The Black Madonna (21 page)

It was only a full ten minutes later, when she had paid the bill and he had still not returned that she began to get annoyed. It wasn’t possible surely that he had bumped into the drunk again and been cajoled into another brandy at the bar. It seemed highly unlikely but she had never quite got a grip on Western men’s drinking habits and she knew from experience that they could get out of hand. After another five minutes, however, she decided to see where on earth he had got to. The bar was already starting to thin out as the bullfight crowd filtered away, having slaked their thirst and sated their early evening hunger, deciding the traffic had abated enough to think about going home for dinner.

A couple of large men at the bar smiled ingratiatingly at her as she passed, appreciative of such a classic dark-eyed beauty. She ignored their attention as she squeezed between them and a table to the little corridor at the back of the bar marked ‘
Servicios
’. There was a door at the end and two on the left, the second of which was labelled ‘
Caballeros
’ with a picture of a matador’s tricorn hat. One of the men who had smiled at her at the bar excused himself as he passed her and pushed open the door. Nazreem called, ‘Marcus,’ as discreetly as she could under the circumstances, but there was no immediate reply.

She looked around her. Of the drunk from earlier there was no sign. In fact, by now there were barely a dozen or more customers
in the bar, dedicated drinkers mostly, the vast array of tapas had been decimated. Behind the counter the barman was rearranging what was left and repositioning it behind the glass. The waiter who had served them had taken his broom and was sweeping the debris on the floor towards the street door. She tried calling Marcus again, twice and a little louder this time, as the door to the Gents’ opened and the big man who had just gone in came out again. He smiled at her once more as he squeezed past but it was a strange,
questioning
smile and she noticed that as he resumed his place at the bar he nudged his companion and made a twisting motion with one finger pointed at his head: ‘
Loca
?’ A crazy woman.

‘Marcus!’ she called again, rapping hard on the door this time. There was clearly something wrong. Maybe he was being sick. She regretted having encouraged him to drink that brandy. ‘Are you all right? Talk to me.’

‘
Señora
,’ the barman called to her. She looked back briefly in
irritation
and began banging on the door again. The man who had just exited the lavatory got off his seat and came towards her, the smile on his face now replaced by a dark frown. Instinctively she backed away, but the man kept coming, holding out his hands on either side as if to block her escape.

‘Marcus!’ she cried, louder than before, hammering on the door and lifting her hand to defend herself against the Spaniard if he came closer. The man held his two hands up, but at the same time backed off and said something to her softly at first. Then when he saw he was not getting through he tried again, more loudly, this time in broken English:

‘Lady. No there. Is no one there.’

It wasn’t a question. Nazreem suddenly understood, and looked first at him, then at the door, then back at him in horror. She felt suddenly short of breath as she summoned up all her courage and did something that as a Muslim woman she could never have
imagined
herself doing: she pushed open the door to the men’s lavatory and rushed in.

To her relief – and horror, all at once – there really was no one inside. Streams of flushing water gushed down the white porcelain of the single urinal in front of her. On her left the door to a single empty toilet stall gaped open. Marcus Frey had simply vanished.

Marcus opened his eyes and instantly wished he hadn’t. His head ached and even the low light felt like hot needles puncturing his retinas. He closed them again and realised there was nothing
awaiting
him but nightmares, waking or asleep. And sleep was no longer an option.

Slowly, like a man surfacing after a shipwreck, afraid of seeing only an icy, corpse-littered ocean, he let the outside world seep into his consciousness. Gradually his brain started trying to put back the pieces even if his fractured memory was not yet capable of
reassembling
them in the right order: the spectacle in the ring, the
celebration
of slaughter, the old man’s strange pseudo-philosophical ramblings, then the tapas bar, and his unanticipated offer to take them with him to the monastery. And what else?

