‘Tomatoes,’ he said. ‘You cut tomatoes. With your hands?’
‘Yes.’
‘Next time, with grenades!’ the boy said, and mimed throwing one. ‘Ka-blam! Already cooked.’ He sighed again, then removed from the side pocket of his bag a small pot, and, using his little finger, touched a tiny flake of the wax within to the Sergeant’s hand. The relief was ecstatic, so sudden it almost hurt. He gasped.
‘Good?’ the boy asked.
‘Yes! Where can I get some?’
The boy administered more salve, but sparingly. He looked concerned. ‘You better come with me. See the Witch.’
‘What witch?’
‘She is American, the good kind. Johns Hopkins. That is a very good school.’
In the Mancreu worldview, Americans were people who got up early and ran five kilometres before breakfast and urged you to improve yourself. They seemed to believe that the right mixture of Nike, granola and hard work would turn anyone, anywhere in the world, into a millionaire. And, of course, there were darkside Americans too, the ones where all that virtue and enthusiasm found its outlet in villainy, whether for personal gain or the security of the state. It was tricky, with Americans, because you never knew which you were getting. But the boy was a brand snob. Johns Hopkins was a good school, so the Witch was at least somewhat acceptable.
‘She’s a doctor?’
‘She is a witch,’ the boy said. ‘She has warts. It is very traditional.’
In the event, the Witch had no warts. She was actually rather beautiful, in a distracted way. The Sergeant knew it was a beauty the boy would not be able to see because he was young.
‘Lester,’ the Sergeant said, when she asked his name. ‘Lester Ferris.’ He listened to it, wondering. ‘Lester Ferris.’ It suited someone else.
The Witch was looking at him, and he realised he had been repeating the words in different tones, trying them out. ‘Sorry.’
She nodded. ‘Soldier?’
‘Yes. Well. Not for much longer. Retiring.’
That apparently concluded the smalltalk. ‘Show me,’ she said, then winced when he dutifully extended his arms.
He felt the need to apologise. ‘I wasn’t intending . . .’ To go berserk? To see the red mist and fill up with hate for a yard full of fruit? ‘I didn’t know this could happen,’ he amended firmly.
She turned his hands. He half expected her to say they’d have to come off. She wore a pair of loose trousers and a kind of long shirt with pockets at the hip. It smelled of turpentine, and he wondered if she was an oil painter as well as a witch.
‘The tomatoes retain some of the chemicals in the Discharge Clouds,’ she said. ‘Not in the fruit,’ as he stared at her aghast, ‘but in the leaves and stems. They break down into . . . well. You washed yourself in all kinds of puke.’
He twitched. The word ‘puke’ sounded wrong from her, like a duchess with only one ear.
‘I’ll make a salve up for you. Do you want something for the stress, as well?’
He wasn’t sure what that meant.
‘Right,’ she muttered. ‘My mistake.’ She looked at his right hand more closely, and growled. ‘Damn.’ She tugged on his right ring finger. ‘What’s this?’
The finger was crooked, price of a scuffle a million years ago. Was it in the line, or in a barracks somewhere? The Sergeant couldn’t remember. He couldn’t feel anything in it at all. He explained. She left him there, rummaged, came back. He was expecting the salve, but instead she carried a roll of twine and a wicked little hooked knife, the kind used by fishermen for nets and by farmers for gelding. He devoutly hoped she proposed to fish, but she did not. She reached over, back, and pasted something onto his finger, then cut a short loop of twine and tied it tightly around the base. ‘Look away,’ she said, and when he didn’t she sighed again and said, ‘All right.’
Something wriggled in his hand, a muscle in spasm. A tired finger. That finger. Dead, but now it wriggled.
She took the hook knife, and he reached over with his other hand to pass her the string, but suddenly she was cutting open the pad of his red, sausage finger along the line of one of his grazes, a deft, deep aperture welling blood and pus and something else, a grey-blue thing with a leech mouth, and then the grey-blue thing was a vein and the leech mouth belonged to a black worm which she nailed to the table with the point of the hook knife, and she slammed his hand deep into a jar of clear water which smelled wrong and it bubbled – cauldron! – and he recognised the smell, a kind of disinfectant he hadn’t seen since Bosnia. The worm writhed on the table, bleeding. Probably bleeding his blood as well as its own.
