Tigerman (39 page)

He could not leave her here. She was vulnerable to the burning town and to the mob. She was an infant. He realised, in passing, that he had been wrong about something fundamental: no one looked after the boy. When he went away, it was not to be cared for but to care. His mother was his unwitting ward. All seeming evidence to the contrary was proof rather of his self-sufficiency. The comic books he provided for himself; the laptop, the phone, the food – for both of them, no doubt. He was in many ways already grown, waiting only for his body to catch up with his life.

The Sergeant felt a twinge of fellow feeling, unexpected. He had up to a point taken care of his father, when Arthur Ferris had withdrawn to his television set and his late-onset diabetes and smoked himself fiercely towards the plot beside his wife. Young Lester had forged school notes and worked odd jobs and thought he was looking out for number one, but somehow he had put food on the table for his dad as well, and seen him through the few remaining years. His sister, too, of course, but she had been older and already on her way. She had never entirely understood how much their father had ground to a halt, because he freshened up for her, at his son’s insistence, and they were complicit, if in no other way, in concealing the decay. But it had been nothing like this, not really. Or, only somewhat.

His vision flashed white and he was lifted from his feet, a solid impact taking him in the right kidney and hurling him forward. A knife blade, he realised, deflected by the links of chain woven into the vest, the power of it still passed to his body, if spread wide enough to avoid penetration.
I’ll piss pink all week,
he thought sourly, and rolled as fast as he could to avoid a stamping boot.
If I get the chance.

He kept rolling and surged to his feet, bounced off a wall and swirled the torch around the room. There were two of them, ordinary thugs with ugly expressions. Their attention was on him but their goal was Sandrine. He looked for hunger and rape and, curiously, couldn’t see it. Just intent. The nearer one was flourishing the knife at him, the other had a short billy club.
Take the blade, but don’t imagine the billy’s not a problem.

The Sergeant slowed, feigning disorientation, lashed out wildly when the man feinted, and invited a circular stab low at his left side, blocked it early and clipped the elbow with the torch to bend it, driving the weapon hand up along his enemy’s spine until the shoulder dislocated, then putting his knee upwards through the man’s face. Shadows danced and he kept moving, trusting in motion to keep him safe. The billy man rushed in belatedly – they weren’t used to working as a team, probably wouldn’t do it again – and the Sergeant threw his first target into the line of attack to ward him off. The knife skittered away and its owner collapsed, moaning.

The other man came on. The Sergeant remembered the taser but had no time to reach it as the man attacked, leading with his weak hand, the billy held in reserve for a quick finish. The Sergeant thrust the torch forward instead, directing the blinding light into the billy man’s face. The man scuttled back and reset his feet.

Sandrine drove the discarded knife in a straight line from the shoulder, hips twisting, power coming out of the legs and the strength of her entire body. The blade went through the back of the billy man’s skull and continued until the point made a soft sound against his forehead. She continued the spiral to bring the arm back, heel of the hand leading and the blade outward, then dropped the knife. He thought it was completely mysterious to her how she had come to be holding it in the first place. The corpse fell at the same time, like a sack.

She looked at the Sergeant, then dropped to her knees and drew the tiger from the stele on his chest, perfectly, in blood on the floor. She looked at him again as if to say that finished the matter, and walked out of the door. He was fairly sure she had no understanding of what had passed, that she had killed a man, and a worm of suspicion was gnawing in him that this was because she only barely grasped what it meant that he had ever been alive. The world – the island – was one piece to her. Some of it moved, and some of it did not, and that was all.

He stared after her, wondering how he would get her back to Brighton House, because force seemed a far less practicable option than it had five minutes before, and by the time he heard the engine outside and launched himself at the door he was too late.

Sandrine was in the back seat of an open white jeep, and beside her sat a woman the Sergeant did not recognise. The woman was actually singing, high and clear, and Sandrine, with blood still wet on her fingertips, was listening to her in placid fascination.

The driver saw the Sergeant and took off for the main road.

He ran flat out and kept the jeep in view, pale and angular and framed by the weird brown clouds at the edges of his vision. He sucked air, spat, and pushed his legs harder. The jeep meant Sandrine and Sandrine belonged to the boy and he had promised to get her. For as long as he could see it he could catch up, and that was the target, the plan. That was the order from authority, even if authority in this case was him.

