China Mieville

by The City

  “You’re the boss, boss.”

  “Not really, but I’m the boss of this for a little bit.”

  “Shall we?” She indicated the car.

  “I’ll walk it to a tram.”

  “Serious? Come on, you’ll be hours.” But I waved her off. I walked away to the sounds only of my own steps and some frenzied backstreet dog, towards where the grey glare of our lamps was effaced and I was lit by foreign orange light.

  SHUKMAN WAS MORE SUBDUED in his lab than out in the world. I had been on the phone to Yaszek asking for the video of the kids’ interrogation, the previous day, when Shukman contacted me and told me to come. It was cold, of course, and fuggy with chemicals. There was as much dark and many-stained wood as steel in the huge windowless room. There were notice boards on the walls, from each of which grew thickets of papers.

  Dirt seemed to lurk in the room’s corners, on the edges of its workstations: but once I had run a finger along a grubby-looking groove by the raised spill-stopper, and it had come back clean. The stains were old. Shukman stood at the head of a steel dissecting table on which, covered with a slightly stained sheet, the contours of her face plain, was our Fulana, staring as we discussed her.

  I looked at Hamzinic. He was only slightly older, I suspected, than the dead woman. He stood respectfully close by, his hands folded. By chance or not he stood next to a pinboard to which was attached among the postcards and memos a small gaudy shahada. Hamd Hamzinic was what the murderers of Avid Avid would also term an ébru. These days the term was used mainly by the old-fashioned, the racist, or in a turnabout provocation by the epithet’s targets: one of the best-known Besź hip-hop groups was named Ébru WA.

  Technically of course the word was ludicrously inexact for at least half of those to whom it was applied. But for at least two hundred years, since refugees from the Balkans had come hunting sanctuary, quickly expanding the city’s Muslim population, ébru, the antique Besź word for “Jew,” had been press-ganged into service to include the new immigrants, become a collective term for both populations. It was in Besźel’s previously Jewish ghettos that the Muslim newcomers settled.

  Even before the refugees’ arrival, indigents of the two minority communities in Besźel had traditionally allied, with jocularity or fear, depending on the politics at the time. Few citizens realise that our tradition of jokes about the foolishness of the middle child derives from a centuries-old humourous dialogue between Besźel’s head rabbi and its chief imam about the intemperance of the Besźel Orthodox Church. It had, they agreed, neither the wisdom of the oldest Abrahamic faith, nor the vigour of its youngest.

  A common form of establishment, for much of Besźel’s history, had been the DöplirCaffé: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevant side, or ostentatiously from either and both in the case of freethinkers. Whether the DöplirCaffé was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.

  The Besźel ghetto was only architecture now, not formal political boundary, tumbledown old houses with newly gentrified chic, clustered between very different foreign alter spaces. Still, that was just the city; it wasn’t an allegory, and Hamd Hamzinic would have faced unpleasantnesses in his studies. I thought slightly better of Shukman: a man of his age and temperament, I was perhaps surprised that Hamzinic felt free to display his statement of faith.

  Shukman did not uncover Fulana. She lay between us. They had done something so she lay as if at rest.

  “I’ve emailed you the report,” Shukman said. “Twenty-four-, -five-year-old woman. Decent overall health, apart from being dead. Time of death, midnightish the night before last, give or take, of course. Cause of death, puncture wounds to the chest. Four in total, of which one pierced her heart. Some spike or stiletto or something, not a blade. She also has a nasty head wound, and a lot of odd abrasions.” I looked up. “Some under her hair. She was whacked round the side of the head.” He swung his arm in slow-motion mimicry. “Hit her on the left of her skull. I’d say it knocked her out, or at least down and groggy, then the stab wounds were the coup de grace.”

  “What was she hit with? In the head?”

  “Something heavy and blunt. Could be a fist, if it was big, I suppose, but I seriously doubt it.” He tugged the corner of the sheet away, expertly uncovered the side of her head. The skin was the ugly colour of a dead bruise. “And voilà.” He motioned me closer to her skinheaded scalp.

