Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  ‘No, sir, not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘Then Jesus, Lester! Do not scare me like that. Jesus.’ He looked up. ‘The next words out of your mouth better not include “sir”, Lester.’

  ‘All right, Mr Kershaw, I shall bear that in mind.’

  ‘Jed.’

  ‘Jed. Yes, sir.’

  Kershaw glowered, then grinned. ‘You are fucking with me just now, Lester, in a manner you no doubt believe is comradely joshing.’

  ‘If you say so, Jed.’

  ‘I do, Lester.’

  And after that they talked, but nothing more was actually said. The Sergeant excused himself before Jed Kershaw had to find an excuse to get away, and Kershaw looked gratefully after him as he went downstairs. In the street, the Sergeant glanced around for the boy but could not see him. He felt a little sad, but stiffened his spine and reminded himself that they were doing something hunnerten pro cent ZOMG later, and that this was apparently good. In any case, the boy had other aspects to his life that were his own.

  He looked around once more and got into his car.

  The town of Beauville was surprisingly beautiful as he drove back to Brighton House, like a strong-jawed choir mistress allowing the day to see her softer side. The hard, industrial region of Mancreu was away on the south coast, the ferroconcrete slab housing of the 70s chemical men who had come to refine and combine and produce plastics.

  But here in the north, Beauville looked alive and even bustling. Along the harbour front, a few of the very oldest buildings still remained, low-ceilinged and achingly pretty, smelling of three hundred years of tobacco and drink, and traced with cracks from earthquakes and battering gales. In a ring around them loomed gawky colonial townhouses and stores; wooden crossbeams taken from ships bore witness to the ongoing settlement by mariners and merchants. The outer circle was a kind of loose net of tracks, farms, warehouses and fisher huts, slowly giving way to the back country. Mancreu was a fisher island first, a tenuous farmland second, and everything revolved around the town where produce could be bought and sold. A small number of people lived out on the mountainsides, herders and weavers for the most part, and a very few bandits who were mostly bandits by inheritance rather than vocation. The Sergeant peered out that way now, thinking of the men who had killed Shola, wondering if they were from some such raggedy clan. He had thought those men had been among the first to Leave, taking their twentieth-century bolt-action rifles and their few belongings and heading off for some other place where they could quietly waste away. But then, this crew had carried proper weapons. Militia guns, not shepherd’s companions.

  A real policeman, he thought, would follow those guns somehow, track them backwards. Or he might draw inferences from their make and model, from their presence at all. How unlikely was it that that gear was in private hands on the island? Not very. North Africa and Yemen both overflowed with Kalashnikovs. So did large parts of South-East Asia. Mancreu was surrounded by a ring of cheap, durable guns. Surrounded, but at a distance, and something of the British ethos regarding firearms had prevailed here for a long while. He had been right a moment ago: Mancreu bandits carried guns which would not have been out of place at Gallipoli or Ypres, and used them largely for shooting glass bottles and sheep belonging to other people, and only very occasionally for a stick-up. Certainly, they did not spree.

  Things did not fit. He was keeping count of them in his mind, but they were all so hazy, so very tenuous. He might be being foolish. After all, Shola had been his friend. He very much wanted the death to mean something. And the boy needed it to mean something, needed this bleak introduction to messy, ketchup mortality to be more than just the consequence of a jostling in the marketplace. It dawned on him that he needed to do something else for a few hours. He could knock his head against what had happened until he bled, and he would still not understand it. He would miss the truth if it was offered to him because he was starting to have ideas about what it should look like and he would ignore anything which looked different. He had to step back.

  And then, too, the rest of Mancreu’s perpetual crisis had not ground to a halt merely because Shola had died. It felt that way, or it felt that it should be that way, but he had lost enough friends to know better. The silence you feel belongs to you. To everyone else, it’s just another day.

  He went home by way of the hospital. The other survivors of the shooting knew no more than he did, and he found himself apologising. They told him not to, and he returned to Brighton House pensive and took refuge for a while in the coarse yellowy pages of his book.

