Parry nodded, demonstrating that he understood.
Now Reich brought his hands together at waist-height and, after some fumbling, manufolded TRANQUILLITY.
TRANQUILLITY?
Peace. A truce. He was asking for a truce.
Parry’s instinct was to respond with NEGATIVE, but then he thought of Cecilia. He had to know where she was, what Reich had done with her.
ACCEPTANCE, he replied. Then: FEMALE, INTERROGATIVE.
Reich, evidently feeling that hand-symbols were inadequate to the task, shook his head and reached up for his ear-defenders. He pointed at Parry, indicating that he should do the same.
The two men simultaneously slid their ear-defenders back over their heads, down to their necks.
Thunder.
Stunningly loud.
Like the lowest pedal-notes of a thousand cathedral organs being played in unison. A continuous moaning roar that crammed the otic canal, penetrating tympanum, stapes, cochlea, pressing in hard all the way to the nerve-receptors. A sound like earthquakes and tidal waves. Tectonic tumult. An aural Götterdämmerung on a scale not even Wagner dreamed of. The noise that might accompany planets cracking asunder, heavens fissuring, suns going nova.
Head swimming, dizzied by the din, Parry looked across at Reich. Reich was grinning, as though relishing the discomfort, both Parry’s and his own. He shouted something to Parry. In the midst of the comp-res roar, his voice was a mouse’s scratch, the words unintelligible
Parry yelled back, “Can’t hear!”
Reich replied at the top of his lungs, “I said, ‘Count yourself lucky I’m not supposed to kill you!’”
“What does that mean, ‘not supposed to’?”
Reich either did not hear the question or did but did not see fit to answer it. “I bet you’re wondering where she is!”
“If she’s dead, Reich, I swear to God, so are you!”
“She isn’t dead, Jack! Not yet! I admit you –”
The rest was lost amid a sudden temporary swell in the sound from the array.
“What?” Parry shouted.
“You came earlier than you were meant to!” Reich bellowed. “But that’s OK! This past few days, improvisation’s just about become my middle name!”
“Where is she?”
“Somewhere in the building! You shouldn’t have much trouble finding her, but you better start looking now! She’s tied up and she isn’t wearing her set of these any more!” He tapped his ear-defenders. “I’ve been watching her squirm without them! Kind of beautiful, in a way!”
“Bastard!” Parry took a step towards him.
Reich’s hand flashed to the knife hilt. “Listen, Jack! I meant for you to find her deafened, maybe even dead! This way, at least you’ve got a chance to save her! Only thing is, you can save her or you can try to arrest me! One or the other! And I’m not going down without a fight!”
“Give up, Reich! Take me to her and then come back with me to New Venice! I’ll put in a good word for you, say you co-operated!”
“No way, Jack!”
“I mean it! Do you really expect to get clean away? Someone’ll catch you eventually! Help me now, and local law will go easier on you!” Parry’s voice was starting to fail. His damaged throat was finding it a strain to keep bawling at this level.
“No one’s going to find me! I’m going to slip away and no one’ll have the first clue where I am or even who I am! It’s all planned out, Jack! There are still places on this planet where a man can disappear, especially a man with enough money to cover his tracks!”
“I’ll find you!”
“Yeah, yeah! Big talk! Now come on! Clock’s ticking! Are you going to try and tackle me, or are you going to go rescue your little girlfriend before she goes completely Quasimodo? It’s up to you! Bear in mind I’m the one with the knife, and even without it I’d still kick your scrawny English ass! So you can sacrifice yourself or you can save Cecilia! It’s an either/or deal! Me or her! One or the other of us but not both!”
Parry thought of charging at him. Thought better of it.
“So who’s it to be?” Reich yelled. The grin on his face was now so broad it was almost a leer.
I could take you, Parry thought. Knife or not, I know I could take you down.
“Quick, Jack! Make up your mind!”
But then Cecilia’s only chance...
“Me or her? Time’s a-wasting!”
A teenage girl.
