China Mieville

by The City

  “We haven’t figured out exactly who did what, and we don’t know why, but where was he going, you say? He was going to find out. I told him it wouldn’t work—he didn’t speak the language, he didn’t read it—but he had addresses we got from the internet and a phrase book and, what, was I going to tell him not to go? Not to go? I’m so proud of him. Those people hated Mahalia for years, since she first came here.”

  “Printed out from the internet?”

  “And I mean here, Besźel. When she came to the conference. Then the same thing with others, in Ul Qoma. Are you going to tell me there’s no connection? She knew she’d made enemies, she told us she’d made enemies. When she went looking into Orciny she made enemies. When she looked deeper she made more. They all hated her, because of what she was doing. What she knew.”

  “Who hated her?”

  “All of them.”

  “What did she know?”

  She shook her head and sagged. “My husband was going to investigate.”

  He had climbed out of a ground-floor bathroom window, to avoid my watching officers. A few steps across the road, what could have merely been a breaking of the rules we had set him, but he had blundered out of a crosshatching and into an alter area, a yard that existed only in Ul Qoma; and Breach, who must have watched him all the time, had come for him. I hoped they hadn’t hurt him too badly. If they had I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any doctor back home who would be able to identify the agent of his injury. What could I say?

  “I’m sorry for what happened, Mrs. Geary. Your husband shouldn’t have tried to evade Breach. I … We are on the same side.” She looked at me carefully.

  She whispered to me eventually, “Let us go, then. Go on. We can walk back to the city. We have money. We … my husband’s going crazy. He needs to be looking. He’ll just come back. We’ll come through Hungary and, or, we’ll come up via Turkey or Armenia-there are ways we can get in, you know … We’re going to find out who did this …”

  “Mrs. Geary, Breach are watching us now. Now.” I raised my open hands slowly and filled them with air. “You wouldn’t get ten metres. What is it you think you can do? You don’t speak Besź, Illitan. I … Let me, Mrs. Geary. Let me do my job for you.”

  MR. GEARY WAS STILL UNCONSCIOUS when the plane boarded. Mrs. Geary looked at me with reproach and hope, and I tried to tell her again that there was nothing I could do, that Mr. Geary had done this himself.

  There were not many other passengers. I wondered where Breach was. Our remit would end when the plane doors were sealed. Mrs. Geary cushioned her husband’s head as he lolled in the stretcher in which we carried him. In the plane doorway, as they took the Gearys to their seats, I showed my badge to one of the attendants.

  “Be good to them.”

  “The deportees?”

  “Yeah. Seriously.” He raised his brows but nodded.

  I went to where the Gearys were seated. Mrs. Geary stared at me. I squatted.

  “Mrs. Geary. Please pass my apologies to your husband. He shouldn’t have done what he did, but I understand why.” I hesitated. “You know … if he’d known Besźel better, he could probably have avoided falling into Ul Qoma, and Breach couldn’t have stopped him.” She just stared. “Let me get that.” I stood, took her bag and put it overhead. “Of course when we know what’s happening, if we get any leads at all, any information, I’ll tell you.” Still she didn’t say anything. Her mouth was moving: she was trying to decide whether to plead with me or accuse me of something. I bowed a little, old-fashioned, turned and left the plane and the two of them.

  Back in the airport building, I took out the paper I had taken from the side pocket of her bag and looked at it. The name of an organisation, True Citizens, copied from the internet. That his daughter must have told him hated her, and where Mr. Geary had been going with his own dissident investigations. An address.

  Chapter Nine

  CORWI COMPLAINED, more dutifully than with fervour. “What’s this all about, sir?” she said. “Aren’t they going to be invoking Breach any minute?”

  “Yes. In fact they’re taking their time. They should’ve done it by now; I don’t know what the holdup is.”

  “So what the fuck, sir? Why are we in such a rush to do this? Mahalia’ll have Breach hunting for her killer soon.” I drove. “Damn. You don’t want to hand it over, do you?”

  “Oh, I do.” So …

  “I just want to check some things first, in this unexpected little moment we have.”

