China Mieville

by The City

  In the mirror of the car I saw Mr. Geary watch a passing truck. I unsaw it because it was in Ul Qoma.

  His wife and he murmured to each other occasionally—my English or my hearing was not good enough to tell what they said. Mostly they sat in silence, each alone, looking out of windows on either side of the car.

  Shukman was not at his laboratory. Perhaps he knew himself and how he would seem to those visiting the dead. I would not want to be met by him in these circumstances. Hamzinic led us to the storage room. Her parents moaned in perfect time as they entered and saw the shape below the sheet. Hamzinic waited with silent respect while they prepared, and when her mother nodded he showed Mahalia’s face. Her parents moaned again. They stared at her, and after long seconds her mother touched her face.

  “Oh, oh yes that’s her,” Mr. Geary said. He cried. “That’s her, yes, that’s my daughter,” as if we were asking formal identification of him, which we were not. They had wanted to see her. I nodded as if that were helpful to us and glanced at Hamzinic, who replaced the sheet and made himself busy as we led Mahalia’s parents away.

  “I DO WANT TO, to go to Ul Qoma,” Mr. Geary said. I was used to hearing that little stress on the verb from foreigners: he felt strange using it. “I’m sorry, I know it’s probably going to be … to be hard to organise but, I want to see, where she …”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Of course,” Corwi said. She was keeping up with a reasonable amount of the English, and spoke occasionally. We were eating lunch with the Gearys at the Queen Czezille, a comfortable enough hotel with which the Besź Police had a long-standing arrangement. Its staff were experienced in providing the chaperoning, almost surreptitious imprisonment, that unqualified visitors required.

  James Thacker, some middle-ranking twenty-eight-or -nine-year-old at the US embassy, had joined us. He spoke occasionally to Corwi in excellent Besź. The dining room looked out at the northern tip of Hustav Isle. Riverboats went by (in both cities). The Gearys picked at their peppercorned fish.

  “We suspected that you might like to visit your daughter’s place of work,” I said. “We’ve been in discussion with Mr. Thacker and his counterparts in Ul Qoma for the paperwork to get you through Copula Hall. A day or two I think is all.” Not an embassy, in Ul Qoma, of course: a sulky US Interests section.

  “And … you said that this is, this is for the Breach now?” Mrs. Geary said. “You said it won’t be the Ul Qomans investigating it but it’ll be with this Breach, yes?” She stared at me with tremendous mistrust. “So when do we talk to them?”

  I glanced at Thacker. “That will not happen,” I said. “The Breach is not like us.”

  Mrs. Geary stared at me. “‘Us’ the … the policzai?” she said.

  I had meant the “us” to include her. “Well, among other things, yes. It… they aren’t like the police in Besźel or in Ul Qoma.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Inspector Borlú, I’ll be happy to explain this,” Thacker said. He hesitated. He wanted me to go. Any explanation carried out in my presence would have to be moderately polite: alone with other Americans he could stress to them how ridiculous and difficult these cities were, how sorry he and his colleagues were for the added complications of a crime occurring in Besźel, and so on. He could insinuate. It was an embarrassment, an antagonism to have to deal with a dissident force like Breach.

  “I don’t know how much you know about Breach, Mr. and Mrs. Geary, but it is … it isn’t like other powers. You have some sense of its… capabilities? The Breach is … It has unique powers. And it’s, ah, extremely secretive. We, the embassy, have no contacts with … any representative of Breach. I do realise how strange that must sound, but… I can assure you Breach’s record in the prosecution of criminals is, ah, ferocious. Impressive. We will receive word of its progress and of whatever action it takes against whoever it finds responsible.”

  “Does that mean …?” Mr. Geary said. “They have the death penalty here, right?”

  “And in Ul Qoma?” his wife said.

  “Sure,” Thacker said. “But that’s not really at issue. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, our friends in Besźel and the Ul Qoma authorities are about to invoke Breach to deal with your daughter’s murder, so Besź laws and Ul Qoman laws are kind of irrelevant. The, ah, sanctions available to Breach are pretty limitless.”

