You did not defuse this kind of madness by treating with it upon its own terms. You answered the embracing fear, not the question. For the moment, he waited, honouring the grief. He waited until the storm had died, until the tide had risen to its highest and ebbed and the boy had noticed that no denials or affirmations had been forthcoming, and some part of him had begun to feel instinctively that his confessor must render judgement or lose his position.
‘You’re getting snot on my shirt,’ the Sergeant said to the top of the boy’s head. Translation: the worst thing you are capable of is covering a dirty shirt in mucus.
Silence.
‘I don’t mind,’ he continued. ‘I’m not saying I mind. I just felt, you know, I should say something in case you end up glued to my armpit.’ Translation: cry as long as you need to. I’m here. But the world is still the world, and you haven’t changed.
Silence.
‘And you didn’t shoot him yourself, did you? And you didn’t hire those men to shoot him. So all this is sort of by proximity. I’m not saying you’re wrong. You may be right. At the moment I just don’t see how, is all.’
He didn’t push. He let the tiny, shuddering thing in his arms subside, and realised from the residual tension that there was something left, that the boy had a final charge against himself, and that it was the most serious, the most vile.
‘I did not tell you,’ the boy said at last, stepping out of the embrace to stand in some invisible dock. ‘I have obstructed the investigation and the course of your inquiries and the execution of your duty.’ He was calmer now. Miserable.
‘How so?’ Very neutral, because there was just a chance.
‘Shola worked for Bad Jack,’ the boy said.
The Sergeant opened his mouth to say ‘Bad Jack?’ and shut it again in the awareness that he would sound like a fool. He moved through a chain of response and counter-response in his head, looking for a place to enter the conversation which would be neither condescending nor credulous: if I say this, he will say that. It was hard. He wondered whether it was hard because it was hard, or because he was getting old and couldn’t remember being a boy.
Shola worked for Bad Jack.
On the face of it, the idea was absurd. The main thing about Bad Jack was that he was a fairy tale. There was no such person, and if there had once been a Jack, a brigand, say, or a murderer, well, he was by now at least three hundred years old: a bit long in the tooth to have been Shola’s employer.
But the boy knew all this – and he knew the difference between story and truth. He read Superman and watched Fox News, read Batman and watched Al Jazeera. He was not the sort to fret about a bogeyman. A child living on an island which is itself under threat of execution for the crime of having been environmentally raped has no need of invented villains. A person trading mountain honey with the Black Fleet for shoes and DVDs, running go-between for who-knows-what deals with the shore, did not conjure crooks out of the air. So when the boy said Bad Jack, he did not – could not – mean the nine-foot-tall pumpkin man or the web-footed devil. He meant the kind of Bad Jack who did business in the world, the kind who could command a measure of actual fear. The kind who might have enemies with Kalashnikovs.
‘Someone goes by the name of Bad Jack?’ the Sergeant asked, having come to the end of this line of reasoning and arrived at a response which was not patronising or ignorant.
The boy nodded.
‘Since when?’
‘Since always.’
Which to anyone under the age of twenty meant a length of time greater than a year, but you couldn’t say that, either.
‘He’s always called himself Bad Jack?’
‘No. This Jack is new. But there is always Jack.’
It was just distantly possible, he supposed: an unbroken line of Jacks come down from when Mancreu was a wild island port halfway between French North Africa and British South-East Asia. A secret king, a pirate, a smuggler, a crook.
He pictured a Lord of Misrule on a throne, a combination of ogre and imp in a mountain hall, surrounded by stolen virgins and treasure. Translate that: a thug with gold teeth and imported slave-women, wearing a gangster’s gold chain and thinking himself a monarch. Or an urbane sort of plausible sod from Boosaaso or Yangon with a business degree, taking a hand in the heroin trade.
‘And Shola . . . what did Shola do for him?’
‘Store things. Make rum. Make connections. Everyone went to Shola’s. Like an oasis with lions and giraffes.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’
The boy shook his head. ‘He comes, he goes. Everyone looks away. No one sees him. No one ever sees Jack, no one talks about Jack.’
The boy was apologising now. ‘I did not tell you, because no one talks about Jack. Or else.’ He drew a line across his throat, made a slicing noise.
‘Well, if he’s so bad, that makes a short suspect list. Who’d stand up to him?’
‘Other bad men.’
Fleet men, maybe. But that was a world of trouble. If this was Fleet, he had no remedy, and he wanted no part of it. He wondered what he would do if it was, how he would explain the limit of his power. Of his will.
‘Bad men doing what? Why?’ he asked instead.
The boy shrugged. ‘This was maybe a demonstration, maybe like Alderaan?’
Alderaan. The Sergeant was the right age to know what that meant. He had been to see the film the first time around, very young and very amazed as the orange and white starship went over his head, and then even more amazed as its enormous pursuer roared after it, going on and on and on for ever and shaking the seats. Movies had never seemed so big.
