Malika's father had not yet become enemies with Moz's mother, so the two of them were still allowed to be friends. Except this was a fairy story about how Malika's father was really someone else.
"They killed your father?"
"No, stupid." Malika shook her head in exasperation. "If he was my father I'd be much older."
"How much?"
The nine-year-old girl thought about it.
"Not sure," she said. "Almost grown-up probably."
"That would be weird."
Malika looked at him.
"If I was me and you were grown-up..." Moz shrugged at the thought and shook out his left arm, feeling blood return to his fingers. The twine that usually bound this arm behind his back was curled on the tiles where Malika had thrown it.
Moz was happy. He was on the roof of the baker's with Malika, his arm untied and his jellaba discarded in an untidy heap beside the twine snake. All he wore were the shorts his mother insisted he wear beneath his jellaba and Malika's hat.
Malika sat against a wall opposite. And from where they both sat they could see across the city's white roofs to La Mosquée, the heart of Marrakech. Everyone in the city steered themselves through the jumble of the Medina by glimpses of La Koutoubia's seventy-metre-high minaret. It became instinct. A way of triangulating position by how much could be seen of this or that monument, but always with La Koutoubia as the main point.
They were hiding on the roof of the baker's because Malika was in trouble with ould Kasim again. Quite what for, Moz was unsure; not that it made much difference. She'd still have to go down to face him sometime. That was how their conversation began.
"He's not my real father, you know," Malika said suddenly.
"What?"
"That man." She meant Corporal ould Kasim.
"Then who is?"
"A hippie."
"They didn't exist when you were a baby."
"Yes, they did," said Malika. "There just weren't very many of them. He was English."
The boy raised his eyebrows.
"Rich," Malika said. "Very rich. He paid gold for the house in Derb Yassin and painted all the rooms black. He was a poet."
Moz thought of the narrow house his mother now shared in the Mellah with Malika's father. Two rooms each, split upstairs and down. No running water. No electricity. It wasn't that he thought Malika was lying, he just didn't quite understand.
"My real father died," Malika said. "Of a fever. He got thinner and thinner until he couldn't even stand up. My mother tried spells and doctors but nothing worked. He didn't want to live, she said." Malika's voice was bleak. "And after she buried him she discovered he'd spent all the money."
Moz could imagine the rest without being told. Corporal ould Kasim, the man he'd always thought was her father, owned a small café. Only a tiny place between machine shops but it was on Djemaa el Fna, good for tourists, and a woman might work there. Of course, she would need to be married...
"Everything I do is wrong," said Malika. "The meat's not good. The bread's stale. I pay too much for grain. The chickens don't lay enough for what I feed them." She did a good imitation of ould Kasim's dead-eyed stare and the sourness of his words. "I'm going down," Malika said, resignation in her voice. "Do you want me to tie your arm first?"
It took only a minute for her to loop twine round Moz's wrist and secure the hand behind his back. Malika knew which knot to use. She'd been untying and retying the restraint for almost two years.
"What happened to the man?"
Malika turned, shading her eyes against the sun. "Which man?"
"The one they caught."
"Driss. They dragged him to the rubbish heap outside Bab Doukkala and burnt him along with all the others and the police did nothing. Although the new Pasha set a guard over the mound of burnt bodies to stop wise women breaking bits off to work magic."
"How do you know?"
"My mother told me. She went to watch."
Years later, in a public library in Amsterdam, Moz discovered that Sultan Mohammed V, newly King of Morocco, was so appalled by the hunting and burning of the traitor Thami al Glaoui's followers that he refused to eat for seven days, despite the fact that al Glaoui had been responsible for the Sultan's exile to Madagascar.
Of course, from another book, Moz learnt that al Glaoui was a hero whose clever manipulation of his colonial overlords kept the French out of much of the High Atlas. By then, Moz had been away from Marrakech for so long it never occurred to him that he might one day go back.
CHAPTER 51
Lampedusa, Tuesday 10 July [Now]
"Okay," said Petra Mayer, "I'm just going to switch this on." She flipped open a silver box about the size of a paperback and tapped its only button. Two diodes lit at the front, one red and one green. The diodes were actually something clever involving complex light-emitting polymer. Compared to the rest of the box they were almost steam driven.
"You know what it is?" Extracting an Italian cigarette from its garish packet, Professor Mayer tapped the silver box.
"A recorder," said Prisoner Zero.
The Professor and he had an agreement. He talked to her and she pretended to Colonel Borgenicht that he was still locked in silence. It seemed to Prisoner Zero that this arrangement was about to come to an end.
"Not exactly," said Petra Mayer, fishing for her lighter. "It blocks parabolic mikes and makes bugging near impossible. Everything said remains between the two of us."
"And the President."
"Yeah," agreed Petra Mayer. "Him too."
"So it's the three of us," Prisoner Zero said. He was having a numbers day. It began with a battered road sign on the way down to Calla Madonna. Without thinking, he'd divided the kilometres by eight in his head and multiplied by five to get miles. Then he did it properly, using 8.04672.
The numbers thing had gone on from there really.
Now he and Petra Mayer were on the terrace of a deserted café, staring out over a rocky headland towards the Tunisian coast. Either that, or what the Professor thought was North Africa was really a low bank of cloud spread thin across the horizon.
Professor Mayer sighed. More rested on this than just her friendship with the Newman boy, as she still found herself calling the President, albeit only in her head. She'd had calls from colleagues, calls from enemies. A New York tabloid openly accused her of consorting with traitors, although it used shorter words.
On a secure line the previous night she'd asked President Newman what he wanted and come to the nasty conclusion that he didn't know. He just wanted everything to be different. It was a very Gene Newman position. The man simply couldn't understand why Prisoner Zero wouldn't explain why he took a shot at the President, express remorse and beg for a Presidential pardon.
It obviously wasn't religion or politics, tabloids notwithstanding. Even the rump of the Republican Party was beginning to admit this. And then there was what the President now called "All that stuff with numbers written in shit." The director of the Saatchi Gallery in London had labelled its destruction the greatest act of artistic barbarism this century. New Scientist was offering a life subscription to anyone who could fill in the second half of the final line. Although Petra Mayer felt a Nobel Prize was probably more appropriate.
"You're running out of time," Professor Mayer said.
"Seventy-six hours," said Moz, watching a seagull twist for the fifth time in the same thermal. "Four thousand, five hundred and sixty minutes. Two hundred and seventy-three thousand, six hundred seconds."