Tigerman (8 page)

The boy shrugged his private shrug, or perhaps it was merely that his mind had wandered, for the next thing he said was that he had heard the British government had captured a flying saucer in the early part of the 1900s, and did the Sergeant know anything about it? Would the Queen know? Or would it be hidden away from everyone, the way the Roswell saucer was at Area 51? The Sergeant answered these questions with the same serious attention he would have given to anything the boy said, as if they were entirely reasonable and not at all preposterous, and after a while longer watching the waves they went back the way they had come – if not together, then two men going in the same direction at the same time.

They ended up, inevitably, at Shola’s. The Sergeant recognised by the boy’s heavy knapsack and his contemplative quiet that there was reading to be done. He had in his own pocket the paperback of
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
, and was finding it entirely engrossing: ‘Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.’ He therefore made his way to his own familiar seat, and the boy, without a backward glance, went to the bodyguard’s table, and spread out a sheaf of the work of the great Bendis, the bard of Cleveland. Shola obliged them both with quiet and what provisions they desired, and the common life of Mancreu came and went around them, until the day became the evening and the Sergeant’s left buttock began to ache in a way he could not any longer ignore. Age, he supposed, and bad furniture.

Shola peered at the Sergeant, appearing to read something in his face which was both familiar and a little bit sad. ‘Anaesthetic,’ he offered. ‘Special Mancreu style.’ He produced a bottle from beneath the counter and poured himself a single measure in a little red glass.

The rum was brown and thick, and there were veins like treacle in it. Every September, Shola harvested his small marijuana crop – the plant grew well on the island, at least on the sheltered side – and selected some of the best leaves. He dipped them briefly in boiling water to kill anything living, and pushed a handful into each of twelve bottles of sweet white alcohol. Then he buried the bottles in the mud at the back of his house, and the sun baked the mud and the mud coddled the rum, so that when he dug it up again in July the leaves were beaded with resiny sap. He shook the bottles one by one until the rum was the colour of crude oil, then poured it through a fresh linen cloth, and finally stoppered the finished product again and laid the bottles by for special occasions and dire emergencies. It was quite respectable. Mancreu men had brewed fortified rums for as long as anyone could remember. There were pictures of missionaries drinking them and losing their inhibitions, and stories of Knights Templar finding out about them and mistaking them for Christ’s Blood. The original indigenes had made theirs with a local hallucinogenic root, but no one used that any more because it was addictive and had the unfortunate property of sending you blind and mad. Marijuana was better, and you could sell it to the Black Fleet for Swiss francs. Shola no longer trusted dollars. The Chinese owned the dollar, Shola said. It was only a matter of time.

The Sergeant declined the drink with thanks, though part of him very much wanted to accept. A strange, Victorian spectre dangled over him: the image of a fat, hirsute colonial administrator taking to the local drugs and losing his mind, running naked through the streets. Children laughed and pointed, women smirked. Men sucked air through their teeth as something terrible and a little bit funny happened to his exposed member. People – undefinable people, but including Kershaw, Beneseffe, the Witch, Pechorin, and of course, Kaiko Inoue and even the boy – would think less of him.

Shola shrugged and poured half the glass carefully back into the bottle, then drank the rest. The Sergeant, feeling embarrassed at this evidence of his own prudishness, accepted a bowl of soup instead, and returned his attention to Eddie Coyle.

The men came in as Shola was shifting the café from one mood to another. He had turned on the neon lights and taken the tea kettle off the hob, but he had not closed the shutters. He had gone up to the private rooms to change his workmanish daytime shirt for the extraordinarily ugly red silk one he wore at night. Every day he looked exactly the same. Perhaps he had several sets of each uniform. The Sergeant imagined a daytime closet upstairs filled with vests and aprons and grubby trousers, and opposite it an old wardrobe filled with a row of Casanova blouses, vintage 1974 from Yeah, Baby! of Brick Lane, bought from eBay and shipped by sea to Qatar and then on to Mancreu, vacuum-sealed by Shola’s explicit instruction, lest the damp creep in and they arrive covered in mould.

