The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘So if the pagan gods somehow survived. In Christian clothing. What does it mean?’

  ‘It means it’s time for us to get the hell out of here!’

  56

  Hendaye was for half the twentieth century one of the final frontier towns in western Europe. It may no longer have the frisson of risk and romance that adhered to its backstreet bars and waterfront cafés when it was the gathering point for the idealist communist ‘red brigade’ volunteers about to risk their lives in the fight against Franco in the dark days of the late 1930s, or even in the seventies and eighties when it was a heavily policed haven for militant Basque separatists and arms smugglers.

  But in a Europe of fallen frontiers and banished borders, the Bidassoa river still marks a tangible boundary. The minute the train rattled over the iron bridge from the lively little Spanish Basque town of Irún and rolled through the sleepy suburbs of Hendaye, Marcus and Nazreem were aware they were in France: it was only just gone ten p.m. but most of the lights were out as if everyone had already gone to bed.

  ‘It’s eerie,’ said Nazreem as they stepped out onto the platform to change trains. There were few other passengers waiting for the overnight service to Paris, a couple locked in each other’s arms in a corner of a waiting room, a few weary looking backpackers whom Marcus had picked out as British students, and a podgy little man in a beret basque engrossed in his newspaper.

  ‘So obviously another country, and yet no barbed wire, no fences, not even passport controls. Nothing. I almost would prefer if they still had frontier posts and border policemen.’

  ‘Would you? Really?’

  To Marcus’s surprise she actually seemed to consider the question for a moment before an almost wistful smile broke slowly across her face: ‘No, of course not,’ she said quietly. ‘It would be nice if someone looked at my French passport and said “welcome home”, but that’s never what frontier officials do. People talk about security but for those of us who have lived most of our lives behind closed borders, staring at men with guns, there is nothing to surpass the taste of freedom. It … just takes a while to get used to it.’

  ‘Let’s just hope it lasts. There are enough people ready to take it away.’

  Nazreem nodded silently. She knew what he meant.

  They took their seats in the compartment. At the same time the train began to pick up speed, the dark houses of the Hendaye suburbs flashing by and quickly giving way to pine forests on one side and tufted sand dunes on the other as the train rushed along the Atlantic coast towards Biarritz and Bayonne before it would twist inland to rush through the depths of rural France via Dax and Orléans to the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris.

  They were due to arrive just before eight-thirty in the morning. The train was quiet. Marcus had deliberately avoided the smart Madrid-Paris Elipsos ‘Trenhotel’ service. The NZ4052, which started in Hendaye, was one of the few long distance European routes not always operated by a high-speed line. Reservations were required, but could normally be picked up at the station. In any case there were only two of them in the four-berth compartment, although that could not be guaranteed.

  Nazreem settled down on the hard leather-cloth seat near the window and stared out into the darkness. Marcus stood in the corridor for a moment then came into the compartment, noticing the quaint photographs of rural French scenes designed to tempt tourists with a future stop-off: the still elegant nineteenth-century splendour of Biarritz’s promenade, the golden stone mediaeval clock in Bordeaux, the already dated-looking Futuroscope theme park in Poitiers. A conductor stuck his head in and said he assumed they didn’t need help with the couchettes as there were only the two of them booked into the compartment and the upper berths were already made.

  ‘Ça va, ça va,’ said Marcus, struggling, and then wondered why he bothered, given that French was Nazreem’s second language. But she was paying no attention, still gazing out into the fleeting night as the train hurtled with remarkable quiet stillness deeper into the dark. He realised all of a sudden that this was possibly the first time she had ever been in the country whose citizenship she held and where her mother had grown up. And he wondered what, if anything, that meant to her.

  He reached out and was just about to put his hand on her shoulder when his mobile rang. He pulled it irritably from his trouser pocket and flipped it open. The number was withheld and it occurred to him for a moment that it would have been a better idea to reject the call. A feeling that was reinforced when he put it to his ear and heard the voice that spread a chill across him like a daytime recurrence of a bad dream:

  ‘Hey, professor, how’re ya doin’? Just thought we’d see how you were getting along, if maybe you need a hand, or two.’ Marcus couldn’t fail to recognise the voice. The Texan’s tones were unmistakable.

  Nazreem had turned her head towards him in curiosity, her attention at last drawn away from the nothingness outside the window, but Marcus only shook his back at her reassuringly, although the sentiment was anything but that which he was feeling.

  ‘Hi there,’ he said back, with a mock conviviality that was intended to reassure Nazreem as much as to give an impression of cordial cooperation to the man on the other end of the phone, whom he supposed and seriously hoped to be still in the suburbs of Madrid.

