I sank back into the red velvet couch and nursed my adopted beer waiting for the next abandoned beverage to make itself known. And that's when the guy across the table leaned forward and told me his problem.

"She's gone. I've come so far, but she's gone."

I nodded and glanced at his glass. Quarter full. Not worth my attention. I took another swallow of my second hand beer.

"Gone," he repeated.

"It happens."

"You don't understand."

He was right. I didn't understand. And frankly I didn't want to. Had problems of my own. Couldn't quite put my finger on what exactly these problems were, but I had some, of that I was sure. Beyond not having any money, that is, but like I said, that wasn't a problem. Not in Prague. Not on the cusp of the new Millennium. Not if you didn't mind drinking other people's beer.

"The cage was there, but she wasn't in it."

Cage? Damnit, now he had me interested. I probably shouldn't have been surprised at the direction the conversation had taken, after all we were in the Marquis de Sade. Even so I gave the guy a good long look. Late twenties, skinny, horn-rimmed glasses with coke-bottle lenses. Didn't appear the type to be putting women in cages, but perhaps that depends more on the tastes of the lady involved.

"I don't know if I'll ever find her now."

"When did you last see her?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"I've never seen her, except in sketches. And my dreams."

Never seen her? What was this guy going on about?

"Never seen who?"

"The Black Madonna." He spoke her title in a reverential tone.

The Black Madonna? It seemed absurd but no more than a Latvian Elvis. Unbidden, my mind threw up images of a black woman in a blonde wig singing 'Like a Virgin' from within a go-go girl cage. I had never heard of such an act, but then that wasn't exactly my scene.

So this guy was a desperate fan in search of his idol.

"Maybe I can help you find her. My name is Thomas Twinnings. I'm a private detective."

We shook hands, his grip firmer than I had expected given his bookish appearance. He introduced himself as Kyle Lewiston, a scholar of religious relics. He begged me to begin at once, agreeing immediately to my terms.

"Before I start I'll need the retainer fee up front in dollars," I told him, signaling to Magda, the nineteen year-old barmaid, for two beers.

"I haven't the cash on me. I'd need to visit a bank first."

Magda arrived with the beers. One for me and for my new client. I was feeling like a big shot.

"Please. I want you to begin your investigation at once." He reached into his front pants' pocket and pulled out a couple of folded Czech bank notes. "Here, I have three thousand. Start immediately and it's yours. The rest I'll get for you later today."

I pocketed his money just as Magda brought the beers. Then I took my time, savoring the texture of my virgin beer. Even so I finished well ahead of Lewiston the scholar. He claimed that he hadn't wanted a beer to begin with as he rose hurriedly to his feet.

"It's bad luck to leave an unfinished beer," I insisted as I downed the remainder of his beer.

I slipped Magda a thousand crown note and left before receiving the change. Not that there would be much left after settling up my long running tab, but it was the impression that counted.

Lewiston led the way. He headed left, walking past a tiny park and into a short alley. A passageway led from the alleyway through to Celetna Street. As we stepped out into the street the beers I had recently downed and the sudden open space left me feeling strangely disassociated from my limbs. Were those my feet at the end of these long rickety legs? Eyes down I charted my advance with knees ready to buckle. Were it not for my preoccupation with proper appearances, I'd have almost certainly staggered. Instead I flung my right arm around Mr. Lewiston's scrawny shoulder. He was stronger than he looked, taking my added weight without faltering.

"We are heading to her cage, right?"

"Yes, see? There it is."

I tried to follow his gesture, though that meant taking my gaze from the ground. 'Don't look up' my stomach warned but there was a job to do. My vision took in a circular kiosk from which cigarettes, newspapers and magazines were sold. Just then a school of Italian students swam into view. The wake of their passage buffeted my sense of balance and space and were it not for my grip upon Kyle's shoulders the turbulence might very well have knocked me off my feet. Then the Italians paused in place, surrounding us. Even while hovering in place their gills moved ceaselessly. So too their fore-fins, with which they held themselves in place by means of wide sweeping motions. Indeed were it not for my familiarity of the phenomena I might have been tempted to interpret the extensive fin movement as being a form of communicative gesturing and that of the gills as being equivalent to speech. Such an interpretation would naturally be quite absurd. The school was itself a single organism. Were an individual unit to somehow find itself separated from its fellows it would still maintain contact with the mass mind, its apparent individuality being only illusionary.

