The Black Madonna Read Online Free PDF

This time, however, it was he who gave way.
    ‘Marcus, I’m glad to hear from you. I really am …’ Her voice tailed away. ‘It’s just that … this is so unexpected, so many things have happened.’
    ‘I know. I know. Terrible, it was in the papers.’
    ‘It was? Where are you calling from?’
    ‘England. Oxford. It was all in The Times . And on the BBC. Terrible, just terrible. Are we really talking about a portrait of …?’
    ‘Not on the phone. I’d like to talk to you, Marcus, I really would, but …’
    ‘Don’t worry about the cost of the phone call. Anyway the college is paying. The book is finished, you know. I owe you.’
    ‘You owe me nothing. But that’s good. I’m glad.’
    ‘But let’s talk about you. How are you, apart from the theft, I mean. The report in the paper was very mysterious, suggested it might even be …’
    ‘NO! Marcus, no! Not now! I will tell you about it, but please not now, not on the phone.’
    ‘Hey, easy does it. You archaeologists aren’t tapping each other’s phones these days, are you?’
    Her reply, when it came, was suffused with the strain of tired exasperation: ‘You don’t understand, Marcus.’
    ‘No, I don’t.’ He was confused. On the one hand, she seemed genuinely pleased he’d called. On the other he could almost feel the tension that he had seen in her face and heard in her voice on the television. In the circumstances, he said the first thing that came into his head: ‘It would be great to see you again, one of these days.’
    There was a silence on the end of the line, a silence that made Marcus swallow hard. He had forgotten that in the world Nazreem inhabited people scorned throwaway lines. Lives were sometimes cheap but words always had meaning.
    ‘It would?’ He knew the question was real, but so was his answer:
    ‘You know it would.’
    That silence again.
    But only because he could not hear Nazreem Hashrawi’s heart pounding on the other end of the line as her eyes flickered around her room, to the slammed desk drawer, to the pile of papers on top,to alight on one card, wedged under a scarab beetle paperweight. She snatched it, scanned it, then threw it down and reached in her right-hand desk drawer to pull out a dog-eared timetable that the cover announced was two years out of date but she hoped would still be valid. They said the past never escaped the present, and they were right, but sometimes the past, even the very recent past, could ride to the rescue of the present. Even in the improbable shape of an old flame that did not need rekindling.
    In distant Oxford, Marcus Frey was struggling with his own particular demon: embarrassment. Awkward silences had always defeated him. He was about to give up and say something he knew would sound stupid like, ‘Well, see you around then’, when all of a sudden Nazreem’s voice returned, clear as a bell and sharp as a sergeant-major.
    ‘Then turn up at Heathrow Airport on Monday to meet flight MS777 from Cairo. I think it gets in around three p.m.’
    ‘What? You’re coming to England? Is there something …?’
    There was a breathless urgency in her reply: ‘Marcus, can you simply, just this once, do as I say? Yes or no?’
    ‘Is something the matter?’
    A pause. ‘Marcus! Can you just be there?’
    ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
    ‘Good. I’m counting on you.’
    The line went dead.
    A sudden rattling noise caused Marcus to look up. The golden stone of Hawksmoor’s towers had turned to grey under the leaden shadow of an oppressive black cloud and fat summer raindrops were bouncing off the windowpane. In the distance there was a peal of thunder. It’s a good thing, he thought to himself, that I’m not superstitious.

7
    Rafah
    There was a thin, faintly antiseptic smell in the still, clammy air, an indication that the minions had done their job well, washing down and swilling away into the grating in the corner every last trace of the blood and urine. The man in the long robes