"You're wrong, you know," said Gregory, without looking round.
"About what?"
"Whoever named this building didn't have a lousy sense of humour, or X-ray vision, for that matter. Whoever called this building Seaview Tower understood that the difference between having a view of the sea and not having a view of the sea but living close to it is so small as to be insignificant."
"Meaning?"
"Simple psychology. You know in which direction the sea lies, don't you, Mr Novak, and sometimes, when the wind blows right, you can hear the engines of motor launches and jet-skis, am I right? And it can't be denied that the air in this area is just that much clearer, that much fresher, for the sea's proximity. And so, even though you can't see the sea, even though it lies two or three buildings away, you are still constantly aware of it. The view is in your mind's eye, and the building's name reaffirms and refreshes that image."
"Yeah, well, if only that made a difference to the rent."
The remark won a smirk from Gregory. "What I'm getting at," he said, "is that something as simple as a name can have a powerful effect on the human psyche. If well-chosen, it can stick like a grain of sand in the mind, and around it can form a pearl of unconscious thought, a gorgeous, self-created mental mirage. Music can do that, too. Good music has the power to seed pearls of the imagination, wouldn't you agree?"
Aaron was about to answer when something shattered in the living room.
"Sorry!" one of the officers called out, with very little apology in his tone of voice. The other two officers, in different rooms, snickered.
Aaron winced. It could have been one of his Foreign statuettes, but he suspected, hoped, prayed it was only the sheet of glass that topped the coffee table. There had been no hum beforehand, had there? And the FPP, for all their thoroughness, were notoriously careful about handling Foreign artefacts.
"I am sorry," said Gregory sincerely.
"Fuck that," said Aaron.
Gregory turned his ocean-blue eyes on Aaron, not in anger but in curiosity. Where had this spark of resentment come from? Of all the Sirens he regularly raided, Aaron Novak was among the most passive, the most subdued. Some harangued the FPP from the moment they arrived to the moment they left. Others sat sullenly in a corner talking to their lawyers on the phone, or followed the officers around with a palmcorder scrupulously taping everything they did. Aaron simply accepted the intrusions and the officers' behaviour. Almost as if he expected to be caught with contraband and was resigned to the fact. Either that, or he thought that to act submissively was a good way of avoiding suspicion.
"Why do you do it?" Gregory asked. "Sing for Foreigners?" The enquiry was casual, as if Gregory was merely making conversation.
Aaron shrugged. The pressure in his groin was making him irritable, but he regretted having snapped at Gregory just now and wanted to regain the captain's favour, so with an extra effort of will he kept his voice calm and level and friendly as he said: "Because I can. Because I'm good at it. Because it makes me a lot of money."
"There are many other more respectable trades a young man could turn his hand to."
"I don't think singing's unrespectable. It's no less respectable than being a hotel owner and charging the golden giants a fortune for Foreign-scale rooms. Everyone in Bridgeville, whether they realise it or not, is making money off the Foreigners. Cabbies, street vendors, tour-guides, garbage collectors, even..."
Gregory raised his eyebrows. "You were going to say?"
"Nothing."
"You were going to say, 'Even FPP officers.'"
Aaron shuffled embarrassedly. "Yeah," he murmured. "Even FPP officers."
"'Everybody else is doing it so why can't you?' That's what you think, yes?"
"Yes." Defiantly. Aaron had nothing to be ashamed of.
Captain Silas Gregory of the Foreign Policy Police, Bridgeville division, parted his hands, turned around, rested his backside against the windowsill and folded his arms across his chest - all with the deliberate slowness of a schoolteacher who has just stumbled across some hitherto undiscovered vein of ignorance in his class.
