From this landscape and palette they derived a mood, a sense of foreboding and intrusion. The theme was never being safe, and above all never being safe in isolation. In these stories, the boy said, if you wanted to be the hero you had to stand alone, but when you were alone was also when you might get eaten by the monster.
‘First it is seen,’ the boy explained, waving his hands at the edge of his vision, ‘here. And then there are more and more warnings, and they are ignored. Always, in daylight, the warnings are funny. They come from someone a little silly, maybe. And finally it walks in the night and everything is terrible.’
The interesting thing, to the Sergeant, was how these stories were at least in one way quite true to life: you didn’t know whether you were the hero or not until the end, because at any time up to that moment you could just get eaten and the rest would be about someone else. In fact you were never safe, because sometimes the monsters won.
From patches and scraps they stitched a skittering cockroach blanket and left it out for Mancreu to find.
The following morning, the fourth since Shola’s death, the Sergeant carefully assembled his face and manner into an attitude of amiable vagueness. It was difficult, requiring constant attention. If his focus wandered, his shoulders tightened and his mouth slipped into the sneer he recognised from the first day of deployment to an active theatre. But it was necessary for what came next that he should appear benign to the point of risible, so he thought about what Shola would say to this new plan, and played his part.
‘You’re quite out of your mind, Lester, you know that?’
‘Yes, Shola, I do.’
‘I mean, seriously, my friend: this is a terrible idea.’
‘So you like it.’
‘I love it. But that does not make it smart.’
‘You want to come?’
‘I’ll watch from a safe distance, I think. But you go ahead and have fun. Give Marie a hug for me, Lester. She’s not doing well.’
But that was too close to home, and he hurriedly put the vision away, then composed a hazy smile and ambled through the streets of Beauville with his customary pleasantness. He greeted the people and gossiped, accepted their condolences and their respect, and took his ease. Wherever he went he allowed the conversation to follow its own course, to wind and meander. That sort of chatter, on Mancreu, inevitably tended to swapping gossip and rumour, and where it seemed appropriate he would laugh and mention the demon, just in passing. Then – if someone asked ‘What demon?’ which they mostly did – he would explain and laugh some more. If he laughed too hard, well, he was a man who had lost a friend, and he could be allowed to find humour where he might. If it didn’t come up, then, well, that was fine too.
He told farmers he’d heard the story from stevedores, drovers he had it from seamstresses, bakers it came from lobstermen. Always he dismissed it out of hand, even as he spiced the pot with alarming details: the hint of missing persons, the flavour of doubt and poorly concealed official concern. He sought reassurances: ‘Oh, so you have seen Old Père Lipton? Good, all right, then he’s fine,’ as if crossing a potential victim off a list in his head. When pressed, he would explain that there were concerns about a real monster behind the story, a ghoul in the night. He didn’t outright say that it might be a human being so warped by the Discharge Clouds that he had become something other. He let the notion bubble up. He was jaunty, and called the whole thing a ghost story, nothing worth thinking about. And then in parting he would drop a reference to someone who was still missing. Every so often he sealed the deal with an earnest ‘There’s really no cause for alarm.’
It was so easy, he felt a little ashamed. You could have done it anywhere, in any village in the world. At a pub near Hereford, he remembered, an earnest matron had told him in great seriousness that windmills caused cancer, and the government was covering it up. A man from the Spectator, she said, had come and given a lecture. When the Sergeant had begun to express doubt, the whole saloon bar had laughed at him for his credulity. Myths and monsters were a human weakness, even in places not about to be evacuated and sterilised by fire.
The boy meanwhile had let the story slip to the card-players, who inevitably handed it on to passers-by and friends, and the legend grew in the telling so that one lonely ghost became a host led by an appalling demon prince. Inoue was right, apparently: the mountain people, in particular, had a lot of demons – although the fishermen had more than enough to be going on with, rising up from the frozen deep-water hell.
The boy had moved on to the waterfront and idled with the net-menders and the basket-weavers, run errands for the Portmaster. If he mentioned along his way the matter of the disappearances, the ones NatProMan was covering up, well, he could hardly be blamed. He was a child, and, after all, everyone was talking about it.
This being the way of things, it was quite natural for the Sergeant to bump into Pechorin, pass him a routine report from Kershaw’s office, and share the local colour.
‘Watch out for the demon!’ he said as he was leaving, and Pechorin grinned.
‘Sure, Lester. I will be very careful. I would not want Baba Yaga to come and steal my balls. Unless it is young Baba Yaga. A beautiful demon would be okay.’ He made a helpful gesture with his hips for clarification.
‘Well, I can’t help you there,’ the Sergeant said genially. ‘We’re pretty certain it’s a man.’
‘Fuck!’ Pechorin cried in appalled delight. ‘You taking this seriously? There is a demon?’
