Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  The Sergeant walked on.

  In the end he went to see Arno because he might as well. He was here and he had to keep up appearances, and he was too jumpy to go home and work. Arno seemed to understand what was happening. He had music playing in his office, just loud enough to wash away the tension. It was Bach, endlessly looping and sonorous, and it took the edge off the day somehow. So did the herbal tea Arno made with his own hands. He’d been bombed, too, of course, but he didn’t know the island so he didn’t care. In any case, he probably got bombed all the time. He was a military investigator, and his work would go where the wars went. The Sergeant didn’t make the mistake of laughing at the Italians. Any country could make soldiers. Bravery was not choosy about where you were born. Generals were harder to come by, and good political leadership even more so. Dirac said Arno was a soldier, and that was that.

  Arno’s people were as good – or, given what they were doing here, as bad – as he was. There was a Dane called Ólafsdóttir, a broad-shouldered woman with a soft, cherubic face and maternal eyes who nonetheless was his deputy. She had spent most of her time pottering around the markets and the waterfront, buying bits of fabric from the weavers who sat on their porches. No doubt she knew the card-players by now, too, and had been blessed by the sweepers. Probably she had talked flowers with them, swapped hints about aphids. She could talk to anyone.

  Guillaume was even worse. A lanky Frenchman, he was an endurance runner, and he was just about to go running in the mountains. It was a scouting trip, an orientation. He wore strange shoes which were almost slippers, with little toes, and looked to be able to run on and on for ever. He had run in the Copper Canyons on the Mexican border, Ólafsdóttir whispered as Guillaume trotted out of the door, and he had come third in the Leadville race. That was 80km long and it started at 3000m above sea level. It would take, the Sergeant judged, about an afternoon for the young men of Beauville to discover that this guy twice their age could outrun them on their home terrain, and by evening they would be begging him to teach them, showing him the backtrails. He’d know the island inside out in a week.

  There were others whose skills were more cerebral, who were no doubt equally to be feared. Analysts, and more than should be necessary, the Sergeant felt, to turn in the inevitable cover-up at the end of all this. It was wasteful. It was needlessly finicky. There were a thousand places in the world where this kind of effort would make a real difference. Christ, he’d lived in many of them, grown up in one. He imagined Arno turned loose on the petty crimes – and the serious ones, yes – of his old home town. A horde of bastards legging it over the back fence, only to find that Arno, unlike your average TV copper, had considered that possibility and taken steps to provide against it.

  ‘I blame the government,’ he muttered to himself, then realised how much he sounded like everyone who has ever been arrested for something of which they were unequivocally guilty.

  Arno was pleased to receive him, or at least he said he was. His grave face gave only the faintest hint of reaction, and the Sergeant briefly wondered if he had nerve damage and couldn’t smile properly. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked the Italian.

  ‘Slowly,’ Arno said, with the air of one who is pleased to bitch about life to someone who’ll understand. ‘The video footage has been messed with before release. I thought we could get biometric data, run it against the files we hold for Mancreu-based personnel.’ Shit. Could you? ‘But whoever released it does not want that to happen. The broadcast material has been substantially reworked. I could not tell you at this point whether the Tiger Man is five foot or six foot tall. In the footage he is both.’

  ‘You can’t just,’ he waved a hand, ‘clean it up?’

  Arno crinkled. Still not an actual smile, but near enough. ‘Like CSI Miami? I like that show too. No. If there is no data, we cannot make more. With the original recordings, maybe. Not with what we have.’

  ‘Does that mean it might not even be real at all?’

  Arno shook his head. ‘It happened. Maybe not exactly like it looks. But it happened. There was a person who did those things.’

  ‘And did them at the time we’re supposed to think they happened? It’s not staged?’

  ‘That . . . is a much more interesting question. I spoke to Pechorin at some length. He is remarkably resistant to being helpful. So much so that one feels he has orders. You see?’

