The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘What has occurred is certainly disquieting,’ he said simply. ‘We must talk about this in some detail, later. Right now, I believe we must satisfy your curiosity, and answer the question which, I confess, is in both our minds.’

  Nazreem’s eyes turned back to the great golden shrine in its ornately encrusted niche and to the little figure swamped in its folds of rich and ancient drapery and the royal paraphernalia that dwarfed it. For her, however, the regalia for all its splendour was an obstruction, a deliberate obfuscation. She closed her eyes and conjured up another image, a millennia-old sculpture pulled from the sands of her native city. She had to retrieve and retain that image, in order to compare, to try to match against what little here was visible beneath the trappings of centuries of veneration.

  When the abbot spoke again she was surprised to hear his voice coming from in front of her. She opened her eyes to find him standing on the step of the shrine, looking down at her and felt – with an unexpected frisson of horror – that he might be about to bestow on her some Christian blessing as a penitent. Instinctively she made to recoil, but he merely lifted a finger to his lips and said words she had scarcely dared hope to hear:

  ‘For you, my child, we are about to do something extremely rare. We shall disrobe the Virgin.’

  Marcus stood back a step. The words had shocked him. Ridiculously. He knew that what the abbot – a man whose every word and gesture he now considered suspect – meant was that he was about to remove the ornate vestments that concealed almost all of the original sculpture, an act that in itself was an honour so rare that he suspected it was never carried out in public, but only by monks in private, exchanging one set of raiment for another. Yet even that, added to the words themselves, somehow conveyed an almost perverse sexual charge. For a moment the grotesque image that flitted through his mind was that of old men undressing Barbie dolls. There again, maybe in the cult of the Virgin there really was something left from more ancient, earthly rituals.

  When the process was complete, and the costly regalia was laid to one side in trays of old Spanish oak lined with black velvet, and the abbot stood aside, the expression etched deep on the old man’s face was one of conspiratorial embarrassment, like one who had indeed confessed to a guilty, shameful secret, and yet filled with fraught expectation in the hope that those to whom he had revealed his secret passion would share it rather than laugh at it.

  Marcus had to bite his lip. His own reaction could not have been further from that he imagined the old man in his long skirts hoped for. The little dark wooden statue stripped of its golden robes was in such stark contrast to the grandiose baroque splendour of its shrine that it shocked him. Far more than he had expected. There was no logic to his reaction, but he realised, suddenly and with gut-wrenching disquiet, that he had been subconsciously expecting something much more remarkable in an anachronistically conventional way: a sculpture if not exactly on a par with the works of a Michelangelo or Donatello then at least in their tradition, a work of classical beauty, tender and lifelike on a par with portraiture. Was that not the whole magic of the promise inherent in the mystery: to actually see the face of Jesus Christ’s mother?

  Instead, the figure in front of him, in its unadorned simplicity, the bright robes replaced by a simply hewn, roughly coloured suggestion of clothing below that bland, straight-nosed face, was a naïve, primitive totem, the sort of thing he might have imagined being picked up in an African market offering naïve tribal carvings, more like a bush child’s plaything, an inanimate expressionless wooden dolly with a stick-like baby. It was all he could do to keep from laughing. Baby Jesus reminded him inescapably of a finger-bob puppet he had bought as a child from a Soweto street trader. He had cradled it too on the way home in the car not dissimilarly to the way this supposed image of the Divinity perched on the knees of its wooden mother, and poked it through the crook of his elbow at the car window: Peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo.

  With a smile on his face that he hoped suggested polite appreciation rather than concealed mirth, he put his hand on Nazreem’s shoulder and made gently to turn her towards him to gauge her own reaction. But she resisted the slight pressure of his hand, as if she was not even aware of its presence. The abbot, far from registering Marcus’s less than wholly respectful reaction to his unveiled Madonna, was paying him no attention whatsoever, his eyes fixed totally on Nazreem. Finally, after a silence that seemed to last a microcosm of eternity, he asked her in a quiet voice:

  ‘It is the same?’

