The Foreigners Page 4

  Reaching the sculpture, Parry set down his suitcase and, facing his two subordinates, put his hands together in the same configuration as the crystech hands – SALUTATION. Johansen and Avni reciprocated.

  “Well I never,” Parry said, with a breeziness that he neither meant to sound convincing nor felt inside. “A reception committee. To what do I owe the honour?”

  “First of all, did you have an enjoyable holiday, sir?” Avni asked.

  “It fulfilled its function. Come on. Stop pissing about. What’s going on? Why are you two here?”

  “Boss...” Johansen scratched a thumbnail back and forth across the small fold of skin where his meaty forehead met the bridge of his squat, squared-off nose. “Something bad’s happened.”

  “I gathered that.” Initially Parry had thought that some administrative problem must have cropped up while he was away, some tangled bureaucratic knot that only he could unravel. Now, he knew that a far more serious reason had brought Johansen and Avni here.

  Anna? Had something happened to Anna?

  “We have a dead Siren,” said Johansen.

  Relief. Guilty relief. Not Anna. Anna was OK.

  “A dead Siren? Is that all?”

  Johansen hesitated. “And a lost Foreigner.”

  “Oh Christ,” said Parry.

  “Yeah.” Johansen plucked Parry’s suitcase from the ground as though it weighed nothing. “Precisely. Oh Christ.”

  2. Organ Stop

  THE FPP LAUNCH burred along, wavelets lapping and slapping its bows. Avni was at the helm. With her spine straight and her head held erect, she looked every inch the proud Israeli sabra as she steered the boat around slower-moving vessels, unerringly negotiating the city’s waterway maze. She had the throttle wide open and was pushing the launch close to its maximum speed of ten knots. All the same, Parry found himself wishing they could go faster. For once, the restrictions imposed on the rapidity of travel by the limited power output of complementary-resonance cells, instead of cheering him, chafed. The scene of the incident, the Amadeus Hotel, was still a good quarter of an hour away, and he wanted to be there now. Johansen had filled him in briefly on what he could expect to find when they got there, but this served only to exacerbate his impatience. The sooner they reached the hotel, the sooner he could see for himself what had happened and begin the process of repairing the damage. That was what he desired most at this moment: to restore order to the world, to right the imbalance that had been caused by an appalling, unthinkable wrong.

  He turned to Johansen, who was sitting beside him in the stern of the launch. The Norwegian had his sun-honeyed face raised to the breeze, and in this position every sinewy striation in his thick neck was visible, like the grain in wood. Parry observed that the lieutenant’s jacket and trousers were too tight in several places, the sleeves riding up under his armpits, the seams along his thighs stretched taut. FPP uniforms were individually tailored, but Johansen’s addiction to pumping weights and augmenting his physique to more and yet more outlandish proportions meant that he outgrew each new outfit within a matter of months. He looked schoolboyish in the ill-fitting suit, and in certain respects he was as unsophisticated as a schoolboy. He was also, like many habitual gym-goers, prone to favouring development of the body at the expense of development of the brain. Set against that, however, he had clear, straightforward thought-processes and an engaging sense of humour, and was as loyal as the day is long, and it was for these virtues that Parry, upon his promotion to captaincy two years earlier, had personally selected Johansen as his second-in-command.

  “What time were we notified?” he asked.

  “Avni says the call came in just after seven a.m.”

  Avni was in charge of the small-hours shift for Parry’s district. Any call made to the South-West’s operations room between midnight and eight was handled by her personally.

  “And naturally she contacted Captain van Wyk right away.”

  “Um, no, not exactly, boss. She contacted me, wanting to know if your flight had landed yet.”

  “And you told her that it hadn’t.”

  Johansen offered his senior officer a sheepish, lopsided smile. “I have a confession to make.”

  Parry already had a good idea what Johansen was going to say. “Van Wyk doesn’t know anything about this yet, does he.”

