It was the third photograph that made Katie Petrov jerk forward and wrap her arms around her stomach.
“Fuck.”
She fought briefly against the bile that rose in her throat and then gave up the fight, running from her office.
Professor Mayer smoked a cigarette while waiting for the younger woman to return and then smoked another. And when she finally reached for the photograph of Malika it was to turn it face down on Dr. Petrov’s desk.
“This is for you,” she said after Katie reappeared in the doorway, wiping the back of her mouth with one hand. “You may want to read it now.”
The letter was short and polite. It thanked Katie Petrov for agreeing to be a court-appointed psychiatrist, assured her that her fee would be paid in full and told her that her services were no longer required. It was signed by the White House official who had appointed her in the first place.
“What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing,” Petra Mayer assured her. “You did everything exactly as it was meant to be done. Your notes are a model of professionalism.”
“But I haven’t even submitted my report.”
“They know that.” Professor Mayer shook another cigarette from its packet, sat back in her chair and smiled. It was a particularly grim smile. The kind that glared from the back of her more recent books and suggested she knew her readers wouldn’t understand the contents but they should damn well try. “What would it have said?”
“I’m not sure I can tell you,” Katie Petrov said.
The Professor shook her head. “Don’t sulk,” she warned, “it doesn’t suit you.”
“I’m not,” said Katie Petrov, obviously feeling about twelve. “I’m just not sure.”
They were both in part engaged in displacement activity. Professor Mayer knew this and she imagined that Katie knew it as well. Neither one of them had so much as glanced at the down-turned photograph since Katie walked back into the hot little room she’d been given as an office.
“Give me your thoughts,” Petra Mayer suggested.
“This is unattributable?”
The Professor smiled. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“So young,” said Professor Mayer, “and they’ve already got you speaking the language. Yes,” she said, “this is unattributable. So tell me exactly what you think.”
She watched Katie Petrov run through the main points in her head, and when Katie seemed sure she had them in the right order and wasn’t about to make a fool of herself, Professor Mayer listened to Katie count them off aloud, waiting for interruptions that never came.
“So you think he’s sane?”
“Speaking clinically? Not a chance. At least not in any sense I understand. As the Pentagon’s man pointed out, the autistic silences, the self-cutting, the obsessive nakedness and coprophilia can all be faked, but I still think he’s the real thing.”
“And legally?”
“More tricky,” said Katie. “Did Prisoner Zero know the nature and quality of his actions? Difficult to say. And I have to be certain he was incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Not as he is now or was when that journalist met him in Paris, but in Marrakech, that afternoon, when he loaded the gun, pointed it at the President and pulled the trigger.”
“Tough call.”
Katie Petrov leant back, nodded. “Near impossible,” she said, “why else do you think it’s taken me so long not to reach a conclusion?”
Petra Mayer smiled. “Off the record,” she said, “which way were you leaning?”
“Legally, I think he was sane,” said Katie Petrov. “Strictly off the record.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought…” The older woman flipped open her packet of cigarettes, extracted the last and lit it with the stub of the one that had gone before. She had jet lag to make the vanished irritations of PMS feel like a minor cold and was in a space where she was surviving on will power and nicotine alone. The first mouthful of food or sip of alcohol would slam her into oblivion.
Petra Mayer knew her body. It was one of the things most men found frightening about her. “Are you okay to go through the rest of the file?”
“I’m off the case,” Katie said, “why would I want to do that?” It was a real question.
“Because I want to hire you,” said Professor Mayer. “To work with me on what comes next.”
“And what does?”
Petra Mayer shrugged. “Good question,” she said. “Read the file and we’ll begin to work it out.”
On 15 August 1977 Marzaq al-Turq, known also as Moz, was charged with the rape and murder of a girl whose age was put as between thirteen and sixteen, with a coroner’s side note in French that a history of malnutrition would have put her age in the latter bracket. There was no mention in the brief and almost insultingly dismissive report that anorexia would have achieved the same, this not being a problem commonly facing the poor of Marrakech in the late 1970s.
The girl was described as half and half, with neither half being specified. She was not pregnant at the time of her death and her heart, lungs, liver and kidneys were in excellent condition. Her last meal had been vegetables, bread and water. There were no traces of alcohol, hashish or any other drug in her blood.
A long list of injuries matched those in the photograph; that is, all those injuries which could be seen in the original photograph were listed, although there were many more on the list which were not visible.
“Why only one crime scene?”
“I’m sorry?” Professor Mayer glanced up.
“Only one crime-scene shot,” said Katie Petrov. “Where are the others?”
The Professor smiled sadly. “This was Marrakech, 1977. The miracle is that there are any at all.” She thought about that, dragging on the last of her cigarette before stubbing it out in a saucer now filled to overflowing with splayed and twisted filters that looked like nothing so much as extracted bullets.
“In fact,” said Professor Mayer, “the real question is why did somebody bother to take this photograph at all?”
“And you know the answer…” It was not quite a question.
