“For?”
“Oh, nothing really. Just thanks.”
When Johansen and Reich had gone, Parry went to the chamber’s outer wall and pressed his hands to it. The crystech felt smooth and neutral, neither cold nor hot, neither pliant nor unyielding. He gazed through its transparent thickness into the jet-black canal, into the unseen currents, the hidden motion. The canals had been dubbed “the veins of New Venice”, which, like most travel-brochure clichés, was unimaginative but not without a certain basic truth. Through his palms, through the crystech, Parry could faintly detect what felt like a pulse. He did not think he was imagining it. It was definitely there – a sluggish thing, a slow, steady, tidal push-and-pull, an echo of the immense surges of the ocean around the city.
After the Foreigners were gone, after people were gone, after the city’s hotels and towers were abandoned to bleach and rot in the sun, there would still be this heartbeat. New Venice would continue to be nourished by Mother Mediterranean. The sea would continue to imbue the city, this stillborn dream, with a kind of life.
It was something, at least.
“Boss?”
Snapped from reverie, Parry realised he had been standing, leaning against the crystech wall, for a good quarter of an hour. “Yes?”
“Looks like you did the right thing releasing him.”
“Well, I still have my doubts, but his alibis seem sound.”
“Very sound. Because we’re one of them now.”
“What?”
“There’s been another shinju.”
“You’re kidding.”
“The desk-duty officer just told me. The call came in about twenty minutes ago. Captain van Wyk’s already on his way.”
“Where?”
“The Scroll.”
38. Fourth
OF ALL THE hotels in New Venice, the Scroll was the most unusual-looking and, since distinctiveness confers cachet, the most expensive. It was a slender, helical building, in effect a coiled strip of rooms that had been drawn upward from the centre till, fully unfurled, it formed a cone a kilometre high. A funicular lift served the interior, cabling up and down a spiral track, and the penthouse suite, known as the High Den, a split-level turret with a 360º panoramic balcony, was almost entirely kitted out with crystech decor – crystech floor-tiles, crystech bathroom furniture and fixtures, crystech dining table and chairs, crystech cutlery and crockery and glassware, crystech wall-mosaics, crystech bar, even a crystech refrigerator. Designed for human occupancy, to spend one night in this dazzling eyrie cost the equivalent of the price of a modest-sized family home. For the mega-wealthy, no other hotel room in New Venice would do.
The Scroll, in short, was an extraordinary edifice. Unique. There were even rumours to the effect that the building – resembling, as it did, that fairly well-known symbol of phallic potency, a unicorn’s horn – augmented the sexual performance of those staying in it, not to mention the vocal performance of Sirens singing there for Foreign residents.
What lay in a shadowed side-alley at the Scroll’s base, however, was neither as unique as the hotel, nor as lovely to behold. Indeed, what lay in a shadowed side-alley at the Scroll’s base – a human body and a set of Foreign remains – was something that had become (for Parry, at any rate) all-too-horribly humdrum, all-too-depressingly routine.
When he and Johansen reached the scene, they found that a small crowd of onlookers had formed at the alley’s mouth. Close enough to see what was going on but not so close that they could see too much, the onlookers were murmuring to one another, strangers exchanging opinions as frankly as old friends. They did not move aside when asked, so Parry and Johansen, with their FPP badges clipped to their shirt pockets, had to shoulder their way through, Johansen offering an excuse-me here and there, Parry in too grim a mood to bother.
A few metres along the alley there was a vent in the side of the hotel from which emanated a plume of steam and the smell of laundering. Next to it stood a sparkling-clean garbage container, lid firmly sealed so that no odours could escape. The two sets of remains, Foreign and human, lay beside the garbage container. As ever, the one was shining and markless, the other brutally damaged, both deprived of the life they had contained.
Parry took stock of the scene. A little further on along the alley van Wyk was standing, engaged in conversation with a woman in a chambermaid’s uniform. The woman was describing something, pointing and gesticulating to illustrate what she was saying.