  ‘Just checking, you see, that you were still in Guadalupe,’ the Texan drawled, ‘cos we were thinking of driving up there from the big city, to see how you were getting on, what the little lady’s verdict had been, you might say, on the black Barbie.’ There was a familiar unpleasant suppressed chuckle on the line but Marcus breathed a sigh of relief that the Americans had so far at least taken him at his word. What disquieted him most, however, though he had scarcely dared admit it even to himself, was how much their descriptions of the abbot’s state of mind had coincided with the attitude they had found the man himself expressing. But that was no longer the point: he was more concerned about Nazreem, about what she was keeping from him, about the real reason for her fascination with the Madonna. He was beginning to suspect that she knew far more than she had revealed about what had really happened to the missing figure.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘sure thing. We’re still here.’ Nazreem shot him another glance and again he waved her away. He wasn’t sure what he wanted her to believe or why he was maybe dissimulating, but then he still wasn’t sure how to handle any of this. There was something about her, about the way she had been acting that wasn’t the Nazreem he remembered, something that wasn’t born out of just her quest to find out the truth about the black Madonna.

  ‘It seems you were right,’ he said after a pause, not because he meant it, or because he even knew what it meant, but because under the circumstances it seemed a neutral thing to say. It was seldom a phrase people didn’t like hearing.

  ‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said the voice on the other end. ‘So it’s time to discuss where we go from here. I take it you’d be happy to see us then?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Marcus. ‘Sure thing.’ It was the only thing he could say. He sincerely hoped that by the time the Texan and his friends got to Guadalupe and discovered they had done a flit, they would be hundreds of miles away. They were already across one, albeit non-existent border, by then they might be back in Britain, across another, one that for better or worse was still defended with a degree of xenophobia.

  ‘That would be good, whenever you like,’ he added, still standing up and watching Nazreem who had once more turned her eyes to the blackness outside, a blackness in which he could glimpse only an endless flicker of rushing vertical narrow tree trunks, barely visible beyond the reflection caused by the low wattage yellow light bulbs in the compartment ceiling, a reflection in which he saw himself in silhouette, his own tall unkempt shape with his arm bent at an awkward angle to hold the mobile phone to his ear. And another dark figure behind him.

  The corridor door opened. He spun around. And found himself gazing into the muzzle of a handgun pointed at his head. And the s
miling bulldog face of ex-US Marine Colonel Martin Jones.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ the Texan drawl said. ‘You’ll be real glad we’re right here then.’

  57

  Marcus backed into the compartment at gunpoint, his hands, still with his mobile phone in his right, held high. Behind him Nazreem, a scream stifled in her lungs had leapt to her feet and reached for the red emergency stop lever above the window.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, honey,’ said the man with the gun. ‘Not just yet. Unless you want your boyfriend here’s brains splattered all over the nice clean bedlinen on those little bunk beds up there.’

  Instinctively she glanced up at the couchettes and then, feeling at the same time ridiculous and despairing, brought her hand down by her side.

  ‘There’s a good girl,’ said the man in what she recognised only loosely as an accent from somewhere in the southern United States. Texan, it had to be. This was the man Marcus had told her about. The ones who had drugged him and let him go. The Christian fundamentalists. ‘As mad as the mullahs,’ he had called them, ‘the Texan Taliban.’ Behind the big man now a second appeared, younger, thinner, darker complexioned, one of the Mexican thugs she supposed. He stood in the doorway, eyes darting up and down the corridor and then at her, looking her up and down in a way that for the first time in her life made her almost understand those of her co-religionists who chose to conceal their entire bodies beneath a burkha.

  ‘It’s a misunderstanding,’ said Marcus. ‘I was going to call you, but we left in a hurry. We need to talk about this.’

  ‘Sure thing, professor,’ said the colonel, though he had signally failed to lower his gun. ‘After all, that’s what we’re here for. Sit down, why don’t you. You too, miss. And then maybe the professor here can explain why he lied, why he broke his word to us, and not just his word, but an oath sworn on the Holy Bible. Not exactly the mark of a good Christian now, is it?’

  ‘I can explain.’

  The Texan looked at him sceptically. ‘Actually, it doesn’t really matter. Turns out, as it happens, the goalposts have moved. We need to talk to both of you, both you and the little Muslim lady here, and right here and now seems as good a time as any.’

  Right here and now, thought Marcus, would be an ideal time for the conductor to come by and ask for their tickets. But he had a feeling that somehow that wasn’t going to happen.

  ‘I don’t understand. How did you …?’

  ‘This train originates in Madrid. Maybe you hadn’t noticed that? Bit of a coincidence though, you and us happening to be on it at the same time.’

  ‘How did you … You’ve been following us …?’

  ‘Never you mind, professor. What say we just put it down to divine providence, say we all had the same idea at the same time, to head up north and see the lights of “gay Paree”. That’s what they say, isn’t it? See Paris and die? Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

  ‘The fact is, professor, since last time we met things have changed, and it hasn’t helped you not being completely honest with us about your whereabouts. You see, we now have reason to believe you – or rather your lady friend here – is going to be able to lead us to this pagan abomination. And as you know we wouldn’t like it to fall into the wrong hands, which might just be any hands but ours.’

  ‘What on earth makes you so self-righteous?’ Once again Marcus could see the fire burn in Nazreem’s eyes, the fire that burned cold and black when the Madonna was mentioned.

  The colonel smiled, a supercilious smile that was at once overbearingly patronising and had all the self-confidence of a man backed up by a loaded weapon.

