Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

“Moz,” she said, then said nothing more.

  What Moz wanted to do was lean her backwards slightly and slide his fingers between her legs. Instead he made do with reaching round to the small of her back, feeling her spine sharp beneath his fingers.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Malika’s nod was as brief as his happiness.

  “You’re crying.”

  The girl shrugged.

  “I can stop,” said Moz.

  Malika shook her head, “No need.”

  On the ruined palace opposite, the solitary stork was preparing to bathe in the last of the afternoon’s sun, shifting itself out of the shadow now that evening had begun to blunt the worst of the day’s heat.

  Moz kissed her again, more softly this time. And as Moz tasted Malika’s tears on his own lips her hands reached up to twist into his hair, locking him into a long salt embrace.

  Somewhere between the sadness and the settling to sleep of that solitary stork, Moz’s fingers dropped from the small of Malika’s back to the waistband of her white knickers and crept under the tired elastic.

  She let his hand go where it would.

  “Enough,” Malika said finally. “We’d better get ready.” And with that she stood, leaving Moz with a stain spreading across the front of his new trousers. He tried not to mind that she turned her back on him to adjust herself, fingers hooking between her legs to free crumpled cotton.

  CHAPTER 30

  New York, Friday 6 July

  “So, let’s go through this again. You met him where?”

  Bill Hagsteen sat across the table from a man in a black suit, a spread of newspapers covering most of the space between them. About a quarter of these were American, the rest foreign. It was the foreign ones that seemed to upset the man in the suit most.

  The man had not bothered to introduce himself but the fact two officers from NYPD’s Sixth Precinct stood up when he came in told Bill Hagsteen all he needed to know.

  The thickset officer had carried away Bill’s iMac, his PowerBook, his PalmPilot, his digital recorder, his camera and his MP3, while the young one, the Hispanic kid with the cheekbones, had fastened the door to Bill’s brownstone with a plastic seal the size of the Pope’s fist and run a length of police tape across the bottom of his stoop.

  After this, they ran him down to the Sixth and there he’d stayed. Occasionally people would poke their head round the door but that seemed mostly to take a look at him. Once someone offered him coffee and donuts and when he refused brought them anyway.

  All of which changed when the suit arrived.

  Bill Hagsteen was the journalist who’d put a name to the man in Vice Questore Pier Angelo’s photograph. The man in the suit was not at all happy about that. Nor, it seemed, were Jake Razor’s family, who had issued a press release, through a very expensive New York lawyer, informing the world that Jake had died in a fire in Amsterdam fifteen years earlier.

  Unfortunately their press release coincided with Lady Celia Vere’s interview in the Sunday Times in which she claimed to have recognized Jake instantly. Her reason for not recognizing Jake from the shot issued soon after Prisoner Zero’s initial arrest was the same as Bill’s…

  Jim Morrison could have hidden behind that greying beard and hair and no one would have recognized him either. The man in Langley’s original photograph looked like nothing so much as a flat-eyed and wild-haired Islamic fanatic. Since this had been entirely intentional, Agent Wharton found it hard to fault this bit of Bill Hagsteen’s defence.

  There were other parts to the journalist’s story about which Agent Wharton was even less happy. “You wrote three versions of this article. In one of them you said it was impossible to be certain that Prisoner Zero was Jake.”

  “They were drafts,” Bill said. “That was the second draft.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  Bill Hagsteen shrugged.

  “We’ll find out,” said the agent. “All your calls are being retrieved from the cell-phone company. We’re busy re-creating all your wiped files. It would be much simpler if you just told us.”

  “Told you what?” Bill Hagsteen demanded. “That I changed my mind? It’s Jake Razor,” he said. “Deal with it.”

  A list of everything found on Bill’s PowerBook was printed out on a long sheet which unfolded like stair carpet and tumbled down one side of the table, proof of guilt supposedly, although what kind of guilt was unspecified. There were perforations where each sheet could be torn. Bill Hagsteen felt like offering to do the job himself.

  The agent didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of Bill’s capacity to tell the truth. Come to that, he didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of Bill, period. And Bill couldn’t help thinking this might be down to forensics finding those old spanking downloads on his Apple.

  He’d thought at the beginning that the agent wanted to talk to him about the abortive trip to Paris, but something else seemed to be exercising the man.

  “How long ago did you first meet Jake Razor?”

  Bill Hagsteen shrugged again, which had been his default position to a number of questions since he’d been told that he wasn’t being allowed access to a lawyer and that Miranda rights didn’t apply.

  “We’ll find out,” repeated the man in the suit. “So you might as well answer.”

  “I can’t remember,” Bill said, and watched the two uniforms glance at each other. “It was fucking years back,” he added crossly. “How well can you remember the seventies?”

  The Hispanic officer with the cheekbones sucked his teeth. “In the seventies,” he said, “I wasn’t born.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Okay,” said Agent Wharton. “Forget that. Where did you first meet him?”

  “God knows,” Bill Hagsteen said. “The Mercer Arts Center before it fell down. Max’s Kansas City. The downstairs dive at the Palace flophouse…One of the regular places. Where everyone met.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Johnny Thunders and Chris Stein, Terry Ork, the Ramones…Hell, Debbie Harry waited tables. That’s just the way it was. Half the time you didn’t get names, you just knew the faces.”

