‘Samana’s daughter will tell you. I am tired. I will sleep.’ The curandero raised a hand in farewell and ducked in through the doorway of his caravan.
Sabir glanced down at Yola to see what effect the curandero’s strange behaviour might be having on her. To his astonishment, she was crying. ‘What is it? What did he say to you?’
Yola shook her head. She ran the back of her hand across her eyes like a child.
‘Come on. Please tell me. I’m completely out of my depth here. That much must be obvious.’
Yola sighed. She took a deep breath. ‘The curandero told me that I would never make a shamanka. That God had chosen another path for me – a path that was harder to accept, more humbling and with no certainty of achievement. That I wasn’t to question this path in any way. I was simply to follow it.’
‘What does he know? Why would he tell you such a thing? What gives him the right?’
Yola looked at Sabir in shock. ‘Oh, the curandero knows. He is taken away in his dreams by an animal spirit. He is shown many things. He may not influence events, however, but only prepare people to accept them. That is his function.’
Sabir masked his bewilderment with inquiry. ‘Why did he touch you like that? Along the hairline? It seemed to hold some significance for him.’
‘He was cementing both halves of my body together.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘If I am to succeed in what I have been chosen to do, the two halves of my body must not be split one from another.’
‘I’m sorry, Yola. But I still don’t understand.’
Yola stood up. She glanced uncertainly towards Sergeant Spola, then allowed her voice to drop to whisper. ‘We are all made in two halves, Damo. When God cooked us in His oven, He fused the two parts together into one mould. But each part still looked in a different direction – one to the past and one to the future. When both parts are reversed and brought back together – by illness, perhaps, or by the actions of a curandero – then this person, from that moment onwards, will look only to the present. They will live entirely in the present.’ Yola searched for the right words to convey her meaning. ‘They will be of service. Yes. That is it. They will be able to be of service.’
Sensing that they were finally aware of him once again, the ever-courteous Sergeant Spola raised his shoulders quizzically from over by the road. He had long acknowledged that he was way out of his depth with these gypsies, but as time trickled past, he was increasingly dreading the somewhat inevitable call from Captain Calque about his charges.
For Sergeant Spola had belatedly realised that he could never satisfactorily explain how he had allowed the girl to persuade him to abandon Alexi to his sickbed in favour of this visit to the curandero . Not even to himself could he explain it.
As he stood by his car, willing the gypsies to give up what they were doing and hurry back to him, he experienced a sudden desperate urge to return and check on his other charge in case someone, somewhere, had taken advantage of his good nature and was planning to land him in the horseshit.
Sabir raised a placatory hand. Then he turned his attention back to Yola. ‘And these things around our necks?’
‘They are for killing ourselves.’
‘What?’
‘The curandero fears for our lives against the eye-man. He senses that the eye-man will hurt us simply out of anger if we fall into his hands again. Inside this vial is the distilled venom of the Couleuvre de Montpellier. That is a poisonous snake that lives in the south-western part of France. Injected into the bloodstream, it will kill in under a minute. Taken by the throat…’
‘Taken by the throat?’
‘Swallowed. Drunk like a liquid. Imbibed. Then it will take fifteen minutes.’
‘You can’t mean it. Are you seriously telling me that the curandero has provided us with a poison? Like the sort they used to give spies who risked torture by the Gestapo?’
‘I don’t know who the Gestapo are, Damo, but I doubt very much that they are as terrible as the eye-man. If he takes me again, I will drink this. I will go to God intact and with my lacha untarnished. You must promise me that you will do the same.’
70
Joris Calque was a deeply unhappy man. Only once in his life had he been responsible for breaking the news to a family of the death of their only son and that time he had been covering for another officer who was injured in the same engagement. He had been in no way responsible. Far from it, in fact.
This was another matter entirely. His proximity to Marseille, Macron’s home town and the fact that Macron had died violently, at the hands of a murderer and on his watch, made Calque’s job all the harder. It had somehow become a priority for him personally to deliver the news.
By mid-afternoon on the second day it was obvious to everyone that the eye-man had somehow escaped the net. Helicopters and spotter-planes had criss-crossed the entire area below the N572 Arles to Vauvert road – including the vast span of country delimited by the Parc Natiurel Regional de Camargue – and they had found nothing. The eye-man appeared to be a wraith. CRS units had inspected every building, every bergerie and every ruin. They had stopped every car going either in or out of the Parc Naturel. It was an easy place to seal off. You had the sea on one side and the marshes on the other. Few roads bisected it and those that did were fl at, with traffic visible for miles in every direction. It should have been child’s play. Instead, Calque could feel his position as chief coordinator of the investigation becoming more precarious by the minute.
Macron’s family were waiting for him at the family bakery. A female police officer had gathered them all together, without being allowed to tell them the exact reason for their convocation. This was established practice. Dread, in consequence, laced the atmosphere like ether.
Calque was visibly surprised to find that not only were Macron’s father, mother and sister present, but also a bevy of aunts, uncles, cousins and even, or so it appeared, three out of four of his grandparents. It occurred to Calque that the smell of freshly baking bread would be forever linked in his mind with images of Macron’s death.
‘I am grateful that you are all here together. It will make what I have to tell you easier to bear.’
‘Our son. He is dead.’ It was Macron’s father. He was still wearing his bakery whites and a hairnet. As he spoke he took off the hairnet, as though it were in some way disrespectful.
‘Yes. He was killed late last night.’ Calque paused. He needed a cigarette badly. He wanted to be able to lean over and light it and to use the movement as a convenient means of masking the vast sea of faces that were now focusing on him with the greediness of anticipated grief. “He was killed by a murderer who was holding a woman hostage. Paul arrived a little before the main body of the force. The woman was in imminent danger. She had a rope around her neck and her kidnapper was threatening to hang her. Paul knew that the man had killed before. A security guard, up in Rocamadour. And another man. In Paris. He therefore decided to intervene.” ’
‘What happened to Paul’s killer? Do you have him?’ This, from one of the cousins.
Calque realised that he had been casting his seed on stony ground. Macron’s family must inevitably have heard about the possible death of a police officer on the radio or TV and have come to their own conclusions when the Police Nationale had convoked them. They hadn’t needed his rubber-stamping. All he could reasonably do, in the circumstances, was to provide them with any information they needed and then abandon them to the grieving process. He certainly couldn’t use them to rinse out his conscience. ‘No. We don’t have him yet. But we soon will. Before he died, Paul was able to get off two shots. It is not public knowledge yet – and we would prefer that you keep the information to yourselves – but the killer was badly injured by one of Paul’s bullets. He is on the run somewhere inside the Parc Naturel. The whole place is sealed off. More than a hundred policemen are out there searching for him as we speak.’ Calque was desperately trying to look away from the scenes in front of him – to concentrate on the questions that the peripheral family were firing off at him. But he was unable to take his eyes off Macron’s mother.