China Mieville

by The City

  “Sir?” I knocked and poked my head around his door. I considered ways to explain my visit to the True Citizens. I hoped Corwi was not too loyal or honourable to blame me if she was taking shit herself for it. “You wanted me?”

  Gadlem looked at me over the rim of his cup and beckoned, motioned me to sit. “Heard about the Gearys,” he said. “What happened?”

  “Yes sir. It was … it was a cock-up.” I had not tried to contact them. I did not know if Mrs. Geary knew where her paper had gone. “I think they were, you know, they were just distraught and they did a stupid thing …”

  “A stupid thing with a lot of preplanning. Quite the most organised spontaneous foolishness I’ve ever heard of. Are they lodging a complaint? Am I going to hear stern words from the US embassy?”

  “I don’t know. It would be a bit cheeky if they did. They wouldn’t have much to stand on.” They had breached. It was sad and simple. He nodded, sighed, and offered me his two closed fists.

  “Good news or bad news?” he said.

  “Uh … bad.”

  “No, you get the good news first.” He shook his left hand and opened it dramatically, spoke as if he had released a sentence. “The good news is that I have a tremendously intriguing case for you.” I waited. “The bad news.” He opened his right hand and slammed it on his desk with genuine anger. “The bad news, Inspector Borlú, is that it’s the same case you’re already working on.”

  “… Sir? I don’t understand …”

  “Well no, Inspector, who among us understands? To which of us poor mortals is understanding given? You’re still on the case.” He unfolded a letter and waggled it at me. I saw stamps and embossed symbols above the text. “Word from the Oversight Committee. Their official response. You remember, the little formality? They’re not handing the Mahalia Geary case over. They’re refusing to invoke Breach.”

  I sat back hard. “What? What? What the hell …?”

  His voice was flat. “Nyisemu for the committee informs us that they’ve reviewed the evidence presented and have concluded that there’s insufficient evidence to suppose any breach occurred.”

  “This is bullshit.” I stood. “You saw my dossier, sir, you know what I gave them, you know there’s no way this wasn’t breach. What did they say? What were their reasons? Did they do a breakdown of the voting? Who signed the letter?”

  “They’re not obliged to give any reasons.” He shook his head and looked disgusted at the paper he held in fingertips like tongs.

  “God damn it. Someone’s trying to … Sir, this is ridiculous. We need to invoke Breach. They’re the only ones who can … How am I supposed to investigate this shit? I’m a Besźel cop, is all. Something fucked is going on here.”

  “Alright, Borlú. As I say they’re not obliged to give any reasons, but doubtless anticipating something of our polite surprise, they have in fact included a note, and an enclosure. According to this imperious little missive, the issue wasn’t your presentation. So take comfort in the fact that no matter how cack-handed you were, you more or less convinced them this was a case of breach. What happened, they explain, is that as part of their ‘routine investigations,’” his scare quotes were like birds’ claws, “more information came to light. To whit.”

  He tapped one of the pieces of mail or junk on his desk, threw it to me. A videocassette. He pointed me to the TV/VCR in the corner of his office. The image came up, a poor sepia-tinted and static-flecked thing. There was no sound. Cars puttered diagonally across the screen, in not-heavy but steady traffic, above a time-and-date stamp, between pillars and the walls of buildings.

  “What am I looking at?” I worked out the date—the small hours, a couple of weeks ago. The night before Mahalia Geary’s body was found. “What am I looking at?”

  The few vehicles sped up, beetled with tremendous jerky business. Gadlem waved his hand in bad-tempered play, conducting the fast-forwarding image with the remote control as if it were a baton. He sped through minutes of tape.

  “Where is this? This picture is shit.”

  “It’s a lot less shit than if it was one of ours, which is rather the point. Here we are,” he said. “Deep of the night. Where are we, Borlú? Detect, detective. Watch the right.”

  A red car passed, a grey car, an old truck, then—“Hello! Voilà!” shouted Gadlem—a dirty white van. It crawled from the lower right to the upper left of the picture toward some tunnel, paused perhaps at an unseen traffic signal, and passed out of the screen and out of sight.

