Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  He moved his shoulders cautiously, felt the slickness of her creams between his skin and the bandages.

  A little while later he realised that he was not alone.

  ‘Well done with the car,’ he said. ‘And the story. That was sharp.’

  The boy sat down. As always when they were close together, the Sergeant felt conscious of his own bigness.

  ‘It was okay?’

  The Sergeant contemplated last night’s events. ‘Yes. It was good work.’

  ‘You are not arrested.’

  ‘No. I think . . . the longer I am not arrested, the less likely it is that I will be. Or killed. I suppose that’s the other thing.’

  The small head came up fiercely. ‘They had better not!’

  ‘You’ll sort them out for me, Tigerboy?’ Something flickered in the boy’s face. The question was suddenly unfunny. There were plenty of places where someone his age would be quite old enough to do that. The best guerrilla fighters and commandos in many wars were children this age: small, quick, and desperately loyal. And ruthless, with the clarity of childhood. There were warlords not much older.

  ‘Joking,’ the Sergeant said quietly. ‘In bad taste, I s’pose. Sorry.’

  The boy hung his head. ‘I should have known what was in the cave.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes! I totally screwed up.’ Pride. If the car was his own good work, then the cave was also his, with what that entailed. No day without night. No glory without responsibility.

  ‘All right,’ the Sergeant agreed. ‘Yes. We should have done more work up front. We were sloppy and we screwed up. You and me both. But we didn’t die and, fingers crossed, we got away with it. We just have to be smart. It’s like . . .’ He cast around. ‘It’s like after a bank robbery in the movies. They always get away clean and then someone buys a new car when they shouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes. That is dumb.’

  ‘It is. So we go through it. Tell me what you saw last night.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘You went into the cave. A few minutes later there was a huge bang, and smoke. I vamoose! Watch from a little way. You – Tigerman – come out. Look strange and scary. (Great mask!) They follow you, very angry. You run. I take the car and dump it where you will find it. Then I re-moose. I go home, erase the video footage.’ Oh, yes. The boy’s video. ‘Which is a shame, because it is the shizzle. Simpson Bruckheimer himself has no shizzle like this shizzle.’

  ‘Erase how?’

  ‘Tell the computer to write stuff over – random numbers again and again. Takes a long time. Better-than-DoD-standard.’ This last had the feel of a direct quote from the manual. ‘I was careful all the time. I looked up high for the eyes in the sky! But there was cloud, like this way then that, all the time. I think they can see one minute in every five.’

  Let us devoutly hope.

  The Sergeant nodded and fell silent. He did not know how to ask his next question, but he did not have the option to put it aside. It had become his habit when talking to the boy. He avoided the things which might cause friction between them, treating their friendship like something very fragile because precious things were, to his mind, always so. But not this one, not today.

  ‘How did you find out about the cave?’

  The boy looked away. ‘It is known.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘Many people. It is not a secret. And in the past it has absolutely been a clubhouse.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘I? No.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Some people.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Some people that I know.’

  They glared at one another. Finally the Sergeant said: ‘Have you spoken to any of these people recently? About the cave?’

  ‘You wish to know if someone lied?’

  ‘No.’ Although now that you say it I’m worried about it. Who? And why?

  The boy scowled for a moment, and then he brightened. ‘You worry that this person will give us away!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘She would not.’ With absolute certainty.

  She, the Sergeant heard. Not anonymous people any more. One person. A woman who would never, ever give him away. Someone who for whatever reason would not, could not change her allegiances. Someone bound to him to the point of destruction. Squadmate, family, lover, debtor.

  Family.

  He nodded acceptance, and made sure it was respectful. They had clashed, and they were still friends. It was only polite to acknowledge it.

  The boy saw that his debrief was over. He nodded in return.

  ‘I am going to the lake,’ he said carelessly.

  ‘Have fun.’

  ‘There will be good water.’

  ‘I’m not allowed to swim. The Witch said.’

  The boy nodded acceptance of this overriding command.

  ‘But,’ the Sergeant added, ‘I might eat later. Maybe at the café. Kswah swah.’

  Laughter. ‘Kswah swah.’ Then: ‘Will you burn the suit?’