  “And you were the drummer in Jake Razor’s band?”

  “It wasn’t his band,” said Bill. “And I didn’t play in it. We supported him once in London. We paid our own expenses and after the Rox deducted damage from the night’s take we ended up owing the club. We never toured with them again.”

  “Of course it was Jake’s band.” The thickset officer looked so certain that Bill suddenly had a vision of the man hanging out at CBGB’s in a different incarnation. “Jake Razor. Razor’s Edge.”

  “He named himself after the band,” Bill said. “Which fucked off a lot of people. The band’s name came first.”

  “So,” said Agent Wharton, “you knew the man well enough to know this. And yet somehow you couldn’t recognize him when you spent a week together in Paris. Have I got that right?”

  “I called you, remember?” said Bill Hagsteen. He was beginning to think this might have been a bad move.

  “Only once it was too late.” Agent Wharton held a fat file in his hand, but he held it carelessly and Bill Hagsteen could see from its reflection in the window behind the desk that most of the pages were blank. Some, however, were not blank and there were enough of those to be worrying.

  On the table in front of the man were copies of photographs pulled from Bill’s partner’s camera. Endless mood shots of Parisian cafés, the slowly rusting pomp of the Beauborg Centre and the formal garden behind Rue de Rivoli. A couple of shots showed the steel shell of L’Institute du Monde Arabe and the man in the suit had been particularly interested in those.

  Bill had tried to explain how pneumatic pumps shut huge steel irises against the brightness of the Parisian sun in a modern take on the Islamic arabesque, but he wasn’t sure the man had been listening. By then Agent Wharton had moved on to the two photographs of a shabby and bearded tramp outlined against th
e silver waters of the River Seine.

  “I’m telling you,” Bill said. “I thought Jake was French.”

  “Did he sound French?”

  “He did to me.”

  “And you met him on the street?”

  “In a market. He was at a table scraping chicken stew from an old saucepan.”

  “And this meeting was prearranged?”

  Bill Hagsteen shook his head. He’d have stood up and walked round the room but the last time he’d tried that Cheekbones had put his hands on Bill’s shoulders and pushed him back into the chair.

  It was becoming obvious that Bill should have contacted someone in authority before writing his piece. Certainly before the story was printed and hit the streets. It made a mockery of the US intelligence services if the people who finally blew the identity of the President’s would-be assassin turned out to be a pair of middle-aged rock journalists.

  Bill had been told this several times.

  Not found, blew…He’d been constructing entire conspiracy theories and the proposal for a book around that one word.

  “So,” said the suit, “you didn’t know in Paris. You didn’t know when you wrote your second draft.” He placed heavy emphasis on the word as if using the term somehow carried extra meaning. “What changed?”

  Somewhere in the Twenty-third Precinct on the Upper West Side Jim was being asked identical questions. Bill knew that. He’d been told to which precinct his partner had been taken but not the actual location. Bill was meant to read something into this, only it was hard to know what. Apart from the fact they had him locked in an interview room on the Lower West while his long-term lover and ex–work colleague was being held on the Upper West.

  And the thing that got Bill Hagsteen was not that Agent Wharton was furious, it was that the man was embarrassed.

  Not found, blew…

  Bill could feel the book deal turning into a miniseries. Other journalists might have been more worried but he’d been through the riots in Cleveland and marched against the second Gulf War. Besides his name was splashed across newspapers all over the world. In America there was no defence against mistreatment stronger than the threat of bad publicity.

  “I got a call,” Bill said. “That was the first thing.”

  Agent Wharton waited.

  “Someone in London tipped me off about Celia Vere’s piece for the Sunday Times. I still wasn’t sure but I figured if Jake’s ex-manager was going to put her name to it—”

  “And the second thing?”

  “His watch,” Bill said.

  The agent looked up from his file.

  “Which watch?”

  “He was wearing an Omega in Paris,” Bill said, “gold with a white face, check the shots.”

  “Pretty odd for a tramp,” said Agent Wharton.

  “Pretty odd about describes him.” Bill had taken to leaning forward, as if trying to include the agent in his story. “Jim enhanced the picture quality and matched the watch to one in the shots from Razor’s last interview. He swears the watch is identical, right down to damage on the face. And then…you know…there were those photographs…”

  Bill meant the ones splashed across the front of most of the papers, the shots the new Italian government had released without first alerting Washington. Agent Wharton knew more than he wanted to about them.

  “He looked more like Jake in those. Kind of battered and sunburnt but the sneer was right and the way he stood, one foot forward and his arms folded. Maybe you had to know him to recognize it.”

  “Yeah,” said the man with the suit. “And you did, didn’t you? You spend a week with this man in Paris and the next thing that happens is he takes a crack at the President…What?” Agent Wharton demanded, glaring at the door as if he could see straight through it and kill whoever knocked on the other side with a single glance.

  “You need to turn on your cell phone.”

  “What?”