The drunk of course, knocking into him. And buying him the brandy. Carlos III –
Carlos Tercero
– his brain remembered,
obdurately
, because the way the man had pronounced it –
Carlos Tersero
– something odd about that, his brain seemed to recall though he had no idea what. It must have been one hell of a brandy if it had got him that drunk. No, impossible. He remembered heading for the loo, swaying slightly as he moved through the crowds at the bar, and then staring at the porcelain, feeling distinctly ill, having to reach out and grab the top of the urinal to stop himself falling into it. And then? Then there had been men, other men, one on either side. Catching him as he fell. Helping hands?

Like hell! That was what had been wrong with
Carlos Tersero
– one of the few things he did know about Spanish was that classic Castilian had a lisp –
Carlos Terthero
was what they said in Madrid.

The last thing that he could recall was guttural accents, the feeling of being dragged into fresh air and then a car door slamming.
Something
had happened that his mind didn’t want to acknowledge – he had been kidnapped. His eyes sprang open, all of his senses
suddenly
awake. Where the hell was he?

He tried to move his feet and was surprised to discover he could do so freely. His hands too. At least he was not tied up. Nor was the surface he was lying on hard dirt. He was on a bed of some sort, although not a particularly comfortable one. He tried to persuade himself he just had had some sort of fit and been taken back to the hotel? But he didn’t believe it.

The room might have been a hotel, but he doubted it. The bed he was lying on was double, but with just a simple sheet. There was a small bedside table but with no lamp on it, and a drawer that he doubted very much contained a Gideon’s bible. The room was dark with just a pale ray of grey light coming in through what appeared to be closed venetian blinds.

Uncontrollably he felt a tremor in his left knee, a nervous tic deep in his flesh between muscle, bone and the tiny shard of shrapnel that remained lodged there, and he knew he was afraid. Very afraid. If he was in the hands of Islamic extremists he had good reason.

He had seen the videos. The grainy, ill-focused, low-resolution internet images of dishevelled, terrified hostages kneeling on the floor, pleading for their lives to some distant politician whose
hand-wringing
moral refusal to ‘negotiate with terrorists’ was their death warrant. The men in masks and checked keffiyehs slung around their necks, standing beneath Arabic slogans – phrases from the Koran – with Kalashnikovs in their hands. Except for one. The one wielding the knife. The long curved blade brandished like a butcher’s implement with which he would lean forward and cut the hostage’s throat, while the cameraman captured it all, the blood and the screams and the death rattle, to be broadcast on the World Wide Web, picked up by television channels mercifully too squeamish to screen it, and sickos in US trailer parks who would watch it over and over again in the small hours of the Midwestern night telling themselves it was their patriotic duty to stoke up hatred for the invisible enemy.

Marcus realised he was terrified. If the last thing he had done before passing out had not been to pee he would have wet himself. There were no good ways to die but the one he relished least was as a trussed sheep whose legacy would be as a low-grade piece of snuff-porn.

He lifted himself up on his elbows trying to make out more of his surroundings. His head ached and he was not yet sure if he was up to standing. There was a washbasin against one wall with a cracked
mirror above it. And a door next to it. Locked. Or open? There was only one way to find out. Gingerly he put his feet on the floor and tried to put his weight on them.

‘I’d be a bit careful about that if I were you.’

The voice came out of nowhere. Marcus swivelled round to see a small bucket armchair squeezed into the darkest corner of the room parallel to the bedhead, and squeezed into the armchair a
swarthy-skinned
man with dark hair and a full moustache, studiously
cleaning
a handgun. The man looked at him, tilted his head to one side, then stood up, setting the handgun carefully down on the table, well out of Marcus’s reach, and said in heavily-accented English: ‘Good morning.’

Morning? ‘Who the hell are you? And what do you want?’ Marcus said, raising his head and shoulders, supporting himself on his elbows and avoiding the acute temptation to look at his watch. It sounded more resilient than he felt. For a fraction of a second he was glad Nazreem had chosen not to tell him more about her precious missing Madonna and then realised how willingly he would have given away anything he knew. It could have been the one chance to save his life. Where was Nazreem anyhow? He had left her seated at the bar, and had no memory of seeing her since. Had they got her too?

