by The City
Buidze stared at me. He glanced at Nancy. He looked around the room. After long seconds he laughed.
“You’re joking. Okay then. Alright then, Officers. Yeah they’re scared alright, but not that someone’s breaching from fuck knows where to mess with them. Is that what you’re thinking?” He shook his head. “They’re scared because they don’t want to get caught.” He held up his hands in surrender. “You’ve got me, Officers. There is breaching going on that we’re not able to stop. These little sods breach all the damn time.”
He met our stares. Not defensive. He was matter-of-fact. Did I look as shocked as Dhatt? Professor Nancy’s expression was if anything embarrassed.
“You’re right, of course,” Buidze said. “You can’t avoid all breach, not in a place like this, and not with kids like these. These aren’t locals, and I don’t care how much training you give them, they’ve never seen anything like this before. Don’t tell me it’s not the same back in your place, Borlú. You think they’re going to play loyal? You think while they wander around town they’re really unseeing Besźel? Come on. Best any of us can hope for’s they’ve got the sense not to make a big thing of it, but of course they’re seeing across the border. No we can’t prove it, which is why Breach wouldn’t come unless they really fuck up. Oh it’s happened. But much rarer than you think. Not for a long time.”
Professor Nancy still looked down at the table. “You think any of the foreigners don’t breach?” Buidze said, and leaned in towards us, spreading his fingers. “All we can get from them’s a bit of politeness, right? And when you get a bunch of young people together, they’re going to push it. Maybe it’s not just looks. Did you always do what you’re told? But these are smart kids.”
He sketched maps on the table with his fingertips. “Bol Ye’an crosshatches here, here, and the park it’s in here and here. And yeah, over at the edges in this direction, it even creeps into Besźel total. So when this lot get drunk or whatever, don’t they egg each other on to go stand in a crosshatch bit of the park? And then, who knows if they don’t, maybe standing still there, without a single word, without even moving, cross over into Besźel, then back again? You don’t have to take a step to do that, not if you’re in a crosshatch. All here.” Tapped his forehead. “No one can prove shit. Then maybe next time when they’re doing that they reach down, grab a souvenir, straighten back up into Ul Qoma with a rock from Besźel or something. If that’s where they were when they picked it up, that’s where it’s from, right? Who knows? Who could prove it?
“So long as they don’t flaunt it, what can you do? Even Breach can’t watch for breach all the time. Come on. If they did, not a single one of this foreign lot would still be here. Isn’t that right, Professor?” He looked at her not unkindly. She said nothing but looked at me in embarrassment. “None of them mentioned Breach, SD Dhatt, because they’re all guilty as hell.” Buidze smiled. “Hey, don’t get me wrong: they’re only human, I like them. But don’t make this more than it is.”
As we ushered them out, Dhatt got a call that had him scribbling notes and muttering. I closed the door.
“That was one of the uniforms we sent to get Bowden. He’s gone. They got to his apartment and no one’s answering. He’s not there.”
“They told him they were coming?”
“Yeah, and he knew about the bomb. But he’s gone.”
Chapter Eighteen
“I WANT TO GO BACK AND TALK to that kid again,” Dhatt said.
“The unificationist?”
“Yeah, Jaris. I know, I know, ‘It wasn’t him.’ Right. You said. Well, whatever, he knows something and I want to talk to him.”
“You won’t find him.”
“What?”
“Good luck. He’s gone.”
He fell behind me a few steps and made a phone call.
“You’re right. Jaris is nowhere. How did you know? What the fuck are you playing at?”
“Let’s go to your office.”
“Fuck the office. The office can wait. Repeat, how the fuck did you know about Jaris?”
“Look …”
“I’m getting a bit spooked by your occult abilities, Borlú. I didn’t sit on my arse—when I heard I’d be babysitting you, I looked you up, so I know a little bit, I know you’re no one to fuck with. I’m sure you did the same, so you know the same.” I should have done. “So I was geared up to be working with a detective. Even some hot shit. I wasn’t expecting this lugubrious tutting bugger. How the fuck did you know about Jaris, and why are you protecting that little shit?”
“Okay. He phoned me last night from a car or I think from the train and told me he was going.”
He stared at me. “Why the fuck did he call you? And why the fuck did you not tell me? Are we working together or not, Borlú?”
“Why did he call me? Maybe he wasn’t bananas about your interrogation style, Dhatt. And are we working together? I thought the reason I was here was to obediently give you everything I’ve got, then watch TV in my hotel room while you find the bad guy. When did Bowden get burgled? When were you going to tell me that? I didn’t see you rushing to spill whatever shit you found out from UlHuan at the dig, and he should have the choicest info—he is the bloody government mole, isn’t he? Come on, it’s no big deal, all public works have them. What I object to is you cutting me out then coming the ‘How could you?’”
We stared at each other. After a long moment he turned and walked to the kerb.
“Put out a warrant for Jaris,” I said to his back. “Put a stop on his passports, inform the airports, stations. But he only called me because he was en route, to tell me what he thinks happened. His phone’s probably smashed up by the tracks in the middle of Cucinis Pass, halfway to the Balkans by now.”
