The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “Sir,” Parry said, stepping off the balcony, back into the room. “Would you kindly do as my colleague says? You’re interfering with a Foreign Policy Police investigation.”

  “Captain, I’m very sorry,” Shankar said. “It’s my fault. I left the door ajar. He walked right in.”

  “That’s OK, sergeant.” Parry moved a couple of paces closer to the man with the palmcorder.

  The man was powerfully built, his body bulking out the bathrobe. His face was so solidly fat that what would otherwise have been wrinkles across the forehead were deep seams, and his mouth was a surly batrachian pout. His visible eye, the one not obscured by the palmcorder, was closed, so Parry had no choice but to direct his comments to the lens of the palmcorder itself.

  “Sir,” he said, “please, I implore you. Turn the camera off. Now.”

  There was implacable obstinacy, not only in the blank blue-brown gaze of the lens but in the attitude of the man himself, his stance, his silence. He was not about to stop doing anything for anybody.

  None the less Parry persisted. He had no choice. “Sir, I must demand that you switch off the palmcorder this instant.”

  “Please, my friend,” said Shankar, “you must do as the captain says.”

  But still the man did not respond, and Shankar, piqued by his stubbornness, made a grab for the palmcorder. He succeeded in knocking it away from the man’s eye, and the man, letting out a growl, retaliated by seizing Shankar’s collar with his free hand and giving the sergeant a mighty shove that sent him staggering backwards. The back of Shankar’s knee collided with the edge of the bed and he tumbled to the floor. The man wheeled round and made for the door.

  Parry, pausing only to check that Shankar was not seriously hurt, set off in pursuit.

  The palmcorder man was surprisingly fleet of foot for someone of such a physique. When Parry emerged from the room, he was already halfway down the corridor, propelling himself along with bounding thrusts of his stumpy legs. Parry sprinted off in pursuit. The man passed the lifts and, at the end of the corridor, barged through a pair of fire-doors and turned a corner. The fire-doors did not have time to swing shut before Parry reached them and lunged through. Skidding, he veered left as the man had done, then halted. The man was gone. The corridor stretched ahead, empty.

  Parry loped along it, wondering if his quarry had taken refuge in one of the rooms on either side. No, that was impossible, unless he had a master key-unit, which he surely did not.

  Twenty metres on from the fire-doors, Parry came to a half-glassed door marked “Staircase”. He pushed it open just in time to hear the corresponding door on the next floor up hiss shut on its hydraulic hinge.

  Galvanised back into action, he bounded up after the man, taking the stairs three at a time, and yanked the door open. Turning right, he headed along the corridor and thrust through the fire-doors which, according to a plaque on the wall, led to Rooms 960-990. The man was nowhere to be seen, but that did not matter. It was obvious now where he had fled to. Parry recalled that the balcony on the floor below with the Foreign remains on it was four along from the balcony on which he had first sighted the man. If the Foreigner’s room was 879, then the man’s room had to be – a quick spot of mental arithmetic – number 971. Parry offered up a brief prayer of thanks for the mathematical rectitude of the hotel’s designers.

  Outside 971, he brandished the master key-unit. The door clunked open. Tensing in anticipation of hostility, if not actual assault, he entered.

  The man was in the middle of the room, bent double, red-faced, heaving for breath. He was still clutching the palmcorder. Beside him, with a solicitous hand on his back, stood a woman. She was of similar age and proportions to him, short, rotund, in her fifties. She was wearing a bra and a nylon petticoat slip, and she was staring over her shoulder at Parry with a mixture of shock and indignation.

  Immediately Parry manufolded APOLOGY, to which the woman’s only response was to swivel round and lodge her fists on the shelves of her hips, the latter action causing great swags of doughy flesh to clump down from her upper arms. Her eyes were small and spaced too close together, and her cheeks and the yoke of her shoulders were rosily radiant with sunburn. Her huge breasts, slung within the conical confines of the bra’s cups, jutted forward like a pair of warheads, minatory and military. She made no effort to cover herself. She knew how intimidating she could look, even in her underwear.