"I won't deny that Bridgeville has a lot to be thankful to the golden giants for," he said. "Nor will I deny that almost every one of this town's citizens, in one way or another, benefits from their generosity. There are, however, different levels of complicity. My role as an officer for the FPP, for instance, is to ensure that Foreigners are not conned, victimised, intimidated or mistreated in any way during their visits. That, I would have said, was a respectable and, more to the point, a respectful way of profiting from the Foreign input into the Bridgeville economy. Not only that but it serves a useful function as well. Whereas singing, it seems to me, preys on the Foreigners' most basic instincts."
"They enjoy it."
"Of course they do. And how handsomely they reward Sirens like you, the men and women whose voices bring them such pleasure. Look at all this, Mr Novak." Gregory gestured around the bedroom, at its walnut fixtures, at the plush divan, at the mood-attuned wall fabric which was currently attempting to soothe Aaron's emotional and physical discomfort with a deep midnight blue. "How many twenty-four-year-olds live in this kind of splendour?"
"Twenty-five," Aaron said.
"I'm sorry?"
"I turned twenty-five last week."
"Congratulations. Your first quarter-century. I myself am approaching the end of my second."
"You look good on it."
"Thank you." Gregory seemed genuinely flattered. He spread out his arms. "And that's my point. Here I am, nearly twice your age, and I've not earned in my whole lifetime nearly a tenth as much as you have in yours."
"That must make you very unhappy."
"No." Gregory frowned, as though giving the facetious comment serious thought. "No, I don't resent you at all, Mr Novak, if that's what you're implying. I'm envious of your talent, perhaps, but I think that even if I was equipped with a magnificent singing voice, I wouldn't squander it on Foreign music."
"Have you ever heard me sing?"
Gregory shook his head.
"Then how do you know my voice is magnificent?"
"Isn't it?" said Gregory simply.
Aaron laughed, even though the action elicited a twinge of pain from his bulging bladder. "Fair enough. And what would you sing, Captain Gregory, if you could sing as magnificently as you say I do?"
"Songs with words, for one thing. Words and tunes. Songs that have something to say, that mean something. Operatic arias. Beatles numbers. Old show tunes. Standards. Not this meandering, monotonous muck the Foreigners like. Songs that stir emotions in the heart." He slapped his chest. "The human heart."
"Well, I guess that's the difference between you and me," said Aaron. "You want to stir emotions, I want to earn a living."
"Yes," sighed Gregory. "I suppose that is the difference."
The urge to urinate had now become an imperative. Fearing that the only alternative was wetting himself, Aaron asked the captain's permission to answer the call of nature. It was granted with a nod, and Aaron skipped to the bathroom, where one of the officers had just finished tossing the contents of the basin cabinet on to the floor and was now attempting to slash open the shower curtain with a razor blade.
"How on earth would I be able to hide anything inside that?" Aaron asked him.
The officer shrugged and started cutting along the seam of the curtain's lower hem.
Doing his best to ignore the man's presence, Aaron flipped up the lavatory seat and relieved himself.
When he returned to the bedroom, he found Captain Gregory overseeing the two other officers as they dismantled the bed. While one methodically palpated the pillows, his colleague was on his hands and knees busily unscrewing the bolts that secured the headboard to the base. The walls, mistaking all this activity as the prelude to vigorous sexual congress, had gone peach-pink.
Gregory asked Aaron if he knew what they were looking for.
"I do now," sai
d Aaron. "A vocal enhancer."
"Quite right." Gregory narrowed his eyes. "Was that, I wonder, just a lucky guess?"
"What else could fit into the hem of a shower curtain?"
"Ah yes, well deduced. Yesterday we arrested a greyware pirate who confessed to selling at least three dozen enhancers within the past month. He gave no names, just physical descriptions. One of those descriptions matched yours."
"And what if I said I don't use one because I don't need one?"
"Coming from a young man of such self-assurance, I'd have said that was highly likely. However, these days, with so many Sirens competing for the Foreigners' attention, each of you needs every advantage he or she can get. Even you, Mr Novak, might be tempted to use a vocal enhancer if you thought it would give you an edge over the competition. And since my job is to see to it that all Foreigners are treated fairly and equally..." The sentence languished into a take-it-or-leave-it shrug.
