Naturally he had to go to his head of department and request to be excused from his professorial duties while he and the Foreigner went about their work. He begged the head of department to keep quiet about the presence of a Foreigner on campus, but word leaked out, and soon the entire music faculty, and then the entire university, was assisting Verhulst in his efforts, suggesting pieces he might like to try out on the golden giant. The change that had come over their colleague was the source of much comment and amazement among Verhulst’s peers. Since the Foreigner had become a daily visitor to his study, Verhulst had ceased to be the distracted, absent-minded figure of yore. He was focused now, a man with a purpose. It was as though his life till now had been a dormant state, as though he had been waiting, pupa-like, for this moment to emerge from his chrysalis. Every morning he would stride through the university’s Oudemanhuispoort entrance with a stack of discs wedged between his hands and chin and with an unmistakable eagerness in his stride, and every morning the Foreigner would be there waiting for him when he opened his study door, ready to begin their work anew. Verhulst knew the task he was engaged in was an important one, and rose to the challenge splendidly.
Within a month he had worked out definitions for almost all of the ninety-six hand-symbols the Foreigner had demonstrated. The last few days of their collaboration were spent fine-tuning those hand-symbols whose meanings remained nebulous or were not as precise as Verhulst wished. By the morning of the fortieth day since the Foreigner’s first appearance in his study, Verhulst realised that their labours were almost complete. That evening he headed home, knowing somehow that he had seen the last of the golden giant. Sure enough, the following morning he arrived at his study to find the Foreigner not there. It had, however, left a gift for him. Standing on the lid of the piano was an object no one on Earth had seen before: a statuette made of a yellow, gold-flecked, marble-like substance, its hands interlaced in the formation that Verhulst knew signified GRATITUDE. When he finally nerved himself to touch the statuette, he was so startled by the note that sprang forth from it that he let out a shriek loud enough to be heard on the other side of the campus.
The official public unveiling of hand-symbols occurred a fortnight later. News of what Verhulst and the Foreigner were up to together had already leaked out, but Verhulst had kept mum about the actual nature of the form of communication that the Foreigner was teaching him, and so there was a huge sense of anticipation about the event. Parry remembered watching the broadcast and being impressed both by the simplicity of the hand-symbols themselves and by Verhulst’s short speech detailing his part in their creation. Others in Verhulst’s position might have claimed an unwarranted proportion of the credit for themselves. He, after all, was the only human witness to what had gone on in his study, and no one would have been any the wiser had he decided to lie, or at the very least gild the truth. However, Verhulst gave an utterly self-effacing account of events, famously describing himself as “little more than an enlightened amanuensis”. In so doing, he endeared himself to a world that was just starting to look for honest role-models once more, heroes rather than media-generated celebrities.
Verhulst remained consistently modest in all the many interviews that followed, and international renown, a sizeable advance for his book and even a special Nobel failed to turn his head. This, coupled with his stereotypically professorial looks that no amount of PR ironing could unrumple, meant that he soon became to musicology what Einstein had become to physics – the friendly face of an academic discipline, brilliant yet approachable.
Verhulst was retired from academic life these days and, though in worldwide demand as a lecturer and after-dinner speaker, was content to live away from the limelight for the most part, enjoying long leisurely bicycle rides through the flat, regimented Netherlands landscape. His legacy, in the shape of the ninety-six finger formations that were taught in schools alongside reading and writing, would live on as long as Foreigners continued to visit the Earth, and his story had become something of a latterday fable – an archetypal example of the beneficially transformative influence of the golden giants.
Parry wrapped his toes around the bathplug chain, yanked the plug out, and lay there as the water swirled away, feeling his body grow heavier. When the bath was all but empty he climbed out and towelled himself dry, then cleaned his teeth and strode naked to the bedroom.
He had decided he would go to Anna’s party after all. Partly this change of mind had been brought about by his encounter with the Foreigner and by his contemplation of the story of Jan Verhulst, both of which had reminded him that this was the Foreign era, an age when you should not feel you had to apologise for doing what you wanted to do. Mostly, though, he had changed his mind because he did not relish the prospect of spending another evening like this one, alone, bereft of human company and conversation. A night of drinking and socialising at casa Fuentes? A chance to see Anna again? Why not? Why the hell not?
Before going to bed, he sent a second message to Cecilia.
On second thoughts, milady... If the invitation still stands, I’d love to come.
22. Dialogue
NO FURTHER SHINJU occurred that night. Throughout the morning Parry kept expecting the call to come. Sir, we’ve found another one. Every time his work-board telephone rang, he picked up the receiver with an apprehensive hand, but every time it turned out to be routine business, the run-of-the-mill stuff of an FPP captain’s day.
