Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

When it was done, Dirac sighed.

‘Okay, Lester, you got two problems.’

‘Two?’

‘Yeah. Your third one is taking care of itself. The Ukrainian asshole is in hospital. Someone beat the crap out of him last night.’

‘That was him? The patrol and all the helicopters?’

‘ Bien sûr . Pechorin is very unhappy, he is deep in shit for reasons I do not want to know, he has cosmetic surgery on his nose. That will do?’

The Sergeant nodded. And then some .

‘So then there is the gang and Shola. The dog, that’s sick. Okay? That is fucking sick. But it’s kids, it’s idiots. Okay? Professionals, they would kill you, and they would do it between the Xeno Station and Beauville, where there is no help and you would disappear for ever. Right?’

‘I’d do it that way.’

‘Me too. Also it’s what those Pathan bastards would do, and they are the fucking world leaders in making you wish you were somewhere else. They come from a part of the world with death in the fucking title, you know that? The Hindu Kush ?’

‘Yes.’

‘And so we are professionals and they are artists and we agree that this dog thing is amateur. It’s someone who watches too much Tarantino, although I hear Tarantino likes Balzac so maybe he’s not so bad. But okay: you will find those guys if you look for them. The issue is supply. You get what I’m saying? And it is in both your problems.’

‘The guns and the bikes.’

‘Yes. There is a supply of new shit. Overseas shit. Where is it coming from? Who on Mancreu has any money to import shit? Us. Us, and maybe a criminal who deals with us.’

‘Bad Jack.’

‘No. I don’t think so. I think there’s no Jack.’ He scowled. ‘ Mauvais Jacques . And the new Mancreu Demon, too. It’s bullshit. This island is going crazy. You know what I saw the other day? I saw a boat come from the Fleet and land on the shore. With people in it, and they got off. They had a fucking picnic on the beach.’

The Sergeant stared at him. ‘Fleet people?’

‘Fleet people, fucking casual. Like tourists. They came onto the island for a cheese and wine party. I choose to believe I was drunk and misunderstood.’ Because if he had not been drunk, he would technically have witnessed a breaching of Mancreu’s tangled covenant. The shore was a barrier between the world which was denied and the world which could never be acknowledged. The Fleet did not touch the shore. Not ever. It was how the boy made his money, by running errands and trading luxuries between land and sea. Dirac belched. ‘It’s all coming apart. So fine, the world’s coming to an end, okay? But Bad Jack? No. Who says so?’

The Sergeant had decided he would lie about that. The boy did not belong in this discussion, not even with Dirac. ‘One of the killers. “Shola worked for Bad Jack.” Like that was the end of that.’

‘Then go back and ask him more. Offer him a deal.’

‘I did.’

‘What terms?’

‘Just a deal.’

‘You have to be specific. If you are not specific it’s just a noise you make because you want something. It’s only tempting when you lay it out, point by point. I will give you this, this, this and this, but you must give me this. It is a price comparison, like shopping. And you encourage that he haggle. Once he haggles, he has accepted the principle: he will cut a deal.’

Dirac said this with the surprising certainty of one who knows, and the Sergeant found that he had raised his eyebrows at the Frenchman in what could only be a ‘how the hell do you know?’ expression. Dirac rubbed his eyes with his fingers and blew air through his cheeks. ‘After the Africa thing, they sent this Italian, you remember? I thought, “Great, he will laugh and talk about racing cars and girls and we will get drunk.” But the guy was like a laser. He’s inside the door and he’s asking me when I decided, who did I talk to, like he already knows everything. He’s asking exactly the right questions, the ones you either tell the truth or you tell a big lie, one they can check. And he has a deal. All the stuff they were worried about — that I took money, that I planned to do this, that I’m a partisan, pahpahpah : it wasn’t true. But this deal he is offering, it’s good enough that I seriously have to think about taking it and I’m not even guilty. Okay? My commander already offered me a deal, like you did: some deal, whatever, we work out the details between us. You say yes to that, you basically admit everything already. But with this guy. . nom de Dieu . Him I want to say yes to. The way he puts it on the table, I want to say yes.’

‘And did you?’

A shrug. ‘They took it off the table again when they realised I hadn’t done anything. Threw me to the military system, but I’m such a hero by then I get medals and lunch with the President, whatever. I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I was just angry. But you see? You have to have a deal. You can’t get him to do it, he will make up a deal he can turn down or one you cannot offer. Tell him, “For this, you get that.” You find out about where the guns come from, he gets a room with a bathtub and a view, better food, whatever. He’s not smart, Lester, or he wouldn’t be a low-rent killer on an island the Americans are going to incinerate. That’s not a growth sector.’

Let us hope.

They finished the coffee, arguing lightly about whether the Foreign Legion, the Royal Green Jackets, or the Rhodesian Light Infantry-as-was were the toughest bastards in the game. Somewhere in the house a phone rang, with an actual bell. Dirac ignored it, and the caller gave up. A moment later he or she tried again, and then again, and finally Dirac growled that something must actually be happening and stamped away. ‘There’s cognac,’ he said, pointing. ‘It’s fucking awful, but when you’ve said that it’s not that bad.’

Cognac on top of pain pills, caffeine, burn salves and unknown topical analgesics did not seem like a brilliant idea, so the Sergeant poured one for Dirac and splashed some water into his own glass, then took the lid off a small bottle of vodka and laid it on the table where the Frenchman would see it. In the event, Dirac didn’t see it, because he didn’t come out again.

‘Lester,’ he called from inside the house, ‘I am completely wrong. Please bring the cognac and come and watch television.’

The Sergeant ducked through a low door and found himself in the sitting room. The television was a new one on a spindly glass table. Dirac had turned a chair around by the small dining table and was sitting astride it like Christine Keeler. The remote was in his hand, dangling down so slackly that for a moment the Sergeant thought he might have had a stroke, and the cry had been some garbled plea for help. The Frenchman was staring at the screen, and he had the sound off, either because he couldn’t stand the commentary or because he simply hadn’t thought to turn it on yet. With a feeling of extreme fatigue, the Sergeant turned to look.

Someone else, evidently, had had a camera at the cave. And not just one — they must have been everywhere. It didn’t really look as if it mattered very much that the boy had deleted his YouTube-ready revenge footage, because this was better, so much better, and it was already on just about every channel in the world. ‘Anonymous footage’, the caption said, ‘sent to our offices in Sana’a.’ There was a parenthesis afterwards, to let you know that was in Yemen.

The first shot showed Tigerman as a shadowed figure picking his way like a heron between the trucks. Then he went inside and the picture switched over to grainy reddish-brown, some kind of enhanced view. The figure stood eerily still; a fleshy darkness wrapped him and he was gone.