Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 42 Lampedusa, Monday 9 July [Now]

"You know what," said Petra Mayer, fanning photographs out on the mattress in two neat rows. "I can't believe it took me this long to work out. These are you. You're the Arab boy."

The speed with which Prisoner Zero jerked his gaze from the window was impressive.

"Everyone's got it wrong," she said, with a slow smile. "And, as yet, no one has any idea just how badly." Her excitement was almost tangible. "Just wait till Gene finds out."

A large number of people considered Petra Mayer unreliable, badly dressed and unable to cope with the simplest things in life, like driving round the Washington Circle without crashing (right outside the GW Hospital). An embarrassment that happened only once and about which far too much was made, mostly by journalists who could barely read the titles of her later books, never mind understand them. Those who knew the Professor better would have recognized the gleam in her eye.

Entire layers of fact were being discarded and reassembled. She'd taken all the evidence and put it together in the only way that worked.

"They are you, aren't they?"

Prisoner Zero gave a slight shake of his head, while simultaneously mouthing the word "yes"... Conflicted, Katie Petrov would have said and she'd have been right. Although after the drugs, the culture shock and the years in Amsterdam and Paris it was a wonder he knew who he was at all.

"Almost professional," said Petra Mayer, picking up a black and white of a boy about to step into a shower and then making herself put it back. "They show real talent."

The naked man remained silent and after a few seconds his gaze returned to the window. There was something very deliberate about the way he took his attention away from the photographs.

Petra Mayer smiled. She'd won; he just didn't know it yet.

Accompanying the two dozen photographs was a letter from the new Chief of Police in Marrakech which outlined the contents of the envelope to which it had been attached. Inside the envelope had been the photographs, an evidence docket, a typed suggestion that the photographs be burnt and a handwritten note giving reasons why they were to be sealed and marked for storage in a secure vault rather than destroyed.

No mention was made on the docket of the boy's name or where the photographs were taken, and the only name Petra Mayer recognized was scrawled on the first note, the one outlining reasons for the photographs' destruction, which was couched as a suggestion but read like an order.

Claude de Greuze. The man had been infamous.

"This is a good one," said the Professor. She crossed the tiles and dropped to a crouch in front of Prisoner Zero. His nakedness meant nothing to her and as for the stale sweat that rose from his body, it was what she would expect in this heat from any man who hadn't washed for a day or so. Petra Mayer was very pragmatic about these things.

"Take a look." She flipped the photograph round so Prisoner Zero could see a younger version of himself asleep and naked on a bed. When he moved his head she moved the photograph with it.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

The man shook his head, openly this time. And it was all Petra Mayer could do not to grin. Two psychiatrists, three doctors, a Moroccan diplomat and even a top-level military psychiatrist who'd worked Guantanamo Bay, brought out of retirement especially, and she was the one who got a reaction.

"Did Jake take these?" Another photograph, of the same boy sleeping. He looked younger in that one, more vulnerable and, Petra Mayer had to admit it, very obviously under-age.

"Does it matter?"

It was an interesting voice, particularly to someone like Petra Mayer, who had dabbled in social linguistics. Interesting because Prisoner Zero's voice had a slight dissonance, a mere trace of something usually found in those who'd remained silent for a long time, whether voluntary or enforced.

There was a second reason. Most people are defined by their voices -- place, class and education all being easily identified. Languages adopted through the act of learning, however, carried indicators of the person teaching as well as of the person being taught.

The extreme examples were well known. Professor Mayer had met a Zambian physicist who'd read his original degree at a university outside Kiev and come back talking like an elderly Chechen prostitute. A palaeontologist at New York's natural history museum, a self-educated man from Brooklyn, spoke Persian with the Tabrizi accent of a 1950s aristocrat.

In the prisoner's statement were echoes of Moroccan Arabic, Upper East Side New York, received BBC pronunciation and something that could only be Amsterdam-inflected Dutch, which was the Netherlands' equivalent of Brooklyn.

"Of course it matters," said the Professor. "I want you to tell me what really happened."

The prisoner stood up, walked past her and dropped to a crouch by the bed, reaching out to take one particular photograph from the mattress and examine it carefully, while Professor Mayer looked over his shoulder.

Dark eyes stared from a half-turned face and the face looked towards the camera. In a looking glass behind the boy could be seen a naked sliver of the photographer, all soft hip and pale skin. Petra Mayer wondered why she hadn't seen it earlier.

When Prisoner Zero put the photograph of the naked boy back again it was face down beside the other pictures on the mattress. Although that still left several shots the right way up.

"They're good," she said.

The prisoner seemed slightly surprised, the first time his face had actually expressed emotion, and Petra Mayer absent-mindedly made a mark on a chart, checking the time on her watch without being seen to do so.

"Technically," she said. "I mean technically. Jake must have owned a good camera."

"It was Celia's," said the prisoner.

He'd only found out how expensive it was when he'd seen the thing advertised in a magazine. A newer model, minimal changes and an extortionate price. He'd thought of all nasrani as rich, that this richness varied Prisoner Zero only realized later, around the same time he finally came to understand how far the blonde Englishwoman had been up that particular scale.

"A Leica, with rapid-load and rewind, proper engraving to the brass, self-timer, functioning shutter and flash socket. They were hand-made," Prisoner Zero added, just in case Petra Mayer didn't know this.

She'd offered him money, Celia had. Cash to get out of her life and start again, somewhere he wouldn't be known and cause her problems. At the time he'd thought the sum incredibly generous, even as he refused the envelope she tried to push into his hand. It was only later, when Jake told him about her father dying and the will being contested by two of the man's ex-wives, that Moz discovered just how much money had been settled on Celia on her eighteenth birthday, with more at twenty-one, twenty-five and thirty-two.

Then Celia's offer began to seem almost contemptuous. Of course, by then he'd done what she wanted and for nothing. He was out of her life and deep into the dregs of his own, a life circumscribed by Jake, heroin and the narrowness of a single mattress on the floor of an unfurnished squat in Amsterdam.

"Celia?" said Petra Mayer. Short questions generally worked best and she was old enough to have taught herself not to fill in the gaps, to leave space for what the other person wanted to say. "I thought Jake was your lover."

"Lady Celia Vere." The bitterness in the prisoner's voice was undeniable now. "Her uncle was British ambassador to Paris, you know."

Petra Mayer shuffled her file. "No," she said, "I didn't know. How did you first meet?"

Prisoner Zero smiled. "I stole her watch."

"Is that true?"

Prisoner Zero shook his head. "No," he said. "I only pretended it was me. Someone else took it."

"Who?"

"A girl called Malika," said Prisoner Zero, and then he didn't say anything else for a very long time.