The Black Madonna (29 page)

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, you’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.

There were five compartments to pass before the end of the
carriage
. There were lights in none of them, suggesting either they were unoccupied or the passengers inside had already turned in for the night. Two of them at least looked empty, their sliding doors partly or wholly open, the interior in darkness.

They had passed the second when Marcus heard a muffled thunk, like a fridge door being slammed next to his ear. Simultaneously the muzzle of the gun held against his back canonned into him. He waited for the searing pain of hot lead ripping into his abdomen. Instead he felt the huge weight of the colonel’s body slump against him and caught a sudden stench of cordite. The dark glass of the corridor window blossomed into a messy flower of sticky red blood.

‘Run, now. Get off. Before it’s too late.’

‘What!’ That accent. The voice. Somehow familiar. Marcus
staggered
under the weight of the collapsed body, turned and saw the American colonel with a neat round hole in his head, black, smoking and big enough to put a finger into, oozing blood like tomato ketchup. He gagged.

The Mexican was gawping in stark terror into the silenced barrel of a gun in the hand of a small plump man in dark clothes and a beret. It was the little man who had been so engrossed in his newspaper on the platform, the same little man, Marcus now realised – staring at the red blood oozing from the hole in the Texan’s skull – that he had first noticed filling his face with tripe in tomato sauce in the
monastery
restaurant in Guadalupe. Now there was something about him that seemed more familiar still. Something in the voice, the accent? The fridge door closed again and a smoking black hole opened up in the forehead of the mouthing Mexican. Nazreem’s scream blended with the piercing howl of an electronic alarm as the train jerked and
squealed under the impact of emergency brakes. Their saviour, the unknown assassin had pulled the emergency stop switch, just as the Texan had planned to. The voice behind him, the same brusque yet soft accent, uncannily out of context said: ‘Go. Quick.’

The little fat man was waving his hand in front of his face with the pistol still in it. From further down the suddenly stopped train, Marcus could hear the commotion of confused, frightened
passengers
, and approaching feet and voices. He grabbed Nazreem by the arm and dragged her to the end of the corridor, pulled down the window to open the door from the outside and jumped with her almost in his arms onto the rough pebbles of the railway bed. With sore knees and aching limbs but fired by adrenalin they struggled to their feet into the dense forest of silver birch. Fleetingly he glanced back at the yellow light spilling from the open carriage door. But of the strange little assassin on the train there was no sign.

A clamour of voices rose behind them at the discovery of the bodies and the open door. A torch beam played haphazardly among the trees, a flickering strobe among the pencil-straight birch trunks. If they were not careful they would be the subject of a manhunt. Ahead beyond the edge of the forest, there was the susurrus of car tyres on wet tarmac. They could not be far from a road. Beside him Nazreem was panting, out of breath. And then they came upon a long straight empty strip of black flat-lining into the distance: the road that followed the train tracks through the great swathe of flat reclaimed land all the way up the Bay of Biscay coast.

‘What happened?’ asked Nazreem, her voice shaking. ‘Who was that?’

And all of a sudden Marcus stood stock still by the roadside, gazing back into the barcode forest of pale thin tree trunks and dark spaces in between, as a realisation he had been fighting crystallised in his head:

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, half to himself, ‘I’m really not sure.’ And then, his voice fading away as the hot-wired synapses in his brain made links that didn’t make sense. ‘Maybe it was your fairy godmother.’

In the black Renault Espace in the depths of the forest, the Reverend Henry Parker was saying his prayers under his breath. His
companions
were not fond of him uttering them aloud in their presence. For them as much as him, this was an unholy alliance of necessity. But the man in the front seat gave the orders, and his orders were unquestioningly obeyed.

In fact, Parker had noted, he rarely ever gave orders as such, rather inspired his followers into anticipating them. It was an attribute he was literally in awe of and yet understood; there had been times over the past thirty-six hours when he had almost longed himself for the merest flicker of the bastard’s approbation. It was an awe, he decided, inspired mostly by silences.

The silence now had been a long one, amplified by the
location
, deep in this endless wood. They had driven throughout the day while the colonel and José had waited to catch the train from Madrid. The sulking Freddie, his ear bandaged, was wedged in the centre seat between the two Algerians.