Slowly, wearily, Parry approached the pile of Foreign clothing. Mask, gloves, robe – no different from the three sets of Foreign remains he had previously encountered. He wished he was more disturbed by what he was looking at, but repetition had begun to inure him. What had, at the Amadeus, seemed appalling, a crime against nature, now was no more than saddening, like the sight of a small bird lying dead on the ground, frail and insignificant.
He moved on to the corpse, which belonged to – strictly speaking had belonged to – a small, dark-haired man of indeterminate age.
Immediately, he saw that there was no way in the world that the man could have killed himself. His head was battered and broken, one eye bulging from its socket, the other buried beneath swollen, plum-purple lids. Several of his fingers were mangled, twisted, crushed. Blood had poured from his ears and nose, caking his mouth and hair. His mashed lips resembled sun-dried tomatoes. This person, quite clearly, had been beaten to death.
All the while, the crowd of onlookers was growing restive and more vocal. Parry heard his name mentioned a couple of times, and then someone said, in a loud, direct voice, “You FPP. You’re just letting this happen. Why are you not doing something?”
Another of the onlookers joined in, made brave by the boldness of the first: “Yeah, why don’t you let someone else take over? Someone competent like the mainland police.”
A third added: “This is all your fault!”
The rest, roused by these denouncements, uttered growls and grumbles and mutterings in a variety of languages, a polyglot murmur of discontent, the words different, the sentiments alike. Parry turned and examined their faces, and saw in them a look he knew well, a look he remembered vividly from the Hunger Riots: the fury of fear.
He turned to Johansen. “Pål, would you mind having a word with that lot? Try and calm them down a bit?”
Johansen went over to the crowd and attempted to convince them that there was nothing of interest to them here and that they should disperse and return to their hotels. Parry, meanwhile, made his way over to van Wyk and the chambermaid.
“Natives getting restless, eh, Parry?” said van Wyk.
“As well they might. Who is this?”
Van Wyk introduced him to Senhora Coutinho, a member of the Scroll’s janitorial staff. She was a stout, squat, thickly-bespectacled Portuguese. Shock and consternation were writ large in her face.
“Senhora Coutinho is the one who made the call to HQ,” van Wyk said.
“And you were also the one who discovered them, senhora?” Parry asked.
“Sim.” Senhora Coutinho pronounced the last letter of the affirmative as a glottal rather than a labial, so that the word sounded not unlike sing. “I walk this way, along here, for the bus to take me home, and I find them.” She indicated the lost Foreigner and dead Siren without actually looking at them.
“Perhaps you could tell the captain what else you saw, senhora,” said van Wyk.
“I see a man, running away.” Senhora Coutinho aimed a stubby finger towards the other end of the alley, which opened out onto a walkway beside a narrow canal. “I come around corner from the hotel entrance, hear feet, pit-pat. See the man running.”
“Definitely a man?” said Parry. “Not a woman?”
“Definite a man. The shape of him, how he run. Then I see the dead ones, the man and the Estrangiero.”
“Can you tell me what he looked like, the man, the one running?” Parry could scarcely believe it. An eyewitness. Some good luck at last. “Was he European
? Asian? North African?”
“I see nothing of how he look like.”
Crestfallen: “Nothing at all?”
“I see only his back. And it is dark. I see only a shape like a man, you understand?”
“A silhouette.”
“Isso! Silueta. And my eyes” – the senhora circled an index finger at her spectacles – “are not so good. At night, very not good.”
“Well, was he tall? Short? Anything you can remember seeing, senhora, anything at all will help.”
“It’s no good, Parry,” said van Wyk. “I already asked her all of this. All she saw was a man who appeared to be of average height and medium build, and that’s it. Which gets us absolutely no nearer finding these Triple-Xers.”
“Damn!” Professional decorum prevented Parry from venting his frustration with a coarser expletive.
