China Mieville

by The City

  “She’s gone? After what happened to Mahalia, now Yolanda? Oh my God, Officers, do you—”

  “We’re looking into it,” Dhatt said. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  Bowden looked stricken. We had similar reactions from his colleagues. One by one we went through the four academics we could find on-site, including Thau’ti, the senior of the two Ul Qomans, a young taciturn man. Only Isabelle Nancy, a tall well-dressed woman with two pairs of glasses of different prescriptions on chains around her neck, was aware that Yolanda had disappeared.

  “It’s good to meet you, Inspector, Senior Detective.” She shook our hands. I had read her statement. She claimed she had been at home when Mahalia was murdered but could not prove it. “Anything I can do to help,” she kept saying.

  “Tell us about Mahalia. I get the sense she was well-known here, if not by your boss.”

  “Not so much anymore,” Nancy said. “At one point maybe. Did Rochambeaux say he didn’t know her? That’s a bit… disingenuous. She’d ruffled some feathers.”

  “At the conference,” I said. “Back in Besźel.”

  “That’s right. Down south. He was there. Most of us were. I was, David, Marcus, Asina. Anyway she’d been raising eyebrows at more than one session, asking questions about dissensi, about Breach, that sort of thing. Nothing explicitly illegitimate, but a bit vulgar, you could say, the sort of thing you’d expect from Hollywood or something, not the nuts-and-bolts stuff of Ul Qoman or pre-Cleavage or even Besź research. You could see the bigwigs who’d come along to open proceedings and dedicate ceremonies and whatnot were getting a bit leery. Then finally she out and starts raving about Orciny. So David’s mortified, of course; the university’s embarrassed; she nearly gets chucked out—there were some Besź representatives there who made a big hoo-ha about it.”

  “But she didn’t?” Dhatt said.

  “I think people decided she was young. But someone must have given her a talking-to, because she simmered down. I remember thinking the Ul Qoman opposite numbers, some of whom had also turned up, must be pretty sympathetic to the Besź reps who were so put out. When I found out she was coming back for a PhD with us I was surprised she’d been allowed in, with dubious opinions like that, but she’d grown out of it. I’ve already made a statement about all this. But tell me, do you have any idea what’s happened to Yolanda?”

  Dhatt and I looked at each other. “We’re not even sure anything’s happened to her at all,” Dhatt said. “We’re checking into it.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said again and again. “But I normally see her around, and it’s a good few days now, I think. That’s what makes me … I think I mentioned that Mahalia disappeared a bit before she was … found.”

  “She and Mahalia knew each other?” I said.

  “They were best friends.”

  “Anyone who might know anything?”

  “She’s seeing a local boy. Yolanda, I mean. That’s the rumour. But who it was I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Is that allowed?” I asked.

  “These are adults, Inspector, SD Dhatt. Young adults, yes, but we can’t stop them. We, ah, make them aware of the dangers and difficulties of life, let alone love, in Ul Qoma, but what they do while they’re here …” She shrugged.

  Dhatt tapped a foot when I spoke to her. “I’d like to speak to them,” he said.

  Some were reading articles in the tiny make-do library. Several, when finally Nancy escorted us to the site of the main dig itself, stood, sat and worked in that deep, straight-edged hole. They looked up from below striae discernable in shades of earth. That line of dark—the residue of an ancient fire? What was that white?

  At the edges of the big marquee was wild-looking scrubland, thistled and weedy between a litter of broken-off architecture. The dig was almost the size of a soccer pitch, subdivided by its matrix of string. Its base was variously depthed, flat-bottomed. Its floor of compacted earth was broken by inorganic shapes, strange breaching fish: shattered jars, crude and uncrude statuettes, verdigris-clogged machines. The students looked up from the section they were in, each at various careful depths, through various cord borders, clutching pointed trowels and soft brushes. A couple of the boys and one girl were Goths, much rarer in Ul Qoma than in Besźel or in their own homes. They must have got a lot of attention. They smiled at Dhatt and me sweetly from beneath eyeliner and the muck of centuries.

