compulsively to try and overcome the sudden dryness in his mouth, Amoy dropped down from the cart and eased himself into the scrub at the side of the road.

Crouching, he made a circuit of a few hundred metres in the rough form of a crescent, then squatted down in a stand of reeds and watched the motorhome approach.

The driver was the young leader who had shot his horse last November. There was a woman sleeping beside him. But this was not one of the women who had accompanied the leader and his companion in the initial expedition in which they had shot Radu – the sorts of women a man would have paid good money to have nothing whatsoever to do with. This was a beautiful woman, with lustrous hair and a pale face.

He’d seen enough. He cut back over the scrubland until he caught up with his horse and cart again. He flattened himself across the seat to make believe he had been sleeping all the time, and leaving his horse to find its own way home.