The boy shrugged. ‘We were not leet.’
Dirac fairly obviously did not know what that meant, and equally obviously did not need a translation. ‘No. Don’t fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There’s just not being dead.’ And hard eyes, commander’s eyes fixing them both in turn to be sure they understood. ‘I am not blowing smoke up your asses.’
‘When we fight crime, we must be better,’ the boy said.
The Sergeant had forgotten that, had assumed it was a transient strangeness born of the moment of Shola’s death and their survival. He let it fall away without reaction. Dirac, after a moment, did the same.
With some hesitation, the boy unlimbered his knapsack and drew out the dog-eared and curled issue of The Invisibles he had used as a weapon, and offered it up for Dirac’s inspection. The Frenchman took it gravely and tapped the end. ‘Huh. Pas mal.’ He gave it back, and sighed. ‘As good as it could have been, my friend. If the world were perfect there would be no war and I would be sleeping with Lauren Bacall.’
The boy was immediately interested. ‘1944 Bacall, or Bacall now?’
‘Both!’ Dirac replied, with absolute certainty.
This was for some reason very funny, and because there was no reason why it should be, it was acceptable that it was funny. Heads turned in the café as they laughed, faces briefly startled and then reassured. Oh, yes. It’s true: life continues. We grieve and we say goodbye because we are alive.
They drank beer. Then, at Dirac’s insistence, they drank their way through some involved Legion funeral song which seemed to the Sergeant’s uncertain ear for French to involve a great deal of discussion of veal sausage and the shortcomings of the Belgians. There was to be no sausage for the Belgians, because they were shirkers. At each utterance of this dire sentence, it was necessary to drink. The Sergeant duly did so, knowing that he would regret it, knowing that the regret, too, was part of the wake. After a certain point, he lost track of what he was drinking and became separated from himself. The remaining sober corner was able to think quite clearly and to see through his eyes, but could not direct the action of his limbs. That job was now entirely given over to a mad percussionist who performed ‘The Liverpool Girl’ and ‘How I Met Your Sisters’ and found a willing chorusline in the other guests, and then at some point the babble fell away and people departed, and at last Tom brought food and tea and gently eased the remaining mourners out into the deep middle night. The Sergeant wandered homewards through the chill, serenading the endless sky with a pint-glass-and-spoon rendition of ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. By a strange grace, the percussionist appeared to have a good sense of direction.
Where the road forked, however, he surprised himself. Instead of going right, which would have brought him directly home to his bed, he went left, up towards the jungle and the shanty. The cool air was seeping into his muscles and driving the disparate parts of him back together. As he went along the line of a low wall and beside a stream, then down and over a hedge, he stopped singing and took stock. He felt empty, and that was good. His balance was returning. He was placid yet full of an inexhaustible energy, caught in the place between wakefulness and sleep. The compulsion to go in the wrong direction was still undeniable.
He realised he was walking through someone’s garden. There was laundry hanging out, and he nearly got caught up on an immense pair of bloomers. The frilled legs grasped for him like some hunting sea creature, but he fought them off with doggy digging motions, and passed by. He plunged through a thorny bush and out the other side, down a lane, and finally felt he was nearing his destination. The road gave way to a track, and the blackness of the lower jungle rose ahead of him. His feet touched hard paving, then soil. Dust. Grass. An elegant iron gate. It was familiar, for sure, but he had no idea why he was here. He went through. The moon overhead was vast and silver-white, seeming to fill the sky. He sat down.
When he woke he was cold, and he knew he was in the cemetery where Shola was buried, and that he had come to say another goodbye, to apologise, and that he had lost another friend in this life and hadn’t enough to be giving them away. He made a noise, head in hands: wordless sorrow without the stamp of appropriate grieving moulded onto it. He looked for the fresh grave, entertaining a mad fantasy of digging it up, of waking Shola even at this late date, getting him to a proper hospital where they could treat his injuries. No, not a proper hospital: the Fleet! The Fleet could help him. They must have everything there, all the impossible new medicines, machines to pump his blood, machines machines machines. They could give him a new lung, a new heart, a new spine, grow new bones or steal them from someone else. They could do anything, if they wanted. Anything at all.
