by The City
“Probably. Let’s find out why she keeps her hair so clean.”
There was a league-table of instinct. We all knew that in his street-beating days, Commissar Kerevan broke several cases following leads that made no logical sense; and that Chief Inspector Marcoberg was devoid of any such breaks, and that his decent record was the result, rather, of slog. We would never call inexplicable little insights “hunches,” for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.
Officers Shushkil and Briamiv were surprised, then defensive, finally sulky when I asked them what they were doing moving the mattress. I put them on report. If they had apologised I would have let it go. It was depressingly common to see police boots tracked through blood residue, fingerprints smeared and spoiled, samples corrupted or lost.
A little group of journalists was gathering at the edges of the open land. Petrus Something-or-other, Valdir Mohli, a young guy called Rackhaus, a few others.
“Inspector!” “Inspector Borlú!” Even: “Tyador!”
Most of the press had always been polite, and amenable to my suggestions about what they withhold. In the last few years, new, more salacious and aggressive papers had started, inspired and in some cases controlled by British or North American owners. It had been inevitable, and in truth our established local outlets were staid to dull. What was troubling was less the trend to sensation, nor even the irritating behaviour of the new press’s young writers, but more their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born. Rackhaus, who wrote for a weekly called Rejal!, for example. Surely when he bothered me for facts he knew I would not give him, surely when he attempted to bribe junior officers, and sometimes succeeded, he did not have to say, as he tended to: “The public has a right to know!”
I did not even understand him the first time he said it. In Besź the word “right” is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning he intended. I had to mentally translate into English, in which I am passably fluent, to make sense of the phrase. His fidelity to the cliché transcended the necessity to communicate. Perhaps he would not be content until I snarled and called him a vulture, a ghoul.
“You know what I’m going to say,” I told them. The stretched tape separated us. “There’ll be a press conference this afternoon, at ECS Centre.”
“What time?” My photograph was being taken.
“You’ll be informed, Petrus.”
Rackhaus said something that I ignored. As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.
With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.
Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.
Chapter Two
I HAD A CONSTABLE DROP ME north of Lestov, near the bridge. I did not know the area well. I’d been to the island, of course, visited the ruins, when I was a schoolboy and occasionally since, but my rat-runs were elsewhere. Signs showing directions to local destinations were bolted to the outsides of pastry bakers and little workshops, and I followed them to a tram stop in a pretty square. I waited between a care-home marked with an hourglass logo, and a spice shop, the air around it cinnamon scented.
When the tram came, tinnily belling, shaking in its ruts, I did not sit, though the carriage was half-empty. I knew we would pick up passengers as we went north to Besźel centre. I stood close to the window and saw right out into the city, into these unfamiliar streets.
The woman, her ungainly huddle below that old mattress, sniffed by scavengers. I phoned Naustin on my cell.
“Is the mattress being tested for trace?”
“Should be, sir.”
“Check. If the techs are on it we’re fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.” Perhaps she was new to the life. Maybe if we’d found her a week later her hair would have been electric blonde.
These regions by the river are intricate, many buildings a century or several centuries old. The tram took its tracks through byways where Besźel, at least half of everything we passed, seemed to lean in and loom over us. We wobbled and slowed, behind local cars and those elsewhere, came to a crosshatching where the Besź buildings were antique shops. That trade had been doing well, as well as anything did in the city for some years, hand-downs polished and spruced as people emptied their apartments of heirlooms for a few Besźmarques.
Some editorialists were optimists. While their leaders roared as relentlessly at each other as they ever had in the Cityhouse, many of the new breed of all parties were working together to put Besźel first. Each drip of foreign investment—and to everyone’s surprise there were drips—brought forth encomia. Even a couple of high-tech companies had recently moved in, though it was hard to believe it was in response to Besźel’s fatuous recent self-description as “Silicon Estuary.”
I got off by the statue of King Val. Downtown was busy: I stop-started, excusing myself to citizens and local tourists, unseeing others with care, till I reached the blocky concrete of ECS Centre. Two groups of tourists were being shepherded by Besź guides. I stood on the steps and looked down UropaStrász. It took me several tries to get a signal.
“Corwi?”
“Boss?”
“You know that area: is there any chance we’re looking at breach?”
There were seconds of silence.
“Doesn’t seem likely. That area’s mostly pretty total. And Pocost Village, that whole project, certainly is.”
“Some of GunterStrász, though …”
“Yeah but. The closest crosshatching is hundreds of metres away. They couldn’t have …” It would have been an extraordinary risk on the part of the murderer or murderers. “I reckon we can assume,” she said.
“Alright. Let me know how you get on. I’ll check in soon.”
