by The City
“When did you last see her?”
“I don’t know. A few days before she … before. Listen, Borlú, this is what you need to know. She knew she was in trouble. She got really angry and upset when I said something about Orciny. The last time. She said I didn’t understand anything. She said something like she didn’t know if what she was doing was restitution or criminal.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. She said Breach was nothing. I was shocked. Can you imagine? She said everyone who knew the truth about Orciny was in danger. She said there weren’t many but anyone that did wouldn’t even know how much shit they were in, wouldn’t believe it. I said ‘Even me?’ she said ‘Maybe, I maybe already told you too much.’”
“What do you think it means?”
“What do you know about Orciny, Borlú? Why the fuck would anyone think Orciny was safe to fuck with? How d’you think you stay hidden for centuries? By playing nice? Light! I think somehow she got mixed up working for Orciny, is what I think happened, and I think they’re like parasites, and they told her she was helping them but she found something out, and when she realised they killed her.” He gathered himself. “She carried a knife at the end, for protection. From Orciny.” A miserable laugh. “They killed her, Borlú. And they’re going to kill everyone who might trouble them. Everyone who’s ever brought attention to them.”
“What about you?”
“I’m fucked, is what. She’s gone, so I’m gone too. Ul Qoma can go fuck itself and so can Besźel and so can Or-fucking-ciny. This is my good-bye. Can you hear the sound of wheels? In a minute this phone is going out the fucking window when we’re done and say-onara. This call’s a good-bye present, for her sake.”
By the last words he was whispering. When I realised he had rung off I tried to call him back but his number was blocked.
***
I RUBBED MY EYES for long seconds, too long. I scribbled notes on the hotel-headed paper, nothing I would ever look at again, just trying to organise thoughts. I listed people. I saw the clock and did a time-zone calculation. I dialled a long-distance number on the hotel phone.
“Mrs. Geary?”
“Who is this?”
“Mrs. Geary, this is Tyador Borlú. Of the Besźel police.” She said nothing. “We … May I ask how Mr. Geary is?” I walked barefoot to the window.
“He’s alright,” she said finally. “Angry.” She was very careful. She could not decide about me. I pulled the heavy curtains back a little, looked out. No matter that it was the small hours, there were a few figures visible in the street, as there always are. Now and then a car passed. So late, it was harder to tell who was local and who foreign and so unseeable in the day: the colours of clothes were obscured by streetlamp light and the huddled quick night-walking blurred body language.
“I wanted to say again how sorry I was about what happened and to make sure you were alright.”
“Have you got anything to tell me?”
“You mean have we caught who did this to your daughter? I’m sorry, Mrs. Geary, we have not. But I wanted to ask you …” I waited, but she did not hang up, nor say anything. “Did Mahalia ever tell you she was seeing anyone here?”
She only made some sound. When I had waited several seconds I continued. “Do you know Yolanda Rodriguez? And why was it the Besź nationalists Mr. Geary was looking for? When he breached. Mahalia lived in Ul Qoma.”
She made the sound and I realised that she was crying. I opened my mouth but could only listen to her. Too late as I woke up more I realised that I should perhaps have called from another phone, if my and Corwi’s suspicions were right. Mrs. Geary did not break the connection, so after a little while I said her name.
“Why are you asking me about Yolanda?” she said finally. She had pulled her voice together. “Of course I met her, she’s Mahalia’s friend. Is she …?”
“We’re just trying to get hold of her. But…”
“Oh my God, is she missing? Mahalia confided in her. Is that why …? Is she …?”
“Please don’t, Mrs. Geary. I promise you there’s no evidence of anything untoward; she may have just taken a few days away. Please.” She started again but controlled herself.
“They hardly spoke to us on that flight,” she said. “My husband woke up near the end and realised what had happened.”
I said, “Mrs. Geary, was Mahalia involved with anyone here? That you know of? In Ul Qoma, I mean?”
“No.” She sighed it. “You’re thinking ‘How would her mother know?’ but I would. She didn’t tell me details, but she …” She gathered herself. “There was someone who hung around with her, but she didn’t like him that way. Said it was too complicated.”
