The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “Where are they?” he asked. The question was a stalling tactic. He needed time to think, time to come up with a fresh way of handling van Wyk.

  Van Wyk gestured towards the bathroom door. “In there. It’s a nasty sight.”

  “A Siren?”

  “A Siren and a Foreigner.”

  “How were they discovered?”

  “Same as at the Amadeus: a wake-up call wasn’t answered. And before you say any more, Parry – I know. I know. Another shinju. And you think that it should be yours to handle. But let us consider one simple, salient fact. This is the Hannon Regency. The Hannon is in the North-West district.” Van Wyk folded him arms. To the tips of his brush-stiff flaxen hair, he was the picture of gloating triumph. “My wedge, Parry. My wedge.”

  “But the commissioner –”

  “I’ve already discussed it with her. She feels as I do. It’s time another captain took on the investigation. And happenstance has decreed that that captain should be me.” He leaned closer to Parry. “And a good thing too, because I am going to get results, Parry. Believe you me, I am.”

  Parry struggled against a mounting, engulfing sense of impotence. He must be able to salvage something from this. He did not know what direction van Wyk was going to take with the investigation, but whatever it was, he knew it was going to be drastic and unsubtle. He recalled van Wyk’s suggestion for an alternative method of resolving the problem at Koh Farang: a quick, hard crackdown on the perpetrators would have sorted everything out in no time.

  He took a deep intake of breath, drawing on every gramme of self-control he possessed, every last reserve of reserve. “All right. As you say, happenstance has brought you in on the investigation. Can I ask what you propose to do?”

  “You can ask. I don’t see why I have to tell you.”

  “Because the previous two shinjus were in my district. And because I’ve been on the case for nearly a week.”

  “Without any notable success.”

  “Nevertheless, in that time I have gained some insight into how local residents and Sirens feel about what’s going on.”

  “You think you’re the only one who’s been getting feedback from the public? So has everyone who wears this badge!”

  “But I’m still the FPP officer everyone associates with the investigation.”

  “The FPP officer everyone associates with an inability to solve it.”

  “Van Wyk, just tell me what you’re going to do. Please.”

  “Oh well, since you said the magic word...” Van Wyk turned to Erraji, who, along with the criminalists, had been doing his best to pretend not to be listening. “Doctor? Would it be all right for me to show my colleague the remains?”

  Erraji considered, then nodded. “Please avoid touching anything if you can.”

  “Thank you. We’ll be careful. Parry? Over here.”

  Van Wyk led Parry across to the bathroom door, which he opened with a small flourish.

  The bathroom had no windows. Light from the main room illuminated its interior dimly. Parry, at van Wyk’s invitation, stepped forward into the doorway. The reek of blood, thick and sickly, pervaded his nostrils. He saw two haphazard heaps of clothing on the floor, one of them glinting. There was something occupying the bath, something bulky and pallid and shapeless and streaked with black. There were marks on the wall above it – a pattern of smears, black also.

  Van Wyk ran his hand over the light-switch sensor. Lights flickered on. Black became vermilion.

  The two heaps of clothing were a pile of human garments and the remains of a Foreigner. The thing in the bath was a naked man. Although the bath was Foreign-scale, the man was so grossly, grotesquely overweight that it looked the appropriate size for him. He was lying on his back, his head wedged against the mixer-tap, his chin thrust down into a half-dozen doughy rolls of neck fat. His eyes were open, their irises misted, one upper eyelid drooping. There was blood all over him. Blood marbled his bulbous belly and his lumpen legs and his squashed, flabby pectorals. Blood strung his body-hairs in tiny coagulated blobs. Blood seamed the folds in his lily-livid flesh. Blood had collected in a pool at his crotch, making a neat island of his genitals. It was blood which had been released from within him via a ragged slash in each wrist – wounds gouged with the pocketknife that was now clasped loosely in the fingers of his right hand. And there was so much of it! So much blood that it seemed scarcely feasible a single corpse, even one as corpulent as this one, could once have contained it all. So much blood that it was as if the dead man had been attempting to wash himself in his own lifestuff rather than water.

