The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “Or a good time to step up their campaign. Ma’am, I can’t be a part of this.”

  “No one’s asking you to stand up and say everything’s peachy and wonderful, Jack. All you have to do is be there next to me at the press conference and let me tell everybody what a good job you’ve done so far. You could maybe even smile, if you think you could manage it. And then you can get back to hunting for the other perpetrators. Just a few minutes in front of the cameras, that’s all I’m asking from you, while I do what I can to pull this city back from the brink and maybe buy you some time into the bargain.”

  “I can’t,” Parry said, shaking his head as emphatically as his traumatised neck would allow. “I won’t.”

  “Sometimes, Parry, you have to be prepared to compromise a little,” said van Wyk.

  “Exactly,” said Quesnel.

  “Well, in that case I have no choice.” Parry’s hand went to his badge.

  “Oh no.” Quesnel stabbed a stern, admonishing finger at him. “Don’t you try that on me. Don’t you even think about pulling that stunt. I won’t have it. I won’t have you flouncing off like some snitty teenager who can’t get his own way. You don’t get off the hook that easily. You have a job to do, captain, and you’re damn well going to do it!”

  “Then,” said Parry, his hand falling away from the badge, “help me do it, commissioner, by being absolutely honest at the press conference.”

  “I’ve told what I’m going to do. I’m not going to change my mind, and you are not going to change it for me.”

  “Then don’t expect me to support you. Don’t expect me to stand beside you and endorse a lie.”

  So saying, Parry spun about on his heel.

  “Jack.”

  He marched to the door.

  “Jack!”

  He hauled the door open.

  “Jack!”

  Without a backward glance, he exited Quesnel’s office.

  42. Scale

  DOWN IN HIS office, he sat at his desk with his head in his hands, trying to work out whether what he had just done had been terrifically principled or terrifically pigheaded. Either way, one thing was for certain: tactically, it had been a serious blunder. He had antagonised the commissioner, a friend, an ally, at a time when friends and allies seemed in drastically short supply. It was obvious what he should do. He should head straight back upstairs, apologise and agree to attend the press conference. It would only be a few minutes of his life, a small act of silent complicity, for the greater good of the city. Would that put such a strain on his conscience?

  Well, yes, it would. He could see Quesnel’s point, of course. Right now, soothing the city’s fevered brow was of paramount importance. The need for the FPP to act with perfect integrity came second to that. Besides, her decision to “finesse” the facts could be justified, broadly, under the terms of Measure Seven and, for that matter, Measure Nine, so it was not even as if the Constitution was being contravened, at least not in the letter. There was nothing wrong, in other words, with what Quesnel proposed to do. None the less he felt that she had, in some indefinable but fundamental way, betrayed him. By asking him to stand beside her in front of the cameras, she had invited him to play a visible role in a conspiracy to mislead. Worse, she had baited the invitation with an appeal to his ego: Let me tell everybody what a good job you’ve done so far. As if he was in this for fame and acclaim! As if that was the only reason he had joined the FPP!

  He wondered if he was judging the commissioner too harshly. But then she herself judged others by the severest standards. And she must have been aware what an awkward position she had put him in. Must have.

  So it went, round and round in his head, reason and resentment on a whirling carousel, the one chasing the other, till at last, growing impatient with his own indecision, he told himself to stop farting around and make a choice. Either go upstairs and grovel to Quesnel and then show up for her damn press conference, or else stick to his guns, accept that he had done nothing wrong, and get on with doing his job.

  For once, in a tussle between common sense and pride, pride won. He would get on with doing his job. Right. Great. That was that sorted. So what should he do?

  Well, one possibility was go downstairs to the basement and have a word with Greg. Perhaps he might succeed where van Wyk had failed and be able to winkle out what Greg knew – assuming Greg knew anything – about the other Triple-X cell.

  On the other hand, he could go and see if Hosokawa was still at work and, if so, try to get him to elaborate on that hint he had dropped last night (if indeed it had been a hint).

