The Marks of Cain

27

‘Bonjour!’

Leaning out of his hotel window, on his tiny balcony, David returned a nervous hello to the affable, middle-aged French gentleman, sitting with his copy of Le Figaro on his lap, on the next balcony along. David weakly smiled – then turned resolutely away. He didn’t want to talk, he didn’t want to be recognized and acknowledged. He wanted pure and inconspicuous anonymity.

So he stared in the other direction, along the Biarritz seafront. The scene was boisterous: the beaches were wide and golden, hemmed by the glittering lace of the crashing waves; the architecture was a remarkable mix of Victorian townhouses, concrete casinos, and pink stucco palaces. The strange and clashing mixture matched his mood.

They’d been hiding out in this hotel for a several days, using only payphones, and occasionally sneaking out to cybercafes to send and receive emails. He’d got two emails from Simon Quinn, updating him. Which was useful.

But it was still a dislocating sensation. Being here. And the disorientation was compounded by one dazzling new fact: he and Amy had begun sleeping together.

It had happened their second night in Biarritz. They’d decided they’d had enough of skulking in their tiny adjoining hotel rooms, so they had quietly wandered to the Rock of the Virgin, the local beauty spot high on a promontory, and when they got there they had shyly stared at the lamps and the stars and the moon over the bay and the tourists downing oysters by the Porte des Pecheurs – and she’d started crying.

Her tears were unquenchable. She had cried for half an hour. Unsure what to do, David had escorted her to his room – and there she had shuddered and slipped into his bathroom to shower. He sat there, listening to the noise of the water hissing fiercely against the shower-curtain. He began to worry: was she OK?

Then she emerged, wrapped in white hotel towels, her face pink and her hair damp, her body shivering. Her blue eyes were filled with a depthless grief: she looked down at herself. Then she stared his way, her gaze honest, and brutally sad.

She said she felt dirty, and unclean. Tainted.

He asked why.

She started, then stopped; then she confessed, her words halting yet clear. She said she felt soured and bitter because she had once loved Miguel. And therefore it was all her fault. Everything. Because she loved him once, she had poisoned everything. She was the unclean one.

Amy was naked but for the towels. They were inches apart. He could smell the French soap on her roseate skin. Amy shivered again and then she turned to him and whispered I shouldn’t have loved Miguel and the way she said I shouldn’t have loved Miguel was so dark, so lushed, so violet and yielding, he’d felt commanded, he felt he had no choice: he leaned forward, and his lips had sunk onto her wet mouth, and the word Miguel became a kiss, a ferocious kiss, and then his hand slipped into her damp yellow hair, and between their kisses she whispered make me clean and then she said make me clean once again and then she said fuck me.

It had been one of the best moments of his life, and one of the most complex.

David was unnerved, and remained unnerved, because their lovemaking was so charged, so fierce, so freshly different. He had experienced nothing like it. The sex left them both breathless, shining with perspiration, with the balcony doors flung open to the cool night breezes off the sea, cooling their nakedness. And so it had continued ever since: agitated and wild. Fucking. Her scratches on his back were so deep they stung him when he showered in the morning.

Sometimes David wondered why their sex was so exquisitely savage – so tenderly brutal. Their twinned loneliness? The unhappy past they shared? The fact that death had seemed so close? Sometimes she talked of her Jewishness, her family, her dead father – even her relatives killed in the Holocaust – and he detected a kind of deep-rooted guilt. Survivor guilt. And maybe that’s what he had too. Survivor guilt.

And maybe that was it – what drove them together with such passion. They were alone and they were survivors. They were like starving people falling on the first food in many weeks: they craved each other’s bodies, feasted on each other, grabbed at each other, sometimes she bit his shoulder until he almost bled, sometimes he pulled her hair very hard, and often she swore when he turned her over, fighting him, then yielding, then fighting, her sweet brown legs kicking at the sheets. Screaming into the pillow, clawing the bedboard.

Harder, she said, do it harder.