  And on the wall tiles above this ghastly sight, this veritable bloodbath, Parry could see that the pattern of smears was in fact a sentence – words formed in sloppy, multi-fingered strokes of blood.

  In a limp, nerveless voice he read the words aloud, as though by speaking them he might deprive them of some of their unwelcome and uncompromising significance:

  “‘Don’t Let This World Become The New World.’”

  A slogan.

  A well-known slogan.

  And beneath it there were three crosses in a row, like some sinister love-token:

  X X X

  “So you see, Parry?” said van Wyk. “There’s no question any more, is there? No doubt about what’s happening. Triple-X. They did this. How they faked this fellow’s suicide, I’m not sure. My guess is the autopsy will show that they drugged him, then dumped him in the bath and opened his wrists for him. The main thing is, it’s clear that the perpetrators are Triple-X and they’ve been waiting for us to come after them. They want us to come after them. They’ve got fed up with us wallowing around without a clue. They’ve put their signature to their handiwork because they want credit for these killings. This is a direct challenge from them, and I’ve accepted it.”

  “But how?” was all Parry could think of to say. “How do you plan on finding them?”

  “How else? The local Xenophobes have got to know who they are and where they are. Kyagambiddwa did, didn’t he?”

  “But Kyagambiddwa volunteered the information. You can’t just go waltzing into Free World House and force the Xenophobes to tell you where the Triple-Xers are.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “It’s unConstitutional.”

  “Measure Nine, Parry.”

  “But the public good –”

  “– is threatened, as far as I’m concerned. Law is about interpretation, after all, and I interpret the presence of a Triple-X cell in our city – a murderous Triple-X cell – as a danger to everyone here.”

  “I really can’t stand by and let you do this, van Wyk. I’m going to talk to the commissioner right away.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good. Céleste has already sanctioned the arrests.”

  “Then she can unsanction them.”

  “Parry, don’t you see?” Van Wyk shook his head pityingly. “It’s too late. Weren’t you listening to me just now? I said I’ve accepted Triple-X’s challenge. Accepted, past tense. Officers are already on their way to Free World House. In fact, I’d be surprised if MacLeod and his cronies aren’t being shipped to HQ even as we speak.”

  “Shipped to –? For God’s sake, van Wyk! Do you know how much trouble this is going to cause?”

  “I said I’d get results. I bet by lunchtime we’ll have the names of these Triple-X maniacs and where they’re hiding.”

  “And if the Xenophobes don’t know?”

  “They know, Parry. Believe me, they know. And by the time I’m through questioning them, they’ll be begging to tell me.”

  33. Chamber

  FLOOR LOWER B, the basement of FPP HQ, consisted of a bunker-like corridor with a row of cubic chambers along one side, hollowed out from the building’s crystech foundations. The walls, floors and ceilings were plastered and painted white, except the outer walls of the chambers. These were left unrendered and, being transparent, provided a source of light and a view, at least during daytime, although the
view was of the depths of the Fourth Canal and the light was consequently filtered and dimmed by water. What you could see was entrancing anyway. Through a metre of clear crystech you could see fish swimming amid the jostling subaquatic shafts of sunlight. You could see the miniature tornadoes of bubbles that trailed the shadows of passing surface traffic, whip-whirling in the wake of propeller turbulence. If you looked upwards, you could even see the canal surface itself, a rippling, flexing membrane between worlds.

  The chambers – no one called them cells – were not uncomfortably furnished, and their doors, in keeping with the rest of HQ, were without any form of retaining mechanism other than a spring-loaded catch. In theory, anyone escorted down to the basement was free to depart at any time. In practice, this seldom happened. The majority of people detained by the FPP knew that one of three fates awaited them: a trip to the airport, a trip to the mainland, or simply the extraction of a promise not to repeat your misdemeanour. Since none of these was too fearsome a prospect, there was nothing to be lost by staying put and availing yourself of the FPP’s hospitality.