  “Here you see,” Nancy said. We stood a way from the excavations. I looked down at the many markers in the layered dirt. “You understand how it is here?” It might be anything that we could see beneath the soil.

  She spoke quietly enough that her students, though they must have realised that we were talking, could probably not make out about what. “We’ve never found written records from Precursor Age except a few poem fragments to make sense of any of it. Have you heard of the Gallimaufrians? For a long time when the pre-Cleavage stuff was first unearthed, after archaeologist-error was grudgingly ruled out,” she laughed, “people made them up as an explanation for what was being fished up. A hypothetical civilisation before Ul Qoma and Besźel that systematically dug up all artefacts in the region, from millennia ago to their own grandmother’s bric-a-brac, mixed them all up and buried them again or chucked them away.”

  Nancy saw me looking at her. “They didn’t exist,” she reassured me. “That’s agreed now. By most of us, anyway. This”—she gestured at the hole—“is not a mix. It is the remnants of a material culture. Just one we’re still not very clear on. We had to learn to stop trying to find and follow a sequence and just look.”

  Items that should have spanned epochs, contemporaneous. No other culture in the region made any but the scantest, seductively vague references to the pre-Cleavage locals, these peculiar men and women, witch-citizens by fairy tale with spells that tainted their discards, who used astrolabes that would not have shamed Arzachel or the Middle Ages, dried-mud pots, stone axes that my flat-browed many-greats grandfather might have made, gears, intricately cast insect toys, and whose ruins underlay and dotted Ul Qoma and, occasionally, Besźel.

  “This is Senior Detective Dhatt of the militsya and Inspector Borlú of the policzai,” Nancy was telling the students in the hole. “Inspector Borlú’s here as part of the investigation into the … into what happened to Mahalia.”

  Several of them gasped. Dhatt crossed off names, and I copied him, as one by one the students came to talk to us in the common room. They had all been interviewed before but came docile as lambs, and answered questions they must have been sick of.

  “I was relieved when I realised you were here for Mahalia,” the Goth woman said. “That sounds awful. But I thought you’d found Yolanda and something’d happened.” Her name was Rebecca Smith-Davis, she was a first year, working on pot reconstruction. She got teary when she spoke about her dead friend and her missing friend. “I thought you’d found her and it was … you know, she’d been …”

  “We’re not even sure Rodriguez is missing,” Dhatt said.

  “You say. But you know. With Mahalia, and everything.” Shook her head. “Them both being into strange stuff.”

  “Orciny?” I said.

  “Yeah. And other stuff. But yeah, Orciny. Yolanda’s more into that stuff than Mahalia was, though. People said Mahalia used to be way into it when she first started, but not so much now, I guess.”

  Because they were younger and partied later, several of the students, unlike their teachers, had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death. At some unspoken point Dhatt deemed Yolanda an official missing person, and his questions grew more precise, the notes he took longer. It did not do us much good. No one was sure of the last time they had seen her, only that they hadn’t seen her for days.

  “Do you have any idea what might have happened to Mahalia?” Dhatt asked all the students. We got no after no.

  “I’m not into conspiracies,” one boy said. “What happened was … unbelievably horrible. But, you know, the idea t
hat there’s some big secret …” He shook his head. He sighed. “Mahalia was … she could piss people off, and what happened happened because she went to the wrong part of Ul Qoma, with the wrong person.” Dhatt made notes.

  “No,” said a girl. “No one knew her. You maybe thought you did, but then you realise she was doing all kinds of secret stuff you didn’t know anything about. I think I was a bit scared of her. I liked her, I did, but she was kind of intense. And smart. Maybe she was seeing someone. Some local crazy. That’s the kind of thing she’d have … She was into weird stuff. I’d always see her in the library—we’ve got like reading cards for the university library here?—and she’d be making all those little notes in her books.” She made cramped writing motions and shook her head, inviting us to agree on how strange that was.

  “Weird stuff?” Dhatt said.

  “Oh, you know, you hear stuff.”

