The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘They certainly would be by the time you got them. What do you think I am, a secretary?’

  ‘Sorry, sergeant,’ grimaced Hulpe. He knew when he was being put in his place.

  ‘Maybe we can all sit down over a nice cup of coffee when he gets his head around that lot.’

  ‘Anything particularly pressing in it?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. But that just came through on the Europol link,’ she said, lifting one sheet from the pile and thrusting it into his hands. ‘From London. Top priority, it says. And that tends to mean their spooks rather than Scotland Yard these days. I printed it out specially.’

  Weinert looked up, wrinkled his nose and snatched the sheet of paper irritably: ‘Fucking hell!’ he said, ignoring Monika’s stern frown. ‘Fucking bloody hell!’

  He had found a sword all right, a double-edged one. There were two photographs on the sheet of paper, beneath an urgent request for any information or sightings to be passed to the security services of the United Kingdom. They were unmistakably those of the South African man and Palestinian woman they had left less than twenty minutes ago.

  ‘Come on,’ he called to Hulpe, turning on his heel and heading straight for the staircase. ‘Let’s hope the birds haven’t already flown.’

  33

  It was just gone five-fifteen p.m. on one of those English afternoons that could either turn into bright sunshine or squally showers when the phone on Sebastian Delahaye’s downstairs desk in Thames House – the one that did have a window with a view – burst unexpectedly into life. The call being patched through to him, it was rapidly explained, was from a German police lieutenant in Munich who had information on the elusive Dr Marcus Frey and his companion.

  The man’s name was Weinert, he spoke reasonable if not perfect English, and he was somewhat embarrassed. He had come through on the direct line given on the urgent information request bulletin put out over Europol. Delahaye and his likes had scant regard for the Hague-based agency, which they regarded as more of a sop to EU political correctness than genuine cross-border crime fighting, but it had its uses as an information dissemination network.

  He took the call politely; unlike some of his colleagues on the domestic intelligence front, Delahaye was of the opinion that being rude to foreigners wasn’t necessarily a national obligation. Particularly as he already had more than a premonition of what the man was about to tell him.

  To say he was embarrassed was something of an understatement, however. Delahaye could positively feel the man’s cheeks glowing down the other end of the telephone line as he was forced to admit that he had interviewed the couple British intelligence wanted to question just a few hours earlier. He had sent men back to their hotel but they had already checked out. He was extremely apologetic and would give the British agent all the information he had on the couple.

  It turned out to be a lot more than Delahaye had bargained for. He had only just been told from an intercept of Stansted passenger lists that Frey and his lady friend had flown to Munich without – that being the way with budget airlines these days – return tickets. Until now, however, he had had no idea why. Any link to the mutilation and death of a known Islamic terrorist only increased his interest in Marcus Frey a thousandfold. That they were also suspected of involvement in the disappearance of a middle-aged nun seemed bizarre to say the least.

  ‘The one thing we are certain of is that she didn’t leave the country with them,’ said Weinert, relieved that he was giving his British colleague information he didn’t have. It was still only compensation but he had kept the best bit for last. ‘The reason I am calling personally is that you may still be able to pick them up when they land. The Bundesgrenzschutz – the border police – at Munich airport registered their departure on a flight forty minutes ago …’

  ‘… to Madrid.’ Delahaye couldn’t resist finishing the sentence.

  ‘You knew already?’ There was an unmistakable irritation in the German policeman’s voice. He had clearly hoped he was delivering an important tipoff.

  ‘Just an informed guess, lieutenant, but I would be more than grateful for the flight number.’

  ‘Ah, quite, indeed,’ said Weinert, and supplied it, clearly happy that there was something he could deliver. ‘You will keep us in the loop if there are developments. In relation to the disappearance, and the mutilation incident.’

