Tigerman (21 page)

‘To be a father you’re going to put on a mask and be a monster?’

‘A hero.’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘Once, one time. To show him a win. A world where sometimes someone does fix it. Doesn’t just walk away.’ Doesn’t just sit and stare into space, and give up, and die by inches.

‘For a son you ain’t got.’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s not funny!’ White Raoul shrieked abruptly. ‘That’s not funny at all!’ The scrivener dropped his head and leaned forward over the counter, shuddering. The Sergeant started forward to help him, but Raoul waved him off, his face wet. ‘Not funny!’ He plunged his hand into the black paint and across the face of the ballistic shield, fingers shaping the pigment. He slashed one way, then the other, and screamed, hammered his fist down onto the worktop. Paint splashed. His other hand delved into the yellow pot and clapped down dotting and slicing, and suddenly a tiger’s face leaped from the flat surface, made real by the contrast. The eyes were luminous.

Raoul reached for the second plate, and this time he used only the yellow. He moved his hand four times, and a shape like a mathematician’s
x
appeared, the lower portions curving back up. He went to make one more gesture and then snatched his hands away, forced his breath out slowly, like a man backing away from a fight.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘They always want more than they can carry. That’s pride, not the art. The smallest mark, the most meaning, and stop.’ He pushed the plates across the counter at the Sergeant. ‘There.’ He pointed at the tiger’s image. ‘Man see that in the night-time, he’s going to run like hell. Might shoot at it, too, instead of your thick head.’ The image seemed to ripple in agreement.

‘And this one?’ The Sergeant pointed to the second plate.

‘Backplate, Honest. Sometimes you got to leave in a hurry.’

‘I know that. What does it mean?’

‘Mean? Means you. Tiger’s face again. See? Cat’s mouth?’ He traced the lower part of the
x
, turned it around, and the Sergeant almost jerked back from it, the same tiger’s face conveyed in bare lines. His tiger, as it had stared down at him in the graveyard. The smell of the paint was heady and thick.

The scrivener touched the plates. ‘Touch-dry already. Waterproof in an hour. Now go. Show your boy.’

‘What’s not funny?’

‘Most things, I guess.’

‘When you were working. You said it wasn’t funny.’

‘I was possessed by the spirit of my future. How should I know?’

‘Tell me. Please.’

White Raoul sighed. ‘Nothing about this is funny, Honest. Take those to your boy and say you ain’t doing it. Throw them in the sea and tell him you want to take him away from here. See what he says. Maybe there’s a family for you after all. Leave your victory on this island where it belongs.’

‘Do you know,’ the Sergeant asked abruptly, ‘who his parents are? Are they alive?’

White Raoul stared at him. ‘Is that a price, Honest? I tell you, you take him away and forget all about your Tigerman? Even if he don’t want to go?’

After a long moment the Sergeant shook his head. White Raoul sighed and sat in the basket chair again, and closed his eyes. ‘Then I am sleeping now, Honest. Not talking. Go do what you do. Go.’ From the corners of his weak eyes, lines of moisture ran down his flat white cheeks, and he dabbed at them with leaded fingers, and turned away.

Outside, Lester Ferris rested his back against the black oak door and let the sun bake him. The armour plates were in his hands. He felt committed, filled with the taut excitement of an operation approved and begun. It was a sergeanting state of mind: make your decision in advance, and even in disaster everything thereafter makes sense.

Pechorin and his cronies had a hideout somewhere, a place where they took girls and got drunk. They went there every week. This time, the Sergeant would follow and take his moment with Pechorin. He would introduce the Ukrainian to Tigerman, the demon of Mancreu, and if possible capture that moment of bowel-loosening fear for posterity. A handy snapshot would adorn the inside lid of his locker for evermore, and more than a few messhalls, too. Rough justice, but justice, for sure. And then he would fade into the night and that would be that.

Barracks humour. An education in Lester’s Law. Nothing more.

He went back to Brighton House to put on the suit.

