The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  The song, which to judge by its most often repeated line was entitled “That’s What I Want From Her”, reached its climax in a tumult of chords and a cascade of cymbal crashes. This was followed by a squalling, terminative wail from the vocalist. Then the drummer seemed to strike every piece of his kit at once, and then the guitarist and the bassist joined him in pounding their instruments simultaneously, once, and again, and one more time, and then one more time for luck, and then the vocalist screeched “Yeah!” and there was another all-for-one pounding of instruments, which seemed to signify that this was truly the end of the song, but then the guitarist wrenched out one more chord, and the drummer hit his snare, and the bassist twanged his E-string, and the singer yelped, and the guitarist tweaked off a high note, and the drummer, determined to have the very final word, hit his snare with both sticks ... and at last, after many false endings, there was silence.

  The cognoscenti at the bar put down their drinks and applauded lightly. There were a couple of thin cheers.

  “Thank you!” the vocalist gasped. His efforts at the microphone had left him so short of breath that, were this a hospital, you might have expected to see an orderly rushing off to fetch a cylinder of oxygen. “You’ve been (wheeze) wunnerful audience. Love to (wheeze) home with us. We’re (wheeze) the Burning (wheeze) Red-Hot Lovers. Thank you. G’night.”

  There was another patter of applause as the vocalist staggered offstage and the guitarist and bassist unplugged their instruments and followed him, filing out through a side door. By way of a triumphal parting gesture, the drummer, as he stood up from his stool, lobbed his sticks towards the audience. The throw was clumsy and the sticks landed well short of their intended target, clattering onto the dancefloor and rolling to a halt. When, eventually, an audience member went to pick them up, it was not with the air of an eager souvenir-seeker but rather with the air of someone tidying up a piece of litter that could be a hip-breaking hazard to the unwary.

  A trio of roadies – hirsute, cumbersome, dressed in leather waistcoats, black T-shirts and black jeans – came out and set about preparing the stage for the next act on the bill, wrestling a digital piano to the fore. Meanwhile, Parry and Johansen found themselves a table at the edge of the room.

  “So what did you think of them, boss?” Johansen asked, with a nod of his head in the direction of the stage.

  “I’ve heard worse.”

  “Yeah. OK if you like that sort of thing. But actually what I meant was what did you think of them as Triple-Xers? Because I tell you, they looked way too old to me.”

  “Old, but still quite sprightly. Besides, I know you get your younger Triple-Xers, your student reactionaries, but mostly they’re people who were around long before the Debut.”

  “Maybe the next lot will fit the bill better.”

  “Yes. Or maybe...”

  The roadies had finished rearranging the stage, and as they ambled off Parry saw someone emerging from a dark corner beyond the bar. Lithe and leather-clad, the man bounded across the dancefloor, hopped up onto the stage and took the microphone.

  “Good evening again, my friends,” said Guthrie Reich, grinning against the spotlights. “Didn’t I tell you the Lovers would rock your socks off? Yeah! And now, with our last act tonight, a change of pace, not to mention perspective. She enthralled music-lovers for over twenty-five years with her extraordinary songwriting ability and her laceratingly confessional lyrics. She’s been retired for a decade, but we’re proud and privileged that she’s performing again and she’s on our bill. A goddess of the piano keyboard with songs like candy-coated cyanide, she’s here tonight with her band. Please put your hands together and welcome ... Miss Leni Foss and the Three A.M. Sessioneers!”

  Out came four men, not one of whom would see his fiftieth birthday again, followed a moment later by a frail-framed woman of similar vintage, with long wiry copper hair and startled bushbaby eyes. Leni Foss (for this was she) approached the stage and her piano stool timidly, as if having to coax herself every step of the way. Yet once Reich had stepped aside and surrendered the microphone stand to her, she underwent a transformation, taking charge, straddling her stool, adjusting the mic stand. She then shouted out a greeting to the audience, gave the title of a song (“Men’s True Hate”), counted the band in, and launched into a harsh bluesy riff on the piano which her drummer complemented with a lolloping 12/8 beat and plenty of hissing high-hat action, while her bassist provided the underpinning with some sinewy travelling-arpeggio work.

  No sooner had this middle-of-the-road vibe been established, however, than Leni Foss hurtled off down some extraordinary vocal byways, singing a lyric about sex during menstruation in a banshee soprano that looped and skirled around what would otherwise have been quite a pretty melody, adding jagged edges to sustained notes and making her quavers quiver. She sang about “twisted sheets and tangled bodies”, about “a trickle of scarlet on her lover’s thigh”, about her lover’s fearful rush for the bedroom door, about the blood that meant that “I’m living, not you’re dying”, and it was abundantly clear that she relished the discomfort her words were inducing in the men present and her voice was inducing in everyone present irrespective of gender. She grinned ferociously as she scratched and slammed at the piano keys, while riding her stool like an unbroken stallion. She was compelling to watch, and at the same time unsettling, for her commitment to her song was so absolute that she seemed almost naked, a creature of nothing but rage and music.