  The boy arrived at a quarter after the hour bearing a huge sack almost as high as himself, and demanded that they go out onto the terrace facing the sea. The sack shortly resolved itself into a paper bag full of further paper bags, white and ribbed with wire. These, being unfurled, became cylinders nearly five feet in height and two across.

  ‘Thai lanterns!’ the boy said. ‘Hunnerten pro cent! In many places a bit illegal because of fires. But here, not. Also we send them out there.’ He pointed to the blue water beyond the terrace wall. The wind was blowing over the house and out to the horizon, and the distinction between sea and sky was indistinct.

  ‘Send them?’ the Sergeant said, and then wondered a little nervously why his first question had not been about the fires.

  For answer, the boy produced a stretch of grubby cloth and bundled it up into a ball the size of his fist. He stuffed the rag into a cradle beneath the lantern. ‘Hold! We must inflate.’

  The Sergeant held the lantern at top and bottom, beginning to understand, and the boy ignited the ball. Hot air billowed up, and the paper crinkled and swelled.

  ‘Wait until it really wants to go,’ the boy said.

  They waited, and presently the lantern rose in their hands until the boy was on tiptoe. ‘Now!’ he said.

  The lantern lifted slowly, turning from the last brush of their fingers and wobbling as a light breeze buffeted it towards the house. The Sergeant winced. Then it went higher and suddenly seemed to get the idea, floating proudly away over the dark, oily sea beneath the cliff. After a moment more its reflection was visible in the water, a twin glow hanging in another sky.

  ‘Quick,’ the boy said. ‘Another!’

  They launched all seven, a flickering procession of lights climbing ever upwards in a small, attenuated flock, the first one dwindling from view but not extinguished as the last took flight. The lanterns were fragile but tenacious, heading off over that vast ocean towards an unknown end, and by their simple, purposeful ascent and their warm yellow light, they turned the mind to the indefinable colour of the evening and the sound of the wind, to the scale of the world.

  ‘How far will they go?’ the Sergeant asked.

  The boy shrugged. ‘Long way. Sometimes they go up and catch a thermal. Hundreds of miles, then. I have seen them burn and fall, and sometimes they are forced down. But I have never seen one come down at the end of its flight. They are always too far.’

  The man and the boy watched as the lanterns winked away in the gathering dark, and then, when the last of the lights they were following might or might not have been the running lights of a ship or an aircraft, or a star, they went inside.

  The next morning the boy was gone, as usual fading into the air like some sort of sprite, and leaving only a blanket on the spare bed and an unwashed coffee cup in his wake. The Sergeant tossed the blanket over a window ledge to air and scrubbed the cup, enjoying his own exasperation at the chore. As he worked, it occurred to him that he should start small. Shola’s murder was too big to understand, too important for him to take on. He should by rights pass it to someone with experience but there was no one like that so it would have to be him, after all, and yet he had no real idea where to go from here. He was baulked.

  So he would begin with the lost dog. It was a small problem, but no doubt it mattered to the owner, and that would tell. It would get him started. At the same time, he would uncover what he could about the
boy’s parentage. Two small things would be done, both needful to someone, and in the simplicity of these distractions his mind might turn up some new avenue by which he could approach Shola’s death.

  As he made his way to the car, he found himself smiling. The lanterns had indeed been ‘zed oh em gee’.

  6. Dog

  TO HIS ALARM, the Matter of the Missing Dog was more complex than it first appeared. After a visit to the very ordinary old lady to whom the animal belonged, it technically became the Matter of the Kidnapped Dog because someone had been seen by two witnesses actually lifting the animal into the back of a flatbed truck, and he was forced to revise his opinion regarding the likely seriousness of the situation. The first witness he was inclined to dismiss – a housebound old geezer who must have been bored and drunk since before the Sergeant was born – but the second was a sensible young woman who was only visiting Mancreu to help her family move to her home in Botswana. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that she would make up such a tale, or that if she did it would tally with that of the old man.

