They climbed the steps, and Reich waved to them. “Hey, you two. Where you guys been?”
“Just having a wander,” Parry replied.
“Fine night for it.”
“Yes, it is.”
“We heard some laughter out there. Guess it must have been you.”
“Guess it must have,” said Parry, unable to prevent a slight Californian drawl from entering his voice. Normally, so as to avoid the risk of offence, he was punctilious about maintaining his native accent. This was a particularly important skill in a city where English could be heard in such a broad range of inflections and pronunciations. Emulating an interlocutor’s speech patterns was an easy trap to fall into. That Parry had just done so showed just how far his inhibitions had been lowered.
Reich, if he noticed Parry’s slip, gave no indication of it. “So what were you up to that was so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. Just a game we were playing.”
“Yeah? What kind of a game?”
“Well, not even a game really. We were just having fun.”
“Is that so?” Reich leaned close to Parry, dropping his voice. “Only – and you know, Jack, I don’t mean any disrespect by this – but the way you two came out from the trees like that, it kinda looked like...” He winked. “If you know what I mean.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Reich leaned back. “That’s how it looked, is all.”
Parry paused for a second, assessing what he had just heard. Was Reich really implying what he appeared to be implying?
“But you know, I wouldn’t blame you,” Reich added. “If I were you, hey, I’d do the same.”
“I think you’d better take back that remark,” said Parry. Every word of the sentence was rimed with ice.
“Jack.” Reich shrugged. “It was just an observation. I’m not saying anything was going on. I’m simply telling you how it looked.”
The owner of The Gondoliers and the NACA administrator were looking on with interest, as was Cecilia. None of them had heard the content of Reich’s sotto voce aside to Parry. They had seen the American murmur something to Parry and Parry then bristle, but they had no way of knowing what had sparked the antipathy – the palpable crackle of resentment – that was now radiating from Parry towards Reich.
As for Parry, the sense of wellbeing that had filled him just a couple of minutes earlier was gone as if it had never existed, and outrage had come rushing in to fill the vacuum left by its departure. That Reich would dare say such a thing! That he could even think it!
“Apologise,” he said simply, hoarsely. “Now.”
“Whoa, Jack,” Reich replied, half-laughing. “Easy there.”
Easy there? Easy there?
An aquifer of pure frigid fury surged through Parry, welling towards the surface, speeding up through cracks and crevices. He urged himself to stay calm. His hand was up almost before he realised it. A hunk of Reich’s shirtfront was clutched in his fist, cloth screwed over knuckles, and he was dragging the music promoter towards him. Gasps came from all around, and Reich’s eyes were wide and startled but in them a steady amusement continued to flicker, like a pilot light that will not, no matter what, go out.
“Listen, you tosser,” Parry said, his voice a grunting, guttural hiss. “I’ll say it just once more. Apologise. You’re sorry, you regret ever opening your mouth, you’re a stupid arsehole and it won’t happen again. Do that, and maybe I won’t shove your teeth down your throat.”
“Jack. Please.” Reich had his hands up like someone at gunpoint, but he was grinning. The physical intimidation did not appear to worry him at all. “There’s no call for this.”
“Say. You’re. Sorry.”
“OK, Jack, OK. Whatever. Sorry. I’m sorry. Peace.”
Parry stared into the American’s eyes. He saw no trace of regret there. But what was he going to do? Was he going to punch Reich? In front of all these people? In full view of the crème de la crème of New Venice?
And just like that his anger was gone, and he felt empty and deflated and foolish. He relinquished his grip on Reich’s shirt, and Reich shook out his collar and smoothed out his shirtfront and began crooking his head from side to side as though his neck bones had been thrown out of alignment.
“Hell, Jack,” he said, sounding vaguely pained, “I was only having a little fun.”
“Fun?” Parry echoed weakly. He was conscious of dozens of pairs of eyes on him. Interest in the altercation had rippled out through the crowd on the terrace. Conversations had dwindled, and heads were now turned towards him and Reich. He looked to Cecilia for support, and found her trying to appear amused, unconvincingly.
“Sure,” said Reich. “Jerking your chain a little. Course, if I’d known you were going to react like that...”
“Jack?” said a female voice.
Parry swung round. He had thought the situation could not get any worse, but there – as if to prove him utterly wrong – was Anna, and beside her, further compounding his embarrassment, NACA Liaison al-Shadhuli. It was impossible to know how much of the incident either of them had seen. All Parry could be certain of was that they had seen enough to be appalled at him.
“Jack, what is going on?” Anna demanded.
“Nothing,” Reich interjected quickly. “Nothing’s going on. Just a little misunderstanding between me and the captain. A little difficulty in interpretation. How’s it go? ‘Two nations divided by a common language’?” He turned to Parry. “So, no hard feelings, Jack.” He held out a hand. “Huh, buddy?”
