Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

He took ibuprofen, drank Coca-Cola from the cellar, and kept moving. Movement would help, and he needed to be seen. By now, whatever NatProMan was doing about last night was in motion. If the whole thing had been identified as weird bullshit from a crew of fish-thieving East European wideboys then the business would be shelved. If not, investigators would be on the way. He owed London a report, so he went into the house and fired off an advisory: NatProMan pissed off about something, no military threat apparent, no details yet available at this end . He made it somewhat less informal, but the sense was that knickers were in a twist for no discernible reason and there was nothing to see here. He’d have to revise that later, but for now it was nicely in character.

He glanced at himself in the mirror. In character . When had he started thinking of Lester Ferris as a role to inhabit? He had known, in Iraq, a young man who had realised belatedly that the army life was not for him. The kid had been from some shithole, signed up half-drunk and was now seeing real bullets and bombs and wishing he hadn’t. So he pretended to be mad.

It was simple enough. He went on patrol in a Mickey Mouse hat he’d got from somewhere, and he carried his gun like a swagger stick. He’d never seen M*A*S*H , so he didn’t realise he was travelling a well-worn path. And after each patrol he’d push it a bit further until they had to take notice. They’d put him in a secure hospital cell indefinitely, and he’d carried on the game for weeks and months and faked a suicide attempt and bitten an orderly and finally he’d broken down and explained that he was faking it, he just wanted so very much to go home. And the doctors told him: ‘It’s okay. You’re going home, and no one’s going to punish you.’ But he deserved to be punished, he said. He’d faked it. ‘Yeah,’ the doctors said. ‘We always knew you thought you were faking it. But that’s the thing: you never were. It was real, and now you’re better.’ Which was about the most disturbing fucking idea the Sergeant had ever heard, until he came here and it was just life, and then he had the really disturbing idea that everyone in the world was carrying on this way all the time.

Mancreu turned everyone into a psychologist. And a lunatic, as well.

Well, that sort of thing got worse the more you thought about it. So he made a list of all the things he ought to do, would normally do. Pretend last night never happened: what would today ordinarily be about?

Well, yes: he would investigate the business of the dog, and he would give due consideration to how Mancreu’s new motoring enthusiasts could best be brought to consider their actions in a responsible and adult light. Somewhere in the back of his mind, sharp teeth flashed and something growled: like the light of burning quad bikes . He pushed the thought away. It was not exactly un-sergeantly, but it tasted of the mask and of those soldiers who couldn’t ever put the battlefield away. He thought of his war on tomatoes, and shook his head.

Second — always hidden, always present — came the matter of the boy’s parentage. Inoue’s work said the end was coming, and that meant he could no longer afford to dawdle, which, as he looked at himself in this exhausted clarity, was what he had been doing for months. On the other hand, Inoue had also given him a lead. And so had the boy: the unnamed woman who knew about the cave. To an average copper in an average situation that would surely scream ‘tart’, but here and now, not so much. The Protectorate forces were like American GIs during the Second World War: they had food and access, and they were exciting. When they had first arrived, both the men and the women of NatProMan had been the subject of intense local interest. So the boy’s family member — he did not say ‘mother’, did not prejudge, because it could be a sister or an aunt or even a grandmother — was probably lively, attractive, and might be single. She was still here. She might be a familiar face. Between the records at the Chapelle Sainte Roseline and that, he could narrow it down to a manageable number. Even if some of his working assumptions were wrong, it might work. He was not too proud to accept a bit of luck.

And not unrelatedly there was Shola, and that almost made everything else make sense. Five days. Five days ago we were laughing . Of course there was a dead dog on the bonnet of his vehicle. Of course there was a gang who wanted his attention, and a Ukrainian unit smuggling industrial quantities of drugs. Why not, if Shola could be slaughtered in his own house by men who would not say why? If there was still a distance being preserved between himself and the boy, then Shola was part of the bridge. Perhaps it was a fair enough price of admission, at that: If you cannot answer this, how can you protect me? If you will not answer this, how can I trust you? The boy would never put it that way, perhaps would never even think it, and yet it was written in him, in how he spoke. You didn’t judge that sort of thing and you didn’t choose it. Those calculations took place in the engine room of a person, grimy and irreducible. Something more is needed .

It was needed in any case: here he was, Shola’s friend, who had put on a fancy-dress outfit to avenge some torn comic books and an adolescent’s pride, who had blown up some big drug smuggler’s hoard on a whim, but somehow couldn’t do much for a murder he himself had witnessed, whose perpetrators he had in custody to question at his pleasure. He had learned a new phrase in his comic book studies: Bizarro World. It was the place where everything was wrong. He found himself wondering how you’d know for sure you were there.

Well, that was sergeanting, for sure. Something more was always needed, and your job was to get up and deliver it. Advance to meet the enemy.

He drew breath. Fair enough. He had a real direction of his own, something which came from who he was rather than the masquerade of last night. That was NatProMan business, after all, and he didn’t get involved in that.

For the rest he could talk to Dirac and get some perspective. Dirac was crazy, but his craziness was the right sort, the sort which let him keep being Dirac even when the world didn’t want him to. That was where to start.

He went to see the Frenchman and laid it out, and Dirac listened. They were sitting on the balcony of the townhouse where he lived, which was a proper wrought-iron thing more suited to a lovestruck Juliet than a brace of hoary soldiers. There was a pot of Turkish coffee on the table, mellow and sweet. Dirac wore a bathing suit and a towelling bathrobe, and when he moved there was always a possibility that his genitals would peep out of the suit next to his thigh. The Sergeant chose on the whole to avoid these occasional appearances and had therefore positioned himself a little way back from the cheap marble-topped coffee table and directly across it. The round white stone concealed Dirac’s body from navel to knee, which still meant that the bulk of his broad chest, with its profane, nautical and religious tattoos, was visible when the robe gaped. There were flowers all around the balcony in lead planters. It seemed surprising that Dirac should be a good gardener.

He knew how to listen, though, with the attentiveness of a man who has listened to briefings in order to stay alive. He listened now to everything the Sergeant knew about Shola’s death, and about the dog gang and whether they might be related, and even about Pechorin’s fish, because in the story of Lester Ferris the harmless washout that was still an open case. There was no mention of the boy because that was something else, and not within Dirac’s particular competences.