The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

Marcus wondered about that.

  ‘Okay,’ was all he said.

  ‘Okay? Then if you don’t mind I’d like you to swear it.’

  Marcus shrugged. To get out of there right now he’d have sworn his own mother was the Virgin Mary. But before he could say anything the little reverend had produced a black, leather-clad volume with a gold cross on its cover.

  ‘An oath ain’t an oath unless it’s sworn on the Good Book. Take it in your right hand.’

  Marcus looked at it as if it were a prop in a play but did as he was told.

  ‘Repeat after me: I, Marcus Frey, swear by the Holy Bible that I will keep Col Martin Jones aware of my whereabouts and reveal to him or the Reverend Henry Parker, here present, any information that may be of use in locating the statue discovered in Gaza and referred to as the black Madonna.’

  It was absurd, surreal, yet the man absolutely meant it. The only people Marcus had ever seen swearing on a Bible were witnesses in a jury trial, and even then he found it hard to believe the ritual had any force or meaning for those who automatically performed it. Even so, as he repeated the formula with the book in his hand, the residual intimidatory power of religious ritual still sent a shiver down his spine. The Texan seemed satisfied.

  ‘Okay, José, as they say in the movies. Let’s take a ride downtown.’

  The Mexicans appeared behind him and slipped a blindfold over his eyes held by elastic bands. Instinctively he brought his hands up to try to remove it, but found them held down by the Mexican in front of him, while a second blindfold, this time tied behind his head was placed over the first.

  ‘Easy on, easy on, guy,’ the Texan was saying. ‘There’s no issue here. It’s just a precaution … until we get to know you better.’ Marcus went silent. It wasn’t an acquaintance that on the evidence so far he was keen to build on. ‘That’s British Airways Club Class shuteye you’ve got under there. Nice and comfy. The other one’s just to keep it in place. Not too tight, Freddie.’

  Minutes later, after a descent in a lift and a brief few steps in the open air – what sort of area was it, Marcus wondered to himself, where nobody noticed blindfolded men being led out? – he was eased into a cloth-upholstered back seat of a car that smelled of cheap pine air freshener. Marcus could imagine one of those horrid dangly things shaped like cardboard cut-out Christmas trees suspended from the rear-view mirror. He felt a heavy hand laid on his shoulder:

  ‘Okay, fella, good luck now. Remember what I said. It’s up to you what you do. But if you need any help, we won’t be far.’

  Marcus contented himself with another nod. It wasn’t exactly the most reassuring thing he had ever heard. On the other hand, he had to admit that they hadn’t hurt him badly; he had been scared, but it had not been the nightmare he had feared he was awakening to when the drug wore off. There were madmen and madmen. Maybe even not everything they had said was as mad as it sounded, was it? Maybe he would find out.

  It seemed like an hour, but it was probably not more than twenty minutes later at most when the Mexican in the back seat next to him – ‘Freddie’ – untied the cloth blindfold and told him he could take off the other one. He pulled the satin up over his eyes – noting in passing the little BA logo that showed the Texan had been telling the truth about one thing anyhow – and let the already warm late morning sunlight wash over his field of vision.

  They were on a main road, an inner-city dual carriageway, with heavy traffic all around. There was a pedestrian avenue lined with green trees in between the car-clogged roads. From what little he knew of Madrid’s geography, Marcus guessed they were on the Paseo de la Castellana, the city’s main north-south drag. Up ahead he could see an array of wedding cake buildings, one festooned with spiky antennae, which, as they drew closer, he realised formed four corners around a great central roundabout, in the centre of which was a statuary grouping spraying sparkling jets of water into the air.

  ‘Cibeles,’ said the driver, José, pronouncing it ‘See-bellies’ with the soft South American consonant that Marcus had noticed in the bar the night before. They came onto the roundabout and the car pulled in to the side of the road in front of the most fantastically turreted of the buildings around it. Alfredo opened the door and motioned for him to get out. Marcus stared up at the extraordinary building that towered above them. ‘Palacio de Communicaciones,’ said José who had obviously adopted the role of tour guide. The fountain is in the middle of the roundabout.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Marcus, flatly, getting out.

