The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘You must excuse me,’ their elderly driver was saying. ‘I sometimes do not pay attention enough.’

  Marcus shook his head, climbing back into the car. ‘No, it wasn’t your fault.’ He looked significantly at Nazreem. ‘If I didn’t know better I would say that was a deliberate attempt to run us off the road.’

  But the old man dismissed it: ‘There is a quarry up ahead. In the hills. It was an accident. Nearly.’

  ‘Nearly is right,’ said Marcus, unconvinced. Yet if anyone had really wanted to get rid of them, surely it wouldn’t have been ‘nearly’. He could imagine few things easier or more convincing than arranging an ‘accident’ with an elderly driver on a dangerous mountain road. On the other hand, ‘nearly’ was scary enough. And that might have been the intention.

  ‘Are you okay to drive?’ Nazreem was asking.

  ‘Yes, yes, it is fine now,’ he said, turning the key in the ignition. The engine made a grating noise for a second or two, but then sprang to life. The wheels spun up their own small dust cloud of grit before gaining purchase on the tarmac, and then they were off again, although they had twice to slow down while the old man adjusted the damaged wing mirror.

  ‘Another miracle?’ said Marcus.

  47

  The atmosphere in the little apartment high above the rooftops of Madrid’s Almenara district all but crackled with adrenalin and repressed violence, the pheromones of fear mingling with the testosterone that automatic weapons induced.

  While the Reverend Parker’s wet trouser leg betrayed more of his inner emotion than the words of the 23rd Psalm, ‘Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death I shall fear no ill,’ that his lips were silently forming, the former Marine Corps athlete held in a humiliating headlock next to him let his eyes exude an all but contemptuous hatred. The attitude of a man who at any moment expected the tables to be turned.

  In front of him, the tall Muslim in the dark robes and white turban stood and examined his captives the way a slaughterman might size up a consignment of two-year-old bullocks. He seemed puzzled by the Texan’s anger, a man more obviously used to silent submission. The silence of the lambs of God.

  ‘Ah, it may be that you are waiting on your Hispanic friends. Los Mexicanos, eh?’ he said, pronouncing it effortlessly, ‘mehicanos’, with an expression that ill disguised a sneer.

  The little minister let his eyes stray to the Texan’s face and saw the sickening realisation the Islamist’s words had evoked etched across the big man’s broad features.

  ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ the man in the turban said, a thin smile for the first time flitting across his sombre complexion. And then he barked something fast, in a guttural language that the Americans took to be Arabic. The Texan could feel for a second the blade at his throat disappear and almost thought of making a move except that the hold on his head simultaneously tightened.

  Then the knife was back, and with a wet flop something soft and slimy landed on the floor in front of them. Instinctively he closed his eyes. The Reverend Parker, whose glasses were misting up and had been twisted out of their usual position, thought at first they had thrown some piece of shellfish in a plastic bag onto the carpet. It was only when he heard the outburst of fury from the Texan that he dared attempt a closer look. Only the iron grip around his head stopped him from throwing up as he recognised the object as a bloody human ear.

  ‘I am most terribly sorry. It was necessary. He was very courageous, very protective of your privacy. We had been following the girl, you see. You stole a march on us taking the man. To each his own, I suppose,’ he said with an almost nonchalant shrug. ‘No matter, we have met up at last.’

  He gestured to one of the two automatic-armed men who produced a mobile phone from his pocket, called a number and said something in what sounded like Arabic into it. A few minutes later the door to the apartment opened and two more black-clad figures entered, pushing in front of them, wrists tied behind their backs, the cowed and frightened figures of Alfredo and José, ‘Freddie and Joseph’, the former clutching a blood-soaked white cloth to the side of his head and snivelling uncontrollably. At a gesture from the mullah they were hustled into the bedroom. The Reverend Parker tried hard to control his sphincter as he heard the pitiful sobs coming from the former macho Mexican tough guy.

  ‘What do you want with us?’ the Texan snarled, his Adam’s apple bobbing dangerously next to the sharp blade at his throat, seemingly oblivious to the irony that only a few hours before he had faced an angry and unwilling captive of his own.

  The mullah stroked his beard for a second.

  ‘I am an Arab, you are Americans. In the modern world, therefore, we are enemies.’

  The Texan rewarded him with a low growl that confirmed the obvious truth of the statement.

  ‘However,’ the Arab said, ‘as men of religion, we both know that the world is a fleeting thing. And sometimes there can be a communion of interests.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The Arab closed his eyes a second as if dealing with a child.

  ‘I think you do.’

  He waited a moment, expecting the Texan to concede, but the man just glared at him. Eventually he said, ‘I believe that you have no more love for idolatry than we do.’

  Slowly the Texan blinked his eyes in place of the nod he could not risk without serious damage to his windpipe and then rolled them sideways to see the Reverend Parker was doing the same only more rapidly. For the first time it had begun to dawn on the self-important man of God that these preachers of an alien religion were not going to slit their throats for the crime of being ‘infidels’. In fact, with a bit of luck they might not be going to slit their throats at all. Even if it was too soon to absolutely bank on that.