  Johansen glanced at his wristwatch. “He’s probably just arriving at HQ now. I’ve left him an ‘Urgent’ e-memo on his work board, but as you’re going to be the first senior officer on the scene, it’ll become your case. And strictly speaking, it’s your wedge. Captain van Wyk was only minding the South-West for you while you were away.”

  “He’s going to be mightily pissed off he wasn’t called at home, Pål.”

  “Oh yes, boss. Mightily.”

  “You must realise how this is going to look. It’s going to look like you’re getting your own back.”

  Originally Parry had deputised Johansen to mind his district while he was on holiday. Van Wyk, upon learning of this, had remonstrated with Commissioner Quesnel, saying a mere lieutenant was neither worthy of nor suited to such responsibility. So great was the fuss van Wyk had kicked up, so ferocious his indignation, that in the end Quesnel had bowed to pressure and granted van Wyk himself jurisdiction over the district for the week. She had told Parry she had done this in order to preserve the peace, and he had wanted to believe her. He had not wanted to think that she was simply playing favourites.

  Johansen shrugged his gargantuan shoulders. “I know.”

  “I bet you anything Captain van Wyk reports you to the commissioner.”

  “And she’ll tell me off and there’ll be an official reprimand on my conduct record. That’s a price I’m prepared to pay. You have got to be in charge of this, boss. What we have here is too important to let a dritt-hode like Captain van Wyk loose on it.”

  Parry, in spite of himself and the gravity of the situation, found it hard to keep a straight face. “I have no idea what dritt-hode means, Pål, but I’m not sure I should be hearing you using it with reference to a superior officer.”

  “It means ‘sweet-natured and wonderful person’.”

  “Really. And not something like ‘shit-head’?”

  “No, boss.”

  “Oh well, that’s OK then.”

  Johansen had done the right thing, the sensible thing, by keeping van Wyk out of the picture. It was not that Parry had an inflated opinion of his own abilities, rather that he had a clear understanding of Captain Raymond van Wyk’s shortcomings. The fact that Johansen’s deliberate error of omission would almost certainly leave van Wyk irate and fuming was, however, not a little gratifying, and Parry would not have been human if he had been unable to enjoy a brief moment of schadenfreude at the expense of a man he distrusted and disliked. Not wishing Johansen to see the glee in his eyes – he did not want to appear to be condoning the lieutenant’s actions – he turned his head away and devoted his attention to the passing scenery.

  On a palm-shaded esplanade, souvenir vendors were setting out their stalls, while municipal cleansing operatives clad in white turbans and djellabas stood doubled over, hand-pulling weeds from flower-beds. On the staggered balconies of a ziggurat-like hotel, newly-arisen tourists were taking breakfast and the morning air. At a canalside café, waiters were ministering to patrons seated at white wrought-iron tables in white wrought-iron chairs, surrounded by white planter troughs that effervesced with bougainvillaea and hibiscus. Avni steered left, and the launch passed under a footbridge, a broad, graceful arc of chalk-pale stone that afforded coolness and a momentary respite from the sun’s glare. Beyond the bridge, they overtook two taxi-gondoliers who raised a hand from their steering-poles in salute. Parry saw a seagull perched on the backrest of a public bench. Next to it, no more than half a metre between them, was a blue-backed, golden-breasted parrot. The grey-garbed scavenger and the tropical dandy were busily preening, each minding its own business, neither acknowledging the other, pea
ceably coexisting. Then there was a brief, glinting glimpse of something tall and golden-robed making its way across a distant plaza, something moving in a series of forward-bent lurches that somehow managed to appear both effortful and graceful. The Foreigner was gone almost the instant he caught sight of it, vanishing around the corner of a building, but when he closed his eyes it was retained in his retinas, a temporary afterimage, a tiny blue ghost.

  He thought of the fake Foreigner in Leicester Square. Already his holiday in England was starting to seem like a dream, a fugue-state into which he had temporarily fallen. He could hardly believe he had been away at all. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that he had been back in New Venice barely half an hour and was already at work again (and, moreover, on his way to the scene of a serious Foreigner-related incident). Perhaps, in order to address itself fully to the exigencies of the present, his mind considered it necessary to draw a veil over the immediate past. Or was it that, like the amnesia of trauma, the holiday was an experience he was better off forgetting?

