The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “What sort?”

  “I got a request earlier from Toroa MacLeod.”

  “What does he want?” said Parry with a sigh.

  “It so happens, you.”

  19. Counterpoint

  IT HAD STOPPED raining. A low leaden layer of cloud still glowered overhead but for the time being the drizzle was holding off.

  Thankful for small mercies, Parry killed the launch’s engine, tied up, and stepped ashore onto the canalside walkway.

  The walkway ran alongside a wall into which wrought-iron gates were set at regular intervals. The gate directly in front of him was distinct from all the others in that its bars were fashioned to incorporate a simplified representation of a Mercator projection of the Earth. Outside it, behind him, a small launch was tethered, doubtless the Xenophobes’ private transport. Through the gate, he saw a long, narrow garden consisting of a lawn, a few cypresses, some flowerbeds thick with liliaceous cordylines and spiky orange strelitzia, and a winding gravel path that led to the front door of a house. The house was one of long, staggered row of identical residences, all tall and white and softly contoured, their corners and edges chamfered, like dice.

  Immediately to the right of the gate was an entry intercom unit, mounted flush into the wall. Above it was a brass plaque inscribed with the words “Free World House” and, in smaller letters, “Xenophobe League, New Venice Chapter”. This was not merely the Xenophobes’ base of operations in New Venice. It was also, since few of them could otherwise afford to live in a resort-city, their private lodgings.

  Parry pressed the bell-button on the intercom unit and waited, rocking back and forth on his heels.

  No one addressed him from the intercom speaker. Instead, he heard soft, rapid footsteps pattering towards him along the path, and the next moment he was facing a pair of Alsatians through the bars of the gate. Ears pricked, tails high, the dogs looked alert and distinctly unfriendly. Then there was a buzz from the intercom, and the gate clanked open, swinging inwards.

  “Pinkerton and Butterfly will escort you to the house,” said a voice from the speaker. The accent was Antipodean but Parry was almost certain that the voice did not belong to MacLeod. “Stick to the path and they won’t attack.”

  Parry eyed the dogs warily. They looked back at him, their gazes jet-black and hostile.

  Sod this, he thought. And sod you, MacLeod. Any chance you were going to get a sympathetic hearing from me – gone, mate.

  He took a deep breath and, reasoning that no one, not even a Xenophobe, would be so stupid as to employ a pair of guard dogs that were anything but immaculately trained, stepped through the gateway.

  Immediately one of the Alsatians fell in behind him while the other turned and began trotting ahead. Parry followed the one in front – Pinkerton, to judge by the unneutered rear view – all the while keeping a wary eye on the one behind; and like this, a dog sandwich with a man as the filling, they wended their way along the sinuous turns of the path to the front door.

  At the door, Pinkerton moved out of Parry’s way and joined Butterfly at his rear. Both Alsatians sat down on their haunches, keeping their attention fixed on him. He fancied he saw disappointment in their faces. They would have loved it if he had ignored advice and strayed from the path.

  The door was opened by an Australian aborigine dressed in chinos and a denim workshirt.

  “G’day,” he said. This was the man who had addressed Parry over the intercom. With a flick of his fingers he invited Parry in.

  Parry entered in a broad, cool hallway, tiled with pine parquet in a zigzag pattern. All around, on all four walls, were displayed hand-crafted artefacts from all over the world. There were ceremonial items: a medicine bag, a rainstick, tribal masks of threatening mien. There were musical instruments: a didgeridoo, a set of panpipes, different kinds of drum. There were ornaments: a scrimshawed narwhal horn, a bark scroll decorated with finger-painted representations of animals, dozens of figures and figurines carved from a range of materials (bone, coral, stone, wood). And there were weapons: a reed blowpipe with jaguar-claw darts, an assegai and shield, several sets of bows and arrows, a knobkerrie and, next to it, another kind of club, one with a short stubby handle and a head that was flat and oval with incurving indentations on both sides, so that in outline it resembled nothing on earth so much as a violin. The over-all impression was of a museum, but the items were not tagged with identifying labels and there was none of the dustiness, the mustiness, traditionally associated with museums. This was a commemoration, then. A reminder.

