The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

Genres: Literary Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

In the ruins of Gaza, the war-torn Palestinian city that has been a metropolis since the time of the Pharaohs, a plucky young female archaeologist has made a remarkable find: possibly the earliest known image of the Virgin Mary, created during her lifetime. But before she can reveal it to the world, it is stolen from her amidst the chaos of an Israeli airstrike. Who has stolen it and why? And what hidden secret does it conceal? 'A truly compelling, globetrotting thriller...Look out, Dan Brown, make way for Millar.' - Jeffery Deaver

Release date: April 19, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 219

Sample

1


Gaza City, present day


The dust hung in the air like a dirty gauze veil across the face of the city, drawn not out of modesty but to hide its ugliness. No matter how much Nazreem Hashrawi loved her work, and of late she had come to love it very much indeed, the business of getting there was never a joy.

She picked her way through the honking horns and concrete rubble of a city that was both Mediterranean and Middle Eastern, part ancient metropolis and part jerry-built refugee camp, negotiated the street vendors with their piles of oranges, lemons, tomatoes and cheap cotton T-shirts, made in China. A residual tang of sea salt, rotting citrus and powdered concrete lingered in the hot heavy air. The streets were always like this nowadays. There was scarcely a building that did not seem to be in the process of construction or demolition. Bombsites and building sites resembled each other.

On the corner of Omar El-Mokhtar Street a clattering khaki truck laden with scaffolding, breeze blocks and leather-faced labourers with Arafat-style keffiyehs and stony eyes nearly sent her sprawling into the gutter, and prompted a shrill blast on the whistle and a sharp rebuke from a hassled-looking traffic policeman. The driver and the workers ignored him, clattering on their way. The people laughed at their own police, the bitter laughter of those who could not take their puppet state seriously, yet knew it was all they had. And perhaps all they were likely to get.

For over 2,000 years Gaza had been one of the most important cities on the Mediterranean, while from the landwards side it was the key to Egypt, a city prized by the Pharaohs before it was captured by the Philistines, ancestors of her own people. The Hebrews’ legends said their hero Samson had broken down its gates, but ended up blind in its jails when his hair was cut and his magical strength failed.

Alexander had laid siege for three months to wrest it from the Persian empire. In Greek and Roman times it was famed as the end of the incense road, from where ships set sail for Athens and Rome. Napoleon had called it the Forward Garrison of Africa and the Gate to Asia.

Yet for all that history, there was precious little to see. The twentieth century had not been kind to Gaza. Her own little museum was a token: a monument to the past in a millennia-old city that was not only unexcavated but where each day new rubble was piled upon old. It had remarkably little to boast, and much of that was borrowed. Or had been until now.

The events of the past week had changed everything. Which was why Nazreem was heading in to work now, on a Friday evening of all times, when the museum was closed. That meant it would be quiet, as quiet as anywhere ever was in overcrowded Gaza, and she would be undisturbed. She had a dossier to prepare, a dossier that could change her entire career and she intended to work through the night if need be.

As she took her keys from her purse and opened the side door into the museum she could hear the last call to evening prayer echoing from the minaret of the Al-Omari mosque, which had once been a crusader church, itself built on the site of an ancient pagan temple. What goes around, comes around, she smiled to herself as she climbed the stairs to the little room that served as a staff kitchen. She was going to need a pot of strong coffee.

Outside, the small dusty square was settling into its familiar sundown routine – the men gathering to smoke and argue over sweet mint tea at the dilapidated corner café, the women retiring indoors to get on with the cooking, the daytime stench of diesel exhaust gradually yielding to odours of grilling lamb and strong tobacco. Then the universe imploded.

She heard the scream first. The unmistakable high-pitched keening of a kerosene-fuelled missile. Then she felt the shock, the earth tremor of impact, a millisecond before the thunderous detonation, the roar of collapsing masonry. And then the human screaming started. A thick plume of dirty, grey-black smoke rose from a side street barely a hundred metres away. In the distance sirens howled against the familiar futile staccato of men firing automatic weapons into the empty sky. And in the midst of it, the building around her erupted, as if in sympathy, into a wail of its own.

