In the fourth cell, on the off chance, the Sergeant changed tack and did a certain amount of shouting. The man in the fourth cell had a missing toe and looked to be in pain – not horrible pain but misery pain – so shouting was particularly unpleasant for him. He wept. The boy shouted too, got right down beside him and shouted high and long into his face. The man protested and objected and demanded more of whatever they were giving him for the toe. That and strong drink.
‘Why?’ the Sergeant repeated. ‘You came into my friend’s bar and gunned him down. Why?’ And then he was shouting quite genuinely, screaming into the prisoner’s face over and over: ‘WHY? WHY? WHY?’
He pulled himself back sharply, swallowed. He wished for a chain of command, for men in authority above him to hold him back. He wished for laws to make his limits plain. He wanted very much to beat the murder out of all of them, to bruise them and bludgeon them and let out the fury in his chest. Line them up like fucking tomatoes and cut them down, over and over and over, these bastards who had done this bloody, brutal thing on his doorstep, who had come into his special place, his town, his island and killed his friend, made the boy so bleakly and irretrievably unhappy. Made the boy grow up.
He glanced across at his friend, afraid he would see fear or shock, but the boy looked quite impressed, even encouraging. Well, yes. All he had done was shout. Shouting was fair enough. He turned his gaze back to the prisoner.
But his monstering seemed to have achieved nothing at all. The man stared at them and then, after a moment, he suddenly shouted back, screamed that his foot was rotting and burning and hurting and he wanted more, more, MORE MORE MORE. It was like an echo. The man began to wail then, like an infant. More, more, more. Perhaps he was an addict already and this had just sharpened his need. (More, more, MORE!)
Useless.
The last cell was bigger, and the man in the bed was unconscious. His eyes were burned. It was all treatable, but that kind of medical care was expensive and no one cared. The Sergeant shrugged and made a note to request it. Maybe the man would open up when he saw the world again. Or maybe he’d be able to look a jury in the eye and see their verdict. Whatever. On the scale of things here, the ships and the NatProMan deployment, it wasn’t that much money. Maybe they’d save this man’s vision only for him to be acquitted or just released and that would be Shola’s memorial: an almost miraculous gift to one of his murderers. That was the world sometimes, and Mancreu, especially. Kswah swah.
He went in again, cell by cell, repeated his lines. Then he had the boy try in Moitié, listened to the ebb and flow and heard the story in cell two expand a little. ‘I was on the high road by the river. There were men, they offered me money. They had bags. I thought these bags contained contraband for sale. I thought we would sell it. At the bar we got out. It is a good place to sell, a bar, everyone knows this. Then they took out guns. I also must carry a gun. I fire into the air. I know no names. I know nothing. I am bystander. I wished only to make a little money to take a ship. To go away before the end. I have no family.’
The Sergeant slipped himself into the discussion, made the man tell it in reverse. It’s hard to lie in reverse. The story bent a little, acquired details, but did not change. He didn’t know if that was because it was a simple lie, or because it was true.
Then he photographed them one by one, and they made this hard or not hard, each according to his lights.
When the interrogators came out into the fresh air, a light mist had settled over the ocean and the fishing boats and even the Black Fleet seemed to be suspended somewhere between the water and the sky. The horizon line had vanished entirely from east to west, and sea and cloud had melded into a purpled canvas so that the Arlington Bride – a Swiss-owned, Wilmington-registered cargo hauler which had been one of the first to arrive when Mancreu was extralegalised – appeared to be hovering over the automated lighthouse at the end of the pier. The boy sighed deeply.
‘I know,’ the Sergeant said. ‘They didn’t give us anything.’
‘No,’ the boy replied.
‘They will. We’ll get there.’
‘Maybe.’ He had dropped directly into the dejected funk which was the flipside of his manic highs. The Sergeant wasn’t sure if this was the sort of thing which would be considered an actual sickness or just a part of being however old he was. Probably it depended where you were. In France, he knew, they used a different manual for psychological medicine. They might well say no. In America, everything was diagnosable, probably even positive traits could be treated if you wanted to get rid of them. Then, too, the boy had real things to be sad about. He had lost a friend, and the interrogation which had promised an explanation of sorts had failed to deliver. Instinct told the Sergeant to keep his friend moving forwards, to avoid letting him dwell on the bad things. There was time for that, but you wanted momentum to get you through it, so that you could grieve without ceasing to function. Sorrow was something you did best if you did it while other things were happening, or it could freeze you in place.
‘We will get there. But maybe we’ll have to poke around a bit. I’ve got a few things to look into otherwise, too.’ He needed it to be true. He had seen the boy’s face in the café after the fight, the look which said Lester Ferris was an actual superstar. He didn’t need it to be that way all the time, but the more distant it became the more conscious he was of a kind of pain.
‘Yes,’ the boy said dully, meaning ‘no’.
So the Sergeant told him about the tiger.
