The Black Madonna (5 page)

Marcus Frey stood in the arrivals hall scanning every face that emerged from the sliding doors with scarcely concealed
anticipation
. It had been more than three years since he had last seen Nazreem.

He knew from the newspaper that she had changed little
physically
, except perhaps for that hint of hardness in her eyes that may have been a trick of the light, although it could also have been the hard knocks of the world she lived in and chose not to leave. Nazreem had always had more self-confidence than most women who grew up in such a male-dominated world. But over time the process of attrition was bound to take its toll.

He had no idea how they would react to each other. Her manner on the telephone had been tense, and not just because of the theft from her museum. It was almost as if she was afraid of something. Marcus was worried. On the other hand, he told himself, maybe he was just imagining it. The truth was, he was nervous about seeing her again. Why she was coming to London, he had no idea. He was certainly not vain enough to imagine that it was to see him. There was another question: how was she managing to come to London at all; as far as Marcus knew the Rafah crossing into Egypt was
currently
closed, opened only sporadically to let through emergency supplies, usually in inadequate quantities. The Palestinian
Authority’s
attempt to set up its own embryonic airline had been left literally in ruins by the bombing raids that had ripped up the runway of Gaza City’s short-lived ‘international airport’. The port was blockaded and the Israeli navy patrolled the coast. The occupying army might have gone, but Gaza remained little more than an open prison.

The information displayed on the arrivals board indicated that the EgyptAir flight from Cairo had landed some forty minutes ago
and that the baggage had already been transferred to the arrivals hall. But Marcus was not surprised to be still waiting. In the current international political climate security checks were strict,
particularly
on passengers arriving from the Middle East. Even as he scanned the arrivals board, he could feel the ubiquitous surveillance camera panning across the crowd. It was all in the name of
passenger
safety, but sometimes he felt there was nowhere in Britain
nowadays
that didn’t have a ‘big brother’ looking over your shoulder.

The doors slid open again and a new batch of arrivals emerged, pushing trolleys loaded with heavy bags, blinking at the waiting crowds, looking for family members, men wearing sunglasses indoors, holding message boards with Arabic names written in English, waiting chauffeurs or mini-cab drivers. As a rule Marcus hated airports. But Heathrow Terminal 3 exuded a whiff of spice and the tropics: Saudis and Gulf State Arabs in white djellebahs and checkered keffiyehs, Nigerians and Ghanaians with colourful
floor-length
robes and pill-box African headdresses, Iranian or Afghan women in body-covering black chadors or burkhas with tiny slits for their eyes, Americans and Australians in either sharp suits or bulging out of ill-advised tourist leisurewear, businesslike Japanese tour groups, Indian and Pakistani women in brightly-coloured saris, Sikhs in turbans – although many of them he noted actually belonged to the airport ground staff. As an old colonial boy, he never ceased to be amazed by how multicultural London had become.

And then he caught sight of her: a slight figure bustling in a
businesslike
manner through the ambling crowds of passengers. She looked more like a hassled Western backpacker than a museum curator, with a functional-looking green coat over trousers, a
headscarf
pushed well back so that it was more like a neckerchief; her only luggage a rucksack and a leather bag slung over one shoulder. She saw him immediately.

For the past forty-eight hours Marcus had been trying to imagine this moment, wondering how he would react, and only now realised that he still didn’t know. He beamed, held out his arms and brought them back together and then with an awkwardness he could scarcely believe, held out his hand. Nazreem walked straight towards him and with a wry smile on her face, took it, then stood on tiptoes and pecked him on the cheek.

‘Good to see you,’ she said.

‘You too.’ For an instant their eyes met.

‘Here, let me take that,’ he said, reaching for the rucksack. ‘You travel light. Looks like you’re planning on camping.’

She pushed him back, firmly but still smiling. ‘It’s okay. Thanks, but I can manage. And it’s practical. I don’t like suitcases. You never know what people can put in them.’

‘Right, of course. I hadn’t thought of it like that.’ He had almost forgotten where she had come from. ‘How did you … I mean …?’

‘How did I get out of Gaza? The great open jail?’ She touched the side of her nose, gave him a cynical glance and mimed throwing a shovelful of earth over her shoulder.

‘The tunnels? I thought they were all …’

‘The Israelis tried to bomb them all. The Egyptians fill them in. We dig more. It is not hard to know someone who knows someone, and on the other side it is still Rafah, the same language more or less, the same people more or less … and from Cairo, I still have a French passport, you remember, the one gift from my mother.’

