Tigerman

  So he told the boy that if it could be arranged, he would have such a sign, but that it must be a secret, and the boy said that the scrivener’s calling was like the confessional, that he would die before he told a single one of the secrets he carried in his strange head.

  ‘God is inside him like the ringer in a bell,’ the boy said solemnly, and when the Sergeant glanced at him – religious faith not being part of his stated world-view – he shrugged and added that people believed all kinds of stuff.

  Perhaps this lack of faith was the reason he would not enter the shop. ‘I may not come in,’ he informed the Sergeant as they stood at the door. ‘It is not allowed.’

  Much negotiation had been required to secure an audience at such short notice: a rapid-fire telephone discussion in Moitié passing far beyond the Sergeant’s ability to comprehend. There had been a woman’s voice first, sharp and annoyed, and then eventually she had yielded the device to someone else: a man who spoke low and slow, to whom the boy was – if not actually respectful – gentle and wheedling. Then the boy had taken some items from the costume pile and required that the Sergeant drive him to the waterfront and circle the car until called for. Favours were being called in, the Sergeant sensed, and gravest contracts signed. But none of these, it seemed, would bind him personally. The debt would rest with the boy, or perhaps Raoul was discharging some earlier IOU. The boy was stubbornly opaque on the matter, and would only talk about what came next.

  ‘It is your quest. Your tree on Degobah!’ the boy said. ‘Maybe you meet Darth Vader. Full of evil win!’ He looked worried for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, no. You meet only White Raoul. I have told him already what he must do for you. I have given him what he needs. He is a crazy old man, maybe also a prophet. Like Hunter Thompson found Jesus, maybe.’

  ‘With a beautiful daughter,’ the Sergeant muttered.

  ‘She is ordinary,’ the boy said reflexively, and then he looked away, so the Sergeant immediately wondered whether he was in love.

  It would make sense. The boy was an enigma and so was she: Sandrine, the hallowed virgin, secret and perfect. The boy loved winkling out secrets, and it seemed there was no door barred to him. If anyone on the island could fall in love with with the princess in the tower it would be this wolf child, courting her without knowing what he was doing, losing his heart. She would be fifteen years his senior or more: a hopeless, unrequited passion. Or the Sergeant could be seeing things, making up stories like a sad old man.

  He took a breath and walked into the scrivener’s shop, smelling the air, tasting salt and solvent.

  The first thing he noticed was the smoke, thick and blue. It was grandfather smoke, hanging in sheets and curtains, wrapping itself around his hands and teasing his mouth with bitter fingers. Thirty-five-year smoke. If you could open this room to the light, you’d see that everything in it was preserved behind a glaze of solid smoke.

  White Raoul sat in a basket chair which hung from the ceiling in the darkest part of the shop. The rope was old and dry so that it creaked against its hook. The man had patches of dark brown skin at the corners of his eyes and mouth and rising on one side of his neck, but the rest of his face was a stark, uncompromising white, like the belly of an eel or a clapboard church. He had a narrow face and yellow-silver hair cropped less than a half-inch from his scalp, and around his chin was a fine, soft beard.

  His hands clung to the wicker of the chair, and of all of him they were the most vibrant part. The skin was stained with inks and pigments in a strange motley, so that from the elbow down he was a mosaic or a tortoiseshell of reds and greens and blues. Beneath the colours they were working man’s hands, strong and scarred even now, but the nails were trimmed very precisely and the skin of his fingertips looked soft beneath its gaudy coat. Pumice, perhaps. Someone must do the manicure for him, someone with a very certain touch.

  ‘I’m Raoul,’ he said, as if the Sergeant might genuinely be unsure, ‘and you’re the soldier.’ His voice was hoarse, but when it caught – when the apparatus of his speech unlocked from whatever spasm habitually held it – there was an echo of depth, of a tone fit for hymns and hellfire sermonising. In between times he hoarded his breath, dropped words and letters into the gaps between his inhalations. Cancer, the Sergeant thought, or poison-gas damage to the lungs. Pneumonia. Emphysema. Gunshots. Even partial drowning.

