Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  And: May I not have one good thing which is just for me?

  But he had promised the boy he would find Shola’s killers, the men behind the men, and now he was doing nothing about it and time was running out, and to take his mind off that decision he was leafing through government paperwork on thousands of people in the hope of finding out whether the child he was thus swindling was an orphan, because if he was that would make the Sergeant’s own life neater and easier.

  That was unfair. This was important, too, and it couldn’t wait much longer, either. And it wasn’t as if he was particularly guilty of ignoring the other stuff. Everyone on Mancreu ignored the Fleet, except the boy himself, and Kershaw. Kershaw couldn’t, because Kershaw was saddled with some sort of role in the Fleet’s world. He was the gatekeeper. Did that mean he was Bad Jack? The Sergeant pictured Kershaw in fatigues: Black Ops Jed; wily and ruthless Evil Jed. Still primed with comic books and parallel worlds, the Sergeant’s imagination awarded the image a goatee and maroon jackboots. Jack Boots.

  Absurd.

  Beneseffe, then. The Portmaster was ideally placed to smuggle and conceal. He wouldn’t even have to pay himself to turn a blind eye to shipments, he could collect them off the dock and no one would object. He need only be skilled with obfuscatory paperwork.

  This was idle. Bad Jack was not the problem. It was Jack’s trading partner or his enemy who was the issue: his unfaithful friend, and surely Jack must have known that would happen, that he would be betrayed. Had Shola himself been Jack? Jack had not retaliated because Jack was dead. Except that perhaps Jack had retaliated. The men who had killed Shola were ash. Maybe that explosion had been Jack declaring war on the Fleet, in which case . . .

  Jack could be my ally. If he is alive. If I was taking the case.

  Which the British sergeant never would, however much Lester Ferris might think it was the right thing to do.

  A team-up.

  It was a staple of the comics world: the moment when a situation so dire emerged that villains and heroes had to fight back to back, each fearing the moment when the other turned on them, each preparing and holding back, until finally both were threatened and must commit fully, come what may.

  And it was irrelevant, because he could do nothing about the Fleet, however much he might wish to and whatever he had promised, and the boy understood that. One man could not move the Fleet any more than he could shoot lasers from his eyes. The Red Cross and the International Court couldn’t move the Fleet, couldn’t even get on board.

  Perhaps he is waiting for you to do the right thing. Perhaps it has no value if he must ask.

  He lost his place in the files, and realised as he went back that he had not looked at any of the pictures in front of him for a while. He had been opening the folders, leafing through the pages, and putting them away. He went back through the discards painstakingly until he was sure he had not missed the crucial one. He worked into the night, only aware of the passage of time because he had to switch on a light, and then another, and finally to bring in a third from another room. The high ceiling and the dark wood devoured illumination. When he grew tired he went to the bathroom and splashed water on himself, then washed his eyes with drops from the first-aid kit. He made a pot of tea and went back to the desk, conjured another hour from himself, and another.

  Sometime after midnight, he became aware of a new sound, like geese and thunder, and the smell of woodsmoke touched his face.

  He walked to the east windows and looked out towards the bay.

  Beauville was burning.

  The descent into the port was a delirium splashed in bad colours across the dark. The shanty was scored with the bonfires of abandoned farmsteads and upturned cars, and columns of smoke rose and spread and reflected the flames. Beauville was washed in the light of its own conflagration. Here and there, knots of angry people destroyed the streets through which they had walked all their lives, with special attention paid – it seemed at least to the Sergeant, gazing in mute horror through the windows of the Land Rover – to those places which were particularly beautiful or welcoming. Here a façade painted a hundred years ago with scenes from the lives of fishermen split and boiled; there a small mews, with its absurd front doors like tiny portcullises, crumbled and fell in. Looters brandished their trophies, fought over them like gulls, and then lost interest, letting them drop or adding them to the nearest blaze. Almost every item could have been had at any time over the last months, taken with respect from empty houses left unlocked by those who chose not to destroy what they could not carry away, but now Beauville was delivering judgement on those who had departed and all their worldly effects, declaring them dead and exiled and showing its contempt for anyone too cowardly to see the island to its end.