  The Sergeant who peered round the door looked the suit up and down, too battle-scarred and too old to give a damn for anyone who wasn’t her boss or an immediate colleague. “That’s what the message said, turn on your mobile.”

  She shut the door with a bang.

  “Agent Wharton,” said the suit into his phone. “What? You’re shitting me…” Michael Wharton never swore and certainly not in front of uniforms from the NYPD. So he stared the Hispanic out for a few brief seconds, as if daring him to smirk, and went back to his call.

  “Where?”

  “Both of them?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Snapping shut his cell phone, Agent Wharton took a look at the printouts, the photographs and the mess of papers and prepared to walk away from the lot. “Wrap him up,” he told the older of the two officers. “He’s off to see the President.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20

  The Emperor flinched at the sound of a lash, then flinched again and again until daylight pulled open his eyes and he woke to find himself in the Pavilion of Celestial Dreams, the smell of a distant city on his skin and ruined flesh burned into his memory.

  He was exhausted by the effort of holding the dreams in his head.

  “Saw two shooting stars last night.”

  Zaq looked around him for the source of the words. And miles above the Forbidden City particulate matter fell softly through the upper atmosphere. All that remained from a Casimir coil dumped by a racing yacht which had been stolen once to order and once again on something stronger than a whim.

  All Tomorrow’s Parties shed the first coil because that was what it always did at the halfway point of any race, once the vector was in sight and pit craft were waiting to cocoon it back into health. It took the decision on its own, based on precedent and extrapolation of all available data, which was rather less than it would have liked. The second coil it dumped because Tris told it to and she was holding a gun to its memory.

  Where every emperor since the original Chuang Tzu had slept on a bed of solid oak, his head resting on a wooden pillow, Zaq bedded down in a corner of his room, wrapped in an old blanket and nightmares. He did this because it annoyed the Library and he had no need to tell the Library about the nightmares because it already knew.

  They were the price Zaq paid for refusing to be Chuang Tzu. At least Zaq imagined they were. The war between Zaq and the Library was quiet and understated, but they both knew it was moving into a new and dangerous phase.

  These days the darkness signed itself Rapture Library, the rapture bit being an old and bad joke at the expense of Holy Ghost Guides Us, a converted freighter fleeing from the world of the first Chuang Tzu, which stumbled through space and into the still-forming 2023 worlds.

  Landing in the hills behind the embryo city, its crew imagined the world in which they found themselves to be deserted and it was only when a breakaway sect of fundamental polygamists began cutting down mulberry trees to the north of the Forbidden City that the Library disabused them.

  The Boy Emperor had been forced to hide in his palace as thunder crashed hard enough to crack glass and lightning destroyed the tents of the polygamists with improbable accuracy.

  Of course, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu was not really a boy, whatever the legends said, although all of those who followed after had been children, almost all adapting happily to their new name and lives. The fact the Library had begun to refer to Zaq by his pre-manifestation name was worrying because it seemed to suggest that what Zaq feared was true.

  And the Emperor knew how problematic a thought that was, how wrapped around with doubt, and this worried Zaq also…The Chuang Tzu was required to be solid in his certainty, representative of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom. He was, to quote the Librarian, the spiritual health of the 2023 worlds made manifest.

  It seemed doubtful to Zaq that the Library had ever intended this to be the lesson learnt from its banishment of the polygamists. A short and rather frightening conversation between Zaq and th
e Librarian revealed that it had been the destruction of the mulberry gardens which angered it.

  “Although anger’s probably the wrong word…It is, isn’t it?”

  Assent came from inside Zaq’s own skull. A place both suffocatingly close and infinite in its distance.

  Applying human emotions to an entity already ancient before amino acids tripped into life half a galaxy away was not helpful. Although this didn’t stop the amino acid’s descendant from so doing. And it seemed, from a throwaway afterthought, that what really troubled the Library was not the physical destruction of the mulberry bushes or the threat this implied to the silkworms which gave the orchard its reason for existing.

  The Library had been scared that the orchard’s destruction might upset the fragile happiness of the young Chinese navigator, who was only just coming to terms with his own progression from ice to Emperor.

  There were a few among the cold immortals who felt that the navigator and every emperor who came after were no more than pets for the Library. Zaq knew different. The Library had been created not to command but to serve and without someone to serve its existence had no meaning.

  This alone was the reason it clung to its role as tutor to each new Chuang Tzu with all the ruthlessness of a court eunuch in the real Forbidden City.

  “Bath,” Zaq shouted.

  As orders went this was entirely redundant. A bath would have been run by servitors the moment Zaq dropped out of deep sleep and into his half-waking haze of dusty alleys and hurt children. In the event that Zaq remained there, another bath would be run and then another and another.

  Zaq never saw this happen. He just rolled out of his huddle, walked through a single door and found a steaming pool awaiting him. All of this Zaq knew in the instant he realized that he didn’t, facts simply appearing in his head.

  The only place where the Librarian kept its peace was in the walled Butterfly Garden, which was within a larger walled garden to the north of the three private pavilions. And Zaq knew this was only because the butterflies were in themselves manifestations of the Librarian, who was, of course, merely one manifestation of the Library, which was merely…