Shola worked for Bad Jack.
On the face of it, the idea was absurd. The main thing about Bad Jack was that he was a fairy tale. There was no such person, and if there had once been a Jack, a brigand, say, or a murderer, well, he was by now at least three hundred years old: a bit long in the tooth to have been Shola’s employer.
But the boy knew all this – and he knew the difference between story and truth. He read Superman and watched Fox News, read Batman and watched Al Jazeera. He was not the sort to fret about a bogeyman. A child living on an island which is itself under threat of execution for the crime of having been environmentally raped has no need of invented villains. A person trading mountain honey with the Black Fleet for shoes and DVDs, running go-between for who-knows-what deals with the shore, did not conjure crooks out of the air. So when the boy said Bad Jack, he did not – could not – mean the nine-foot-tall pumpkin man or the web-footed devil. He meant the kind of Bad Jack who did business in the world, the kind who could command a measure of actual fear. The kind who might have enemies with Kalashnikovs.
‘Someone goes by the name of Bad Jack?’ the Sergeant asked, having come to the end of this line of reasoning and arrived at a response which was not patronising or ignorant.
The boy nodded.
‘Since when?’
‘Since always.’
Which to anyone under the age of twenty meant a length of time greater than a year, but you couldn’t say that, either.
‘He’s always called himself Bad Jack?’
‘No. This Jack is new. But there is always Jack.’
It was just distantly possible, he supposed: an unbroken line of Jacks come down from when Mancreu was a wild island port halfway between French North Africa and British South-East Asia. A secret king, a pirate, a smuggler, a crook.
He pictured a Lord of Misrule on a throne, a combination of ogre and imp in a mountain hall, surrounded by stolen virgins and treasure. Translate that: a thug with gold teeth and imported slave-women, wearing a gangster’s gold chain and thinking himself a monarch. Or an urbane sort of plausible sod from Boosaaso or Yangon with a business degree, taking a hand in the heroin trade.
‘And Shola… what did Shola do for him?’
‘Store things. Make rum. Make connections. Everyone went to Shola’s. Like an oasis with lions and giraffes.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’
The boy shook his head. ‘He comes, he goes. Everyone looks away. No one sees him. No one ever sees Jack, no one talks about Jack.’
The boy was apologising now. ‘I did not tell you, because no one talks about Jack. Or else.’ He drew a line across his throat, made a slicing noise.
‘Well, if he’s so bad, that makes a short suspect list. Who’d stand up to him?’
‘Other bad men.’
Fleet men, maybe. But that was a world of trouble. If this was Fleet, he had no remedy, and he wanted no part of it. He wondered what he would do if it was, how he would explain the limit of his power. Of his will.
‘Bad men doing what? Why?’ he asked instead.
The boy shrugged. ‘This was maybe a demonstration, maybe like Alderaan?’
Alderaan. The Sergeant was the right age to know what that meant. He had been to see the film the first time around, very young and very amazed as the orange and white starship went over his head, and then even more amazed as its enormous pursuer roared after it, going on and on and on for ever and shaking the seats. Movies had never seemed so big.
As for the boy, in the flatiron days of the hot season he wore a baseball cap he had begged from an Afrikaner ship-captain. It said in yellow letters on a starry background: HAN SHOT FIRST, and it proclaimed another of his global allegiances. Now he ended his suggestion on an upward note to make it a question, and he had that look again, the one which said ‘Is this my fault? Do you hate me?’ and most of all ‘Should I hate myself?’ The Sergeant wondered who had put that idea in his head, and how long ago.
‘You’re a good lad,’ he said, answering the important question first. You are filled with whatever it is which makes worth. You have not expended it or negated it. ‘You did right, telling me. You’re not, you’re not bad. You hear me? You’re a good lad. And this is good. I can use it. Find out what happened. Tomorrow I’ll go and talk to those men again, and I’ll talk to them about Jack. It’s better when you know what to ask. They’ll tell me things and that’ll be because of you. You’ve done a brave thing here today. The right thing. And I’m proud of you.’ He found he was having trouble speaking and, hearing his own voice, realised he was nearly in tears. He saw in his mind the boy standing mute and hopeful in front of an ugly armchair, its back towards him and a silence proceeding from it which could only mean a perpetual, corrosive disappointment. A moment later he realised that it was not the boy at all but himself, in that bloody room at home, and there was the electric fire and the print of a hunt and the ship in a bottle. He shuddered. Christ, he had to hold it together. It was not the time, not the time at all to be worrying over old, dead ghosts.
Sergeanting had an answer to that. When you were utterly fucked and you didn’t know what to do, you got busy making sure everyone else was all right and told them not to worry and by the end of it there was a good chance you’d convinced yourself. And if you hadn’t, well, sooner or later you either died or you didn’t and in either case the problem went away. He hauled himself into the present and ordered a forward march, but that did require a definition of forward, and he wasn’t sure where that was, so he just said ‘You’re a good lad’ again, and stood there.
After a moment in this hiatus, the boy slipped quietly back under his arm and rested against the Sergeant’s ribs. The weight was familiar, as if they had sat in this way many times over many years and the Sergeant was only now remembering.
We are changed, the Sergeant thought. Of course we are. Whatever this is, we’re deeper in it.
He shifted slightly and brought his other arm around to make it a real hug, and heard a gasp. When he looked down, he saw under the wide boat-neck of the smock a series of stark blue-red lines across the boy’s shoulders, and recognised them after a moment as bruises.
Some people knew horses and some people knew guns. There were navy men who swore they could tell you from the taste of the water what ocean they were in. You picked things up as you went along and these things became part of you whether you really wanted them to or not. He suspected that Jed Kershaw could tell from walking into a room if someone was about to get shitcanned or promoted. It was just part of becoming who you were.
And Lester Ferris was an infantryman the way the Witch was a doctor. He’d hiked through snowfields and crawled across hot rocks, marched through opium fields and jungle, been shot at and occasionally shot, and blown up. At various times and in various places he’d fought men with his fists and his feet, with broken bottles and with bits of wood picked up from the floor. Some of them had wanted to kill him, others had just been enjoying a donnybrook. Three days ago he’d broken a man’s arm with a frying pan to save the life of one friend and avenge the death of another, had known as he was doing it exactly how much it hurt and how much force was necessary to make sure of the bones.