The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  By 7.45 he was back downstairs and waiting on the condominium’s jetty for Johansen to pick him up.

  8. Chorus

  ARMED WITH HARDCOPIES of a morgue-slab head-and-shoulders photograph of the dead Siren, Parry and Johansen cruised the sites where Sirens were wont to gather of an evening.

  At the Medina Maroc, no one recognised the face in the picture, which Erraji had cleaned up and composed so that now the dead young man looked merely as if he were fast asleep.

  Likewise at the Place des Fontaines, no one could be found who claimed acquaintance with the young man. Parry and Johansen showed the picture to Sirens who were sitting perched on the rims of the basins of the plaza’s eponymous fountains, where the air was cooled by the action of water tumbling and splashing in cascades and shallow rippling rills over inner-illuminated crystech boulders. One after another the Sirens denied having ever seen or met anyone even resembling the man in the photograph.

  At St Cecilia’s Square the story was repeated. None of the occupants of the tables of the cafés and bars that lined the square’s periphery could help. Whenever there was a language barrier to be circumvented, Parry and Johansen had only to present the photograph and solicitously form the hand-symbol for ENTREATY. It made no difference. In reply, all they got was the silent Esperanto of shrugs and shaken heads.

  At the Weillplatz, Johansen thought he had struck lucky when a fellow Scandinavian, a slim Swede of roughly the same age as the dead Siren, seemed convinced that the young man in the picture was a resident of the hotel at which he himself was staying. However, when the Swede fetched a friend and compatriot with whom he shared a room and showed him the picture, the other Swede said that he knew the man his room-mate was talking about and that he bore no more than a passing likeness to the person in the photograph. Shorter, fatter, broader – only the hair and the colouring were the same.

  It was close to ten o’clock when Parry and Johansen pulled up alongside what they fully expected to be their last port of call that evening, the Esplanade of Glass. Sirensong was due to begin at any moment, and once it was under way they would have little chance of obtaining a useful response to their enquiries.

  While Johansen tethered the launch to an FPP-only mooring post, Parry leapt nimbly ashore and climbed the steps to the esplanade. With Sirensong so close, the atmosphere here was one of jittery carnival, both festive and restive. People, many of them in costumes or in national dress (or a parody thereof), milled about, greeting, talking, laughing, but at the same time warily eyeing up the competition. Waiters scurried. Bottle necks clinked against the rims of tumblers and wineglasses. Cappuccino machines coughed and spluttered. The occasional aromatic waft of marijuana smoke reached Parry’s nostrils, and an old instinct, no longer valid, had to be suppressed. Here and there voices could be heard warming up, running through scales and arpeggios that sounded like rising and falling chants of self-assertion, egocentric mantras of me-me-me me-me-me meee. Taxi-gondolas thronged the canal, dropping off fare after fare, and a handful of FPP officers present were busy ushering tourists away from the scene. The tourists, hoping to capture Sirensong with their cameras and palmcorders, were reluctant to leave, but could not hold out long in the face of reason and reasonability, the two main weapons of the FPP.

  Parry set to working his way through the crowd, accosting everyone he could, loners, pairs, groups, showing the photograph and asking over and over whether anyone knew the man in it. Johansen did the same, moving in the opposite direction from Parry so that they could cover as much ground as possible in the scant time that remained to them. None of the Sirens was so incautious or impolite as to shrink away when approached by an FPP officer, and each took an obligingly long and careful look at the picture, but it was obvious that their minds were on other things, and this, coupled with the habitual guardedness of many Sirens towards the FPP, meant that neither Parry nor Johansen believed they were going to have any more success here than they had had at their four previous destinations. Even if someone did recognise the dead man, it was unlikely that he or she was going to admit it, not now, not with Foreigners imminent. Who in their right mind was going to risk missing out on an evening’s work because they had been stuck talking to the Foreign Policy Police when the Foreigners showed up?

  Still the two men persevered, feeling it was better to try and fail than simply not try at all. And in the end, much to Parry’s surprise, their persistence was rewarded.