“Choose, Jack! Who’s it going to be?”
CODA
THEY HAD ARRANGED to meet at a café, and briefly, for a minute or so, it was as though nothing had changed: the two of them sitting down at a table together, her ordering coffee, him tea. But then a silence fell between them, a silence magnified by the lack of patrons at the tables around them, the unfrequentedness of the once-busy plaza on which the café was situated, the thinness of the traffic on the canal beyond. A silence that was just one of many now occupying the city, one of the increasing number of absences and emptinesses that were taking over as life and noise and activity in New Venice day by day abated.
“How are you, Jack?” Anna asked.
“Bearing up. You?”
“Fine.”
“Cecilia?”
Anna made a glum face.
“But the specialist said her hearing might get better.”
“No sign of that so far. The ringing is still there. It drives her mad sometimes.”
“But she can still hear.”
“Most things. But it’s not just the deafness. What he did to her, pulling a knife on her like that, tying her up...”
“I know.”
“She has nightmares about it. She sleeps with me now. We always have to have a light on in the bedroom. The therapist is trying to help, but I wonder whether she’ll ever truly get over it.”
“She will, I’m sure.”
“Maybe.”
“Does she still blame me?”
“Partly.”
“What if I were to go and see her?”
“Not a good idea, I don’t think.”
“I could tell her I’m sorry. That might make a difference.”
“Possibly. Possibly not. Don’t take it to heart, Jack. Whatever Cissy thinks, it wasn’t your fault. Any of it. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine. I let her go off with him. I shouldn’t have, but then I had no idea about him. He seemed so decent, so trustable.”
“He seemed a lot of things.”
“But you feel you should have known somehow, don’t you? You feel you should be able to sense when someone is that dangerous, that insane.”
“I used to meet people like him all the time, back before the Debut,” Parry said. “Smiling rapists. Baby-faced child-killers. Butter-wouldn’t-melt wife-beaters. Blokes you’d have happily had as friends if you didn’t know they broke kneecaps for a living. I thought they’d become extinct. Their time had been and gone. That’s what living here too long does to you.” He shook his head, like an old man weary of the ways of the world. “Cecilia told me a joke the other day. How do you make a New Venetian blind?”
“That’s one of her favourites. ‘Poke his eyes out.’”
“The real answer is: you don’t have to. Chances are he’s blind already.”
“You hated Reich from the start, though,” said Anna. “You saw through him. You saw what he was.” She no longer referred to Reich by his first name. She, like the reporters and commentators on television, preferred the monosyllable of his surname. You could say it like a dog-bark, or like hawking phlegm from your throat.
“Not hate him. At your party, he just ... got to me. He knew which buttons to push. Christ, did he know which buttons to push!”
“But maybe if I’d listened to you...”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference, I don’t think.”
Their drinks arrived. The café owner himself brought them, and then took up a position at the edge of his territory, mournfully surveying the plaza and
its dearth of potential customers. There was sweat shining on the back of his neck and dampening his shirt in great crescents below his armpits.
Parry stirred milk into his tea. “I just wish he’d come after me directly. I just wish he hadn’t involved anyone else.”
“Why did he do it, Jack? Take against you like that? Why did it suddenly become so personal for him?”
He gave her the explanation he had given Quesnel, Muhammad al-Shadhuli, the FPP Council, anyone who asked. The glib, bogus explanation which, because it came from such an unimpeachable source, and because no one but he and Reich knew the full truth, had so far not failed to convince.
“Someone like that needs an enemy, a face that can become the focus for his hatred and paranoia. Plus, criminals often get to feel that they’re engaged in a personal war with the cops pursuing them. Reich decided I was his main opponent, and as the net tightened around him he decided to lash out against me. He’d become mad with what he’d achieved so far, drunk on success. He thought he could do anything he liked. Never mind that Cecilia wasn’t part of his original plan. He wanted to harm me in the worst way he could think of – by harming her.”