“What was his name?”
“Don’t you think I’d have told you? I don’t know. She met him through politics, I think.”
“You mentioned Qoma First.”
“Oh, my girl made them all mad.” She laughed a bit. “She got people sore on all sides of it. And even the unifiers, is that what they are? Michael was going to check them all. It was easier to find names and addresses for Besźel. That’s where we were. He was going to check them all out, one at a time. He wanted to find them all, because … one of them did this.”
I promised her all the things she wanted me to, rubbing my forehead and staring at Ul Qoma’s silhouettes.
Not later enough, I was woken by Dhatt’s phone call.
“Are you still in fucking bed? Get up.”
“How long before you …” It was morning, not that early.
“I’m downstairs. Hurry up, come on. Someone sent a bomb.”
Chapter Seventeen
IN BOL YE’AN men of the Ul Qoma bomb squad lounged outside the tiny ersatz postroom, talking to several awed security guards, chewing, squat in their protective clothes. The squad wore their visors up, angling from their foreheads.
“You Dhatt? It’s cool, SD,” one said, glancing at Dhatt’s insignia. “You can go in.” He eyed me and opened the door onto the cupboard-sized room.
“Who caught it?” Dhatt said.
“One of the security boys. Sharp. Aikam Tsueh. What? What?” Neither of us said anything, so he shrugged. “Said he didn’t like how it felt; he went out to the militsya outside, asked them to take a look at it.”
Pigeonholes covered the walls, and large brown parcels, opened and unopened, lay in corners and plastic bins, on tabletops. Displayed on a stool in the centre, surrounded by ripped envelope and fallen letters trodden with footprints, was a package splayed, electronic innards jutting like wire stamens from a flower.
“This is the mechanism,” the man said. I read the Illitan on his Kevlar: his name was Tairo. He spoke to Dhatt, not me, pointing with a little laser pen, red-dotting what he referred to. “Two layers of envelope.” Scribbling with the light all over the paper. “Open the first one, nothing. Inside’s another one. Open that…” Clicked his fingers. Indicating the wires. “Nicely done. Classic.”
“Old-fashioned?”
“Nah, just nothing fancy. But nicely done. Not just son et lumiere either—this wasn’t made to scare someone, it was made to fuck someone up. And I tell you what also. See this? Very directed. It’s linked up with the tag.” The remnants of it visible in the paper, a red strip on the inner envelope, printed in Besź Pull here to open. “Whoever does is going to get a faceful of bang and fall down. But short of pretty bad luck, anyone standing next to them’s only going to need a new hairdo. The blast is directed.”
“It’s defused?” I asked Tairo. “Can I touch it?” He did not look at me but at Dhatt, who nodded him to answer.
“Fingerprints,” Tairo said, but shrugged. I took a ballpoint from one of the shelves and took out its cartridge, not to mark anything. I prodded gently at the paper, smoothing down the inner envelope. Even scored open by the defusers, it was easy to read the name written on it: David Bowden.
“Check this,” Tairo said. He rummaged gently. Below the p
arcel on the inside of the outer envelope, someone had scribbled, in Illitan, The heart of a wolf. I recognised the line but could not place it. Tairo sang it and grinned.
“It’s an old motherland song,” Dhatt said.
“It wasn’t a scare and it wasn’t for generalised mayhem either,” Dhatt said to me quietly. We sat in the office we had commandeered. Opposite us, trying politely to avoid eavesdropping, Aikam Tsueh. “That was a kill-shot. What the fuck?”
“With Illitan written on it, sent from Besźel,” I said.
Dusting didn’t turn anything up. Both envelopes had been scrawled on, the address on the outer and Bowden’s name on the inner in a chaotic script. The package was sent from Besźel from a post office that was grosstopically not far from the dig itself, though of course the package would have been imported a long way round through Copula Hall.
