Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 32 Marrakech, Summer 1977 [Then]

"You know about ould Kasim...?"

Yeah, Moz knew. Idries had told him already. The old Corporal had been beyond angry when Malika finally got back to the Mellah, after helping deliver the parcel for Hassan's uncle.

Moz should have stayed around but Malika had insisted on making her own way back. At the time she'd seemed more furious about Moz changing his mind and agreeing to take Hassan's job than she did about him being the first boy to get into her pants.

Now Moz wasn't so sure. "You know where she is?"

"Haven't seen her."

"Really?"

"That's what I said." Hassan seemed anxious to be rid of him.

"Okay," said Moz.

The other boy shook his head as Moz wandered away, a Perrier bottle in one hand, his other deep in the pocket of khaki trousers ripped at the knees. Whoever had made them had sewn chain between the ankles, so that Moz looked like a hobbled camel.

That was fashion, apparently.

Hassan's own suit was Italian wool with a thin chalk stripe and five-button cuffs, double stitching on the lapel and on all of the button-holes, even those on the five-button sleeve. A tailor at Hotel Mamounia had made it to a pattern Hassan had seen in a magazine.

This, a present from his uncle, was fashion.

Also, in part, a disguise.

Malika was missing. Nothing else would have dragged Moz from Riad al-Razor back to Café Georgiou, the tourist café in Gueliz that Hassan would one day inherit from his uncle.

It was an irony not lost on Hassan that Moz, who wanted more than anyone he'd ever met to be nasrani, avoided Gueliz because this was where Hassan now spent most of his time.

"Me?" Moz halted outside the dog woman's house, taking in Corporal ould Kasim on his rickety stool surrounded by a sea of abandoned tabloids, a tray of pastries now reduced to a few sticky crumbs and a half-full tea glass which the midday heat was keeping blood hot.

"Of course, you. Who do you think I'm talking to?"

Raw anger was the only emotion Corporal ould Kasim ever expressed, all others, even cold hatred and icy contempt, seemed beyond him. As if his time in the French police had somehow scrubbed all subtlety from the palate of his emotions. An old-fashioned army truck forever stuck in first gear was how Moz's mother once described the man, in a voice so sad it spoke of broken hopes that a higher gear might exist, just waiting for her to find it.

"Yourself, I imagine..." said Moz. "I can't think of anyone else who'd be interested in what you've got to say."

"I need to talk to you."

"So?"

Sidi ould Kasim scowled. "Come here," he ordered, waiting for the boy to amble over. It didn't help the Corporal's temper that he was gathering an audience, beginning with the two hajj who lived next to the dog woman's old house. Cousins, they were forever squatting in their doorway playing backgammon. Their wives would also be watching, from behind wooden shutters that blinded two tiny first-floor windows.

In the Mellah one only had to sneeze and an old woman five streets away would immediately want to know what the doctor had said. The wives watched from behind closed shutters because houses in the Mellah were either too poor or too Jewish to have mas-rabiyas, those ornately screened balconies found across most of North Africa.

Jewish houses had windows at the front and shutters instead.

"Where's Malika gone?" The old man's voice carried a brook-no-argument, watch-yourself kind of tone.

"I don't know," said Moz, gulping from the Perrier bottle he still held in one hand. "Why don't you tell me?" The mineral water came from Celia's supplies at Riad al-Razor, obviously enough. He'd taken it along with some speed when he woke to find the morning he'd been planning to spend at the riad unravelling around him. Celia and Jake were locked into some argument and neither had seemed particularly pleased to see him.

Sweeping one hand through his spiky hair, Moz let his shades follow the old man's gaze towards the backgammon players.

"Do they know what you did to her?"

She'd left the house early on Saturday. The bread had not been made since, the floors went unswept and litter had begun to build up in layers around the old man's wooden stool. A random circle of dirty tea glasses stood going sticky and dust-encrusted in the heat.

