The City & the City (8 page)

Here, though, at this building not just my colleagues but the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be. That terrible presence might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car. If Byela, Fulana, had been breaching, she would have brought that in. So it was likely not suspicion of that specifically that had made Drodin afraid.

“There was just something.” He looked up out of the window at the two cities. “Maybe she would, she would have brought Breach on us, eventually. Or something.”

“Hang on,” Corwi said. “You said she was leaving …”

“She said she was going over. To Ul Qoma. Officially.” I paused from scribbling notes. I looked at Corwi and she at me. “Didn’t see her again. Someone heard she’d gone and they wouldn’t let her back here.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true, and if it is I don’t know why. It was just a matter of time … She was poking around in dangerous shit, it gave me a bad feeling.”

“That’s not all, though, is it?” I said. “What else?” He stared at me.

“I don’t
know
, man. She was trouble, she was scary, there was too much … there was just something. When she was going on and on
about all the stuff she was into, it started to give you the creeps. Made you nervous.” He looked out of the window again. He shook his head.

“I’m sorry she died,” he said. “I’m sorry someone killed her. But I’m not that surprised.”

THAT STINK OF INSINUATION
and mystery—however cynical or uninterested you thought yourself it stuck to you. I saw Corwi look up and around at the shabby fronts of the warehouses when we left. Perhaps seeing a little long in the direction of a shop she must realise was in Ul Qoma. She felt watched. We both did, and we were right, and fidgety.

When we drove out, I took Corwi—a provocation I admit though not aimed at her but at the universe in some way—for lunch in Besźel’s little Ul Qomatown. It was south of the park. With the particular colours and script of its shop fronts, the shape of its facades, visitors to Besźel who saw it would always think they were looking at Ul Qoma, and hurriedly and ostentatiously look away (as close as foreigners could generally get to unseeing). But with a more careful eye, experience, you note the sort of cramped kitsch to the buildings’ designs, a squat self-parody. You can see the trimmings in the shade called Besźel Blue, one of the colours illegal in Ul Qoma. These properties are local.

These few streets—mongrel names, Illitan nouns and a Besź suffix, YulSainStrász, LiligiStrász, and so on—were the centre of the cultural world for the small community of Ul Qoman expatriates living in Besźel. They had come for various reasons—political persecution, economic self-betterment (and how the patriarchs who had gone through the considerable difficulties of emigrating for that reason must be rueing it now), whim, romance. Most of those aged forty and below are second and now third generation, speaking Illitan at home but Besź without an accent in the streets. There is maybe an Ul Qoman influence to their clothes. At various times local bullies and worse break their windows and beat them in the streets.

This is where pining Ul Qoman exiles come for their pastries, their sugar-fried peas, their incense. The scents of Besźel Ul Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful as rain (“Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities,” the proverb has it. In Ul Qoma they have the same saw, but one of the subjects is “fog.” You may occasionally also hear it of other weather conditions, or even rubbish, sewage, and, spoken by the daring, pigeons or wolves). But those smells are in Besźel.

Very occasionally a young Ul Qoman who does not know the area of their city that Ul Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically Ul Qoman Besźel-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected—there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm—and Breach are normally merciful.

“Boss,” Corwi said. We sat at a corner café, Con ul Cai, that I frequented. I had made a great show of greeting the proprietor by name, like doubtless many of his Besź clientele. Probably he despised me. “Why the fuck are we here?”

“Come on,” I said. “Ul Qoman food. Come on. You know you want it.” I offered her cinnamon lentils, thick sweet tea. She declined. “We’re here,” I said, “because I’m trying to soak up the atmosphere. I’m trying to get into the spirit of Ul Qoma. Shit. You’re smart, Corwi, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here. Help me with this.” I counted off on my fingers. “She was here, this girl. This Fulana, Byela.” I almost said Marya. “She was here—what?—three years ago. She was around dodgy local politicos, but she was looking for something else, which they couldn’t help her with. Something even
they
thought was dodgy. She leaves.” I waited. “She was going to Ul Qoma.” I swore, Corwi swore.

“She’s been researching stuff,” I said. “She goes over.”

“We think.”

“We think. Then suddenly she’s back here.”

“Dead.”

