Calque and Sabir had also hired themselves a car. But they had one major advantage over the others – they already knew the location of the Gypsy camp. Furthermore, they were acting on the assumption that Lamia must already be well ahead of them, which provided them with an extra vested interest in hastening to their destination.
Sabir drove like a demon through the outskirts of Paris. At one uncertain moment, when it wasn’t immediately obvious which side of a concrete bifurcation barrier Sabir intended to make for, Calque had rammed both his feet down onto the floor like Fred Flintstone.
‘For God’s sake, man, it won’t solve anything if we get pulled over by the police. Or if we engineer ourselves a head-on collision with a wall. We’re either in time or we’re not. It’s two in the morning. The night duty pandores have nothing better to do than to pick up speeding idiots like you. It’s either that, or pursue real criminals, with all the bureaucracy that that entails. You are doing 200 kilometres an hour in a 130-kilometre-an-hour speed district, Sabir. They’ll throw the book at you and toss away the key with it. You’ll be lucky if they don’t box-flatten the car and charge you for the haulage.’
‘You sound just like a policeman.’
Sabir had a clear picture in his head of Yola pregnant. The thought of her dying, after all they had been through together, was the stuff of nightmares. She had undoubtedly saved his life back at the Maset de la Marais, just as he had saved hers down at the river, when Achor Bale had tossed her into the ice-cold water like a used rag-doll. She, Alexi, and he belonged to each other. The blood tie that he had inadvertently entered into with Yola’s late brother, Babel Samana, was only a small part of it. He felt responsible for her and for the unborn child to whom he would be serving as kirvo – the Gypsy version of an adoptive godfather. It would be up to him to both christen and baptize the child, and also to support him with money and with mentoring whenever necessary. It would be a lifelong commitment.
Sabir had been looking forward to all this more than he cared to admit. He had no children of his own, and now that his burgeoning relationship with Lamia had been cut off at the neck, he suspected that he never would have. It was becoming painfully obvious that he wasn’t cut out for the world of conventional relationships.
‘What time is it?’
Sabir gave a small jump. He peered down at the car’s clock. ‘It’s 2.15.’
‘Are you intending to head straight to the caravan?’
‘Yes. Do you have you a better plan?’
‘No. But I dearly wish we had a weapon of some sort. That hermaphrodite one. Aldinach. He struck me as particularly sinister. He was all set to skewer you back at Ek Balam.’
‘He wouldn’t have stopped with me, Calque. He had you in his sights too.’
‘Yes. But somehow knowing you were for it first was very comforting to me.’
Sabir burst out laughing. He let up a little on the accelerator.
This had been Calque’s plan all along, and he let out a small sigh of gratification. Dying in a car accident on the Paris périphérique had never been one of his ambitions. ‘I still can’t believe that Lamia intends to harm Yola and her child. We can’t have misread her to that extent.’
‘Maybe not. Maybe we simply misunderstood her motives right from the start, and piled error onto error? My father always told me that one isn’t the sum of one’s past actions.’
‘But we haven’t misunderstood the other two. They mean Yola harm, and we have to stop them.’
‘Whatever it takes?’
‘Whatever it takes.’