The City & the City (27 page)

Nothing guaranteed that I was not watched, but I did not think I was by the
militsya
. It was not long after dawn, but Ul Qomans were everywhere. I would not risk walking closer to Bol Ye’an. As the morning wore on the city filled with hundreds of children: those in the strict Ul Qoman school uniforms, and dozens of street children.
I attempted to be moderately unobtrusive, watched from behind the overlong headlines of the
Ul Qoma Nasyona
, eating fried street food for breakfast. People began to arrive at the dig. Arriving often in little groups, they were too far away for me to tell who was who as they entered, showing their passes. I waited a while.

The little girl I approached in her outsized trainers and cutoff jeans looked at me sceptically. I held up a five-dinar note and a sealed envelope.

“You see that place? You see the gate?” She nodded, guarded. They were opportunist couriers, these kids, among everything else.

“Where you from?” she said.

“Paris,” I said. “But that’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. I have a job for you. Do you think you could persuade those guards to call someone for you?” She nodded. “I’m going to tell you a name, and I want you to go there, and find the person with that name, and only that person, and I want you to hand over this message.”

She was either honest or realised, smart girl, that from where I stood I could see almost her entire route to the door of Bol Ye’an. She delivered it. She threaded in and out of the crowds, tiny and quick—the sooner this lucrative task was done the sooner she could get another. It was easy to see why she and the other homeless children like her had the nickname “job-mice.”

A few minutes after she reached the gates, someone emerged, moving fast, bundled up, head down, walking stiffly and quickly away from the dig. Though he was far away, alone like that and expected, I could tell that it was Aikam Tsueh.

I HAD DONE THIS BEFORE
. I could keep him in sight, but in a city I didn’t know it was hard to do so while ensuring that I could not be seen. He made it easier than it should have been, never once looking behind him, taking in all but a couple of places the largest, most crowded and crosshatched roads, which I presumed were the most direct routes.

The most complicated point came when he took a bus. I was close to him, and was able to huddle behind my paper and keep
him in sight. I winced when my phone rang, but it was not the first in the bus to do so, and Aikam did not glance at me. It was Dhatt. I diverted the call and switched the ringer off.

Tsueh disembarked, and led me to a desolate total zone of Ul Qoman housing projects, out past Bisham Ko, way out from the centre. No pretty corkscrew towers or iconic gasrooms here. The concrete warrens were not deserted but full of noise and people between the stretches of garbage. It was like the poorest estates of Besźel, though even poorer, with a soundtrack in a different language, and children and hustlers in other clothes. Only when Tsueh entered one of the dripping towerblocks and ascended did I have to exercise real care, padding as soundlessly as I could up the concrete stairs, past graffiti and animal shit. I could hear him racing ahead of me, stopping at last, and knocking softly. I slowed.

“It’s me,” I heard him say. “It’s me, I’m here.”

An answering voice, alarm, though that impression may have been because I expected alarm. I continued to quietly and carefully climb. I wished I had my gun.

“You
told
me to,” Tsueh said. “You
said
. Let me in. What is it?”

The door creaked a little, and the second voice came whispering, but just a little louder. I was one stained pillar away now. I held my breath.

“But you
said…
” The door opened more and I heard Aikam step forward, and I turned and went fast across the little landing behind him. He did not have time to register me, or to turn. I shoved him hard, and he barrelled into the ajar door, slamming it open, pushing aside someone beyond him, falling and sprawling on the floor of the hallway beyond. I heard a scream, but I had followed him through the door and slammed it closed behind me. I stood against it, blocking exit, looking along a gloomy corridor between rooms, down at where Tsueh wheezed and struggled to stand, at the screaming young woman backing away, staring at me in terror.

I put my finger to my lips and, surely by coincidence of her breath running out, she ebbed to silence.

“No, Aikam,” I said. “She didn’t say. The message wasn’t from her.”

“Aikam,” she blubbered.

“Stop,” I said. I put my finger to my lips again. “I’m not going to hurt you, I’m
not
here to hurt you, but we both know there are others who want to. I want to help you, Yolanda.”