  ‘Absolutely. And thank you once again.’ Delahaye put the phone down and smiled to himself. The flight number was useful. He was more than happy to have pinned down Frey definitively and on consideration had no regrets at all that the German had not picked him up. Nor was he about to take the conscientious Munich lieutenant’s suggestion that he have Spanish security detain them the minute they disembarked at Barajas airport. From the moment of the Brick Lane incident, Frey had been running somewhere or to someone. Delahaye wanted to know where. And why. As long as Frey had no suspicion he was under surveillance by a government agency, keeping tabs on him was the easiest thing in the world.

  His ‘guess’ that the ‘nutty professor’ – as he had now mentally labelled him – was on his way to Madrid was not exactly wild. The minute he had been put on the internal security service’s ‘of interest’ list, procedures had been set in motion, as a result of which the screen in front of him currently displayed a constantly updated list of all calls made from Dr Marcus Frey’s mobile phone: the latest, timed at barely three hours ago, had been to a fixed landline in Madrid.

  Delahaye had already had his people call it, from a shielded phone, intending to come across as a wrong number. But that had not been necessary. The voice on the other end had belonged to an answering machine. The curiosity was, however, that it had not spoken Spanish but some other, loosely-related, Romance language.

  Part Three

  … ORA PRO NOBIS PECCATORIBUS …

  … Pray for us sinners …

  34

  Madrid

  The heat was stifling. The taxi meandered its way down a warren of impossibly narrow streets also scraping walls with its wing mirrors before emerging into a small triangular plaza where it disgorged Marcus Frey and Nazreem Hashrawi at the side door of the great nineteenth-century pile that was the Hotel Victoria.

  The clerk behind the great mahogany reception desk looked up inquisitively at the couple who stepped through the side door only to pull up short at the incongruous sight of a metal-detector arch. He dashed forward to usher them through, apologising in broken English: ‘Most sorry señor, señora, but it has been necessary. La seguridad. You understand.’ Marcus nodded. In March 2004, a team of Islamic fundamentalist bombers had killed more than 200 people in central Madrid. He understood only too well.

  ‘We believe there is a reservation for us,’ he said as the clerk returned to his side of the vast desk, looking around at the grandiose lobby. The Victoria obviously played up its old links with the world of bullfighting: there were antique posters and various taurino memorabilia dotted around the lobby. Marcus was still coming to terms with the fact that they were now, wholly unexpectedly, in Madrid.

  Barely five minutes after the two German policemen had left them in the lobby of that very different hotel in Munich, Marcus, at Nazreem’s insistence, was calling the number on the card they assumed had been sent by Sister Galina. +34 had turned out to be the international code for Spain, 91 the area code for Madrid. The voice on the other end of the line was male and it took Marcus a second or two to realise it was an answering machine, but somewhat longer to work out exactly what it was saying.

  He had assumed it would be Spanish, but Nazreem, who had a little of the language assured him it was not. It wasn’t Italian either – Marcus had a smattering of that – and Catalan seemed unlikely in Madrid. It was then that he realised that he was listening to a message left on a twenty-first-century answering service in Church Latin, the mediaeval language used by Roman Catholic cardinals in conclave.

  He had felt rather stupid but Nazreem insisted they left a mes
sage in English, announcing themselves as friends of Sister Galina of Altötting, nothing more, nothing less and giving the number of Marcus’s mobile. Almost immediately, the call was returned by a man speaking a crisp, precise if somewhat stilted English. He announced himself only as a servant of the monastery of Guadalupe and when Marcus began to tell him what had happened hushed him, as if he feared their conversation was being listened to.

  ‘Come to Madrid,’ the man said simply, not so much in the tone of a man used to giving orders, but in that of one used to being listened to obediently. ‘Straight away. Stay at the Hotel Victoria on the Plaza del Angel. I will make the booking.’ With that he put the phone down. When they called the number again, there was only the answering machine.

  Fired by Nazreem’s newfound decisiveness, they had found themselves barely fifteen minutes later on the S-bahn headed for Munich’s Franz Josef Strauss airport. It had not dawned on Marcus until they were actually in the air that they had promised to inform Lieutenant Weinert of any radical change in plans.

