Tigerman (36 page)

‘Who . . . came and got you?’

‘Beneseffe,’ Pechorin growled. ‘He and his lobstermen. We had a little conversation about fish this morning. Some opportunities were discussed. Some possible business. They send some local kid round to check me out, I figure they know what’s going on, so I go see them. We make friends. Then a couple of hours ago, “Pavel, Pavel, we have to save Lester” and blah blah, and I say okay, because you will box with me and you’re good when I lose my temper, which is not everyone. The world is not full of people who will decline the opportunity to hit me in the head.’

You have no idea.

‘I like this house,’ Pechorin went on. ‘You got some architecture here. Where I come from there’s some stuff like this but all the wood and paint is gone. You can go visit but the guide will tell you “here used to be very pretty, now it’s shit,” and leave you to imagine the rest. But it’s full of invalids. You got an old lady down the hall, two lobstermen bleeding on the couch. You are the last British colonial hospital all of a sudden. Is this place still a consulate? That’s going to throw some egg.’ He considered this last, shook his head. ‘Whatever. The tits say you should go back to sleep, get your strength. I’m not to wake you, blahblahblah.’

The Sergeant could feel himself slipping into sleep again. ‘I thought you were arrested,’ he murmured.

Pechorin shrugged. ‘I got unarrested. I tell you another time.’ He hesitated. ‘You keep a secret, Lester?’

‘Yes.’ Lots.

‘I don’t want that you think I’m a fuckhead war profiteer drug pusher, okay? Let’s say I maybe had some orders to do what I did. When a government does something it’s not a crime, is politics. Maybe I fight war on terror. Maybe I do good work, get tip-off. Maybe my job, it’s not completely clear. Okay? Like the CIA in Vietnam. I tell myself I’m sending drugs home to hospitals. Maybe it’s only my boss is a fuckhead war profiteer drug pusher and I’m a stooge.’ He shrugged. ‘I do what is necessary. It’s Mancreu. Makes no difference, anyway.’

It does. It does, it does. It does to Shola, and the others. It does to the dogs. To the boy, it does.

He tried to fix Pechorin with an interrogator’s eye:
Are you lying? Is this bullshit? Tell me what you know!
But the world was brown and warm and then he was gone again.

By late afternoon he had shaken off the Witch’s insistence that he stay in bed and was walking around, complaining with every movement but convinced he was doing himself good, and she averred between curses that he might be, but that he’d be happier if he didn’t. She had no time to chase him, however, because the sweeper’s hip was broken and she was concerned about clotting. One of the lobstermen had an infected cut which required medicines she could not get without crossing Beauville to Kershaw’s building, and the riot was still going, so she had instead to make her best alternative from plants by boiling them in a pan and supplementing the mix with powders from the medical supplies at Brighton House, which were for the most part out of date.

He couldn’t escape the feeling that all this was his fault, that he could have done more – that while Lester Ferris could never have stood alone in front of the gang and faced them down, he was no longer only Lester Ferris and he had in some sense abandoned his post, at great cost to an old woman and he had no idea how many others. He hoped Inoue was out of it, firmly on the far side of the island. He even hoped Kershaw was okay. He was sure Dirac was.

He barely dared to think about the boy. There were so many things that could be wrong. Perhaps he slept in an abandoned house and it had simply burned around him. Perhaps he had defended a dog, or perhaps his trading association with the Fleet had been viewed as treason. It was all equally possible. A father would go out and find him, risks or no, injuries or not. A real father would have no choice, would feel, surely, the tug in his blood and his bones and the need beyond common sense. He would go house to house. He would find the corpse if he must, the living child if he could, but he would be out there.

And, the voice of experience told him, that man would be an idiot. A noble, short-lived idiot, searching a burning town for a child who knew its alleys and its secrets, who was better suited to it than a clumping parent could ever be. More than likely the would-be rescuer would bring the mob to his child’s door, and they would both burn. Nightmares boiled in his mind’s eye, multiple scenarios of doom and folly, and each one grew more grotesque, more self-defeating.

‘Dude! You got ganked!’

The boy stood in the doorway and stared at him, mightily impressed. ‘You got really messed up! That is . . . that is
roarsome
!’

