The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  Van Wyk peered over Parry’s shoulder. All three Moroccans, equipment in hand, were staring at him, startled. Immediately van Wyk composed himself and, flattening his hands together at chest height and bending his nose to his fingertips, said, “Salaam, gentlemen.” Then, grabbing Parry by the elbow and the door by the handle, he hauled the former out of the room and pulled shut the latter.

  “Well?” he demanded, tugging Parry brusquely along the corridor. “Can you explain Johansen’s actions?” Anger made van Wyk’s Afrikaans accent more pronounced, so that he chopped off words and flattened vowels with greater than usual vehemence. “Because I can tell you this for free, that musclebound Nordic oaf has fucked up big-time! Flagrant bloody disobedience. Quesnel is going to hear about this, and you can bet your arse I’m going to push for a suspension, Parry. Without pay. You can bet your fucking arse, oh yes!”

  By the time van Wyk finished this profanity-garnished speech, he and Parry had reached the end of the corridor, which gave directly onto a broad communal balcony. Emerging into the open air, the two men halted. New Venice lay spread out before them, bone-white and brilliant. The canals were busier than earlier, and there were more pedestrians out and about, enjoying the day while it was still pleasantly hot, before the shadows grew short and the sun bore down with its full ferocious force.

  “Look, van Wyk,” Parry said, in a placatory tone, “I’m not about to defend what Lieutenant Johansen did.”

  “Too bloody right you’re not.”

  “But I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t do the wrong thing for all the right reasons. You have your own district to run, after all, and Johansen obviously felt you’ve got enough on your plate already without having to handle an incident like this in my wedge as well. He knew I was coming back this morning and, well, it may have been misguided of him, but I believe he had your best interests at heart.”

  “Please do me the courtesy of at least pretending not to think I’m a moron,” van Wyk snorted. “Johansen resents the fact that I prevented him from playing captain for a week. Also, because this is a major incident here, he didn’t want me to take charge of it because he knew I’d deputise one of my own lieutenants as my second-in-command instead of him. He’s an ambitious bastard, that Johansen, although I dare say you don’t realise that.”

  Van Wyk calling someone else ambitious? Here was a man who was seven years Parry’s junior and yet of equal rank within the New Venice FPP. A man who had scaled the ladder of command in half the time it had taken Parry, powering his way upwards through a combination of obsequiousness, shameless self-promotion, good old-fashioned brown-nosing and, as even Parry had to admit, great efficiency, too. A man who rubbed everyone up the wrong way except the right people. A man who was so cosy with Commissioner Quesnel that he was known around Headquarters, scurrilously, as QT – short for Quesnel’s Tampon.

  Parry refrained from drawing van Wyk’s attention to the irony, however. He also refrained from voicing the suspicion that what irked van Wyk most was not that Johansen had failed to observe proper procedure but that responsibility for the incident had, by fair means or foul, fallen to Parry rather than him.

  Instead, adopting a conciliatory tone, he said, “Well, what’s done is done. Johansen acted in good faith and made a mistake. Feel free to report him if you wish, but the fact remains, for better or worse I’m in charge here, and I’d really appreciate it if you would respect that and give me the space and support I need.”

  It was galling to have to abase himself before van Wyk in this manner, like a dog submissively showing another, more vicious dog its belly, but a good FPP officer was, if nothing else, a skilled and self-effacing diplomat.

  “Yes, well,” said van Wyk. The colour was beginning to fade from his face. “The point is rules, isn’t it? Rules must be observed.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “And trust.” Van Wyk pointed to his bronze lapel badge, with its engraved logo of a pair of hands intricately enfolded – right index finger curled over the lower joint of the left little finger, the other three fingers of each hand clasping the opposite hand, the thumbs tucked away – and, beneath this, the letters FPP. “That’s why we carry this around on our chests,” he said, and directed a sneer at Parry’s civilian clothing. “Those of us in uniform, that is. The manufold for TRUST. If FPP officers can’t trust one another, what chance do we have of the public and Foreigners trusting us?”

