Tigerman

17. Sandrine

HE PASSED AROUND the edge of the town proper, where the fires were far between. The buildings were more cursory in the first place, tin roofs and breeze-block construction, poverty in the spliced power lines and the drainage ditches which were not quite open sewers. He saw stragglers from the riots, either fleeing or looking for something worth the trouble to destroy, and turned the bike into the cheek-by-jowl warren of the shanty. Immediately he heard shouting, veered towards it knowing it for trouble, for a wrong thing. Beauville, something inside him still insisted, was a good place. It was filled with good people. They were ordinary people, venal people, even stupid people, but they were rarely mean and this was beyond them, should be beyond them, should have stayed in the pit of wretched possibility for the island even in its dying. It had been created out of malice.

The bike slid and skittered on the loose rubble in the alleys, so he abandoned it. He was close enough to Sandrine’s house to walk, and he would need in any case a better transport if he must abduct her. He could hardly ride with a screaming woman across his handlebars – in his mind’s eye he saw the journey, the slender, fragile legs of his patient-captive thrashing and distracting him, catching on some obstacle at speed and shattering, pulling her from the saddle to a red ruin on the road. He pushed the thought away and walked on, hanging close to the walls as if he was back in contested Baghdad.

In a marketplace he came upon a living fragment of the mob, perhaps two dozen strong. The square was illuminated by the headlights of a quad bike, and the Quad himself stood full height on his saddle and snarled as the mob tormented a small family group cowering by the water pump. In one way that was good: the Quads were dispersed rather than gathered, which meant that there was time to see to the boy’s mother before dealing with the attack on Brighton House. But for these people, it was bad, because the Quad was here and so were they.

In the hard white light the victims looked stark and ill: a woman, a young man, a child. He didn’t know whether the child was male or female, not that it mattered, and he couldn’t imagine what their crime had been. Perhaps they had dared to try to put out a fire, or perhaps they were identifiably from the wrong part of the shanty, or possibly the woman had refused to sleep with someone, or the young man had, or just had the wrong sort of face. Tonight it was all one. Tonight it was a lottery, and they had lost. The first bottles were flying, smashing on the ground in front of them, splinters spattering over their feet and lower legs. The child flinched and howled, the young man lifted it and offered his back as a shield. Good lad.

The Sergeant moved around the shadows of the square until he was directly behind the Quad. He made no particular effort at concealment, and on the fringes of the mob people glimpsed him and turned, so that by the time he had reached his chosen position fully half the mob was looking not at the Quad nor his victims but into the darkness for something they could not see, blinded as they were by the bright light from the bike. The bottles slowed and stopped, and a hush fell over the square.

The Sergeant whispered, ‘Go home.’ And heard the mask turn it into something harsh and cold. ‘Go home,’ he said again, louder, and then he shouted it and heard the echo bounce off the far walls of the square, a noise from a torture room or a surgeon’s cutting station.

Between him and the Quad was an open space like a road, and he stepped into it, his anger mounting until he was running and the Quad was staring open-mouthed, so the Sergeant drove his fist into the offered target and followed the staggering man over the front of the bike and down, landing on him with both knees and hearing a gasp and a crunch of collarbone. He reared up and hit the man three more times, feeling the gloves soak up punishment which would have cracked his knuckles, knowing the Quad’s cheekbones were not so protected. The man slumped, coughing, then gasping as each convulsion shook the broken bones in his face. The Sergeant dragged him towards the family by the pump and left him lying in the broken glass. He looked at the mob.

The square emptied. He turned and found the family had vanished too, into the night.

A few minutes later, when he found Sandrine’s house, it was already burning.

He went in anyway.

The lower floor was filled with smoke, and breathing through the mask was like taking a mouthful of tea straight from the pot. He trusted the filter would protect his lungs, but there was no saliva in his mouth and his throat felt like dry wood. His teeth grew uncomfortably hot to the touch. He was an astronaut on Mars, or Venus, or whichever of them was hot and dark. He saw porcelain ducks on the wall. His parents had had ducks like that. They might even have been from the same factory. For all he knew they were the same ducks, travelled by some weird route across the world to see him die just as they had seen his first days after his mother brought him home from the hospital.

