‘See what?’ one of the men demanded. ‘Only what, please?’
‘Nothing,’ the Sergeant said hastily. ‘Nothing at all.’ When Pechorin raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘Let’s hear it’ – not in the manner of a gossip, but that of a cautious leader of men – the Sergeant shrugged unwillingly, then went on. ‘Only there’s a small list – not more than a dozen – that I can’t account for that way, even with the Brighton House records and asking people to come forward and so on. It’s early days. I’m sure they’ll turn up.’ He laughed. ‘It’s not as if the witnesses are consistent. This morning someone told me it’s a man with a monster’s face. Except that the next one says you can’t see him because he’s invisible. He has hands like a tiger, or a mouth like a heron. And he comes and takes your teeth while you sleep. It’s a bedtime story for naughty children. Unless maybe there’s a market for teeth somewhere. Eh? Hah!’
He nudged the Ukrainian with thunderous good humour, to indicate that everyone should laugh. They did, but politely, because it wasn’t very funny. It was true that there was no market for human teeth because these days dentists could make them out of ceramic and sooner or later they’d just grow them, that was how it was going. Organs, on the other hand, absolutely could be bought and sold around the world. It was a quite legitimate medical trade, one which states regulated very carefully to prevent abuse, meaning that the abuse was profitable and sophisticated. There was a hospital ship in the Bay of the Cupped Hands called the Reluctant Alice, where you could buy a heart for $120,000, not including surgery. The Alice was one of the more receptive vessels of the Black Fleet, so much so that she very nearly advertised. The numbers were common knowledge on Mancreu: a whole body was only $210,000 and a liver was $80,000, so it was actually a better investment to plump for the corpse entire and reckon to resell the other organs. Of course, if there was a sudden lack of buyers you’d be out a lot of money, but in practice that seldom happened. Someone, somewhere, always needed something.
But suppose for a moment that the problem were reversed: you might find there was no compatible donor, and if you were in a hurry – and what rich transplant patient ever felt he or she had too much time before the situation became critical? – well, under those circumstances it was whispered certain groups would undertake commissions. If no suitable cadaver could be found, one might be made to order. Soldiers, their medical records on file, would be a particularly good source of organs for anyone with access – politicians, say, or spies – and, of course, soldiers died all the time. There would almost certainly never be any need to help them along.
‘Nothing in it,’ the Sergeant said. ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. But if you do see anything strange, call me. And call for a medical team, just in case.’
Pechorin worked his way through that. In case the victim has been robbed of his kidneys and is sitting alone in a room in a bath of ice waiting to die.
The Sergeant left them to gather their gear.
The prank – he was thinking of this salutary lesson in manners as a prank, so that if he ever had to testify about it he could truthfully say that was how he’d seen it – was shaping up nicely, but there remained the question of what to wear. The Sergeant had no idea how to begin. He was not someone who spent a great deal of time on clothes. Beyond sewing on a button or a new rank insignia, he had also never done any kind of tailoring. The boy, however, asserted that he had made costumes before, for festivals and parties and for his own enjoyment, and appointed himself quartermaster. This would be better than a normal costume, because it would be real. In fact it must be perfect. Yes, perfect – and would the Sergeant stop wriggling and please allow him to take a chest measurement?
The Sergeant obediently raised his arms and waited. He had been thinking of something rather more ad hoc, but realised now that the exercise of imagination and skill in all this was as much a balm to his friend’s hurt as the prospect of justice itself. In the end, it was also better by far that the boy should be party to his redress than that it should be given to him as a gift. He therefore suffered himself to be measured in his various dimensions, and tried not to growl when the waist came up larger than his vanity would have liked. Thinking about it – with his hands in the air and his back straight while the boy measured his chest – the Sergeant understood that what he was proposing to undertake was in some measure stupid and dangerous, so he would do well to be prepared for it to go wrong. He stopped the design process, walked the boy down the long corridor to the newest section of Brighton House, and opened the armoury.
After a while, the boy said: ‘Holy socks.’
The weapons were all along the right-hand wall and in racks which slid out on rails to allow many men to arm themselves at once. There was protective gear at the back, and specialist situ-ations kit – demolitions and bomb disposal, engineering, survival and scuba gear on the left. The boy was particularly impressed by a row of sharkpunches – slim aluminium batons tipped with a shotgun shell for dealing with ocean predators on dive missions – and averred that Roy Scheider should have had one. Immediately next to the entrance were various sorts of chemical-weapons suits, because you didn’t want to have to go any further than was absolutely necessary when you needed them in a hurry.
The Sergeant wondered what it must be like to see so much appallingly dangerous stuff gathered together in one place, so many strange and expensive tools of destruction and defence, for the first time.
Finally, the boy said: ‘This is not a good room,’ and Lester Ferris thought he would cheer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t. But it’s got things in it I might need.’ He knocked on an armoured vest, and sighed.
The boy nodded.
Together, then, they sat with the comics and the inventory list and drew up an outline of how he should appear. They began with words:
dangerous
fiendish
indestructible
monstrous
capable.
The boy proposed also
cannibalistic
but the Sergeant demurred, and the boy in return struck off
professional
as being more something a soldier should be than a caped crusader. They got stuck for a while, and came up with
scary
which was redundant, and
lethal
which made them both uncomfortable, however true it might be that they wanted their creation to seem that way. And then the boy suggested
shocking
and, of course,
awesome.
The Sergeant laid down a few hard rules for equipment, and then withdrew to watch his friend work, bemused by the sketches the boy drew on sheets of paper from the stationery cupboard and by the piles of gear he fetched and discarded from the armoury. Mancreu and even Pechorin, Lester Ferris understood well enough, but it occurred to him now that he did not understand the business of superheroing at all. He knew it as a thing to be admired and as a brief diversion in childhood, but he had never considered it for what it was or how it might actually be done, or even what it might mean if one did.
He was going to put on a funny hat and fight crime. He was going, however briefly, into their world, and you didn’t do that without learning about where you were going. He needed to see the fictional landscape of hopes and aspirations and the characters who inhabited them. Symbolic terrain.