  I looked at him for an answer. “Mark the stains,” he said. He was fast-forwarding, making little cars dance again. “They’ve trimmed us a bit. An hour and change later. Hello!” He pressed play and one, two, three other vehicles, then the white van—it must be the same one—reappeared, moving in the opposite direction, back the way it came. This time the angle of the little camera captured its front plates.

  It went by too quick for me to see. I pressed the buttons on the built-in VCR, hurtling the van backwards into my line of sight, then bringing it a few metres forward, pausing it. It was no DVD, this, the paused image was a fug of ghost lines and crackles, the stuttering van not really still but trembling like some troubled electron between two locations. I could not read the number plate clearly, but in most of its places what I saw seemed to be one of a couple of possibilities—a vye or a bye, zsec or kho, a 7 or a 1, and so on. I took out my notebook and flicked through it.

  “There he goes,” murmured Gadlem. “He’s onto something. He has something, ladies and gentlemen.” Back through pages and days. I stopped. “A lightbulb, I see it, it’s straining to come on, to glow illumination across the situation …”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Indeed fuck.”

  “It is. That’s Khurusch’s van.”

  “It is, as you say, the van of Mikyael Khurusch.” The vehicle in which Mahalia’s body had been taken, and from which it had been dumped. I looked at the time on the image. As I looked at it onscreen it almost certainly contained dead Mahalia. “Jesus. Who found this? What is it?” I said. Gadlem sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Wait, wait.” I held up my hand. I looked at the letter from the Oversight Committee, which Gadlem was using to fan his face. “That’s the corner of Copula Hall,” I said. “God damn it. That’s Copula Hall. And this is Khurusch’s van going out of Besźel into Ul Qoma and coming back in again. Legally.”

  “Bing,” said Gadlem, like a tired game-show buzzer. “Bing bing bloody bing.”

  AS PART, WE WERE TOLD—and to which, I told Gadlem, we would return—of the background investigations pursuant to any invocation of Breach, CCTV footage of the night in question had been investigated. That was unconvincing. This had looked so clear a case of breach no one had any reason to pore so hard through hours of tape. And besides, the antique cameras in the Besź side of Copula Hall would not give clear enough pictures to identify the vehicle—these were from outside, from a bank’s private security system, that some investigator had commandeered.

  With the help of the photographs provided by Inspector Borlú and his team, we heard, it had been ascertained that one of the vehicles passing through an official checkpoint in Copula Hall, into Ul Qoma from Besźel and back again, had been that in which the deceased body had been transported. Accordingly, while a heinous crime had been committed and must be investigated as a matter of urgency, the passage of the body from the murder site, though it appears it was in Ul Qoma, to the dumping ground in Besźel had not, in fact, involved breach. Passage between the two cities had been legal. There were, accordingly, no grounds to invoke Breach. No breach had been committed.

  This is the sort of juridical situation to which outsiders react with understandable bewilderment. Smuggling, they regularly insist, for example. Smuggling is breach, yes? Quintessentially, yes? But no.

  Breach has powers the rest of us can hardly imagine, but its calling is utterly precise. It is not the passage itself from one city to the other, not even with contraband: it is
the manner of the passage. Throw felid or cocaine or guns from your Besź rear window across a crosshatched yard into an Ul Qoman garden for your contact to pick up—that is breach, and Breach will get you, and it would still be Breach if you threw bread or feathers. Steal a nuclear weapon and carry it secretly with you through Copula Hall when you cross but cross that border itself? At that official checkpoint where the cities meet? Many crimes are committed in such an act, but breach is not one of them.

  Smuggling itself is not breach, though most breach is committed in order to smuggle. The smartest dealers, though, make sure to cross correctly, are deeply respectful of the cities’ boundaries and pores, so if they are caught they face only the laws of one or other or both places, not the power of Breach. Perhaps Breach considers the details of those crimes once a breach is committed, all the transgressions in Ul Qoma or Besźel or both, but if so it is only once and because those crimes are functions of breach, the only violation Breach punishes, the existential disrespect of Ul Qoma’s and Besźel’s boundaries.