‘Oh, yes. Of course. Well, not like a real demon sort of demon, obviously. Just someone not right in the head. Or a man suffering some sort of break because of . . . everything. There’s no serious suggestion that he’s been affected by the Clouds. Yeah,’ he mused, almost to himself, ‘there’s a few Leavers have been a bit mad, we tend to brush them under the carpet, sort them out at the other end. And there was one lad with longish fingernails and teeth, but he was from the mountains and you couldn’t say for sure he wasn’t always like that. Anyway, nothing to worry about for an armed patrol. Less good by yourself in a dark corner, I suppose, if he’s really far gone. I mean, you know what crazy people are.’ He sucked air through his teeth, as if this thought was just now occurring to him.
The merriment faded. Pechorin’s mother was from Rostov, at one time the home of Eastern Europe’s most infamous murderer. A grubby little man in a brown overcoat had killed nearly a hundred people, and ever since his execution by firing squad the town had had a ridiculously high rate of serial murderers, as if Chikatilo’s spirit had passed into the air. Perhaps it had; the arresting officer had been suspicious because of a smell he detected around the suspect, a smell he called simply ‘evil’ but which forensics later explained as the meaty exhalation of a cannibal.
Pechorin’s crew muttered and crossed themselves. It was an irritation to the Sergeant that men who one moment before had been braying for the sexual favours of a fiend could appeal to the Virgin in the next. It smacked of sloppy thinking.
‘He’s killed men?’ Pechorin demanded. ‘Women?’
The Sergeant raised his hands resignedly. ‘People are missing. But people are always missing on Mancreu. They drown. They fall off cliffs. Or they Leave and don’t tell anyone. It’s not serious. Only . . .’ He let his voice trail off as if in thought, then shook his head to clear it. ‘Never mind. But if you see anything, let me know.’
‘See what?’ one of the men demanded. ‘Only what, please?’
‘Nothing,’ the Sergeant said hastily. ‘Nothing at all.’ When Pechorin raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘Let’s hear it’ – not in the manner of a gossip, but that of a cautious leader of men – the Sergeant shrugged unwillingly, then went on. ‘Only there’s a small list – not more than a dozen – that I can’t account for that way, even with the Brighton House records and asking people to come forward and so on. It’s early days. I’m sure they’ll turn up.’ He laughed. ‘It’s not as if the witnesses are consistent. This morni
ng someone told me it’s a man with a monster’s face. Except that the next one says you can’t see him because he’s invisible. He has hands like a tiger, or a mouth like a heron. And he comes and takes your teeth while you sleep. It’s a bedtime story for naughty children. Unless maybe there’s a market for teeth somewhere. Eh? Hah!’
He nudged the Ukrainian with thunderous good humour, to indicate that everyone should laugh. They did, but politely, because it wasn’t very funny. It was true that there was no market for human teeth because these days dentists could make them out of ceramic and sooner or later they’d just grow them, that was how it was going. Organs, on the other hand, absolutely could be bought and sold around the world. It was a quite legitimate medical trade, one which states regulated very carefully to prevent abuse, meaning that the abuse was profitable and sophisticated. There was a hospital ship in the Bay of the Cupped Hands called the Reluctant Alice, where you could buy a heart for $120,000, not including surgery. The Alice was one of the more receptive vessels of the Black Fleet, so much so that she very nearly advertised. The numbers were common knowledge on Mancreu: a whole body was only $210,000 and a liver was $80,000, so it was actually a better investment to plump for the corpse entire and reckon to resell the other organs. Of course, if there was a sudden lack of buyers you’d be out a lot of money, but in practice that seldom happened. Someone, somewhere, always needed something.
But suppose for a moment that the problem were reversed: you might find there was no compatible donor, and if you were in a hurry – and what rich transplant patient ever felt he or she had too much time before the situation became critical? – well, under those circumstances it was whispered certain groups would undertake commissions. If no suitable cadaver could be found, one might be made to order. Soldiers, their medical records on file, would be a particularly good source of organs for anyone with access – politicians, say, or spies – and, of course, soldiers died all the time. There would almost certainly never be any need to help them along.
‘Nothing in it,’ the Sergeant said. ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. But if you do see anything strange, call me. And call for a medical team, just in case.’
Pechorin worked his way through that. In case the victim has been robbed of his kidneys and is sitting alone in a room in a bath of ice waiting to die.
The Sergeant left them to gather their gear.
The prank – he was thinking of this salutary lesson in manners as a prank, so that if he ever had to testify about it he could truthfully say that was how he’d seen it – was shaping up nicely, but there remained the question of what to wear. The Sergeant had no idea how to begin. He was not someone who spent a great deal of time on clothes. Beyond sewing on a button or a new rank insignia, he had also never done any kind of tailoring. The boy, however, asserted that he had made costumes before, for festivals and parties and for his own enjoyment, and appointed himself quartermaster. This would be better than a normal costume, because it would be real. In fact it must be perfect. Yes, perfect – and would the Sergeant stop wriggling and please allow him to take a chest measurement?
The Sergeant obediently raised his arms and waited. He had been thinking of something rather more ad hoc, but realised now that the exercise of imagination and skill in all this was as much a balm to his friend’s hurt as the prospect of justice itself. In the end, it was also better by far that the boy should be party to his redress than that it should be given to him as a gift. He therefore suffered himself to be measured in his various dimensions, and tried not to growl when the waist came up larger than his vanity would have liked. Thinking about it – with his hands in the air and his back straight while the boy measured his chest – the Sergeant understood that what he was proposing to undertake was in some measure stupid and dangerous, so he would do well to be prepared for it to go wrong. He stopped the design process, walked the boy down the long corridor to the newest section of Brighton House, and opened the armoury.
