The Black Madonna (7 page)

‘Believe me,’ Dr Heidi Wenger said, ‘it’s not exactly what we were expecting either. And before you ask: No, I’ve no way of explaining it. At least not one that makes any sort of sense.’

‘Then how do you know …?’

‘Take a look at this. Not that it’s going to help with any of the
questions
you want an answer to,’ and she handed the bemused
Kriminalpolizei
lieutenant a sheet of paper. It was a printout of an email message, though he noticed that the headers had been blocked out with a thick black indelible, and impenetrable, marker.

‘It’s a translation of the official Israeli report of the incident,’ she said.

Weinert read: ‘Report from 1st battalion, 3rd Coy, Gaza frontier unit, IDF (Israeli Defence Force, he understood), Major XXXXX (blacked out) commanding:

‘The incident was logged as commencing at 00:10 hours when the duty sentries at the Israeli end of the Erez crossing point into Gaza became aware of some form of altercation at the Palestinian checkpoint some 150 metres distant. Heightened observation
immediately
after identified a vehicle heading for the main checkpoint fortification at approximately thirty kilometres per hour. As
crossings
without prior notification are heavily restricted, all checkpoint personnel were immediately put on full alert.

‘As the vehicle continued to approach, floodlights were trained on it and the usual warning given in Arabic, Hebrew, English and Russian. The vehicle continued its progress and warning shots were fired into the air.

‘With the aid of night vision binoculars, the forward watch
ascertained
that the vehicle in question was an early-model Honda CR-V with limited four-wheel drive capability and darkened executive windows. It was not possible to see inside the vehicle or know how many people it contained.

‘As is customary in the current heightened security situation,
the officer commanding gave the order to fire once more into the air above the vehicle and repeat the warning, this time in Arabic only, that failure to halt immediately carried potentially lethal consequences.

‘Notwithstanding the vehicle continued. When it was
approximately
seventy metres distant, the commanding officer issued the general order to fire at the vehicle’s tyres with the express purpose of halting its progress, with permission granted to aim at the radiator grill or other bodywork if necessary but not yet at the cabin pending further, imminent instruction.

‘Hits were marked on the vehicle’s front radiator grill and left-side front tyre, causing it to skew but not halt. At this stage the
commanding
officer considered due process to have been observed and ordered blistering fire at the windshield which disintegrated,
affording
a partial view of a single occupant in the driving position now hunched forward presumed hit.

‘The vehicle however continued to advance in the face of
withering
fire to within ten metres of the checkpoint at which distance it was consumed by a powerful explosion presumably as the result of onboard devices detonated by the occupant. There were no other casualties. IDF forces secured the area with no Palestinian
resistance
. Representatives from the Palestinian Authority denied all responsibility for the incident, claiming their own security people were “distracted”.’

‘And you’re trying to tell me the man inside the car was …’

‘Exactly, the same individual whose vital organs had arrived in Altötting nearly twenty-four hours earlier. From what the Israeli forensic team pieced together …’ Weinert winced at what he was not altogether sure was an unintentional pun, ‘he was pretty high on the list of wanted terrorists. Just not their list.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Oh, they wanted him okay, as did a lot of other people. They just hadn’t expected him to turn up on their territory.’

‘So how did they identify him?’

‘By the DNA, there and then like here and now. He was on an internationally distributed database. They’d taken comprehensive samples when he was in jail in Spain.’

‘Spain?’

‘Yep. Their bits of body, just like our bits of body, belonged to …’ 
she consulted another piece of paper, ‘one Ahmed Abdul Rashid
al-Zahwani
. Moroccan by birth, last known place of residence:
Algeciras
, Spain. Served six months in 1999 for incitement to violence. Part-time Islamist, full-time hood, not so much martyr as materiel supplier with links to Chechen gangs and anybody else who can make holy war into a nice little money-spinner. He’s been high on Interpol’s wanted list since 2002, suspected of having sourced the explosives used in the Madrid bombings and possibly even involved in the attacks in London as well. Scotland Yard say he was suspected of being a courier between Islamist groups on the continent and in England.’

‘Well that certainly deals with any sympathy I might have been feeling for the dear deceased.’

‘Indeed, on the other hand, there’s no suggestion here that he himself was a prospective martyr.’