  “Nearly there,” said Johansen, pointing ahead.

  Moments later, Avni pulled in alongside the Amadeus’s landing jetty. The boat having been secured, all three FPP officers crossed the jetty and entered the hotel’s lobby.

  To judge by the tranquil atmosphere in the lobby, you would never have suspected that anything untoward had recently occurred on the premises. A janitor was swabbing the floor, bent over his mop, slowly and methodically slopping suds. A porter stood to attention beside a large ornamental earthenware urn, his brass-buttoned chest puffed out, his white-gloved hands tucked behind his back, his gaze focused on nothing in particular. At the reception counter, one concierge was taking a reservation over the phone while another was giving a pair of guests advice on shopping in the city, marking the locations of the best arcades on a map. Other guests, seated in armchairs around low tables, were perusing international newspapers or working at portable home boards or chatting. Voices were subdued, little louder than the background exhalation of the air-conditioning.

  The entrance of two FPP officers, accompanied by a rather unremarkable-looking man in plain clothes, caused a few heads to turn, a few brows to furrow in mild curiosity, and even a couple of hearts – the kind that automatically grew nervous in the presence of authority – to quicken. Fascinated and furtive eyes watched the trio’s progress across the lobby, and pianissimo speculations passed between neighbours as to the reason for the FPP’s presence here. The assumption most readily made was that the unremarkable-looking civilian was a Siren who felt he had not been sufficiently remunerated for his services. The FPP had been summoned to negotiate a settlement between him and the Foreigner who had hired him.

  The moment the concierge on the phone caught sight of the FPP officers, she curtailed her conversation and hurried off to fetch the manager.

  He, Klaus Lechner, a short, stiff-necked, dapper Austrian, took a moment to recognise his district captain out of uniform. When Parry offered him SALUTATION, however, Lechner quickly returned it, and followed it with an under-and-over clench of both fists, GRATITUDE.

  “This way, please,” he said, and led Parry, Johansen and Avni towards a lift. Lechner was doing his best to maintain an impression of business-as-usual calm, but his efforts were belied by the film of sweat on his forehead and the thumbprint-sized spot of choleric magenta on each cheek, and once he was alone in the lift with the three FPP officers and ascending to the eleventh floor, his façade of composure slipped altogether.

  “I still can’t believe this,” he groaned. “In my hotel! The Amadeus has won awards, you know. Stars for its catering. It’s mentioned in all the best guides. So far this year two hundred and fifty-two Foreigners have taken advantage of our premium-rate rooms. We’re not the Hannon or the Shibata Excelsior, but we hold our own respectably well. If word of this gets out...” He turned and fixed Parry with an imploring stare. “But you’ll see that it won’t, won’t you, captain? I mean, no one has to know. You can keep the news people from finding out, can’t you? Surely?”

  “Since a Foreigner is involved, Mr Lechner,” Parry replied evenly, “it’s possible that under the terms of the Foreign Policy Constitution we have legitimate grounds for keeping the location of this incident secret. But I can’t promise anything. To a large extent it depends on your staff.”

  “My staff are utterly reliable.”

  “Let’s hope so. How many of them actually know what’s gone on here?”

  “The concierge downstairs. Another concierge, the one who found them. That’s all.”

  “It would be good for you if you could keep it that way.”

  The lift slowed, bounced to a halt, and unrolled its doors.

  Officer Yoshitaka Hosokawa had been posted by Johansen to stand guard outside Room 1114. Hosokawa and Avni had been the first FPP officers on the scene and, according to Avni, the young Japanese had taken one look at what was in the room and sprinted to the bathroom to vomit. “College boy,” she had commented to Parry with a disparaging sniff. “And what’s worse, he all but begged to come along. He was there when I took the call, and he pleaded to go with me.”

  “Well, you can’t fault his enthusiasm,” had been Parry’s reply.