***
I HAD PAPERWORK ON OTHER CASES that I opened, establishing them a while in holding patterns like circling aircraft. A woman beaten to death by her boyfriend, who had managed to evade us so far, despite tracers on his name and his prints at the airport. Styelim was an old man who had surprised an addict breaking and entering, been hit once, fatally, with the spanner he himself had been wielding. That case would not close. A young man called Avid Avid, left bleeding from the head after taking a kerb-kiss from a racist, “Ébru Filth” written on the wall above him. For that I was coordinating with a colleague from Special Division, Shenvoi, who had, since some time before Avid’s murder, been undercover in Besźel’s far right.
Ramira Yaszek called while I ate lunch at my desk. “Just done questioning those kids, sir.”
“And?”
“You should be glad they don’t know their rights better, because if they did Naustin’d be facing charges now.” I rubbed my eyes and swallowed my mouthful.
“What did he do?”
“Barichi’s mate Sergev was lippy, so Naustin asked him the bareknuckle question across the mouth, said he was the prime suspect.” I swore. “It wasn’t that hard, and at least it made it easier for me to gudcop.” We had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them. Naustin was one of those who’d switch to hard qu
estioning too easily. There are some suspects that methodology works on, who need to fall down stairs during an interrogation, but a sulky teenage chewer is not one.
“Anyway, no harm done,” Yaszek said. “Their stories tally. They’re out, the four of them, in that bunch of trees. Bit of naughty naughty probably. They were there for a couple of hours at least. At some point during that time—and don’t ask for anything more exact because you aren’t going to get it beyond ‘still dark’—one of the girls sees that van come up onto the grass to the skate park. She doesn’t think much of it because people do come up there all times of day and night to do business, to dump stuff, what have you. It drives around, up past the skate park, comes back. After a while it speeds off.”
“Speeds?”
I scribbled in my notebook, trying one-handedly to pull up my email on my PC. The connection broke more than once. Big attachments on an inadequate system.
“Yeah. It was in a hurry and buggering its suspension. That’s how she noticed it was going.”
“Description?”
“‘Grey.’ She doesn’t know from vans.”
“Get her looking at some pictures, see if we can ID the make.”
“On it, sir. I’ll let you know. Later at least two other cars or vans come up for whatever reason, for business, according to Barichi.”
“That could complicate tyre tracks.”
“After an hour or whatever of groping, this girl mentions the van to the others and they go check it out, in case it was dumping. Says sometimes you get old stereos, shoes, books, all kinds of shit chucked out.”
“And they find her.” Some of my messages had come through. There was one from one of the mectec photographers, and I opened it and began to scroll through his images.
“They find her.”
COMMISSAR GADLEM CALLED ME IN. His soft-spoken theatricality, his mannered gentleness, was unsubtle, but he had always let me do my thing. I sat while he tapped at his keyboard and swore. I could see what must be database passwords stuck on scraps of paper to the side of his screen.
“So?” he said. “The housing estate?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“South, suburbs. Young woman, stab wounds. Shukman’s got her.”
“Prostitute?”
“Could be.”
“Could be,” he said, cupped his ear, “and yet. I can hear it. Well, onward, follow your nose. Tell if you ever feel like sharing the whys of that ‘and yet,’ won’t you? Who’s your sub?”
“Naustin. And I’ve got a beat cop helping out. Corwi. Grade-one constable. Knows the area.”
“That’s her beat?” I nodded. Close enough.
“What else is open?”
“On my desk?” I told him. The commissar nodded. Even with the others, he granted me the leeway to follow Fulana Detail.
“SO DID YOU SEE the whole business?”
It was close to ten o’clock in the evening, more than forty hours since we had found the victim. Corwi drove—she made no effort to disguise her uniform, despite that we had an unmarked car-through the streets around GunterStrász. I had not been home until very late the previous night, and after a morning on my own in these same streets now I was there again.
There were places of crosshatch in the larger streets and a few elsewhere, but that far out the bulk of the area was total. Few antique Besź stylings, few steep roofs or many-paned windows: these were hobbled factories and warehouses. A handful of decades old, often broken-glassed, at half capacity if open. Boarded facades. Grocery shops fronted with wire. Older fronts in tumbledown of classical Besź style. Some houses colonised and made chapels and drug houses: some burnt out and left as crude carbon renditions of themselves.
The area was not crowded, but it was far from empty. Those who were out looked like landscape, like they were always there. There had been fewer that morning but not very markedly.
“Did you see Shukman working on the body?”
“No.” I was looking at what we passed, referring to my map. “I got there after he was done.”
“Squeamish?” she said.
“No.”
“Well …” She smiled and turned the car. “You’d have to say that even if you were.”
“True,” I said, though it was not.
She pointed out what passed for landmarks. I did not tell her I had been in Kordvenna early in the day, sounding these places.
