The Foreigners
Page 46
That was what everyone now thought, at any rate, and, as motives went, it seemed credible enough. But as with the explanation for Reich’s kidnapping of Cecilia, there was more to it than that. Why did Reich choose New Venice rather than a resort-city closer to home – Bridgeville, for example, or Baja Beach? And where had he come by the money to fund his enterprise and bribe Hosokawa? So far not many people had seen fit to ask these questions, and even fewer had attempted to answer them.
But Parry thought he knew.
Hearing an airship overhead, he paused and looked up. It was nosing its way eastwards, heading out over open sea. These days, whenever you saw an airship, it always seemed to be heading out to sea, its destination elsewhere. Anywhere so long as it was elsewhere. And its engine note was a forlorn, mournful drone, a dirigible dirge.
The airship passed out of sight and Parry resumed walking. Perhaps tonight he would go and visit Johansen at St Cecilia’s. Johansen’s leg was healing well and in general he seemed to be in good spirits. A couple more operations on the tendon were required, and Johansen found the physiotherapy painful and a chore, and prevented from keeping up with his weightlifting routine he was missing his daily endorphin hit and was running to fat, and he griped about all these things but his sense of humour remained largely intact. He and Parry had taken to sitting out on the hospital’s terrace of an evening and chatting or just silently watching the sunset. Parry would give him regular updates on the goings-on at HQ, providing verbal snapshots of life under the new regime of Commissioner Raymond van Wyk.
Quesnel had handed in her resignation shortly after Reich escaped. She had justified the decision to Parry by saying that an important head should roll, and he had opined that it ought to be his, and she had replied that she was the one ultimately responsible here, and besides, maybe a high-profile sacrifice might make a difference. So she had shouldered a burden of blame that was not rightly hers, and gone back to Canada.
And of course it had made no difference at all.
As anyone could have predicted, van Wyk was appointed her successor, and immediately he set about drafting changes to the Constitution which he submitted to the FPP Council under the heading of sensible precautions for preventing the shinjus, or anything like them, from occurring again. The changes involved amplified powers of arrest and detention, the right to carry out surveillance operations, and the right to expel from a resort-city anyone deemed, by very loose criteria, undesirable or a threat to stability. He also proposed the implementation of tighter entry and exit controls at Customs. They were policing practices from a bygone age. Antediluvian. Rumour was, the Council and the UN were going to ratify them.
Parry, naturally enough, resented being professionally answerable to van Wyk, but not as much as he had expected he would. He realised he had developed a grudging, ironic respect for the man. You had to hand it to van Wyk. He had been right all along, more or less. About the shinjus. About the Xenophobes. A cynic like Raymond van Wyk, and he had been right all along.
NACA, meanwhile, was doing its best to woo back tourists and, more importantly, Sirens to New Venice. Huge sums of money had been spent on an advertising campaign in every medium, extolling the city’s virtues and buffing up its tarnished image by means of such slogans as “New Venice, the Jewel in the Mediterranean” and “New Venice – Still the Place to Come!” and “New Opportunities, New Horizons, a New Beginning ... New Venice”. Promotional chemotherapy, but so far the patient was not responding to treatment. The much-publicised arraignment of Toroa MacLeod and his accomplice on counts of murder and Xenocide had not helped, either. Yes, it showed that the law was working, but it also served to reinforce in people’s minds New Venice’s associations with murder and anti-Foreign sentiment.
Onward Parry went, head down, barely looking where he was going. He was thinking now about Hector Fuentes, and wondering just how intensely the man must have loathed him, to have wrought this much death and desolation on his behalf. Or perhaps Fuentes had not loathed him. Perhaps Fuentes had looked down, like a god, and decided to crush his wife’s lover just because he felt like it, just because he could. Whatever the reason, hatred or mere spite, Parry was almost certain that Fuentes was the true architect of his and the city’s downfall. Lying on his deathbed, Fuentes had reached out his mighty hand and imperiously, impetuously, arranged for New Venice to be humbled and brought low, and Parry with it.
Fuentes had not spent his final few days, as Anna had put it, “getting his affairs in order”.
He had been getting her affair in order.
And in Guthrie Reich he had found a more than willing agent to execute his posthumous revenge. Reich had carried out Fuentes’s wishes to the letter, and with gusto. Too much gusto, in the event. Fuentes of course would not have wanted Cecilia hurt. By that stage in the proceedings, however, Reich had ceased to differentiate between what Fuentes desired and what he himself thought was necessary. Sensing that he was running out of time, and wanting to deliver one last devastating blow to Parry, Reich had turned his sights on the only person in New Venice to whom Parry was close, other than Anna and Johansen. Cecilia had suffered because of her friendship with Parry. Would probably suffer for the rest of her life. You could say that that was her father’s fault, and also Reich’s, but in the end, Parry knew it was really only his own. His own and Anna’s. And that was the awful truth which Anna must never know. That he and she together were the ones who had triggered all this off. That their affair, begun in perfect innocence, had been the catalyst for the entire tragedy.
Count yourself lucky I’m not supposed to kill you, Reich had said at the hum farm.
Parry counted himself unlucky. Killing him might have been the kindest thing Reich could have done.
He walked on through the abandoned city, a tired, broken man carrying a secret around inside him, heavy as a boulder.
Would Reich be found?
Would Foreigners return to New Venice?
Would he ever see Anna again?
There was only one answer to any of these questions.
I don’t know.
The simplest, bravest, most honest three words any human being can say.
I don’t know.
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