  Hosokawa was indeed somewhat green-faced still, but snapped to attention as Parry approached, and even braved a smile. Parry directed a quick SALUTATION to him while Lechner set about unlocking the door using a master key-unit. Hosokawa responded with the complex interlacing of fingers that signified RESPECT, the customary manufold greeting in Oriental countries. Verbally he added, “Good to have you back, sir.”

  The door to every room in the hotel was secured with a sonic code that consisted of an individual phrase of music from a symphony movement (the symphony, for security reasons, being changed on a regular basis). Key-units specific to the room played just the single phrase, but the master key-unit played a compressed, ultra-fast version of the entire movement, blurting through from beginning to end in a matter of seconds. Lechner held the small black plastic lozenge up to the door’s sensor and pressed a button, and the master key-unit emitted a faint, rippling squeal. Registering that amid all the other note combinations the appropriate phrase had been played, the heavy door unlocked itself and swung inwards.

  “If it’s all right with you, Captain Parry, I won’t go in,” said Lechner, averting his gaze from the interior of the room. “I’ve seen them once already. It was enough.”

  “Of course,” Parry replied. “No need for you to hang around outside. Just be somewhere where we can find you if we need you.”

  “My office? It’s on the ground floor.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Um, captain?” said Hosokawa. “If it’s all right with you, I’d prefer not to go back in either.”

  Parry heard Avni snort softly, and he directed a reproving glance at her. To Hosokawa, he manufolded INDULGENCE. Hosokawa returned a heartfelt GRATITUDE.

  Turning, Parry entered the room, followed by Johansen and Avni. Lechner leaned in and pulled the door to behind them.

  Everything in a premium-rate hotel room was built to Foreign scale, which meant larger by a sixth. The bed was a sixth bigger than king-size, the ceiling a sixth higher than average, the chairs a sixth more voluminous. It was hard, when walking in, not to feel as though you had suddenly shrunk by the same fraction. Invariably there was a moment of disorientation as your brain adjusted to the perceived change in spatial relationships around you. This reaction was more pronounced in adults than in children, since children were still growing and therefore used to a world in which proportions were flexible. Some adults, indeed, found Foreign-scale rooms impossible to cope with and could not remain in one without suffering, sometimes violently, from dizziness and nausea.

  The trick, Parry had learned, was to close your eyes as you entered and imagine the room and its furnishings to be even larger than they were. That way everything would seem normal-sized when you reopened your
eyes.

  As usual, the tactic worked. The sight that confronted Parry next, however, was enough to leave anyone feeling ill.

  The body was sprawled, face-up, by the foot of the bed. The limbs were bent and splayed, the four of them describing a shape not unlike a swastika. The front of the white T-shirt the body was wearing was soaked with blood. Blood also soaked the carpet around the head, lending it a sinister dark-crimson halo. The rear portion of the head was gone, destroyed, so that the corpse’s cranium appeared to be half-embedded in the floor. The hair was matted with blood and clotted with soft lumps of yellow-grey tissue. More such tissue, and more blood, splash-patterned the wall nearby. A gun, a large-calibre semiautomatic, lay on the carpet a few millimetres from the fingertips of the body’s right hand. A faint whiff of gunpowder was detectable in the air; also a sharp, clean, meaty smell reminiscent of butcher’s shops.

  Johansen and Avni remained by the door, giving their captain space to step forward and inspect the body more closely. Breathing through his mouth, Parry did so.

  He had been a young man. Early twenties, was Parry’s guess. Thick black hair, strong nose, cleft chin. He had almost certainly been handsome. An eye-twinkler. A charmer. But death had undone his glamour. His face was now sagging, slack-jawed, dull. That was the thing about the violently killed, in Parry’s experience. They never looked at repose, and they seldom looked horrified or traumatised. For the most part the violently killed simply looked stupid, their eyelids half-closed, their expressions stultified, as though death were the most boring surprise imaginable. Or maybe it was simply that stupidity was the natural state of human beings, revealed once and for all when life was gone.