  The Esplanade of Glass took its name from the crystech sculptures positioned at intervals across its length and breadth. Modelled on the minimalist principle of reiterative musical motifs, the sculptures consisted of hexagonal columns of transparent crystal that were arranged in rows and tiers and, like the fountains of the Place des Fontaines, lit from beneath so that they glowed. Although all apparently identical, each of the rows of columns was subtly distinct. The gradations in height differed minutely from one to the next, and the stepped parabola each described was unique. Grown into shape by means of pure sound, crafted through tonality and frequency, the sculptures were proof of the versatility of crystech as an architectural material. Its applications could be immense and functional, as when it was providing foundations for construction or forging bridges between islands or fashioning mid-air walkways between the upper floors of buildings in waterlogged cities, but they could be small-scale and aesthetic, too.

  It was a castrato standing next to one of these sculptures who at last put a name to the dead Siren’s face.

  “That’s Daryl,” the castrato said. “Daryl ... Anderson, I think his surname is. No, Henderson. That’s it. Daryl Henderson.”

  “You’re sure?” said Parry.

  The castrato nodded. He was a Scot, pale-skinned, shaven-scalped, soft with fat. A plethora of piercings glinted around his head. Mascara made black stars of his eyelashes. A tongue-stud flickered as he spoke. “Aye.” He squinted at the picture again. “Definitely him. He’s an Aussie. Nice fellow. I saw him just the other night, actually, over at St Cecilia’s.”

  “The other night? Can you be a bit more specific? Might it have been last night by any chance?”

  “No. No. Couple of nights ago at least. Maybe three.” The castrato flicked a glance over Parry’s shoulder. No Foreigners coming. “Aye, three nights ago.”

  “And your name is?”

  “Do I have to tell you?”

  “No, but it would help me greatly if you did.”

  “Only, I don’t want to end up on the Siren register just ’cause I was doing you a favour, you know, helping out.”

  “You have my word that won’t happen.”

  The castrato eyed Parry carefully. “Well, if you can’t trust the FPP...” he said finally. “Hamish Dillon. D-I-L-L-O-N.”

  Parry had out a pencil and his small spiral-bound notebook, two items of stationery he had constantly carried with him since his early days as a junior constable in the Met. He had already jotted down the dead Siren’s name. Now he made a note of the castrato’s, adding after it “Falsetto?” He crossed the word out. Dillon’s speaking voice sounded authentically raspy and high-pitched, and genuine castrati did tend to run to fat. Not only that, but another, more irrefutable proof of surgical subtraction floated in formaldehyde in a hermetically-sealed glass jar that hung on a chain around Dillon’s neck. Falsetti trying to pass themselves off as castrati used skilfully-crafted rubber replicas, but the pallid, shrivelled, preserved testicles in Dillon’s jar looked real to Parry. All too wince-inducingly real.

  “And you know this Henderson well?” he asked.

  “I know him to talk to. We were at the Conservatorio together. Different classes, though. He was a bass-baritone.”

  Parry wrote down “Conservatorio di Musica Straniera”.

  “And when you met him the other night, how did he seem to you?”

  “Seem?”

  “His behaviour. His attitude.”

  “Oh. Normal, I suppose. We didn’t have a chat as such. Just hello, how
’s it going, that type of thing. That’s all.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where he was staying in New Venice?”

  “No idea.” Dillon checked over Parry’s shoulder again. Then a thought occurred to him. “Hang on a second. Shit.” He examined the picture, then peered up at Parry. “‘Was staying’. The poor wee bastard’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Not all of the Sirens to whom Parry and Johansen had so far shown the photograph had spotted this. To the ones that had, the two FPP officers had given the explanation that Parry now gave to Dillon. “We found his body this morning. We believe he may have met with an accident. We couldn’t identify him, so that’s why we’ve been asking around.” A lie, yes, but Quesnel had stipulated that the incident at the Amadeus was to kept out of the public domain for the time being, and Parry could understand her reasoning. The prepenultimate of the nine measures of the Foreign Policy Constitution stated that Openness and accountability for all its actions shall be among the avowed aims of the Foreign Policy Police, and in all dealings with humans and Foreigners its officers shall be wholly honest and without evasion, except in those circumstances in which it is deemed either by a senior officer or by the Council that the public interest is better served by the suppression of certain information until such time as said information may safely be revealed without fear of causing prejudice or concern and regardless upon the expiry of a period of 60 (sixty) days after said information is originally discovered. In other words, a small white lie was permissible if it was for the greater good, which in this instance it surely was.