“So what is it he thinks happened?”
“Orciny.”
He turned in disgust and waved the word away.
“Were you even going to fucking tell me this?” he said.
“I told you, didn’t I?”
“He’s just done a runner. Doesn’t that tell you anything? The goddamn guilty run.”
“What, you talking about Mahalia? Come on, what’s his motive?” I said that but remembered some of what Jaris had told me. She had not been one of their party. They had driven her out. I hesitated a little. “Or you mean Bowden? Why the hell and how the hell would Jaris organise something like that?”
“I don’t know, both. Who knows what makes these fuckers do what they do?” Dhatt said. “There’ll be some fucked-up justification or other, some conspiracy thing.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said carefully, after a minute. “It was … Okay, it was him who called me from here in the first place.”
“I knew it. You fucking covered for him …”
“I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. When he called last night he told me. Wait, wait, listen, Dhatt: why would he call me in the first place if it was him who killed her?”
He stared at me. After a minute he turned and hailed a cab. He opened its door. I watched. The cab had halted skew-whiff on the road: Ul Qoman cars sounded their horns as they went past, Besź drivers cut quietly around the protub, the law-abiding not even whispering cusses.
Dhatt stood there half-in, half-out, and the cabbie made some remonstrance. Dhatt snapped something and showed him his ID.
“I don’t know why,” he said to me. “Something to find out. But it’s a bit fucking much, isn’t it? That he’s gone?”
“If he was in on it there’s no sense him drawing my attention to anything. And how’s he supposed to have got her to Besźel?”
“Called his friends over there; they did it …”
I shrugged a doubting maybe. “It was the Besź unifs who gave us our first lead on all this, guy called Drodin. I’ve heard of misdirection, but we didn’t have anything to misdirect. They don’t have the smarts or contacts to know which van to steal—not the ones I’ve met. Plus there’s more policzai agents than members on their bo
oks anyway. If this was unifs it was some secret hardcore we’ve not seen.
“I spoke to Jaris … He’s scared,” I said. “Not guilty: scared and sad. He was into her, I think.”
“Alright,” Dhatt said after a while. He looked at me, motioned me into the cab. He stayed standing outside for several seconds, giving orders into his phone too quiet and quick for me to follow. “Alright. Let’s change the record.” He spoke slowly as the cab drove.
“Who gives a fuck what’s gone down between Besźel and Ul Qoma, right? Who gives a fuck what my boss is telling me or what yours is telling you? You’re police. I’m police. Let’s fix this. Are we working together, Borlú? I could do with some help on a case that’s getting more fucked by the minute, how about you? UlHuan doesn’t know fuck, by the way.”
Where he took me, a place very close to his office, was not as dark as a cop bar in Besźel would have been. It was more salubrious. I still would not have booked a wedding reception there. It was, if only just, during working hours, but the room was more than half-full. It cannot have all been local militsya, but I recognised many of the faces from Dhatt’s office. They recognised me, too. Dhatt entered to greetings, and I followed him past whispers and those so-charmingly frank Ul Qoman stares.
“One definite murder and now two disappearances,” I said. I watched him very carefully. “All people who are known to have looked at this stuff.”
“There is no fucking Orciny.”
“Dhatt, I’m not saying that. You said yourself there are such things as cults and lunatics.”
“Seriously fuck off. The most culty lunatic we’ve met just fled the scene of the crime, and you gave him a free pass.”
“I should have said first thing this morning, I apologise.”
“You should’ve called last night.”
“Even if we could find him I thought we didn’t have enough to hold him. But I apologise.” Held my hands open.
I stared at him some time. He was overcoming something. “I want to solve this,” he said. The pleasant burr of Illitan from the customers. I heard the clucks as one or two saw my visitor’s mark. Dhatt bought me a beer. Ul Qoman, flavoured with all kinds of whatnot. It would not be winter for weeks, and though it was no colder in Ul Qoma than in Besźel, it felt colder to me. “What do you say? If you won’t even fucking trust me …”
“Dhatt, I’ve already told you stuff that—” I lowered my voice. “No one else knows about that first phone call. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand any of this. I’m not solving anything. I’m by some fluke that I do not know the whys of any more than you, being used. For some reason I’ve been a repository for a bunch of information that I don’t know what to do with. I hope there’s a yet after that, but I don’t know, just like I don’t know anything.”
“What does Jaris think happened? I’m going to track that fucker down.” He would not.
“I should’ve called, but I could … He’s not our guy. You know, Dhatt. You know. How long you been an officer? Sometimes you know, right?” I tapped my chest. I was right, he liked that, nodded.
I told him what Jaris had said. “Fucking crap,” he said, when I was done.
“Maybe.”
“What the fuck is this Orciny stuff? That’s what he was running from? You’re reading that book. The dodgy one Bowden wrote. What’s it like?”
“There’s a lot in it. A lot of stuff. I don’t know. Of course it’s ludicrous, like you say. Secret overlords behind the scene, more powerful even than Breach, puppetmasters, hidden cities.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe. And”—I opened my hands at him—“something big’s going on, and we have no idea what it is.”