  When the song ended, the ensuing applause was as much of relief that the song was over as of praise for its content and the way it had been performed. Leni Foss thanked the audience and began to introduce her band members, whom she referred to as her “boys”.

  Parry decided that now was as good a time as any to make his move. He signalled to Johansen to accompany him, and they stood up and walked past the bar to the corner to which Reich had returned after his bout of emcee-ing.

  “Guthrie Reich?”

  Reich, who was sitting with his feet up on a table and his chair canted on its rear legs, looked round and furrowed his brow, apparently confused to have been addressed by name by a complete stranger. Then he executed an almost textbook double-take, and broke into a smile.

  “If it ain’t old Jack ‘shove your teeth down your throat’ Parry,” he exclaimed. “Well, well. You’re a different man out of uniform. What you doing here? Come for the show?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “No? I kinda thought it might be your thing. Not Leni, maybe, but some of the other guys.”

  “I’m not here for any kind of entertainment at all. Mr Reich, I’d like to ask you to return with me to Headquarters to discuss a matter of FPP business.”

  Reich’s eyebrows shot up.

  “You are under no obligation to comply with my request,” Parry continued. “However, refusal to do so may count against you at a later date. You may defer compliance to a more convenient time, which is to be not less than twenty-four hours from now.” He was doing this by the book, reeling out the standard FPP rote, keeping firmly within the guidelines, staying formal and expressionless – yet it could not be denied that secretly, guiltily, he was enjoying himself. “Should you wish, we can arrange for a mainland lawyer to be in attendance while we interview you, although you must bear in mind that this is not, in the legal sense, an arrest.”

  Reich still looked astonished.

  Leni Foss commenced her next number, a little ditty she called “I’d Rather Die”.

  Parry folded his arms. “Well, Mr Reich? What’s it going to be?”

  Finally Reich said, “Leni’s the last act on the bill. Just let me see her off at the end, then I’ll come with you.”

  37. Indeterminacy

  AT NIGHT, THE chambers of Floor Lower B were not as agreeable and welcoming as they were by day. With no sunlight to illuminate the canal water, the transparent outer walls showed nothing but blackness. There was no sense of distance or perspective. Fish could not b
e seen. There was nothing but a void out there, a dark weight of water, glowering, impenetrable. You could not help but think that you were deeper than you actually were. You could not help but imagine that you were down in the colder fastnesses of the ocean, the trenches where the nightmare creatures lurked – the X-ray crustaceans, the surly coelacanths, that whole benthic bestiary of evolutionary by-products and offcasts and dead ends, blind and gaping and skeletal and snaggle-toothed.

  “I’m telling you, Jack,” said Guthrie Reich, not blind, not gaping, well-fleshed, with perfect dentition, “they’re artistes. They’re passionate about one thing and one thing only, and that’s their music. OK, from time to time they might gripe that these days it’s Sirens who get all the attention and most of the money. But come on, who of us doesn’t bitch from time to time about the guys who earn more than we do, the guys who get the glory we think we deserve? That’s just how people are.”

  “And yourself, Mr Reich?” said Parry. “Do you gripe about Sirens?”

  “Sure, I’ve been known to. Now and then. You heard me at Anna’s. So I don’t like what they sing. That makes me a critic, man. Not a psycho-killer.”

  “And Foreigners?” said Johansen.

  “What about them?”

  “Do you hate them?”

  “No way. Like I told the captain the other night, I’ve got nothing against them at all. They’re kinda fun to have around. They get on and do their thing, I get on and do mine, that’s OK. So long as no one’s giving me grief, I’m a live-and-let-live kind of person, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Nevertheless, Mr Reich,” said Parry, “it seems an odd coincidence, don’t you think, that the first shinju murder occurred two days after the Trad Music Revue turned up in New Venice.”

  “‘Odd’ because it was two days? Should it have been a shorter length of time? Longer? What are you getting at, Jack?”

  “Mr Reich...”

  “So it’s a coincidence. Coincidences happen. If they didn’t, nobody’d have invented a word for them. Anyway, when was the first shinju? Sunday night?”

  “The early hours of Monday morning.”

  “Sunday night, I was with the bands. We were rehearsing.”

  “Till when?”

  “Late. Midnight, at least. You can check. We were using an empty storage area down on the waterfront. East district. We were making enough noise. People nearby got to have heard us.”

  “How about Wednesday night?” said Johansen.

  “Gig. A place called The Tempo Zone.”

  Parry remembered the name of the club from the flyer. “And how late did that go on?”

  “Pretty late. I can’t say exactly how late. Thing is, the guys in the Revue? I don’t know if you noticed, but they’re none of them what you might call spring chickens. Even playing a short set takes it out of them. Afterwards, all they want to do is go to bed and go to sleep. Like the Burning Red-Hot Lovers. You saw them? Forget about burning red-hot love. A nice rubdown with warm liniment is about the most those guys can handle.”