Senhora Coutinho turned to van Wyk. “You have not tell him the violin.”
“The violin?” said Parry.
“The senhora,” van Wyk said, making a face, as if this was some ridiculous childish fancy he was being expected to indulge, “seems to believe that the fellow was carrying a violin.”
“Sim. It was this shape...” Senhora Coutinho used both hands to mime the outline of a string instrument – the long narrow neck, the voluptuous curves, the waist-like indentations.
Parry frowned. The Triple-Xer had used a violin to batter the Siren and the Foreigner? What good was that as a weapon? Senhora Coutinho had to have been mistaken. As she herself had said, her night vision was not good.
Offering her a cursory GRATITUDE, Parry excused himself and strode off along the alley in the direction the fleeing killers had taken.
Triple-X had been here. Less than three-quarters of an hour ago, one of them had been here. He was passing through the air the man had passed through, breathing the very molecules he had exhaled. So close. So bloody close! And yet still, damn it, not close enough.
He reached the canal at the end of the alley. He braced his hands on the walkway guardrail. Opposite was the NVTV building, a huge blank-sided cube topped with a crewcut of aerial masts. Close by, to his right, was a line of mooring posts. The Triple-Xer could have had a boat tied up there, perhaps with an accomplice waiting in it, keeping the engine idling. The killer could have climbed in and made a quick and easy getaway, the canal waters erasing the boat’s wake, smoothing out tracelessly.
It was a bit insulting, actually, when you considered it. The Triple-Xers were no longer bothering to try to make the murders look like double suicides. So confident were they that the FPP wasn’t going to catch them, they weren’t even going to the trouble of hiding in hotel rooms and carrying out their crimes in soundproofed seclusion. They were simply waylaying their victims in alleys and clubbing the hell out of them there, just like the cultists had at Koh Farang.
Bastards!
Overcome by a fit of rage, Parry banged his fist against the guardrail.
Bastards! Bastards!
He banged his fist again, then started banging it repeatedly, pounding and pounding the guardrail till he thought he might fracture a metacarpal. The impacts echoed dully along the guardrail’s hollowness. Soon the pain became too great and he had to stop. Wincing, he held up his hand and examined it, peering at it as though it were not a part of him but some throbbing, painful parasite that had fastened itself to the end of his arm. He thought of the victim’s hands. He had been holding them up, hadn’t he? That was how his fingers had ended up so bashed and mangled. He had been trying to ward off the blows. The blows that had been inflicted with ... a violin?
It could not have been a violin. Something that looked like one, maybe, but not a violin.
Then it came to him.
It came to him in one of those subtle, silent instants of clarity. No thunderbolt from heaven. No lightbulb popping on. Just sudden understanding emerging from within, fully-formed, entire. Like a map being unrolled, revealing the full lie of the land.
Seconds later, he was back at van Wyk’s side.
“Van Wyk, I know who did this.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes really. This and all the other shinjus. And we have to go and arrest them right now, before they can dispose of the murder weapon.”
“Right now?” Van Wyk grinned superciliously. “But Parry, surely we need authorisation from the commissioner.”
“Never mind that.”
“Well, what about the Constitution? Measure Five forbids –”
“Van Wyk, I never thought I’d hear myself say this, and I know you never thought you’d hear me say this, but to hell with the Constitution. And to hell with the commissioner. We may already be too late, but if we don’t move now, we may never get a chance like this again.”
“Well now.” Van Wyk eyed Parry appraisingly and with a certain amount of approval. “You’ve certainly changed your tune.”
“I’m just fed up with these wankers giving us the runaround. We can stop them, right now. You, me and Johansen. How about it?”
“You know who they are?”
“I do.”
“Definitely?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Van Wyk grinned. “Then enough chitchat. Let’s get moving.”
INTERLUDE
One Day Ago...
