Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

A sergeant. A diplomat. Words to hide the same shame, it seemed.

He could hear the tiger’s tread behind him at Shola’s grave, smell its breath. In its box at Brighton House, the mask was waiting for him to produce it, to give it to Arno and buy safety, even promotion. That was the sensible course. But that would mean no more Tigerman, and if the Sergeant couldn’t do anything resembling what was right in this situation, Tigerman could. If it came to it, Tigerman could. That was the point of him. Tigerman wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t even real.

Tigerman could do anything.

Lester Ferris shook his head so vigorously that Kathy Hasp stopped talking and stared at him.

‘Tinnitus,’ he muttered, when she asked if he was okay. ‘It comes and goes.’

He went back to Brighton House and started working through the school files. Life was what was important. Life, and the boy, and whatever would happen at the intersection of the two. There would be a moment – and it was coming very soon, maybe in a matter of days – when he would have to make the offer of adoption, even if he didn’t know whether there were parents to be considered. Even if the mood between them was still strained. And in that connection: perhaps that was why the mood was strained. He had had that experience with a girl once, had waited and waited for the right moment to ask her out and it had never come, and their friendship – which they had both vowed they wanted to preserve above all else – had decayed and faded away, because the central plank of it was that question. There came a time with any unconsummated desire of whatever sort when you simply had to speak up or let it go.

More faces stared up at him, more files in random order. No, no, no, maybe… no. No, no, no.

After an hour, he found the first of his possible names, resting between a baby born the year before and a man in late age. Mustaffe Etienne Gerard was tubby and already showing the barest whisper of a moustache. He was the right age and he had something of the boy about him, his look, his bones, but he was utterly different. In the picture, he had a placid face and wore an oversized hockey shirt saluting a team in St Petersburg.

The Sergeant laid Mustaffe’s file gently in the discard pile, and carried on. To his irritation, his mind threw up accusations and spectres of guilt, as if he had better things to be doing. He didn’t. This was his heart, the thing he needed: Save the boy. At least find out if it can be done. Save one future, make one good thing come out of this.

And: May I not have one good thing which is just for me?

But he had promised the boy he would find Shola’s killers, the men behind the men, and now he was doing nothing about it and time was running out, and to take his mind off that decision he was leafing through government paperwork on thousands of people in the hope of finding out whether the child he was thus swindling was an orphan, because if he was that would make the Sergeant’s own life neater and easier.

That was unfair. This was important, too, and it couldn’t wait much longer, either. And it wasn’t as if he was particularly guilty of ignoring the other stuff. Everyone on Mancreu ignored the Fleet, except the boy himself, and Kershaw. Kershaw couldn’t, because Kershaw was saddled with some sort of role in the Fleet’s world. He was the gatekeeper. Did that mean he was Bad Jack? The Sergeant pictured Kershaw in fatigues: Black Ops Jed; wily and ruthless Evil Jed. Still primed with comic books and parallel worlds, the Sergeant’s imagination awarded the image a goatee and maroon jackboots. Jack Boots.

Absurd.

Beneseffe, then. The Portmaster was ideally placed to smuggle and conceal. He wouldn’t even have to pay himself to turn a blind eye to shipments, he could collect them off the dock and no one would object. He need only be skilled with obfuscatory paperwork.

This was idle. Bad Jack was not the problem. It was Jack’s trading partner or his enemy who was the issue: his unfaithful friend, and surely Jack must have known that would happen, that he would be betrayed. Had Shola himself been Jack? Jack had not retaliated because Jack was dead. Except that perhaps Jack had retaliated. The men who had killed Shola were ash. Maybe that explosion had been Jack declaring war on the Fleet, in which case…

Jack could be my ally. If he is alive. If I was taking the case.

Which the British sergeant never would, however much Lester Ferris might think it was the right thing to do.

A team-up.

It was a staple of the comics world: the moment when a situation so dire emerged that villains and heroes had to fight back to back, each fearing the moment when the other turned on them, each preparing and holding back, until finally both were threatened and must commit fully, come what may.

And it was irrelevant, because he could do nothing about the Fleet, however much he might wish to and whatever he had promised, and the boy understood that. One man could not move the Fleet any more than he could shoot lasers from his eyes. The Red Cross and the International Court couldn’t move the Fleet, couldn’t even get on board.

Perhaps he is waiting for you to do the right thing. Perhaps it has no value if he must ask.

He lost his place in the files, and realised as he went back that he had not looked at any of the pictures in front of him for a while. He had been opening the folders, leafing through the pages, and putting them away. He went back through the discards painstakingly until he was sure he had not missed the crucial one. He worked into the night, only aware of the passage of time because he had to switch on a light, and then another, and finally to bring in a third from another room. The high ceiling and the dark wood devoured illumination. When he grew tired he went to the bathroom and splashed water on himself, then washed his eyes with drops from the first-aid kit. He made a pot of tea and went back to the desk, conjured another hour from himself, and another.

Sometime after midnight, he became aware of a new sound, like geese and thunder, and the smell of woodsmoke touched his face.

He walked to the east windows and looked out towards the bay.

Beauville was burning.

The descent into the port was a delirium splashed in bad colours across the dark. The shanty was scored with the bonfires of abandoned farmsteads and upturned cars, and columns of smoke rose and spread and reflected the flames. Beauville was washed in the light of its own conflagration. Here and there, knots of angry people destroyed the streets through which they had walked all their lives, with special attention paid – it seemed at least to the Sergeant, gazing in mute horror through the windows of the Land Rover – to those places which were particularly beautiful or welcoming. Here a façade painted a hundred years ago with scenes from the lives of fishermen split and boiled; there a small mews, with its absurd front doors like tiny portcullises, crumbled and fell in. Looters brandished their trophies, fought over them like gulls, and then lost interest, letting them drop or adding them to the nearest blaze. Almost every item could have been had at any time over the last months, taken with respect from empty houses left unlocked by those who chose not to destroy what they could not carry away, but now Beauville was delivering judgement on those who had departed and all their worldly effects, declaring them dead and exiled and showing its contempt for anyone too cowardly to see the island to its end.

He drove past the Witch’s house and saw that it, too, was in flames, the solid porch and the high-backed chair from which she had encouraged the scrivener fuelling the blaze. The flowers were strewn all about. Because she was foreign? Or because she was kind? He slowed the car, wondering if he should search for her, but the fire was old. If she had been inside, she was dead now, and no amount of stupidity on his part would change that, even if it did make him feel better. If she was not inside, then entering wasn’t even brave, it was asinine. He cursed. There was gear in the armoury which would help with this: firefighting equipment, oxygen. He should go back and get it, but to turn around now smacked of desertion, so he drove on.