The great majority of his work was administration and personnel management. As a sergeant and then a lieutenant he had been more directly involved in the process of intercession between humans and Foreigners. For the most part this entailed nothing more than showing a high profile in public places, his presence a polite reminder to people to act conscientiously and courteously towards one another and, more importantly, towards the golden giants. Where necessary, however, he had taken an active hand in shielding Foreigners from abuse or exploitation, by cautioning vagrants who pestered them for handouts, by admonishing tourists who followed them around taking endless snapshots and video footage, and by extracting APOLOGY and recompense from hoteliers who had overcharged them, Sirens who had short-changed them and taxi-gondoliers who had taken them on circuitous “scenic” routes. An FPP officer could not force people to comply with his or her demands, since the Foreign Policy Constitution did not endow the FPP with the right to incarcerate or fine. Successful resolution of a dispute lay in the individual officer’s powers of persuasion, and Parry, in his less modest moments, considered that he had been quite adept at prevailing upon people’s better natures. Now, his responsibility was making sure that the officers under his command performed their duties – the same duties he used to perform – to the best of their abilities. He watched the watchmen. Only in exceptional circumstances, such as when there was a human or Foreign fatality in his district, was he required to roll up his sleeves and become embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the job once again. It was ironic: he had always relished administering Foreign Policy where it counted, at street-level, but nowadays he got a chance to do so only under the grimmest and most exacting conditions.
So the day rolled by, and he found himself relaxing, the knot in his stomach unclenching, as the blow he dreaded failed to materialise. At lunch, in a mood of heady reprieve, he gave in to Carmen at the commissary and ordered a helping of ginger pudding to go with his main course of chicken-and-apricot tajine with couscous. Carmen rewarded him with a splendid vanilla smile.
He carried his tray of food to a corner table and was just tucking into the tajine when Quesnel appeared.
“Jack, mind if I join you?”
She set her tray down opposite his and sat. On the tray were a Caesar salad, an apple and a 50cl. bottle of carbonated mineral water. She glanced at Parry’s somewhat heartier meal.
“Don’t tell me you eat like that every day.”
“I would if Carmen had her way.”
“Yes, she’s a one-woman pressure group, ain’t she?
And speaking of pressure groups: how was it at Free World House yesterday?”
Parry dabbed sauce from the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin. “Dogged.”
“What did MacLeod want?”
“What do you think? To let us know he’s there. He sees this situation as a marvellous opportunity to cause trouble, or, putting it generously, further his cause.”
“Predictable, I guess. Anything else?”
“He was sounding me out, trying to work out if we fancy the Xenophobes for the shinjus or not.”
“What did his attitude tell you? Does he know something we don’t?”
“He didn’t give much away, but then he doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who ever gives much away.”
Quesnel speared a crouton, forked it into her mouth and munched it ruminatively. “There has to be a reason why he was so keen to talk with you. I mean, over and above just wanting to make his number. You think he has Triple-X connections?”
“Hard to say. The line between the Xenophobes and Triple-X is so blurred, sometimes I’m not sure it’s even there at all. I suspect MacLeod may harbour Triple-X sympathies. But connections? I don’t know.”
“You don’t think he might even be a Triple-Xer himself?”
“What are you getting at, ma’am?”
“Really I’m just thinking out loud here. You see, let’s assume the worst and say that the shinjus are murders not suicides and that they’re Triple-X crimes. If MacLeod knows this, then there are two possible reasons why he’s concerned about them – so concerned that he demands an audience with the officer investigating them. One reason’s good and the other reason’s bad. The good one is that he wants to emphasise the legitimate Xenophobe movement’s disassociation from the Triple-Xers. He doesn’t want to get dragged down by them like Kyagambiddwa did. The bad reason is that he’s covertly trying to assist Triple-X by attempting to winkle out from us whether we’ve linked it to the deaths.”
“Respectfully, ma’am, the problem with this whole line of thinking is that Triple-Xers insist they aren’t out to harm humans. It’s one of the planks of their manifesto, or would be if they had a manifesto as such. They’re on humankind’s side, or so they always say. And here we have two dead Sirens.”
“True. But human lives have been lost in Triple-X attacks, have they not?”
Parry nodded. He could think of at least four instances off the top of his head. That firebomb at the Bridgeville Hilton, for starters. The bomb destroyed three Foreigners but also resulted in injury to a half-dozen human guests of the hotel and the death of a bellhop who had spotted an unattended suitcase and gone to pick it up, little realising that the item of luggage contained a paraffin-gel device set to detonate by remote signal.
Then there was the fragmentation-grenade attack on a beach near Nice which, in addition to shredding five golden giants, had killed two sun-bathers and maimed four others.
Then there was the blaze at a hotel in Gaijin Hello Friendly Island in which thirteen people had suffered fatal burns or asphyxiated on fumes. That was widely suspected to have been an arson attack and to have been instigated by a Triple-X cell, although neither suspicion was ever conclusively proved. (Ironically, if the fire was an attempt to incinerate Foreigners, it failed, since no charred Foreign remains were found at the scene.)
Last but not least, there was the incident on La Isla de Los Extranjeros off the coast of Costa Rica, when a rocket launcher had been fired at the window of a Foreign-scale hotel room. Falling débris from the explosion had smashed open the skull of the owner of a souvenir stall below.
