The City & the City (20 page)

“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.

“She’s gone? After what happened to Mahalia, now Yolanda? Oh my God, Officers, do you—”

“We’re looking into it,” Dhatt said. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Bowden looked stricken. We had similar reactions from his colleagues. One by one we went through the four academics we could find on-site, including Thau’ti, the senior of the two Ul Qomans, a young taciturn man. Only Isabelle Nancy, a tall well-dressed woman with two pairs of glasses of different prescriptions on chains around her neck, was aware that Yolanda had disappeared.

“It’s good to meet you, Inspector, Senior Detective.” She shook our hands. I had read her statement. She claimed she had been at home when Mahalia was murdered but could not prove it. “Anything I can do to help,” she kept saying.

“Tell us about Mahalia. I get the sense she was well-known here, if not by your boss.”

“Not so much anymore,” Nancy said. “At one point maybe. Did Rochambeaux say he didn’t know her? That’s a bit… disingenuous. She’d ruffled some feathers.”

“At the conference,” I said. “Back in Besźel.”

“That’s right. Down south. He was there. Most of us were. I was, David, Marcus, Asina. Anyway she’d been raising eyebrows at more than one session, asking questions about
dissensi
, about Breach, that sort of thing. Nothing explicitly illegitimate, but a bit
vulgar
, you could say, the sort of thing you’d expect from Hollywood or something, not the nuts-and-bolts stuff of Ul Qoman or pre-Cleavage or even Besź research. You could see the bigwigs who’d come along to open proceedings and dedicate ceremonies and whatnot were getting a bit leery. Then finally she out and starts raving about Orciny.
So David’s mortified, of course; the university’s embarrassed; she nearly gets chucked out—there were some Besź representatives there who made a big hoo-ha about it.”

“But she didn’t?” Dhatt said.

“I think people decided she was young. But someone must have given her a talking-to, because she simmered down. I remember thinking the Ul Qoman opposite numbers, some of whom had also turned up, must be pretty sympathetic to the Besź reps who were so put out. When I found out she was coming back for a PhD with us I was surprised she’d been allowed in, with dubious opinions like that, but she’d grown out of it. I’ve already made a statement about all this. But tell me, do you have any idea what’s happened to Yolanda?”

Dhatt and I looked at each other. “We’re not even sure anything’s happened to her at all,” Dhatt said. “We’re checking into it.”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said again and again. “But I normally see her around, and it’s a good few days now, I think. That’s what makes me … I think I mentioned that Mahalia disappeared a bit before she was … found.”

“She and Mahalia knew each other?” I said.

“They were best friends.”

“Anyone who might know anything?”

“She’s seeing a local boy. Yolanda, I mean. That’s the rumour. But who it was I couldn’t tell you.”

“Is that allowed?” I asked.

“These are adults, Inspector, SD Dhatt. Young adults, yes, but we can’t stop them. We, ah, make them aware of the dangers and difficulties of life, let alone love, in Ul Qoma, but what they do while they’re here …” She shrugged.

Dhatt tapped a foot when I spoke to her. “I’d like to speak to them,” he said.

Some were reading articles in the tiny make-do library. Several, when finally Nancy escorted us to the site of the main dig itself, stood, sat and worked in that deep, straight-edged hole. They looked up from below striae discernable in shades of earth. That line of dark—the residue of an ancient fire? What was that white?

At the edges of the big marquee was wild-looking scrubland, thistled
and weedy between a litter of broken-off architecture. The dig was almost the size of a soccer pitch, subdivided by its matrix of string. Its base was variously depthed, flat-bottomed. Its floor of compacted earth was broken by inorganic shapes, strange breaching fish: shattered jars, crude and uncrude statuettes, verdigris-clogged machines. The students looked up from the section they were in, each at various careful depths, through various cord borders, clutching pointed trowels and soft brushes. A couple of the boys and one girl were Goths, much rarer in Ul Qoma than in Besźel or in their own homes. They must have got a lot of attention. They smiled at Dhatt and me sweetly from beneath eyeliner and the muck of centuries.

“Here you see,” Nancy said. We stood a way from the excavations. I looked down at the many markers in the layered dirt. “You understand how it is here?” It might be anything that we could see beneath the soil.

She spoke quietly enough that her students, though they must have realised that we were talking, could probably not make out about what. “We’ve never found written records from Precursor Age except a few poem fragments to make sense of any of it. Have you heard of the Gallimaufrians? For a long time when the pre-Cleavage stuff was first unearthed, after archaeologist-error was grudgingly ruled out,” she laughed, “people made them up as an explanation for what was being fished up. A hypothetical civilisation before Ul Qoma and Besźel that systematically dug up all artefacts in the region, from millennia ago to their own grandmother’s bric-a-brac, mixed them all up and buried them again or chucked them away.”

Nancy saw me looking at her. “They didn’t exist,” she reassured me. “That’s agreed now. By most of us, anyway. This”—she gestured at the hole—“is
not
a mix. It is the remnants of a material culture. Just one we’re still not very clear on. We had to learn to stop trying to find and follow a sequence and just look.”