  Another eternity, during which as far as Marcus could tell her eyes remained focused entirely on the crude little wooden statue, and then Nazreem said, in a voice that was surprisingly strong and yet subdued: ‘No. Not exactly.’

  And then she repeated the phrase, slowly, carefully, approaching and bending low over the little wooden doll.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  50

  ‘How do you know? And what do you know?’ The Texan all but shouted at the tall man in the white turban who towered above him. He reckoned he was a man who knew a con when he smelled one. He suspected one now, but deep down he had to admit he wasn’t sure.

  ‘We know because the thief was one of us. Or at least he pretended to be one of us.’

  The Texan looked at him warily.

  ‘The man who stole the statue from the museum in Gaza was recruited here. In Spain. You will appreciate already that the fact we are telling you something like this should in itself be proof of our good faith.’

  The Texan nodded. The men standing behind their chairs with their goddamn scimitars or whatever they called those butchers’ blades were equally eloquent, though the message was different.

  ‘His name was Ahmed Abdul Rashid al-Zahwani, also known as Abu Ataa.’

  The name obviously meant nothing to the Reverend Parker but Jones’s eyes opened wide.

  ‘Yes. He was known to your military intelligence. He was a man who had carried out many operations of jihad. But we will not go into that now,’ he added just in time to counter an outburst from the Texan who had seen al-Zahwani’s pictures on army wanted lists. He had also seen the report of his death.

  ‘He was also a fool,’ the mullah added.

  ‘You had him steal the statue?’

  ‘No. We do not steal from our own.’ He waved a hand. ‘Perhaps in this instance there might have been an excuse, but we did not know what it was he had stolen, were not aware of its true importance.’

  Was the man saying he thought the statue was authentic?

  ‘He used information acquired from us, about the timing of an Isareli air attack. To break into the museum amidst the chaos.’

  The Texan made wide eyes again. The mullah waved them away.

  ‘You think we do not know what the Zionists plan? What should we do? We cannot evacuate all of Gaza; there is nowhere to go. If they wish to stoke the hatred of our people then we cannot prevent them. Every attack creates another suicide bomber. This was no exception.’

  ‘I thought I read in the papers that al-Zahwani died in a suicide operation. Driving full tilt at a checkpoint.’

  ‘So it would appear. Perhaps the brick on the accelerator was too heavy.’

  The realisation dawned. ‘He was already dead. You killed him. But why, if he was “one of you”?’

  ‘Because he was a liar, and a traitor to his religion. He tried to sneak out of Gaza with the spoils of his theft. But that is not so easy. The borders are controlled, by the Egyptians almost as strictly as by the Israelis. We have ways. But we also have watchers. He should have gone nowhere without our permission.

  ‘A soldier does not desert his post. And he was not supposed to be taking with him something that belonged to the Palestinian people. Our people discovered it in his bags as he tried to enter the Rafah tunnels.’

  ‘You’re saying the guy was working for someone else?’

  ‘The man was a mercenary, not a soldier of Allah but a piece of shit who on occasion happened to be useful – he
would do things that a true Muslim would not, could not – but which could still, on occasion, be useful to us, but he was not trustworthy.’

  ‘So who was he working for?’

  The mullah looked at him with an expression of mild scorn mingled with exasperation.

  ‘Who do you think he was working for? What body on this earth would have most interest in possessing what they supposed to be the original likeness of the Virgin Mary?’

  The Texan almost cracked up at the obviousness of it, and the fact that filthy lucre had won over an apostle of Mohammed as surely as it had tainted the soul of Judas Iscariot to betray the Lord Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: ‘The Vatican – the Roman Catholic Church itself.’

  The mullah closed his eyes in what the Texan took for silent acquiescence.

  ‘He told you this?’

  ‘Let us say, he had to answer some questions which proved difficult for him.’