  “This way,” said the aborigine.

  He led Parry across the hallway and up a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs. On the landing Parry glanced through an open doorway and saw what looked like an administrative office. A Native American woman was busy at a work board, typing away. She was young and forceful-looking, her hair hanging either side of her face in two long plaits, her skin the colour of bloodstained earth. At a second desk in the room, a Mexican Indian was talking on the phone in mellifluent Spanish, reclining in his chair with his ankles crossed on the desktop. A water cooler and a coffee percolator stood in one corner, and a large cork board hung on the wall, festooned with thumbtacked memos and newspaper clippings. Parry surmised that this was where most of the chapter’s fund-raising took place, a vital function for the Xenophobe movement, since maintaining a presence in every major capital and every resort-city did not come cheap.

  On the next flight of stairs there was a Tibetan monk, polishing the banisters. He stopped work and, clutching his cloth and can of polish to his saffron robes, stood back to let the aborigine and Parry pass. Bliss-eyed, he bowed his shaven head to them both, then resumed his labours.

  On the second-storey landing, the aborigine knocked on a door.

  “Yes?” said a voice within.

  “Mate, it’s the FPP fella.”

  “OK.”

  The aborigine opened the door and stepped aside to allow Parry to go in.

  The room would have been, had this house been a family residence, the master bedroom. The Xenophobes had made of it a kind of conference-room-cum-recreation-lounge. In the middle there was a rectangular arrangement of sofas and armchairs of canvas and chromed tubular steel, centred around a wooden coffee-table on which there was a glass ashtray, a bowl of pot-pourri, and a stack of vintage copies of National Geographic, neatly fanned, their page-edges almost as yellow as the border on their covers. A fully-equipped home-entertainment stack occupied the far corner, linked to a wallscreen. Bamboo Venetian blinds filtered the sunshine. Downlighters recessed into the ceiling cast a flat, even brightness.

  Toroa MacLeod was sitting in one of the armchairs with the entertainment stack’s remote control in his left hand. He was watching the live transmission of Quesnel’s second press statement on NN24. As soon as Parry entered, he aimed the control at the entertainment stack, muted the volume and rose from his seat, right hand extended.

  Never having met MacLeod in the flesh, Parry was surprised at how short the man was. On television he seemed a giant, but in fact he had only a couple of centimetres of height on Parry himself. He was broad, though, solidly built, and his hand had a dry-palmed grip of some strength – enough strength to imply that a great deal more was being held in reserve.

  “Captain Parry,” he said. His voice was broad and solidly built, too, richly reverberant, commanding. “A pleasure to meet you at last. Although I must admit, I’m a little surprised you came.”

  So am I, Parry nearly replied, but instead said, “Well, that’s what the FPP’s here for. To listen to people, to hear out complaints. As long as it involves Foreigners, it matters to us.”

  “And how do you know my reason for asking you here involves the Pakeha?”

  “If it doesn’t, Mr MacLeod, then you’re wasting my time and yours.”

  MacLeod chuckled and turned to the aborigine, who was still standing by the door. “Greg, would you mind bringing Captain Parry and myself some coffee? No,
wait. Make that tea.” He looked at Parry. “You almost certainly prefer tea, don’t you, captain? And I’m sure that, for an FPP officer on duty, an alcoholic beverage is out of the question.”

  Parry knew it would be rude not to accept the offer of hospitality, even though it came from a Xenophobe. Besides, right then a cup of tea seemed a very refreshing proposition indeed. “Tea would be nice. Thank you.”

  “Thanks, Greg,” said MacLeod.

  “No worries.”

  The aborigine exited, and MacLeod gestured to one of the sofas, inviting Parry to sit. Parry did, and MacLeod resumed his place in his armchair.

  “You mind if we watch the rest of this?” he said, pointing to the wallscreen. “I do enjoy watching our commissioner squirm.”