  The latter seemed potentially the more profitable of the alternatives, so he left his office and made his way to the operations room.

  Grins and claps and cheers greeted his entrance. With as much graciousness as he could muster, he batted down the applause, using both hands spread flat, as a conductor does when quietening the orchestra. He felt fraudulent. He had done nothing to deserve this. His small and very hard-won triumph at Free World House was a tick in the plus column, certainly, but it barely began to offset the many, deeply-scored minuses he had racked up over the past few days.

  He crossed the room, glancing sideways at Johansen’s empty cubicle as he went (the “NORWEGIAN FROM HELL” slogan on the chair-back seemed bleakly vainglorious just then). Near the far end was where Hosokawa usually sat. Being a junior officer, Hosokawa did not have a cubicle and work board exclusively his own but time-shared with equally junior officers on different shifts.

  He was not occupying the cubicle right now. Another officer was in his place.

  Parry turned to Avni, whose shift officially ended half an hour ago but who was still at her desk, catching up on filework.

  “Is Yoshi around?”

  “He didn’t come in last night, sir.” Avni could not resist a wry, insinuating raise of one eyebrow.

  “Didn’t come in? Well, did he call in sick?”

  Avni shook her head. “I tried ringing him at home several times. His board was in answer mode.”

  “Try him again, would you?”

  Avni punched up and dialled Hosokawa’s home number. “Still in answer mode,” she said, replacing the receiver.

  “Then where’s he got to?”

  “I was wondering that myself, sir.”

  Parry knew Hosokawa to be a conscientious young man. If unwell or otherwise indisposed, he would have contacted Avni in order to inform her of his absence from work. That he had not done so, in conjunction with his visit last night, started an itchy tingle at the back of Parry’s brain. Neither event, last night’s visit or this morning’s absence, was in itself particularly untoward. Together, however, they added up to...

  To what?

  Parry could not say. Somehow, though, he had the feeling not only that the two events were linked, but that they amounted to more than the sum of their parts.

  “Sergeant, I realise you’re off-duty, but would you do me a favour?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Ten minutes later, Parry and Avni were aboard an FPP launch, pulling out from the vehicle pool at the rear of HQ. Parry was ensconced at the stern and Avni was at the helm. She guided the launch along the subsidiary canal that ran behind HQ, then eased to a halt at the junction with the Fourth Canal. Traffic was busy on the Fourth, lines of boats streaming in both directions. Their wakes churned up such a chop that, in order to hold the launch in place while waiting for a break in the flow, Avni had to keep the propeller gently turning and make continual small adjustments to the rudder.

  As the launched idled and bobbed, Parry’s attention was drawn towards the steps of the Piazza Verdi, where a small crowd of men and women was gathering. Journalists. He watched them checking their equipment and chatting amongst themselves, and he thought of the impending press conference and felt a flush of shame. He was running away. That was what it boiled down to, wasn’t it? This journey to Hosokawa’s apartment was nothing more than a pretext – and a slim one a
t that – for avoiding rather than facing up to a problem. He was worried about Hosokawa, yes, no question. But so worried that he had to go and check up on him straight away? So worried that he couldn’t put off doing so till after the press conference?

  He contemplated telling Avni to turn the boat around, but at that moment the sergeant, spying a gap in the traffic, gunned the throttle, and the launch lurched forwards and the opportunity was lost.

  Through New Venice’s waterway web they warp-and-wefted, travelling for the most part along subsidiary canals, side-routes and rat-runs and doglegs and cut-throughs, until eventually, five kilometres west of Hub Lagoon, they arrived at Scriabin Heights, a complex of residential blocks that afforded sea views – or rather between-building sea glimpses – for its upper-storey tenants with west-facing windows. Tying up at a communal mooring area, they continued on foot, following colour-coded signs to the block where Hosokawa lived, F# White. There, Avni pressed the bell-button for Hosokawa’s apartment. After several tries had failed to obtain a response, she turned to Parry with a shrug. “Well, sir? What now?”

