I told Dhatt a place—I did not know the address, had to describe it in vague topography, which he recognised—a piece of parkland walking distance from where Yolanda hid, to meet me at the end of the following day. “Anyone asks, tell them I’m working from the hotel. Tell them about all the ridiculous paperwork hoops they make us jump through in Besźel, that keep me busy.”
“It’s all we ever fucking talk about, Tyad.” Dhatt could not stay in one place, he was so anxious, so frenetic with lack of trust, in anything, so troubled. He did not know where to look. “Blame you or not, I’m going to be on school liaison for the rest of my fucking career.”
We had agreed there was a good possibility we would not hear from Bowden again, but I got a call on poor Yallya’s phone half an hour after midnight. I was sure it was Bowden though he said nothing. He called again just before seven the next morning.
“You sound bad, Doctor.”
“What’s happening?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Are you going? Is Yolanda with you? Is she coming?”
“You have one shot, Doctor.” I scribbled times on my notepad. “If you’re not going to let me come for you. You want out, be outside the main traffic gate of Copula Hall at seven p.m.”
I disconnected. I tried to make notes, plans on paper, could not. Bowden did not call me back. I kept the phone on the table or in my hand throughout my early breakfast. I did not check out of the hotel—no telegraphing of movements. I sorted through my clothes for anything I could not afford to leave, and there was nothing. I carried my illegal volume of Between the City and the City, and that was all.
I took almost the whole day to get to Yolanda and Aikam’s hide. My last day in Ul Qoma. I took taxis in stages to the ends of the city. “How long you staying?” the last driver asked me.
“A couple of weeks.”
“You like it here,” he said, in enthusiastic beginner’s Illitan. “Best city in the world.” He was Kurdish.
“Show me your favourite parts of town, then. You don’t get trouble?” I said. “Not everyone’s welcoming to foreigners, I heard …”
He made a pooh-poohing noise. “Are fools all over everywhere, but is the best city.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Four years and some. I was one year in camp …”
“A refugee camp?”
“Yeah, in the camp, and three years study for Ul Qoma citizenship. Speaking Illitan and learning, you know, not to, you know to unsee the other place, so not to breach.”
“Did you ever think of going to Besźel?”
Another snort. “What’s in Besźel? Ul Qoma is the best place.”
He took me first past the Orchidarium and the Xhincis Kann Stadium, a tourist route he had obviously taken before, and when I encouraged him to indulge more personal preferences he started to show me the community gardens where alongside Ul Qoman natives those Kurds, Pakistanis, Somalis and Sierra Leoneans who got through the stringent conditions for entry played chess, the various communities regarding each other with courteous uncertainty. At a crossroads of canals he, careful not to say anything unequivocally illegal, pointed out to me where the barges of the two cities-pleasure craft in Ul Qoma, a few working transport boats unseen in Besźel—wove between each other.
“You see?” he said.
A man on the opposite side of a nearby lock, half-hidden in people and little urban trees, was looking straight at us. I met his eye—for a moment I was not sure but then decided he must be in Ul Qoma, so it was not breach—until he looked away. I tried to watch where he went, but he was gone.
When I expressed choices between the various sights the driver proposed, I made sure the resulting route crisscrossed the city. I watched the mirrors as he, delighted with this fare, drove. If we were followed it was by very sophisticated and careful spies. I paid him a ridiculous amount, in a much harder currency than I was paid in, after three hours of escorting, and I had him drop me where backstreet hackers abutted cheap secondhand shops, around the corner from the estate where Yolanda and Aikam hid.
For moments I thought they had skipped out on me, and I closed my eyes, but I kept repeating in a whisper up close to the door, “It’s me, it’s Borlú, it’s me,” and at last it opened, and Aikam ushered me in.
“Get ready,” I said to Yolanda. She looked dirty to me, thinner and more startled like an animal than even when I had last seen her. “Get your papers. Be ready to agree with whatever me or my colleagues say to anyone at the border. And get lover-boy used to the idea that he’s not coming, because we’re not having a scene at Copula Hall. We’re getting you out.”