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘I should.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The boy seemed to concede this, then shook his head. ‘But you may need it. To prove that you are helping. And if you find it then your DNA can be on it when they test. It is natural. Your fingerprints, the same.’

  The Sergeant recognised this as special pleading, and he mistrusted how much he wanted to agree. He did not relish the idea of destroying the suit – it was something they had done together – but it was evidence that could hang him. But then again, yes: what the boy said was true. He might need, down the line, to produce some sort of coup to demonstrate his commitment to good order on Mancreu and to the search for the terrorist in the funny outfit. Assuming such a search ever took place.

  ‘There is a burn bag,’ he said at last. The boy blinked at him owlishly. He never said, ‘I do not know what that means.’ He just waited until you said it another way. ‘A metal container for the storage of sensitive documents. It is a diplomatic bag, but it has a small bomb inside it. If the wrong combination is used, the contents of the bag are destroyed.’

  The boy nodded. ‘The suit goes in the bag.’

  ‘And then at least only London can find it.’

  ‘And you are London. In all Mancreu, only you are London.’

  True. He would keep the suit, for now. If things got hot, he could always destroy it later. He tried not to feel glad at this decision. It was perfectly rational.

  He waited until the boy had gone before he moved the suit. He wasn’t sure why; it wasn’t as if they would somehow be overcome by it and rush out again to foil a bank robbery, but he could not shake the feeling that it was a temptation, somehow, that he should not extend. When he picked the pieces up in his hands, he felt like a man engaged in an illicit affair with someone else’s wife.

  He put the whole suit in the burn bag and put the burn bag in the armoury. As soon as he closed the door he remembered the photograph of Shola he had found in the cave. Theoretically there might be fingerprints on it. He might even be able to lift them with talc. Tomorrow. It would have to be tomorrow. He was exhausted, which was natural, and he was aching. A nap would be ideal.

  He took ibuprofen, drank Coca-Cola from the cellar, and kept moving. Movement would help, and he needed to be seen. By now, whatever NatProMan was doing about last night was in motion. If the whole thing had been identified as weird bullshit from a crew of fish-thieving East European wideboys then the business would be shelved. If not, investigators would be on the way. He owed London a report, so he went into the house and fired off an advisory: NatProMan pissed off about something, no military threat apparent, no details yet available at this end. He made it somewhat less informal, but the sense was that knickers were in a twist for no discernible reason and there was nothing to see here. He’d have to revise that later, but for now it was nicely in character.
/>   He glanced at himself in the mirror. In character. When had he started thinking of Lester Ferris as a role to inhabit? He had known, in Iraq, a young man who had realised belatedly that the army life was not for him. The kid had been from some shithole, signed up half-drunk and was now seeing real bullets and bombs and wishing he hadn’t. So he pretended to be mad.

  It was simple enough. He went on patrol in a Mickey Mouse hat he’d got from somewhere, and he carried his gun like a swagger stick. He’d never seen M*A*S*H, so he didn’t realise he was travelling a well-worn path. And after each patrol he’d push it a bit further until they had to take notice. They’d put him in a secure hospital cell indefinitely, and he’d carried on the game for weeks and months and faked a suicide attempt and bitten an orderly and finally he’d broken down and explained that he was faking it, he just wanted so very much to go home. And the doctors told him: ‘It’s okay. You’re going home, and no one’s going to punish you.’ But he deserved to be punished, he said. He’d faked it. ‘Yeah,’ the doctors said. ‘We always knew you thought you were faking it. But that’s the thing: you never were. It was real, and now you’re better.’ Which was about the most disturbing fucking idea the Sergeant had ever heard, until he came here and it was just life, and then he had the really disturbing idea that everyone in the world was carrying on this way all the time.

  Mancreu turned everyone into a psychologist. And a lunatic, as well.

  Well, that sort of thing got worse the more you thought about it. So he made a list of all the things he ought to do, would normally do. Pretend last night never happened: what would today ordinarily be about?

