Jon Grimwood - Stamping Butterflies

She looked at him through huge eyes. "I'm not sure I understand," she said.

Zaq dressed himself in his pale blue chao pao, the one decorated around the neck, across the shoulders and above the hem with embroidered five-clawed dragons.

The original ruling was simple. Five claws for an emperor, four for a prince and three for generals, chamberlains and dukes.

Sometime between the first Chuang Tzu and Zaq, who was the fifty-third emperor to have taken that title, imperial dragons had suffered severe inflation and so had the materials from which they were made. The dragon embroidered across the cloak that Zaq now wore had so many claws they were almost impossible to count.

"Go," Zaq told the girl.

"Where should I go?"

"Home?"

So she went, still naked. And Zaq watched her walk away until she turned a corner at the end of a corridor and he was alone again.

I may eat this, I may not eat that. I will walk this distance and stay silent for that many hours. Hold my hands out to my sides for this many minutes. Stay awake for that many hours.

The rules Zaq made for himself were no more arbitrary than those written for him by tradition. And if others failed to understand them that was not his fault.

Was it?

Wrapping the dragon cloak around him, Zaq allowed himself a red bean mini moon cake from a gold plate and headed back to the garden, stopping only to smash all the mirrors as he came to them.

Fifteen minutes after the girl in the oversized haik left Café Impérial and retraced her steps along the edge of Jardin de Hartai to where a boy waited, five sticks of industrial explosive detonated beneath a bench at the rear of the café. The wooden bench was against the left-hand wall and only one person was sitting there because the café was almost empty, which was all that could be said for what happened.

The primers had been manufactured for quarrying. Of low grade to begin with, age and careless storage had taken them to the edge of their useful life. In fact, the forensic expert borrowed from Paris regarded it as a wonder that they hadn't detonated of their own accord while being carried through the streets of Marrakech.

Sécurité regarded this as a poor miracle.

It mattered little that the bomb was of such low quality because someone had taped rusty nails around each stick. A report written a couple of weeks after the atrocity by a policeman called Major Abbas and circulated by the Ministry of the Interior to Paris and Washington noted the similarity between this attack and similar Algerian-inspired atrocities, concluding that the organizers were probably already across the border and thus could not be found.

His report contradicted a suggestion in Le Matin that the nails were chosen because they were rusty, pointing out that these were probably all that had been to hand.

Either way, the rust added complications to wounds that were already, if one were honest, beyond anything other than the most palliative treatment. Shrapnel from a bomb can spin up to and through the point of impact. Where and when it stops spinning depends on the rate of spin and the density of the tissue with which it comes into contact; bone is usually enough.

Of the few patrons in Café Impérial scarcely any survived. And of the three who did, all died from side effects or medical complications within a period of fifteen weeks. The last to die was Ishmael Bonaventure, who still controlled a number of brothels, clubs and cafés at the time of his death, including Samantha's, a discothèque on the edge of the Palmeraie visited by Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix.

Among those who died instantly were the manager, his son, the man on the bench and a second cousin of Hassan's uncle, who'd come to meet Ishmael Bonaventure.

Monsieur Bonaventure had been as surprised to receive a telephone call from the cousin as that cousin was to be contacted by Caid Hammou. Having fallen out six months before over profits from a bar in Agadir, the bad blood between Hassan's uncle and the cousin was known to many.

Caid Hammou offered his cousin a simple choice: renewed friendship or a lifetime of enmity. That this life was likely to be short went unspoken.

The cousin had not been looking forward to visiting Café Impérial, centre of Bonaventure's operations in the New Town. As prices went, however, acting as go-between for Caid Hammou and Ishmael Bonaventure was far less than the cousin had been expecting to have to pay for what, in retrospect, was a very unfortunate error in accounting.

So he agreed, fixed the meeting and went with a list of suggestions from Caid Hammou on how operations in Marrakech might be more fairly divided.

Eminently reasonable suggestions, all things considered. And sitting across a table from the elderly freedom-fighter turned gangster, the cousin could see that Bonaventure felt this too.

"I will need to meet Caid Hammou." The old man's tone might have been peremptory but his acceptance of Hammou's right to the title "caid" said all that was needed about how content he was with the compromise on offer.

"Of course," Caid Hammou's cousin said. "Shall we arrange that now?"

The old man looked surprised, also gratified. He had assumed that Caid Hammou would make difficulties about the exact time and place of the meeting in an attempt to keep face. "He's happy with this?"

The man on the other side of the table nodded. "Let me make the call," he suggested, pointing one finger at a telephone on the wall. "May I use that?"

"Be my guest." Ishmael Bonaventure sat back to enjoy the moment. He was still savouring his success when a young Arab girl walked in, swathed in a black haik. Someone's servant, he imagined.

She drank mint tea, the cheapest thing on the board, and ate half a pastry, leaving her payment in a handful of small coins. Ishmael Bonaventure was willing to bet a few would be empire cheffian , old currency from the days before the French gave up their claim to his country.

Bonaventure watched her eat, drink her mint tea and pay in an old mirror which his father had imported from Paris. He didn't notice that she'd forgotten to take her shopping bag.

The old gangster and Caid Hammou's cousin were both still waiting, somewhat impatiently, for Caid Hammou to arrive when the bomb exploded at the table behind them and their impatience ceased to matter.

The café was destroyed, its back wall ripped open, its ceiling crumbling in like eggshell. It was mere bad luck that Café Impérial backed onto a notario's office sometimes used by French intelligence. And it was this, that an office on Boulevard Abdussallam had been destroyed and two European lawyers killed in the blast, which made the news.

More fucking flash guns than at the Oscars. Colonel Borgenicht kept his assessment to himself, while still regarding it as pretty accurate.

Originally he'd demanded that the event take place during the day and that numbers be limited. He'd been overruled on both counts. His attempts to go over the head of General Mayer, as he found himself referring through gritted teeth to the Professor, foundered when the five-star general he approached was overruled by Gene Newman in his capacity as Commander in Chief.

So Colonel Borgenicht found himself providing security for a Sicilian village emptied of most of its inhabitants and filled with the cream of the world's press, which wasn't exactly how the Colonel thought of the growling and surging mob roped off on one side of a picturesque nineteenth-century square.

After a quick once-over, he'd dismissed the female journalists. Mostly they were scrawny, dressed in black and utterly interchangeable, being short-haired, immaculately made up despite the heat, and thin as teenaged boys. His own tastes were more lush. The men came in two models, ponytailed and those, infinitely greater in number, who sported heads as cropped as any of his own marines.