“We’ll get the techs on it,” Dhatt said. “See if we can trace it backwards, but we’ve got nothing to point to anyone. Maybe your lot’ll turn something up.” The chances were low to nil we could reconstruct its journey backwards through both the Ul Qoman and Besź postal services.
“Listen.” I made sure Aikam could not hear. “We know Mahalia had pissed off some hardcore nats back home. I get it, such organisations cannot possibly exist in Ul Qoma, of course, but if by some inadvertent glitch any of them are out here too, the chances are reasonable that she might have pissed them off too, no? She was mixed up in stuff that could have been designed to annoy them. You know, undermining the power of Ul Qoma, secret groups, porous boundaries, all that. You know.”
He watched me without expression. “Right,” he said eventually.
“Two out of two students with special interests in Orciny are out of the picture. And now we’ve got a bomb to Mr. Between Cities.”
We looked at each other.
After a moment, louder now, I said, “Well done, Aikam. That was really something that you did.”
“Have you held a bomb before, Aikam?” Dhatt said.
“Sir? No.”
“Not in national service?”
“I haven’t done mine yet, Officer.”
“So how do you know what a bomb feels like?”
Shrug. “I didn’t, I don’t, I just… It was wrong. Too heavy.”
“I bet this place gets a lot of books in the mail,” I said. “Maybe computer stuff too. They’re pretty heavy. How did you know this was different?”
“… Different heavy. It was harder. Under the envelopes. You could tell it wasn’t paper, it was like metal or something.”
“Matter of fact is it even your job to be checking mail?” I said.
“No, but I was in there, just because. I was thinking that I could bring it out. I wanted to, and then I felt that one and it was … there was something about it.”
“You have good instincts.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you think about opening it?”
“No! It wasn’t to me.”
“Who was it to?”
“It wasn’t to anyone.” That outer envelope had named no recipient, only the dig. “That’s another reason, that’s why I looked at it, maybe, because I thought that was weird.”
We conferred. “Okay, Aikam,” Dhatt said. “You gave your address to the other officer, in case we need to get hold of you again? When you go out would you send in your boss and Professor Nancy, please?”
He hesitated in the doorway. “Do you have any information about Geary yet? Do you know what happened yet? Who killed her?” We told him no.
Kai Buidze, the chief guard, a muscular fifty-year-old, ex-army I’d guess, came in with Isabelle Nancy. She, not Rochambeaux, had offered her help in any way she could. She was rubbing her eyes. “Where’s Bowden?” I said to Dhatt. “Does he know?”
“She called him when the bomb squad opened the outer envelope and there was his name.” He nodded at Nancy. “She heard one of them reading it out. Someone’s gone to get him. Professor Nancy.” She looked up. “Does Bowden get a lot of mail here?”
“Not so much. He doesn’t even have an office. But a bit. Quite a lot from foreigners, a few from prospective students, people who don’t know where he lives or who assume he’s based here.”
“Do you send it on?”
“No, he comes in to check it every few days. Throws most of it away.”
“Someone’s really …” I said quietly to Dhatt. Hesitated. “Trying to outrun us, know what we’re doing.” With everything that was happening, Bowden might be wary now of any packages to his home. With the outer envelope and its foreign postmark discarded, he might even have thought something with only his name written on it an internal communication, something from one of his colleagues, and torn the strip. “Like someone knew he’d been warned to be careful.” After a moment I said, “They’re bringing him in?” Dhatt nodded.
“Mr. Buidze,” Dhatt said. “You had any trouble like this before?”
“Not like this. Sure, we get, you know, we had some letters from fuckups. Excuse me.” A glance at an unruffled Nancy. “But you know, we get warnings from Leave-the-Past-Alone types, people who say we’re betraying Ul Qoma, all that shit, UFO watchers and junkies. But an actual … but this? A bomb?” He shook his head.
“That’s not true,” Nancy said. We stared at her. “This happened before. Not here. But to him. Bowden’s been targeted before.”
“Who by?” I said.
“They never proved anything, but he got a lot of people angry when his book came out. The right. People who thought he was disrespectful.”
