Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 50 Marrakech, Summer 1977 [Then]

Several years before she died Malika told Moz a fairy tale. It was the summer she turned nine and Malika told it without once looking at Moz, her eyes fixed on a distant line of clouds.

Moz told the story to Jake and Celia as they all drove north in the VW campervan, the earth beyond their windows turning from red to yellow and finally to brown as they travelled the two hundred kilometres that took them to Casablanca and three seats on an Air Maroc caravelle to Tangiers, where a ferry to Alicante waited for them.

It was a flat road and mostly straight, dotted occasionally with spindly cedar, larch and imported eucalyptus and it cut through the Middle Atlas, a mountain range so scrawny and underfed by the time the mountains met the Marrakech-Casablanca road that it barely merited the name.

The fields along either side of the road were hedged with prickly pear and occasionally stone, the plots broken into smaller and smaller fragments as farms passed from fathers to sons and parcels of land were divided time and again.

At this point Jake still intended to buy a house in Spain, although he changed his mind shortly after docking at Alicante when three gun-toting, green-cloaked members of the Guarda Civile, having ordered everyone out of the car he'd just bought, emptied Jake's luggage onto the road, dismantled the seats and ripped the spare tyre from its wheel.

A body search followed for each of them.

That was when Celia announced she was going back to Cheyne Walk as soon as possible and Jake decided he might try Amsterdam instead. They had a short and bitter argument about who had responsibility for Moz.

Jake lost.

Moz told them Malika's story when the VW was an hour outside Marrakech and Jake and Celia were still talking to each other. He told it because he hated them and because he knew they would not understand. The story began on the sixteenth day of Jumaada al Thamy in the year 1375 AH, which Jake and Celia knew as 1956.

On that day, Monday 30 January, in a square near Bab Doukkala, three Arab stallholders poured petrol through the broken window of a racing-green Studebaker, the 1954 model. They were watched by a heavily veiled woman chewing on a dried fig and a small boy who hopped from leg to leg with excitement.

Waving the boy and his grandmother away from the car, the eldest of the three men pulled a brass lighter from his jellaba pocket and lit a petrol-soaked rag he'd already tied to a stone, tossing the stone high in the air, so the rag flamed like a comet on its way down.

So huge was the explosion that the small boy tipped backwards and suddenly found himself sitting in the dirt. For a second his bottom lip quivered and then he began to clap.

At the other end of Derb Ali, in what had once been stables, a young Berber shouldered open a locked door. He did this as quietly as he could. Something of a rarity for Driss Mahmud, a man who liked to make his presence felt.

Sultan Mohammed V had returned from French-imposed exile to declare himself King. On the morning in question, at 11.30, his old enemy Thami al Glaoui, eagle of Telouet, the black panther and mountain gazelle, the last great lord of the Atlas and Pasha of Marrakech, had died, having made profession of his faith.

He was seventy-eight years of age, feared and revered in equal measure. A hero to many and a traitor to more. And with his final breath withered not only the Glaoui's life, but the protection his reputation gave to those who had served him.

"Hide me." Driss Mahmud's voice was jagged with fear, although one had to know the man to realize this.

"Where?"

He could hear contempt in Maria's question, which was the first time she'd ever dared reveal such an emotion to his face. Her mother had been an esclave in the Glaoui kasbah as had her grandmother before that. The girl's father was unknown, a man who'd given his unclaimed daughter little to remember him by but pale skin and green eyes.

This room had been Driss Mahmud's present to Maria. Not really his to give but that seldom mattered to the servants of Si Thami al Glaoui. All Driss had done was order a café to give up its storeroom and the girl had been living there ever since.

She was fat with child, her breasts sore against the thin cotton of a cheap dress. Her head was bare, her hair untied and her forehead sweaty. Darkness was approaching but it brought only a shift in the sounds of the city. It was a bad night to be found with a servant of the old Pasha.

"Hide me here," said the man. "Say you've got a customer."

Maria slapped him then.

And when she finally picked herself off the dirt floor, wiping blood from her lips, it was to walk past him to the storeroom door. "I don't do that anymore," she said, pulling aside the curtain.

A single step brought Driss close, so close Maria could feel his breath on the nape of her neck and a sharpness against her skin. Everyone knew that Driss Mahmud carried a knife and on a night like this he might well be carrying his gun.

Except there had never been another night like this.

"In here," Maria shouted, and would have shouted again but for the sudden hand over her mouth to ensure silence.

"I should kill you," Driss said.

You should have killed me months back... The thought came and went, more wish than thought. Maria wasn't good at considering her own emotions. Most of the time the girl found it hard to believe that what she felt might matter.