"Or see to it that no one person is allowed to earn more money from the Foreigners than anyone else," Aaron added.
"The FPP Council," said Gregory, "welcomes Foreign tourism in every resort-city and wants the golden giants to feel free to do as they please. They are our guests. But it also wants them to know that while they're on Earth they'll be safe from exploitation. That's why there are regulations - regulations it is my duty to enforce - against cabbies taking Foreign fares on unnecessarily circuitous routes, against tour-guides showing Foreigners around anything other than the officially designated sites, and against Sirens using any means other than their God-given talents to charm the golden giants."
"I never once met a Foreigner who complained because my voice was better than someone else's."
"That's not the point," said Gregory, stepping smartly sideways to avoid the mattress that one of the officers was heaving off the base of the divan. "The point is that we mustn't give them cause to take offence. If one of them feels he's been defrauded, for whatever reason, and however mild the alleged deceit, it could have a disastrous effect. We know so little about this race, they're such a mystery to us, even after forty years, and yet we owe them so much. And it doesn't take much to scare them off, as we know from what happened at Koh Farang and New Venice. It's such a precarious situation. What if something drives them off from the entire planet, as it did from those cities? What if they abandon us altogether? Then where will we be?"
Aaron pretended that the thought had never once crossed his mind or caused him to lose sleep.
"So you see, Mr Novak, I'm not picking on you. I'm not picking on anybody. I'm just trying to keep everybody happy, humans and Foreigners alike."
"There's nothing here, sir," said the FPP officer kneeling by the bed. He straightened up with a grunt and smoothed the wrinkles out of his suit jacket. "Either he's got a very clever hiding-place, or he's as honest as the day is long."
Aaron struggled to keep the gloat of vindication out of his face.
"Very well then, Mr Novak," said Gregory. "I'm sorry to have troubled you. Again. This will be the fourth time this year, won't it?"
"And it's only July," said Aaron.
Following the four FPP officers into the living room, he glanced back over his shoulder at his wrecked bed. With the mattress half on, the pillows strewn, the sheets awry and the headboard detached, it looked like a discarded sandwich. He couldn't face having to rebuild it right now; he would sleep on the sofa for the rest of the night.
The living room looked as if it had suffered an earthquake. Pictures hung askew, pot plants had been tipped over, artfully arranged piles of unread vintage books had been spilled, and a vase of dried flowers had been emptied out on to the lid of the Steinway baby grand on which Aaron accompanied himself when he rehearsed. He saw, to his relief, that it had been the sheet of glass on the coffee table, after all, and not one of the statuettes that had been shattered. A snowdrift of fragments lay on the floor beneath the table's hollow frame, roughly enclosed by its legs. The glass could be replaced. The statuettes had a value uniquely their own.
"I love those things," said Gregory. He had followed the direction of Aaron's gaze. "May I? I'll be extremely careful."
Warily Aaron gave his consent, and while the three officers looked on, neither impatiently nor with much interest, Gregory approached the statuettes, which were arrayed at assorted levels on the sideboard and on the shelves behind.
They ranged in size from handspan miniatures to three-foot-tall figurines as thick in diameter as a grown man's calf, and all were carved from the same opaque yellow quartz. The sculpting was rough, unfinished, primitive in its lack of finesse, yet at the same time artful and evocative. The statuettes represented Foreigners. As slender and elegant as African tribesmen, they stood in various ritual poses with their hands and their long, expressive fingers held at waist level to form manufolds, the elementary human/Foreign creole, a vocabulary of ninety-six words that every three-year-old child knew: TRANQUILLITY, GRATITUDE, APPROVAL, SALUTATION, RESPECT, and all the other examples of convoluted digit origami that could nowadays be found adorning everything from soft-drink cans to television station idents.