  The Texan closed his eyes. He could imagine being interrogated by these guys in more detail than the unpleasantness they had inflicted on him since smashing down the apartment door.

  ‘In the end, for the sake of his soul, and after some necessary persuasion, he told us everything, including what he had done to the woman. Under the circumstances,’ he said, closing his eyes briefly as if envisaging the moment, ‘even his bodily remains did not deserve the appearance of martyrdom.’

  The Texan could see the muscles of the armed bodyguards tense. He wondered if any of them had witnessed – or carried out – the man’s execution. He could imagine it proving a powerful incentive to loyalty.

  But there was a problem with the mullah’s story that only just dawned on him.

  ‘Then that means … you have the figure? Or at least it’s still in Gaza. So why …?’

  The dark frown on the mullah’s face deepened further like a thundercloud invading his soul.

  ‘I told you the man was stupid,’ he said. ‘Had he reached his masters they would not have been pleased either. He took the wrong figure.’

  ‘Wha … at?’

  The mullah flung his hand at the ground as if flicking away some piece of ordure that had stuck to it.

  ‘The Christians have so many trinkets, so many idols. Even still, it was a stupid mistake. And not the only one he made. If he had come to us in the first place and told us what he had been ordered to steal …’

  ‘You killed him not just because he was working for the Vatican, or because you wanted the figure but because he was stealing from Gaza?’

  ‘And also because he committed an atrocity in so doing. He violated one of our Muslim sisters. It was the first of the sins he confessed before going to meet his creator. That is no doubt why she is now working against us.’

  ‘You mean … the woman from the museum in Gaza, who found the thing? The professor’s girlfriend.’

  The mullah made a face.

  ‘She has been offended, gravely. She wants her revenge. She wants it in the form of personal fame.

  ‘She wants to know if this object really is what the world believes. She wants to know if it is rather what she believes it to be. She is a seeker after truth, but one who has abandoned the only real way to the truth, through her faith, through the Qu’ran. Because of what had happened to her, we did not prevent her from leaving Gaza. If he had confessed so quickly to the full nature of his betrayal that too would have been different.

  ‘We let her leave because of the unclean thing he did to her – an act of compassion. As so often, it turned out to be our mistake.’

  ‘You don’t mean you think she …’

  ‘We know. The museum in Gaza has been searched thoroughly. She left in a hurry, taking what appeared to be a single heavy bag. We believe it contained the real figure. It is the only reason she is still alive.’

  51

  The smell of roasted suckling pig and orange blossom filled the warm night air. In a corner of the great Gothic courtyard a duet of violin players wove strange bittersweet tapestries of sound that drifted up to the battlements and dissipated into a sky full of half-glimpsed constellations. Old sky gods turning still in their ancient accustomed rotations, imperfectly drawn echoes of man’s eternally inadequate attempts to understand his place in the universe. The abbot of Guadalupe lifted one hand from his replete stomach to signal to the waiter for a second bottle of rich dark Rioja. Seated across from him Nazreem Hashrawi lifted her glass and touched the intoxicating liquor to her lips, savouring its powerful complex taste and the rare sensation of alcohol working its unfamiliar magic on her brain.

  Marcus Frey sat alongside her, feeling very much the outsider at the feast. Far from soaking up the unexpectedly sensuous aesthetic offering of this remote little town with its hidden treasure and gastronomic delights, his mind whirred with complex, contradictory conspiracies and an ambiguity towards religious icons that had never before troubled him. He was not sure who to trust: the urbane, sophisticated and undoubtedly intelligent monk who indulged a passion for blood sports and, when it suited him, a convenient economy with the truth. Or a bunch of Bible-belt American rednecks who had kidnapped him and spouted bigoted anti-Catholic conspiracy theories worthy of seventeenth-century witch burners. The trouble was that the theories seemed less crazy with every passing hour.

  Nazreem had been a different person since seeing the primitive little wooden statue that was the preposterous object at the heart of the cult of religious veneration that had spread from the Old World to the New.