‘You mean?’

‘I mean that according to Interpol, and the portfolio the Spanish and British police and security services had put together on him, his personality profile does not match that normally attributed to suicide bombers. He wasn’t even one of those who goads others on to do his dirty work. He liked women – preferably not heavenly virgins – gambled heavily and drank alcohol. In short, al-Zahwani was a thug, a criminal who saw Islamic fundamentalism as nothing more than a nice little earner.’

‘You’re saying you don’t believe he volunteered for this mission.’

‘Let’s just say he wouldn’t have had the balls for it.’

The first indication Marcus had that Nazreem had not walked out of his life as abruptly as she had re-entered it was the sound of running water coming once again from the adjoining bathroom around
six-fifty
p.m. Ten minutes later, promptly, there was a knock on his door.

He opened it to find her there in jeans and a white T-shirt. Not a headscarf in sight, but not acres of bare midriff exposed either: she could have been French or Italian, a picture of understated
Mediterranean
sophistication. Marcus was impressed and he smiled to show it.

She smiled back, somehow indefinably more relaxed, as if she really had spent the better part of two hours in the bath. Curious as he was, Marcus had no intention of quizzing her. If she wanted to she would tell him in her own good time, though he could provide the opportunity:

‘Did you get a good rest?’ he asked, trying to sound as natural as possible.

‘Yes,’ the reply came without a second’s hesitation. ‘I fell asleep. I’m sorry, I hope you didn’t want the bathroom.’

‘It’s okay, there’s one along the corridor.’ Her own good time might not be any time soon. ‘So, where would you like to go for dinner? And then you can tell me all about it.’ Or not, he thought. ‘There are several Lebanese restaurants around.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind. Maybe something local would be nice though. But not something boiled. I have heard things about English food.’

‘It’s not as bad as it used to be. How about the national dish?’

Nazreem looked sceptical: ‘Fish and chips, yes?’

Marcus laughed. ‘Not any more, these days they reckon it’s Chicken Tikka Masala. Indian food, sort of.’

She laughed back: ‘Sounds excellent.’

‘Good. I know just the place.’

It was raining when they got downstairs, one of those seasonal thunderstorms that alternated with hot spells, and had recently
become part of what the newspapers had started calling the ‘English monsoon season’. Marcus insisted Nazreem stay in the lobby while he went to fetch the Peugeot. He had thought of taking a cab, but the pouring rain meant there were few free and this was not the sort of hotel that had doormen in top hats who stepped out into the street to summon them. Also the Peugeot needed to be rescued from its exorbitant meter before full rates cut in again at eight a.m.

As they made their way eastwards through the dark and quickly emptying streets of the City, Marcus checked his rear-view mirror carefully. There was no obvious sign of an unusually attentive black Mercedes.

Perhaps he had been over-reacting, although he was not quite sure he believed that. He knew he should tell Nazreem what he had seen. If she was really being followed, she ought to know. But to tell her would expose her lie to him. It was difficult. The whole thing made him slightly uneasy.

Priji’s in Brick Lane would cheer him up. It was his favourite curry restaurant in London. Maybe dinner would provide a chance for them to talk properly, for Nazreem to open up. He found a parking space in Fournier Street, by the side of Christ Church, Spitalfields, the newly restored eighteenth-century masterpiece that was one of his favourite London buildings. It had been designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the same architect who had given All Souls its Gothic spires. It was also in easy walking distance of Priji’s.

The rain meant there were fewer than usual of the curry touts hassling passers-by. Priji’s had been recommended to him by a South African friend of Asian extraction. The food, like most of the Brick Lane eateries, was not actually Indian but Bangladeshi, and the chef-owner, a second generation Londoner of Bengali extraction was not just a master in the kitchen but a host with a heart of gold. He noticed Nazreem looking disconcertedly at the sea of brown faces and at the street names written in both English and Bengali.

‘This is … like a ghetto?’ she said.

‘I suppose, but the word has too many negative connotations these days. I prefer to think of it as the historical equivalent of an airport arrivals lounge.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Marcus smiled. ‘Well, it’s called Brick Lane because back in the middle ages there were fields here where workmen dug the clay to
make London bricks. They didn’t build houses on any scale until after the Great Fire of 1666. Once they did, because the area was so close to the docks, it became a bedding-in zone for new immigrants.

