by The City
Khurusch shrugged.
“I didn’t get it together. I was going to. I was busy …”
“We know how busy you are, Mik, and still I ask, why didn’t you report it gone?”
“I didn’t get it together. Really there’s nothing fucking dubious—”
“For three days?”
“Have you got it? What happened? It was used for something, wasn’t it? What was it used for?”
“Do you know this woman? Where were you on Tuesday night, Mik?” He stared at the picture.
“Jesus.” He went pale, he did. “Someone was killed? Jesus. Was she hit? Hit and run? Jesus.” He pulled out a dented PDA, then looked up without turning it on. “Tuesday? I was at a meeting. Tuesday night? Christ’s sake I was at a meeting.” He gave a nervous noise. “That was the night the goddamn van got stolen. I was at a meeting, and there’s twenty people can tell you the same.”
“What meeting? Where?”
“In Vyevus.”
“How’d you get there, with no van?”
“In my fucking car! No one’s stolen that. I was at Gamblers Anonymous.” I stared. “Fuck’s sake I go every week. Last four years.”
“Since you were last in prison.”
“Yes since I was in fucking prison, Jesus, what do you think put me there?”
“Assault.”
“Yeah, I broke my fucking bookie’s nose because I was behind and he was threatening me. What do you care? I was in a room full of fucking people on Tuesday night.”
“That’s, what, two hours at the most…”
“Yeah and then afterwards at nine we went to the bar—it’s GA not AA—and I was there till after midnight, and I didn’t go home alone. There’s a woman in my group … They’ll all tell you.”
He was wrong about that. Of the GA group of eighteen, eleven wouldn’t compromise their anonymity. The convenor, a wiry pony-tailed man who went by Zyet, “Bean,” would not give us their names. He was right not to do so. We could have forced him, but why? The seven who would come forward all verified Khurusch’s story.
None was the woman he claimed to have gone home with, but several of them agreed that she existed. We could have found out, but again what would the point have been? The mectecs got excited when we found Khurusch’s DNA on Fulana, but it was a tiny number of his arm hairs on her skin: given how often he hauled things in and out of the vehicle, it proved nothing.
“So why didn’t he tell anyone it was missing?”
“He did,” Yaszek told me. “He just didn’t tell us. But I spoke to the secretary, Ljela Kitsov. He’s been pissing and moaning about it for the last couple of days.”
“He just never got it together to tell us? What does he even do without it?”
“Kitsov says he just piddles stuff up and down across the river. The occasional import, on a very small scale. Pops abroad and picks up stuff to resell: cheap clothes, dodgy CDs.”
“Abroad where?”
“Varna. Bucharest. Turkey sometimes. Ul Qoma, of course.”
“So he’s just too dithery to report the theft?”
“It does happen, boss.”
Of course, and to his rage—despite having not reported it stolen, he was now suddenly eager to have it returned—we wouldn’t give him his van back. We did take him to the pound to verify it was his.
“Yes, it’s mine.” I waited for him to complain about how ill it had been used, but that was obviously its usual colour. “Why can’t I have it? I need it.”
“As I keep saying, it’s a crime scene. You’ll get it when I’m ready. What’s all this for?” He was huffing and grumping, looked into the back of the van. I held him back from touching anything.
“This shit? I don’t fucking know.”
“This, I’m talking about.” The ripped-up cord, the pieces of junk.
“Yeah. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t put it here. Don’t look at me like that—why would I carry garbage like this?”
I said to Corwi in my office afterwards: “Please, do please stop me if you have any ideas, Lizbyet. Because I’m seeing a may-or-may-not-be working girl, who no one recognises, dumped in plain sight, in a stolen van, into which was carefully placed a load of crap, for no reason. And none of it’s the murder weapon, you know—that’s pretty certain.” I prodded the paper on my desk that told me.
“There’s rubbish all over that estate,” she said. “There’s rubbish all over Besźel; he could’ve picked it up anywhere. ‘He’ … They, maybe.”
“Picked it up, stashed it, dumped it, and the van with it.”
Corwi sat rather stiff, waiting for me to say something. All the rubbish had done was roll into the dead woman and rust her as if she, too, were old iron.
Chapter Four
BOTH OF THE LEADS WERE BOGUS. The office assistant had resigned and not bothered to tell them. We found her in Byatsialic, in the east of Besźel. She was mortified to have caused us trouble. “I never hand in notice,” she kept saying. “Not when they’re employers like that. And this has never happened, nothing like this.” Corwi found Rosyn “The Pout” without any difficulty. She was working her usual pitch.
“She doesn’t look anything like Fulana, boss.” Corwi showed me a jpeg Rosyn had been happy to pose for. We couldn’t trace the source of that spurious information, delivered with such convincing authority, nor work out why anyone would have mistaken the two women. Other information came in that I sent people to chase. I found messages and blank messages on my work phone.
It rained. On the kiosk outside my front door the printout of Fulana softened and streaked. Someone put up a glossy flyer for an evening of Balkan techno so it covered the top half of her face. The club night emerged from her lips and chin. I unpinned the new poster. I did not throw it away—only moved it so Fulana was visible again, her closed eyes next to it. DJ Radic and the Tiger Kru. Hard Beats. I did not see any other pictures of Fulana though Corwi assured me they were there, in the city.