“Dead.”

“Fuck.” Corwi leaned in, took and began thoughtfully to eat one
of my pastries, stopped mouth full. For a long time neither of us said anything.

“It is. It’s fucking breach, isn’t it?” Corwi said eventually.

“… It looks like it might be breach, I think—yes I think it does.”

“If not to get over, to come back. Where she gets done. Or postmortem. Gets dumped.”

“Or something. Or something,” I said.

“Unless she crossed legit, or she’s been here the whole time. Just because Drodin’s not seen her…”

I recalled the phone call. I made a sceptical
maybe
face. “Could be. He seemed pretty sure. It’s sus, whatever.”

“Well…”

“Alright. So say it’s breach: that’s alright.”

“Bullshit it is.”

“No, listen,” I said. “That means it wouldn’t be our problem. Or at least… if we can persuade the Oversight Committee. Maybe I’ll get that started.”

She glowered. “They’ll give you shit. I heard they were getting—”

“We’ll have to present our evidence. It’s circumstantial so far but
might
be enough to get it passed over.”

“Not from what I heard.” She looked away and back. “Are you sure you’d want to, boss?”

“Shit yes. Shit yes. Listen. I get it. It’s a credit to you that you want to keep it, but listen. If there’s a chance we’re right… you can’t investigate breach. This Byela Fulana Foreigner Murdered Girl needs someone to look after her.” I made Corwi look at me by waiting. “We’re not the best people, Corwi. She deserves better than we can do. No one’s going to be able to look out for her like Breach. Christ, who gets Breach on their behalf? Sniffing out a murderer?”

“Not many.”

“Yeah. So if we can we need to hand it over. The committee knows that everyone would try to pass off everything; that’s why they make you jump through hoops.” She looked at me dubiously and I kept on. “We don’t have proof and we don’t know the details, so let’s take the next couple of days putting a cherry on top. Or proving ourselves
wrong. Look at the profile we’ve got of her now. We’ve got enough at bloody last. She disappears from Besźel two, three years ago, turns up dead now. Maybe Drodin’s right she was in Ul Qoma. Aboveboard. I want you to hit the phone, make some contacts here
and
over there. You know what we’ve got: foreigner, researcher, et cetera. Find out who she is. Anyone fobs you off, hint this is a Breach issue.”

On my return I went by Taskin’s desk.

“Borlú. Got my call?”

“Ms. Cerush, your laboured excuses for seeking my company are becoming unconvincing.”

“I got your message and I’ve got it in motion. No, don’t commit to eloping with me yet, Borlú, you’re bound to be disappointed. You may have to wait a while to talk to the committee.”

“How’s it going to work?”

“When did you last do this? Years ago, right? Listen, I’m sure you think you’ve got a slam dunk—Don’t look at me like that, what’s your sport? Boxing? I know you think they’ll have to invoke”—her voice grew serious—“instantly I mean, but they won’t. You’ll have to wait your turn, and it could be a few days.”

“I thought—”

“Once, yes. They’d have dropped what they were doing. But it’s a tricky time, and it’s more us than them. Neither set of reps relish this, but honestly Ul Qoma’s not your issue at the moment. Since Syedr’s lot came into the coalition screaming about national weakness the government’s fretting about seeming too eager to invoke, so they’re not going to rush. They’ve got public enquiries about the refugee camps, and there’s no way they’re not going to milk those.”

“Christ, you’re kidding. They’re still freaking out about those few poor sods?” Some must make it through and into one city or the other, but if they did it would be almost impossible for them not to breach, without immigration training. Our borders were tight. Where the desperate newcomers hit crosshatched patches of shore the unwritten agreement was that they were in the city of whichever border control met them, and thus incarcerated them in the coastal camps, first. How crestfallen were those who, hunting the hopes of Ul Qoma, landed in Besź.

“Whatever,” Taskin said. “And other stuff. Glad-handing. They’re not going to shunt off business meetings and whatnot like they would’ve done once.”

“Whoring it for the Yankee dollar.”

“Don’t knock it. If they’re getting the Yankee dollar here that’ll do me. But they’re not going to rush for you, no matter who’s died. Did someone die?”