  She stopped staring at me when we arrived at the headquarters of the True Citizens. I had called in and got someone to check the address for me: it was as it was written on Mrs. Geary’s paper. I had tried to contact Shenvoi, my acquaintance undercover, but couldn’t get him, so relied on what I knew and could quickly read on the TCs. Corwi stood beside me, and I saw her touch the handle of her weapon.

  A reinforced door, blocked-off windows, but the house itself was or had been residential, and the rest of the street remained so. (I wondered if there had ever been any attempt to close the TC down on zoning charges.) The street almost looked crosshatched, its random-seeming variation between terraced and detached buildings, but it was not, it was total Besźel, the variation of styles an architectural quirk, though it was only a corner away from a very crosshatched area.

  I had heard it alleged by liberals that this was more than irony, that the proximity of Ul Qoma gave the TC opportunities to intimidate the enemy. Certainly no matter how they unsaw them, the Ul Qomans in physical proximity must have registered at some level the paramilitary fatigues, the Besźel First patches. You could almost claim it was breach, though of course not quite.

  They were milling as we approached, lounging, smoking, drinking, laughing loud. Their efforts to claim the street were so overt they might as well have been pissing musk. All but one were men. All eyed us. Words were spoken and most of them ambled into the building, leaving a few by the door. In leather, denim, one despite the cold in a muscle top his physiology deserved, staring at us. Bodybuilder, several men with cropped hair, one affecting an antique Besź-aristo cut like a fussy mullet. He leaned on a baseball bat—not a Besź sport but just plausible enough that he could not be done for Possessing Weapon with Intent. One man muttered to Haircut, spoke rapidly on a cell phone, clicked it shut. There were not many passersby. All there were of course were Besź, so they could and did stare at us and the TC crew, though most then looked away.

  “You ready for this?” I said.

  “Fuck off, boss,” Corwi muttered back. The bat holder swung it as if idly.

  A few metres from the reception committee I said loudly into my radio: “At TC headquarters, four-eleven GyedarStrász, as planned. Check-in in an hour. Code alert. Ready backup.” I thumbed the radio off quickly before the operator had the chance to audibly respond along the lines of What on earth are you on about, Borlú?

  The big man: “Help you, Officer?” One of his comrades looked Corwi up and down and made a kiss-kiss noise that might be the chirrup of a bird.

  “Yes, we’re coming in to ask a few questions.”

  “I don’t think so.” Haircut smiled, but it was Muscles doing the talking.

  “We really are, you know.”

  “Not so much.” This was the man who had made the call, a blond suede-headed man, pushing in front of his big acquaintance. “Got Entry and Search papers? No? Then you will not be coming in.”

  I shifted. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why keep us out?” Corwi said. “We’ve some questions …” but Muscles and Haircut were laughing.

  “Please,” Haircut said. He shook his head. “Please. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  The close-shorn man gestured him to shut up. “We’re done here,” he said.

  “What do you know about Byela Mar?” I said. They looked without recognition, or uncertain. “Mahalia Geary.” That time they knew the name. The telephoner made an ah noise; Haircut whispered to the big man.

/>   “Geary,” Bodybuilder said. “We read the papers.” He shrugged, que sera. “Yes. A lesson in the dangers of certain behaviours?”

  “How so?” I leaned against the doorjamb companionably, forcing Mullet to back up a step or two. He muttered again to his friend. I could not hear what.

  “No one’s condoning attacks, but Miss Geary”—the man with the phone said the name with exaggerated American accent, and stood between us and all the others—“had form and a reputation among patriots. We’d not heard from her for a while, true. Hoped she might have gained some perspective. Seems not.” He shrugged. “If you denigrate Besźel, it’ll come back to bite you.”

  “What denigration?” Corwi said. “What do you know about her?”

  “Come on, Officer! Look at what she worked on! She was no friend of Besźel.”

  “Alright,” Yellow said. “Unif. Or worse, a spy.” I looked at Corwi and she at me.

  “What?” I said. “Which you going to go for?”

