The card-player gently retrieved his bottle and took a swig, then handed it back before the boxer could object.
For a moment, it seemed to be working. The sheer, brazen normality of it was waking them, bringing them to themselves. A moment more, and they would have names again, and a sense of self. They were tired. The bacchanal was run out, and the dawn was coming. It was cold and the air was blowing dust. It was working.
And then a woman near the sweeper said: ‘You missed a bit here, by me,’ and when the sweeper went to get it she kicked it lightly away.
The sweeper pursued it patiently, but the woman chased and kicked it again, and the sweeper slipped and went down, and the whole street heard the crack as she landed hard on one hip, and the reedy cry which went out of her. Her outstretched hand, reaching for solace and assistance, caught the woman by the ankle.
‘Get off me!’ the woman shrieked at her, and kicked out, and the toe of her shoe clipped the sweeper across the mouth. It was – it all was – an accident.
The dealer shot to his feet and started to speak and the boxer came up with him, drawing back his hand to silence what he assumed would be a furious denunciation with his fist, and the Sergeant shouted: ‘No!’
He stepped into the silence awkwardly, wishing for his full uniform, for something which spoke of what he represented, what he was, but he only had his parade-ground voice, and it would have to be enough.
‘Siddown!’ he barked at the dealer, and the man sank to his chair again. I am obeyed. He knew the mob had registered it, could feel them making space for him. Authority, exercised on their behalf. ‘And you,’ he added more gently to the boxer. ‘That right hand of yours is used to gloves. You hit that old fart with it and you’ll ruin your knuckles for months. Don’t be a twit.’ He turned before the young man could object. He had to keep moving, keep making sense. ‘I’m Lester,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be up at the big house hiding under the carpet, but I’ve got friends down here and I didn’t want them to get hurt so I came. I’ve seen him fight at the gym,’ he added, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘He’s a terror. Faster than you’d believe. Drops his shoulder a bit, mind, but a good coach’ll break that habit. Someone take off their coat for that lady, please, she’s old enough to be my mother and shouldn’t be lying in the cold. You, miss, would you mind stepping back aways?’ This to the woman who had felled her. ‘I think you’ve had a bit of a shock. It’s always hard to be close to something like this, you always feel it’s somehow your fault and it never is.’ Bemused, the woman backed away and was embraced solicitously by those around her. A moment later, the sweeper was covered in a makeshift blanket.
‘Now,’ the Sergeant carried on, ‘we’re all alone out here tonight. Those arseholes,’ he gestured vaguely in the direction of Kershaw’s office, ‘aren’t coming, so we’ve no emergency services. We’d best do it ourselves, hips can be tricky. I need a few strong lads to get this lady into my car and I’ll take her to a doctor. You, sir, you better come along so she’s got a familiar face.’ This last to the dealer, who got unsteadily to his feet, assisted by the boxer.
They were carrying the sweeper down the side street with surpassing gentleness and loading her into the long back of the Land Rover when the Sergeant heard engines, and felt the mood thicken around him. He shook his head. I had them. I bloody did.
But he had lost them now. He pressed the keys into the dealer’s hand. ‘Get in the car. Go to the scrivener’s office and get him and the Witch and get up to Brighton House – she knows where to find the key. If it gets nasty use the red phone in the office and tell the snotty prick on the other end that I’m compromised and the diplomatic premises are under direct threat.’
And before the man could say anything he stepped back and waved cheerily. ‘Off you go, now, sir. I’ll be right behind you. I want to help these folk clean up a bit.’
The dealer got the Land Rover started and went, and the old woman’s eyes locked on the Sergeant’s in mute concern as they pulled away.
Lester Ferris turned, and saw the boys on their quad bikes rolling slowly through the crowd, and with them a kind of bitter recollection of anger. They had work to do. There were things to be broken, statements to be made.
‘English sergeant,’ the leader said from beneath his mask.
‘Shame we got no dogs left,’ said the next.
The Sergeant felt the crowd respond. No dogs left, and someone’s got to be nailed up.
