Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Sometime after midnight, he became aware of a new sound, like geese and thunder, and the smell of woodsmoke touched his face.

He walked to the east windows and looked out towards the bay.

Beauville was burning.

The descent into the port was a delirium splashed in bad colours across the dark. The shanty was scored with the bonfires of abandoned farmsteads and upturned cars, and columns of smoke rose and spread and reflected the flames. Beauville was washed in the light of its own conflagration. Here and there, knots of angry people destroyed the streets through which they had walked all their lives, with special attention paid — it seemed at least to the Sergeant, gazing in mute horror through the windows of the Land Rover — to those places which were particularly beautiful or welcoming. Here a façade painted a hundred years ago with scenes from the lives of fishermen split and boiled; there a small mews, with its absurd front doors like tiny portcullises, crumbled and fell in. Looters brandished their trophies, fought over them like gulls, and then lost interest, letting them drop or adding them to the nearest blaze. Almost every item could have been had at any time over the last months, taken with respect from empty houses left unlocked by those who chose not to destroy what they could not carry away, but now Beauville was delivering judgement on those who had departed and all their worldly effects, declaring them dead and exiled and showing its contempt for anyone too cowardly to see the island to its end.

He drove past the Witch’s house and saw that it, too, was in flames, the solid porch and the high-backed chair from which she had encouraged the scrivener fuelling the blaze. The flowers were strewn all about. Because she was foreign? Or because she was kind? He slowed the car, wondering if he should search for her, but the fire was old. If she had been inside, she was dead now, and no amount of stupidity on his part would change that, even if it did make him feel better. If she was not inside, then entering wasn’t even brave, it was asinine. He cursed. There was gear in the armoury which would help with this: firefighting equipment, oxygen. He should go back and get it, but to turn around now smacked of desertion, so he drove on.

At the next crossroads he chose the harbour road, aiming in part for the scrivener’s shop. Breanne would have gone there, he suspected, if she could. He would go past, see if they were all right. He could offer to put them up at Brighton House. He pulled out his cellphone, slapped the battery in and called the boy, got a synthesised female voice telling him the person he was calling was not available. He left a message: ‘I’m in the car. Beauville’s gone to shit. If you need me, call or go to the house. Bring whoever you want,’ he added after a moment, thinking of the elusive guardian. ‘There’s room for quite a few.’ He wondered if he would come back to find a horde of street children or a family of twenty seeking refuge in what was still technically consular accommodation, and what diplomatic shit that might kick off.

Towards the seafront, where the buildings were closer together, the fires faded as if the riot was saving the best for last. An ugly calm lay over the streets like the anticipation of a beating. Away from the source, the Sergeant heard the sound of the mob as he had from up on the hill, a kind of birdlike laughter on the wind. He realised too that he had been driving through fouled air, that there was ash in his snot, clogging his nostrils with black slime. He blew his nose, then cleared his throat and almost vomited, jerking to open the window and spit nauseating burned rubber stink onto the street. He sluiced water from a bottle in the back seat into his mouth, partially inhaled it and snorted it out, then abandoned his handkerchief to the gutter. And now, standing outside the car, he could smell something else, a grim mix of animal and hair. He looked around and about, then caught it again. That way.

He got back behind the wheel and rolled the Land Rover slowly forward. Let it not be a person , he thought. Let it be a fox or a cow. I don’t really care. But not a person and not anyone I know . And then he felt, when he saw it, that he had brought this on himself, that he had conjured it.

Spartacus . He couldn’t remember the name of the general who had ordered it and that pleased him, but he recalled the rest. Westcott had talked about it endlessly, the moment when savagery had transformed the wobbling Roman Republic into an enduring empire: security at the price of freedom. When Spartacus’s rebellion was defeated, the Via Appia was lined with six thousand crucified slaves as a warning to the world.

From each of the telegraph poles on the road leading down to the waterfront dangled the corpse of a dog, front paws nailed to a coarse crosspiece ripped from a packing crate. Not six thousand. Not even a hundred. But still a manifest monstrosity and an earnest of more.

He got back into the Land Rover, hating the world.

The Portmaster’s office was shuttered, heavy steel blinds chained to the concrete pediment, and the waterfront was almost deserted. The lobstermen had taken their boats to more amenable moorings and the lines of storage shacks along the docks gaped open, corrugated-iron walls bare and so rudimentary that burning them was an empty gesture. Twenty minutes with a hammer and a few bits of wood and the same metal would be in the same position, if anyone cared.

The scrivener’s shingle hung halfway along the waterfront, a single lantern glowing dimly beside the papal writ. The windows were dark, but they always were. White Raoul never drew the curtains. His den was a mystery, a magician’s cave. All along the road was rubble and splatter, dark stains which might be blood, and others — paint, booze, water and piss. This was a battlefield, sure as any Lester Ferris had ever seen.

Rolling the Land Rover onward, the Sergeant was starkly aware of how wide and exposed the promenade was, like a medieval killing ground. He had been driving without lights anyway, and now he stared out into the night, cursing the limits of his eyes and wishing for night vision goggles, for a partner to watch his back. And where was the boy, anyway? The Sergeant tried not to think of him running with the pack, putting Beauville to the torch and screaming like a madman, but if he wasn’t doing that then he might be in trouble, be hiding, be burned. He didn’t seem the type, but no one ever did. This kind of thing came from nowhere and washed you away; it was elemental. Or had that strange parent come for him, whisked him off to some mountainside for safekeeping, and was he even now looking down on the orange pall and wondering where in all that stink and flame was his friend the Sergeant? But if this last, he had only to pick up his phone messages and respond.

Call me. Is that so much to ask?

The Land Rover crunched over something brittle, a vase or a bottle. The noise was shockingly loud and made him jump. He lurched the car one way and then the other to throw off the first shot from a sniper’s rifle in case that same sound excited a response in some lethal watcher on the rooftops, feeling sure there was no sniper, not here, but doing it anyway because you did, you followed your instincts and asked why later, or sooner or later you paid for it.

An improvised explosive device, now. He wouldn’t rule out something like that here, not tonight. A big drum of diesel oil lifted from the harbour. What a fine blaze that would make, if a fellow knew how to rig it — and no doubt some did.

The car jiggled again, this time riding over a long piece of hosepipe. No, not a hose: a cable, and fat as a man’s arm. He stared at it, following the long spaghetti line around in a wide spiral and down to the edge of the water. It was draped in seaweed and muck. In fact. . Yes, it was the cable TV connection to the Black Fleet, he realised, ripped up and severed, and for the first time he felt a sense of sympathy with the marauders. Let the Fleet feel something, even if it was just having to fall back on DVDs and movies on highly covert iPads and laptops.