His jailer looked at him for a long moment as if trying to decide how to reply. The man looked back towards the side table and crossed to it and lifted his gun. Marcus swallowed hard. Then, tucking it into his waistband, he walked over to the sink against the wall, lifted a toothglass from a metal holder next to the cracked mirror and
half-filled
it from a small bottle of mineral water on the shelf below it.

‘Here, for you,’ he said. ‘Water.’

Marcus took the glass gingerly weighing the wisdom of throwing it at an armed man’s head, before the realisation that it was plastic mercifully dispensed with that idea. The man’s eyes were hard, unblinking and there was a glint in them that suggested he was not troubled by slow reactions.

‘Where the hell am I? What’s going on?’ He wanted to add, ‘Where’s Nazreem?’ but stopped himself; if they already had her, he would find out soon enough and there was no point otherwise in jogging their memories.

The man narrowed his eyes and nodded as if he had been given
an explanation rather than an angry question, then raised his finger to his lips.

‘One minute,’ he said. Then to Marcus’s surprise he turned around and walked out the door.

Throwing the plastic water glass to one side – he was thirsty as hell but he wasn’t going to drink anything he hadn’t sourced himself – Marcus did his best to hurl himself from the bed. It wasn’t as easy as it might have been, his head reeled and he almost lost his balance the minute he tried to stand. He patted himself down, discovered to his surprise – but not reassurance – that he seemed still to have his wallet; muggers would have been infinitely preferable. For a moment his hopes soared, but a hand thrust into the inside zip pocket of his jacket shattered them all too predictably: they had taken one item, his mobile phone.

Tentatively, he tried the door handle, easing the round knob as softly as he could – the last thing he wanted was to bring the thug with the gun hurtling back in to deal out a pistol lashing, or worse – and was scarcely surprised to find it was locked. He tweaked the slats on the venetian blind, only to find himself looking out on a sea of red-tiled roofs, concrete, stonework and television aerials with a forty-foot drop. He was on the fourth or fifth floor of an apartment block, probably somewhere in the endless Madrid suburbs.

It was in a flat like this, he remembered dimly, with a chill like iced water running down his spine, that police had cornered the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic fundamentalist bombers a month after the Madrid bombings. They had refused to surrender, battening down for a siege that ended only when they had deliberately set off a bomb inside the apartment, blowing themselves up at the very moment the police were about to storm the building. Cold comfort indeed. What was it he had read in the
Metro
that had sent them on the madcap journey to Altötting? That the heart dumped on Sister
Galina’s
desk had been proved by DNA to be that of someone suspected of involvement in the Madrid attacks? He conjured up the image of some fanatic plunging a curved knife into his breast to extract his still beating heart, and bitter bile rose in his throat.

Then the door opened and the swarthy young man with the gun came back into the room, grinning broadly when he saw Marcus standing up. ‘You are better,’ he said. ‘This is good.’ And he turned to the large figure who suddenly filled the door frame behind him.
The imposing man who strode into the room with the rolling gait of a Worldwide Wrestling Federation champion entering the ring looked less like an Islamic fundamentalist than anyone Marcus Frey had ever seen in his life.

He had a head of close-cropped blond hair tending to grey that sat atop the vast body of a weightlifter run to fat, enormous rippling muscles decaying slowly to rolls of lard sweating profusely under a too tight T-shirt.

‘That’s the best news you’ll get today, José,’ he boomed. The voice could have been that of a retired Sergeant of Marines, as did the accent, an unmistakable Texan drawl. The logo on the T-shirt
proclaimed
‘Jesus Wants You for a Sunbeam’.

‘I’m afraid we owe you something of an apology,’ the Marine
Sergeant
voice boomed as Marcus sat down on the edge of the bed in stunned silence. He had been expecting a black-robed Iraqi
executioner
; instead he was facing George Bush’s overweight cousin.

It was almost comic. Almost. But not quite.

The man facing him spoke his language and was superficially the same racial type, but you didn’t grow up in South Africa without knowing that was nothing to go on. There was a glint in his eye that Marcus immediately recognised; he identified it with fanaticism. Or insanity.

