China Mieville

by The City

  Chapter Thirteen

  “WHAT’S IT LIKE, BOSS?” There was a lag on the hotel’s line to Besźel, and Corwi and I were stutteringly trying not to overlap each other.

  “Too early to say. Weird to be here.”

  “You saw her rooms?”

  “Nothing helpful. Just student digs, with a bunch of others in a building leased by the university.”

  “Nothing of hers?”

  “Couple of cheap prints, some books complete with scribbled margin notes, of which none are interesting. A few clothes. A computer which either has really industrial-strength encryption or nothing germane on it. And on that I have to say I trust Ul Qoman geeks more than ours. Lots of Hi Mom love you emails, a few essays. She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”

  “You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”

  “None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.” Perhaps one day we would be finished with I-don’t-understand-the-internet jokes. “On which topic she hadn’t updated her MySpace since moving to Ul Qoma.”

  “So you didn’t figure her all out?”

  “Sadly no, the force was not with me.” It really had been a star-tlingly bland and uninformative room. Yolanda’s, by contrast, a corridor over, into which we had also peered, had been crammed with hipster toys, novels and DVDs, moderately flamboyant shoes. Her computer was gone.

  I had gone carefully through Mahalia’s room, referring often to the photographs of how it had been when the militsya entered, before the books and few bits and pieces had been tagged and processed. The room was cordoned, and officers kept the students away, but when I glanced out of the door over the little pile of wreaths I could see Mahalia’s classmates in knots at either end of the corridor, young women and men with little visitors’ marks discreetly on their clothes. They whispered to each other. I saw more than one weeping.

  We found no notebooks and no diaries. Dhatt had acquiesced to my request for copies of Mahalia’s textbooks, the copious annotations of which appeared to be her preferred study method. They were on my table: whoever had photocopied them had been rushed, and the print and handwriting yawed. As I spoke to Corwi I read a few cramped lines of Mahalia’s telegraphic arguments with herself in A People’s History of Ul Qoma.

  “What’s your contact like?” Corwi said. “Your Ul Qoman me?”

  “Actually I think I’m his you.” The phrase was not best chosen but she laughed.

  “What’s their office like?”

  “Like ours with better stationery. They took my gun.”

  In fact the police station had been rather different from our own. It did have better fittings, but it was large and open-plan, full of whiteboards and cubicles over which neighbouring officers debated and bickered. Though I am sure most of the local militsya must have been informed that I was coming, I left a wake of unabashed curiosity as I followed Dhatt past his own office—he was ranked enough to get a little room—to his boss’s. Colonel Muasi had greeted me boredly with something about what a good sign of the changing relationships between our countries, herald of future cooperation, any help at all I needed, and had made me surrender my weapon. That had not been agreed beforehand, and I had tried to argue it but had given in quickly rather than sour things so early.

  When we had left it had been to another roomful of not-very-friendly stares. “Dhatt,” someone had greeted him in passing, in a pointed way. “Ruffling feathers, am I?” I had asked, and Dhatt had said, “Touchy touchy. You’re Besź, what did you expect?”

  “Fuckers!” said Corwi. “They did not.”

  “No valid Ul Qoman licence, here in advisory role, et cetera.” I went through the bedside cupboard. There was not even a Gideon Bible. I did not know whether that was because Ul Qoma is secular, or because of lobbying by its disestablished but respected Lux Templars.

  “Fuckers. So nothing to report?”

  “I’ll let you know.” I glanced over the list of code phrases we had agreed to, but none of them—I miss Besź dumplings = am in trouble, Working on a theory = know who did it—were remotely germane. “I feel fucking stupid,” she had said as we came up with them. “I agree,” I had said. “I do too. Still.” Still, we could not assume that our communications would not be listened to, by whatever power it was that had outmanoeuvred us in Besźel. Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?

  “Same weather over here as back home,” I said. She laughed. That cliché witticism we had arranged meant nothing to report.

  “What next?” she said.