  ‘Maybe nothing on earth, lady. Let’s just say we’re on a mission from God, and in case you get any funny ideas, it seems that for once your God and ours have the same idea.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Never you mind. You’ll find out soon enough. You can make your confession on your own terms, or whatever you people call it. What we want from you now is to tell us where the pagan idol is.’

  ‘Why should I – even if I knew – and why are you so desperate to find it? What is it to you?’

  ‘What is it? Lady, I called the thing a pagan idol and believe me, it’s not just any pagan idol. We are talking about a figure of a so-called goddess that was centre of one of the most depraved cults in ancient Rome, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘What do you mean “depraved”?’

  ‘You don’t know, do you, you really have no idea what you’re dealing with here, for all your bookish learning, do you? You’re refusing to see it in context, as if just because something is old, it deserves protection. The black bitch – Astarte, Hecate, the witch, you can call her what you will but Kybele was by far the most poisonous variation. She had a priesthood that were the sickest bunch of weirdos the ancient world could imagine. They honoured the female all right, but rather than let women be their priests they tried to turn themselves into them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s right: the Gallae, they called themselves, dressed up in women’s clothing and perfume, shaved their bodies, the whole thing and I mean the whole thing: they cut their balls off. Oh yes, you can stare: self-castration. More than a few of them died in the process, you can imagine. The rest danced and fornicated in the streets, with either sex. They were so debauched that the Emperor Augustus locked them up in their temple and only allowed them out on one day a year. That’s the sort of adoration your so-called Mother Goddess inspired. And you wonder we want to destroy her. Perverts and sickos, transsexuals and transvestites, all that’s at the heart of the moral turpitude of the modern world. You want to see that held up as divine? It makes me want to puke.’

  There were flecks of spittle flying from the corners of the man’s mouth. Even the most recondite corners of Marcus’s mental squirrel store held nothing about a sect called the Gallae but he was only too well aware that a Texan Christian fundamentalist former Colonel of Marines was not someone likely to have a particularly liberal attitude to gay rights.

  ‘And if you find the statue what will you do with it?’

  ‘Just exactly what we said. Destroy it. The world will not weep for one less pagan idol, let alone one most people never knew existed.’

  ‘Even if most of them might have thought it represented the Virgin Mary?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It is still an abomination. Roman Catholicism has become a perversion of Jesus Christ’s teaching that besmirches the true story of the birth and sacrifice of Our Lord.’

  ‘You mean that that way you can keep the bits of the story you prefer.’

  The colonel’s eyes narrowed sharply and his arm lashed out to press the gun against Marcus’s temple. ‘You know, for a man brought up in a decent church, professor, you’ve sure let book learning tarnish your soul. Maybe too much time with the wrong books – guess you should have been reading the Good Book. Well, it’s too late now.’ His finger softly squeezed the trigger.

  ‘No!’ screamed Nazreem, ‘No! You are right. It is only a statue. I will do what I can to help you.’

  The colonel cast a quick glance sideways at her, not lessening the pressure of his finger on the trigger. ‘You’d give away your precious idol, your claim to fame, just for lover boy here?’

  ‘He is not my lover. But I will not see anyone, much less a friend, die to prevent you getting your hands on what you rightly call an “idol”. In my faith too we abhor graven images. You may do with it as you will. I will tell you where it is.’

  Slowly the colonel let his eyes run up and down her in the same way the Mexican had done, eyeing her up, wondering what she would be like in bed. The thought repulsed her. Were all men like this underneath? Was it the feeling of power that prompted their lust? And encouraged violence.

  But Marcus felt the barrel of the gun removed from his temple.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ the colonel said abruptly, glancing at his wrist-watch. ‘Under the circumstances, yo
u’ll forgive us if we don’t take you at your word, Miss Hashrawi. But we’ll let you lead us to it. Now get to your feet, both of you, and let’s get going.’

  ‘Going? Where to?’

  ‘That’s for you to tell us; we’ll be one big happy family party together. We have alternative transport arranged, which you might find more comfortable. Or you might not. It doesn’t really matter, because that’s what we’re doing.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Get up. We’ve got five minutes, and then I’ll let you have your play with that emergency stop switch after all. Now won’t that be fun …’

  Marcus and Nazreem did as they were told, edging slowly towards the compartment door. In the corridor, the colonel gestured to the Mexican to go in front, with Nazreem just behind him. He followed, the gun wedged in the small of Marcus’s back.

  ‘And don’t be tempted to do anything silly. I’m keeping this little friend of mine so close to your professor that any wrong move and the slug’ll pass through him so fast it’ll probably catch you too with what’s left of his guts on it. But as long as everybody does as they’re told, there’s absolutely no reason for anybody to get harmed.’

  Nazreem was sorely tempted to hammer on the doors of any compartment that was likely to have people inside. But she had no doubt that the colonel would not hesitate to put a bullet in Marcus, even if he might let her live as the sole means of achieving his end. This was one instance she hadn’t considered when she decided that keeping Marcus in blissful ignorance was a means of protecting him. It was as if she was sleepwalking, as if the whole thing was a nightmare in which she was conscious she would soon awake.