  Parry was on the point of manufolding INDULGENCE, but checked himself and offered the standard terrestrial be-my-guest gesture instead.

  MacLeod upped the volume, and Quesnel’s voice filled the room.

  “...incident at the Debussy Hotel is currently under investigation and therefore it’s impossible for me to comment in detail on it. However, the FPP is indebted to News Network 24 for drawing our attention to the circumstantial resemblance between this Siren death and Foreign loss and those at the Amadeus. While it’s too early yet to establish a direct link between the two incidents, the similarities would lead us to believe that they are related. I must stress, however, that there is no cause for concern at this time, nor any reason why anyone in New Venice should not feel safe to go about his or her business...”

  Quesnel was saying nothing particularly surprising or revelatory, but then it wasn’t the content of her speech that was so important as the fact that she was there, on people’s screens at work and at home, looking measured and gracious and sounding suitably worried, yes, but also sounding quite determined to see the problem resolved as soon as possible.

  Parry surreptitiously turned his attention to MacLeod and, while the Xenophobe’s gaze was fixed on the wallscreen, studied him.

  Lieutenant Johansen had the edge on MacLeod in terms of sheer meaty bulk, but the Norwegian’s physique seemed vain and inflated by comparison. On MacLeod, every muscle, every sinew, looked taut with purpose. He was wearing a tight-fitting sleeveless T-shirt, and the biceps and forearm flexors and extensors, sheathed beneath his ochre skin, were like knotted nests of pythons. His hair he wore swept upwards in a short, stiff brush-cut, and his nose was the characteristic Maori shape, flat with wide, uptilted nostrils. His eyes were small, hard black pearls, and the sharp, fierce contours of his face were emphasised by its tattoos, which, up close, were intricate and even more intimidating than they looked on television. Across his lobey forehead ran two mirror-image sets of thick, fanning lines, like a simple sketch of a bird’s wings, each emanating from the inner tip of an eyebrow. On either flank of his nose there were intricate spirals, and these unravelled and flowed into a series of parallel arcs that spread out sideways and traced the hollows of his cheeks all the way down to the jaw. Beneath his lower lip were a pair of paisley shapes, head-to-head, and on each of the two bumps of his cleft chin there was another small spiral. The lines were ingrained in a dye that was the purple of thunderclouds, the deep blue of a stormy sea.

  So much for the man’s appearance. As for his character, what Parry knew was patchy at best, derived mainly from a news profile that had aired a few months back, shortly after MacLeod arrived in New Venice to assume the reins of the local chapter from his predecessor, Augustus Kyagambiddwa, who had resigned the post following the unearthing and successful ousting of the Triple-X cell. The venerable Kyagambiddwa had been shocked when to learn that Triple-X had infiltrated the city. A man of principles, he had ascertained the names and whereabouts of the cell’s members, submitted these to the FPP, and then done the honourable thing by quitting as head of the chapter.

  The profile had made much of MacLeod’s impoverished upbringing in the suburban slums of Auckland and of the fact that he had won a scholarship to read law at Victoria University in Wellington, where he had excelled both academically and on the rugby field, in the latter case to the extent of earning himself a tryout for the All Blacks. It also mentioned that he had been committed civil rights activist and had campaigned tirelessly throughout his student days for all of the land appropriated from the Maori by British settlers to be restored to its rightful owners, a dream which had finally become a reality not long after MacLeod graduated, when, in the spirit of euphoria that had swept the world in the wake of the Debut, the Christchurch Covenant was signed, giving the Maori everything that they had been asking for.

