The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  He tried to move his feet and was surprised to discover he could do so freely. His hands too. At least he was not tied up. Nor was the surface he was lying on hard dirt. He was on a bed of some sort, although not a particularly comfortable one. He tried to persuade himself he just had had some sort of fit and been taken back to the hotel? But he didn’t believe it.

  The room might have been a hotel, but he doubted it. The bed he was lying on was double, but with just a simple sheet. There was a small bedside table but with no lamp on it, and a drawer that he doubted very much contained a Gideon’s bible. The room was dark with just a pale ray of grey light coming in through what appeared to be closed venetian blinds.

  Uncontrollably he felt a tremor in his left knee, a nervous tic deep in his flesh between muscle, bone and the tiny shard of shrapnel that remained lodged there, and he knew he was afraid. Very afraid. If he was in the hands of Islamic extremists he had good reason.

  He had seen the videos. The grainy, ill-focused, low-resolution internet images of dishevelled, terrified hostages kneeling on the floor, pleading for their lives to some distant politician whose hand-wringing moral refusal to ‘negotiate with terrorists’ was their death warrant. The men in masks and checked keffiyehs slung around their necks, standing beneath Arabic slogans – phrases from the Koran – with Kalashnikovs in their hands. Except for one. The one wielding the knife. The long curved blade brandished like a butcher’s implement with which he would lean forward and cut the hostage’s throat, while the cameraman captured it all, the blood and the screams and the death rattle, to be broadcast on the World Wide Web, picked up by television channels mercifully too squeamish to screen it, and sickos in US trailer parks who would watch it over and over again in the small hours of the Midwestern night telling themselves it was their patriotic duty to stoke up hatred for the invisible enemy.

  Marcus realised he was terrified. If the last thing he had done before passing out had not been to pee he would have wet himself. There were no good ways to die but the one he relished least was as a trussed sheep whose legacy would be as a low-grade piece of snuff-porn.

  He lifted himself up on his elbows trying to make out more of his surroundings. His head ached and he was not yet sure if he was up to standing. There was a washbasin against one wall with a cracked mirror above it. And a door next to it. Locked. Or open? There was only one way to find out. Gingerly he put his feet on the floor and tried to put his weight on them.

  ‘I’d be a bit careful about that if I were you.’

  The voice came out of nowhere. Marcus swivelled round to see a small bucket armchair squeezed into the darkest corner of the room parallel to the bedhead, and squeezed into the armchair a swarthy-skinned man with dark hair and a full moustache, studiously cleaning a handgun. The man looked at him, tilted his head to one side, then stood up, setting the handgun carefully down on the table, well out of Marcus’s reach, and said in heavily-accented English: ‘Good morning.’

  Morning? ‘Who the hell are you? And what do you want?’ Marcus said, raising his head and shoulders, supporting himself on his elbows and avoiding the acute temptation to look at his watch. It sounded more resilient than he felt. For a fraction of a second he was glad Nazreem had chosen not to tell him more about her precious missing Madonna and then realised how willingly he would have given away anything he knew. It could have been the one chance to save his life. Where was Nazreem anyhow? He had left her seated at the bar, and had no memory of seeing her since. Had they got her too?

  His jailer looked at him for a long moment as if trying to decide how to reply. The man looked back towards the side table and crossed to it and lifted his gun. Marcus swallowed hard. Then, tucking it into his waistband, he walked over to the sink against the wall, lifted a toothglass from a metal holder next to the cracked mirror and half-filled it from a small bottle of mineral water on the shelf below it.

  ‘Here, for you,’ he said. ‘Water.’

  Marcus took the glass gingerly weighing the wisdom of throwing it at an armed man’s head, before the realisation that it was plastic mercifully dispensed with that idea. The man’s eyes were hard, unblinking and there was a glint in them that suggested he was not troubled by slow reactions.

  ‘Where the hell am I? What’s going on?’ He wanted to add, ‘Where’s Nazreem?’ but stopped himself; if they already had her, he would find out soon enough and there was no point otherwise in jogging their memories.

