The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  Marcus shook his head. He knew the words all right, the ones inscribed on Nazreem’s buried casket.

  ‘It comes from an address made in May 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI himself, the man who helped cover up decades of child abuse. And do you know what it is?’

  Marcus shook his head again, though this time judging from the look on Jones’s face he was not at all sure he had done the right thing. But it was the quiet little minister who suddenly interjected, his dull face erupting in a purple apoplexy of outrage:

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is – it’s sacrilege, apostasy and an affront to the Lord God Himself. The words “Regina Caeli” are Latin, sir,’ he said in a way that made even a rudimentary command of the language seem like a mortal sin. ‘They mean “Queen of Heaven”. And that, sir, is a pagan concept, a heathen idea not found in Scripture, not in the Old Testament, nor the New. It is a bastardisation of the true faith and an excuse for idolatry.’

  ‘Calm down, reverend,’ said the Texan. ‘It is just one example, Professor Frey.’ He gestured disdainfully at the pile of papers. ‘I could find you hundreds. But the words to pay attention to there were “all the needs of the church and of humanity”. Being entrusted, not to the Lord God, but to a statue of a woman.’

  The reverend cleared his throat, and said in a more level voice than before: ‘You will have heard some of those people refer to the Bishop of Rome as the Antichrist.’ Marcus nodded. Whatever the man said, he felt sure he knew what was coming; he had a long-established mental image of the ogre-like figure of the Reverend Ian Paisley roaring diatribes against the pope as the ‘Harlot of Rome’.

  ‘You have to realise that not all of that is prejudice, particularly when it comes to the most recent incumbents of that office.’

  He paused, for effect as much as for breath. ‘Did you know that John Paul II was considering declaring the Virgin Mary “coredemptrix”?’

  ‘No. I’m not even sure what that means, in a theological sense?’

  ‘It means, sir, co-redeemer. Joint saviour, if you like! It means that he was about to put Mary on the same footing as Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. It means putting a woman, however blessed, on a par with God. Do you know what that amounts to?’

  What Marcus was hearing, he felt sure, was as upfront an admission of misogyny that he had heard in a long time, but at the same time, he had an inkling of what the man was trying to say in theological terms. Even so, he shook his head.

  ‘It amounts to polytheism! Paganism by another name. Believing in more than one God!’

  Maybe it was not the moment to mention the Holy Trinity.

  ‘John Paul II is likely to be declared a saint.’

  The Texan shook his head and the reverend snorted: ‘Saint John Paul the Pole, Saint Juan Diego the Aztec, what’s the difference? The saints, man, don’t you see, are part and parcel of it. Nothing more than false little gods. When did you ever hear Jesus talk about saints?’

  Marcus hadn’t personally ever heard Jesus talk about anything and nor, he expected, had this large Texan ex-Marine, but he guessed this wasn’t a time to start splitting theological hairs.

  ‘Damn demigods able to intervene directly with the Almighty!’ Jones fumed. ‘There are holy men, saintly men even, but when we die we all await the resurrection the same and don’t float around with angels. The saints, these big papier-mâché dummies they carry round at their fiestas, they’re no different from pagan idols. This is a way in which the devil keeps alive the myths of the old gods, who we know to be nothing more than his demons.’

  ‘And you’re suggesting that there’s some sort of secret society within the Catholic Church that is a party to this?’ Marcus could hardly keep the scepticism out of his voice.

  ‘We’ll let you judge for yourself, professor. Let’s just say that there is clear evidence of a faction within the church – not an open organisation like Opus Dei or the Jesuits, though the Lord knows those are weird enough distortions of his Holy Word. At times these people have been referred to as the Giuliani, in old Italian records, but the name is not important. What matters is what they have done: what started in the early church as a means of suppressing paganism by turning their feast days into Christian festivals …’

  ‘You mean like Christmas?’

