Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  He was meant to ask, All right then, what is the question? Prisoner Zero understood that but he just couldn’t be bothered. And anyway, she was going to tell him, it was obvious from her face.

  “Do you regret trying to shoot the President?”

  “I’m not sure,” Prisoner Zero said with a shrug. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Petra Mayer sighed. “The correct answer is ‘Yes, deeply’…We have a problem. And the problem is that the world doesn’t want you dead.”

  Prisoner Zero looked at the small woman who sat opposite, chain-smoking her way through a packet of Italian cigarettes.

  She appeared to be entirely serious.

  “Don’t you get it?” said Professor Mayer. “It would be like shooting Einstein. World opinion won’t let Gene do it, that’s his first problem. The second is, he can’t afford simply to pardon you.”

  Prisoner Zero smiled.

  “What’s funny?” There was irritation in Petra Mayer’s voice. And a low-level fear that she might have missed something important.

  “Who said I wanted pardoning?” asked Prisoner Zero. “You know what I see when I look at you?”

  “Malika?”

  “I see cliffs. Impossibly tall cliffs. And you know where they are?”

  The Professor didn’t.

  “Etched onto the inside of my eyes. Make sense of that if you can.” Reaching out, Prisoner Zero drained the last of his glass of water. “You know what I see if I keep my eyes shut?”

  There was no way she could know, but Prisoner Zero asked anyway because he was talking to himself; which was all anyone ever did, it seemed to him, talk to themselves while half meanings and misunderstandings fed into the minds of those who thought they were listening.

  “I see ice and darkness,” said Prisoner Zero.

  Professor Mayer lit the last of her cigarettes. “Really,” she said. “So what does the darkness see?”

  CHAPTER 52

  Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20

  Many things had changed next morning. The wind, which usually swung Tris and Luca’s sleeping bag through the patterns inherent in the bag using only one retaining rope but containing two people, both fastened by tethers of their own…This wind was gone.

  Better still, the heavy cloud that had clung like guilt to the lip of the cliff was also gone and had taken the snowfall with it. Clean skies spread above Tris and hawks ran thermals in the clear air below.

  It was said that in the old stories skies had been blue rather than pale silver. This idea was odd enough to have caught Tris’s imagination as a child. And she’d spent much of one week trying to come up with reasons why. In the end she’d given up, not because she couldn’t find reasons but because she had better things to do.

  Like find her way from one level to another.

  And now Tris could see from where she hung on the cliff right to the valley floor, and it was very long way. So far indeed that Tris wasn’t sure if what she saw below her was a village, a town or the Forbidden City itself. All she could see was a square smudge of green.

  “What do you reckon?”

  A faint echo was her only answer.

  That was the other change and Tris wasn’t too sure how she felt about this one. In fact, if she hadn’t been so annoyed with Luca she’d probably be crying again. But there was a limit to how much and how often one person could cry and Tris felt she was beyond it.

  All the same…

  She woke cold but not frozen and found herself curled up like a child in the bottom of their makeshift sleeping bag. Curled up and alone. Waking slowly through the dreams of a man who stared out over a huge expanse of beaten metal below the blue of a childish sky.

  Still tired and unquestionably cross, Tris had kicked out one leg, claiming stiffness in her knees but really hoping to hit Luca. Instead of the Baron her bare foot caught the edge of the sleeping bag and she felt it then, the change. A part of her wanted to describe it as a wrongness, but Tris wasn’t sure this was the right word.

  Luca was missing.

  Struggling to her knees inside the bag, Tris reached out and made sure of what she already knew. Luca had gone and she was alone. More than this, he’d left his knife, the marble, his satchel, what remained of the food and their two unused climbing spikes.

  Tris stopped, took a slow look around her and did what she did best.

  Reconstructed events from the facts stacking up inside her mind. It wasn’t intelligence that let her do this, though Tris sometimes told herself that it was. And even Doc Joyce seemed to buy into the idea of her intelligence. At least he pretended he did.