  The man narrowed his eyes and nodded as if he had been given an explanation rather than an angry question, then raised his finger to his lips.

  ‘One minute,’ he said. Then to Marcus’s surprise he turned around and walked out the door.

  Throwing the plastic water glass to one side – he was thirsty as hell but he wasn’t going to drink anything he hadn’t sourced himself – Marcus did his best to hurl himself from the bed. It wasn’t as easy as it might have been, his head reeled and he almost lost his balance the minute he tried to stand. He patted himself down, discovered to his surprise – but not reassurance – that he seemed still to have his wallet; muggers would have been infinitely preferable. For a moment his hopes soared, but a hand thrust into the inside zip pocket of his jacket shattered them all too predictably: they had taken one item, his mobile phone.

  Tentatively, he tried the door handle, easing the round knob as softly as he could – the last thing he wanted was to bring the thug with the gun hurtling back in to deal out a pistol lashing, or worse – and was scarcely surprised to find it was locked. He tweaked the slats on the venetian blind, only to find himself looking out on a sea of red-tiled roofs, concrete, stonework and television aerials with a forty-foot drop. He was on the fourth or fifth floor of an apartment block, probably somewhere in the endless Madrid suburbs.

  It was in a flat like this, he remembered dimly, with a chill like iced water running down his spine, that police had cornered the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic fundamentalist bombers a month after the Madrid bombings. They had refused to surrender, battening down for a siege that ended only when they had deliberately set off a bomb inside the apartment, blowing themselves up at the very moment the police were about to storm the building. Cold comfort indeed. What was it he had read in the Metro that had sent them on the madcap journey to Altötting? That the heart dumped on Sister Galina’s desk had been proved by DNA to be that of someone suspected of involvement in the Madrid attacks? He conjured up the image of some fanatic plunging a curved knife into his breast to extract his still beating heart, and bitter bile rose in his throat.

  Then the door opened and the swarthy young man with the gun came back into the room, grinning broadly when he saw Marcus standing up. ‘You are better,’ he said. ‘This is good.’ And he turned to the large figure who suddenly filled the door frame behind him. The imposing man who strode into the room with the rolling gait of a Worldwide Wrestling Federation champion entering the ring looked less like an Islamic fundamentalist than anyone Marcus Frey had ever seen in his life.

  He had a head of close-cropped blond hair tending to grey that sat atop the vast body of a weightlifter run to fat, enormous rippling muscles decaying slowly to rolls of lard sweating profusely under a too tight T-shirt.

  ‘That’s the best news you’ll get today, José,’ he boomed. The voice could have been that of a retired Sergeant of Marines, as did the accent, an unmistakable Texan drawl. The logo on the T-shirt proclaimed ‘Jesus Wants You for a Sunbeam’.

  39

  ‘I’m afraid we owe you something of an apology,’ the Marine Sergeant voice boomed as Marcus sat down on the edge of the bed in stunned silence. He had been expecting a black-robed Iraqi executioner; instead he was facing George Bush’s overweight cousin.

  It was almost comic. Almost. But not quite.

  The man facing him spoke his language and was superficially the same racial type, but you didn’t grow up in South Africa without knowing that was nothing to go on. There was a glint in his eye that Marcus immediately recog
nised; he identified it with fanaticism. Or insanity.

  ‘The hired hands can be a little bit overenthusiastic sometimes,’ the large man continued, coming forward and reaching out a hand the size of a baseball mitt with two gold signet rings.

  ‘Martin Jones, pleased to meet you, Professor Frey. And this here’s my good friend and colleague, the Rev. Henry S. Parker.’

  Until then Marcus had barely even noticed the wiry, grey-haired man with aquiline features and rimless spectacles who now emerged from behind his larger accomplice. He was wearing a dog collar underneath a lightweight grey suit and a thin smile that he obviously reserved for special occasions.

  ‘At your service, sir,’ he said politely, nodding.

