Sabir shrugged. ‘One of you, I suppose.’
Some of the older men laughed.
The man with the knife winked at him, in unconscious echo of the wink that had saved Sabir’s testicles two short minutes before. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll meet him soon. With or without your balls. The choice is yours.’
16
At least they’re feeding me, thought Sabir. It’s harder to kill a man you’ve broken bread with. Surely.
He spooned up the last of the stew, then reached down with his manacled hands for his coffee. ‘The meat. It was good.’
The old woman nodded. She wiped her hands on her voluminous skirts but Sabir noticed that she did not eat. ‘Clean. Yes. Very clean.’
‘Clean?’
‘The spines. Hedgehogs are the cleanest beasts. They are not mahrime. Not like…’ She spat over her shoulder. ‘Dogs.’
‘Ah. You eat dogs?’ Sabir was already having problems with the thought of hedgehogs. He could feel the onset of nausea threatening.
‘No. No.’ The woman burst into uproarious laughter. ‘Dogs. Hah hah.’ She signalled to one of her friends. ‘Heh. The gadje thinks we eat dogs.’
A man came running into the clearing. He was instantly surrounded by young children. He spoke to a few of them and they peeled off to warn the camp.
Sabir watched intently as boxes and other objects were swiftly secreted beneath and inside the caravans. Two men broke off from what they were doing and came towards him.
‘What is it? What’s happening?’
They picked him up between them and carried him, splay-legged, towards a wood-box.
‘Jesus Christ. You’re not going to put me in there?
I’m claustrophobic. Seriously. I promise. I’m not good in narrow places. Please. Put me in one of the caravans.’
The men tumbled him inside the wood-box. One of them drew a stained handkerchief from his pocket and thrust it into Sabir’s mouth. Then they eased his head beneath the surface of the box and slammed shut the lid.
17
Captain Calque surveyed the disparate group in front of him. He was going to have trouble with this lot. He just knew it. Knew it in his bones. Gypsies always shut up shop when talking to the police – even when it was one of their own who had been the victim of a crime, as in this case. Still they persisted in wanting to take the law into their own hands.
He nodded to Macron. Macron held up the photograph of Sabir.
‘Have any of you seen this man?’
Nothing. Not even a nod of recognition.
‘Do any of you know who this man is?’
‘A killer.’
Calque shut his eyes. Oh well. At least someone had actually spoken to him. Addressed a comment to him. ‘Not necessarily. The more we find out, the more it seems that there may be a second party involved in this crime. A party whom we have not yet succeeded in identifying.’
‘When are you going to release my brother’s body so that we can bury him?’
The men were making way for a young woman – she manoeuvred herself through the closed ranks of women and children and moved to the forefront of the group.
‘Your brother?’
‘Babel Samana.’
Calque nodded to Macron, who began writing vigorously in a small black notebook. ‘And your name?’
‘Yola. Yola Samana.’
‘And your parents?’
‘They are dead.’
‘Any other relatives?’
Yola shrugged and indicated the surrounding sea of faces.
‘Everyone?’
She nodded.
‘So what was he doing in Paris?’
She shrugged again.
‘Anyone know?’
There was a group shrug.
Calque was briefly tempted to burst out laughing – but the fact that the assembly would probably lynch him if he were to do so, prevented him from giving in to the emotion. ‘So can anyone tell me anything at all about Samana? Who he was seeing – apart from this man Sabir, of course. Or why he was visiting St-Denis?’
Silence.
Calque waited. Thirty years of experience had taught him when and when not, to press an issue.
‘When are you giving him back?’
Calque summoned up a fake sigh. ‘I can’t tell you that exactly. We may need his body for further forensic tests.’
The young woman turned to one of the older male gypsies. ‘We must bury him within three days.’
The gypsy hitched his chin at Calque. ‘Can we have him?’
‘I told you. No. Not yet.’
‘Can we have some of his hair then?’
‘What?’
‘If you give us some of his hair, we can bury him. Along with his possessions. It has to be done within three days. Then you can do what you like with the body.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Will you do as we ask?’
‘Give you some of his hair?’
‘Yes.’
Calque could feel Macron’s eyes boring into the back of his head. ‘Yes. We can give you some of his hair. Send one of your people to this address…’ Calque handed the gypsy a card. ‘Tomorrow. Then you can formally identify him and cut the hair at the same time.’
‘I will go.’ It was the young woman – Samana’s sister.
‘Very well.’ Calque stood uncertainly in the centre of the clearing. The place was so completely alien to him and to his understanding of what constituted a normal society, that he might as well have been standing in a rainforest discussing ethics with a group of Amerindian tribesman.
‘You’ll call me if the American, Sabir, tries to make contact with you in any way? My number is written on the card.’
He glanced around at the assembled group.
‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’
18
Sabir was close to delirium when they lifted him out of the wood-box. Later, when he tried to reassemble the emotions he had felt upon being forced into the box, he found that his mind had blocked them out entirely. For self-protection, he assumed.
For he hadn’t been lying when he said he was claustrophobic. Years before, as a child, some schoolmates had played a prank on him which had involved locking him inside the trunk of a professor’s car. He had blacked out then, too. The professor had found him, half dead, three hours later. Made a Hell of a stink about it. The story had appeared in all the local newspapers.
Sabir had claimed not to remember who had perpetrated the prank, but almost a decade on he had had his revenge. As a journalist himself he had become possessed of considerable powers of innuendo and he had used these to the full. But the revenge hadn’t cured him of his claustrophobia – if anything, in recent years, it had got even worse.
Now he could feel himself sickening. His hand was throbbing and he suspected that he may have picked up an infection during the course of the night. The cuts had reopened and as he’d had nothing to clean them with before reapplying the bandage, he could only presume that they had attracted a few unwanted bacteria along the way – the incarceration in the wood-box must simply have compounded the issue. His head lolled backwards. He tried to raise a hand but couldn’t – in fact, his entire body seemed beyond his control. He felt himself being carried into a shady place, then up a few stairs and into a room in which light drifted on to his face through coloured panes of glass. His last memories were of a pair of dark brown eyes staring intently into his, as if their owner were trying to plumb the very depths of his soul.
He awoke to a deadening headache. The air was stifling and he found difficulty in breathing, as if his lungs had been three-quarters filled with foam rubber whilst he was sleeping. He looked down at his hand. It had been neatly rebandaged. He tried to raise it but only managed one desultory twitch before allowing it to collapse helplessly back on to the bed.
He realised that he was inside a caravan. Daylight was streaming in through the coloured glass windows beside him. He attempted to raise his head to see out of the single white pane but the effort was beyond him. He collapsed back on to the pillow. He’d never felt so completely out of contact with his body before – it was as if he and his limbs had become disjointed in some way and the key to their retrieval had been lost.