Items that should have spanned epochs, contemporaneous. No other culture in the region made any but the scantest, seductively vague references to the pre-Cleavage locals, these peculiar men and women, witch-citizens by fairy tale with spells that tainted their discards,
who used astrolabes that would not have shamed Arzachel or the Middle Ages, dried-mud pots, stone axes that my flat-browed many-greats grandfather might have made, gears, intricately cast insect toys, and whose ruins underlay and dotted Ul Qoma and, occasionally, Besźel.

“This is Senior Detective Dhatt of the
militsya
and Inspector Borlú of the
policzai,”
Nancy was telling the students in the hole. “Inspector Borlú’s here as part of the investigation into the … into what happened to Mahalia.”

Several of them gasped. Dhatt crossed off names, and I copied him, as one by one the students came to talk to us in the common room. They had all been interviewed before but came docile as lambs, and answered questions they must have been sick of.

“I was relieved when I realised you were here for Mahalia,” the Goth woman said. “That sounds awful. But I thought you’d found Yolanda and something’d happened.” Her name was Rebecca Smith-Davis, she was a first year, working on pot reconstruction. She got teary when she spoke about her dead friend and her missing friend. “I thought you’d found her and it was … you know, she’d been …”

“We’re not even sure Rodriguez is missing,” Dhatt said.

“You say. But you know. With Mahalia, and everything.” Shook her head. “Them both being into strange stuff.”

“Orciny?” I said.

“Yeah. And other stuff. But yeah, Orciny. Yolanda’s more into that stuff than Mahalia was, though. People said Mahalia used to be way into it when she first started, but not so much now, I guess.”

Because they were younger and partied later, several of the students, unlike their teachers, had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death. At some unspoken point Dhatt deemed Yolanda an official missing person, and his questions grew more precise, the notes he took longer. It did not do us much good. No one was sure of the last time they had seen her, only that they hadn’t seen her for days.

“Do you have any idea what might have happened to Mahalia?” Dhatt asked all the students. We got no after no.

“I’m not into conspiracies,” one boy said. “What happened
was … unbelievably horrible. But, you know, the idea that there’s some big secret …” He shook his head. He sighed. “Mahalia was … she could piss people off, and what happened happened because she went to the wrong part of Ul Qoma, with the wrong person.” Dhatt made notes.

“No,” said a girl. “No one knew her. You maybe thought you did, but then you realise she was doing all kinds of secret stuff you didn’t know anything about. I think I was a bit scared of her. I liked her, I did, but she was kind of intense. And smart. Maybe she was seeing someone. Some local crazy. That’s the kind of thing she’d have … She was into weird stuff. I’d always see her in the library—we’ve got like reading cards for the university library here?—and she’d be making all those little notes in her books.” She made cramped writing motions and shook her head, inviting us to agree on how strange that was.

“Weird stuff?” Dhatt said.

“Oh, you know, you hear stuff.”

“She pissed someone off, yo.” This young woman spoke loud and quickly. “One of the crazies. You heard about her first time to the cities? Over in Besźel? She nearly got into a fight. With like academics and like
politicians
. At an
archaeology
conference. That’s hard to do. It’s amazing she ever got let back in anywhere.”

“Orciny.”

“Orciny?” Dhatt said.

“Yeah.”

This last speaker was a thin and straightlaced boy wearing a grubby T-shirt featuring what must have been the character from a children’s television show. His name was Robert. He looked mournfully at us. He blinked desperately. His Illitan was not good.

“Do you mind if I speak to him in English?” I said to Dhatt.

“No,” he said. A man put his head round the corner of the door and stared at us. “You go on,” Dhatt said to me. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He left, closing the door behind him.

“Who was that?” I said to the boy.

“Doctor UlHuan,” he said. The other of the Ul Qoman academics on-site. “Will you find who did this?” I might have answered with
the usual kind, meaningless certainties, but he looked too stricken for them. He stared at me and bit his lip. “Please,” he said.

“What did you mean about Orciny?” I said eventually.

“I mean”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. Just keep thinking about it, you know? Makes you nervy. I know it’s stupid but Mahalia used to be right up in that, and Yolanda was getting more and more into it—we used to rip shit out of her for it, you know?—and then both of them disappear…” He looked down and closed his eyes with his hand, as if he did not have the strength to blink. “It was me who called about Yolanda. When I couldn’t find her. I don’t know,” he said. “It just makes you wonder.” He ran out of what to say.

“
WE’VE GOT SOME STUFF
,” Dhatt said. He was pointing me along the walkways between the offices, back out of Bol Ye’an. He looked at the masses of notes he had made, sorted through the business cards and phone numbers on scraps. “I don’t know yet what it is that we’ve got, but we’ve got stuff. Maybe. Fuck.”

“Anything from UlHuan?” I said.

“What? No.” He glanced at me. “Backed up most of what Nancy said.”