Once, in the time of the big war, a fat foreigner had sat in a rattan chair on the terrace of the Pasha's kasbah and said something that made the Pasha roar with laughter. They'd both been looking at a small girl scooping ice into a bowl when he spoke.

"You." The Pasha's voice was low, surprisingly soft. And Maria realized she'd never dared listen to his voice before. "What's your name?"

She gave her mother's village, her grandfather's name and his job as one of the Pasha's herdsmen. Maria wasn't sure how else to answer. All of this the Pasha related to the foreigner in the stranger's language.

"So," said the foreigner, "call her Mimi." Or so one of the dancing girls reported afterwards.

The Pasha stared at him.

"Her hands," explained the fat man. "They're frozen."

"What was it you asked?" said the Pasha. "How much do I pay them?" He turned to the girl. "How much do you get paid?" he said.

Maria looked at him, her eyes wide.

The fat man in the rattan chair dragged on his cigar, blew out a cloud of smoke and turned to the Pasha. Whatever he said about her silence made the Pasha frown.

"You." He nodded to the girl. "Why do you work for me?"

She had no answer to that either.

When the Pasha glanced at Maria again it was to wave her away. So Malika's mother picked up her bucket, which was actually silver and made in Paris, covered it with a white linen napkin as she'd been taught and crept from the terrace.

The next time anyone noticed her it was to offer her to a German industrialist. She was twelve.

A month later Driss was told to deliver her to a brothel in the Medina. It was unlikely the Pasha even knew or cared that she was gone. Between the kasbah and the brothel, Driss stopped once to push her into a bricked-up archway, raise her dress and turn her to face the wall.

Now he stood behind her again. In the room which he'd found for her. And though his life was in danger and the Medina full of men after people like him, Driss Mahmud paused for long enough to force one hand inside Maria's dress and grip a swollen breast, twisting hard.

"You won't forget me," he said.

And as fear and a full bladder emptied themselves down Maria's bare leg, Driss went, knife out in front of him, running at a half crouch like some wounded animal.

"Here," Maria shouted to no one in particular. "Over here."

A motorbike beam lit the night and bounced wildly off the alley walls. The owner left its engine running to keep the beam bright. "Where?"

"Over there," shouted Maria, and pointed towards a shadow which hugged a far wall, moving at a jagged run. "He's one."

As the stolen 500cc Norton lurched forward, a second hunter sprinted from a side passage and swung himself onto the bike behind its rider. He carried a curved sword in one hand.

"After him."

The order was unnecessary. The single-cylinder machine was already skidding down the alley, its headlight picking out Driss Mahmud. A blip of the throttle, a single slash and the antique blade had opened up the running man's shoulder.

"Go round again," shouted the man with the sword and the bike slid to a halt.

It might not be the worst cut their victim had taken, but there would be others and the wounded man understood this. The most intelligent thing he could do was anger his attackers so badly they killed him outright.

"Fatah!"

He was many things, Driss Mahmud. A coward was not one of them. Holding his knife in his one good hand, he watched the 500cc Norton turn in the alley and blinked as its headlight caught him in its beam.

Shouting his insult again, Driss flipped the knife so that he held it by the blade. The man would have seen that, which was the point.

"Come and get me..."

Driss felt no pain and barely any shock, only a determination to take both riders with him if he could. Somewhere inside he must have been afraid, though. He had to be; why else would his lips be reciting prayers?

It was late, the evening call from the mosque of Bab Doukkala was long gone. Fires burned across the city. At least they burnt in the only bit of Marrakech to really matter. Who knew or much cared what happened beyond the walls in Hivernage or Gueliz?

Driss could smell wood smoke and grilling goat in the alley, and something uglier like burning rubber.

That was his last conscious thought. Tyres burning, foreigners beyond the wall, a final declaration of faith... And then the bike was on him in a blaze of light that dragged a blade behind it.

Driss threw, hard as he could, and ducked like his old caid had taught him, rolling out of the motorbike's way and into a sudden kick to his spine. Vertebrae cracked and Driss crawled away from the pain straight into the path of another boot. There were legs all around him now.

It had been a mistake to let go of his knife.

"Wait!" Climbing from his bike, the off-duty policeman pushed his way through the mob. The figure at their feet was still recognizably human, though the noise issuing from his bloodied mouth was strictly animal.

"Not here," the man said. "Take him to the rubbish dump."

Someone tried to make Driss Mahmud walk but broken ankles and cracked vertebrae made this impossible. So instead the mob poured gasoline over him, tied a rope around his ankles and dragged him to the dump beyond the Doukkala Gate, gathering onlookers with every arch and alley corner they navigated.