  “Invoke?” said Mrs. Geary.

  “There are protocols,” I said. “To be followed. Before Breach’ll manifest to take care of this.”

  Mr. Geary: “What about the trial?”

  “That will be in camera,” I said. “Breach … tribunals,” I had tried out decisions and actions in my head, “are secret.”

  “We won’t testify? We won’t see?” Mr. Geary was aghast. This must all have been explained previously, but you know. Mrs. Geary was shaking her head in anger, but without her husband’s surprise.

  “I’m afraid not,” Thacker said. “It is a unique situation here. I can pretty much guarantee you, though, that whoever did this will not only be caught but, be, ah, brought to pretty severe justice.” One could almost pity Mahalia Geary’s killer. I did not.

  “But that’s—”

  “I know, Mrs. Geary, I’m truly sorry. There are no other posts like this in the service. Ul Qoma and Besźel and Breach … These are unique circumstances.”

  “Oh, God. You know, it’s… it’s all, this is all the stuff Mahalia was into,” Mr. Geary said. “The city, the city, the other city. Besźel”—Bezzel, he said it—“and Ul Qoma. And or seen it.” I didn’t understand that.

  “Or seen ee,” Mrs. Geary said. I looked up. “It’s not Orsinnit, it’s Orciny, honey.”

  Thacker pouted polite incomprehension and shook his head in question.

  “What’s that, Mrs. Geary?” I said. She fiddled with her bag. Corwi quietly took out a notebook.

  “This is all this stuff Mahalia was into,” Mrs. Geary said. “It’s what she was studying. She was going to be a doctor of it.” Mr. Geary grimace-smiled, indulgent, proud, bewildered. “She was doing real well. She told us a little bit about it. It sounds like that Orciny was like the Breach.”

  “Ever since she first came here,” Mr. Geary said. “This is the stuff she wanted to do.”

  “That’s right, she came here first. I mean … here, this, Besźel, right? She came here first, but then she said she needed to go to Ul Qoma. I’m going to be honest with you, Inspector, I thought it was kind of the same place. I know that was wrong. She had to get special permission to go there, but because she’s, was, a student, that’s where she stayed to do all her work.”

  “Orciny … it’s a sort of folk tale,” I told Thacker. Mahalia’s mother nodded; her father looked away. “It is not so really like the Breach, Mrs. Geary. Breach is real. A power. But Orciny is …” I hesitated.

  “The third city,” Corwi said in Besź to Thacker, who still furrowed his face. When he showed no comprehension, she said, “A secret. Fairy tale. Between the other two.” He shook his head and looked, uninterestedly, Oh.

  “She loved this place,” Mrs. Geary said. She looked longing. “I mean, sorry, I mean Ul Qoma. Are we near where she lived?” Crudely physically, grosstopically, to use the term unique to Besźel and Ul Qoma, unnecessary anywhere else, yes we were. Neither Corwi nor I answered, as it was a complicated question. “She’d been studying it all for years, since she first read some book about the cities. Her professors always seemed to think she was doing excellent in her work.”

  “Did you like her professors?” I said.

  “Oh, I never met them. But she showed me some of what they were doing; she showed me a website for the program, and the place she worked.”

  “This is Professor Nancy?”

  “That was her advisor, yes. Mahalia liked her.”

  “They worked well together?” Corwi was watching me as I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Mrs. Geary even laughed. “Mahalia seemed to argue with her all
the time. Seemed they didn’t agree on much, but when I said, ‘Well how does that work?’ she told me it was okay. She said they liked disagreeing. Mahalia said she learned more that way.”

  “Did you keep up with your daughter’s work?” I said. “Read her essays? She told you about her Ul Qoman friends?” Corwi moved in her seat. Mrs. Geary shook her head.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  “Inspector,” said Thacker.

  “The stuff she did just wasn’t the sort of thing that I could … that I was real interested in, Mr. Borlú. I mean since she’d been over here, sure, stories in the paper about Ul Qoma would catch our eye a bit more than they had before, and sure I’d read them. But so long as Mahalia was happy, I … we were happy. Happy for her to get on with her thing, you know.”

