It was dark inside the school, with shuttered windows. A single unlit bulb hung from a small ceiling rose in the middle of the hall and the floor was covered with dark linoleum. There were five doors and all were closed.
"Okay," said Major Abbas. "Now you must stand." He tipped Moz onto his feet and steadied his shoulders for a few seconds. When he let go the boy swayed but remained upright, staring mutely around him.
Sounds came from behind most doors.
"Take him to three."
"No." Major Abbas shook his head. "Not yet. It's not necessary."
Claude de Greuze just looked at him.
"It... is... not... necessary," the Major said, stressing every syllable. For the first time, Moz heard quiet anger in his voice.
"Do you want to tell me why? Or should I call the General?"
Moz had no idea who the General might be but that didn't matter. There was always a general or a pasha, someone who made decisions.
"Call him," said Major Abbas. "Tell him you want to question one of my best informers. Someone I've spent five years developing." There was heavy emphasis on the word "question" and the Major's voice sounded more furious than ever.
"Is that true?" It was the first time the one-time advisor to the Pasha had spoken directly to the boy. "Well?"
Moz shrugged.
He'd told Major Abbas some stuff, repeated a few rumours and occasionally followed some foreigner to see where he went. That was it really, not what Moz thought of as being an informer. Informers were sinister figures. Shadows of the men Malika talked about, the Pasha's eyes and ears back in the days when Thami el Glaoui ruled the Red City.
"You don't know?" The Frenchman sounded incredulous.
"He knows nothing," said Major Abbas. "I've told you that already. Are you going to make that call or not?"
Moz was surprised that the Major kept pushing de Greuze but something had changed between the two men, and it wasn't that Major Abbas felt more at home in this strange place because he looked almost as uncomfortable as Moz felt.
It was something else. A challenge of some sort.
The two men stared at each other, both ignoring the boy who stood sticky with blood that showed only as glossy camouflage against the red lettering and black cotton background of his Ramones T-shirt.
"Okay," de Greuze said finally. "We'll do it your way."
"Yeah," said Major Abbas. "We will. Give me an hour."
CHAPTER 36
Lampedusa, Saturday 7 July [Now]
The file Petra Mayer put down in front of Katie Petrov was tattered along the edges and had a coffee stain prominently over one corner, but what Katie really noticed was the slew of Arabic running right to left across the top and the French translation underneath.
"You need to see this."
In case Katie couldn't read the French someone had thoughtfully provided a translation and paper-clipped it to the top of the file.
MARRAKECH POLICE -- HOMICIDE DIVISION.
They'd also provided a translation for every one of the pages inside, although Katie Petrov didn't need a translation to recognize most of the names. Marzaq al-Turq, Jake Razor, Malika bint Kasim...
The shot of Jake showed a man in his early twenties snarling at the photographer. Something about its studied defiance suggested the three-by-four originated with his record company. Moz's shot was very different, a diminished imitation that had the boy staring into the lens of a police camera, one of his lips badly swollen and a long gash taped shut in his hairline.
It was the third photograph that made Katie Petrov jerk forward and wrap her arms around her stomach.
"Fuck."
She fought briefly against the bile that rose in her throat and then gave up the fight, running from her office.
Professor Mayer smoked a cigarette while waiting for the younger woman to return and then smoked another. And when she finally reached for the photograph of Malika it was to turn it face down on Dr. Petrov's desk.
"This is for you," she said after Katie reappeared in the doorway, wiping the back of her mouth with one hand. "You may want to read it now."
The letter was short and polite. It thanked Katie Petrov for agreeing to be a court-appointed psychiatrist, assured her that her fee would be paid in full and told her that her services were no longer required. It was signed by the White House official who had appointed her in the first place.
"What did I do wrong?"
"Nothing," Petra Mayer assured her. "You did everything exactly as it was meant to be done. Your notes are a model of professionalism."
"But I haven't even submitted my report."
"They know that." Professor Mayer shook another cigarette from its packet, sat back in her chair and smiled. It was a particularly grim smile. The kind that glared from the back of her more recent books and suggested she knew her readers wouldn't understand the contents but they should damn well try. "What would it have said?"
"I'm not sure I can tell you," Katie Petrov said.
The Professor shook her head. "Don't sulk," she warned, "it doesn't suit you."
"I'm not," said Katie Petrov, obviously feeling about twelve. "I'm just not sure."
They were both in part engaged in displacement activity. Professor Mayer knew this and she imagined that Katie knew it as well. Neither one of them had so much as glanced at the down-turned photograph since Katie walked back into the hot little room she'd been given as an office.
"Give me your thoughts," Petra Mayer suggested.
"This is unattributable?"
The Professor smiled. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-seven."
"So young," said Professor Mayer, "and they've already got you speaking the language. Yes," she said, "this is unattributable. So tell me exactly what you think."
She watched Katie Petrov run through the main points in her head, and when Katie seemed sure she had them in the right order and wasn't about to make a fool of herself, Professor Mayer listened to Katie count them off aloud, waiting for interruptions that never came.
"So you think he's sane?"
"Speaking clinically? Not a chance. At least not in any sense I understand. As the Pentagon's man pointed out, the autistic silences, the self-cutting, the obsessive nakedness and coprophilia can all be faked, but I still think he's the real thing."
"And legally?"
"More tricky," said Katie. "Did Prisoner Zero know the nature and quality of his actions? Difficult to say. And I have to be certain he was incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Not as he is now or was when that journalist met him in Paris, but in Marrakech, that afternoon, when he loaded the gun, pointed it at the President and pulled the trigger."
"Tough call."
Katie Petrov leant back, nodded. "Near impossible," she said, "why else do you think it's taken me so long not to reach a conclusion?"
Petra Mayer smiled. "Off the record," she said, "which way were you leaning?"
"Legally, I think he was sane," said Katie Petrov. "Strictly off the record."
"Yeah, that's what I thought..." The older woman flipped open her packet of cigarettes, extracted the last and lit it with the stub of the one that had gone before. She had jet lag to make the vanished irritations of PMS feel like a minor cold and was in a space where she was surviving on will power and nicotine alone. The first mouthful of food or sip of alcohol would slam her into oblivion.
Petra Mayer knew her body. It was one of the things most men found frightening about her. "Are you okay to go through the rest of the file?"