“Of course,” Quesnel continued, “humans are never the intended targets. They’re, to use an ugly and hopefully obsolete phrase, ‘collateral damage’. But given that media coverage of Triple-X actions is always more extensive and prolonged when there are human as well as Foreign casualties, you could be forgiven for thinking that Triple-Xers don’t go out of their way to avoid causing human deaths. You could even be forgiven for thinking that they cause them deliberately.”
“And it isn’t that big a step from killing people accidentally-on-purpose to killing people on purpose,” Parry said, nodding.
“Especially if those people are Sirens. It’s no secret how Triple-Xers feel about Sirens. Their e-ther site’s bad enough. ‘Unnatural hotel-room proclivities’. ‘Grievous perversions of the human voice’. Their pamphlets are worse. Last one I read, Sirens were likened to Nazi collaborators.”
The internetworks had a self-imposed code of conduct that was stringently exercised. Rhetoric liable to incite hatred or violence against individuals or types of individuals was expressly forbidden, on pain of immediate site-closure, and so, within the e-ther, groups such as Triple-X had to settle for guarded, grumbling references of the kind just cited by Quesnel. There were, however, no such controls over the printed word. Being a neglected medium of dissemination and almost impossible to regulate, the printed word allowed unfettered expression of opinion, and Triple-X, in their secretly distributed, often quite professionally produced literature, took full advantage of that.
“I suppose,” Parry said, “if there was any one class of human that Triple-X was likely to extend its campaign of violence to include, Sirens would be it. But why target Sirens and Foreigners together?”
“Two birds with one stone?”
“Well, maybe, but I wouldn’t exactly consider the methods used in the shinjus to be ‘one stone’. A gun killed Henderson, a fall from an eighth-storey balcony killed Dagmar Pfitzner, and while we’ve no idea what was responsible for the losses of the Foreigners with them, it certainly wasn’t a gun or a fall. If it was the case that there’d just been a bomb in each of those rooms, then yes, I’d say this was Triple-X at work. An escalation of their typical modus operandi, but only a slight one. But if the shinjus aren’t shinjus, if you see what I mean – if they’re double murders dressed up as double suicides – then what is the point of them? What statement is Triple-X trying to make with them?”
23. Bar
HE ASKED JOHANSEN the same question a few hours later in a bar just off the Piazza Verdi. At quitting time Johansen had popped his head round the door to Parry’s office and invited him out for an evening’s carousing. “And maybe we can find some nice tourist girls to chat up,” he had added. “It’s been a tough week, yeah? We should let off some steam.” Parry had declined the offer of a full night out on the razzle but had agreed to accompany Johansen for at least one round of drinks, maybe two, before he headed off for his next social engagement, the party at Anna’s. So they were sitting in a booth at the Bar Brindisi, a drinking establishment whose proximity to FPP HQ meant that the majority of its clientele were FPP, and Parry had just finished filling his lieutenant in on his lunchtime conversation with the commissioner in the commissary.
“She didn’t have an answer,” he said. “How about you? Any suggestions?”
Johansen picked up an unshelled peanut from a bowl on the tabletop and crushed it in his fist. He shook fragments of pulverised shell into an ashtray and thumb-flicked the twin kernels one after another in quick succession into his mouth.
“It’s tricky,” he said. “Who knows what goes on inside the head of a Triple-Xer?”
“It would be cheap and easy for me to say, ‘Nothing.’ So I won’t.”
“Admirable self-restraint, boss. OK, why not let’s break this down into its basic components. What does Triple-X want?”
“To rid this world of all Foreigners.”
“And what do they do to achieve this goal?”
“They cause Foreign losses, usually by means of fire or high-explosive, with sometimes some human deaths as a side-result.”
“And how else do they achieve their goal?”
“Propaganda. Graffiti and pamphlets and suchlike.”
“Yeah. They try and turn people’s minds against the Foreigners.”
Parry took a sip of beer. The Bar Brindisi boasted an comprehensive range of beverages fr
om around the world, including bitter ale hand-drawn and served in a straight glass at blood-temperature. A pint of this was extremely expensive, but, to the perpetual mystification of the bar’s Italian proprietor, his British customers couldn’t seem to get enough of the stuff.
“Then the shinjus could be a way of combining the two things,” he said. “Or had you already thought of that?”
“I thought of it as I was asking you those questions.”
“Propaganda slayings.” Parry shook his head. “Jesus. And hence the wake-up call at the first one. ‘Here it is, everyone. Come and have a look.’”
Johansen nodded sombrely and took a sip of his cocktail, a Bellini.
“Sir?”
Parry turned.
Yoshi Hosokawa was standing beside the booth, dressed in civvies, a crisp T-shirt and a pair of pleated, slim-fit slacks. “I apologise for interrupting. I was told at the operations room that I might find you here.”
“You’re not interrupting. Come on, sit down.”
Johansen edged around the booth’s plush horseshoe bench to make room.
“What’ll you be having, Yoshi?” Parry indicated his and Johansen’s glasses, which were nearly empty.
“Allow me to buy the round, sir.”
“Nonsense. My treat.”
“All right. Makino, please.”
The Foreigners Page 22