The City & the City (22 page)

“Open!” Dhatt slammed on the door. “This is the unif hangout,” he said to me. “They’re constantly on the phone to your lot in Besźel—that’s kind of their
deal
, right?”

“What’s their status?”

“You’re about to hear them say they’re just a group of friends meeting for a chat. No membership cards or anything, they’re not stupid. Shouldn’t take a fucking bloodhound for us to track down some contraband, but that’s not really what I’m here for.”

“What are we here for?” I looked around at decrepit Ul Qoman facades, Illitan graffiti demanding that so-and-so fuck off and informing that such-and-such person sucked cock. Breach must be watching.

He looked at me levelly. “Whoever made that phone call to you did it from here. Or frequents this place. Pretty much guarantee it. Want to find out what our seditionist pals know.
Open.”
That to the door. “Don’t be fooled by their whole
who us?
thing; they’re perfectly happy to smack shit out of anyone quote working against unification unfuckingquote.
Open.”

The door obeyed this time, a crack onto a small young woman, the sides of her head shaved, showing tattooed fish and a few letters in a very old alphabet.

“Who …? What do you want?”

Perhaps they had sent her to the door hoping her size would shame anyone out of what Dhatt did next, which was to shove the door hard enough to send her stumbling backwards into the grotty hallways.

“Everyone here now,” he shouted, striding through the corridor, past the dishevelled punkess.

After confused moments when the thought of attempting to get out must have crossed their minds and been overruled, the five people
in the house gathered in their kitchen, sat on the unstable chairs where Dhatt put them, and did not look at us. Dhatt stood at the head of the table and leaned over them.

“Right,” he said. “Here it is. Someone made a phone call that my esteemed colleague here is keen to recall, and we’re keen to find out who it was who was so helpful on the phone. I won’t waste your time by pretending I think any of you are going to admit it, so instead we’re going to go round the table and each of you is going to say, ‘Inspector, I have something to tell you.’” They stared at him. He grinned and waved them begin. They did not, and he cuffed the man nearest him, to the cries of his companions, the man’s own shout of pain and a noise of surprise from me. When the man looked slowly up his forehead was stained with incoming bruise.

“‘Inspector, I have something to tell you,’” Dhatt said. “We’re just going to have to keep going till we get our man. Or woman.” He glanced at me; he had forgotten to check. “That’s the thing with cops.” He got ready for a backwards swipe across the same man’s face. I shook my head and raised my hands a bit, and the unificationists gathered around the table made various moans. The man Dhatt threatened tried to rise but Dhatt grabbed his shoulder with his other hand and shoved him back into the chair.

“Yohan, just say it!” the punk girl shouted.

“Inspector, I’ve got something to tell you.”

Around the table it went. “Inspector, I have something to tell you.” “Inspector, I have something to tell you.”

One of the men spoke slowly enough, at first, that it might have been a provocation, but Dhatt raised an eyebrow at him and slapped his friend yet again. Not as hard, but this time blood came.

“Holy fucking Light!”

I dithered by the door. Dhatt made them all say it again, and their names.

“Well?” he said to me.

It had been neither of the two women, of course. Of the men, one’s voice was reedy and his Illitan accent, I presumed, from a part of the city I didn’t recognise. It could have been either of the other two. One in particular—the younger, named, he told us, Dahar
Jaris, not the man Dhatt menaced, but a boy in a battered denim jacket with NoMeansNo written on the back in English print that made me suspect it was the name of a band, not a slogan—had a voice that was familiar. Had I heard him say exactly the words my interlocutor had used, or had I heard him speak in the same long-dead form of language, it might have been easier to be sure. Dhatt saw me looking at him and pointed questioningly. I shook my head.

“Say it again,” Dhatt said to him.

“No,” I said, but Jaris was gabbling pointlessly through the phrase. “Anyone speak old Illitan or Besź? Root-form stuff?” I said. They looked at each other. “I know, I know,” I said. “There’s no Illitan, no Besź, and so on. Do any of you speak it?”

“All of us,” said the older man. He did not wipe the blood from his lip. “We live in the city and it’s the language of the city.”

“Careful,” said Dhatt. “I could charge you on that. It’s this one, right?” He pointed at Jaris again.