  “Inspector, when do you think we might be receiving the Ul Qoma transfer papers?” Thacker said.

  “Soon, I think. And she was? Happy?”

  “Oh, I think she …” Mrs. Geary said. “There were always dramas, you know.”

  “Yeah,” her father said.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Geary.

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Well now it wasn’t … only she’d been kind of stressed recently, you know. I told her she needed to come home for a vacation—I know, coming home hardly sounds like a vacation, but you know. But she said she was making real progress, like making a breakthrough in her work.”

  “And some people were pissed about that,” Mr. Geary said.

  “Honey.”

  “They were. She told us.”

  Corwi looked at me, confused. “Mr. and Mrs. Geary …” While Thacker said that, I explained quickly to Corwi in Besź, “Not ‘pissed’ drunk. They’re American—‘angry.’ Who was pissed?” I asked them. “Her professors?”

  “No,” Mr. Geary said. “Goddammit, who do you think did this?”

  “John, please, please …”

  “Goddammit, who the fuck are First Qoma?” Mr. Geary said. “You haven’t even asked us who we think did this. You haven’t even asked us. You think we don’t know?”

  “What did she say?” I said. Thacker was standing now and patting the air, Calm down everybody.

  “Some little bastard at a conference tells her her work was goddamn treason. Someone’d been gunning for her since the first time she came here.”

  “John, stop, you’re mixing it up. That first time, when that man said that, she was here, here here, Besźel-here, not in Ul Qoma, and that wasn’t First Qoma, that was the other ones, here, nationalists or True Citizens, something, you remember …”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “First Qoma? And—someone said something to her when she was in Besźel? When?”

  “Hold on boss, it’s …” Corwi spoke quickly in Besź.

  “I think we all need to take a minute,” Thacker said.

  He placated the Gearys as if they had been wronged, and I apologised as if I had wronged them. They knew that they were expected to stay in their hotel. We had two officers stationed downstairs to ensure compliance. We told them that we would tell them as soon as we had news that their paperwork for travel had come through, and that we would be back the following day. In the meantime, if they needed anything or any information—I left them my numbers.

  “He will be found,” Corwi said to them as we took leave. “Breach will take who did this. I promise you that.” To me outside she said, “Qoma First, not First Qoma, by the way. Like the True Citizens, only for Ul Qoma. As pleasant as our lot, by all accounts, but a lot more secretive and thank fuck not our headache.”

  More radical in their Besźel-love even than Syedr’s National Bloc, True Citizens were marchers in quasi-uniform and makers of frightening speeches. Legal but not by much. We had not succeeded in proving their responsibility for attacks on Besźel’s Ul Qomatown, the Ul Qoman embassy, mosques and synagogues and leftist bookshops, on our small immigrant population. We—by which I mean we policzai, of course—had more than once found the perpetrators and that they were members of TC, but the organisation itself disavowed the attacks, just, just, and no judge had yet banned them.

  “And Mahalia annoyed both lots.”

  “So her Dad says. He doesn’t know …”

  “We know she certainly managed to get the unificationists here mad, ages ago. And then she did the same to the nats over there? Any extremists she hasn’t made angry?” We drove. “You know,” I said, “that meeting, of the Oversight Committee … it was pretty strange. Some of the things some people were saying …”

  “Syedr?”

  “Syedr, sure, among others, some of what they were saying didn’t make much sense to me at the time. Maybe if I followed politics more carefully. Maybe I’ll do that.” After a silence I said, “Maybe we should ask around a bit.”

  “The fuck, boss?” Corwi twisted in her seat. She did not look angry but confused. “Why were you even grilling them like that? The muckamucks are invoking fucking Breach in a day or two to deal with this shit, and woe betide whoever did Mahalia then. You know? Even if we do find any leads now, we’re going to be off the case any minute; this is just biding time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I swerved a little to avoid an Ul Qoman taxi, unseeing it as much as possible. “Yeah. But still. I’m impressed with anyone who can piss off so many nutters. All of whom are at each other’s throats as well. Besź Nats, Ul Qoman Nats, anti-Nats …”

  “Let Breach deal. You were right. She deserves Breach, boss, like you said. What they can do.”

