by The City
“Someone in Besźel drove the van through the border. But we know Geary was killed in Ul Qoma. So unless the killer murdered her, raced over to Besźel, grabbed a van, raced back, grabbed her, raced back again to dump the body, and why, we might add did they dump the body where they dumped it?, we’re looking at a cross-border phone call followed by a favour. So two perps.”
“Or breach.”
I moved.
“Yeah,” I said. “Or breach. But from what we know someone’s gone to a fair bit of trouble to not breach. And to let us know that.”
“The notorious footage. Funny how that turned up …”
I looked at him, but he did not seem to be mocking. “Isn’t it?”
“Oh come on, Tyador, what, are you surprised? Whoever’s done this, smart enough to know not to fuck with the borders, gives a friend over your side a call, and now’s shitting rocks that Breach is going to appear for him. And that would be unfair. So they’ve got some little helper in Copula Hall or Traffic or something and they’ve given them a whisper what time they crossed. It isn’t as if Besź bureaucrats are irreproachable.”
“Hardly.”
“There you go, then. See, you look happier.”
It would be a smaller conspiracy that way, than some of the other looming possibilities. Someone had known which vans to look for. Pored over a bunch of videos. What else? In that freezing but pretty day, cold muting Ul Qoma’s colours to everyday shades, it was hard and felt absurd to see Orciny in any corners.
“Let’s retrace,” he said. “We’re not going to get anywhere hunting for this fucking van driver. Hopefully your lot are on that. We’ve got nothing except a description of the van, and who in Ul Qoma’s going to admit having even maybe seen a Besź van, with or without permit to be there? So let’s go back to square one. What was your break?” I looked at him. I looked at him carefully and thought over the order of events. “When did she stop being Unknown Corpse One? What started it?”
In my room at the hotel were the notes I had taken from the Gearys. Her email address and phone number were in my notebook. They did not have their daughter’s body nor could they return to collect it. Mahalia Geary lay in the freezer waiting. For me, you could say.
“A phone call.”
“Yeah? A snitch?”
“… Sort of. It was his lead got me to Drodin.” I saw him remember the dossier, that this was not how it was described there.
“What are you … Who?”
“Well this is the thing.” I paused a long time. Eventually I looked at the table and drew shapes in my spilled tea. “I’m not sure what to … It was a phone call from here.”
“Ul Qoma?” I nodded. “What the fuck? From who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why were they calling?”
“They saw our posters. Yeah. Our posters in Besźel.”
Dhatt leaned in. “The fuck they did. Who?”
“You realise that this puts me in—”
“Of course I do.” He was intent, spoke quickly. “Of course I do, but come on, you’re police, you think I’m going to fuck you over? Between us. Who was it?”
It was not a small thing. If I was accessory to breach, he was now accessory to accessory. He did not seem nervous about it. “I think they were unifs. You know, unificationists?”
“They said so?”
“No, but it was what they said and how they said it. Anyway, I know it was totally not-on, but it was that got me on the right track … What?” Dhatt was sitting back. His fingers drummed faster now, and he was not looking at me.
“Fuck, we’ve got something. I cannot fucking believe you didn’t mention this before.”
“Hold on, Dhatt.”
“Okay, I can really—I can see that this puts you in a bit of a position.”
“I don’t know anything about who this was.”
“We’re still in time; we can maybe hand it over and explain that you were just a bit late …”
“Hand what over? We don’t have anything.”
“We have a unif bastard who knows something is what we have. Let’s go.” He stood and jiggled his car keys.
“Go where?”
“Go fucking detecting!”
“OF BLOODY COURSE,” Dhatt said. He was tearing up Ul Qoma streets, the car’s siren gasping. He turned, shouting abuse at scuttling Ul Qoman civilians, swerved wordlessly to avoid Besź pedestrians and cars, accelerating with the expressionless anxiety foreign emergencies occasion. If we hit one of them it would be a bureaucratic disaster. A breach now would not be helpful.
“Yari, it’s Dhatt.” He shouted into his cell phone. “Any clue if the cc of the unifs are in at the moment? Excellent, thanks.” He slapped it shut.