‘The hired hands can be a little bit overenthusiastic sometimes,’ the large man continued, coming forward and reaching out a hand the size of a baseball mitt with two gold signet rings.

‘Martin Jones, pleased to meet you, Professor Frey. And this here’s my good friend and colleague, the Rev. Henry S. Parker.’

Until then Marcus had barely even noticed the wiry, grey-haired man with aquiline features and rimless spectacles who now emerged from behind his larger accomplice. He was wearing a dog collar underneath a lightweight grey suit and a thin smile that he
obviously
reserved for special occasions.

‘At your service, sir,’ he said politely, nodding.

It was more than Marcus could take: ‘At my …? I don’t think so. You kidnap me and lock me in a room with an armed thug and you have the nerve to … what the hell did you do to me? Drug me or something? Who the hell are you and what on earth are you playing at?’

‘Like I said, we do owe you something of an apology,’ the man who called himself Jones said, ‘and now you’ve had that. As for what was slipped in your drink? Rohypnol, I’m afraid. It’s best known as “the date rape drug”, but you can rest assured, professor, we have no intention of anything like that, do we, reverend?’ Jones said,
bellowing
at his own sense of humour.

The man in the dog collar gave him a stern glare. ‘No indeed, sir. I should think not. We leave the devil’s perversions to the devil’s spawn.’

‘José, why don’t you go and get Freddie to brew us all up a nice hot pot of coffee. That’ll do the professor here the world of good and I sure could use a cup too. How about you, reverend?’

The reverend nodded.

‘You have to excuse the guys. Mexicans,’ Jones added as the swarthy gunman left the room. ‘Wetbacks. Still got Rio Grande mud in their toes, like most of the population of south Texas these days, but they mean well. A few friends in the right places to find them gainful employment and they’ve even seen the light of the true faith and given up the ways of idolatry for the word of the Good Book, by which I mean of course the King James’ Authorised Version, isn’t that right, reverend?’

‘Amen to that,’ said the man in the dog collar without the slightest hint of irony.

‘We need them over here, on account of the lingo,’ the big man said, tapping a finger to his nose as if confiding a business tip.

Marcus nodded, as if he understood anything at all. ‘I’d like to leave now,’ he said.

‘Sit down, professor,’ the big man said with a smile but in a tone of voice that made clear he didn’t consider there to be an alternative. ‘Make yourself at home. We’ve got a bit to talk about here.’

‘I don’t consider I’ve got anything to say to you or you to me, except to explain why your men abducted me and what’s happened to the woman I was with. If you’ve touched her …’ Even as the words were leaving his mouth Marcus realised how hollow his bravado might sound. If he thought these people would be reasonable just because they were American Christians rather than Islamic
fundamentalists
, he might be seriously deluding himself.

The big man’s eyebrows raised as if he would be entertained as to what the second half of Marcus’s threat might entail. But all he said was: ‘Ah, the Arab lady. Rest assured, sir, we did not touch one hair of her head. As far as we know she could still be sitting over a cup of coffee waiting for you to come back from the john, but I would imagine she’ll be back at your hotel by now.’

‘Then give me back my phone and let me call her.’

The minister looked sheepish but Jones shook his head. ‘All in
good time, professor, all in good time. We wanted what you might call a little “quality time” with your good self. You are, after all, one of us.’

‘One of you?’

‘Yes sir, a white man, for a start, if I can use that term these days in a non-derogatory sense. And a Christian. Brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church, I believe, a very honest, God-fearing branch of the true faith.’

Marcus said nothing. So they were as much guilty of
swallowing
the stereotype as he nearly had been. He remembered the
self-righteous
middle-class white women his mother used to associate with at the golf club going off to church on Sunday to pray for their fellow man and ‘all God’s children’ before coming home and treating the black ‘houseboy’ like dirt. The man facing him was the type they would have expected to join the police, ‘to keep the kaffirs in order’. Yes, he would have got on just fine in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Jones chose to interpret his silence his own way. Like most people did. ‘You see,’ he was saying, ‘we would hate you to do something you would mightily regret, and think you ought to know the full facts about what you’re dealing with here.’

