Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

The Dogs arrived on the third day of Dirac’s mission; a few hundred of them, with mobile artillery. They were very careful. They didn’t fire on the UN tents. They lined the ridges along the valley and glowered down at the pathetic worm of suffering below. It made great television, really pointed up the issues. And every night, while the VIPs were talking sincerely to the press pack, the Dogs lobbed shells down into the valley floor and cut the refugees to pieces.

Dirac didn’t take to it. It was monstrous, and vile, and it offended him on a personal level. He was a son of the Republic, he was a son of the Legion, and as far as he was concerned the Marseillaise didn’t fancy this sort of thing either. Aux armes, citoyens . ‘I want to do something,’ he told his regional commander. ‘This is shit.’

The regional commander knew his duty to the political apparatus. He was mostly a peacetime soldier, and he accepted what his civilian masters referred to as the wider picture. Permission to engage was not forthcoming.

‘This is shit,’ Dirac said.

An hour later he had said it quite a lot more and peppered it a few times with ‘ Je m’en fous ’, but he had a plan. He rounded up the few serious lunatics in his command and told them what he proposed to do, and they kicked the tyres of his insanity and pronounced it good, and that evening before word could get out or they could change their minds they made it happen. They sneaked up into the ravines on either side of the valley and moved down the line in near-as-dammit silence, capturing gun emplacements. They used the darkness and they used their bayonets and they took prisoners as they went. By the time morning came they were exhausted and they’d run out of restraint tags, but they’d captured two hundred and thirty-seven members of the Dogs of the Pure Christ and eight light artillery pieces, along with fourteen shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and a pile of automatic rifles and side arms. Dirac marched Gervaise to the nearest crossroads and stripped him naked, then thrashed him with a local thorn bush across the buttocks and told him to take his men and piss off. By some unhappy chance the press corps got wind of this before it happened, so there was global coverage of the most feared warlord in the region getting spanked until he wept.

It was an utterly inexcusable breach of Dirac’s orders and a woeful piece of modern colonialist behaviour. The French government apologised with mountainous sincerity to everyone involved, and even offered to pay for reconstructive plastic surgery on Gervaise’s buttocks. This resulted in the details of the humiliation Gervaise had suffered being once again dwelled upon at length by the international press. The UN investigated — ‘a little Italian bastard with grey eyes came, you couldn’t hide anything from him. It was like hell. He found my girlfriends, my bar tab, everything. I was completely naked in front of an Italian.’ Dirac was summoned to headquarters and told he was no longer welcome in post, then handed over to the French senior staff. They lectured him without a whiff of irony on the proud traditions of the French military which he had sullied with this shameful act, and they told him he was to be demoted — yes, and he was lucky to keep his commission at all! Then they gave him a medal, which went very nicely next to the Pan-African Award for Peace and the German People’s Medal of Justice. At around the same time the Mancreu posting became available and Dirac was permitted to resume his former rank on the understanding that he see out the island’s destruction however long it might take, that he had been a very naughty boy, and that he was really not to do it again.

‘Holy Mother of Christ, Lester,’ Dirac said, first in French and then in English to emphasise his point. ‘Really with custard?’

The Sergeant nodded. Dirac banged his hands on the table, papapapapow! and grinned. ‘That was some shit. And you got them all?’

‘He got one.’ Indicating the boy. ‘With a comic book.’

Dirac raised his eyebrows briefly, but when the Sergeant nodded that he was entirely serious, raised his glass in Gallic salute. ‘Good work! As good as it could have been, okay? As good as it could have been. Both of you, you need to know that.’

The boy shrugged. ‘We were not leet .’

Dirac fairly obviously did not know what that meant, and equally obviously did not need a translation. ‘No. Don’t fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There’s just not being dead.’ And hard eyes, commander’s eyes fixing them both in turn to be sure they understood. ‘I am not blowing smoke up your asses.’

‘When we fight crime, we must be better,’ the boy said.

The Sergeant had forgotten that, had assumed it was a transient strangeness born of the moment of Shola’s death and their survival. He let it fall away without reaction. Dirac, after a moment, did the same.

With some hesitation, the boy unlimbered his knapsack and drew out the dog-eared and curled issue of The Invisibles he had used as a weapon, and offered it up for Dirac’s inspection. The Frenchman took it gravely and tapped the end. ‘Huh. Pas mal .’ He gave it back, and sighed. ‘As good as it could have been, my friend. If the world were perfect there would be no war and I would be sleeping with Lauren Bacall.’

The boy was immediately interested. ‘1944 Bacall, or Bacall now?’

‘Both!’ Dirac replied, with absolute certainty.

This was for some reason very funny, and because there was no reason why it should be, it was acceptable that it was funny. Heads turned in the café as they laughed, faces briefly startled and then reassured. Oh, yes. It’s true: life continues. We grieve and we say goodbye because we are alive.

They drank beer. Then, at Dirac’s insistence, they drank their way through some involved Legion funeral song which seemed to the Sergeant’s uncertain ear for French to involve a great deal of discussion of veal sausage and the shortcomings of the Belgians. There was to be no sausage for the Belgians, because they were shirkers. At each utterance of this dire sentence, it was necessary to drink. The Sergeant duly did so, knowing that he would regret it, knowing that the regret, too, was part of the wake. After a certain point, he lost track of what he was drinking and became separated from himself. The remaining sober corner was able to think quite clearly and to see through his eyes, but could not direct the action of his limbs. That job was now entirely given over to a mad percussionist who performed ‘The Liverpool Girl’ and ‘How I Met Your Sisters’ and found a willing chorusline in the other guests, and then at some point the babble fell away and people departed, and at last Tom brought food and tea and gently eased the remaining mourners out into the deep middle night. The Sergeant wandered homewards through the chill, serenading the endless sky with a pint-glass-and-spoon rendition of ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. By a strange grace, the percussionist appeared to have a good sense of direction.

Where the road forked, however, he surprised himself. Instead of going right, which would have brought him directly home to his bed, he went left, up towards the jungle and the shanty. The cool air was seeping into his muscles and driving the disparate parts of him back together. As he went along the line of a low wall and beside a stream, then down and over a hedge, he stopped singing and took stock. He felt empty, and that was good. His balance was returning. He was placid yet full of an inexhaustible energy, caught in the place between wakefulness and sleep. The compulsion to go in the wrong direction was still undeniable.

He realised he was walking through someone’s garden. There was laundry hanging out, and he nearly got caught up on an immense pair of bloomers. The frilled legs grasped for him like some hunting sea creature, but he fought them off with doggy digging motions, and passed by. He plunged through a thorny bush and out the other side, down a lane, and finally felt he was nearing his destination. The road gave way to a track, and the blackness of the lower jungle rose ahead of him. His feet touched hard paving, then soil. Dust. Grass. An elegant iron gate. It was familiar, for sure, but he had no idea why he was here. He went through. The moon overhead was vast and silver-white, seeming to fill the sky. He sat down.