“Read the file,” Professor Mayer said, sitting back.
A sworn statement from an officer in the Marrakchi police stated that Marzaq al-Turq was the only suspect for the murder of Malika, daughter of Corporal Sidi ould Kasim, sometime informant and agent provocateur. The suspect lived in ould Kasim’s house, in a room directly above the girl’s, and a search of that room had revealed that a hole in the floor allowed the occupant to spy on the room below.
A trawl of the Mellah by the police had revealed no clue to the suspect’s current whereabouts and extensive questioning of his known associates had produced so little information about the suspect’s recent activities that this was suspicious in itself. Katie Petrov read this twice, to make sure she understood what was being said.
On the basis of the statement a warrant for the boy’s arrest on sight had been issued by the Marrakchi police and then allowed to gather dust. Both the arrest warrant and the sworn statement were signed by a Major Abbas.
“What do you think?”
“The interest is in the gaps,” said Katie Petrov. “If I got sent this back home I’d have returned it and demanded sight of the real thing. And I’d refuse to start work until the real thing arrived.”
Professor Mayer nodded. “That’s what I’ve done,” she said. “Although I’m not sure how much we’ll get.”
Flicking through the three photographs, Katie forced herself to glance again at the final one. There existed crime-scene shots of Texas lynchings that showed less tissue damage.
“Check the file again,” suggested Petra Mayer.
Three photographs, an arrest warrant, a sworn statement, a tatty strip of fingerprints lifted from a pocket knife found at the crime scene, a crudely drawn map of the wasteland marking where the girl’s body was found and a report from the coroner.
“What
am I missing?” Katie Petrov asked.
“These,” Professor Mayer said, tossing across a cromalin of a second set of fingerprints, each one neatly positioned in a different-coloured box. The cromalin was new and still smelt of chemicals. The fingerprints came from the police HQ in Amsterdam and the name scrawled at the top of the original sheet was Jake Razor.
“Don’t tell me…”
Katie held up the strip of fingerprints lifted from the crime scene in Marrakech and compared them to prints on the page in front of her. She didn’t really need to be told what she would find. The American minimum for matching points was ten, the European standard was set at sixteen.
To Katie’s gaze it looked like the match between Prisoner Zero’s prints, those taken from the Marrakchi knife and the prints for Jake Razor from the Amsterdam drug clinic had at least eighteen points of similarity, maybe more.
“Still think he’s sane?” Professor Mayer asked.
CHAPTER 37
Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20
The jets came in low over the water, three in all. Each one as flat as a manta ray and utterly silent, their uncloaking timed for when the already sinking yacht reached midway along the gorge.
So far as Tris could tell all three were completely transparent, as if made from glass or carved from ice, and they materialized just as the shell of All Tomorrow’s Parties finally tipped on its side, expelling Tris from her doorway in a massive fart of bubbles and river water.
Sweeping low, the jets banked hard and came back on themselves, targeting the river where the yacht had been. And suddenly there was no water and no river and no yacht, just emptiness, which filled as the river roared back in.
Either the jets really didn’t see Tris or they didn’t care. Or else, Tris told herself, as the current carried her rapidly downstream towards some rocks, they simply weren’t looking for a girl with a blue marble in her mouth and pockets full of water.
The jacket was a classic, expensive probably, with an inner lining that clung to her body no matter how oversized the garment looked on the outside and a waist buckle that was busy trying to do itself up. Unfortunately the wrists were still significantly too big for her and the pockets seemed to be expanding to make space for more water.
Tris reached for the buckle.
Once she’d extracted the marble from her mouth and finished coughing up river, she had another go. Only this time, Tris took a hurried breath before dunking herself and tugged hard at the buckle. When the buckle refused to budge, Tris tried pulling the jacket over her head, which would have worked if only the lining didn’t keep shaping itself around her to provide warmth. She was being killed by the thing’s blind and stupid kindness.
“Shit…
“Prick…
“Pudenda…”
The one advantage, probably the only advantage, to being alone in the middle of nowhere was that her grandmother wasn’t around to slap her if she swore. Which was just as well, as Tris was rapidly reaching levels of vocabulary even Doc Joyce didn’t know she possessed.
“Fuck this,” Tris said. And she yanked at the buckle so hard it made her knuckles almost pop with the effort.
“About time.”
Quite how Tris made it over the rocks unscathed she didn’t know until later, when she rolled herself onto a gravel bank under the gaze of broken grey cliffs and realized she hadn’t made it through unscathed at all. One shoulder was a mess of bruises and her left heel had been sliced near the arch, cut open by a stone. Bleached skin gaped on both sides of the cut.
Staring too hard at the wound made Tris feel sick so she stopped looking, pulled herself completely out of the water and sat with her back to the cliff. It was time to work out where she was and relate that to where she should be, which was infiltrating the Forbidden City with the express purpose of killing the Chuang Tzu.