Nazreem leapt to her feet in horror. For a second she had stared in shock at the unfolding drama, terrible but almost too familiar to be frightening. Now she was genuinely scared. But not for herself. She pulled open the office door and sprinted the few metres of corridor that led to the stairs. She knew what had happened: the alarms had gone off. The museum was being broken into.

Or rather she fervently hoped it wasn’t: that the shock wave generated by the nearby explosion and collapse of a building had set off the sensors. It was a coincidence, that was all. A coincidence rather than a genuine attempt to break into her museum on the first night in its still brief history that it held a find of significant importance. A find of such potential that they had tried to keep it secret, at least until it could be verified. But rumours spread. And you never knew.

You never knew what was round the next corner, she told herself as she ran into the main gallery. A pulsing red glow from the activated motion detectors played surreally on decapitated heads and fragments of torsos, salvaged stones from Greek and Roman statuary. Her city was as old as civilisation, but had next to nothing to show for it. Until now.

Then she stiffened. A shadow, or a movement in the shadows. In the flickering crimson light it was impossible to tell. The howl from the alarms was deafening, but so was the clamour outside. The police should have been here by now. The police had other things to do; there would be Hamas fighters in the street baying for Israeli blood. The shadow moved again. This time she was sure of it.

Beyond the sarcophagus. The museum’s sole relic of Egyptian mummification – on loan from Cairo – was a marble slab with a few faded hieroglyphs that proclaimed it the last resting place of an official who may or may not once have been the province’s governor. She was almost certain she had seen something move beyond it; between her and the object she wanted more than anything else to protect. She looked about her for a weapon, rejected a priceless ancient Pharaonic flail and settled on a small handheld fire extinguisher. Her sole hope was that whoever had forced entry had no idea there was anyone else in the building. She advanced cautiously, her footsteps masked by the sirens. The gallery beyond was the special exhibition space.

The sarcophagus was just a few feet away. To her left, standing upright against the wall, was the cedar mummy case it had once contained. She shot it a passing glance and saw the shadow emerge from it. Her own scream was lost in the collective cacophony. A man’s hand clamped over her mouth and nose.

The fire extinguisher clattered from her hand, discharging its spume of chemical foam uselessly across the floor. She tried to bite fingers that were smooth but brutal, smelled of stale cigarette smoke and threatened to squeeze the life out of her, while the other hand twisted her long dark hair up into a thick knot. She cursed herself for not wearing her headscarf.

Stumbling forward, gasping for air, she could feel her captor’s breath, hot, warm and sickly sweet on the back of her naked neck. Her arms flailed helplessly against the powerful body pressed against her, earning only a painful blow from a knee to the base of her spine. She felt herself fall forward and sent sprawling onto the chemical-covered floor. She tried to scramble to her feet, her knees even, but her sandals floundered in the slippery white goo spreading across the parquet.

Instinctively she turned her head to try to see her assailant, pushing herself up into a crawl. She saw no more than a glimpse of a tall dark shape before a ferocious kick to the backside sent her sprawling again in agony. Frantic now, she willed her fingers to drag her away. And then he fell on her. A great crushing weight, pinning her to the floor. There was a rip, a sound of cloth tearing, cloth from her own long cotton skirt. The hand that had wound itself back into her hair jerked her head roughly from the floor and a folded strip of cloth covered her eyes, pulled so tightly it hurt her eyeballs, and she felt the knot being tied in with her hair behind her head.

Then, all of a sudden, he was off her. For a moment she almost lost control of herself completely. Was that it? Or was she milliseconds away from the bullet in the back of the head. She was not afraid of death; she had faced death before. But not now, not like this. She shuffled forwards on her knees. A metre, maybe two, maybe more. She would be in the exhibition room by now. Beyond that, no more than half a dozen metres away, was the door to her own office. If she reached that, then maybe … no, it was impossible.

A blow to the small of the back knocked her flat and he was on her again. Not lying this, time, but squatting on her legs. Another rip, and her arms were jerked behind her back, the wrists bound, painfully tight. Another rip and this time she felt her bare thighs exposed, and then she felt what they were exposed to, and realised why he had released her for a second; to open his flies.

