The City & the City (3 page)

“‘Grey.’ She doesn’t know from vans.”

“Get her looking at some pictures, see if we can ID the make.”

“On it, sir. I’ll let you know. Later at least two other cars or vans come up for whatever reason, for business, according to Barichi.”

“That could complicate tyre tracks.”

“After an hour or whatever of groping, this girl mentions the van to the others and they go check it out, in case it was dumping. Says sometimes you get old stereos, shoes, books, all kinds of shit chucked out.”

“And they find her.” Some of my messages had come through. There was one from one of the mectec photographers, and I opened it and began to scroll through his images.

“They find her.”

COMMISSAR GADLEM CALLED ME IN
. His soft-spoken theatricality, his mannered gentleness, was unsubtle, but he had always let me do my thing. I sat while he tapped at his keyboard and swore. I could see what must be database passwords stuck on scraps of paper to the side of his screen.

“So?” he said. “The housing estate?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“South, suburbs. Young woman, stab wounds. Shukman’s got her.”

“Prostitute?”

“Could be.”

“Could be,” he said, cupped his ear, “and yet. I can hear it. Well, onward, follow your nose. Tell if you ever feel like sharing the whys of that ‘and yet,’ won’t you? Who’s your sub?”

“Naustin. And I’ve got a beat cop helping out. Corwi. Grade-one constable. Knows the area.”

“That’s her beat?” I nodded. Close enough.

“What else is open?”

“On my desk?” I told him. The commissar nodded. Even with the others, he granted me the leeway to follow Fulana Detail.

“
SO DID YOU SEE
the whole business?”

It was close to ten o’clock in the evening, more than forty hours since we had found the victim. Corwi drove—she made no effort to disguise her uniform, despite that we had an unmarked car-through the streets around GunterStrász. I had not been home until very late the previous night, and after a morning on my own in these same streets now I was there again.

There were places of crosshatch in the larger streets and a few elsewhere, but that far out the bulk of the area was total. Few antique Besź stylings, few steep roofs or many-paned windows: these were hobbled factories and warehouses. A handful of decades old, often broken-glassed, at half capacity if open. Boarded facades. Grocery shops fronted with wire. Older fronts in tumbledown of classical Besź style. Some houses colonised and made chapels and drug houses: some burnt out and left as crude carbon renditions of themselves.

The area was not crowded, but it was far from empty. Those who were out looked like landscape, like they were always there. There had been fewer that morning but not very markedly.

“Did you see Shukman working on the body?”

“No.” I was looking at what we passed, referring to my map. “I got there after he was done.”

“Squeamish?” she said.

“No.”

“Well …” She smiled and turned the car. “You’d have to say that even if you were.”

“True,” I said, though it was not.

She pointed out what passed for landmarks. I did not tell her I had been in Kordvenna early in the day, sounding these places.

Corwi did not try to disguise her police clothes because that way those who saw us, who might otherwise think we were there to entrap them, would know that was not our intent; and the fact that we were not in a bruise, as we called the black-and-blue police cars, told them that neither were we there to harass them. Intricate contracts!

Most of those around us were in Besźel so we saw them. Poverty deshaped the already staid, drab cuts and colours that enduringly characterise Besź clothes—what has been called the city’s fashionless fashion. Of the exceptions, some we realised when we glanced were elsewhere, so unsaw, but the younger Besź were also more colourful, their clothes more pictured, than their parents.

The majority of the Besź men and women (does this need saying?) were doing nothing but walking from one place to another, from late-shift work, from homes to other homes or shops. Still, though, the way we watched what we passed made it a threatening geography, and there were sufficient furtive actions occurring that that did not feel like the rankest paranoia.

“This morning I found a few of the locals I used to talk to,” Corwi said. “Asked if they’d heard anything.” She took us through a darkened place where the balance of crosshatch shifted, and we were silent until the streetlamps around us became again taller and familiarly deco-angled. Under those lights—the street we were on visible in a perspective curve away from us—women stood by the walls selling sex. They watched our approach guardedly. “I didn’t have much luck,” Corwi said.