He could keep up and even gain ground while they were in the shanty, because the narrow streets twisted and turned and the jeep was restricted to a few larger roads and even those were treacherous, especially now. He could run in a straight line and know roughly where they would have to turn and slow, where he might make up for time lost when their route was clear and the engine powered away from him, impossibly far ahead. For a few hundred yards he found himself running along the roofs of market stalls. He wasn’t sure how he’d got up there, vaguely recalled climbing some stairs to avoid a pile of rubble which had slouched sideways from a burned brick bakery into his path, remembered leaping insanely and making it, stumbling on and regaining his feet. Faces turned towards him, rioters and others peered up and wondered. He was drawing a crowd and that was bad, he was moonlit and that was bloody stupid, a good sniper would take about a second to pick him off. He should get down onto the street but then he might not be able to see the jeep when it turned at the T-junction ahead, might pick wrong and lose her. Then the stalls just stopped and he dropped off the last one, muscles white agony, and found that he had not fallen, was not flat on his back, but still moving. Behind him there were people shouting, pointing.
Tigerman! Tigerman!
He didn’t care. They had torches, both electrical and the old-fashioned kind, and they were following, watching. So long as they stayed back. So long as no one shot him, tripped him, ambushed him, the only important thing was ahead. This was running you could die of, the kind that had killed – the Sergeant, irrelevantly, had always been able to remember the man’s name since learning it at school, a piece of military trivia which hadn’t impressed the recruiter – Pheidippides of Athens after the original Marathon.

Bugger Marathon
. And then, irrelevantly:
And they call them ‘Snickers’ now, anyway.
Old anger. Chocolate bars should not take on new identities. They should be content with who they were.

He rounded a bend and saw a man threatening a woman with a broken bottle. Not Sandrine, no. Just a woman. Just a man.

He surged past, twisting his body and scything his elbow as he unwound. He was in the air when the blow landed: perfect technique. The impact took the man across the ear, snapped his head around. He fell and stayed down. The Sergeant’s motion was pure and unaffected, and he ran on. Behind him there was another shout, like an amen in a charismatic church or the roar of fury from a football crowd. The jeep went left. So did he. The road seemed to bear him up, as if the island’s constant vibration was for this purpose, to power his feet as he chased the jeep. Was he catching up? Maybe. Not long now. Not long. Close enough, soon, to do something, use the belt. Flashbang? Taser? Fire extinguisher? Something something something. Anything. Catch up.

In between accelerations, he could hear the woman in the back seat singing.
‘Danny Boy’, for fuck’s sake. Enough with Danny bloody Boy! Change the record
. But ‘Danny Boy’ seemed to be working well enough, Sandrine was still calm. Or perhaps she was just enjoying the ride. She glanced back and saw him, watched him run. ‘
. . . From glen to glen, and down the mountainside . . .
’

Shit.

The jeep swerved and knocked out the supporting post of a wooden awning just ahead of him. He had his hand at his belt for a stun grenade, had to abandon it for balance, saw a girl not five years old staring up and lifted her, lifted her away and she wailed because he’d banged her head against the metal plate on his chest, bloody HELL she was heavy, so small to be that heavy, and the fucking awning was coming down on them both and of course it would have a water tank on it this end, it just would, so he swerved and smashed his way through a plywood board as the structure came down behind him, sprawled and let her find her own balance, scraped himself up and carried on but he was slowing, slowing, too slow and the jeep was escaping and FUCK FUCK FUCK! All for nothing if he didn’t find more.

