Shouting his insult again, Driss flipped the knife so that he held it by the blade. The man would have seen that, which was the point.
“Come and get me…”
Driss felt no pain and barely any shock, only a determination to take both riders with him if he could. Somewhere inside he must have been afraid, though. He had to be; why else would his lips be reciting prayers?
It was late, the evening call from the mosque of Bab Doukkala was long gone. Fires burned across the city. At least they burnt in the only bit of Marrakech to really matter. Who knew or much cared what happened beyond the walls in Hivernage or Gueliz?
Driss could smell wood smoke and grilling goat in the alley, and something uglier like burning rubber.
That was his last conscious thought. Tyres burning, foreigners beyond the wall, a final declaration of faith…And then the bike was on him in a blaze of light that dragged a blade behind it.
Driss threw, hard as he could, and ducked like his old caid had taught him, rolling out of the motorbike’s way and into a sudden kick to his spine. Vertebrae cracked and Driss crawled away from the pain straight into the path of another boot. There were legs all around him now.
It had been a mistake to let go of his knife.
“Wait!” Climbing from his bike, the off-duty policeman pushed his way through the mob. The figure at their feet was still recognizably human, though the noise issuing from his bloodied mouth was strictly animal.
“Not here,” the man said. “Take him to the rubbish dump.”
Someone tried to make Driss Mahmud walk but broken ankles and cracked vertebrae made this impossible. So instead the mob poured gasoline over him, tied a rope around his ankles and dragged him to the dump beyond the Doukkala Gate, gathering onlookers with every arch and alley corner they navigated.
“It’s not much of a fairy tale.” Petra Mayer looked up from her notes. In front of her was a deposition from Lady Celia Duncalf, née Vere. Now resident in Holland Park, with a flat in St. Germain des Prés and a beach house in the Hamptons, Lady Celia’s main concern seemed to be that her newly married daughter might discover details of the summer her mother spent “working” in Marrakech.
There was an accompanying letter, written in strong script and addressed to Professor Mayer by name. This touched briefly on Lady Celia’s belief that Marzaq al-Turq had died in a fire in Amsterdam and enclosed a photocopy of a note to that effect signed “Jake.” The lettering of the signature was as spindly as Celia’s writing was firm and determined.
“You wrote this,” said Professor Mayer, as she pushed the note across to Prisoner Zero. “How did it feel announcing your own death?”
Only Prisoner Zero ignored her because he was too busy remembering when the tale had been told to him. “A fairy tale” was what Malika called it, in a voice which showed she didn’t quite understand why someone else, someone grown-up, had called it that.
Malika’s father had not yet become enemies with Moz’s mother, so the two of them were still allowed to be friends. Except this was a fairy story about how Malika’s father was really someone else.
“They killed your father?”
“No, stupid.” Malika shook her head in exasperation. “If he was my father I’d be much older.”
“How much?”
The nine-year-old girl thought about it.
“Not sure,” she said. “Almost grown-up probably.”
“That would be weird.”
Malika looked at him.
“If I was me and you were grown-up…” Moz shrugged at the thought and shook out his left arm, feeling blood return to his fingers. The twine that usually bound this arm behind his back was curled on the tiles where Malika had thrown it.
Moz was happy. He was on the roof of the baker’s with Malika, his arm untied and his jellaba discarded in an untidy heap beside the twine snake. All he wore were the shorts his mother insisted he wear beneath his jellaba and Malika’s hat.
Malika sat against a wall opposite. And from where they both sat they could see across the city’s white roofs to La Mosquée, the heart of Marrakech. Everyone in the city steered themselves through the jumble of the Medina by glimpses of La Koutoubia’s seventy-metre-high minaret. It became instinct. A way of triangulating position by how much could be seen of this or that monument, but always with La Koutoubia as the main point.
They were hiding on the roof of the baker’s because Malika was in trouble with ould Kasim again. Quite what for, Moz was unsure; not that it made much difference. She’d still have to go down to face him sometime. That was how their conversation began.
