The City & the City (11 page)

“Oh,” she said, the woman. She reached out her hand. “Oh yes, you are, you’re Mr. Corwi are you, is that—”

“No, ma’am. I’m Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel ECS.” I shook her hand, her husband’s hand. “This is constable Lizbyet Corwi. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, I, we, are very deeply sorry for your loss.”

The two of them blinked like animals and nodded and opened their mouths but said nothing. Grief made them look stupid. It was cruel.

“May I take you to your hotel?”

“No, thank you, Inspector,” Mr. Geary said. I glanced at Corwi, but she was following what was said, more or less—her comprehension was good. “We’d like to … we’d like to do what it is we’re here for.” Mrs. Geary clutched and unclutched at her bag. “We’d like to see her.”

“Of course. Please.” I led them to the vehicle.

“Are we going to see Professor Nancy?” Mr. Geary asked as Corwi drove us. “And May’s friends?”

“No, Mr. Geary,” I said. “We can’t do that, I’m afraid. They are not in Besźel. They’re in Ul Qoma.”

“You know that, Michael, you know how it works here,” his wife said.

“Yes yes,” he said to me, as if they had been my words. “Yes, I’m sorry, let me … I just want to talk to her friends.”

“It can be arranged, Mr. Geary, Mrs. Geary,” I said. “We’ll see about phone calls. And …” I was thinking about passes through Copula Hall. “We’ll have to get you escorted into Ul Qoma. After we’ve dealt with things here.”

Mrs. Geary looked at her husband. He stared out at the buildup of streets and vehicles around us. Some of the overpasses
we were approaching were in Ul Qoma, but I was certain he wouldn’t forebear staring at them. He would not care even if he knew not to. En route there would be an illicit, breaching, view to a glitzy Ul Qoman Fast Economy Zone full of horrible but big public art.

The Gearys both wore visitors’ marks in Besź colours, but as rare recipients of compassionate-entry stamps they had no tourist training, no appreciation of the local politics of boundaries. They would be insensitive with loss. The dangers of their breaching were high. We needed to protect them from unthinkingly committing acts that would get them deported, at least. Until the handover of the situation to Breach was made official, we were on babysitting duty: we would not leave the Gearys’ sides while they were awake.

Corwi did not look at me. We would have to be careful. Had the Gearys been regular tourists, they would have had to undergo mandatory training and passed the not-unstringent entrance exam, both its theoretical and practical-role-play elements, to qualify for their visas. They would know, at least in outline, key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colours and gestures, obligatory details—and, depending on their Besź teacher, the supposed distinctions in national physiognomies—distinguishing Besźel and Ul Qoma, and their citizens. They would know a little tiny bit (not that we locals knew much more) about Breach. Crucially, they would know enough to avoid obvious breaches of their own.

After a two-week or however-long-it-was course, no one thought visitors would have metabolised the deep prediscursive instinct for our borders that Besź and Ul Qomans have, to have picked up real rudiments of unseeing. But we did insist that they acted as if they had. We, and the authorities of Ul Qoma, expected strict overt decorum, interacting with, and indeed obviously noticing, our crosshatched neighbouring city-state not at all.

While, or as, sanctions for breach are severe (the two cities depend on that), breach must be beyond reasonable doubt. We all suspect that, while we are long-expert in unseeing it, tourists to the Old
Besźel ghetto are surreptitiously noticing Ul Qoma’s glass-fronted Yal Iran Bridge, which in literal topology abuts it. Look up at the ribbon-streaming balloons of Besźel’s Wind-Day parade, they doubtless can’t fail (as we can) to notice the raised teardrop towers of Ul Qoma’s palace district, next to them though a whole country away. So long as they do not point and coo (which is why except in rare exceptions no foreigners under eighteen are granted entry) everyone concerned can indulge the possibility that there is no breach. It is that restraint that the pre-visa training teaches, rather than a local’s rigorous unseeing, and most students have the nous to understand that. We all, Breach included, give the benefit of the doubt to visitors when possible.

In the mirror of the car I saw Mr. Geary watch a passing truck. I unsaw it because it was in Ul Qoma.

His wife and he murmured to each other occasionally—my English or my hearing was not good enough to tell what they said. Mostly they sat in silence, each alone, looking out of windows on either side of the car.