Her teeth gritted, her eyes weeping painful tears into the fabric of her own torn clothing. Still uncertain if it would end with a bullet in the head. She felt the same smooth brutal fingers rip away her underwear and force themselves into her. He was on top of her now, the free hand feeling for her breasts, the hot, sweaty weight of his belly on her buttocks and the hard penis pushing, thrusting, penetrating. Penetrating. And then she realised what was happening. Rape was not bad enough. The bastard was sodomising her. Nazreem Hashrawi did the one thing left to her: she screamed with all her might into the unlistening noise-filled night.

And as she did, the blindfold on her eyes slackened almost imperceptibly, just enough for her to glimpse, on the pedestal in the centre of the exhibition room, an ancient serene expression of endless compassion. Christians called her Mater Misericordiae, Mother of Mercy, the Immaculate Virgin. Nazreem’s scream became a howl of bitter rage.




2


Oxford, England


It was a late spring morning and pale sunbeams filtered through the golden stone Gothic window frames of the Senior Common Room along with the subtle scent of new mown grass from a quintessential English lawn. One of the older Fellows rose from his armchair muttering something about a draught and closed the window.

Marcus Frey shook his head in wry resignation: that was All Souls for you. The place was an anomaly, an eccentric anachronism. Officially named the College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed, in commemoration of those who died in the Hundred Years War with France, it was a 500-year-old college that remained substantially true to its origins. Above all, it had never been tempted into the modern folly of lecturing to the young.

All Souls had no students, only a body of worthy academics – some of who bore the title ‘Professor’ while others did not – elected to be Fellows, and whom the ancient founders’ munificence continued to allow to pursue their undistracted studies. Or not, as the case might be, he reflected, watching Dunkin, the elderly Fellow who had closed the window, sink back into his preprandial slumber.

Now approaching his thirty-sixth summer, Frey was one of the younger inmates of this unusual institution. He had arrived at Oxford from his native South Africa as a postgraduate Rhodes Scholar with a bit of a reputation. His doctoral thesis, inspired by growing up under apartheid and then through the dramatic transition to today’s much-hyped ‘Rainbow Nation’ had been a study of how history had been rewritten over those decades, martyrs and terrorists redefined. He had experienced, and described, how the past – because records and memories of it existed only in the present – was actually perpetually in flux. The flux was called history, a shifting science of the subjective. It was controversial but hardly new. Marcus’s favourite quote came from the nineteenth-century satirist Samuel Butler who had written, ‘The only reason God tolerates historians is because they can do the one thing He cannot: alter the past.’ The study of those alterations was called Comparative Historiography, and it was people like Marcus who were making it fashionable.

The thesis had been a success, not just academically, but repackaged for a more populist audience in book form as Nelson Mandela, Saint or Sinner and it had gone on to be a bestseller. He had won his fellowship on the strength of it. As a follow-up he had chosen another of the world’s most intractable subjects and the new book, Promised Land or Stolen Land: Palestine versus Israel, had done almost as well.

That was why he so unexpectedly disturbed the somnolent peace of the All Souls Common Room when he picked up his copy of The Times, turned to the foreign pages and almost immediately spilt his tea. The loud clink of bone china cup against saucer and muted cry of pain as the hot liquid splashed onto his trouser leg earned sharply disapproving glances from the grey heads that surfaced momentarily from the leather armchairs. But he paid them no attention. He could not take his eyes from the page in front of him.

The headline on the news story running along the bottom of the page, in a space normally reserved for more light-hearted or offbeat items read, rather archly: ‘Maybe Mary Goes Missing.’ It was not the report, however, but the photograph next to it that had seized Marcus’s attention: standing amidst rubble on the sun-drenched steps of some Mediterranean building, wearing a yellow headscarf which almost but not quite covered her raven-dark hair, was a striking young woman whom Marcus Frey knew for a fact was not called Mary.