  ‘Got a seen-the-world face. Been boiled honest, like soup. You’re worried about secrets. I tell you, this is between us, whatever comes. You understand? I don’t talk about it and nor do you. That’s part of the price for both of us.’ The accent meandered from Paris and Sudan to somewhere American. The Sergeant guessed Miami, but he didn’t know what a Miami accent sounded like, so he wasn’t sure. Perhaps there wasn’t one. Everyone said Miami was full of people from somewhere else.

  Raoul waved. ‘Come to me for a stele. For my blessing written down. But maybe I should write it so you don’t find no more battles. Just happiness. You maybe fall in love with my girl and raise goats. Goats’re a good life for an honest man. They are a pain in the ass and they smell like hell, but they give milk and they taste good when you take one f’the table. Yes. I shall write a stele for a man of peace and you go on out in the world with my Sandrine and make her content, hey?’

  ‘She’s just a girl,’ the Sergeant said, then realised he had no idea. Until this moment he’d had her image in his mind, a slim-hipped almost-woman with dark eyes staying firmly behind the counter. She could be anything at all.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Raoul said. ‘After all this time, she’s just a girl.’ As if this was the saddest thing he had ever said, and the Sergeant had missed the point entirely. He puffed out his cheeks. ‘And you won’t marry her and live a life of goats.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  White Raoul leaned forward in his basket chair.

  ‘No, you’re no kind of sorry. Not now. When you look back and understand I was right, well, you maybe will and then again perhaps you won’t see you could have done different. Faugh!’ He lurched to his feet and went hand over hand along the counter, favouring his left leg. ‘Dead flesh, dead island.’

  ‘Not dead yet.’ It didn’t sound convincing.

  ‘Bullshit.’ White Raoul balanced, moved the bad leg with his hands and pulled sharply at a leather strap, a brace. The leg stiffened and he hissed. ‘I got messed up. Should have seen it coming. Should have wrote my own stele, but it ain’t allowed.’ He grimaced and lifted a bucket of yellow-brown paint onto the counter, then another, of black. ‘Shit. I got old. When did that happen?’

  ‘Some time ago.’

  The scrivener laughed and it was a huge sound. Pirate captain, the Sergeant decided. Not poet.

  ‘Hah,’ Raoul said. ‘True as hell. But not polite, and you knew I’d think that was funny, too. Now lay your hands flat. I need to touch you and I don’t want you jumping about.’

  White Raoul reached out over the counter. He brushed down the Sergeant’s face and chest, a clinical contact, dry and diagnostic. ‘My eyes are bad.’ He growled in his throat, a deep, dog noise. ‘You think I’m seeing you as you are, Honest? Then you’re wrong. I’m looking back from out of the future. Where’s the man you want? The you who wears this sign? Oh, yes. There, and there and there he is . . . your Tigerman. Sure. You’re gonna make a famous victory, all right, just like the boy says.’

  But if this victory pleased him the joy was invisible. He shook his head, then pulled open a drawer behind the counter and drew out a curved grey tablet, then a second. For a moment the Sergeant assumed they were pieces of a Cadillac, a fragment of some strange Mancreu moment where the mayor of Beauville had ridden around in a huge American car. Then he placed them: ceramic plates. Body armour, the kind worn by special-forces soldiers in frontline operations, although these were his own, from the Brighton House armoury. The boy had delivered them in advance.

  White Raoul slapped the first plate down on the counter and drove his hand into the black bu
cket, swirled the paint. Over time, the toxicity must be killing him in a dozen different ways. ‘No brushes, Honest. I have to touch the stele. You and these both, becoming one through me. It’s about touching and heart. So the heart: who is this Tigerman inside you?’

  ‘A hero. Like in a comic book.’

  ‘Tcha. Of course. That’s not enough, Honest. What does he care about?’

  The Sergeant had never had to lay his heart out for a stranger. His body, yes, for surgeries and medicals. But the heart was private and unvoiced. He tried: ‘Justice.’