It was a strange story and he told it haltingly, and he probably oversold the part about being very drunk, because the boy’s lips twitched in puritanical disdain. All the same, when he got to the good bit, about scratching the huge head, the boy’s eyes were very wide. The Sergeant had to break off and swear, repeatedly, to the truth of it. He swore several different appalling oaths, each bringing doom and despair on him in different ways if he was lying in the smallest particular, but what finally persuaded his audience was how the story ended, without resolution.
‘Real life has no understanding of proper structure,’ the boy said, ‘which is why news stories are always made of little lies.’ This pleased the Sergeant very much because it was a brief flicker of the boy’s usual self, like a familiar face in a crowd.
He saw a way forward, considered briefly, and then jumped. ‘It might speed things up with my other stuff if I had some help,’ he said. ‘I mean: usually, in a p’lice context,’ and bless DI Burroughs for this bit of coppering nonsense, ‘usually these sorts of matters would be dealt with by an investigation team, so it’s hardly surprising I’m struggling a bit with the caseload all by myself.’
The boy nodded in a worldly, serious way. Of course. Anyone of consequence knew that about policing. There might be less educated persons who would disagree, his manner said, but we need not concern ourselves with them at present.
Deep breath. ‘So what I was thinking was that you could come along. Help out. Unofficially deputised into the Mancreu Investigatory Force, as it were. Only if you want. I know you’ve got things to do, I don’t mean to say you haven’t. But if you did want to, well, there’s always things I can’t get to and which you might be ideally placed for, being familiar with the local environment and so on.’ He trailed off, looking at the impossible flying ships.
After a moment, he heard the boy say tentatively: ‘Fight crime?’
‘Well, yes. I mean, any actual fighting – and there won’t be any – but if there was, then that would be my part. You’d be my eyes and ears. Make sure I didn’t miss anything. Use that brain of yours.’
The boy seemed to expand, the damp rag of his depression becoming a sort of balloon.
‘Fight crime!’
‘In a strictly auxiliary capacity,’ the Sergeant said hastily.
‘Taking the law to the mean streets of the city!’
‘Well—’
‘Yes! You will need me. I am your kid partner. I will crack wise. I will rock it
Gangnam Style!’
‘I don’t want you getting in trouble. You’re a minor.’
‘Yes! Pretty weird kid partner, otherwise.’ The Sergeant saw teeth, and knew he was being teased.
‘You wouldn’t be my partner. That’s—’ He choked down insane and discarded against regulations, wondering what he’d got himself into. ‘Not something I’m allowed to do.’
‘Of course! I am not with you. We are in the same place at the same time. If anything happens, I shall run away. I am a civilian.’
‘Yes.’
‘But when danger strikes: I am off the books and off the hook!’
‘No!’
‘Excellent! Just like that: deny, deny, deny! Sometimes justice must wear a mask!’
‘No masks. No adventure. Just police work. It can be boring, I won’t lie to you. But . . .’ He hesitated. ‘You’d be with me. We could talk.’ He dried up again. ‘About stuff.’
The boy nodded solemnly. ‘Go places, talk about stuff. Find a box of matches, get a DNA sample, hairs from victim’s pullover. Investigate! Unassuming sergeant for fallen empire by day! Foolhardy boy companion! And it will be hard work. Gather evidence, data, follow leads. Good men fighting to protect and serve in a town where there is no law!’ The Sergeant winced. That was a bit on the nose. ‘But then, later . . . when the moon is in the sky and the evildoer thinks he is safe . . . Tigerman strikes!’
‘Tiger-what what?’
The boy leaned back away from him, waved his hands to indicate the bigness of this idea. ‘Tigerman! You are Tigerman!’ Huge circles. ‘Hero of Mancreu!’
‘I am not. I’m just doing a job of work.’ And I’m probably not supposed to do that.
‘For now! But you were chosen by the tiger at Shola’s grave! There is no justice, there’s just us! When it is necessary . . .’ The boy waved his arms again, now in a gesture which was either movie kung fu or the tricky business of changing costumes in a phone box. ‘When it is necessary: Tigerman!’ He made a whoomf noise in his cheeks. ‘Famous victory!’
‘Well, as long as you understand there will be no actual Tigerman.’
Whoomf. Hand gestures, definitely pulling open a shirt this time. ‘Tigerman!’
‘My name’s Lester. You can’t have a hero called Lester.’
‘Tigerman,’ the boy said fervently. ‘Full of win.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Win. Full of. Also: famous victory.’
‘No.’
‘Yes!’
‘No!’
But the Sergeant was losing his grip on seriousness. It was funny. Joyful. And he wanted, had wanted for so long, to be a hero for this boy. Not a broken-down old fart. A cool person. The sort of person you’d hope would be your dad.
Whoomf. ‘Tigerman!’
They stared at one another without blinking.
‘No,’ the Sergeant said, just as the boy said ‘Yes!’ with equal vigour. The man scowled, the boy grinned, and that was that. Each had said his piece, the other knew where he stood, and now they would leave the matter to the world. Kswah swah.
They shook on it.