The caption beneath read: ‘Nazreem Hashrawi, curator of the Museum of Palestine in Gaza tells reporters of the theft of a recently discovered, possibly priceless and historically important early Christian artefact.’

But Marcus could not concentrate on the words. His gaze continually drifted back to the photograph of Nazreem. It had been more than five years since he had last seen her and her familiar big dark eyes seemed unusually hard and focused. He was strangely unsurprised to find she had gone back to her childhood home, to Gaza City, even though it was one of the most dangerous places on earth. She had no real alternative. Except of course for the one he might have given her. Nor was he particularly surprised that she had risen to become curator of her own museum, a remarkable achievement for a woman in the male-dominated Muslim world. Nazreem Hashrawi was a formidable young woman.

She had impressed him the first time he saw her, sitting at a café on the edge of Cairo’s bustling Khan el-Khalili market. Marcus had been immersed in on-the-ground research for his book about the Israeli-Palestianian conflict, and had been introduced to her by a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University whom he had asked for assistance. He needed to learn more about what Arabs thought today about the history of the conflict, particularly the 1967 Six-Day War which had been so disastrous for their attempt to eliminate Isreal. But what he also wanted was someone who could act both as a guide and interpreter, preferably with some knowledge of the Palestinian territories. He could not ask for anybody better, the professor had assured him, than Nazreem Pascale Hashrawi. To be sure, she was not studying politics – Marcus reflected that that was not necessarily a bad thing in the circumstances – but a graduate student in the Department of Archaeology. She was bright, multilingual – half-French, though her mother had died in childbirth – with a good command of English, and had been brought up in Gaza City itself. Marcus could not have asked for more.

The work had thrown them together, literally in the end: during an overflight of Sinai their Soviet-made Egyptian Army helicopter had gone out of control and crash-landed. The pilot and co-pilot had died and Hamzi, a photographer along for the ride, had been trapped in the wreckage and had to have a leg amputated. Nazreem and Marcus had been thrown clear but even so he had metal fragments embedded in his leg and was forced to spend several weeks in Cairo’s Ahmed Maher hospital. Nazreem had visited him daily and their relationship developed beyond work so that when he was released he had moved into her apartment, and a few days later, almost to his own surprise, into her bed.

The fact that they had become lovers did not impinge on their working relationship; she continued to be his guide when his research took him to Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, proving not only remarkably knowledgeable but also singularly open-minded about the evolution of a conflict in which the two sides often seemed implacably opposed. He had discussed offering her co-authorship but she had declined, refusing even a dedication, telling him the book would do better under his name alone – she was offering nothing more than context and background, the interpretation was all his – and in any case, she had a career of her own to make.

When he left, as eventually he had to, there were regrets on both sides, promises – sincere but unspecific – to keep in touch. But no tears. Yet to see her now, standing in a Middle Eastern street that even in a still photograph suggested noise, colour, vibrancy, danger, Marcus realised how far their worlds had drifted apart.

Frey lifted his eyes for a moment from the photograph and looked around him at the worn leather armchairs, the stone gargoyles visible through the great Gothic windows, and the human gargoyles dozing beneath their newspapers. Somehow this had become the setting for his career, his world, while she had made her own, just as she had promised she would, in her own, very different world. Marcus had never heard of the Museum of Palestine – it seemed more like an aspiration than an institution given the irredeemably fraught situation in that part of the world – but that only made him think all the more of her.

She had achieved success on her own terms, in her community. Except that now, it seemed, fate had struck her a terrible blow. Marcus knew the world of museum curators: losing an exhibit was a disaster. Losing a major exhibit, and a new find at that, was a catastrophe.

There was no photograph of the find. Marcus wondered if that was because there was none available or because some sub-editor had preferred a photograph of a pretty young woman. Nazreem was undoubtedly as striking as she had ever been even though it was not a particularly flattering picture: there was a hard set to her jaw and her eyes appeared to lack their usual spark. It could have been just the angle, but it gave the impression she had taken the theft badly, personally almost.