“Maybe I’ll take a look at it after you,” Dhatt said. “Who the fuck knows anything.” He said the last word carefully.
“Qussim.” A couple of his colleagues, men of about his age or mine, raising their glasses to him, just about to me. There was something in their eyes, they were moving in like curious animals. “Qussim, we’ve not had a chance to meet our guest. You’ve been hiding him away.”
“Yura,” Dhatt said. “Kai. How’s tricks? Borlú, these are detectives blah and blah.” He waved his hands between them and me. One of them raised his eyebrow at Dhatt.
“I just wanted to find out how Inspector Borlú was finding Ul Qoma,” the one called Kai said. Dhatt snorted and finished his beer.
“Fuck’s sake,” he said. He sounded as amused as angry. “You want to get drunk and get into an argument with him, maybe even if you’re far gone enough, Yura, a fight. You’ll bring up all manner of unfortunate international incidents. The fucking war might get dusted off. You might even say something about your dad. His dad was in the UQ Navy,” he said to me. “Got tinnitus or some shit in a fucking idiot’s skirmish with a Besź tugboat over some disputed lobster pots or whatever.” I glanced, but neither of our interlocutors looked particularly outraged. There was even a trace of humour on Kai’s face. “I’ll save you the trouble,” Dhatt said. “He’s as much of a Besź wanker as you think, and you can spread that around the office. Come on, Borlú.”
We went via his station’s garage and he picked up his car. “Hey …” He indicated me the steering wheel. “It never even occurred to me, maybe you want to give the Ul Qoman roads a go.”
“No, thanks. I think it would be a bit confusing.” Driving in Besźel or Ul Qoma is hard enough when you are in your home city, negotiating local and foreign traffic. “You know,” I said. “When I was first driving … it must be the same here, as well as seeing all the cars on the road you’ve got to learn to unsee all the other cars, the ones abroad, but unsee them fast enough to get out of their way.” Dhatt nodded. “Anyway, when I was a kid first driving we had to get used to zooming past all these old bangers and stuff in Ul Qoma, donkey carts in some parts and what have you. That you unsaw, but you know … Now years later most of the unseens have been overtaking me.”
Dhatt laughed. Almost embarrassed. “Things go up and down,” he said. “Ten years from now it’ll be you lot doing the overtaking again.”
“Doubt it.”
“Come on,” he said. “It’ll shift; it always does. It’s already started.”
“Our expos? A couple of little pity investments. I think you’ll be top wolf for a while.”
“We’re blockaded!”
“Not that you seem to be doing too bad on it. Washington loves us, and all we’ve got to show for it is Coke.”
“Don’t knock that,” Dhatt said. “Have you tasted Canuck Cola? All this is old Cold War bullshit. Who gives a fuck who the Americans want to play with, anyway? Good luck with them. Oh Canada …” He sang the line. Dhatt said to me, “What’s the food like at that place?”
“Okay. Bad. No worse than any other hotel food.”
He yanked the wheel, took us off the route I’d come to know. “Sweet?” he said into his phone. “Can you chuck some more stuff on for supper? Thanks, beautiful. I want you to meet my new partner.”
Her name was Yallya. She was pretty, quite a lot younger than Dhatt, but she greeted me very poised, playing a role and enjoying it, waiting at the door of their apartment to triple-kiss me hello, the Ul Qoman way.
On the way to the house, Dhatt had looked at me and said “You okay?” It was quickly obvious that he lived within a mile, in grosstopic terms, of my own house. From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya’s rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Besźel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents’ whispered strictures to unsee the other. Children are sacks of infection. That was the sort of thing that spread diseases. Epidemiology was always complicated here and back home.
“How y
ou liking Ul Qoma, Inspector?”
“Tyador. Very much.”
“Bullshit, he thinks we’re all thugs and idiots and being invaded by secret armies from hidden cities.” Dhatt’s laughter was not without edge. “Anyway we’re not getting much chance to exactly go sightseeing.”
“How’s the case?”
“There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there’s a dead girl at the end of it all.”
“Is that true?” she said to me. They were bringing out food in bits and pieces. It was not home cooking, and seemed to include a lot of convenience and prepackaged food, but it was better quality than I’d been eating, and was more Ul Qoman, though that is not an unmitigated good. The sky darkened over the crosshatched park, with night and with wet clouds.
“You miss potatoes,” Yallya said.
“Is it written on my face?”
“It’s all you eat, isn’t it?” She thought she was being playful. “This too spicy for you?”
“There’s someone watching us from the park.”
“How can you tell from here?” She glanced over my shoulder. “Hope for their sake they’re in Ul Qoma.” She was an editor at a financial magazine and had, judging by the books I saw and the posters in the bathroom, a taste for Japanese comics.
“Are you married, Tyador?” I tried to answer Yallya’s questions though they came too fast really for that. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”
“No, but the first time for a long time.”
“So you don’t know it.”
“No. I might once have claimed to know London, but not for years.”
“You’re well travelled! And now with all this are you mixing with insiles and breachers?” I did not find this line adorable. “Qussim says you’re spending your time where they’re digging up old hex stuff.”