Tigerman (26 page)

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.’

‘And did you?’

A shrug. ‘They took it off the table again when they realised I hadn’t done anything. Threw me to the military system, but I’m such a hero by then I get medals and lunch with the President, whatever. I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I was just angry. But you see? You have to have a deal. You can’t get him to do it, he will make up a deal he can turn down or one you cannot offer. Tell him, “For this, you get that.” You find out about where the guns come from, he gets a room with a bathtub and a view, better food, whatever. He’s not smart, Lester, or he wouldn’t be a low-rent killer on an island the Americans are going to incinerate. That’s not a growth sector.’

Let us hope.

They finished the coffee, arguing lightly about whether the Foreign Legion, the Royal Green Jackets, or the Rhodesian Light Infantry-as-was were the toughest bastards in the game. Somewhere in the house a phone rang, with an actual bell. Dirac ignored it, and the caller gave up. A moment later he or she tried again, and then again, and finally Dirac growled that something must actually be happening and stamped away. ‘There’s cognac,’ he said, pointing. ‘It’s fucking awful, but when you’ve said that it’s not that bad.’

Cognac on top of pain pills, caffeine, burn salves and unknown topical analgesics did not seem like a brilliant idea, so the Sergeant poured one for Dirac and splashed some water into his own glass, then took the lid off a small bottle of vodka and laid it on the table where the Frenchman would see it. In the event, Dirac didn’t see it, because he didn’t come out again.

‘Lester,’ he called from inside the house, ‘I am completely wrong. Please bring the cognac and come and watch television.’

The Sergeant ducked through a low door and found himself in the sitting room. The television was a new one on a spindly glass table. Dirac had turned a chair around by the small dining table and was sitting astride it like Christine Keeler. The remote was in his hand, dangling down so slackly that for a moment the Sergeant thought he might have had a stroke, and the cry had been some garbled plea for help. The Frenchman was staring at the screen, and he had the sound off, either because he couldn’t stand the commentary or because he simply hadn’t thought to turn it on yet. With a feeling of extreme fatigue, the Sergeant turned to look.

Someone else, evidently, had had a camera at the cave. And not just one – they must have been everywhere. It didn’t really look as if it mattered very much that the boy had deleted his YouTube-ready revenge footage, because this was better, so much better, and it was already on just about every channel in the world. ‘Anonymous footage’, the caption said, ‘sent to our offices in Sana’a.’ There was a parenthesis afterwards, to let you know that was in Yemen.

The first shot showed Tigerman as a shadowed figure picking his way like a heron between the trucks. Then he went inside and the picture switched over to grainy reddish-brown, some kind of enhanced view. The figure stood eerily still; a fleshy darkness wrapped him and he was gone.

Inside the cave, the Ukrainians didn’t yet know he was there. Then the head appeared, ghastly arachnoid fur and parasite mouth, apparently out of thin air. They fired, and a moment later Tigerman slithered into the room. The screen went white and he was gone again, only to reappear a moment later in the air as the cave exploded in flames, and then vanish again into the supernatural dark of the tunnel. You couldn’t see how it was possible, only that he did it, and he seemed almost disinterested, as if the whole thing was somehow a side issue.

He was replaced by a breathy anchorman with perfect teeth.

Dirac thumbed the remote and rewound the clip, sucking air between his teeth. They watched the whole thing again.

‘He’s good,’ Dirac muttered. ‘I mean, he’s a fucking lunatic, but we knew that from the hat, right? But that there,’ he paused the playback, ‘that could be free running or it could be Systema, that shit they teach Spetsnaz.’

‘Russians and Ukrainians,’ the Sergeant said, almost automatically.

‘For sure,’ Dirac muttered, ‘because those assholes do not live without complicating things.
Connerie de merde!
He blew them up and stamped on them. That is some shit.’