‘Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were mostly Huguenot Protestants, expelled from Louis XIV’s fervently Catholic France. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries
it filled up with eastern European Jews, fleeing the pogroms. And from the early twentieth century onwards Bengali seamen off tea clippers from Calcutta began to settle here. Gradually the
community
grew until just after the Second World War they opened
Britain’s
first “Indian” restaurants. It has been a magnet for others ever since so that now the dominant community is Muslim. The Brick Lane area is now home to the biggest community of Bangladeshi Muslims outside Southeast Asia. The locals call it Bangla Town. You see that building on the corner, the one with the sundial protruding from high up on the wall?’

Nazreem looked in the direction he was pointing and saw a big, old-looking building of stone and brick with what looked like Arabic on a board that was just too far for her to read. ‘Yes?’

‘The whole history of this part of the East End is summed up by that building. When it was built in 1743 it was a Huguenot church; by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a prominent
synagogue
. It’s now a mosque. There are shops around here that started life as French butchers, became kosher and are now halal. I like it. It’s the sort of place that makes you understand why history matters.’

Priji’s was in the middle of a line of similar-looking restaurants, but first Marcus took Nazreem into a newsagent opposite that also advertised itself as an off-licence and bought two bottles of cold Cobra lager from the cooler. ‘A lot of the restaurants around her don’t sell alcohol to avoid offending their Muslim customers but they don’t mind if you bring your own,’ he explained. ‘Drink?’

Nazreem nodded with just a hint of a self-conscious smile: ‘I’d love a little white wine. Hamas have banned all alcohol in Gaza.’ Marcus chose a half bottle of Petit Chablis and said, ‘This do?’ She nodded again, blushing like a guilty schoolgirl.

When they entered Priji’s, Ali himself was sitting by the kitchen door and immediately came over to greet them. He was a plump cheerful man with an accent that mixed broad East End cockney with just a hint of the subcontinent: ‘’Ow are you, Professor Fry,’ – he
always overstated Marcus’s academic status and missed the nuance in his surname – ‘and ’ow’s your luvvly lady friend? Table in the window, or perhaps the corner, a bit more private?’

‘The corner would be fine, Ali,’ said Marcus, and let them be shepherded to a small table near the rear of the restaurant. A waiter brought menus and took the wine and beer away to open the bottles.

Marcus ordered starters, the famous chicken tikka masala as well as a couple of more authentically Bengali dishes including balti lamb, shorisha king prawns in chilli and mustard sauce and a garlicky lentil tarka dall. He was hungry. The service was quick and attentive. He sipped at the cold beer, while Nazreem sipped her white wine with her eyes closed. He waited for her to begin the conversation, but the starters arrived almost immediately. Nazreem picked up a pappadum, dribbled some mint yoghurt on it, raised it to her lips and then put it down again without eating.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Marcus said at last.

‘Hmm?’

‘What’s going on … in your mind. Is it what happened in Gaza. This find of yours, the theft. I just wondered if you wanted to talk about it.’

She looked up at him and gave him a thin resigned smile.

‘Of course. More than anything else.’ But she didn’t.

‘In the paper,’ prompted Marcus. ‘They hinted that this find … was something rather special. Particularly for Christians.’

She gave him the same thin-lipped smile of resignation,
accompanied
by a slight shrug of the shoulders.

‘Who knows? Who knows what to believe?’

‘How did it happen?’ Marcus tried, then sensing from her frown that he had trodden on sensitive territory he retracked, ‘the find, I mean? The paper seemed to imply that the context dated it to the first century.’

Nazreem took a long sip of her wine and leaned forward. ‘That much is indisputable,’ she said. All of a sudden, as if the memory itself had reinvigorated her, she began talking quietly, briskly as if reliving the moment itself:

‘It was just to the north of Gaza City itself, a place the Israelis call Tel a-Shakef, a sensitive location. Not so long ago it was an Israeli army base before they pulled out of Gaza. About three weeks ago bulldozers went in, to clear away rubble. The road leads towards
Erez, the crossing point. They were pushing back the drifting sand when they came across old stones, paving, very obviously ancient not modern.’

