The City and The City

Chapter One

I COULD NOT SEE THE STREET or much of the estate. We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course—a child’s mimicking of geography. Maybe they had been going to wood it and put in a pond. There was a copse but the saplings were dead.

The grass was weedy, threaded with paths footwalked between rubbish, rutted by wheel tracks. There were police at various tasks. I wasn’t the first detective there—I saw Bardo Naustin and a couple of others—but I was the most senior. I followed the sergeant to where most of my colleagues clustered, between a low derelict tower and a skateboard park ringed by big drum-shaped trash bins. Just beyond it we could hear the docks. A bunch of kids sat on a wall before standing officers. The gulls coiled over the gathering.

“Inspector.” I nodded at whomever that was. Someone offered a coffee but I shook my head and looked at the woman I had come to see.

She lay near the skate ramps. Nothing is still like the dead are still. The wind moves their hair, as it moved hers, and they don’t respond at all. She was in an ugly pose, with legs crooked as if about to get up, her arms in a strange bend. Her face was to the ground.

A young woman, brown hair pulled into pigtails poking up like plants. She was almost naked, and it was sad to see her skin smooth that cold morning, unbroken by gooseflesh. She wore only laddered stockings, one high heel on. Seeing me look for it, a sergeant waved at me from a way off, from where she guarded the dropped shoe.

It was a couple of hours since the body had been discovered. I looked her over. I held my breath and bent down toward the dirt, to look at her face, but I could only see one open eye.

“Where’s Shukman?”

“Not here yet, Inspector…”

“Someone call him, tell him to get a move on.” I smacked my watch. I was in charge of what we called the mise-en-crime . No one would move her until Shukman the patho had come, but there were other things to do. I checked sightlines. We were out of the way and the garbage containers obscured us, but I could feel attention on us like insects, from all over the estate. We milled.

There was a wet mattress on its edge between two of the bins, by a spread of rusting iron pieces interwoven with discarded chains. “That was on her.” The constable who spoke was Lizbyet Corwi, a smart young woman I’d worked with a couple of times. “Couldn’t exactly say she was well hidden, but it sort of made her look like a pile of rubbish, I guess.” I could see a rough rectangle of darker earth surrounding the dead woman—the remains of the mattress-sheltered dew. Naustin was squatting by it, staring at the earth.

“The kids who found her tipped it half off,” Corwi said.

“How did they find her?”

Corwi pointed at the earth, at little scuffs of animal paws.

“Stopped her getting mauled. Ran like hell when they saw what it was, made the call. Our lot, when they arrived …” She glanced at two patrolmen I didn’t know.

“They moved it?”

She nodded. “See if she was still alive, they said.”

“What are their names?”

“Shushkil and Briamiv.”

“And these are the finders?” I nodded at the guarded kids. There were two girls, two guys. Midteens, cold, looking down.

“Yeah. Chewers.”

“Early morning pick-you-up?”

“That’s dedication, hm?” she said. “Maybe they’re up for junkies of the month or some shit. They got here a bit before seven. The skate pit’s organised that way, apparently. It’s only been built a couple of years, used to be nothing, but the locals’ve got their shift patterns down. Midnight to nine a.m., chewers only; nine to eleven, local gang plans the day; eleven to midnight, skateboards and rollerblades.”

“They carrying?”

“One of the boys has a little shiv, but really little. Couldn’t mug a milkrat with it—it’s a toy. And a chew each. That’s it.” She shrugged. “The dope wasn’t on them; we found it by the wall, but”—shrug—“they were the only ones around.”

She motioned over one of our colleagues and opened the bag he carried. Little bundles of resin-slathered grass. Feld is its street name—a tough crossbreed of Catha edulis spiked with tobacco and caffeine and stronger stuff, and fibreglass threads or similar to abrade the gums and get it into the blood. Its name is a trilingual pun: it’skhat where it’s grown, and the animal called “cat” in English is feld in our own language. I sniffed it and it was pretty low-grade stuff. I walked over to where the four teenagers shivered in their puffy jackets.

“’Sup, policeman?” said one boy in a Besź-accented approximation of hip-hop English. He looked up and met my eye, but he was pale. Neither he nor any of his companions looked well. From where they sat they could not have seen the dead woman, but they did not even look in her direction.

They must have known we’d find the feld , and that we’d know it was theirs. They could have said nothing, just run.

“I’m Inspector Borlú,” I said. “Extreme Crime Squad.”

I did not say I’m Tyador . A difficult age to question, this—too old for first names, euphemisms and toys, not yet old enough to be straightforward opponents in interviews, when at least the rules were clear. “What’s your name?” The boy hesitated, considered using whatever slang handle he’d granted himself, did not.

“Vilyem Barichi.”

“You found her?” He nodded, and his friends nodded after him. “Tell me.”

“We come here because, ’cause, and …” Vilyem waited, but I said nothing about his drugs. He looked down. “And we seen something under that mattress and we pulled it off.

“There was some …” His friends looked up as Vilyem hesitated, obviously superstitious.

“Wolves?” I said. They glanced at each other.

“Yeah man, some scabby little pack was nosing around there and …

“So we thought it…”

“How long after you got here?” I said.

Vilyem shrugged. “Don’t know. Couple hours?”

“Anyone else around?”

“Saw some guys over there a while back.”

“Dealers?” A shrug.

“And there was a van came up on the grass and come over here and went off again after a bit. We didn’t speak to no one.”

“When was the van?”

“Don’t know.”

“It was still dark.” That was one of the girls.

“Okay. Vilyem, you guys, we’re going to get you some breakfast, something to drink, if you want.” I motioned to their guards. “Have we spoken to the parents?” I asked.

“On their way, boss; except hers”—pointing to one of the girls—“we can’t reach.”

“So keep trying. Get them to the centre now.”

The four teens looked at each other. “This is bullshit, man,” the boy who was not Vilyem said, uncertainly. He knew that according to some politics he should oppose my instruction, but he wanted to go with my subordinate. Black tea and bread and paperwork, the boredom and striplights, all so much not like the peeling back of that wet-heavy, cumbersome mattress, in the yard, in the dark.

STEPEN SHUKMAN AND HIS ASSISTANT Hamd Hamzinic had arrived. I looked at my watch. Shukman ignored me. When he bent to the body he wheezed. He certified death. He made observations that Hamzinic wrote down.

“Time?” I said.

“Twelve hours-ish,” Shukman said. He pressed down on one of the woman’s limbs. She rocked. In rigor, and unstable on the ground as she was, she probably assumed the position of her death lying on other contours. “She wasn’t killed here.” I had heard it said many times he was good at his job but had seen no evidence that he was anything but competent.

“Done?” he said to one of the scene techs. She took two more shots from different angles and nodded. Shukman rolled the woman over with Hamzinic’s help. She seemed to fight him with her cramped motionlessness. Turned, she was absurd, like someone playing at dead insect, her limbs crooked, rocking on her spine.

She looked up at us from below a fluttering fringe. Her face was set in a startled strain: she was endlessly surprised by herself. She was young. She was heavily made up, and it was smeared across a badly battered face. It was impossible to say what she looked like, what face those who knew her would see if they heard her name. We might know better later, when she relaxed into her death. Blood marked her front, dark as dirt. Flash flash of cameras.

“Well, hello cause of death,” Shukman said to the wounds in her chest.

On her left cheek, curving under the jaw, a long red split. She had been cut half the length of her face.

The wound was smooth for several centimetres, tracking precisely along her flesh like the sweep of a paintbrush. Where it went below her jaw, under the overhang of her mouth, it jagged ugly and ended or began with a deep torn hole in the soft tissue behind her bone. She looked unseeingly at me.

“Take some without the flash, too,” I said.

Like several others I looked away while Shukman murmured—it felt prurient to watch. Uniformed mise-en-crime technical investigators, mectecs in our slang, searched in an expanding circle. They overturned rubbish and foraged among the grooves where vehicles had driven. They lay down reference marks, and photographed.

“Alright then.” Shukman rose. “Let’s get her out of here.” A couple of the men hauled her onto a stretcher.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “cover her.” Someone found a blanket I don’t know from where, and they started again towards Shukman’s vehicle.

“I’ll get going this afternoon,” he said. “Will I see you?” I wagged my head noncommittally. I walked towards Corwi.

“Naustin,” I called, when I was positioned so that Corwi would be at the edge of our conversation. She glanced up and came slightly closer.

“Inspector,” said Naustin.

“Go through it.”

He sipped his coffee and looked at me nervously.

“Hooker?” he said. “First impressions, Inspector. This area, beat-up, naked? And …” He pointed at his face, her exaggerated makeup. “Hooker.”

“Fight with a client?”

“Yeah but… If it was just the body wounds, you know, you’d, then you’re looking at, maybe she won’t do what he wants, whatever. He lashes out. But this.” He touched his cheek again uneasily. “That’s different.”

“A sicko?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. He cuts her, kills her, dumps her. Cocky bastard too, doesn’t give a shit that we’re going to find her.”

“Cocky or stupid.”

“Or cocky and stupid.”

“So a cocky, stupid sadist,” I said. He raised his eyes, Maybe .

“Alright,” I said. “Could be. Do the rounds of the local girls. Ask a uniform who knows the area. Ask if they’ve had trouble with anyone recently. Let’s get a photo circulated, put a name to Fulana Detail.” I used the generic name for woman-unknown. “First off I want you to question Barichi and his mates, there. Be nice, Bardo, they didn’t have to call this in. I mean that. And get Yaszek in with you.” Ramira Yaszek was an excellent questioner. “Call me this afternoon?” When he was out of earshot I said to Corwi, “A few years ago we’d not have had half as many guys on the murder of a working girl.”

“We’ve come a long way,” she said. She wasn’t much older than the dead woman.

“I doubt Naustin’s delighted to be on streetwalker duty, but you’ll notice he’s not complaining,” I said.

“We’ve come a long way,” she said.

“So?” I raised an eyebrow. Glanced in Naustin’s direction. I waited. I remembered Corwi’s work on the Shulban disappearance, a case considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared.

“It’s just, I guess, you know, we should keep in mind other possibilities,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“Her makeup,” she said. “It’s all, you know, earths and browns. It’s been put on thick, but it’s not—” She vamp-pouted. “And did you notice her hair?” I had. “Not dyed. Take a drive with me up GunterStrász, around by the arena, any of the girls’ hangouts. Two-thirds blonde, I reckon. And the rest are black or bloodred or some shit. And …” She fingered the air as if it were hair. “It’s dirty, but it’s a lot better than mine.” She ran her hand through her own split ends.

For many of the streetwalkers in Besźel, especially in areas like this, food and clothes for their kids came first; feld or crack for themselves; food for themselves; then sundries, in which list conditioner would come low. I glanced at the rest of the officers, at Naustin gathering himself to go.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you know this area?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s a bit off the track, you know? This is hardly even Besźel, really. My beat’s Lestov. They called a few of us in when they got the bell. But I did a tour here a couple years ago—I know it a bit.”

Lestov itself was already almost a suburb, six or so k out of the city centre, and we were south of that, over the Yovic Bridge on a bit of land between Bulkya Sound and, nearly, the mouth where the river joined the sea. Technically an island, though so close and conjoined to the mainland by ruins of industry you would never think of it as such, Kordvenna was estates, warehouses, low-rent bodegas scribble-linked by endless graffiti. It was far enough from Besźel’s heart that it was easy to forget, unlike more inner-city slums.

“How long were you here?” I said.

“Six months, standard. What you’d expect: street theft, high kids smacking shit out of each other, drugs, hooking.”

“Murder?”

“Two or three in my time. Drugs stuff. Mostly stops short of that, though: the gangs are pretty smart at punishing each other without bringing in ECS.”

“Someone’s fucked up then.”

“Yeah. Or doesn’t care.”

“Okay,” I said. “I want you on this. What are you doing at the moment?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

“I want you to relocate for a bit. Got any contacts here still?” She pursed her lips. “Track them down if you can; if not, have a word with some of the local guys, see who their singers are. I want you on the ground. Listen out, go round the estate—what’s this place called again?”

“Pocost Village.” She laughed without humour; I raised an eyebrow.

“It takes a village,” I said. “See what you can turn up.”

“My commissar won’t like it.”

“I’ll deal with him. It’s Bashazin, right?”

“You’ll square it? So am I being seconded?”

“Let’s not call it anything right now. Right now I’m just asking you to focus on this. And report directly to me.” I gave her the numbers of my cell phone and my office. “You can show me around the delights of Kordvenna later. And …” I glanced up at Naustin, and she saw me do it. “Just keep an eye on things.”

“He’s probably right. Probably a cocky sadist trick, boss.”

“Probably. Let’s find out why she keeps her hair so clean.”

There was a league-table of instinct. We all knew that in his street-beating days, Commissar Kerevan broke several cases following leads that made no logical sense; and that Chief Inspector Marcoberg was devoid of any such breaks, and that his decent record was the result, rather, of slog. We would never call inexplicable little insights “hunches,” for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

Officers Shushkil and Briamiv were surprised, then defensive, finally sulky when I asked them what they were doing moving the mattress. I put them on report. If they had apologised I would have let it go. It was depressingly common to see police boots tracked through blood residue, fingerprints smeared and spoiled, samples corrupted or lost.

A little group of journalists was gathering at the edges of the open land. Petrus Something-or-other, Valdir Mohli, a young guy called Rackhaus, a few others.

“Inspector!” “Inspector Borlú!” Even: “Tyador!”

Most of the press had always been polite, and amenable to my suggestions about what they withhold. In the last few years, new, more salacious and aggressive papers had started, inspired and in some cases controlled by British or North American owners. It had been inevitable, and in truth our established local outlets were staid to dull. What was troubling was less the trend to sensation, nor even the irritating behaviour of the new press’s young writers, but more their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born. Rackhaus, who wrote for a weekly called Rejal! , for example. Surely when he bothered me for facts he knew I would not give him, surely when he attempted to bribe junior officers, and sometimes succeeded, he did not have to say, as he tended to: “The public has a right to know!”

I did not even understand him the first time he said it. In Besź the word “right” is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning he intended. I had to mentally translate into English, in which I am passably fluent, to make sense of the phrase. His fidelity to the cliché transcended the necessity to communicate. Perhaps he would not be content until I snarled and called him a vulture, a ghoul.

“You know what I’m going to say,” I told them. The stretched tape separated us. “There’ll be a press conference this afternoon, at ECS Centre.”

“What time?” My photograph was being taken.

“You’ll be informed, Petrus.”

Rackhaus said something that I ignored. As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.

Chapter Two

I HAD A CONSTABLE DROP ME north of Lestov, near the bridge. I did not know the area well. I’d been to the island, of course, visited the ruins, when I was a schoolboy and occasionally since, but my rat-runs were elsewhere. Signs showing directions to local destinations were bolted to the outsides of pastry bakers and little workshops, and I followed them to a tram stop in a pretty square. I waited between a care-home marked with an hourglass logo, and a spice shop, the air around it cinnamon scented.

When the tram came, tinnily belling, shaking in its ruts, I did not sit, though the carriage was half-empty. I knew we would pick up passengers as we went north to Besźel centre. I stood close to the window and saw right out into the city, into these unfamiliar streets.

The woman, her ungainly huddle below that old mattress, sniffed by scavengers. I phoned Naustin on my cell.

“Is the mattress being tested for trace?”

“Should be, sir.”

“Check. If the techs are on it we’re fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.” Perhaps she was new to the life. Maybe if we’d found her a week later her hair would have been electric blonde.

These regions by the river are intricate, many buildings a century or several centuries old. The tram took its tracks through byways where Besźel, at least half of everything we passed, seemed to lean in and loom over us. We wobbled and slowed, behind local cars and those elsewhere, came to a crosshatching where the Besź buildings were antique shops. That trade had been doing well, as well as anything did in the city for some years, hand-downs polished and spruced as people emptied their apartments of heirlooms for a few Besźmarques.

Some editorialists were optimists. While their leaders roared as relentlessly at each other as they ever had in the Cityhouse, many of the new breed of all parties were working together to put Besźel first. Each drip of foreign investment—and to everyone’s surprise there were drips—brought forth encomia. Even a couple of high-tech companies had recently moved in, though it was hard to believe it was in response to Besźel’s fatuous recent self-description as “Silicon Estuary.”

I got off by the statue of King Val. Downtown was busy: I stop-started, excusing myself to citizens and local tourists, unseeing others with care, till I reached the blocky concrete of ECS Centre. Two groups of tourists were being shepherded by Besź guides. I stood on the steps and looked down UropaStrász. It took me several tries to get a signal.

“Corwi?”

“Boss?”

“You know that area: is there any chance we’re looking at breach?”

There were seconds of silence.

“Doesn’t seem likely. That area’s mostly pretty total. And Pocost Village, that whole project, certainly is.”

“Some of GunterStrász, though …”

“Yeah but. The closest crosshatching is hundreds of metres away. They couldn’t have …” It would have been an extraordinary risk on the part of the murderer or murderers. “I reckon we can assume,” she said.

“Alright. Let me know how you get on. I’ll check in soon.”

***

I HAD PAPERWORK ON OTHER CASES that I opened, establishing them a while in holding patterns like circling aircraft. A woman beaten to death by her boyfriend, who had managed to evade us so far, despite tracers on his name and his prints at the airport. Styelim was an old man who had surprised an addict breaking and entering, been hit once, fatally, with the spanner he himself had been wielding. That case would not close. A young man called Avid Avid, left bleeding from the head after taking a kerb-kiss from a racist, “Ébru Filth” written on the wall above him. For that I was coordinating with a colleague from Special Division, Shenvoi, who had, since some time before Avid’s murder, been undercover in Besźel’s far right.

Ramira Yaszek called while I ate lunch at my desk. “Just done questioning those kids, sir.”

“And?”

“You should be glad they don’t know their rights better, because if they did Naustin’d be facing charges now.” I rubbed my eyes and swallowed my mouthful.

“What did he do?”

“Barichi’s mate Sergev was lippy, so Naustin asked him the bareknuckle question across the mouth, said he was the prime suspect.” I swore. “It wasn’t that hard, and at least it made it easier for me to gudcop.” We had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them. Naustin was one of those who’d switch to hard questioning too easily. There are some suspects that methodology works on, who need to fall down stairs during an interrogation, but a sulky teenage chewer is not one.

“Anyway, no harm done,” Yaszek said. “Their stories tally. They’re out, the four of them, in that bunch of trees. Bit of naughty naughty probably. They were there for a couple of hours at least. At some point during that time—and don’t ask for anything more exact because you aren’t going to get it beyond ‘still dark’—one of the girls sees that van come up onto the grass to the skate park. She doesn’t think much of it because people do come up there all times of day and night to do business, to dump stuff, what have you. It drives around, up past the skate park, comes back. After a while it speeds off.”

“Speeds?”

I scribbled in my notebook, trying one-handedly to pull up my email on my PC. The connection broke more than once. Big attachments on an inadequate system.

“Yeah. It was in a hurry and buggering its suspension. That’s how she noticed it was going.”

“Description?”

“‘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.

“Signs of intercourse?”

“Not recently. So if she’s a working girl maybe it was a refusal to do something that got her in this mess.” I nodded. He waited. “We’ve washed her down now,” he said eventually. “But she was covered in dirt, dust, grass stains, all the stuff you’d expect from where she was lying. And rust.”

“Rust?”

“All over. Lots of abrasions, cuts, scrapes, postmortem mostly, and lots of rust.”

I nodded again. I frowned.

“Defensive wounds?”

“No. Came quick and unexpected, or her back was turned. There’s a bunch more scrapes and whatnot on the body.” Shukman pointed to tear marks on her skin. “Consistent with dragging her along. The wear and tear of murder.”

Hamzinic opened his mouth, closed it again. I glanced up at him. He sadly shook his head: No nothing .

Chapter Three

THE POSTERS WERE UP. Mostly around the area our Fulana was found but some in the main streets, in the shopping streets, in Kyezov and Topisza and areas like that. I even saw one when I left my flat.

It wasn’t even very close to the centre. I lived east and south a bit of the Old Town, the top-but-one flat in a six-storey towerlet on VulkovStrász. It is a heavily crosshatched street—clutch by clutch of architecture broken by alterity, even in a few spots house by house. The local buildings are taller by a floor or three than the others, so Besź juts up semiregularly and the roofscape is almost a machicolation.

