Stamping Butterflies

PROLOGUE Paris, Monday 26 March [Now]

Beijing outraged...

Someone had taken the fate of the world and tossed it onto a chair and somebody else had dumped it under a table, where it remained until a thin, grey-haired tramp picked up the paper, wiped off the worst of the grime and spread it out.

Forty-one degrees in Cairo. Snow in Cape Town. Russia's president-for-life had just re-invaded Chechnya, the Chinese navy was blockading Taiwan and the current occupant of the White House had announced his intention to become the first president since Truman to visit North Africa.

It was five years since the tramp had read a newspaper and within three paragraphs he remembered why. His life was messy enough without adding complications from the rest of the world.

"Monsieur?"

This was his cue to order a coffee or leave. Counting his coins without taking his hand from his coat pocket, the clochard nodded. "Espresso," he said. He didn't blame the boy. There'd been that summer he arrived as the shutters were opening and stayed until the old woman, the one who was now dead, shooed him out onto Rue du Temple so she could finish mopping up for the night.

Leaving a handful of coppers, mostly to prove he could, the tramp began to fold his paper. That was when he first noticed two young men going from table to table, both dressed in the default cool of New York or London, black T-shirts hanging loose outside black chinos, expensive shades and simple shoes.

It was the dress of urban anonymity. One that spoke of hurried lives and the need to blend into a certain stratum of city life. In Paris, where T-shirts got tucked over even the proudest bellies and dressing alike was the preserve of banlieue dwellers or bon chic/bon gen couples with five-button blazers and Rue St. Honoré frocks, such foreignness shouted trouble.

At least it did to the tramp in the tweed coat. And shouted it loud enough for him to push back his chair, stand up and squeeze past a German tourist, who promptly checked her pockets, then frowned, wondering if she'd just been perved.

The men caught up with him later, probably by accident, at a food stall in the Marché des Enfants Rouge, where he sat scraping chicken tagine from a pot while he watched a Sudanese boy argue with a thickset girl who looked half Arab, half something else.

Both the girl and boy knew he was watching; neither minded.

A triangle, made up of Rues St. Paul and de Turenne to the east, des Archives to the west and the river to the south defined the edges of his world, within which the tramp was known and obscurely famous.

No one talked of the heroin, the cheap brandy, the nights he never quite made it back to a derelict, fifth-floor room overlooking Passage St. Jacques. The Marais district was a very private place. So private that many of the tourists who now roamed its narrow streets barely noticed it was there.

"I'm looking for Jake Razor," one of the men said, no introduction and no politeness, just the bald statement and the expectation that this would be enough.

The man in the old tweed coat looked blank.

"Jake Razor."

"Pardonnez-moi?"

They stared at each other and there it might have ended, except that the first of the Gap-clad men signalled to the second, who pulled up a chair. "Nous cherchons pour Jake Razor. Le mathématicien et guitarist punk..." From his jacket he retrieved a press card and a letter from some editor at Rolling Stone, dumping these beside an old photograph of a bare-chested, snarling boy in black jeans.

"Avez-vous seen him?"

"He's dead," said the tramp, checking the name on the card. "Years back. There was a fire. It was on the radio."

Bill Hagsteen sighed. "That was Marzaq," he said. "The Arab kid."

Marzaq al-Turq had been born half German and half Turkish, as his name suggested, but the tramp didn't bother to point this out. "Even if Jake's alive," said the tramp, "what makes you think he moved to Paris?"

"We have information," said Bill Hagsteen.

"There's a family trust," the other said. "It bought an apartment in Rue St. Paul, roughly fifteen years ago."

"But no one from the family uses it. In fact, none of them have been anywhere near this city in all that time." They were like an old married couple, finishing each other's sentences without even noticing.

"No problem," said the tramp. "Give me the number and I'll take you there."

"If we had that we could find it ourselves."

"We shouldn't even know about the apartment," added Bill Hagsteen. "The trust doesn't take kindly to enquiries from the press."

The man in the tweed coat thought about this and then thought about it some more. Pulling a final sliver of flesh from his chicken bone, he pushed away his empty bowl. "Maybe I can help," he said.

The steam bath was at the southern end of Rue St. Paul, and the tramp enjoyed seeing his new friends strip to their towels and sit sweating on tiled benches as they watched every man who entered for signs that he might once have been lead guitarist with Razor's Edge.

"Where now?" Bill Hagsteen asked, which the tramp took as an indication that he'd had enough of watching locals shift uneasily under his gaze or glare right back. They ate brunch at the Cajun place next to the Arts, less than a minute from the steam bath. And then Bill had the idea of checking if Jake had ever rented a room at the hotel. So their guide went in by himself and came out again seconds later.

"Fifty euros," he said.

"Twenty-five," said the other.

Bill Hagsteen pulled fifty from a crocodile skin wallet and handed it over without comment.

Folding the euros into his hand and pocketing them before he even reached reception, the tramp smiled at the woman behind the desk. He was smarter today. Still wearing his tweed coat, but with a pair of trousers which looked almost clean.

"Sorry about that," he said, "forgot something."

The receptionist gave him the rate card he asked for, explained about weekend deals and then looked at him more closely.

"I'm babysitting Americans," he explained. They'd nodded to each other in Le Celtic a few times though never spoken.

"You're American." She said this as a fact.

"I've been many things."

Outside, on the pavement, the tramp regretted that no one resembling Jake now rented a room at the Arts Hotel, although a New York poet had lived there for years. Unfortunately he'd died.

"Did you get a description?"

The tramp shook his head. "Before her time."

They stopped to look at the opium pipes in the window of the Buddha shop, crossed the road to cut down Rue Charlemagne, with its blue plaque naming Charles as "Emperor of the West" and rejoined Rue St. Paul via a passage, old buildings rising six storeys on either side of the narrow walk-through.