After a while, the boy said: ‘Holy socks.’
The weapons were all along the right-hand wall and in racks which slid out on rails to allow many men to arm themselves at once. There was protective gear at the back, and specialist situ-ations kit – demolitions and bomb disposal, engineering, survival and scuba gear on the left. The boy was particularly impressed by a row of sharkpunches – slim aluminium batons tipped with a shotgun shell for dealing with ocean predators on dive missions – and averred that Roy Scheider should have had one. Immediately next to the entrance were various sorts of chemical-weapons suits, because you didn’t want to have to go any further than was absolutely necessary when you needed them in a hurry.
The Sergeant wondered what it must be like to see so much appallingly dangerous stuff gathered together in one place, so many strange and expensive tools of destruction and defence, for the first time.
Finally, the boy said: ‘This is not a good room,’ and Lester Ferris thought he would cheer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t. But it’s got things in it I might need.’ He knocked on an armoured vest, and sighed.
The boy nodded.
Together, then, they sat with the comics and the inventory list and drew up an outline of how he should appear. They began with words:
dangerous
fiendish
indestructible
monstrous
capable.
The boy proposed also
cannibalistic
but the Sergeant demurred, and the boy in return struck off
professional
as being more something a soldier should be than a caped crusader. They got stuck for a while, and came up with
scary
which was redundant, and
lethal
which made them both uncomfortable, however true it might be that they wanted their creation to seem that way. And then the boy suggested
shocking
and, of course,
awesome.
The Sergeant laid down a few hard rules for equipment, and then withdrew to watch his friend work, bemused by the sketches the boy drew on sheets of paper from the stationery cupboard and by the piles of gear he fetched and discarded from the armoury. Mancreu and even Pechorin, Lester Ferris understood well enough, but it occurred to him now that he did not understand the business of superheroing at all. He knew it as a thing to be admired and as a brief diversion in childhood, but he had never considered it for what it was or how it might actually be done, or even what it might mean if one did.
He was going to put on a funny hat and fight crime. He was going, however briefly, into their world, and you didn’t do that without learning about where you were going. He needed to see the fictional landscape of hopes and aspirations and the characters who inhabited them. Symbolic terrain.
He opened a comic and began to read it the way he read soil and weather.
The first thing he understood in that hour was that it was never about hitting people. It was always about proving a point. Hitting people was just a background, the way a uniform was. The message varied like the soldier. For Superman, that point was about justice and ideals. He really was a perfect American dream. For Batman, it was something else altogether. It was a statement that no matter who you were, how tough you were or how wicked, there were some things you simply could not do. He was not primarily about punishment or even prevention. He was a living cypher, a message that the set of actions which were available to human beings did not include certain crimes, and that line was absolute, made absolute not by him but by what he represented, the human capacity to say ‘no’. They could not be prevented, not every time, but they would be uncovered and they would be punished. The Sergeant found himself thinking about Bosnia, where a war had been fought by the West to achieve exactly that same result, and about Afghanistan, where the nations which had pursued Karadžić and Mladić for their misdeeds had decided that some of those things were acceptable so long as they were done for the right reasons.
&
nbsp; The boy asked him to hold something while he marked it in chalk, and the Sergeant put down the comic book and shifted to accommodate the easy pressure of curving lines drawn across his chest and legs. Then he was detailed to cut something along the marks, and found that it was not hard at all. There was even a satisfaction in it, a simple lift in his mood for a simple task unequivocally completed. The boy squinted at his work, and then approved it.
It was very companionable, sitting and making in this way. The Sergeant and his uncle Mike had once made a go-kart together, out of a box crate and some wheels from a discarded perambulator. Mike had insisted at the last minute on adding suspension in the form of bed springs, which had complicated the procedure enormously and resulted in a strange, nauseating ride. All the same, it had been grand. The young Lester had ridden it every day until it tore itself apart. He had not had the knack of reassembling the springs, and the kart had mouldered in a corner of the garage because Mike was living overseas. More than likely it was still there.
The Sergeant found himself wondering whether the boy would enjoy it as much as he had, whether they might repair it together. The warming notion soothed him, and he drifted like a man sleeping in the bath. He considered other things he and the boy might make together: musical instruments, chemical experiments, and even cakes. He had enjoyed cakes, in his earlier life. Somehow you didn’t get much opportunity to make cakes as a sergeant.
‘What you really need,’ the boy said at last as he tied off a thread, ‘is a sign from White Raoul.’
The Sergeant nodded. He knew it was absurd, even a little mad, but it felt like the right thing. The world was being ludicrous at him, so he would be a bit ludicrous back, and he would make that small part of it around him a little better. Call it atonement, perhaps, for being the one to reveal to the boy that adults do not automatically have all the answers, and that justice does not flow like water from people who are taller than a child. If the boy thought he should have a sign from the scrivener, then: good.
Tigerman Page 15