Numbly, dumbly, Parry reached out and shook Reich’s hand. Then, muttering, “Excuse me,” and entangling his fingers into a brief APOLOGY, which he aimed at no one in particular, he turned around, looking for the nearest and most convenient exit route. The terrace steps. He trotted down them and headed, once again, out across the lawn, feeling the weight of silence and several dozen gazes on his back.
Hot-faced into the warm, resinous night air he went, heading for the trees and the anonymity of the dark, cursing himself every step of the way.
28. Lament
FPP HQ ON a Saturday morning was a subdued, hollow husk of itself. A quarter of the usual workforce was on duty, and whereas on weekdays the building busily bustled, now only the occasional voice or set of footfalls could be heard. The sussurant sibilance of the air-conditioning was plainly audible in every corridor, like a sigh of relief.
For a man nursing a mild hangover and a heavy dose of remorse, there were worse places to be.
In his office, Parry had the shinju folder open on his work-board screen. Ostensibly he was reviewing the facts of the case in the light of his conversations yesterday with Quesnel and Johansen and Hosokawa. Actually he had scarcely read a word of the data in front of him, but sitting at his desk pretending to be doing something was preferable to sitting at home doing nothing at all.
He had hoped work would take his mind off the events of last night, but his thoughts returned again and again to the topic like a dog to a much-scented lamp-post. In particular he dwelled on his unfortunate set-to with Reich. Had he overreacted? It was quite possible that he had. Certainly he should not have grabbed Reich. Whatever the provocation, however drunk you were, however badly someone rubbed you up the wrong way, there was no excuse for behaving like a thug, least of all when you were an FPP officer. Then again, Reich should not have suggested, not even light-heartedly, that there had been something improper going on between him and Cecilia. Parry did not consider himself a prude, but there were some things you simply did not joke about.
So, yes, he should have curbed his temper, but by God, the events of the past few days were enough to have worn anyone’s self-restraint thin! It seemed whichever way Parry turned he was being confronted by obstinacy, cynicism, resentment, selfishness, mockery, anger. Van Wyk and Dargomyzhsky and MacLeod and Reich and even Quesnel, with her demands for a speedy resolution to the case – since setting foot in that room at the Amadeus, he had encountered not
hing but the worst in human traits. It was almost as if he had returned from his holiday in England to a parallel-dimension New Venice where all the gains that humankind had made since the Debut had been mysteriously erased. The Siren deaths and Foreign losses had torn away a façade and exposed a squirm of venality beneath, like worms under a stone.
Was the decency of the post-Foreign era really nothing more than a shell, one so thin and brittle that it cracked under the slightest pressure?
He did not think he wanted to know the answer to that question.
And there was a second source of shame from yesterday evening – something he had done after fleeing from the terrace and before letting himself out by the side gate.
A bruise on the left lobe of his forehead was a small memento of that episode. He probed the swelling gingerly, his fingertips triggering a smart of pain. To the touch the bruise felt as large as a tennis ball, but in the bathroom mirror earlier that morning he had seen that it was not much bigger than the yolk of a fried egg. It was all the colours of dusk, and had a thin scabbed cut down the middle like the slit of a cat’s eye.
Though Parry remembered perfectly well how he had obtained the bruise, how he had ended up back at the marine feature in the first place was nothing more than a dim memory. He had followed the path, intending to take the turn-off that led to the side gate, but had somehow missed it. All at once, as the wall of black crystech loomed, he had become aware of the need to urinate. His bladder, full and tight from all the beer, throbbed urgently, and he had known that if he did not relieve himself straight away...
He was not sure what impelled him to go inside the marine feature, but modern manners – or some atavistic, animal need – demanded he seek seclusion. He recalled trying and failing to locate the panel mounted at the tunnel entrance that housed the switch for the underwater light, and then deciding he was probably better off without artificial illumination anyway; less likely to be discovered that way. He had groped through the tunnel, and on the crescent of sand had unzipped his trousers and shuffled to the water’s edge.
As the urine began jetting from him in a hot golden arc, spattering into the marine feature’s shallows, he had had a thought which he remembered finding bitterly hilarious at the time.
I’m pissed. I’m pissed-off. I’m pissing.
Greeting this cunning play on words with a ferocious chortle, he had continued urinating for what felt like an hour. There had seemed to be no end to the contents of his bladder, and standing there waiting for the flow to abate he had had plenty of opportunity to contemplate the marine feature by the light of the stars and moon, to observe the silken, silvery heave of the water, the obsidian shine of the encircling wall. With the flooding, the sea had become a source of fear, the enemy of humankind, and this place – this tamed, neutered ocean-in-miniature – was, it had occurred to him, a kind of revenge. An act of defiance, almost. How much must it have cost to build? And how much did it cost to maintain, to keep the water clean and oxygenated, the fish fed? What a thing of arrogance and extravagance! Pure Hector Fuentes! So why not piss all over it? He had, after all, pissed all over Fuentes in another way, had he not? By screwing his wife?