  ‘You see, professor, you’re halfway there already. I mean exactly like Christmas, which has become perhaps the most pagan festival of them all, centred on a fat demigod in red rather than the miracle of divine incarnation. They took over the feast days, but the Giuliani – or whatever you want to call them – made sure that the ghosts of the old gods came with them.’

  ‘Chief among them Mithras,’ said the reverend gravely.

  ‘Mithras?’ echoed Marcus, whose squirrel mind once again retrieved at least a nutmeg of information. ‘The Persian soldier god?’

  ‘Not a god for real soldiers,’ the Texan took up. ‘No sir, not the God of Christian Soldiers marching as to war with the Cross of Jesus going on before. No sir! A pagan idol of the most pernicious sort, like you said: Persian. Iranian in other words.’ As if that somehow made it worse.

  ‘Do you know what the chief sacrament in the cult of Mithras was – I should say, is?’

  For once Marcus’s treasure-trove of the arcane looked like letting him down. He remembered only that the Mithras cult involved an initiation ceremony, in which the applicants were somehow supposed to be reborn. But the colonel was in any case not waiting for an answer:

  ‘The central element in the legend of Mithras involves the ritual slaughter of a bull.’

  Marcus blinked.

  ‘Yes, indeed. A cruel pagan ritual that is very much alive and well in this country: one that you witnessed last night with your very own eyes.’

  ‘Let me give you another example: you know about Pamplona, the bull-running fiesta of San Fermin? That there’s a pagan rite which seduced even Ernest Hemingway, an honest American who fell foul of the demon drink and the sins of the flesh. What do you think that’s all about?’

  All that Marcus knew about the annual bull run in the mostly Basque city was what he had gleaned when it was shown on the television news because a few runaway steers had gored some lad in the narrow streets while his mates clung for grim life to drainpipes on the walls above. Insofar as he had thought of it at all he had always considered it to be about testosterone-fuelled young Latino men showing off their cojones by publicly risking them in front of the girlfriend.

  But Jones was not looking for a reply: ‘They may not all know it, in fact I daresay most of them don’t, in their ignorance, but what they are acting out is a pagan parable, the made-up story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The chase through the narrow streets is a very metaphor for the monster’s labyrinth.

  ‘The Minotaur, Mithras, the old gods dressed up as so-called saints. The “old religion”, paganism in disguise. Call it what you want to. The so-called “black Madonna” is just another piece in their devilish jigsaw. The piece that holds all the others together.’

  The thin little minister by his side closed his eyes and raised his hands together like a schoolboy saying his prayers, then lowered them reverentially and, still with closed eyes, intoned gravely: ‘For behold, the horned beast is among us.’

  42

  The sharp trilling ringtone of her mobile vibrating on the hard mahogany of the hotel bedroom desk was like a knife scraping on a blackboard. Nazreem snatched for it greedily, and held her breath when she saw Marcus’s number indicated, her hunger for good news acidly laced with a frisson of fear. Just because it was his phone it did not mean he was using it.

  It was not until she pressed ‘answer’ and heard his voice that she allowed the first wave of emotional relief to break over her. At least he was still alive.

  ‘Marcus! What? Where …? Are you all right? What happened? Where did you go? I thought …’

  The questions poured out of her uncontrollably, barely giving him time to answer.

  But the voice on
the other end of the connection sounded calm and composed. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry.’ Maybe too composed. Don’t worry? How could he say something like that? Without explaining.

  ‘Don’t worry? What do you mean don’t worry. Where have you been? What happened?’

  A pause.

  ‘It’s a long story. But I’m all right. Everything’s all right.’

  ‘Where are you? What happened …?’

  ‘It’s okay. Trust me. The meeting. With the man from the monastery. Where were we supposed to meet him?’

  ‘Plaza de Cibeles.’ She spelt it out for him. ‘It’s a big square, with a fountain, not far from the hotel. Ten minutes’ walk or so, but … where are you?’

