Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Why?” Major Abbas asked.

  “I use the wrong hand,” Moz said, his voice matter-of-fact. “All the time. Mostly to eat. You know, my dirty hand.”

  Everyone Major Abbas knew ate with their right hand only. And in Paris it had been a shock to see his French friends, people he regarded fondly, tearing at their baguettes with both hands and lifting fruit from bowls with whichever hand was nearest. All the same…

  “Your mother does this?”

  The boy shook his head. “Malika’s father.”

  “But your mother lets him?”

  “He owns the house,” said Moz, as if that explained everything and perhaps it did.

  “So,” Hassan said later. “You’re friends with policemen now.”

  Moz shrugged.

  “Tell me,” insisted Hassan. “What were you talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He walked you across Djemaa el Fna and bought you cakes for nothing?” There was a slyness to his voice Moz hadn’t heard before.

  Idries sniggered.

  “I’m going home,” Moz said firmly.

  “What a good idea,” said Hassan. “We’ll come with you.”

  Twisting to check his escape route, Moz spied the two Algerian boys leaning against the wall about ten paces behind him. Both were smiling. He knew what was coming and was obscurely glad that Malika was not there to see it.

  “Catch me,” Moz said, jinking around Hassan and cutting down an alley so tight a toddler could have touched both sides at once.

  They did.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lampedusa, Saturday 30 June

  The office was tiny, stacked with boxes. On one wall a work roster gave duties to Antonio, Marc and Gus, bar staff who’d long since been sent back to their villages. A marine artificer had bolted a steel grill across the room’s only window, reducing the daylight to baroque shards which ran across the top of a desk as if escaping from a painting.

  An electric fan on a small filing cabinet swung back and forth. Every time it reached hard right it glitched, clattering noisily as it stripped plastic gears, before beginning to swing back again. Prisoner Zero would have liked to fix it but both his feet were shackled to a chair.

  “Have they been treating you well?”

  Prisoner Zero looked at the redhead in the doorway and then flicked his gaze to the marine and the suit behind. The suit wore black Armani, with a red tie and white shirt. His shoes were expensive but dusty, the side effect of not being senior enough to rate his own jeep. On his little finger was a graduation ring. It looked expensive.

  “Doesn’t he talk?”

  The suit’s question was addressed to his military escort. The man was a civilian so Master Sergeant Saez didn’t bother to answer.

  “I’m Katie.”

  Stepping towards the chair, Dr. Petrov held out one hand and waited. When the prisoner didn’t take it, she kept her hand extended, apparently counting off the seconds behind watchful green eyes. At a point known only to herself, Katie Petrov dropped her hand and nodded.

  “I’m Bill Logan,” said the suit. “And this is Dr. Petrov. She’ll be asking you some questions.”

  “Everything you tell me will be in confidence.” Katie’s voice was firm and the glance she gave Bill Logan was heavy with meaning. “I want you to know that.”

  “I’ll leave you with him then.”

  “That would probably be a good idea.” Turning to the desk, Katie picked up a manila file and flicked it open. Inside was a single piece of lined paper, blank on both sides. She usually used a Psion Organiser to record her notes and then downloaded them to her laptop, but this was different.

  “Undo the shackles,” she told the marine. “And then let me have the room to myself.”

  “The shackles are to stay on, ma’am,” Master Sergeant Saez said. “And I’m to stay here.”

  “Not a chance,” said Katie Petrov. “I don’t talk to patients in front of third parties. It’s unethical.”

  “For your own safety, ma’am.”

  The psychiatrist smiled. “I have a black belt in jitsu,” she said. “I work out for two hours a day. Look at him…” She nodded at Prisoner Zero who sat, head down, staring at dust that danced in the shards of sunlight, his body encased in a filthy orange jump suit. “Do you really think he’s a threat?”

  “He tried to kill the President.”

  “With an antique rifle,” said Katie Petrov, “from almost half a mile away. And I’m not the President, thank God.”

