93

Abi parked the motorhome in a lay-by on the far side of the highway, a few hundred metres shy of the Serbian side of the Romanian border. He’d tried to persuade Antanasia to make her base in a nearby hotel, from where he promised to collect her when the whole thing was over. Antanasia refused, just as Abi had known that she would.

It wasn’t the best of spots, but Abi figured that the Mercedes Geist would blend in with all the container lorries and their resting drivers – many of whom were busy entertaining prostitutes in their hastily converted cabs – and the banks of taxis waiting to be summoned by shoppers overwhelmed with purchases from the very same market the copper-pot maker had no doubt been attending before he clip-clopped back across the border and saved Radu’s life a few months before. It was better than the open road, anyway.

Over the course of the next twenty-four hours there were long periods when neither of them spoke a word to the other. Such lacunae, however, were interspersed with sudden periods of intense questioning by Antanasia.

‘Tell me about the Parousia, Abiger. Tell me about that.’

Abi faked an intense concentration on the road ahead – he had no place to hide, and he knew it. ‘I thought you understood all about that. I thought your brother was the Parousia. That’s what he told everybody, wasn’t it? That’s what the long hair and the beard and the flowing clothes were all about, wasn’t it? Tricking people into believing he was the Second Coming?’

Antanasia stared silently at Abi from the passenger seat. The motorhome was so wide that four people could have squeezed into the gap between the front seats. The distance loomed between them like a no-man’s-land.

‘Okay. That was unfair of me.’ Abi shot a glance at her from over his right shoulder. ‘Jesus. I don’t what it is that you do to me. Now you’ve even got me apologizing to you.’

Antanasia lowered her eyes. She knew not to confront Abi when he was angry – she’d had more than enough of that sort of training from her father and brother.

Abi spat out his words. ‘The murderer Sabir blurted the truth out to my sister, Lamia, when he was ginch-struck and thought that he was in love with her. My older brother, Rocha, told us the same thing a few months before. That one of Nostradamus’s fifty-eight lost quatrains – quatrains that only Sabir has access to – tells when and where and via who the Second Coming will be born.’

‘But this is incredible.’ Antanasia decided that she would try and change Abi’s mood. She wasn’t scared of him – but anger of any sort unsettled her.

‘Incredible, yes, but apposite, given the belief many have that 21 December 2012 is going to mark a Great Change in the human tide. A change for the worse or the better, depending on how we play it. Madame, my mother, and the rest of the Corpus Maleficus were determined to make sure that it was the worst. Your brother was a major part of their plan.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t care either way. The world can go to hell as far as I am concerned.’

‘As long as you get what you want out of it?’

‘That’s pretty much the long and the short of it.’

They were both silent for some time.

‘Has the Parousia already been born?’

Abi shrugged. ‘Not to my knowledge. He’s still a bun in Yola Dufontaine’s oven as far as I can make out. The last sight I caught of her – which was, admittedly, in a pitch-dark hunting lodge in the middle of the Carpathian Mountains – I’d say he’s due within the month.’

‘Are you going to kill him too?’

‘No. I have no interest whatsoever in promulgating my mother’s idiocies. I’m after Sabir and Calque. And there’s a Gypsy called Radu I wouldn’t mind offing too. But him I can take or leave.’

Antanasia shook her head. ‘How does Sabir know that Yola is to be the mother of the Parousia?’

‘Search me. But I think it has something to do with the female line of Gypsies who have been guarding the verses since the sixteenth century – Nostradamus left the legacy to them via his daughter, Madeleine. The theory seems to be that one of this line of women – of childbearing age around the time of the Great Change – will be the mother. Yola seems to be the obvious candidate. Plus she’s pregnant. Plus she’s a Samana.’

‘A Samana?’

‘That’s the family who protected the verses. The Samanas. I know this for a fact because my brother Rocha killed Yola Dufontaine’s brother, and he was called Babel Samana.’

‘But I am a Samana, Abiger. The Samanas are Romani. My mother was a Romani Gypsy. She was called Zina Samana. She was murdered when I was still a child. For being a witch.’

Abi stared at Antanasia. His eyes flicked across her face and body without fixing anywhere. His face was a mask. ‘Are you pregnant? Is that it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

Antanasia raised a hand to her throat. ‘Of course not.’

‘Are you sure your brother didn’t rape you while you were unconscious? That would be the final irony. The fucking Third Antichrist fathering the Second Coming through his own sister. Even the Bible can’t outdo that one.’

Antanasia remained silent for a very long time. ‘He did rape me, yes. But not in a way I could get pregnant, if you understand my meaning. Before that time, I had not had sex with him for three months.’ She covered her face with both hands so that Abi could no longer see her. ‘I did not want to say this to you. To anyone. I am ashamed.’

Abi gripped the steering wheel as if he was about to rip it from its housing. ‘I’m glad I beat the bastard to death with his own whip. I’m glad I made him suffer. My only regret is that I should have taken longer over it. Far longer.’

Antanasia dropped her hands. ‘So you didn’t kill him the way you told me? By accident? When he was threatening you with a pistol?’

‘No. That was a lie too. In fact pretty much everything I’ve ever told you has been a lie. I keep on telling you this and you refuse to believe me. Maybe you think everything’s one great big lie?’ Abi gave a shrug. ‘Maybe you’re right, at that.’ Antanasia’s admission had broken something in Abi. Shattered some invisible barrier that had prevented him from telling her about his true self. ‘Let me lay it on the line for you then. Your brother tried to bribe me to finish whipping you to death after I’d as good as incapacitated him. You’ve got to hand it to the man – if there’s such as thing as evil, he was evil as all hell. And he carried it with him all the way to the countdown.’ Abi’s expression turned bitter. ‘Something he said must have got to me. Some particular thing. Or maybe it was the sight of you lying there, strapped to his bed? I’d seen you once before, you know.’

‘Of course. When your sisters kidnapped me.’

‘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 Slujbă Neagră – at a willow grove near the town of Călaraşi, 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.’