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘When I was talking to the men who died last night,’ he said after a moment, ‘there was a name. Bad Jack. It’s supposed to be a local king of the underworld. The fellow I was talking to, I held his hand over a map because he didn’t want to talk to me.’

  ‘Over a map?’

  ‘Yes.’ Uncomfortable. Not torture. Duress, maybe.

  Arno seemed to approve. ‘Not a candle flame. In this day and age that’s . . . chivalrous.’

  ‘He pulled away from the harbour and the shanty.’

  ‘The access to the water and the poor part of town.’ Arno nodded. ‘That was well done. Bad Jack,’ he repeated to an analyst, and the man immediately opened a new file. This room was a map of the island, the Sergeant realised, and there were fewer and fewer blank spaces on it.

  He felt a chill. ‘I don’t suppose the satellite data was any good?’

  Arno tutted. ‘Bad coverage.’ Whether it was too bad to be any use was not clear. Arno muttered ‘bad’ a few more times, then: ‘Bad Jack. Does Jack know that you know?’

  The Sergeant considered who had heard him say the name: the dead men, the marine on guard duty, the boy, Dirac, Kershaw, the assistant. No one else. ‘Maybe. I wasn’t careful. On the other hand, if he does know, he has very good hearing. Too good.’

  Arno sighed. ‘If there is a Jack, does he trade with the Fleet? Do they do business or are they at war? Or both? Did the Fleet kill your friend to attack Jack? Did Jack kill the prisoners to protect the Fleet? Around and around and around. You bring me puzzles, Lester. Always more puzzles. Kershaw said I would do well to talk to you. I was not sure what he meant. Now I am.’

  I wish I was.

  On this convivial note, Arno shepherded him gently out with promises of updates and requests that he pass on any information he thought worth considering.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Arno said as they approached the main door, ‘I wonder if you could answer me one question which has been troubling me?’ His eyes were deceptively mild.

  Oh, yes, here it comes. Save one tiny little question until you’re standing by the door, when I’m all relaxed and off guard. You watch Columbo as well as CSI. ‘Of course, Colonel.’ I’m buggered. I know I am.

  Arno shrugged. ‘Well, my team, they are of necessity interviewing a lot of people with whom you have already spoken. I mean, in connection with the investigation, although obviously also people whom you simply happen to know. They come to me at the end of the day with questions about your questions. For me it’s simple. You are not a policeman. You are just doing what you can. So sometimes the way you work is a little strange. But all the same there is one thing in particular I do not understand.’ Under the airy tone, the slightest hint of his focus.

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘Well, then. Which one?’ And please, let it not be the missing fish. That would tie him to Pechorin. Loosely, yes, but he did not want Arno getting interested in his dealings with the Ukrainians. Not at all.

  The Italian spread his hands. ‘You ask, quite often, about a boy. About where he comes from and who he is. Yet often this person is seen with you. Why do you not just ask the question direct?’

  The Sergeant stared at him. ‘I . . . Oh. Well. You know the island is to be destroyed, and the people resettled elsewhere?’

  Arno nodded. Of course he did.

  ‘Have you got kids?’

  ‘No. I hope I still have time.’

  Yes. That exactly.

  ‘And have you ever seen an evacuation?’ He had. He’d seen that African disaster which had produced Dirac’s moment of madness.

&nb
sp; ‘Yes,’ Arno said.

  ‘Well, this lad is special. He’s very bright and he’s got a, what would you call it, a good way about him. We’re friends. I don’t know if he has any family. Any parents. I thought . . .’ He trailed off. Telling people was getting to be a habit. If he told anyone else, he would have to tell the boy before he learned about it as gossip. He should tell the boy anyway. That much was getting painfully obvious. ‘I thought . . . if he was an orphan, you know, all that . . . I thought I might adopt him. I don’t have a family, and it might work well for both of us. He’s too smart for the system. Too good. They’d break him in half to make him fit in the boxes. I can’t just let him—’ He felt a catch in his throat, rode over it. ‘I can’t let it all go bad for him, in some bloody resettlement camp somewhere.’