  There were other things on Marcus’s mind. Not least the fact the clerk confirmed there was indeed a booking for two single rooms in their names. What was disconcerting was that the hotel had their names at all despite the fact that the man they had spoken to on the telephone had neither asked, nor been given them. The clerk regretted he did not know who had made the booking.

  ‘Oh,’ he added, removing something beneath the room reservation form, ‘there is also this,’ and he handed Marcus a sealed envelope. Marcus ran his finger under the seal and opened it to discover two tickets for that evening, tickets to an event that, far from being something he was keen on, he actually believed ought to be banned.

  The man in the cream Mercedes of the type that served as taxis in central Madrid sat with his ‘for hire’ sign turned off next to the newspaper kiosk in the Plaza del Angel with a cup of coffee and a well-thumbed copy of Hola! magazine. The little three-sided square which abutted the larger Plaza Santa Ana was a favourite place for cab drivers to pause for a break. If any of the four or five others parked there had bothered to be more observant, they might have noticed that he had been there substantially longer than the average coffee break.

  They might also have remarked on the fact that the cab lacked the usual advertising that defaced most of the city taxis’ doors. But being busy men who valued their few minutes of free time when they could briefly ignore the hassle of the crowded city streets, they paid him no attention. Most finished their coffee and cigarette and then took their place in the queue on the rank which in this bustling neighbourhood was one of the city’s busiest, even at the relatively early hour of five-thirty, which most Madrileños regarded as mid-afternoon.

  The driver of the cab parked next to the kiosk, however, had no intention of taking his place in the rank, now or ever. The only ranks in which he had ever taken his place were those of the soldiers of God. But his patience at last had its reward. Over the top of the magazine he watched the couple he had been waiting for leave the front entrance of the hotel and turn right heading down towards Puerta del Sol. He had no doubt that he had identified them correctly, the man tall, blond and typically Anglo-Saxon in appearance, walking with an ever so slight but just noticeable limp, the young woman shorter, dark-haired, olive-skinned, could almost have been a typical Latin beauty, from the south, Andalucia maybe, although he had been reliably informed she was not. Still, there was enough shared material in the gene pool.

  He gave them five minutes, just to be sure there was little chance of them realising they had forgotten something and turning back, although it would have been a nice irony if they actually flagged him down. He would have given them a ride all right, even if it had not exactly been what was on the agenda. But they did not, and following them down the warren of narrow streets that led down to Sol was not an option. That was not a problem. He was fairly certain he knew where they were headed, and there was an easy way to make certain.

  A few seconds later, the reception clerk who had welcomed Marcus and Nazreem to the Victoria and was still smarting from the fact that he had not been given a tip, saw an olive-skinned man who certainly did not look like the usual class of resident in a four star hotel dash through the door, in a state of some excitement.

  ‘Taxi,’ the man announced, explaining everything, ‘for Señora Hashrawi,’ looking at his watch, ‘with apologies. I am a little late. The traffic.’

  The receptionist nodded. Madrid traffic was a nightmare these days, especially in the narrow streets between Sol and Angel. The taxi driver spoke perfect Spanish albeit with just a slight accent which he couldn’t place. He looked at his books and then up again with an expression of stage commiseration: ‘Ah, the Middle Eastern lady. I am sorry. They have just left.’

  The driver looked devastated. ‘Another missed job. The boss will be furious.’

  The receptionist looked at this disconsolate individual cluttering his lobby and felt obliged to offer at least a word of consolation: ‘My fault, I’m afraid. I had no idea they had ordered a taxi. They didn’t say. In fact, I advised them to take the metro. I wouldn’t worry if I were you – tell your boss it would have been a bad fare. They were headed for Las Ventas, and if you thought the traffic around here was bad think what it’ll be like up there in the middle of San Isidro.’