  “All the same,” said the Master Sergeant. “My orders are to stay with the prisoner.”

  “Really?”

  Master Sergeant Saez nodded.

  “Then we have a problem,” Katie told Bill Logan. Shutting her file with a snap, Katie ignored the marine, nodded politely to Prisoner Zero and prepared to vacate the room designated her office.

  “Where are you going?” Bill Logan was media coordinator for this operation, his temporary release from CavourCohen Media coming after a brief call to Max Cohen from someone unspecified at the Pentagon.

  “Where do you think?” Katie said. “If you can fly me out to the middle of nowhere then presumably you can fly me back again.”

  She eyeballed the man in the black suit, gaze firm. She knew exactly who Logan was and how he’d made his reputation, but since the man hadn’t bothered to introduce himself properly Katie chose to think of him in the abstract, as a hanging for expensive clothes and limited outlooks. Doing this made it easier not to feel worried by her decision.

  “We’ll get another psychiatrist,” said Bill Logan. “That won’t be hard. And you’re only here because you went to college with the President’s son. In fact, we can make a virtue of this. Announce that you felt compromised by your knowledge of the First Family. Unable to assess the maniac who tried to kill—”

  “Except that’s not what I’ll be announcing,” Katie said, “is it?” She put her folder back on the desk and turned to face the man. Without even realizing, she fell into a combat pose. A fact not missed by Master Sergeant Saez, who took a second look at her, reappraising.

  “What I’ll announce,” she said, “is that I turned down this assignment because you refused to give me proper access to Prisoner Zero. A man who is quite obviously drugged. To this statement, I’ll add a rider. That, in my personal opinion, flying me out to this godforsaken island was nothing more than a cynical media exercise by the Secretary of Defense designed to keep the White House quiet…”

  “Okay,” said Katie. Picking up her pencil, she wrote “30 June” at the top of her piece of paper, then added “Isola di Lampedusa” and “Session One.”

  If in doubt begin at the beginning.

  Under that, Katie wrote “Question One.”

  Beyond the window, marines continued to crunch their way across gravel, coming to the end of a path and then starting back, their swivel a rasp of stone against metal. The sound reminded Katie of her childhood. Not that she’d spent her childhood on military bases. Her father had owned a gold Dunhill lighter, the kind with a revolving pillar built into one corner. Turning the pillar made steel grind against flint to create the spark.

  She’d loved that lighter.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” Katie Petrov said.

  It was the question few clients could resist. Occasionally some patient would throw a tantrum and flatly refuse to answer, which was an answer in itself. And often Katie found herself explaining that just because something bad had happened didn’t make it significant. As for the number of times ex-lovers had lain there in the dark, still burning from the afterglow, to paint the night with their when I was young…

  Looking up from her sheet of paper, Katie found the prisoner staring at her. For a second she thought Prisoner Zero was looking at her breasts and then she realized, even as she blushed and grew angry with herself for blushing, that it wasn’t her breasts which interested him but the 2b pencil in her hand.

  “You want
this?”

  The pencil was entirely black, little more than a stub, with “Calvin Klein” written in script down one side and a black rubber at the top, slightly chewed.

  “From an old boyfriend,” she said. “A fashion journalist. We didn’t last long.” Men talked about themselves when they felt insecure, women when they were at their most confident. And Katie worked on the basis of information exchange; not everyone in the profession approved but it worked for her.

  Prisoner Zero’s eyes never left her hand, his gaze animal and hard. Working in prisons had taught Katie that almost anything could be used as a weapon. This was why her pencil was short and blunt. Too short really to hold properly, which made the thing too short to be used as a weapon. At least Katie hoped so.

  “You want it?”

  The man nodded.

  “Then say so.”

  Prisoner Zero transferred his gaze from her hand to her face. He looked younger than she’d been led to expect and strangely vulnerable now that his beard and tangled hair were gone. It was hard to reconcile him with the bug-eyed fanatic featured on the front of every paper.

