Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Shit smeared the page, but Moz didn’t mind. Having scraped the square of paper clean, he washed it in a fountain and pegged it on his mother’s clothes line to dry in the sun. These days it lived in a small cardboard box under his bed along with three Spanish coins, a plastic Biro that no longer worked and an Opinel knife with a broken blade.

  No one he asked knew how long a mile was.

  Moz forgot to do the jobs his mother gave him and cared so little that he barely noticed her irritation turn from anger to worry. He ate less, slept less and tasted nothing. Eventually he ran out of people to ask. That was when he realized his world was really quite small.

  It was Sidi ould Kasim, the old army corporal who lived on the ground floor, who told Moz he’d been infected. Sat on his wooden stool outside the tiny house in Derb Yassin on the edge of the old Jewish quarter, he scowled at the one-armed child and sipped at a tea glass which contained three mint leaves floating in neat marc, brandy distilled from little more than pips and skin. Everyone in the Mellah knew what his glass contained but no one mentioned it. The Corporal’s temper saw to that.

  Corporal ould Kasim, Malika, Moz’s mother and Moz lived in the same narrow house, where the dark alley of Derb Yassin intersected with an even tighter passage, one too decrepit and dark to merit a name or even appear on a map. The Corporal and his daughter occupied the downstairs while Moz and his mother occupied both of the rooms upstairs and everyone shared the roof as somewhere to dry washing or store furniture so worthless as to be unsellable.

  “I said,” ould Kasim demanded, “who told you about miles anyway?”

  No one told me, Moz wanted to say. I discovered them for myself from a nasrani’s shit scraper, when I was meant to be collecting skhina.

  Skhina were the pots of eggs, meat and vegetables which got baked every Friday for the Yehoudia still living in the Mellah. Moz worked odd days for Maallan Mohammed, a master baker who owned the nearest bread oven and the maallan charged double for Jews.

  This was not a reply Moz could give and besides, feet and miles were just unspecified measurements he’d stumbled over and kept stumbling, as Moz always did until he found his answers.

  “Are you deaf as well as stupid?”

  There were some who said ould Kasim was a police informer and a few who believed he was nosy by instinct. Most just thought he’d never recovered from his wife catching a fever. Because Leila was dead, when something went wrong he hit his daughter instead.

  “He’s not stupid,” Moz’s mother said, coming out to collect her son from where he stood in the street, too afraid to walk past the old Corporal. “He just sees things we don’t…”

  Sidi ould Kasim could not understand why Moz’s mother would not marry him. She was foreign, ill and poor, a German woman who no longer even wrote to her family. Whereas he had a pension from Paris, a city he’d help liberate, and owned a Croix de Guerre as proof. It was a small pension by French standards but more than enough to keep a man living in this city. Certainly enough to ensure that any woman he married would never need to work again.

  All the same, Dido kept refusing and the old man with his stool, filthy jellaba and frayed boots took her refusals badly. He blamed Moz and in this ould Kasim was right. If not for her son Dido would probably have married the Corporal to get away from what her life had become.

  “All he does is dream,” Sidi ould Kasim told the woman. “Dream stupid dreams and make up lies.”

  Moz shook his head.

  “And what’s that he’s got now?”

  “Just a magazine,” Moz protested. “I found it.”

  “American muck,” the Corporal said crossly. “Soon you won’t be any use at all.” Taking the magazine from Moz’s hand, he opened it at random. A half-naked negro with her brat, a man wearing a glass helmet and a boy holding a Molotov cocktail.

  “You shouldn’t let him read this,” he told Dido, tearing that week’s issue of Time in two. And so Moz missed knowing that Apollo had reached the moon and famine had killed thousands in Biafra while violence stalked the slums of Northern Ireland.

  Later, when his mother had gone out to work and ould Kasim was back on his stool, watching boys scrap and small girls hurry home with wild snails for that evening’s soup, Moz clambered over the edge of the roof, dropped onto a pile of crates stacked against the side of their house and jumped from here to the ground. All this he did one-handed.