The reverend sat in the rear holding the colonel’s iPhone and fervently wished that he understood the damn thing better. As far as he was concerned, the fact that he could see where a particular human being was on the face of the planet was itself an act little short of blasphemy, no matter how useful. Only God had the right to an all-seeing eye. But the US military had long ago successfully challenged his monopoly. And now the technology was in the public domain. He wondered why the little red dot on the screen had stopped moving. Especially as the man it represented should, if everything had gone according to plan, be in their presence by now. Albeit almost certainly reluctantly.

The bark from the man in the front seat startled him out of his reverie. It was answered, in the usual tone of military precision laced with deep deference, by the driver. The Arabic sounded harsh and guttural and wholly incomprehensible. When they talked among
themselves they made little allowance for his complete and utter lack of understanding of the language of the prophet. But this time they made an exception.

‘They are late,’ the man in front said. The reverend had heard the others seem to address him as Saladin – which he thought about as absurd as the colonel styling himself Richard the Lionheart – but, given the position he was in, he was not about to show the man
anything
other than a grudging respect. ‘What does the device show? Where are they?’

‘Hmm? Oh,’ it was only then that it dawned on him that he had been right to be concerned about the red dot’s lack of movement. He was not very good at zooming in on it, getting his fingers to magnify the screen. He was terrified of doing anything that would lose the signal. In a minute the colonel would be back. By then the tracking device would have successfully served its purpose.

Except that the colonel was late. And the colonel was never late. One of the Algerians had got him to call the colonel on his mobile phone a while ago. He was reluctant to take the iPhone off the GPS programme, even to make a call. The colonel had said everything was on track, that the targets had, as expected, boarded the train at Hendaye. The rendezvous point had been set. Since then there had been silence.

The man in the front seat barked again and the people-carrier reversed out of the small clearing and onto the main road that ran in a tedious straight line parallel to the railway tracks through the forest-planted, reclaimed swamp that the French called Les Landes.

The headlights revealed nothing but an endless strip of black tarmac through the grid of vertical silver birch trunks on both sides. He used the Algerian’s mobile to call his own again. It rang and rang, and then suddenly almost to his own surprise, a voice answered. But it was not the deep Texan drawl he knew so well. In fact, it was not even English.

‘You have reached him?’ barked the man in front.

‘I … I don’t know. It’s … I think it’s in French.’

A fist thrust back from the seat immediately in front and ordered: ‘Give me.’

Parker looked apprehensive but the man they called Saladin made up his mind for him: ‘Give it to him. He speaks French.’

‘
Qui êtes vous
?’ the Algerian snapped into the phone. ‘
Où est
l’Américain?
’ He listened for a long moment, asked a question and was obviously asked one in return for he thrust the phone at the little minister in the seat behind him, before rattling off a few sentences in what even to someone who understood nothing of the language was clearly angry Arabic. Then there was another silence, this time interrupted by the Reverend Parker, no longer willing to be treated like a piece of awkward baggage.

‘What is it, for God’s sake?’ he could not help himself saying, ‘Has something happened?’

‘Yes,’ came the monosyllabic answer from the front seat.

‘What? What’s happened to the colonel? Who was that?’

‘Be quiet. There is a problem.’

It was not the answer Parker wanted to hear. He had not been happy in the first place seeing the colonel go off and leave him with the hard men and the injured, resentful Freddie still barely
restraining
the simmering rage that had boiled within him since his
mutilation
in Madrid.

Ahead of them on either side the headlights played like a
stroboscope
off the interstices between the trees on a road to nowhere. And then from the edge of the forest two figures emerged, and lurched, almost drunkenly into the road, gesticulating at them to stop.

For the first time the reverend heard what could only be described as a throaty chuckle from the sombre, sinister man in the front seat, as the car slowed on his command and the headlights picked out the two faces staring blindly into the glare like anxious rabbits.

‘
Allahu-akhbar
,’ he said in a low, deep voice.

For once the reverend could share his sentiment. Indeed, God was indeed great. Maybe any minute now the colonel would show up and everything would be all right after all.