  Here were sequestered the three Xenophobes – MacLeod, Greg, and the Tibetan monk – who were permanent residents of Free World House. (The other two that Parry had seen at Free World House, the Native American woman and the Mexican Indian, worked there but, it transpired, lived elsewhere.) When invited by van Wyk’s officers, very politely, to return with them to HQ, the three men had complied demurely and without demur, as any law-abiding citizen would, and now each was ensconced in a separate chamber and showing neither any inclination to leave nor, unfortunately for van Wyk, any inclination to speak. Indeed, the Tibetan monk had taken himself off to a corner of his chamber and was sitting there cross-legged, hands on knees, eyelids shut fast, sunk into a state of meditation so profound that you could have screamed in his ear and he would not have noticed. The Xenophobes had, it appeared, a prearranged policy on what to do when arrested by the FPP. Acquiescence up to a point; thereafter, mute defiance.

  Van Wyk had found the defiance entertaining at first. He relished a challenge. By the time Parry joined him down on Floor Lower B, however, van Wyk had been questioning the Xenophobes for the best part of an hour without managing to extract so much as a syllable from any of them. He was, therefore, no longer in a particularly agreeable frame of mind.

  During that hour, Parry did two things. First, he phoned Johansen at home and asked him to come in to HQ. Johansen, bless his loyal socks, did not ask why he was wanted but simply said he would be there as soon as possible and hung up. Next, Parry went up to see Quesnel in order to ask permission to continue to play a part in the shinju investigation.

  The request surprised the commissioner. “I wasn’t aware you were off the investigation, Jack.”

  “But I thought, you know, because van Wyk was at the Hannon...”

  “Then you thought wrong. Yes, Ray is on the case now. He has to be. I can hardly hand you responsibility for an incident in his wedge, can I? But I never said anything about you not staying involved with the investigation as well. In fact, I said just the opposite to Ray when I gave him authority to round up the Xenophobes. I told him you and he would be working together from now on. Equal partners. I guess he didn’t mention that to you, did he?”

  “It... didn’t come up in the conversation.”

  “Damn it. Ray’s a basically decent person, but ambition gets the better of him sometimes.”

  “Sometimes, ma’am?” Parry said, with a certain – he hoped forgivable – rancour.

  “OK, a lot of the time,” Quesnel conceded. “But you shouldn’t resent a guy for trying to get ahead.”

  “Not unless he does it at someone else’s expense. He lied to me so as to have some time alone with the Xenophobes.”

  “He didn’t lie, Jack.”

  “He deliberately omitted to tell me something, knowing I’d assume he’d been handed sole charge of the investigation. It amounts to the same thing.”

  “Maybe it does. In the long run it doesn’t make much difference. Ray is how he is. Deal with it and move on.”

  “Ma’am, forgive me for saying this, but why are you always so ready to defend him? You know as well as everyone else in this division that he’s short-tempered and has a pretty cavalier attitude regarding the Constitution. I mean, here he is, invoking Measure Nine in order to justify hauling the Xenophobes in, and he’s no proof they’re connected to Triple-X!”

  Quesnel dropped her voice, becoming quietly, imperiously stern. “Jack. Ray is a good officer, a good captain. He’s forceful. He gains respect. If he’s short-tempered, well... I could name another captain who’s been a bit deficient in the anger-management department recently. In fact, while we’re on that subject, I hope you have a good explanation for what went on at the Fuentes place, night before last.”

  “There’s nothing I can say. I was out of line.”

  “Goddamn right you were. And I’m only going to overlook what you did because I know how these shinjus are running you ragged and because I know that, if you want to hold onto your job, you won’t be so stupid as to ever do anything like that again.”

  “I understand, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “But getting back to Ray. I may not always approve of his methods, but I trust him. I trust him like I trust you, although for different reasons. You I always know are going to do the decent thing. He I always know is going to do the correct thing – correct as in best but not necessarily most desirable.”

  “Ma’am...”

