Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 6 High Atlas, Monday 25 June [Now]

Ghosts hid among the holm oaks and cedar trees. Aged and almost transparent with exhaustion, they had been driven into the High Atlas by disbelief and fundamentalism, the last being a nasrani term for long beards and a rigid belief.

The ghosts had learned to distinguish those who disbelieved from those who objected by their clothes. Disbelievers wore jeans and T-shirts mostly. Blue jeans, sometimes black and mostly tight, although a few of the girls now wore trousers that flapped round their ankles like sails starved of a breeze.

Objectors wore three, sometimes four fists of beard, when in the old days two would have been considered sufficient. Like the disbelievers, they also refused to accept the ghosts, albeit for diametrically opposite reasons.

So the djinn wandered the city hungry and lonely, spilling into absence with every new breeze. Those who could, the ones freshly fed on belief or fear, headed for the dry woodlands of the High Atlas, where their kind were still welcome and if not welcome then at least accepted for what they were.

The man rough plastering an arch in a half-finished kasbah on the slopes of a valley had no trouble believing in ghosts; but then Prisoner Zero had little trouble believing in most things, except himself.

"Nobody's worth that much," said Idries, tossing his newspaper to the floor of the kasbah. The dust it raised stuck to the lower edges of a freshly plastered area, extracting a sigh from Prisoner Zero.

"You know how much it is now?" Idries demanded.

Prisoner Zero didn't.

"Twenty-five million dollars. You have any idea how much that is in dirham? You want to thank God you're among friends." There was a tightness to the small man's voice that the prisoner might have found worrying had his mind been less locked into flashbacks of ghosts, burning cars and the falling 'copter.

It was nearly three weeks since he'd shot the Brigadier. A time spent working himself half to death in Hassan's kasbah, unable to summon up the doubt he needed to make the ghosts vanish, while lacking enough faith to deny their existence.

A doctor had been introduced the first morning, a clean-shaven young man who arrived blindfolded in the back of Idries's jeep and who dressed the burns on Prisoner Zero's stomach, listened to his heart and peered deep into the back of his eyes using a cross between a flashlight and a magnifying glass.

"It will take time," the doctor said.

"What will?" Idries asked.

"For the drugs to leave his system."

"Drugs?" That was Hassan. At least Prisoner Zero thought it was; he had trouble remembering.

"This man is drugged," said the doctor. "Surely you knew?"

"Is he?" Hassan's laugh was bitter. "I'm surprised you can tell."

"Aren't you going to answer that?" Idries asked eventually, after Prisoner Zero abandoned his arch to drag a metal ladder into the hall, signalling Idries to bring a bucket full of rounded stones.

"Answer what?" Prisoner Zero demanded.

"Your mobile." The rat-faced man held out a cell phone he'd spent the previous week trying to make Prisoner Zero carry round with him.

"I don't think so," said Prisoner Zero, putting his ladder into position.

Seen from above, Idries looked every bit as unprepossessing as the prisoner remembered, maybe even worse now that a thin skim of hair was all that covered the man's narrow skull. Prisoner Zero tried to recall who'd first called Idries rat boy and gave up.

It didn't really matter. As a small child, Idries had been weaker than the others, or so Prisoner Zero had been told. So what he lacked in strength he decided to make up for in guile, but his mind wasn't quite as fast as the others' either. That was why Hassan eventually gave him a knife.

The next boy to pick on Idries got his cheek opened in a single slash. There were two things Hassan told Idries to learn from that incident.

The first was that skin stretched tight over bone splits easily and bleeds more than seems possible. The second was that their uncle Caid Hammou was right. There are some things in life that need to be done only once. Almost everybody left Idries alone after that.

It was just after dawn and Prisoner Zero was already tired. He'd started early, partly because, these days, his dreams were even more complex than his life and sleep had become a tougher choice than polishing the walls; but mostly he'd started early because whole areas of the hall still needed to be soaped and until his tadelackt plaster was sealed it remained vulnerable to just about everything.

