The City & the City (26 page)

“Dhatt, I’ve already told you stuff that—” I lowered my voice. “No one else knows about that
first
phone call. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand any of this. I’m not solving anything. I’m by some fluke that I do not know the whys of any more than you, being used. For some reason I’ve been a repository for a bunch of information that I don’t know what to do with. I hope
there’s a
yet
after that, but I don’t know, just like I don’t know anything.”

“What does
Jaris
think happened? I’m going to track that fucker down.” He would not.

“I should’ve called, but I could … He’s not our guy. You know, Dhatt. You know. How long you been an officer? Sometimes you
know
, right?” I tapped my chest. I was right, he liked that, nodded.

I told him what Jaris had said. “Fucking crap,” he said, when I was done.

“Maybe.”

“What the fuck
is
this Orciny stuff?
That’s
what he was running from? You’re reading that book. The dodgy one Bowden wrote. What’s it like?”

“There’s a lot in it. A lot of stuff. I don’t know. Of course it’s ludicrous, like you say. Secret overlords behind the scene, more powerful even than Breach, puppetmasters, hidden cities.”

“Crap.”

“Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe. And”—I opened my hands at him—
“something
big’s going on, and we have no idea what it is.”

“Maybe I’ll take a look at it after you,” Dhatt said. “Who the fuck knows anything.” He said the last word carefully.

“Qussim.” A couple of his colleagues, men of about his age or mine, raising their glasses to him, just about to me. There was something in their eyes, they were moving in like curious animals. “Qussim, we’ve not had a chance to meet our guest. You’ve been hiding him away.”

“Yura,” Dhatt said. “Kai. How’s tricks? Borlú, these are detectives blah and blah.” He waved his hands between them and me. One of them raised his eyebrow at Dhatt.

“I just wanted to find out how Inspector Borlú was finding Ul Qoma,” the one called Kai said. Dhatt snorted and finished his beer.

“Fuck’s sake,” he said. He sounded as amused as angry. “You want to get drunk and get into an argument with him, maybe even if you’re far gone enough, Yura, a fight. You’ll bring up all manner of
unfortunate international incidents. The fucking war might get dusted off. You might even say something about your dad. His dad was in the UQ Navy,” he said to me. “Got tinnitus or some shit in a fucking idiot’s skirmish with a Besź tugboat over some disputed lobster pots or whatever.” I glanced, but neither of our interlocutors looked particularly outraged. There was even a trace of humour on Kai’s face. “I’ll save you the trouble,” Dhatt said. “He’s as much of a Besź wanker as you think, and you can spread that around the office. Come on, Borlú.”

We went via his station’s garage and he picked up his car. “Hey …” He indicated me the steering wheel. “It never even occurred to me, maybe you want to give the Ul Qoman roads a go.”

“No, thanks. I think it would be a bit confusing.” Driving in Besźel or Ul Qoma is hard enough when you are in your home city, negotiating local and foreign traffic. “You know,” I said. “When I was first driving … it must be the same here, as well as seeing all the cars on the road you’ve got to learn to unsee all the other cars, the ones abroad, but unsee them fast enough to get out of their way.” Dhatt nodded. “Anyway, when I was a kid first driving we had to get used to zooming past all these old bangers and stuff in Ul Qoma, donkey carts in some parts and what have you. That you unsaw, but you know … Now years later most of the unseens have been overtaking me.”

Dhatt laughed. Almost embarrassed. “Things go up and down,” he said. “Ten years from now it’ll be you lot doing the overtaking again.”

“Doubt it.”

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll shift; it always does. It’s already started.”

“Our expos? A couple of little pity investments. I think you’ll be top wolf for a while.”

“We’re blockaded!”

“Not that you seem to be doing too bad on it. Washington loves us, and all we’ve got to show for it is Coke.”

“Don’t knock that,” Dhatt said. “Have you tasted Canuck Cola? All this is old Cold War bullshit. Who gives a fuck who the Americans want to play with, anyway? Good luck with them.
Oh
Canada
…” He sang the line. Dhatt said to me, “What’s the food like at that place?”