IT DID NOT TAKE CORWI LONG
to find what I had sent her to find. Late the next day she came into my office with a file.

“I just got it faxed over from Ul Qoma,” she said. “I been trail-chasing. It wasn’t even so hard, when you knew where to start. We were right.”

There she was, our victim—her file, her picture, our death mask, and suddenly and rather breathtakingly photographs of her in life, monochrome and fax-smudged but there, our dead woman smiling and smoking a cigarette and midword, her mouth open. Our scribbled notes, her details, estimated and now others in red, no question marks hesitating them, the facts of her; below her various invented names, there her real one.

Chapter Six

“
MAHALIA GEARY
.”

There were forty-two people around the table (antique, would there ever be question?), and me. The forty-two were seated, with folders in front of them. I stood. Two minutes-takers transcribed at their stations in the room’s corners. I could see microphones on the table, and translators sat nearby.

“Mahalia Geary. She was twenty-four. American. This is all my constable’s doing, Constable Corwi, all this information, ladies and gentlemen. All the information’s in the papers I sent.” They were not all reading them. Some did not have them open.

“American?” someone said.

I did not recognise all of the twenty-one Besź representatives. Some. A woman in her middle ages, severe skunk-stripe hair like a film-studies academic, Shura Katrinya, minister without portfolio, respected but past her moment. Mikhel Buric of the Social Democrats, official opposition, young, capable, ambitious enough to be on more than one committee (security, commerce, arts). Major Yorj Syedr, a leader of the National Bloc, the rightist grouping with whom Prime Minister Gayardicz controversially worked in coalition, despite Syedr’s reputation not only as a bully but a less than competent one. Yavid Nyisemu, Gayardicz’s under-minister for Culture
and committee chair. Other faces were familiar, and with effort more names would come. I recognised none of the Ul Qoma counterparts. I did not pay close attention to foreign politics.

Most of the Ul Qomans flicked through the packets I had prepared. Three wore headphones, but most were fluent enough in Besź at least to understand me. It was strange not to unsee these people in formal Ul Qoma dress—men in collarless shirts and dark lapel-less jackets, the few women in spiral semiwraps in colours that would be contraband in Besźel. But then I was not in Besźel.

The Oversight Committee meets in the giant, baroque, concrete-patched coliseum in the centre of Besźel Old Town, and of Ul Qoma Old Town. It is one of very few places that has the same name in both cities—Copula Hall. That is because it is not a crosshatched building, precisely, nor one of staccato totality-alterity, one floor or room in Besźel and the next in Ul Qoma: externally it is in both cities; internally, much of it is in both or neither. All of us—twenty-one lawmakers from each state, their assistants, and I—were meeting at a juncture, an interstice, one sort-of border built above another.

To me it was as if another presence were there: the reason for the meeting. Perhaps several of us in the room felt watched.

As they fussed with their papers, those who did so, I thanked them again for seeing me. A little political gush. These meetings of the Oversight Committee were regular, but I had had to wait days to see them. I had despite Taskin’s warning tried to convene an extraordinary meeting to pass over responsibility for Mahalia Geary as quickly as possible (who wanted to think of her murderer free? There was one best chance of sorting that), but short of epochal crisis, civil war or catastrophe, this was impossible to arrange.

What about a diminished meeting? A few people missing surely wouldn’t … But no, I was quickly informed, that would be quite unacceptable. She had warned me and she had been right, and I had grown more impatient with each day. Taskin had given me her best contact, a confidential secretary to one of the ministers on the
committee, who had explained that the Besźel Chamber of Commerce had one of its increasingly regular trade fairs with foreign businesses, and that counted out Buric, who had had some success overseeing such events, Nyisemu, and even Syedr. These of course were sacrosanct occurrences. That Katrinya had meetings with diplomats. That Hurian, commissioner of the Ul Qoma Exchange, an impossible-to-reschedule meeting with the Ul Qoman health minister, and very et cetera, and there would be no special meeting. The young dead woman would have to remain inadequately investigated a few more days, until the gathering, at which time, between the indispensable business of adjudication on any
dissensus
, of the management of shared resources—a few of the larger grid power lines, drains and sewage, the most intricately crosshatched buildings—I would be given my twenty-minute slot to make my case.