He knew that Idries found his ability to plaster both comic and disconcerting. People like him weren't supposed to acquire the skill. Such jobs were meant to be left to those who grew up with them. And the trick of working in tadelackt was something handed down from father to sons, a family secret retained by generations of plasterers in Marrakech, Fez and Rabat.

Yet all it really took was a smattering of basic chemistry. At least, that was all it took for Prisoner Zero.

Produced by burning limestone contaminated with clay, tadelackt was different. The silico-aluminates from the burning combined with water to produce a plaster which allowed for hydraulic setting. Although the real skill, not to mention the hard work, came when the finish needed polishing. This had to be done by hand, using the force of a flat pebble to control crystallization. As for the soap, that was required to seal the surface and impede chemical reactions, allowing a finish as hard and smooth as polished marble.

"What's going to happen?" Idries said.

"I'm going to finish polishing," said Prisoner Zero, "then start with the black soap..."

That wasn't what Idries meant and Prisoner Zero knew it. Hassan's rat-faced cousin was there because Caid Hammou had given him the job of babysitting Prisoner Zero.

It was typical of Hammou and Hassan to combine keeping their guest safe with making him work for his keep, a very North African combination of exploitation and obligation which Prisoner Zero still found strange after all these years.

There were twelve bedrooms in Hassan's new kasbah, four bathrooms, five reception rooms and a kitchen, built around a central courtyard with a fountain as yet unattached to any source of water, and Prisoner Zero got the feeling Hassan intended to have him plaster them all. Idries had not even seemed surprised that first morning to find Prisoner Zero alive when all the papers were busy reporting him dead.

He'd just turned up, as ordered, in a jeep laden with lime plaster and released Prisoner Zero from the chair to which he'd been tied. That was when Prisoner Zero first realized that being driven out to the half-built kasbah didn't necessarily equate with being shot.

"What are you smiling at?"

"Your boss."

Idries looked worried. "What about him? No, wait..." The rat-faced man held up one hand, common sense changing his mind. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."

"You think he's going to kill me?"

"Caid Hammou?" As if Prisoner Zero might mean anyone else.

"Yeah, your uncle, the boss."

"No," said Idries. "If he was going to do that then you'd be dead."

"And this house would never get finished."

"There are other plasterers in Marrakech," Idries said flatly.

"Thousands of them," agreed Prisoner Zero. "So why doesn't Hassan get someone else? I've got other things on my mind."

Like ghosts and dreams and a nagging, insistent feeling that something kept looking at the world from behind his eyes and not liking a single thing it saw. A feeling which manifested itself as a low-level headache in the back of Prisoner Zero's skull where the darkness lurked.

"Hassan believed you were long since dead," said Idries. "We all did."

Prisoner Zero thought about his final months in Amsterdam, the squat overlooking the canal and the fire. "I was," he said. "Then I went to Paris."

Idries made a sign against the evil eye, his reaction so instinctive it operated below the level of conscious thought. "You shouldn't say such things."

"You weren't there," said Prisoner Zero.

"But you came back to Morocco."

"Yeah." Prisoner Zero smiled. "That's one way of putting it." Two days on a cheap coach, a ferry crossing from Alicante and a week of sleeping under flowering almond trees, walnuts and finally palms as he hitched south, doing his best to avoid anything that looked like authority. The heroin lasted from the real Paris to Paris sur la Mer, otherwise known as Casablanca, leaving him sick and sweating.

"And before..." Idries skirted around the incident in Djemaa el Fna, yet they both knew what he meant. "Hassan asked around. Apparently you were plastering an old brothel at the back of Maison Tiskiwine. For food..."

"For keep," said Prisoner Zero, "there's a difference."

"Ahh."

Prisoner Zero smiled and let Idries think he meant sex, though that wasn't it. He'd enjoyed seeing Leila's girls pass by in their thongs or camiknickers but he was there for anonymity, to be regarded like an old piece of furniture, comfortable and useful but consistently invisible. A woman in a souk had been talking about hiring a plasterer when the man who wasn't Jake had interrupted, offered his services.

"You've done the work before?"

"Of course."

"Where?" Leila's eyes were bright, openly suspicious.