“Okay. Bad. No worse than any other hotel food.”

He yanked the wheel, took us off the route I’d come to know. “Sweet?” he said into his phone. “Can you chuck some more stuff on for supper? Thanks, beautiful. I want you to meet my new partner.”

Her name was Yallya. She was pretty, quite a lot younger than Dhatt, but she greeted me very poised, playing a role and enjoying it, waiting at the door of their apartment to triple-kiss me hello, the Ul Qoman way.

On the way to the house, Dhatt had looked at me and said “You okay?” It was quickly obvious that he lived within a mile, in grosstopic terms, of my own house. From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya’s rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Besźel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents’ whispered strictures to unsee the other. Children are sacks of infection. That was the sort of thing that spread diseases. Epidemiology was always complicated here and back home.

“How you liking Ul Qoma, Inspector?”

“Tyador. Very much.”

“Bullshit, he thinks we’re all thugs and idiots and being invaded by secret armies from hidden cities.” Dhatt’s laughter was not without edge. “Anyway we’re not getting much chance to exactly go sightseeing.”

“How’s the case?”

“There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there’s a dead girl at the end of it all.”

“Is that true?” she said to me. They were bringing out food in bits and pieces. It was not home cooking, and seemed to include a lot of
convenience and prepackaged food, but it was better quality than I’d been eating, and was more Ul Qoman, though that is not an unmitigated good. The sky darkened over the crosshatched park, with night and with wet clouds.

“You miss potatoes,” Yallya said.

“Is it written on my face?”

“It’s all you eat, isn’t it?” She thought she was being playful. “This too spicy for you?”

“There’s someone watching us from the park.”

“How can you tell from here?” She glanced over my shoulder. “Hope for their sake they’re in Ul Qoma.” She was an editor at a financial magazine and had, judging by the books I saw and the posters in the bathroom, a taste for Japanese comics.

“Are you married, Tyador?” I tried to answer Yallya’s questions though they came too fast really for that. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“No, but the first time for a long time.”

“So you don’t know it.”

“No. I might once have claimed to know London, but not for years.”

“You’re well travelled! And now with all this are you mixing with insiles and breachers?” I did not find this line adorable. “Qussim says you’re spending your time where they’re digging up old hex stuff.”

“It’s like most places, much more bureaucratic than it sounds, no matter how weird the stories are.”

“It’s ridiculous.” She looked contrite, quite suddenly. “I shouldn’t make jokes about it. It’s just because I don’t know almost anything about the girl who died.”

“You never ask,” Dhatt said.

“Well, it’s … Do you have a picture of her?” Yallya said. I must have looked surprised because Dhatt shrugged at me. I reached into my inner pocket jacket, but remembered when I touched it that the only picture I had—a small copy of a copy taken in Besźel, tucked into my wallet—was of Mahalia dead. I would not show that.

“I’m sorry, I don’t.” In the little quiet it occurred to me that Mahalia was only a few years younger than Yallya.

I stayed longer than I had expected. She was a good host, particularly when I got her off this stuff—she let me steer the conversation away. I watched her and Dhatt perform gentle bickering. The proximity of the park and of other people’s affection was moving, to the point of distracting. Watching Yallya and Dhatt made me think of Sariska and Biszaya. I recalled the odd eagerness of Aikam Tsueh.

When I left, Dhatt took me down to the street and headed for the car, but I said to him, “I’ll make my own way.”

He stared. “Are you okay?” he said. “You’ve been funny all night.”

“I’m fine, sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude; it was very kind of you. Really it was a good night, and Yallya … you’re a lucky man. I just, I’m trying to think things through. Look, I’m okay to go. I’ve money. Ul Qoman money.” I showed him my wallet. “I’ve got all my papers. Visitor’s badge. I know it makes you uncomfortable having me out and about, but seriously, I’d like to walk; I need to be out for a bit. It’s a beautiful night.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? It’s raining.”

“I like rain. Anyway, this is drizzle. You wouldn’t last a day in Besźel. We get
real
rain in Besźel.” An old joke but he smiled and surrendered.