  “She wasn’t…” Corwi said. We both hesitated.

  The men stayed in the doorway and would not even bicker with us anymore. Mullet seemed minded to, in response to my provocations, but Bodybuilder said, “Leave it, Caczos,” and the man shut up, and only watched us from behind the bigger man’s back, and the other who had spoken remonstrated with them quietly and they backed a few feet away but still watched me. I tried to reach Shenvoi, but he was away from his secure phone. It occurred to me that he might (I was not one of the few who knew his assignment) even be in the building before me.

  “Inspector Borlú.” The voice came from behind us. A smart black car had pulled up behind ours, and a man was walking towards us, leaving the driver’s door open. He was in his early fifties, I would say, portly, with a sharp, lined face. He wore a decent dark suit without a tie. What hair had not receded was grey and cut short. “Inspector,” he said again. “Time for you to leave.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Of course, of course,” I said. “Only forgive me … who in the name of the Virgin are you?”

  “Harkad Gosz. Barrister for the True Citizens of Besźel.” Several of the thuggish men looked rather startled at that.

  “Oh terrific,” whispered Corwi. I took Gosz in ostentatiously: he was clearly high-rent.

  “Just popping by, are you?” I said. “Or did you get a call?” I winked at the phone-man, who shrugged. Amiably enough. “I take it you don’t have a direct line to these donkeys, so who did it come through? They put the word to Syedr? Who dropped you a line?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess why you’re here, Inspector.”

  “A moment, Gosz … How do you know who I am?”

  “Let me guess—you’re here asking questions about Mahalia Geary.”

  “Absolutely. None of your boys seem too cut up about her death. And yet lamentably ignorant about her work: they’re labouring under the delusion that she was a unificationist, which would make the unifs laugh very hard. Never heard of Orciny? And let me repeat—how do you know my name?”

  “Inspector, are you really going to waste all our time? Orciny? However Geary wanted to spin it, whatever foolishness she wanted to pretend to, whatever stupid footnotes she wanted to stick in her essays, the thrust of everything she was working on was to undermine Besźel. This nation is not a plaything, Inspector. Understand me? Either Geary was stupid, wasting her time with old wives’ tales that manage to combine being meaningless with being insults, or she was not stupid, and all this work about the secret powerlessness of Besźel was designed to make a very different point. Ul Qoma seems to have been more congenial for her, after all, didn’t it?”

  “Are you joking with me? What’s your point? That Mahalia pretended to be working on Orciny? She was an enemy of Besźel? What, an Ul Qoman agent…?”

  Gosz came close to me. He motioned the TC-ers, who backed into their fortified house and half closed the door, waiting and watching.

  “Inspector, you have no Entry and Search. Go. If you’re going to insist on this, let me dutifully recite the following: continue this approach and I’ll complain to your superiors about harassment of the, let’s recall, entirely legal TC of B.” I waited a moment out. There was more he wanted to say. “And ask yourself what you’d infer about someone who arrives here in Besźel; commences research on a topic long and justifiably ignored by serious scholars, that’s predicated on the uselessness and weakness of Besźel; makes, unsurprisingly, enemies at every turn; leaves and then goes straight to Ul Qoma. And then anyway, which you appear to be unaware of, starts to quietly drop what was always an entirely unconvincing arena for research. She’s not been working on Orciny for years—might as well have admitted the whole thing was a blind, for goodness’ sake! She’s working at one of the most contentious pro–Ul Qoman digs of the last century. Do I think there’s reason to suspect her motives, Inspector? I do.”

  Corwi was staring at him literally with her mouth open. “Damn, boss, you were right,” she said without lowering her voice. “They’re batshit.” He looked at her coldly.

  “How would you know all that, Mr. Gosz?” I said. “About her work?”

  “Her research? Please. Even without the newspapers ferreting around, PhD topics and conference papers aren’t state secrets, Borlú. There’s a thing called the internet. You should try it.”