  “An accident,” said Dillon morosely. “Christ. Poor Daryl.”

  “I’m sorry to have had to break the bad news.”

  “Not your fault. He wasn’t like a friend or anything. It’s just, well ... someone you know, you know?”

  “I understand. One last thing. Can you tell me where you’re staying? I don’t think it’s very likely but I may need to contact you again.”

  “I’m at the...” Dillon hooked his thumbs together with his hands twisted away from each other, forming the S-like configuration for EXCELLENCE, which a certain Japanese megacorporation had co-opted as its company logo.

  Parry wrote down “Shibata Excelsior” and connected the words with an arrow to Dillon’s name.

  “Thank you very much for your help, Mr Dillon,” he said, shutting and stowing away the notebook.

  “No problem. Glad to –”

  Dillon broke off. A thrill was running through the crowd like an electric current. Conversations were petering out, joints and cigarettes were being stubbed out, cups and glasses drained. Everyone was looking towards the canal’s edge, craning their necks for a glimpse.

  They were coming. Foreigners were coming.

  Parry stepped back, giving Dillon room. This was nothing to do with him now. He had no place here any more except, perhaps, as an observer. This, now, was a time for Foreigner and Sirens. For manufolds and vocal preening. For the hooking of clients and the selling of selves.

  Sirensong.

  The sound began near the water. A dozen throats all at once opened, a dozen voices began to fashion impromptu arias, a dozen mouths shaped fa’s and la’s and oohs and mmm’s. The noise massed and swelled, catching from person to person like fire. Now two dozen were singing. Now fifty. The volume increased with each Siren who joined in and increased further as those who were already singing sang louder to be heard above the newcomers. Soon every Siren on the Esplanade of Glass was vocalising at the top of his or her lungs, vying with one another, trying to outdo one another.

  It was birdsong bursting raucously from the dawn treetops. It was the horny caterwaul of back-alley toms and queens. It was wolves in ancient forests, keening for territory and the companionship of the pack. It was the grumble and mourn of whales summoning mates across thousands of miles of ocean. It was the late-night howl of city dogs, setting one another off in canine canon.

  Language ceased to be relevant. Into simple syllables or nonsense phrases the Sirens projected everything that they had hoped or felt or believed or desired. Some of them swaying, some stock-still, some with their eyes tight shut, they sang and sang and sang. It was unintelligible. It was cacophony. It was exquisite. It was deafening.

  Here were a trio of Bulgarian women in peasant costume, their hair braided, their bosoms a-heave as they knitted together strange chords with uncanny, even eerie accuracy.

  Here was a Mongolian throat-singer, emitting multiple notes in a buzzing, inhuman drone from somewhere deep, dark and cavernous within his ribcage.

  Here were a quintet of Gregorian monks, or men dressed as Gregorian monks, habited and tonsured, intoning melismatic plainsong.

  Here was a choirboy chaperoned by a watchful mother, cherubic in cassock and surplice as he generated variations on the soaring melody of Allegri’s Miserere.

  Here was a Native American in full tribal regalia, his feathered headdress quivering as he let forth a languid, chanting wail.

  Here was a blues singer with a voice as muddy as a silted-up delta, grunting out twelve-bar phrases and no doubt giving thanks for every cigarette he had ever smoked and every shot of whisky he had ever downed and every woman who had ever done him wrong.

  Here was an Arab Muslim who must once have been a muezzin, his cry rhythmic and hypnotic, the sound of minarets against a sky greyed by daybreak or dusk.

  Here was a willowy, anaemic folk-artiste, her timbre gauzy and ethereal, dreaming of unicorns and meadows as she plucked her notes from the air.

  Here was a wizened, wise-eyed, bandy-legged jazzbo, scatting his way through doo-wops and shoo-bops and oo-be-doo yeahs, shuffling his feet and brisking his wrinkled, monkey-paw hands.

  Here was a busty, blowsy veteran of a million stage musicals, a trouper who knew all about giving it some oomph, putting everything she had into it, stopping the show.