"It's not much of a fairy tale." Petra Mayer looked up from her notes. In front of her was a deposition from Lady Celia Duncalf, née Vere. Now resident in Holland Park, with a flat in St. Germain des Prés and a beach house in the Hamptons, Lady Celia's main concern seemed to be that her newly married daughter might discover details of the summer her mother spent "working" in Marrakech.

There was an accompanying letter, written in strong script and addressed to Professor Mayer by name. This touched briefly on Lady Celia's belief that Marzaq al-Turq had died in a fire in Amsterdam and enclosed a photocopy of a note to that effect signed "Jake." The lettering of the signature was as spindly as Celia's writing was firm and determined.

"You wrote this," said Professor Mayer, as she pushed the note across to Prisoner Zero. "How did it feel announcing your own death?"

Only Prisoner Zero ignored her because he was too busy remembering when the tale had been told to him. "A fairy tale" was what Malika called it, in a voice which showed she didn't quite understand why someone else, someone grown-up, had called it that.

Malika's father had not yet become enemies with Moz's mother, so the two of them were still allowed to be friends. Except this was a fairy story about how Malika's father was really someone else.

"They killed your father?"

"No, stupid." Malika shook her head in exasperation. "If he was my father I'd be much older."

"How much?"

The nine-year-old girl thought about it.

"Not sure," she said. "Almost grown-up probably."

"That would be weird."

Malika looked at him.

"If I was me and you were grown-up..." Moz shrugged at the thought and shook out his left arm, feeling blood return to his fingers. The twine that usually bound this arm behind his back was curled on the tiles where Malika had thrown it.

Moz was happy. He was on the roof of the baker's with Malika, his arm untied and his jellaba discarded in an untidy heap beside the twine snake. All he wore were the shorts his mother insisted he wear beneath his jellaba and Malika's hat.

Malika sat against a wall opposite. And from where they both sat they could see across the city's white roofs to La Mosquée, the heart of Marrakech. Everyone in the city steered themselves through the jumble of the Medina by glimpses of La Koutoubia's seventy-metre-high minaret. It became instinct. A way of triangulating position by how much could be seen of this or that monument, but always with La Koutoubia as the main point.

They were hiding on the roof of the baker's because Malika was in trouble with ould Kasim again. Quite what for, Moz was unsure; not that it made much difference. She'd still have to go down to face him sometime. That was how their conversation began.

"He's not my real father, you know," Malika said suddenly.

"What?"

"That man." She meant Corporal ould Kasim.

"Then who is?"

"A hippie."

"They didn't exist when you were a baby."

"Yes, they did," said Malika. "There just weren't very many of them. He was English."

The boy raised his eyebrows.

"Rich," Malika said. "Very rich. He paid gold for the house in Derb Yassin and painted all the rooms black. He was a poet."

Moz thought of the narrow house his mother now shared in the Mellah with Malika's father. Two rooms each, split upstairs and down. No running water. No electricity. It wasn't that he thought Malika was lying, he just didn't quite understand.

"My real father died," Malika said. "Of a fever. He got thinner and thinner until he couldn't even stand up. My mother tried spells and doctors but nothing worked. He didn't want to live, she said." Malika's voice was bleak. "And after she buried him she discovered he'd spent all the money."

Moz could imagine the rest without being told. Corporal ould Kasim, the man he'd always thought was her father, owned a small café. Only a tiny place between machine shops but it was on Djemaa el Fna, good for tourists, and a woman might work there. Of course, she would need to be married...

"Everything I do is wrong," said Malika. "The meat's not good. The bread's stale. I pay too much for grain. The chickens don't lay enough for what I feed them." She did a good imitation of ould Kasim's dead-eyed stare and the sourness of his words. "I'm going down," Malika said, resignation in her voice. "Do you want me to tie your arm first?"

It took only a minute for her to loop twine round Moz's wrist and secure the hand behind his back. Malika knew which knot to use. She'd been untying and retying the restraint for almost two years.

"What happened to the man?"

Malika turned, shading her eyes against the sun. "Which man?"

"The one they caught."

"Driss. They dragged him to the rubbish heap outside Bab Doukkala and burnt him along with all the others and the police did nothing. Although the new Pasha set a guard over the mound of burnt bodies to stop wise women breaking bits off to work magic."

"How do you know?"

"My mother told me. She went to watch."

Years later, in a public library in Amsterdam, Moz discovered that Sultan Mohammed V, newly King of Morocco, was so appalled by the hunting and burning of the traitor Thami al Glaoui's followers that he refused to eat for seven days, despite the fact that al Glaoui had been responsible for the Sultan's exile to Madagascar.

Of course, from another book, Moz learnt that al Glaoui was a hero whose clever manipulation of his colonial overlords kept the French out of much of the High Atlas. By then, Moz had been away from Marrakech for so long it never occurred to him that he might one day go back.