Marcus snorted involuntarily. On that at least, he was in full
agreement.
But as yet he had no idea where these people were coming from, why they had abducted him and what they expected of him, though he had a keen idea that none of it would be a world’s remove from his relationship to Nazreem and the cursed black figure she had dug up from the sands of Gaza.

‘What do you know about “
la leyenda negra
”?’ the big man said, leaning back against the washbasin with a smirk on his face, as if he had uttered some magic talisman.

Marcus looked at him in utter mystification for a moment, then sat down on the bed while once again, to his own surprise, his brain involuntarily delved into its cavernous treasure trove to bring up a few nuggets. In fact, the ‘black legend’ was one of those issues he had squirreled away with a marker: another example of history turning schizophrenic, two sides to every story. He could imagine which side Jones had heard.

‘A propaganda exercise on behalf of English protestant monarchs from the time of the Spanish Armada onwards, trying to depict all Spaniards as cruel and Spain as a pawn of the devil.’

Jones turned to the minister who now perched like an underfed
bird of prey on the edge of the little armchair and said, ‘What did I tell you, reverend, the professor here’s a smart guy.’

‘I said it was a propaganda exercise. It fitted in with English foreign policy. Philip II had a claim on the English throne and Spain had a rich American empire. By demonising the Spanish the English
legitimised
the piracy of people like Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh.’

The American frowned for a minute then broke into a chortle. ‘That’s good, professor, it really is. They always said the sign of a good academic was a man who could turn history on its head for the hell of it. But I think you know as well as I do that the black legend had more to it than that. That’s why you’re here.’

Marcus played dumb.

‘Come on, professor, the sooner we level with each other here, the sooner we can be best friends. You see we know why you’re here.’

Marcus said nothing, but he was not surprised. He was
beginning
to see Nazreem’s mysterious missing Mary as the source of all trouble. The Texan gave a sigh of mild exasperation as if Marcus was a sulky child: ‘You’re on your way to Guadalupe. That’s why you met up with the gentleman you were with last night. And you’re going there because of the so-called “black Madonna”.’

Marcus shrugged. There was no point in denying the obvious. He needed to know what these men knew, and what they thought they stood to get out of him.

‘It’s not a coincidence you know, the black legend and the black Madonna.’

The door opened again and this time Marcus recognised the drunk from the Torero Bravo, the one who had so loved the ‘
Eenglish
’, poured coffee all over him and insisted on buying him a brandy, the brandy he now realised had been spiked with Rohypnol.

‘Ah, caw-ffee,’ Jones boomed. ‘Thank you, Freddie.’

Marcus looked sceptical at the name. ‘Alfredo,’ said the big Marine, ‘but he prefers to use a proper American name now, don’t you, Freddie?’ The man gave him a thin smile and said, ‘Si señor Jones,’ leaving Marcus less than convinced. Not that he cared what they called him. He couldn’t imagine any chance he would get to pay the man back but if it came up he didn’t want to miss it. Alfredo, aka Freddie, set down the obviously heavy coffee pot, laid out small blue porcelain cups and looked at his large lord and master questioningly as to whether or not he should pour.

‘For you, professor?’ asked Jones.

‘No, thank you,’ said Marcus firmly. ‘I’ve had experience with the sort of drinks he serves.’

Jones shrugged, as if the sarcasm was wasted on him: ‘Suit
yourself
. A lot of people, particularly in the United States today, will say – with some justification, mind you – that the black legend actually refers to a genuine Hispanic sickness of the mind, that Hispanics have a genetic predisposition to this sort of pagan idolatry, just like the black man has towards jazz,’ he laughed.

Marcus watched the Mexican pour coffee for the two Americans.

‘But I’m here to tell you it ain’t true,’ Jones went on. ‘There’s a grain of truth there, all right, just like there is in all those stereotypes, but these two boys have found that Jesus is about a lot more than bells and smells and black Barbie dolls, isn’t that right, Freddie?’

‘
Si señor
, I love Lord Jesus,’ said the re-christened Alfredo,
flashing
gleaming white teeth at Marcus who came close to flinging his coffee cup into them.