‘Of course.’ He could hardly have forgotten. Had Nazreem
possessed
nothing more than the so-called passport issued by the
Palestinian
Authority, travel would have been a nightmare, an everlasting series of queues for visas, and unwanted interrogations, and that from those countries that professed to look on it kindly.

‘I have a car,’ Marcus said.

‘Good. Then let’s get out of here.’

As they turned towards the exit doors from the terminal making their way to the car park, a dark-haired young man with dark glasses and a beard who had been holding a sign indicating he was a
chauffeur
sent to meet M. Joliet arriving from Tangier obviously decided his charge was no longer coming, and did likewise.

On a high stool at the Costa Coffee bar by the exit a young woman with blonde hair and more stylish sunglasses worn high on her forehead chatting girlishly on her iPhone watched him go. Only the most assiduous observer would have noticed the change in the tone of her conversation.

The traffic meant it took Marcus nearly forty-five minutes to get into central London from Heathrow, complicated by the fact that he was unfamiliar with driving in the metropolis and that he had no idea where they were headed.

‘Just drive,’ Nazreem had said, climbing into his battered
baby-blue
Peugeot 406 in the concrete maze of the Terminal 3 car park. She had insisted on throwing her rucksack onto the back seat on top of Marcus’s piles of papers, sandwich wrappers and empty Lucozade bottles.

‘Where to?’

‘London. Where else?’

Almost anywhere else, Marcus had thought, dismayed by her brusque, almost unfriendly tone. He had imagined taking her back to Oxford, showing her round the ‘city of dreaming spires’, dinner at High Table in All Souls, the other dons taken aback by his
beautiful
exotic companion. But deep down he had known that was just wishful thinking. Nazreem was a woman with a purpose. He would just have to wait for her to share it with him. Or not.

He was not sure if she had ever been to London before. Probably not, he surmised, although she seemed to be paying undue attention to the queues of cars exiting the car park and on the crowded M4 motorway, even for a first-time tourist. London’s traffic was bad but it was not unique.

‘We need to find rooms,’ she had said, beginning to lighten up as they came down off the Westway overpass into the busy Marylebone Road. Marcus noted the plural, but then he had not been making any assumptions. ‘Something cheap, where I can pay cash.’

‘There’s no need …’ Marcus began. If she was going to be a
first-time
tourist in London he could at least afford to put them up
somewhere
decent, not the Savoy or the Dorchester perhaps but not one of the flop houses around Paddington.

‘Somewhere close to the British Museum.’

Marcus nodded. Maybe that was it: this was a business trip, she had a meeting set up and he was just a useful incidental. He didn’t know much about hotels in the area but was pretty sure there was a respectable establishment on Russell Square, a short walk from the museum.

The traffic crawled along the Marylebone Road and through the Euston underpass. A taxi driver leaned out of the window of his black cab and swore vociferously at Marcus when he pulled abruptly across the road to be in the right-turn lane that led down towards the British Museum.

He had come this way before and found it confusing: despite a mixture of names that suggested a series of broad open expanses – Upper Woburn Place, Tavistock Square, Woburn Place, Russell Square – and a volume of traffic that suggested a major
thoroughfare
, the reality was one continuous relatively narrow, clogged road, with the odd patch of green to the side, pedestrians darting
continuously
into the spaces between cars and double-decker buses
relentlessly
elbowing their way through.

The difference was that since the last time Marcus had driven down here the route – the very place names – had acquired a fresh veneer of horror. He could not look at the red double-deckers without thinking of the horrific image of one very similar on this very road, its top ripped off, the buildings around smeared with blood. Thirteen people had died on one bus in the most publicly visible attack on the bloody Thursday in July 2005, when Al Qa’eda had struck at the heart of London. He wondered if Nazreem was even aware of it when she suddenly grabbed his arm, saying: ‘Stop here. This’ll do.’

Marcus looked askance at her and then at the drab red-brick building she was pointing at. It was indeed a hotel, but one that looked as if it had seen better days, although possibly it never had. It was a six-storey, anonymous-looking pile except for a blue neon sign that said Country Hotel. He was about to protest, but Nazreem was already opening the door in the stationary traffic and hoisting her rucksack from the back seat.