Laced by the shadows of girdered towers that would loom over it if they were there, Ascension Church is at the end of VulkovStrász, its windows protected by wire grilles, but some of its stained panes broken. A fish market is there every few days. Regularly I would eat my breakfast to the shouts of vendors by their ice buckets and racks of live molluscs. Even the young women who worked there dressed like their grandmothers while behind their stalls, nostalgically photogenic, their hair tied up in dishcloth-coloured scarves, their filleting aprons in patterns of grey and red to minimise the stains of gutting. The men looked, misleadingly or not, straight off their boats, as if they had not put their catches down since they emerged from the sea, until they reached the cobbles below me. The punters in Besźel lingered and smelled and prodded the goods.

In the morning trains ran on a raised line metres from my window. They were not in my city. I did not of course, but I could have stared into the carriages—they were quite that close—and caught the eyes of foreign travellers.

They would have seen only a thin man in early middle age in dressing gown at his morning yoghurt and coffee, shake-folding a copy of a paper—Inkyistor or Iy Déurnem or a smudgy Besźel Journal to keep my English practiced. Usually alone—once in a while one or other of two women about his age might be there. (An economic historian at Besźel University; a writer for an art magazine. They did not know of each other but would not have minded.)

There when I left, a short distance from my front door on a poster stand, Fulana’s face watched me. Though her eyes were closed, they had cropped and tinkered with the picture so that she did not look dead but stupefied. Do you know this woman? it said. It was printed in black and white, on matte paper. Call Extreme Crime Squad , our number. The presence of the poster might be evidence that the local cops were particularly efficient. Maybe they were all over the borough. It might be that, knowing where I lived, they wanted to keep me off their back with one or two strategic placements, especially for my eyes.

It was a couple of kilometres to ECS base. I walked. I walked by the brick arches: at the top, where the lines were, they were elsewhere, but not all of them were foreign at their bases. The ones I could see contained little shops and squats decorated in art graffiti. In Besźel it was a quiet area, but the streets were crowded with those elsewhere. I unsaw them, but it took time to pick past them all. Before I had reached my turning on Via Camir, Yaszek called my mobile.

“We’ve found the van.”

I PICKED UP A CAB, which sped-stalled repeatedly through the traffic. The Pont Mahest was crowded, locally and elsewhere. I had minutes to look into the dirty river as we edged toward the western bank, the smoke and the grimy dockyard ships in the reflected light of mirrored buildings on a foreign waterfront—an enviable finance zone. Besź tugs bobbed in the wakes of ignored water taxis. The van was skew-whiff between buildings. It was not a lot that it was in, but a channel between the premises of an import-exporters and an office block, a stub of space full of trash and wolf shit, linking two larger streets. Crime-scene tape secured both ends—a slight impropriety, as the alley was really crosshatch, but rarely used, so the tape was a common rule-bend in such circumstances. My colleagues were faddling around the vehicle.

“Boss.” It was Yaszek.

“Is Corwi on her way?”

“Yeah, I gave her the info.” Yaszek said nothing about my commandeering of the junior officer. She walked me over. It was an old, beat-up VW, in very bad condition. It was more off-white than grey, but it was darkened with dirt.

“Are you done dusting?” I said. I put on rubber gloves. The mectecs nodded and worked around me.

“It was unlocked,” Yaszek said.

I opened the door. I prodded the split upholstery. A trinket on the dashboard—a hula-dancing plastic saint. I pulled open the glove compartment onto a battered road atlas and dirt. I splayed the pages of the book but there was nothing inside: it was the classic Besź driver’s aid, though an edition old enough to be black and white.

“So how do we know this is it?” Yaszek led me to the rear and pulled it open. I looked in on more dirt, a dank though not sick-making smell at least as much rust as mould, nylon cord, piled-up junk. “What is all this?”

I poked it. A few bits. A little motor from something, rocking; a broken television; remnants of unidentifiable bits and pieces, corkscrewed detritus, on a layer of cloth and dust. Layers of rust and scabs of oxide.

“See that?” Yaszek pointed at stains on the floor. Had I not been looking carefully I might have said it was oil. “A couple of people in the office call it in, a deserted van. The uniforms see its doors are open. I don’t know whether they listen to their alerts or if they’re just thorough when they check through outstandings, but either way we’re lucky.” One of the messages that would have been read to all Besź patrols the previous morning would have requested they investigate and report any grey vehicles, and refer to ECS. We were fortunate these officers had not just called in the impounders. “Anyway they saw some muck on the floor, had it tested. We’re verifying, but it looks like it’s Fulana’s blood type, and we’ll have a definite match soon.”

Lying like a mole below heavy refuse, I leaned down to look under the debris. I moved it gently, tilting the junk. My hand came away red. I looked piece by piece, touched each to gauge their heft. The engine thing might be swung by a pipe that was part of it: the bulk of its base was heavy and would break what it was swung into. It did not look scuffed, though, nor bloodied nor specked with hair. As a murder weapon it did not convince me.

“You’ve not taken anything out?”

“No, no paperwork, no nothing. There was nothing in here. Nothing here except this stuff. We’ll get results in a day or two.”

“There’s so much crap,” I said. Corwi had arrived. A few passersby were hesitating at either end of the alleyway, watching the mectecs working. “It’s not going to be a problem of not enough trace; it’s going to be too much.

“So. Let’s assume for a minute. That junk in there’s got rust all over her. She’s been lying around in there.” The smears had been on her face as well as her body, not concentrated on her hands: she had not tried to push the rubbish away from her, or protect her head. She was unconscious or dead when she was in the van while the rubbish knocked against her.

“Why were they driving around with all this shit?” said Corwi. By that afternoon we had the name and address of the van’s owner, and by the next morning we had verification that the blood was our Fulana’s.

THE MAN’S NAME was Mikyael Khurusch. He was the van’s third owner, officially at least. He had a record, had done time for two assault charges, for theft, the last time four years previously. And—“Look,” said Corwi—he had been done for Sex Buying, had approached a policewoman undercover in a prostitution blackspot. “So we know he’s a John.” He had been off radar since, but was, according to hurried intel, a tradesman selling bits and pieces in the city’s many markets, as well as three days a week from a shop in Mashlin, in western Besźel.

We could connect him and the van, and the van and Fulana—a direct link was what we wanted. I went to my office and checked my messages. Some make-work on the Styelim case, an update from our switchboard on the posters and two hang-ups. Our exchange had promised for two years to upgrade to allow Caller ID.

There had been, of course, many people calling to tell us they recognised Fulana, but only a few—the staff who took those calls knew how to filter the deluded and the malicious and to a startling degree were accurate in their judgements—only a few so far that looked worth chasing. The body was a legal assistant in a small practice in Gyedar borough, who had not been seen for days; or she was, an anonymous voice insisted, “a tart called Rosyn ‘The Pout,’ and that’s all you get from me.” Uniforms were checking.

I told Commissar Gadlem I wanted to go in and talk to Khurusch in his house, get him to volunteer fingerprints, saliva, to cooperate. See how he reacted. If he said no, we could subpoena it and keep him under watch.

“Alright,” Gadlem said. “But let’s not waste time. If he doesn’t play along put him in seqyestre , bring him in.”

I would try not to do that, though Besź law gave us the right. Seqyestre , “half-arrest,” meant we could hold a nonwilling witness or “connected party” for six hours, for preliminary interrogation. We could not take physical evidence, nor, officially, draw conclusions from noncooperation or silence. The traditional use was to get confessions from suspects against whom there was not sufficient evidence to arrest. It was also, occasionally, a useful stalling technique against those we thought might be a flight risk. But juries and lawyers were turning against the technique, and a half-arrestee who did not confess usually had a stronger case later, because we looked too eager. Gadlem, old-fashioned, did not care, and I had my orders.

Khurusch worked out of one of a line of semiactive businesses, in an economically lacklustre zone. We arrived in a hurried operation. Local officers on cooked-up subterfuge had ascertained that Khurusch was there.

We pulled him out of the office, a too-warm dusty room above the shop, industrial calendars and faded patches on the walls between filing cabinets. His assistant stared stupidly and picked up and put down stuff from her desk as we led Khurusch away.

He knew who I was before Corwi or the other uniforms were visible in his doorway. He was enough of a pro, or had been, that he knew he was not being arrested, despite our manner, and that therefore he could have refused to come and I would have had to obey Gadlem. After a moment when he first saw us—during which he stiffened as if considering running, though where?—he came with us down the wobbling iron staircase on the building’s wall, the only entrance. I muttered into a radio and had the armed officers we had had waiting stand down. He never saw them.

Khurusch was a fatly muscular man in a checked shirt as faded and dusty looking as his office walls. He watched me from across the table in our interview room. Yaszek sat; Corwi stood under instructions not to speak, only watch. I walked. We weren’t recording. This wasn’t an interrogation, not technically.

“Do you know why you’re here, Mikyael?”

“No clue.”

“Do you know where your van is?”

He looked up hard and stared at me. His voice changed—suddenly hopeful.

“Is that what this is about?” he said eventually. “The van?” He said a ha and sat a little back. Still guarded but relaxing. “Did you find it? Is that —”

“Find it?”

“It was stolen. Three days ago. Did you? Find it? Jesus. What was … Have you got it? Can I have it back? What happened?”

I looked at Yaszek. She stood and whispered to me, sat again, and watched Khurusch.

“Yes, that’s what this is about, Mikyael,” I said. “What did you think it was about? Actually no, don’t point at me, Mikyael, and shut your mouth until I tell you; I don’t want to know. Here’s the thing, Mikyael. A man like yourself, a delivery man, needs a van. You haven’t reported yours as missing.” I looked down briefly at Yaszek, Are we sure? She nodded. “You’ve not reported it stolen. Now I can see that the loss of that piece of shit and I do stress piece of shit wouldn’t cut you up too badly, not on a human level. Nonetheless, I’m wondering, if it was stolen, I can’t see what would stop you alerting us and indeed your insurance. How can you do your job without it?”

Khurusch shrugged.

“I didn’t get it together. I was going to. I was busy …”

“We know how busy you are, Mik, and still I ask, why didn’t you report it gone?”

“I didn’t get it together. Really there’s nothing fucking dubious—”

“For three days?”

“Have you got it? What happened? It was used for something, wasn’t it? What was it used for?”

“Do you know this woman? Where were you on Tuesday night, Mik?” He stared at the picture.

“Jesus.” He went pale, he did. “Someone was killed? Jesus. Was she hit? Hit and run? Jesus.” He pulled out a dented PDA, then looked up without turning it on. “Tuesday? I was at a meeting. Tuesday night? Christ’s sake I was at a meeting.” He gave a nervous noise. “That was the night the goddamn van got stolen. I was at a meeting, and there’s twenty people can tell you the same.”

“What meeting? Where?”

“In Vyevus.”

“How’d you get there, with no van?”

“In my fucking car! No one’s stolen that. I was at Gamblers Anonymous.” I stared. “Fuck’s sake I go every week. Last four years.”

“Since you were last in prison.”

“Yes since I was in fucking prison, Jesus, what do you think put me there?”

“Assault.”

“Yeah, I broke my fucking bookie’s nose because I was behind and he was threatening me. What do you care? I was in a room full of fucking people on Tuesday night.”

“That’s, what, two hours at the most…”

“Yeah and then afterwards at nine we went to the bar—it’s GA not AA—and I was there till after midnight, and I didn’t go home alone. There’s a woman in my group … They’ll all tell you.”

He was wrong about that. Of the GA group of eighteen, eleven wouldn’t compromise their anonymity. The convenor, a wiry pony-tailed man who went by Zyet, “Bean,” would not give us their names. He was right not to do so. We could have forced him, but why? The seven who would come forward all verified Khurusch’s story.

None was the woman he claimed to have gone home with, but several of them agreed that she existed. We could have found out, but again what would the point have been? The mectecs got excited when we found Khurusch’s DNA on Fulana, but it was a tiny number of his arm hairs on her skin: given how often he hauled things in and out of the vehicle, it proved nothing.

“So why didn’t he tell anyone it was missing?”

“He did,” Yaszek told me. “He just didn’t tell us. But I spoke to the secretary, Ljela Kitsov. He’s been pissing and moaning about it for the last couple of days.”

“He just never got it together to tell us? What does he even do without it?”

“Kitsov says he just piddles stuff up and down across the river. The occasional import, on a very small scale. Pops abroad and picks up stuff to resell: cheap clothes, dodgy CDs.”

“Abroad where?”

“Varna. Bucharest. Turkey sometimes. Ul Qoma, of course.”

“So he’s just too dithery to report the theft?”

“It does happen, boss.”

Of course, and to his rage—despite having not reported it stolen, he was now suddenly eager to have it returned—we wouldn’t give him his van back. We did take him to the pound to verify it was his.

“Yes, it’s mine.” I waited for him to complain about how ill it had been used, but that was obviously its usual colour. “Why can’t I have it? I need it.”

“As I keep saying, it’s a crime scene. You’ll get it when I’m ready. What’s all this for?” He was huffing and grumping, looked into the back of the van. I held him back from touching anything.

“This shit? I don’t fucking know.”

“This, I’m talking about.” The ripped-up cord, the pieces of junk.

“Yeah. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t put it here. Don’t look at me like that—why would I carry garbage like this?”

I said to Corwi in my office afterwards: “Please, do please stop me if you have any ideas, Lizbyet. Because I’m seeing a may-or-may-not-be working girl, who no one recognises, dumped in plain sight, in a stolen van, into which was carefully placed a load of crap, for no reason. And none of it’s the murder weapon, you know—that’s pretty certain.” I prodded the paper on my desk that told me.

“There’s rubbish all over that estate,” she said. “There’s rubbish all over Besźel; he could’ve picked it up anywhere. ‘He’ … They, maybe.”

“Picked it up, stashed it, dumped it, and the van with it.”

Corwi sat rather stiff, waiting for me to say something. All the rubbish had done was roll into the dead woman and rust her as if she, too, were old iron.

Chapter Four

BOTH OF THE LEADS WERE BOGUS. The office assistant had resigned and not bothered to tell them. We found her in Byatsialic, in the east of Besźel. She was mortified to have caused us trouble. “I never hand in notice,” she kept saying. “Not when they’re employers like that. And this has never happened, nothing like this.” Corwi found Rosyn “The Pout” without any difficulty. She was working her usual pitch.

“She doesn’t look anything like Fulana, boss.” Corwi showed me a jpeg Rosyn had been happy to pose for. We couldn’t trace the source of that spurious information, delivered with such convincing authority, nor work out why anyone would have mistaken the two women. Other information came in that I sent people to chase. I found messages and blank messages on my work phone.

It rained. On the kiosk outside my front door the printout of Fulana softened and streaked. Someone put up a glossy flyer for an evening of Balkan techno so it covered the top half of her face. The club night emerged from her lips and chin. I unpinned the new poster. I did not throw it away—only moved it so Fulana was visible again, her closed eyes next to it. DJ Radic and the Tiger Kru. Hard Beats. I did not see any other pictures of Fulana though Corwi assured me they were there, in the city.

Khurusch was all over the van, of course, but with the exception of those few hairs Fulana was clean of him. As if all those recovering gamblers would lie, anyway. We tried to take the names of any contacts to whom he had ever lent the van. He mentioned a few but insisted it had been stolen by a stranger. On the Monday after we found the body I took a call.

“Borlú.” I said my name again after a long pause, and it was repeated back to me.

“Inspector Borlú.”

“Help you?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you could help me days ago. I’ve been trying to reach you. I can help you more like.” The man spoke with a foreign accent.

“What? I’m sorry, I need you to speak up—it’s a really bad line.”

It was staticking, and the man sounded as if he was a recording on an antique machine. I could not tell if the lag was on the line, or if he was taking a long time to respond to me each time I said anything. He spoke a good but odd Besź, punctuated with archaisms. I said, “Who is this? What do you want?”

“I have information for you.”

“Have you spoken to our info-line?”

“I can’t.” He was calling from abroad. The feedback from Besźel’s outdated exchanges was distinctive. “That’s kind of the point.”

“How did you get my number?”

“Borlú, shut up.” I wished again for logging telephones. I sat up. “Google. Your name’s in the papers. You’re in charge of the investigation into the girl. It’s not hard to get past assistants. Do you want me to help you or not?”

I actually looked around but there was no one with me. “Where are you calling from?” I parted the blinds in my window as if I might see someone watching me from the street. Of course I did not.

“Come on Borlú. You know where I’m calling from.”

I was making notes. I knew the accent.

He was calling from Ul Qoma.

“You know where I’m calling from and that is why please don’t bother asking my name.”

“You’re not doing anything illegal talking to me.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. You don’t know what I’m going to tell you . It is—” He broke off, and I heard him mutter something with his hand over the phone, for a moment. “Look Borlú, I don’t know where you stand on things like this but I think it is lunatic, an insult, that I am speaking to you from another country.”

“I’m not a political man. Listen, if you’d rather…” I started the last sentence in Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma.

“This is fine.” He interrupted in his old-fashioned Illitan-inflected Besź. “It’s the same damn-faced language anyway.” I wrote that he said that. “Now shut up. Do you want to hear my information?”

“Of course.” I was standing, reaching, trying to work out a way to trace this. My line was not equipped, and it would take hours to go backwards, through BesźTel, even if I could get hold of them while he was speaking to me.

“The woman who you’re … She’s dead. Isn’t she? She is. I knew her.”

“I’m sorry to …” I only said this after he was silent many seconds.

“I’ve known her … I met her a time ago. I want to help you, Borlú, but not because you’re a cop . Holy Light. I don’t recognize your authority. But if Marya was … if she was killed, then some people I care about may not be safe. Including the one I care about most, my very own self. And she deserves … So—this is all I know.

“Her name’s Marya. That’s what she went by. I met her here. Ul Qoma-here. I’m telling you what I can, but I never knew much. Not my business. She was a foreigner. I knew her from politics. She was serious—committed, you know? Just not to what I thought at first. She knew a lot; she was no time-waster.”

“Look,” I said.

“That’s all I can tell you. She lived here.”

“She was in Besźel.”

“Come on.” He was angry. “Come on. Not officially. She couldn’t. Even if she was, she was here. Go look at the cells, the radicals. Someone’ll know who she is. She went everywhere. All the underground. Both sides, must have done. She wanted to go everywhere because she needed to know everything. And she did. That’s all.”

“How did you find out that she’d been killed?” I heard his hiss of breath.

“Borlú, if you really mean that you’re stupid and I’m wasting my time. I recognized her picture, Borlú. Do you think I’d be helping you if I didn’t think I had to? If I didn’t think this was important? How do you think I found out? I saw your fucking poster.”

He put the phone down. I held my receiver to my ear a while as if he might return.

I saw your poster . When I looked down at my notepad, I had written on it, beside the details he had given me, shit/shit/shit .

I DID NOT STAY in the office much longer. “Are you alright, Tyador?” Gadlem said. “You look …” I’m sure I did. At a pavement stall I had a strong coffee aj Tyrko —Turkish style—a mistake. I was even more antsy.

It was, not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me—cathedrals, bars, the brick flourishes of what had been a school—that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried.

I dialled the number of Sariska, the historian, that evening. Sex would have been good, but also sometimes she liked to talk over cases that I was working on, and she was smart. I dialled her number twice but disconnected twice before she could respond. I would not involve her in this. A disguised-as-hypothesis infraction of the confidentiality clause on ongoing investigations was one thing. Making her accessory to breach was another.

I kept coming back to that shit/shit/shit . In the end I got home with two bottles of wine and set out slowly—cushioning them in my stomach with a pick-pick supper of olives, cheese, sausage—to finish them. I made more useless notes, some in arcane diagram form as if I might draw a way out, but the situation—the conundrum—was clear. I might be the victim of a pointless and laboured hoax, but it did not seem likely. More probable was that the man on the telephone had been telling the truth.

In which case I had been given a major lead, close information about Fulana-Marya. I had been told where to go and who to chase to find out more. Which it was my job to do. But if it came out that I acted on the information no conviction would ever stand. And much more serious, it would be far worse than illegal for me to pursue it, not only illegal according to Besź codes—I would be in breach.

My informant should not have seen the posters. They were not in his country. He should never have told me. He made me accessory. The information was an allergen in Besźel—the mere fact of it in my head was a kind of trauma. I was complicit. It was done. (Perhaps because I was drunk it did not occur to me then that it had not been necessary for him to tell me how he had come by the information, and that he had to have had reasons for doing so.)