  He drove past the Witch’s house and saw that it, too, was in flames, the solid porch and the high-backed chair from which she had encouraged the scrivener fuelling the blaze. The flowers were strewn all about. Because she was foreign? Or because she was kind? He slowed the car, wondering if he should search for her, but the fire was old. If she had been inside, she was dead now, and no amount of stupidity on his part would change that, even if it did make him feel better. If she was not inside, then entering wasn’t even brave, it was asinine. He cursed. There was gear in the armoury which would help with this: firefighting equipment, oxygen. He should go back and get it, but to turn around now smacked of desertion, so he drove on.

  At the next crossroads he chose the harbour road, aiming in part for the scrivener’s shop. Breanne would have gone there, he suspected, if she could. He would go past, see if they were all right. He could offer to put them up at Brighton House. He pulled out his cellphone, slapped the battery in and called the boy, got a synthesised female voice telling him the person he was calling was not available. He left a message: ‘I’m in the car. Beauville’s gone to shit. If you need me, call or go to the house. Bring whoever you want,’ he added after a moment, thinking of the elusive guardian. ‘There’s room for quite a few.’ He wondered if he would come back to find a horde of street children or a family of twenty seeking refuge in what was still technically consular accommodation, and what diplomatic shit that might kick off.

  Towards the seafront, where the buildings were closer together, the fires faded as if the riot was saving the best for last. An ugly calm lay over the streets like the anticipation of a beating. Away from the source, the Sergeant heard the sound of the mob as he had from up on the hill, a kind of birdlike laughter on the wind. He realised too that he had been driving through fouled air, that there was ash in his snot, clogging his nostrils with black slime. He blew his nose, then cleared his throat and almost vomited, jerking to open the window and spit nauseating burned rubber stink onto the street. He sluiced water from a bottle in the back seat into his mouth, partially inhaled it and snorted it out, then abandoned his handkerchief to the gutter. And now, standing outside the car, he could smell something else, a grim mix of animal and hair. He looked around and about, then caught it again. That way.

  He got back behind the wheel and rolled the Land Rover slowly forward. Let it not be a person, he thought. Let it be a fox or a cow. I don’t really care. But not a person and not anyone I know. And then he felt, when he saw it, that he had brought this on himself, that he had conjured it.

  Spartacus. He couldn’t remember the name of the general who had ordered it and that pleased him, but he recalled the rest. Westcott had talked about it endlessly, the moment when savagery had transformed the wobbling Roman Republic into an enduring empire: security at the price of freedom. When Spartacus’s rebellion was defeated, the Via Appia was lined with six thousand crucified slaves as a warning to the world.

  From each of the telegraph poles on the road leading down to the waterfront dangled the corpse of a dog, front paws nailed to a coarse crosspiece ripped from a packing crate. Not six thousand. Not even a hundred. But still a manifest monstrosity and an earnest of more.

  He got back into the La
nd Rover, hating the world.

  The Portmaster’s office was shuttered, heavy steel blinds chained to the concrete pediment, and the waterfront was almost deserted. The lobstermen had taken their boats to more amenable moorings and the lines of storage shacks along the docks gaped open, corrugated-iron walls bare and so rudimentary that burning them was an empty gesture. Twenty minutes with a hammer and a few bits of wood and the same metal would be in the same position, if anyone cared.

  The scrivener’s shingle hung halfway along the waterfront, a single lantern glowing dimly beside the papal writ. The windows were dark, but they always were. White Raoul never drew the curtains. His den was a mystery, a magician’s cave. All along the road was rubble and splatter, dark stains which might be blood, and others – paint, booze, water and piss. This was a battlefield, sure as any Lester Ferris had ever seen.