SHE MADE HIM STAY IN THE ROOM. He looked as if he would not do as she asked, but she made him. I did not trust him to be unobtrusive.
He demanded to know again and again why he could not come. She showed him where she had his number, and she swore that she would call him from Besźel, and from Canada, and that she would call for him there. It took her several such promises until he stood at last miserable as a neglected thing, staring as we closed the door on him and walked fast through the shadowing light to the corner of the park, where Dhatt was waiting in an unmarked police car.
“Yolanda.” He nodded to her from the driver’s seat. “Pain in my arse.” He nodded to me. We set off. “What the fuck? Who exactly have you pissed off, Miss Rodriguez? You’ve got me fucking my life and collaborating with this foreign wacko. There’s clothes in the back,” he said. “Course I’m out of work, now.” He very well might not be exaggerating.
Yolanda stared at him until he glanced into the mirror and snapped at her, “For fuck’s sake, what, you think I’m peeping?” and she scootched down in the rear seat and began to wriggle out of her clothes, replacing them with the militsya uniform he had brought for her, that almost fit.
“Miss Rodriguez, do as I say and stick close. There’s fancy dress for our possible-other-guest too. And that’s for you, Borlú. Might save us a bit of shit.” A jacket with a fold-down militsya blazon on it. I made it visible. “I wish they had rank on them. I’d’ve fucking demoted you.”
He did not meander, nor make the mistake of the guilty nervous and drive more slowly, more carefully than the cars around us. We took the main streets, and he flicked on and off the headlights at other drivers’ infractions as Ul Qoman drivers do, little messages of road-rage code like aggressive Morse, flick flick, you cut me up, flick flick flick, make up your mind.
“He called again,” I said to Dhatt quietly. “He might be there. In which case …”
“Come on, pain in my arse, say it again. In which case he’s going over, right?”
“He’s got to get out. Did you get spare papers?”
He swore and punched the steering wheel. “Fuck I really wish I’d thought of a way to talk myself out of this fucking shit. I hope he doesn’t come. I hope fucking Orciny does get him.” Yolanda stared at him. “I’ll sound out whoever’s on duty. Get ready to crack out your wallet. If push comes to shove I’ll give him my fucking papers.”
We saw Copula Hall over the roofs and through cables of telephone exchanges and gasrooms many minutes before we arrived at it. The way we came, we first passed, as unseeing as we could, the building’s rear-to-Ul Qoma, its entryway in Besźel, the queues of Besź and returning Ul Qoman passengers siphoning in in patient dudgeon. A Besź police light was flashing. We were obliged not to and did not see any of it, but we could not but be aware as we did so that we would be on that side soon. We rounded the huge building to its Ul Maidin Avenue entrance, opposite the Temple of Inevitable Light, where the slow line into Besźel proceeded. There Dhatt parked—a bad job not corrected, skewed from the kerb with the swagger of militsya, keys hanging ready—and we emerged to cross through the night crowds towards the great forecourt and the borders of Copula Hall.
The outer guards of militsya did not ask a thing or even speak to us as we cut across the lines of people, walked over the roads weaving through st
ationary traffic, only ushered us through the restricted gates and on into the grounds proper of Copula Hall, where the huge edifice waited to eat us.
I looked everywhere as we came. Our eyes never stopped moving. I walked behind Yolanda, moving uneasily in her disguise. I raised my stare above the sellers of food and tat, the guards, the tourists, the homeless men and women, the other militsya. Of the many entrances we had chosen the most open, wide and unconvoluted under a vault of old brickwork, with a view clear through the yawning interstitial space, over the mass of crowds filling the great chamber on both sides of the checkpoint—though more, noticeably, on the Besźel side, wanting to come in to Ul Qoma.
From this position, this vantage angle, for the first time in a long time we did not have to unsee the neighbouring city: we could stare along the road that linked Ul Qoma to it, over the border, the metres of no-man’s-land and the border beyond, directly into Besźel itself. Straight ahead. Blue lights awaited us. A Besź bruise just visible beyond the lowered gate between the states, the flashing we had unseen minutes before. As we passed the outer fringes of Copula Hall’s architecture, I saw at the far end of the hall standing on the raised platform where the Besź guards watched the crowds a figure in policzai uniform. A woman—she was very distant yet, on the Besźel side of the gates.