  No, it was coldness. This stacking up of facts, sifting of ideas and synthesis of both into a conclusion was about protection and distance. About protecting herself from the world outside her and keeping her distance from those not drawn like moths to the same cold flame.

  “I’ve been tried,” said a voice in her head. “I’m not interested in overturning the conviction.”

  Tris blinked.

  The man beside the huge expanse of water was standing up, waiting calmly as other men moved towards him, shackling his hands behind his back while a woman looked on.

  “I’ll call Gene,” said the woman. “See what he says.”

  Tris looked from the rope that held the sleeping bag secure to the overhang, then looked at the tether still knotted around her thighs, the one which ran from between her legs, under her padded jacket and up to a steel spike in the rock-face. And finally she looked at the rope she’d been avoiding.

  It was cut very cleanly, probably by the bare blade now resting in the bottom of the sleeping bag. And there was something else: the bag remained sealed along the side Luca had chosen. Which meant…Tris tried to clarify in her head exactly what this meant and rather began to wish she hadn’t.

  Cold and alone, Luca had unzipped the molecules along his edge of the sleeping bag, climbed out to hang in space and then leant across to seal the bag again before cutting himself free and falling to his death.

  He’d sealed the bag to keep Tris safe, to prevent her absent-mindedly kicking the knife or spikes out of the bag or rolling out herself into the night wind to panic as she twisted on her short length of tether.

  Tris could think of half a dozen practical, utterly prosaic reasons why Luca might have done what he did. But she couldn’t think of the reason, not the one that really made sense.

  “Shit,” she said to herself. It was hard to remain furious with someone who’d sacrificed himself to let you live.

  “If that’s what he did,” said the voice in her head.

  “What else?”

  “Despair.”

  “At what?” The girl’s voice was contemptuous.

  “The sheer scale of that descent.”

  Tris shook her head, even as she picked up his satchel and put it over her shoulder. The knife went through her belt, its cold edge rather too close to Tris’s hips for her liking. And then she clambered out of the sleeping bag, yanked down her trousers and pissed into the cold air.

  “It’s time to start,” said the voice.

  “Yes,” Tris said. “I’ve already worked that out.” She took a final look at the silver haze above her where other worlds formed their fractured shell around the distant sun.

  She would have to leave the sleeping bag where it was, because only Luca knew how to turn it from cloak into a bivouac or bag and back again and it was much too cumbersome to carry.

  “Move,” Tris said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

  “Well, do it.”

  Tris was talking to herself again.

  CHAPTER 53

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  Prisoner Zero knew when things went wrong exactly. A few minutes after the early evening call to prayer had finished echoing from the minaret of La Koutoubia, when Idries hurried into Chez Luz, a two-room café off Djemaa el Fna used by the men in Moz’s part of the Mellah, and sat himself opposite Moz
and Malika without being invited.

  “Malika was still alive at this point?”

  Prisoner Zero nodded. “This was before.”

  “And Malika didn’t like Idries?”

  “Nobody liked Idries,” Prisoner Zero said. He was telling Petra Mayer why he decided to carry drugs for Hassan after all.

  “What do you want?” Moz made no attempt to hide his irritation. The rat-faced boy was Hassan’s bagman, little more. These days he might dress like Hassan in a suit cut to the European style, but the garment looked as stupid on Idries as it looked stylish on bagman.

  “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “We?”

  “Hassan,” said Idries quickly. “Hassan’s been waiting.”

  “Then let him wait,” Malika said. She was the only girl in a café full of old men wearing jellabas, a couple of middle-aged men in suits and the two teenaged boys. Only Moz was close enough to see that her hands were trembling.

  “It pays,” said Idries, smiling at the look on the other boy’s face. It was a particularly rat-faced smile, even for Idries. “Hassan said that would interest you.”

  “How much?” said Moz.