  ‘Later. I’ll tell you everything later. The important thing now is to meet our man as we agreed.’

  ‘Okay, but what about you? What happened last night?’

  ‘I’ll meet you there. Leave the hotel in about ten minutes’ time. Tell them to put the bill on the credit card they took an imprint of when we checked in and pick up my things from next door. There’s not much. Just trust me, Nazreem. Everything’s fine. It’ll be okay. It was just a misunderstanding. I’ll see you soon. Just be there. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, feeling anything but. Something in his voice was telling her he was not alone. What did he mean ‘a misunderstanding’? She had hardly slept a wink all night, staring at her mobile, sitting in the hotel room, the connecting door to his open in case he should reappear unannounced, her head filled with visions of him chained to a radiator being tortured. She had fallen asleep around four a.m. and woken only when the cleaners opened the door to his room, saw the connecting door open, her sprawled half dressed across the bed, and had retreated rapidly out of misplaced tact.

  That had been more than two anxious hours ago during which she had fussed and fretted and blamed herself for whatever might have happened to him, half praying for his safe return, half afraid that the only God she had ever worshipped, and that with perhaps less assiduousness than many of her co-religionists, might react perversely to a prayer uttered only in adversity. But wasn’t adversity when most people prayed?

  ‘I, the Lord your God am a jealous God’, was part of Christianity’s sacred ten commandments. And there were both Christians and Muslims – albeit a minority – who said it was the same God, deep down, more or less? If the eternal omnipotent could be either ‘deep down’ or ‘more or less’. She didn’t want to think about it.

  Nazreem knew she prayed in the same way some people crossed their fingers, more out of habit and superstition than true faith. She was a historian not a theologian. Yet wasn’t the situation she was in precisely the result of her historical tinkering with the basics of religion? She was challenging the gods. The gods, plural? Not the one God. Not Allah the Almighty but a perversion of the Christian version. Wasn’t she? She was searching for the truth. How dangerous was that?

  She had dragged her hand through her hair and not for the first time in her life wished she smoked to give her distraction a focus. The television news had been full of nothing, unknown politicians, talking heads, speaking in a language she didn’t understand. Was this what it was like to live in a country where death and destruction were not part of the daily grind.

  Then she remembered that the conflict that laid waste to her homeland had scarred this city too. She had gone to the window and looked out at the early morning Madrid skyline and wondered how far she was from the stations where the bombs had exploded, and if the people here hated all Muslims because of them.

  And then the phone had rung. The shrill warble of the mobile she had almost forgotten to turn on. And here she was minutes later throwing their things into the lightweight travelling bags they had picked up, with the spare clothing, at Stansted. Picking up Marcus’s spare socks, pants and shirt with all the domesticity of a woman clearing up after her man. Don’t go there, she told herself. What’s past is past. The relationship they had once had was a thing of another time, something to be remembered fondly but nothing to do with here or now. Yet, wasn’t that why she had trembled so much when she finally heard his voice again? She splashed water over her face in the bathroom and dragged a comb through her hair. Pull yourself together, woman; men have no power over you. Not any more.

  The hotel clerk gave her a second look when she declared she was checking out for both of them on Marcus’s credit card even though he himself was not there. She turned down his offer of a taxi and she could feel his eyes on her back as she walked out the door, certain that it would not be long before he had conferred with the cleaning women and begun to conjure up stories she could scarcely imagine.

  She consoled herself that the most likely conclusion to be drawn was of a lovers’ tiff, of a woman abandoned after some passionate argument, nothing that required the attention of the authorities. Unless something caused someone to come looking. She still worried that they had left Munich peremptorily only hours after telling the German police they would do no such thing. If she had learned one thing from her upbringing it was that the best relationship to have with the civil powers in a country that regarded you as an alien was none at all.