But instead, on an impulse he reached for the cafetière and filled the third cup with coffee. If the other two had drunk from the same pot he had to assume there was nothing wrong with it. Maybe the caffeine would clear his head, which was still fuggy from the drug. In any case they seemed to want him awake and listening. But he still did his best to respond with a scowl to the smug smile Alfredo flashed him again before leaving the room.

The Texan leaned towards him conspiratorially making Marcus instinctively draw back.

‘I’m going to tell you something, sir,’ he said. ‘You may have taken against those Mexican boys – and I can understand that, in the
circumstances
– their only order was to bring you here on your own, without causing any harm to your lady friend, and maybe they went a bit too far. If so, maybe that’s my fault. But you have to understand what they were rescued from.’

‘Rescued?’

‘Rescued, sir. Rescued from the most insidious pagan plot known to man.’

Jones took another swig of coffee and refilled his cup. Marcus could see beads of sweat gathering on the man’s nose. He bet he was a reformed drinker. They were always the worst evangelists. ‘You may know – in fact, I’m sure you do – that the little statue your lady
friend is so keen to visit is not the only black Madonna of
Guadalupe
, in fact not even the best known.’

Marcus nodded. ‘There’s one somewhere in the Americas.’

‘There certainly is. In Mexico City.’

‘And what does the Mexican statue have to do with the one here?’

Jones smiled, like a precocious schoolboy asked to recite his favourite lesson.

‘Everything and nothing,’ he announced. ‘It’s not a statue, you see. In fact, it’s not even black – that’s just what they call it – but that don’t stop it being sinister. In fact, that’s part of the plot.’

Marcus gave him just enough of a curious look to encourage him to continue. Not that he needed any encouragement.

‘As always, the legend here involves a simple peasant. Everybody loves a simple peasant. This guy was allegedly an Aztec, although interestingly enough he appears to have been called Juan Diego – I’ll come back to that. Now one day back in 1531 he was walking up a hill near the old Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan – today’s Mexico City, more or less – when he saw a vision. Don’t they all? A shining lady, no less, who asked him, as they invariably do, to tell his bishop to build a chapel to her on that spot.

‘Our peasant did what he was told, but the bishop – allegedly – was a sceptical guy and he told the peasant to get his lady friend to produce a bunch of roses. You with me, so far? The point being, of course, that this was not the season for roses. But hey presto, just like a rabbit from a hat, the lady produces the roses and the peasant wraps them in his cloak, a traditional Aztec garment called a
tilma
, to take them to the bishop. And when he gets there – this is the good bit – not only are the roses fine, but there’s also a full-length picture of the good lady herself on the cloak.’

Pleasing Jones was the last thing Marcus wanted to do, but he still couldn’t avoid a whimsical look of scepticism that clearly delighted the big man.

‘Exactly. Exactly. And that picture, still there today in the basilica built on the spot is sure as hell one piece of holy hokum, a nice old painting on a bit of cloth and proof of the conspiracy.’

‘What conspiracy?’

‘Here’s the rub: that hill that old peasant walked up was known to the Aztecs as Tepeyac and on it, before the Spaniards arrived, was a temple to Tonantzin, the Aztec earth goddess – Tonantzin
even means ‘our venerable mother’ in Nahuatl, which happened to be the language the so-called Virgin Mary spoke to Juan the man. Tonantzin’s symbol is the crescent moon, and guess what the
so-called
Madonna is standing on in the picture? Yep, a crescent moon.

‘Now we come to the name. According to the story this fine lady, speaking Nahuatl remember, used the expression
coatlaxopeuh
.’ He spelled it out for Marcus. ‘Write it down in English letters and it looks like nonsense – but what the Spaniards heard was something that sounded like ‘kwa-tla-hup-ehj’ which they decided was an attempt by the natives to say Guadalupe, which just happened to be where a lot of the conquistadors came from. There ya go: proof
positive
that the Virgin Mary had travelled with them – or proof perfect that people hear what they want to!’