Shit.
There was no retreat from this situation. He was cut off. There would be no help from Kershaw, either, that was clear. And no blather he could muster would soothe them. So he pointed his index finger at the leader and scowled.
‘You’re the toerag who kills broken-down old pups, is it? The limp-dicked, shrivel-sacked little puswad, the best part of whom dried up on a hankie, who thinks nailing a dog to a telegraph pole will make him a hero. Is that right? Is that the fucking size of it? You miserable excuse for a shitheel? Well, then. Well, then. WELL, THEN. Let’s have a bit of fun, you and me. A man-to-man discussion, eh?’ He was walking forward now, and that was pretty unlikely, unlikely enough to stop the momentum, change the game. But it had to be just right. He had to be offensive enough to challenge, but not enough to be dismissed as disrespectful of the game. ‘Or are you a bit too scared of an old geezer for any of that? You can always hide behind your mates. You can have them soften me up a bit first, can’t you? Let them take some of the sting out of it for you.’ And they backed away, bless them, at this ignoble suggestion. Oh, for a few of my lads behind me. We could actually win.
The leader got down off his quad and stretched. He was loose-limbed and fluid, with a dangerous reach. His hands had seen proper work and proper fighting.
And then he produced a long-barrelled revolver from his belt and levelled it.
‘Beat the shit out of him,’ he said simply.
And they did.
The first blow came in low and numbed the Sergeant’s left leg, the second across his back. They had pieces of timber, ungainly but none the less painful and bruising. The third blow knocked him from his feet and he knew that it was all up, that he would almost certainly die on this clean white street, and he rolled into a ball, saving his head as best he could and wondering when the first bone would crack. They were unprofessional and not particularly enthusiastic, but their anger was growing as they struck and quite soon they would start to mean it, and shortly after that he would lose consciousness and then it really would be over, because they would kill him without even really meaning to. It didn’t matter who you were, the human body was just not that tough.
And then he went away, until curiously he smelled fish and bad cigars.
He came to in his own bed, again, expecting to see the Witch or the boy and slightly hoping for Kaiko Inoue. The unexpected smell of fish was gone, but the bad cigars, stale and grim, hung in the air along with a pungent male odour. He opened his eyes and saw a man with a bandaged nose.
‘Holy shit, Ferris, they hardly touched you,’ Pechorin said. ‘When that fat bastard came and got me I thought maybe you’d lose a kidney at least, but look at you. The doctor with the extremely Ukrainian tits out there, who claims to come from Kansas? She says you’re not even going to die a little bit.’
‘Who . . . came and got you?’
‘Beneseffe,’ Pechorin growled. ‘He and his lobstermen. We had a little conversation about fish this morning. Some opportunities were discussed. Some possible business. They send some local kid round to check me out, I figure they know what’s going on, so I go see them. We make friends. Then a couple of hours ago, “Pavel, Pavel, we have to save Lester” and blah blah, and I say okay, because you will box with me and you’re good when I lose my temper, which is not everyone. The world is not full of people who will decline the opportunity to hit me in the head.’
You have no idea.
‘I like this house,’ Pechorin went on. ‘You got some architecture here.
Where I come from there’s some stuff like this but all the wood and paint is gone. You can go visit but the guide will tell you “here used to be very pretty, now it’s shit,” and leave you to imagine the rest. But it’s full of invalids. You got an old lady down the hall, two lobstermen bleeding on the couch. You are the last British colonial hospital all of a sudden. Is this place still a consulate? That’s going to throw some egg.’ He considered this last, shook his head. ‘Whatever. The tits say you should go back to sleep, get your strength. I’m not to wake you, blahblahblah.’
The Sergeant could feel himself slipping into sleep again. ‘I thought you were arrested,’ he murmured.
Pechorin shrugged. ‘I got unarrested. I tell you another time.’ He hesitated. ‘You keep a secret, Lester?’
‘Yes.’ Lots.