He named Riad-al-Razor, near Bab Doukkala.

"Never heard of it."

"It was a while ago."

The rate Leila mentioned was so low that even Prisoner Zero had raised his eyebrows, only accepting when he realized she was about to turn back to her conversation.

"Look," Idries said. "You need to answer that."

"No," said Prisoner Zero. "I don't. So stop bothering me."

Idries began to shrug, looked at the man he was there to watch and smiled, understanding spreading slowly across his thin face. "You're not meant to answer it," he said. "It's a signal."

Prisoner Zero said nothing. He handed his polishing stone to Idries, climbed down from the ladder and walked slowly to the window, stopping while he was still in shadow.

Ghosts and the memories of things still to happen were waiting for him out there. And yet by next spring there would also be a garden of small palms and ornamental bushes, a fountain fed by water piped from higher up the valley. Pegs already marked where the beds were to be dug and foundations had been laid for a road to run from the gate to a parking area along one side of the kasbah.

Prisoner Zero tried to imagine what it would be like to own such a house and found he couldn't. It was years since he'd owned more than his memories and the clothes in which he stood. Even the flat in Paris was owned by a family trust, his tiny allowance for food, electricity and gas unchanged since the day it was first paid.

"I need some cigarettes," he said, turning back from the window.

"You don't smoke."

"How would you know?"

Idries sighed. "I'll get some tomorrow," he promised.

"Now," Prisoner Zero said. "I mean it. I can't finish this until I've got some." He indicated the area of wall he'd been polishing with the fist-sized lump of agate. It had a dull shine like poor quality marble.

"What kind?" Idries asked.

"The cheapest you can find. Try the village."

The village was six mud-brick houses, the crumbling, white-domed tomb of a local saint and a téléboutique used by every family within a five-kilometre radius to make calls, collect messages, buy cigarettes and gossip. There was no mosque as such, so the men held Friday prayers in the whitewashed tomb.

Ties of kinship being what they were, seven other villages had connections to this one and together the eight made up a holding which originally owed obligation to the caid of a valley fifteen kilometres distant. All of the houses in the eight villages followed the same simple design but their colours varied from village to village, depending on the mud from which the bricks had been made.

An ancient path passed the walls of Hassan's new kasbah, leading down a gravel slope to the village in the dip below. Another path crossed this one near the kasbah's gate and headed uphill towards an abandoned village on the plateau.

Choosing this spot was Hassan's way of making it look as if his kasbah had been there forever, a meeting point for paths and part of the valley's history. The pretence would work better when the concrete blocks making up the gate had been plastered over and the garden had been given a chance to settle in.

It was into this valley that one of Maréchal Lyautey's brigades had limped in the spring of 1916, tired and near defeated from fighting the tribes south of the High Atlas. Instead of attacking as expected, the leader of the tiny village, a descendant of the local saint, gave the French shelter and food, ammunition and replacement horses. When the brigade left, their major promised the chief that he would be made caid, ruler of the whole valley.

Hassan claimed that his uncle was the bastard of that man's bastard, the grandson of a slave and a man whose name was to become enough to make other villages surrender without a shot being fired.

"Look, if you won't go to the village, I'll go myself."

"No way," Idries said. "You know what the boss ordered. You're to stay in the house, you're not even to go near the windows. Anything you need, I get."

"Fine," said Prisoner Zero. "Get me a packet of cigarettes."

If ever a house needed ghosts it was this one. The breeze-block shell of the kitchen was hungry for feasts yet to be cooked, there were basins upstairs where no one had washed and bedrooms where no man had sulked and no woman cried herself to sleep. No one had died in their beds because there were no beds. And thus no girl had ever spread her legs to make sheets for a boy she hoped one day to love and no babies had been born of such blind and necessary optimism.

All this Prisoner Zero knew, just as he knew that ghosts had fled to this valley from Marrakech and that he might just have saved Idries's life by sending him to buy cigarettes that no one would ever smoke.