  “Yes?” she said. “Excuse me?”

  Her accent was Russian, Parry guessed, and the guess was confirmed by a glimpse of a New Venice guidebook sitting on the dressing table – the cover text was in Cyrillic script – and by the sight of a Schebalin portable home board plugged into the bedside phone socket. The brand had few devotees outside Russia.

  “Captain Parry, Foreign Policy Police,” he said.

  “I can see you are FPP. Why are you chasing my husband?”

  Parry was about to reply when the man grunted something in his native tongue. His wife asked him a question, which he answered with a gasped torrent of words, then wiped sweat from his brow and resumed panting.

  “Misha says that he has done nothing wrong,” the woman told Parry. “He was making a video film, and one of your men attacked him.”

  “Da,” said the man. “Attack.”

  “Please inform your husband, Mrs... Excuse me, I don’t know your name.”

  “Dargomyzhsky. Irina Dargomyzhsky. My husband is Mikhail.”

  “Please inform your husband, Mrs Dargomyzhsky, that he intruded on a situation of a highly sensitive nature and filmed footage of something I would prefer he had not.”

  Irina Dargomyzhsky explained this to her husband, and translated his reply. “Misha says he by chance passed the room you were in. The door was open. Out of curiosity he looked in. He happened to have his palmcorder on him, so he started to film. The other officer with you attacked him. You were both talking to him but he did not know what you were saying. His English,” she added, “almost does not exist.”

  That last part, at least, sounded true. As for the rest, Parry knew Dargomyzhsky had not passed the room “by chance”. He had been prowling the eighth-floor corridor, having observed Parry’s and Shankar’s keen interest in one of the balconies on that floor, and perhaps having also spied the Foreign clothing on that balcony. He had scented an opportunity and decided to exploit it.

  Biting back an exasperated sigh, Parry said, “I admit that, in order to stop him filming, my sergeant acted in a somewhat intemperate manner, and I apologise for that. If your husband wishes to file a complaint about the sergeant’s conduct, then he is free to do so through the appropriate channels. What I have to know, Mrs Dargomyzhsky, is what your husband intends to do with the footage he has obtained.”

  Mrs Dargomyzhsky passed Parry’s question on.

  “He will sell it to a television station.”

  Which was precisely what Parry had expected, and feared.

  Mikhail Dargomyzhsky spoke again. He had got his wind back by now.

  “It will make much money,” his wife said. “The woman’s body alone will make money, but the remains of a Foreigner, too – a television station will pay plenty for this.”

  Parry took a deep breath, ordering himself to remain calm, remain civil. “I understand that, Mrs Dargomyzhsky, and you are probably aware that as an FPP officer I have no legal authority to force you and your husband hand over the palmcorder disc to me. I can only ask – beg – that you do. The footage on that disc, if aired on television, may significantly compromise an ongoing FPP investigation.”

  “Can the Foreign Policy Police offer more money for it than a television station?” was Dargomyzhsky’s reply, transmitted via the medium of his wife.

  “Your only compensation would be the gratitude of the New Venice FPP and the satisfaction of knowing that you have helped the cause of Foreign-human relations.”

  When his wife told him this, Dargomyzhsky simply laughed. His subsequent speech was couched
in such a sneering tone, Parry almost did not need to have it rendered into English.

  “Misha says that gratitude will not pay us back the cost of this holiday, and he does not care about Foreign-human relations. We are from Kiev. Foreigners do not often visit there. What difference does it make to us how well they get on with humans?”

  “Because,” said Parry, and he was about to launch into an impassioned homily concerning the many reasons why the people of Earth, all of them, of every nationality, had a vested interest in retaining the goodwill of the golden giants, not to mention a moral duty to do so. Then he thought: Why bother? Whatever he said, it was unlikely to have any impact on the couple, least of all on Mr Dargomyzhsky, who would be receiving the speech second-hand through his wife. Dargomyzhsky was dead-set on making a fast buck from his palmcorder footage, and no amount of reasoned, sincere argument was going to dissuade him.