  “We’re going to Bol Ye’an.”

  “What, now?”

  “No. Sadly. I wanted to go earlier today, but they didn’t get it together and it’s too late now.” After I had showered and eaten, and wandered around the drab little room, wondering if I would recognise a listening device if I saw one, I had called the number Dhatt gave me three times before getting through to him.

  “Tyador,” he had said. “Sorry, did you try to call? Been flat out, got caught tying up some stuff here. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s getting on. I wanted to check about the dig site …”

  “Oh, shit, yeah. Listen, Tyador, it’s not going to happen tonight.”

  “Didn’t you tell people to expect us?”

  “I told them to probably expect us. Look, they’ll be glad to go home, and we’ll go first thing in the morning.”

  “What about What’s-her-name Rodriguez?”

  “I’m still not convinced she’s actually … no, I’m not allowed to say that, am I? I’m not convinced that the fact that she’s missing is suspicious, how’s that? It’s hardly been very long. But if she’s still gone tomorrow, and not answering her email or her messages or anything, then it’s looking worse, I grant you. We’ll get Missing Persons on it.” So …

  “So look. I’m not going to get a chance to come over tonight. Can you …? You’ve got stuff you can do, right? I’m sorry about this. I’m couriering over a bunch of stuff, copies of our notes, and that info you wanted, about Bol Ye’an and the university campuses and all that. Do you have a computer? Can you go online?”

  “… Yeah.” A departmental laptop, a hotel Ethernet connection at ten dinar a night.

  “Alright then. And I’m sure they’ve got video-on-demand. So you won’t be lonely.” He laughed.

  I READ Between the City and the City for a while, but stalled. The combination of textual and historic minutiae and tendentious therefores was wearing. I watched Ul Qoman television. There were more feature films than on Besź TV, it seemed, and more and louder game shows, all a channel-hop or two from newsreaders listing the successes of President Ul Mak and the New Reform packages: visits to China and Turkey, trade missions to Europe, praise from some in the IMF, whatever Washington’s sulk. Ul Qomans were obsessed with economics. Who could blame them?

  “Why not, Corwi?” I took a map and made sure all of my papers, my policzai ID, my passport and my visa were in my inside pocket. I pinned my visitor’s badge to my lapels and went into the cold.

  Now there was the neon. All around me in knots and coils, effacing the weak lights of my far-off home. The animated yammering in Illitan. It was a busier city than Besźel at night: now I could look at the figures at business in the dark that had been unseeable shades until now. I could see the homeless dossing down in side streets, the Ul Qoman rough sleepers that we in Besźel had had to become used to as protubs to pick our unseeing ways over and around.

  I crossed Wahid Bridge, trains passing to my left. I watched the river, that was here the Shach-Ein. Water—does it crosshatch with itself? If I were in Besźel, as these unseen passersby were, I would be looking at the River Colinin. It was quite a way from the Hilton to Bol Ye’an, an hour along Ban Yi Way. Aware that I was crisscrossing Besźel streets I knew well, streets mostly of very different character than their Ul Qoman topolgangers
. I unsaw them but knew that the alleys off Ul Qoma’s Modrass Street were in Besźel only, and that the furtive men entering and emerging from them were customers of the cheapest Besź prostitutes, who if I failed to unsee them I might have made out as miniskirted phantoms in that Besźel darkness. Where were Ul Qoma’s brothels, near what Besźel neighbourhoods? I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passersby we tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintily over fucking couples they assiduously unsaw.

  I considered taking the subway, which I never had (there is nothing like it in Besźel), but it was a good thing to walk. I tested my Illitan on conversations I overheard; I saw the groups of Ul Qomans unsee me because of my clothes and the way I held myself, double-take and see my visitor’s mark, see me. There were groups of young Ul Qomans outside amusement arcades that rang with sound. I looked at, could see, gasrooms, small vertically oriented blimps contained within integuments of girders: once urban crow’s nests to guard against attack, for many decades now architectural nostalgias, kitsch, these days used to dangle advertisements.