With Idries gone, Prisoner Zero picked up his cell phone and turned it off, tossing the thing into a bucket of newly mixed plaster where it slowly but certainly began to sink. Viscosity, density and displacement, he filed all three away to consider later. If there was a later.

Finding a rag in the kitchen he rinsed it under water from a standpipe in the garden and headed for a half-built stable block. Horses were still considered a sign of wealth in the Atlas and Hassan had a stallion and four mares on order, pure-bred Arabs every one. The black jeep currently occupying what would become the end stall was an old diesel, running round the clock for the second time. Its treads were worn almost bare and a bang had scraped paint off one door.

Sacks of lime plaster still sat in the back, so Prisoner Zero moved these first and then began to wipe down the vehicle. Once the doors were free of fingerprints, he climbed inside the front seat and began, as quickly as he could, to remove all trace of Idries.

He wiped down the steering wheel and gear stick, the rubber pedals and handbrake, smeared his rag across a length of plastic dashboard and then wiped down the insides of both doors. Clambering out, Prisoner Zero reached for the mats and almost ran to a half-dug flowerbed, shaking both free of gravel and dirt.

All clean, he sat himself back in the driver's seat and changed gears, running rapidly through a whole sequence. After that he turned the handles which wound down the windows and put the handbrake on and off half a dozen times. As an afterthought, he wiped down the lever that put the jeep into four-wheel drive and worked that back and forth for a few seconds.

Then he got out of the jeep and promptly leant back in again to shake dandruff from his filthy hair on to the driver's seat. All that remained was to wipe down the sacks of plaster he'd carefully unloaded.

This wasn't what Prisoner Zero was meant to do if his mobile rang and it was probably pointless, but he did it just the same. He was meant to head for the high plateau where a goatherd would meet him near the top of the path. And he was to take Idries with him.

Idries didn't know this because he hadn't been told. That was the way Caid Hammou worked. The only people to know were the goatherd, who was meant to meet Prisoner Zero near the abandoned village, and Prisoner Zero himself.

Obligation and the repayment of debts could be a very complex thing in Marrakech.

There was a certain strength and logic to Hammou's plan, but a weakness also and it was the weakness which had always undercut his family's ideas where Jake Razor, Malika and Moz al-Turq were concerned. Caid Hammou and his nephew consistently ignored the obvious, which was that some people had real trouble doing what they were told.

The bolts on the cedar front doors to the kasbah were as long as Prisoner Zero's arm and as thick as the wrist of a child. They were brass, as was traditional, although chrome had become fashionable for riads in the city.

Prisoner Zero, very intentionally, left the main doors unlocked but the soldiers still came in the windows, smashing half a dozen simultaneously to toss in stun grenades. Even with torn strips of cotton in his ears and his hands protecting his head, the shock waves made Prisoner Zero feel sick.

Dropping to a crouch, he found a wet rag he'd prepared and slammed it over his mouth and nose, shutting his eyes against the tear gas and keeping his breath shallow.

"You, down!..."

The words were shouted in English, followed a second later by a bark of Arabic and then French, same meaning, different voices. As Prisoner Zero was already crouched in the middle of the hall, he simply tipped on his side and stretched out on his front, the rag still held to his mouth.

"Hands behind your head."

Prisoner Zero assumed the position and waited. He could see feet... Well, boots really. Mostly black boots although one pair was green, made of canvas with thinner laces. That was the pair which stopped directly in front of him, shuffling back and forward. For a moment Prisoner Zero thought those boots intended to kick him in the face.

"Roll over... No... Keep your hands where they are."

Prisoner Zero rolled, and found himself looking up at a handful of US marines, a Moroccan liaison officer and two men from an elite regiment raised in Fez. They all had guns, even the liaison officer, and all of the weapons were pointed at him. It was like being... Prisoner Zero wasn't quite sure what. A fish maybe. Pulled out of the water, finally seeing the owner of the net.

"You going to shoot or not?" Prisoner Zero asked.

"Nothing so easy," the liaison officer said. And as if a signal had been given, one of the others stamped on Prisoner Zero's leg. A kick to the head followed and Prisoner Zero tumbled into somewhere else.