  Their two small carry bags, even taken together, were not heavy, but they were inconvenient and she switched them from shoulder to shoulder alternately as she strode at a brisk space down the narrow streets that gradually broadened out as she approached the grand boulevards of the museum district. She glanced at her watch. There was still just over half an hour before they were due to meet the man who was apparently the link between Sister Galina and the abbot of Guadalupe.

  The thought sobered her. It was possible – probable? – that whoever had seized the nun within hours of their meeting was also responsible for Marcus’s disappearing act the night before. But if so, why had they let him go? Or was she just imagining things? Could it just have been that in those minutes when she had taken him at his word that he was visiting the bathroom he had gone off on some agenda of his own? But what and why? Maybe it was all nonsense; maybe he had just met some girl, that was why he had been so odd on the phone, he had met some cheap floozie and gone off with her? Why not, he was a free agent, wasn’t he? She could feel herself getting flustered and told herself it was because even the suggestion was preposterous.

  But the only alternative that she could think of was that he had been kidnapped. And then released? As what, a warning? Why would they not have held him? Held him as they were holding the nun. As they had to be. Surely. Held him to ransom? As they were holding her? Yet ransom was impossible if the demand could not be delivered. Was that what had happened to Marcus? She needed to hear his story. But deep down, she knew also, she had to tell him the rest of hers.

  43

  Marcus handed his phone back to the big Texan who was watching him carefully. He resented the idea that this man who had kidnapped him ‘for his own good’, in the cause of some crackpot fundamentalist Christian conspiracy theory, was in even temporary control of his life. The man had refused point blank to let Marcus call Nazreem in private, in fact had insisted on hearing every word of both sides of the conversation. But then again both the Mexicans José and Alfredo, ‘Joseph and Freddie’, were very visibly carrying guns. They had said they were letting Marcus go. And he was not about to do anything to put them off the idea.

  The Texan responded to his frown with a smile, unclipped his piggy-back listening device from Marcus’s phone: ‘Cibeles, eh? Your idea or his?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The meeting place – the fountain. Who suggested it? Your little “monkey” friend, I’m assuming? Geddit: monk – monkey.’

  Marcus grimaced, but nodded in answer to the question.

  ‘I thought so. Well, when you get there take a good look at it, my friend. And ask yourself if it’s where a so-called man of God ought to choose for a rendezvous. Believe me, my friend, there’s symbolism in everything they do in this country.’

  Marcus let it r
ide. He hadn’t a clue what the man was going on about, but he’d had enough theology, half-baked or otherwise, for one morning.

  ‘Just bear it in mind, that’s all I ask.’

  Marcus nodded again. He had decided conversation with the Texan was easiest if kept to a minimum.

  ‘Now, we’re going to let you go, just like we said. No question about that. You can go and meet your little Arab girlfriend just like you told her you would. We’re men of our word.’ The remark did little to reassure Marcus. In his experience, even in the academic world, when people said there was no question about something it was usually a preamble to raising one. He was not disabused.

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ the Texan added. ‘You’ll agree we haven’t treated you bad? I know, I know, you may think we were well out of line going to the extremes we did to talk to you alone, and maybe you’re right. Like I said, the Mexies here sometimes get a bit carried away, do things more like back home than our way. But in the end we’ve had a civilised chat and we’ve made a few points I hope you’ve taken on board.’

  Marcus nodded. He wasn’t about to say anything that would stop him getting out of there as soon as absolutely possible.

  ‘Okay, good. And you understand that we want to get our hands on this evil idol for the best of reasons.’

  ‘I understand you have reasons you deeply believe in.’

  The Texan eyed him a moment.

  ‘Okay, I guess that’ll do. I have a strong feeling that you’re gonna come around to our way of thinking pretty soon. But before we say goodbye right now, I’d like you to promise that you’ll keep in touch. It only takes a quick ring on your phone here. Remember we could be there to help as much as anything else. You’re involved in a complicated business here and you just might find there are more people interested in this so-called black Madonna than just us, people a whole lot nastier.’