  Most of his magazine was gone, used to set a fire in the grate of ould Kasim’s kitchen, but what little was left Moz took to a bench in the Jardin Aguedal, working meaning from the letters by the light of a dying sun.

  From where he sat, Moz could see a stork’s nest set like a turret on the city walls. The comforting smell of warm dung rose from two donkeys tethered under a tree behind him. There were other smells warming the air, charcoal from a bread oven and grilled meat, goat probably. He could almost taste the greasy smoke as it drifted from a house on the other side of the gate.

  And then Moz put his hunger aside and turned to the scraps of magazine. There was a wall in China so big it could be seen from space. This wall was in urgent need of repair. Solid objects were not really solid but made from vibrations. Clever people believed more worlds than one might exist. And one day machines might be smarter than humans (although the person writing said this was unlikely).

  Even after he’d laboriously spelt words out one letter at a time, saying them aloud to the darkening sky, many remained hard, but their meaning could sometimes be guessed from simpler words on either side.

  And so the parasite entered his brain and changed everything. It changed how Moz saw life now that he knew nothing was as it seemed and the wall on which the storks nested, his roof and the scraps of torn magazine in his hand were made of spaces between vibrations which moved around each other, attracting and repelling.

  This knowledge ate out the certainties of his life and kept eating until it changed the way things felt beneath his hand. Somehow everything in the Mellah became less solid and more ghostlike than it had been before.

  He talked to a Sufi at the mosque near Dar si Said, where Rue Zitoun el Jedid met an alley that cut through to Rue Zitoun el Kedim. It was a small mosque and not as important as La Koutoubia or the mosque in Quartier Berima, which was nearer but also opposite the Royal Palace.

  The Sufi was one of a circle of old men who sat cross-legged on a bench outside, talking quietly among themselves. It took Moz three weeks to summon the courage to approach the man because Hajj Rahman was the oldest and wisest of those who met each day.

  Like Marrakech’s famous red walls, La Koutoubia and many of the city’s older buildings, the sides of the little mosque were pocked with square holes left by wooden scaffolding from when it was built many years before. The city’s pigeons and doves had been squatting in them ever since.

  “Please…” Moz said.

  The Sufi looked up to see a small boy with an empty sleeve pinned crudely to the front of his jellaba. “What is it?” he demanded.

  The one-armed boy shuffled his feet and tugged at the neck of a threadbare gown. He had flour on his fingers and a chunk of bread bulged from his pocket, neither of which was appropriate for the place in which he found himself. In between shuffling his feet and glancing at the Sufi, the boy seemed to be matching pigeons to their holes in the wall.

  “Are you in trouble?” Boys were sent to him for punishment, mostly by mothers who believed he could change things he could not. “Well?” demanded the Sufi.

  “No more than usual…”

  Hajj Rahman smiled, examining the boy properly for the first time. His hair was dark blond, which was not unusual in the Atlas. He had the sallow skin of a Berber and cheekbones to match, but his eyes were almost black. The Sufi could not remember having seen him before.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Turq.”

  The old man shook his head. “Your name,” he said, “not where your father comes from.”

  “Tha
t’s what people call me,” the boy answered, his voice apologetic.

  “And your father,” the Sufi asked, “does he call you Turk?”

  “No,” said Moz, “he left.”

  “Your mother then.” For a second the man looked thoughtful. “You do have a mother?”

  Moz nodded. “She calls me Moz.”

  “Short for what?”

  “I don’t know,” said the boy. “She’s German,” he added, as if one might explain the other.

  “And your father was Turkish.” Hajj Rahman nodded to himself as everything fell into place. He knew of this boy, whose mother sold majoun, cakes of marijuana, to foreigners on Djemaa el Fna and sometimes went to their beds.

  “Tell me why you’re here,” said the Sufi, but Moz just stood there. A couple of times his mouth opened and then he dropped his eyes and turned away.

  “I said, tell me.”

  “It was a stupid question,” said Moz. “I’m sorry.”

  “Let me be the judge,” ordered the Sufi.

