Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 18 Lampedusa, Sunday 1 July [Now]

Concrete stabilized the cliffs on which the Hotel Vallone dell'Acqua now stood. Money for shoring up the cliffs came from an EU budget. There had been billions of lira in the fund originally but every time money passed down the line from government to regions, from regions to cities, from cities to towns and villages some of it seemed to get siphoned off.

People assumed it was the Mafia. In Sicily, when funds went missing, people always assumed it was the Mafia. In fact, it was everybody else, the politicians and council members, the police chiefs, administrators and town leaders.

So by the time the money actually reached Vallone dell'Acqua in the middle of the 1970s there was only just enough left to do the job it was meant to do, shore up a kilometre of crumbling cliff beneath Pasquali's chapel. A tiny seventeenth-century church built by a local saint who was convinced that Lampedusa, not Malta, was the island on which St. Paul had been wrecked. That a hotel was later built near the chapel was coincidence.

Had anyone on the island decided to take their cut, the job could never have been done. Only no one did, because even the fascists understood that saving Pasquali's chapel was more important than a new fridge, money under the mattress or a stove that lit itself.

This was, of course, a time when cash regularly went missing, ministers turned up in the boots of cars, bankers miraculously tied themselves up and then jumped off bridges and newly elected but unpopular popes suddenly woke up dead. It was a time of exploding railway stations, murdered magistrates and hijacked trains.

Un momento di corruzione.

Italy was different now, respectable again. It was the front line against clandestini, a bastion of Catholic light facing a sea of darkness. Italians knew this, they'd had a prime minister who kept telling them so. Of course, the fact he owned most of the country's TV stations made this easier than it might otherwise have been.

Situated just outside an Area Riserva Naturale which protected a large and rocky swathe of Lampedusa's southern coast from tourist development, Hotel Vallone had its own glass-sided funicular that ran down to a private beach where turtles sometimes stumbled ashore and guests could bathe naked, secure in their exclusivity.

The guests were gone and the funicular was out of commission. It had taken all the manager's tact to persuade a large and seemingly intransigent marine sergeant that he didn't want to wrap plastic explosive around a high-tension wire and cut the lift free, this being what Master Sergeant Saez had been in the process of doing when the manager arrived.

Now the manager was holed up in someone else's hotel, drinking Peroni from the minibar and watching stripping housewives on RTI. He felt safer that way.

Hollow clay blocks lay between upturned T-joists. Of the six surfaces in the weights room the ceiling should have been the most promising and would have been if only marines hadn't been using the room above.

The sound of heavy footsteps overhead had given Prisoner Zero that information.

Without a watch, Prisoner Zero had been reduced to judging time by changes in the slit just about visible under the weights room door. If he was right, the time was somewhere after midnight and before first dawn.

"Now," said the darkness.

Hunting down something sharp took time, so the darkness suggested Prisoner Zero shut his eyes and run his fingers over each side of the cage in turn. Which the prisoner did, plucking silent notes from plastic-coated mesh in his search for a way out.

When this failed, Prisoner Zero swept his hands under the bed and up the corners of his cage, where the sheets of mesh had been soldered together.

Above the lintel of the hatch Prisoner Zero found a vee of mesh not properly welded to the frame and began to twist, counting elephants until he reached forty-nine and the wire came free in his hand, so hot at the fracture point that Prisoner Zero heard his fingers hiss as they touched the break.

Whoever had originally tiled the weights room had smeared a sand and cement mix across the entire floor and then scraped it clean with a plastic blade. And they'd lacked enough cement to get a good mix because most of what Prisoner Zero cut from between his practice tile beneath the mesh was sand, the kind which hadn't been washed before bagging.

He was humming to himself as he worked, a song he hadn't thought of in years; three lines from the three-chord wonder which was "Lost in Mythik Amerika." The three lines leading up to the bridge...

I was watching you smile and seeing you cry,

Lost in Mythik Amerika,

Lost in the lie.

Even after he cut the grouting from around a tile, the wire mesh on which he knelt would prevent him from being able to lift the thing. Prisoner Zero knew this and would wait for the darkness to tell him how to cut his way through the wire.

Two of the half-dozen interchangeable marines woke him at dawn and fed him and told him how many days until he died, which was ten. The Sergeant who'd first punched him was missing or at least busy with other duties, although his absence made little difference.

They still spat in his food, kicked over his slop bucket and did the things all guards had done for centuries and would do for centuries still. And when he was fed and his bucket was righted and the floor wiped clean, the marines unlocked his cage and took him to see Miles Alsdorf, one at each arm.

At the door of the weights room they were met by Sergeant Saez and the small black woman with the scowl. The two with their thumbs dug into Prisoner Zero's upper arms carried Colt 1911s holstered at their sides, as did Specialist Stone, who led the way. Only the Sergeant carried a rifle, its muzzle grinding into Prisoner Zero's neck at the point where his skull met vertebrae.