The gravel where Tris sat was built up on the quiet side of the river, while on the other bubbling foam scoured against a rock wall. This was the way it worked, Tris realized, looking upriver towards a different bend and at another bend beyond that, tracking the course she’d taken. The river roared into the bends and threw up gravel on the quiet side, reversing sides when the gorge curved a different way.
Her own bank began fifty paces behind her as a narrow strip of shingle bellied out into the river and then narrowed again to nothing a hundred paces ahead. Walking to safety along the edge of the river was definitely out.
And that was a problem, because the rock-face behind Tris’s back was sheer beyond climbing, even for Tris, and both sides of the gorge seemed to rise endlessly through the charcoal of cliffs to a belt of green before fading into a pale grey that rose like a watercolour wash above the tree line.
She was going to have to go back into the water, but first…Digging a thumbnail into the latex over her hip, Tris tried to rip the top half free from the bottom of her jump suit without messing everything up too much. All that happened was that the material tore and she ended up with an over-long top and a ridiculously low-slung pair of trousers.
Having done what she needed, Tris washed her hands in the river and yanked up her trousers, tying torn strips of latex together at both sides.
It was time to get wet again.
Tris wasn’t sure when she first noticed the light in the sky. It might have been on her second night or the third. Whichever night it was, she’d got hungry enough not to care too much about anything but finding food. At the time Tris was trudging along a strip of shingle and expecting it to end in a return to the cold water. And at the point she realized the gravel was there for good, she was several klicks from where she’d last scrambled ashore and her cut foot was warm enough to hurt; although it would mend soon, her wounds always did.
Warmth and food, these weren’t exactly thoughts, more the things that went through Tris’s head as she climbed a shingle bank and found herself stumbling towards the light across rough grass.
When it moved, Tris froze.
The weapon Doc Joyce had given her was either at the bottom of the river or else broken into its constituent atoms, which seemed more likely. And the knife she usually carried was where she’d left it, on the side in Doc Joyce’s surgery. He’d assured her that the blade would wake every alarm system on Chinese Rocks and he was undoubtedly right. All the same she missed its weight on her belt.
To go forward or to go back?
Tris was still debating this question when the light ambled towards her and the answer became irrelevant. Compared to transparent jets, high-sided gorges and hunger so sharp it hurt, a knee-high stag with luminous antlers counted for less than zero.
Tiny fluorescent bonsai topped its lowered head and one front hoof pawed angrily at the damp grass in open threat, but Tris found it hard to take seriously a stag no higher than her hips, antlers included. Besides, she already knew about the petit juc; they appeared regularly enough in those sickly little feeds about the Emperor.
“Shoo,” said Tris.
When the stag refused to move Tris decided to walk round it, which was how she found herself at the brow of a hill, staring towards a second, far brighter light.
“Now what?”
Rapture was known to be empty except for the three overlapping, interlinked areas of the city itself. No one lived in the walled palace except Chuang Tzu, his eunuchs, guards and servitors. A child of five knew that. The two outer cities looked from the air exactly like a single cell dividing down the middle, assuming both halves of a cell could be square and one half could contain the families of the servitors, the soldiers’ camp followers and the shopkeepers, tradespeople and artisans needed to feed and clothe the inhabitants of the other, which housed the 2022 ambassadors to the Celestial Throne.
Maybe guards had been sent out to see if anyone had survived the crash, except it wasn’t really a crash, more a bad landing, and those jets had obliterated the physical carcass of All Tomorrow’s Parties along with the very water in which it sunk.
Tri
s hated not knowing what was going on. In fact, Tris hated it so much that most of the time she refused to admit to herself this was even a possibility. There were good reasons for that, reasons she studiously avoided, because if you didn’t avoid them then the reasons had won.
“Fuck it,” said Tris. Here she was, almost hallucinating with hunger, having been threatened by some midget stag with lights for antlers and still days away from where she needed to be, and already she was too scared to investigate what would probably turn out to be marsh gas or something equally stupid.
One of the first laws of exploring new worlds proved to be that it is a lot easier to walk uphill in the dark than it is to go down. Tris discovered this at the point her heel skidded on wet moss and she lost her balance, landing with a splash at the bottom of an absurdly short slope.
The light looked no closer but the grass was firm underfoot and the ground rose gently, so Tris set one shaky foot in front of the other and tuned her brain to a place where she’d crashed All Tomorrow’s Parties slap bang in the middle of the imperial pavilions and mowed down the charging bannermen with a laser pistol she discovered at the very last minute, right next to the exit hatch.
Tris had once held a laser pistol.
It was very small and incredibly old. A collector’s item, the owner said. He’d arrived one morning carrying a talking doll for her, a necklace of ever-changing stones for her mother and a knife for her father, even though everyone knew he was long gone and never coming back. Tris had hidden the knife when the grown-ups were talking and neither the man nor her mother ever asked where it went.
In the months to come Tris got a silver book and a bracelet which could answer questions on any subject beginning with a letter between “F” and “L.” And for a while her mother was happy and their shack contained more food than Tris could ever remember seeing.
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