  “Depends,” Idries said.

  “On what?” Most conversations with Idries were like this. Unsatisfactory exchanges of minimal amounts of information. Idries spoke out of the corner of his mouth and chain-smoked Gitanes. The result of too many afternoons watching black and white Belmondo films at a cinema behind Boulevard Safi.

  “Whether it’s two of you or one.” Idries glanced at Malika. “It’s in a smart area of the Nouvelle Ville,” he added. “So she can’t dress like that.”

  “What’s wrong with my clothes?” Malika demanded.

  Idries ignored her.

  “How much?” demanded Moz, bringing the discussion back to the thing that mattered. “And what’s the job?”

  “Hassan will tell you,” Idries said. “Meet him in an hour outside the café opposite the market on Mohammed the Fifth.” As an afterthought, Idries turned back to address Malika. “Any chance you own a hijab?”

  The answer was no, but Malika could borrow one. Come to that, she could steal one freshly washed off the wall behind her house and claim a sudden, God-inspired attack of modesty if she got caught. The old crows were quite stupid enough to believe that.

  “Find one,” Idries said, “and wear something that covers your arms.” He stood without offering to pay for the pastries he’d taken from the plate in the centre of their table and threaded his way towards the door, sneering at the old jellaba-clad men.

  Idries made a real point of not looking back.

  “Here,” Moz said, pausing to tear a piece of cake in two and offer half to Malika, “you need to eat.”

  Malika shook her head, her red hair hidden and her face framed by the black folds of a haik. She looked beautiful. A beauty that only highlighted the set of her mouth and the anger in her cat-like eyes as she stalked across Place de Foucauld into Avenue Mohammed V, catching her reflection in the first shop window.

  “Look at me.”

  “You look great,” Moz insisted. Only this time flattery was not enough. And so Malika strode ahead and the boy in the black jeans and weird T-shirt hurried to keep up.

  “It pays,” Moz said.

  Malika snorted. “One of these days,” she said, “Hassan’s going to get you into real trouble.”

  The avenue around them was beginning to fill as those in the Old City came out for the evening. A few tourists hurried passed the edge of Parc Lyautey, heads down, wearing shirts that were too thick, the wrong cut or just too tight for the heat, but mostly this stretch of Mohammed V was filled with Marrakchi in traditional dress.

  Ahead of Malika and Moz bicycles, mopeds and donkey carts streamed through Bab Larissa, scenting the air with burning oil and the sweet smell of animal sweat and dung.

  “Look,” Moz said. “I need to make my peace with Hassan.”

  And Malika finally halted, ignoring the scowls of the old men around her as she touched her fingers to a bruise on Moz’s cheek.

  “What about this?”

  Moz shrugged. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “Hassan’s going to be somebody. You and me…” He looked into the eyes of the girl opposite. “We’re just going to be ourselves. And maybe that’s enough.”

  He understood this now. Jake wasn’t going to be Moz’s ticket out of Marrakech after all, because Moz no longer wanted a way out unless it included Malika. What he wanted walked beside him into Gueliz dressed in a stolen haik, her sandals slapping angrily on the dusty pavement.

  “Idries is irrelevant,” said Moz. “And I didn’t say we should be friends with Hassan. I said we needed a truce.”

  “You said peace.”

  Peace, truce…Moz was about to say, What’s the difference? Then he thought it through. “I meant truce,” he said. “You don’t have to like Hassan. But I want to stop having to avoid him.”

  “You don’t avoid Hassan,” protested Malika.

  Moz looked ashamed. “That’s not true,” he said. “I’ve been avoiding him my whole life.”

  “You came,” said Idries, and Hassan glanced at his bag carrier. It was a slight glance, so quick that neither Moz nor Malika really bothered to wonder what it meant. This was a mistake, although how much of a mistake Moz only realized later and by then it was too late.