A scent washed over him, strange and sharp. It was warm and not unpleasant: leaves and bark, yes, and sweat. An animal smell. A neighbourhood dog, he thought, and awaited the wet nose in his ear. Well, that would be nice. Companionship. Dogs were good companions. They had no solid memory, only a sort of endless now. A happy dog was happy almost all the time, and shared that with you, which he could use about now.
The nose did not arrive. The dog butted him gently, quite high on his back. A large dog, or a smaller one on its hind legs. It sighed, and the noise was amazingly loud in the night. He wondered if his own sigh had been quite so massive, if he had woken anyone. He felt that any dog with that much heart should be rewarded with a hug.
He turned around into a completely alien intelligence, a huge soup-plate face with wide, reflective eyes. They were not yellow or green but a scalding platinum. He smelled meat and musk, tasted it in the air.
The tiger blinked. It was enormous. They were supposed to be smaller. They were supposed to be shy, too. Perhaps this one was lonely. The head was on a level with his own as he sat, and bigger. The whole animal must top three hundred kilos. He’d been part of four-man squads which didn’t weigh that much.
It peered at him, neither skittish nor aggressive but imponderable. It snuffled, and he smelled that same scent again, stronger: warm saliva and fur. It sneezed. Tiger snot spattered his chest. He did not cry out. The tiger looked almost embarrassed, butted him again.
Well, dog or not, it seemed to want to know him. He reached out very slowly with his left hand (in case it was torn off). The tiger twitched back from it, then sniffed the offered limb and found nothing to object to. It suffered him to stroke it. The fur was thick and dark, heavy with oil. He wondered whether to scratch it. Domestic cats liked to be scratched. His mother’s had. The tiger had taken the initiative, though, and was pushing upwards under his palm. He scratched. Its eyes closed, and it made a new noise, like a distant avalanche. Purring, he supposed, though it seemed a ridiculous word to describe this sound which was almost too deep to hear.
Time passed. The Sergeant’s left arm grew tired and he substituted his right. Then his right arm grew tired and he slowed and stopped. The tiger whickered reproach. He shrugged. It considered him and accepted the verdict, then wandered away. He was for a moment forcefully reminded of the boy. Conversation over, see you next time. He watched the animal make a slow circuit of the graveyard. He thought it might make a special pilgrimage to Shola’s plot, a sort of omen, but it didn’t and he was obliquely glad. Then, without meaning to, he shut his eyes for a moment and it was gone. He came upright and opened his mouth to call after it, then stopped: he had no idea what he would say. He realised he had been in some way hoping for its approval.
He took two or three steps forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of it by the trees.
5. ZOMG
HE STRUGGLED THROUGH the next morning because there were things to do, things which couldn’t wait a day however awful he felt. He got up. It wasn’t pleasant. He ate some soup, wished he hadn’t. It swilled around in his stomach as if he was a hollow plastic sack. He knew better than to add bread. It would swell and make him feel bloated and leaden.
The weather was stubbornly ordinary. The natural world was remorseless about human death and just r
olled on. Some people took solace in that, in the continuance of a greater cycle, but the Sergeant had found that he did not. Death was bad, and that was all. It was not a mercy, not a release, not a victory, and there was no more joy in a man becoming food for worms than in a chicken becoming food for a man.
He waited for the soup to recede, then took himself out for a run. He pushed himself through the blinding headache and on until he felt the jelly in his legs fade and the poisons in his blood bubble out through his skin. He stank. Tainted sweat fell from his body onto the track, and he wondered if it would make any difference to the cocktail of slurry and strangeness under the island. Booze metabolites and skin, salt and water, filtering down through endless layers of sand and rock to a weird melting pot somewhere down below. He showered, and midway through, as the water spiralled away down the plughole, he abruptly found the notion enormously alarming. He was giving up tiny parts of his physical self to be assimilated by what was under the island, would become part of an alien thing so dangerous that only total war could be contemplated, an annihilation so fierce it would take the stone and the sea with it. He retched, but nothing emerged from him. He allowed himself two ibuprofen tablets from supplies, logged them, and chased them with more water and a sachet of electrolyte salts intended for treating severe diarrhoea. Finally he added a multivitamin and a single bit of crispbread from the larder to settle his stomach. The mixture was sickly, but he knew it would work.