“Whatever. We have to work this out, you know; we’re not getting very far.”

“No.”

“And us the best minds our cities have, right? And Yolanda Rodriguez remains unfound, and now we’ve lost Bowden, too. We’re not going to win medals for this.” He looked around. “Seriously, what is going on?”

“You know everything I know,” I said.

“What bugs me,” he said, “isn’t that there’s no way to make sense of this shit. It’s that there
is
a way to make sense of it. And it’s not a way I want to go. I don’t believe in …” He waved at malevolent hidden cities. He stared the length of his street. It was total, so none of the lights from windows above was foreign. It was not so late, and we were not alone. People were silhouetted by the lights of a road perpendicular to Dhatt’s street, a road mostly in Besźel. For a moment
I thought one of the black figures had, for seconds long enough to constitute breach, watched us, but then they moved on.

When I started walking, watching the wet-edged shapes of the city, I was not going anywhere in particular. I was moving south. Walking alone past people who were not, I indulged the idea of walking to where Sariska or Biszaya lived, or even Corwi—something of that melancholy connection. They knew I was in Ul Qoma: I could find them and could walk alongside them in the street and we would be inches apart but unable to acknowledge each other. Like the old story.

Not that I would ever do such a thing. Having to unsee acquaintances or friends is a rare and notoriously uncomfortable circumstance. What I did do was walk past my own house.

I half expected to see one of my neighbours, none of whom, I think, knew I was abroad, and who might therefore be expected to greet me before noticing my Ul Qoman visitor’s badge and hurriedly attempting to unbreach. Their lights were on, but they were all indoors.

In Ul Qoma I was in Ioy Street. It is pretty equally crosshatched with RosidStrász where I lived. The building two doors along from my own house was a late-night Ul Qoman liquor store, half the pedestrians around me in Ul Qoma, so I was able to stop grosstopically, physically close to my own front door, and unsee it of course, but equally of course not quite, with an emotion the name of which I have no idea. I came slowly closer, keeping my eyes on the entrances in Ul Qoma.

Someone was watching me. It looked like an old woman. I could hardly see her in the dark, certainly not her face in any detail, but something was curious in the way she stood. I took in her clothes and could not tell which city she was in. That is a common instant of uncertainty, but this one went on for much longer than usual. And my alarm did not subside, it grew, as her locus refused to clarify.

I saw others in similar shadows, similarly hard to make sense of, emerging, sort of, not approaching me, not even moving but holding themselves so they grew more in focus. The woman continued
to stare at me, and she took a step or two in my direction, so either she was in Ul Qoma or breaching.

That made me step back. I kept backing away. There was an ugly pause, until as if in belated echo she and those others did the same, and were gone suddenly into shared dark. I got out of there, not quite running but fast. I found better-lit avenues.

I did not walk straight to the hotel. After my heart had slowed and I had spent some minutes in a not-empty spot, I walked to the same vantage point I had taken before, overlooking Bol Ye’an. I was much more careful in my scrutiny than I had been, and tried to affect Ul Qoman bearing, and for the hour I watched that unlit excavation, no
militsya
came. So far they tended to be either violently present or altogether absent. Doubtless there was a method of ensuring subtle intervention from the Ul Qoman police, but I did not know it.

At the Hilton I requested a 5 a.m. wakeup call, and asked the woman behind the desk if she would print me up a message, as the tiny room called a “business centre” was closed. First she did so on marked Hilton paper. “Would you mind doing it on plain?” I said. I winked. “Just in case it’s intercepted.” She smiled, not sure what intimacy it was she was privy to. “Can you read that back to me?”

“‘Urgent. Come ASAP. Don’t call.’”

“Perfect.”

I was back overlooking the site the next morning, having taken a circuitous walked route through the city. Though as law demanded I wore my visitor’s mark, I had placed it at the very edge of my lapel, where cloth folded, only visible to those who knew to look. I wore it on a jacket that was a genuine Ul Qoman design and was, like my hat, not new but new to me. I had set out some hours before any shops were open, but a surprised Ul Qoman man at the farthest reach of my walk was several dinar richer and lighter his outer clothes.