The house was one of the old farm cottages which had been swallowed by Beauville’s expansion and hemmed in by concrete-slab homes, lean-to shacks and the permanent tents of the inner shanty’s markets. The walls and stairs were made of stone. Everything else was dry wood. He judged he had less than two minutes.

On the upper landing there was more smoke but less flame. He slammed open one door, then another, sure he was getting the firefighting all wrong, but sure as well that it didn’t matter because the house was doomed anyway and anyone in it too unless they got out right now.

He found her lying in the middle of the bedroom floor, a roiling cloud stretched above her like a comforter, and thought with relief that she had made a good choice, up to a point. He could have wished that she would just abandon the house through the window onto the adjoining roof – he glanced out, saw that it was the side to which the fire had not spread – but then he would not have found her, would not be able to take her back to her son. The son she didn’t know.

But she ignored him, flat on her tummy and staring down at the wooden boards. They must be painfully hot, and the steam coming up through the cracks must be scorching, but she was resting on some sort of tray or panel. Her expression was intent. What was she doing?

A tendril of flame leaped up a few inches from her face, and she smiled in delight.

He realised she was lying on a full-length mirror on the floor of her burning house, watching the fire. A moment later another jet was erupting between the cracks and then another and he knew the house was giving up, that the time was now. She clapped.

He offered her his hand but she did not acknowledge him, so he scooped her up by the hips and lifted her, his legs and lower back protesting, until she was a wriggling, objecting burden in his arms and he was lunging for the window, feeling the boards sag under him as he went and expecting at any moment to fall into the inferno below, a thing he might just about survive but which would see her roast in his arms in an instant, and that would make an end of Lester Ferris, he was fairly sure, in any form he recognised now.

He lowered his head and hunched as he dived out of the window, felt the catch give way rather than the wood and glass, so no shower of razors, thank God, followed them down onto the next roof. He landed too hard and felt something crack, then realised with relief when no pain followed that it had not been his ankle. He had just enough time to wonder what that meant, and then they crashed through to the ground floor. He picked himself up, ready to fight, but the room was quiet and when he turned on a torch he saw it had until recently been some sort of vegetable stall. A mongrel pup had been sleeping in the corner, and the woman immediately shied a cobble at it, glowering. The mongrel yipped and scuttled out, and she mellowed again immediately, as if that was all it took to restore order to the world.

Sandrine – he had no doubt that it was she, he knew the lines of her face by proxy, and there was a weird disfocus to her expression which spoke of a damaged or remade intelligence – peered at him. Her hand reached out hesitantly to touch the mask, then sank to poke experimentally at the proboscis.

‘I’ve come to take you somewhere,’ he said, then cursed himself as the reassuring words came out metallic and wild.

But she smiled in approval and poked the mask again as if he had done something clever and interesting. She dived forward and began to investigate him, pat him down and follow the contours of his body in frank appraisal. It was not a sexual curiosity, but something else. She had never seen a man in a mask like this. He was a new thing. New things pleased her, so she wanted to know as much as possible about him. When she had roved, rapidly, all over him, and established that he felt essentially the same as other men, she frowned in disappointment and stepped away.

‘It’s not safe.’ He tried again. ‘You have to come with me.’ He made a beckoning gesture. Did she understand language, even though she could not speak? Did waving your hands count as language? Or was she so completely alien now that it didn’t matter, that anything he might attempt to tell her would just be sound and light? Operationally speaking, he realised, he should probably have asked more questions at the beginning.

‘There is a boy.’ He was pantomiming a small, slim person, her son, knowing that she would make nothing of it. ‘Your son, the one you don’t remember. He still loves you and I love him,’ and that was his first time saying that aloud. ‘I came to rescue you. To bring you to him.’ He thought he saw a glimmer of understanding in her face, of happiness or assent, but then she shrugged and wandered away to look at the damage they had done.

He could not leave her here. She was vulnerable to the burning town and to the mob. She was an infant. He realised, in passing, that he had been wrong about something fundamental: no one looked after the boy. When he went away, it was not to be cared for but to care. His mother was his unwitting ward. All seeming evidence to the contrary was proof rather of his self-sufficiency. The comic books he provided for himself; the laptop, the phone, the food – for both of them, no doubt. He was in many ways already grown, waiting only for his body to catch up with his life.