“God.” Anna shuddered. “God, I want to hurt him so badly. When they find him, I’m going to ask to be left alone in a room with him for half an hour. I’ll bribe whoever I have to. I won’t kill him. I’ll just leave him wishing he was dead.”
“They won’t find him, Anna.”
“You say that with such conviction.”
Conviction, or hope? “They won’t. He’s a clever bastard. He’ll have changed his appearance, and he’ll be hopping from place to place, resort-city to resort-city, never staying anywhere long, never doing the same thing twice, never drawing attention to himself.”
“But how will he manage it? Surely he’ll run out of money soon.”
Oh, I doubt it, Parry thought, but said, “He’ll manage. We’re talking about someone who pulled off three vicious and audacious murders, someone who manipulated an entire city into self-destructing. He’ll stay one step ahead of the law until the fuss has died down, and then he’ll quietly settle somewhere and blend in and no one’ll know who he is or anything about him apart from he’s the nice new neighbour who moved to the area recently.”
“But you want him caught too, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said, but he didn’t, not really. Good though it would be to see Reich brought to justice, he knew that if Reich was caught, then inevitably the whole story would have to come out, the real reason why Reich had done everything he had done. And then... Well, then everyone would know what at present only the two of them, he and Reich, knew. And Parry had no desire for Anna to suffer any more than she had already. He wanted her to be spared the exquisite torment that he was going through. He wanted the pain, for her sake, to be his and his alone.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“About Reich?”
“Generally. Now that...”
“Now that there are so few Foreigners left in New Venice and most Sirens have buggered off too and those that haven’t are making plans to go and soon there’ll hardly be anyone here at all?” He sighed. “Stay. That’s all I can do. I don’t belong anywhere else, and the FPP will keep its division open for as long as there are people here, a core presence. I can be a part of that. Everything’s uncertain, but for the time being I can hang on. What about you?”
“I ... I think I may be ‘buggering off’ myself.”
“Yes?”
“Back to Romania most likely, with Cissy. Make a fresh start there. I can introduce her to my side of the family. All those relatives she’s never met before. And it’ll be a different culture, a whole different environment, and that’ll be good for her. No bad memories. I’ll sell up here if I can. Frankly I don’t think there’ll be anyone willing to buy the house, and even if there is, it won’t fetch a fraction of what it’s worth. But that’s not the point. Cissy and I have more than enough to live on.”
“I think that’ll be a good idea,” Parry said, after a moment’s pause.
“Do you?”
He nodded. “There’s nothing really here any more, is there?”
She seemed as though she was about to say something important just then, but thought better of it. They finished their drinks and paid the bill and parted with a light kiss on the cheek and a hollow goodbye, and as Parry walked home he wondered if she had been going to ask him to come with her and Cecilia to Romania and be a part of her “fresh start”; and he was glad that she had decided against doing so, so that he hadn’t had to turn her down.
Litter bins on plazas and esplanades were overflowing, and grateful seagulls were greedily snacking on the spilled morsels of edible matter, the crusts and rinds and peels and leftovers. Fine shoots of grass were poking up between paving stones, and seaweed was proliferating in the canals, unchecked. The smell of saltwater, characteristic of the city, was somehow more prevalent these days, pungently briny where once it had been mild and tangy and invigorating. It was a slow death. A death by desertion and neglect. New Venice withdrawing from existence by degrees. A long, lingering diminuendo.
You could count the remaining Foreigners and Sirens in their dozens rather than in their hundreds. A golden giant wending its way through the gathering dusk to Sirensong was a rare sight, and Sirensong itself was a depleted, desultory affair, more motet than chorale, a handful of voices, none of them trying their hardest. Sometimes Parry wished that it could just be over with, finished, done; that New Venice could be put out of its misery like a lame horse, a bolt through the skull, that’s it, goodnight. Other times, he regarded the continuing presence of Foreigners and Sirens as an encouraging sign, hinting that the city’s decline was reversible and that Foreigners might start visiting again in their droves and departed Sirens might return and everything would end up as it had been before. It was not often that he felt such a miracle was possible, but at least he still had his moments of optimism. Brief the moments and faint the optimism, but at least, even after all that had happened, he still had them.