  Well, yes: he would investigate the business of the dog, and he would give due consideration to how Mancreu’s new motoring enthusiasts could best be brought to consider their actions in a responsible and adult light. Somewhere in the back of his mind, sharp teeth flashed and something growled: like the light of burning quad bikes. He pushed the thought away. It was not exactly un-sergeantly, but it tasted of the mask and of those soldiers who couldn’t ever put the battlefield away. He thought of his war on tomatoes, and shook his head.

  Second – always hidden, always present – came the matter of the boy’s parentage. Inoue’s work said the end was coming, and that meant he could no longer afford to dawdle, which, as he looked at himself in this exhausted clarity, was what he had been doing for months. On the other hand, Inoue had also given him a lead. And so had the boy: the unnamed woman who knew about the cave. To an average copper in an average situation that would surely scream ‘tart’, but here and now, not so much. The Protectorate forces were like American GIs during the Second World War: they had food and access, and they were exciting. When they had first arrived, both the men and the women of NatProMan had been the subject of intense local interest. So the boy’s family member – he did not say ‘mother’, did not prejudge, because it could be a sister or an aunt or even a grandmother – was probably lively, attractive, and might be single. She was still here. She might be a familiar face. Between the records at the Chapelle Sainte Roseline and that, he could narrow it down to a manageable number. Even if some of his working assumptions were wrong, it might work. He was not too proud to accept a bit of luck.

  And not unrelatedly there was Shola, and that almost made everything else make sense. Five days. Five days ago we were laughing. Of course there was a dead dog on the bonnet of his vehicle. Of course there was a gang who wanted his attention, and a Ukrainian unit smuggling industrial quantities of drugs. Why not, if Shola could be slaughtered in his own house by men who would not say why? If there was still a distance being preserved between himself and the boy, then Shola was part of the bridge. Perhaps it was a fair enough price of admission, at that: If you cannot answer this, how can you protect me? If you will not answer this, how can I trust you? The boy would never put it that way, perhaps would never even think it, and yet it was written in him, in how he spoke. You didn’t judge that sort of thing and you didn’t choose it. Those calculations took place in the engine room of a person, grimy and irreducible. Something more is needed.

  It was needed in any case: here he was, Shola’s friend, who had put on a fancy-dress outfit to avenge some torn comic books and an adolescent’s pride, who had blown up some big drug smuggler’s hoard on a whim, but somehow couldn’t do much for a murder he himself had witnessed, whose perpetrators he had in custody to question at his pleasure. He had learned a new phrase in his comic book studies: Bizarro World. It was the place where everything was wrong. He found himself wondering how you’d know for sure you were there.

  Well, that was sergeanting, for sure. Something more was always needed, and your job was to get up and deliver it. Advance to meet the enemy.

  He drew breath. Fair enough. He had a real direction of his own, something which came from who he was rather than the masquerade of last night. That was NatProMan business, after all, and he didn’t get involved in that.

  For the rest he could talk to Dirac and get some perspective. Dirac was crazy, but his craziness was the right sort, the sort which let him keep being Dirac even when the world didn’t want him to. That was where to start.

  He went to see the Frenchman and laid it out, and Dirac listened. They were sitting on the balcony of the townhouse where he lived, which was a proper wrought-iron thing more suited to a lovestruck Juliet than a brace of hoary soldiers. There was a pot of Turkish coffee on the table, mellow and sweet. Dirac wore a bathing suit and a towelling bathrobe, and when he moved there was always a possibility that his genitals would peep out of the suit next to his thigh. The Sergeant chose on the whole to avoid these occasional appearances and had therefore positioned himself a little way back from the cheap marble-topped coffee table and directly across it. The round white stone concealed Dirac’s body from navel to knee, which still meant that the bulk of his broad chest, with its profane, nautical and religious tattoos, was visible when the robe gaped. There were flowers all around the balcony in lead planters. It seemed surprising that Dirac should be a good gardener.

  He knew how to listen, though, with the attentiveness of a man who has listened to briefings in order to stay alive. He listened now to everything the Sergeant knew about Shola’s death, and about the dog gang and whether they might be related, and even about Pechorin’s fish, because in the story of Lester Ferris the harmless washout that was still an open case. There was no mention of the boy because that was something else, and not within Dirac’s particular competences.