Dressed and dry, he took himself out to the car. He had prisoners to talk to: Kershaw was keeping them for him.
Beauville did have a prison – an old red Victorian box with narrow, barred windows and a high wall – but it had been commandeered by NatProMan to house its overspill, and was now full of administrators, soldiers and a considerable stock of weapons. Serious criminals – of which there had not been many – had been transferred to prisons in the Scandinavian countries where the crime rate was actually dropping so fast that the prison infrastructure industry was having trouble staying afloat. Denmark had been a net importer of criminals since 2011.
It had been understood that the island wasn’t going to last long enough for the lack of a prison to be a problem. Except that it had, so the Sergeant, five months into his role as Brevet-Consul, had persuaded Jed Kershaw to fix up an empty wooden building at the far end of the waterfront which had once been a fish-packing plant. The jail wasn’t secure by any modern standard, but the refrigeration units were big enough to serve as cells and you could lock them. A team of engineers had drilled holes in the sides so that the prisoners did not suffocate, and had turned off the cooling system so they did not freeze. Until yesterday it had housed only a few serial brawlers and an aged flasher.
The boy was sitting on a low wall with his knapsack, waiting. When he slipped down from his perch and walked across the cracked stone to the Sergeant’s position, he did so with such an air of formality that the Sergeant briefly saw him dressed in a lawyer’s wig and gown: five feet tall and making the case for the prosecution, or even pronouncing sentence. He had gathered the straps of the bag in his left hand and carried it like a briefcase.
The Sergeant had been aware that this was coming, that the boy would inevitably wish to confront Shola’s killers or at least to confront the tangible fact of them. He had decided that he would not argue. Perhaps he should, but in his mind it simply would not be fair – not comprehensible, either to himself or, he felt sure, to the boy – to claim now, when it was safe, that the matter was too grown up, too serious for him to handle. It might have been possible before Shola’s blood had spattered his face. Not after.
The men had been separated and held incommunicado. They had been given water to drink and basic medical attention and food. Yesterday, the Sergeant judged, would have been the perfect time to talk to them, but today would do. And the boy would be an added oddness, an unbalancing factor. They might believe Shola had been his father.
Which raised the question of whether he had been, but the Sergeant pushed this to one side.
‘I’ll get you in,’ he told the boy, ‘but you don’t talk and you do what I say, all right?’
The boy nodded. His lips formed words but there was no breath in them. After a moment, the Sergeant turned to him firmly, made him spread his arms in a T-shape, and frisked him. No knife. No razorblade. No bomb, no gun. No vial of some appalling gas or germ sneaked from a Fleet repository in exchange for a particularly impressive bit of local contraband.
‘Sorry,’ the Sergeant said.
‘No,’ the boy replied. ‘You are so right. I would waste these badmashes in two ticks of a lamb’s arsehole. For Shola, I totally would.’
The Sergeant nodded. ‘I know you would,’ he said.
‘Whatever,’ the boy growled. ‘Emote later. Right now: Voight-Kampff FTW.’
With this perplexing battle-cry, he turned and went inside.