THE BOY HAD
laid it out for him on the bed, and he felt a curious sense of purity as he changed. He began with undergarments supplied to work well with combat protective gear. Then he stepped into thick, blade-resistant cloth trousers and a similar shirt, then the body armour with White Raoul’s scrawled insignia, and then the utility belt, heavy and tight and covered in curious things the boy had felt he might need. Next there were gloves, thick and reinforced across the knuckles and braced to strengthen the wrists. A slick camouflage webbing wrapped around the whole to make him amorphous, a little mutable – it was for urban snipers, according to the box, and why anyone had imagined he might require it here he had no idea. In a separate bag was the mask, the boy’s special creation. He left it where it was for the moment.

He stared at himself in the mirror. The stele glimmered back at him, unfamiliar and slightly alive. He wondered if he was claiming it, or if the ownership went the other way around. Only one thing was lacking – but when the Sergeant reached for his side arm the boy stopped him.

‘Batman has no gun,’ the boy said.

‘Maybe Tigerman does,’ the Sergeant suggested. The boy shook his head very gravely.

‘No. He does not carry a gun because he does not need one. Men who carry guns think that guns make them strong, but they are not. Tigerman is a ghost, and he has skill and he cannot ever be stopped. He doesn’t carry a gun because he destroys the idea of the gun by existing.’

The Sergeant was painfully aware of how he could be stopped. The boy seemed to sense this, because he shrugged. ‘Also, it would not be good if you shot someone.’

This was clearly true.

He left the gun off, though he did sneak it into the glove compartment of the tiny, rusted hatchback which had been the Consul’s wife’s personal runabout, and before that part of a job lot brought to the island by the chemical men. They were known locally as
toutous
because they looked like turtles. Without plates it was as close to anonymous as he could hope for. He allowed his sidekick to drive – on Mancreu, you learned as soon as you could see over the wheel – and conceded that the boy might make a video recording insofar as that was possible without revealing himself or coming into the line of fire, but it was not to be shown, shared, broadcast or otherwise disseminated, ever.

‘And if anything goes wrong, you scarper. Dump the car in the alley behind the mission house.’

‘Scarper?’

‘Make yourself scarce. Drive away fast. Skedaddle.’

‘Vamoose!’

‘Yes. That.’

‘If anything goes wrong, I shall totally vamoose. But nothing will.’

The Sergeant sighed, and glanced at the sky. Some high cloud, some clear sky, the promise of rain before dawn. ‘Take us on a loop through the town,’ he said. ‘Get us under the awning at the fish market. Let a few people go past us, wait for a car like this one. We’ll buy some dinner at the same time.’ He drew a long coat around himself, hiding the suit.

The fish was expensive and the boy insisted on haggling, which served them well because just as he was finishing up not one but three
toutous
came in at once. The Sergeant looked upwards again. Fully half of the sky was covered now in solid cloud. The other part was gauzy. He sighed. ‘Get ready,’ he said. ‘We leave when they do.’

The boy looked at him curiously, and then his mouth opened in a startled O. ‘Satellites!’ he said. ‘You are thinking of satellites! That is hardcore!’

‘Watch the road,’ the Sergeant told him.

The boy brought the car out and around, then across the shanty to a ridge where they could watch the gate of the NatProMan barracks on the north-east side of town.

The Ukrainians left Beauville very fast, driving in convoy and heading for the central mountains. The Sergeant watched them through his lightweight binoculars, while the boy did the same with the enormous antique field glasses. The boy had parked in a drainage ditch on a hillside west of the shanty, and from here they could see Pechorin’s barracks and his likely routes. It was a good lookout point, well hidden but with a broad view. ‘Smuggler post,’ the boy said, when the Sergeant asked. ‘Keeping an eye out for John Revenue!’

The convoy passed two small farms the Sergeant had briefly considered as possible locations for the hideout, and zoomed onward towards the foothills. He had a weird moment of inversion, looking down on them. This must be how the Afghans had seen him all the time: hasty and energetic and ineffectual. He could see, from here, how you could just detonate the road underneath and watch the wreckage slide down into a ravine. It would have a satisfying elegance – a distant, clinical justice, all that busybodying brought to one climactic head and then silenced. He shivered.