  So instead Parry simply said, with as much rancour as he would permit himself, and a little more than perhaps was Constitutional, “Well, no doubt you’ll feel very proud of yourselves, both of you, as you cash the TV station’s cheque. I expect you’ll feel a real sense of achievement, knowing you’ve behaved in a way the rest of us grew out of years ago.”

  “You want to shame me into changing my mind?” was Dargomyzhsky’s wife’s rendition of his reply. “I am Russian. A good Russian capitalist. When it comes to money I know no shame.”

  “I was trying to appeal to your better nature,” Parry said. “To your conscience.”

  Dargomyzhsky pushed past his wife and barked several sentences of Russian at Parry, punctuating them with chopping forward thrusts of his hand. According to Mrs Dargomyzhsky, he was accusing Parry of putting far too much store by a conscience. If a conscience was what made Parry so sensitive towards the Foreigners’ needs that he had become, effectively, their lapdog, then a conscience was surely a bad thing. Was Parry forgetting which race was here on this planet first? Why should humans have to put Foreign interests before their own every time? Why was it up to humans to adapt their ways to suit Foreigners and not the other way round?

  The contempt in Dargomyzhsky’s words and tone was somehow, paradoxically, the greater for being relayed in such a calm, neutral manner by his wife. Parry wondered how it could be – how Dargomyzhsky could so wholeheartedly believe that he was in the right and Parry was in the wrong. Surely, by any objective standard, the reverse was true?

  He and Dargomyzhsky stood there, glaring at each other, and suddenly the urge to punch the Russian was immense. Parry could feel his right hand itching to clench and swing. It would be great, wouldn’t it? So satisfying to plant a fist into that fat, belligerent face.

  In the old days, even as a copper, he might have done it, and sod the consequences. Now, though, he knew he had to restrain himself. In this world, as a member of the new and improved human race, you were expected to act at all times with forbearance, not least if you worked for the FPP.

  “I regret this encounter,” Parry said as he turned on his heel and exited the Dargomyzhskys’ room.

  He hoped that in Russian, as in English, the word regret could convey both apology and distaste.

  17. Discordance

  PARRY’S RETURN JOURNEY from the ninth floor to the eighth was as slow and ruminative as the journey from the eighth floor to the ninth had been swift and purposeful. All the way, he simmered with anger. Dargomyzhsky’s refusal to budge over the issue of the palmcorder disc seemed to him the worst kind of arrogance. It was as though the man felt he had a God-given right to make money from the footage he had filmed. A good Russian capitalist. Like that was something to be proud of.

  But then – a small, reasonable voice in a corner of Parry’s mind pointed out – Dargomyzhsky was not entirely to blame for the way he was. Prior to the Debut, the West had spent many years and a great deal of money enticing Dargomyzhsky and his countrymen into the embrace of capitalism, like a suitor wooing a lover, offering all manner of bribes and blandishments. After some initial wariness and a few misunderstandings and false starts, the Russians had taken to enterprise culture with a vengeance, and soon the grasping, voracious Russian businessman had become a stock figure of caricature. Free-Market Fyodor. Boris Gotenough. Ivan Awful-Lot. And then the Foreigners had come and the world had moved on.

  Or had it? Capitalism, after all, had not vanished with the coming of the golden giants. International trade accords had been put in place to make the distribution of wealth among nations fairer, and there were strict controls over monopolies and firm guidelines on wages and workers’ benefits, but money – the creating of it, the obtaining of it, the augmenting of it – still made the world go round. If anything, the presence of the Foreigners had lent further legitimacy to the pursuit of financial gain. You only had to think of Sirens, and of resort-cities, and of the many crystech pioneers who had amassed fortunes from a technological process they did not themselves invent. Hector Fuentes for one. Anna’s late husband. The self-styled Crystech Caballero.

