The Foreigners Read online

  “It’s about the incident this morning, of course,” Hosokawa said, adding, “The deaths, I mean,” in case Parry might think he was referring to his regurgitant reaction to the sight of the Siren’s body.

  “Yes?”

  “I was prevented from mentioning this to you by, um, circumstances at the time, but the scene in that room reminded me of a tradition we have in my homeland. Well, not a tradition exactly. More a bad habit. We call it shinju.”

  They reached the lift and Parry pressed the Call button. The lift car was already present, and the doors slid open. Parry stepped inside. Hosokawa, after hesitating a moment, as if expecting an invitation, followed him in.

  “Shinju,” Parry said, pressing the button for Floor E, two floors down. “That is?”

  “When lovers, teenagers usually, find that their families disapprove of their liaison and want them to split up, they make a pact and kill themselves together. That is shinju.”

  The doors kissed shut and the lift began to descend.

  “A lovers’ suicide pact? You think that was what we saw at the Amadeus?”

  “It appeared to me as if it might have been, yes – although of course I didn’t have a long look around the room.”

  Parry summoned up the scene in his mind: Room 1114, the empty Foreign clothing, the messy gangle of human remains. Was it possible? Had these two members of utterly different species fallen in love and, recognising the impossibility of their situation, taken their own lives? Found perfect consummation in death?

  A note – F above middle-C – bonged from the speaker on the lift-button panel, announcing that they were passing the third floor.

  He shook his head. No, it didn’t seem right. If nothing else, the relationship between a Foreigner and a Siren was supposed to be business. Strictly business. The Siren provided a service and the Foreigner paid for it. Handsomely, usually.

  But there had been cases, hadn’t there? Instances of Sirens and Foreigners forming strong bonds, becoming almost inseparable for a while, travelling together, sightseeing together (at the Foreigner’s expense, naturally). The Siren becoming a sort of paid companion, on hand to sing whenever the golden giant required. Between two humans it was feasible that such a relationship might develop into love. But between a Foreigner and a human?

  E above middle-C chimed out from the speaker, and the lift sighed to a halt.

  “It’s an interesting theory, Yoshi,” Parry said as the doors opened. He stepped out, turned and signed GRATITUDE. “Thank you for mentioning it.”

  A smile twitched the corners of Hosokawa’s mouth, and he manufolded ACCEPTANCE and RESPECT to his captain.

  Deep in thought, Parry strolled along the corridor to the commissary. There, he ordered a tea (milk, no sugar) from Carmen behind the serving counter.

  “You’ll be wantin’ some ginger cake with that,” Carmen said. This was neither a question nor a suggestion. Carmen, a bulbous, ebullient Barbadian, had made it her mission in life to encourage everyone she met, especially those like Parry who erred on the skinny side, to eat more. She was a doctor dispensing her own prescription for happiness, food.

  “You can put a slice on my saucer but you know it’ll only stay there.”

  Carmen expressed her disapproval, sucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “How you speck to find a woman want to be your wife, captain, you stay so bony?”

  “It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.”

  The tea was handed to him with a slice of ginger cake duly lodged beside the cup.

  It was while he was in the lift on the way back up to his office that Parry abruptly realised what had been bothering him about the incident, the nagging anomaly. It was, now that he saw it, kick-yourself obvious.

  The wake-up call. Why had someone in Room 1114 requested a seven a.m. wake-up call? If the death and loss really were suicides, surely the last thing on anyone’s mind yesterday night was making sure they got up on time the following morning. Which meant either that the idea of suicide had been a last-minute thing, or else that the suicidees wanted to be discovered.

  If the latter, why? To make a point? And if so, what point? Besides, they would have been discovered soon enough even without the wake-up call. At some stage during the day, a chambermaid would have gone into the room to clean it. So, other than ensuring that their remains were found earlier than they otherwise might have been, the wake-up call had no clear purpose.