The Sergeant felt a twinge of fellow feeling, unexpected. He had up to a point taken care of his father, when Arthur Ferris had withdrawn to his television set and his late-onset diabetes and smoked himself fiercely towards the plot beside his wife. Young Lester had forged school notes and worked odd jobs and thought he was looking out for number one, but somehow he had put food on the table for his dad as well, and seen him through the few remaining years. His sister, too, of course, but she had been older and already on her way. She had never entirely understood how much their father had ground to a halt, because he freshened up for her, at his son’s insistence, and they were complicit, if in no other way, in concealing the decay. But it had been nothing like this, not really. Or, only somewhat.

His vision flashed white and he was lifted from his feet, a solid impact taking him in the right kidney and hurling him forward. A knife blade, he realised, deflected by the links of chain woven into the vest, the power of it still passed to his body, if spread wide enough to avoid penetration. I’ll piss pink all week, he thought sourly, and rolled as fast as he could to avoid a stamping boot. If I get the chance.

He kept rolling and surged to his feet, bounced off a wall and swirled the torch around the room. There were two of them, ordinary thugs with ugly expressions. Their attention was on him but their goal was Sandrine. He looked for hunger and rape and, curiously, couldn’t see it. Just intent. The nearer one was flourishing the knife at him, the other had a short billy club. Take the blade, but don’t imagine the billy’s not a problem.

The Sergeant slowed, feigning disorientation, lashed out wildly when the man feinted, and invited a circular stab low at his left side, blocked it early and clipped the elbow with the torch to bend it, driving the weapon hand up along his enemy’s spine until the shoulder dislocated, then putting his knee upwards through the man’s face. Shadows danced and he kept moving, trusting in motion to keep him safe. The billy man rushed in belatedly – they weren’t used to working as a team, probably wouldn’t do it again – and the Sergeant threw his first target into the line of attack to ward him off. The knife skittered away and its owner collapsed, moaning.

The other man came on. The Sergeant remembered the taser but had no time to reach it as the man attacked, leading with his weak hand, the billy held in reserve for a quick finish. The Sergeant thrust the torch forward instead, directing the blinding light into the billy man’s face. The man scuttled back and reset his feet.

Sandrine drove the discarded knife in a straight line from the shoulder, hips twisting, power coming out of the legs and the strength of her entire body. The blade went through the back of the billy man’s skull and continued until the point made a soft sound against his forehead. She continued the spiral to bring the arm back, heel of the hand leading and the blade outward, then dropped the knife. He thought it was completely mysterious to her how she had come to be holding it in the first place. The corpse fell at the same time, like a sack.

She looked at the Sergeant, then dropped to her knees and drew the tiger from the stele on his chest, perfectly, in blood on the floor. She looked at him again as if to say that finished the matter, and walked out of the door. He was fairly sure she had no understanding of what had passed, that she had killed a man, and a worm of suspicion was gnawing in him that this was because she only barely grasped what it meant that he had ever been alive. The world – the island – was one piece to her. Some of it moved, and some of it did not, and that was all.

He stared after her, wondering how he would get her back to Brighton House, because force seemed a far less practicable option than it had five minutes before, and by the time he heard the engine outside and launched himself at the door he was too late.

Sandrine was in the back seat of an open white jeep, and beside her sat a woman the Sergeant did not recognise. The woman was actually singing, high and clear, and Sandrine, with blood still wet on her fingertips, was listening to her in placid fascination.

The driver saw the Sergeant and took off for the main road.

He ran flat out and kept the jeep in view, pale and angular and framed by the weird brown clouds at the edges of his vision. He sucked air, spat, and pushed his legs harder. The jeep meant Sandrine and Sandrine belonged to the boy and he had promised to get her. For as long as he could see it he could catch up, and that was the target, the plan. That was the order from authority, even if authority in this case was him.