“Nats,” Dhatt said.
“I don’t even remember which city it was from. Both lots had it in for him. Probably the only thing they agreed on. But this was years ago.”
“Someone’s remembered him,” I said. Dhatt and I stared at each other and he pulled me aside.
“From Besźel,” he said. “With a little Illitan fuck-you on it.” He threw up his hands: Any ideas?
“What’s the name of those people?” I said after a silence. “Qoma First.”
He stared. “What? Qoma First?” he said. “It came from Besźel.”
“Maybe a contact there.”
“A spy? A nat Qoman in Besźel?”
“Sure. Don’t look like that—it’s not so hard to believe. They’d send it from over there to cover their tracks.”
Dhatt wagged his head noncommittally. “Okay …” he said. “Still a hell of a thing to organize, and you’re not—”
“They never liked Bowden. Maybe they figure if he’s got wind that they’re after him he might have alarm bells, but not with a package from Besźel,” I said.
“I get the idea,” he said.
“Where’s Qoma First hang out?” I said. “That’s what they’re called, right? Maybe we should visit—”
“That’s what I keep trying to tell you,” he said. “There’s nowhere to go. There is no ‘Qoma First,’ not like that. I don’t know how it is in Besźel, but here …”
“In Besźel I know exactly where our own versions of these characters hang out. Me and my constable went round there recently.”
“Well congratulations but it doesn’t work that way here. There’s not like a fucking gang with little membership cards and a house they all live in; they’re not unifs and they’re not The Monkees.”
“You’re not saying you’ve got no ultranationalists …”
“Right, I’m not saying that, we’ve got plenty, but I’m saying I don’t know who they are or where they live, very sensibly they keep it that way, and I’m saying Qoma First’s just a term some press guy came up with.”
“How come the unificationists congregate but this lot don’t? Or can’t?”
“Because the unifs are clowns. Dangerous clowns sometimes, alright, but still. The sort of people you’re talking about now are serious. Old soldiers, that sort of thing. I mean you got to … respect that…”
No wonder they could not be allowed to gather visibly. Thei
r hard nationalism might rebuke the People’s National Party on its own terms, which the rulers would not permit. The unifs, by contrast, were free or free-ish to unite the locals in loathing.
“What can you tell us about him?” Dhatt said, raising his voice to the others who watched us.
“Aikam?” Buidze said. “Nothing. Good worker. Dumb as a brick. Okay look, I’d have said that until today, but given what he just did, scratch that. Not nearly as tough as he looks. All pecs and no teeth, that one. Likes the kids, makes him feel good to hobnob with clever foreigners. Why? Tell me you’re not eye-balling him, SD. That parcel came from Besźel. How the hell would he—”
“Absolutely it did,” Dhatt said. “No one here’s accusing anyone, least of all the hero of the hour. Standard questions.”
“Tsueh got on with the students, you said?” Unlike Tairo, Buidze did not look for permission to answer me. He met my eye and nodded. “Anyone in particular? Good friends with Mahalia Geary?”
“Geary? Hell no. Geary probably never even knew his name. Rest her.” He made the Sign of Long Sleep with his hand. “Aikam’s friends with some of them, but not Geary. He hangs out with Jacobs, Smith, Rodriguez, Browning …”
“Just that he asked us—”
“He was very keen to know about any leads in the Geary case,” Dhatt said.
“Yeah?” Buidze shrugged. “Well that got everyone really upset. Of course he wants to know about it.”
“I’m wondering …” I said. “This is a complicated site, and I notice that even though it’s mostly total, there’s a couple of places where it crosshatches a bit. And that’s got to be a nightmare to watch. Mr. Buidze, when we spoke to the students, not a single one of them mentioned Breach. At all. Didn’t bring it up. A group of foreign kids? You know how much foreigners are obsessed with that stuff. One of their friends is disappeared and they’re not even mentioning the most notorious bogeyman of Ul Qoma and Besźel, which is even real, and they don’t mention it? Which couldn’t help but make us wonder what are they afraid of?”