According to The Times reporter, the circumstances of the stolen artefact’s discovery indicated it as being of ‘no later than the first century AD’: it had only recently been unearthed, hidden in the foundations of an ancient Christian church, itself only recently discovered after the demolition following an air raid of later buildings erected on the site. It seemed to Marcus as if the reporter was deliberately hedging around the subject of exactly what it was that had been stolen and why it might be so important. It was only towards the end when he reached the line that stated ‘Dr Hashrawi refused to confirm or deny the persistent rumours that have caused such extreme controversy in local religious and archeological circles’ that he let a long, low whistle escape from between his teeth. Ignoring the frowns that greeted it, Marcus drained the remains of his now cold tea and stood up: what the report clearly implied was that Nazreem had found – and lost – one of the most important, semi-legendary items in Christian lore: the only depiction of the Virgin Mary created in her own lifetime.




3


Rafah, southern end of the Gaza Strip


The room was dark, hot, stifling. Unless the door was opened, which it rarely was, no air entered, with the result that after a while it became hard to breathe. Not that that mattered much; no one who had spent much time there had ever left the room alive.

Then the light came on. A harsh white artificial light that flickered a second or two before exploding into sharp white merciless and all-revealing fluorescence. The man by the door, with his hand still on the pull cord that triggered the light, spat on the floor. What air there was in the room was thick, heavy with the smell of bleach and cheap antiseptic which did little to mask the stench of sweat, blood and urine.

The room was lined with concrete breeze blocks and empty save for a metal locker in one corner, an enamel sink with a bucket in it and a small metal table with a plate of surgical instruments. The only other furniture was a single chair, set not next to the table, but about a metre and a half out from the far wall, facing away from it. When occupied, it was normally straddled, backwards, to allow close-up examination of the poor soul suspended, spreadeagled and naked from the manacles fixed to the wall.

The figure had flinched when the light came on, but more out of instinct than awareness. Mercifully he was aware of almost nothing any more. He would in any case not have rejoiced at the company. The man who had entered the room crossed to the bucket, took a wet sponge from it and moistened the face and lips of the prisoner. He did not do so out of kindness, merely to keep the man alive. For the moment. The moisture on the sponge was vinegar. His captors had thought it wryly appropriate.

The figure hanging from the wall grunted and rolled his head away, the vinegar stinging his cracked, torn lips. He would dearly have loved to spit in the face of his tormentor, but even with the acid liquid rubbed across his mouth he had insufficient saliva. His bruised eyelids opened just wide enough for him to perceive the blurred image of a single figure in front of him. Just the routine tormentor. So it was not yet the end. Then, dimly, he made out the sound of a second voice. And changed his mind.

The man with the sponge moved away. Through his injured eyes and a mist of dull persistent pain the prisoner could only make out a blurred figure, dressed head to foot in black, but the voice alone told him the identity of the newcomer: Death himself.

His carer, jailer and torturer – for the man with the sponge performed all three functions as required – could see perfectly well and it did not stop him from being every bit as intimidated by the other presence in the room. He stood back respectfully as the tall, bearded man in his sombre attire came over to inspect the prisoner.

The tall man looked up and down the battered body hanging on the wall, at the array of purple bruises on his arms and legs, where bones had been broken, at the traces of blood that ran down his chest from the razor cuts on his nipples. The sight evoked no pity, only disgust.

The man holding the vinegar sponge said, ‘You have more questions for this dog?’ in a tone that he hoped implied total readiness to do whatever was asked of him. But the tall man shook his head:

‘No. He has told us everything we wanted to know. And more. Far more.’

‘Then it is time to put him out of his misery? I can finish him?’

The tall man turned and regarded his underling with a look that made the man tremble, fearing he had shown even a hint of compassion. That would not have gone down well. He reached for the pistol on the table to show willing.

The tall man raised a hand and hesitated a second, which to the other two living beings in the room seemed like an eternity, and then said simply, ‘Yes.’

The figure hanging from the wall slumped visibly, but in reality it was more out of relief than despair. He knew his body had taken all it could endure.

He was wrong.

‘But not like that,’ the tall man said softly, his hand reaching back to the open box on the table. From it he took a blood-streaked surgical scalpel and handing it to his accomplice, pointed and said: ‘There.’