  There are some who believe there are no stupid or unnecessary questions. Hajj Rahman was not one of those. Almost every major question which could be asked had already been answered, either in the Holy Qur’an or the Hadith, the sayings and case law of Islamic wisdom or by the Sufi masters.

  “I’ve been trying to find out about things.”

  “Ah,” said the man, “I see…” Tugging at his beard, Hajj Rahman adjusted his jellaba until he could sit more comfortably. “What things?”

  The Sufi treated the boy’s question with great dignity. A far greater dignity than he would have shown to someone twice the boy’s age.

  Moz gestured to the crowded street and to those wheeling carts or riding past on tiny motorbikes or dodging this traffic, then he included himself and the old man with the white beard.

  “Ah.” Hajj Rahman smiled. “You wish to know about God.”

  “No,” said Moz, as politely as he could. “Mostly I want to know about atoms and how long a mile is.”

  “Whatever they are,” said Hajj Rahman, “the one made the other.” At the sight of the boy’s puzzled frown, the old man gestured that Moz should join him on the bench.

  This the boy did, awkwardly.

  “There are ninety-nine names of God,” explained the Sufi. “The Merciful, the Subtle, the Apparent…These are written. Without knowing it, we all search for the Hundredth Name.”

  Moz didn’t mean to be rude. He was just too surprised to remember to be polite, even to a hajj. “Says who?” he asked.

  “It’s agreed,” said the Sufi. “And everyone is looking, including you.”

  Glancing at the boy, he saw matted hair and broken nails, fingers grimed with dirt and flour and an oversized jellaba that was filthier still. And then he looked beneath this and saw hunger, of a kind not fed by food.

  “This word,” said Moz.

  “Which one?”

  “The name.”

  “Who said it was a word?” Hajj Rahman asked.

  “You did.”

  “No,” said the Sufi. “That’s not what I said at all. It could be a sunset or a perfect number. A pattern of tiles so beautiful that suicides decide to live. Not having found it, how can anyone know what this name might be?”

  “It could be a number?”

  “Of course,” said the Sufi. “It could also be a perfect note, a falling leaf. There are seventy-two paths open to humanity.” He gestured to the mosque beside them. “Beauty is only one of them…You know what writing is?”

  Moz scowled. Of course he knew.

  “Everything is written,” said the Sufi.

  If all things were written, then…“I don’t understand,” said Moz, “everything is decided in advance?”

  “No.” The Sufi shook his head. “Everything is written. All paths and all possibilities, but you should not worry yourself about this.” He smiled at the boy, face thoughtful. “In fact,” he said, “many people do not worry about such things at all.”

  It was only after Moz had thanked the Sufi and left that he realized he still didn’t know the length of a mile.

  CHAPTER 4

  Marrakech, Thursday 7 June

  Prisoner Zero had been tried in his absence. The blond CIA man had been careful to explain that international law allowed this to happen. He’d been tried by a military commission, found guilty and condemned to death, which translated as five thousand milligrams of penthanol, followed by a hundred milligrams of pancuronium bromide.

  In handing him over, the Moroccan government was merely meeting its legal obligations. A military commission had tried him because his attack on the President was deemed an act of war. And his confession had been accepted as sufficient proof of guilt.

  Prisoner Zero knew this. It had already been explained to him by an official from the Interior Ministry, a fat Souari in a crumpled suit who ended his brief visit by asking if Prisoner Zero wished to appeal directly to the King. (On the birth of his son in 2003, Hassan VI had freed 9,459 prisoners and reduced the sentences of another 38,599.)

  Taking Prisoner Zero’s silence as a negative, the official breathed a sigh of relief, introduced the man beside him as an American agent and hammered on the door, demanding that the guard outside let him out of the cell. He didn’t bother to say goodbye to Agent Bilberg or Charlie’s new prisoner.

  Only when the official was gone did Charlie Bilberg introduce himself. The suit Charlie wore was charcoal, but cut from summer-weight Italian wool, and his white shirt had single cuffs which displayed enamel Langley cufflinks. He looked, he hoped, as the new breed of CIA operative was meant to look.