A black woman at the only free till in Monoprix looked briefly at Bill Hagsteen's old photograph and shook her head, her attention already on a man waiting impatiently behind them. Visits to the tabac and the English bookshop produced much the same result.

"Tell me," said their guide, "how good is your information?"

"Sixty per cent," said Bill Hagsteen. "Maybe less."

"I hope it didn't cost you too much."

"It cost nothing," the other said tartly.

"Could be," said the tramp, as he pocketed their fee, "that's why it's worthless."

She was young and pretty and very scared. And 150 euros was what it took to get her delivered to Passage St. Jacques in an uninsured taxi, driven by a boy without a licence. Her name was Zeinab and she was shocked to find that the tramp spoke her language, and more shocked still that his bed turned out to be a mattress on a metal balcony.

He was, after all, paying a sum she could barely imagine.

"I like fresh air," the man said. And watched Zeinab smile doubtfully as she glanced around his filthy attic room, with its torn leather chair facing an untuned TV, which she imagined to be broken, but he knew replayed proof of the Big Bang, dancing snow from the birth of the universe.

"Three years," he told her. That was how long he'd been clean.

Another smile twisted the teenager's lips without ever reaching her eyes. Ahmed had made it very clear about what would happen if the tramp had been lying about having money. About what would happen if he got Zeinab back damaged. She'd been there when her pimp took the man's call, so it was small wonder that her hands wouldn't stop shaking.

Ahmed had been the tramp's dealer in the early days, before he sweated out the darkness and his addiction on a mattress, dragged onto the balcony and never returned, an endless reminder not to go back.

"Until midnight," Zeinab said.

The tramp sighed. He'd told Ahmed that for 150 euros he wanted a girl until sunrise. "I'm not walking you back at midnight," he said.

Zeinab shook her head. "No," she said, voice firmer. "Mr. Ahmed's coming to collect me." And then she lay on her front, as the man instructed, though first she removed her clothes.

Sometime between the tears and midnight, darkness attempted to take over, announcing its arrival with a sudden pressure at the back of the tramp's skull. He heard the girl gasp as his fingers tightened on her shoulders and then she was crying, with those blind unconscious sobs of the truly afraid.

"Okay," he said, "it's okay." Not knowing if he was talking to her or to himself. And withdrawing from the tightness of her body, he rolled off and sat with his face to the night wind, listening to his breath steady and the sounds of the city reappear.

"Monsieur..."

She knelt behind him, apologising for her terror. Alternating between broken French and a stream of Arabic, which trailed into silence as he turned to face her.

"No," he said firmly. "Not you, me..." And he helped Zeinab to her feet and indicated that she should dress, but she shook her head, eyes huge. It was Ahmed, he realized; the kid was terrified that he might complain to her owner.

"It's okay," the man insisted, but he didn't stop Zeinab when she sunk to her knees in front of him, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. After a few minutes he lifted her up again and kissed her on her forehead, smelling unwashed hair and panic.

The darkness and he had a clear agreement on what was and wasn't allowed. Reading a paper had been pushing it. The young whore with her olive skin, dark nipples and fear-enhanced eyes was so far outside the rules that the man knew whatever happened next would be bad.

"You know," he said, as he watched Zeinab eye her clothes. "You should leave now." Her breasts were too small to need a bra and the tramp wondered if her slip was Ahmed's idea, or something she'd owned before she became the sadness she now was. It was only when Zeinab climbed into her jeans and pulled on a jacket that he realized the slip was not a slip at all but some kind of transparent shirt.

They waited for Ahmed under the arch where the passage met Rue St. Paul, five floors of other people's lives stacked over their heads. And when her pimp finally arrived it was in the taxi which had dropped Zeinab at the apartment.

"Jake."

The tramp shook his head. "We've been through this," he said. "I'm not Jake."

"Whatever..." Checking Zeinab with a quick glance, the pimp appeared satisfied. "Behave herself?"

"Yeah," said the tramp, watching the young girl climb in beside Ahmed's driver. "Good as gold." The pimp looked pleasantly surprised.

"Okay, then," he said. "We're done."

"Not really," said the tramp. "We agreed until morning."

"No." Ahmed shook his head. "I agreed nothing. You asked, that's different. Still..." Dipping his hand into a suit pocket, he produced a small paper bag. "Here," he said, "for old times' sake." There were five of them, tiny tubes like a doll's toothpaste, each with a short needle where the cap should be.

The ultimate painkiller. Battlefield heroin.

A full moon reflected off the river, inlaying its surface with jagged slivers of silver. A cat, hunting along the cobbles, detoured around the tramp in a long looping path when it saw him crouched at the water's edge. A cemetery owl from Père La Chaise swooped low overhead, skimming branches before returning the way it came.

The man who was not Jake Razor considered all of these things as he shucked off his tweed coat and rolled up his sleeve. The River Seine looked almost flat and yet it was not; the river was whatever shape the banks and bottom made it. And the moon, that too looked flat, but only if one thought in two dimensions. Or four, the tramp reminded himself. Sometimes the darkness made him think thoughts which were not entirely his own.

It was only on his way home, early next morning, with AMERICAN PRESIDENT REFUSES TO SIGN SPACE ACCORD WITH CHINA, BEIJING OUTRAGED clutched almost forgotten beneath one arm, that the darkness finally gave the tramp his orders. He was passing Rue Charlemagne at the time, with its blue sign, "Roi de France, Empereur." And maybe this was what nudged the darkness into naming its price.

The tramp must kill again. And the person he should kill was the occupant of the White House, Charlemagne's heir, the new Emperor of the West.