The day had been so weighty and the outcome so momentous that the boy decided a special entertainment was now called for, saying only in tones of great import and mystery that it would be ‘hunnerten pro cent zed oh em gee’. The Sergeant recognised the over-revved ‘one hundred and ten per cent’ and the ‘oh my god’ parts, but the ‘z’ quite defeated him. ‘Zombie’ was the only thing he could come up with and it seemed unlikely, unless ‘zombie’ had now acquired an additional meaning of ‘excellent’. Thinking about it, he decided that this was possible, but that he would be quite happy never knowing for sure. He agreed that he would be home at seven to receive his visitor, and they parted.
‘What the fuck, Lester? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking you personally, I’m asking you as a stand-in for God. But that being the case: “what”, “the”, “fuck”? Shola was like a pillar of the world. Why would anyone just kill the guy? Fucking assholes!’
Jed Kershaw had his hands in the air for emphasis. He was a little man, and he used his hands a lot, held them high over his head and waggled his fingers. The Sergeant had initially found this odd. It made Kershaw look like a small, circular wizard casting spells which never worked, or that puppet show his sister had told him about where the puppets took off all their clothes until they finally were just hands again. But you got used to it, and the temptation to talk up into Kershaw’s palm faded away until the American was just another bit of life on the island.
Kershaw would have rejected this idea because Mancreu drove him crazy. He was forever shouting at his staff and down the phone, demanding that the place work properly, behave itself with something like sanity, function in some way which made sense, because he was the bridge between the world where things did make sense and the small circle in this blue ocean where they didn’t have to. But what really drove Jed Kershaw crazy, he said, what was going to kill him if this whole situation wasn’t resolved pretty fucking soon now, any day now, was how British Mancreu was, and maybe also at the same time if this was possible – he wasn’t sure – how French.
Kershaw had long ago realised, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying – which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you – while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you’d have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he’d come to the conclusion that they didn’t do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. British soldiers, for example, gave entire reports to their commanders by the way they said ‘good morning, sir’ and then had to spend half an hour telling them the detail, which was why the Brits always looked bored in briefings. They could sense the trajectory of the conversation, knew the bad news was coming now and the good news now and that there was a question on the end which needed thinking about. With a bit of work they could deduce the question, too, but they always waited politely for it to be asked so that no one felt rushed.
Originally – when he had believed it was some sort of snobbish post-colonial joke – this all had made Kershaw dislike the Brits, but now apparently he sort of admired it. His brother Gabe was a literature professor at Brown, and when Kershaw brought this up with him Gabe had nodded and said, yeah, absolutely, but you had to read T. S. Eliot to understand. So Jed Kershaw had bought The Waste Land from Amazon dot com and read it here in Mancreu. The Waste Land was a fucking terrifying document of gasping psychological trauma, and it was plenty relevant to the island, but the important point about it was that Eliot was trying to make use of something called an ‘objective correlative’, which was an external reference point everyone would understand in the same way without fear of misapprehension. Kershaw found this revealing, he said, because it was very British. Only a British poet – and, for Kershaw’s purposes, Eliot was one – would imagine that the gap between people living in the same street was so fucking enormous that you had to read the entire body of English-language poetry from 1500 to the present day in order to have a background which would allow you to communicate something as simple as ‘your dog is pissing on my lawn’ and be reliably understood. Only a Brit could be so appalled by the staggering complexities of meaning which could be found in the word ‘piss’ that he felt it was necessary to read Paradise Lost and The Mayor of Casterbridge in order to be certain he wasn’t getting the wrong end of the stick. And for sure, only a Brit would imagine that adding a huge raft of l
iterary imagery to the sea of human emotion and history which was English would clarify the situation in any fucking way at all. All the same, there was something glorious in that complexity, in the fact that Brit communication took place in the gaps between words and in the various different ways of agreeing which meant ‘no’. But none of that made Mancreu any easier for Jed Kershaw to deal with, and he suspected but could not prove that this was because the island was also French. ‘And the French are worse, Lester, because they do all this same crap and they fucking improvise, too.’
The Sergeant took his time responding to Jed Kershaw’s question. What the fuck, indeed. ‘Well, apparently, five guys from the hills, Jed. And for no reason at all that I can get them to acknowledge.’
‘Assholes!’
‘Yes. And amateurs, too.’
‘So what are we talking about? Money? Girls? Boys? What?’
‘They won’t say. Or maybe there isn’t anything. Maybe this is next.’
‘What “next”? What do you mean, “this is next”?’
‘Maybe this is what happens after a certain point, Jed. With an island that doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. Maybe people just start getting together and killing one another.’
Kershaw stared at him. ‘Fuck, Lester.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fuck, Lester, that is a nihilistic fucking notion.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re saying maybe they just, what, they got together in the backwoods somewhere and decided to do a murder? Get in the car, go somewhere, spray the place with bullets, because, hey, what the hell, it’s the end of the world?’
‘It’s just a possibility.’
‘So, what, we’ve gone from leaving parties to . . . what? Everybody goes nuts and starts killing everybody like it’s the fucking nutbar apocalypse?’
‘I don’t say it’s likely, sir.’
‘You’re saying “sir” a great deal, Lester. I recognise professional sir-ing when I hear it. Do you have some British psychological-trauma profile which says this is going to happen?’