I WOULD NOT, but who would not be tempted to burn or shred the notes of that conversation? Of course I would not, but. I sat up late at my kitchen table with them spread out in front of me, idly writing shit/shit on them crosswise from time to time. I put on music: Little Miss Train , a collaboration, Van Morrison duetting with Coirsa Yakov, the Besź Umm Kalsoum as she was called, on his 1987 tour. I drank more and put the picture of Marya Fulana Unknown Foreign Detail Breacher next to the notes.

No one knew her. Perhaps, God help us, she had not been properly here in Besźel at all, though Pocost was a total area. She could have been dragged there. The kids finding her body, the whole investigation, might be breach too. I should not incriminate myself by pushing this. I should perhaps just walk away from the investigation and let her moulder. It was escapism for a moment to pretend I might do so. In the end I would do my job, though doing it meant breaking a code, an existential protocol more basic by a long way than any I was paid to enforce.

As kids we used to play Breach. It was never a game I much enjoyed, but I would take my turn creeping over chalked lines and chased by my friends, their faces in ghastly expressions, their hands crooked as claws. I would do the chasing too, if it was my turn to be invoked. That, along with pulling sticks and pebbles out of the ground and claiming them the magic Besź mother lode, and the tag /hide-and-seek crossbreed called Insile Hunt, were regular games.

There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it. There is a sect in Besźel that worships Breach. It’s scandalous but not completely surprising given the powers involved. There is no law against the congregation, though the nature of their religion makes everyone twitchy. They have been the subject of prurient TV programs.

At three in the morning I was drunk and very awake, looking over the streets of Besźel (and more—the crosshatch). I could hear the barking of dogs and a call or two of some scrawny, wormy street wolf. The papers—both sides of the argument still as if it were that, an argument—were all over the table. Fulana-Marya’s face was wineglass-ringed, as were the illegal shit/shit/shit notes.

It is not uncommon for me to fail to sleep. Sariska and Biszaya were used to sleepily walking from the bedroom to the bathroom to find me reading at the kitchen table, chewing so much gum that I would get sugar blisters (I would not take up smoking again). Or looking over the night city and (inevitably, unseeing but touched by its light) the other city.

Sariska laughed at me once. “Look at you,” she said, not without affection. “Sitting there like an owl. Melancholy bloody gargoyle. You mawkish bugger. You don’t get any insight, you know, just because it’s night. Just because some buildings have their lights on.” She was not there to tease me though just then and I wanted whatever insight I could get, even spurious, so I looked on out.

Planes went over the clouds. Cathedral spires were lit by glass skyscrapers. Recurved and crescent neoned architecture across the border. I tried to hook up my computer to look some stuff up, but the only connection I had was dial-up and it was all very frustrating so I stopped.

“Details later.” I think I actually said it aloud. I made more notes. Eventually, at last, I called the direct line to Corwi’s desk.

“Lizbyet. I’ve had a thought.” My instinct as always when I lie was to say too much, too quickly. I made myself speak as if idly. She was not stupid though. “It’s late. I’m just leaving this for you because I’m probably not going to be in tomorrow. We’re not getting anywhere with the street-beat, so it’s pretty obvious it’s not what we thought—someone would’ve recognised her. We’ve got the picture out to all the precincts, so if she’s a street girl off her patch maybe we’ll get lucky. But meanwhile I’d like to look in a couple of other directions while we can keep this running.

“I’m thinking, look, she’s not in her area, it’s a weird situation, we can’t get any beep. I was talking to a guy I know in Dissident Unit, and he was saying how secretive the people he’s watching are. It’s all Nazis and reds and unifs and so on. Anyway it got me thinking about what kind of people hide their identities, and while we’ve still got any time I’d like to chase that a bit. What I’m thinking is—hold on I’m just looking at some notes … Okay, might as well start with unifs.

“Talk to the Kook Squad. See what you can get by way of addresses, chapters—I don’t know much about it. Ask for Shenvoi’s office. Tell him you’re on a job for me. Go by the ones you can, take the pictures, see if anyone recognises her. I don’t need to tell you they’re going to be weird with you—they’re not going to want you around. But see what you can do. Keep in touch, I’ll be on the mobile. Like I say, I won’t be in. Okay. Talk tomorrow. Okay, bye.”

“That was terrible.” I think I said that aloud too.

When I had done that I called the number of Taskin Cerush in our admin pool. I had been careful to take a note of her direct line when she had helped me through bureaucracy three or four cases ago. I had kept in touch. She was excellent at her job.

“Taskin, this is Tyador Borlú. Can you please call me on my mobile tomorrow or when you get the chance and let me know what I might have to do if I wanted to put a case to the Oversight Committee? If I wanted to push a case to Breach. Hypothetically.” I winced and laughed. “Keep this to yourself, okay? Thanks, Task. Just let meknow what I need to do and if you’ve got any handy insider suggestions. Thanks.”

There had not been much question about what my terrible informant had been telling me. The phrases I had copied and underlined.

same language

recognise authority—not

both sides of the city

It made sense of why he would call me, why the crime of it, of what he’d seen, or that he’d seen it, would not detain him as it would most. Mostly he had done it because he was afraid, of whatever Marya-Fulana’s death implied for him. What he had told me was that his coconspirators in Besźel might very possibly have seen Marya, that she would not have respected borders. And if any group of troublemakers in Besźel would be complicit in that particular kind of crime and taboo, it would be my informer and his comrades. They were obviously unificationists.

SARISKA MOCKED ME in my mind as I turned back to that night-lit city, and this time I looked and saw its neighbour. Illicit, but I did. Who hasn’t done that at times? There were gasrooms I shouldn’t see, chambers dangling ads, tethered by skeletal metal frames. On the street at least one of the passersby—I could tell by the clothes, the colours, the walk—was not in Besźel, and I watched him anyway.

I turned to the railway lines a few metres by my window and waited until, as I knew it would eventually, a late train came. I looked into its rapidly passing, illuminated windows, and into the eyes of the few passengers, a very few of whom even saw me back, and were startled. But they were gone fast, over the conjoined sets of roofs: it was a brief crime, and not their faults. They probably did not feel guilty for long. They probably did not remember that stare. I always wanted to live where I could watch foreign trains.

Chapter Five

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW much about them, Illitan and Besź sound very different. They are written, of course, in distinct alphabets. Besź is in Besź: thirty-four letters, left to right, all sounds rendered clear and phonetic, consonants, vowels and demivowels decorated with diacritics—it looks, one often hears, like Cyrillic (though that is a comparison likely to annoy a citizen of Besźel, true or not). Illitan uses Roman script. That is recent.

Read the travelogues of the last-but-one century and those older, and the strange and beautiful right-to-left Illitan calligraphy—and its jarring phonetics—is constantly remarked on. At some point everyone has heard Sterne, from his travelogue: “In the Land of Alphabets Arabic caught Dame Sanskrit’s eye (drunk he was despite Muhamed’s injunctions, else her age would have dissuaded). Nine months later a disowned child was put out. The feral babe is Illitan , Hermes-Aphrodite not without beauty. He has something of both his parents in his form, but the voice of those who raised him—the birds.”

The script was lost in 1923, overnight, a culmination of Ya Ilsa’s reforms: it was Atatürk who imitated him, not, as is usually claimed, the other way around. Even in Ul Qoma, no one can read Illitan script now but archivists and activists.

Anyway whether in its original or later written form, Illitan bears no resemblance to Besź. Nor does it sound similar. But these distinctions are not as deep as they appear. Despite careful cultural differentiation, in the shape of their grammars and the relations of their phonemes (if not the base sounds themselves), the languages are closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all. It feels almost seditious to say so. Still.

Besźel’s dark ages are very dark. Sometime between two thousand and seventeen hundred years ago the city was founded, here in this curl of coastline. There are still remains from those times in the heart of the town, when it was a port hiding a few kilometres up the river to shelter from the pirates of the shore. The city’s founding came at the same time as another’s, of course. The ruins are surrounded now or in some places incorporated, antique foundations, into the substance of the city. There are older ruins too, like the mosaic remnants in Yozhef Park. These Romanesque remains predate Besźel, we think. We built Besźel on their bones, perhaps.

It may or may not have been Besźel, that we built, back then, while others may have been building Ul Qoma on the same bones. Perhaps there was one thing back then that later schismed on the ruins, or perhaps our ancestral Besźel had not yet met and standoffishly entwined with its neighbour. I am not a student of the Cleavage, but if I were I still would not know.

“BOSS.” Lizbyet Corwi called me. “Boss you are on fire. How did you know? Meet me at sixty-eight BudapestStrász.”

I had not yet dressed in day clothes though it was after noon. My kitchen table was a landscape of papers. The books I had on politics and history were propped in a Babel-tower by the milk. I should keep my laptop from the mess, but I never bothered. I brushed cocoa away from my notes. The blackface character on my French drinking chocolate smiled at me. “What are you talking about? What’s that address?”

“It’s in Bundalia,” she said. An industrial presuburb northwest of Funicular Park, by the river. “And are you kidding me what is it? I did what you said—I asked around, got the basic gist of which groups there are, who thinks what of each other, blah blah. I spent the morning going round, asking questions. Putting the fear in. Can’t say you get much respect from these bastards with the uniform on, you know? And I can’t say I had much hopes for this, but I figured what the hell else did we have to do? Anyway I’m going around trying to get a sense of the politics and whatnot, and one of the guys at one of the—I guess you’d say lodges maybe—he starts to give me something. Wasn’t going to admit it at first, but I could tell. You’re a fucking genius, sir. Sixty-eight BudapestStrász is a unificationist HQ.”

Her awe was already close to suspicion. She would have looked at me even harder if she had seen the documents on my table, that I had negotiated with my hands when she phoned me. Several books were open to their indices, propped to show what references they had to unificationism. I really had not come across the BudapestStrász address.

In typical political cliché, unificationists were split on many axes. Some groups were illegal, sister-organisations in both Besźel and Ul Qoma. The banned had at various points in their history advocated the use of violence to bring the cities to their God-, destiny-, history-, or people-intended unity. Some had, mostly cack-handedly, targeted nationalist intellectuals—bricks through windows and shit through doors. They had been accused of furtively propagandising among refugees and new immigrants with limited expertise at seeing and unseeing, at being in one particular city. The activists wanted to weaponise such urban uncertainty.

These extremists were vocally criticised by others keen to retain freedom of movement and assembly, whatever their secret thoughts and whatever threads connected them all out of view. There were other divisions, between different visions of what the united city would be like, what would be its language, what would be its name. Even these legal grouplets would be watched without ceasing, and checked up on regularly by the authorities in whichever their city. “Swiss cheese,” Shenvoi said when I spoke to him that morning. “Probably more informers and moles in the unifs even than in the True Citizens or Nazis or other nutters. I wouldn’t worry about them—they’re not going to do dick without the say-so of someone in security.”

Also, the unifs must know, though they would hope never to see proof of it, that nothing they did would be unknown to Breach. That meant I would be under Breach’s purview too, during my visit, if I was not already.

Always the question of how to get through the city. I should have taxied as Corwi was waiting, but no, two trams, a change at Vencelas Square. Swaying under the carved and clockwork figures of Besź burghers on the town facades, ignoring, unseeing, the shinier fronts of the elsewhere, the alter parts.

The length of BudapestStrász, patches of winter buddleia frothed out from old buildings. It’s a traditional urban weed in Besźel, but not in Ul Qoma, where they trim it as it intrudes, so BudapestStrász being the Besźel part of a crosshatched area, each bush, unflowered at that time, emerged unkempt for one or two or three local buildings, then would end in a sharp vertical plane at the edge of Besźel.

The buildings in Besźel were brick and plaster, each surmounted with one of the household Lares staring at me, a little manlike grotesque, and bearded with that weed. A few decades before these places would not have been so tumbling down; they would have emitted more noise and the street would have been filled with young clerks in dark suits and visiting foremen. Behind the northern buildings were industrial yards, and beyond them a curl in the river, where docks used to bustle and where their iron skeletons still graveyard lay.

Back then the region of Ul Qoma that shared the space had been quiet. It had grown more noisy: the neighbours had moved in economic antiphase. As the river industry of Besźel had slowed, Ul Qoma’s business picked up, and now there were more foreigners walking on the worn-down crosshatched cobbles than Besź locals. The once-collapsing Ul Qoma rookeries, crenellated and lumpenbaroque (not that I saw them—I unsaw carefully, but they still registered a little, illicitly, and I remembered the styles from photographs), were renovated, the sites of galleries and .uq startups.

I watched the local buildings’ numbers. They rose in stutters, interspersed with foreign alter spaces. In Besźel the area was pretty unpeopled, but not elsewhere across the border, and I had to unseeing dodge many smart young businessmen and –women. Their voices were muted to me, random noise. That aural fade comes from years of Besź care. When I reached the tar-painted front where Corwi waited with an unhappy-looking man, we stood together in a near-deserted part of Besźel city, surrounded by a busy unheard throng.

“Boss. This is Pall Drodin.”

Drodin was a tall and thin man in his late thirties. He wore several rings in his ears, a leather jacket with obscure and unmerited membership insignia of various military and other organisations on it, anomalously smart though dirty trousers. He eyed me unhappily, smoking.

He was not arrested. Corwi had not taken him in. I nodded a greeting to her, then turned around slowly 180 degrees and looked at the buildings around us. I focused only the Besź ones, of course.

“Breach?” I said. Drodin looked startled. So in truth did Corwi, though she covered it. When Drodin said nothing I said, “Don’t you think we’re watched by powers?”

“Yeah, no, we are.” He sounded resentful. I am sure he was. “Sure. Sure. You asking me where they are?” It is a more or less meaningless question but one that no Besź nor Ul Qoman can banish. Drodin did not look anywhere other than in my eyes. “You see the building over the road? The one that used to be a match factory?” A mural’s remains in scabs of paint almost a century old, a salamander smiling through its corona of flames. “You see stuff moving, in there. Stuff you know, like, comes and goes, like it shouldn’t.”

“So you can see them appear?” He looked uneasy again. “You think that’s where they manifest?”

“No no, but process of elimination.”

“Drodin, get in. We’ll be in in a second,” Corwi said. Nodded him in and he went. “What the fuck, boss?”

“Problem?”

“All this Breach shit.” She lowered her voice on Breach . “What are you doing?” I did not say anything. “I’m trying to establish a power dynamic here and I’m at the end of it, not Breach, boss. I don’t want that shit in the picture. Where the fuck you getting this spooky shit from?” When I still said nothing she shook her head and led me inside.

The Besźqoma Solidarity Front did not make much of an effort with their decor. There were two rooms, two and a half at generous count, full of cabinets and shelves stacked with files and books. In one corner wall space had been cleared and cleaned, it looked like, for backdrop, and a webcam pointed at it and an empty chair.

“Broadcasts,” Drodin said. He saw where I was looking. “Online.” He started to tell me a web address until I shook my head.

“Everyone else left when I came in,” Corwi told me.

Drodin sat down behind his desk in the back room. There were two other chairs in there. He did not offer them, but Corwi and I sat anyway. More mess of books, a dirty computer. On a wall a large-scale map of Besźel and Ul Qoma. To avoid prosecution the lines and shades of division were there—total, alter, and crosshatched—but ostentatiously subtle, distinctions of greyscale. We sat looking at each other a while.

“Look,” Drodin said. “I know … you understand I’m not used to … You guys don’t like me, and that’s fine, that’s understood.” We said nothing. He played with some of the things on his desktop. “And I’m no snitch either.”

“Jesus, Drodin,” Corwi said, “if it’s absolution you’re after, get a priest.” But he continued.

“It’s just… If this has something to do with what she was into, then you’re all going to think it has something to do with us and maybe it even might have something to do with us and I’m giving no one any excuses to come down on us. You know? You know?”

“Alright enough,” Corwi said. “Cut the shit.” She looked around the room. “I know you think you’re clever, but seriously, how many misdemeanours do you think I’m looking at right now? Your map, for a start—You reckon it’s careful, but it wouldn’t take a particularly patriotic prosecutor to interpret it in a way that’ll leave you inside. What else? You want me to go through your books? How many are on the proscribed list? Want me to go through your papers? This place has Insulting Besź Sovereignty in the Second Degree flashing over it like neon.”

“Like the Ul Qoma club districts,” I said. “Ul Qoma neon. Would you like that, Drodin? Prefer it to the local variety?”

“So while we appreciate your help, Mr. Drodin, let’s not kid ourselves as to why you’re doing it.”

“You don’t understand.” He muttered it. “I have to protect my people. There’s weird shit out there. There’s weird shit going on.”

“Alright,” Corwi said. “Whatever. What’s the story, Drodin?” She took the photograph of Fulana and put it in front of him. “Tell my boss what you started telling me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s her.” Corwi and I leaned forward. Perfect synchronised timing.

I said, “What’s her name?”

“What she said, she said her name was Byela Mar.” Drodin shrugged. “It’s what she said. I know, but what can I tell you?”

It was an obvious, and elegantly punning, pseudonym. Byela is a unisex Besź name; Mar is at least plausible as a surname. Together their phonemes approximate the phrasebyé lai mar , literally “only the baitfish,” a fishing phrase to say “nothing worth noting.”

“It isn’t unusual. Lots of our contacts and members go by handles.”

“Noms ,” I said, “de unification.” I could not tell if he understood. “Tell us about Byela.” Byela, Fulana, Marya was accruing names.

“She was here I don’t know, three years ago or so? Bit less? I hadn’t seen her since then. She was obviously foreign.”

“From Ul Qoma?”

“No. Spoke okay Illitan but not fluent. She’d talk in Besź or Illitan—or, well, the root. I never heard her talk anything else—she wouldn’t tell me where she came from. From her accent I’d say American or English maybe. I don’t know what she was doing. It’s not… it’s kind of rude to ask too much about people in this line.”

“So, what, she came to meetings? She was an organiser?” Corwi turned to me and said without lowering her voice, “I don’t even know what it is these fuckers do, boss. I don’t even know what to ask.” Drodin watched her, no more sour than he had been since we arrived.

“She turned up like I said a couple of years ago. She wanted to use our library. We’ve got pamphlets and old books on … well on the cities, a lot of stuff they don’t stock in other places.”

“We should take a look, boss,” Corwi said. “See there’s nothing inappropriate.”

“Fuck’s sake, I’m helping, aren’t I? You want to get me on banned books? There’s nothing Class One, and the Class Twos we got are mostly available on-fucking-line anyway.”

“Alright alright,” I said. Pointed for him to continue.

“So she came and we talked a lot. She wasn’t here long. Like a couple of weeks. Don’t ask me about what she did otherwise and stuff like that because I don’t know. All I know is every day she’d come by at odd times and look at books, or talk to me about our history, the history of the cities, about what was going on, about our campaigns, that kind of thing.”

“What campaigns?”

“Our brothers and sisters in prison. Here and in Ul Qoma. For nothing but their beliefs. Amnesty International’s on our side there, you know. Talking to contacts. Education. Helping new immigrants. Demos.” In Besźel, unificationist demonstrations were fractious, small, dangerous things. Obviously the local nationalists would come out to break them up, screaming at the marchers as traitors, and in general the most apolitical local wouldn’t have much sympathy for them. It was almost as bad in Ul Qoma, except it was more unlikely they would be allowed to gather in the first place. That must have been a source of anger, though it certainly saved the Ul Qoman unifs from beatings.

“How did she look? Did she dress well? What was she like?”

“Yeah she did. Smart. Almost chic, you know? Stood out here.” He even laughed at himself. “And she was clever. I really liked her at first, you know? I was really excited. At first.”

His pauses were requests for us to chivvy him, so that none of this discussion was at his behest. “But?” I said. “What happened?”

“We had an argument. Actually I only had an argument with her because she was giving some of the other comrades shit, you know? I’d walk into the library or downstairs or whatever and someone or other would be shouting at her. She was never shouting at them, but she’d be talking quietly and driving them mad, and in the end I had to tell her to go. She was … she was dangerous.” Another silence. Corwi and I looked at each other. “No I ain’t exaggerating,” he said. “She brought you here, didn’t she? I told you she was dangerous.”

He picked up the photograph and studied it. Across his face went pity, anger, dislike, fear. Fear, certainly. He got up, walked in a circle around his desk—ridiculous, too small a room to pace, but he tried.

“See the problem was …” He went to his small window and looked out, turned back to us. He was silhouetted against the skyline, of Besźel or Ul Qoma or both I could not tell.

“She was asking all this stuff about some of the kookiest underground bollocks. Old wives’ tales, rumours, urban myths, craziness. I didn’t think much of it because we get a lot of that shit, and she was obviously smarter than the loons into it, so I figured she was just feeling her way around, getting to know stuff.”