  ‘Adiós, amigo,’ said José.

  ‘Adiós yourself,’ said Marcus. ‘And don’t go drinking with your friend. He has bad taste in cocktails.’

  José bared his white teeth and the car – a nondescript Seat clone of some Volkswagen model, the sort that could be seen in their hundreds in any Spanish traffic jam – growled off into the swarm circling the roundabout. Marcus thought for a moment he spotted a Barcelona number plate, but he couldn’t be sure, any more than he could be sure about the two Madrid-licensed black Mercedes that seemed to sandwich it as it left the roundabout.

  Marcus stared up at the ‘communications palace’. It was a fantasy of Mediterranean neo-Gothic, a cross between a vampire’s palace and a white marble wedding cake. The equally extraordinary pile that was the Prado museum was not far away. But it was the fountain in the midst of a vast ornate marble sculpture ensemble in the middle of the busy traffic roundabout that was the spot chosen for their meeting. An easy landmark to find, perhaps, as old Julio had suggested. Did it really have any more sinister symbolism? Marcus dismissed the thought as he was inclined to dismiss almost everything the Texan has said. Except for the threat.

  His watch showed eleven-forty a.m. He waited for the lights to change to red and crossed to the centre of the roundabout. There was no sign of Nazreem yet, or of the man from the monastery, or, as far as he could tell, of religious fundamentalists, Christian or Islamic, lurking with him in their crosshairs, although of that he was by no means certain. Above him, however, loomed the statue he had been told to pay close attention to.

  It was certainly hard to ignore and a significant enough piece of monumental sculpture to be a more than legitimate focus of a tourist’s attention. He thought he remembered vaguely that it was the place from where all distances in Spain were measured, like Charing Cross, in London, or the imbedded cross on the Place du Parvis outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

  Certainly it was an impressive affair: a well-built woman of noble bearing seated in a chariot, pulled by two huge stone lions that reminded him of Landseer’s cast-iron beasts in London’s Trafalgar Square, except that these were on the prowl. Behind the chariot two plump cherubic children played in its wake. The seated figure herself exuded an air of sedate majesty. Marcus wondered if it was meant to represent some historical figure and decided it was almost certainly mythical or allegorical.

  He pulled out his phone and rang Nazreem’s number. It rang twice before she answered, with a whoop so enthusiastic that it seemed he was hearing it in stereo. And then he realised he was. She was only a dozen metres or so away, on the other side of the traffic on the edge of the green sward of the Paseo del Prado. He put his phone back in his pocket and waved to her, with both arms, a good old-fashioned South African rugby supporter’s wave. And then the traffic stopped for a red light and she was in his arms, all of a sudden, unexpectedly. And for a moment the whole world of religious fanatics, ancient statues and conspiracy theories seemed surreal and fantastical.

  After a few seconds she pulled back and looked up at him in amazement as if scarcely believing he was still in one piece, unharmed and unmarked. A flood of questions spilled forth. ‘What happened? Are you all right? Why didn’t you …?

  He could not tell if she was going to kiss him or hit him. Marcus put his finger to his lips.

  ‘I was drugged. Kidnapped.’

  ‘Wha …!?’

  ‘I know, I know. You won’t believe me. Nutters, but American nutt
ers,’ her jaw dropped open.

  ‘But it’s okay. Look they haven’t hurt me.’

  ‘Yes but …’

  ‘l’ll tell you everything later. But our man is going to get here any moment, and I need your help on something.’

  She stood back and stared at him uncertainly: ‘You do?’

  He nodded. ‘This fountain,’ he said, gesturing with an arm to indicate the great structure that dominated the square. ‘What do you know about it? And more specifically what do you know about the lady in the chariot? I had assumed it was supposed to be some sort of female personification of Spain, but now I’m not sure.’