‘Hate those little fuckers,’ she said. ‘After a few months they can get into your brain. Disgusting way to die. I told you to look away,’ she added unsympathetically as he retched. ‘Don’t you dare spew on my carpet.’ But then she relented and agreed that it must be quite a shock, and gave him a dozen tablets, once a day with food, to make sure he didn’t get infected.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Breanne,’ she replied.
‘What?’
‘Breanne. My name. Not Brian or Briony. Breanne.’
‘Thank you, Breanne.’
‘What are you doing in Mancreu, Lester?’
‘I honestly have no idea.’
‘You’re with NatProMan?’
‘No, I’m at Brighton House.’
She stared at him for a second, as if he’d claimed to have come from another world, and then blinked. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re him.’
‘Yes.’ But if that meant anything to her, good or bad, she evidently felt no need to pass it on.
He dawdled, inventing twinges and concerns, until she smiled and very politely kicked him out.
After that, the boy determined his friend needed to spend more time relaxing. ‘You come and meet people,’ he ordered. ‘Learn Moitié!’ The word was short for ‘moitié-moitié’, literally ‘half and half’, the Swiss name for a fondue made with a mix of cheeses and the Mancreu name for the mishmash French-Arabic they spoke when they couldn’t be bothered with English.
The Sergeant had tried to tell him he was tired, or that he couldn’t for official reasons, but there was, he discovered, nothing more persistent than a small boy of uncertain parentage and various talents who has decided he wants to show off his expertise in haggling to his big, slow friend. The boy crouched on the passenger seat of the Land Rover and pointed: ‘There! Left! No, totally the other left! Hashtag: SATNAVFAIL! Zomg!’ And then they would arrive in a side street or at a corner shop with a faded board outside advertising something as unhelpful as ‘fish’, and the boy would be welcomed, greeted like a prince, and there was a special price, yes, of course.
The Sergeant made a note of the Leavings, the times and places, and took himself for a run, letting the inner sadist ride him until he was sweating and weary. Then he showered and went out to the car.
3. Murder
THE SERGEANT TURNED the Land Rover slowly around a narrow bend, using the horn. The tyres complained on the surface of the road. Mancreu high heat was ghastly, made hard by the flatiron rocks and the merciless reflected light from the ocean all around. The salt dried the air and the dust coated the skin and mouth, and you could feel you were dying of thirst even when you were drinking. When the cold came it was carried on sea winds from the south, but the warm heart of the mountains and the shelter of the Cupped Hands broke the force of the gale on the lee side. The south side was stripped and gnarled by storms and then battered by rain which fell in continuous streams from the thunderheads. This day was in between, the tail end of a bread-oven month, white caps on the water to the ocean side a warning that the rainy days were coming.
He worried about the boy as he drove, and about what would happen to the remaining civilians when the island was eventually purged. It had bothered him from the beginning, but more and more as time went by and the inevitable end drew closer. He had seen refugee columns and resettlement c
amps around the world, and he did not care to imagine what the boy would become by living in one. A warlord, in the end, or a corpse. Such places did not admit of middle ways. The joy would be cut from him, for sure.
The Sergeant had a plan to deal with that crisis if – when – it arrived, but he was still working out the detail. There were preparations he had to make, investigations he had been conducting quietly for some time. But he had not actually put the plan into action, and he had not spoken to the boy about it. There were good reasons. Sound reasons.
He braked again to go around another impossible bend, avoiding his own eyes in the mirror. None of these reasons was a lack of resolve on his part, or a lack of personal courage. He was almost sure.