  White Raoul sneered. ‘Bullshit. I want to hear about you! The real truth. What are you doing here in my house? You ain’t a religious man. Ain’t born here, don’t care about the island scrivener or his magic paint. That stuff’s for locals, Sergeant. You make nice about it so’s not to be rude, but you wouldn’t ever come in, not until today. And now here you are, getting a stele from an old black native with rotting skin. Why’re you doing such a thing, Sergeant of Her Majesty? Hmm? Tell me why.’

  He couldn’t say it was a prank. That would be unpardonable, and he was already ashamed. But he didn’t know what to say instead, so he tried truth, of a sort. ‘Shola. The stolen fish.’ Seeing that he was making no ground: ‘Missing dogs.’

  White Raoul scowled like a headmaster. ‘A dead man you barely knew. Tcha! Open your mouth and don’t think. What do you care about?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘WHAT?’

  ‘Family!’ It came out like an admission of guilt. ‘Family.’

  The scrivener exhaled, and nodded. ‘You got one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘None?’

  ‘Sister.’

  ‘You’re not doing this for your sister.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Come on, come on! Who’s this family that you care about so much?’

  ‘The boy,’ he said at last, looking into his hands.

  ‘The boy?’

  ‘The one who brought me here.’ And then, with sudden hope, ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘It’s not about what he is to me! What is he to you?’

  ‘I thought . . .’ He shivered, then dropped his voice so the boy wouldn’t hear, leaned across the counter to White Raoul. ‘I thought I could try to take him back with me. I thought he might need a home. And a dad, maybe.’

  White Raoul stared back at him. ‘You doing this to be a father?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘There’s easier ways.’

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘Still.’

  ‘To be a father you’re going to put on a mask and be a monster?’

  ‘A hero.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘Once, one time. To show him a win. A world where sometimes someone does fix it. Doesn’t just walk away.’ Doesn’t just sit and stare into space, and give up, and die by inches.

  ‘For a son you ain’t got.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that’s not funny!’ White Raoul shrieked abruptly. ‘That’s not funny at all!’ The scrivener dropped his head and leaned forward over the counter, shuddering. The Sergeant started forward to help him, but Raoul waved him off, his face wet. ‘Not funny!’ He plunged his hand into the black paint and across the face of the ballistic shield, fingers shaping the pigment. He slashed one way, then the other, and screamed, hammered his fist down onto the worktop. Paint splashed. His other hand delved into the yellow pot and clapped down dotting and slicing, and suddenly a tiger’s face leaped from the flat surface, made real by the contrast. The eyes were luminous.

  Raoul reached for the second plate, and this time he used only the yellow. He moved his hand four times, and a shape like a mathematician’s x appeared, the lower portions curving back up. He went to make one more gesture and then snatched his hands away, forced his breath out slowly, like a man backing away from a fight.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘They always want more than they can carry. That’s pride, not the art. The smallest mark, the most meaning, and stop.’ He pushed the plates across the counter at the Sergeant. ‘There.’ He pointed at the tiger’s image. ‘Man see that in the night-time, he’s going to run like hell. Might shoot at it, too, instead of your thick head.’ The image seemed to ripple in agreement.

  ‘And this one?’ The Sergeant pointed to the second plate.

  ‘Backplate, Honest. Sometimes you got to leave in a hurry.’

  ‘I know that. What does it mean?’

  ‘Mean? Means you. Tiger’s face again. See? Cat’s mouth?’ He traced the lower part of the x, turned it around, and the Sergeant almost jerked back from it, the same tiger’s face conveyed in bare lines. His tiger, as it had stared down at him in the graveyard. The smell of the paint was heady and thick.

  The scrivener touched the plates. ‘Touch-dry already. Waterproof in an hour. Now go. Show your boy.’

  ‘What’s not funny?’

  ‘Most things, I guess.’

  ‘When you were working. You said it wasn’t funny.’

  ‘I was possessed by the spirit of my future. How should I know?’

  ‘Tell me. Please.’

  White Raoul sighed. ‘Nothing about this is funny, Honest. Take those to your boy and say you ain’t doing it. Throw them in the sea and tell him you want to take him away from here. See what he says. Maybe there’s a family for you after all. Leave your victory on this island where it belongs.’