  I got near the smell of preservative. In among the brunette stubble were several little scabbed puncture marks.

  “What are they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “They’re not deep. Something she landed on, I think.” The abrasions were about the size of pencil-points pushed into skin. They covered an area roughly my hand-breadth, irregularly breaking the surface. In places there were lines of them a few millimetres long, deeper in the centre than at either end, where they disappeared.

  “Signs of intercourse?”

  “Not recently. So if she’s a working girl maybe it was a refusal to do something that got her in this mess.” I nodded. He waited. “We’ve washed her down now,” he said eventually. “But she was covered in dirt, dust, grass stains, all the stuff you’d expect from where she was lying. And rust.”

  “Rust?”

  “All over. Lots of abrasions, cuts, scrapes, postmortem mostly, and lots of rust.”

  I nodded again. I frowned.

  “Defensive wounds?”

  “No. Came quick and unexpected, or her back was turned. There’s a bunch more scrapes and whatnot on the body.” Shukman pointed to tear marks on her skin. “Consistent with dragging her along. The wear and tear of murder.”

  Hamzinic opened his mouth, closed it again. I glanced up at him. He sadly shook his head: No nothing.

  Chapter Three

  THE POSTERS WERE UP. Mostly around the area our Fulana was found but some in the main streets, in the shopping streets, in Kyezov and Topisza and areas like that. I even saw one when I left my flat.

  It wasn’t even very close to the centre. I lived east and south a bit of the Old Town, the top-but-one flat in a six-storey towerlet on VulkovStrász. It is a heavily crosshatched street—clutch by clutch of architecture broken by alterity, even in a few spots house by house. The local buildings are taller by a floor or three than the others, so Besź juts up semiregularly and the roofscape is almost a machicolation.

  Laced by the shadows of girdered towers that would loom over it if they were there, Ascension Church is at the end of VulkovStrász, its windows protected by wire grilles, but some of its stained panes broken. A fish market is there every few days. Regularly I would eat my breakfast to the shouts of vendors by their ice buckets and racks of live molluscs. Even the young women who worked there dressed like their grandmothers while behind their stalls, nostalgically photogenic, their hair tied up in dishcloth-coloured scarves, their filleting aprons in patterns of grey and red to minimise the stains of gutting. The men looked, misleadingly or not, straight off their boats, as if they had not put their catches down since they emerged from the sea, until they reached the cobbles below me. The punters in Besźel lingered and smelled and prodded the goods.

  In the morning trains ran on a raised line metres from my window. They were not in my city. I did not of course, but I could have stared into the carriages—they were quite that close—and caught the eyes of foreign travellers.

  They would have seen only a thin man in early middle age in dressing gown at his morning yoghurt and coffee, shake-folding a copy of a paper—Inkyistor or Iy Déurnem or a smudgy Besźel Journal to keep my English practiced. Usually alone—once in a while one or other of two women about his age might be there
. (An economic historian at Besźel University; a writer for an art magazine. They did not know of each other but would not have minded.)

  There when I left, a short distance from my front door on a poster stand, Fulana’s face watched me. Though her eyes were closed, they had cropped and tinkered with the picture so that she did not look dead but stupefied. Do you know this woman? it said. It was printed in black and white, on matte paper. Call Extreme Crime Squad, our number. The presence of the poster might be evidence that the local cops were particularly efficient. Maybe they were all over the borough. It might be that, knowing where I lived, they wanted to keep me off their back with one or two strategic placements, especially for my eyes.

  It was a couple of kilometres to ECS base. I walked. I walked by the brick arches: at the top, where the lines were, they were elsewhere, but not all of them were foreign at their bases. The ones I could see contained little shops and squats decorated in art graffiti. In Besźel it was a quiet area, but the streets were crowded with those elsewhere. I unsaw them, but it took time to pick past them all. Before I had reached my turning on Via Camir, Yaszek called my mobile.

  “We’ve found the van.”