  The theft of the van and the dumping of the body in Besźel were illegal. The murder in Ul Qoma was horribly so. But what we had assumed was the particular transgressive connection between the events had never taken place. All passage had appeared scrupulously legal, effected through official channels, paperwork in place. Even if the permits were faked, the travel through the borders in Copula Hall made it a question of illegal entry, not of breach. That is a crime you might have in any country. There had been no breach.

  “THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT.”

  I walked back and forth between Gadlem’s desk and the frozen car on-screen, the conveyance of the victim. “This is bullshit. We’ve been screwed.”

  “It is bullshit, he tells me,” Gadlem said to the world. “He tells me we’ve been screwed.”

  “We’ve been screwed, sir. We need Breach. How the hell are we supposed to do this? Someone somewhere is trying to freeze this where it stands.”

  “We’ve been screwed he tells me, and I note he tells me so as if I am disagreeing with him. Which when last I looked I was not doing.”

  “Seriously what …”

  “In fact it could be said I agree with him on a startling scale. Of course we’ve been screwed, Borlú. Stop spinning like a drunk dog. What do you want me to say? Yes, yes, yes this is bullshit; yes someone has done this to us. What would you have me do?”

  “Something! There must be something. We could appeal …”

  “Look, Tyador.” He steepled his fingers. “We are both in accord about what’s happened here. We’re both pissed off that you are still on this case. For different reasons perhaps but—” He waved that away. “But here’s the problem you’re not addressing. While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlú, however they’ve come by the evidence, this is the correct decision.”

  “Have we checked with the border guards?”

  “Yes, and there’s bugger all, but you think they keep records of everyone they wave through? All they needed was to see some vaguely plausible pass. You can’t argue with that.” He waved his hand at the television.

  He was right. I shook my head.

  “As that footage shows,” he said, “the van did not breach, and, therefore, what appeal would we be making? We can’t invoke Breach. Not for this. Nor, frankly, should we.”

  “So what now?”

  “What now is you are continuing this investigation. You started it, finish it.”

  “But it’s…”

  “… in Ul Qoma, yes, I know. You’re going over.”

  “What?”

  “This has become an international investigation. Ul Qoma cops weren’t touching it while it looked like a Breach matter, but now this is their murder investigation, on the what-looks-like convincing evidence that it occurred on their soil. You are going to get to experience the joys of international collaboration. They’ve requested our help. On-site. You’re going to Ul Qoma as the guest of the UQ militsya, where you’ll be consulting with officers from their Murder Team. No one knows the status of the investigation better than you.”

  “This is ridiculous. I can just send them a report…”

  “Borlú, don’t sulk. This has crossed our borders. What’s a report? They need more than a bit of paper. This case has already turned out to be more convoluted than a dancing worm, and you’re the man on it. It needs cooperation. Just go over, talk them through it. See the bloody sights. When they find someone we’re going to want to bring charges against them here, too, for the theft, the body-dumping, and so on. Don’t you know this is an exciting new era of cross-border policing?” It was a slogan from a booklet we had received when last we upgraded our computer equipment.

  “The chance of us finding the killer just dropped hard. We needed Breach.”

  “He tells me. I agree. So go and improve the odds.”

  “How long am I going to be gone for?”

  “Check in every couple of days with me. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s stretching more than a couple of weeks we’ll review—it’s a big enough pain that I’m losing you for those days.”

  “So don’t.” He looked at me sardonically: What’s the choice? “I’d like Corwi to come with me.”

  He made a rude noise. “I’m sure you would. Don’t be stupid.”