  “Quite.”

  “All right. Very well.” Van Wyk was still annoyed, but at least he had had a chance to vent his feelings. “This is your show then, Parry. Make sure you run it well. After all, we can’t have Foreigners getting into their heads that New Venice is a dangerous place, can we? Not unless we want to end up like Koh Farang.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Now there was an object lesson in the inadequacy of the Constitution.” Van Wyk jabbed an emphatic finger at Parry. “A quick, hard crackdown on the perpetrators would have sorted everything out in no time. Round them up and chuck them out of town, that would have been the way to do it. But of course that wasn’t possible, was it? Instead our people had to fuss about trying to get them to make a formal apology to the golden giants. An apology, for God’s sake!”

  By now van Wyk’s face was merely a deep rose-pink and he was speaking at near-normal volume. So as not to antagonise him afresh, Parry worded his reply carefully. “If an occasional failure is the price that has to be paid for retaining the moral high-ground, then so be it. Better that than a return to the bad old days.”

  “None the less, sometimes you need to deal with people roughly to get results. Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for all the right reasons.”

  “You know I have to disagree with you there.”

  “Really? And yet isn’t that how you yourself, just a moment ago, described Lieutenant Johansen’s little slip-up?” Van Wyk’s grin was broad and smug. Trap sprung. Point scored.

  “Apples and oranges.” The rejoinder sounded lame, even to Parry himself. “You’re not comparing like with like.”

  “Am I not? Really? Well, perhaps. But the fact is, Koh Farang put the wind up a lot of people, Parry. A lot of important people. You’d do well to bear that in mind.”

  Forcing on a smile of egregious sincerity, Parry said, “I will, van Wyk. Thank you.”

  Van Wyk, satisfied that he had made his point, offered Parry FAREWELL and a nod, and headed back indoors and off along the corridor towards the lift.

  Parry, turning, strolled over to the balcony’s edge. There, he rested his forearms on the parapet and contemplated the view.

  His eyes were on New Venice, but his mind was on Koh Farang.

  A year and a half ago there had been a string of brutal assaults against Foreigners visiting Thailand’s main offshore resort-city. The culprits were members of an eschatological sect who were aggrieved that the coming of the golden giants had cheated them of the climactic global orgy of death and destruction which they had been looking forward to and which, for a while, had indeed seemed close to becoming a reality. Forced to rethink its beliefs, the sect had fixated on the Foreigners, deciding that they were agents of a worldwide occult conspiracy and that their purpose on Earth was to brainwash and subjugate the masses, starting with Sirens and continuing from there. In order to free humankind, the sect appointed itself the task of purging Earth of the golden giants, starting with Koh Farang. Their strategy was crude but effective. A sect-member, posing as a Siren, would hook a Foreigner with his singing. An accomplice, in the guise of a tuk-tuk driver, would then transport both of them to the Foreigner’s hotel, but along a route that took them through a dark secluded alleyway where other sect-members would be lying in wait. The ambushers would leap out, haul the Foreigner out of the tuk-tuk, and set about it with baseball bats until it collapsed within its clothing and was lost. After seven or eight such attacks, the golden giants began giving Koh Farang a wide berth, and nowadays the manmade atoll stood all but em
pty, a husk of itself, its purpose gone, inhabited by just a few solitary individuals who wandered the dusty, litter-strewn streets in a daze, like the survivors of an air raid or an earthquake.

  Could a similar fate befall New Venice? Could it, too, become a pariah place, shunned for fear that the disaster it had suffered might somehow be contagious?

  Parry could not see that happening. He could not see a set of circumstances which might lead to disarray in the ordered, stable city in front of him. He could not see how, even with one of their number lost in this very hotel, Foreigners would begin to shy away from New Venice in large numbers.

  He could not envisage such an outcome, mainly because he was scared to do so.