At the time, drunk, these thoughts had felt entirely natural and proper. Now, sober, Parry cringed. For one thing, he had not actually hated Fuentes while he was alive. He had envied the man, and felt sorry for him at times – the adulterer’s compassion for the cuckold. He had even feared him. After all, should Fuentes have found out about the affair, it would have given him absolute power over Parry’s life and future. But hated him? He did not think so. Nor had he embarked on the affair with Anna for any other reason than that he was utterly beguiled and besotted. He had loved her and she, incredibly, had reciprocated that love, and whom she was married to had not figured in it at all. Once or twice he might have felt a flicker of furtive satisfaction that by sleeping with Fuentes’s wife he was, in however small and secret a way, subverting the Crystech Caballero’s track record of success, but almost immediately he would disown both the thought and the emotion.
Last night, however, with his pride badly damaged, he had drawn a savage comfort from the act of besmirching the marine feature. It had been a small, cheap victory. He had relished it to the full.
Fate’s revenge had been as immediate as it had been inevitable. Having finally finished urinating, he had tucked himself away, zipped up, turned around and headed confidently towards the spot in the wall where he believed the tunnel mouth to be. A sharp, violent pain in his forehead informed him that he had miscalculated its position by a few crucial centimetres. Clutching his head, he had spun around and stamped his foot and grunted obscenities till the smart of impact had simmered down to a dull sting. Then, very cautiously, he had groped for the outline of the tunnel entrance and fumblingly felt his way through.
One useful by-product had come of the self-inflicted blow. Hitting his head had had the ancillary effect of clearing it, so that there had been no further mishaps on his journey out of the grounds. Pain: not only was it the great teacher, it was the great soberer.
Enough of that. Parry removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, repositioned the spectacles on the bridge of his nose and told himself to concentrate on the matter at hand. To ignore the ache at the back of his skull and the dry, clotted feeling in his mouth and the manifold embarrassments of last night and think.
The shinjus. Triple-X. Propaganda slayings.
Perhaps there was some pattern he was supposed to be perceiving, some link between the Amadeus and Debussy incidents over and above the fact that in each instance a Siren had died and a Foreigner had been lost. If these were killings designed to make a point, then the perpetrators might have strung some tiny cohesive thread between them, some subtle, mischievous indicator of organisation behind the apparent randomness.
The locations, for example. Both hotels were in the same district. Was that pure chance?
Most likely. After all, if the shinjus were simply suicides, then the probability that the second would occur in the same district as the first was only one in eight. Not terrifically long odds. Now, if there was a third shinju – and Parry sent up a small prayer that there would not be – but if there was and it, too, took place in the South-West, then not only would it be a pretty clear indication that the shinjus were not unconnected suicides, but it would give him good reason to suspect that his district had been chosen deliberately, and even that he himself was, for some reason, being targeted.
Was that a possibility? Were the shinjus an indirect attack on him? Did Triple-X harbour a grudge against him?
He could not see why. Had all this been happening in the East District, Captain Roldán’s wedge, then that would have been a different matter, for it was Captain Roldán who had negotiated the departure of the Triple-X cell last year, smoothly convincing the Triple-Xers that staying in the city might not be in their best interests and backing up his argument with the threat of releasing the names and likenesses of the cell’s members to the local media and thus expose them to public opprobrium. This Constitutionally unexceptionable FPP tactic had achieved its goal, but nevertheless Parry could imagine the Triple-Xers resenting not merely the fact that they had been run out of town but also the fact that the only weapon Roldán had deployed against them had been words. They might well want to get their own back on Roldán ... but surely not by carrying out murders in the South-West. Why pick as their theatre of operations a district overseen by a captain who had had no involvement at all in ousting them? And why not directly attack the captain himself?
No, Parry decided, the shinjus were nothing to do with himself personally. There was no point pursuing that paranoid line of reasoning any further.
But still, the locations. If this was a Triple-X plot, was there something in the choice of hotels? Some clue in the lives or, perhaps more likely, deaths of the two eponymous composers?
Aware that a certain amount of clutching at straws was going on here, but feeling that e
ven a straw was more solid and substantial than anything else presently within his grasp, Parry summoned up Search mode on the work board and inputted the words “Mozart” and “Debussy”. He tightened the search parameters to biographies only, and specified a thousand-word limit. Within seconds, assembled text-sketches of the lives of the two composers were up in front of him.
There were similarities between the precocious Austrian prodigy and the wayward French modernist, but only in so far as both composers had been esteemed during and after their lifetimes and were acknowledged by posterity as versatile innovators who contributed significantly to the development and advancement of classical music. In less basic terms, Parry could discern little in common between them. Mozart far outweighed Debussy in prolificacy of output and musicological significance, and also had led a far more frenetic and profligate life. As for their deaths, even Parry, no expert in the subject of classical music, was aware that Mozart had met his end under murky circumstances, possibly poisoned by a rival. Had Debussy likewise been the victim of foul play? It seemed not. Debussy’s promotion to the ranks of the Choir Invisible was the result of natural causes. Cancer brought him to the Final Chord.
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