“Leave it,” I said.

“Who knew Mahalia Geary?” Dhatt said. “Byela Mar?”

“Marya,” I said. “Something.” Dhatt fished in his pocket for her photograph. “But it’s none of them,” I said. I was in the door frame, and moving out of the room. “Leave it. It’s no one. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

He approached me close, looking quizzical. “Hmm?” he whispered. I shook my head minutely. “Fill me in, Tyador.”

Eventually he pursed his lips and turned back to the unificationists. “Stay careful,” he said. He left and they stared after him, five faces frightened and bewildered, one of them bloody and dripping. My own was set, I suspect, from the effort of not showing anything.

“You’ve got me confused, Borlú.” He drove much more slowly than we had come on the return. “I can’t work out what just happened. You backed away from that, and it was our best lead. The only thing that makes sense is that you’re worried about complicity. Because sure, if you got a call and went with it, if you took them up on that information, then yeah that’s breach. But no one’s going to give a shit about you, Borlú. It’s a little tiny breach, and you know as well as I do that they’ll let that go if we sort out something bigger.”

“I don’t know how it is in Ul Qoma,” I said. “In Besźel breach is breach.”

“Bullshit. What does that even mean? Is that what this is? That’s it?” He slowed behind a Besź tram; we rocked over the foreign rails in the crosshatched road. “Fuck, Tyador, we can sort it out; we can come up with something, no problem, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“That’s not it.”

“I fucking hope that’s it. I really do. What else is your beef? Listen, you wouldn’t have to incriminate yourself or anything—”

“That’s not it. None of those were the ones that made the phone call. I don’t know for sure the phone call was even from abroad. From here. I don’t know anything for sure. Could have been a crank call.”

“Right.” When he dropped me at the hotel he did not get out. “I’ve got paperwork,” he said. “I’m sure you do too. Take a couple of hours. We should talk to Professor Nancy again, and I want to have another word with Bowden. Does that meet with your approval? If we drove there and asked a few questions, would those methods be acceptable?”

After a couple of tries I got Corwi. At first we tried to stick to our stupid code, but it did not last.

“I’m sorry boss, I’m not bad at this shit, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to snag Dhatt’s personnel files from the
militsya
. You’ll cause a sodding international incident. What do you want, anyway?”

“I just want to know what his story is.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Who knows? They’re old-school here.”

“Yeah?”

“Robust interrogations.”

“I’ll tell Naustin, he’ll love it, get an exchange. You sound rattled, boss.”

“Just do me a favour and see if you can get anything, okay?” When I had rung off I picked up
Between the City and the City
and put it down again.

Chapter Fifteen

“
STILL NO LUCK WITH THE VAN
?” I said.

“Not pitching up on any cameras we can find,” Dhatt said. “No witnesses. Once it’s through Copula Hall from your side it’s mist.” We both knew that with its make and its Besź number plates, anyone in Ul Qoma who glimpsed it would likely have thought it elsewhere and quickly unseen it, without noticing its pass.

When Dhatt showed me on the map how close Bowden’s flat was to a station, I suggested we go by public transport. I had travelled on the Paris and Moscow Metros and the London Tube. The Ul Qoma transit used to be more brutalist than any—efficient and to a certain taste impressive, but pretty unrelenting in its concrete. Something over a decade ago it was renewed, at least all those stations in its inner zones. Each was given to a different artist or designer, who were told, with exaggeration but not as much as you might think, that money was no object.

The results were incoherent, sometimes splendid, variegated to a giddying extent. The nearest stop to my hotel was a camp mimicry of Nouveau. The trains were clean and fast and full and on some lines, on this line, driverless. Ul Yir Station, a few turns from the pleasant, uninteresting neighbourhood where Bowden lived, was a patchwork of Constructivist lines and Kandinsky colours. It was, in fact, by a Besź artist.

“Bowden knows we’re coming?”

Dhatt lifted a hand for me to wait. We had ascended to street level and he had his cell to his ear, was listening to a message.

“Yeah,” he said after a minute, shutting the phone. “He’s waiting for us.”

David Bowden lived in a second-floor apartment, in a skinny building, giving him the whole storey to himself. He had crammed it with art objects, remnants, antiquities from the two cities and, to my ignorant eye, their precursor. Above him, he told us, was a nurse and her son: below him a doctor, originally from Bangladesh, who had lived in Ul Qoma even longer than he had.