  “And …”

  “Just go,” he said. “Tell Gadlem I sent my regards. Do you want a job, Inspector? No, not a threat, it’s a question. Would you like a job? Would you like to keep the one you have? Are you for real, Inspector How-Do-I-Know-Your-Name?” He laughed. “Do you think this”—a point at the building—“is where things end?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “You got a call from someone.”

  “Now go.”

  “Which paper did you read?” I said with raised voice. I kept my eyes on Gosz but turned my head enough to show I was talking to the men in the doorway. “Big man? Haircut? Which paper?”

  “That’s enough, now,” the crop-haired one said, as Muscles said to me, “What?”

  “You said you read it in the paper about her. Which one? Far as I know no one’s mentioned her real name yet. She was still a Fulana Detail when I saw it. I’m obviously not reading the best press. So what should I be reading?” A mutter, a laugh.

  “I pick things up.” Gosz did not tell the man to shut up. “Who knows where I heard it?” I could not make too much of this. Information leaked fast, including from supposedly secure committees, and it was possible her name had got out and even been published somewhere, though I hadn’t seen it—and if it had not, it would soon. “And what should you be reading? Cry of the Spear, of course!” He waved a copy of the TC newspaper.

  “Well this is all very exciting,” I said. “You’re all so informed. Poor fuddled me, I suppose it’ll be a relief to hand this over. I can’t possibly keep hold of it. Like you say, I haven’t got the right papers to ask the right questions. Of course Breach don’t need any papers. They can ask anything they want, of anyone.”

  That quietened them. I looked at them—at Muscles, Mullet, the telephoner and the lawyer—seconds more, before I walked, Corwi behind me.

  ***

  “WHAT AN UNPLEASANT BUNCH OF FUCKERS.”

  “Ah well,” I said. “We were fishing. A bit cheeky. Though I wasn’t expecting to be spanked like quite such a naughty boy.”

  “What was all that stuff…? How did he know who you are? And all that business about threatening you …”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe he could make life hard if I pushed this. Not my problem very long.”

  “I guess I have heard,” she said. “About links, I mean. Everyone knows the TC are the street soldiers of the NatBloc, so he must know Syedr. Like you said that’s probably the chain: they call Syedr, who calls him.” I said nothing. “Probably is. Might be who they heard about Mahalia from, too. But would Syedr really be so dumb as to feed us to the TC?”

  “You said yourself he is
pretty dumb.”

  “Okay, yeah, but why would he?”

  “He’s a bully.”

  “True. They all are—that’s how the politics work, you know? So maybe, yeah, that’s what’s going on, bluster to scare you off.”

  “Scare me off what?”

  “Scare you, I mean. Not ‘off’ anything. They’re congenital thugs, those guys.”

  “Who knows? Maybe he’s got something to keep to himself, maybe he hasn’t. I admit I like the idea of the Breach hunting him and his. When the invocation finally comes.”

  “Yeah. I just thought you seemed … We’re still chasing stuff, I wondered if you were wishing you could … I wasn’t expecting to do any more of this. I mean we’re just waiting. For the committee …”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well. You know.” I looked at her and away. “It’ll be good to give this one up; she needs Breach. But we haven’t handed over just yet. The more we have to give them, the better I guess …” That was questionable.

  Big breath in, out. I stopped and bought us coffee from a new place, before we went back to the HQ. American coffee, to Corwi’s disgust.

  “I thought you liked it aj Tyrko,” she said, sniffing it.

  “I do, but even more than I like it aj Tyrko, I don’t care.”

  Chapter Ten

  I WAS IN EARLY THE NEXT MORNING but had no time to orient myself to anything. “El jefe wants you, Tyad,” said Tsura, on desk duty, as I entered.

  “Shit,” I said. “He in already?” I hid behind my hand and whispered, “Turn away, turn away, Tsura. Be on a piss break at my ingress. You didn’t see me.”

  “Come on, Tyad.” She waved me away and covered her eyes. But there was a note on my desk. See me IMMEDIATELY. I rolled my eyes. Canny. If he had emailed it to me or left it as a voicemail I could have claimed to not see it for a few hours. I couldn’t avoid him now.