“Looks like at least some of them are. I knew you’d spoken to Besź unifs, of course. Read your report. But what kind of fool am I”—slap slap of his forehead with the heel of his hand—“didn’t occur to me to go talk to our own little homegrowns. Even though of course those fuckers, those fuckers more than any other fuckers—and we have our share of fuckers, Tyad—are all talking to each other. I know where they hang out.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
“I hate those little sods. I hope … Goes without saying, I mean, that I’ve met some great Besź in my time.” He glanced at me. “Nothing against the place and I hope I get to visit, and it’s great that we’re all getting on so well these days, you know, better than it used to be—what was the fucking point of all that shit? But I’m Ul Qoman and I’m fucked if I want to be anything else. You imagine unification?” He laughed. “Fucking catastrophe! Unity is strength my Ul Qoman arse. I know they say crossbreeding makes animals stronger, but what if we inherited, shit, Ul Qoman sense of timing and Besź optimism?”
He made me laugh. We passed between ancient age-mottled roadside stone pillars. I recognised them from photographs, remembered too late that the one on the eastern side of the road was the only one I should see—it was in Ul Qoma, the other in Besźel. So most people said, anyway: they were one of the cities’ controversial disputed loci. The Besź buildings I couldn’t help fail to completely unsee were, I glimpsed, sedate and tidy, but in Ul Qoma wherever we were was an area of decay. We passed canals, and for several seconds I did not know which city they were in, or if it was both. By a weed-flecked yard, where nettles poked out from below a long-immobile Citroën like a hovercraft’s skirt of air, Dhatt braked hard and got out before I had even undone my seatbelt.
“Time was,” Dhatt said, “we’d have locked every one of these fuckers away.” He strode towards a tumbledown door. There are no legal unificationists in Ul Qoma. There are no legal socialist parties, fascist parties, religious parties in Ul Qoma. Since the Silver Renewal almost a century before under the tutelage of General Ilsa, Ul Qoma had had only the People’s National Party. Many older establishments and offices still displayed portraits of Ya Ilsa, often above “Ilsa’s Brothers” Atatürk and Tito. The cliché was that in older offices there was always a faded patch between those two, where erstwhile brother Mao had once beamed.
But this is the twenty-first century, and President Ul Mak (whose portrait you can also see where managers are most obsequious), like President Umbir before him, had announced certainly not a repudiation but a development of the National Road, an end to restrictive thinking, a glasnostroika, as Ul Qoman intellectuals hideously neologised. With the CD-and-DVD shops, the software startups and galleries, the bullish Ul Qoman financial markets, the revalued dinar, came, they said, New Politics, a very vaunted openness to hitherto dangerous dissidence. Not to say that radical groups, let alone parties, were legalised, but their ideas were sometimes acknowledged. So long as they displayed restraint in meetings and proselytisation, they were indulged. So one heard.
“Open!” Dhatt slammed on the door. “This is the unif hangout,” he said to me. “They’re constantly on the phone to your lot in Besźel—that’s kind of their deal, right?”
�
��What’s their status?”
“You’re about to hear them say they’re just a group of friends meeting for a chat. No membership cards or anything, they’re not stupid. Shouldn’t take a fucking bloodhound for us to track down some contraband, but that’s not really what I’m here for.”
“What are we here for?” I looked around at decrepit Ul Qoman facades, Illitan graffiti demanding that so-and-so fuck off and informing that such-and-such person sucked cock. Breach must be watching.
He looked at me levelly. “Whoever made that phone call to you did it from here. Or frequents this place. Pretty much guarantee it. Want to find out what our seditionist pals know. Open.” That to the door. “Don’t be fooled by their whole who us? thing; they’re perfectly happy to smack shit out of anyone quote working against unification unfuckingquote. Open.”
The door obeyed this time, a crack onto a small young woman, the sides of her head shaved, showing tattooed fish and a few letters in a very old alphabet.
“Who …? What do you want?”
Perhaps they had sent her to the door hoping her size would shame anyone out of what Dhatt did next, which was to shove the door hard enough to send her stumbling backwards into the grotty hallways.