“Weren’t you curious?”

“Sure. Young foreign girl, clever, mysterious? Intense?” He mocked himself with how he said that. He nodded. “Sure I was. I’m curious about all the people who come here. Some of them tell me shit, some of them don’t. But I wouldn’t be leader of this chapter if I went around pumping them. There’s a woman here, a lot older than me … I been meeting her on and off for fifteen years. Don’t know her real name, or anything about her. Okay, bad example because I’m pretty sure she’s one of your lot, an agent, but you get the point. I don’t ask.”

“What was she into, then? Byela Mar. Why did you kick her out?”

“Look, here’s the thing. You’re into this stuff…” I felt Corwi stiffen as if she would interrupt him, needle him to get on with it, and I touched her no, wait , to give him his head on this. He was not looking at us but at his provocative map of the cities. “You’re into this stuff you know you’re skirting with … well, you know you step out of line you’re going to get serious trouble. Like having you lot here, for a start. Or make the wrong phone call we can put our brothers in shit, in Ul Qoma, with the cops there. Or—or there’s worse.” He looked at us then. “She couldn’t stay, she was going to bring Breach down on us. Or something.

“She was into … No, she wasn’t into anything, she was obsessed . With Orciny.”

He was looking at me carefully, so I did nothing but narrow my eyes. I was surprised, though.

By how she did not move it was clear that Corwi did not know what Orciny was. It might undermine her to go into it here, but as I hesitated he was explaining. It was a fairy tale. That was what he said.

“Orciny’s the third city. It’s between the other two. It’s in the dissensi , disputed zones, places that Besźel thinks are Ul Qoma’s and Ul Qoma Besźel’s. When the old commune split, it didn’t split into two, it split into three. Orciny’s the secret city. It runs things.”

If split there was. That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown—records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then those black-box centuries of urban instigation—certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the censor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth—then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?

As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style town-houses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making things so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.

Some decades previously there would have been no need for explanations—Orciny stories had been children’s standards, alongside the tribulations of “King Shavil and the Sea-Monster That Came to Harbour.” Harry Potter and Power Rangers are more popular now, and fewer children know those older fables. That’s alright.

“Are you saying—what?” I interrupted him. “You’re saying that Byela was a folklorist? She was into old stories?” He shrugged. He would not look at me. I tried again to make him out and say what he was implying. He would only shrug. “Why would she be talking to you about this?” I said. “Why was she even here?”

“I don’t know. We have stuff on it. It comes up. You know? They have them in Ul Qoma, too, you know, Orciny stories. We don’t just keep documents on, you know, just just what we’re into. You know? We know our history, we keep all kinds of…” He trailed off. “I realised it wasn’t us she was interested in, you know?”

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn’t say they didn’t shore it up with footnotes and research. Their library must have defensively complete holdings of anything that even implied a blurring of urban boundaries. She had come—you could see it—seeking information not on some ur-unity but on Orciny. What an annoyance when they realised her odd researches weren’t quirks of investigation but the very point. When they realised that she did not much care about their project.

“So she was a time-waster?”

“No, man, she was dangerous, like I said. For real. She’d cause trouble for us. She said she wasn’t sticking around anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders vaguely.

“Why was she dangerous?” I leaned in. “Drodin, was she breaching?”

“Jesus, I don’t think so. If she did I don’t know shit about it.” He put up his hands. “Fuck’s sake, you know how watched we are?” He jerked his hand in the direction of the street. “We’ve got you lot on a semipermanent patrol in the area. Ul Qoman cops can’t watch us, obviously, but they’re on our brothers and sisters. And more to the goddamned point, watching us out there is … you know. Breach.”

We were all silent a moment then. We all felt watched.

“You’ve seen it?”

“Course not. What do I look like? Who sees it? But we know it’s there. Watching. Any excuse … we’re gone. Do you …” He shook his head, and when he looked back at me it was with anger and perhaps hate. “Do you know how many of my friends have been taken? That I’ve never seen again? We’re more careful than anyone.”

It was true. A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger. If I were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken.

Here, though, at this building not just my colleagues but the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be. That terrible presence might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car. If Byela, Fulana, had been breaching, she would have brought that in. So it was likely not suspicion of that specifically that had made Drodin afraid.

“There was just something.” He looked up out of the window at the two cities. “Maybe she would, she would have brought Breach on us, eventually. Or something.”

“Hang on,” Corwi said. “You said she was leaving …”

“She said she was going over. To Ul Qoma. Officially.” I paused from scribbling notes. I looked at Corwi and she at me. “Didn’t see her again. Someone heard she’d gone and they wouldn’t let her back here.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true, and if it is I don’t know why. It was just a matter of time … She was poking around in dangerous shit, it gave me a bad feeling.”

“That’s not all, though, is it?” I said. “What else?” He stared at me.

“I don’t know , man. She was trouble, she was scary, there was too much … there was just something. When she was going on and on about all the stuff she was into, it started to give you the creeps. Made you nervous.” He looked out of the window again. He shook his head.

“I’m sorry she died,” he said. “I’m sorry someone killed her. But I’m not that surprised.”

THAT STINK OF INSINUATION and mystery—however cynical or uninterested you thought yourself it stuck to you. I saw Corwi look up and around at the shabby fronts of the warehouses when we left. Perhaps seeing a little long in the direction of a shop she must realise was in Ul Qoma. She felt watched. We both did, and we were right, and fidgety.

When we drove out, I took Corwi—a provocation I admit though not aimed at her but at the universe in some way—for lunch in Besźel’s little Ul Qomatown. It was south of the park. With the particular colours and script of its shop fronts, the shape of its facades, visitors to Besźel who saw it would always think they were looking at Ul Qoma, and hurriedly and ostentatiously look away (as close as foreigners could generally get to unseeing). But with a more careful eye, experience, you note the sort of cramped kitsch to the buildings’ designs, a squat self-parody. You can see the trimmings in the shade called Besźel Blue, one of the colours illegal in Ul Qoma. These properties are local.

These few streets—mongrel names, Illitan nouns and a Besź suffix, YulSainStrász, LiligiStrász, and so on—were the centre of the cultural world for the small community of Ul Qoman expatriates living in Besźel. They had come for various reasons—political persecution, economic self-betterment (and how the patriarchs who had gone through the considerable difficulties of emigrating for that reason must be rueing it now), whim, romance. Most of those aged forty and below are second and now third generation, speaking Illitan at home but Besź without an accent in the streets. There is maybe an Ul Qoman influence to their clothes. At various times local bullies and worse break their windows and beat them in the streets.

This is where pining Ul Qoman exiles come for their pastries, their sugar-fried peas, their incense. The scents of Besźel Ul Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful as rain (“Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities,” the proverb has it. In Ul Qoma they have the same saw, but one of the subjects is “fog.” You may occasionally also hear it of other weather conditions, or even rubbish, sewage, and, spoken by the daring, pigeons or wolves). But those smells are in Besźel.

Very occasionally a young Ul Qoman who does not know the area of their city that Ul Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically Ul Qoman Besźel-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected—there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm—and Breach are normally merciful.

“Boss,” Corwi said. We sat at a corner café, Con ul Cai, that I frequented. I had made a great show of greeting the proprietor by name, like doubtless many of his Besź clientele. Probably he despised me. “Why the fuck are we here?”

“Come on,” I said. “Ul Qoman food. Come on. You know you want it.” I offered her cinnamon lentils, thick sweet tea. She declined. “We’re here,” I said, “because I’m trying to soak up the atmosphere. I’m trying to get into the spirit of Ul Qoma. Shit. You’re smart, Corwi, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here. Help me with this.” I counted off on my fingers. “She was here, this girl. This Fulana, Byela.” I almost said Marya. “She was here—what?—three years ago. She was around dodgy local politicos, but she was looking for something else, which they couldn’t help her with. Something even they thought was dodgy. She leaves.” I waited. “She was going to Ul Qoma.” I swore, Corwi swore.

“She’s been researching stuff,” I said. “She goes over.”

“We think.”

“We think. Then suddenly she’s back here.”

“Dead.”

“Dead.”

“Fuck.” Corwi leaned in, took and began thoughtfully to eat one of my pastries, stopped mouth full. For a long time neither of us said anything.

“It is. It’s fucking breach, isn’t it?” Corwi said eventually.

“… It looks like it might be breach, I think—yes I think it does.”

“If not to get over, to come back. Where she gets done. Or postmortem. Gets dumped.”

“Or something. Or something,” I said.

“Unless she crossed legit, or she’s been here the whole time. Just because Drodin’s not seen her…”

I recalled the phone call. I made a sceptical maybe face. “Could be. He seemed pretty sure. It’s sus, whatever.”

“Well…”

“Alright. So say it’s breach: that’s alright.”

“Bullshit it is.”

“No, listen,” I said. “That means it wouldn’t be our problem. Or at least… if we can persuade the Oversight Committee. Maybe I’ll get that started.”

She glowered. “They’ll give you shit. I heard they were getting—”

“We’ll have to present our evidence. It’s circumstantial so far but might be enough to get it passed over.”

“Not from what I heard.” She looked away and back. “Are you sure you’d want to, boss?”

“Shit yes. Shit yes. Listen. I get it. It’s a credit to you that you want to keep it, but listen. If there’s a chance we’re right… you can’t investigate breach. This Byela Fulana Foreigner Murdered Girl needs someone to look after her.” I made Corwi look at me by waiting. “We’re not the best people, Corwi. She deserves better than we can do. No one’s going to be able to look out for her like Breach. Christ, who gets Breach on their behalf? Sniffing out a murderer?”

“Not many.”

“Yeah. So if we can we need to hand it over. The committee knows that everyone would try to pass off everything; that’s why they make you jump through hoops.” She looked at me dubiously and I kept on. “We don’t have proof and we don’t know the details, so let’s take the next couple of days putting a cherry on top. Or proving ourselves wrong. Look at the profile we’ve got of her now. We’ve got enough at bloody last. She disappears from Besźel two, three years ago, turns up dead now. Maybe Drodin’s right she was in Ul Qoma. Aboveboard. I want you to hit the phone, make some contacts here and over there. You know what we’ve got: foreigner, researcher, et cetera. Find out who she is. Anyone fobs you off, hint this is a Breach issue.”

On my return I went by Taskin’s desk.

“Borlú. Got my call?”

“Ms. Cerush, your laboured excuses for seeking my company are becoming unconvincing.”

“I got your message and I’ve got it in motion. No, don’t commit to eloping with me yet, Borlú, you’re bound to be disappointed. You may have to wait a while to talk to the committee.”

“How’s it going to work?”

“When did you last do this? Years ago, right? Listen, I’m sure you think you’ve got a slam dunk—Don’t look at me like that, what’s your sport? Boxing? I know you think they’ll have to invoke”—her voice grew serious—“instantly I mean, but they won’t. You’ll have to wait your turn, and it could be a few days.”

“I thought—”

“Once, yes. They’d have dropped what they were doing. But it’s a tricky time, and it’s more us than them. Neither set of reps relish this, but honestly Ul Qoma’s not your issue at the moment. Since Syedr’s lot came into the coalition screaming about national weakness the government’s fretting about seeming too eager to invoke, so they’re not going to rush. They’ve got public enquiries about the refugee camps, and there’s no way they’re not going to milk those.”

“Christ, you’re kidding. They’re still freaking out about those few poor sods?” Some must make it through and into one city or the other, but if they did it would be almost impossible for them not to breach, without immigration training. Our borders were tight. Where the desperate newcomers hit crosshatched patches of shore the unwritten agreement was that they were in the city of whichever border control met them, and thus incarcerated them in the coastal camps, first. How crestfallen were those who, hunting the hopes of Ul Qoma, landed in Besź.

“Whatever,” Taskin said. “And other stuff. Glad-handing. They’re not going to shunt off business meetings and whatnot like they would’ve done once.”

“Whoring it for the Yankee dollar.”

“Don’t knock it. If they’re getting the Yankee dollar here that’ll do me. But they’re not going to rush for you, no matter who’s died. Did someone die?”

IT DID NOT TAKE CORWI LONG to find what I had sent her to find. Late the next day she came into my office with a file.

“I just got it faxed over from Ul Qoma,” she said. “I been trail-chasing. It wasn’t even so hard, when you knew where to start. We were right.”

There she was, our victim—her file, her picture, our death mask, and suddenly and rather breathtakingly photographs of her in life, monochrome and fax-smudged but there, our dead woman smiling and smoking a cigarette and midword, her mouth open. Our scribbled notes, her details, estimated and now others in red, no question marks hesitating them, the facts of her; below her various invented names, there her real one.

Chapter Six

“MAHALIA GEARY.”

There were forty-two people around the table (antique, would there ever be question?), and me. The forty-two were seated, with folders in front of them. I stood. Two minutes-takers transcribed at their stations in the room’s corners. I could see microphones on the table, and translators sat nearby.

“Mahalia Geary. She was twenty-four. American. This is all my constable’s doing, Constable Corwi, all this information, ladies and gentlemen. All the information’s in the papers I sent.” They were not all reading them. Some did not have them open.

“American?” someone said.

I did not recognise all of the twenty-one Besź representatives. Some. A woman in her middle ages, severe skunk-stripe hair like a film-studies academic, Shura Katrinya, minister without portfolio, respected but past her moment. Mikhel Buric of the Social Democrats, official opposition, young, capable, ambitious enough to be on more than one committee (security, commerce, arts). Major Yorj Syedr, a leader of the National Bloc, the rightist grouping with whom Prime Minister Gayardicz controversially worked in coalition, despite Syedr’s reputation not only as a bully but a less than competent one. Yavid Nyisemu, Gayardicz’s under-minister for Culture and committee chair. Other faces were familiar, and with effort more names would come. I recognised none of the Ul Qoma counterparts. I did not pay close attention to foreign politics.

Most of the Ul Qomans flicked through the packets I had prepared. Three wore headphones, but most were fluent enough in Besź at least to understand me. It was strange not to unsee these people in formal Ul Qoma dress—men in collarless shirts and dark lapel-less jackets, the few women in spiral semiwraps in colours that would be contraband in Besźel. But then I was not in Besźel.

The Oversight Committee meets in the giant, baroque, concrete-patched coliseum in the centre of Besźel Old Town, and of Ul Qoma Old Town. It is one of very few places that has the same name in both cities—Copula Hall. That is because it is not a crosshatched building, precisely, nor one of staccato totality-alterity, one floor or room in Besźel and the next in Ul Qoma: externally it is in both cities; internally, much of it is in both or neither. All of us—twenty-one lawmakers from each state, their assistants, and I—were meeting at a juncture, an interstice, one sort-of border built above another.

To me it was as if another presence were there: the reason for the meeting. Perhaps several of us in the room felt watched.

As they fussed with their papers, those who did so, I thanked them again for seeing me. A little political gush. These meetings of the Oversight Committee were regular, but I had had to wait days to see them. I had despite Taskin’s warning tried to convene an extraordinary meeting to pass over responsibility for Mahalia Geary as quickly as possible (who wanted to think of her murderer free? There was one best chance of sorting that), but short of epochal crisis, civil war or catastrophe, this was impossible to arrange.

What about a diminished meeting? A few people missing surely wouldn’t … But no, I was quickly informed, that would be quite unacceptable. She had warned me and she had been right, and I had grown more impatient with each day. Taskin had given me her best contact, a confidential secretary to one of the ministers on the committee, who had explained that the Besźel Chamber of Commerce had one of its increasingly regular trade fairs with foreign businesses, and that counted out Buric, who had had some success overseeing such events, Nyisemu, and even Syedr. These of course were sacrosanct occurrences. That Katrinya had meetings with diplomats. That Hurian, commissioner of the Ul Qoma Exchange, an impossible-to-reschedule meeting with the Ul Qoman health minister, and very et cetera, and there would be no special meeting. The young dead woman would have to remain inadequately investigated a few more days, until the gathering, at which time, between the indispensable business of adjudication on any dissensus , of the management of shared resources—a few of the larger grid power lines, drains and sewage, the most intricately crosshatched buildings—I would be given my twenty-minute slot to make my case.

Perhaps some people knew the details of these strictures, but the specifics of the Oversight Committee’s machinations had never been of interest. I had presented to them twice before, long before. The committee’s makeup had been different then, of course. Both times, the Besź and Ul Qoman sides almost bristled at each other: relations had been worse. Even when we had been noncombatant supporters of opposing sides in conflicts, such as during the Second World War—not Ul Qoma’s finest hour—the Oversight Committee had had to convene. What uncomfortable occasions those must have been. It had not met, however, as I recalled from my lessons, during our two brief and disastrous open wars against each other. In any case, now our two nations were, in rather a stilted fashion, supposed to be effecting some sort of rapprochement.

Neither of these previous cases I had presented had been so urgent. The first time was a contraband breach, as most such referrals are. A gang in western Besźel had started selling drugs purified from Ul Qoman medicines. They were picking up boxes near the city’s outskirts, from near the end of the east-west axis of the crossroad railway lines that split Ul Qoma into four quadrants. An Ul Qoman contact was dumping the boxes from the trains. There is a short stretch in the north of Besźel where the tracks themselves crosshatch with and serve also as Ul Qoman tracks; and the miles of north-seeking railroads leading out of both city-states, joining us to our northern neighbours through the mountain gash, are also shared, to our borders, where they become a single line in existential legality as well as mere metal fact: up to those national edges, the track was two juridical railroads. In various of those places the boxes of medical supplies were dropped in Ul Qoma, and stayed there, abandoned trackside in Ul Qoman scrub: but they were picked up in Besźel, and that was breach.

We never observed our criminals taking them, but when we presented our evidence that that was the only possible source, the committee agreed and invoked Breach. That drug trade ended: the suppliers disappeared from the streets.

The second case was a man who had killed his wife and when we closed in on him, in stupid terror he breached—stepped into a shop in Besźel, changed his clothes, and emerged into Ul Qoma. He was by chance not apprehended in that instance, but we quickly realised what had happened. In his frantic liminality neither we nor our Ul Qoman colleagues would touch him, though we and they knew where he went, hiding in Ul Qoman lodgings. Breach took him and he was gone too.

This was the first time in a long time I had made this request. I put my evidence. I addressed myself as much, politely, to the Ul Qoman members as to the Besź. Also to the observing power that must, surely, invisibly have watched.

“She’s resident in Ul Qoma, not Besźel. Once we knew that we found her. Corwi did, I mean. She’d been there for more than two years. She’s a PhD student.”

“What’s she studying?” Buric said.

“She’s an archaeologist. Early history. She’s attached to one of the digs. It’s all in your folders.” A little ripple, differently iterated among the Besź and the Ul Qomans. “That’s how she got in, even with the blockade.” There were some loopholes and exceptions for educational and cultural links.

Digs are constant in Ul Qoma, research projects incessant, its soil so much richer than our own in the extraordinary artefacts of pre-Cleavage ages. Books and conferences bicker over whether that preponderance is coincidence of scattering or evidence of some Ul Qoman specific thing (the Ul Qoman nationalists of course insist the latter). Mahalia Geary was affiliated with a long-term dig at Bol Ye’an, in western Ul Qoma, a site as important as Tenochtitlan and Sutton Hoo, which had been active since its discovery almost a century ago.

It would have been nice for my compatriot historians had it crosshatched, but though the park on the edge of which it was located did, just a little, the crosshatch coming quite close to the carefully ploughed-up earth full of treasures, a thin strip of total Besźel even separating sections of Ul Qoma within the grounds, the dig itself did not. There are those Besź who will say that lopsidedness is a good thing, that had we had half as rich a seam of historic rubble as Ul Qoma—anything like as many mixed-up sheila-na-gigs, clockwork remnants, mosaic shards, axe heads, and cryptic parchment scraps hallowed with rumours of physical misbehaviour and unlikely effects—we would simply have sold it off. Ul Qoma, at least, with its mawkish sanctimoniousness about history (obvious guilty compensation for the pace of change, for the vulgar vigour of much of its recent development), its state archivists and export restrictions, kept its past somewhat protected.

“Bol Ye’an’s run by a bunch of archaeologists from Prince of Wales University in Canada, which is where Geary was enrolled. Her supervisor’s lived on and off in Ul Qoma for years—Isabelle Nancy. There’s a bunch of them who live there. They organise conferences sometimes. Even have them in Besźel one year in every few.” Some consolation prize for our remnant-barren ground. “The last big one was a while ago, when they found that last cache of artefacts. I’m sure you all remember.” It had made the international press. The collection had quickly been given some name, but I could not remember it. It included an astrolabe and a geared thing, some intricate complexity as madly specific and untimed as the Antikythera mechanism, to which as many dreams and speculations had attached, and the purpose of which, similarly, no one had been able to reconstruct.

