‘Got a seen-the-world face. Been boiled honest, like soup. You’re worried about secrets. I tell you, this is between us, whatever comes. You understand? I don’t talk about it and nor do you. That’s part of the price for both of us.’ The accent meandered from Paris and Sudan to somewhere American. The Sergeant guessed Miami, but he didn’t know what a Miami accent sounded like, so he wasn’t sure. Perhaps there wasn’t one. Everyone said Miami was full of people from somewhere else.
Raoul waved. ‘Come to me for a stele. For my blessing written down. But maybe I should write it so you don’t find no more battles. Just happiness. You maybe fall in love with my girl and raise goats. Goats’re a good life for an honest man. They are a pain in the ass and they smell like hell, but they give milk and they taste good when you take one f’the table. Yes. I shall write a stele for a man of peace and you go on out in the world with my Sandrine and make her content, hey?’
‘She’s just a girl,’ the Sergeant said, then realised he had no idea. Until this moment he’d had her image in his mind, a slim-hipped almost-woman with dark eyes staying firmly behind the counter. She could be anything at all.
‘Yes, she is,’ Raoul said. ‘After all this time, she’s just a girl.’ As if this was the saddest thing he had ever said, and the Sergeant had missed the point entirely. He puffed out his cheeks. ‘And you won’t marry her and live a life of goats.’
‘I’m sorry.’
White Raoul leaned forward in his basket chair.
‘No, you’re no kind of sorry. Not now. When you look back and understand I was right, well, you maybe will and then again perhaps you won’t see you could have done different. Faugh!’ He lurched to his feet and went hand over hand along the counter, favouring his left leg. ‘Dead flesh, dead island.’
‘Not dead yet.’ It didn’t sound convincing.
‘Bullshit.’ White Raoul balanced, moved the bad leg with his hands and pulled sharply at a leather strap, a brace. The leg stiffened and he hissed. ‘I got messed up. Should have seen it coming. Should have wrote my own stele, but it ain’t allowed.’ He grimaced and lifted a bucket of yellow-brown paint onto the counter, then another, of black. ‘Shit. I got old. When did that happen?’
‘Some time ago.’
The scrivener laughed and it was a huge sound. Pirate captain, the Sergeant decided. Not poet.
‘Hah,’ Raoul said. ‘True as hell. But not polite, and you knew I’d think that was funny, too. Now lay your hands flat. I need to touch you and I don’t want you jumping about.’
White Raoul reached out over the counter. He brushed down the Sergeant’s face and chest, a clinical contact, dry and diagnostic. ‘My eyes are bad.’ He growled in his throat, a deep, dog noise. ‘You think I’m seeing you as you are, Honest? Then you’re wrong. I’m looking back from out of the future. Where’s the man you want? The you who wears this sign? Oh, yes. There, and there and there he is… your Tigerman. Sure. You’re gonna make a famous victory, all right, just like the boy says.’
But if this victory pleased him the joy was invisible. He shook his head, then pulled open a drawer behind the counter and drew out a curved grey tablet, then a second. For a moment the Sergeant assumed they were pieces of a Cadillac, a fragment of some strange Mancreu moment where the mayor of Beauville had ridden around in a huge American car. Then he placed them: ceramic plates. Body armour, the kind worn by special-forces soldiers in frontline operations, although these were his own, from the Brighton House armoury. The boy had delivered them in advance.
White Raoul slapped the first plate down on the counter and drove his hand into the black bucket, swirled the paint. Over time, the toxicity must be killing him in a dozen different ways. ‘No brushes, Honest. I have to touch the stele. You and these both, becoming one through me. It’s about touching and heart. So the heart: who is this Tigerman inside you?’
‘A hero. Like in a comic book.’
‘Tcha. Of course. That’s not enough, Honest. What does he care about?’
The Sergeant had never had to lay his heart out for a stranger. His body, yes, for surgeries and medicals. But the heart was private and unvoiced. He tried: ‘Justice.’
White Raoul sneered. ‘Bullshit. I want to hear about you! The real truth. What are you doing here in my house? You ain’t a religious man. Ain’t born here, don’t care about the island scrivener or his magic paint. That stuff’s for locals, Sergeant. You make nice about it so’s not to be rude, but you wouldn’t ever come in, not until today. And now here you are, getting a stele from an old black native with rotting skin. Why’re you doing such a thing, Sergeant of Her Majesty? Hmm? Tell me why.’
He couldn’t say it was a prank. That would be unpardonable, and he was already ashamed. But he didn’t know what to say instead, so he tried truth, of a sort. ‘Shola. The stolen fish.’ Seeing that he was making no ground: ‘Missing dogs.’
White Raoul scowled like a headmaster. ‘A dead man you barely knew. Tcha! Open your mouth and don’t think. What do you care about?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘What?’
‘I don’t—’
‘WHAT?’
‘Family!’ It came out like an admission of guilt. ‘Family.’
The scrivener exhaled, and nodded. ‘You got one?’
‘No.’
‘None?’
‘Sister.’
‘You’re not doing this for your sister.’
‘I—’
‘Come on, come on! Who’s this family that you care about so much?’
‘The boy,’ he said at last, looking into his hands.
‘The boy?’
‘The one who brought me here.’ And then, with sudden hope, ‘Do you know who he is?’
‘It’s not about what he is to me! What is he to you?’
‘I thought…’ He shivered, then dropped his voice so the boy wouldn’t hear, leaned across the counter to White Raoul. ‘I thought I could try to take him back with me. I thought he might need a home. And a dad, maybe.’
White Raoul stared back at him. ‘You doing this to be a father?’
‘I suppose.’
‘There’s easier ways.’
The Sergeant nodded. ‘Still.’
‘To be a father you’re going to put on a mask and be a monster?’
‘A hero.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Once, one time. To show him a win. A world where sometimes someone does fix it. Doesn’t just walk away.’ Doesn’t just sit and stare into space, and give up, and die by inches.
‘For a son you ain’t got.’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s not funny!’ White Raoul shrieked abruptly. ‘That’s not funny at all!’ The scrivener dropped his head and leaned forward over the counter, shuddering. The Sergeant started forward to help him, but Raoul waved him off, his face wet. ‘Not funny!’ He plunged his hand into the black paint and across the face of the ballistic shield, fingers shaping the pigment. He slashed one way, then the other, and screamed, hammered his fist down onto the worktop. Paint splashed. His other hand delved into the yellow pot and clapped down dotting and slicing, and suddenly a tiger’s face leaped from the flat surface, made real by the contrast. The eyes were luminous.
Raoul reached for the second plate, and this time he used only the yellow. He moved his hand four times, and a shape like a mathematician’s x appeared, the lower portions curving back up. He went to make one more gesture and then snatched his hands away, forced his breath out slowly, like a man backing away from a fight.