Tigerman

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 smoking 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.

From this landscape and palette they derived a mood, a sense of foreboding and intrusion. The theme was never being safe, and above all never being safe in isolation. In these stories, the boy said, if you wanted to be the hero you had to stand alone, but when you were alone was also when you might get eaten by the monster.

‘First it is seen,’ the boy explained, waving his hands at the edge of his vision, ‘here. And then there are more and more warnings, and they are ignored. Always, in daylight, the warnings are funny. They come from someone a little silly, maybe. And finally it walks in the night and everything is terrible.’

The interesting thing, to the Sergeant, was how these stories were at least in one way quite true to life: you didn’t know whether you were the hero or not until the end, because at any time up to that moment you could just get eaten and the rest would be about someone else. In fact you were never safe, because sometimes the monsters won.

From patches and scraps they stitched a skittering cockroach blanket and left it out for Mancreu to find.

The following morning, the fourth since Shola’s death, the Sergeant carefully assembled his face and manner into an attitude of amiable vagueness. It was difficult, requiring constant attention. If his focus wandered, his shoulders tightened and his mouth slipped into the sneer he recognised from the first day of deployment to an active theatre. But it was necessary for what came next that he should appear benign to the point of risible, so he thought about what Shola would say to this new plan, and played his part.

‘You’re quite out of your mind, Lester, you know that?’

‘Yes, Shola, I do.’

‘I mean, seriously, my friend: this is a terrible idea.’

‘So you like it.’

‘I love it. But that does not make it smart.’

‘You want to come?’

‘I’ll watch from a safe distance, I think. But you go ahead and have fun. Give Marie a hug for me, Lester. She’s not doing well.’

But that was too close to home, and he hurriedly put the vision away, then composed a hazy smile and ambled through the streets of Beauville with his customary pleasantness. He greeted the people and gossiped, accepted their condolences and their respect, and took his ease. Wherever he went he allowed the conversation to follow its own course, to wind and meander. That sort of chatter, on Mancreu, inevitably tended to swapping gossip and rumour, and where it seemed appropriate he would laugh and mention the demon, just in passing. Then – if someone asked ‘What demon?’ which they mostly did – he would explain and laugh some more. If he laughed too hard, well, he was a man who had lost a friend, and he could be allowed to find humour where he might. If it didn’t come up, then, well, that was fine too.

He told farmers he’d heard the story from stevedores, drovers he had it from seamstresses, bakers it came from lobstermen. Always he dismissed it out of hand, even as he spiced the pot with alarming details: the hint of missing persons, the flavour of doubt and poorly concealed official concern. He sought reassurances: ‘Oh, so you have seen Old Père Lipton? Good, all right, then he’s fine,’ as if crossing a potential victim off a list in his head. When pressed, he would explain that there were concerns about a real monster behind the story, a ghoul in the night. He didn’t outright say that it might be a human being so warped by the Discharge Clouds that he had become something other. He let the notion bubble up. He was jaunty, and called the whole thing a ghost story, nothing worth thinking about. And then in parting he would drop a reference to someone who was still missing. Every so often he sealed the deal with an earnest ‘There’s really no cause for alarm.’

It was so easy, he felt a little ashamed. You could have done it anywhere, in any village in the world. At a pub near Hereford, he remembered, an earnest matron had told him in great seriousness that windmills caused cancer, and the government was covering it up. A man from the Spectator, she said, had come and given a lecture. When the Sergeant had begun to express doubt, the whole saloon bar had laughed at him for his credulity. Myths and monsters were a human weakness, even in places not about to be evacuated and sterilised by fire.

The boy meanwhile had let the story slip to the card-players, who inevitably handed it on to passers-by and friends, and the legend grew in the telling so that one lonely ghost became a host led by an appalling demon prince. Inoue was right, apparently: the mountain people, in particular, had a lot of demons – although the fishermen had more than enough to be going on with, rising up from the frozen deep-water hell.

The boy had moved on to the waterfront and idled with the net-menders and the basket-weavers, run errands for the Portmaster. If he mentioned along his way the matter of the disappearances, the ones NatProMan was covering up, well, he could hardly be blamed. He was a child, and, after all, everyone was talking about it.

This being the way of things, it was quite natural for the Sergeant to bump into Pechorin, pass him a routine report from Kershaw’s office, and share the local colour.

‘Watch out for the demon!’ he said as he was leaving, and Pechorin grinned.

‘Sure, Lester. I will be very careful. I would not want Baba Yaga to come and steal my balls. Unless it is young Baba Yaga. A beautiful demon would be okay.’ He made a helpful gesture with his hips for clarification.

‘Well, I can’t help you there,’ the Sergeant said genially. ‘We’re pretty certain it’s a man.’

‘Fuck!’ Pechorin cried in appalled delight. ‘You taking this seriously? There is a demon?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course. Well, not like a real demon sort of demon, obviously. Just someone not right in the head. Or a man suffering some sort of break because of… everything. There’s no serious suggestion that he’s been affected by the Clouds. Yeah,’ he mused, almost to himself, ‘there’s a few Leavers have been a bit mad, we tend to brush them under the carpet, sort them out at the other end. And there was one lad with longish fingernails and teeth, but he was from the mountains and you couldn’t say for sure he wasn’t always like that. Anyway, nothing to worry about for an armed patrol. Less good by yourself in a dark corner, I suppose, if he’s really far gone. I mean, you know what crazy people are.’ He sucked air through his teeth, as if this thought was just now occurring to him.