The town and the port spread out below him, the invisible ships surprisingly close to the land. He felt his eyes flick away. Everyone found ways not to see what was in the bays. The Fleet could have painted itself pink or burned to the waterline, and no one would have remarked upon it. People saw the harbour and the horizon and nothing in between. Even the fishermen who went out and zipped in between the big vessels, selling fresh fish and crab, and the traders on junkboats who bought and sold DVDs and Coca-Cola and fresh meat and anything else they could lay hands on – even they had a strange amnesia about which ships they visited. It wasn’t feigned. It was a habit so totally ingrained as to have become part of reality. The enormous ships were a fact of life, and it was a fact that you couldn’t see them.
As with everything else, the boy was an exception. He bartered with the ship captains, argued with them loudly and crudely, demanded – and received – favours, tours, T-shirts, and team hats. He had a Delta Force hat, and a Real Madrid jacket, and a signed copy of something called Transmetropolitan which the Sergeant understood by the jubilation it had entailed to be a major coup. The boy had won them at dice or paid for them with gossip or simply asked for and received them. It seemed the captains admired his cheek, or maybe they were just desperately grateful for someone who acknowledged their existence. It didn’t matter how tough you were, how psychologically motivated. It hurt to be invisible, even if that was the whole point.
Like Diego Garcia, of rendition infamy, Mancreu had been found new uses by democratic governments wishing to avoid the consequences of their own inconvenient liberties, and by corporations seeking relief from the onerous duties of civilisation. The border on the map had been softened and in places entirely cut away, so that a strange zone of legal limbo was created between the breakers and the three-mile limit. In this maritime twilight it was often hard to tell where nations ended and other entities began; where corporate activity shaded into organised crime, spying into a trade in unlawful commodities. Clustered across the Cupped Hands lay a mass of unaffiliated shipping: prisons for deniable detainees and hospitals for unethical procedures; data havens, grey banks, untaxed subsidiaries; floating harems and forced-labour factories, auction houses for contraband goods; torture facilities for hire. So long as it never touched the shore, the business of the Fleet was invisible.
When the storms came in above the southern mountains, the ships drew apart from one another so that covert prows didn’t gouge holes in unacknowledged hulls; so that secret masts didn’t scythe across false-flag decks. When the weather abated, they huddled, so they could share cable television connections to the land and shout news to one another from deck to deck. American intelligence officers and their corporate-side cousins traded Sara Lee brownies with Poles for vodka and Frenchmen for cigarettes. Brits gave up HumInt and lapsang souchong and bought red wine and fresh milk, and sometimes played cricket on a long, lean supertanker moored forever at the northernmost limit of the zone. And all of them traded snippets of information to the Mafia and the Triads in exchange for occasional housekeeping jobs, ex gratia hookers and something to read. And the crooks were good for vanishings, when an interrogation grew heated and a subject expired from his own ignorance. On other deployments the Sergeant had occasionally seen that sort of thing written up by contractors as self-injurious passive psychological attack culminating in asset compromise. But here, on the ships of the Black Fleet, those terms of art were unnecessary. So long as the Fleet kept its activities to the waters of Mancreu, no reports were ever written. Intelligence was sourceless, all analysis was done on site and only the pure information ever emerged. The Rule of Law within the territory of the western democracies was preserved, and the conscience of ministers was notionally clean. Mancreu was a tapestry of questions unasked, because the answers were obvious. It had been going on for so long now that, at least to a global press whose owners sipped Chardonnay with prime ministers, it was no longer distressing.
The Sergeant turned the wheel and felt the beginnings of a skid; the road surface was covered in scree and shale. He allowed the car to drift a little, enjoying the play of the tyres and the tarmac, then straightened up and let his route take him in amongst the narrower streets.
Kershaw – his first stop, out of politeness – was not available, which meant the American was probably receiving information or instructions. The Sergeant left a message at the desk with a promise to come back later. He went over to the harbour and Beneseffe showed him the scene of the great fish theft, which was predictably stinky but otherwise not terribly helpful. A fully staffed crimes unit could have taken fingerprints and statements, worked out who had used the winches and the hauler. It would still have been almost impossible to learn much from the physical evidence because everyone likely to have committed the crime was allowed to use the equipment. It was remotely possible that someone not from the port had sneaked in, known how to work everything, gone off with the fish. But that person would then have to dispose of the fish, and how precisely would a shepherd explain his sudden good fortune? Had they fallen as rain? (And on Mancreu in particular: if they had, would anyone buy them?)