“So what is the story with this girl?” It was one of the Ul Qomans who spoke, a fat man in his fifties with a shirt in shades that would have made it questionably legal in Besźel.

“She’s been based there, Ul Qoma, for months, for her research,” I said. “She came to Besźel first, before she’d been to Ul Qoma, for a conference about three years ago. You might remember, there was the big exhibition of artefacts and stuff borrowed from Ul Qoma, and there was a whole week or two of meetings and so on. Loads of people came over from all over the place, academics from Europe, North America, from Ul Qoma and everything.”

“Certainly we remember,” Nyisemu said. “Plenty of us were involved.” Of course. Various state committees and quangos had had stands; government and opposition ministers had attended. The prime minister had started the proceedings, Nyisemu had formally opened the exhibition at the museum, and it had been required attendance for all serious politicians.

“Well she was there. You might even have noticed her—she caused a bit of a stink, apparently, was accused of Disrespect, made some terrible speech about Orciny at a presentation. Almost got chucked out.” A couple of faces—Buric and Katrinya certainly, Nyisemu perhaps—looked as if that sparked something. At least one person on the Ul Qoman side of things looked reminiscent too.

“So she calms down, it seems, finishes her MA, starts a PhD, gets entry into Ul Qoma, this time, to be part of this dig, do her studies—she’d never have got back in here, I don’t think, not after that intervention, and frankly I’m surprised she got in there—and she’d been there since except for holidays for a while. There’s student accommodation near the dig. She disappeared a couple of weeks ago and turned up in Besźel. In Pocost Village, in the estate, which is, you will recall, total in Besźel, so alter for Ul Qoma, and she was dead. It’s all in the folder, Congressman.”

“You haven’t shown breach, have you? Not really.” Yorj Syedr spoke more softly than I would expect from a military man. Opposite him several of the Ul Qoman congressmen and –women whispered in Illitan, his interjection spurring them to confer. I looked at him. Near him Buric rolled his eyes, saw me see him doing so.

“You have to forgive me, Councillor,” I said eventually. “I don’t know what to say to that. This young woman lived in Ul Qoma. Officially, I mean, we have the records. She disappears. She turns up dead in Besźel.” I frowned. “I’m not really sure … What else would you suggest was evidence?”

“Circumstantial, though. I mean, have you checked the Foreign Office? Have you found out, for example, whether perhaps Miss Geary left Ul Qoma for some event in Budapest or something? Maybe she did that, then came to Besźel? There’s almost two weeks unaccounted for, Inspector Borlú.”

I stared. “As I say, she wouldn’t have got back into Besźel after her little performance …”

He made an almost regretful face and interrupted me. “Breach is … an alien power.” Several of the Besź and some of the Ul Qoman members of the committee looked shocked. “We all know it’s the case,” Syedr said, “whether it is polite to acknowledge it or not.

“Breach is an I say it again alien power , and we hand over our sovereignty to it at our peril. We’ve simply washed our hands of any difficult situations and handed them to a—apologies if I offend, but—a shadow over which we have no control. Simply to make our lives easier.”

“Are you joking, Councillor?” someone said.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Buric began.

“We don’t all cosy up to enemies,” Syedr said.

“Chair,” Buric shouted. “Will you allow this slander? This is outrageous …” I watched the new nonpartisan spirit I had read about.

“Of course where its intervention’s necessary I fully support invocation,” Syedr said. “But my party’s been arguing for some time that we need to stop … rubber-stamping the ceding to the Breach of considerable authority. How much research have you actually done, Inspector? Have you spoken to her parents? Her friends? What do we actually know about this poor young woman?”

I should have been more prepared for this. I had not expected it.

I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn’t? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes . I was not used to seeking permissions, invoking, this arcane way. Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don’t mention the Ul Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn’t, from where you stand in Besźel, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.

When I was fourteen I saw the Breach for the first time. The cause was the most common of all such—a traffic accident. A boxy little Ul Qoman van—this was more than thirty years ago, the vehicles on Ul Qoma’s roads were much less impressive than they are now—had skidded. It had been travelling a crosshatched road, and a good third of the cars in that area were Besź.

Had the van righted, the Besź drivers would have responded traditionally to such an intrusive foreign obstacle, one of the inevitable difficulties of living in crosshatched cities. When an Ul Qoman stumbles into a Besź, each in their own city; if an Ul Qoman’s dog runs up and sniffs a Besź passerby; a window broken in Ul Qoma that leaves glass in the path of Besź pedestrians—in all cases the Besź (or Ul Qomans, in the converse circumstances) avoid the foreign difficulty as best they can without acknowledging it. Touch if they must, though not is better. Such polite stoic unsensing is the form for dealing with protubs—that is the Besź for those protuberances from the other city. There is an Illitan term too, but I do not know it. (Only rubbish is an exception, when it is old enough. Lying across crosshatched pavement or gusted into an alter area from where it was dropped, it starts as protub, but after a long enough time for it to fade and the Illitan or Besź script to be obscured by filth and bleached by light, and when it coagulates with other rubbish, including rubbish from the other city, it’s just rubbish, and it drifts across borders, like fog, rain and smoke.)

The van driver I saw did not recover. He ground diagonally across the tarmac—I do not know what the street is in Ul Qoma, it was KünigStrász in Besźel—and thudded into the wall of a Besź boutique and the pedestrian window-shopping there. The Besź man died; the Ul Qoman driver was badly hurt. People in both cities were screaming. I did not see the impact, but my mother did, and grabbed my hand so hard I shouted in pain before I even registered the noise.

The early years of a Besź (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.

I was older than that when I looked up to see the bloody result of that breaching accident, and remember remembering those arcana, and that they were bullshit. In that moment when my mother and I and all of us there could not but see the Ul Qoman wreck, all that careful unseeing I had recently learned was thrown.

In seconds, the Breach came. Shapes, figures, some of whom perhaps had been there but who nonetheless seemed to coalesce from spaces between smoke from the accident, moving too fast it seemed to be clearly seen, moving with authority and power so absolute that within seconds they had controlled, contained, the area of the intrusion. The powers were almost impossible, seemed almost impossible, to make out. At the edges of the crisis zone the Besź and, I could still not fail to see, Ul Qoman police were pushing away the curious in their own cities, taping off the area, closing out outsiders, sealing off a zone inside of which, their quick actions still visible though child-me so afraid to see them, Breach, organising, cauterising, restoring.

These kind of rare situations were when one might glimpse Breach, performing what they did. Accidents and border-perforating catastrophes. The 1926 Earthquake, a grand fire. (There had once been a fire grosstopically close to my apartment. It had been contained in one house, but a house not in Besźel, that I had unseen. So I had watched footage of it piped in from Ul Qoma, on my local TV, while my living room windows had been lit by the fluttering red glow of it.) The death of an Ul Qoman bystander from a stray Besź bullet in a stickup. It was hard to associate those crises with this bureaucracy.

I shifted and looked about the room at nothing. Breach has to account for its actions to those specialists who invoke it, but that does not feel like a limitation to many of us.

“Have you spoken to her colleagues?” Syedr said. “How far have you taken this?”

“No. I haven’t spoken to them. My constable has, of course, to verify our information.”

“Have you spoken to her parents? You seem very keen to divest yourself of this investigation.” I waited a few more seconds before speaking over the muttering on both sides of the table.

“Corwi’s got word to them. They’re flying in. Major, I’m not sure you understand the position we’re in. Yes I am keen. Don’t you want to see the murderer of Mahalia Geary found?”

“Alright, enough.” Yavid Nyisemu. He galloped his fingers on the table. “Inspector, you might not take that tone. There’s a concern, both reasonable and growing, among representatives that we’re too quick to cede to Breach in situations where we might actually choose not to, and that doing so’s dangerous and potentially even a betrayal.” He waited until eventually his requirement was clear and I made a noise that could be thought apology. “However,” he continued. “Major, you might also consider being less argumentative and ridiculous. For goodness’ sake, the young woman’s in Ul Qoma, disappears, turns up dead in Besźel. I can hardly think of a more clear-cut case. Of course we’ll be endorsing the surrender of this to Breach.” He cut the air with his hands as Syedr began to complain.

Katrinya nodded. “A voice of sense,” Buric said. The Ul Qomans had obviously seen these internal fights before. The splendours of our democracy. Doubtless they conducted their own squabbles.

“I think that’ll be all, Inspector,” he said, over the major’s raised voice. “We’ve got your submission. Thank you. The usher’ll show you out. You’ll be hearing from us shortly.”

THE CORRIDORS OF COPULA HALL are in a determined style that must have evolved over the many centuries of the building’s existence and centrality to Besź and Ul Qoman life and politics: they are antique and haute, but somehow vague, definitionless. The oil paintings are well executed but as if without antecedent, bloodlessly general. The staff, Besź and Ul Qoman, come and go in those in-between corridors. The hall feels not collaborative but empty.

The few Precursor artefacts in alarmed and guarded bell jars that punctuate the passages are different. They are specific, but opaque. I glanced at some as I left: a sag-breasted Venus with a ridge where gears or a lever might sit; a crude metal wasp discoloured by centuries; a basalt die. Below each one a caption offered guesses.

Syedr’s intervention was unconvincing—he gave the impression that he had decided to make his stand on the next petition that crossed the desk, and had the misfortune for it to be mine, a case with which it was hard to argue—and his motivations questionable. If I were political I would not in any circumstances follow his lead. But there was a reason to his caution.

The powers of the Breach are almost limitless. Frightening. What does limit Breach is solely that those powers are highly circumstantially specific. The insistence that those circumstances be rigorously policed is a necessary precaution for the cities.

That is why these arcane checks and balances between Besźel, Ul Qoma, and the Breach. In circumstances other than the various acute and unarguable breaches—of crime, accident or disaster (chemical spill, gas explosion, a mentally ill attacker attacking across the municipal boundary)—the committee vetted all potential invocations—which were, after all, all circumstances in which Besźel and Ul Qoma would denude themselves of any powers.

Even after the acute events, with which no one sane could argue, the representatives of the two cities on the committee would carefully examine ex post facto justifications they commissioned for Breach’s interventions. They might, technically, question any of these: it would be absurd to do so, but the committee would not undermine their authority by not going through important motions.

The two cities need the Breach. And without the cities’ integrities, what is Breach?

Corwi was waiting for me. “So?” She handed me coffee. “What did they say?”

“Well, it’s going to be handed over. But they made me jump through hoops.” We walked towards the police car. All the streets around Copula Hall were crosshatched, and we made our way unseeing through a group of Ul Qoman friends to where Corwi had parked. “You know Syedr?”

“That fascist prick? Sure.”

“He was trying to make out as if he wouldn’t let the case go to Breach. It was weird.”

“They hate Breach, don’t they, the NatBloc?”

“Weird to hate it. Like hating air or something. And he’s a nat, and if there’s no Breach, there’s no Besźel. No homeland.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it,” she said, “because even though we need them, it’s a sign of dependence that we do. Nats are divided, anyway, between balance-of-power people and triumphalists. Maybe he’s a triumphalist. They reckon Breach are protecting Ul Qoma, the only thing stopping Besźel taking over.”

“They want to take it over? They’re living in a dreamworld if they think Besźel would win.” Corwi glanced at me. We both knew it was true. “Anyway, it’s moot. He was posturing, I think.”

“He’s a fucking idiot. I mean, as well as being a fascist he’s just not very clever. When are we going to get the nod?”

“A day or two, I think. They’ll vote on all the motions put in front of them today. I think.” I did not know how it was organised, in fact.

“So in the meantime, what?” She was terse.

“Well, you’ve got plenty of other stuff to be getting on with, I take it? This isn’t your only case.” I looked at her as we drove.

We drove past Copula Hall, its huge entrance like a made, secular cave. The building is much larger than a cathedral, larger than a Roman circus. It’s open at its eastern and western sides. At ground level and for the first vaulted fifty feet or so above it is a semienclosed thoroughfare, punctuated with pillars, traffic streams separated by walls, stop-started with checkpoints.

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission—or sometimes refused it—to leave Besźel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the crosshatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.

Copula Hall like the waist of an hourglass, the point of ingress and egress, the navel between the cities. The whole edifice a funnel, letting visitors from one city into the other, and the other into the one.

There are places not crosshatched but where Besźel is interrupted by a thin part of Ul Qoma. As kids we would assiduously unsee Ul Qoma, as our parents and teachers had relentlessly trained us (the ostentation with which we and our Ul Qoman contemporaries used to unnotice each other when we were grosstopically close was impressive). We used to throw stones across the alterity, walk the long way around in Besźel and pick them up again, debate whether we had done wrong. Breach never manifested, of course. We did the same with the local lizards. They were always dead when we picked them up, and we said the little airborne trip through Ul Qoma had killed them, though it might just as well have been the landing.

“Won’t be our problem much longer,” I said, watching a few Ul Qoman tourists emerge into Besźel. “Mahalia, I mean. Byela. Fulana Detail.”

Chapter Seven

TO FLY TO BESŹEL from the east coast of the US involves changing planes at least once, and that’s the best option. It is a famously complicated trip. There are direct flights to Besźel from Budapest, from Skopje, and, probably an American’s best bet, from Athens. Technically Ul Qoma would have been harder for them to get to because of the blockade, but all they needed to do was nip into Canada and they could fly direct. There were many more inter national services to the New Wolf.

The Gearys were coming in to Besźel Halvic at ten in the morning. I had already made Corwi break the news of their daughter’s death to them over the phone. I told her I would escort them to see the body myself, though she could join me if she chose. She did.

We waited at Besźel Airport, in case the plane came in early. We drank bad coffee from the Starbucks analogue in the terminal. Corwi asked me again about the workings of the Oversight Committee. I asked her if she had ever left Besźel.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to Romania. I’ve been to Bulgaria.”

“Turkey?”

“No. You?”

“There. And London. Moscow. Paris, once, a long time ago, and Berlin. West Berlin as it was. It was before they joined.”

“Berlin?” she said. The airport was hardly crowded: mostly returning Besź, it seemed, plus a few tourists and Eastern European commercial travellers. It is hard to tourist in Besźel, or in Ul Qoma—how many holiday destinations set exams before they let you in?—but still, though I had not been I had seen film of the newish Ul Qoma Airport, sixteen or seventeen miles southeast, across Bulkya Sound from Lestov, and it got vastly more traffic than us, though their visitor conditions were not less strenuous than our own. When it had been rebuilt a few years previously, it had gone from somewhat smaller to much larger than our own terminal in a few months of frenetic construction. From above its terminals were concatenated half-moons of mirrored glass, designed by Foster or someone like that.

A group of foreign orthodox Jews were met by their, judging by clothes, much less devout local relatives. A fat security officer let his gun dangle to scratch his chin. There were one or two intimidatingly dressed execs from those gold-dust recent arrivals, our new high-tech, even American, friends, finding the drivers with signs for board members of Sear and Core, Shadner, VerTech, those executives who did not arrive in their own planes, or copter in to their own helipads. Corwi saw me reading the cards.

“Why the fuck would anyone invest here?” she said. “Do you reckon they even remember agreeing to it? The government blatantly slips them Rohypnol at those junkets.”

“Typical Besź defeatist talk, Constable. That’s what’s doing our country down. Representatives Buric and Nyisemu and Syedr are doing precisely the job with which we entrust them.” Buric and Nyisemu made sense: it was extraordinary Syedr had got into organising the trade fairs. Some favour pulled in. The fact that, as these foreign visitors showed, there were even small successes was even more remarkable for that.

“Right,” she said. “Seriously, watch these guys when they come out—I swear that’s panic in their eyes. Have you seen those cars ferrying them around town, at tourist spots and crosshatchings and whatever? ‘Seeing the sights.’ Right. Those poor sods are trying to find ways out.” I pointed at a display: the plane had landed.

“So you spoke to Mahalia’s supervisor?” I said. “I tried to call her a couple of times but can’t get through and they won’t give me her mobile.”

“Not for very long,” Corwi said. “I got hold of her at the centre—there’s like a research centre that’s part of the dig in Ul Qoma. Professor Nancy, she’s one of the bigwigs, she has a whole bunch of students. Anyway I called her and verified that Mahalia was one of hers, that no one had seen her for a while, et cetera et cetera. I told her we had reason to believe dot dot dot. Sent over a picture. She was very shocked.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. She was … kept going on about what a great student Mahalia was, how she couldn’t believe it, what had happened, so on. So you were in Berlin. Do you speak German then?”

“I used to,” I said. “Kin bisschen.”

“Why were you there?”

“I was young. It was a conference. ‘Policing Split Cities.’ They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.”

“Fuck!”

“I know, I know. That’s what we said at the time. Totally missing the point.”

“Split cities? I’m surprised the acad let you go.”

“I know, I could almost feel my freebie evaporating in a gust of other people’s patriotism. My super said it wasn’t just a misunderstanding of our status it was an insult to Besźel . Not wrong, I suppose. But it was a subsidised trip abroad, was I going to say no? I had to persuade him. I did at least meet my first Ul Qomans, who’d obviously managed to overcome their own outrage, too. Met one in particular at the conference disco as I recall. We did our bit to ease international tensions over ‘99 Luftballons.’” Corwi snorted, but passengers began to come through and we composed our faces, so they would be respectfully set when the Gearys emerged.

The immigration officer who escorted them saw us and nodded them gently over. They were recognisable from the photographs we had been sent by our American counterparts, but I would have known them anyway. They had the expression I have seen only on bereaved parents: their faces looked clayish, lumpy with exhaustion and grief. They shuffled into the concourse as if they were fifteen or twenty years older than they were.

“Mr. and Mrs. Geary?” I had been practicing my English.

“Oh,” she said, the woman. She reached out her hand. “Oh yes, you are, you’re Mr. Corwi are you, is that—”

“No, ma’am. I’m Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel ECS.” I shook her hand, her husband’s hand. “This is constable Lizbyet Corwi. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, I, we, are very deeply sorry for your loss.”

The two of them blinked like animals and nodded and opened their mouths but said nothing. Grief made them look stupid. It was cruel.

“May I take you to your hotel?”

“No, thank you, Inspector,” Mr. Geary said. I glanced at Corwi, but she was following what was said, more or less—her comprehension was good. “We’d like to … we’d like to do what it is we’re here for.” Mrs. Geary clutched and unclutched at her bag. “We’d like to see her.”

“Of course. Please.” I led them to the vehicle.

“Are we going to see Professor Nancy?” Mr. Geary asked as Corwi drove us. “And May’s friends?”

“No, Mr. Geary,” I said. “We can’t do that, I’m afraid. They are not in Besźel. They’re in Ul Qoma.”

“You know that, Michael, you know how it works here,” his wife said.

“Yes yes,” he said to me, as if they had been my words. “Yes, I’m sorry, let me … I just want to talk to her friends.”

“It can be arranged, Mr. Geary, Mrs. Geary,” I said. “We’ll see about phone calls. And …” I was thinking about passes through Copula Hall. “We’ll have to get you escorted into Ul Qoma. After we’ve dealt with things here.”

Mrs. Geary looked at her husband. He stared out at the buildup of streets and vehicles around us. Some of the overpasses we were approaching were in Ul Qoma, but I was certain he wouldn’t forebear staring at them. He would not care even if he knew not to. En route there would be an illicit, breaching, view to a glitzy Ul Qoman Fast Economy Zone full of horrible but big public art.

The Gearys both wore visitors’ marks in Besź colours, but as rare recipients of compassionate-entry stamps they had no tourist training, no appreciation of the local politics of boundaries. They would be insensitive with loss. The dangers of their breaching were high. We needed to protect them from unthinkingly committing acts that would get them deported, at least. Until the handover of the situation to Breach was made official, we were on babysitting duty: we would not leave the Gearys’ sides while they were awake.

Corwi did not look at me. We would have to be careful. Had the Gearys been regular tourists, they would have had to undergo mandatory training and passed the not-unstringent entrance exam, both its theoretical and practical-role-play elements, to qualify for their visas. They would know, at least in outline, key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colours and gestures, obligatory details—and, depending on their Besź teacher, the supposed distinctions in national physiognomies—distinguishing Besźel and Ul Qoma, and their citizens. They would know a little tiny bit (not that we locals knew much more) about Breach. Crucially, they would know enough to avoid obvious breaches of their own.