And all of it, everything, was haunted by Miguel. The memory of Miguel ravishing her in the witch’s cave. David wanted to deny it but he couldn’t. Miguel was always there. He was there even when they had sex. Maybe especially when they had sex.

Eusak Presoak! Eusak Herrira! Otsoko.

And now they had been here five days and he knew he was falling in love with her and he was wondering what to do next.

David turned from the balcony, and went back into the hotel room. He heard a key in the lock; it was Amy. He glanced her way – quizzically – she’d been to the internet cafe: she had been going there several times a day – they reckoned her fluent French and Spanish made her less conspicuous than David. So she went there more than him.

He could tell from Amy’s face that she had news.

‘An email?’

‘Yes.’ She sat down on the bed and slipped off her sandals. She was wearing slender jeans and a grey cashmere jumper; the autumn weather in Biarritz was sunny but cool. Gazing at her bare ankles, David repressed his desires, they had already had sex twice this morning: it was too much. It was all too much. It was wonderful. He was hungry. He wanted an enormous breakfast with brioche and baguette with sweet Bayonne confit de cerise. He wanted to see her naked, touch her there, the wounded pelt; the she-wolf shot by hunters, bleeding in the snow. Too much.

‘Eloise emailed.’

She lay back on the bed. Staring up. Blue eyes staring at the ceiling like the blue sea laid out beneath the sun.

‘You were right. She’s in Namibia. She says she is OK. We mustn’t worry about her…She says if we want to come, she can tell us where. She gave me…instructions.’

‘What?’

‘Namibia. She won’t say exactly where but she promises we can be safe there. We have to meet someone in a hotel when we get there. He will tell us more.’

‘She’s with that guy. Angus Nairn.’

‘Just like you guessed. Nairn gave her the money. Apparently -’ Amy reached out as David came over and held his hand ‘- Nairn has been trying to persuade her to come to Namibia for a while.’

‘Yeah?’

Amy held David’s hand, tighter. And said: ‘He wanted to do blood tests on her, and her family.’

‘Because they are Cagots.’

‘Of course. He’d been pestering her for months – but her mum and dad always said no, even though he offered money.’

Her hair smelt of citrus shampoo. David kissed her neck. She pushed him away, gently.

‘And then after the murders, she got scared. And then, apparently, Angus Nairn offered her safety again – when she was with us in Campan, she sneaked off, read an email from him. And he offered to fly her straight out, to somewhere a long way away. Where no one can reach her.’ Amy shrugged. ‘Can’t really blame her. The last known Cagot in the world…Of breeding age.’

‘Apart from Miguel.’

She shivered. He touched her face.

‘Maybe we should go there too,’ he said. ‘The beaches of Namibia. It might be safer…Gotta be safer.’ He caressed her hair, cupped her cheek; he devoutly wished he wasn’t falling in love with her. He knew it was dangerous. If he dived in the pool he could break his neck, because he still didn’t know the depths. He kissed her again even though he didn’t want to, he kissed her because he had to.

She pushed him away again.

‘And she said something else. It reminded me…’

‘What?’

‘Of what José said to you.’

‘You mean?’

Amy’s expression was stern. ‘She said this. She said the mystery, the Nairn stuff, the whole thing, it’s bigger than we could imagine, bigger than anything. It’s something to do with the Holocaust, the Nazis, the Jews…I don’t know.’

‘That’s what she said?’

Amy exhaled. ‘Sort of.’

Then she suddenly, and unexpectedly smiled.

‘So we go there. So we don’t. Come here!’

She was reaching for his shirt buttons.

But their lovemaking was halted by a brusque knock on the bedroom door.

‘Monsieur! Mademoiselle!’

David immediately tensed. Rigid and wordless, he gazed at Amy, asking, with his eyes: what shall we do; she shrugged in return – a helpless, despairing shrug.

He got up, and swallowed his fears, and padded across.

‘Who is it?’

‘S’il vous plaît. La porte.’

They were cornered. They had no escape. They could hardly jump from the balcony. The next knock was louder and aggressive.

‘Open the door!’