  “So there’s no one young on the Revue?” Johansen said. “No one at all?”

  “It’s a senior citizen’s game,” replied Reich. “I’m the youngest person involved by a coupla decades.”

  “And why is that?” said Parry. “Why is someone like you, someone your age, involved in trad music?”

  “Why not? It’s my thing. It’s what I do.”

  “Not much money in it, though.”

  “So? Some of us don’t have any choice about what we dedicate ourselves to. We just find what we like, what we’re best at, and do it. Some people still collect old books, don’t they? Some people won’t watch any television that wasn’t broadcast before the turn of the century. Some people breed cats or koi carp or whatever. I like trad music, and that’s how I’ve chosen to make my living, such as it is. Could be because my dad was a musician, a son of the rock’n’roll generation, and I grew up listening to the old stuff he liked. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. We are what we are, aren’t we? You’re a Foreign Policy cop. I’m a trad music promoter. Whatever life fits us out for, that’s what we become.”

  “Mr Reich,” said Johansen, “have you at any time had any association with the Xenophobe movement?”

  “The Xenophobe movement? That bunch of whiny windbags? No way. Uh-uh.”

  “What about Triple-X?” said Parry.

  “Yeah, like, even if I was a Triple-Xer, I’d say so.”

  “But Triple-Xers certainly aren’t ‘whiny windbags’, are they? Xenophobes talk, but Triple-Xers do.”

  “You know what? I’m not sure you have the right to be asking me these questions.”

  “We have the right to ask them. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’ve been answering, haven’t I? And I think that says a great deal. Tell me, Jack, did someone put you up to this?”

  Parry frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, OK, I realise you don’t like me much. I don’t know why you don’t like me, ’cause I think I’m a pretty likeable guy, but I guess something about me rubs you up the wrong way. Thing is, I can’t believe you’d let that be your sole reason for suspecting me and my artistes of being ... well, hell, for want of a better word, terrorists. So I can only assume that someone else pointed the finger at us. Said, ‘Try those Trad Music Revue dudes. They’re kinda hinky.’ Maybe even suggested we were killers. Am I right?”

  “I admit, the idea wasn’t entirely mine.”

  “There you go. Whose was it? Some Siren? Some of those guys have got a real grudge against trad musicians. Probably because they’ve stuck to their guns. They’ve kept their integrity and Sirens haven’t.”

  “Actually, it was one of my own officers.”

  “One of your own officers.”

  “Whom I don’t think has anything particularly against trad music.”

  “Young guy, is he?”

  “Relatively young.”

  “Well-educated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kind of stuffy?”

  “I wouldn’t really call him stuffy.”

  “Yoshi’s a bit stuffy,” Johansen said.

  “Big fan of Foreigners?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “There’s a certain type of person, you see, Jack, who just wants to do a Stalin number on the past and erase every trace of everything that happened before the Debut. And things like my Revue piss that sort of person off. I’m not saying this officer of yours is like that exactly, but if he pointed you in my direction, without any solid evidence, just as a suggestion, then you’ve got to ask yourself why he did it. What does he have against something like the Revue? It’s got to be some kind of a personal grievance, doesn’t it?”

  Some kind of a personal grievance. Parry wasn’t sufficiently well-acquainted with Hosokawa to know whether or not he hated trad music and its practitioners. He was, however, rapidly coming to the conclusion that a personal grievance had played a part in his decision to arrest Reich: his own dislike of Reich. It was he, after all, who had inferred from Hosokawa’s vague, generalised comment a specific reference to the Trad Music Revue. It was he, too, who had divined a deeper significance to Reich’s complaints about Sirens at Anna’s party.

  Damn it. Reich was right. Something about him did rub Parry up the wrong way, and he had allowed it to influence his decision-making. Animosity had clouded his judgement. He had not been thinking. He had only been feeling.

  He looked at Reich, looked at him long and hard, with resentment and a certain amount of shame, and finally he said, “You’re free to go.”

  “What?” said Reich. “Interview over? Just like that? You sure?”

  Johansen’s face was exhibiting a similar sentiment.

  “You may leave,” said Parry. “You are at liberty to depart. The door is open. How many other ways can I put it?”

  “I sort of had the feeling I was here
for the night.”

  “Lieutenant Johansen will escort you upstairs and arrange for transport to take you back to the OZ Club, or to your hotel if you’d prefer.”

  “Well, that’s very nice of you, but – ”

  “Mr Reich, do you or do you not want to go?”

  Reich got to his feet. “I guess this means we’re innocent, then. We’ve got the alibis.”

  Parry did not reply.

  “Ah, come on, Jack, no need to be like that. You’re only doing your job, right? Can’t fault a guy for that.”

  Parry made a gesture, something between a jerk of the thumb and a swat at an imaginary fly. “Enjoy the rest of your time in New Venice, Mr Reich.”

  “I surely will, captain. And thanks.”