He opened a comic and began to read it the way he read soil and weather.
The first thing he understood in that hour was that it was never about hitting people. It was always about proving a point. Hitting people was just a background, the way a uniform was. The message varied like the soldier. For Superman, that point was about justice and ideals. He really was a perfect American dream. For Batman, it was something else altogether. It was a statement that no matter who you were, how tough you were or how wicked, there were some things you simply could not do. He was not primarily about punishment or even prevention. He was a living cypher, a message that the set of actions which were available to human beings did not include certain crimes, and that line was absolute, made absolute not by him but by what he represented, the human capacity to say ‘no’. They could not be prevented, not every time, but they would be uncovered and they would be punished. The Sergeant found himself thinking about Bosnia, where a war had been fought by the West to achieve exactly that same result, and about Afghanistan, where the nations which had pursued Karadžić and Mladić for their misdeeds had decided that some of those things were acceptable so long as they were done for the right reasons.
The boy asked him to hold something while he marked it in chalk, and the Sergeant put down the comic book and shifted to accommodate the easy pressure of curving lines drawn across his chest and legs. Then he was detailed to cut something along the marks, and found that it was not hard at all. There was even a satisfaction in it, a simple lift in his mood for a simple task unequivocally completed. The boy squinted at his work, and then approved it.
It was very companionable, sitting and making in this way. The Sergeant and his uncle Mike had once made a go-kart together, out of a box crate and some wheels from a discarded perambulator. Mike had insisted at the last minute on adding suspension in the form of bed springs, which had complicated the procedure enormously and resulted in a strange, nauseating ride. All the same, it had been grand. The young Lester had ridden it every day until it tore itself apart. He had not had the knack of reassembling the springs, and the kart had mouldered in a corner of the garage because Mike was living overseas. More than likely it was still there.
The Sergeant found himself wondering whether the boy would enjoy it as much as he had, whether they might repair it together. The warming notion soothed him, and he drifted like a man sleeping in the bath. He considered other things he and the boy might make together: musical instruments, chemical experiments, and even cakes. He had enjoyed cakes, in his earlier life. Somehow you didn’t get much opportunity to make cakes as a sergeant.
‘What you really need,’ the boy said at last as he tied off a thread, ‘is a sign from White Raoul.’
The Sergeant nodded. He knew it was absurd, even a little mad, but it felt like the right thing. The world was being ludicrous at him, so he would be a bit ludicrous back, and he would make that small part of it around him a little better. Call it atonement, perhaps, for being the one to reveal to the boy that adults do not automatically have all the answers, and that justice does not flow like water from people who are taller than a child. If the boy thought he should have a sign from the scrivener, then: good.
So he told the boy that if it could be arranged, he would have such a sign, but that it must be a secret, and the boy said that the scrivener’s calling was like the confessional, that he would die before he told a single one of the secrets he carried in his strange head.
‘God is inside him like the ringer in a bell,’ the boy said solemnly, and when the Sergeant glanced at him – religious faith not being part of his stated world-view – he shrugged and added that people believed all kinds of stuff.
Perhaps this lack of faith was the reason he would not enter the shop. ‘I may not come in,’ he informed the Sergeant as they stood at the door. ‘It is not allowed.’
Much negotiation had been required to secure an audience at such short notice: a rapid-fire telephone discussion in Moitié passing far beyond the Sergeant’s ability to comprehend. There had been a woman’s voice first, sharp and annoyed, and then eventually she had yielded the device to someone else: a man who spoke low and slow, to whom the boy was – if not actually respectful – gentle and wheedling. Then the boy had taken some items from the costume pile and required that the Sergeant drive him to the waterfront and circle the car until called for. Favours were being called in, the Sergeant sensed, and gravest contracts signed. But none of these, it seemed, would bind him personally. The debt would rest with the boy, or perhaps Raoul was discharging some earlier IOU. The boy was stubbornly opaque on the matter, and would only talk about what came next.
‘It is your quest. Your tree on Degobah!’ the boy said. ‘Maybe you meet Darth Vader. Full of evil win!’ He looked worried for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, no. You meet only White Raoul. I have told him already what he must do for you. I have given him what he needs. He is a crazy old man, maybe also a prophet. Like Hunter Thompson found Jesus, maybe.’
‘With a beautiful daughter,’ the Sergeant muttered.
‘She is ordinary,’ the boy said reflexively, and then he looked away, so the Sergeant immediately wondered whether he was in love.
It would make sense. The boy was an enigma and so was she: Sandrine, the hallowed virgin, secret and perfect. The boy loved winkling out secrets, and it seemed there was no door barred to him. If anyone on the island could fall in love with with the princess in the tower it would be this wolf child, courting her without knowing what he was doing, losing his heart. She would be fifteen years his senior or more: a hopeless, unrequited passion. Or the Sergeant could be seeing things, making up stories like a sad old man.
He took a breath and walked into the scrivener’s shop, smelling the air, tasting salt and solvent.
The first thing he noticed was the smoke, thick and blue. It was grandfather smoke, hanging in sheets and curtains, wrapping itself around his hands and teasing his mouth with bitter fingers. Thirty-five-year smoke. If you could open this room to the light, you’d see that everything in it was preserved behind a glaze of solid smoke.
White Raoul sat in a basket chair which hung from the ceiling in the darkest part of the shop. The rope was old and dry so that it creaked against its hook. The man had patches of dark brown skin at the corners of his eyes and mouth and rising on one side of his neck, but the rest of his face was a stark, uncompromising white, like the belly of an eel or a clapboard church. He had a narrow face and yellow-silver hair cropped less than a half-inch from his scalp, and around his chin was a fine, soft beard.
His hands clung to the wicker of the chair, and of all of him they were the most vibrant part. The skin was stained with inks and pigments in a strange motley, so that from the elbow down he was a mosaic or a tortoiseshell of reds and greens and blues. Beneath the colours they were working man’s hands, strong and scarred even now, but the nails were trimmed very precisely and the skin of his fingertips looked soft beneath its gaudy coat. Pumice, perhaps. Someone must do the manicure for him, someone with a very certain touch.
‘I’m Raoul,’ he said, as if the Sergeant might genuinely be unsure, ‘and you’re the soldier.’ His voice was hoarse, but when it caught – when the apparatus of his speech unlocked from whatever spasm habitually held it – there was an echo of depth, of a tone fit for hymns and hellfire sermonising. In between times he hoarded his breath, dropped words and letters into the gaps between his inhalations. Cancer, the Sergeant thought, or poison-gas damage to the lungs. Pneumonia. Emphysema. Gunshots. Even partial drowning.