Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 11 Marrakech, July 1971 [Then]

Something of the desolation and misery of the esclave clung to the walls of Criée Berbere and unnerved those who came in search of bargains from the rug merchants who had taken the slave auctioneer's place.

The buying and selling of people had lasted well into the twentieth century and at one time the going rate in Marrakech was two slaves for a camel, ten for a horse and forty for a civet cat. Those days were gone but there were children in the souks whose grandparents and sometimes even parents had been owned by someone else.

The passage behind Criée Berbere was narrow, high-walled and thick with smoke from a makeshift grill. The height of its walls trapped the grill's thick haze and forced all who used the passage to pass through a cloud of thyme, onion and burning charcoal.

And as the coals over which the skewers of lamb cooked were still a little too hot, the boy behind the grill offered that afternoon's customers cheap paper tissues as protection for their fingers.

He was doing his best not to look at the Englishman.

David Giles sat in a locked doorway, near where the alley turned a corner. His Afghan coat was missing, the Tuarag cross was gone from around his neck and someone had pulled one jeans pocket inside out. He smelt a lot worse than when Moz last saw him but he'd been alive then, that was the difference.

The previous afternoon, Call-me-Dave had been wandering fairly aimlessly from stall to stall in Djemaa el Fna, asking people if they knew somewhere inexpensive he could sleep. Since the second of the day's calls to prayer had barely finished echoing from the square's three minarets this seemed odd to Moz, but the man was a hippie and foreigners were odd by nature.

"What's wrong with your bus?"

It took Dave Giles a second or so to work out that the boy meant his VW Caravette. "The police towed my bus away," he said. "I've got to pay a fine."

"For using the mosque garden?"

Dave Giles shrugged. "They didn't say," he said. "But I need somewhere to stay while my family send money."

Malika's father had offered the man a space on their roof for ten dirham a day, which was nothing for a foreigner, but David Giles turned it down. He was looking for a place with a television. When ould Kasim asked Moz what was wrong with Derb Yassin, he told the old soldier that the foreigner wanted hot water.

It seemed easier.

A dozen heels must have brushed past the nasrani as people slipped between the leather and carpet souks and stepped over his outstretched feet while pretending not to notice he was there.

Glancing round, Moz dropped to a crouch beside the foreigner and slid his good hand quickly inside the man's shirt. He was definitely dead and his wallet on a string was gone. An irregular circle of white around one finger revealed he'd also lost his puzzle ring.

In Call-me-Dave's back pocket, however, Moz found a comic -- Galactic Warrior -- which he pocketed before turning to the boy with the grill, who was dicing onions on an upturned tile.

"How long?" Moz asked.

"How long what?"

"Has the dead man been here."

The boy peered at him from under badly cut hair, his face suspicious. "Which dead man?" he said and went back to his onions.

It took courage for Moz to talk to a policeman, even the kind who wore khaki shirts and carried only small guns. And by the time he found that courage a whole café full of officers knew the small one-armed boy wanted to talk to them.

The café was just outside the gates of the Medina. A place of metal chairs, Formica tables and tiny floor tiles that felt like studs under feet. The walls hid behind sheets of reconstituted local marble better suited for public baths or cheap graves. Café Nouveau had been built in the last decade of French rule in a style that was already out of fashion on the mainland. The police used it because no one else did. Or maybe it was the other way round.

"What do you want?"

The one-armed boy didn't answer the sergeant who spoke. He chose instead an officer with a kinder face, a man younger than the others at that table. So it was only by accident that Moz found himself talking to the most senior police officer present. A graduate who'd taken his degree in Paris. Which might have been enough to cause Aboubakr Abbas endless problems, except for the fact that his uncle had only just retired from the force and he'd spent a childhood hanging around staff canteens in the Hotel de Police in Gueliz.

"What?"

"I've found a body." Moz's words came out so quiet that he repeated them without being asked. "In a passage behind Criée Berbere."

"Man or woman?"

The sergeant was waved into silence by Major Abbas.

"A hippie," said Moz, answering anyway.

Major Abbas sighed. "What's the name of this street?"

"It doesn't have one," said Moz.

The Major nodded. There was nothing unusual about that. A hundred different passages in the Old City made do without names and even the most modern government-produced maps left blank whole areas of the Mellah and much of the inner souk.

"And you," said the policeman, "do you have a name?"

"Al-Turq," Moz said, without thinking.

Major Abbas shrugged, he'd heard stranger. Finishing his mint tea with a single gulp, the Major nodded to the others, half farewell and half to say they could stay where they were. "Show me," he said.