The merriment faded. Pechorin’s mother was from Rostov, at one time the home of Eastern Europe’s most infamous murderer. A grubby little man in a brown overcoat had killed nearly a hundred people, and ever since his execution by firing squad the town had had a ridiculously high rate of serial murderers, as if Chikatilo’s spirit had passed into the air. Perhaps it had; the arresting officer had been suspicious because of a smell he detected around the suspect, a smell he called simply ‘evil’ but which forensics later explained as the meaty exhalation of a cannibal.

Pechorin’s crew muttered and crossed themselves. It was an irritation to the Sergeant that men who one moment before had been braying for the sexual favours of a fiend could appeal to the Virgin in the next. It smacked of sloppy thinking.

‘He’s killed men?’ Pechorin demanded. ‘Women?’

The Sergeant raised his hands resignedly. ‘People are missing. But people are always missing on Mancreu. They drown. They fall off cliffs. Or they Leave and don’t tell anyone. It’s not serious. Only…’ He let his voice trail off as if in thought, then shook his head to clear it. ‘Never mind. But if you see anything, let me know.’

‘See what?’ one of the men demanded. ‘Only what, please?’

‘Nothing,’ the Sergeant said hastily. ‘Nothing at all.’ When Pechorin raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘Let’s hear it’ – not in the manner of a gossip, but that of a cautious leader of men – the Sergeant shrugged unwillingly, then went on. ‘Only there’s a small list – not more than a dozen – that I can’t account for that way, even with the Brighton House records and asking people to come forward and so on. It’s early days. I’m sure they’ll turn up.’ He laughed. ‘It’s not as if the witnesses are consistent. This morning someone told me it’s a man with a monster’s face. Except that the next one says you can’t see him because he’s invisible. He has hands like a tiger, or a mouth like a heron. And he comes and takes your teeth while you sleep. It’s a bedtime story for naughty children. Unless maybe there’s a market for teeth somewhere. Eh? Hah!’

He nudged the Ukrainian with thunderous good humour, to indicate that everyone should laugh. They did, but politely, because it wasn’t very funny. It was true that there was no market for human teeth because these days dentists could make them out of ceramic and sooner or later they’d just grow them, that was how it was going. Organs, on the other hand, absolutely could be bought and sold around the world. It was a quite legitimate medical trade, one which states regulated very carefully to prevent abuse, meaning that the abuse was profitable and sophisticated. There was a hospital ship in the Bay of the Cupped Hands called the Reluctant Alice, where you could buy a heart for $120,000, not including surgery. The Alice was one of the more receptive vessels of the Black Fleet, so much so that she very nearly advertised. The numbers were common knowledge on Mancreu: a whole body was only $210,000 and a liver was $80,000, so it was actually a better investment to plump for the corpse entire and reckon to resell the other organs. Of course, if there was a sudden lack of buyers you’d be out a lot of money, but in practice that seldom happened. Someone, somewhere, always needed something.

But suppose for a moment that the problem were reversed: you might find there was no compatible donor, and if you were in a hurry – and what rich transplant patient ever felt he or she had too much time before the situation became critical? – well, under those circumstances it was whispered certain groups would undertake commissions. If no suitable cadaver could be found, one might be made to order. Soldiers, their medical records on file, would be a particularly good source of organs for anyone with access – politicians, say, or spies – and, of course, soldiers died all the time. There would almost certainly never be any need to help them along.

‘Nothing in it,’ the Sergeant said. ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. But if you do see anything strange, call me. And call for a medical team, just in case.’

Pechorin worked his way through that. In case the victim has been robbed of his kidneys and is sitting alone in a room in a bath of ice waiting to die.

The Sergeant left them to gather their gear.

The prank – he was thinking of this salutary lesson in manners as a prank, so that if he ever had to testify about it he could truthfully say that was how he’d seen it – was shaping up nicely, but there remained the question of what to wear. The Sergeant had no idea how to begin. He was not someone who spent a great deal of time on clothes. Beyond sewing on a button or a new rank insignia, he had also never done any kind of tailoring. The boy, however, asserted that he had made costumes before, for festivals and parties and for his own enjoyment, and appointed himself quartermaster. This would be better than a normal costume, because it would be real. In fact it must be perfect. Yes, perfect – and would the Sergeant stop wriggling and please allow him to take a chest measurement?

The Sergeant obediently raised his arms and waited. He had been thinking of something rather more ad hoc, but realised now that the exercise of imagination and skill in all this was as much a balm to his friend’s hurt as the prospect of justice itself. In the end, it was also better by far that the boy should be party to his redress than that it should be given to him as a gift. He therefore suffered himself to be measured in his various dimensions, and tried not to growl when the waist came up larger than his vanity would have liked. Thinking about it – with his hands in the air and his back straight while the boy measured his chest – the Sergeant understood that what he was proposing to undertake was in some measure stupid and dangerous, so he would do well to be prepared for it to go wrong. He stopped the design process, walked the boy down the long corridor to the newest section of Brighton House, and opened the armoury.