Corwi did not try to disguise her police clothes because that way those who saw us, who might otherwise think we were there to entrap them, would know that was not our intent; and the fact that we were not in a bruise, as we called the black-and-blue police cars, told them that neither were we there to harass them. Intricate contracts!
Most of those around us were in Besźel so we saw them. Poverty deshaped the already staid, drab cuts and colours that enduringly characterise Besź clothes—what has been called the city’s fashionless fashion. Of the exceptions, some we realised when we glanced were elsewhere, so unsaw, but the younger Besź were also more colourful, their clothes more pictured, than their parents.
The majority of the Besź men and women (does this need saying?) were doing nothing but walking from one place to another, from late-shift work, from homes to other homes or shops. Still, though, the way we watched what we passed made it a threatening geography, and there were sufficient furtive actions occurring that that did not feel like the rankest paranoia.
“This morning I found a few of the locals I used to talk to,” Corwi said. “Asked if they’d heard anything.” She took us through a darkened place where the balance of crosshatch shifted, and we were silent until the streetlamps around us became again taller and familiarly deco-angled. Under those lights—the street we were on visible in a perspective curve away from us—women stood by the walls selling sex. They watched our approach guardedly. “I didn’t have much luck,” Corwi said.
She had not even had a photograph on that earlier expedition. That early it had been aboveboard contacts: it had been liquor-store clerks; the priests of squat local churches, some the last of the worker-priests, brave old men tattooed with the sickle-and-rood on their biceps and forearms, on the shelves behind them Besź translations of Gutiérrez, Rauschenbusch, Canaan Banana. It had been stoop-sitters. All Corwi had been able to do was ask what they could tell her about events in Pocost Village. They had heard about the murder but knew nothing.
Now we had a picture. Shukman had given it to me. I brandished it as we emerged from the car: literally I brandished it, so the women would see that I brought something to them, that that was the purpose of our visit, not to make arrests.
Corwi knew some of them. They smoked and watched us. It was cold, and like everyone who saw them I wondered at their stockinged legs. We were affecting their business of course-plenty of locals passing by looked up at us and looked away again. I saw a bruise slow down the traffic as it passed us—they must have seen an easy arrest—but the driver and his passenger saw Corwi’s uniform and sped again with a salute. I waved back to their rear lights.
“What do you want?” a woman asked. Her boots were high and cheap. I showed her the picture.
They had cleaned up Fulana Detail’s face. There were marks left—scrapes were visible below the makeup. They could have eradicated them completely from the picture, but the shock those wounds occasioned were useful in questioning. They had taken the picture before they shaved her head. She did not look peaceful. She looked impatient.
“I don’t know her.” “I don’t know her.” I did not see recognition quickly disguised. They gathered in the grey light of the lamp, to the consternation of punters hovering at the edge of the local darkness, passed the picture among themselves and whether or not they made sympathy noises, did not know Fulana.
“What happened?” I gave the woman who asked my card. She was dark, Semitic or Turkish somewhere back. Her Besź was unaccented.
“We’re trying to find out.”
“Do we need to worry?”
After I paused Corwi said, “We’ll tell you if we think you do, Sayra.”
We stopped by a group of young men drinking strong wine outside a pool hall. Corwi took a little of their ribaldry then passed the photograph round.
“Why are we here?” My question was quiet.
“They’re entry-level gangsters, boss,” she told me. “Watch how they react.” But they gave little away if they did know anything. They returned the photograph and took my card impassively.
We repeated this at other gatherings, and afterwards each time we waited several minutes in our car, far enough away that a troubled member of any of the groups might excuse himself or herself and come find us, tell us some dissident scrap that might push us by whatever byways towards the details and family of our dead woman. No one did. I gave my card to many people and wrote down in my notebook the names and descriptions of those few that Corwi told me mattered.
“That’s pretty much everyone I used to know,” she said. Some of the men and women had recognised her, but it had not seemed to make much difference to how she was received. When we agreed that we had finished it was after two in the morning. The half-moon was washed out: after a last intervention we had come to a stop, were standing in a street depleted of even its latest-night frequenters.
“She’s still a question mark.” Corwi was surprised.
“I’ll arrange to have the posters put around the area.”
“Really, boss? Commissar’ll go for that?” We spoke quietly. I wove my fingers into the wire mesh of a fence around a lot filled only with concrete and scrub.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’ll roll over. It’s not that much.”
“It’s a few uniforms for a few hours, and he’s not going to … not for a …”
“We have to shoot for an ID. Fuck it, I’ll put them up myself.” I would arrange for them to be sent out to each of the city’s divisions. When we turned up a name, if Fulana’s story was as we had tentatively intuited, what few resources we had would vanish. We were milking leeway that would eradicate itself.