Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Kershaw was glossy in the heat; his skin had a fried-egg slickness. He was short but seemed to have been fitted with an oversize motor so that he talked too fast and moved like a dragonfly, zigging and zagging and pouncing on things. It was exactly how not to feel comfortable in the heat. His family was Norwegian back down the line, and he looked like a stumpy brown-haired Viking who’d taken a job as a golf pro. You could not have found someone less suited to Mancreu’s climate if you’d searched the whole world. Kershaw didn’t even like Florida. But he had come down to Shola’s and personally taken charge because he was basically decent, and he’d sat at the man’s table and eaten with him.

‘Fuck,’ Kershaw said again, seemingly to nobody. He looked at the Sergeant’s uniform, with its splatter of Shola’s blood along one sleeve and the dust all over his side from his dive to the floor. ‘Lester, for Christ’s sake, sit down. Stop being a sergeant for a few seconds and just. . Holy shit, Lester, are you okay?’

The Sergeant allowed that a sit down might be just what he needed. He was aware abruptly that he had scalded his face, probably walking through the cloud of burned custard. The Witch would laugh at him. Her cleavage appeared in his mind’s eye, rising and falling, leaning over him: post-combat lust. He struggled to focus on the matter at hand as she straddled him, guiding his hands, his mouth. God, yes. I want this.

And then, more truthfully: I need a hug.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, in answer to all Kershaw’s questions. ‘I think it was about Shola, but I don’t know. There’s no reason anyone would come after me.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ Kershaw said.

For a moment, the Sergeant thought this rather unkind. He interpreted it as a rebuke: you’re a policeman! Why don’t you know already? But then he realised that as far as Kershaw was concerned it was an explanation in itself. You’re a policeman: some people don’t like them. It had not really occurred to him that in many places this would be reason enough to shoot someone dead while they were having soup. His perceptions of copperhood were formed by the dream of England, still. A copper was a bloke in a slightly silly hat who walked the beat, talked to shopkeepers about the price of fish, and sorted out young ruffians. You didn’t attack him. It was like attacking a field of wheat, and anyway, you’d have to answer to his mum.

The Witch reappeared, came through the door with her medicine bag. He tried not to see her, then realised when she peered into his face with benign professional concern that this time she was real. He had already opened his mouth to receive her kiss. He shut it. She nodded, began to move carefully around him, tut at the mess on his clothes, probe his bruises.

Kershaw was talking about stability, viable stability under abnormal crisis-induced deindividuational stress, from which according to some NatProMan policy document everyone on Mancreu was presently suffering. He punctuated his speech by yelling at his men to ‘cover that body, find someone to do some fucking clean-up, where’s the fucking undertaker, is there still a fucking undertaker or has the fucker already fucking fucked off?’ The words were irrelevant. His presence was the message. He cared enough to be here, to come in person into what must feel like a very dangerous place, and now he was here he was as confused as everyone else.

‘You didn’t do anything to make this happen, Lester? I’m not going to find out that you and Shola were running coke to kids in Beauville?’

‘That is rude,’ the Witch said without looking up. ‘And ridiculous.’

‘Fuck you, lady! Who asked you anything? What the fuck are you even doing here?’

‘You called for doctors. I am a doctor. Deal with it.’

‘I meant real doctors! My guys!’

‘And they are putting blood back into the women who were shot. Who will live, by the way — I’m so glad you asked.’

‘Fucking MSF fuckers,’ Kershaw muttered. He was embarrassed, the Sergeant could see, by the callousness of his own questions. But it was his role to be callous, to ask the bad questions while others did the repair work, in case there were bad answers.

The Witch sneered and muttered something about inhibited men from Ivy League schools.

‘No,’ the Sergeant said to Kershaw, before this could escalate, ‘nothing like that.’

Kershaw took that at face value and turned to the Witch, asking, by way of amelioration, ‘Is he okay?’

‘He will be,’ the Witch said. ‘Which is a miracle. Lester, turn your head.’

He did.

Kershaw, assured that the Sergeant was not seriously hurt and not a drug dealer, seemed to calm somewhat. Then, too, he had probably needed to know this wasn’t some sort of insurrection. There were those on the island who objected to NatProMan’s presence. Occasionally leaflets surfaced, printed neatly and distributed invisibly, nailed to walls and left on café tables. They denounced Kershaw by name, railed against the destruction of the island, in English, French, and Moitié. It was not what you would call an insurgency. It felt pro forma, or possibly sophomoric: angry young men with a smattering of political history and a sense of betrayal. The Sergeant couldn’t blame them, but in his judgement they — whoever they were — had nothing like the steel for something like this. This was horrible, but it was not revolution. It felt too specific for that. But hardly surgical.

The Sergeant looked for the boy, but he was gone, most likely to whatever place he called home. The Sergeant hoped that whoever waited there would look after him. He felt bad that he had not provided some sort of care while he spoke to Kershaw, but the boy had been quite firm, and he was sovereign. ‘Speak to the American. It is necessary.’ If there was anyone waiting. If he had anyone. The Sergeant hoped that he did, somewhere, and then hoped that he didn’t because that would mean he shared his friend with someone he did not know, that the boy was ultimately not his boy, just a boy he knew. It would make his furtive, half-acknowledged Plan B that much more difficult.

The Witch drove him to her surgery without speaking. She gave him leaves and unguents for his scorched face, more for his bruises, and dressed a gash in his shoulder which must have been from a near miss with the shotgun as he fled into the kitchen. Finally she sighed.

‘I knew Shola,’ she said. ‘Marie will be devastated.’

The Sergeant nodded. Marie, Shola’s girlfriend. Wife, really, though not on paper. Widow. Christ, someone would have to tell her. Except that by now she already knew. There was nothing he could do about that. He’d have to go and see her, of course.

‘Everyone will be,’ he said. And the boy: had he witnessed death like this before? Not impossible. Not here. ‘If you see,’ as ever he baulked at saying ‘Robin’, ‘my friend, tell him to come and find me.’

The Witch shrugged. Exhausted, he accepted that as a yes. He breathed in, hoping to catch her scent to carry it away with him, but the room smelled of the sea, and of disinfectant.

That night the Sergeant dreamed of a woman, in terms he knew were utterly pornographic. They did things he had only read about: desperate things which arched them both and made them cry out until they spasmed and clutched and clawed their way to satisfaction, and then on relentlessly to more and more transgressive journeys in search of some sort of restitution from the world. He called her Breanne, but when finally his lover laid her head upon his chest and slept, her body was slim and pale, and her fingers were tipped in an absurd sherbet pink.

When he woke, the memory was fading and he was aching and grazed and filled with regret — for Shola, for the others who had died so arbitrarily. If he went armed, habitually, as a soldier in a foreign land should, he might have. . what? Stood off five men with one pistol? Got into a firefight and died? Or should he have marched around Beauville with an SA 80, carrying the weight of it across his chest, the lethal message wherever he went. And what message, exactly, does an armed soldier give out when he is a thousand miles from reinforcements? Fear, perhaps. Foolishness. Thuggishness. It was idiotic. And yet he felt a powerful conviction that he should somehow have prevented what had happened. Should have been prepared for it.