It was seven paces from his cage to the weights room door, fifty-four paces from the weights room to the door of the health club where his lawyer had been given a room as his office. Fifty-four paces, plus one right turn and then a left.

Originally given over to colonics, Miles Alsdorf's room had been cleared of couches, water tanks and tubes and furnished with a cheap desk and two simple chairs. Iron bars had been set crudely into its only window. One window and one door, the rooms on either side occupied by marines. Prisoner Zero was beginning to see a pattern.

"You're late," Miles Alsdorf said, but his words were aimed at Specialist Stone.

The marine shrugged. Her mother had scrubbed floors for a man like him. So far as she was concerned, Miles Alsdorf could whinge all he wanted, she answered only to those directly above.

After shackling the prisoner's feet together, the marines stood back. "We'll be outside the door," said Master Sergeant Saez, managing to make it sound like a threat.

"Whatever," Miles Alsdorf said.

The door closed with a bang and the lock was turned noisily.

"We need to talk," said the lawyer. "And talk now."

As ever, Prisoner Zero said nothing.

Sipping from a plastic cup, Miles Alsdorf dragged one hand across his immaculately cut hair and dried his fingers discreetly on the leg of a Brooks Brothers summer-weight suit. "You've got ten days," he said. "And that's it... Always assuming you're not going for some dramatic last-second reprieve?"

Again, that blankness.

Miles Alsdorf sighed. "I really do suggest you sign this," he said.

It was a power of attorney and under it rested a second piece of paper, actually two pieces. "And this is our request for a retrial," Miles Alsdorf added. "A civilian trial, you understand? A proper trial." He pulled a pen from his pocket. "All I need," he said, "is your signature."

Taking the platinum Montblanc from Miles Alsdorf's hand, Prisoner Zero unscrewed its top and carefully began to stab his wrist, keeping his back to the lawyer after Miles Alsdorf lunged to retrieve his pen. After the seventh dot, Prisoner Zero stabbed a double to mark the door, then methodically stabbed himself another fifty-four times.

Only then did he return the pen.

"The easiest way to get rid of me," said Katie Petrov, "is to talk to Mr. Alsdorf, your lawyer." She smiled, as if the comment was funny.

Raw scabs ran the length of Prisoner Zero's lower arm. Either an indication of self-hatred, in which case he should be on suicide watch, or a crude attempt, according to Miles Alsdorf, to give himself a prison tattoo.

The lawyer was relying on her to tell him which.

Katie Petrov sighed. Nodding to a bowl of pastries on her desk, she indicated that he should take a piece and tried not to worry when she got no response at all.

"When you're hungry," she said.

The talking to herself was intentional and something Katie used often. Everything about Katie's approach to this case had been thought through in advance, from the net curtains she'd recently put up to stop the man from losing himself in the Mediterranean beyond her window to the Sicilian sweets and the clothes she currently wore. A selection so neat and anonymous that even she had to look at them to remember exactly what she was wearing.

There'd been a suggestion, from her as it happened, that Prisoner Zero might respond better to a male psychiatrist. It had been made in the panic following her first meeting with the man and she'd had the sense not to push it when Petra Mayer disagreed. Having seen how Prisoner Zero shut down in the presence of Miles Alsdorf, she could only concede that the Professor had been right.

"We're going to do it differently today," said Katie. Actually they were going to be doing it differently every day until she finally hit on something that worked. Dr. Katie Petrov knew all the reasons why consistency was good. She'd done the lectures on building trust without establishing dependency. Hell, she'd written some of them, but he was running out of time and elective autism was a poor defence.

It was surprising the number of attorneys who assumed that a sudden descent into silence by their client would pass for evidence of mental trauma. Every half-bit stalker with a knife and a grudge, every thirty-something sleazebag who saw kindergarten gates as the entrance to heaven...

She was getting angry, mostly with herself, Katie realized. A sign of helplessness and very unlike her. Katie didn't get emotional at work. Not even when working with anorexic adolescents and statistically they were more likely to push industry professionals over the edge than anyone else.

"The thing is," Katie said, "you've only got ten days. I don't know if anyone's explained that?" She caught it then, a quick flicker behind his dark eyes. "Oh," said Katie, as she picked up what looked like the bag for a laptop, "I see. Everyone's told you that, have they?"

A cricket outside her window gave the only answer.

Opening the case, Katie pulled out a small silver box that trailed a mains lead. "I'd like to use this," she said. "It's not compulsory but it would help me help you." She held out the device. "Do you want to take a look?"

Sixty seconds later Katie let her hand drop.

"Electrodes," she explained, extracting a tangle of wires from the small case and putting them carefully on her desk. "This is a basic electroencephalograph. I use it mostly for kids with Ritalin dependency. It helps them learn to normalize certain brain patterns. Obviously that's not what I want to try with you..." There was a pause, the expectant kind. One Prisoner Zero was meant to fill.