  The taxi-driver smiled gratefully and nodded his agreement: ‘Ah, that was it, no wonder they were in a hurry. They’ll be faster on the metro right enough and I can make more in a couple of jobs out on the street than sitting up the Alcalá for an hour or more. Have a good evening then.’

  ‘You too,’ said the receptionist and watched with satisfaction as the swarthy customer left through the revolving doors. What was it about that accent?

  Back behind the wheel of the cream Mercedes, it was indeed time for the taxi-driver to report to his boss. He already guessed what the orders were likely to be and was not surprised when, after a brief conversation, his expectations were confirmed. He started the engine and turned the cab into the Calle del Prado, a clogged narrow street of bars and small restaurants and squeezed past the parked cars that straddled the kerb to emerge past the Cortes and join the broad boulevards that were Madrid’s main traffic arteries next to the great museum itself. He headed north for a few hundred metres then swung right around the great fountain onto the vast Calle de Alcalá.

  The congestion was every bit as appalling as predicted, although still not as bad as the unorchestrated confusion that passed for traffic in the city where he had grown up. It was forty minutes later before he pulled up at the kerbside next to the great arena that rose like some mad Disneyland nightmare dominating the streets around. He pulled the cab onto the triangle of dusty ground next to the metro station and cab rank, lit up a cigarette and settled down to wait. His ‘for hire’ sign was still turned off. With luck he would be taking a passenger after all this evening, and not a paying fare.

  35

  Marcus felt as if he could hardly breathe. A blue-brown fug of exhaust fumes hung over the Calle de Alcalá from the parping, grumbling traffic piled up all the way back to Plaza de Roma. Marcus was glad they had taken the hotel concierge’s advice and used the metro. But even the fact that the bullring had its own stop – Ventas – had not quite prepared him for the massive structure that loomed above them the instant they emerged from the relative cool of the underground into the still sweltering early evening and the milling crowds of aficionados.

  The Plaza de Toros Monumental de Las Ventas was exactly what it said on the label: monumental in every sense, a latter-day Coliseum in a fusion of Gothic and Arabic brickwork. It might have been a million miles from Munich.

  Marcus had been to a bullfight only once before, on a holiday to the Costa del Sol his first summer in Europe. He had left early with a sense, not of disgust but of mild distaste for the provincial matadors’ somewhat messy dispatch of a handful of less than threatening bulls. It had taken place in an arena scarcely bigger than
a big top circus ring. By contrast the building in front of them now was a vast ornate red-brick structure, decorated with crenellations and ceramic inlays that made it look like a cross between the old Wembley football stadium and a Moorish seraglio.

  ‘Incredible,’ Nazreem was saying. ‘This belongs to the world of Islam. The curved arches, the decoration, it could be in a mosque in Morocco or a Turkish palace.’

  ‘It’s called Mudéjar,’ Marcus replied, dredging up more of the obscure information that his brain was programmed to download to the dark recesses of its organic hard drive for potential future academic projects. Some of it had recently begun to turn out more useful in his daily life than he had ever imagined. ‘After the end of the Caliphate, when the Moors who had ruled Spain for more than 600 years were finally driven out, a few Muslims who had converted – under duress – to Christianity stayed on and maintained artistic traditions. But that was back in the fifteenth century. I never imagined it persisted as late as this.’

  ‘How old is it?’

  ‘Not very. At least, not as old as you might think. Look.’ He pointed up to lettering done in black tiles on white above the main gate and an ornate balcony window that could have been inspired by the Taj Mahal. It read: Año 1929. The building was less than a century old.

  ‘Where do we go?’ Nazreem asked, staring in bewilderment at the teeming throng pressing towards ticket windows and towards the entrances. The fiesta of San Isidro was the highlight of the bullfighting year and tickets were notoriously hard to get, particularly for the sought-after places in the shade. Touts selling black market tickets at up to several times their face value attracted little knots of arguing prospective customers. Marcus heard the figure of 200 euros being discussed angrily and glanced again at the pair he held in his hand.