There were five men, and they arrived as the Sergeant finished his soup. They were local but not familiar, and from his vantage the Sergeant had time to be uncomfortable with their intent faces and their focus. He shifted his weight from the bones of his arse to his feet, and felt the muscles in his stomach tighten as he leaned forward over his empty bowl.

The shooting started.

They weren’t systematic but they made up for it with sheer aggression. They had a shotgun and four Chinese AKs. Two fishermen having dinner before going out for the evening went down first, then the dogmeat seller who always smelled of chum. Two good-time girls at the bar – Isobel and Fleur, or so they had claimed – tried to dive behind it and were hit on the way over. Then Shola.

The Sergeant saw Shola very clearly, because they were on opposing trajectories. The Sergeant was heading out, knees protesting as he hurled himself forward, but protesting in a willing way:
fuck, yes, but don’t make a habit of it
. He imagined he must look almost horizontal, head forward, muscles straining to keep up with his lunge for the kitchen and the back door. He had a sudden image of the boy’s comic books. Men in those stories ran like this all the time. Heroes did. Towards the action, it must be said, but they were often indestructible and in one way or another well armed. They ran like this to answer a ringing phone, sometimes.

Shola was coming down the main stairs with his barman’s rag over his shoulder, buttoning the awful shirt, the wide smile of welcome vanishing as he saw the guns, replaced by a look of horror as his early customers – his friends, mostly – started to scream. He shouted ‘Stop!’ the way people do when something utterly awful is happening and will continue to happen whatever they say. There was no expectation that it would change anything, but it must be said. The human throat could not keep it inside. People said it to bombs and hurricanes and tsunamis and wildfires. The Sergeant had seen video footage, in 2001, of a woman standing on the street bellowing it at the Twin Towers.

It never made any difference, and no one expected it to. It was the soul’s voice, in hell.

Shola’s soul was inaudible, but between stutters and bangs the men saw him. Perhaps because he was coming forward, all of them reacted. First the AKs punctured him and he jiggled like a hula dancer, arms wide as if snapping his fingers and inviting you to join in. Then the shotgun tore a fistful from his chest and he stopped being Shola and became a dead thing, flying backwards and landing on his own floor.

The Sergeant realised he was kneeling in the kitchen, concealed by the angle of the bar, and staring back into the room. The boy was still sitting where he had been when it all started. His face was spattered with something which must have come from Shola, a strange granular mixture the Sergeant had never seen before. Brain and bile, perhaps. Or Shola’s lunch. The comic book in front of the boy was ruined, piled high with dripping anatomy. The boy was staring straight ahead, quite still. The Sergeant could not decide if he had frozen or if he understood instinctively that movement would kill him.

The killers for their part looked rather surprised to have succeeded so well. They had apparently been expecting some manner of resistance. They kept their weapons trained on the boy. The only question among them appeared to be who would kill him. The Sergeant heard one of them say
temoin
, witness. For God’s sake, he thought. Leave him alone. Shola’s dead. It’s over.

He peeped in again and saw the point man’s eyes go from alert to cold. The boy would die in a second or two. The decision was made.

He looked down at his hands and found he was holding a metal biscuit tin. He opened it and saw a smattering of yellow grains, smelled Bird’s Custard. What was he doing with it? Ludicrously, this was quite a dangerous object: shake a teaspoon of custard powder in a box and add a flame and the whole thing goes off like a bomb. It has to do with burn rates and surface area. ‘Explosive yield,’ the Sergeant’s demolitions tutor had told him, ‘is bloody complicated, so don’t piss about with it. If you’ve got to improvise, assume you need to be a long way away.’

And then he hadn’t got the tin any more. What had he done with it? He was kneeling in a pile of discarded yellow powder. He heard a gunshot, and almost immediately afterwards he was deaf.

Part of him – the trained-soldier part, a parcel of endlessly drilled responses which required no thought, which often took over in times of crisis – had been expecting a sort of woofing noise. The best he could have hoped for was a loud pop and plenty of light to blind them. He must have got the proportions exactly right, and Shola’s tin must have had a tighter lid than advertised.
Expecting? How had he been expecting anything?

He stepped through the kitchen door brandishing a long-handled copper frying pan.