He found more. Hadn’t run like this from Pechorin’s lot. That had been rehearsal. Light training. Hadn’t run like this in his life, never cared this much. Stupid old man. Water sluiced across the road behind him, the crowd splashed through it.
Tigerman!
With his luck he’d catch Sandrine and they would burn him, burn her, stake them out like a dog on a telegraph pole. Nothing left in the tank. His tank, not the jeep, fucking jeep was fine. Fucking John Henry this was, man versus machine and all the odds stacked. He had seconds. Seconds. Make it count make it count make it—

And here was more trouble, more stupid, stupid, in-the-way trouble. Beneseffe and his dockmen –
thieves and brigands and smugglers all, if we’re honest,
so what was happening was not so much good versus evil as it was demarcation and turf – were facing off against a few Quads and their hangers-on, and the jeep piled on through them, and no, no, no NO, of course it wasn’t just a few Quads it was all of them, and here were the trucks, the waiting trucks to carry the mob up the hill. This wasn’t a chance encounter, it was a last stand. He’d been unfair to Beneseffe, this was pro bono after all. Trucks and flatbeds and bikes and all for Brighton House, all ready for the burning, that was how you got a mob to go up a hill: you laid on transport.

And press. Press bloody everywhere, Kathy Hasp following her nose and commandeering someone’s car, everyone else following Kathy Hasp, all there to cover the endgame of British Colonial rule on Mancreu. See the kick-off, rush up the hill to catch the first Molotov cocktail and then be in time for the massacre, win a Pulitzer and home before bedtime.

He looked around and realised he was standing by the mission house. Up on the weathervane was the pelican, dislodged from her perch and apparently looking to him to sort it all out. Like everyone else. He stood at the intersection of a huge number of paths and powers, all gathered by accident in this one place. He: Tigerman.

And he had stopped running. Where was Sandrine?

The jeep rolled out of the far side of the square onto the main road. Clear path to the docks now, to the Fleet, to NatProMan, to anywhere – wherever they were going, it didn’t matter. If he’d been faster. If he’d been twenty instead of nearly forty – although, no. Never, really; not unless he’d been Mo Farah and he wasn’t. And this was his business, right here, right now.

He heard the sound of the engine fade away, and turned to face the Quads. If he took off his mask, Beneseffe might help him. But if he took off his mask, the mob would tear him apart and Africa would scatter what was left to the four winds, and it still wouldn’t help anyone and he’d never have a chance to get Sandrine back from wherever she ended up.

He rolled his head around slowly on his neck as if this was what it had been about, as if he had planned everything to bring them all to this moment. The sound of his breathing, amplified and alarming, filled the square. He took the sharkpunch from his belt and held it in his right hand, twirled it like a swordsman, then threw his left hand forward in a stabbing gesture that reminded him instantly of Sandrine and her knife. With his index finger, he indicated the biggest and ugliest of the Quads, hanging by one arm from the fountain, and fixed his eyes – the mask’s eyes – on the Quad’s face. He did not speak. He just pointed, and waited, and let the challenge stand.

Waited.

And waited.

And the Quad did not come.

The Sergeant would fall on his knees soon. Would pass out. Nothing in his life had prepared his body for that pointless dash through the backstreets. He measured it in his mind. Three miles? Four? At top speed, desperation speed. He would fall, surely, any moment now. He shifted his feet, feeling for the vibration in the ground, and realised that it had stopped, that for the first time in days everything was still. He saw everyone else realise it too, with relief and an unlikely sense of loss.

Something was happening at the back of the crowd. A weird susurrus was spreading out in waves, words exchanged and shared, accounts of witnesses and testimonies, and out of all of them emerged that one word so that it ebbed and flowed in the tide of whispers but never vanished, and moment by moment it actually grew, strengthened and unified, and here was a young man with a phone holding it high for others to see – video, more bloody video, always someone. But now it seemed there were more cameras, more angles, and the square was lit as if by candles with glowing screens and tiny cameo recordings. Tigerman flew from a burning house with a sick woman in his arms. He stopped a rape, or a murder. He rescued a child. He chased, always, impossibly and indefatigably, chased an abduction by someone in a foreign car, a Fleet car, chased and would not give up even though his breathing rasped and his feet twisted.
Tigerman.
And then, here, at last, he let it go, because for all that he had done in his quest, this moment in the square was more important, not to him but to them.
Tigerman. Tigerman. Tigerman
. He was not Fleet. He was not Britain or America or France or anywhere except Mancreu, Mancreu looking out for its own.
Tigerman, Tigerman, Tigerman
, and the noise was louder than anything he had ever heard.
Tigerman
, for Mancreu, because they needed him so very, very much.