  That was, if the incident had been a double suicide. If it had been a double murder, then presumably the request for the wake-up call had been made before the perpetrator attacked. Or else the perpetrator was eager for his or her handiwork to be made known.

  Parry re-entered his office, fully intending to sit down and mull over the problem further and at the same time enjoy the tea. No sooner had he set the cup down on his desk, however, than Johansen appeared in the doorway.

  “Boss? Commissioner wants to see you.”

  The lieutenant was looking haggard, like someone who has just witnessed a serious car crash.

  “I take it she’s just been talking to you,” Parry said.

  Johansen gave a pained smile. “I hate it how she speaks so softly when she’s angry. I’d much prefer it if she would yell.”

  “Suspension?”

  “Oh no. Like I thought, a reprimand on my file.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  One in the eye for van Wyk, he thought.

  With a forlorn glance at the tea, which was too hot to drink now and would be too cold to drink by the time he returned, Parry exited his office again.

  6. Brass

  QUESNEL’S OFFICE, ON Floor Upper C, was dominated by the vast circular window behind the commissioner’s desk which provided a view of the Fourth Canal, one of the eight main aqueous arteries which radiated out, spoke-fashion, from Hub Lagoon, dividing the city up into eight arcs of district. The entire length of the canal was visible, stretching all the way to the sea and traversed at intervals by footbridges that diminished with perspective until the most distant appeared as slender as a strand of spider’s silk. Set into the centre of the window was a stained-glass representation of the FPP logo picked out in shades of gold – TRUST superimposed over the city.

  Quesnel rose from her chair as Parry entered. She was a tall woman, strong-jawed and handsome, who never wore anything but the bare minimum of make-up. Her ash-grey hair hung in a collar-length ponytail, fastened at the back by a tortoiseshell clip, and her eyes were such a sparkling, startling blue that it was often assumed, by those who did not know her well, that she wore tinted contact lenses. Quesnel, however, would have been the last person to indulge in such cosmetic vanities. She was of straight-talking, no-frills Canadian stock, a former RCMP colonel who had been brought up by strict French Catholic parents in Saskatchewan, not far from the training facility at Regina where she had undergone her initiation into the mysteries of the Mountie craft.

  All Parry knew about Quesnel’s private life, other than the foregoing, was that she had a husband who lived somewhere near Montreal. Though not divorced, it was clear she had no intention of returning to the fellow at any stage or of inviting him to join her in New Venice, and Parry suspected that whatever had gone awry with her marriage she herself was in no small part to blame for. Céleste Quesnel was not a forgiving person. She demanded high standards from those around her and was swift to chide when they were not met – although, to her credit, the highest standards of all were those she demanded from herself.

  “Jack, come on in,” she said affably. “Normally I’d want to know what you’re doing out of uniform, but Lieutenant Johansen explained everything to me. Tell me how your trip went.”

  “It was fine. Cold but” – he searched for a euphemism – “rewarding.”

  “Doesn’t sound like fun.”

  “I wasn’t expecting windsurfing and margaritas.”

  “So you’re glad to be back.”

  “Delighted.”

 
“Though I guess this business at the Amadeus ain’t exactly the ideal homecoming.”

  “I don’t know. There’s nothing quite like diving in headlong after a break, is there? To get you back into the swing of things.”

  Quesnel laughed briefly. “Sit down, Jack.”

  Parry positioned himself in the padded, leather-upholstered swivel chair that faced the commissioner’s desk, which was a vast chunky lozenge of crystech the colour of lapis lazuli, complete with an in-built work board. Quesnel, still standing, paused the work board and pushed the screen flat into its recess so that they would not be interrupted.

  “So,” she said. “Tell me what you’ve got so far.”

  Parry recited every detail he could remember about the lost Foreigner and dead Siren. “Pending full reports from the medical examiner and the forensics labs in Tangier, that’s it.”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Johansen and I will go out this evening before Sirensong to ask around. We probably won’t have much joy, but at least we can try.”

  “What about Xenophobes? You thought about making enquiries in that direction at all?”