  Rolling the Land Rover onward, the Sergeant was starkly aware of how wide and exposed the promenade was, like a medieval killing ground. He had been driving without lights anyway, and now he stared out into the night, cursing the limits of his eyes and wishing for night vision goggles, for a partner to watch his back. And where was the boy, anyway? The Sergeant tried not to think of him running with the pack, putting Beauville to the torch and screaming like a madman, but if he wasn’t doing that then he might be in trouble, be hiding, be burned. He didn’t seem the type, but no one ever did. This kind of thing came from nowhere and washed you away; it was elemental. Or had that strange parent come for him, whisked him off to some mountainside for safekeeping, and was he even now looking down on the orange pall and wondering where in all that stink and flame was his friend the Sergeant? But if this last, he had only to pick up his phone messages and respond.

  Call me. Is that so much to ask?

  The Land Rover crunched over something brittle, a vase or a bottle. The noise was shockingly loud and made him jump. He lurched the car one way and then the other to throw off the first shot from a sniper’s rifle in case that same sound excited a response in some lethal watcher on the rooftops, feeling sure there was no sniper, not here, but doing it anyway because you did, you followed your instincts and asked why later, or sooner or later you paid for it.

  An improvised explosive device, now. He wouldn’t rule out something like that here, not tonight. A big drum of diesel oil lifted from the harbour. What a fine blaze that would make, if a fellow knew how to rig it – and no doubt some did.

  The car jiggled again, this time riding over a long piece of hosepipe. No, not a hose: a cable, and fat as a man’s arm. He stared at it, following the long spaghetti line around in a wide spiral and down to the edge of the water. It was draped in seaweed and muck. In fact . . . Yes, it was the cable TV connection to the Black Fleet, he realised, ripped up and severed, and for the first time he felt a sense of sympathy with the marauders. Let the Fleet feel something, even if it was just having to fall back on DVDs and movies on highly covert iPads and laptops.

  He drove on, feeling the cable squirm under his tyres, and stopped outside the scrivener’s door. He debated whether to hoot, whether to leave the engine running in case he needed to make an escape. But didn’t want to lose the car to some wandering sneak, so he took the keys and went to the door.

  She opened it before he could knock. ‘I’m okay.’

  He breathed out slowly. ‘I was hoping.’

  She didn’t ask how he knew to look for her here. Well, he was supposed to be a detective, and perhaps everyone had known except him. Gossip was like that.

  ‘Have you seen the boy?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ And he saw her face mirror his own worry: If he’s not with me and he’s not with you, then where? But at least she was not the boy’s mother, that was something. The world she could offer was so big. He could not compete with that, wouldn’t try. Johns Hopkins. Ivy League schools. A woman who could open doors. That would be a fine place for the boy. Just not his boy, any more. But it seemed he was spared that moment. He felt a guilty triumph.

  ‘Your house . . .’ he began, but she raised a hand.

  ‘I know. I heard. But it’s fine. You know, it’s just stuff. My clarinet, I suppose, I’ve had it for years, but in the end it’s a thing. It’s not like a violin, like a Stradivarius. Just a decent Yamaha, I can get one on eBay and it’ll be exactly the same. It’s just stuff,’ she said again, and with the repetition it seemed to hurt her a little less. People she had known, probably, had come and destroyed all that they could reach of what she owned. That and her garden, he suspected, hurt more than the material things. She wasn’t a soldier, used to showing up and being shot at.

  He cast about, wondering how she would regain her sense of the world. Not by hitting someone or shooting at them, obviously. Not by arresting them. She would want to reconnect, to help. He pursed his lips. ‘I can tell Kershaw to sort out a medicine bag for you, if you like.’

  She smiled wanly. ‘Thank you.’

  He looked at the road, the residue of conflict on it, then back at her. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘The crowd came, obviously. Beneseffe and the dockmen stood them down. Well, I say that. It was pretty much a medieval battle. They even had drummers, or near enough. It was . . . insane.’

  ‘Raoul?’