  5. Notes

  IN HIS OFFICE at FPP HQ, Parry ate a lunch of grilled-chicken salad and went over every piece of information that had been accumulated so far about the Amadeus Hotel deaths, typing notes into a case-folder on his work board. Outside his window the light was infernally dazzling. The sun was at its zenith, shade was at a premium, and anyone with any sense was indoors. This was the period of the day when, on canals and plazas, activity ceased; New Venice was still; Sol was dominant.

  The morning’s questioning had yielded precious few additional facts. According to Johansen, the Foreigner checked into Room 1114 the previous day at around four p.m. What time it went out to search for a Siren was unclear. One Foreigner crossing a lobby looked indistinguishably like another, after all. Likewise, what time it returned with the young man in tow was also unclear. The concierge on night duty reckoned that a Siren matching the young man’s description might have turned up with a Foreigner at around midnight, but could not say so with any certainty. The concierge had cultivated the habit, as had most hotel employees, of discreetly ignoring Sirens and their comings and goings. What he could say with confidence was that an electronic request for an early morning wake-up call had come down from Room 1114 shortly after half-past one. The hotel’s computer records confirmed this, logging the message at 1.37 a.m.

  The wake-up call had been timed for seven a.m. At the appointed hour, the computer rang the room three times at five-minute intervals. When, after the third attempt, the wake-up call was still not acknowledged, one of the early-shift concierges went upstairs with a master key-unit. She was the one who had found the bodies.

  Johansen reported that the woman was coping well. She had been an accident-and-emergency nurse before moving to New Venice, had seen similar and worse scenes in her time, and so was sanguine about the sight of blood. Trauma counselling had been offered to her but would most likely be unnecessary.

  As for Avni and Hosokawa, they had drawn a blank interviewing other guests on the eleventh floor. Of the half-dozen humans staying in standard-rate rooms on that floor, not one had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary during the night.

  The lack of corroborating evidence almost made Parry wish for closed-circuit surveillance in New Venice. Almost. But then he had never been in favour of video cameras as a law-enforcement tool. They undermined the public trust and made police officers lazy, turning them into glorified security guards. The red diode, in his view, was no substitute for the blue lamp.

  So this was all he knew, all he had to go on: sometime between 1.37 and 7.00 a.m., a Foreigner and a Siren had taken their own lives – or had had them taken.

  There was more to it, though. Something was nagging at him, some small but crucial anomaly. What? What was it? He didn’t know. He knew only that, like a splinter embedded in the skin, too deep for tweezers, he should not worry at it and risk driving it further in. Left alone, it would work its way up to the surface of its own accord eventually.

  He was just finishing off the salad when a fanfare announced the arrival of Dr Erraji’s preliminary report at his work board.

  The report (which bore all the hallmarks of having been run through a language-enhancement program in order to polish up the doctor’s written English, rendering it more fluent and idiomatic) augmented slightly, but not by much, the sum total of Parry’s knowledge about the incident. Erraji narrowed down the time of death, at least as far as the Siren was concerned, to between one and two in the morning. He added that gunshot residue tests on swabs taken from the deceased’s right hand indicated that it had held and fired the gun at least once, suggesting that the Siren’s fatal wounds might well be self-inflicted. If so, then the shot to the chest must have come first (and, to judge by the starring of the skin around the entrance wound, had been fired with the muzzle of the gun in close contact with the victim). The shot to the head, fired inside the buccal cavity, had therefore been second. The reverse order, Erraji remarked dryly, was highly improbable.

  “Given that two shots were fired rather than one,” he wrote, “it may be that a third party was responsible. The shot to the chest sufficiently debilitated the victim to allow the killer to wrap the victim’s hand around the gun when firing the second. The resulting gunshot residue on the deceased’s skin would create the appearance of self-termination and disguise the truth of the crime. Placing the gun next to the deceased’s hand would compound this impression. However, I submit that there is a stronger case for arguing that this death is what it seems to be, a suicide. Assuming the deceased was sufficiently determined to end his life, having failed to secure that goal with the first shot he could still have retained the necessary self-awareness and presence of mind to administer the second shot in a manner more certain to bring success.”