He could keep up and even gain ground while they were in the shanty, because the narrow streets twisted and turned and the jeep was restricted to a few larger roads and even those were treacherous, especially now. He could run in a straight line and know roughly where they would have to turn and slow, where he might make up for time lost when their route was clear and the engine powered away from him, impossibly far ahead. For a few hundred yards he found himself running along the roofs of market stalls. He wasn’t sure how he’d got up there, vaguely recalled climbing some stairs to avoid a pile of rubble which had slouched sideways from a burned brick bakery into his path, remembered leaping insanely and making it, stumbling on and regaining his feet. Faces turned towards him, rioters and others peered up and wondered. He was drawing a crowd and that was bad, he was moonlit and that was bloody stupid, a good sniper would take about a second to pick him off. He should get down onto the street but then he might not be able to see the jeep when it turned at the T-junction ahead, might pick wrong and lose her. Then the stalls just stopped and he dropped off the last one, muscles white agony, and found that he had not fallen, was not flat on his back, but still moving. Behind him there were people shouting, pointing. Tigerman! Tigerman! He didn’t care. They had torches, both electrical and the old-fashioned kind, and they were following, watching. So long as they stayed back. So long as no one shot him, tripped him, ambushed him, the only important thing was ahead. This was running you could die of, the kind that had killed – the Sergeant, irrelevantly, had always been able to remember the man’s name since learning it at school, a piece of military trivia which hadn’t impressed the recruiter – Pheidippides of Athens after the original Marathon.

Bugger Marathon. And then, irrelevantly: And they call them ‘Snickers’ now, anyway. Old anger. Chocolate bars should not take on new identities. They should be content with who they were.

He rounded a bend and saw a man threatening a woman with a broken bottle. Not Sandrine, no. Just a woman. Just a man.

He surged past, twisting his body and scything his elbow as he unwound. He was in the air when the blow landed: perfect technique. The impact took the man across the ear, snapped his head around. He fell and stayed down. The Sergeant’s motion was pure and unaffected, and he ran on. Behind him there was another shout, like an amen in a charismatic church or the roar of fury from a football crowd. The jeep went left. So did he. The road seemed to bear him up, as if the island’s constant vibration was for this purpose, to power his feet as he chased the jeep. Was he catching up? Maybe. Not long now. Not long. Close enough, soon, to do something, use the belt. Flashbang? Taser? Fire extinguisher? Something something something. Anything. Catch up.

In between accelerations, he could hear the woman in the back seat singing. ‘Danny Boy’, for fuck’s sake. Enough with Danny bloody Boy! Change the record. But ‘Danny Boy’ seemed to be working well enough, Sandrine was still calm. Or perhaps she was just enjoying the ride. She glanced back and saw him, watched him run. ‘…From glen to glen, and down the mountainside…’

Shit.

The jeep swerved and knocked out the supporting post of a wooden awning just ahead of him. He had his hand at his belt for a stun grenade, had to abandon it for balance, saw a girl not five years old staring up and lifted her, lifted her away and she wailed because he’d banged her head against the metal plate on his chest, bloody HELL she was heavy, so small to be that heavy, and the fucking awning was coming down on them both and of course it would have a water tank on it this end, it just would, so he swerved and smashed his way through a plywood board as the structure came down behind him, sprawled and let her find her own balance, scraped himself up and carried on but he was slowing, slowing, too slow and the jeep was escaping and FUCK FUCK FUCK! All for nothing if he didn’t find more.

He found more. Hadn’t run like this from Pechorin’s lot. That had been rehearsal. Light training. Hadn’t run like this in his life, never cared this much. Stupid old man. Water sluiced across the road behind him, the crowd splashed through it. Tigerman! With his luck he’d catch Sandrine and they would burn him, burn her, stake them out like a dog on a telegraph pole. Nothing left in the tank. His tank, not the jeep, fucking jeep was fine. Fucking John Henry this was, man versus machine and all the odds stacked. He had seconds. Seconds. Make it count make it count make it—

And here was more trouble, more stupid, stupid, in-the-way trouble. Beneseffe and his dockmen – thieves and brigands and smugglers all, if we’re honest, so what was happening was not so much good versus evil as it was demarcation and turf – were facing off against a few Quads and their hangers-on, and the jeep piled on through them, and no, no, no NO, of course it wasn’t just a few Quads it was all of them, and here were the trucks, the waiting trucks to carry the mob up the hill. This wasn’t a chance encounter, it was a last stand. He’d been unfair to Beneseffe, this was pro bono after all. Trucks and flatbeds and bikes and all for Brighton House, all ready for the burning, that was how you got a mob to go up a hill: you laid on transport.