  “Charles Bilberg,” Charlie said, his voice tinged with old Boston. “I’ll be going with you to the airfield.” If he was surprised that the prisoner he’d come to collect was naked and shackled by a length of chain he didn’t let it show.

  Staying in the fetid cell long enough to explain to Prisoner Zero that he was about to be moved, such explanations being part of Langley’s latest policy, Charlie retreated to the governor’s office and suggested Prisoner Zero be hosed down and found an old jellaba, shoes and dark glasses. Only then would he be relieving the governor of his burden.

  So now Charlie sat on the rear seat of a battered Peugeot 306, seven cars back from a prison van with blackened windows, while a silent Moroccan police officer hunched behind the petite taxi’s steering wheel and cast glances at Prisoner Zero in the driver’s mirror.

  “It’s fine,” said Charlie, tugging at the handcuffs which attached the prisoner to his left wrist. “Stop worrying.”

  Getting this job was a good sign. It showed the Agency had faith in his initiative and work skills. The fact Marrakech was a Berber city and he was the only person in the section to speak rudimentary Chleuh, the side effect of a not-so-long-gone summer spent hiking in the High Atlas, was purely coincidental. Charlie Bilberg knew this, he’d been told so by his section head.

  Charlie was hot, the petite taxi lacked anything as sophisticated as air-conditioning, his summer-weight suit was beginning to look as if he’d slept in it and the edginess of the small Moroccan at the wheel was making him nervous. “Look,” said Charlie, turning to the prisoner shackled to his wrist. “Maybe we can do a deal.”

  Since Prisoner Zero had already been condemned to death, this seemed less than likely. Anyway, the prisoner was far too busy concentrating on a Yamaha 125 stalled in the traffic to pay the agent’s words much attention.

  He’d had a dirt bike very like that when he was a kid. An older model, obviously, but not that much older. It seemed there were still sidewalk mechanics in Avenue Houman el Fetouaki who could machine replacement parts for cars and motorbikes most people in the West had forgotten even existed.

  What made this bike interesting was its rider, a boy in a black leather jacket and open-faced Shoei despite the blistering heat and the fact that no one, but no one, in Marrakech ever bothered with helmets or protective clothing.

  The Yamaha wa
s a two-stroke, single cylinder. One of those sit-up-and-beg bikes with long forks and all-terrain tyres, its exhaust tucked beneath the saddle. Originally shipped as 125cc, some kid from the tanneries had obviously rebored the pot and stripped off the mudguards.

  So now, on a good day, the bike whined like a wounded wasp and spat oily smoke. Unfortunately it also overheated, choked and died on a regular basis. Which was how a suicide bomber with enough ex-Soviet C4 wrapped round his waist to take out an armoured van found himself on the approach to a roundabout, frantically trying to kick start a dead engine as his target drove past, police bikes to the front and rear.

  “You listening?” Charlie Bilberg said, glancing at his prisoner. Only Prisoner Zero just kept staring after the rider now disappearing behind them.

  “Guess not,” said the man.

  Up ahead the crawling prison van was being beaten with fists like some recalcitrant donkey. A crowd hammered against its slit windows and twisted at the handles on its rear doors, the noise of their fury lost beneath the frustrated howl of sirens from stalled police bikes and the low thud of a helicopter overhead.

  “Aren’t your people going to do anything about that?”

  Charlie didn’t know the name of the driver who glanced back at this question and smiled, but he knew the man’s rank and it was high enough to have Charlie worried. Brigadiers made for unusual chauffeurs, even at such unusual times.

  “Relax,” said the small man. “This is for show only. I have my own men in the crowd.”

  “Where?” Charlie demanded.

  The Brigadier grinned. “Who do you think’s hammering on that van?” They were now three cars back from the decoy, which actually translated as them, plus another two completely innocent petite taxis, three donkeys and at least five mopeds, a cheap scooter and three cycles: because that was how most people in this overhot and dusty city seemed to travel, on foot or on two wheels. Charlie Bilberg was still trying to work out if private cars were banned inside the walls of the Medina or if no one could afford them.