The Black Madonna (28 page)

 

‘I don’t like it and I’m not going to pretend I like it.’

The big Marine hushed the man next to him: ‘Operational
necessity
, reverend. You can’t always choose your short-term allies. Let me tell you: I’ve been there. Out in Saudi Arabia in the First Gulf War those goddamn ragheads wouldn’t even let us praise the Lord in our own camps, or give our boys a Christian funeral. Not even when our boys had died defending their goddamn country.’

The reverend closed his eyes as if doing so would prevent him from hearing such infamy.

‘That’s right. It wasn’t nice, but we gritted our teeth, because that’s what we had orders to do. Now we have to work alongside some other shits, but we’re still under orders, orders from the Lord, ain’t that right, reverend?’

The reverend nodded, acknowledging the trials that faith required of the godly. ‘It would indeed appear that that is the truth.’

‘Then we’ll see those orders are carried out. And then we’ll see what we do. Okay by you?’

The reverend nodded again. It was okay by him. It was not as if he had a choice. The two men were sitting at a table in the Madrid
apartment
with a jug of coffee and a plate of half-eaten takeaway
enchiladas
which both of them had agreed were nothing like the stuff they got back home. The food had been fetched from a nearby restaurant by José, strictly accompanied by two of the Arabs, as both Americans referred to them. He had tried to persuade Freddie to eat some, and protested angrily that the injured man urgently needed a doctor. The protest, however, had been ignored; Freddie had been given a high dose of painkillers, the remains of his mutilated ear treated with
proprietary
antiseptics, bandaged up and he was now sleeping deeply on the same bed on which he had twenty-four hours earlier thrown the drugged Marcus. José sat slumped in the armchair next to him, alternately dozing and channel-surfing with the TV remote.

The Islamists, their dark hoods now removed to reveal the typical
sallow complexions of southern Mediterranean-Middle Easterners – based on a few overheard words of what he thought was French, the reverend was coming round to the opinion that they might actually be Algerians – stood outside in the hallway, their weapons
prominently
on display, more like armed jailers than allies. Their
spiritual
and military leader had disappeared, although the Americans doubted he was far distant. He had given them strict instructions – it was hard to interpret the terms of their relationship otherwise – that their role in their common enterprise was, for the moment at least, primarily technological.

And although the Reverend Parker was less than happy with the colonel’s seeming rationalisation of their situation, he was the
military
man, and if he was content to bide his time then that was what they would do.

The colonel pushed the half-finished enchiladas to one side, pulled out his iPhone, and touched the GPS icon.

‘Well now, look what we got here.’

On the screen appeared a map of central Madrid. The app worked in conjunction with Google Maps which allowed him to zoom in to a relatively high degree of accuracy. He reckoned it was probably possible even to work out exactly which building the phone was in. But thanks to the SIM card-sized transmitter he had slipped inside Marcus Frey’s phone, it also told him with the same degree of
accuracy
where the ‘professor’ was. It was, he liked to think, a reliable and, provided the other party was unaware of it, infinitely kinder way of keeping someone on a tight leash.

The Reverend Parker did as he was told, watching the map of Madrid disappear as if seen from a soaring rocket ship, then the screen refocus on a flashing red spot to the southwest of the capital amid the dark greens of the Spanish Mesa pine forests and the russet browns where they gave way to barren rock.

‘That’s Guadalupe?’ he asked, uncertain of the degree of detail or magnification on an unfamiliar landscape.

‘No,’ the colonel said, ‘and slid thumb and forefinger apart across the touchscreen to magnify the image of the landscape until it was almost filled with an irregular sandstone-coloured geometric shape. ‘That’s Guadalupe. The monastery itself, in fact. Big, isn’t it?’

The minister nodded. ‘But the point is,’ the colonel said, ‘our friends are no longer there. They’re on the move. Look.’

He pulled thumb and forefinger together and the landscape grew again until now a red dot appeared in the centre of the screen, and almost immediately moved a few millimetres up it. ‘They’re heading north by northeast and from what I can make out,’ he performed a few more manipulations, running his finger across screen, ‘they’re in a vehicle of some sort, heading along this road.’ The map on the screen tilted and turned as if he were playing some sort of
helicopter
simulation, bringing the landscape itself into an approximation of relief contours, while road numbers flashed up and place names appeared: ‘They could be heading for Cáceres, although I doubt it, because there’s a more direct route from Guadalupe, or they could be making for Avila. Neither makes a whole heap of sense just at the moment. What I’d really like to know is: why? Have they cut some sort of deal with the abbot? Is he driving them? I wish to hell I had one of these little GPS bugs on that bastard too. Or have they cut and run?’

‘What do we do?’

The Texan leaned back, his eyes resting on the little dot as it moved northwards, towards the edge of the laptop screen. He ran a finger over the trackpad and repositioned it in the centre. ‘Right now, we do nothing. I believe in giving a man a lot of rope, especially if I anticipate eventually having to hang him with it.’

The turreted walls of Avila stood sentry round the heart of the ancient city like a fantasy made from children’s sandcastles upended out of plastic buckets. As they had done for the better part of a
thousand
years.

Despite his training as a historian, the colonial boy in Marcus Frey found certain parts of Europe’s flagrant flaunting of its
incalculable
heritage just a little too in-your-face. These crenellated walls, stretched in a perfect ring around a mediaeval city centre to create an ensemble as impressive as the great monastery they had just left in Guadalupe. The landscape in most of Europe had nothing on the South African Veldt, but the architecture sang of history. Maybe the abbot was right; the fusion of history and art was a religion in itself. If that’s what he had been saying. Marcus was still far from sure.