  I ran my hands through my hair. “Commissar, I need her help. If anything she knows more about the case than I do. She’s been integral to it from the beginning. If I’m going to take this over the border …”

  “Borlú, you’re not taking anything anywhere; you’re a guest. Of our neighbours. You want to saunter over with your own Watson? Anyone else you’d like me to supply? Masseuse? Actuary? Get this in your head: over there you’re the assistant. Jesus, it’s bad enough that you press-ganged her in the first place. Under what authority, please? Instead of focusing on what you’ve lost, I suggest you remember the good times you had together.”

  “This is—”

  “Yes, yes. Don’t tell me again. You want to know what’s bullshit, Inspector?” He pointed the remote control at me, as if he could stop me or rewind me. “What’s bullshit is a senior officer of the Besźel ECS stopping off, with the subordinate officer he’s quietly commandeered as his personal property, for an unauthorised, unnecessary, and unhelpful confrontation with a group of thugs with friends in high places.”

  “… Right. You heard about that, then. From the lawyer?”

  “What lawyer would you be speaking of? It was representative Syedr who was good enough to call this morning.”

  “Syedr called you himself? Damn. Sorry, sir. I’m surprised. What, was he telling me to leave them alone? I thought part of the deal was that he was never quite open about being connected to TCs. Hence sending for that lawyer, who seemed a tad out of the league of the tough guys.”

  “Borlú, I know only that Syedr had just heard about the previous day’s tête-à-tête and was aghast to hear that he’d been mentioned, phoned in no small spleen to threaten various sanctions against you for slander should his name come up again in any such context, et cetera. I don’t know and don’t want to what led to that particular little investigative cul-de-sac, but you might ask yourself about the parameters of coincidence, Borlú. It was this same morning, only hours after your fabulously fruitful public argument with the patriots, that this footage popped up, and that Breach was called off. And no I have no idea what that might mean either, but it’s an interesting fact, is it not?”

  “DON’T ASK ME, BORLÚ,” Taskin said when I phoned her. “I don’t know. I just found out. I get rumours is all I get. Nyisemu’s not happy about what happened, Buric is livid, Katrinya’s confused, Syedr’s delighted. That’s the whisper. Who leaked what, who’s messing with who, I don’t have anything. I’m sorry.”

  I asked her to keep her ears out. I had a couple of days to prepare. G
adlem had passed on my details to the relevant departments in Besźel and to a counterpart in Ul Qoma who would be my contact. “And answer your damn messages,” he said. My pass and orientation would be organised for me. I went home and looked at clothes, put my old suitcase on my bed, picked up and put down books.

  One of the books was new. I had received it in the mail that morning, having paid extra for expedited shipping. I’d ordered it online from a link on fracturedcity.org.

  My copy of Between the City and the City was old and bruised, intact but with the cover folded back and its pages stained and annotated by at least two hands. I had paid an outrageous price for it despite these deficits because of its illegality in Besźel. It was not much of a risk, having my name on the dealer’s list. It had been easy for me to ascertain that the book’s status was, in Besźel at least, more a mildly embarrassing throwback than due to any ongoing sense of sedition. The majority of illegal books in the city were only vaguely so: sanctions were rarely applied, even the censors rarely cared.

  It was published by a long-gone anarcho-hippy press, though judging by the tone of the opening pages it was far drier than its florid, druggy cover would suggest. The print wobbled rather up and down the pages. There was no index, which made me sigh.

  I lay on the bed and called the two women I saw, told them I was going to Ul Qoma. Biszaya, the journalist, said, “Cool, make sure you go to the Brunai gallery. There’s a Kounellis exhibition. Buy me a postcard.” Sariska the historian, sounded more surprised, and disappointed that I might be gone for I did not know how long.

  “Have you read Between the City and the City?” I said.

  “When I was an undergrad, sure. My cam-cover was The Wealth of Nations.” During the 1960s and ’70s, some banned literature could be bought bound in the stripped covers of legal paperbacks. “What about it?”

  “What did you think?”

  “At the time, that it was amazing, man. Plus that I was unspeakably brave to be reading it. Subsequently that it was ridiculous. Are you finally going through adolescence, Tyador?”