Lewiston shook me back to my self. Saliva was dripping from my chin as my digestive system ran through the procedure leading to regurgitation. Pulling a package of paper tissues from my pants' pocket I used one to wipe away the saliva while simultaneously swallowing back the gurgle of stomach acid climbing up my throat, aborting the ejection procedure at the last possible moment.

He pointed again. Evidentially he was indicating the building beyond the newspaper kiosk. I managed to hold my head level, though my vision threatened to tilt away either to the left or the right on neck muscles turned to rubber. I saw that he was indicating the cubist building at the corner of Celetna and Ovocny trh. The Italians clearly recognized this as well. Their group mind apparently took Kyle's finger pointing towards the building as an indication that the cubist building was an object of interest. In a sudden burst of orchestrated flow the entire school darted towards the building and into the bookstore which took up most of the ground floor. And then they were gone and the open street lay deserted and silent. A nearby grilled klobasa salesman stood mute and motionless beneath the umbrella shading his wagon.

I felt an unbearable bubble of recognition build just beneath the epidermis of my conscious mind as I took in the significance of the sign above the bookstore's door. It read: U ?erné Matky Boží.

Though I had lived in the Czech Republic nearly a decade, I had yet to gain more than a rudimentary understanding of the language. Yet the sign begged to be deciphered. I knew that the U indicated At or Near. The word ?erné meant black. Matky was clearly mother, while Boží was a form of the word God. The endings of the words had something to do with esoteric issues of grammar which were well beyond my ability to decode. Then I saw the cage attached to the corner of the building about ten feet above the street. The cage was empty.

Something was just not right.

The cage, the sign, Mr. Lewiston's profession as a scholar of religious relics, his quest for the Black Madonna, all were pieces of the enigma of which I was somehow a part. I felt the unmistakable shudder of recognition presaging an imminent epiphany. The Black Mother of God, the empty cage, the missing stripper. And then the door to the bookstore door flew open , disgorging a profusion of Italian students. It was just the break I needed. This missing person case was turning weird and I was in a hurry to get it over with. Better to solve it now and to get paid for a full three days than to let it stretch out into an actual ongoing investigation. Not that I minded the idea of conducting a real investigation, that wasn't what was bothering me. No, it was my lack of a secretary, an office, or even a telephone that had me feeling a bit insecure. How would it look if my client were to discover just how low my overhead was?

Not to worry, I had just had a brainstorm. I took my arm from around Mr. Lewiston's shoulders, my legs were once more fully my own. I pointed to the cage.

"That's where you expected to find her, right?"

"Well, yes. According to the French author Marie Durand-Lefébvre this site …"

"Save the history lesson for another time. Right now let's just go into this bookstore and see what they can tell us."

"I've already tried that."

"So what did they tell you?"

"Nothing. They said that they didn't know anything about it."

"So we will ask them again. At least I will. It'll probably go better if they don't see you with me." I pointed back to the passage through which we had come. "My friend Gabriel runs an African shop right over there. Tell him I sent you. He'll make you feel at home."

I thought that that would be the end of it, but Lewiston turned and gestured for me to follow him into the passage. The street had come back to life, subtly and pervasively. A troupe of Hare Krishna's wove and spun while chanting their chant and playing bells and tambourines. I got out of their way, ducking into the passage after Lewiston.

"I need to warn you. Yes to warn you. There is something that I must tell you. It was wrong for me to involve you in this. When we first met I had thought that you might be the one I've been told to find, but now I fear that I was mistaken. But it is not yet too late for you to escape the dark fate that awaits."

Great, this was just what I didn't need, a client flirting on the edge of acute paranoia.

"Don't worry yourself over nothing. No mystery here. These statues get taken to be cleaned and restored all the time. I'm just going to go and see what they have to say in the bookstore. You go on into the African shop," I pointed to the door of Gabriel's shop from whose open doors rolled the rhythms of Bob Marley. "Go on."