  At this moment she was leaning across the white tablecloth, wine glass held unsteadily in her outstretched hand. Marcus thought she had maybe consumed four glasses, but then that was probably more than on any other evening in her life. The abbot’s eyes had drifted off as if he too were under the influence of the wine. There were fewer than a dozen other diners in the great Gothic courtyard: a family party of five adults and a couple of small children who kept clambering off their chairs and playing hide-and-seek with each other behind potted palms, a young couple who had only eyes for each other and may have come to Guadalupe, as many did, simply to obtain the Virgin’s blessing on their union, a dumpy little man in a black beret alone at a table in the corner, his head bowed almost reverentially over a steaming plate of tripe in tomato sauce.

  Over the course of dinner she had, possibly unadvisably in Marcus’s opinion, related what had happened to them in London, Munich and Madrid, including Marcus’s kidnapping and release.

  ‘I am worried,’ she said, ‘about the fate of Sister Galina. You must be too. After what happened to Marcus I fear she may have been kidnapped by the same people. Or worse.’ Marcus, who was fairly certain that the former at least was not the case, shook his head, but the abbot was speaking first.

  ‘We should not assume that she has definitely been kidnapped.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that. If the German police have declared her missing and are concerned for her safety, then we should be too,’ Marcus said. He was not yet about to reveal, for all that Nazreem seemed taken by the abbot, that he had been comprehensively warned against him and all he stood for, even if it was a warning from individuals of questionable sanity. Not yet. There was a benefit of the doubt to be given, but for the moment at least it had to be given both ways.

  ‘Sister Galina is a remarkable woman,’ the abbot said obtusely, ‘one of great resources.’

  ‘There is also the minor matter of the mutilated body parts dumped on her desk. I assume you know about that,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the abbot, and now he genuinely did look crestfallen, a dark shadow falling over his brows as he closed his eyes briefly, staring at the ground. A waiter appeared with the second bottle of Rioja, offered it to taste but the abbot gestured to him to serve it anyway.

  ‘We must pray for her,’ the abbot said at last, looking up again and giving each of them a grim little thin-lipped smile.

  ‘You act as if you don’t even care about her,’ said Marcus. Nazreem looked shocked by his
rudeness.

  ‘That is not the case. Not at all. It is merely that for the moment at least the matter is not in our hands.’

  ‘Look,’ said Marcus suddenly, against his own best intentions losing his fragile cool: ‘Whoever has been pursuing us, whoever has kidnapped her, the grotesque thing that happened in Altötting with the body parts, it’s all somehow related to that little fetish statue with the gold braid frocks in there.’

  Marcus had been deliberately goading the man, but rather than react with horror to such a sacrilegious description, the abbot simply leaned back in his chair and said quietly, ‘Yes, of course, you’re quite right. That is why the original must be dealt with properly.’

  Nazreem had drained her glass of wine by now and done nothing to stop the waiter replenishing it. She was sitting back in her chair too, opposite the abbot like a sparring partner in a chess game, at which Marcus was no more than a spectator.

  She looked him straight in the eye across the table and with a slight shake of her head that suggested she did not quite believe what she was going to say, said: ‘You know, don’t you.’

  The abbot’s eyes twinkled back.

  ‘He knows what?’ said Marcus starting to get angry at being treated like a schoolboy.

  Her eyes still on the abbot who was holding her gaze, Nazreem said slowly, deliberately: ‘He knows that the statue in this monastery, and the one we found in Gaza of which it is a very close copy, has got nothing to do with the Virgin Mary. Or at least has got nothing to do with any woman who might ever have lived in Palestine in the first century, whether or not she gave birth to some rabbi who claimed to be the son of God.’

  To Marcus’s astonishment, once again the abbot simply smiled and said: ‘I told you before there are those of us within the Christian community who are not afraid of challenges to the orthodoxy. History is something we respect,’ then, after a pause, ‘even if, as you yourself know only too well, Dr Frey, there are often different interpretations.’