  If the dog had been of a combative breed he might have suspected a fighting ring, but Madame Duclos’s pet was evidently not of that sort. She showed him a photograph. The animal was fat to the point of shapeless, like a lumpy brown quilt dumped on the sofa. Even its ears were fat. With her permission, he retained the photograph. As he left, she took his hand and said ‘please’.

  Why on Earth did people keep dogs? He could feel the dryness of her skin. She chopped her own wood, this old woman.

  ‘Please,’ she said again.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he told her. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ she said. ‘The English love dogs.’

  He nodded assent.

  She peered at him and tutted with the unerring instinct of grandmothers for unspoken reservations, then half-sang, half-muttered something which might have been an island lament or a dinner call for the dog as she ushered him to the door.

  The Duclos house was in an old white-stone quarter which seemed entirely inhabited by old people who dedicated their lives to making things pretty. There were window boxes and vines everywhere along the narrow streets, and as he walked he found that it was unusually densely populated for Beauville in these days. Here three wrinkled men played cards at a white iron table; there a bent old lady swept dust from her step. There were empty houses, but not many. He nodded to the card-players and offered them a respectful bonsalum in Moitié. It was almost the only local word he could say with confidence, even now. Every speaker seemed to have his or her own version of the dialect, and each believed it was a solemn duty to instruct this uncouth foreigner in the beautiful tongue.

  They waved back, bonsalum avoumem, so he switched to English and asked them whether there’d been some sort of joint decision to stay as long as possible. They shrugged amiably. No, they said. It was just that when someone here decided to Leave, they invited someone who was staying a little longer and whose home was not as nice to come and live in their house. Someone old, of course, because the young people might ruin it.

  ‘But that will happen anyway, in the end,’ the Sergeant observed.

  ‘That’s no reason to invite it,’ the dealer said. ‘Young people,’ and this clearly included the Sergeant himself, ‘young people never understand. The last days are no less important than the others just because they are near to the end.’ He nodded at his friends. ‘Should we stop living today just because death is no longer a stranger? Should we go naked because our clothes no longer fit as well as they did?’

  ‘I should say not!’ said the woman with the broom. ‘No one wants to see your horrible bottom!’

  ‘Then you oughtn’t be peering in at my window!’ the dealer retorted. The sweeper shook her fist in mock fury and cackled.

  The Sergeant realised that there was another Mancreu here which he had not known about, a Mancreu of the very old. It was easy to think of the island as one place with various parts dangling off it, but in truth it was layer upon layer, and each of them as real as the others.

  ‘Will you all Leave together?’ he asked.

  The card-players shrugged. ‘If we live that long,’ the dealer said. ‘And when we leave, we will leave the houses as they should be. Perhaps houses have souls and we will meet them again one day. Or perhaps they will just go into this burning with dignity. Your man Kershaw, thought so. He came here when he first arrived and he tried to pretend he saw only bricks. But he cried a little when he realised the houses would die. He’s a decent man.’

  The Sergeant reassessed them all once more. Old and watchful. The whole street was filled with old, watchful men and women. He tried his luck. ‘Anyone seen this dog?’

  They shook their heads. ‘But it can’t have gone far,’ one of the players muttered, to general agreement.

  The dealer dealt a fresh hand, and the Sergeant took the gentle hint and moved away down the perfect, empty street. A moment later, he heard the man’s voice raised in his direction once more.

  ‘Hey, Sergeant!’ he called.

  ‘No,’ the Sergeant shouted back, ‘I don’t want to see your horrible bottom, either!’

  This rated a huge laugh from the card-players, and snorting approval from the sweeper. The dealer shushed them all. ‘You didn’t ask about the fish!’ he complained.