"I did nothing." Ould Kasim's voice was contemptuous. "You're the problem. You and those friends of yours."

"Maybe you did more than just beat her... Is that what happened?"

"Watch your mouth."

"Maybe you buried her in the cellar."

"I'm warning you," said the Corporal.

"You're warning me?" Moz said. He looked the soldier up and down with all the disgust he could manage. "Maybe you should be the one worrying about the police. You pervert--"

Sidi ould Kasim stood.

It was meant to be frightening. A threat. Don't make me stand up. Don't make me come over there. Why do you bring these things on yourself? Moz and Malika knew the litany by heart. And no doubt Malika's mother had known it before that, when she was still alive. It went with the unbuckling of his belt, the clenching of a fist, the twist of one shoulder, signals of what was to come.

Moz could almost taste his own fear. A miasma made from old memories and reactions that clung to his body like steam from a hamman. All the same Moz managed to make his shrug dismissive, he was proud of that.

And if he got hurt. So what?

A single graze on Malika's arm had always hurt him more than the darkest bruise on his own body. They were tied, connected in ways neither of them wanted to talk about. Sometimes, when Malika glanced at him, Moz could see that knowledge written in her eyes.

Their names began with the same letter, they lived in the same house, in rooms exactly above and below each other, they were born in the same month, a year and a day apart, both had parents who were dead, his mother had been nasrani and so, Malika insisted, had her real father.

And then there was ould Kasim.

They both hated the man and had talked about running away when they were small. As they got older, it became not running away but escaping to find a new life... He'd let her down. All that stuff with Celia. His hands inside Malika's knickers on the roof.

Finding Malika had become the only thing that mattered. Because Moz knew, as well as he knew his own smell, that Malika would not have run away without him.

"Where are you going?" The voice was a shout behind him. One that Moz chose to ignore.

"Don't you dare walk away from me!"

The sensible thing to do would have been to keep walking. Instead, Moz turned and began to walk back, throwing up one arm to meet the belt as he had a hundred times before.

Only this time Moz stepped into the blow, more or less by accident, and the buckle which came whistling down wrapped the leather around his wrist. So Moz grabbed the strap below the buckle and yanked, almost pulling ould Kasim from his feet.

Cardamom, cheap brandy and a lifetime's bitterness, Moz could smell them all on the old man's rancid breath. Now was the moment Moz had waited for, the one where he ripped the belt from Sidi ould Kasim's hands and turned it on its owner, beating Malika's persecutor to his knees.

Malika and Moz had dreamed about this endlessly, in between making plans to run away, poison the old man with bad meat or wrap his drunken body in a sheet and drop it down a well behind La Koutoubia.

"Let go," Corporal ould Kasim ordered.

"Make me."

The backgammon players were on their feet now and the oldest of the wives had come to the door, bringing with her the smell of cheap rose-water and lamb tagine.

Stepping back, Moz yanked hard on his end of the belt, watching the old man stagger, then dig in his heels and yank back.

Moz grinned.

It was this more than anything else that stoked the old man's fury. Bringing up one knee, the soldier aimed for Moz's groin and when that failed he stamped the edge of his boot down the front of the boy's shin. Only Moz's foot was no longer there.

"Missed," said Moz. A very childish thing to say, but he didn't care.

The Corporal, the man who claimed he could reduce hardened prisoners to whimpering obedience with a single pebble and a short length of string, could no longer even knee someone properly. Moz wanted the group standing opposite to understand that.

"You know," Moz said loudly, "I haven't got time for this." Stepping back, he yanked viciously on his bit of the belt and watched the old man stumble, going down on one knee in the dust.

"See you," Moz said, dropping the belt.

And there it might have ended if only Sidi ould Kasim had let Moz leave. But as the boy turned away, already readjusting his shades and sweeping one hand through his hair, the Corporal regained his feet.

"No you don't," he said, swinging the belt harder than ever. The heavy buckle of the belt hit Moz's shoulder, bruising flesh as its metal tang pierced his shirt and lodged in his skin below the collarbone.