“He’s not my real father, you know,” Malika said suddenly.
“What?”
“That man.” She meant Corporal ould Kasim.
“Then who is?”
“A hippie.”
“They didn’t exist when you were a baby.”
“Yes, they did,” said Malika. “There just weren’t very many of them. He was English.”
The boy raised his eyebrows.
“Rich,” Malika said. “Very rich. He paid gold for the house in Derb Yassin and painted all the rooms black. He was a poet.”
Moz thought of the narrow house his mother now shared in the Mellah with Malika’s father. Two rooms each, split upstairs and down. No running water. No electricity. It wasn’t that he thought Malika was lying, he just didn’t quite understand.
“My real father died,” Malika said. “Of a fever. He got thinner and thinner until he couldn’t even stand up. My mother tried spells and doctors but nothing worked. He didn’t want to live, she said.” Malika’s voice was bleak. “And after she buried him she discovered he’d spent all the money.”
Moz could imagine the rest without being told. Corporal ould Kasim, the man he’d always thought was her father, owned a small café. Only a tiny place between machine shops but it was on Djemaa el Fna, good for tourists, and a woman might work there. Of course, she would need to be married…
“Everything I do is wrong,” said Malika. “The meat’s not good. The bread’s stale. I pay too much for grain. The chickens don’t lay enough for what I feed them.” She did a good imitation of ould Kasim’s dead-eyed stare and the sourness of his words. “I’m going down,” Malika said, resignation in her voice. “Do you want me to tie your arm first?”
It took only a minute for her to loop twine round Moz’s wrist and secure the hand behind his back. Malika knew which knot to use. She’d been untying and retying the restraint for almost two years.
“What happened to the man?”
Malika turned, shading her eyes against the sun. “Which man?”
“The one they caught.”
“Driss. They dragged him to the rubbish heap outside Bab Doukkala and burnt him along with all the others and the police did nothing. Although the new Pasha set a guard over the mound of burnt bodies to stop wise women breaking bits off to work magic.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother told me. She went to watch.”
Years later, in a public library in Amsterdam, Moz discovered that Sultan Mohammed V, newly King of Morocco, was so appalled by the hunting and burning of the traitor Thami al Glaoui’s followers that he refused to eat for seven days, despite the fact that al Glaoui had been responsible for the Sultan’s exile to Madagascar.
Of course, from another book, Moz learnt that al Glaoui was a hero whose clever manipulation of his colonial overlords kept the French out of much of the High Atlas. By then, Moz had been away from Marrakech for so long it never occurred to him that he might one day go back.
CHAPTER 51
Lampedusa, Tuesday 10 July
“Okay,” said Petra Mayer, “I’m just going to switch this on.” She flipped open a silver box about the size of a paperback and tapped its only button. Two diodes lit at the front, one red and one green. The diodes were actually something clever involving complex light-emitting polymer. Compared to the rest of the box they were almost steam dr
iven.
“You know what it is?” Extracting an Italian cigarette from its garish packet, Professor Mayer tapped the silver box.
“A recorder,” said Prisoner Zero.
The Professor and he had an agreement. He talked to her and she pretended to Colonel Borgenicht that he was still locked in silence. It seemed to Prisoner Zero that this arrangement was about to come to an end.
“Not exactly,” said Petra Mayer, fishing for her lighter. “It blocks parabolic mikes and makes bugging near impossible. Everything said remains between the two of us.”
“And the President.”
“Yeah,” agreed Petra Mayer. “Him too.”
“So it’s the three of us,” Prisoner Zero said. He was having a numbers day. It began with a battered road sign on the way down to Calla Madonna. Without thinking, he’d divided the kilometres by eight in his head and multiplied by five to get miles. Then he did it properly, using 8.04672.
The numbers thing had gone on from there really.
Now he and Petra Mayer were on the terrace of a deserted café, staring out over a rocky headland towards the Tunisian coast. Either that, or what the Professor thought was North Africa was really a low bank of cloud spread thin across the horizon.