Marcus was struck by how her mood had changed. Archaeology was her life blood.

‘They stopped work immediately – it does not take much to make them stop work,’ she added with a pertinent look. ‘The foreman sent someone to the museum, to ask for advice. In the past, during the occupation, the Israeli archaeologists would have been all over it. We were lucky. If you can describe anything that happens in Gaza as luck.

‘I went with some workers, a few volunteers. It did not take much to discover we had found an old Christian church, a
very
old church.’

‘Not from the first century?’ Marcus looked puzzled. The early Christians had met in private homes. Under the Roman
persecution
they had gathered in caves and cellars. Purpose-built churches didn’t start to appear in any number until the Romans did a U-turn when the Emperor Constantine made it the state religion in the fourth century.

‘No, of course not,’ Nazreem said dismissively. ‘The uppermost ruins included a beautiful mosaic floor – the sand dunes had
protected
it – that inscriptions made clear dated from the reign of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. They were all in Greek of course; that was effectively the official language of the eastern Roman Empire by that date. It appeared the church was dedicated to St Julian.’

Marcus made a face: ‘I’m afraid I’m not very good on my saints.’

Nazreem shrugged. ‘Obviously, nor am I, but my Egyptian
colleague
, a Coptic Christian, reckoned it had to be St Julian of
Anazarbus
, a Roman citizen of senatorial rank who was born in what is now Turkey and put to death around the end of the third century during the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian. Sealed in a sack of vipers and thrown into the sea.’

‘Nice.’

‘But that church was built on top of one that was even older, and others beneath that. It had obviously been a holy place for many centuries.’

Marcus was impressed: ‘The Coptic Christian church was
allegedly
founded by the apostle Mark shortly after the crucifixion. But I’m surprised you kept digging after making a find like that.’

Nazreem shrugged and sighed, ‘It was an accident. You know sometimes how our workmen are. One of them was trying to move the bulldozer out of the way, when the ground beneath it suddenly dropped. The weight had obviously collapsed some subterranean chamber, possibly part of a crypt.’

Marcus winced. It was exactly the sort of thing
archaeologists
dreaded: their own interventions spoiling the evidence. Nazreem closed her eyes an instant in tacit acknowledgement of his understanding.

‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘part of the layer below was still a void, although we still haven’t quite worked out its relationship to the church above. Initially we thought we’d hit a treasure trove – there were large numbers of coins.’ She almost laughed: ‘My biggest fear was that the workers would start to pocket them, when their main importance was to help the dating.’

‘And they did?’

She nodded: ‘Almost all from the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.’

‘Suggesting the early part of the first century.’

She nodded. ‘That was when we found the casket. I had to fight to stop the workmen dragging it out. I suppose they thought it had more treasure inside. That’s when we noticed the inscription: not in Greek, but in Latin. Older therefore. Just two words:
Regina Coeli
.’

Marcus whistled under his breath: ‘The Queen of Heaven.’

‘We took it out carefully. You can imagine, didn’t even open it on the spot. Some of the workers got restless, thought we were making off with treasure. I had to point out the writing, that it was a
religious
artefact, a Christian thing. I don’t know if they believed me. It was only when we got back to the museum that we opened the casket.’

‘And found …? Come on … don’t keep me in suspense.’

‘An image, a graven image. Female. The workmen sneered at it.’ Marcus wasn’t surprised: Islam forbade any depiction of human beings or animals, let alone the divine or semi-divine. Idolatry was a cardinal sin. ‘The location would suggest that it could be a Madonna and the date would make it the earliest known. But obviously we wanted to date it definitely before revealing it to the world.’

‘But you didn’t get the chance. Somebody leaked.’

She shrugged, a bitter, half-hearted little shrug.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

Marcus looked at her quizzically. All of a sudden there was that glazed hardness again in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s not obvious to me.’

‘Mossad.’

‘Mossad?’

‘The Israeli secret service,’ she spat out the words.

‘I know who Mossad are, I just don’t see why …’

‘Why? Because they want it for themselves, that’s why! Because they will claim it was theirs all along, like everything else. Like the grains of sand on the beach, the air that we breathe, because they will leave us nothing of value, and if possible nothing at all, least of all our history, our decency or our self-respect! Do you think they want Gaza to become a shrine?’