The Stolen (38 page)

‘I have a last favour to ask of you,' he finally said.

The young gypsy, startled by Matthias's grave tone, glanced over. ‘For you, anything, my brother. It is you we should be thankful to.'

‘Latcos, I want to borrow the statuette just for a few more hours, to conduct some tests on the metal at my laboratory. I promise I will return her safely.'

Latcos studied the profile that was similar in some ways to his own but in other ways so different. What choice did he have but to trust him?

‘On your life?'

‘On my life.'

‘One day she will be yours, but one day only,' he answered slowly.

‘Thank you for your trust. I am honoured.'

They arrived at the street the laboratory was on and Matthias turned into it. ‘Latcos, who do you think the statuette is of?'

‘My mother always told me it was of the Madonna, our lady of light.'

‘That's not possible.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The statue has four arms, not two. Did Keja ever talk about it possibly being another goddess? A far older one?'

‘No, she just described it as being the great “lady”. The queen of the soul. I always assumed she meant the Madonna.'

‘I believe the statue might be far, far older than you can imagine and of another goddess – an Indian one. Your family would have kept her from the time they first started travelling.'

‘You mean she has always been with us?'

‘From the very beginning.'

‘From the
puro cheeros
, the old time, from the
Baro Tem
– the land of five rivers?'

‘I believe so.'

‘No wonder she was stolen from us, and no wonder my uncle was determined to find her and bring her back. But now she is home. She will be safe with you in your laboratory?'

‘I promise I will bring her to you when I've finished.'

‘Whatever you do to her, you must not desecrate her. This is a holy object, far more powerful than any other statuette.'

‘I think you might be right,' Matthias said carefully.

‘Great power demands great respect. Yojo always told me the Madonna was capable of great love and great destruction.' He suddenly smiled at Matthias. ‘Like all women,' he joked. ‘Be careful, my brother.'

Matthias, his hands covered by thin rubber gloves, carefully placed the statuette on the laboratory bench. The whole building was eerily empty, devoid of both the laboratory assistants and general staff. The caretaker would not be back in the building until eight a.m., which gave him just enough time, but he'd still brought the statuette in through a fire exit, determined to avoid the security cameras and any possible awkward questions later.

Sheer excitement and adrenalin had infused his body with a tension that made him feel wide-awake despite the fact he hadn't slept for over twenty hours. He looked over at the statuette, the sheer power of her presence belying her scale. She seemed to stare back at him, a mocking half-smile playing across her full lips, her four arms sculpted with such fluidity they gave the illusion that she was beckoning him seductively into a fatal embrace. But it was the surface of the iron ore she was made from that intrigued him the most and as he stared at the curious dark-grey surface speckled with tiny diamond-like flecks that caught the light, a ripple seemed to pass through the statue in a wave. For a moment Matthias thought he was imagining things.

He peeled off a glove and touched one of the outstretched hands cautiously. He felt the slight tingling again, like a small electric shock.

‘Sky metal,' he told himself, remembering how Latcos had described the ore, ‘metal that fell from the sky, holy iron.' But what exactly was it? It didn't look like any of the known alloys or base metals he'd worked with before. As he bent down he noticed for the first time tiny letters inscribed along the inside of one of her arms. He lifted a magnifying glass and peered through it. To his untutored eye it looked like Sanskrit. It was as if the goddess herself were trying to speak to him. He was gripped with a strong anticipation, as if he were about to experience a great historical moment. He needed a witness, someone he could trust who could be an objective bystander, someone who would be able to hear the goddess's words.

 

‘Definitely Sanskrit,' Helen whispered, awestruck, her face inches from the head of the statuette, ‘but I think what is just as significant is that it's inscribed on her sword arm, the death blow.' She stood up. ‘It's a warning, Matthias – you shouldn't dismantle or destroy her.'

‘I don't intend to, just explore what she's actually made of. The metal alloy is extraordinary – if it is indeed metal. I've never seen anything like it before, not in my entire career. I'm going to see how other materials react to the metal. I've noticed when I touch it, it seems to emit an electrical current. I have a hunch about the original material – for a start it has some interesting magnetic qualities – but there's a lot to achieve in five hours.'