  ‘So you ask about him—’

  ‘Because if he has parents he loves, I don’t want to embarrass him. Embarrass either of us.’ I don’t want to be rejected.

  It hung in the air between them, a palpable truth, and frankly truer and more important to him than the Tigerman mess or any of the rest of it.

  Arno’s face was moved, and even a little impressed. There was an inclination in his upper body which suggested his instinct was to wrap the Sergeant in a broad, Mediterranean embrace. He contented himself with a nod of respect.

  God, the Sergeant thought, a little awed. You got right to it, didn’t you? You got the core of me so fast you missed the bit you were interested in.

  It seemed he had. The dangerous intensity was, if not entirely gone, massively in abeyance.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Arno said, holding the door. He nodded gravely, one un-father to another.

  15. Fire

  THERE WAS A bad feeling in the street, like the hush after someone says something appallingly stupid but just before the first bottle gets broken. The Sergeant walked through Beauville as if it was a place he didn’t know and he had stepped off the plane into a siege or an insurrection. For the first time, his uniform felt less like a public service than a target for a sniper. The NatProMan soldiers could feel it too, and they hunched a little as they worked to clear the rubble of the refrigeration plant. That it had contained mostly murderers was beside the point. They had been islanders, and the marines guarding them had been saved, which made a stark distinction about the value of life.

  Hearts and minds, bollocks. It was amazing how often that expression was used to describe what was already gone and could not now be clawed back. Although in fairness no one had ever cared much about what the Mancreux thought. They were small and they had no natural resources, no pressure groups. Their only important export was the Discharge Clouds, which was why everyone was here.

  And the Fleet.

  He didn’t want to think about the Fleet, but the choice had been taken away from him. You could ignore something which was quiet and distant. You couldn’t keep that up when it was bombing you.

  ‘Hey, I know you!’

  The voice was high and robust, an Australian woman which meant a journalist. And yes, she knew him, from Mali and Iraq. But perhaps she would lose interest if he didn’t seem to hear.

  ‘Lester! Lester! What is it – Harris? Morris? You can turn around, Lester, I’m just gonna follow you up the street.’

  He turned, and there she was: small and blonde and with too many teeth in the lower set, so that her smile looked a bit too much like a ferret.

  She stuck out her hand for him to shake, and it was almost as weathered and leathery as his own.

  ‘Kathy Hasp,’ she reminded him.

  ‘BBC,’ he replied. She shook her head.

  ‘Not any more. They closed my office. So now it’s the Post.’ Which Post she didn’t say. Washington? Bangkok? Huffington? Or something else he hadn’t heard of, something that anyone who was anyone would know? ‘So what’s really going on, Lester? You’re a straight shooter.’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I was having dinner, someone blew up a building.’

  ‘But a building full of your prisoners, right?’

  Not such a chance meeting, after all.

  He nodded. ‘Yes. My investigation. It’s been rather swallowed up now.’

  ‘And how’s that feel?’

  ‘It’s a relief. I had a murder case. This has gone political. I don’t do political.’

  ‘Thought you were the Consul. All promoted and wearing a suit.’

  ‘It’s pro forma. I have a watching brief. Britain has withdrawn from Mancreu.’ Belatedly, he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to say anything. ‘I have a prepared statement.’

  She shrugged. ‘Nah, I know what it says. Just wanted to catch up. If you find you’ve got anything you want to say, you know me, right? Fair shake.’ True. She’d been straight with her sources before, mostly.

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

  She grinned. ‘You do that.’

  He glanced over at the horizon. He had plenty of opinions about that, for example. About what went on there. It wasn’t his place to have them, but they were there, if he cared to get them out and have a look.

  Hasp followed his eyes. ‘You ever ask yourself how this place would work if that lot weren’t out there?’