Lewiston went. I turned and made my way across the street. The inside of the bookstore was much I had imagined in. Guidebooks and art books, with a section of bestsellers in English and German. I took out a hundred crown note and passed it to the counter girl, asking her what she could tell me about the Black Madonna.

"I've been working here a year and I've never seen this madonna thing."

An older woman sitting behind the counter snorted. She was eating a pastry of some sort. Saying something that sounded horribly rude she made a twisted face and then spat on the floor in my general direction. Then said something to the counter girl. Rather shyly the young woman began to translate what had been said.

"It used to be outside in the cage, she says that it was an awful thing. She used the words 'cerna potvora' which means," at this this counter girl paused and a bit of red touched her cheeks, "black woman who is not very nice. And then one day about two years ago it just disappeared. And she says that she is glad that it is gone."

I peeled another hundred from my roll for the old woman but she refused it. I shrugged and turned to leave when the older woman yelled more.

"Enjoy your stay in Prague," was the counter girl's hurried mistranslation. I heard the woman scolding her over the ringing on the chime as I opened the door and left.

I had understood the older woman well enough

"Nech ji na pokoji."

Leave her alone.

There was an entrance to the cubist gallery next to the bookstore. The times on the door said 9:00 - 18:00 and my watch showed the time as quarter to six, but the grating was chained shut. Typical.

Back outside the African shop a woman wrapped deep in a shawl sat under an arch way. Head bowed, all features hidden, she cradled a bundled infant with one arm, her other hand extended, palm up. I stepped over her and continued into Gabriel's shop.

African drums, jewelry and fetishes lined the shelves. Gabriel sat behind the counter drinking a cup of coffee. He looked like he always looks, dreadlocks, black sunglasses, smiling like a Cheshire cat.

"Tomáš, my friend. Good it is to see you."

A quick glance around the small shop showed that Lewiston wasn't in the showroom.

"I sent a client of mine here. You haven't seen him, have you?"

Gabriel began his characteristic chuckle and I knew that sending Lewiston here had been a big mistake.

"Yes Mon, your friend was here. He explained his problem to me, and that was good, cause I under … stand what it is that this man need."

"Now wait a minute! Mr. Lewiston is my client and …"

"And what? The way Kyle tells it, you already squeeze him for three tisic."

Kyle? Trust Gabriel to get on first name basis with my lunch ticket.

"Look, Mr. Lewiston and I have an agreement."

"Who you fool here, Mon? No contract, no agreement. You do no even have office. Look Tomáš, about business, this isn't. You … please, my friend, sit down."

He point to a hand crafted turtle chair, whose raised head on a serpentine neck served as a back rest. I took the seat to find it more comfortable than it appeared, but not by much.

"Tomáši listen to me. You damn good at what you do. But this is no to help some rich mother and father to find their babies who hide in Prague. This matter of one man's spiritual pain and theological confusion. It just no in your region of comprehension."

I wanted to argue with him, but I just wasn't sure what exactly he was talking about.

"But when I find the statue …"

"You never find Her! That what I waste my time to try to tell you, Mon. You never find Her cause you no know how to look."

"Bullshit."

Gabriel only broadened his smile. He pointed outside, towards the bookstore.

"So look and tell me what you see."

What did I see? Not much, what with all the wind chimes and clothes hanging in the way. The beggar was still huddled beneath the archway coddling her young accomplice. Beyond them groups of tourists passed back and forth between the cubist building and my line of sight.

"I don't see anything worth commenting on."

And I didn't. I'd grown more than tired of Gabriel and his game. I got off of the damn turtle and was about to part the curtain of beads that served as the curtain between front room and back when Gabriel put up a restraining arm.

"No Mon, you no want to do that. That be the veil between worlds. You reach through there and things never be the same. Never."

I gave him my cold eyed stare but he may as well have been blind behind his black sunglasses for all the reaction he gave the look.

"Kyle," he called to the backroom. "Come out and talk to your private detective before he start to damage up my merchandise."

Lewiston stepped through the curtain of beads into the showroom. He looked at me guiltily.