  MacLeod’s subsequent espousal of Xenophobia seemed to Parry an act of stunning ingratitude. It was baffling to him that someone could turn on the very race whose advent had brought about so many positive changes in the world, including one that directly benefited him and his people. The reason, he supposed, was that MacLeod was one of those men who enjoyed sparring, be it verbally or physically. He knew this because he had read MacLeod’s police records and learned (something the news profile had not mentioned) that MacLeod had been arrested several times during his student-activist days and been indicted for affray, assault on a police officer, and incitement to violence. These were all crimes committed on the picket lines, crimes of rashness and passion, and Parry was not so naïve as to think that the New Zealand police were not at least partly responsible. He was only too aware how heavy-handed tactics intended to calm civil unrest can often have the opposite effect. None the less MacLeod seemed to him the type who adopted a cause not so much because he believed in it but because he was innately aggressive and needed a legitimising outlet, a channel sanctioned by a higher authority, through which to vent that aggression.

  “That will be all for now,” said Quesnel. “Thank you.”

  Camera flashbulbs sparked as the commissioner stepped away from the press microphones. Questions were shouted at her but she pretended not to hear them.

  MacLeod switched the television off and turned to Parry.

  “Well, there we go, eh? A skilful performance. Neither excuse nor apology but a little bit of both. Well done, Céleste.”

  “If you’ve invited me here, Mr MacLeod, just so that I can listen to you mock the commissioner, then I think there’s no reason for me to stay.” Parry made as if to stand.

  MacLeod made a calming gesture, as though patting a cushion. “Forgive me, captain. Sit back down. I’m sorry. Sincerely. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “So,” said Parry, satisfied that the point had been made, “why am I here? What is it you want to talk about?”

  “These incidents, of course. The ones you’re investigating. These deaths.”

  Parry withheld a sigh. “Mr MacLeod, if you want to find out about an investigation the FPP is involved in, you’re perfectly at liberty to apply to our information department. The FPP are obliged to release all evidence concerning an investigation no later than sixty days after the initial event.”

  “I know, I know. Measure Seven of the revered Foreign Policy Constitution. But the thing is, captain, I’d prefer not to have to wait for the FPP to decide on my behalf when I can and cannot know about what’s going on in this town. And rather than be spoon-fed, I’d like to get my information straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything if I don’t want to.”

  “But I think you will want to.”

  “Oh, you do?”

  “Because I can help you.”

  “You can help me? How can you help me? And, more to the point, why would you?”

  “Perhaps I phrased that wrong. I can ... not hinder you.”

  Parry frowned, then nodded. “I get it. I play along, and the Xenophobes won’t make life difficult for the FPP.”

  “I myself wouldn’t put it quite so crudely, but basically, yes. I hardly need tell you, captain, that I’m capable of inconveniencing you and your colleagues in all sorts of ways. I can make it my mission to denoun
ce and disparage you at every turn, and there’s no shortage of forums available to me for that purpose – television, radio, newspapers, the e-ther. One of the few redeeming features of the age in which we live is that it’s no longer considered merely polite to listen to alternative, counter-orthodox viewpoints, it’s considered nothing short of mandatory. Then there’s the personal influence I wield. I have the ear of a number of well-regarded and powerful individuals, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

  “I’m aware that your movement has some very wealthy backers,” said Parry, and, to illustrate his point, indicated their surroundings. “A piece of prime real estate in a resort-city does not come cheap.”

  “Then you know that such individuals can bring significant pressure to bear on governments, who in turn can lean on the Foreign Policy Council – which, after all, depends on the international community for its funding – and it in turn can lean on you.”

  Parry gave a dismissive shake of his head. “I’d believe that kind of talk if this was, say, twenty years ago. Back then, that was the way things worked. But life’s different now. Big business doesn’t run and ruin the world any more. We’ve cleaned up our act.”

  “You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “I know so, Mr MacLeod. And it seems to me that you’re laying down some pretty heavy threats for someone who claims he just wants a bit of fast-track information.”

  “Merely setting out my stall. Letting you know who you’re dealing with.”

  “I already know who I’m dealing with,” Parry said, and arranged his mouth into something that was three parts grin to one part sneer.

  Greg re-entered the room with a tray on which stood two sets of cups and saucers, a milk jug, a sugar bowl, and a teapot with steam trailing from its spout. He placed the tray on the table between Parry and MacLeod. MacLeod thanked him, and Parry made a point of thanking him, too.