In fact, Pechorin was coming this way, heading for the Iron Bridge over the white Lucretia River. The hideout must be in the mountains proper, a hillman’s hut or something like it. The trucks hurtled on, not directly towards their position but off along a spur and through the sparse beginnings of the real jungle to the lower peak. They drove for half an hour, then up into the winding lanes which led over to the south side. Abruptly the lights zagged and juddered up ahead, the trucks bouncing and banging their way across terrain rougher than they were really able to deal with, and then a little later the glow vanished entirely as if covered in a blanket.

‘Cave,’ the boy said at the same moment the Sergeant understood.

‘Give them ten minutes to get settled inside.’

They waited, watching the dashboard clock. The orange plastic hands, styled for cheery city shopping, snicked loudly as each minute passed.

‘Let’s go,’ the Sergeant said. ‘What’s the best way?’

But the boy was already moving the car very slowly along a drainage ditch, over what seemed to be a precipice – the Sergeant’s hands tightened on the door handle, but he forced himself to breathe out and not shout, and his forbearance was rewarded. The noise of the tyres on gravel stopped, and they ducked down between old concrete walls and rolled along on silent wheels. ‘Smugglers,’ the boy said. ‘I told you.’

Indeed, the Sergeant realised, this was not a second route to the entrance, it was the proper one, major pirate engineering using stolen half-pipe segments no doubt intended for some bit of chemical plant back in the day. Arriving at the cave by the public road was for amateurs.

He grinned. This would be fun.

The Sergeant alighted from the car and made sure that the boy went on – just a weary traveller on his way home – then turned and slipped away into the scrub. He felt clumsy at first, and then entirely at home. That stand of bushes was tall enough to hide him, that boulder would make good cover, those trees were an ideal landmark. He felt the terrain around him, not seeing it in his head like a tabletop map but knowing it the way he knew the location of his limbs. He realised he had been committing the island to memory since his arrival. That road went down into the valley, that one to the peaks. That one was hard in monsoons but fine in the dry season – today it would be passable in the Land Rover, tough on foot. Over towards the volcano there was a small village in a valley with a defensible approach, but the headman was old and his sons were fractious. Two miles down that way was the Iron Bridge, and beyond it a strip of dense jungle and then the Beauville shanty. Brighton House was behind the curve of the mountain . . . He knew it all. He shouldn’t be surprised: Always In Combat, after all. He glanced up: some cloud, sporadic patches of sky. If the helicopters came . . .

But there would be no helicopters, and no need for them.

He passed the truck, very careful in case the Ukrainians had posted a sentry. No: bad practice. Part of him wanted to shake his head and sigh. They were off duty, so they weren’t being soldiers, and never mind that they were deep in a foreign land. A large part of him wanted to give them a stern talking to, a bit of parade-ground beasting. But their lack of good sense was to his advantage, so instead he peered up along the line of the path. There: a shadow in the rockface. The entrance.

The Sergeant removed the mask from its bag and studied it. The boy had taken a gas mask and decorated it with fragments of fur and bone. The long, mournful face was sinister enough, but with these additions it became feral and judgemental. The nose of the respirator hung down to cover his neck – a tongue or a stinger, it wasn’t clear – and in front of his mouth was a strange echo chamber into which the boy had inserted a papery disc like a kazoo’s. He breathed into it and heard a soft burr, like the first grunt of a motorcycle on a cold morning.

There was music playing inside the cave, so they would not hear him speak. He wondered how he had come this far without putting the mask on, and knew he had been avoiding it. Experimentally he raised it to his face and said, ‘I am Tigerman,’ and heard the words came out in a deep, insectoid buzz, as if a wasp’s nest had a voice.

I am Tigerman.
It should have been absurd. Here, now, he wasn’t sure he could live up to it.

He looked down at the thing in his hands, lying open like a black rubber flower. There had been a moistness to the inner surface against his cheek, and the shape was fitted to embrace the human head. He wasn’t sure whether it would kiss him or swallow him. He had a nightmarish flash of the shiny interior sticking to his skin for ever, turning him into . . . what? A man with a silly mask on his head; but in comic books it would be something more, something strange and awful and powerful. He rolled his shoulders. The gas mask was to complete the effect and to conceal his identity. The boy had made it while he watched. There were no old, dead gods or mad scientists involved, just tape and glue and scissors.