  “She pissed someone off, yo.” This young woman spoke loud and quickly. “One of the crazies. You heard about her first time to the cities? Over in Besźel? She nearly got into a fight. With like academics and like politicians. At an archaeology conference. That’s hard to do. It’s amazing she ever got let back in anywhere.”

  “Orciny.”

  “Orciny?” Dhatt said.

  “Yeah.”

  This last speaker was a thin and straightlaced boy wearing a grubby T-shirt featuring what must have been the character from a children’s television show. His name was Robert. He looked mournfully at us. He blinked desperately. His Illitan was not good.

  “Do you mind if I speak to him in English?” I said to Dhatt.

  “No,” he said. A man put his head round the corner of the door and stared at us. “You go on,” Dhatt said to me. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He left, closing the door behind him.

  “Who was that?” I said to the boy.

  “Doctor UlHuan,” he said. The other of the Ul Qoman academics on-site. “Will you find who did this?” I might have answered with the usual kind, meaningless certainties, but he looked too stricken for them. He stared at me and bit his lip. “Please,” he said.

  “What did you mean about Orciny?” I said eventually.

  “I mean”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. Just keep thinking about it, you know? Makes you nervy. I know it’s stupid but Mahalia used to be right up in that, and Yolanda was getting more and more into it—we used to rip shit out of her for it, you know?—and then both of them disappear…” He looked down and closed his eyes with his hand, as if he did not have the strength to blink. “It was me who called about Yolanda. When I couldn’t find her. I don’t know,” he said. “It just makes you wonder.” He ran out of what to say.

  “WE’VE GOT SOME STUFF,” Dhatt said. He was pointing me along the walkways between the offices, back out of Bol Ye’an. He looked at the masses of notes he had made, sorted through the business cards and phone numbers on scraps. “I don’t know yet what it is that we’ve got, but we’ve got stuff. Maybe. Fuck.”

  “Anything from UlHuan?” I said.

  “What? No.” He glanced at me. “Backed up most of what Nancy said.”

  “You know what it’s interesting that we didn’t get?” I said.

  “Eh? Not following,” Dhatt said. “Seriously, Borlú,” he said as we neared the gate. “What d’you mean?”

  “That was a group of kids from Canada, right…”

  “Most of them. One German, one a Yank.”

  “All Anglo-Euro-American, then. Let’s not kid ourselves—it might seem a bit rude to us, but we both know what outsiders to Besźel and Ul Qoma are most fascinated with. You notice what not a single one of them brought up, in any context, as even possibly to do with anything?”

  “What do you …” Dhatt stopped. “Breach.”

  “None of them mentioned Breach. Like they were nervous. You know as well as I do that normally it’s the first and only thing foreigners want to know about. Granted this lot have gone a bit more native than most of their compatriots, but still.” We waved thanks to the guards who opened the gate, and we stepped out. Dhatt was nodding carefully. “If someone we knew just disappeared without a single damned trace and out of nowhere like this, it’s one of the first things we’d consider, right? However much we might not want to?” I said. “Let alone people who must find it a whole lot harder than us not to breach every minute.”

  “Officers!” It was one of the security detail, an athletic-looking young man with a mid-period David Beckham Mohican. He was younger than most of his colleagues. “Officers, please?” He jogged towards us.

  “I just wanted to know,” he said. “You’re investigating who killed Mahalia Geary, right? I wanted to know … I wanted to know if you knew anything. If you got anywhere. Could they have got away?”

  “Why?” said Dhatt eventually. “Who are you?”

  “I, no one, no one. I just… It’s sad, it’s terrible, and we all, me and the rest of us, the guards, we feel bad and we want to know if, whoever, if who did this …”

  “I’m Borlú,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Aikam. Aikam Tsueh.”

  “You were a friend of hers?”

  “I, sure a little bit. Not really, but you know I knew her. To say hello. I just want to know if you found anything.”

  “If we did, Aikam, we can’t tell you,” said Dhatt.

  “Not now,” I said. Dhatt glanced at me. “Have to work things out first. You understand. But maybe we can ask you a few questions?” He looked alarmed for a moment.

  “I don’t know anything. But sure, I guess. I was worried if they could get out of the city, past the militsya. If there was a way you could do that. Is there?”