  It was more than Marcus could take: ‘At my …? I don’t think so. You kidnap me and lock me in a room with an armed thug and you have the nerve to … what the hell did you do to me? Drug me or something? Who the hell are you and what on earth are you playing at?’

  ‘Like I said, we do owe you something of an apology,’ the man who called himself Jones said, ‘and now you’ve had that. As for what was slipped in your drink? Rohypnol, I’m afraid. It’s best known as “the date rape drug”, but you can rest assured, professor, we have no intention of anything like that, do we, reverend?’ Jones said, bellowing at his own sense of humour.

  The man in the dog collar gave him a stern glare. ‘No indeed, sir. I should think not. We leave the devil’s perversions to the devil’s spawn.’

  ‘José, why don’t you go and get Freddie to brew us all up a nice hot pot of coffee. That’ll do the professor here the world of good and I sure could use a cup too. How about you, reverend?’

  The reverend nodded.

  ‘You have to excuse the guys. Mexicans,’ Jones added as the swarthy gunman left the room. ‘Wetbacks. Still got Rio Grande mud in their toes, like most of the population of south Texas these days, but they mean well. A few friends in the right places to find them gainful employment and they’ve even seen the light of the true faith and given up the ways of idolatry for the word of the Good Book, by which I mean of course the King James’ Authorised Version, isn’t that right, reverend?’

  ‘Amen to that,’ said the man in the dog collar without the slightest hint of irony.

  ‘We need them over here, on account of the lingo,’ the big man said, tapping a finger to his nose as if confiding a business tip.

  Marcus nodded, as if he understood anything at all. ‘I’d like to leave now,’ he said.

  ‘Sit down, professor,’ the big man said with a smile but in a tone of voice that made clear he didn’t consider there to be an alternative. ‘Make yourself at home. We’ve got a bit to talk about here.’

  ‘I don’t consider I’ve got anything to say to you or you to me, except to explain why your men abducted me and what’s happened to the woman I was with. If you’ve touched her …’ Even as the words were leaving his mouth Marcus realised how hollow his bravado might sound. If he thought these people would be reasonable just because they were American Christians rather than Islamic fundamentalists, he might be seriously deluding himself.

  The big man’s eyebrows raised as if he would be entertained as to what the second half of Marcus’s threat might entail. But all he said was: ‘Ah, the Arab lady. Rest assured, sir, we did not touch one hair of her head. As far as we know she could still be sitting over a cup of coffee waiting for you to come back from the john, but I would imagine she’ll be back at your hotel by now.’

  ‘Then give me back my phone and let me call her.’

  The minister looked sheepish but Jones shook his head. ‘All in good time, professor, all in good time. We wanted what you might call a little “quality time” with your good self. You are, after all, one of us.’

  ‘One of you?’

  ‘Yes sir, a white man, for a start, if I can use that term these days in a non-derogatory sense. And a Christian. Brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church, I believe, a very honest, God-fearing branch of the true faith.’

  Marcus said nothing. So they were as much guilty of swallowing the stereotype as he nearly had been. He remembered the self-righteous middle-class white women his mother used to associate with at the golf club going off to church on Sunday to pray for their fellow man and ‘all God’s children’ before coming home and treating the black ‘houseboy’ like dirt. The man facing him was the type they would have expected to join the police, ‘to keep the kaffirs in order’. Yes, he would have got on just fine in the Dutch Reformed Church.

  Jones chose to interpret his silence his own way. Like most people did. ‘You see,’ he was saying, ‘we would hate you to do something you would mightily regret, and think you ought to know the full facts about what you’re dealing with here.’

  Marcus snorted involuntarily. On that at least, he was in full agreement. But as yet he had no idea where these people were coming from, why they had abducted him and what they expected of him, though he had a keen idea that none of it would be a world’s remove from his relationship to Nazreem and the cursed black figure she had dug up from the sands of Gaza.

  ‘What do you know about “la leyenda negra”?’ the big man said, leaning back against the washbasin with a smirk on his face, as if he had uttered some magic talisman.