  “Say yes,” said Katie, “and you can have it. At least until the end of the session.”

  The man simply stared at her.

  “I know you understand.”

  Holding out his hand, the man waited. And Katie had to force herself not to gasp at the lacerations across his palm.

  “They did that to you?”

  Was that a shake of his head? Katie Petrov wasn’t sure. All she knew was that the man’s hand remained out and his gaze had returned to the pencil.

  “Okay,” she said, “why not?”

  Prisoner Zero tore the pencil’s eraser from its sheath with his teeth and bit flat its hollow black tube. Then he ripped open the front of his orange jump suit, slid his arms from the sleeves and began to drop his trousers.

  “What are you—?” Katie was about to hit the attack alarm she’d been given and which hung on a paper ribbon around her neck, when Prisoner Zero sat down again and began to use the flattened metal tube to scratch rapid lines into his thighs, blood beading the middle of the lines where his improvised blade dug deepest.

  When the map was finished, Prisoner Zero flipped round the pencil, sucked blood from the edge of the metal and then used the pencil’s point to sketch an identical map on the inside of his jump suit. Only then did he stand up, almost as if nothing had happened, and shuffle his arms back into the sleeves.

  “Put it on the desk,” said Katie. “If you’ve finished with it.”

  So he did, placing the pencil parallel to the edge, with its blunt lead just touching the corner of the manila file. This was to stop the pencil from rolling away. The ripped-free eraser he balanced on end just below the point of the pencil, like the dot on an exclamation mark.

  Katie now knew three things about Prisoner Zero. He manifested self-destructive tendencies, he was anal, in the broader, less accurate sense of being meticulous and he was uncircumcised, which was definitely culturally counter-intuitive. He was also either unashamed of his nakedness or oblivious, because nothing in his recent behaviour suggested exhibitionism.

  Actually, Katie knew four facts, although it took a few seconds for her memory of the needle’s spoor to sink in. He’d been a drug addict at some time in his life, which undoubtedly meant he had a previous criminal record. And that should make it marginally easier to pin an identity on the man.

  “I’ve been told you speak English,” Katie said. “But if you’re not comfortable with that then I also speak French and a little Arabic…”

  Nothing. Just those eyes, as empty as deep space.

  “You’ve lived in the US?” Katie Petrov glanced at her notes from habit and remembered they were blank. “Nationality?” she wrote at the top, adding her question mark as an afterthought.

  “Tell me about your mother.”

  No answer.

  Prisoner Zero watched while the woman made a note.

  “What?” she asked, when she finally looked up. “Why do you smile?”

  That pencil, the paper, Prisoner Zero wanted to say. He suspected, inasmuch as he thought about it, that they were intentionally old-fashioned to make him feel secure. As if a laptop might somehow be too foreign, too American.

  In this he was wrong.

  She’d demanded and got doctor-patient confidentiality in all matters except any directly affecting Homeland Security, which she was duty bound to report immediately, and Katie Petrov didn’t want some spook with a Van Phrecker sat next door recording every keystroke she made, so she used a pencil and paper. It was her own attempt to keep the interview secure.

  CHAPTER 16

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 13

  The first of the imperial pavilions was simpler than the servitor had expected. Still vast, but simpler. A double-eaved hipped roof rested on red walls, while fretted shutters that hinged from the top were held open by ropes, the windows below being surprisingly ordinary and papered from inside. An empty bed, built from brick and covered with a silk mattress, stood against one wall. The silk was crumpled and scrolls lay unopened next to it on the floor.

  A Tartar bow and a quiver full of arrows gathered dust on a gable high overhead. Not having seen a bow before, the servitor imagined it was some kind of single-stringed musical instrument.

  The tray was his passport through the pavilions of the inner court. An ebony and jade passport laid with a glass cup, squat iron teapot and pre-warmed gold platter on which sat five types of dim sum, each one representing all that was best of the cuisine of the original Middle Kingdom.