‘Okay, be it on your head if you unleash anything, but before you begin you need to know about the history. She can be read like a map of the migration of the Roma people. The statuette itself is a traditional depiction of Kali standing over Shiva, her husband. The later additions look as if they were made to accommodate shifting religious alliances adopted during the Roma's long odyssey – and we're talking centuries here. The original feature is the traditional sword Kali always holds in her top-right hand, but she's missing the spear she traditionally holds in her lower right hand. That's been replaced by a late Christian addition of the cross and nail. On the left side there would have been a severed head held high in her top-left hand and a dish collecting the dripping blood held beneath in her lower left hand, representational of the great battle in which she slew the demon Raktabija. She is also missing her garland of skulls and skirt of dismembered arms.'

‘But she is the goddess of destruction?'

‘So the Judeo-Christian perspective would have us believe, but the depiction is metaphoric, not literal. Her appearance should only be terrifying to those who have not evolved spiritually through true Hindu practice, who are still bound to a terror of mortality. The idea being that an evolved individual who practises a freeing of the ego would not find Kali terrifying. Remember, the goddess is not just associated with battlefields and burial grounds, she is also Mother Kali, who represents the time before creation and the time after the end of creation.'

‘But you're suggesting that the Roma have altered her to be more acceptable to their current Christianity?'

‘Not just Christian.'

Helen pointed to the gold inlay on the ankles and wrists of the statuette.

‘These look Persian or Arabic and the halo is a far later addition – maybe eighteenth or nineteenth century, no doubt added to fit into the Kalderash's current association with the Ukrainian Orthodox church. But what's most fascinating is the addition of the cross and the nail.

‘One of the pervading beliefs some of the Roma themselves subscribe to is the idea that they originated in Palestine and that during the time of the crucifixion Roman soldiers approached various blacksmiths asking them to make the nails to fasten Jesus to the cross. One by one they refused, until the Romans approached a gypsy blacksmith who agreed to make seven long nails and they were used in the crucifixion. In revenge God was meant to have cursed the gypsies to wander the Earth for ever.' She looked up to catch Matthias looking at her, amazed.

‘It's total nonsense of course. But the Sanskrit… that's been written on her since she was made; that's the ancient message in the bottle. We'd be fools not to heed it.'

‘How long would it take you to translate it?'

‘A day, perhaps, if I'm lucky.'

‘Helen, there isn't the time. We will just have to risk the wrath of the gods. '

‘Do I have a choice?'

‘No. It needs to be returned to the family as soon as possible.'

Matthias studied the statuette, swept back to the images from his early childhood he'd only recently recalled, images he'd assumed had simply been nightmares, born from his imagination. The sound of a young woman crying and pleading, being pressed into the broad arms of a woman whose blonde hair fell in a plait down one side. Waking in the swaying carriage of a train, an acrid smell of burning. Keja had been forced to give up her own son; if she understood the statue as being the image of a mother carrying the cross her son was crucified on, and the nails that were driven through his feet and hands, it would have particular poignancy for her.

‘Think about Keja, my real mother, and what it must have cost her to give me up, then to announce my existence to the community so many years later – at the risk of expulsion and condemnation. The return of this' – he indicated the statuette – ‘will be healing. I swore I would hand her back unharmed. Forgive me?'

‘Forgiven.'

Helen wrapped her arms round him. He didn't turn but stayed with his back to her facing the goddess, who seemed in that minute to be almost mocking his reserve. ‘You know I can't promise you anything. I'm broken, defensive, and possibly on the run.' He stumbled over the words, frightened of losing her through his honesty.

‘I'll take the gamble. I've always believed in the impossible,' she murmured into his ear, ‘and I know I'm not alone.'

‘The impossible it is then.' He turned and kissed her, desire flaring between their lips like a candle. They were interrupted by the local church bells ringing. ‘I should begin the testing. Time's running out.' Matthias moved away from her reluctantly.

 

The small room was a mass of electrical cables, set against a wall of control panels and several large orange-painted vacuum chambers, all linked to TV monitors, linked to computers. Canisters of liquid nitrogen and other cooling agents sat on the floor connected to the testing chambers. One assistant's work – a half-constructed electronic panel – lay on his desk, abandoned for the night. A
Peanuts
cartoon was taped up on a pinboard over the desk. Matthias switched on the lights and fluorescent strips spluttered into life, casting a cold white-blue light over everything.

He carefully took the box they'd laid the statuette in and, after pushing aside some spare electrical cable, placed it onto a workbench. Helen scanned the room.

‘My God, I thought it would be more ordered than this; this is real anarchy.'