YOU SHOULD’VE KNOWN this might happen. In a way you did know, so it doesn’t matter so much. You were sort of prepared for the possibility. It was one of the many variables you had to take into account, so you already know what countermeasures you need to deploy.
In your hotel room, he sits on the edge of the bed and wrings his hands. An inarticulate manufolding.
“I can’t go on,” he says.
“Yes, you can.”
“I can’t stand it any longer. The lying. The deception.”
“You’ve been doing great so far.”
“I think he knows.”
“He doesn’t have a clue.”
“And I ... I like him. I feel sorry for him.”
“Don’t. He doesn’t deserve your sympathy.”
“I want out.”
“There isn’t much more to do. Just a few more days, that’s all. Everything’s running fine. Better than fine! We just have to keep our nerve and keep going. We can do this!”
“But I’m scared all the time. Scared someone’s going to catch me. I’m risking so much!”
“You’re risking so much?” It’s time for some judicious anger. Time to set him straight on a couple of things. “Compared with me you’re risking nothing!”
“I’m an accessory.”
“And I’m the fucking criminal! You think you could get into trouble? Look what I’m doing! You think what you’re doing is hard? Try walking in my shoes, my friend! Christ, I thought you were stronger than this. I thought you were more of a man.”
He flinches, as though whipped. He stops wringing his hands. He goes slack, subdued.
“I’m sorry,” he says, limply. “I’m sorry. I don’t find this easy, that’s all.”
You soften, too. Forgivingly. Like a parent with a child.
“Hey, I understand.” You touch his shoulder. “It isn’t easy. But if it was, I’d have asked someone else to do it. I wouldn’t have chosen you if I didn’t think you were up to the challenge. We’re a team, man. We’re partners. You and me – we rely on each other. That’s how it works.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. Your hand remains on his shoulder. If he stands up and tries to kiss you, you’ll kill him. There’s a hunting knife in the drawer of the bedside table, on top of the Bible. You’ll gut him in one swift stroke like a fish. You’ll slice him up like fucking sushi.
But he doesn’t try anything. He just sits there, then says, “Of course. Forgive me. A team. You’re right. I’m sorry about all this. I let the pressure get to me. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
You pat him once, then let go of him. “It’s no big deal. Just a few more days, then it’ll all be over.”
“I can manage that.”
“Good. Good fellow.”
After he leaves, you know that at some point you are going to have to kill him. Once he’s outlived his usefulness (as the saying goes), he’s dead. You can’t afford to have him roaming around, obsessing over his complicity. Eventually his conscience will get the better of him and he’ll crack, and then he’ll sell you out. You’re quite certain of that. Guy like him, he won’t be able to stop himself.
That’s OK, though. Killing him won’t be a problem.
You didn’t really want to have to share the loot anyway.
FINALE
39. Attack
“GIVE THEM A bit longer,” said Parry, peering through the bars of the gate into the darkened garden. The gravel path shone like a meandering moonlit river. Free World House rose at the end, a tall, pale oblong inset with black squares of unilluminated window. “They live there. There must be somebody home.”
“Do you want me to try the bell again?” said Johansen.
“Leave it just another moment.” Parry stared at the house, willing a light to come on. The Xenophobes had to be in. This was their stronghold, their lair. Where else would they run to? He glanced back at the launch that was tethered outside the gate. In the days of combustion engines, he would have been able to tell if the launch had been used within the past half-hour by laying a hand on the motor housing. Comp-res engines, however, generated negligible quantities of heat, so there was no simple way of telling if the boat was the getaway vehicle the Xenophobes had used to return here from the Scroll. He was almost certain it was, though.
“Looks to me,” said van Wyk, never one to miss an opportunity to carp, “as if we’ve had a wasted journey.”
Parry ignored the comment and was about to tell Johansen to press the bell button again when a downstairs window abruptly filled with brightness. Seconds later, a wary voice issued from the intercom speaker.
“Yeah? Who is this? And d’you know what bloody time it is?”
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