After a two-week or however-long-it-was course, no one thought visitors would have metabolised the deep prediscursive instinct for our borders that Besź and Ul Qomans have, to have picked up real rudiments of unseeing. But we did insist that they acted as if they had. We, and the authorities of Ul Qoma, expected strict overt decorum, interacting with, and indeed obviously noticing, our crosshatched neighbouring city-state not at all.

While, or as, sanctions for breach are severe (the two cities depend on that), breach must be beyond reasonable doubt. We all suspect that, while we are long-expert in unseeing it, tourists to the Old Besźel ghetto are surreptitiously noticing Ul Qoma’s glass-fronted Yal Iran Bridge, which in literal topology abuts it. Look up at the ribbon-streaming balloons of Besźel’s Wind-Day parade, they doubtless can’t fail (as we can) to notice the raised teardrop towers of Ul Qoma’s palace district, next to them though a whole country away. So long as they do not point and coo (which is why except in rare exceptions no foreigners under eighteen are granted entry) everyone concerned can indulge the possibility that there is no breach. It is that restraint that the pre-visa training teaches, rather than a local’s rigorous unseeing, and most students have the nous to understand that. We all, Breach included, give the benefit of the doubt to visitors when possible.

In the mirror of the car I saw Mr. Geary watch a passing truck. I unsaw it because it was in Ul Qoma.

His wife and he murmured to each other occasionally—my English or my hearing was not good enough to tell what they said. Mostly they sat in silence, each alone, looking out of windows on either side of the car.

Shukman was not at his laboratory. Perhaps he knew himself and how he would seem to those visiting the dead. I would not want to be met by him in these circumstances. Hamzinic led us to the storage room. Her parents moaned in perfect time as they entered and saw the shape below the sheet. Hamzinic waited with silent respect while they prepared, and when her mother nodded he showed Mahalia’s face. Her parents moaned again. They stared at her, and after long seconds her mother touched her face.

“Oh, oh yes that’s her,” Mr. Geary said. He cried. “That’s her, yes, that’s my daughter,” as if we were asking formal identification of him, which we were not. They had wanted to see her. I nodded as if that were helpful to us and glanced at Hamzinic, who replaced the sheet and made himself busy as we led Mahalia’s parents away.

“I DO WANT TO, to go to Ul Qoma,” Mr. Geary said. I was used to hearing that little stress on the verb from foreigners: he felt strange using it. “I’m sorry, I know it’s probably going to be … to be hard to organise but, I want to see, where she …”

“Of course,” I said.

“Of course,” Corwi said. She was keeping up with a reasonable amount of the English, and spoke occasionally. We were eating lunch with the Gearys at the Queen Czezille, a comfortable enough hotel with which the Besź Police had a long-standing arrangement. Its staff were experienced in providing the chaperoning, almost surreptitious imprisonment, that unqualified visitors required.

James Thacker, some middle-ranking twenty-eight-or –nine-year-old at the US embassy, had joined us. He spoke occasionally to Corwi in excellent Besź. The dining room looked out at the northern tip of Hustav Isle. Riverboats went by (in both cities). The Gearys picked at their peppercorned fish.

“We suspected that you might like to visit your daughter’s place of work,” I said. “We’ve been in discussion with Mr. Thacker and his counterparts in Ul Qoma for the paperwork to get you through Copula Hall. A day or two I think is all.” Not an embassy, in Ul Qoma, of course: a sulky US Interests section.

“And … you said that this is, this is for the Breach now?” Mrs. Geary said. “You said it won’t be the Ul Qomans investigating it but it’ll be with this Breach, yes?” She stared at me with tremendous mistrust. “So when do we talk to them?”

I glanced at Thacker. “That will not happen,” I said. “The Breach is not like us.”

Mrs. Geary stared at me. “‘Us’ the … the policzai ?” she said.

I had meant the “us” to include her. “Well, among other things, yes. It… they aren’t like the police in Besźel or in Ul Qoma.”

“I don’t—”

“Inspector Borlú, I’ll be happy to explain this,” Thacker said. He hesitated. He wanted me to go. Any explanation carried out in my presence would have to be moderately polite: alone with other Americans he could stress to them how ridiculous and difficult these cities were, how sorry he and his colleagues were for the added complications of a crime occurring in Besźel, and so on. He could insinuate. It was an embarrassment, an antagonism to have to deal with a dissident force like Breach.

“I don’t know how much you know about Breach, Mr. and Mrs. Geary, but it is … it isn’t like other powers. You have some sense of its… capabilities? The Breach is … It has unique powers. And it’s, ah, extremely secretive. We, the embassy, have no contacts with … any representative of Breach. I do realise how strange that must sound, but… I can assure you Breach’s record in the prosecution of criminals is, ah, ferocious. Impressive. We will receive word of its progress and of whatever action it takes against whoever it finds responsible.”

“Does that mean …?” Mr. Geary said. “They have the death penalty here, right?”

“And in Ul Qoma?” his wife said.

“Sure,” Thacker said. “But that’s not really at issue. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, our friends in Besźel and the Ul Qoma authorities are about to invoke Breach to deal with your daughter’s murder, so Besź laws and Ul Qoman laws are kind of irrelevant. The, ah, sanctions available to Breach are pretty limitless.”

“Invoke?” said Mrs. Geary.

“There are protocols,” I said. “To be followed. Before Breach’ll manifest to take care of this.”

Mr. Geary: “What about the trial?”

“That will be in camera,” I said. “Breach … tribunals,” I had tried out decisions and actions in my head, “are secret.”

“We won’t testify? We won’t see?” Mr. Geary was aghast. This must all have been explained previously, but you know. Mrs. Geary was shaking her head in anger, but without her husband’s surprise.

“I’m afraid not,” Thacker said. “It is a unique situation here. I can pretty much guarantee you, though, that whoever did this will not only be caught but, be, ah, brought to pretty severe justice.” One could almost pity Mahalia Geary’s killer. I did not.

“But that’s—”

“I know, Mrs. Geary, I’m truly sorry. There are no other posts like this in the service. Ul Qoma and Besźel and Breach … These are unique circumstances.”

“Oh, God. You know, it’s… it’s all, this is all the stuff Mahalia was into,” Mr. Geary said. “The city, the city, the other city. Besźel”—Bezzel , he said it—“and Ul Qoma. And or seen it.” I didn’t understand that.

“Or seen ee,” Mrs. Geary said. I looked up. “It’s not Orsinnit, it’s Orciny, honey.”

Thacker pouted polite incomprehension and shook his head in question.

“What’s that, Mrs. Geary?” I said. She fiddled with her bag. Corwi quietly took out a notebook.

“This is all this stuff Mahalia was into,” Mrs. Geary said. “It’s what she was studying. She was going to be a doctor of it.” Mr. Geary grimace-smiled, indulgent, proud, bewildered. “She was doing real well. She told us a little bit about it. It sounds like that Orciny was like the Breach.”

“Ever since she first came here,” Mr. Geary said. “This is the stuff she wanted to do.”

“That’s right, she came here first. I mean … here, this, Besźel, right? She came here first, but then she said she needed to go to Ul Qoma. I’m going to be honest with you, Inspector, I thought it was kind of the same place. I know that was wrong. She had to get special permission to go there, but because she’s, was, a student, that’s where she stayed to do all her work.”

“Orciny … it’s a sort of folk tale,” I told Thacker. Mahalia’s mother nodded; her father looked away. “It is not so really like the Breach, Mrs. Geary. Breach is real. A power. But Orciny is …” I hesitated.

“The third city,” Corwi said in Besź to Thacker, who still furrowed his face. When he showed no comprehension, she said, “A secret. Fairy tale. Between the other two.” He shook his head and looked, uninterestedly, Oh .

“She loved this place,” Mrs. Geary said. She looked longing. “I mean, sorry, I mean Ul Qoma. Are we near where she lived?” Crudely physically, grosstopically, to use the term unique to Besźel and Ul Qoma, unnecessary anywhere else, yes we were. Neither Corwi nor I answered, as it was a complicated question. “She’d been studying it all for years, since she first read some book about the cities. Her professors always seemed to think she was doing excellent in her work.”

“Did you like her professors?” I said.

“Oh, I never met them. But she showed me some of what they were doing; she showed me a website for the program, and the place she worked.”

“This is Professor Nancy?”

“That was her advisor, yes. Mahalia liked her.”

“They worked well together?” Corwi was watching me as I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mrs. Geary even laughed. “Mahalia seemed to argue with her all the time. Seemed they didn’t agree on much, but when I said, ‘Well how does that work?’ she told me it was okay. She said they liked disagreeing. Mahalia said she learned more that way.”

“Did you keep up with your daughter’s work?” I said. “Read her essays? She told you about her Ul Qoman friends?” Corwi moved in her seat. Mrs. Geary shook her head.

“Oh no,” she said.

“Inspector,” said Thacker.

“The stuff she did just wasn’t the sort of thing that I could … that I was real interested in, Mr. Borlú. I mean since she’d been over here, sure, stories in the paper about Ul Qoma would catch our eye a bit more than they had before, and sure I’d read them. But so long as Mahalia was happy, I … we were happy. Happy for her to get on with her thing, you know.”

“Inspector, when do you think we might be receiving the Ul Qoma transfer papers?” Thacker said.

“Soon, I think. And she was? Happy?”

“Oh, I think she …” Mrs. Geary said. “There were always dramas, you know.”

“Yeah,” her father said.

“Now,” said Mrs. Geary.

“Oh?” I said.

“Well now it wasn’t … only she’d been kind of stressed recently, you know. I told her she needed to come home for a vacation—I know, coming home hardly sounds like a vacation, but you know. But she said she was making real progress, like making a breakthrough in her work.”

“And some people were pissed about that,” Mr. Geary said.

“Honey.”

“They were. She told us.”

Corwi looked at me, confused. “Mr. and Mrs. Geary …” While Thacker said that, I explained quickly to Corwi in Besź, “Not ‘pissed’ drunk. They’re American—‘angry.’ Who was pissed?” I asked them. “Her professors?”

“No,” Mr. Geary said. “Goddammit, who do you think did this?”

“John, please, please …”

“Goddammit, who the fuck are First Qoma?” Mr. Geary said. “You haven’t even asked us who we think did this. You haven’t even asked us. You think we don’t know?”

“What did she say?” I said. Thacker was standing now and patting the air, Calm down everybody .

“Some little bastard at a conference tells her her work was goddamn treason. Someone’d been gunning for her since the first time she came here.”

“John, stop, you’re mixing it up. That first time, when that man said that, she was here, here here, Besźel-here, not in Ul Qoma, and that wasn’t First Qoma, that was the other ones, here, nationalists or True Citizens, something, you remember …”

“Wait, what?” I said. “First Qoma? And—someone said something to her when she was in Besźel? When?”

“Hold on boss, it’s …” Corwi spoke quickly in Besź.

“I think we all need to take a minute,” Thacker said.

He placated the Gearys as if they had been wronged, and I apologised as if I had wronged them. They knew that they were expected to stay in their hotel. We had two officers stationed downstairs to ensure compliance. We told them that we would tell them as soon as we had news that their paperwork for travel had come through, and that we would be back the following day. In the meantime, if they needed anything or any information—I left them my numbers.

“He will be found,” Corwi said to them as we took leave. “Breach will take who did this. I promise you that.” To me outside she said, “Qoma First, not First Qoma, by the way. Like the True Citizens, only for Ul Qoma. As pleasant as our lot, by all accounts, but a lot more secretive and thank fuck not our headache.”

More radical in their Besźel-love even than Syedr’s National Bloc, True Citizens were marchers in quasi-uniform and makers of frightening speeches. Legal but not by much. We had not succeeded in proving their responsibility for attacks on Besźel’s Ul Qomatown, the Ul Qoman embassy, mosques and synagogues and leftist bookshops, on our small immigrant population. We—by which I mean we policzai , of course—had more than once found the perpetrators and that they were members of TC, but the organisation itself disavowed the attacks, just, just, and no judge had yet banned them.

“And Mahalia annoyed both lots.”

“So her Dad says. He doesn’t know …”

“We know she certainly managed to get the unificationists here mad, ages ago. And then she did the same to the nats over there? Any extremists she hasn’t made angry?” We drove. “You know,” I said, “that meeting, of the Oversight Committee … it was pretty strange. Some of the things some people were saying …”

“Syedr?”

“Syedr, sure, among others, some of what they were saying didn’t make much sense to me at the time. Maybe if I followed politics more carefully. Maybe I’ll do that.” After a silence I said, “Maybe we should ask around a bit.”

“The fuck, boss?” Corwi twisted in her seat. She did not look angry but confused. “Why were you even grilling them like that? The muckamucks are invoking fuckingBreach in a day or two to deal with this shit, and woe betide whoever did Mahalia then. You know? Even if we do find any leads now, we’re going to be off the case any minute; this is just biding time.”

“Yeah,” I said. I swerved a little to avoid an Ul Qoman taxi, unseeing it as much as possible. “Yeah. But still. I’m impressed with anyone who can piss off so many nutters. All of whom are at each other’s throats as well. Besź Nats, Ul Qoman Nats, anti-Nats …”

“Let Breach deal. You were right. She deserves Breach, boss, like you said. What they can do.”

“She does deserve them. And she’ll get them.” I pointed, drove on. “Avanti . For the next little while she’s got us.”

Chapter Eight

EITHER HIS TIMING WAS PRETERNATURAL or Commissar Gadlem had had some techie rig up a cheat on his system—whenever I came into the office, any emails from him were invariably top of my inbox.

Fine , his latest said. I gather Mr. & Mrs. G ensconced in hotel. Don’t particularly want you tied up for days in paperwork (sure you agree) so polite chaperoning only please till formalities complete. Job done .

Whatever information we had I would have to hand over when the time came. No point making work for myself, Gadlem was saying, nor costing the department my time, so take my foot off the accelerator. I made and read notes that would be illegible to everyone else, and to me in an hour’s time, though I kept and filed them all carefully—my usual methodology. I reread Gadlem’s message several times, rolling my eyes. I probably muttered something out loud to myself.

I spent some time tracking down numbers—online and through a real live operator on the end of the phone—and placed a call that made clucking noises as it ran through various international exchanges. “Bol Ye’an offices.” I’d called twice before but previously had gone through a kind of automated system: this was the first time I’d had anyone pick up. His Illitan was good, but the accent was North American; so in English I said: “Good afternoon, I’m trying to reach Professor Nancy. I’ve left messages on her voicemail, but—”

“Who’s calling please?”

“This is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad.”

“Oh. Oh.” The voice was quite different now. “This is about Mahalia, isn’t it? Inspector, I’m … Hold on I’m going to try to track down Izzy.” A long hollow-acousticked pause. “This is Isabelle Nancy.” Anxious-sounding, American I’d have guessed if I hadn’t known she was from Toronto. Not much like her voicemail voice.

“Professor Nancy, I’m Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Policzai , ECS. I think you have spoken to my colleague Officer Corwi? You got my messages maybe?”

“Inspector, yes, I’m … Please accept my apologies. I’d meant to call you back but it’s been, everything’s been, I’m very sorry …” She shifted between English and good Besź.

“I understand, Professor. I am sorry too about Miss Geary. I know this must be a very bad time for all of you and your colleagues.”

“I, we, we’re all in shock here, Inspector. Real shock. I don’t know what to tell you. Mahalia was a great young woman and—”

“Of course.”

“Where are you? Are you … local? Would you like to meet?”

“I’m afraid I’m calling internationally, Professor; I’m still in Besźel.”

“I see. So … how can I help you, Inspector? Is there any problem? I mean any problem other than, than all of this, I mean …” I heard her breath. “I’m expecting Mahalia’s parents any day now.”

“Yes, I just was with them actually. The embassy here is putting in paperwork for them, and they should come to you soon. No, I am calling you because I want to know more about Mahalia and what she was doing.”

“Forgive me, Inspector Borlú, but I was under the impression … this crime … will you not be invoking Breach, I thought…?” She had calmed and was speaking only Besź now, so what the hell I gave up on my English, which was no better than her Besź.

“Yes. The Oversight Committee … excuse me, Professor I don’t know how much you know about how these matters go. But yes, responsibility for this will be passed over. You understand how that will work, then?”

“I think so.”

“Alright. I’m just doing some last work. I’m curious, is all. We hear interesting things about Mahalia. I want to know some things about her work. Can you help me? You were her advisor, yes? Do you have time to speak to me about that for a few minutes?”

“Of course, Inspector, you’ve waited long enough. I don’t know quite what—”

“I want to know what she was working on. And about her history with you and with the program. And tell me about Bol Ye’an, too. She was studying Orciny, I understand.”

“What?” Isabelle Nancy was shocked. “Orciny? Absolutely not. This is an archaeology department.”

“Forgive me, I’d been under the impression … What do you mean, this is archaeology?”

“I mean that if she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she’d be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in trowels.” She did not sound angry but sad and amused. “But we wouldn’t have accepted her unless her PhD was real archaeology.”

“So what was it?”

“Bol Ye’an’s an old dig, Inspector.”

“Please tell me.”

“I’m sure you’re aware of all the controversy around early artefacts in this region, Inspector. Bol Ye’an’s uncovering pieces that are a good couple of millennia old. Whichever theory you subscribe to on Cleavage, split or convergence, what we’re looking for predates it, predates Ul Qoma and Besźel. It’s root stuff.”

“It must be extraordinary.”

“Of course. Also pretty incomprehensible. You understand we know next to nothing about the culture that produced all this?”

“I think so. That’s why all the interest, yes?”

“Well … yes. That and the kind of things you have here. What Mahalia was doing was trying to decode what the title of her project called ‘A Hermeneutics of Identity’ from the layouts of gears and so on.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Then she did a good job. The aim of a PhD’s to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you’re doing after the first couple of years. I’m joking, you understand. What she’s doing would have had ramifications for theories of the two cities. Where they came from, you know. She played her cards pretty close, so I was never sure month to month where she stood exactly on the issue, but she still had a couple of years to make up her mind. Or to just make something up.”

“So she was helping with the actual dig.”

“Absolutely. Most of our research students are. Some for primary research, some as part of their stipend deal, some a bit of both, some to suck up to us. Mahalia was paid a little bit, but mostly she needed to get her hands on the artefacts for her work.”

“I see. I’m sorry, Professor, I’d been under the impression that she’d been working on Orciny …”

“She used to be interested in that. She first went to Besźel for a conference, some years ago.”

“Yes, I think I heard about that.”

“Right. Well, it caused a little stink because at that time she was very into Orciny, totally—she was a little Bowdenite, and the paper she gave didn’t go down very well. Led to some remonstrations. I admired her guts, but she was on a hiding to nothing with all that stuff. When she applied to do her PhD—to be honest I was pretty surprised it was with me—I had to make sure she knew what would and wouldn’t be … acceptable. But… I mean, I don’t know what she was reading in her spare time, but what she was writing, when I got the updates on her PhD, they were, they were fine.”

“Fine?” I said. “You don’t sound …”

She hesitated.

“Well … Honestly I was a little, a little bit disappointed. She was smart. I know she was smart, because, you know, in seminars and so on she was terrific. And she worked superhard. She was a ‘grind,’ we’d say”—the word in English—“always in the library. But her chapters …”

“Not good?”

“Fine. Really, they were okay. She’d pass her doctorate, no problem, but it wasn’t going to set the world on fire. It was kind of lacklustre, you know? And given the number of hours she was working, it was a bit thin . References and so on. I’d spoken to her about it, though, and she promised that she was, you know. Working on it.”

“Could I see it?”

“Sure.” She was taken aback. “I mean, I suppose. I don’t know. I have to work out what the ethics of that are. I’ve got the chapters she gave me, but they’re very unfinished; she wanted to work on them more. If she’d finished it it would be public access, and no problem, but as it is … Can I get back to you? She probably should have been publishing some of them as papers in journals—that’s kind of the done thing—but she wasn’t. We’d talked about that too; she said she was going to do something about it.”

“What’s a Bowdenite, Professor?”

“Oh.” She laughed. “Sorry. It’s the source of this Orciny stuff. Poor David wouldn’t thank me for using the term. It’s someone inspired by the early work of David Bowden. Do you know his work?”

“… No.”