  The Sergeant shook his head. For a moment, the statement made no sense. What fish? But yes, it had been on his list the day of Shola’s death: Beneseffe’s stolen catch. He hadn’t asked them about it, primarily because he had completely forgotten, but even had he remembered there was no earthly reason to suppose that they would know anything. Except, he realised, that they knew everything. They were one of the last stations in what had once been the great Mancreu gossip network, and their art had been refined rather than diluted by their proximity to one another, and their loneliness. So they knew – from who could say what messengers – that he was looking for stolen fish. This was no doubt how the boy got some of his uncanny information: he talked to someone who watered plants and sat by the roadside, someone who chatted and watched, and he traded time for knowledge.

  Tomorrow, the Sergeant thought, he would come back here and ask about the boy, if he still needed to. He would bring a picture. He might even explain why. He thought they would understand, and surely they would respect his desire to know whether such a thing was possible before he offered it.

  In the meantime, he raised his hands in surrender. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now I’m asking. Who took the fish?’

  ‘The Ukrainians,’ the dealer said, waving him away. ‘Pechorin has a brother on a factory ship. They come by every few months and buy whatever he can steal. You can sell a big tuna for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Japan. He’s not a bad man, maybe, but that’s a lot of money.’

  It would turn out to be true, the Sergeant knew. He’d never prove it, and if he did there’d be nothing he could do about it. But it would be true, and that was something. Perhaps the fishermen who had been robbed would go into business with Pechorin. It might be easier all round.

  That cheered him, but by the time he reached the Portmaster’s office he was frowning again. He had walked and talked, called in at a petrol station, a tabac and a greengrocer, and he had made inquiries. For his trouble, he had no more information about Madame Duclos’s missing dog – but he had been asked about three more.

  Beneseffe politely expressed his pleasure at the Sergeant’s presence in his office, and then smiled much more genuinely at the idea that the fish-theft might be a profitable business opportunity.

  ‘I’ll put the word out,’ he said. ‘Good catch, Lester. Good timing.’

  ‘Been a bit twitchy, has it?’

  ‘Twitchy. Exactly. A lot of sharp knives on the docks. A lot of young men with large balls.’

  ‘Balls and knives don’t go well together.’

  ‘No. They do not.’

  ‘Speaking of twitchy, what do you hear about missing dog
s?’ Beneseffe looked completely blank. ‘Never mind. Or guns? Imported guns?’

  The Portmaster winced. ‘Shola.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have been thinking since it happened. There are many boats which might bring in guns. Fewer now, but still enough. And no Customs authority any more. But who, and when, and why, and how to find out . . . I don’t know. I would just ask, but now they would know why. They would be ashamed.’

  ‘Maybe that would help.’

  Beneseffe sighed. ‘Yes. If it was you, Lester, you would be ashamed and you would tell me. But not everyone is you.’

  ‘Ask anyway. Please.’

  ‘Of course.’

  They drank a cup of tea on the wooden veranda in front of the office – the Sergeant, very much against his instinct, with his back to the street. When his spine itched and tingled in this position, he took comfort in the dirty reflective surface of the windows and in the knowledge that Beneseffe’s wide smile was being read all the way from the chandler’s stall to the harbour gate as a sign and an omen of peace. The British Sergeant has done his job. Say that much: say he, at least, understands obligation.

  Their tea was interrupted – though it had come, in real terms, to its natural end and was now just a matter of the last of the pot – by the sound of a large engine, and then a gleeful barrage of obnoxious hooting. The Sergeant, glancing in the glass, saw the image of a Toyota Hilux 4×4 stopped at the kerb, the driver’s door opening to reveal a dark-haired elegant woman with violently orange fingernails.

  ‘Hey, Beneseffe! Hullo, Lester!’ Inoue said, dropping down from the driver’s seat. It was a long way for a person of less than average height, but the brief moment of free fall did nothing to ruffle her. Beneseffe waved a greeting.

  ‘Doctor,’ the Sergeant replied. She frowned at him.

  ‘We have discussed this, Lester. We have agreed that we will be informal.’

  That made him smile. ‘I recall you telling me I was going to be informal, certainly.’