  “With the greatest of respect, ma’am, this doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of a Xenophobe action.”

  “Not even a Triple-X action?”

  “I assumed that’s who you were referring to.”

  “And you think they weren’t responsible because...?”

  “Because it happened somewhere private, not somewhere public. When Triple-Xers commit one of their atrocities, they do it in a way that’ll get as much attention as possible – like the firebomb attack on the Bridgeville Hilton last September. Besides, Captain Roldán negotiated the repatriation of a Triple-X cell just a couple of months ago, didn’t he? And there’s no intelligence to suggest that any of them have crept back into the city.”

  “They may have. It doesn’t take many to form a Triple-X cell. Two people, three – that’s all.”

  “I take your point, ma’am. I’m just not convinced this is the sort of thing Xenophobes, even militant-extremist Xenophobes, would do.”

  “Well, if that’s your considered opinion, Jack, I’m happy to go along with it. But I’m going to have to push you a bit here.” Quesnel perched one buttock on the edge of her desk and leaned towards Parry. “If this isn’t terrorism, what is it?”

  Parry hesitated. “I wish I could lie and tell you I have an idea, ma’am, but the truth is, I don’t. We’ve come across lost Foreigners before, of course, and dead Sirens, but not often, and never together like this, in the same room at the same time. Bad enough that we have a human fatality. But what were the Foreign remains doing there? Why was it lost? How was it lost?”

  “Too many questions, Jack. I need statements of fact.”

  “Foreigners, ma’am.” Parry gave a hapless shrug. “They’re one big question mark.”

  The commissioner stood up and strode over to the window. “I appreciate your difficulties,” she said, looking out. “But I have to have something to tell the FPP Council and our NACA Liaison, something more than mere speculation. So let me ask you straight. What happened in that room?”

  “Ma’am, I really cannot say at present. Perhaps once I have more on the Siren, his personality, his history, then I can start piecing together a theory. Until then...” He shrugged.

  “Fair enough. But in your opinion, was this incident a one-off, or are we looking at the start of something, some kind of pattern or trend?”

  “Again, ma’am, I really can’t say.” Parry injected a note of bemused exasperation into the reply. Surely the commissioner must appreciate that she was seeking an assurance from him that he could not give.

  Quesnel turned and fixed him with her blazing blue eyes. “Jack, this is me you’re dealing with, not some hack from the Clarion. I want to know your real thoughts on this, not what you think I ought to hear.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

  “So?”

  “So you want to know if this was a one-off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Commissioner.” The awkwardness of his position necessitated a thicker than usual lacquer of politeness. “I can’t predict that we won’t find the remains of a Siren and a Foreigner together in a room again at some point in the future. I can only say that at this stage there is no obvious indication that the incident, whatever it was, will be repeated.”

  “Jack.” Quesnel’s eyes were blazing more intensely than ever.

  Oh God, Parry thought. Here it comes. The wrath of Quesnel. She didn’t use up her quota for the day on Johansen. There’s still some left over for me.

  A pair of fine, curved creases (like opening and closing parentheses) formed on either side of her mouth as Quesnel smiled. “You’re so English when you get wound up, you know that? Listen, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. It’s just that, you know how nervous the Council have been lately.”

  “Since Koh Farang.”

  “Since Koh Farang. So when I conference with them on this, which I’m due to in about an hour, I’d like to be able to tell them that one of my most trusted and respected captains is confident it was an isolated event.”

  “But now, because you can’t tell them that...?”

  “I won’t.”

  “That’s a promise?”

  There was a note of rebuke in Quesnel’s reply. “You know it is.”

  “Yes. Of course, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

  “No need. Sometimes I forget how hot you are on this honesty thing.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “I’d sure as hell like to think so. But you more than most, Jack.”

  “It’s no secret that I believe we have a duty, now that the Foreigners are here, to be the best that we can be,” Parry said. “They’ve given us so much. Most of all a second chance – a second chance we didn’t really deserve. The least we can do is show our gratitude by behaving well, towards them and towards one another. And they’re so skittish, that’s the other thing. Like rabbits or deer. You get the feeling that they could bolt at the slightest provocation. Simply turn and run and never be seen again. They’d wipe this city from their tourist brochures.”