  There was a siren I quickly unheard, of a Besź policzai car, that passed. I focused instead on the locals moving quickly and without expression to get out of its way: that was the worst kind of protub. I had marked Bol Ye’an on my street map. Before coming to Ul Qoma I had considered travelling to its topolganger, the physically corresponding area of Besźel, to accidentally glimpse that unseen dig, but I would not risk it. I did not even travel to the edges where the ruins and park trip over tinily into Besźel itself. Unimpressive, people said, like most of our antique sites: the large majority of the great remnants were on Ul Qoman soil.

  Past an old Ul Qoman edifice, though of European style, I—having planned this route—stared down a slope the length of Tyan Ulma Street, heard distantly (across a border, before I thought to un-hear) the bell of a tram crossing the street in Besźel a half mile in front of me in the country of my birth, and I saw filling the plateau at the street’s end under the half-moon the parkland, and ruins of Bol Ye’an.

  Hoardings surrounded them, but I was above and could look down over those walls. An up-down treed and flowered landscape, some parts wilder, some coiffed. At the northern end of the park, where the ruins themselves were, what looked at first like a wasteland, was scrub punctuated with old stones of fallen temples, canvas-covered walkways linking marquees and prefab office buildings in some of which lights were still on. Ground showed the marks of digging: most of the excavation was hidden and protected by tough tents. Lights dotted and shone down at the winter-dying grass. Some were broken, and shed nothing but excess shadow. I saw figures walking. Security guards, keeping safe these forgotten then remembered memories.

  In places the park and the site itself were edged right up to its rubble and boscage by the rear of buildings, most in Ul Qoma (some not) that seemed to jostle up against it, against history. The Bol Ye’an dig had about a year before the exigencies of city growth would smother it: money would breach the chipboard and corrugated iron boundary, and with official expressions of regret and necessity, another (Besźel-punctuated) block of offices would rise in Ul Qoma.

  I traced on my map the proximity and route between Bol Ye’an and the offices of Ul Qoma University used by Prince of Wales Archaeology Department. “Hey.” It was a militsya officer, his hand on the butt of his weapon. He had a partner a pace behind.

  “What are you doing?” They peered at me. “Hey.” The officer at the rear pointed at my visitor’s sign.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m interested in archaeology.”

  “The fuck you are. Who are you?” Finger click for papers. The few unseeing Besź pedestrians crossed without probably being conscious that they did so to the other side of the street. There is little more unsettling than nearby foreign trouble. It was late, but there were some Ul Qomans close enough to hear the exchange, and they did not pretend not to listen. Some stopped to watch.

  “I’m …” I gave them my papers.

  “Tye Adder Borlo.”

  “More or less.”

  “Police?” They stared all confused at me.

  “I’m here assisting the militsya with an international investigation. I suggest you contact Senior Detective Dhatt of the Murder Team”

  “Fuck.” They conferred out of my hearing. One radioed something through. It was too dark to take a shot of Bol Ye’an on my cheap cell phone camera. The smell of some heavy-scented street food reached me. This was increasingly the prime candidate for the smell of Ul Qoma.

  “Alright, Inspector Borlú.” One of them returned my documents.

  “Sorry about that,” his colleague said.

  “It’s quite alright.” They looked annoyed, and waited. “I’m on my way back to the hotel anyway, officers.”

  “We’ll escort you, Inspector.” They would not be deterred.

  When Dhatt came to pick me up the next morning, he said nothing beyond pleasantries when he came into the dining hall to find me trying “Traditional Ul Qoman Tea,” which was flavoured with sweet cream and some unpleasant spice. He asked how the room was. Only when I had finally got into his car and he lurched away from the kerb faster and more violently than even his officer the previous day had done did he say to me finally, “I wish you hadn’t done that last night.”

  THE STAFF AND STUDENTS of the Prince of Wales University Ul Qoman Archaeology program were mostly at Bol Ye’an. I arrived at the site for the second time in less than twelve hours.