‘I'd like to think of it as creative chaos. But in reality I think it reflects the way each of us works – very much in our own tiny world that we are constructing right in front of us. Take Toshiro from Tokyo – that's his desk over there – his speciality is type two superconductors, alloys mainly. Absolutely no social skills, but he's brilliant. I have a policy to recruit the difficult lateral ones who might not flourish so well in a larger lab like the IBM one.' He looked at the statue. ‘I'm looking for a continuous loop of the metal. I want to check how conductive the statuette is; all the indicators I've seen so far seem to suggest that it's potentially very conductive.'

‘And you think that might be one of the reasons it has so much mythology attached to it?'

‘Possibly. It isn't such a crazy theory. Certainly having strange magnetic effects on objects around it would have lent weight to the idea of a powerful statuette. Often there's a scientific explanation behind so-called magic.'

He turned the statuette upside down. On the base was another plate of the metal, of which a small corner had obviously broken off in the past and been forced back into place. Matthias eased it off; it was curiously heavy in his hand, the weight disproportionate to its size.

‘I'll use this, so there will be no damage to the figure. It will provide all sorts of information – including potential carbon dating if we can find any organic material – so you will be able to place the goddess in her right era.'

‘That would be a huge bonus.'

Matthias carefully placed the fragment into a vice, placing some paper beneath to catch the filings. The metal had a curious flint-like composition – it was almost fracturing under the blade of the file as if it were made of minute crystals. Matthias had seen nothing like it in his entire career. He lifted the paper up that now contained a small pile of filings.

‘What's that for?' Helen had been watching, fascinated, perched on the edge of the desk, observing how, as Matthias had described earlier, he really did fall into a self-contained bubble of concentration when working, like a vacuum that excluded everything else – including the presence of other people – around him.

Bending the paper into a funnel, he poured the filings into a test tube.

‘For viewing later; they're small enough to go under a microscope.'

He held the fragment under the lamp light, illuminating the filed edge of the piece.

‘Helen, look at this.'

She looked over his shoulder. The core of the metal was lighter in colour – a captivating blue-silver, glistening with the specks of a flint-like substance.

‘The surface must have oxidised; it was probably this colour originally.' He had the exhilarating sensation that he was on the edge of a great mystery – like standing on a precipice of a canyon whose beauty and sheer scale was beyond human imagination. It was a dangerous feeling and one that had disappointed in the past –
research has many impasses
, he reminded himself, trying to control the sudden dryness in his mouth.

‘Maybe that's why the Kalderash called it sky metal, because of the colour?' Helen suggested, marvelling at the diamond-like luminosity of the piece.

‘Perhaps, but I have another hypothesis.'

He took the fragment to the instrument he used to electrically charge materials. There he attached two wires to the two sides. Helen joined him at the machine.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Running an electrical charge through it to see whether it can hold any of it.'

He turned the dial of the charger and they both leaned forward to watch. There was a slight crackle and a spark ran over the surface of the fragment. Helen clutched at Matthias's arm, then laughed.

‘I don't know why, but I feel like we're committing some great sin against an ancient power or perhaps Nature itself,' she said. ‘Maybe we should just let the goddess keep her secret.'

‘Helen, I promise the statuette won't be harmed by any of this.'

‘No, but you might destroy all the mystery – reduce it to an interesting metallurgical discovery. Isn't that what all scientists do, take the wonder away?'

‘No, quite the opposite. We find the wonder in the most mundane materials – we are able to illuminate some of the great unknowns. It's what I dedicate my life to, moments like this. I just happen to believe that part of Nature is human evolution and science is part of that.' The fragment emitting another crackle interrupted them. They both swung back to the workbench.

‘Is it charged?' Helen asked.

‘We'll find out in a minute. Next step is to place the fragment in a foam container, place a small magnet on top of it, then fill the container with liquid nitrogen to lower the temperature of the fragment to below thirty-nine kelvin, at which point hopefully —'

‘The Meissner effect kicks in and all the electrons —'

‘Conductance electrons —' he corrected her, smiling, pleased that she had absorbed some of the explanation he'd given her the first night they'd really talked.

‘Line up and whizz around in order with absolutely no resistance,' she completed his sentence, grinning back.

‘You remembered?'

‘I cheated. I read up on the subject.'

Matthias walked over to a cooling unit: several foam containers were stacked beside it and he lifted one up and slid the fragment into it, then, after opening the unit, pulled out a shelf and placed the container with the fragment on top. He got a pair of tongs and picked up a magnet from a tray of them, all individually packed and marked with weight and size. Using the tongs he placed the magnet onto the surface of the fragment and reached for a canister of dry ice.