Three men were on the ground, and the biscuit tin was sticking out of the far wall, blown open like a razor-edged sunflower. The two remaining killers were staring blindly, but neither of them had yet started shooting. The boy was under the heavy wooden tabletop. Adolf Hitler, the Sergeant remembered irrelevantly, had once been preserved from death by a tabletop.

He could see how it had happened quite clearly, even as he drove the pan down hard on the arms and hands of the first armed man and felt them break. The tin had flown in, and the man nearest had opened fire. A bullet, red-hot and trailing burning residues, had penetrated the tin, igniting the powder. The explosion – there was nothing else to call it – blasted the tin to pieces, firing the greater part into the wall and a cone of small fragments of hot metal directly at the hapless marksman. The bang had been deafening, which was why the Sergeant could not hear anything. The men in the fire zone would not die, though the closest probably would lose the sight in his right eye.

The second standing man was bringing up his gun. The Sergeant suspected the killer was mostly seeing fuzzy shapes, but he knew he was under attack and he knew what to do about it. A soldier or a militiaman who had seen some sort of combat. The initial attack is blunted, but that doesn’t mean you stop. You keep fighting, because the moment you stop you hand the enemy the initiative. That was right and proper.

The Sergeant’s technical approval did not stop him from batting the gun to one side and shattering the man’s face with the base of the copper pan. The man pulled the trigger as he went down, and one of his friends on the ground shrieked as he lost a toe.
Well, such is combat (you murdering prick)
.

The Sergeant saw movement and turned to find the boy poking another of the men on the floor in the eye with his comic book. Rolled tight, the comic was a stout wooden stick with a series of cookie-cutter edges at each end. The man screamed as his nerves reported the assault, and the boy kicked his gun away. The Sergeant hit the last man in the head, collected a gun and held it on them, counted: yes, five accounted for. His mouth tasted of bile and burning. He glanced out into the street: they had no backup.

Done.

And that was it. Five armed bandits versus a tween and a man having a quiet afternoon, and they’d won.

The boy looked around in wonder.

‘We’re alive!’ he said, and then again, Frankenstein style: ‘I am a-liiiive!’ The Sergeant wondered if this was shock, and thought it was, filtered through the boy’s weird, frenetic brain. ‘We pwn!’ the boy shouted. ‘We are alive and they are teh suxor!’

The Sergeant had only the vaguest idea what this meant. ‘Pwn’ was familiar, although he didn’t think you were supposed to say it out loud. Someone had explained it to him. He realised with a sickly feeling it had been Lieutenant Westcott, browsing his latest ebook in a Panther CLV, somewhere between Farah and Rudbar. Abruptly he was there as well as here. He knew he was remembering but couldn’t find the pause button. The playback just rolled on over the top of the men on the floor, the boy’s jubilant awareness of survival.

‘It’s a typo,’ Westcott had said. ‘They made it into a joke. You start with the simple statement “we won”. If you’re typing in a hurry, it might become “own”. Yes? And if you’re really going for it you might hit the wrong button altogether and get “pwn”. The lexicon is always growing. A lot of these games have chat channels as well as control keys, so that you can trashtalk the opposition. Like sledging’ – because cricket is always the clearest comparison. ‘So the kids type in a hurry because they’re under fire. Mostly war games, of course. The Americans use them to train the marines in teamwork, actually. Very forward-looking.’

The Sergeant had had a brief image of every sitting room in every town in the world becoming a training ground for marines. A wealth of potential recruits. Even more enemies. But there were always more enemies than allies, in video games. It had been that way since Space Invaders, which some people had actually wanted to ban on the grounds that it was wrong to suggest there were some fights you couldn’t win. You can always win, these people insisted, if you just
go for it
. Nike soldiering. Pep-talk strategy, and never mind the logistics, which will land you high and dry without food or body armour or even bullets. Real soldiers – soldiers like the ones in Hollywood films – could improvise a machine gun with a drainpipe and a bunch of clothespegs.

Like a man improvising a bomb with a tin of custard. He swayed, trying to remember what the real world looked like. The café. The café and Shola’s blood and bone everywhere and the smell of it. That was what it looked like now.