Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

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.