  Marcus looked at him in utter mystification for a moment, then sat down on the bed while once again, to his own surprise, his brain involuntarily delved into its cavernous treasure trove to bring up a few nuggets. In fact, the ‘black legend’ was one of those issues he had squirreled away with a marker: another example of history turning schizophrenic, two sides to every story. He could imagine which side Jones had heard.

  ‘A propaganda exercise on behalf of English protestant monarchs from the time of the Spanish Armada onwards, trying to depict all Spaniards as cruel and Spain as a pawn of the devil.’

  Jones turned to the minister who now perched like an underfed bird of prey on the edge of the little armchair and said, ‘What did I tell you, reverend, the professor here’s a smart guy.’

  ‘I said it was a propaganda exercise. It fitted in with English foreign policy. Philip II had a claim on the English throne and Spain had a rich American empire. By demonising the Spanish the English legitimised the piracy of people like Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh.’

  The American frowned for a minute then broke into a chortle. ‘That’s good, professor, it really is. They always said the sign of a good academic was a man who could turn history on its head for the hell of it. But I think you know as well as I do that the black legend had more to it than that. That’s why you’re here.’

  Marcus played dumb.

  ‘Come on, professor, the sooner we level with each other here, the sooner we can be best friends. You see we know why you’re here.’

  Marcus said nothing, but he was not surprised. He was beginning to see Nazreem’s mysterious missing Mary as the source of all trouble. The Texan gave a sigh of mild exasperation as if Marcus was a sulky child: ‘You’re on your way to Guadalupe. That’s why you met up with the gentleman you were with last night. And you’re going there because of the so-called “black Madonna”.’

  Marcus shrugged. There was no point in denying the obvious. He needed to know what these men knew, and what they thought they stood to get out of him.

  ‘It’s not a coincidence you know, the black legend and the black Madonna.’

  The door opened again and this time Marcus recognised the drunk from the Torero Bravo, the one who had so loved the ‘Eenglish’, poured coffee all over him and insisted on buying him a brandy, the brandy he now realised had been spiked with Rohypnol.

  ‘Ah, caw-ffee,’ Jones boomed. ‘Thank you, Freddie.’

  Marcus looked sceptical at the name. ‘Alfredo,’ said the big Marine, ‘but he prefers to use a proper American name now, don’t you, Freddie?’ The man gave him a thin smile and said, ‘Si señor Jones,’ leaving Marcus less than convinced. Not that he cared what they called him. He couldn’
t imagine any chance he would get to pay the man back but if it came up he didn’t want to miss it. Alfredo, aka Freddie, set down the obviously heavy coffee pot, laid out small blue porcelain cups and looked at his large lord and master questioningly as to whether or not he should pour.

  ‘For you, professor?’ asked Jones.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Marcus firmly. ‘I’ve had experience with the sort of drinks he serves.’

  Jones shrugged, as if the sarcasm was wasted on him: ‘Suit yourself. A lot of people, particularly in the United States today, will say – with some justification, mind you – that the black legend actually refers to a genuine Hispanic sickness of the mind, that Hispanics have a genetic predisposition to this sort of pagan idolatry, just like the black man has towards jazz,’ he laughed.

  Marcus watched the Mexican pour coffee for the two Americans.

  ‘But I’m here to tell you it ain’t true,’ Jones went on. ‘There’s a grain of truth there, all right, just like there is in all those stereotypes, but these two boys have found that Jesus is about a lot more than bells and smells and black Barbie dolls, isn’t that right, Freddie?’

  ‘Si señor, I love Lord Jesus,’ said the re-christened Alfredo, flashing gleaming white teeth at Marcus who came close to flinging his coffee cup into them.

  But instead, on an impulse he reached for the cafetière and filled the third cup with coffee. If the other two had drunk from the same pot he had to assume there was nothing wrong with it. Maybe the caffeine would clear his head, which was still fuggy from the drug. In any case they seemed to want him awake and listening. But he still did his best to respond with a scowl to the smug smile Alfredo flashed him again before leaving the room.

  The Texan leaned towards him conspiratorially making Marcus instinctively draw back.