  “And we’d all be out of a job.”

  “That’s not why it would be a tragedy, ma’am. I don’t care about our jobs. I care about New Venice. I care about what it represents. A step forward for humanity, a new way of doing things, a glimpse of how the entire world could be.”

  “That’s an awful lot of significance to put on just a town, Jack.”

  “Maybe so. But this is a special place. I think you know that too. And it would be a hell of a shame to see it go the way of Koh Farang.”

  “You think that might happen because of this Amadeus thing?”

  “No. But it might happen if we’re not constantly vigilant. I don’t mean just the FPP. I mean everyone here. The Foreigners are a kind of, I don’t know, living litmus test for our behaviour. As long as they keep coming here, it means that we’re still managing to do something right.”

  “Or simply that we have good Sirens.”

  “If you wish to be cynical, yes. I’d rather think that the Sirens are just the icing on the cake, that it’s New Venice itself that attracts Foreigners. The beauty of it, the architecture, the atmosphere. People are happy here, visitors and residents. They’re courteous, they’re welcoming. And I’d like to believe that Foreigners are drawn to that, and that the presence of the FPP guarantees that they’ll continue to come.”

  Quesnel smiled, shaking her head. “Jack, you truly are one of the most – well, I would say naïve, but I know you’re not that. Virtuous. One of the most virtuous people I’ve ever come across.”

  Parry manufolded ACCEPTANCE – both palms spread out, fingers latticed, thumb-tips touching. “No one quite so virtuous as the reformed sinner, is there?”

  “Don’t ask me, ask St. Paul.”

  “There you go. Case in point.”

  “Yup.” Quesnel nodded. “An
d I have to say, I’m not unhappy that it was you who got to be in charge of this situation, Jack. I think it’s going to need your delicate touch.”

  This oblique reference to van Wyk surprised and pleased Parry. “I’m going to do the best I can, ma’am.”

  “Of course you are. But in the meantime, while you’re investigating, I feel we should keep a tight lid on this thing. Measure Seven of the Constitution. It’s not in the public’s interest to know about this right away. We don’t want people jumping to conclusions. We especially don’t want Sirens getting twitchy. If the Sirens get twitchy, they might start to leave. They’re as skittish in their way as Foreigners, don’t you think?”

  “They’re certainly not too fussed which resort-city they stay at. One’s as good as another to them.”

  “Exactly. Also, we want to keep the Xenophobes out of our hair.”

  “Unless they already know what’s happened.”

  “Well spotted, Jack. They make a squeak before we’ve gone public on this, and it’ll tell us one of two things. Either they have well plugged-in spies, or...”

  “Or they had a hand in it.”

  “Bingo. We’ll see if we can’t trip them up here.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Righty-ho. Everything’s clear, then?”

  “Clear as crystech.”

  “Good.” Quesnel pressed the spring catch of her work board screen, which gently rose from her desktop until it was a few degrees from vertical. Parry took this as a signal that the interview was at an end. He stood up.

  “Squirt me over a copy of your case-folder on this one, will you?” Quesnel said.

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, and Jack?”

  Parry paused, halfway to the door.

  “Do me a favour. Stay virtuous.”

  INTERLUDE

  One Decade Ago...

  YOU’VE BEEN AVOIDING the casket all day. Others have been going up and paying their respects, but you have been nervous, scared even, about approaching it. You’ve no desire to look at him close-up. You’ve glimpsed his face, his hands, from across the room. You don’t like the thought of seeing him lying there, full-length, in a suit he never wore while he was alive. It would make it too real for you, too final. And so you’ve kept coming up with excuses to stay out of the room, to hang around in the kitchen area and hallway. Sooner or later you’re going to have to pluck up the courage and walk over to him and say goodbye, but not yet. Not just yet.