And press. Press bloody everywhere, Kathy Hasp following her nose and commandeering someone’s car, everyone else following Kathy Hasp, all there to cover the endgame of British Colonial rule on Mancreu. See the kick-off, rush up the hill to catch the first Molotov cocktail and then be in time for the massacre, win a Pulitzer and home before bedtime.

He looked around and realised he was standing by the mission house. Up on the weathervane was the pelican, dislodged from her perch and apparently looking to him to sort it all out. Like everyone else. He stood at the intersection of a huge number of paths and powers, all gathered by accident in this one place. He: Tigerman.

And he had stopped running. Where was Sandrine?

The jeep rolled out of the far side of the square onto the main road. Clear path to the docks now, to the Fleet, to NatProMan, to anywhere – wherever they were going, it didn’t matter. If he’d been faster. If he’d been twenty instead of nearly forty – although, no. Never, really; not unless he’d been Mo Farah and he wasn’t. And this was his business, right here, right now.

He heard the sound of the engine fade away, and turned to face the Quads. If he took off his mask, Beneseffe might help him. But if he took off his mask, the mob would tear him apart and Africa would scatter what was left to the four winds, and it still wouldn’t help anyone and he’d never have a chance to get Sandrine back from wherever she ended up.

He rolled his head around slowly on his neck as if this was what it had been about, as if he had planned everything to bring them all to this moment. The sound of his breathing, amplified and alarming, filled the square. He took the sharkpunch from his belt and held it in his right hand, twirled it like a swordsman, then threw his left hand forward in a stabbing gesture that reminded him instantly of Sandrine and her knife. With his index finger, he indicated the biggest and ugliest of the Quads, hanging by one arm from the fountain, and fixed his eyes – the mask’s eyes – on the Quad’s face. He did not speak. He just pointed, and waited, and let the challenge stand.

Waited.

And waited.

And the Quad did not come.

The Sergeant would fall on his knees soon. Would pass out. Nothing in his life had prepared his body for that pointless dash through the backstreets. He measured it in his mind. Three miles? Four? At top speed, desperation speed. He would fall, surely, any moment now. He shifted his feet, feeling for the vibration in the ground, and realised that it had stopped, that for the first time in days everything was still. He saw everyone else realise it too, with relief and an unlikely sense of loss.

Something was happening at the back of the crowd. A weird susurrus was spreading out in waves, words exchanged and shared, accounts of witnesses and testimonies, and out of all of them emerged that one word so that it ebbed and flowed in the tide of whispers but never vanished, and moment by moment it actually grew, strengthened and unified, and here was a young man with a phone holding it high for others to see – video, more bloody video, always someone. But now it seemed there were more cameras, more angles, and the square was lit as if by candles with glowing screens and tiny cameo recordings. Tigerman flew from a burning house with a sick woman in his arms. He stopped a rape, or a murder. He rescued a child. He chased, always, impossibly and indefatigably, chased an abduction by someone in a foreign car, a Fleet car, chased and would not give up even though his breathing rasped and his feet twisted. Tigerman. And then, here, at last, he let it go, because for all that he had done in his quest, this moment in the square was more important, not to him but to them. Tigerman. Tigerman. Tigerman. He was not Fleet. He was not Britain or America or France or anywhere except Mancreu, Mancreu looking out for its own. Tigerman, Tigerman, Tigerman, and the noise was louder than anything he had ever heard. Tigerman, for Mancreu, because they needed him so very, very much.

The Quad shook his head, threw his mask down on the ground.

They carried the Sergeant through the town, and where they went they put out the fires. Small groups broke away from the main throng and became anything from street sweepers to civil engineers, and road by road and house by house the sound of Beauville became a goosegabble of hammering and mending.

The Quads were gone, not merely vanished or fled but publicly retired, even unmade. As one they rolled their bikes into the harbour and knelt – to the Sergeant’s vast embarrassment – to receive his absolution. He wanted to tell them all to apologise to the old lady for killing her dog. And to anyone else whose beloved pet they had crucified. But then he would have to take them to task for sins more dire and ultimately there would be blood, again. It was not his choice to make, and he had no desire, anyway, to see them dangle and kick from the dockyard cranes. This, though, surely this was too much?