Marcus found it surprisingly easy to find a free parking space with a meter until he read its extortionate rates per minute and the reminder that he would also have to pay the £8 daily central London congestion charge. He hurried into the hotel lobby, a dingy place
with a smoky, down-at-heel atmosphere peopled by men in tweed jackets or anoraks and women in sturdy shoes. The concierge shot a shifty glance at him as he came up behind Nazreem.

‘Two rooms was it then, miss? Adjoining okay? Shared facilities,’ with an insinuating smile. Marcus decided the hotel clientele was probably used on an equal basis by out-of-town farming folk and adulterous couples looking for a cheap venue for illicit trysts.

‘That’ll be £40 each for the night then. Cash upfront will do nicely. Oh, and sign the register, would you. As you like.’ It was obviously a pro forma rather than official request.

Marcus managed to edge Nazreem aside and get his wallet out – he was determined to pay if nothing else – and was bemused to see Nazreem fill in the registration forms in the names Marie Mathieu and John West. He said nothing and grabbed her rucksack with one hand, only to put it down again suddenly, surprised by the weight.

‘I take back what I said about you travelling light. What’s in here anyway?’

Nazreem spun round and shot him a dark look. ‘Leave it alone. It’s books. Important ones.’

‘You’ve brought them with you.’

‘Yes, for a friend. At the museum. I told you.’

He was about to say she hadn’t but thought better of it. Nazreem hoisted the rucksack onto her back and gestured at him to follow her towards the lift.

‘Is there a reason why you gave them false names?’ he said as the lift groaned to a halt at the fourth floor. ‘Protecting our modesty?’

Nazreem gave a long, weary sigh and turned to him with a ghost of a smile, the first he had seen on her face since that initial moment of meeting at the airport: ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a reaction to not having to produce identity documents every five minutes.

‘Look, Marcus, you’re right. There’s lots we need to talk about. But just right now, I need to freshen up. A good long soak in the bath to wash the desert sand away.’ She leaned forward and gave him the slightest of pecks on the cheek. ‘Just let me wind down a bit. I’ll knock on your door in …’ she looked at her watch. It was just gone five p.m. ‘… two hours’ time?’

Marcus smiled back and shrugged: ‘Whatever you say. You’re the boss.’

The room was even dingier than the lobby, with peeling wallpaper
in one corner and a low, metal-framed cot with worn sheets. Marcus shook his head and wondered how he was going to pass the time. There was an ancient-looking fourteen-inch television but he couldn’t find the remote control. He heard the lock turn on the other side of the door to the bathroom which the two rooms shared, then the sound of water running. He turned the television on
manually
and pushed buttons to see what was on. There was no cable or satellite, just the five terrestrial channels, and reception on the fifth was fuzzy, but BBC2 was showing highlights from the British Lions’ rugby tour of South Africa. He sat back relatively contentedly to watch.

The room was stifling however and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. There was no air conditioning and after a few minutes, he got up, crossed to the window, pulled the flimsy net curtains aside and opened it. The sound of the street rose to meet him, a dull
cacophony
of traffic noise. The air was not much cooler, but at least it was relatively fresh, if you discounted the exhaust fumes. He leaned out to push the window wide and immediately caught his breath. There on the pavement below him, unmistakable with her mane of thick dark hair now completely uncovered and the preposterous red and green rucksack on her back, was Nazreem climbing into the back of a black taxi.

For a moment Marcus stared in sheer disbelief. He wanted to call down to her, not that he would have been heard, but he realised he had no idea what he would have said. He was literally speechless. The cab pulled out into the crawling traffic, moving at little more than walking pace at best. He could run down the stairs and be out in the street in less time than it would take the cab driver to reach the next corner, barely twenty yards away. But what would be the point? If she wanted to slip away without telling him, there was nothing he could do about it. And despite the rising lump in his throat, he didn’t believe that. If she had not wanted to see him again, there had been no need even to mention that she was coming to the country, let alone ask him to meet her at the airport. No, she would be back and she would explain. If she wanted to.

It was then that he noticed the bearded man with dark glasses on the other side of the street folding up a copy of a newspaper and climbing into a black Mercedes with tinted windows. There was something that for a second seemed disconcertingly familiar. Not
about the car; black Mercedes were common enough, particularly as chauffeured cars, the sort you routinely saw waiting to pick up guests at the airport or outside hotels. Not hotels like this, though.