Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

He went to the prison to lay down a deal.

He chose the man in cell two because he had been easy to talk to. It didn’t matter if he had lied, he was interested in dialogue. The golden hour was past, he’d have regained some of his vinegar, but the Sergeant had more to work with now, had a magic word to open doors. He let it set the tone as the marine on duty pulled the door closed.

‘I want to know more about Bad Jack,’ he said. ‘For information relating to Jack, I will release you. I will put you on a boat. I will assume that you are just what you say you are, a man who got in over his head. That you fired into the air. But I want to know,’ the door shut with a very final clunk , ‘everything.’ The marine must have heard. Well, if Kershaw didn’t know about Mancreu’s apparent crime kingpin already, he would know now.

‘There is not Bad Jack,’ the herder said.

‘Oh, but there is.’

‘No. It is not real. Everyone knows this. What is Jack? A silly story for children.’

‘I hear Jack’s real enough. I hear he runs the island. I hear the man you killed worked for Jack, so that means Jack doesn’t like you.’

‘He did not work for Jack because there is not Jack.’

‘I think those nice guns you had — those very foreign guns — I think they came from Jack’s opposition. Tell me they didn’t.’

‘There is not Jack.’

The Sergeant nodded. ‘Perfect. Then lie to me. Tell me a lie about Jack. Tell me a fairy story.’ The man stared at him. ‘Go on. It’s all right. Make something up. Jack comes from the moon. Jack can fly. I don’t care. For a lie about Jack, I will arrange a nicer cell. One lie, about a man who isn’t real.’

And now he saw fear. ‘There is not Jack.’

‘If there’s no Jack, then lie to me.’

The man closed his eyes and turned away.

‘No Jack.’

‘No Jack?’

‘No Jack.’

The Sergeant took a map from his pocket and laid it out, and then he came around the table hard and fast as if he was in a bar fight. He captured the herder’s arm and shoved one shoulder hard into his chest, took the man’s centre and locked his elbow against the joint. He held the helpless hand over the map. ‘Where in particular is there no Jack?’

The man flinched away. The Sergeant wrestled with him, hauled him back. Was this abuse? If he’d been interrogating a prisoner of war, certainly. But this was a civilian matter. He was not physically harming this man. He was manhandling him, which was probably illegal in Britain, the Sergeant didn’t know, but they weren’t in Britain and the governments of the world had quite deliberately made ‘legal’ disappear on Mancreu. It wasn’t wrong, he was pretty sure about that. It was nasty, but not wicked.

He looked down at the herder’s hand. Hovering and twitching over the map, unwillingly giving up secrets. The prisoner’s aversion to the paper was strong. He did not want to touch it. But there were some places he did not want to touch more than others. The Beauville shanty. The harbour.

‘No Jack!’ the man was shouting. ‘No Jack! No Jack, no Jack!’ And the marine was opening the door, though he clearly did not know what he was going to do now that it was open, now that he could see what was and was not happening.

The Sergeant let go. ‘Deal on the table,’ he said. ‘I know about Jack. You’ve just confirmed it, haven’t you? But I want to know who he deals with and who doesn’t like him. I want it all. Because I want to know who killed Shola and why, and I don’t mean you and your friends, I mean who paid for it. For that information, I will let you go. I will arrange travel. Passports, even.’ He wished he could ask about caves and heroin and NatProMan soldiers dealing dirty, but he didn’t dare and probably this poor sod would know nothing about it. And if he did, the Sergeant himself understood too little to tell a lie from the truth. Don’t ask questions whose answers you won’t understand , DI Burroughs had said. Well, fine, but you’ve got to start somewhere , Lester Ferris wanted to object now. What did you do when you had the middle but neither end, and nothing to reel them in with?

The herder was staring at him in dismay, and at the marine as if to say ‘Help me.’ The Sergeant sighed and went out. With the others he made the same offer, simple and clear, and saw them understand it, saw them try to pretend they didn’t, and turn away. Outside in the corridor, he found he was incredibly angry with them all for being so stupid, so stubborn. He shouted, an explosion of noise without shape because no curse could adequately express how stupid all this was, how very much it was in his way.

The marine, evidently unsettled by this evidence of passion, followed close behind him all the way to the outer door, as if concerned he might steal the plastic spoons or the ancient, stinking coffee machine.

Being in Beauville and with a moment to spare, it was natural that he should call in on Kershaw and talk shop. Today, of course, shop for Kershaw would be the Tigerman footage, and the Sergeant took care to be genuine in his expression of sympathy.

‘All right, Jed?’

‘Go away, Lester.’

‘I gather some of your lads got beaten up by a sex pervert last night.’

‘Seen from space, your entire country looks like a gusset.’

‘Be that as it may, Jed, I understand this pervert actually flashed them his man-parts. I do hope they’re not so traumatised by this terrible experience that they’ll never save the free world again.’

‘They were Ukrainians, Lester, I’m sure they’ve seen scarier things than a sex pervert’s genitals.’

‘You mean he actually was a sex pervert?’

Kershaw stopped and appeared to consider this. ‘God, I wish. That would actually be terrific. I would love that. And do you see how insane that is? I am fallen far, Lester, when I find that I am wishing, in my official capacity as chief civilian authority in theatre of the NATO and Allied Protection Force on Mancreu, for sex perverts. I don’t suppose anyone’s actually saying that, out there?’

‘No idea. I’ve been out and about. I saw the telly at Dirac’s place earlier. Bloody weird.’

‘You think? Back in the US, we get guys who can fly and breathe under water and beat up heavily armed soldiers all the time!’ Kershaw scowled. ‘You tell me, Lester. You took down those guys from Shola’s. What was this?’

‘Commando,’ the Sergeant said smartly. ‘Dirac said Russian. I thought maybe Chinese, what with all that rolling and that, but he says Spetsnaz. I gather he’s a bit of a connoisseur of your international ethnic fisticuffs. Was that stuff in the background really what I think it was?’

‘If you think it was a boatload of fucking heroin bricks made from processed opium, then you think what I think but I don’t know yet. There’s a guy coming. An investigator. That side is all his problem.’

‘Top dog, I imagine.’

‘Arno. Dirac knows him.’

He’s asking exactly the right questions, the Sergeant recalled, the ones where you either tell the truth or you tell a big lie, one they can check. ‘Sounds ideal,’ he said, thinking: well, shit.

‘Lester, I have to ask: have you ever had any hint of anything like this on Mancreu?’

‘Like what? Commandos? Well, there must be a few out there.’ He nodded at the sea. ‘And if that’s really about a city’s worth of heroin in the video, that’s got to be Fleet crap, hasn’t it? Cheeky sods, bringing it onshore. Maybe they were trying to cut someone out of the supply line and he got cross.’

‘Yeah, but it’s weird.’

‘Weird, Jed, I have definitely seen on this island. Someone threw a dead dog at me the other day, you know. I’m still a bit cross about that. The culprit will feel the pointy end of my boot shortly.’