Professor Mayer sighed. More rested on this than just her friendship with the Newman boy, as she still found herself calling the President, albeit only in her head. She’d had calls from colleagues, calls from enemies. A New York tabloid openly accused her of consorting with traitors, although it used shorter words.
On a secure line the previous night she’d asked President Newman what he wanted and come to the nasty conclusion that he didn’t know. He just wanted everything to be different. It was a very Gene Newman position. The man simply couldn’t understand why Prisoner Zero wouldn’t explain why he took a shot at the President, express remorse and beg for a Presidential pardon.
It obviously wasn’t religion or politics, tabloids notwithstanding. Even the rump of the Republican Party was beginning to admit this. And then there was what the President now called “All that stuff with numbers written in shit.” The director of the Saatchi Gallery in London had labelled its destruction the greatest act of artistic barbarism this century. New Scientist was offering a life subscription to anyone who could fill in the second half of the final line. Although Petra Mayer felt a Nobel Prize was probably more appropriate.
“You’re running out of time,” Professor Mayer said.
“Seventy-six hours,” said Moz, watching a seagull twist for the fifth time in the same thermal. “Four thousand, five hundred and sixty minutes. Two hundred and seventy-three thousand, six hundred seconds.”
Petra Mayer nodded.
Prisoner Zero was pretending to do the maths in his head. And without realizing it, he had his head twisted to one side, the way Jake always did when he was thinking, but no math was required. He had the figures ready and waiting in the way Celia kept a running total of just how much she’d eaten on any day. She could do calories by single day, individually day by day over the course of a week or any permutation of averages.
Prisoner Zero had never asked the woman how she managed it and doubted if Jake even realized it happened, but he could pretty much guarantee it wasn’t by having darkness hollow out a cave in her skull and sit in one corner whispering numbers.
“Coffee?” Petra Mayer suggested.
Moz asked for an espresso without thinking and the coffee came black as night and bitter as memory. Actually, it was perfectly ordinary, if slightly chewy in that Italian way.
“Better?” said Professor Mayer.
“Than what?”
The Professor sighed.
She was the thinnest woman Prisoner Zero had ever seen. So tiny he could see either side of the back of her chrome chair at the same time. All she ever seemed to ingest was coffee and nicotine. He’d intended to ask her about the silver box but ended up nodding to her cigarette.
“Those keep you thin, right?”
“No,” she said. “Being ill keeps me thin. These are just killing me. Of course,” she added, “it doesn’t help that I’m hopelessly addicted.”
“To what?”
What have you got? The small woman waited, then shrugged. “Brando,” she said, “The Wild One.”
Prisoner Zero had seen it dubbed into Dutch, in a fleapit under a strip joint on Warmoesstraat. Jake had snored through the final reel, his head flopped onto Prisoner Zero’s shoulder. All he could remember about the film was the smell of ammonia in a filthy lavatory, a couple of raddled queens arguing about Brando’s beauty and a sullen kid in his late teens smoking badly cured schwag.
That had been him. “You do realize,” said Professor Mayer, “that the Pentagon still wants you dead?”
Prisoner Zero said nothing.
“And the Secretary of Defense is determined to get his way…”
The man in front of her thought about that. “I’m not sure I care,” he said.
“You don’t care?”
“Not really.” Prisoner Zero shook his head. “I’m freezing up.”
“You’re cold?” They were in the shade of a green umbrella that read “Café Lampedusa” and all around them grass was turning brown while tarmac went sticky in the heat. Beyond the headland, the sun had hammered the sea into a sheet of glistening armour.
“It’s over ninety,” she told Prisoner Zero, and another number twisted like a fleck of dust in front of his eyes, flickered and died.
“Inside,” he said. “I’m cold inside.”
Where the darkness waited and the story stood frozen, with Tris hung from her cliff and the Emperor still watching butterflies flicker and die like so many twisting numbers. Prisoner Zero had lost count of the times he’d watched that scene in his head, never quite reaching the end.