  Of course, Hassan might not really have glanced at Idries. Moz might only have imagined this in Amsterdam, when he was digging through all the memories that refused to stay buried.

  “Why would they not come?” said Hassan, his voice arrogant. He nodded abruptly to Moz and would have ignored Malika completely had she not reached forward to feel the lapel of his suit.

  “Nice cloth,” Malika said, managing to make it sound like an insult.

  Moz laughed.

  This was the point Hassan should have thrown them out, stood up and punched Moz or said something cutting, but he only sat back in his chair and pulled out a wallet, counting ten-dollar bills onto the table. The total got to forty dollars before Hassan shrugged, casually added one more to the pile and slipped his wallet back inside his jacket.

  “Fifty dollars,” he said.

  It was an incredible sum in a city where an entire family could work for a month and earn nowhere near that.

  “Half now,” said Hassan, “and half later.” Pulling a small cigarillo from a leather case, he waited for Idries to produce a lighter. It was brass overlaid with chrome, the name of some Essaouria nightclub in enamel along one side. “We can meet at Café Lux afterwards.”

  “After what?” Malika demanded.

  “After you deliver this.” Hassan lifted a plastic bag onto the café table. “I’m glad you came,” he added, sounding almost sincere. “I would have been very unhappy if you hadn’t.”

  “Tough shit,” said Malika, but she said this under her breath.

  “What’s in it?” That was Moz.

  Idries snorted. “You don’t want to know.”

  “We do,” said Malika, “don’t we?” She looked at Moz, who scowled, although it was at Hassan for raising his eyebrows.

  “Anyway,” Idries said. “Kif isn’t drugs.” He sounded amused at the idea. “And you don’t have to go far.”

  “Where?” said Moz and Hassan named a café on Rue Arabe about fifteen minutes south of where they sat.

  “Malika can be your sister,” Idries suggested. His grin when he said this was less than kind.

  “Not me,” Malika said. “He wants to take it, he can take it…” There was a scrape as she pushed back her chair. “I’m going home.”

  “You can keep all the money,” said Moz, her gaze stripping all the bravado from his offer. “Please,” Moz added.

  Malika sighed. “Who do we ask for?”

  “You don’t ask for anyone,” said Hassan. “You leave this bag under a table at the back, near the left-hand corner.” He held up his left hand, so they both understo
od which one he meant. “A friend will collect it after you’re gone.”

  “And if someone’s using the table?”

  “The table will be free,” Hassan said. He sounded very certain about this…

  Malika carried the plastic bag in one hand, swinging it gently so it looked like shopping. And they talked as they walked, about the things Malika and Moz always talked about: the Mellah, Malika’s mother, how weird it must be to have a normal family like Hassan’s.

  Somewhere after the Church of St. Anne and before the green wrought-iron railings and neat flowerbeds of the Jardin de Hartai they passed two police cars parked in a side street outside a half-built hotel, windows down, their occupants listening to what sounded like static on a radio.

  Café Impérial was where Hassan said it would be, between two of the new hotels and backing onto a slightly tatty French-built office block, and the table was empty. “I’ll do it,” Malika said. “They’ll notice you.”

  No one stopped her from entering and few noticed when she left. No one came to collect the bag. The next person to use the table kicked it under a bench. He was still sitting there when it exploded.

  “I see,” said Petra Mayer. In front of her, fanned out on Prisoner Zero’s floor, were the contents of the Marrakchi police file. The worst of the Cimetière Européen crime-scene photographs showed an adolescent girl, the marks of a swollen ligature around her neck. Slash marks on the torso had been matched to a lock knife found at the scene. The fingerprints on the handle of the knife were those of the man in front of her.

  Petra Mayer reread the arrest warrant, although she already knew it by heart. It charged Marzaq al-Turq with the rape and murder of Malika, daughter of Sidi ould Kasim.

  “And the knife was the one you’d used to cut her ropes. That’s why your fingerprints are on it.”