“Everyone here now,” he shouted, striding through the corridor, past the dishevelled punkess.
After confused moments when the thought of attempting to get out must have crossed their minds and been overruled, the five people in the house gathered in their kitchen, sat on the unstable chairs where Dhatt put them, and did not look at us. Dhatt stood at the head of the table and leaned over them.
“Right,” he said. “Here it is. Someone made a phone call that my esteemed colleague here is keen to recall, and we’re keen to find out who it was who was so helpful on the phone. I won’t waste your time by pretending I think any of you are going to admit it, so instead we’re going to go round the table and each of you is going to say, ‘Inspector, I have something to tell you.’” They stared at him. He grinned and waved them begin. They did not, and he cuffed the man nearest him, to the cries of his companions, the man’s own shout of pain and a noise of surprise from me. When the man looked slowly up his forehead was stained with incoming bruise.
“‘Inspector, I have something to tell you,’” Dhatt said. “We’re just going to have to keep going till we get our man. Or woman.” He glanced at me; he had forgotten to check. “That’s the thing with cops.” He got ready for a backwards swipe across the same man’s face. I shook my head and raised my hands a bit, and the unificationists gathered around the table made various moans. The man Dhatt threatened tried to rise but Dhatt grabbed his shoulder with his other hand and shoved him back into the chair.
“Yohan, just say it!” the punk girl shouted.
“Inspector, I’ve got something to tell you.”
Around the table it went. “Inspector, I have something to tell you.” “Inspector, I have something to tell you.”
One of the men spoke slowly enough, at first, that it might have been a provocation, but Dhatt raised an eyebrow at him and slapped his friend yet again. Not as hard, but this time blood came.
“Holy fucking Light!”
I dithered by the door. Dhatt made them all say it again, and their names.
“Well?” he said to me.
It had been neither of the two women, of course. Of the men, one’s voice was reedy and his Illitan accent, I presumed, from a part of the city I didn’t recognise. It could have been either of the other two. One in particular—the younger, named, he told us, Dahar Jaris, not the man Dhatt menaced, but a boy in a battered denim jacket with NoMeansNo written on the back in English print that made me suspect it was the name of a band, not a slogan—had a voice that was familiar. Had I heard him say exactly the words my interlocutor had used, or had I heard him speak in the same long-dead form of language, it might have been easier to be sure. Dhatt saw me looking at him and pointed questioningly. I shook my head.
“Say it again,” Dhatt said to him.
“No,” I said, but Jaris was gabbling pointlessly through the phrase. “Anyone speak old Illitan or Besź? Root-form stuff?” I said. They looked at each other. “I know, I know,” I said. “There’s no Illitan, no Besź, and so on. Do any of you speak it?”
“All of us,” said the older man. He did not wipe the blood from his lip. “We live in the city and it’s the language of the city.”
“Careful,” said Dhatt. “I could charge you on that. It’s this one, right?” He pointed at Jaris again.
“Leave it,” I said.
“Who knew Mahalia Geary?” Dhatt said. “Byela Mar?”
“Marya,” I said. “Something.” Dhatt fished in his pocket for her photograph. “But it’s none of them,” I said. I was in the door frame, and moving out of the room. “Leave it. It’s no one. Let’s go. Let’s go.”
He approached me close, looking quizzical. “Hmm?” he whispered. I shook my head minutely. “Fill me in, Tyador.”
Eventually he pursed his lips and turned back to the unificationists. “Stay careful,” he said. He left and they stared after him, five faces frightened and bewildered, one of them bloody and dripping. My own was set, I suspect, from the effort of not showing anything.
“You’ve got me confused, Borlú.” He drove much more slowly than we had come on the return. “I can’t work out what just happened. You backed away from that, and it was our best lead. The only thing that makes sense is that you’re worried about complicity. Because sure, if you got a call and went with it, if you took them up on that information, then yeah that’s breach. But no one’s going to give a shit about you, Borlú. It’s a little tiny breach, and you know as well as I do that they’ll let that go if we sort out something bigger.”
“I don’t know how it is in Ul Qoma,” I said. “In Besźel breach is breach.”