She had not even had a photograph on that earlier expedition. That early it had been aboveboard contacts: it had been liquor-store clerks; the priests of squat local churches, some the last of the worker-priests, brave old men tattooed with the sickle-and-rood on their biceps and forearms, on the shelves behind them Besź translations of Gutiérrez, Rauschenbusch, Canaan Banana. It had been stoop-sitters. All Corwi had been able to do was ask what they could tell her about events in Pocost Village. They had heard about the murder but knew nothing.

Now we had a picture. Shukman had given it to me. I brandished
it as we emerged from the car: literally I brandished it, so the women would see that I brought something to them, that that was the purpose of our visit, not to make arrests.

Corwi knew some of them. They smoked and watched us. It was cold, and like everyone who saw them I wondered at their stockinged legs. We were affecting their business of course-plenty of locals passing by looked up at us and looked away again. I saw a bruise slow down the traffic as it passed us—they must have seen an easy arrest—but the driver and his passenger saw Corwi’s uniform and sped again with a salute. I waved back to their rear lights.

“What do you want?” a woman asked. Her boots were high and cheap. I showed her the picture.

They had cleaned up Fulana Detail’s face. There were marks left—scrapes were visible below the makeup. They could have eradicated them completely from the picture, but the shock those wounds occasioned were useful in questioning. They had taken the picture before they shaved her head. She did not look peaceful. She looked impatient.

“I don’t know her.” “I don’t know her.” I did not see recognition quickly disguised. They gathered in the grey light of the lamp, to the consternation of punters hovering at the edge of the local darkness, passed the picture among themselves and whether or not they made sympathy noises, did not know Fulana.

“What happened?” I gave the woman who asked my card. She was dark, Semitic or Turkish somewhere back. Her Besź was unaccented.

“We’re trying to find out.”

“Do we need to worry?”

After I paused Corwi said, “We’ll tell you if we think you do, Sayra.”

We stopped by a group of young men drinking strong wine outside a pool hall. Corwi took a little of their ribaldry then passed the photograph round.

“Why are we here?” My question was quiet.

“They’re entry-level gangsters, boss,” she told me. “Watch how they react.” But they gave little away if they did know anything. They returned the photograph and took my card impassively.

We repeated this at other gatherings, and afterwards each time we waited several minutes in our car, far enough away that a troubled member of any of the groups might excuse himself or herself and come find us, tell us some dissident scrap that might push us by whatever byways towards the details and family of our dead woman. No one did. I gave my card to many people and wrote down in my notebook the names and descriptions of those few that Corwi told me mattered.

“That’s pretty much everyone I used to know,” she said. Some of the men and women had recognised her, but it had not seemed to make much difference to how she was received. When we agreed that we had finished it was after two in the morning. The half-moon was washed out: after a last intervention we had come to a stop, were standing in a street depleted of even its latest-night frequenters.

“She’s still a question mark.” Corwi was surprised.

“I’ll arrange to have the posters put around the area.”

“Really, boss? Commissar’ll go for that?” We spoke quietly. I wove my fingers into the wire mesh of a fence around a lot filled only with concrete and scrub.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’ll roll over. It’s not that much.”

“It’s a few uniforms for a few hours, and he’s not going to … not for a …”

“We have to shoot for an ID. Fuck it, I’ll put them up myself.” I would arrange for them to be sent out to each of the city’s divisions. When we turned up a name, if Fulana’s story was as we had tentatively intuited, what few resources we had would vanish. We were milking leeway that would eradicate itself.

“You’re the boss, boss.”

“Not really, but I’m the boss of this for a little bit.”

“Shall we?” She indicated the car.

“I’ll walk it to a tram.”

“Serious? Come on, you’ll be hours.” But I waved her off. I walked away to the sounds only of my own steps and some frenzied
backstreet dog, towards where the grey glare of our lamps was effaced and I was lit by foreign orange light.