  I PICKED UP A CAB, which sped-stalled repeatedly through the traffic. The Pont Mahest was crowded, locally and elsewhere. I had minutes to look into the dirty river as we edged toward the western bank, the smoke and the grimy dockyard ships in the reflected light of mirrored buildings on a foreign waterfront—an enviable finance zone. Besź tugs bobbed in the wakes of ignored water taxis. The van was skew-whiff between buildings. It was not a lot that it was in, but a channel between the premises of an import-exporters and an office block, a stub of space full of trash and wolf shit, linking two larger streets. Crime-scene tape secured both ends—a slight impropriety, as the alley was really crosshatch, but rarely used, so the tape was a common rule-bend in such circumstances. My colleagues were faddling around the vehicle.

  “Boss.” It was Yaszek.

  “Is Corwi on her way?”

  “Yeah, I gave her the info.” Yaszek said nothing about my commandeering of the junior officer. She walked me over. It was an old, beat-up VW, in very bad condition. It was more off-white than grey, but it was darkened with dirt.

  “Are you done dusting?” I said. I put on rubber gloves. The mectecs nodded and worked around me.

  “It was unlocked,” Yaszek said.

  I opened the door. I prodded the split upholstery. A trinket on the dashboard—a hula-dancing plastic saint. I pulled open the glove compartment onto a battered road atlas and dirt. I splayed the pages of the book but there was nothing inside: it was the classic Besź driver’s aid, though an edition old enough to be black and white.

  “So how do we know this is it?” Yaszek led me to the rear and pulled it open. I looked in on more dirt, a dank though not sick-making smell at least as much rust as mould, nylon cord, piled-up junk. “What is all this?”

  I poked it. A few bits. A little motor from something, rocking; a broken television; remnants of unidentifiable bits and pieces, corkscrewed detritus, on a layer of cloth and dust. Layers of rust and scabs of oxide.

  “See that?” Yaszek pointed at stains on the floor. Had I not been looking carefully I might have said it was oil. “A couple of people in the office call it in, a deserted van. The uniforms see its doors are open. I don’t know whether they listen to their alerts or if they’re just thorough when they check through outstandings, but either way we’re lucky.” One of the messages that would have been read to all Besź patrols the previous morning would have requested they investigate and report any grey vehicles, and refer to ECS. We were fortunate these officers had not just called in the impounders. “Anyway they saw some muck on the floor, had it tested. We’re verifying, but it looks like it’s Fulana’s blood type, and we’ll have a definite match soon.”

  Lying like a mole below heavy refuse, I leaned down to look under the debris. I moved it gently, tilting the junk. My hand came away red. I looked piece by piece, touched each to gauge their heft. The engine thing might be swung by a pipe that was part of it: the bulk of its base was heavy and would break what it was swung into. It did not look scuffed, though, nor bloodied nor specked with hair. As a murder weapon it did not convince me.

  “You’ve not taken anything out?”

  “No, no paperwork, no nothing. There was nothing in here. Nothing here except this stuff. We’ll get results in a day or two.”

  “There’s so much crap,” I said. Corwi had arrived. A few passersby were hesitating at either end of the alleyway, watching the mectecs working. “It’s not going to be a problem of not enough trace; it’s going to be too much.

  “So. Let’s assume for a minute. That junk in there’s got rust all over her. She’s been lying around in there.” The smears had been on her face as well as her body, not concentrated on her hands: she had not tried to push the rubbish away from her, or protect her head. She was unconscious or dead when she was in the van while the rubbish knocked against her.

  “Why were they driving around with all this shit?” said Corwi. By that afternoon we had the name and address of the van’s owner, and by the next morning we had verification that the blood was our Fulana’s.

  THE MAN’S NAME was Mikyael Khurusch. He was the van’s third owner, officially at least. He had a record, had done time for two assault charges, for theft, the last time four years previously. And—“Look,” said Corwi—he had been done for Sex Buying, had approached a policewoman undercover in a prostitution blackspot. “So we know he’s a John.” He had been off radar since, but was, according to hurried intel, a tradesman selling bits and pieces in the city’s many markets, as well as three days a week from a shop in Mashlin, in western Besźel.