  ‘No,’ he muttered.

  ‘Right old carnival of the bastards, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s unaligned shipping. You’d have to speak to the Portmaster.’

  ‘The way I see it, either they’re keeping this place alive or they’re keeping it under the hammer. Should have been sorted out years ago, but somehow it just never quite happens, does it?’

  ‘No doubt the world community will reach a decision at the appropriate time.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet they will. Right about now, is what I hear. Now that Dr Inoue’s team are saying it’s gonna be the Big One. Except I also hear she says boiling the place away won’t help.’

  ‘Dr Inoue is very highly qualified. I’m sure her opinions will be given due weight.’ He was sergeanting now, stone-faced and literal. He could do this all day. Yes, sir. No, sir. ‘The mission will achieve the assigned objective.’ And never mind that the assigned objective is asinine, or that we’ll just have to retreat the day after. He could hear Africa telling him to turn around and walk away, but he didn’t. Something in him needed to hear the lies in his mouth rather than in his head. He knew what the Fleet was. Everyone knew. He just chose not to.

  Shola and his killers and the missile; the heroin and Pechorin; the quad bikers and the dog. It all wrapped somehow into the Fleet, maybe more than once. The photograph in the cave, the new guns, and Bad Jack. Round and around and around it went, and he chose not to look too closely because if he did he must, inevitably, see things which were invisible.

  I say I’m the police, but I choose not to see because that’s my real job. To look the other way, because it’s expedient. Except that killing Shola isn’t a matter of national security, is it? It’s just a crime like any other, and they can do it because everyone looks the other way. And they can kill the witnesses in my custody, too, because apparently I don’t care. Because a sergeant in the British Army, and a Brevet-Consul, couldn’t be allowed to see what’s under his nose and make a stink. That blindness was the whole point of the island.

  A sergeant. A diplomat. Words to hide the same shame, it seemed.

  He could hear the tiger’s tread behind him at Shola’s grave, smell its breath. In its box at Brighton House, the mask was waiting for him to produce it, to give it to Arno and buy safety, even promotion. That was the sensible course. But that would mean no more Tigerman, and if the Sergeant couldn’t do anything resembling what was right in this situation, Tigerman could. If it came to it, Tigerman could. That was the point of him. Tigerman wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t even real.

  Tigerman could do anything.

  Lester Ferris shook his head so vigorously that Kathy Hasp stopped talking and stared at him.

  ‘Tinnitus,’ he muttered, when she asked if he was okay. ‘It comes an
d goes.’

  He went back to Brighton House and started working through the school files. Life was what was important. Life, and the boy, and whatever would happen at the intersection of the two. There would be a moment – and it was coming very soon, maybe in a matter of days – when he would have to make the offer of adoption, even if he didn’t know whether there were parents to be considered. Even if the mood between them was still strained. And in that connection: perhaps that was why the mood was strained. He had had that experience with a girl once, had waited and waited for the right moment to ask her out and it had never come, and their friendship – which they had both vowed they wanted to preserve above all else – had decayed and faded away, because the central plank of it was that question. There came a time with any unconsummated desire of whatever sort when you simply had to speak up or let it go.

  More faces stared up at him, more files in random order. No, no, no, maybe . . . no. No, no, no.

  After an hour, he found the first of his possible names, resting between a baby born the year before and a man in late age. Mustaffe Etienne Gerard was tubby and already showing the barest whisper of a moustache. He was the right age and he had something of the boy about him, his look, his bones, but he was utterly different. In the picture, he had a placid face and wore an oversized hockey shirt saluting a team in St Petersburg.

  The Sergeant laid Mustaffe’s file gently in the discard pile, and carried on. To his irritation, his mind threw up accusations and spectres of guilt, as if he had better things to be doing. He didn’t. This was his heart, the thing he needed: Save the boy. At least find out if it can be done. Save one future, make one good thing come out of this.