“Bullshit. What does that even mean? Is that what this is? That’s it?” He slowed behind a Besź tram; we rocked over the foreign rails in the crosshatched road. “Fuck, Tyador, we can sort it out; we can come up with something, no problem, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“That’s not it.”
“I fucking hope that’s it. I really do. What else is your beef? Listen, you wouldn’t have to incriminate yourself or anything—”
“That’s not it. None of those were the ones that made the phone call. I don’t know for sure the phone call was even from abroad. From here. I don’t know anything for sure. Could have been a crank call.”
“Right.” When he dropped me at the hotel he did not get out. “I’ve got paperwork,” he said. “I’m sure you do too. Take a couple of hours. We should talk to Professor Nancy again, and I want to have another word with Bowden. Does that meet with your approval? If we drove there and asked a few questions, would those methods be acceptable?”
After a couple of tries I got Corwi. At first we tried to stick to our stupid code, but it did not last.
“I’m sorry boss, I’m not bad at this shit, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to snag Dhatt’s personnel files from the militsya. You’ll cause a sodding international incident. What do you want, anyway?”
“I just want to know what his story is.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Who knows? They’re old-school here.”
“Yeah?”
“Robust interrogations.”
“I’ll tell Naustin, he’ll love it, get an exchange. You sound rattled, boss.”
“Just do me a favour and see if you can get anything, okay?” When I had rung off I picked up Between the City and the City and put it down again.
Chapter Fifteen
“STILL NO LUCK WITH THE VAN?” I said.
“Not pitching up on any cameras we can find,” Dhatt said. “No witnesses. Once it’s through Copula Hall from your side it’s mist.” We both knew that with its make and its Besź number plates, anyone in Ul Qoma who glimpsed it would likely have thought it elsewhere and quickly uns
een it, without noticing its pass.
When Dhatt showed me on the map how close Bowden’s flat was to a station, I suggested we go by public transport. I had travelled on the Paris and Moscow Metros and the London Tube. The Ul Qoma transit used to be more brutalist than any—efficient and to a certain taste impressive, but pretty unrelenting in its concrete. Something over a decade ago it was renewed, at least all those stations in its inner zones. Each was given to a different artist or designer, who were told, with exaggeration but not as much as you might think, that money was no object.
The results were incoherent, sometimes splendid, variegated to a giddying extent. The nearest stop to my hotel was a camp mimicry of Nouveau. The trains were clean and fast and full and on some lines, on this line, driverless. Ul Yir Station, a few turns from the pleasant, uninteresting neighbourhood where Bowden lived, was a patchwork of Constructivist lines and Kandinsky colours. It was, in fact, by a Besź artist.
“Bowden knows we’re coming?”
Dhatt lifted a hand for me to wait. We had ascended to street level and he had his cell to his ear, was listening to a message.
“Yeah,” he said after a minute, shutting the phone. “He’s waiting for us.”
David Bowden lived in a second-floor apartment, in a skinny building, giving him the whole storey to himself. He had crammed it with art objects, remnants, antiquities from the two cities and, to my ignorant eye, their precursor. Above him, he told us, was a nurse and her son: below him a doctor, originally from Bangladesh, who had lived in Ul Qoma even longer than he had.
“Two expats in one building.” I said.
“It’s not exactly a coincidence,” he said. “Used to be, before she passed away, that upstairs was an ex-Panther.” We stared. “A Black Panther, made it out after Fred Hampton was killed. China, Cuba and Ul Qoma were the destinations of choice. When I moved here, when your government liaison officer told you an apartment had come up, you took it, and blow me if all the buildings we were housed in weren’t full of foreigners. Well, we could moan together about whatever it was we missed from home. Have you heard of Marmite? No? Then you’ve obviously never met a British spy in exile.” He poured me and Dhatt, unbidden, glasses of red wine. We spoke in Illitan. “This was years ago, you understand. Ul Qoma didn’t have a pot to piss in. It had to think about efficiencies. There was always one Ul Qoman living in each of these buildings. Much easier for a single person to keep an eye on several foreign visitors if they were all in one place.”