  Nazreem was staring at him as if he had lost control of his senses. ‘Why? What does it matter?’

  ‘The guide book, the green Michelin, the one we picked up at the airport. You have it? Quick.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  She fumbled in her bag, and produced it. Marcus snatched it off her impatiently and flicked through to the section on Madrid and the reference to the fountain, paraphrasing rapidly aloud as he went: ‘… dates from late eighteenth century… time of classical revival … the playing children a romantic affectation added later… Here we go: … seated sculpture of goddess of fertility and of the earth, known to the ancient Romans as Ceres, derivation of modern English “cereal”, yes, yes, yes … also to ancient Greeks as Demeter, but in this incarnation taking the form of the Phrygian goddess Cibele and known popularly to Madrileños as Cibeles.’

  He tried pronouncing it both ways, ‘See-bellies,’ like the Mexican had said, or ‘Thibelehs’, as the locals did. Either way it meant nothing to him, except that the rednecks had been right about the old man choosing a pagan goddess as a rendezvous point. And where the hell was Phrygia anyhow, he wondered aloud.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Nazreem suddenly. ‘Let me see that.’ She grabbed the book from his hand, read the name again, and looked up at the great seated statue with a new recognition.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That hat is wrong, but it is her okay. You were right, Marcus, it is all a matter of pronunciation. The problem is the Latin alphabet, the letter ‘c’. To the ancient Greeks there was no such thing. It led to less confusion.’

  ‘What?’

  Nazreem was standing stock still staring up at the great piece of neoclassical statuary:

  ‘Not “c”, kappa – “k”. Her real name is Kybele. I have been looking everywhere for her.’

  He turned to her, dumbstruck: ‘You have?’

  44

  If there was one thing that made Sebastian Delahaye uncomfortable, it was long-range operations. Not that he was an ‘in your face’ operator either: an up-front rough-and-tumble merchant. His strongest belief was that the secret world should stay, if not secret, then at least inconspicuous. He believed passionately that despite the concerns of the civil libertarians, technology was a weapon that improved security.

  That was why he failed totally to understand why countries such as Spain and Germany lagged so far behind the United Kingdom in the implementation of closed circuit cameras in the public domain. He had had the discussion late at night in a Chelsea wine bar with a colleague from the BfV – Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the direct equivalent of Britain’s domestic security service. A country that has known totalitarianism, the man had insisted, guarded even the littlest of its liberties all the more fiercely. Delahaye had refused to accept that a system such as Argus – although even to a German on the same level of security clearance he did not give it its name – infringed on the freedom of UK citizens.

  ‘Ah,’ the German had simply said, ‘but in the wrong hands, it might.’

  Delahaye had insisted that could never happen. The German had simply smiled and said, ‘I hope you know your politicians!’

  Delahaye knew that if he had the same conversation with a Spaniard it would probably have gone along the same lines. Even so, it was more than thirty years since the death of Franco and with the threat of Basque terrorism and the Madrid bombings he found it amazing that the Spanish security services had not increased their surveillance capabilities.

  It was inconvenient, to say the least. He was fishing long and with a fine line. The London surveillance of Al Barani had been stepped up, with results. The past forty-eight hours had seen a remarkable alteration in his schedule. He had hardly moved. At first it was suspected he had become aware of the level of observation, then that he was ill. He had a steady stream of visitors, all of them logged and checked against the databases. Mobile phone traffic was limited, emails almost non-existent. The operation did not yet merit full-scale bugging, but it could if it escalated the way Delahaye was beginning to anticipate. The word ‘Saladin’ had been picked up more than once by long-range directional mikes. It was possible they were having a history lesson, but it was more likely that they were referring to the renegade Iraqi who had been on the fringes of the West’s security radar for some time.

  Madrid meanwhile concerned Delahaye more. He had a trace on Frey’s mobile phone – enough at least to let him know within forty-five minutes that he had used it, what number he had called and roughly where from. But it was difficult keeping any closer tabs on him without calling in either Spanish internal security or going cap in hand to the James Bonds in the ‘jolly green giant’ across the river.