SHUKMAN WAS MORE SUBDUED
in his lab than out in the world. I had been on the phone to Yaszek asking for the video of the kids’ interrogation, the previous day, when Shukman contacted me and told me to come. It was cold, of course, and fuggy with chemicals. There was as much dark and many-stained wood as steel in the huge windowless room. There were notice boards on the walls, from each of which grew thickets of papers.

Dirt seemed to lurk in the room’s corners, on the edges of its workstations: but once I had run a finger along a grubby-looking groove by the raised spill-stopper, and it had come back clean. The stains were old. Shukman stood at the head of a steel dissecting table on which, covered with a slightly stained sheet, the contours of her face plain, was our Fulana, staring as we discussed her.

I looked at Hamzinic. He was only slightly older, I suspected, than the dead woman. He stood respectfully close by, his hands folded. By chance or not he stood next to a pinboard to which was attached among the postcards and memos a small gaudy
shahada
. Hamd Hamzinic was what the murderers of Avid Avid would also term an
ébru
. These days the term was used mainly by the old-fashioned, the racist, or in a turnabout provocation by the epithet’s targets: one of the best-known Besź hip-hop groups was named Ébru WA.

Technically of course the word was ludicrously inexact for at least half of those to whom it was applied. But for at least two hundred years, since refugees from the Balkans had come hunting sanctuary, quickly expanding the city’s Muslim population,
ébru
, the antique Besź word for “Jew,” had been press-ganged into service to include the new immigrants, become a collective term for both populations. It was in Besźel’s previously Jewish ghettos that the Muslim newcomers settled.

Even before the refugees’ arrival, indigents of the two minority communities in Besźel had traditionally allied, with jocularity or
fear, depending on the politics at the time. Few citizens realise that our tradition of jokes about the foolishness of the middle child derives from a centuries-old humourous dialogue between Besźel’s head rabbi and its chief imam about the intemperance of the Besźel Orthodox Church. It had, they agreed, neither the wisdom of the oldest Abrahamic faith, nor the vigour of its youngest.

A common form of establishment, for much of Besźel’s history, had been the
DöplirCaffé:
one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevant side, or ostentatiously from either and both in the case of freethinkers. Whether the
DöplirCaffé
was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.

The Besźel ghetto was only architecture now, not formal political boundary, tumbledown old houses with newly gentrified chic, clustered between very different foreign alter spaces. Still, that was just the city; it wasn’t an allegory, and Hamd Hamzinic would have faced unpleasantnesses in his studies. I thought slightly better of Shukman: a man of his age and temperament, I was perhaps surprised that Hamzinic felt free to display his statement of faith.

Shukman did not uncover Fulana. She lay between us. They had done something so she lay as if at rest.

“I’ve emailed you the report,” Shukman said. “Twenty-four-, -five-year-old woman. Decent overall health, apart from being dead. Time of death, midnightish the night before last, give or take, of course. Cause of death, puncture wounds to the chest. Four in total, of which one pierced her heart. Some spike or stiletto or something, not a blade. She also has a nasty head wound, and a lot of odd abrasions.” I looked up. “Some under her hair. She was whacked round the side of the head.” He swung his arm in slow-motion mimicry. “Hit her on the left of her skull. I’d say it knocked her out, or at least down and groggy, then the stab wounds were the coup de grace.”

“What was she hit with? In the head?”

“Something heavy and blunt. Could be a fist, if it was big, I suppose, but I seriously doubt it.” He tugged the corner of the sheet away, expertly uncovered the side of her head. The skin was the ugly colour of a dead bruise. “And voilà.” He motioned me closer to her skinheaded scalp.

I got near the smell of preservative. In among the brunette stubble were several little scabbed puncture marks.

“What are they?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re not deep. Something she landed on, I think.” The abrasions were about the size of pencil-points pushed into skin. They covered an area roughly my hand-breadth, irregularly breaking the surface. In places there were lines of them a few millimetres long, deeper in the centre than at either end, where they disappeared.