"I'm sorry, I was wrong to involve you. Your friend Gabriel has demonstrated that you are clearly not the man I had mistaken you for. That being the case I am no longer in need of your services."

"That's your decision to make, but there is the matter of my retainer. Three hundred dollars cash minus the three thousand crowns you've already paid. I normally wouldn't have even stepped out of the Marquis' without it. Don't forget that you wouldn't have met my 'friend' Gabriel had I not led you to him." Like an idiot, I reminded myself.

I was half expecting the little bookworm to swell his chest and give me an, "And if I don't?" But he didn't. Instead he simply shrugged again.

"Ok, I'll pay. I'll just go to the bank and bring back -'

"No," I corrected him, "we'll go to the bank together, you and me."

I rushed him out of the African shop leaving Gabriel smiling and apparently unperturbed at his place behind the counter. The day outside was noticeably warmer. The gypsy with her baby had moved on. The path we took to the bank ran along the front of the cubist museum.

Lewiston had the gall to ask if I had ever seen the Black Madonna.

"I suppose I must've. But I'm not much for looking up with my neck all stretched out of shape. That's for tourists. So maybe I've seen it, but if so it hasn't exactly stuck in my mind."

Lewiston nodded as though what I said was a confirmation of one of his pet theories.

"That is exactly I had thought. Consider how strange it is that you can't recall this most unique statue. Extravagantly baroque with a gold crown upon her head and the infant Jesus within her lap, she should have been unforgettable in her gilded cage. But instead she was all but invisible. Why?"

I started to explain that about the only landmarks I consciously recognized were a pair of golden arches when I noticed a certain glassy look to eyes. Humor him, I reminded myself.

"I don't know, because she was black?"

"No, her blackness should have made her all that more obvious. It is the building."

The building? We stopped walking and I gave the squat five storied cubist structure a careful study. The building gave the impression of having been formed from a single block of beige sandstone. Large square slabs had been removed to make way for the windows. Each of the windows had side panels, folded inward at a forty-five degree angle as though to artificially exaggerate the illusion of perspective. The fourth story was decorated with stunted columns between windows. The addition of this classical element lent the building an air of the absurd as it stared outward with bulging windows faceted like quartz crystals.

"What is it with this building?" For indeed there was something decided unsettling about the whole structure. The angles were all wrong, not quite cubic at all.

"You have to realize that the original topology has been altered. The Black Madonna was originally attached to a seventeenth century building once located over there." Lewiston pointed to the location of Gabriel's shop. "The house was a grotesque example of the baroque, complete with twin copper cupolas of emerald green. At that time both the stature and the house were known as Our Lady Behind the Grille for, in a very real sense, she and the house were one. An aura emanated from her statue, an aura, which the shape and structure of the house amplified and strengthened."

"How do you know so much about the house?"

"How? One of my ancestors designed it. He belonged to an underground order of Templers. It was no coincidence that the house occupied the same piece of land as had a vast Templers estate centuries earlier. Nor is it a coincidence that it was the Templers who imported the cult of the Black Madonna from Jerusalem to Europe. The patron saint of midwives, she was said to revive stillborn infants long enough for baptism so as to save them from damnation. Such activities were viewed as threatening by members of the orthodoxy, many of whom, though they would never have admitted it publicly, considered the Black Madonna to be demonic."

Lewiston turned his feverish gaze upon me fixing me where I stood before the cubist house. Again the street seemed deserted except for the two of us.

"And how does one go about binding a demon?"

He was asking me? Like I was supposed to know or something. Three hundred US dollars wasn't worth this kind of madness … Well that wasn't exactly true. Three hundred dollars with the exchange rates what they were …

"I don't know, draw a pantagram around it I guess."

"Yes well, that at least was the method we've been led to believe medieval demonologists used. But chalk marks on the floor bind only the most ephemeral of demons. A demon such as the black virgin would never have been confined by such a blatantly two-dimensional method of manipulation. Rather one would need to translate the magical schematic into the material plane."

He pointed accusingly at the hulking cubist house.

"That is your pentagram."

"What? This building?"