4


Frey was almost running across the quadrangle, even though he knew it would provoke not only stern looks from his fellow dons but possibly even a rebuke from the Warden. Even so he mounted the stairs two at a time, shooting past the descending portly figure of Nicholas Butterworth, an individual whose only day-to-day relationship with rapid motion involved the operability of quantum mechanics at near-light speed.

Once inside his comfortable if spartanly furnished set of rooms, Frey switched on the small flat-panel television which despite their acquaintance with cutting-edge scientific theory most of his colleagues regarded with little short of wonder, and flicked through the Freeview channels to BBC News 24. It was only when he read the last few words of The Times story that it had occurred to him it might have made the television news at well, if only as a tail piece. But it was not so much the facts that interested Marcus, as the possibility of seeing more of Nazreem.

The featured item when he turned on was a long dreary report on yet another funding crisis in the National Health Service, but using the red interactive button on his remote, Marcus found there was indeed an item on the theft from the Gaza museum. His suspicion that it might have been given the ‘light news’ treatment was confirmed when he hit the button and heard the anchorman’s opening words:

‘And finally, controversy raging amongst clergymen and archaeologists today amid reports that what is believed to be the oldest known image of the Virgin Mary has been found in Gaza City, and then stolen all within the space of a few days.’

The report gave details of how the find was made when contractors clearing debris had come upon remains of an ancient, previously unrecorded Christian church and called in local archaeologists.

And then, all of a sudden, there she was, standing on the steps of a nondescript concrete building amid all the noise and chaos of a typical Middle Eastern street. For a moment Marcus sat spellbound, staring at the face and listening to the voice of the woman that had once meant more to him than anything else: that familiar soft but slightly husky accent that bore indecipherable traces of both French and Arabic, as she told a gaggle of reporters that although the missing artefact had yet to be authenticated its loss was a devastating blow, not just to a new museum struggling to restore a sense of identity to the people of Palestine, but to the whole world of archaeology. Passionate, proud, just the same as ever. But no, not the same. Different: the figure on the television screen was simultaneously harder and more vulnerable than the Nazreem he knew. As if there was somehow unfathomable hurt and repressed fury lurking beneath her tone. And then she was gone again.

Marcus was almost tempted to jiggle with the red button to go back to the beginning of the piece, but he found himself instead listening to a Roman Catholic archbishop described as a ‘senior antiquities expert’: ‘The discovery of an image of Our Lady created in her own lifetime would of course have been a huge blessing for the faithful, presuming of course that it was proved to be authentic,’ this last phrase with a slightly sceptical upward curl of the lips.

‘It has long been believed by many that the first image was created by St Luke himself, painting on the Holy Virgin’s own kitchen table. However, we have unfortunately had no information yet as to the precise nature of this archaeological discovery, which it would seem has almost immediately been tragically lost. Needless to say we must pray for the miracle of its recovery.’

Marcus wasn’t sure but somehow the expression on the face of the man in purple did not exactly suggest a belief in miracles.




5


Nazreem Hashrawi felt like shit. She felt sullied, violated, as if all of a sudden the foundations of her life had collapsed under her, and there was nothing or nobody she could rely on.

Amidst the chaos of the air raid, it had taken six hours from the time the alarms at the museum had started ringing before anyone else had even thought to investigate. By then Nazreem herself was no longer there. When she had come to, bloody and defiled, she had felt sick to her core. She knew what had happened and took what little comfort she could in the knowledge that it could have been worse, much worse. Apart from anything else, she was still alive. She had made her way home, grateful for once for the darkness, and had showered as well as she could with the meagre water supply in her tiny flat.

She knew that in cleansing herself she was removing evidence, but it was not evidence that would ever be used to support a prosecution. The Palestinian police had not the resources for DNA sampling. Even if they had what good would it have done? An arrest for rape was as likely as an agreement over Jerusalem. If the Palestinian Authority was ever to become a government in any real sense of the word, one day their police would have to be respected as such, not just by the Israelis who treated them as potential enemies, but by their own people.

What had happened to her personally was not something she would