After a while, the boy said: ‘Holy socks.’

The weapons were all along the right-hand wall and in racks which slid out on rails to allow many men to arm themselves at once. There was protective gear at the back, and specialist situ-ations kit – demolitions and bomb disposal, engineering, survival and scuba gear on the left. The boy was particularly impressed by a row of sharkpunches – slim aluminium batons tipped with a shotgun shell for dealing with ocean predators on dive missions – and averred that Roy Scheider should have had one. Immediately next to the entrance were various sorts of chemical-weapons suits, because you didn’t want to have to go any further than was absolutely necessary when you needed them in a hurry.

The Sergeant wondered what it must be like to see so much appallingly dangerous stuff gathered together in one place, so many strange and expensive tools of destruction and defence, for the first time.

Finally, the boy said: ‘This is not a good room,’ and Lester Ferris thought he would cheer.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t. But it’s got things in it I might need.’ He knocked on an armoured vest, and sighed.

The boy nodded.

Together, then, they sat with the comics and the inventory list and drew up an outline of how he should appear. They began with words:

dangerous

fiendish

indestructible

monstrous

capable.

The boy proposed also

cannibalistic

but the Sergeant demurred, and the boy in return struck off

professional

as being more something a soldier should be than a caped crusader. They got stuck for a while, and came up with

scary

which was redundant, and

lethal

which made them both uncomfortable, however true it might be that they wanted their creation to seem that way. And then the boy suggested

shocking

and, of course,

awesome.

The Sergeant laid down a few hard rules for equipment, and then withdrew to watch his friend work, bemused by the sketches the boy drew on sheets of paper from the stationery cupboard and by the piles of gear he fetched and discarded from the armoury. Mancreu and even Pechorin, Lester Ferris understood well enough, but it occurred to him now that he did not understand the business of superheroing at all. He knew it as a thing to be admired and as a brief diversion in childhood, but he had never considered it for what it was or how it might actually be done, or even what it might mean if one did.

He was going to put on a funny hat and fight crime. He was going, however briefly, into their world, and you didn’t do that without learning about where you were going. He needed to see the fictional landscape of hopes and aspirations and the characters who inhabited them. Symbolic terrain.

He opened a comic and began to read it the way he read soil and weather.

The first thing he understood in that hour was that it was never about hitting people. It was always about proving a point. Hitting people was just a background, the way a uniform was. The message varied like the soldier. For Superman, that point was about justice and ideals. He really was a perfect American dream. For Batman, it was something else altogether. It was a statement that no matter who you were, how tough you were or how wicked, there were some things you simply could not do. He was not primarily about punishment or even prevention. He was a living cypher, a message that the set of actions which were available to human beings did not include certain crimes, and that line was absolute, made absolute not by him but by what he represented, the human capacity to say ‘no’. They could not be prevented, not every time, but they would be uncovered and they would be punished. The Sergeant found himself thinking about Bosnia, where a war had been fought by the West to achieve exactly that same result, and about Afghanistan, where the nations which had pursued Karadžić and Mladić for their misdeeds had decided that some of those things were acceptable so long as they were done for the right reasons.

The boy asked him to hold something while he marked it in chalk, and the Sergeant put down the comic book and shifted to accommodate the easy pressure of curving lines drawn across his chest and legs. Then he was detailed to cut something along the marks, and found that it was not hard at all. There was even a satisfaction in it, a simple lift in his mood for a simple task unequivocally completed. The boy squinted at his work, and then approved it.

It was very companionable, sitting and making in this way. The Sergeant and his uncle Mike had once made a go-kart together, out of a box crate and some wheels from a discarded perambulator. Mike had insisted at the last minute on adding suspension in the form of bed springs, which had complicated the procedure enormously and resulted in a strange, nauseating ride. All the same, it had been grand. The young Lester had ridden it every day until it tore itself apart. He had not had the knack of reassembling the springs, and the kart had mouldered in a corner of the garage because Mike was living overseas. More than likely it was still there.

The Sergeant found himself wondering whether the boy would enjoy it as much as he had, whether they might repair it together. The warming notion soothed him, and he drifted like a man sleeping in the bath. He considered other things he and the boy might make together: musical instruments, chemical experiments, and even cakes. He had enjoyed cakes, in his earlier life. Somehow you didn’t get much opportunity to make cakes as a sergeant.

‘What you really need,’ the boy said at last as he tied off a thread, ‘is a sign from White Raoul.’

The Sergeant nodded. He knew it was absurd, even a little mad, but it felt like the right thing. The world was being ludicrous at him, so he would be a bit ludicrous back, and he would make that small part of it around him a little better. Call it atonement, perhaps, for being the one to reveal to the boy that adults do not automatically have all the answers, and that justice does not flow like water from people who are taller than a child. If the boy thought he should have a sign from the scrivener, then: good.

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 bucket, 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.