When merely ‘awesome’ is not enough.

The boy was still going. ‘This is your Bespin! You failed, but you didn’t die, and you totally kept your integrity—’

And then he could not continue because the Sergeant had wrapped him in a vast embrace, painful and absolute, and was having trouble letting go even as panic gripped him that this was absolutely outside their way of being, this absolute and unequivocal hug so full of worry and dismay. He wrenched his arms open and stepped away.

The boy gazed at him, wide-eyed.

And then hesitantly crossed the space between them for a second, half-hug, resting his head against the Sergeant’s shoulder.

‘It is okay,’ he said, his face very sombre and eerily old. ‘I was fine.’ He stayed there for a moment, and then slipped away. ‘By the way, you have mail. The Italian said to bring this to you.’ From his bag, he produced a slim envelope. ‘Said it would help with your investigation. Check it out! Maybe it will tell us how to beat those badmashes on the bikes! I will make tea!’

He scampered away, and the Sergeant found he could breathe, despite his aching ribs, for the first time in a day. He opened the envelope and glanced at the contents, then stopped and stared.

Sergeant
–

You have been doing my work for me. It is only fair I do yours. It is busy here, but there is no better time for this. I wish you well.

– A.

Not the bike gang, and nothing about Tigerman or Shola’s death.

The boy’s face stared up at him from the file, his birthday, his given name. His parents.

The Sergeant retreated to the study and closed the door. It was not privacy he needed but calm, a sense of constancy. This was the thing. This was the file. The boy’s file. Everything he had wanted to know was here, and yet reading it all would be cheating, of a kind. He did not have to read it all. He would leave the boy his mysteries. He had read the name at the top, had already forgotten it. Saul? Sullah? Simon? It began with an S. Or possibly M, or X, or J. He could check, but he would not. The boy was the boy, complete in himself. It was idle to give him a name beyond that unless he wanted one. The Sergeant needed only the names of his family, and where to find them.

He began to read. He tried to avoid the detail but it was impossible, the truth was buried in the text, so he had to intrude at least that much. Not a problem. He could forget it afterwards, could wait to have it explained and never let it be known that he knew.

The boy’s father had been a longline fisherman from Malé. He had come to the island after a storm and stayed just long enough to fall in love and father a child. Arno had written in the margin that he thought it really had been love. He must have been out gathering information before the riot, or perhaps the investigative team had simply gone on about their business, backed by a few marines and moving carefully to avoid the mob. They must have worked in worse places; in Somalia, at least, and maybe Kashmir or the West Bank. The young sailor, anyway, had gone back to his ship and headed home to acquaint his family with his intent to marry, and had got caught instead on an outgoing line and drowned. It happened, Arno noted, quite a lot. He knew families at home who had suffered by the same thing.

The Sergeant turned the page, and – seeing what was written there – nodded in a kind of acknowledgement. The boy’s mother was alive, of course. She was not a nun, or a bar fly. She was no one he knew. But he knew of her, as everyone did, and he knew that he had been in some way expecting this.

Once upon a time,
he thought,
only it’s not like that because it’s not fucking funny.
And where had he heard that?
‘Throw the stele in the sea and tell him you want to take him away from here and see what he says. Maybe there’s a family for you after all. Leave your victory on this island where it belongs.’

The story went on, relentless.

Once upon a time, White Raoul knew a lover from the mountains, a weaver woman of the old stock. They made no marriage and no contract. She would not have him, because he was a foreigner. He amused her and adored her and perhaps his feelings were reciprocated. But when she conceived a child she told him that Beauville was too modern and too cold a place to raise a daughter and she went home, and would not see him any more. Sandrine was born on the floor of a herder’s cottage, midwifed by a cowman. She visited her father as she grew. He kept a place for her always in his house, and she was famed for her looks. Her father’s fierce protectiveness was misconstrued. He was not guarding her virtue, just his small allotment of time with the child as she grew and changed from month to month and he missed each waystation of her life: her first tooth, her first word, her first love.