He cast around for an escape but found none, so he duly placed a gloved hand on each of twenty heads and pressed down without words, and saw that half of them were weeping and prostrating themselves and had to be lifted up by the crowd. They would make redress where they could and carry the guilt otherwise, and that was all that the world offered anyone, for crimes and omissions large or small.

Everywhere, the press pack followed. They spoke to men and women on the fringes of the crowd, but when they occasionally ventured closer the crowd drew together to keep them away. Tigerman was a mystery, and they did not want him unmasked, did not want him to promise things or demand things, did not like it when he spoke at all. His existence was his meaning, and if he tried to encapsulate himself he might get it wrong. Which was entirely acceptable to the man inside the mask, whose stubble was beginning to itch against the slick surface, and who wanted above all else to get away, to lie down and sleep. He had work. He had work and he must find Sandrine for the boy, he must pretend again to look for himself, to track himself across the island. He must speculate with Arno. He must find out about his powers and responsibilities towards adopted quasi-orphans and how he could account for and care for the boy’s mother.

The boy. The boy had a name. He had read it, but it had felt unfitting and he had forgotten it. Boy. Boy. Son? He whispered the word and heard it echo, saw the nearest members of the crowd flinch slightly.

His focus was fading, his eyelids appallingly heavy. Soon he would black out or sleep, and there would be very little difference. He had to get away. But they were relentless: he must see everything, bless everything, and how long before they took him to the NatProMan building and expected it to fall before him like the walls of Jericho? And would Kershaw and Arno be circumspect with the Tigerman at their gates, or would they reckon to snatch him first and apologise later, to unravel the mystery? He was walking through water, through thick, clear oil, and it was cold.

And then he was rescued.

As they walked along the harbour front and he nodded to the teams of men and women clearing away the rubble of Beneseffe’s line in the sand, five men emerged from a side road wearing gas masks and firefighting gear and stood in a silent line, not so much like soldiers or workmen as monks at their offices. There was a solemnity about them, a sense of ritual and place.

The gear they wore was not his gear – not from his armoury – but a hodgepodge of local stuff. All the same it had been cobbled together somehow to make it just a little Tigerman-ish, to suggest his suit without actually being like it. They wore long coats and let their arms hang by their sides. They did not move or speak, they just waited in the faint light of the predawn. The crowd slowed and stopped, and somehow knew that they must let him go, that it was time.

Knowing it was intended, and too tired to doubt that it was wise, he walked slowly through the crowd and felt reverent hands reach out to touch him as he passed, to take a blessing from his back and shoulders, touch the stele on his chest.

The masked men did not acknowledge him as he walked between them. They did not turn their heads. Instead, as soon as he was through them they folded in behind him like an honour guard, and then streamed around him, ahead of him into an empty house and out again, heading in different directions all at once so that his own path became curiously invisible. As the last one peeled away he gave the Sergeant a gentle push: go straight ahead.

He managed one last effort, made his feet work, wished he could take off his heavy coat, the utility belt with all its useless toys.

Outside, in a backstreet, a car was waiting for him, battered and a little scorched. Flotsam, like him. He climbed in.

‘Just friends,’ the boy said hastily, gesturing back along the side road as he drove off. ‘They do not know you. Know only that Tigerman must disappear now, that we help him. They do not ask how I know. It is holy now.’

The Sergeant nodded, too tired to worry.

‘That was leet,’ the boy said after a pause. ‘It was the most leet. Onehunnerten pro cent thirteen thirty-seven. You are full of win.’

‘I didn’t get her,’ the Sergeant murmured.

‘I saw. Everyone saw. Everyone in the world. You tried so hard and it was not possible. You are Elvis. More famous than Jesus Christ. Also higher approval ratings. You saved everyone. No riots. No fire. All good.’

‘But I didn’t catch up. Too slow. I’m sorry.’ He looked over. He had taken off the mask but he wanted to take it off again, to meet the boy’s eyes more frankly and make him understand the failure. Please don’t forgive me. Please. I can’t stand it. ‘I didn’t get her. I’m sorry.’

The boy looked back at him with a strange, merciless certainty. ‘You will,’ he said simply. ‘You are full of win.’