Khurusch was all over the van, of course, but with the exception of those few hairs Fulana was clean of him. As if all those recovering gamblers would lie, anyway. We tried to take the names of any contacts to whom he had ever lent the van. He mentioned a few but insisted it had been stolen by a stranger. On the Monday after we found the body I took a call.
“Borlú.” I said my name again after a long pause, and it was repeated back to me.
“Inspector Borlú.”
“Help you?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you could help me days ago. I’ve been trying to reach you. I can help you more like.” The man spoke with a foreign accent.
“What? I’m sorry, I need you to speak up—it’s a really bad line.”
It was staticking, and the man sounded as if he was a recording on an antique machine. I could not tell if the lag was on the line, or if he was taking a long time to respond to me each time I said anything. He spoke a good but odd Besź, punctuated with archaisms. I said, “Who is this? What do you want?”
“I have information for you.”
“Have you spoken to our info-line?”
“I can’t.” He was calling from abroad. The feedback from Besźel’s outdated exchanges was distinctive. “That’s kind of the point.”
“How did you get my number?”
“Borlú, shut up.” I wished again for logging telephones. I sat up. “Google. Your name’s in the papers. You’re in charge of the investigation into the girl. It’s not hard to get past assistants. Do you want me to help you or not?”
I actually looked around but there was no one with me. “Where are you calling from?” I parted the blinds in my window as if I might see someone watching me from the street. Of course I did not.
“Come on Borlú. You know where I’m calling from.”
I was making notes. I knew the accent.
He was calling from Ul Qoma.
“You know where I’m calling from and that is why please don’t bother asking my name.”
/> “You’re not doing anything illegal talking to me.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. It is—” He broke off, and I heard him mutter something with his hand over the phone, for a moment. “Look Borlú, I don’t know where you stand on things like this but I think it is lunatic, an insult, that I am speaking to you from another country.”
“I’m not a political man. Listen, if you’d rather…” I started the last sentence in Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma.
“This is fine.” He interrupted in his old-fashioned Illitan-inflected Besź. “It’s the same damn-faced language anyway.” I wrote that he said that. “Now shut up. Do you want to hear my information?”
“Of course.” I was standing, reaching, trying to work out a way to trace this. My line was not equipped, and it would take hours to go backwards, through BesźTel, even if I could get hold of them while he was speaking to me.
“The woman who you’re … She’s dead. Isn’t she? She is. I knew her.”
“I’m sorry to …” I only said this after he was silent many seconds.
“I’ve known her … I met her a time ago. I want to help you, Borlú, but not because you’re a cop. Holy Light. I don’t recognize your authority. But if Marya was … if she was killed, then some people I care about may not be safe. Including the one I care about most, my very own self. And she deserves … So—this is all I know.
“Her name’s Marya. That’s what she went by. I met her here. Ul Qoma-here. I’m telling you what I can, but I never knew much. Not my business. She was a foreigner. I knew her from politics. She was serious—committed, you know? Just not to what I thought at first. She knew a lot; she was no time-waster.”
“Look,” I said.
“That’s all I can tell you. She lived here.”
“She was in Besźel.”
“Come on.” He was angry. “Come on. Not officially. She couldn’t. Even if she was, she was here. Go look at the cells, the radicals. Someone’ll know who she is. She went everywhere. All the underground. Both sides, must have done. She wanted to go everywhere because she needed to know everything. And she did. That’s all.”
“How did you find out that she’d been killed?” I heard his hiss of breath.
“Borlú, if you really mean that you’re stupid and I’m wasting my time. I recognized her picture, Borlú. Do you think I’d be helping you if I didn’t think I had to? If I didn’t think this was important? How do you think I found out? I saw your fucking poster.”
He put the phone down. I held my receiver to my ear a while as if he might return.
I saw your poster. When I looked down at my notepad, I had written on it, beside the details he had given me, shit/shit/shit.
I DID NOT STAY in the office much longer. “Are you alright, Tyador?” Gadlem said. “You look …” I’m sure I did. At a pavement stall I had a strong coffee aj Tyrko—Turkish style—a mistake. I was even more antsy.
It was, not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me—cathedrals, bars, the brick flourishes of what had been a school—that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried.
I dialled the number of Sariska, the historian, that evening. Sex would have been good, but also sometimes she liked to talk over cases that I was working on, and she was smart. I dialled her number twice but disconnected twice before she could respond. I would not involve her in this. A disguised-as-hypothesis infraction of the confidentiality clause on ongoing investigations was one thing. Making her accessory to breach was another.
I kept coming back to that shit/shit/shit. In the end I got home with two bottles of wine and set out slowly—cushioning them in my stomach with a pick-pick supper of olives, cheese, sausage—to finish them. I made more useless notes, some in arcane diagram form as if I might draw a way out, but the situation—the conundrum—was clear. I might be the victim of a pointless and laboured hoax, but it did not seem likely. More probable was that the man on the telephone had been telling the truth.