“You need another coffee.” Snapping her fingers, Petra Mayer signalled to a thin man hovering in the gloom of the café.
The owner was nervous for a good reason. Nervous, cross and totally unable to do anything to change the situation in which he’d been placed. Professor Mayer wanted to borrow his café. Colonel Borgenicht had explained this to his local liaison officers, who’d explained it to the patron.
Their coffee came in unwashed cups, Prisoner Zero’s thumbprint clearly visible on one side of an absurdly small handle. The patron reused dirty cups to make his protest. He was alone inside the café, minus his usual staff. The tourists were already missing and even his wife had been told to go home. So it was just him, his espresso machine and whatever food his wife had prepared already.
US jeeps locked off the coast road at both ends. Half a dozen marines stood next to each vehicle, the marines flanked by a dozen unhappy-looking carabinieri. Their commander, a colonel on loan from Rome, had tried to claim control of the operation. He’d lost.
“You see that flash?”
A flare of sunlight reflected from a headland to one side of them.
“Telescopic sights,” said Prisoner Zero, sipping his coffee. He’d seen the snipers with their long rifles on his way to the café. A couple of them had stood by a hastily thrown up roadblock, waiting for orders.
Their job was to stop anyone shooting at Prisoner Zero, that was what Colonel Borgenicht had told Petra Mayer. Maybe the marines didn’t do irony. The Colonel certainly seemed to find nothing odd in throwing up a cordon to protect the life of someone his men were scheduled to kill in seventy-five and a half hours.
Four thousand, five hundred and thirty minutes.
Two hundred and seventy-one thousand, eight hundred…The prisoner tried to blink away the darkness and got freefall, except he was roped to a cliff and it was this safety line which brought him up short, spilling numbers from his mouth.
“Shit,” said Petra Mayer, looking at the pile of vomit. “That’s all we need.”
Very carefully, the owner put a glass of water on the table in front of the prisoner and retreated to the safety of inside. Maybe he just wanted to be out of
the afternoon sun.
“Sip it slowly,” Professor Mayer instructed. “But wash your mouth out first.”
Spitting water into the dust, Prisoner Zero swilled out his mouth and spat again. He drank half of what remained in a single gulp, overflow escaping from the sides of his mouth to roll down his chin and splash onto his combats.
“Slowly,” said Petra Mayer.
Colonel Borgenicht had him dressed in desert casuals and canvas combat boots. So many subtexts were backed up behind this decision that Prisoner Zero hadn’t even tried to shuffle his way through them. He was leaving that to Petra Mayer.
She’d been the one doing all the talking since she had Prisoner Zero dug out of his cell, dressed at gunpoint and loaded into a jeep. Only then did she mention that they were going for a picnic. Mostly she’d been talking about the guilt Prisoner Zero must feel for Malika’s death. Quite how the woman had the gall to imagine she knew, Prisoner Zero was uncertain. Only the more he listened, the more certain he was that she did.
It was a weird feeling.
“Those flashes,” Petra Mayer said, watching another spark from a peak of the headland. “They’re camera lenses.”
The prisoner thought about this and decided it made as much sense as anything else. “There must be a lot.”
“Six,” said Petra Mayer. And Prisoner Zero remembered how keen she was that he took the other chair.
“How do you know?” Prisoner Zero demanded.
When Professor Mayer smiled her face crumpled into a map. “Because that’s how many I told the Italian police to let in.”
“They didn’t mind you—?”
Petra Mayer’s laugh was not entirely kind. “I gave them names.”
She might pretend to dislike the marines, but in the end the Professor, Dr. Petrov and the marines were all on the same side. It was, Prisoner Zero reminded himself, as well to remember this.
“What do you want?”
“No,” said Petra Mayer, “that’s not the question.” Picking up a paper napkin, she tore off the strip that read “Café Lampedusa” and twisted it into a tiny rope which she placed neatly beside her saucer. “Displacement,” she added, when she saw Prisoner Zero watching. “Something you seem to have turned into a life’s work.”
Stamping Butterflies Page 38