As for the boy, in the flatiron days of the hot season he wore a baseball cap he had begged from an Afrikaner ship-captain. It said in yellow letters on a starry background: HAN SHOT FIRST, and it proclaimed another of his global allegiances. Now he ended his suggestion on an upward note to make it a question, and he had that look again, the one which said ‘Is this my fault? Do you hate me?’ and most of all ‘Should I hate myself?’ The Sergeant wondered who had put that idea in his head, and how long ago.
‘You’re a good lad,’ he said, answering the important question first. You are filled with whatever it is which makes worth. You have not expended it or negated it. ‘You did right, telling me. You’re not, you’re not bad. You hear me? You’re a good lad. And this is good. I can use it. Find out what happened. Tomorrow I’ll go and talk to those men again, and I’ll talk to them about Jack. It’s better when you know what to ask. They’ll tell me things and that’ll be because of you. You’ve done a brave thing here today. The right thing. And I’m proud of you.’ He found he was having trouble speaking and, hearing his own voice, realised he was nearly in tears. He saw in his mind the boy standing mute and hopeful in front of an ugly armchair, its back towards him and a silence proceeding from it which could only mean a perpetual, corrosive disappointment. A moment later he realised that it was not the boy at all but himself, in that bloody room at home, and there was the electric fire and the print of a hunt and the ship in a bottle. He shuddered. Christ, he had to hold it together. It was not the time, not the time at all to be worrying over old, dead ghosts.
Sergeanting had an answer to that. When you were utterly fucked and you didn’t know what to do, you got busy making sure everyone else was all right and told them not to worry and by the end of it there was a good chance you’d convinced yourself. And if you hadn’t, well, sooner or later you either died or you didn’t and in either case the problem went away. He hauled himself into the present and ordered a forward march, but that did require a definition of forward, and he wasn’t sure where that was, so he just said ‘You’re a good lad’ again, and stood there.
After a moment in this hiatus, the boy slipped quietly back under his arm and rested against the Sergeant’s ribs. The weight was familiar, as if they had sat in this way many times over many years and the Sergeant was only now remembering.
We are changed, the
Sergeant thought. Of course we are. Whatever this is, we’re deeper in it.
He shifted slightly and brought his other arm around to make it a real hug, and heard a gasp. When he looked down, he saw under the wide boat-neck of the smock a series of stark blue-red lines across the boy’s shoulders, and recognised them after a moment as bruises.
Some people knew horses and some people knew guns. There were navy men who swore they could tell you from the taste of the water what ocean they were in. You picked things up as you went along and these things became part of you whether you really wanted them to or not. He suspected that Jed Kershaw could tell from walking into a room if someone was about to get shitcanned or promoted. It was just part of becoming who you were.
And Lester Ferris was an infantryman the way the Witch was a doctor. He’d hiked through snowfields and crawled across hot rocks, marched through opium fields and jungle, been shot at and occasionally shot, and blown up. At various times and in various places he’d fought men with his fists and his feet, with broken bottles and with bits of wood picked up from the floor. Some of them had wanted to kill him, others had just been enjoying a donnybrook. Three days ago he’d broken a man’s arm with a frying pan to save the life of one friend and avenge the death of another, had known as he was doing it exactly how much it hurt and how much force was necessary to make sure of the bones.
If Lester Ferris knew just one thing in the world the way meat knows salt, it was bruises.
So he knew a professional punishment beating when he saw one, and his world caught fire as if he had just been waiting to explode all along and now he was raining down on Mancreu like the volcano which had brought him here.
‘Who,’ he grated out, before he could hem himself in with cautions, ‘did that?’ It might be a parent, of course. That might be why the boy was so elusive yet so fond, so seemingly in need in a way the Sergeant could not quite reach. He had a bad dad and needed a good one he could run to when blood was not thick enough to endure. Well, if so, there would be words. ‘Who?’
The boy did not answer immediately, just looked back in something like amazement at the anger kindled in the Sergeant’s face, as if he hadn’t dared to expect it but now that he saw it he was drinking it in like nectar. Christ. Did I not make it obvious that I cared? Is this the only way you know? But then the thought blew away, a frozen bird tossed in the body of the storm.
‘Show me!’ the Sergeant demanded, then carefully bit back the measure of his fury so that he could say ‘please’ and not add to the boy’s injuries a disregard for his sovereignty, however badly he had already been infringed. (And how badly? If he had been, as the newspapers would have it, ‘abused’, there would be no place on the island for the doer. That person would simply vanish into a woodchipper somewhere, and thank you to the allied powers for their extralegal zone.)
But when the boy removed his kirtle the damage was almost surgical. There were bruises which marked where he had been held and more where the lash had fallen – no, not a lash, it had been stiff: a baton or a truncheon – but nothing below the waist, nothing which suggested that sort of interference, and his motion was easy at the hip. No. No, this was punishment, and it had the feel of what a particularly brutal man would call education. On a hunch, the Sergeant glanced over at the boy’s knapsack where it lay on the floor, and saw that it was uncharacteristically poorly fastened, as if in haste. He glanced at his friend for permission and when at least no denay was forthcoming he stalked over to it and plucked at the buckles with his fingers. His hands were clumsy and he snatched and scrabbled, goring his thumb on a sharp edge, but he barely noticed.