It seemed unlikely that this crime would remain mysterious for very long. There was a limited number of things you could do with four tons of fresh fish.
Pursuant to his other investigation – the one which related to his long-term solution for the boy’s evacuation – the Sergeant asked Beneseffe casually if he knew who his friend’s parents were.
‘Which boy?’ the Portmaster responded.
‘The one who’s always around. Comic books and a big old cellphone. Slim, dark hair. Smart.’
For a moment he thought Beneseffe might actually be able to tell him. There was a flicker of recognition in his face. Perhaps it was common knowledge. That boy who was orphaned in the storm of ’02, whose parents died of a fever, who survived the car crash back in ’09. Perhaps this would be simple. But Beneseffe shook his head. There were a lot of boys on Mancreu, even now. ‘Ask at the schoolhouse,’ he suggested.
‘He doesn’t go to school.’
‘If he doesn’t and he should then they’ll know who he is, won’t they?’ Beneseffe pointed out, his tone implying that if this was detective work he considered it easier than people believed.
And they might know, at that, the Sergeant thought. Absence might be conspicuous. He would ask – but not today. Tomorrow. If he asked too many questions all at once, people would notice. The boy might find out about it indirectly, and that was not part of the plan.
Standing outside in the sunlight, he considered his idea of dropping in on the Witch as if by accident, but felt now that this would amount to an imposition of his presence. She must recognise it for what it was: a loneliness, and an approach. It would be better instead to make overt what was in his mind. Send her flowers. Ask her out. She was quite capable of refusing him with grace and making the matter relatively painless, he knew that. He wondered if she liked to read, as well as to play music. He had books he could lend her. Perhaps they would swap books. Perhaps reading would become an evening together, and between pages of a novel she would undress, and kiss him.
He sighed. He should have made his proposition months ago. It might have been possible. Now there was a fatigue about his desire
, as if they had been lovers for too long and the flame was guttering, leaving them with a comfortable friendship and nothing more. His mind offered him visions of her, and his body was keen enough to accept the notion, but more and more they came with the hollow familiarity of repetition, and faded away without heat.
Seagulls landed all around him in a cloud, shrieking. One of the open boats was coming in, the bait high and vile in the air. The Witch was banished. Well, now he could not go and see her. Her skin was muddled in his mind with the smell of drying mackerel. Hardly good kindling.
At a loose end, he went out onto the seafront and sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the dock like a child. The dog? The mugging?
Mancreu shuddered, and he rolled himself hastily away from the water’s edge. He had no desire to take a dip in the diesel-filmed harbour, swallowing seagull shit and oil. He stretched out a hand to steady himself on the cobbles.
The tremor faded.
He settled, resuming his seat, and listened to the sounds behind him in the town. Someone was brushing a broken bottle into a pan, and over on the other side of the Portmaster’s office a lobsterman was chasing a stray lobster along the ground. The Sergeant laughed, but then the man turned and he was wearing a cheap surfing T-shirt, and it was – absurdly – one he had seen before, dozens of times, in Afghanistan. Someone must have donated a crate of them, because the kids all wore them when they went to school.
He sighed. Afghanistan had been a mess. The Americans called it a Total Goatfuck, and they laughed and swore and kept their spirits up by firing huge bombs into the cave systems. Several of the local section commanders had taken to wearing stetsons and sheriff’s badges when they went out in public, and one actually made a temporary drive-in and screened a bunch of cowboy movies dubbed into Pashtun and Farsi. ‘I want them to know where we’re coming from,’ he said. ‘I want them to understand that this is how we do.’ The Afghans watched the movies, some from the makeshift benches in the drive-in and some through field glasses from up in the hills, and there was a great deal of debate over coffee and raisins about whether Rooster Cogburn really did have true grit. Then one morning the projectionist was found with the second reel of High Noon pushed into his open chest.