"The Black Madonna is a creation of curves and spheres. Imprisoned within a cell attached to this box-like structure, her powers were blocked. Powerless she was bound to this incantation written in stone."

Remember, I told myself, humor him.

"Well yes, I guess I see what you mean. And not imply that this hasn't all been very enlightening, but the banks here are not the most service oriented in the world. Maybe we could continue this part of the tour some other time?"

Lewiston ignored me, sneering at the cubist building before him.

"But now she's free," he said, turning away from the house at last.

My fears concerning banking hours were well justified, for by the time we arrived the bank was closed.

"Look, I have traveler's checks," Lewiston offered.

"They pay traveler's checks in crowns. Getting them changed to dollars is expensive and a pain in the ass. That's why I insist on dollars. If dollars were cheap and easy to get that would be a different story. But they aren't and so it isn't. Get it?"

"Sure I get it." A sudden change came over Lewiston. It was as though everything up until this point had been an act and now he was free to show himself as he truly was. A prick. "Here's the best I can do for you. Find the Black Madonna by tomorrow morning, call me at this number and I'll get you the rest of your fee along with a decent bonus. Otherwise, consider yourself already paid in full."

Damn, no way, I was losing three hundred green. I could see it slipping away.

"Wait. Ok, look traveler's checks sound fine."

"No," he said backing away and raising his hands. "Find her or forget the cash."

"Find who?"

"The Black Mother of God."

"What? The statue? It's in some god-damn museum somewhere."

"Then it should be easy enough for you to find."

And then he turned and left me standing there outside the bank with his hotel's phone number in my hand. Like I said, three hundred green slipping through my fingers. No way I was going to find anything in the museum's bureaucracy. I didn't have enough cash to throw around. And besides, Gabriel was right. I just didn't know how to look, let alone where.

Walking back to the Marquis de Sade I came across the same woman begging with her child. The sky was a long tan dusk. She and her child sat with the shadow of the dying day, faces hidden, the mother's hand palm up. I had to admire her persistence. Not that persistence had ever done me any good, but that didn't mean it shouldn't be rewarded. I handed the woman a hundred crown note which she took with stiff and clumsy fingers.

As I walked away she called out to me.

"?erná Matka Boží ?eká na Vás".

"What?"

I turned back. As she struggled to rise, using a nearby door handle to pull herself to her feet, the bundled infant slipped from her lap landing heavily on the pavement without complaint.

"Poj? sem," she called and then disappeared into the night, heading down a nearby back street.

"WAIT, your baby!" But she was gone from sight.

I looked down at the little bundle as it lay on its side. Off in the distance I heard the woman calling for me to follow, that the patron saint of midwives was waiting. But what was this package lying silent and motionless at my feet? From a neighboring building I heard the sounds of a woman grieving. What was inside the cocoon the she-beggar had been coddling within her lap? I reached down towards the bedding of cloth thinking to find an opening.

Then I remembered Gabriel's grip upon my arm and the words he had spoken.

"No Mon, you no want to do that. That be the veil between worlds. You reach through there and things never be the same. Never."

I pulled my hand away. Maybe it was better not to know what, if anything, lay within the bundle. Listening for the beggar woman's voice I followed in the direction she had gone. Not far from the Marquis de Sade I spied a feminine form slouching within a doorway. Breathless from running I made my to the doorway only to find it occupied not by the beggar but by Magda, the barmaid from the Marquis. She was talking on her mobile phone when I stumbled in and nearly collapsed on her.

"Oh hey. What's up with you Thomas?"

I shook my head, trying to catch my breath, pushing everything away in the you-don't-even-want-to ask motion.

She said something into the phone and laughed with whatever was said in reply.

"Look, um Magda, have you seen …"

Words failed me.

"Thomas, who is it are you looking for?"

I just stared at her for a minute and then glanced back the way I had come, back towards where the bundle lay abandoned. Then I raised my hands in submission.

"I'm looking for the Black Madonna."

Magda looked at me with growing realization animating her gorgeous little nineteen year old face.

"Oh wow, Thomas, I didn't know that was your scene."

"Does that surprise you?"