Until she too bore a child, to a longline fisherman, and when he died she mourned and healed and in time the boy attended school in Beauville, for the dead father had persuaded her the world beyond the island was worth knowing. She obtained by some haggling an old computer and a solar mat to charge it, and they learned together of the history of Mancreu, and Europe and Africa and more, and together they were angry and impressed and afraid. She studied correspondence courses and prepared for the day she must travel with him to the mainland and enrol them both in some manner of university. It was possible. There were bursaries, charities, husbands and even sugar daddies, and if these failed there was always crime. Her family knew crime.

She was methodical, composing options and plans, laying groundwork. She networked, by phone and by email and later by the new avenues of social media. With the assistance of a passing photographer and a local flautist she created a YouTube slot which picked up thirty thousand views. And she got her wish: scholarships for them both one autumn, with all the trimmings, at an institution in Qatar.

That summer she walked the high passes every day. She took pictures of them, inhaled them, sketched them and sang to them. She slept under the stars, sometimes alone and sometimes in company, drank and danced and visited her mother and her uncles and aunts. She and the boy together toiled over their English and their Arabic both, watching movies and listening to CDs and reading books, so that the way they spoke was a muddle of Scotland and Baltimore, Tikrit and Tunis.

On the last day of her sabbatical, the first Discharge Cloud came. It rolled down along the high valleys, and she was caught in it and changed. She was vibrant and beautiful still, compassionate and energetic. But from moment to moment she forgot almost everything and everyone, living in an endless now which seemed to worry her not at all. Of all things, she remembered most of all the island, the endless smugglers’ paths and narrow goat tracks, the rivers and waterfalls where she swam. She was content and even joyful in her new state. But she never spoke, and she did not know her son.

And he, of course, still knew her.

IT HAD BEEN
quiet enough during the day, the Beauville mob sleeping off its rage on stolen mattresses dragged out onto the street or in the bedrooms of departed neighbours, but as dusk fell fresh fires were already being kindled in the shanty and the weird gabble of the riot began whispering on the wind. The rage was building again, the furious rejection of an intolerable circumstance. The Sergeant could feel it in his teeth, in the line of his jaw: the cold wash of coming violence. It whispered between men and women camped in town squares, in ditches and ruined houses. It sparked and glittered. In another place it would have meant revolution and civil war, but here there was nowhere to put it, nothing to be done with it which was even as constructive as tearing down statues, so it zinged back and forth and grew, and as it grew it grew uglier.

He stood on the flat roof at the edge of the wing and peered over the lip of the house down towards Beauville. From up here – the highest point of the building – one could see the whole of the town. When the wind came up he could smell the sea, and the stink of burning.

Beauville would burn again tonight unless someone stepped in, and there was no one to do it. Kershaw would not, and perhaps he was right that he could not. NatProMan might become the occupying enemy as opposed to the tolerated presence of the outer world. The Fleet was even more disbarred, had its denizens had any desire to intervene. Beneseffe’s little army was simply too small, there were no NGOs to mediate, and the global press pack was getting great TV out of the collapse. How often did anyone get to cover an actual apocalypse, however local and small? Crisis was commonplace; endings were not.

The thought did not make him happy, and even less so because he was in some senses not affected. Up here on the hill, Brighton House was a long walk from the centre. You could herd a mob – if you had, say, quad bikes and a willingness to deploy violence – but you couldn’t push them to walk an hour in the dark. That was a little too cold and considered. Brighton House was a symbol of the good old days as much as the bad ones, which was why Lester Ferris had been made Mancreu’s bobby on the beat by acclamation.

So he was safe enough so long as he kept his head down, and when it was all done – in a fortnight, he guessed, not much more – he would go home and he would have some photographs and probably quite soon a new job, and that would be that.

But down there it would be bad, and really the end of the island would bring no release. Mancreu’s last ten thousand would be evacuated and resettled and they’d be a people dispossessed and perhaps unwelcome, in places they did not know. He was a tourist, a spectator, as surely as Kathy Hasp and her pals. He might help the boy – though how, he did not know, and he had no notion of what Sandrine meant to that plan: would he have to adopt them both? Fake a marriage with her? – but that would be the extent of it, and a pisspoor extent it was. And he was a man under authority, specifically instructed to stay out of the way. In films that might not mean anything, but for all his adult life he had taken orders and it counted with him. It was a piece of who he was, a thing made not of duty or queen and country, but self.