In which case I had been given a major lead, close information about Fulana-Marya. I had been told where to go and who to chase to find out more. Which it was my job to do. But if it came out that I acted on the information no conviction would ever stand. And much more serious, it would be far worse than illegal for me to pursue it, not only illegal according to Besź codes—I would be in breach.
My informant should not have seen the posters. They were not in his country. He should never have told me. He made me accessory. The information was an allergen in Besźel—the mere fact of it in my head was a kind of trauma. I was complicit. It was done. (Perhaps because I was drunk it did not occur to me then that it had not been necessary for him to tell me how he had come by the information, and that he had to have had reasons for doing so.)
I WOULD NOT, but who would not be tempted to burn or shred the notes of that conversation? Of course I would not, but. I sat up late at my kitchen table with them spread out in front of me, idly writing shit/shit on them crosswise from time to time. I put on music: Little Miss Train, a collaboration, Van Morrison duetting with Coirsa Yakov, the Besź Umm Kalsoum as she was called, on his 1987 tour. I drank more and put the picture of Marya Fulana Unknown Foreign Detail Breacher next to the notes.
No one knew her. Perhaps, God help us, she had not been properly here in Besźel at all, though Pocost was a total area. She could have been dragged there. The kids finding her body, the whole investigation, might be breach too. I should not incriminate myself by pushing this. I should perhaps just walk away from the investigation and let her moulder. It was escapism for a moment to pretend I might do so. In the end I would do my job, though doing it meant breaking a code, an existential protocol more basic by a long way than any I was paid to enforce.
As kids we used to play Breach. It was never a game I much enjoyed, but I would take my turn creeping over chalked lines and chased by my friends, their faces in ghastly expressions, their hands crooked as claws. I would do the chasing too, if it was my turn to be invoked. That, along with pulling sticks and pebbles out of the ground and claiming them the magic Besź mother lode, and the tag /hide-and-seek crossbreed called Insile Hunt, were regular games.
There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it. There is a sect in Besźel that worships Breach. It’s scandalous but not completely surprising given the powers involved. There is no law against the congregation, though the nature of their religion makes everyone twitchy. They have been the subject of prurient TV programs.
At three in the morning I was drunk and very awake, looking over the streets of Besźel (and more—the crosshatch). I could hear the barking of dogs and a call or two of some scrawny, wormy street wolf. The papers—both sides of the argument still as if it were that, an argument—were all over the table. Fulana-Marya’s face was wineglass-ringed, as were the illegal shit/shit/shit notes.
It is not uncommon for me to fail to sleep. Sariska and Biszaya were used to sleepily walking from the bedroom to the bathroom to find me reading at the kitchen table, chewing so much gum that I would get sugar blisters (I would not take up smoking again). Or looking over the night city and (inevitably, unseeing but touched by its light) the other city.
Sariska laughed at me once. “Look at you,” she said, not without affection. “Sitting there like an owl. Melancholy bloody gargoyle. You mawkish bugger. You don’t get any insight, you know, just because it’s night. Just because some buildings have their lights on.” She was not there to tease me though just then and I wanted whatever insight I could get, even spurious, so I looked on out.
Planes went over the clouds. Cathedral spires were lit by glass skyscrapers. Recurved and crescent neoned architecture across the border. I tried to hook up my computer to look some stuff up, but th
e only connection I had was dial-up and it was all very frustrating so I stopped.
“Details later.” I think I actually said it aloud. I made more notes. Eventually, at last, I called the direct line to Corwi’s desk.
“Lizbyet. I’ve had a thought.” My instinct as always when I lie was to say too much, too quickly. I made myself speak as if idly. She was not stupid though. “It’s late. I’m just leaving this for you because I’m probably not going to be in tomorrow. We’re not getting anywhere with the street-beat, so it’s pretty obvious it’s not what we thought—someone would’ve recognised her. We’ve got the picture out to all the precincts, so if she’s a street girl off her patch maybe we’ll get lucky. But meanwhile I’d like to look in a couple of other directions while we can keep this running.
“I’m thinking, look, she’s not in her area, it’s a weird situation, we can’t get any beep. I was talking to a guy I know in Dissident Unit, and he was saying how secretive the people he’s watching are. It’s all Nazis and reds and unifs and so on. Anyway it got me thinking about what kind of people hide their identities, and while we’ve still got any time I’d like to chase that a bit. What I’m thinking is—hold on I’m just looking at some notes … Okay, might as well start with unifs.
“Talk to the Kook Squad. See what you can get by way of addresses, chapters—I don’t know much about it. Ask for Shenvoi’s office. Tell him you’re on a job for me. Go by the ones you can, take the pictures, see if anyone recognises her. I don’t need to tell you they’re going to be weird with you—they’re not going to want you around. But see what you can do. Keep in touch, I’ll be on the mobile. Like I say, I won’t be in. Okay. Talk tomorrow. Okay, bye.”
“That was terrible.” I think I said that aloud too.
When I had done that I called the number of Taskin Cerush in our admin pool. I had been careful to take a note of her direct line when she had helped me through bureaucracy three or four cases ago. I had kept in touch. She was excellent at her job.