  Here was a yodeller in Tyrolean hat and lederhosen, the noise he made as slippery and gap-riddled as Swiss cheese.

  Here, and here, and here, were Elvis lookalikes, whole hunks a’ burnin’ love, pausing to murmur thangyewvermuch every so often as they hummed, twitched and quivered their way through sweaty rock’n’roll riffs.

  Here was a dozen-strong gospel choir, all happiness and handclaps and hallelujah harmonies.

  Here was a whistler, cheeks pinched and lips pursed, warble-twittering like a canary and hoping against hope that tonight he would have the good fortune to encounter one of those rare Foreigners with a taste for his specialist wares – whistling in the dark, in more ways than one.

  Here they all were, men, women and children, clamouring clamorously, and here, now, among them, came the objects of their bids for attention.

  Each stood a head higher than any human present (with the exception of Johansen, who was something of a golden giant himself). Each moved in a series of short, gliding lurches, bent-backed like a penitent priest, the hem of its robe swishing along the ground. Each gleamed in the effulgence of the crystech sculptures, whose patterns of soft light added to the unearthliness of its appearance, making it radiant, angelic. Each turned now this way, now that, as a voice or combination of voices grabbed its interest, twisting its whole body round until its mask faced in the right direction and inclining slightly towards the Siren or Sirens concerned, who in response upped the volume and introduced trills and grace notes and generally redoubled their efforts to impress. Each seemed capable of singling out the sound of individuals or groups from the over-all medley with unerring precision, and each acted like a shopper sampling goods, listening to one kind of singing for a while, then moving on and listening to another, and then another, then another.

  An alien race. You could never forget that. As the Foreigners infiltrated the Siren crowd, fanning out across the Esplanade of Glass, weaving among the massed humans, it was impossible not to feel a small shiver of excitement. At least for Parry it was. Some Sirens acted blasé about the golden giants, claiming to regard them as nothing mo
re than two-and-a-half-metres-tall sources of income, but for Parry they were never anything less than objects of wonder. Several of them swept by him, just centimetres away, easily within reach. He could have held out a hand and brushed their robes with his fingertips had he wanted to, had he not known that they shied away from the physical contact with humans, seeming to dislike it. An alien race. Beings who, through their arrival, had pulled humankind back from the brink of self-annihilation. Strange saviours, worthy of respect, to be begrudged nothing.

  After several minutes of browsing, the Foreigners began making selections. Gravitating towards the voice or voices that most took their fancy, they commenced the process of negotiation. Delving into a slit in its robes, each produced a handful of gemstones, which the individual Siren, or whichever one was the elected representative of a group, was invited to examine. If the jewels did not, by the look of them, match up to expectation, the Siren would form DISAPPOINTMENT. The Foreigner might then return the jewels to the slit in its robes and walk away, or else it might rummage again in its “pocket” and pull out larger gemstones, or a greater number of gemstones of similar size to the first lot. The Siren could either accept this better offer or refuse it and hold out for a further increase. Few did, since Foreigners seldom made a third offer for a Siren’s services, and the second offer was normally overgenerous anyway. On the other hand, a third offer could be astonishingly lucrative, and if the Siren was feeling confident that the Foreigner concerned was more than usually keen, then the gamble could be well worth taking. AGREEMENT was signalled by holding the right hand down with the palm out and the index and middle fingers of the left hand pressed horizontally across.

  Should the negotiation fall through, the Siren could try to regain the Foreigner’s patronage by forming the hand-symbol for REGRET. If the Foreigner responded with FORGIVENESS, then all was well, but if the Foreigner, too, manually expressed REGRET, then the Siren had forfeited that particular golden giant’s custom for the night. All was not lost, however, as Sirensong could last for anything up to four hours and there would be further waves of Foreigners later, if not at the Esplanade of Glass then at other venues across New Venice. Inevitably there would be some Sirens who would return to their hotels or apartments unsuccessful and empty-handed, by virtue of simple mathematics: there were many more of them touting for business than there were Foreigners to provide it. As a rule, however, with diligence and a bit of effort a Siren who could sing well could almost always gain employment before Sirensong drew to a close.