‘I don’t want that you think I’m a fuckhead war profiteer drug pusher, okay? Let’s say I maybe had some orders to do what I did. When a government does something it’s not a crime, is politics. Maybe I fight war on terror. Maybe I do good work, get tip-off. Maybe my job, it’s not completely clear. Okay? Like the CIA in Vietnam. I tell myself I’m sending drugs home to hospitals. Maybe it’s only my boss is a fuckhead war profiteer drug pusher and I’m a stooge.’ He shrugged. ‘I do what is necessary. It’s Mancreu. Makes no difference, anyway.’
It does. It does, it does. It does to Shola, and the others. It does to the dogs. To the boy, it does.
He tried to fix Pechorin with an interrogator’s eye: Are you lying? Is this bullshit? Tell me what you know! But the world was brown and warm and then he was gone again.
By late afternoon he had shaken off the Witch’s insistence that he stay in bed and was walking around, complaining with every movement but convinced he was doing himself good, and she averred between curses that he might be, but that he’d be happier if he didn’t. She had no time to chase him, however, because the sweeper’s hip was broken and she was concerned about clotting. One of the lobstermen had an infected cut which required medicines she could not get without crossing Beauville to Kershaw’s building, and the riot was still going, so she had instead to make her best alternative from plants by boiling them in a pan and supplementing the mix with powders from the medical supplies at Brighton House, which were for the most part out of date.
He couldn’t escape the feeling that all this was his fault, that he could have done more – that while Lester Ferris could never have stood alone in front of the gang and faced them down, he was no longer only Lester Ferris and he had in some sense abandoned his post, at great cost to an old woman and he had no idea how many others. He hoped Inoue was out of it, firmly on the far side of the island. He even hoped Kershaw was okay. He was sure Dirac was.
He barely dared to think about the boy. There were so many things that could be wrong. Perhaps he slept in an abandoned house and it had simply burned around him. Perhaps he had defended a dog, or perhaps his trading association with the Fleet had been viewed as treason. It was all equally possible. A father would go out and find him, risks or no, injuries or not. A real father would have no choice, would feel, surely, the tug in his blood and his bones and the need beyond common sense. He would go house to house. He would find the corpse if he must, the living child if he could, but he would be out there.
And, the voice of experience told him, that man would be an idiot. A noble, short-lived idiot, searching a burning town for a child who knew its alleys and its secrets, who was better suited to it than a clumping parent could ever be. More than likely the would-be rescuer would bring the mob to his child’s door, and they would both burn. Nightmares boiled in his mind’s eye, multiple scenarios of doom and folly, and each one grew more grotesque, more self-defeating.
‘Dude! You got ganked!’
The boy stood in the doorway and stared at him, mightily impressed. ‘You got really messed up! That is . . . that is roarsome!’
When merely ‘awesome’ is not enough.
The boy was still going. ‘This is your Bespin! You failed, but you didn’t die, and you totally kept your integrity—’
And then he could not continue because the Sergeant had wrapped him in a vast embrace, painful and absolute, and was having trouble letting go even as panic gripped him that this was absolutely outside their way of being, this absolute and unequivocal hug so full of worry and dismay. He wrenched his arms open and stepped away.
The boy gazed at him, wide-eyed.
And then hesitantly crossed the space between them for a second, half-hug, resting his head against the Sergeant’s shoulder.
‘It is okay,’ he said, his face very sombre and eerily old. ‘I was fine.’ He stayed there for a moment, and then slipped away. ‘By the way, you have mail. The Italian said to bring this to you.’ From his bag, he produced a slim envelope. ‘Said it would help with your investigation. Check it out! Maybe it will tell us how to beat those badmashes on the bikes! I will make tea!’
He scampered away, and the Sergeant found he could breathe, despite his aching ribs, for the first time in a day. He opened the envelope and glanced at the contents, then stopped and stared.
Sergeant –
You have been doing my work for me. It is only fair I do yours. It is busy here, but there is no better time for this. I wish you well.
– A.