“Corwi.” I did not know I’d said her name aloud until Dhatt said to me, “That her?” I was about to tell him it was too far off to know, but he said to me, “Hold on a second.”
He was looking back the way we had come. We stood somewhat apart from most of those heading into Besźel, between lines of aspirant travellers and on a thin fringe of pavement vehicles travelling slowly. There was, Dhatt was right, something about one of the men behind us that was disconcerting. There was nothing about his appearance which stood out: he was bundled against the cold in a drab Ul Qoman cloak. But he walked or shuffled towards us somewhat across the directionality of the line of his fellow pedestrians, and I saw behind him disgruntled faces. He was pushing out of his turn, walking towards us. Yolanda saw where we were looking, and gave a little whimper.
“Come on,” Dhatt said, and put his hand to her back and walked her more quickly towards the entrance of the tunnel, but seeing how the figure behind us tried as far as the constraints of those around him would permit to raise his speed as well, to exceed our own, to come towards us, I turned around suddenly and began to move toward him.
“Get her over there,” I said to Dhatt behind me, without looking. “Go, get her to the border. Yolanda, go to the policzai woman over there.” I accelerated. “Go.”
“Wait,” Yolanda said to me but I heard Dhatt remonstrate with her. I was focused now on the approaching man. He could not fail to see that I was coming towards him, and he hesitated and reached into his jacket, and I fumbled at my side but remembered I had no gun in that city. The man backed up a step or two. The man threw up his hands and unwrapped his scarf. He was shouting my name. It was Bowden.
He pulled out something, a pistol dangling in his fingers as if he were allergic to it. I dived for him and heard a hard exhalation behind me. Behind me another spat-out breath and screams. Dhatt shouted and shouted my name.
Bowden was staring over my shoulder. I looked behind me. Dhatt was crouched between cars a few metres away. He was wrapping himself up in himself and bellowing. Motorists were hunched in their vehicles. Their screams were spreading to the lines of pedestrian travellers in Besźel and in Ul Qoma. Dhatt huddled over Yolanda. She lay as if tossed. I could not see her clearly, but there was blood across her face. Dhatt was gripping his shoulder.
“I’m hit!” he shouted. “Yolanda’s … Light, Tyad, she’s shot, she’s down …”
A commotion started in the hall a long way off. Over the sedately moving traffic I saw at the farthest end of the enormous room a surge in the crowd in Besźel, a movement like animal panic. People scattering away from a figure, who leaned on, no, raised, something in both hands. Aiming, a rifle.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ANOTHER OF THOSE ABRUPT LITTLE SOUNDS, hardly audible over the rising screams the length of the tunnel. A shot, silenced or muffled by acoustics, but by the time I heard it I was on Bowden and had pushed him down, and the explosive percussion of the bullet into the wall behind him was louder than the shot itself. Architecture sprayed. I heard Bowden’s panicked breath, put my hand on his wrist and squeezed until he dropped his weapon, kept him down out of the sightline of the sniper targeting him.
“Down! Everybody down!” I was shouting that. So sluggishly it was hard to believe, the crowds were falling to their knees, their cowering and their screams more and more exaggerated as they realised the danger. Another sound and another, a car braking violently and with an alarm, another implosive gasp as bricks took a bullet.
I kept Bowden on the tarmac. “Tyad!” It was Dhatt.
“Talk to me,” I shouted to him. The guards were all over the place, raising weapons, looking everywhere, yelling idiot pointless orders at each other.
“I’m hit, I’m okay,” he replied. “Yolanda’s head-shot.”
I looked up, no more firing. I looked up further, to where Dhatt rolled and gripped his wound, to where Yolanda lay dead. Rose slightly more and saw militsya approaching Dhatt and the corpse he guarded, and way off policzai running towards where the shots had come from. In Besźel the police were buffeted and blocked by the hysterical crowd. Corwi was looking in all directions—could she see me? I was shouting. The shooter was running.