  “She does deserve them. And she’ll get them.” I pointed, drove on. “Avanti. For the next little while she’s got us.”

  Chapter Eight

  EITHER HIS TIMING WAS PRETERNATURAL or Commissar Gadlem had had some techie rig up a cheat on his system—whenever I came into the office, any emails from him were invariably top of my inbox.

  Fine, his latest said. I gather Mr. & Mrs. G ensconced in hotel. Don’t particularly want you tied up for days in paperwork (sure you agree) so polite chaperoning only please till formalities complete. Job done.

  Whatever information we had I would have to hand over when the time came. No point making work for myself, Gadlem was saying, nor costing the department my time, so take my foot off the accelerator. I made and read notes that would be illegible to everyone else, and to me in an hour’s time, though I kept and filed them all carefully—my usual methodology. I reread Gadlem’s message several times, rolling my eyes. I probably muttered something out loud to myself.

  I spent some time tracking down numbers—online and through a real live operator on the end of the phone—and placed a call that made clucking noises as it ran through various international exchanges. “Bol Ye’an offices.” I’d called twice before but previously had gone through a kind of automated system: this was the first time I’d had anyone pick up. His Illitan was good, but the accent was North American; so in English I said: “Good afternoon, I’m trying to reach Professor Nancy. I’ve left messages on her voicemail, but—”

  “Who’s calling please?”

  “This is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad.”

  “Oh. Oh.” The voice was quite different now. “This is about Mahalia, isn’t it? Inspector, I’m … Hold on I’m going to try to track down Izzy.” A long hollow-acousticked pause. “This is Isabelle Nancy.” Anxious-sounding, American I’d have guessed if I hadn’t known she was from Toronto. Not much like her voicemail voice.

  “Professor Nancy, I’m Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Policzai, ECS. I think you have spoken to my colleague Officer Corwi? You got my messages maybe?”

  “Inspector, yes, I’m … Please accept my apologies. I’d meant to call you back but it’s been, everything’s been, I’m very sorry …” She shifted between English and good Besź.

  “I understand, Professor. I am sorry too about Miss Geary. I know this must be a very bad time for all of you and your colleagues.”

  “I, we, we’re all in shock here, Inspector. Real
shock. I don’t know what to tell you. Mahalia was a great young woman and—”

  “Of course.”

  “Where are you? Are you … local? Would you like to meet?”

  “I’m afraid I’m calling internationally, Professor; I’m still in Besźel.”

  “I see. So … how can I help you, Inspector? Is there any problem? I mean any problem other than, than all of this, I mean …” I heard her breath. “I’m expecting Mahalia’s parents any day now.”

  “Yes, I just was with them actually. The embassy here is putting in paperwork for them, and they should come to you soon. No, I am calling you because I want to know more about Mahalia and what she was doing.”

  “Forgive me, Inspector Borlú, but I was under the impression … this crime … will you not be invoking Breach, I thought…?” She had calmed and was speaking only Besź now, so what the hell I gave up on my English, which was no better than her Besź.

  “Yes. The Oversight Committee … excuse me, Professor I don’t know how much you know about how these matters go. But yes, responsibility for this will be passed over. You understand how that will work, then?”

  “I think so.”

  “Alright. I’m just doing some last work. I’m curious, is all. We hear interesting things about Mahalia. I want to know some things about her work. Can you help me? You were her advisor, yes? Do you have time to speak to me about that for a few minutes?”

  “Of course, Inspector, you’ve waited long enough. I don’t know quite what—”

  “I want to know what she was working on. And about her history with you and with the program. And tell me about Bol Ye’an, too. She was studying Orciny, I understand.”

  “What?” Isabelle Nancy was shocked. “Orciny? Absolutely not. This is an archaeology department.”

  “Forgive me, I’d been under the impression … What do you mean, this is archaeology?”

  “I mean that if she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she’d be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in trowels.” She did not sound angry but sad and amused. “But we wouldn’t have accepted her unless her PhD was real archaeology.”