  “If he’s not in, he’s not in. Nothing more we can do, I suppose.”

  “But if he is in?”

  “That’s just it. That’s what worries me.”

  “If you really need to know if something’s happened to him, I could always break in.”

  “Break in? You mean pick the lock? Kick down the door? I don’t think that would be appropriate.”

  “No.” Avni took a step back and peered up. “Whenever I’ve locked myself out of my apartment – it hasn’t happened often, I should add – what I do is I ask my next-door neighbours to let me in, then climb along from their balcony to mine and get in through my window.”

  Parry frowned up at the building. F# White, like every block in Scriabin Heights, was of a chunky, utilitarian design, its balconies divided one from the other by thick, jutting partitions.

  “Do you really think you could manage it?”

  “Sure. I don’t see why not.”

  “What if Yoshi’s window’s locked?”

  “Who locks their balcony windows?”

  “Fair point.”

  Hosokawa lived on the fifth floor. There was nobody home in the apartments on either side of his. The occupant of the next apartment but one, however, was in, and when Parry explained to him that they needed to use his balcony, he – a grizzled but genial Welshman – was only too happy to be of assistance. He ushered the two FPP officers through his living-cum-dining area, out onto the balcony.

  There, Avni clambered smartly over the balustrade and reached, first with one arm, then with one leg, around the partition that separated the balcony from the one belonging to the residents who lived between the Welshman and Hosokawa. Having established a handhold and toehold on the other side of the partition, she then (in a manoeuvre which, just watching it, made Parry’s palms go cold and his balls crawl) began inching her way around, hugging the partition tightly, until the majority of her body – head, torso and hips – was on the far side. Her other arm and leg followed, one at a time, and then she was easing herself over the balustrade and stepping down onto the neighbour’s balcony tiles.

  “All right?” Parry said, leaning around the partition.

  “Of course, sir,” Avni replied.

  “Ah, the magnificent confidence of the young,” said the Welshman, who had been standing at Parry’s shoulder all this while, looking on. “They never have any reason to doubt themselves physically. Not like us oldies, eh, captain?”

  Parry nodded without looking round, none too happy to have been bracketed as a fellow “oldie” by someone who was at least a decade his senior.

  “It’s that Oriental lad you’re after, is it?” the Welshman went on. This episode was clearly going to be the highlight of his day. “I don’t know him very well, see. Keeps to himself. But he’s one of you, isn’t he? I see him coming and going in his uniform.”

  Parry nodded again.

  “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with these awful murders.”

  “Just an FPP matter.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. That’s a bad business that is, those murders. A bad, sad business. I hope you catch the bastards quickly, that’s all I can say. Although I’ve a horrible feeling that however soon you get them, it’s going to be too late.”

  Parry refrained from commenting. By now Avni had walked the length of the neighbour’s balcony and was on the outside of the balustrade again, preparing to negotiate the next partition. He watched her feel around the partition with one hand and grasp the lip of the balustrade to Hosokawa’s balcony. He watched her foot go next, questing for the gap between balustrade and balcony floor. Then she was sliding herself around the partition, shifting her weight from one side of it to the other. There was a drop of four storeys beneath her, with nothing to break her fall at the bottom except a paved courtyard floor. He envisaged one of her hands losing its grip. He envisaged her plummeting.

  Then Avni was on the other side of the partition. Then she was bringing her other limbs around it. Then she was clambering over the balustrade.

  “Safe and sound,” said the Welshman, with a relieved sigh.

  “See anything, Rachel?” Parry called across the intervening balcony.

  “The drapes are drawn,” came the reply. “I’m going to try the window.”

  There was the rumbling roll of a window sliding open, then, for a brief while, silence.

  And then Parry heard Avni say, just audibly, “Oh no.” And then, louder, urgently: “Sir? Sir!”