  “Let me finish. Decent doesn’t always work, Jack. A few days back you sent me a report saying the first shinju was a double suicide. You believed that. So did I. Maybe we wanted to believe it a little too much. I don’t know. The upshot is, we got skewered. And now we know for sure that this business is a Triple-X action, and it so happens they chose to stage this new atrocity in a hotel in the North-West, and that means Ray has to be dealt in on the game, and frankly I think that’s no bad thing. I think you and he together, and I stress together, may be able to crack this. You’re opposites; you complement each other. Ray has good gut-instincts. You’ve a good heart. That makes for a good combination. So I want you, Jack – well, no, I’m ordering you: swallow your pride and suck up your resentment and work with him.”

  And if I refuse to obey that order? Parry thought. But the spark of insubordination fizzled out swiftly. “Of course, ma’am. Yes.”

  “Ray may be wrong about the Xenophobes, but equally he may not. The link between them and Triple-X is historically strong – strong enough for there to be reasonable grounds for bringing them in. I have my misgivings, but I gave Ray the go-ahead, and that’s my decision, my call. You will respect that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And Jack.” Quesnel’s eyes were blue lightning. “You will never, ever query my judgement again. In anything. Is that understood?”

  Understood and remembered and never to be forgotten. Parry left Quesnel’s office feeling chastised and to a lesser degree chastened, and headed downstairs to wait for Johansen in the entrance atrium. It aggrieved him to have been sidelined on his own case, and he had that never-comforting sensation of events slipping out of one’s grasp. He felt buffeted about, as though he had spent the past week in a lifeboat on a stormy sea. Nothing was certain any more, it seemed. There was nothing he could count on.

  Then Johansen arrived, and seeing the Norwegian – who had agreed to come without having to be asked twice, without wanting to know why – Parry felt his spirits lifting somewhat.

  Down in the basement, the two of them made their way along the corridor to where van Wyk’s day-shift sergeant, a Czech woman by the name of Fibich, was standing.

  “Captain,” she said, offering them SALUTATION. “Lieutenant.”

  “Is Captain van Wyk in there?” Parry asked, pointing to the nearest door.

  Fibich nodded.

  Without knocking, Parry and Johansen went in.

  Toroa MacLeod was sitt
ing in a chair that was positioned to face the viewing wall. Van Wyk was standing beside him, twitchy and exasperated, his hands clasped tightly together behind his back as though each was restraining the other from lashing out.

  “Parry,” van Wyk said, neither pleased nor surprised.

  MacLeod turned his head to give Parry and Johansen a cursory glance. His eyes flicked up briefly to the bruise on Parry’s forehead, which overnight had begun to spread and fade like a clot of smoke being dispersed by wind. His face showed no expression except that lent it by his tattoos. Whatever the arrangement of MacLeod’s features, implicit aggression was ever-present in the tattoos’ swirl and roil.

  “And I see you’ve brought along your pet yeti for moral support,” van Wyk added.

  “Let’s keep it civil, shall we?” Parry said. “So – what’s the news?”

  “Mr MacLeod here and his friends have been keeping schtum. Which, as I see it, can only mean they have something to keep schtum about.”

  “Or that they know they’re under no obligation to talk,” said Johansen. The “pet yeti” crack had not gone down well with him.

  “No legal obligation perhaps, lieutenant,” van Wyk said tersely, “but how about a moral obligation? These people know who’s killing Sirens and Foreigners. Don’t you, MacLeod?” MacLeod, who had resumed gazing out into the canal, did not respond. “They know their names and where they’re hiding. And as residents of this city and as human beings, they cannot in all conscience withhold that information from us. They have no right to.”

  “Perhaps if I were to have a chat with Mr MacLeod?” Parry ventured. “Alone? He and I have already established a certain ... understanding.”

  “No, Parry,” said van Wyk. “No. You’ve had your shot. Had it and blown it. It’s my turn now.”

  “I feel I shouldn’t have to remind you that the commissioner has stipulated that we work together and get on together. Or perhaps I do have to remind you.”

  The barb found no purchase in van Wyk’s thick hide. He merely shrugged. “Then get on with me by leaving me to get on with this.”