"No," she answered after a moments pause. "Really it explains a lot of things about you that I just couldn't figure out before."

She ended one call and began another. I heard her say the words ?erna madonna and then she finished the call.

"Come on, its all arranged. I'm taking you to her."

She led me down a side street to a herna with huge plate window. Behind the window the eyes of the clientele roved the streets on the lookout for a figure of authority which apparently I wasn't, because they gave my approach no more than the quickest of glances. Once inside Magda, sweet blonde little Magda, handed me over to a thickset swarthy gentleman with busy hands.

"She say you look for Black Madonna. This true?

I nodded, afraid that saying too much would spoil whatever arrangements Magda had made.

He smiled and pulled a joint out of a pack of cigarettes.

"Here, smoke this, won't need more than a little."

"No, I'm fine."

"You say you look for Black Madonna but won't smoke. Maybe I think you are policie. American are you? DEA, yes?"

"No. Look, all right I'll smoke. There isn't any tobacco in it, is there? I can't smoke tobacco."

"No tobacco. I make it special American style."

I took a deep toke. No tobacco, but there was something. Something like black tar with the taste of graveyard dirt.

"Phooey! Take this shit. I've gotta …"

I had to get out of there. Out through the door, away from the plate glass aquarium where bug-eyed fish tracked my progress unperturbed at my flight. I came to rest on a bench in a tiny park boxed in on three sides by the walls of neighboring buildings.

I spewed my lunch of three borrowed beers. After wiping my mouth with a paper tissue I tried shoving the package of tissues back into my pocket when it suddenly seemed like way too much trouble. Instead I let the package fall gently unhurriedly to the ground. That was when I noticed the beggar woman standing in the shadows. And then I saw the face beneath her shawl, an oval face of sculpted oak, as she stepped forward and gathered me within her wooden arms.

Her embrace was sweeter than life. No pain, no turmoil. Pure eternal peace. I submitted to her gentle ministrations as she pressed me to her breast, her teat worming its way into my mouth. Soothing liquid flowed into my mouth as she folded her arms around me. This was bliss, this suspension within the mass of my mother's flesh, this encapsulation, this entombment. I drank at the flow of liquid that first slowed to a trickle before it thickened and turned to dust. I tried to force the teat from my mouth but what was the point? Was this not but the fulfillment of the love of a mother for its child?

My soul, now purged of sin, should have been free from the fires of damnation. Yet fires still raged, stoked high by sour winds howling down the spongy corridors of my fibrillating lungs. A wall of pressure drove gritty sand into the swollen tissue of my throat.

"Breathe! Mon, you no start to breathe you damn us all!"

Intruding fingers pulled funeral gauze from my mouth. Then one empty chasm docked with another. Warm fetid air flowed into my shrunken lungs, gagging me. I coughed out centuries of dust, my head pounding in agony with the thrashing of my heart. And then I found myself on the ground with Gabriel kneeling above me.

"That black bitch almost drag you down. Tomaší, I tell you to stay out of this business. But no, you always must to touch the wound."

I looked around the park but the Madonna was gone.

"Where is she?"

"Underground, where she belong."

"He's her child now. The Whore's given birth. The sequence has begun." The voice was familiar and I could just barely make out the shape of Lewiston sitting on the bench in the shadows. Still talking crazy. He pulled an envelope out of his jacket pocket.

"Here detective. As per our agreement."

I dragged myself up onto the bench beside him, took the envelope and pocketed it. Right then more than anything else, I needed a beer. My own glass of nice cold fresh from the tap Czech beer. Thankfully the Marquis de Sade was less than 50 meters away and open till two.

But first I had to know.

"You never really were looking for her, were you?" I asked as I reached for the collar of his jacket.

Kyle effortlessly brushed my hand away.

"Don't be a fool, I was sent here to find you by the Prieuré de Sion. You can't hide from who you are. Not anymore."

"Look, I got no problem with taking your money, but at the same time, irregardless of whatever crazy thoughts you might be entertaining, I'm a nobody. Just a third rate drunk living in exile. That's all I am and all I'll ever be." And having said so I set out to prove myself right.