Not the bike gang, and nothing about Tigerman or Shola’s death.
The boy’s face stared up at him from the file, his birthday, his given name. His parents.
The Sergeant retreated to the study and closed the door. It was not privacy he needed but calm, a sense of constancy. This was the thing. This was the file. The boy’s file. Everything he had wanted to know was here, and yet reading it all would be cheating, of a kind. He did not have to read it all. He would leave the boy his mysteries. He had read the name at the top, had already forgotten it. Saul? Sullah? Simon? It began with an S. Or possibly M, or X, or J. He could check, but he would not. The boy was the boy, complete in himself. It was idle to give him a name beyond that unless he wanted one. The Sergeant needed only the names of his family, and where to find them.
He began to read. He tried to avoid the detail but it was impossible, the truth was buried in the text, so he had to intrude at least that much. Not a problem. He could forget it afterwards, could wait to have it explained and never let it be known that he knew.
The boy’s father had been a longline fisherman from Malé. He had come to the island after a storm and stayed just long enough to fall in love and father a child. Arno had written in the margin that he thought it really had been love. He must have been out gathering information before the riot, or perhaps the investigative team had simply gone on about their business, backed by a few marines and moving carefully to avoid the mob. They must have worked in worse places; in Somalia, at least, and maybe Kashmir or the West Bank. The young sailor, anyway, had gone back to his ship and headed home to acquaint his family with his intent to marry, and had got caught instead on an outgoing line and drowned. It happened, Arno noted, quite a lot. He knew families at home who had suffered by the same thing.
The Sergeant turned the page, and – seeing what was written there – nodded in a kind of acknowledgement. The boy’s mother was alive, of course. She was not a nun, or a bar fly. She was no one he knew. But he knew of her, as everyone did, and he knew that he had been in some way expecting this.
Once upon a time, he thought, only it’s not like that because it’s not fucking funny. And where had he heard that? ‘Throw the stele in the sea and tell him you want to take him away from here and see what he says. Maybe there’s a family for you after all. Leave your victory on this island where it belongs.’
The story went on, relentless.
Once upon a time, White Raoul knew a lover from the mountains, a weaver woman of the old stock. They made no marriage and no contract. She would not have him, because he was a foreigner. He amused her and adored her and perhaps his feelings were reciprocated. But when she conceived a ch
ild she told him that Beauville was too modern and too cold a place to raise a daughter and she went home, and would not see him any more. Sandrine was born on the floor of a herder’s cottage, midwifed by a cowman. She visited her father as she grew. He kept a place for her always in his house, and she was famed for her looks. Her father’s fierce protectiveness was misconstrued. He was not guarding her virtue, just his small allotment of time with the child as she grew and changed from month to month and he missed each waystation of her life: her first tooth, her first word, her first love.
Until she too bore a child, to a longline fisherman, and when he died she mourned and healed and in time the boy attended school in Beauville, for the dead father had persuaded her the world beyond the island was worth knowing. She obtained by some haggling an old computer and a solar mat to charge it, and they learned together of the history of Mancreu, and Europe and Africa and more, and together they were angry and impressed and afraid. She studied correspondence courses and prepared for the day she must travel with him to the mainland and enrol them both in some manner of university. It was possible. There were bursaries, charities, husbands and even sugar daddies, and if these failed there was always crime. Her family knew crime.
She was methodical, composing options and plans, laying groundwork. She networked, by phone and by email and later by the new avenues of social media. With the assistance of a passing photographer and a local flautist she created a YouTube slot which picked up thirty thousand views. And she got her wish: scholarships for them both one autumn, with all the trimmings, at an institution in Qatar.
That summer she walked the high passes every day. She took pictures of them, inhaled them, sketched them and sang to them. She slept under the stars, sometimes alone and sometimes in company, drank and danced and visited her mother and her uncles and aunts. She and the boy together toiled over their English and their Arabic both, watching movies and listening to CDs and reading books, so that the way they spoke was a muddle of Scotland and Baltimore, Tikrit and Tunis.