Israel out of Gaza Strib. Palestine for the Palestinians, it read.
“They cannot spell,” Assad commented as he got into the car.
Wonders never cease. I didn’t think you could, either, Carl thought, but kept it to himself.
He started the car and glanced at his assistant, whose gaze was now firmly fixed on the dashboard. Assad was somewhere very far away.
“Hey, Assad, anyone home?”
His eyes didn’t flinch. “Yes, I am right here, Carl,” he said.
After that, not a word passed between them until they were back at Police HQ.
9
The windows of the little congregation hall were glowing like molten metal. So the cretins were well under way.
He pulled off his coat in the vestibule, greeted the so-called unclean menstruating women who stood listening to the exalted songs of praise from outside, and then entered as discreetly as he could through the double doors.
The meeting had reached the point where excitement mounted toward a climax. He had been there before, several times, and the ritual was always the same. The pastor was standing in his homemade vestments at the altar performing the Comfort, as they called the Eucharist. Shortly, everyone, children and adults alike, would rise on his command and shuffle together, converging in their lily-white robes, heads bowed.
This communion every Thursday evening was the highlight of the week. Here, the congregation received the bread and the wine from the Mother of God, personified in the pastor. Presently, those assembled here in the Mother’s Hall would break into joyous dance and cascading words of praise for the Mother of God, who with the help of the Holy Spirit gave life to the Lord Jesus Christ. Their voices would overflow with the gift of tongues, they would pray for all the unborn children, embrace each other warmly, and recall the sensuality with which the Mother of God had abandoned herself to the Lord, and lots more in the same vein.
It was drivel, all of it, like everything else that went on in here.
He tiptoed quietly to the far end of the room and stood against the wall. People smiled at him devoutly. The smiles told him everyone was welcome here. And in a few moments, when the congregation had gone into raptures, they would offer thanks for his coming to them in his yearning for the Mother of God.
In the meantime, he watched the family he had selected. Mother, father, and five children. Families were seldom smaller in these circles.
The father stood partly hidden behind the two boys, and in front of them the three girls swayed rhythmically from side to side, their long hair untied and flicking with their movement. Foremost among the women stood their mother, with lips parted, eyes closed, and hands loosely holding her breasts. All the women were standing like this. Lost to the world, pitching in the collective consciousness, trembling in the presence of the Mother of God.
The majority of the young women were pregnant. One, seemingly as close to giving birth as was possible, had lactated through her robes, which now were stained with her milk.
The men looked upon these fertile women in rapt submission. Apart from when she was menstruating, a woman’s body was the most hallowed of objects for any disciple of the Mother Church.
In this assembly of fertility worshippers, the adult males stood with hands folded at their crotches, the smaller boys giggling and trying to imitate them, presumably possessing barely the slightest insight into what it was all about. They sang and did as their parents did. The thirty-five people in the congregation were as one. This was the togetherness so elaborately detailed in the Mother’s Decree.
Togetherness in their faith, in their belief in the Mother of God, the very foundation of life itself…He had heard it all until he was sick to the back teeth.
Each sect its own unassailable, unfathomable truth.
He watched Magdalena, the second of the family’s three girls, as the pastor flung bread at the closest members of the congregation and jabbered in tongues.
The girl seemed far away, immersed in thought. Was she thinking of the Eucharist? Or of what she was hiding in the garden at home? Perhaps her mind was on the day they would initiate her as a servant of the Mother, when they would undress her and douse her in fresh sheep’s blood? Or the day they would select a husband for her and sing praise to her womb that it might bear fruit? It was hard to tell. What goes on in the mind of a twelve-year-old girl, anyway? Only she would know. Perhaps she was frightened, and no wonder if she was.
Where he came from, it was the boys who had to pass through initiation rites, obliged to relinquish their free will, hopes, and dreams to the Church. They were the ones who bore the brunt. He remembered it all too well. All too well indeed.
Here, though, it was the girls.
He tried to catch Magdalena’s eye. Perhaps her mind was on whatever it was she was hiding in the garden, after all? Perhaps the thought of this unmentionable secret niggled at forces within her that were stronger than her faith?
Most likely she would be harder to break than her brother. And for that reason, he was as yet uncertain which of them he would choose.
Which one he would kill.
He had waited an hour before breaking into the house, after the family had left for worship and the March sun had settled into the horizon. It had taken him only two minutes to unlatch a window in the main house and wriggle into the bedroom of one of the children.
The room he broke into belonged to the youngest of the girls. That much was immediately obvious to him. Not because it was pink, or because the sofa was strewn with small cushions embroidered with hearts. Quite the opposite. In this room there were no Barbie dolls, or pencils with teddy bears on the ends, or little shoes with ankle straps under the bed. In this room there was absolutely nothing that might be considered to reflect a normal ten-year-old girl’s outlook on either herself or the world around her. The only thing to indicate that the room indeed belonged to the youngest sister was the christening gown on display on the wall. Such was the tradition of the Mother Church. The christening gown was the swaddling cloth of the Mother of God, to be treasured and passed down to the next-born girl, who was obliged to protect the gown with might and main. To brush it gently each Saturday before the hour of rest. To smooth its collar and lace when Easter came.
Fortune would smile upon the girl who treasured this holy cloth the longest. Indeed, not only would she find fortune in life, she would also be blessed with unusual happiness and joy. So it was said.
He went into the father’s study and quickly found what he was looking for. Documents confirming the family’s wealth, the annual appraisal specifying the Mother Church’s assessment of each individual’s place within it, and finally the contact lists that provided him with a new overview of the geographical distribution of the sect, both in Denmark and around the globe.
Since the last time he had struck within this particular movement, approximately one hundred new members had come to the fold in mid-Jutland alone.
It was not a pleasant thought.
Once he had checked all the rooms, he slid out of the window and pushed it back into place. He stared down the garden. Magdalena’s little corner wasn’t a bad spot at all in which to play. There she would be almost unseen from the main house and the rest of the garden.
He looked up at the blackening low-hanging cloud. It would soon be dark. He needed to get a move on.
He knew where to look, otherwise he would never have found it. Magdalena’s hiding place was revealed only by a twig sticking up from the edge of a piece of turf. He smiled when he saw it, then carefully levered up the hand-size clod.