Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

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?’