She cried again and I could not tell if it was fear or relief.

Chapter Nineteen

AIKAM GOT TO HIS FEET
and tried to attack me. He was muscular and held his hands as if he had studied boxing but if he had he was not a good student. I tripped him and pushed his face down onto the stained carpet, pinioned an arm behind his back. Yolanda shouted his name. He half rose, even with me straddling him, so I pushed his face down again, ensuring that his nose bled. I stayed between both of them and the door.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Are you ready to calm down? I’m not here to hurt her.” Strength to strength, eventually he would overpower me unless I broke his arm. Neither eventuality was desirable. “Yolanda, for God’s sake.” I caught her eye, riding his shuffles. “I have a gun—don’t you think I’d have shot you if I wanted to hurt you?” I switched to English for the lie.

“’Kam,” she said at last, and almost instantly he grew calm. She stared at me, backed into the wall at the corridor’s end, her hands flat against it.

“You hurt my arm,” Aikam said beneath me.

“Sorry to hear it. If I let him up, is he going to behave?” That in English again to her. “I’m here to help you. I know you’re scared. You hear me, Aikam?” Switching between two foreign languages was not hard, so adrenalised. “If I let you up, you going to go look after Yolanda?”

He did nothing to clear away the blood that dripped from his nose. He cradled his arm and, unable to put it comfortably around Yolanda, sort of loomed lovingly over and around her. He put himself between me and her. She looked out at me from behind him with wariness, not terror.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I know you’re scared. I’m not Ul Qoma
militsya
—I don’t trust them any more than you do. I’m not going to call them. Let me help you.”

IN WHAT YOLANDA RODRIGUEZ
called the living room she cowered in an old chair they had probably pulled in from an abandoned flat in the same tower. There were several such pieces, broken in various ways but clean. The windows overlooked the courtyard, from which I could hear Ul Qoman boys playing a rough makeshift version of rugby. They were invisible through the whitewash on the glass.

Books and other things sat in boxes around the room. A cheap laptop, a cheap inkjet printer. No power, though, so far as I could tell. There were no posters on the walls. The door to the room was open. I stood leaning by it, looking at the two pictures on the floor: one of Aikam; the other, in a better frame, of Yolanda and Mahalia smiling behind cocktails.

Yolanda stood, sat again. She would not meet my eye. She did not try to hide her fear, which had not abated though I was no longer its immediate object. She was afraid to show or indulge her growing hope. I had seen her expression before. It is not uncommon for people to crave deliverance.

“Aikam’s been doing a good job,” I said. I was back to English. Though he did not speak it, Aikam did not ask for translation. He stood by Yolanda’s chair and watched me. “You had him trying to find out how to get out of Ul Qoma, below the radar. Any luck?”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Your boy’s been doing just what you told him to. He’s been trying to find out what’s going on. What did he ever care about Mahalia
Geary? They never spoke. Now you, though, he cares about. So there’s something odd when, like you told him to, he’s been asking all about her. Gets you thinking. Why would he do that? You, you did care about her, and you do care about yourself.”

She stood again and turned her face to the wall. I waited for her to say something, and when she did not I continued. “I’m flattered you’d get him to ask me. The one police you think just might possibly not be part of what’s happening. The outsider.”

“You don’t know!” She turned to me. “I
don’t
trust you—”

“Okay, okay, I never said you did.” A strange reassurance. Aikam watched us jabbering. “So do you never leave?” I said. “What do you eat? Tins? I guess Aikam comes, but not often …”

“Can’t come often. How did you even
find
me?”

“He can explain. He got a message to come back. For what it’s worth he was trying to look after you.”

“He does that.”

“I can see.” Dogs began to fight outside, noise told us. Their owners joined in. My phone buzzed, audible even with the ringer off. She started and backed away as if I might shoot her with it. The display told me it was Dhatt.

“Look,” I said. “I’m turning it off. I’m turning it off.” If he was paying attention, he would know his call was rerouted to voicemail before the rings had all sounded out. “What happened? Who got to you? Why did you run when you did?”