When he got the bag open, pantomime snow fell from its mouth onto the bed, wide white pieces drifting down to settle on the blanket. He stared at them, turned them in his hands. Not snow, paper. And not all white. White and pink. White and red. White and black, blue, green. He saw a face with a mask, and recognised at last the remains of a comic book, and then he emptied the bag out and realised that he was seeing the corpse of the boy’s entire collection for the month, ripped beyond restoration. Carefully ripped. Painstakingly.
He felt the world pulse again, as if the room was stretching out wider, bowing to make space for his reaction. A beating was a beating and it was wrong, but there were persons – it might be a schoolmaster, a priest, or even a nun – who would claim that old adage about sparing the rod. But this was not that. This was vandalism of a calculated sort, a two-pronged assault most deliberate, to torture the body and deprive the mind, and it possessed a persistent cruelty. To rip a comic book in half out of frustration, yes. He could see that. Didn’t like it, but yes. But this had taken time and effort and bespoke a refined sort of sadism.
‘They did this in front of you.’
The boy nodded. Of course they had. They had. And they had done it, he knew without asking, from the back of each book, so that there was no possibility of reading them however hurriedly in the right order. The boy must turn his head away and listen, or face the destruction and suffer spoilers as well as desecration. It possessed a peculiar elegance, like the killing of the dog.
‘Who?’ he said, and this time it was a whisper.
‘The fish,’ the boy said at last, and before the Sergeant could misunderstand: ‘I knew that you could not go. It is NatProMan, the fish. But I thought if I went and could take a picture, you would have something and you could show Kershaw. I thought I would fight crime, and then you would have time.’ And the Sergeant wondered if the missing words he swallowed were ‘for me’ or ‘for Shola’ or some combination of both.
‘I see,’ he said. And then, because he had to say the name, he said it like a curse, as if it could turn good food into rot: ‘Pechorin.’
The boy stared at him, eyes wide, and did not say ‘What will you do?’ but Lester Ferris was already asking himself that question, because one way and another he was going to do something and that something must answer this most exquisitely.
He looked around at the flakes of paper on the floor, the ruined mess of bright colours and ridiculous stories of salvation from the sky, and he knew what he would do, as if he was staring through stone to the very heart of the island to find his answer written there. It was a glorious idea, one that was both foolish enough to pass for a prank and yet still savage enough, specific enough to be perfectly understood. He would lay down a law. Not a law in words, but a soldier’s law. Lester Ferris’s law. And the right people would know, without any ambiguity at all, where that law began and ended, and what came if you crossed it.
He would draw the line first of all for Pavel Ygorovitch Pechorin, personally, in a manner appropriate to the sin.
‘Tigerman,’ he gritted out. ‘Whoomf.’
8. Suit
ON GRASPING THE Sergeant’s intention the boy had been almost incandescent with delight. The word ‘win’ had filled his mouth and for several long minutes he had seemed unable to say anything else. Then he explained in a whisper that the plan was composed entirely of awesome. It was made and designed by the House of Awesome, from materials found in the deep awesome mines of Awesometania and it would be recorded in the Annals of Awesome – and nowhere else, because any other book would catch fire and explode from the awesome – and by its awesomeness it would be known from now until the crack of doom.
Then abruptly he had sobered and applied himself to the matter, eyes alight not with enthusiasm but with that almost eerie intensity of thought which occasionally marked him out from the crowd. He ran off with promises of a speedy return, and an hour later he was indeed back with an actual suitcase full of comics, the muscles straining in his narrow arms as he hauled it across the gravel of Brighton House: the rest of his trove, the Sergeant assumed, fetched out of whatever hiding place to meet the need of the hour. ‘My library,’ the boy agreed.
‘Library?’
‘Sure,’ the boy said. ‘Wood and brass, velvet armchairs. Many floors underground in my secret volcano base. I drink brandy, wear a sm
oking jacket. Take over the world. Because: that’s how I roll, dude.’
‘Oh,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Right.’ His mind’s eye pictured a shed or a cellar like the one he had co-opted for his own use long ago – it really was way back now, three decades gone – hung with spare blankets and scattered with books, cushions, chewy sweets and battery-powered torches. Later he had added a radio and thought himself rich. He wanted to ask more, to reminisce and share that fragment of himself, but as so often when he tried to say something ordinary to the boy he couldn’t find the words, and anyway it was the wrong time.
When the boy unclipped the fastenings on the case and threw back the lid, glossy nightmares slithered out onto the floor: tentacled things in suits reached for appalled plucky girl reporters; dogs barked at half-transformed wolfmen; nameless creatures crawled from the ocean towards sleeping fisher towns. The next level down featured more conventional heroes fighting strange enemies, inhabitants of horror stories briefly making uncomfortable appearances in the primary-colour worlds of the Justice League or the Avengers before skulking back where they belonged. Below that, the boy’s energetic scrabbling revealed a remarkable collection of true stories, or stories which were said by those relating them to be true: the Mothman, the Yeti, the Chupacabra and the Ozark Howler, and sundry tales of people being taken to alien places or deserted houses by entities too strange to understand.