Gregory positioned himself in front of a medium-sized statuette and with an almost reverential care raised a finger to stroke its chest. Immediately a note filled the room - E flat below middle C. Pure and clear, the note rose in volume the more insistently Gregory stroked the statuette, and as he brought other fingers into play, so high and low harmonics appeared, like the blur around a vibrating violin string. You could almost imagine that the statuette had come to life and that the humming note was issuing from the oval double-bow of the lips on its upturned face, and that the more pleasure Gregory's masturbatory caresses brought it, the harder it sang.
Gregory's expression was that of a child when shown the simplest of conjuring tricks, one part bewilderment to three parts wonder, and had Aaron been in a less distracted frame of mind he would have envied the FPP captain his easy delight. Gregory, in his capacity as UN-sponsored killjoy, only ever met Foreigners under trying and exacting circumstances, answering their complaints and arbitrating over disputes between them and humans. Foreigners were seldom happy to see him, and even when he helped them they were not effusive in their thanks. Where Aaron won the golden giants' approval and their gifts with his singing, Gregory earned little in return for his efforts except perhaps a manufolded GRATITUDE. No Foreigner would ever present Gregory with a statuette, or any other gift, in grateful recognition of his services.
Finally Gregory took his hand from the statuette, and the note ended.
"You could play a whole symphony on a collection like this," he mused, eyeing the many different sizes of the statuettes. "How do they do it, I wonder? How do they make crystal sing like that? Will we ever know? Will we ever make musical instruments half as cunning and as graceful as these?"
"I wish we could," Aaron retorted. "Then they wouldn't cost so damn much to insure."
"Well, anyway." Gregory turned away from the statuettes quickly, as though their hold over him could only be broken by force. "We've two more appointments to keep tonight. My apologies for disturbing you, Mr Novak. Stay honest, and we'll stay out of your way."
Aaron nearly pointed out that honesty was never any guarantee of freedom from FPP interference, not these days. But he thought better of it, and instead said, "Captain Gregory?"
"Yes?"
"Would you like to take one of the statuettes home with you? I could pick you out one. As a gift. That one, perhaps." He indicated a handspan-high example that could pipe out a piccolo F.
Gregory blinked, glanced at his subordinates (whose faces said, What do we care?), looked down at his toecaps, back to his subordinates (they still didn't care), and finally said to Aaron: "No. No, thank you, Mr Novak. I don't think that would be a good idea. Much as I would like..." He blinked again. "Much as I admire your collection, it would be inappropriate for me to accept anything from you that might be construed at a later date as a bribe. But a very ge
nerous offer nonetheless. A very generous offer."
After that, Gregory could not meet Aaron's gaze again, and as the FPP captain hustled his three subordinates out of the apartment, Aaron allowed himself a small and not altogether agreeable chuckle. Conventional wisdom among Sirens was that you didn't mess with the FPP because, if they felt like it, they could bring a whole load of unnecessary shit down on your head, but in the course of this encounter Aaron had proved to himself that a man like Gregory was neither to be feared nor despised. A man like Gregory, who lived a life circumscribed by rules, regulations and subservience to others, was only to be pitied.
That was the last time Gregory came to Aaron's apartment before the Foreigners stopped visiting Earth.
The years after the Foreigners' disappearance were hard on everyone. While it was generally held that no human was to blame, suspicious glares were easy to come by and even easier to cast. A friend, a relative, a neighbour, even a stranger in the street might be the guilty one, the one who had scared the Foreigners away, the one who had abused their sweetly naïve generosity, the one whose carelessness had caused the golden giants to bolt like a herd of skittish deer, the one who had mortally offended one and therefore all of them.
Like all the other resort-cities, Bridgeville fell prey to rage and despair. Fights and brawls became commonplace. Random, motiveless murders abounded. The fears and frustrations of a populace, a large proportion of whom had relied solely on the Foreigners as a source of income and now found themselves without money or employment, fermented, seethed and ultimately boiled over.
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