Shukman was not at his laboratory. Perhaps he knew himself and how he would seem to those visiting the dead. I would not want to be met by him in these circumstances. Hamzinic led us to the storage room. Her parents moaned in perfect time as they entered and saw the shape below the sheet. Hamzinic waited with silent respect while they prepared, and when her mother nodded he showed Mahalia’s face. Her parents moaned again. They stared at her, and after long seconds her mother touched her face.

“Oh, oh yes that’s her,” Mr. Geary said. He cried. “That’s her, yes, that’s my daughter,” as if we were asking formal identification of him, which we were not. They had wanted to see her. I nodded as if that were helpful to us and glanced at Hamzinic, who replaced the sheet and made himself busy as we led Mahalia’s parents away.

“
I DO WANT TO
, to
go
to Ul Qoma,” Mr. Geary said. I was used to hearing that little stress on the verb from foreigners: he felt strange
using it. “I’m sorry, I know it’s probably going to be … to be hard to organise but, I want to see, where she …”

“Of course,” I said.

“Of course,” Corwi said. She was keeping up with a reasonable amount of the English, and spoke occasionally. We were eating lunch with the Gearys at the Queen Czezille, a comfortable enough hotel with which the Besź Police had a long-standing arrangement. Its staff were experienced in providing the chaperoning, almost surreptitious imprisonment, that unqualified visitors required.

James Thacker, some middle-ranking twenty-eight-or -nine-year-old at the US embassy, had joined us. He spoke occasionally to Corwi in excellent Besź. The dining room looked out at the northern tip of Hustav Isle. Riverboats went by (in both cities). The Gearys picked at their peppercorned fish.

“We suspected that you might like to visit your daughter’s place of work,” I said. “We’ve been in discussion with Mr. Thacker and his counterparts in Ul Qoma for the paperwork to get you through Copula Hall. A day or two I think is all.” Not an embassy, in Ul Qoma, of course: a sulky US Interests section.

“And … you said that this is, this is for the Breach now?” Mrs. Geary said. “You said it won’t be the Ul Qomans investigating it but it’ll be with this Breach, yes?” She stared at me with tremendous mistrust. “So when do we talk to them?”

I glanced at Thacker. “That will not happen,” I said. “The Breach is not like us.”

Mrs. Geary stared at me. “‘Us’ the … the
policzai
?” she said.

I had meant the “us” to include her. “Well, among other things, yes. It… they aren’t like the police in Besźel or in Ul Qoma.”

“I don’t—”

“Inspector Borlú, I’ll be happy to explain this,” Thacker said. He hesitated. He wanted me to go. Any explanation carried out in my presence would have to be moderately polite: alone with other Americans he could stress to them how ridiculous and difficult these cities were, how sorry he and his colleagues were for the added complications of a crime occurring in Besźel, and so on. He could insinuate.
It was an embarrassment, an antagonism to have to deal with a dissident force like Breach.

“I don’t know how much you know about Breach, Mr. and Mrs. Geary, but it is … it isn’t like other powers. You have some sense of its… capabilities? The Breach is … It has unique powers. And it’s, ah, extremely secretive. We, the embassy, have no contacts with … any representative of Breach. I do realise how strange that must sound, but… I can assure you Breach’s record in the prosecution of criminals is, ah, ferocious. Impressive. We will receive word of its progress and of whatever action it takes against whoever it finds responsible.”

“Does that mean …?” Mr. Geary said. “They have the death penalty here, right?”

“And in Ul Qoma?” his wife said.

“Sure,” Thacker said. “But that’s not really at issue. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, our friends in Besźel and the Ul Qoma authorities are about to invoke
Breach
to deal with your daughter’s murder, so Besź laws and Ul Qoman laws are kind of irrelevant. The, ah, sanctions available to Breach are pretty limitless.”

“Invoke?” said Mrs. Geary.

“There are protocols,” I said. “To be followed. Before Breach’ll manifest to take care of this.”

Mr. Geary: “What about the trial?”

“That will be
in camera,”
I said. “Breach … tribunals,” I had tried out
decisions
and
actions
in my head, “are secret.”

“We won’t testify? We won’t see?” Mr. Geary was aghast. This must all have been explained previously, but you know. Mrs. Geary was shaking her head in anger, but without her husband’s surprise.

“I’m afraid not,” Thacker said. “It is a unique situation here. I can pretty much guarantee you, though, that whoever did this will not only be caught but, be, ah, brought to pretty severe justice.” One could almost pity Mahalia Geary’s killer. I did not.