  ‘Do you know,’ the Sergeant asked abruptly, ‘who his parents are? Are they alive?’

  White Raoul stared at him. ‘Is that a price, Honest? I tell you, you take him away and forget all about your Tigerman? Even if he don’t want to go?’

  After a long moment the Sergeant shook his head. White Raoul sighed and sat in the basket chair again, and closed his eyes. ‘Then I am sleeping now, Honest. Not talking. Go do what you do. Go.’ From the corners of his weak eyes, lines of moisture ran down his flat white cheeks, and he dabbed at them with leaded fingers, and turned away.

  Outside, Lester Ferris rested his back against the black oak door and let the sun bake him. The armour plates were in his hands. He felt committed, filled with the taut excitement of an operation approved and begun. It was a sergeanting state of mind: make your decision in advance, and even in disaster everything thereafter makes sense.

  Pechorin and his cronies had a hideout somewhere, a place where they took girls and got drunk. They went there every week. This time, the Sergeant would follow and take his moment with Pechorin. He would introduce the Ukrainian to Tigerman, the demon of Mancreu, and if possible capture that moment of bowel-loosening fear for posterity. A handy snapshot would adorn the inside lid of his locker for evermore, and more than a few messhalls, too. Rough justice, but justice, for sure. And then he would fade into the night and that would be that.

  Barracks humour. An education in Lester’s Law. Nothing more.

  He went back to Brighton House to put on the suit.

  9. Cave

  THE BOY HAD laid it out for him on the bed, and he felt a curious sense of purity as he changed. He began with undergarments supplied to work well with combat protective gear. Then he stepped into thick, blade-resistant cloth trousers and a similar shirt, then the body armour with White Raoul’s scrawled insignia, and then the utility belt, heavy and tight and covered in curious things the boy had felt he might need. Next there were gloves, thick and reinforced across the knuckles and braced to strengthen the wrists. A slick camouflage webbing wrapped around the whole to make him amorphous, a little mutable – it was for urban snipers, according to the box, and why anyone had imagined he might require it here he had no idea. In a separate bag was the mask, the boy’s special creation. He left it where it was for the moment.

  He stared at himself in the mirror. The stele glimmered back at him, unfamiliar and slightly alive. He wondered if he was claiming it, or if the ownership went the other way around. Only one thing was lacking – but
when the Sergeant reached for his side arm the boy stopped him.

  ‘Batman has no gun,’ the boy said.

  ‘Maybe Tigerman does,’ the Sergeant suggested. The boy shook his head very gravely.

  ‘No. He does not carry a gun because he does not need one. Men who carry guns think that guns make them strong, but they are not. Tigerman is a ghost, and he has skill and he cannot ever be stopped. He doesn’t carry a gun because he destroys the idea of the gun by existing.’

  The Sergeant was painfully aware of how he could be stopped. The boy seemed to sense this, because he shrugged. ‘Also, it would not be good if you shot someone.’

  This was clearly true.

  He left the gun off, though he did sneak it into the glove compartment of the tiny, rusted hatchback which had been the Consul’s wife’s personal runabout, and before that part of a job lot brought to the island by the chemical men. They were known locally as toutous because they looked like turtles. Without plates it was as close to anonymous as he could hope for. He allowed his sidekick to drive – on Mancreu, you learned as soon as you could see over the wheel – and conceded that the boy might make a video recording insofar as that was possible without revealing himself or coming into the line of fire, but it was not to be shown, shared, broadcast or otherwise disseminated, ever.

  ‘And if anything goes wrong, you scarper. Dump the car in the alley behind the mission house.’

  ‘Scarper?’

  ‘Make yourself scarce. Drive away fast. Skedaddle.’

  ‘Vamoose!’

  ‘Yes. That.’

  ‘If anything goes wrong, I shall totally vamoose. But nothing will.’

  The Sergeant sighed, and glanced at the sky. Some high cloud, some clear sky, the promise of rain before dawn. ‘Take us on a loop through the town,’ he said. ‘Get us under the awning at the fish market. Let a few people go past us, wait for a car like this one. We’ll buy some dinner at the same time.’ He drew a long coat around himself, hiding the suit.