The Nostradamus prophecies

53

‘What are you burning? I can smell burning.’ Yola instinctively turned her face away from the light and towards the darkness behind her.

‘It’s all right. I’m not setting fire to the house. Or heating up the pinching tongs like the Hangman of Dreissigacker. I’m merely burning cork. To blacken my face.’

Yola knew that she was perilously close to exhaustion.

She didn’t know how much longer she could hold her position. ‘I’m going to fall.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘Please. You have to help me.’

‘If you ask me again, I will sharpen a broom handle and shove it up your arse. That’ll keep you upright.’

Yola hung her head. This man was impossible to touch. All her life she had been able to manipulate and thus to dominate, men. Gypsy men were easy game that way. If you said what you had to say with enough conviction, they would usually give in. Their mothers had trained them well. This man was cold, however. Not amenable to the feminine. Yola decided that there must be a very bad woman in his life to make him this way. ‘Why do you hate women?’

‘I don’t hate women. I hate everybody who gets in the way of what I am doing.’

‘If you have a mother, she must be ashamed of you.’

‘Madame, my mother, is very proud of me. She has told me so.’

‘Then she must be evil too.’

For a moment there was dead silence. Then a movement. Yola wondered whether she had finally gone too far. Whether he was coming across to get her.

But Bale was only stowing away the remainder of the soup in order to give himself a clearer line of movement. ‘If you say more, I shall whip the back of your legs with my belt.’

‘Then Alexi and Damo will see you.’

‘What do I care. They don’t have guns.’

‘But they have knives. Alexi can throw a knife more accurately than any man I know.’

In the distance a horse whinnied. Bale hesitated for a moment, listening. Then, satisfied that it had been his own horse and that there had been no answering call, he resumed their conversation. ‘He missed Sabir. That time in the clearing.’

‘You saw that?’

‘I see everything.’

Yola wondered whether to tell him that Alexi had missed on purpose. But then she thought that it would be a good idea if he continued to underestimate his opponents. Even the smallest thing might be enough to give Alexi or Damo a crucial edge. ‘Why do you want these writings? These prophecies?’

Bale paused, considering. At first Yola expected him to ignore her question but he suddenly appeared to make up his mind about something. In doing so, however, his tone changed infinitesimally. Thanks to the claustrophobic intensity inside the bread bag, Yola had become morbidly sensitive to each and every nuance in the eye-man’s voice – it was thus at that exact moment that she understood, with total certainty, that he intended to kill her whichever way the handover went.

‘I want the writings because they tell of things that are going to happen. Important things. Things that will change the world. The man who wrote them has been proved right many times over. There are codes and secrets hidden within what he writes. My colleagues and I understand how to break these codes. We have been trying to lay our hands on the missing prophecies for centuries. We have followed countless false trails. Finally, thanks to you and your brother, we have found the true one.’

‘If I had these prophecies I would destroy them.’

‘But you don’t have them. And you will soon be dead. So it is all an irrelevance to you.’