Deep down there was something about a place like this that tugged at his soul. And no matter how uncomfortable he felt with it, the only word he could come up with was ‘Christendom’.

‘How long have we got to spend here?’

‘A couple of hours at most,’ said Nazreem. ‘Then we catch the train to Valladolid with a connection to Hendaye, on the French frontier, where we can pick up a train direct to Paris.’

‘I still think it would have been quicker and easier via Madrid.’

‘It would, but how sure are you that we would have got away with it? I mean at least here we’re away from the whole “Mary” thing.’

‘Are we?’

‘Aren’t we?’

‘It depends what you mean. I just had this feeling, as we drove into town, about how religion pervades our culture. And if the
religion
is corrupted …’

‘What is the problem with Avila?’

‘Its saint. The way the abbot talked about pagan deities and
Christian
saints. It’s been on my mind. Do you remember Saint Konrad,
from Altötting, the one who had been sanctified despite not having done much more than been a doorman at the shrine all his life?’

‘Yes,’ said Nazreem, with a sudden smile. She had found it hard not to laugh out loud when Marcus had told her what he found out about the man’s claim to sanctity.

‘Well, what if it was not so much the man as the job he was
elevating
to the “pantheon” of saints.’

‘A god of doormen?’

‘A parallel for Janus – the Roman god of entries and exits,
beginnings
and endings. Where we get the word “January” from.’

‘You really think so?’

Marcus shrugged. ‘How would I know. My field is history not religion, though the lines are blurring fast here. It’s just that there was a sign back there welcoming us to Avila, city of Saint Teresa.’

‘There is a special saint for this town?’ Nazreem was no longer surprised by anything.

‘A patron saint. That’s the thing about Catholicism. It agglutinates.’

‘It what?’

‘It builds upon itself. Like a cancer.’

‘So who is the saint of Avila?’

‘I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘Until now: Saint Teresa. Or at least that’s what they call her. But you could argue Aphrodite would be a better name.’

‘Explain.’

‘There’s not much to explain. She was a local girl who ran away from home, had a mystical experience, came back and reformed the Carmelite order of nuns. But the reason for her fame is a statue. A quite extraordinary statue. Not here, though. It’s in Rome.’

‘Maybe there’s a postcard.’

There was. In fact picture postcards of the statue followed only views of the city walls, its cathedral and little yellow egg-yolk sweets named for St Teresa as the most popular image. He picked one up from a revolving stand outside a tourist shop on the street and handed it to her.

‘It’s by Bernini. Around 1600, I think. Not long after she had died.’

Marcus could not suppress the smile playing on his lips as he waited for her reaction.

‘This,’ she said at length, ‘is a saint!’

‘Yep.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ she was laughing and blushing at the same time. It was, Marcus suddenly remembered, one of her most endearing characteristics.

He looked over her shoulder at the picture, just to remind himself not just of the image, but of his own scarcely believing amazement the first – and only – time he had seen it ‘in the flesh’, in the radiant chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria

There was no doubt it was Bernini’s masterpiece, so vivid and achingly lifelike that it seemed the stone had indeed the quality of flesh, a moment frozen in time, its essence captured forever in the expressions on the faces of the two figures. And what expressions!

‘It’s pure pornography!’ Nazreem said at last. And it was. The critics and art historians had argued otherwise, preached the
sculptor’s
skill in summoning up the spirit of divine spiritual ecstasy unknown to ordinary mortals, but to the casual observer far from being exotic and unknowable it was all too familiar, ecstatic for sure but far from purely spiritual. The angel standing erect above the supine woman was more of a satyr, the smile on his face a smirk of unconcealed lechery while the saint at his feet was writhing beneath her flowing robes, her expression one of the purest, satisfied, carnal lust.

‘It is, isn’t it,’ agreed Marcus. ‘Either the angel of the Lord touched Saint Teresa in a way that took her seriously by surprise or she’d accidentally discovered masturbation, aided and abetted by a very vivid imagination.’ He took the card from her hand and turned it over to find, as he had hoped, the relevant quotation from the saint’s own autobiography. ‘Here’s the bit that inspired Bernini,’ he said, handing it back to Nazreem.

The verse was printed in Spanish with translations into English and Italian. Nazreem started to read it aloud, but soon let her voice fade away in amazement: ‘“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”’

‘It’s quite incredible,’ she said at the end.

‘Yes. That’s the trouble. It starts to seem like the whole Roman
Catholic …’ he struggled for a word, and then, when the only one that seemed applicable came to mind, could not avoid an ironic twist of the lips, ‘pantheon …’

‘Is what?’

‘Just that, quite literally, a pantheon. Not saints at all, not human beings who have come close to God, but a collection of pagan gods in disguise.

‘You know, Nazreem, before all of this I was an agnostic, but a happy agnostic. Happy to treat Christianity as just something we lived with, dogma you could ignore happily as long as you
subscribed
to what we loosely called “Christian values”, and believed the world would be a better place if we imposed them on everyone.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know what you mean. I think. But so often the values and the men of religion don’t seem to go hand in hand. Like in Palestine, Iraq, the whole of what your people call the Middle East.’

‘The thing is,’ said Marcus, ‘that maybe we were wrong all along. Those values, maybe they were never Christian. I mean, if you asked someone to list Western Christian values today, top of the list would probably be democracy. But that wasn’t Christian at all: it had been invented in Athens, more than three hundred years before Jesus Christ was born. The same goes for Platonic love. And the ancient Greeks, including all their great humanist philosophers, got along fine with pagan gods. Christianity conquered the world via the Roman Empire, a dictatorship which had come into its own by
overthrowing
a republic.’

‘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!’

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 smiling 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.’