“Two expats in one building.” I said.

“It’s not exactly a coincidence,” he said. “Used to be, before she passed away, that upstairs was an ex-Panther.” We stared. “A Black Panther, made it out after Fred Hampton was killed. China, Cuba and Ul Qoma were the destinations of choice. When I moved here, when your government liaison officer told you an apartment had come up, you took it, and blow me if all the buildings we were housed in weren’t full of foreigners. Well, we could moan together about whatever it was we missed from home. Have you heard of Marmite? No? Then you’ve obviously never met a British spy in exile.” He poured me and Dhatt, unbidden, glasses of red wine. We spoke in Illitan. “This was years ago, you understand. Ul Qoma didn’t have a pot to piss in. It had to think about efficiencies. There was always one Ul Qoman living in each of these buildings. Much easier for a single person to keep an eye on several foreign visitors if they were all in one place.”

Dhatt met his eye.
Fuck off, these truths don’t intimidate me
, his expression said. Bowden smiled a little bashfully.

“Wasn’t it a bit insulting?” I said. “Honoured visitors, sympaticos being watched like that?”

“Might have been for some of them,” Bowden said. “The Philbys of Ul Qoma, the real fellow travellers, were probably rather put out. But then they’d also be the ones most likely to put up with anything. I never particularly objected to being watched. They were right not to trust me.” He sipped his drink. “How are you getting on with
Between
, Inspector?”

His walls were painted beiges and browns in need of renovation, and busy with bookshelves and books and the folk art in Ul Qoman and Besź styles, antique maps of both cities. On surfaces were figurines and the remnants of pottery, tiny clockwork-looking things. The living room was not large, and so full of bits and pieces it was cramped.

“You were here when Mahalia was killed,” Dhatt said.

“I have no alibi, if that’s what you mean. My neighbour might have heard me puttering about, ask her, but I don’t know.”

“How long have you lived here?” I said. Dhatt pursed his lips without looking at me.

“God, years.”

“And why here?”

“I don’t understand.”

“So far as I can tell you have at least as much Besź stuff as local.” I pointed at one of the many old or reproduction Besź icons. “Is there a particular reason you ended up here rather than Besźel? Or anywhere else?”

Bowden turned his hands so that his palms faced the ceiling.

“I’m an archaeologist. I don’t know how much you know about this stuff. Most of the artefacts that are worth looking at, including the ones that look to us now like they were made by Besź craftsmen, are in Ul Qoman soil. That’s just how it’s always been. The situation was never helped by Besźel’s idiotic willingness to sell what little heritage it could dig up to whoever wanted it. Ul Qoma’s always been smarter about that.”

“Even a dig like Bol Ye’an?”

“You mean under foreign direction? Sure. The Canadians don’t technically own any of it; they just have some handling and cataloguing rights. Plus the kudos they get from writing up, and a warm glow. And dibs on museum tours, of course. The Canadians are happy as Larry about the US blockade, believe me. Want to see a very vivid green? Tell an American archaeologist you work in Ul Qoma. Have you seen Ul Qoma’s laws on antiquities export?” He closed his hands, fingers interlocking like a trap. “Everyone who wants to work on Ul Qoma, or Besźel, let alone if they’re into Precursor Age, ends up here if they can get here.”

“Mahalia was an American archaeologist…” Dhatt said.

“Student,” Bowden said. “When she finished her PhD she’d have had a harder time staying.”

I was standing, glancing into his study. “Could I …?” I indicated in.

“I … sure.” He was embarrassed at the tiny space. It was if anything even more cramped with the tat of antiquity than his living room. His desk was its own archaeology of papers, computer cables, a street-finder map of Ul Qoma, battered and several years old. Amid the mess of papers were some in a strange and very ancient script, neither Illitan nor Besź, pre-Cleaved. I could not read any of it.

“What’s this?”

“Oh …” He rolled his eyes. “It arrived yesterday morning. I still get crank mail. Since
Between
. Stuff that people put together and say is in the script of Orciny. I’m supposed to
decode
it for them. Maybe the poor sods really believe it’s something.”