“He wrote a book, years ago. Between the City and the City . Ring any bells? It was a huge thing for the later flower children. The first time for a generation anyone had taken Orciny seriously. I guess it’s not a surprise you haven’t seen it; it’s still illegal. In Besźel and in Ul Qoma. You won’t find it even in the university libraries. In some ways it was a brilliant piece of work—he did some fantastic archival investigations, and saw some analogies and connections that are … well, still pretty remarkable. But it was pretty crackpot ramblings.”

“How so?”

“Because he believed in it! He collated all these references, found new ones, put them together into a kind of ur-myth, then reinterpreted it as a secret and a cover-up. He … Okay I need to be a little bit careful here, Inspector, because honestly I never really, not really , thought he did believe it—I always thought it was kind of a game—but the book said he believed it. He came to Ul Qoma, from where he went to Besźel, managed I do not know how to go between the two of them—legally I assure you—several times, and he claimed to have found traces of Orciny itself. And he went further-said that Orciny wasn’t just somewhere that had existed in the gaps between Qoma and Besźel since their foundings or coming together or splitting (I can’t remember where he stood on the Cleavage issue): he said it was still here.”

“Orciny?”

“Exactly. A secret colony. A city between the cities, its inhabitants living in plain sight.”

“What? Doing what? How?”

“Unseen, like Ul Qomans to Besź and vice versa. Walking the streets unseen but overlooking the two. Beyond the Breach. And doing, who knows? Secret agendas. They’re still debating that, I don’t doubt, on the conspiracy theory websites. David said he was going to go into it and disappear.”

“Wow.”

“Exactly, wow. Wow is right. It’s notorious. Google it, you’ll see. Anyway, when we first saw Mahalia she was pretty unreconstructed. I liked her because she was spunky and because Bowdenite she may have been but she had panache and smarts. But it was a joke, you understand? I even wondered if she knew it, if she was joking herself.”

“But she wasn’t working on that anymore?”

“No one reputable would supervise a Bowdenite PhD. I had this stern word with her about it when she enrolled, but she even laughed. Said she’d left all that behind. As I say, I was surprised she’d come to me. My work’s not as avant-garde as hers.”

“The Foucaults and the $$i$$eks not your thing?”

“I respect them of course, but—”

“Aren’t there any of those, what should we say, theory types she could have gone with?”

“Yes, but she told me she needed to get her hands on the actual objects . I’m an artefact scholar. My more philosophically oriented colleagues would … well, I wouldn’t trust many of them to brush the dirt off an amphora.” I laughed. “So I guess it made sense to her; she was really insistent on learning how to do that side of things. I was surprised but pleased. You understand these pieces are unique, Inspector?”

“I think so. I’ve heard all the rumours, of course.”

“You mean their magic powers? I wish, I wish. But even so these digs are incomparable. This material culture makes no sense at all. There is nowhere else in the world that you’ll dig up what looks like cutting-edge late antiquity, really beautiful complicated bronzework mixed right up with frankly neolithic stuff. Stratigraphy looks like it goes out of the window with this. It was used as evidence against the Harris Matrix—wrongly, but you can see why. That’s why these digs are popular with young archaeologists. And that’s not even counting all the stories, which is all they are but which hasn’t stopped unlikely researchers pining for a chance to have a look. Still, I’d have thought Mahalia would have tried to go to Dave, not that she’d have had much luck with him.”

“Dave? Bowden? He’s alive? He teaches?”

“Certainly he’s alive. But even back when she was into this, Mahalia wouldn’t have got him to supervise her. I’m willing to bet she must have spoken to him when she was first investigating. And I’m willing to bet she got pretty short shrift. He repudiated all this years ago. It’s the bane of his life. Ask him. A burst of adolescence he’s never been able to shake off. Never published anything else worth a damn—he’s the Orciny man for the rest of his career. He’ll tell you this himself if you ask him.”

“I may. You know him?”

“He’s a colleague. It’s not a big field, pre-Cleavage archaeology. He’s at Prince of Wales too, at least part-time. He lives here, in Ul Qoma.”

She lived several months of the year in apartments in Ul Qoma, in its university district, where Prince of Wales and other Canadian institutions gleefully exploited the fact that the US state (for reasons now embarrassing even to most of its right-wingers) boycotted Ul Qoma. It was Canada, instead, that was enthusiastically forging links, academic and economic, with Ul Qoman institutions.

Besźel, of course, was a friend of both Canada and the US, but the enthusiasm with which the two countries combined plugged into our faltering markets was dwarfed by that with which Canada cosied up to what they called the New Wolf economy. We were a street mongrel, maybe, or a scrawny milkrat. Most vermin are interstitial. It is very hard to prove that the shy cold-weather lizards in cracks in Besź walls can live in Besźel only, as frequently claimed: certainly they die if exported into Ul Qoma (even more gently than by children’s hands), but they tend to do so in Besź captivity as well. Pigeons, mice, wolves, bats live in both cities, are crosshatched animals. But by unspoken tradition, the majority of the local wolves—mean, bony things long-since adapted to urban scavenging—are generally if nebulously considered Besź: it is only those few of respectable size and none-too-vile pelt, the same notion held, that are Ul Qoman. Many citizens of Besźel avoid transgressing this—entirely unnecessary and invented—categorical boundary by never referring to wolves.

I had scared off a pair once, as they foraged through rubbish in the yard of my building. I had thrown something at them. They had been unusually kempt, and more than one of my neighbours had been shocked, as if I had breached.

Most of the Ul Qomanists, as Nancy described herself, were bilocated like her—she explained it with audible guilt, mentioning again and again that it must be a historical quirk that located the more fecund archaeological sites in areas of Ul Qoman totality, or heftily Ul Qoma–weighted crosshatching. Prince of Wales had reciprocal arrangements with several Ul Qoman academies. David Bowden lived more of each year in Ul Qoma, and less back in Canada. He was in Ul Qoma now. He had, she told me, few students, and not much of a teaching load, but I still could not get hold of him on the number she gave me.

A little ferreting online. It was not hard to confirm most of what Isabelle Nancy had told me. I found a page that listed Mahalia’s PhD title (they had not yet taken her name offline, nor put up one of the online tributes I was sure would be coming). I found Nancy’s list of publications, and David Bowden’s. His included the book Nancy had mentioned, from 1975, two articles from around the same time, one more article from a decade later, then mostly journalism, some of it collected into a volume.

I found fracturedcity.org , the main discussion site for the kooks of dopplurbanology, Ul-Qoma-and-Besźel obsession (the site’s approach of conjoining the two as a single object of study would outrage polite opinion in both cities, but judging by comments on the forum it was commonly if mildly illegally accessed from both, too). From there a series of links (cheekily, confident in the indulgence or incompetence of our and the Ul Qoman censors, many were servers with .uq and .zb addresses) gave me a few paragraphs copied from Between the City and the City . It read as Nancy had suggested.

My phone startled me. I realised that it was dark, after seven.

“Borlú,” I said, sitting back.

“Inspector? Oh, shit, sir, we have a situation. This is Ceczoria.” Agim Ceczoria was one of the officers stationed at the hotel to look after Mahalia’s parents. I rubbed my eyes and scanned my email to see if I’d missed any messages coming in. There was a noise behind him, a commotion. “Sir, Mr. Geary … he went AWOL, sir. He fucking … he breached.”

“What?”

“He got out of the room, sir.” Behind him was a woman’s voice, and she was shouting.

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know how the fuck he got past us, sir, I just don’t know. But he wasn’t gone long.”

“How do you know? How did you get him?”

He swore again.

“We didn’t. Breach did. I’m calling from the car, sir, we’re en route to the airport. Breach are … escorting us. Somewhere. They told us what to do. That’s Mrs. Geary you can hear. He has to go. Now.”

CORWI HAD GONE, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I took an unmarked squad car from the pool, but ran it with the sirens making their hysteric gulp gulp noises, so I could ignore traffic laws. (It was only the Besź rules which applied to me and which therefore I was with authority ignoring, but traffic law is one of the compromise areas where the Oversight Committee ensures close similarity between the rules of Besźel and Ul Qoma. Though the traffic cultures are not identical, for the sake of the pedestrians and cars who have, unseeing, to negotiate much foreign traffic, our vehicles and theirs run at comparable speeds in comparable ways. We all learn to tactfully avoid our neighbour’s emergency vehicles, as well as our own.)

There were no flights out for a couple of hours, but they would sequester the Gearys, and in some hidden way Breach would watch them onto the plane, to make sure they were on it, and airborne. Our embassy in the US would already be informed, as well as the representatives in Ul Qoma, and a no visa flagged in their names on both our systems. Once they were out, they would not be back in. I ran through Besźel airport to the office of the policzai , showed my badge.

“Where are the Gearys?”

“In the cells, sir.”

Depending on what I saw I was ready with, do you know what just happened to these people, whatever they’ve done they’ve just lost a daughter , and so on, but it was not necessary. They had given them food and drink and treated them gently. Ceczoria was with them in the little room. He was muttering to Mrs. Geary in his basic English.

She looked at me tearfully. Her husband was, I thought for a second, asleep on the bunk. I saw how very motionless he was and revised my opinion.

“Inspector,” Ceczoria said.

“What’s happened to him?”

“He’s … Breach did it, sir. He’ll probably be okay, wake up in a bit. I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell they did to him.”

Mrs. Geary said, “You’ve poisoned my husband …”

“Mrs. Geary, please.” Ceczoria rose and came closer to me, lowered his voice though he was talking now in Besź. “We didn’t know anything about it, sir. There was a little bit of a commotion outside and someone came into the lobby where we were.” Mrs. Geary was crying and talking to her unconscious husband. “Geary kind of lurches in and passes out. The hotel security go at them, and they just look at this shape, someone behind Geary in the hallway, and the guards stop and wait. I hear this voice: ‘You know what I represent. Mr. Geary breached. Remove him.’” Ceczoria shook his head, helpless. “Then, and I still can’t see anything properly, whoever’s speaking’s gone.”

“How …?”

“Inspector, I don’t fucking know. I … I take responsibility, sir. Geary must have got past us.”

I stared at him. “Do you want a bloody biscuit? Of course it’s your responsibility. What did he do?”

“Don’t know. Breach were gone before I could say a word.”

“What about…” I nodded at Mrs. Geary.

“She wasn’t deported: she didn’t do anything.” He was whispering. “But when I told her we had to take her husband, she said she’d go with him. She doesn’t want to stick around on her own.”

“Inspector Borlú.” Mrs. Geary was trying to sound controlled. “If you’re talking about me you should talk to me. Do you see what’s been done to my husband?”

“Mrs. Geary, I’m terribly sorry.”

“You should be …”

“Mrs. Geary, I didn’t do this. Neither did Ceczoria. Neither did any of my officers. Do you understand?”

“Oh Breach Breach Breach …”

“Mrs. Geary, your husband just did something very serious. Very serious.” She was quiet but for heavy breaths. “Do you understand me? Has there been some mistake here? Were we less than clear in our explanations of the system of checks and balances between Besźel and Ul Qoma? Do you understand that this deportation is nothing to do with us , but that we have absolutely no power to do anything about it, and that he is, listen to me, he is incredibly lucky that’s all he’s got?” She said nothing. “In the car I got the impression that your husband wasn’t quite so clear on how it works here, so you tell me, Mrs. Geary, did something go wrong? Did he misunderstand our… advice? How did my men not see him leave? Where was he going?”

She looked still as if she might cry; then she glanced at her supine husband and her stance changed. She stood straighter and whispered something to him that I did not catch. Mrs. Geary looked at me.

“He was in the air force,” she said. “You think you’re looking at some fat old man?” She touched him. “You never asked us who might have done this, Inspector. I don’t know what to make of you, I really don’t. Like my husband said, you think we don’t know who did this ?” She clutched and folded and unfolded a piece of paper, without looking at it, took it out of a side pocket of her bag, put it in again. “You think our daughter didn’t talk to us? First Qoma, True Citizens, Nat Bloc … Mahalia wasafraid , Inspector.

“We haven’t figured out exactly who did what, and we don’t know why, but where was he going, you say? He was going to find out. I told him it wouldn’t work—he didn’t speak the language, he didn’t read it—but he had addresses we got from the internet and a phrase book and, what, was I going to tell him not to go? Not to go? I’m so proud of him. Those people hated Mahalia for years, since she first came here.”

“Printed out from the internet?”

“And I mean here , Besźel. When she came to the conference. Then the same thing with others, in Ul Qoma. Are you going to tell me there’s no connection? She knew she’d made enemies, she told us she’d made enemies. When she went looking into Orciny she made enemies. When she looked deeper she made more. They all hated her, because of what she was doing. What she knew.”

“Who hated her?”

“All of them.”

“What did she know?”

She shook her head and sagged. “My husband was going to investigate.”

He had climbed out of a ground-floor bathroom window, to avoid my watching officers. A few steps across the road, what could have merely been a breaking of the rules we had set him, but he had blundered out of a crosshatching and into an alter area, a yard that existed only in Ul Qoma; and Breach, who must have watched him all the time, had come for him. I hoped they hadn’t hurt him too badly. If they had I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any doctor back home who would be able to identify the agent of his injury. What could I say?

“I’m sorry for what happened, Mrs. Geary. Your husband shouldn’t have tried to evade Breach. I … We are on the same side.” She looked at me carefully.

She whispered to me eventually, “Let us go, then. Go on. We can walk back to the city. We have money. We … my husband’s going crazy . He needs to be looking. He’ll just come back. We’ll come through Hungary and, or, we’ll come up via Turkey or Armenia-there are ways we can get in, you know … We’re going to find out who did this …”

“Mrs. Geary, Breach are watching us now. Now .” I raised my open hands slowly and filled them with air. “You wouldn’t get ten metres. What is it you think you can do? You don’t speak Besź, Illitan. I … Let me , Mrs. Geary. Let me do my job for you.”

MR. GEARY WAS STILL UNCONSCIOUS when the plane boarded. Mrs. Geary looked at me with reproach and hope, and I tried to tell her again that there was nothing I could do, that Mr. Geary had done this himself.

There were not many other passengers. I wondered where Breach was. Our remit would end when the plane doors were sealed. Mrs. Geary cushioned her husband’s head as he lolled in the stretcher in which we carried him. In the plane doorway, as they took the Gearys to their seats, I showed my badge to one of the attendants.

“Be good to them.”

“The deportees?”

“Yeah. Seriously.” He raised his brows but nodded.

I went to where the Gearys were seated. Mrs. Geary stared at me. I squatted.

“Mrs. Geary. Please pass my apologies to your husband. He shouldn’t have done what he did, but I understand why.” I hesitated. “You know … if he’d known Besźel better, he could probably have avoided falling into Ul Qoma, and Breach couldn’t have stopped him.” She just stared. “Let me get that.” I stood, took her bag and put it overhead. “Of course when we know what’s happening, if we get any leads at all, any information, I’ll tell you.” Still she didn’t say anything. Her mouth was moving: she was trying to decide whether to plead with me or accuse me of something. I bowed a little, old-fashioned, turned and left the plane and the two of them.

Back in the airport building, I took out the paper I had taken from the side pocket of her bag and looked at it. The name of an organisation, True Citizens, copied from the internet. That his daughter must have told him hated her, and where Mr. Geary had been going with his own dissident investigations. An address.

Chapter Nine

CORWI COMPLAINED, more dutifully than with fervour. “What’s this all about, sir?” she said. “Aren’t they going to be invoking Breach any minute?”

“Yes. In fact they’re taking their time. They should’ve done it by now; I don’t know what the holdup is.”

“So what the fuck, sir? Why are we in such a rush to do this? Mahalia’ll have Breach hunting for her killer soon.” I drove. “Damn. You don’t want to hand it over, do you?”

“Oh, I do.” So …

“I just want to check some things first, in this unexpected little moment we have.”

She stopped staring at me when we arrived at the headquarters of the True Citizens. I had called in and got someone to check the address for me: it was as it was written on Mrs. Geary’s paper. I had tried to contact Shenvoi, my acquaintance undercover, but couldn’t get him, so relied on what I knew and could quickly read on the TCs. Corwi stood beside me, and I saw her touch the handle of her weapon.

A reinforced door, blocked-off windows, but the house itself was or had been residential, and the rest of the street remained so. (I wondered if there had ever been any attempt to close the TC down on zoning charges.) The street almost looked crosshatched, its random-seeming variation between terraced and detached buildings, but it was not, it was total Besźel, the variation of styles an architectural quirk, though it was only a corner away from a very crosshatched area.

I had heard it alleged by liberals that this was more than irony, that the proximity of Ul Qoma gave the TC opportunities to intimidate the enemy. Certainly no matter how they unsaw them, the Ul Qomans in physical proximity must have registered at some level the paramilitary fatigues, the Besźel First patches. You could almost claim it was breach, though of course not quite.

They were milling as we approached, lounging, smoking, drinking, laughing loud. Their efforts to claim the street were so overt they might as well have been pissing musk. All but one were men. All eyed us. Words were spoken and most of them ambled into the building, leaving a few by the door. In leather, denim, one despite the cold in a muscle top his physiology deserved, staring at us. Bodybuilder, several men with cropped hair, one affecting an antique Besź-aristo cut like a fussy mullet. He leaned on a baseball bat—not a Besź sport but just plausible enough that he could not be done for Possessing Weapon with Intent. One man muttered to Haircut, spoke rapidly on a cell phone, clicked it shut. There were not many passersby. All there were of course were Besź, so they could and did stare at us and the TC crew, though most then looked away.

“You ready for this?” I said.

“Fuck off, boss,” Corwi muttered back. The bat holder swung it as if idly.

A few metres from the reception committee I said loudly into my radio: “At TC headquarters, four-eleven GyedarStrász, as planned. Check-in in an hour. Code alert. Ready backup.” I thumbed the radio off quickly before the operator had the chance to audibly respond along the lines of What on earth are you on about, Borlú?

The big man: “Help you, Officer?” One of his comrades looked Corwi up and down and made a kiss-kiss noise that might be the chirrup of a bird.

“Yes, we’re coming in to ask a few questions.”

“I don’t think so.” Haircut smiled, but it was Muscles doing the talking.

“We really are, you know.”

“Not so much.” This was the man who had made the call, a blond suede-headed man, pushing in front of his big acquaintance. “Got Entry and Search papers? No? Then you will not be coming in.”

I shifted. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why keep us out?” Corwi said. “We’ve some questions …” but Muscles and Haircut were laughing.

“Please,” Haircut said. He shook his head. “Please. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

The close-shorn man gestured him to shut up. “We’re done here,” he said.

“What do you know about Byela Mar?” I said. They looked without recognition, or uncertain. “Mahalia Geary.” That time they knew the name. The telephoner made anah noise; Haircut whispered to the big man.

“Geary,” Bodybuilder said. “We read the papers.” He shrugged, que sera . “Yes. A lesson in the dangers of certain behaviours?”

“How so?” I leaned against the doorjamb companionably, forcing Mullet to back up a step or two. He muttered again to his friend. I could not hear what.

“No one’s condoning attacks, but Miss Geary” —the man with the phone said the name with exaggerated American accent, and stood between us and all the others—“had form and a reputation among patriots. We’d not heard from her for a while, true. Hoped she might have gained some perspective. Seems not.” He shrugged. “If you denigrate Besźel, it’ll come back to bite you.”

“What denigration?” Corwi said. “What do you know about her?”

“Come on, Officer! Look at what she worked on! She was no friend of Besźel.”

“Alright,” Yellow said. “Unif. Or worse, a spy.” I looked at Corwi and she at me.

“What?” I said. “Which you going to go for?”

“She wasn’t…” Corwi said. We both hesitated.

The men stayed in the doorway and would not even bicker with us anymore. Mullet seemed minded to, in response to my provocations, but Bodybuilder said, “Leave it, Caczos,” and the man shut up, and only watched us from behind the bigger man’s back, and the other who had spoken remonstrated with them quietly and they backed a few feet away but still watched me. I tried to reach Shenvoi, but he was away from his secure phone. It occurred to me that he might (I was not one of the few who knew his assignment) even be in the building before me.

“Inspector Borlú.” The voice came from behind us. A smart black car had pulled up behind ours, and a man was walking towards us, leaving the driver’s door open. He was in his early fifties, I would say, portly, with a sharp, lined face. He wore a decent dark suit without a tie. What hair had not receded was grey and cut short. “Inspector,” he said again. “Time for you to leave.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Of course, of course,” I said. “Only forgive me … who in the name of the Virgin are you?”

“Harkad Gosz. Barrister for the True Citizens of Besźel.” Several of the thuggish men looked rather startled at that.