"No problem," said Katie. "Would you like me to put them on for you?"

Outside her door waited two marines. Tall men with aubergine skin and cropped skulls, a rifle each and fat body armour. In their right ears they wore single black beads, button mikes were taped to their throats.

Either one would have held the captive down while the other helped Katie glue electrodes to his skull, and they'd have done it willingly and probably regarded Katie in a better light afterwards. Katie found the fact she wanted that approval unnerving. Almost as unnerving as realizing it was prompted by an unspoken fear that the marines regarded Katie as somehow against them.

"I'm here to help," Katie said. "I can do that better if you wear these." She nodded to the spider's web of wires. "All the box does is measure brain activity. It won't tell me your secrets or let me look inside your head." She spoke as she might to some drug-addled gang-banger in need of a quick and dirty court report. Casual did it, anything else and most of them retreated into a carapace harder than any which nature could produce.

Katie was still trying to work out exactly why she got this gig. At twenty-seven she was young to be doing this kind of analysis and her pro-bono work for Médecins Sans Frontières was well known. She'd been the only specialist prepared to go on CNN and say the outbreak of unquestioning patriotism which followed the attempt to shoot the President was bad for America's health.

It made her an obvious choice when Petra Mayer, President Newman's unofficial conscience, began looking for an independent expert to balance the expert already produced by the Pentagon. While at the same time rendering her opinion worthless to most of the Supreme Court, the majority of whom had been appointed by the previous incumbent.

So was her evidence meant to be taken seriously or had she been hired to jump through hoops? And, if so, was her old tutor part of that plot? There were levels to this Katie couldn't begin to imagine, she knew that. And rumours enough to keep conspiracy theorists busy for years.

That Prisoner Zero was the First Lady's bastard brother was one of the best. A slightly less fanciful one had the Pentagon knowing exactly who he was but refusing to tell the White House.

Whatever the truth, she'd been handed a poisoned chalice that might still turn into one of the decade's plum jobs. How many psychiatrists of her age could say they'd been retained to evaluate the mental state of a man on trial for trying to kill the President? Come to that, how many of any age...

Picking up the wires, Katie reached for a tube of surgical glue and smeared an electrode, sticking it to one side of the prisoner's skull. When Prisoner Zero didn't complain, Katie stuck another to the opposite side. His lack of complaint was a benchmark. The moment he shrugged her away was the point Katie would stop fixing the wires.

It helped that Prisoner Zero's head was recently shaved. Most of the kids she handled pro bono had hair twisted into topknots or cut to some gang pattern. For a few of the more vain, deciding whether or not to let Katie fix her wires took longer than they put into deciding their plea.

"Okay," Katie said, when the last wire was in place, "I'm going to say words and you're going to tell me the first thing that comes into your head. It can be a memory or reaction. Something from childhood or something from now."

So slow were the pupils which watched her that for a second Katie was worried the marines might be drugging him, but then the breeze lifted a corner of the net she'd pinned in place and, as Prisoner Zero's head flicked towards the movement, his pupils collapsed like stars swallowing themselves.

"Mother," Katie said. "What does that word suggest to you?"

A bottle empty on a table.

"It's all right," said Katie, "you can tell me."

Checking a readout on her EEG, Katie noted how high one of the columns had gone. Someday some genius would work out how to translate results into direct evidence and half her job would disappear overnight. "Okay," she said with a sigh, "let's try another... Cat."

His lover at a pavement café feeding scraps from her plate to a sack of bones then shooing away the ragged child who came trying to beg coins. Amber eyes hurt in the twilight.

"Sun."

Brightness lancing through cracks in a study door and burning a thousand planets of dust, spinning and chaotic, tied by laws he was only just beginning to understand.

"Water."

A skin of liquid on the underside of an Amsterdam fountain clinging to the marble's hard bone and curving away into its own event horizon.

"You."

"What?" demanded Katie, leaning forward. With an effort she made herself sit back and move on to the next word. There had been something there, something the man wanted to say, Katie was sure of it.

"Feathers."

A dream-catcher made from a boa found in a biscuit tin. Celia left it on the wall when she went.

Katie wrote "You" on her notepad and put a tick next to the word.

She often did that, let the questions move on and then make notes for a moment which was gone. Putting pencil to paper the instant something of interest arose sent out the wrong signals and that was something Katie tried to avoid.

"Let's try something else," she said. "Something simpler." Folding a piece of paper in two, she dripped red ink into the crease and neatly folded together the two sides, so that the colour oozed between the pages. And then she peeled them apart again.

"What do you see?" said Katie. "You can tell me."

And without a word Prisoner Zero stood up and shuffled to the door, shackles dragging and wires still trailing from his skull, the tiny EEG box scuttling through the dust behind him like some exotic household pet.