When they were convinced that Lamia wasn’t going to make a belated exit from the arrivals lounge, the pair tried and failed to contact Abi’s cell phone number for the fifteenth time that day. They then debated for a moment or two about whether to call Madame, their mother, for news, but their upbringing had been so strict, and their sense of hierarchy, in consequence, so acute, that they decided to leave things well enough alone for a further twenty-four hours. They had their orders from Abi. They knew what they must do. Lamia must simply have decided to fly the coop once and for all. And the temporary breakdown in telecommunications must be because Abi and the rest of the Corpus, having milked Calque and Sabir of whatever secrets they had left to give, were already on their way back to France, and therefore temporarily off air.
The pair then hired themselves a rental car from Avis and drove the eighty kilometres separating Roissy from Samois, arriving in Samois village square at a little after two o’clock in the morning. Then, exhausted from their journey and the fruitless wait at the airport, and dead certain that they weren’t going to find either a hotel room or the Gypsy camp at that unholy time of the night, they settled down to sleep in their car.
5
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.’
‘I am 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 peripherique 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.’
6
Lamia had been counting on the presence of the taxi driver to help convince Yola of her bona fides – if a total stranger asks you to accompany them in a taxi, it is marginally less threatening than if they appear, out of the blue, and try to inveigle you into their own vehicle. Fifty kilometres short of Samois, however, she changed her mind and ordered the taxi driver to take her to the car rental section at Orly Airport. It simply wouldn’t do for Yola and her to be connected in any way at all in the mind of a third party.
She rented herself an inconspicuous Peugeot, and then drove the remaining forty kilometres to Samois, arriving in the village at a little after 7.30 in the morning. She intended to ask for directions to the encampment at the bakery – which was inevitably the first shop open in a village, and the font of all gossip – but almost immediately she saw a young Gypsy woman single-mindedly picking her way through the early morning shoppers to the public telephone booth.
Lamia parked her car in the village square. She got out and stretched. Then she wandered, as if unintentionally, towards the booth.
The Gypsy woman was having difficulty coordinating the dialling of a number she had written on a piece of paper, the use of her phone card, and the control of the handset.
Lamia pretended that she was waiting for the booth to be free. ‘Can I help you? I could hold the piece of paper and call out the number for you while you dial.’
The Gypsy woman looked Lamia over. Lamia forced herself not to look down, in return, at the woman’s stomach. It was too early yet for much to show, so a glance in the wrong direction would give her away before she even had a chance to establish herself as a potential friend. And maybe her hunch was wrong? Maybe this woman was not Yola, but another person entirely? At least, then, she would be able to find out the location of the camp.
Yola took in Lamia’s birthmark and the non-assertive clothes. She had seen her pulling up in the Peugeot, and knew that she was alone. A well-meaning payo, then – they turned up all the time. Some even wanted to become Gypsies themselves, and live the so-called romantic life. What a joke.
Yola nodded, although without smiling. ‘Yes. Please do this.’
Lamia studied the sheet of paper. It was a 001 number. France to the United States. She decided to take a calculated gamble, even though she had no idea whose the number really was. If the woman wasn’t who she thought she was, then nothing would be lost. ‘But this is Adam Sabir’s number, isn’t it?’ She hesitated, as if unsure of her ground. ‘You must be Yola, then? Yola Samana?’
‘I am Yola Dufontaine.’
‘Oh yes. Of course. You’re married now. To Alexi. Adam told me.’
Yola frowned. It was early in the morning. In a small village miles from anywhere. It was impossible that she could have been followed – she had only made the decision to walk down to the phone booth at the very last moment. What did this woman with the marred face want from her? Why was she here? ‘You know Adam?’