  ‘He wanted to go out and tell them off! I told him no, so he’s angry with me. He’s inside painting a curse, I think, on anyone who burns their own town. On people who smash what’s beautiful. It’s like they can’t bear to see anything good now that they know it’s going to go. Know it properly, I mean. The word’s out on that: that the end is nigh. So now this. If it’s special you smash it before someone else does. I said anyone who does that doesn’t need cursing, and he told me I was a hippy.’ A lovers’ tiff, and a proof of mutual affection. She waved her hand. ‘Do you want to come in?’

  But the Sergeant was already running for the Land Rover, because if there was one place in Beauville which was beautiful it was the street of the card-players, with its white steps and trailing flowers.

  ‘Ferris,’ the Sergeant shouted into his phone, ‘and you know bloody well how to spell it. Now get Jed Kershaw on the phone and tell him it’s the Brevet-Consul of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and I need to know why his lads are sitting in barracks with their thumbs up their arse! I’m not pissing about – this is,’ he groped for the form of words, ‘this is a matter bearing upon the United Kingdom’s willingness to cede sovereign claim to this island to the international protection force.’ The Consul had told him if he ever seriously wanted to get Kershaw’s attention, this was the way to do it. It’ll scare the living shit out of him, the Consul had said, and he’ll be frightfully cross, so don’t do it unless you have to. And for God’s sake, whatever you do don’t imply that you’re actively asserting sovereignty. That could really start some sort of war.

  Kershaw came on the line a moment later, and he did indeed sound very pissed off. ‘What the actual fuck, Lester?’

  ‘Sorry, Jed, I don’t have time to piss about. There’s a bloody riot happening! Get your lads out on the street and do some good!’ He threw the Land Rover around a tight turn and saw the back of the crowd, torches and spars dangling in loose hands. All moving the same way, yes, somehow drawing together again into a mass.

  Kershaw snarled at him down the phone. ‘Oh, thank you, Lester! I did notice the fucking riot, but I decided that since NatProMan is specifically charged with exploding the entire island when the time comes, just maybe my guys were not the ideal fucking choice of policing for the streets of Beauville right now, but I’m sorry I didn’t fucking check with you first! And by the way, Sergeant’ – he spat the rank as if it tasted of rot – ‘don’t you ever fucking bring the diplomatic incident with me! You’re a nice guy, Lester, and I’m sure in a bar in Shropshire you’re tougher than shit, but in this world you are a fucking minnow and I am a shark, do you get me? A fucking shark! And this is where I swim. So unless you have the Queen standing
behind you in her armour, ready to fucking joust for this shithole, get off my phone and go back to your castle and stay there until you get orders from your boss!’

  The Sergeant stopped the Land Rover and stared into the handset. He left the line open and he could hear Kershaw’s breathing. Over on his right was the mob, about five or six minutes from the street of the card-players. He could hear them, no longer like a mad laugh but a sort of sigh, as if the joy had gone out of their destruction but they had a duty to see it through.

  ‘Good night, Jed,’ he said gently, and hung up. Shouting worked on enlisted men and sometimes on junior officers, but it was never really an answer, just a way to get the discussion started. You drove them off until you could welcome them back, and that made them grateful. But he couldn’t do that here, with Kershaw. The two of them were in balance, each sovereign and neither truly in control.

  He put the phone in his pocket and drove the Land Rover around the back of the old market square, then got out and walked the rest of the way.

  The white stone gleamed in the orange light of the sky. The vanguard of the mob was arriving, but the street of the card-players was so neat that there was almost nothing to tear up or burn. The window boxes had been raised to the upper floors, the doors were shut. The flags were sheer and perfect. The Sergeant wondered, briefly, if it was all going to be all right.

  And then he saw, under the one soft lantern, the dealer sitting at his table with a deck and a bottle, waiting.

  The mob saw him at the same moment and surged forward around him, mocking and plucking. A young boxer took one free chair away and smashed it against the road, then when this met with scattered laughter and encouragement, slouched down into the next seat and poured himself a drink. He knocked it back, then threw the glass away, moved to the last free chair and repeated the gesture, staring at the old man.

  A door opened, somewhere, and the sweeper came out with her broom and started to sweep up the broken glass.