  And thinking of Fuentes, Parry was unable to prevent a twinge of sullen resentment attaching itself to his general state of irritability. Alive, Fuentes had been one of those men you either admired or tried hard not to admire. Parry had had no particular dislike of him then. Now, however, Fuentes exerted an unwelcome hold over him, for his death had not, as it ought to have done, freed Anna to carry on her affair with him openly. Rather, for reasons unknown to him, it had had the opposite effect of forcing her to draw back and say that they could not see each other ever again except as friends. (“Good friends,” she insisted, as though that made a difference.)

  These thoughts threatened to drag him down into deeper realms of bitterness, and so, with some effort, he refocused his mind on Dargomyzhsky.

  It was, he decided, not Dargomyzhsky’s desire to make money that annoyed him. A certain acquisitiveness was innate in everyone. It was just that Dargomyzhsky’s greed had been so naked, so unprincipled. That was what left such an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

  Re-entering 879, he found Shankar sitting on the corner of the bed, nursing a bumped elbow.

  “You all right?”

  Shankar performed that characteristic Indian head-wobble which signifies neither yes nor no but a little of both. “I’m fine, I think.”

  “You shouldn’t have touched him.”

  “I know, captain. I was most remiss. Would it help if I went and apologised to him?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “May I ask what happened? Did you catch up with him? You don’t have the disc on you, I see.”

  Parry supplied a terse précis of his full and frank exchange of views with Dargomyzhsky, then exhaled a long, remorseful sigh. “This is going to screw things up pretty badly for us. All I can try and do is limit the damage.”

  “How?”

  “The commissioner’s due to hold a press conference on the Amadeus incident in about” – Parry glanced at his watch – “an hour. I’m going to have to ask her to cancel it.”

  “Cancel it, sir? Why?”

  “Quesnel is going to stand up in front of the assembled media hounds and break the news about death and loss at the Amadeus,” said Parry, heading over to the room’s bedside telephone. “She’s going to want to play it down, emphasise that it’s an exceptional case, unprecedented, with any luck unique. A few hours later, Dargomyzhsky’s footage goes out on air. At best, we’re going to look like we’ve been caught on the hop. At worst, we’re going to come across as a bunch of inept morons who don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on in their own city.”

  “From what the Russian filmed, it’s not obvious that the Pfitzner woman and the Foreign remains are connected.”

  “News people are good at making connections. You and I were down on the bridge, then up in this room. That’s a pretty major clue right there. Add to that the fact that Quesnel will have just told everyone about the discovery of the remains of a Foreigner and a Siren together, and it’s likely that, even
if the Foreign loss and Siren death here weren’t related to each other, the media will assume they were.”

  He picked up the telephone handset, pressed 0 for an outside line, and tapped in the number for HQ.

  “FPP Headquarters, front desk,” said a voice on the line.

  “Captain Parry here. Yoshi?”

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Morning. Would you put me through to the commissioner’s office?”

  “Of course, sir. The body they found. Is it another –?”

  “Just put me through, Yoshi.”

  “I don’t think she’s in yet, sir.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  The dial tone for Quesnel’s work board burred three times, then gaze way to a click of connection.

  “This is the voicemail of Commissioner Quesnel. Speak.”

  “Ma’am, Parry here. I’m at the Debussy. We’ve come across another pair of remains, human and Foreign. Very similar circumstances to the last pair. Unfortunately something’s, um, something’s come up that means we’re not going to be able to keep this one under wraps. I’ll explain why later, in person. Suffice to say it’s beyond my control, I can’t do anything to prevent it, and I strongly suggest that you abort the press conference. Postpone it at least, until we can figure out some kind of revised plan of action.” He laid his finger on the disconnecting switch. “Best try her at home as well. Just to be on the safe side.”

  “You have Commissioner Quesnel’s home number?”

  Parry gave an ironic smirk. “Captain’s privilege.”

  Quesnel’s home board was in answer mode as well. She must be in transit between there and Headquarters. There was no point, then, leaving the same message at her apartment, where she would not pick it up until long after it would be of any use. Parry replaced the receiver and sat for a while with his hands braced on his knees, staring at the Foreign garments out on the balcony.