A Canadian marine wearing NatProMan tour ribbons shepherded them with casual courtesy. The Sergeant wondered how it must have felt to a crew of Mancreu hardcases to be herded down these antiseptic steps. The whole place smelled tartly of phenols. In his childhood that same odour had meant cough pastilles, sugar-coated and blackcurrant-flavoured. One winter he’d had flu: the real thing, hot and bloody awful, and no one had realised until he collapsed on the doormat at home. He had walked back from school, eaten half a dozen of those pastilles one after another, his mouth turning itself inside out, demanding more and more to cut the nausea and the confusion. The whole city had been coming and going in his eyes, grey with rain and red with brakelights, then dark. He’d had a cassette-player Walkman clipped to his belt: the size of a brick, with flimsy headphones. Music copied from an LP, his mother’s, his father’s, a friend’s. It didn’t matter so long as it drowned out the world while he walked, coat soaked through, fever poaching him in his clothes.
The boy shivered. The Sergeant reached out and checked his forehead. It was quite cool.
‘Sir?’ the marine said.
‘I’m a sergeant,’ he responded automatically. ‘I work for a living.’
‘Yes, Sergeant,’ the marine said, and whatever query he had been mustering went away. The Sergeant waited. The marine waited, too, politely but not without a measure of confusion.
After they had all stood in front of the door for a while, the Sergeant realised there was nothing to wait for. Always before in his professional life, whenever he had visited prisoners, there had been a form of words. The custodian of any detention facility had given some sort of warning about proper and improper questions, and the limitations of lawful conduct. But not on Mancreu. Not here. You did what you wanted as long as you were in charge. That was the whole point. He could kill these men: Jed Kershaw might be cross with him, but probably wouldn’t be. No one would seriously object, and if they did, there was no law to prosecute him. Everyone on the island walked within bounds out of sheer habit, respected property and persons and decency because they knew those things were important. But there was no constraint any more, just what you did. He wondered if the men, knowing that, had drawn fearful conclusions from the abattoir tiles and the drains in the floor.
The boy nodded to him, and they went into the first cell.
The man inside was a hillman with a wide face. He positively strutted in his cuffs.
The Sergeant asked his first question. The man nodded like a celebrity, smiled. He had been paid by the Americans to murder the barman, and the whores. Yes. Paid millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account. Hundreds of millions. He would be out of here soon.
The Sergeant asked who would get him out.
The President, the man said. Of the United States. He would personally order it, but of course the order would be disguised. All the same, that was just how it would be.
And what, the Sergeant asked, would happen then?
The man would buy a helicopter and a skyscraper and he would live in Switzerland. He would have a big house by the sea, he had seen pictures of it. If the Serge
ant wanted a job, he could apply. The Sergeant looked like the right sort of man. Dependable, not ambitious.
The boy stepped in, briefly, to observe that Switzerland was not known for its sea coast.
The man jerked back and for a moment he seemed appalled. His mouth stretched wide as if he was going to vomit. Then he shuddered and rolled his head on his neck (things went pop inside him, bones and gristle). He sighed and shook his finger. Children were a trial, he said. They knew nothing of the world. If the Sergeant would take the boy out, it might be better, and they could speak as men, discuss the details of his future employment.
They moved on to the second cell. The occupant was mousy, so the Sergeant asked his questions quietly. That was in the lessons he had had. It was a crude form of something called kinesic interview. You took your cues from the subject. If you were lucky, it helped. Usually – according to the learned DI Burroughs – you were not lucky.
The man said he was a herder. He had driven the car because he was paid to, and then he was told he was coming in. He had come in because he was made to. Yes, he had carried a gun. Everyone had a gun. He had fired high and wide because otherwise he would not be paid and he was afraid he might also be shot. He still was not sure that would not have happened, after. He was sorry for what had been done by the others. Very sorry. For all his life he would be sorry for the barman and the pretty girls.
It was plausible. It could also be so much shit. No way to know, not really. The Sergeant’s gut told him it was probably shit.
The next cell was a slightly different shape, a little closer and tighter – which also made it darker – and the prisoner lay on his bed and did not get up. He was not seriously injured. His face expressed a kind of distant uncaring. He looked at them briefly, flinched a little when he saw the boy, then seemed to accept his inevitability and turned away, in dismissal or despair the Sergeant could not say.
‘Don’t know anything,’ the man muttered as he stared at the wall, from which position no inducement short of physical force could move him.