  “I didn’t make us appointments,” Dhatt said. “I spoke to Professor Rochambeaux, the head of the project. He knows we’re coming again, but the rest of them I thought we’d take by chance.”

  Unlike for my distance viewing of the night, up close the walls blocked off the site from watchers. Militsya were stationed at points outside, security guards within. Dhatt’s badge got us immediately into the little complex of makeshift offices. I had a list of the staff and students. We went first to Bernard Rochambeaux’s office. He was a wiry man about fifteen years my senior, who spoke Illitan with a strong Quebecois accent.

  “We’re all devastated,” he told us. “I didn’t know the girl, you understand? Only to see in the common room. By reputation.” His office was in a portacabin, folders and books on the temporary shelves, photographs of himself in various dig sites. Outside we heard young people walking past and talking. “Any help we can give you, of course. I don’t know many of the students myself, not well. I have three PhD students at the moment. One is in Canada, the other two being, I think, over there.” He indicated the direction of the main dig. “Them I know.”

  “What about Rodriguez?” He looked at me and signalled confusion. “Yolanda? One of your students? Have you seen her?”

  “She’s not one of my three, Inspector. I’m afraid there’s not much I can tell you. Have we … Is she missing?”

  “She is. What do you know about her?”

  “Oh my God. She’s missing? I don’t know anything about her. Mahalia Geary I knew by reputation of course, but we had literally never exchanged words other than at a welcome-new-students party a few months ago.”

  “A lot longer than that,” Dhatt said. Rochambeaux stared at him.

  “There you go—it’s impossible to keep track of time. Is it really? I can tell you about her all the things you already know. Her supervisor’s the one who can really help you. Have you met Isabelle?”

  He had his secretary print a list of staff and students. I did not tell him we had one already. When Dhatt did not offer it to me I took it. Judging by the names, and in accordance with law, two of the archaeologists detailed were Ul Qoman.

  “He’s got an alibi for Geary,” Dhatt said when we left. “He’s one of the very few who does. Most of them, you know, it was late
in the night, no one can vouch, so alibi-wise at least they’re all fucked. He was on a conference call to a colleague in an uncongenial time zone roundabout the time she was killed. We checked it.”

  We were looking for Isabelle Nancy’s office when someone called my name. A trim man in his early sixties, grey beard, glasses, hurrying between temporary rooms towards us. “Is it Inspector Borlú?” He glanced at Dhatt, but seeing the Ul Qoman insignia looked back at me. “I heard you might be coming. I’m glad to coincide with you. I’m David Bowden.”

  “Professor Bowden.” I shook his hand. “I’m enjoying your book.”

  He was visibly taken aback. He shook his head. “I take it you mean my first one. No one ever means the second one.” He dropped my hand. “That’ll get you arrested, Inspector.” Dhatt was looking at me in surprise.

  “Where’s your office, Professor? I’m Senior Detective Dhatt. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I don’t have one, SD Dhatt. I’m only in here a day a week. And it’s not professor. Plain doctor. Or David is fine.”

  “How long will you be here this morning, Doctor?” I said. “Could we grab a word with you?”

  “I … of course, if you’d like, Inspector, but as I say, I’ve no office. Normally I meet students at my flat.” He gave me a card and when Dhatt raised an eyebrow he gave Dhatt one too. “My number’s on that. I’ll wait around if you’d like; we can probably find a place to talk.”

  “Did you not come in to see us, then?” I said.

  “No, this is chance. I wouldn’t normally be in today at all, but my supervisee didn’t turn up yesterday and I thought I might find her here.”

  “Your supervisee?” Dhatt said.

  “Yes, they only trust me with the one.” He smiled. “Hence no office.”

  “Who is it you’re looking for?”

  “Her name’s Yolanda, SD. Yolanda Rodriguez.”

  He was horrified when we told him that she was unreachable. He stammered for something to say.