  As if to prove him right, the mullah made a brief gesture and the two gunmen body-searched both of them, removing a small Derringer pistol from the reverend’s socks, and then the razor-sharp knives were taken from their throats. The mullah gestured for them to rise, like the Mosque faithful after Friday evening prayers. The two men got up gratefully from their knees, each involuntarily rubbing the spot where the blade had been, as if to reassure themselves that their heads were still attached to their shoulders. The mullah barked something in Arabic and the masked men pushed forward two chairs, each positioning himself behind one. Irrespective of whose name was on the lease, for the moment the apartment clearly belonged to them, and the dark-robed figure in front of them.

  ‘This is about the statue,’ the Texan said, positioning himself on the edge of the seat. ‘You want it too.’

  ‘Want it?’ The mullah raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Of course,’ the Texan almost managed a smile. ‘You want it the same way we do … only more … you want it destroyed. What’s the matter? Worried about a little extra competition on the mumbo-jumbo front.’

  In an instant the blades were back at both their throats and a quickly muted whimpering suggested that the Reverend Parker was in danger of finally losing control of the rest of his bodily functions. The mullah’s eyes flashed dark lightning, but again he gestured to his acolytes and the knives were removed.

  ‘This is the famous American sense of humour. I warn you, in our world, religion is not a laughing matter.’

  ‘Point taken, point taken,’ the Texan said quickly. ‘I meant no offence. You’re right, of course. A dislike for graven images is one area on which our faiths agree. But why …?’

  ‘Why do we care about this image?’ The mullah stroked his beard again and closed his eyes for a second. ‘Let us just say that we also do not wish to see Gaza City, the first semi-independent Palestinian area for more than half a century, become dominated by a Christian shrine …’ He let the words hang in the air.

  The Texan nodded slowly as if weighing up the argument, then said: ‘I suppose I can see the logic of that. But what’s the problem? The thing’s gone missing.’

  ‘The problem, as you know as well as we do, i
s how or where it might resurface. If we both share a common interest in its destruction, then we might increase our chance of succeeding in that ambition. I do not know what, if any, influence you may have had on the teacher. I suspect very little, but there is also the possibility that, as Americans, you have technological means of which we do not dispose.’

  The Texan smiled broadly, taking this as due acknowledgement of the innate superiority of American civilisation, without even noticing the disparaging tone in which it was said.

  ‘While we,’ the mullah, ‘have something that you do not.’

  ‘And that might be?’

  ‘Certain information.’

  ‘What sort of certain information?’ The Texan was trying to reestablish some sort of equilibrium here. If he was forced to collaborate with these Muslim fuckers, and ‘collaborate’ was the only word he could think of, particularly given what they’d done to one of the wetbacks’ hearing equipment, he was not going to be continuously bullied.

  ‘We know precisely who stole the statue. And why.’

  48

  Nazreem felt a crawling feeling on her skin and a nausea in the pit of her stomach which, put together, she imagined to be the physical manifestations of a sickness of the soul.

  The contradictions buried within her unconscious were clawing their way to the surface, and she did not like it one bit. All her life she had been taught to regard ‘graven images’ as heathen conceits, toys of the infidel. Yet here she was approaching her first glimpse of the Virgin of Guadalupe with an almost religious feeling. Yet it made her want to throw up.

  It was not as if she had undergone some cathartic conversion to Christianity in its Roman Catholic incarnation. Quite the opposite. It was as if the object of veneration, which for six centuries had been contained within this fortress-like sanctuary, and the small dark figure she had unearthed from the sands of Gaza were coalescing, leading her to an older, greater truth.

  It was just that so far she still failed to see it as anything more than murky shadows, half-truths and shaky theories. And it was that which gave her goose pimples down her spine. Or the feeling of someone walking on her grave. The uncomfortable sensation that she was coming closer to something she had half-known all her life.

  She had not been prepared for the scale of the place, or its physical appearance. She had expected to wind up through the sleepy streets of the little town they had driven into as the sun was beginning to cast long shadows, to find an ancient crumbling church surrounded by the low level dwellings of holy hermits, a neglected provincial relic of a religion in slow decline. Instead she had been confronted by a fortress.

  Two giant square towers of stone, metres thick and bedecked with battlements, squeezed between them a religious façade reached only by ascending a steep flight of steps, dominated the tiny town square like an ogre sentinel at the entrance to a cave. All around, the monastery itself was concealed behind fortifications that could have seen off an army, as they had once been intended to.

  ‘Begun by King Alfonso XI after the battle of Salado in 1340, the crucial conflict of arms which effectively marked the end of the Caliphate in Spain,’ the old priest had informed them as the little car crept out of the afternoon sunshine into the sudden chill of the shadow cast by the immense edifice next to them. ‘This fortress monastery was to house the wonder-working effigy that had inspired the Christians to victory.’

  The little car pulled up outside a fine old white-walled building which ran parallel to the monastic battlements up a narrow cobbled street, and looked almost as ancient as the fortress itself. ‘This is where you shall stay. It has already been booked.’

  Marcus nodded his approval. The building looked as ancient as the monastery.