  The building officially known as Vauxhall Cross was home to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, as opposed to Delahaye’s MI5 in the outdated parlance that still lingered from the Second World War. SIS, responsible for intelligence gathering abroad rather than on the domestic front, mostly referred to themselves as simply ‘Box’, a long antiquated reference to the anonymous ‘Post Office Box 1300’ to which their ordinary mail (when they got any) was even now addressed.

  They were the James Bonds, at least in the popular imagination, the glamour boys and girls, the ‘proper spies’. The fact that they were not the people at the cutting edge of protecting the British public from the increasing menace on their doorstep and in their midst had in the past been too often glossed over. The balance was changing but even so the ‘other side’ remained jealous of their territory and competition, although never as fierce as in the myths, was nonetheless real.

  Which was why he had half anticipated the glowing button on his phonepad which indicated a secure internal connection to Vauxhall Cross and the silky smooth voice of Hilary Macken: ‘Sebastian, good afternoon. How do I find you?’ And then without further ado: ‘It’s about Madrid.’

  Delahaye had already decided he was going to play this one straight. He didn’t want ‘Box’ screwing him over, but he knew this conversation – however it might turn out – was unavoidable.

  ‘I think we have what you might call a bit of an awkward situation here, Sebastian, old man.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you? Good. That will make things so much easier all round.’

  ‘It will?’

  ‘Yes. You see it would appear we have something of an overlap.’

  This was it: the reprimand, the strict instruction to hand over whatever he was dealing with and to keep his fingers out of foreign pies. Well, he would go down fighting.

  ‘I can understand you want to take over, but I must insist this is a case of primarily domestic relevance. We are concerned with tracking an individual who we believe could be a threat to civil order in this country.’

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  ‘Sebastian, I quite agree. This is your pigeon, if you like, but you may not be ungrateful for our involvement. I’m talking about a real overlap – on the ground – and I’m about to provide a second string to your bow.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Or fellow spooks sharing their secrets.

  ‘I mean we’re already there, Seb. On the ground. And running.’

  ‘How? Why?’

  ‘Let’s just say we’ve been going to Sunday School too.’

 
45

  Marcus looked up at the statue and then back at Nazreem and put his hands on her shoulders. She had recognised something in the statue that escaped him, something that the Americans had wanted him to see? It was then that he noticed the man in black advancing towards them.

  ‘Buenos días,’ the elderly bullfighting fan said, nodding his grey head with a pleasant smile. ‘I see you are enjoying the beautiful heart of Madrid.’ Nazreem and Marcus pulled apart with more than a hint of embarrassment. His appearance had been ill-timed in every way.

  ‘Please, do not mind me,’ the old man said. ‘It is just such a shame about the traffic. But there you have it, the modern world. There is no escape. At least not here. Guadalupe, you will find, is much quieter.’

  ‘We were just admiring the fountain,’ Marcus said, half-provocatively. ‘A fine statue.’

  ‘Yes,’ was the non-committal reply although he could not help noticing that the old man was watching both of their faces with his head cocked on one side, like an inquisitive bird.

  ‘Cibeles,’ said Nazreem lisping in best madrileño fashion, and then: ‘Kybele, the great mother goddess of the Phrygians.’

  The old man narrowed his eyes appreciatively. ‘You are a learned woman, particularly for a Muslim woman.’

  ‘I am a historian,’ she said simply. ‘Historians are people who use science more than religion. I know something of the old pagan cults.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘There are those today who believe science should serve religion, particularly in the part of the world you come from.’

  ‘Not all imams are fanatics,’ she replied tartly. Marcus wondered if the man was deliberately trying to goad her.

  ‘Oh, no, I am quite sure they are not,’ was what he actually said. ‘In fact, I was thinking of Christians. I am sure you know that the Catholic Church was once accused of refuting science – and justly so. I think it took us some six centuries before we apologised to Galileo. And that was probably a bit late for him.’