  We could connect him and the van, and the van and Fulana—a direct link was what we wanted. I went to my office and checked my messages. Some make-work on the Styelim case, an update from our switchboard on the posters and two hang-ups. Our exchange had promised for two years to upgrade to allow Caller ID.

  There had been, of course, many people calling to tell us they recognised Fulana, but only a few—the staff who took those calls knew how to filter the deluded and the malicious and to a startling degree were accurate in their judgements—only a few so far that looked worth chasing. The body was a legal assistant in a small practice in Gyedar borough, who had not been seen for days; or she was, an anonymous voice insisted, “a tart called Rosyn ‘The Pout,’ and that’s all you get from me.” Uniforms were checking.

  I told Commissar Gadlem I wanted to go in and talk to Khurusch in his house, get him to volunteer fingerprints, saliva, to cooperate. See how he reacted. If he said no, we could subpoena it and keep him under watch.

  “Alright,” Gadlem said. “But let’s not waste time. If he doesn’t play along put him in seqyestre, bring him in.”

  I would try not to do that, though Besź law gave us the right. Seqyestre, “half-arrest,” meant we could hold a nonwilling witness or “connected party” for six hours, for preliminary interrogation. We could not take physical evidence, nor, officially, draw conclusions from noncooperation or silence. The traditional use was to get confessions from suspects against whom there was not sufficient evidence to arrest. It was also, occasionally, a useful stalling technique against those we thought might be a flight risk. But juries and lawyers were turning against the technique, and a half-arrestee who did not confess usually had a stronger case later, because we looked too eager. Gadlem, old-fashioned, did not care, and I had my orders.

  Khurusch worked out of one of a line of semiactive businesses, in an economically lacklustre zone. We arrived in a hurried operation. Local officers on cooked-up subterfuge had ascertained that Khurusch was there.

  We pulled him out of the office, a too-warm dusty room above the shop, industrial calendars and faded patches on the walls between filing cabinets. His assistant stared stupidly and picked up and put down stuff from her desk as we led Khurusch away.


  He knew who I was before Corwi or the other uniforms were visible in his doorway. He was enough of a pro, or had been, that he knew he was not being arrested, despite our manner, and that therefore he could have refused to come and I would have had to obey Gadlem. After a moment when he first saw us—during which he stiffened as if considering running, though where?—he came with us down the wobbling iron staircase on the building’s wall, the only entrance. I muttered into a radio and had the armed officers we had had waiting stand down. He never saw them.

  Khurusch was a fatly muscular man in a checked shirt as faded and dusty looking as his office walls. He watched me from across the table in our interview room. Yaszek sat; Corwi stood under instructions not to speak, only watch. I walked. We weren’t recording. This wasn’t an interrogation, not technically.

  “Do you know why you’re here, Mikyael?”

  “No clue.”

  “Do you know where your van is?”

  He looked up hard and stared at me. His voice changed—suddenly hopeful.

  “Is that what this is about?” he said eventually. “The van?” He said a ha and sat a little back. Still guarded but relaxing. “Did you find it? Is that—”

  “Find it?”

  “It was stolen. Three days ago. Did you? Find it? Jesus. What was … Have you got it? Can I have it back? What happened?”

  I looked at Yaszek. She stood and whispered to me, sat again, and watched Khurusch.

  “Yes, that’s what this is about, Mikyael,” I said. “What did you think it was about? Actually no, don’t point at me, Mikyael, and shut your mouth until I tell you; I don’t want to know. Here’s the thing, Mikyael. A man like yourself, a delivery man, needs a van. You haven’t reported yours as missing.” I looked down briefly at Yaszek, Are we sure? She nodded. “You’ve not reported it stolen. Now I can see that the loss of that piece of shit and I do stress piece of shit wouldn’t cut you up too badly, not on a human level. Nonetheless, I’m wondering, if it was stolen, I can’t see what would stop you alerting us and indeed your insurance. How can you do your job without it?”