  I made him write his phone number in my notebook before he went back to his station. Dhatt and I watched his back.

  “Did you question the guards?” I said, watching Tsueh go.

  “Of course. Nothing very interesting. They’re security guards, but this site’s under ministry aegis, so the checks are a bit more stringent than usual. Most of them had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death.”

  “Did he?”

  “I’ll check, but I don’t remember his name being red-flagged, so he probably did.”

  Aikam Tsueh turned at the gate and saw us watching. Raised his hand hesitantly in a good-bye.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SIT HIM IN A COFFEE SHOP—a teahouse, really, we were in Ul Qoma—and Dhatt’s aggressive energy dissipated somewhat. He still drummed his fingers on the edge of the table in a complicated rhythm I could not have mimicked, but he met my eyes, did not shift in his seat. He listened and made serious suggestions for how we might proceed. He twisted his head to read the notes I made. He took messages from his centre. While we sat there he did a gracious job, in truth, of obscuring the fact that he did not like me.

  “I think we need to get some protocol in place about questioning,” was all he said, when first we sat, “too many cooks,” to which I murmured some half apology.

  The tea shop staff would not take Dhatt’s money: he did not offer it very hard. “Militsya discount,” the serving woman said. The café was full. Dhatt eyed a raised table by the front window until the man who sat there noticed the scrutiny, rose, and we sat. We overlooked a Metro station. Among the many posters on a nearby wall was one I saw then unsaw: I was not sure it was not the poster I had had printed, to identify Mahalia. I did not know if I was right, if the wall was alter to me now, total in Besźel, or crosshatched and a close patchwork of information from different cities.

  Ul Qomans emerged from below the street and gasped at the temperature, shrank into their fleeces. In Besźel, I knew—though I tried to unsee the Besź citizens doubtless descending from Yan-jelus Station of the overland transit, which was by chance a few scores of metres from the submerged Ul Qoman stop—people would be wearing furs. Among the Ul Qoman faces were people I took to be Asian or Arab, even a few Africans. Many more than in Besźel.

  “Ope
n doors?”

  “Hardly,” Dhatt said. “Ul Qoma needs people, but everyone you see’s been carefully vetted, passed the tests, knows the score. Some of them are having kids. Ul Qoman pickaninnies!” His laugh was delighted. “We’ve got more than you lot, but not because we’re lax.” He was right. Who wanted to move to Besźel?

  “What about the ones that don’t make it through?”

  “Oh, we have our camps, same as you, here and there, round the outskirts. The UN’s not happy. Neither’s Amnesty. Giving you shit about conditions too? Want smokes?” A cigarette kiosk was a few metres from the entrance to our café. I had not realised I was staring at it.

  “Not really. Yes, I guess. Curiosity. I haven’t smoked Ul Qoman I don’t think ever.”

  “Hold on.”

  “No, don’t get up. I don’t anymore; I gave up.”

  “Oh come on, consider it ethnography, you’re not at home … Sorry, I’ll stop. I hate people who do that.”

  “That?”

  “Pimping stuff on people who’ve given up. And I’m not even a smoker.” He laughed and sipped. “Then at least it would be some fucked-up resentment at your success in quitting. I must just generally resent you. Malicious little bastard I am.” He laughed.

  “Look, I’m sorry about, you know, jumping in like that…”

  “I just think we need protocols. I don’t want you to think—”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Alright, no worries. How about I handle the next one?” he said. I watched Ul Qoma. It was too cloudy to be so cold.

  “You said that guy Tsueh has an alibi?”

  “Yeah. They called it in for me. Most of those security guys are married and their wives’ll vouch, which okay isn’t worth a turd, but we couldn’t find any link from any of them to Geary except nods in a corridor. That one, Tsueh, actually was out that night with a bunch of the students. He’s young enough to fraternise.”

  “Convenient. And unusual.”

  “Sure. But he’s got no connections between anyone and anything. The kid’s nineteen. Tell me about the van.” I went over it again. “Light, am I going to have to come back with you?” he said. “Sounds like we’re looking for someone Besź.”