“I didn’t give them the chance. You saw what happened to Mahalia. She was my
friend
. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t going down like that, but she’s
dead.”
She said it with what sounded almost like awe. Her face collapsed and she shook her head. “They
killed
her.”

“Your parents haven’t heard from you …”

“I can’t. I can’t, I have to …” She bit her nails and glanced up. “When I get out…”

“Straight to the embassy next country along? Through the mountains? Why not here? Or in Besźel?”

“You know why.”

“Say I don’t.”

“Because
they’re
here, and they’re there too. They
run
things.
Looking for me. It’s just ’cause I got away when I did that they haven’t found me. They’re ready to kill me like they killed my
friend
. Because I know they’re there. Because I know they’re real.” Her tone alone was enough reason for Aikam to hug her then.

“Who?” Let’s hear it.

“The third place. Between the city and the city. Orciny.”

A WEEK OR SO
would have been long enough ago for me to tell her she was being foolish or paranoid. The hesitation—when she told me about the conspiracy, there were those seconds when I was tacitly invited to tell her she was wrong, during which I was silent-vindicated her beliefs, gave her to think I agreed.

She stared and thought me a co-conspirator, and not knowing what was occurring I behaved like one. I could not tell her her life was not in danger. Nor that Bowden’s was not—perhaps he was dead already—nor mine, nor that I could keep her safe. I could tell her almost nothing.

Yolanda had stayed hidden in this place, that her loyal Aikam had found and tried to prepare, in this part of town that she had never intended to so much as visit and of which she did not know the name the day before she arrived here, after an arduous, circuitous and secret midnight dash. He and she had done what they could to make the place bearable, but it was an abandoned hovel in a slum, that she could not quit for terror of being spotted by the unseen forces she knew wanted her dead.

I would say that she could never have seen the like of this place before, but that may not be true. Maybe she had once or twice watched a documentary named something like
The Dark Side of the Ul Qoma Dream
or
The Sickness of the New Wolf
or what have you. Films about our neighbour were not generally popular in Besźel, were rarely distributed, so I could not vouch, but it would not be surprising if some blockbuster had been made with the backdrop of gangs in the Ul Qoma slums—the redemption of some not-too-hardcore drug-runner, the impressive murder of several others. Perhaps Yolanda had seen footage of the failed estates of Ul Qoma, but she would not have meant to visit.

“Do you know your neighbours?”

She did not smile. “By voice.”

“Yolanda I know you’re afraid.”

“They got Mahalia, they got Doctor Bowden, now they’re going to get me.”

“I know you’re afraid, but you have to help me. I am going to get you out of here, but I need to know what happened. If I don’t know, I can’t help you.”

“Help me?” She looked around the room. “You want me to tell you what’s up? Sure, you ready to bunk down here? You’ll have to, you know. If you know what’s going on, they’ll come for you too.”

“Alright.”

She sighed and looked down. Aikam said to her, “Is it okay?” in Illitan, and she shrugged,
Maybe
.

“
HOW DID SHE FIND ORCINY
?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know and I do not want to. There are access points, she said. She didn’t tell me any more and that was alright by me.”

“Why didn’t she tell anyone but you?” She seemed to know nothing of Jaris.

“She wasn’t crazy. You’ve seen what happened to Doctor Bowden? You don’t admit you want to know about Orciny. That was always what she was here for, but she wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s how they want it. Orcinians. It’s perfect for them that no one thinks they’re real. That’s just what they want. That’s how they rule.”

“Her PhD …”

“She didn’t care about it. She was just doing enough to keep Prof Nance off her back. She was here for Orciny. Do you realise they contacted
her.”
She stared at me intently. “Seriously. She was a bit… the first time she was at a conference, in Besźel, she sort of said a load of stuff. There was a load of politicians and stuff there as well as academics and it caused a bit of—”

“She made enemies. I heard about it.”

“Oh, we all knew the
nats
had their eyes on her, nats on both
sides, but that wasn’t the issue. It was
Orciny
who saw her then. They’re everywhere.”