Odd, thought Moz.

Without further thought, he pulled the buckle from his chest, watching the underlying flesh pucker beneath cloth as the tang pulled free. The next thing he did was turn round and smash his Perrier bottle hard into the side of Sidi ould Kasim's head.

Two days after this, Major Abbas pulled Moz off the corner of Boulevard Mohammed V. The Major did this by the simple expedient of pulling up next to the teenager in a grande taxi, pushing open a door and ordering Moz to climb inside.

The boy would no sooner have refused than try to make a run for it, both of which were known to be very dangerous options where the Marrakchi police were concerned.

"Leave it," Major Abbas snapped, when Moz leant forward to wind down one window. There was something in the way he said this that scared the boy.

"You seen Malika recently?"

Moz shook his head.

"Anyone looking for her?"

"No." She was a foreigner's brat, Corporal ould Kasim's responsibility. No men from Derb Yassin were out searching through the narrow alleys of the Mellah, fired up on rumours and outrage. She wasn't worth the effort.

"You're Marzaq?" The new voice was sharp, like broken glass and edged with an accent which was new to the boy.

Moz nodded. Anything else would have been pointless.

The elderly nasrani who sat in the back of the grande taxi had improbably black hair and tortoiseshell shades which reflected Moz back on himself. A skinny punk in a torn Ramones T-shirt, his hair cut with kitchen scissors and held erect by a mix of sugar water and Vaseline.

"He doesn't look like an Arab."

The stress the old man placed on this last word was both ugly and contemptuous. On the other hand, he was speaking fluent Arabic, which was impressive in itself.

"Half Turkish," said the Major. "Quarter English, quarter German."

"Merde," said Claude de Greuze, one-time advisor to the old Pasha and still on retainer from Paris. "What a fucking mix." A mirrored gaze slid over Moz's thin face and the boy shifted uneasily in his seat. "Maybe he's got something to be worried about..."

"No. The plastic's hot, that's all." Patting the cracked red vinyl, Moz mimicked snatching his fingers away. "Much too hot."

"You speak French."

"Yeah," said Moz, "and Arabic. You want a guide to the souk I'm the best. I can show you around all the best places. Get you good prices."

Slowly, very casually, Claude de Greuze produced a Browning from the inside of his jacket, pulled back the slide and put the muzzle against the side of Moz's head.

It felt warm.

"You think this is a joke?"

Moz stared back. Not defiant, just puzzled. He was good at doing puzzled. "No," he said finally, when the seconds had stretched too thin. "I don't think this is a joke at all. I was just offering to help."

There followed a rapid-fire discussion between Major Abbas and the stranger, which switched between languages almost every other sentence. This was the first time Moz realized the Major had been learning English and now spoke it better than he did.

Moz understood about a quarter of what was said and this was a quarter more than the Frenchman intended him to understand as the words "Malika," "necessity" and "school" tumbled between the two men.

"If you say so," said the stranger, lowering his gun. He glanced again at Moz. "Maybe I'll take him up on that offer," he said to Major Abbas. "Let him show me round the souk." Claude de Greuze's smile revealed a whole mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth. "He could show me some of his favourite cafés, while he's at it. He'd do that for me, wouldn't he?"

Moz thought about those words on his walk back to Riad al-Razor. Not so much what the Frenchman said as the way he said it. And Moz thought about the man's smell. Garlic, tobacco, sweat and ginger were common in a city where water was rare and most washing was ritual, at least for the people he knew.

The foreigner's smell was different. A sour reek which so completely filled the grande taxi that it was a wonder someone as fastidious as Major Abbas could stand it. That was when Moz realized something which was to change the way he looked at the world.

Major Abbas, the most feared police officer in the whole of the Medina, had no choice but to sit with the windows shut, while trying to breathe through his mouth because, for reasons Moz could barely comprehend, he could not afford to offend the old Frenchman.

It was a terrifying thought.