  Sous Chef Chang San had been careful to tell the servitor the significance of each morsel and how it related to the others on the plate. As well as jiaozi dumplings, Szechwan huntun and char siu bao (steamed buns with roast pork), there was har gao and, obviously enough, the sous chef’s special pork dumplings.

  The young man doubted if the sous chef really expected him to explain this to the Emperor. Failing that, however, there seemed little reason for Chang San’s manic intensity or the way he demanded the servitor repeat back the descriptions to prove that he knew which of the slowly congealing lumps of food was which.

  “You won’t forget?”

  “Of course not.”

  Chang San smiled thinly. “Be sure you don’t.” He wouldn’t put it past the young man to claim the cooking as his own. There was something untrustworthy about the servitor’s eyes, which were much too wide apart and possessed an unsettling insolence. Worse than this, his nails were filthy and Chang San found it hard to believe that any previous emperor would have been willing to take food served by someone with dirty hands.

  “So,” said the young servitor, as he casually broke a piece of crust off a deep-fried huntun and fed it to his rat, “what do you think?” But Null merely wrinkled its whiskers and looked round for more.

  After the rat had dined on the oily edges, its master ate what was left of the filo base and most of the chilli and chicken filling, chewing the food with interest as he slid the rat back into his sleeve and rearranged the dim sum so that the plate still looked full.

  “For the Emperor,” he told a guard, and the man stepped back from a gold, red and green arch which was decorated with calligraphic banners praising the Chuang Tzu as the intermediary of heaven.

  “For the Emperor…” Having called out these words, the man slammed his halberd into the tiles so hard that the weapon almost bounced out of his hand.

  The interloper expected to find more guards in the Hall of Union but instead he found himself alone, facing a wooden throne. The throne was gilded, flanked by four lesser thrones, two on either side and all positioned a pace behind the throne of the Emperor. For reasons which were not immediately clear the lesser thrones were hidden under silk. Only the central one was uncovered.

  It fitted him perfectly.

  “You shouldn’t be sitting there.”

  “Tell me about it,” said the servitor
and the voice in his head laughed a little sadly, or maybe it was bitterly. The servitor had always known that it was not really a voice, merely what his mind translated as a voice. It had been a long time since he’d expected other people to hear the things he heard.

  Directly over the dais on which the throne sat was a panel painted with cryptograms representing Wu Wei, the fundamental Taoist principle of responding spontaneously and fluidly to any circumstance.

  Above the panel hung a ceiling so ornate it made the servitor’s head spin just to look at the intricacy of the gilded carving. He could make out endless dragons and, he thought, a phoenix, but most of the central carving was geometric, endless repetitions of a simple form.

  A pale silk carpet covered the dais but the actual floor of the pavilion was dark stone pitted with age and scuffed with the feet of nearly five thousand years of ambassadors presenting their credentials.

  The twenty-seven most commonly used seals rested inside a glass cabinet, some were soapstone, a few sandalwood but most were jade. All but three were in Manchu, one of those being in a language no one had ever identified.

  Watched by at least a billion the servitor carried his tray across the courtyard to the third and last of the private pavilions. Heavenly Purity housed another, significantly more important, seat of power, the Lesser Throne from which the Emperor greeted ambassadors on their first arrival.

  It was in this pavilion that his concubines should live, in eighteen bedrooms, arranged nine on both sides, each bedroom containing three beds, fifty-four in all.

  All but one were deserted.

  And it was this last that the Emperor had made his own. Neither the servitor nor the billions watching knew which room housed the Chuang Tzu because the feed was strangely imprecise about this.

  “For the Emperor,” said the servitor.

  The officers who moved to intercept him wore scale armour made from star-shaped pieces of what looked like steel sewn at the points to a silk jacket, each attachment being protected by the body of the star next to it. An intricate and time-consuming way to create armour. Except that the officers’ armour was summer-weight, carbon-based and required no tempering. It still swallowed the light, though, and presented itself with a solidity belied by its actual lightness.