  Parry highlighted the last two sentences onscreen, and read on.

  The gun, Erraji said, was of German manufacture, a Köchel and Haas 9mm. recoilless semiautomatic, roughly twenty years old, not in the best condition but still serviceable. The serial number had been filed off and the trigger mechanism showed no indication of having been fitted at any time with a government-issue locking bolt. Both these facts pointed to a black-market provenance. Only two of the bullets in the clip had been used. Ballistics analysis would verify whether or not they were same two bullets that had been discharged into the young man, but in all likelihood they were.

  As for the Foreigner, its garments would undergo atomic fluorescence spectrometry to determine their authenticity. Other than that, there was very little that could be done in the way of analysis. If the garments were of non-terrestrial origin, then it had to be inferred that the Foreigner they had clad was no longer in existence. “I could,” Erraji commented, “embark here on a foray of speculation into the nature of Foreign corporeality, but it would profit neither of us. Whether Foreigners are beings of solid sound energy, or they are made of flesh and blood and organs like us, or of some other substance with no earthly analogue, it makes no difference from a medical point of view. Until there is proof, there is only conjecture, and if, as a medical man, conjecture is all I have to offer, then I am better off offering nothing at all.”

  Reading these words, Parry half-smiled. He knew how Erraji felt. Still, after all these years, the Foreigners were pure enigma. Humankind, for all its ingenuity, for all its scientific prowess, remained at a loss to fathom them. Reams of Xenological theory had been written, but the list of proven facts about the golden giants would have left room to spare on the back of the proverbial postage stamp. That, to Parry, was part of their charm. The Foreigners reminded a race that could split atoms and chart invisible stars and rearrange the insides of living cells that there were things it might never comprehend, answers it might never learn, goals it might never achieve. They were a salutary reminder against hubris, wandering about in plain view, there for all to see.

  “As for the actual cause of the Foreign loss,” Erraji continued, “again I have only conjecture. It is impossible even to determine whether, as at Koh Farang, a blunt instrument was used, since the material from which Foreign robes are fabricated does not to retain traces of substances with which it comes into contact. We simply do not get the usual hairs, carpet fibres, flecks of paint, foodstuffs, not even so much as a grain of pollen adhering to its surface.
Perhaps Foreign clothing has been designed to repel all traces of its immediate environment in order to ensure its wearer’s hygiene or safety. I do not know. In the end, all I can say is that your guess as to how the golden giant was lost is as good as mine.”

  Parry copied Erraji’s communication into the case-folder, then took off his reading spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He felt weary and bleary, his brain blunted and not operating at its best.

  A cup of tea. That might help.

  As he was leaving his office, he was intercepted in the corridor by Hosokawa.

  “Sir,” said the young Japanese, fixing his hands into RESPECT. “I was wondering if I might have a word.”

  “Certainly. Didn’t you come off-shift at eight?”

  “I’ve been putting in a few hours’ extra duty on the front desk.”

  “Good lad. I’m on my way to the commissary. Mind walking with me?”

  Hosokawa fell in step beside him. He was a smooth-faced, graceful and slightly fey young man, with chisel-sharp cheekbones and a millimetre-perfect haircut. Parry knew that he had a good brain and admired him for his keenness, but also felt (though not as strongly as Avni) that Hosokawa’s youth and relative rawness meant he was not ideally suited to the role of Foreign Policy Policeman. Hosokawa had been one of the beneficiaries of a recent FPP Council initiative to recruit from outside the sphere of law enforcement and thus broaden the FPP’s demographic composition. A university education and a head full of noble intentions were, however, no substitute for experience of life. In Parry’s view, to be a good FPP officer you needed to have knocked around a bit. You needed to understand people, and like people. Hosokawa gave little indication of affinity for his fellow humans. He gave off, in common with many of the well-educated, an air of diffidence bordering on scorn. But he was determined to do well at the job, and in the end that quality, Parry was sure, would prove to be his saving grace.