His way was blocked, but he swung his rifle like a club when he had to, and people were clearing from around him. Orders would be going out to block the entrance, but how fast would they go? He was moving into a part of the crowd who had not seen him shoot, and were surrounding him, and good as he was he would drop or hide his weapon.
“God damn it.” I could hardly see him. No one was stopping him. He had some way to go before he was out. I looked, carefully, item by item, at his hair and clothes: cropped; grey tracksuit top with a hood behind; black trousers. All nondescript. Did he drop his weapon? He was into the crowd.
I stood holding Bowden’s gun. A ridiculous P38, but loaded and well kept. I stepped towards the checkpoint, but there was no way I could get through it, all that chaos, not ever and not now with both lines of guards in uproar flailing guns around; even if my Ul Qoman uniform got me through the Ul Qoman lines, the Besź would stop me, and the shooter was too far for me to catch. I hesitated. “Dhatt, radio help, watch Bowden,” I shouted, then turned and ran the other way, out into Ul Qoma, towards Dhatt’s car.
The crowds got out of my way; they saw me coming with my militsya emblazoning, saw the pistol I held, and scattered. The militsya saw one of their own, in pursuit of something, and did not stop me. I turned the emergency lights on and started the engine.
I sent the car breakneck, dodging local and foreign cars, screaming outside the length of Copula Hall. The siren confused me, I was not used to Ul Qoman sirens, a ya ya ya more whining than our own cars’. The shooter was, must be, fighting his way through the terrified and confused thronging tunnel of travellers. My lights and alarm cleared the roads before me, ostentatiously in Ul Qoma, on the topolganger streets in Besźel with the typical unstated panic of a foreign drama. I yanked the wheel and the car snapped right, bumped over Besź tram tracks.
Where was Breach? But no breach had occurred.
No breach had occurred though a woman had been killed, brazenly, across a border. Assault, a murder and an attempted murder, but those bullets had travelled across the checkpoint itself, in Copula Hall, across the meeting place. A heinous, complex, vicious killing, but in the assiduous care the assassin had taken—to position himself just so at the point where he could stare openly along the last metres of Besźel over the physical border and into Ul Qoma, could aim precisely down this one conduit between the cities—that murder had been committed with if anything a surplus of care for the cities’ boundaries, the membrane between Ul Qoma
and Besźel. There was no breach, Breach had no power here, and only Besź police were in the same city as the killer now.
I turned right again. I was back where we had been an hour before, in Weipay Street in Ul Qoma, which shared the crosshatched latitude-longitude with the Besź entrance to Copula Hall. I drove the car as close as the crowds let me, braked hard. I got out and jumped on its roof—it would not be long before Ul Qoman police would come to ask me, their supposed colleague, what I was doing, but now I jumped on the roof. After a second’s hesitation I did not stare into the tunnel at the oncoming Besź escaping the attack. I looked instead all around, into Ul Qoma, and then in the direction of the hall, not changing my expression, giving away nothing that suggested that I might be looking anywhere other than at Ul Qoma. I was unimpeachable. The car’s stuttering police lights turned my legs red and blue.
I let myself notice what was happening in Besźel. Many more travellers were still trying to enter Copula Hall than leave it, but as the panic within spread there was a dangerous contraflow. There was commotion, lines backing up, those behind who did not know what it was they had seen or heard blocking those who knew very well and were trying to flee. Ul Qomans unsaw the Besź melee, looked away and crossed the road to avoid the foreign trouble.
“Get out, get out—”
“Let us in, what’s …?”
Among the clots and grots of panicked escapees I saw a hurrying man. He caught my attention by the care with which he tried not to run too fast, not to be too large, to raise his head. I believed it was, then that it was not, then that it was, the shooter. Pushing his way past a last shouting family and a chaotic line of Besź policzai trying to impose order without knowing what it was they should do. Pushing his way out and turning, walking with his hurried careful step away.
The City & the City Page 24