He took his time as he paced through the ailing, failing city, and he thought of Reich and Hosokawa and how, between them, they had achieved this. It had been a scheme as elaborate as it was ruthless, designed with the express purpose of ruining New Venice and, in ruining the city, ruining Jack Parry as well. Piecing it all together had taken time, but once Parry had managed to slot all the elements in place he had been able to perceive the full ingenuity of the plan and even, in a bitter way, to admire it. Perhaps the cleverest aspect of it had been how Reich had manipulated him throughout, using his own hopes and preconceptions against him. Assisted by Hosokawa, Reich had toyed with Parry from the start, letting him think he was making decisions for himself when all he was doing was heading in whichever direction Reich chose to steer him. It was hatefully brilliant.
That the first three shinjus were murders staged to look like suicides had become apparent soon enough. What Parry had failed to realise – even after that Foreigner accosted him and manufolded SUPERNAL, NEGATIVE – was that no Foreigner was lost in the first three. The Foreign outfits left at the scene were genuine enough, but no Foreigners had worn them in a while. They had come from the storage units at HQ, smuggled out by Hosokawa and replaced with accurate replicas. The only golden giant involved had been Reich himself. Reich impersonating a Foreigner. Reich in stacked-sole shoes and a fake mask, like one of those actors in Resort-City Beat. Reich lurching along, Foreigner-fashion, to Sirensong and getting hooked by a Siren and taking the Siren back to a hotel room he had booked into earlier in the day (also in his Foreign guise), and then killing his victim and leaving a set of Foreign clothing at the scene in a pose suggestive of a loss, and then, still dressed as a Foreigner, making his getaway. Anywhere other than a resort-city, such a plan would have had a limited chance of success, but here, a place where, until recently, Foreigners were a common sight, if you had an accurate disguise and a poc
ketful of Foreign currency you could pass yourself off as a golden giant and the deception was not likely to be noticed.
All this Parry had been able to deduce on the strength of two pieces of evidence. The first was the rucksack which he had seen Reich carrying at El-Ghaita and which had been found in the boot of the white Merbecke-Bentzon (the car having turned up, abandoned, on the outskirts of Marrakech). Inside the rucksack, as well as ropes for tying up Cecilia, Reich had been carrying his fake Foreign outfit, including the built-up shoes and a mask that looked indistinguishable from the real thing but could come apart into two halves, dividing along a seam hidden among the corrugations of its “hair”, and be worn over the head. Behind its golden eyes there were one-way lenses; between its golden lips, a tiny slot to facilitate breathing. Unless you peered very closely at it you would never spot the trickery, and who, in the normal course of events, peered closely at a Foreigner’s face? There was never anything to see there. All golden giants were blankly identical. You looked at their hands to gauge their mood, not their masks.
The second piece of evidence was the simple fact, confirmed by the forensics laboratories in Tangier, that three of the Foreign outfits at HQ had been replaced with copies.
So much for the How of Reich’s scheme. The Why had been established, to most people’s satisfaction, by the various journalists who had made enquiries into Reich’s upbringing and background. Their researches had turned up the fact that Reich’s father, an aspiring rock musician, killed himself when Reich was fourteen. Reich senior had had the misfortune, or the lack of commercial nous, to attempt to make a name for himself as an old-school rock’n’roller just when Siren music was becoming the rage, sweeping aside all other musical artforms. He had persevered with his style of songwriting and performance, but no one had wanted to know. Thwarted in his dreams, and unwilling or unable to adapt to suit the times, he had fallen into a profound depression and taken his own life. His son, after spending several years of his adult spent futilely promoting the cause of traditional music through his revue, had decided to state his beliefs in a much more demonstrative and violent manner. The shinjus were an act of vengeance upon Sirens, the people he had borne a ten-year-long grudge against, the people who had, in his view, deprived him of his father.
The Foreigners Page 45