  When it was done, Dirac sighed.

  ‘Okay, Lester, you got two problems.’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Yeah. Your third one is taking care of itself. The Ukrainian asshole is in hospital. Someone beat the crap out of him last night.’

  ‘That was him? The patrol and all the helicopters?’

  ‘Bien sûr. Pechorin is very unhappy, he is deep in shit for reasons I do not want to know, he has cosmetic surgery on his nose. That will do?’

  The Sergeant nodded. And then some.

  ‘So then there is the gang and Shola. The dog, that’s sick. Okay? That is fucking sick. But it’s kids, it’s idiots. Okay? Professionals, they would kill you, and they would do it between the Xeno Station and Beauville, where there is no help and you would disappear for ever. Right?’

  ‘I’d do it that way.’

  ‘Me too. Also it’s what those Pathan bastards would do, and they are the fucking world leaders in making you wish you were somewhere else. They come from a part of the world with death in the fucking title, you know that? The Hindu Kush?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so we are professionals and they are artists and we agree that this dog thing is amateur. It’s someone who watches too much Tarantino, although I hear Tarantino likes Balzac so maybe he’s not so bad. But okay: you will find those guys if you look for them. The issue is supply. You get what I’m saying? And it is in both your problems.’

  ‘The guns and the bikes.’

 
; ‘Yes. There is a supply of new shit. Overseas shit. Where is it coming from? Who on Mancreu has any money to import shit? Us. Us, and maybe a criminal who deals with us.’

  ‘Bad Jack.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. I think there’s no Jack.’ He scowled. ‘Mauvais Jacques. And the new Mancreu Demon, too. It’s bullshit. This island is going crazy. You know what I saw the other day? I saw a boat come from the Fleet and land on the shore. With people in it, and they got off. They had a fucking picnic on the beach.’

  The Sergeant stared at him. ‘Fleet people?’

  ‘Fleet people, fucking casual. Like tourists. They came onto the island for a cheese and wine party. I choose to believe I was drunk and misunderstood.’ Because if he had not been drunk, he would technically have witnessed a breaching of Mancreu’s tangled covenant. The shore was a barrier between the world which was denied and the world which could never be acknowledged. The Fleet did not touch the shore. Not ever. It was how the boy made his money, by running errands and trading luxuries between land and sea. Dirac belched. ‘It’s all coming apart. So fine, the world’s coming to an end, okay? But Bad Jack? No. Who says so?’

  The Sergeant had decided he would lie about that. The boy did not belong in this discussion, not even with Dirac. ‘One of the killers. “Shola worked for Bad Jack.” Like that was the end of that.’

  ‘Then go back and ask him more. Offer him a deal.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What terms?’

  ‘Just a deal.’

  ‘You have to be specific. If you are not specific it’s just a noise you make because you want something. It’s only tempting when you lay it out, point by point. I will give you this, this, this and this, but you must give me this. It is a price comparison, like shopping. And you encourage that he haggle. Once he haggles, he has accepted the principle: he will cut a deal.’

  Dirac said this with the surprising certainty of one who knows, and the Sergeant found that he had raised his eyebrows at the Frenchman in what could only be a ‘how the hell do you know?’ expression. Dirac rubbed his eyes with his fingers and blew air through his cheeks. ‘After the Africa thing, they sent this Italian, you remember? I thought, “Great, he will laugh and talk about racing cars and girls and we will get drunk.” But the guy was like a laser. He’s inside the door and he’s asking me when I decided, who did I talk to, like he already knows everything. He’s asking exactly the right questions, the ones you either tell the truth or you tell a big lie, one they can check. And he has a deal. All the stuff they were worried about – that I took money, that I planned to do this, that I’m a partisan, pahpahpah: it wasn’t true. But this deal he is offering, it’s good enough that I seriously have to think about taking it and I’m not even guilty. Okay? My commander already offered me a deal, like you did: some deal, whatever, we work out the details between us. You say yes to that, you basically admit everything already. But with this guy . . . nom de Dieu. Him I want to say yes to. The way he puts it on the table, I want to say yes.’