“But that’s—”

“I know, Mrs. Geary, I’m truly sorry. There are no other posts like this in the service. Ul Qoma and Besźel and Breach … These are unique circumstances.”

“Oh, God. You know, it’s… it’s all, this is all the stuff Mahalia was into,” Mr. Geary said. “The city, the city, the other city. Besźel”
—Bezzel
, he said it—“and Ul Qoma. And or seen it.” I didn’t understand that.

“Or
seen
ee,” Mrs. Geary said. I looked up. “It’s not Orsinnit, it’s Orciny, honey.”

Thacker pouted polite incomprehension and shook his head in question.

“What’s that, Mrs. Geary?” I said. She fiddled with her bag. Corwi quietly took out a notebook.

“This is all this stuff Mahalia was into,” Mrs. Geary said. “It’s what she was studying. She was going to be a doctor of it.” Mr. Geary grimace-smiled, indulgent, proud, bewildered. “She was doing real well. She told us a little bit about it. It sounds like that Orciny was like the Breach.”

“Ever since she first came here,” Mr. Geary said. “This is the stuff she wanted to do.”

“That’s right, she came here first. I mean … here, this, Besźel, right? She came here first, but then she said she needed to go to Ul Qoma. I’m going to be honest with you, Inspector, I thought it was kind of the same place. I know that was wrong. She had to get special permission to go there, but because she’s, was, a student, that’s where she stayed to do all her work.”

“Orciny … it’s a sort of folk tale,” I told Thacker. Mahalia’s mother nodded; her father looked away. “It is not so really like the Breach, Mrs. Geary. Breach is real. A power. But Orciny is …” I hesitated.

“The third city,” Corwi said in Besź to Thacker, who still furrowed his face. When he showed no comprehension, she said, “A secret. Fairy tale. Between the other two.” He shook his head and looked, uninterestedly,
Oh
.

“She loved this place,” Mrs. Geary said. She looked longing. “I mean, sorry, I mean Ul Qoma. Are we near where she lived?” Crudely physically, grosstopically, to use the term unique to Besźel and Ul Qoma, unnecessary anywhere else, yes we were. Neither Corwi nor I answered, as it was a complicated question. “She’d been
studying it all for years, since she first read some book about the cities. Her professors always seemed to think she was doing excellent in her work.”

“Did you like her professors?” I said.

“Oh, I never met them. But she showed me some of what they were doing; she showed me a website for the program, and the place she worked.”

“This is Professor Nancy?”

“That was her advisor, yes. Mahalia liked her.”

“They worked well together?” Corwi was watching me as I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mrs. Geary even laughed. “Mahalia seemed to argue with her all the time. Seemed they didn’t agree on much, but when I said, ‘Well how does
that
work?’ she told me it was okay. She said they liked disagreeing. Mahalia said she learned more that way.”

“Did you keep up with your daughter’s work?” I said. “Read her essays? She told you about her Ul Qoman friends?” Corwi moved in her seat. Mrs. Geary shook her head.

“Oh no,” she said.

“Inspector,” said Thacker.

“The stuff she did just wasn’t the sort of thing that I could … that I was real interested in, Mr. Borlú. I mean since she’d been over here, sure, stories in the paper about Ul Qoma would catch our eye a bit more than they had before, and sure I’d read them. But so long as Mahalia was happy, I … we were happy. Happy for her to get on with her thing, you know.”

“Inspector, when do you think we might be receiving the Ul Qoma transfer papers?” Thacker said.

“Soon, I think. And she was? Happy?”

“Oh, I think she …” Mrs. Geary said. “There were always dramas, you know.”

“Yeah,” her father said.

“Now,” said Mrs. Geary.

“Oh?” I said.

“Well now it wasn’t … only she’d been kind of stressed recently, you know. I told her she needed to come home for a vacation—I
know, coming home hardly sounds like a vacation, but you know. But she said she was making real progress, like making a breakthrough in her work.”

“And some people were pissed about that,” Mr. Geary said.

“Honey.”

“They were. She told us.”

Corwi looked at me, confused. “Mr. and Mrs. Geary …” While Thacker said that, I explained quickly to Corwi in Besź, “Not ‘pissed’ drunk. They’re American—‘angry.’ Who was pissed?” I asked them. “Her professors?”

“No,” Mr. Geary said. “Goddammit, who do you think did this?”

“John, please, please …”