  Parry ran back through the Welshman’s living area and hurried out of the apartment and along the corridor.

  43. Fingering

  HOSOKAWA’S APARTMENT WAS minimalist heaven. The carpet was the colour of fresh mushrooms, the walls and ceiling were painted with white eggshell, and a full inventory of furniture would go as follows: one standard wallscreen, one black-lacquered coffee table, one matt-black anodised-steel lamp, one buff-coloured armchair, one pair of ash-framed etchings, and – on a shelf, providing a much-needed dash of brightness – one stem vase containing one silk tulip (scarlet). Hosokawa’s home board was tucked out of sight in a corner alcove, and his uniform jacket hung on a hanger on a coathook next to the front door, the last item of clothing to be donned each morning as he left for work. Everything in the room was spaced out, positioned just so, with an artful eye, meticulously, attesting to an orderly life. A life planned out. A life undisrupted.

  But death disorders. Death unplans. Death disrupts.

  Hosokawa was slumped in a kneeling position by the door, naked except for a pair of white Y-fronts. A noose fashioned from a kimono sash ran from his neck to the same coathook from which his uniform jacket was suspended. His face was grey-tinged and, with its protruding tongue and bulging sightless eyeballs, gargoylesque. His hands were clasped tightly together in his lap, and the sash was stretched to its full length, the noose forcing his head back, so that there was an air of penitence about his posture. Upraised face, interlinked fingers – it was a ghastly garrotted genuflection.

  “Oh fuck me,” Parry breathed, as he gazed down at the body. “Oh you poor bloody sod.” He looked round at Avni. Her face was set hard, her lips compressed together. “Rachel?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. He wasn’t a friend or anything. It’s just... Someone you know.”

  “Makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

  “I tried not to be unfair to him. I don’t think I was ever unfair. That ‘college boy’ stuff was only...”

  “Humour in the ranks. Everyone does it. For heaven’s sake don’t go beating yourself up over this.”

  Easy to say, but Parry himself was experiencing similar feelings. It occurred to him that he might bear some of the responsibility for what had happened to Hosokawa. When Hosokawa came to his apartment yesterday night, had it been merely to make vague insinuations about the Trad Music Revue, or had there been a more complex motive? Could it hav
e been that he was trying to indicate that his life was threatened, either by some other person or by some inner demon? Asking, in a shy, oblique way, for his captain’s help?

  If only he had paid a little more attention. If only he had listened to Hosokawa a little more closely. If only –

  No. If-onlys like those led you nowhere good. If-onlys like those led you along a path Parry was all too familiar with, a lonely, downward-spiralling trail of self-recrimination and self-disgust. A long time ago, in another country, he had caused the death of a young person, someone not dissimilar in age to Hosokawa. (Probably caused that young person’s death, but then in the mind of a guilt-stricken and conscientious man there isn’t much difference between probably and definitely – the one bleeds easily into the other.) For weeks after the Hunger Riots, months, years even, he had agonised over the girl he had so ruthlessly battered. He had seen her in his dreams, falling at his feet, blood-streaked, silently screaming. Time and time again he had spotted her face in crowds, or thought he had. For a while, almost every girl of comparable age he encountered had resembled her in one way or another, so that scarcely a day went by when he wasn’t reminded of what he had done. The horror of it had taken a long time to fade, and now, as he looked down at Hosokawa – someone he perhaps could have saved, perhaps should have saved – all the old feelings, the bad feelings, were coming back to him, welling up inside. A guilt like his never really went away, did it? It just retreated to some hidden cave in memory and hibernated there, waiting till for the right time to wake up and spring forth, fresh and undimmed.

  No. Don’t think that way!

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  Avni was looking quizzical.

  Had he murmured it aloud? No. Don’t think that way! He had done, hadn’t he.

  “Right, yes.” He struggled to regain his composure, to claw himself back together. “Well, we should take a look-around, shouldn’t we? See if there’s some clue lying about. A note, maybe. Eh?”