  ‘It also dates from the fifteenth century. It is now a parador, a hotel run by the state, but it was once the hospital run by the knights of St John the Baptist,’ said the priest. ‘Many people came here, looking for a miracle. Many very rich people,’ he added after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Today, however, it is not so expensive. You will be well looked after.’

  ‘But,’ Nazreem had begun immediately, her disappointment all too evident, ‘I thought we were going to see the abbot. And the Madonna.’

  ‘Tomorrow. The abbot too is no longer a young man. He will be pleased to see you in the morning. For now, please, enjoy your meal, a glass of wine. Relax. This is an old place. Neither it nor anything it contains will disappear overnight.’

  Famous last words, thought Nazreem, but she smiled politely as he ushered them towards the hotel and climbed back into his little car. The events of the past weeks had taught her that things had a habit of disappearing just when you relied on them most.

  They ate a delicious meal of roast kid with figs, beside a tinkling fountain in a courtyard that smelled of lemon leaves, and could have been a scene from the Arabian Nights rather than in the sacred heart of one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic countries.

  Afterwards they drank hot sweet coffee on a balcony and listened to the cicadas in the pine trees. Never, thought Nazreem, had she imagined that there were such places where the Christian and Islamic worlds overlapped as totally as here on this ancient fault line between them.

  The next morning they breakfasted in the same elegant little courtyard and went to the front gate of the monastery where, on announcing themselves, they were ushered through a small courtyard into a great cloister.

  The old man was not there to meet them. Instead a young monk, no more than thirty years old she guessed, had emerged from behind a great wooden door that separated the monastic environment proper from that part open to visitors.

  It was the courtyard in which they now found themselves that astonished her most. Along one wall of the cool shady cloister loomed great paintings of scenes from Christianity’s story: big dark works in oil by Renaissance masters.

  Yet in the middle of this darkness all was light; hot bright sunshine on a formal garden of green plants arranged in geometric patterns around a tiny temple that was in itself a miniature masterpiece of almost totally Islamic architecture: a square, open-sided little building on a floor of marble mosaic around a circular pool. On each side opened a Gothic arch, each of which contained two smaller ones of Moorish style supported by columns of red, white or grey marble. Above it rose an ornately carved roof in the form of a triple-tiered octagonal crown.

  Nazreem gasped at the sight of it: ‘It’s … beautiful. It could be in … Baghdad … or Damascus … or …’ For a moment, just a moment, she had a glimpse of the mad dream of fanatics like Osama bin Laden, Islamic imperialists who dreamed of recapturing a lost world. And yet, this was not a monument from the days of the Caliphate, but created afterwards, before the Christian persecution set in; it was a relic of a period of fusion and tolerance. Maybe that was what made it so beautiful. And so rare.

  The young monk gestured towards a doorway. ‘Please,’ he said, in heavily accented English, ‘the abbot is waiting.’

  They followed him out of the cloister with its stark contrasts between light and shade into a dark, curving corridor. Then he crossed himself and opened a door into a room that gleamed with gold and silver. They entered silently. The room was in the shape of a Greek cross with sunlight filtering in through the high dome at its centre on to an enormous pendulum chandelier that hung perilously from its apex. Every inch of every wall was covered either with gold leaf or frescos of the saints whose haloed statues stood in recessed niches. But the eye was immediately drawn to one.

  Set above the altar was the smallest of all, yet the most radiantly attired, a tiny figure on a gold throne, with a halo like the rays of the sun, no bigger than a child’s doll. Nazreem approached it with a mix of awe, scholarly interest and trepidation. Would it match the image she still held so vividly in her head?

  But the closer she came, the greater her disappointment. The figure itself was almost impossible to make out, swamped, even more than in the case of Altötting, by the extravag
ance of its vestments: a great robe of crimson richly embroidered in gold, dotted with stars and crowned with a huge golden diadem that dwarfed the tiny, dark brown face that peered out from beneath it. That, a hand in which a gold sceptre had been placed, and an even tinier impression of a face poking from a hole in the robe and presumably supposed to be that of the baby Jesus, were all that could be seen of the figure itself. The form had been stylised, the ritual vestments concealing every element of the underlying sculpture except for the dark, almost primitive features.

  A familiar voice behind them said, ‘I hope you do not find her a disappointment.’

  They turned and standing in the doorway where the young monk had been, arrayed in white abbatial robes, was their ageing bullfight fan.

  ‘It is time I introduced myself properly,’ he said. ‘Don Julio Federico García, abbot of Guadalupe.’

  49

  ‘Please forgive me, for the little deception. It was, perhaps, unnecessary, but you will understand you came to me under disconcerting circumstances.’

  ‘You mean the disappearance of Sister Galina?’

  The elderly abbot nodded.

  ‘Yes, I can understand that,’ said Nazreem. Marcus said nothing, trying to evaluate the man now standing in front of them clad not in the grand purple or crimson of the upper echelons of Catholic Church hierarchy, but in sacking robes designed to resemble those of mediaeval paupers. Except that these had been subtly garnished and rendered in the finest of cloths for an ecclesiastical aristocracy. The Texan had told him to test the man’s trustworthiness. Was this what he meant? Or was this still part of the act?