She was fat with child, her breasts sore against the thin cotton of a cheap dress. Her head was bare, her hair untied and her forehead sweaty. Darkness was approaching but it brought only a shift in the sounds of the city. It was a bad night to be found with a servant of the old Pasha.
"Hide me here," said the man. "Say you've got a customer."
Maria slapped him then.
And when she finally picked herself off the dirt floor, wiping blood from her lips, it was to walk past him to the storeroom door. "I don't do that anymore," she said, pulling aside the curtain.
A single step brought Driss close, so close Maria could feel his breath on the nape of her neck and a sharpness against her skin. Everyone knew that Driss Mahmud carried a knife and on a night like this he might well be carrying his gun.
Except there had never been another night like this.
"In here," Maria shouted, and would have shouted again but for the sudden hand over her mouth to ensure silence.
"I should kill you," Driss said.
You should have killed me months back... The thought came and went, more wish than thought. Maria wasn't good at considering her own emotions. Most of the time the girl found it hard to believe that what she felt might matter.
Once, in the time of the big war, a fat foreigner had sat in a rattan chair on the terrace of the Pasha's kasbah and said something that made the Pasha roar with laughter. They'd both been looking at a small girl scooping ice into a bowl when he spoke.
"You." The Pasha's voice was low, surprisingly soft. And Maria realized she'd never dared listen to his voice before. "What's your name?"
She gave her mother's village, her grandfather's name and his job as one of the Pasha's herdsmen. Maria wasn't sure how else to answer. All of this the Pasha related to the foreigner in the stranger's language.
"So," said the foreigner, "call her Mimi." Or so one of the dancing girls reported afterwards.
The Pasha stared at him.
"Her hands," explained the fat man. "They're frozen."
"What was it you asked?" said the Pasha. "How much do I pay them?" He turned to the girl. "How much do you get paid?" he said.
Maria looked at him, her eyes wide.
The fat man in the rattan chair dragged on his cigar, blew out a cloud of smoke and turned to the Pasha. Whatever he said about her silence made the Pasha frown.
"You." He nodded to the girl. "Why do you work for me?"
She had no answer to that either.
When the Pasha glanced at Maria again it was to wave her away. So Malika's mother picked up her bucket, which was actually silver and made in Paris, covered it with a white linen napkin as she'd been taught and crept from the terrace.
The next time anyone noticed her it was to offer her to a German industrialist. She was twelve.
A month later Driss was told to deliver her to a brothel in the Medina. It was unlikely the Pasha even knew or cared that she was gone. Between the kasbah and the brothel, Driss stopped once to push her into a bricked-up archway, raise her dress and turn her to face the wall.
Now he stood behind her again. In the room which he'd found for her. And though his life was in danger and the Medina full of men after people like him, Driss Mahmud paused for long enough to force one hand inside Maria's dress and grip a swollen breast, twisting hard.
"You won't forget me," he said.
And as fear and a full bladder emptied themselves down Maria's bare leg, Driss went, knife out in front of him, running at a half crouch like some wounded animal.
"Here," Maria shouted to no one in particular. "Over here."
A motorbike beam lit the night and bounced wildly off the alley walls. The owner left its engine running to keep the beam bright. "Where?"
"Over there," shouted Maria, and pointed towards a shadow which hugged a far wall, moving at a jagged run. "He's one."
As the stolen 500cc Norton lurched forward, a second hunter sprinted from a side passage and swung himself onto the bike behind its rider. He carried a curved sword in one hand.
"After him."
The order was unnecessary. The single-cylinder machine was already skidding down the alley, its headlight picking out Driss Mahmud. A blip of the throttle, a single slash and the antique blade had opened up the running man's shoulder.
"Go round again," shouted the man with the sword and the bike slid to a halt.
It might not be the worst cut their victim had taken, but there would be others and the wounded man understood this. The most intelligent thing he could do was anger his attackers so badly they killed him outright.
"Fatah!"
He was many things, Driss Mahmud. A coward was not one of them. Holding his knife in his one good hand, he watched the 500cc Norton turn in the alley and blinked as its headlight caught him in its beam.
Shouting his insult again, Driss flipped the knife so that he held it by the blade. The man would have seen that, which was the point.
"Come and get me..."
Driss felt no pain and barely any shock, only a determination to take both riders with him if he could. Somewhere inside he must have been afraid, though. He had to be; why else would his lips be reciting prayers?
It was late, the evening call from the mosque of Bab Doukkala was long gone. Fires burned across the city. At least they burnt in the only bit of Marrakech to really matter. Who knew or much cared what happened beyond the walls in Hivernage or Gueliz?
Driss could smell wood smoke and grilling goat in the alley, and something uglier like burning rubber.
That was his last conscious thought. Tyres burning, foreigners beyond the wall, a final declaration of faith... And then the bike was on him in a blaze of light that dragged a blade behind it.
Driss threw, hard as he could, and ducked like his old caid had taught him, rolling out of the motorbike's way and into a sudden kick to his spine. Vertebrae cracked and Driss crawled away from the pain straight into the path of another boot. There were legs all around him now.
It had been a mistake to let go of his knife.
"Wait!" Climbing from his bike, the off-duty policeman pushed his way through the mob. The figure at their feet was still recognizably human, though the noise issuing from his bloodied mouth was strictly animal.
"Not here," the man said. "Take him to the rubbish dump."
Someone tried to make Driss Mahmud walk but broken ankles and cracked vertebrae made this impossible. So instead the mob poured gasoline over him, tied a rope around his ankles and dragged him to the dump beyond the Doukkala Gate, gathering onlookers with every arch and alley corner they navigated.
"It's not much of a fairy tale." Petra Mayer looked up from her notes. In front of her was a deposition from Lady Celia Duncalf, née Vere. Now resident in Holland Park, with a flat in St. Germain des Prés and a beach house in the Hamptons, Lady Celia's main concern seemed to be that her newly married daughter might discover details of the summer her mother spent "working" in Marrakech.
There was an accompanying letter, written in strong script and addressed to Professor Mayer by name. This touched briefly on Lady Celia's belief that Marzaq al-Turq had died in a fire in Amsterdam and enclosed a photocopy of a note to that effect signed "Jake." The lettering of the signature was as spindly as Celia's writing was firm and determined.
"You wrote this," said Professor Mayer, as she pushed the note across to Prisoner Zero. "How did it feel announcing your own death?"
Only Prisoner Zero ignored her because he was too busy remembering when the tale had been told to him. "A fairy tale" was what Malika called it, in a voice which showed she didn't quite understand why someone else, someone grown-up, had called it that.