“Oh terrific,” whispered Corwi. I took Gosz in ostentatiously: he was clearly high-rent.

“Just popping by, are you?” I said. “Or did you get a call?” I winked at the phone-man, who shrugged. Amiably enough. “I take it you don’t have a direct line to these donkeys, so who did it come through? They put the word to Syedr? Who dropped you a line?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess why you’re here, Inspector.”

“A moment, Gosz … How do you know who I am?”

“Let me guess—you’re here asking questions about Mahalia Geary.”

“Absolutely. None of your boys seem too cut up about her death. And yet lamentably ignorant about her work: they’re labouring under the delusion that she was a unificationist, which would make the unifs laugh very hard. Never heard of Orciny? And let me repeat—how do you know my name?”

“Inspector, are you really going to waste all our time? Orciny? However Geary wanted to spin it, whatever foolishness she wanted to pretend to, whatever stupid footnotes she wanted to stick in her essays, the thrust of everything she was working on was to undermine Besźel. This nation is not a plaything, Inspector. Understand me? Either Geary was stupid, wasting her time with old wives’ tales that manage to combine being meaningless with being insults, or she was not stupid, and all this work about the secret powerlessness of Besźel was designed to make a very different point. Ul Qoma seems to have been more congenial for her, after all, didn’t it?”

“Are you joking with me? What’s your point? That Mahalia pretended to be working on Orciny? She was an enemy of Besźel? What, an Ul Qoman agent…?”

Gosz came close to me. He motioned the TC-ers, who backed into their fortified house and half closed the door, waiting and watching.

“Inspector, you have no Entry and Search. Go. If you’re going to insist on this, let me dutifully recite the following: continue this approach and I’ll complain to your superiors about harassment of the, let’s recall, entirely legal TC of B.” I waited a moment out. There was more he wanted to say. “And ask yourself what you’d infer about someone who arrives here in Besźel; commences research on a topic long and justifiably ignored by serious scholars, that’s predicated on the uselessness and weakness of Besźel; makes, unsurprisingly, enemies at every turn; leaves and then goes straight to Ul Qoma . And then anyway, which you appear to be unaware of, starts to quietly drop what was always an entirely unconvincing arena for research. She’s not been working on Orciny for years—might as well have admitted the whole thing was a blind, for goodness’ sake! She’s working at one of the most contentious pro–Ul Qoman digs of the last century. Do I think there’s reason to suspect her motives, Inspector? I do.”

Corwi was staring at him literally with her mouth open. “Damn, boss, you were right,” she said without lowering her voice. “They’re batshit.” He looked at her coldly.

“How would you know all that, Mr. Gosz?” I said. “About her work?”

“Her research? Please. Even without the newspapers ferreting around, PhD topics and conference papers aren’t state secrets, Borlú. There’s a thing called the internet. You should try it.”

“And …”

“Just go,” he said. “Tell Gadlem I sent my regards. Do you want a job, Inspector? No, not a threat, it’s a question. Would you like a job? Would you like to keep the one you have? Are you for real, Inspector How-Do-I-Know-Your-Name?” He laughed. “Do you think this”—a point at the building—“is where things end?”

“Oh no,” I said. “You got a call from someone.”

“Now go.”

“Which paper did you read?” I said with raised voice. I kept my eyes on Gosz but turned my head enough to show I was talking to the men in the doorway. “Big man? Haircut? Which paper?”

“That’s enough, now,” the crop-haired one said, as Muscles said to me, “What?”

“You said you read it in the paper about her. Which one? Far as I know no one’s mentioned her real name yet. She was still a Fulana Detail when I saw it. I’m obviously not reading the best press. So what should I be reading?” A mutter, a laugh.

“I pick things up.” Gosz did not tell the man to shut up. “Who knows where I heard it?” I could not make too much of this. Information leaked fast, including from supposedly secure committees, and it was possible her name had got out and even been published somewhere, though I hadn’t seen it—and if it had not, it would soon. “And what should you be reading? Cry of the Spear , of course!” He waved a copy of the TC newspaper.

“Well this is all very exciting,” I said. “You’re all so informed. Poor fuddled me, I suppose it’ll be a relief to hand this over. I can’t possibly keep hold of it. Like you say, I haven’t got the right papers to ask the right questions. Of course Breach don’t need any papers. They can ask anything they want, of anyone.”

That quietened them. I looked at them—at Muscles, Mullet, the telephoner and the lawyer—seconds more, before I walked, Corwi behind me.

***

“WHAT AN UNPLEASANT BUNCH OF FUCKERS.”

“Ah well,” I said. “We were fishing. A bit cheeky. Though I wasn’t expecting to be spanked like quite such a naughty boy.”

“What was all that stuff…? How did he know who you are? And all that business about threatening you …”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe he could make life hard if I pushed this. Not my problem very long.”

“I guess I have heard,” she said. “About links, I mean. Everyone knows the TC are the street soldiers of the NatBloc, so he must know Syedr. Like you said that’s probably the chain: they call Syedr, who calls him.” I said nothing. “Probably is. Might be who they heard about Mahalia from, too. But would Syedr really be so dumb as to feed us to the TC?”

“You said yourself he is pretty dumb.”

“Okay, yeah, but why would he?”

“He’s a bully.”

“True. They all are—that’s how the politics work, you know? So maybe, yeah, that’s what’s going on, bluster to scare you off.”

“Scare me off what?”

“Scare you, I mean. Not ‘off’ anything. They’re congenital thugs, those guys.”

“Who knows? Maybe he’s got something to keep to himself, maybe he hasn’t. I admit I like the idea of the Breach hunting him and his. When the invocation finally comes.”

“Yeah. I just thought you seemed … We’re still chasing stuff, I wondered if you were wishing you could … I wasn’t expecting to do any more of this. I mean we’re just waiting. For the committee …”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well. You know.” I looked at her and away. “It’ll be good to give this one up; she needs Breach. But we haven’t handed over just yet. The more we have to give them, the better I guess …” That was questionable.

Big breath in, out. I stopped and bought us coffee from a new place, before we went back to the HQ. American coffee, to Corwi’s disgust.

“I thought you liked it aj Tyrko,” she said, sniffing it.

“I do, but even more than I like it aj Tyrko , I don’t care.”

Chapter Ten

I WAS IN EARLY THE NEXT MORNING but had no time to orient myself to anything. “El jefe wants you, Tyad,” said Tsura, on desk duty, as I entered.

“Shit,” I said. “He in already?” I hid behind my hand and whispered, “Turn away, turn away, Tsura. Be on a piss break at my ingress. You didn’t see me.”

“Come on, Tyad.” She waved me away and covered her eyes. But there was a note on my desk. See me IMMEDIATELY . I rolled my eyes. Canny. If he had emailed it to me or left it as a voicemail I could have claimed to not see it for a few hours. I couldn’t avoid him now.

“Sir?” I knocked and poked my head around his door. I considered ways to explain my visit to the True Citizens. I hoped Corwi was not too loyal or honourable to blame me if she was taking shit herself for it. “You wanted me?”

Gadlem looked at me over the rim of his cup and beckoned, motioned me to sit. “Heard about the Gearys,” he said. “What happened?”

“Yes sir. It was … it was a cock-up.” I had not tried to contact them. I did not know if Mrs. Geary knew where her paper had gone. “I think they were, you know, they were just distraught and they did a stupid thing …”

“A stupid thing with a lot of preplanning. Quite the most organised spontaneous foolishness I’ve ever heard of. Are they lodging a complaint? Am I going to hear stern words from the US embassy?”

“I don’t know. It would be a bit cheeky if they did. They wouldn’t have much to stand on.” They had breached. It was sad and simple. He nodded, sighed, and offered me his two closed fists.

“Good news or bad news?” he said.

“Uh … bad.”

“No, you get the good news first.” He shook his left hand and opened it dramatically, spoke as if he had released a sentence. “The good news is that I have a tremendously intriguing case for you.” I waited. “The bad news.” He opened his right hand and slammed it on his desk with genuine anger. “The bad news, Inspector Borlú, is that it’s the same case you’re already working on.”

“… Sir? I don’t understand …”

“Well no, Inspector, who among us understands? To which of us poor mortals is understanding given? You’re still on the case.” He unfolded a letter and waggled it at me. I saw stamps and embossed symbols above the text. “Word from the Oversight Committee. Their official response. You remember, the little formality? They’re not handing the Mahalia Geary case over. They’re refusing to invoke Breach.”

I sat back hard. “What? What? What the hell …?”

His voice was flat. “Nyisemu for the committee informs us that they’ve reviewed the evidence presented and have concluded that there’s insufficient evidence to suppose any breach occurred.”

“This is bullshit.” I stood. “You saw my dossier, sir, you know what I gave them, you know there’s no way this wasn’t breach. What did they say? What were their reasons? Did they do a breakdown of the voting? Who signed the letter?”

“They’re not obliged to give any reasons.” He shook his head and looked disgusted at the paper he held in fingertips like tongs.

“God damn it. Someone’s trying to … Sir, this is ridiculous. We need to invoke Breach. They’re the only ones who can … How am I supposed to investigate this shit? I’m a Besźel cop, is all. Something fucked is going on here.”

“Alright, Borlú. As I say they’re not obliged to give any reasons, but doubtless anticipating something of our polite surprise, they have in fact included a note, and an enclosure. According to this imperious little missive, the issue wasn’t your presentation. So take comfort in the fact that no matter how cack-handed you were, you more or less convinced them this was a case of breach. What happened, they explain, is that as part of their ‘routine investigations,’” his scare quotes were like birds’ claws, “more information came to light. To whit.”

He tapped one of the pieces of mail or junk on his desk, threw it to me. A videocassette. He pointed me to the TV/VCR in the corner of his office. The image came up, a poor sepia-tinted and static-flecked thing. There was no sound. Cars puttered diagonally across the screen, in not-heavy but steady traffic, above a time-and-date stamp, between pillars and the walls of buildings.

“What am I looking at?” I worked out the date—the small hours, a couple of weeks ago. The night before Mahalia Geary’s body was found. “What am I looking at?”

The few vehicles sped up, beetled with tremendous jerky business. Gadlem waved his hand in bad-tempered play, conducting the fast-forwarding image with the remote control as if it were a baton. He sped through minutes of tape.

“Where is this? This picture is shit.”

“It’s a lot less shit than if it was one of ours, which is rather the point. Here we are,” he said. “Deep of the night. Where are we, Borlú? Detect, detective. Watch the right.”

A red car passed, a grey car, an old truck, then—“Hello! Voilà!” shouted Gadlem—a dirty white van. It crawled from the lower right to the upper left of the picture toward some tunnel, paused perhaps at an unseen traffic signal, and passed out of the screen and out of sight.

I looked at him for an answer. “Mark the stains,” he said. He was fast-forwarding, making little cars dance again. “They’ve trimmed us a bit. An hour and change later.Hello!” He pressed play and one, two, three other vehicles, then the white van—it must be the same one—reappeared, moving in the opposite direction, back the way itcame. This time the angle of the little camera captured its front plates.

It went by too quick for me to see. I pressed the buttons on the built-in VCR, hurtling the van backwards into my line of sight, then bringing it a few metres forward, pausing it. It was no DVD, this, the paused image was a fug of ghost lines and crackles, the stuttering van not really still but trembling like some troubled electron between two locations. I could not read the number plate clearly, but in most of its places what I saw seemed to be one of a couple of possibilities—a vye or a bye, zsec or kho , a 7 or a 1, and so on. I took out my notebook and flicked through it.

“There he goes,” murmured Gadlem. “He’s onto something. He has something, ladies and gentlemen.” Back through pages and days. I stopped. “A lightbulb, I see it, it’s straining to come on, to glow illumination across the situation …”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Indeed fuck.”

“It is. That’s Khurusch’s van.”

“It is, as you say, the van of Mikyael Khurusch.” The vehicle in which Mahalia’s body had been taken, and from which it had been dumped. I looked at the time on the image. As I looked at it onscreen it almost certainly contained dead Mahalia. “Jesus. Who found this? What is it?” I said. Gadlem sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Wait, wait.” I held up my hand. I looked at the letter from the Oversight Committee, which Gadlem was using to fan his face. “That’s the corner of Copula Hall,” I said. “God damn it. That’s Copula Hall. And this is Khurusch’s van going out of Besźel into Ul Qoma and coming back in again. Legally.”

“Bing,” said Gadlem, like a tired game-show buzzer. “Bing bing bloody bing.”

AS PART, WE WERE TOLD—and to which, I told Gadlem, we would return—of the background investigations pursuant to any invocation of Breach, CCTV footage of the night in question had been investigated. That was unconvincing. This had looked so clear a case of breach no one had any reason to pore so hard through hours of tape. And besides, the antique cameras in the Besź side of Copula Hall would not give clear enough pictures to identify the vehicle—these were from outside, from a bank’s private security system, that some investigator had commandeered.

With the help of the photographs provided by Inspector Borlú and his team, we heard, it had been ascertained that one of the vehicles passing through an official checkpoint in Copula Hall, into Ul Qoma from Besźel and back again, had been that in which the deceased body had been transported. Accordingly, while a heinous crime had been committed and must be investigated as a matter of urgency, the passage of the body from the murder site, though it appears it was in Ul Qoma, to the dumping ground in Besźel had not, in fact, involved breach. Passage between the two cities had been legal. There were, accordingly, no grounds to invoke Breach. No breach had been committed.

This is the sort of juridical situation to which outsiders react with understandable bewilderment. Smuggling, they regularly insist, for example. Smuggling is breach, yes? Quintessentially, yes? But no.

Breach has powers the rest of us can hardly imagine, but its calling is utterly precise. It is not the passage itself from one city to the other, not even with contraband: it is the manner of the passage. Throw felid or cocaine or guns from your Besź rear window across a crosshatched yard into an Ul Qoman garden for your contact to pick up—that is breach, and Breach will get you, and it would still be Breach if you threw bread or feathers. Steal a nuclear weapon and carry it secretly with you through Copula Hall when you cross but cross that border itself? At that official checkpoint where the cities meet? Many crimes are committed in such an act, but breach is not one of them.

Smuggling itself is not breach, though most breach is committed in order to smuggle. The smartest dealers, though, make sure to cross correctly, are deeply respectful of the cities’ boundaries and pores, so if they are caught they face only the laws of one or other or both places, not the power of Breach. Perhaps Breach considers the details of those crimes once a breach is committed, all the transgressions in Ul Qoma or Besźel or both, but if so it is only once and because those crimes are functions of breach, the only violation Breach punishes, the existential disrespect of Ul Qoma’s and Besźel’s boundaries.

The theft of the van and the dumping of the body in Besźel were illegal. The murder in Ul Qoma was horribly so. But what we had assumed was the particular transgressive connection between the events had never taken place. All passage had appeared scrupulously legal, effected through official channels, paperwork in place. Even if the permits were faked, the travel through the borders in Copula Hall made it a question of illegal entry, not of breach. That is a crime you might have in any country. There had been no breach.

“THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT.”

I walked back and forth between Gadlem’s desk and the frozen car on-screen, the conveyance of the victim. “This is bullshit. We’ve been screwed.”

“It is bullshit, he tells me,” Gadlem said to the world. “He tells me we’ve been screwed.”

“We’ve been screwed, sir. We need Breach. How the hell are we supposed to do this? Someone somewhere is trying to freeze this where it stands.”

“We’ve been screwed he tells me, and I note he tells me so as if I am disagreeing with him. Which when last I looked I was not doing.”

“Seriously what …”

“In fact it could be said I agree with him on a startling scale. Of course we’ve been screwed, Borlú. Stop spinning like a drunk dog. What do you want me to say? Yes, yes, yes this is bullshit; yes someone has done this to us. What would you have me do?”

“Something! There must be something. We could appeal …”

“Look, Tyador.” He steepled his fingers. “We are both in accord about what’s happened here. We’re both pissed off that you are still on this case. For different reasons perhaps but—” He waved that away. “But here’s the problem you’re not addressing. While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but , Borlú, however they’ve come by the evidence, this is the correct decision.”

“Have we checked with the border guards?”

“Yes, and there’s bugger all, but you think they keep records of everyone they wave through? All they needed was to see some vaguely plausible pass. You can’t argue with that.” He waved his hand at the television.

He was right. I shook my head.

“As that footage shows,” he said, “the van did not breach, and, therefore, what appeal would we be making? We can’t invoke Breach. Not for this. Nor, frankly, should we.”

“So what now?”

“What now is you are continuing this investigation. You started it, finish it.”

“But it’s…”

“… in Ul Qoma, yes, I know. You’re going over.”

“What?”

“This has become an international investigation. Ul Qoma cops weren’t touching it while it looked like a Breach matter, but now this is their murder investigation, on the what-looks-like convincing evidence that it occurred on their soil. You are going to get to experience the joys of international collaboration. They’ve requested our help. On-site. You’re going to Ul Qoma as the guest of the UQ militsya , where you’ll be consulting with officers from their Murder Team. No one knows the status of the investigation better than you.”

“This is ridiculous. I can just send them a report…”

“Borlú, don’t sulk. This has crossed our borders. What’s a report? They need more than a bit of paper. This case has already turned out to be more convoluted than a dancing worm, and you’re the man on it. It needs cooperation. Just go over , talk them through it. See the bloody sights. When they find someone we’re going to want to bring charges against them here, too, for the theft, the body-dumping, and so on. Don’t you know this is an exciting new era of cross-border policing?” It was a slogan from a booklet we had received when last we upgraded our computer equipment.

“The chance of us finding the killer just dropped hard. We needed Breach.”

“He tells me. I agree. So go and improve the odds.”

“How long am I going to be gone for?”

“Check in every couple of days with me. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s stretching more than a couple of weeks we’ll review—it’s a big enough pain that I’m losing you for those days.”

“So don’t.” He looked at me sardonically: What’s the choice? “I’d like Corwi to come with me.”

He made a rude noise. “I’m sure you would. Don’t be stupid.”

I ran my hands through my hair. “Commissar, I need her help. If anything she knows more about the case than I do. She’s been integral to it from the beginning. If I’m going to take this over the border …”

“Borlú, you’re not taking anything anywhere; you’re a guest . Of our neighbours. You want to saunter over with your own Watson? Anyone else you’d like me to supply? Masseuse? Actuary? Get this in your head: over there you’re the assistant. Jesus, it’s bad enough that you press-ganged her in the first place. Under what authority, please? Instead of focusing on what you’ve lost, I suggest you remember the good times you had together.”

“This is—”

“Yes, yes. Don’t tell me again. You want to know what’s bullshit, Inspector?” He pointed the remote control at me, as if he could stop me or rewind me. “What’s bullshit is a senior officer of the Besźel ECS stopping off, with the subordinate officer he’s quietly commandeered as his personal property, for an unauthorised, unnecessary, and unhelpful confrontation with a group of thugs with friends in high places.”

“… Right. You heard about that, then. From the lawyer?”

“What lawyer would you be speaking of? It was representative Syedr who was good enough to call this morning.”

“Syedr called you himself? Damn. Sorry, sir. I’m surprised. What, was he telling me to leave them alone? I thought part of the deal was that he was never quite open about being connected to TCs. Hence sending for that lawyer, who seemed a tad out of the league of the tough guys.”

“Borlú, I know only that Syedr had just heard about the previous day’s tête-à-tête and was aghast to hear that he’d been mentioned, phoned in no small spleen to threaten various sanctions against you for slander should his name come up again in any such context, et cetera. I don’t know and don’t want to what led to that particular little investigative cul-de-sac, but you might ask yourself about the parameters of coincidence, Borlú. It was this same morning, only hours after your fabulously fruitful public argument with the patriots, that this footage popped up, and that Breach was called off. And no I have no idea what that might mean either, but it’s an interesting fact, is it not?”

“DON’T ASK ME, BORLÚ,” Taskin said when I phoned her. “I don’t know. I just found out. I get rumours is all I get. Nyisemu’s not happy about what happened, Buric is livid, Katrinya’s confused, Syedr’s delighted. That’s the whisper. Who leaked what, who’s messing with who, I don’t have anything. I’m sorry.”

I asked her to keep her ears out. I had a couple of days to prepare. Gadlem had passed on my details to the relevant departments in Besźel and to a counterpart in Ul Qoma who would be my contact. “And answer your damn messages,” he said. My pass and orientation would be organised for me. I went home and looked at clothes, put my old suitcase on my bed, picked up and put down books.

One of the books was new. I had received it in the mail that morning, having paid extra for expedited shipping. I’d ordered it online from a link on fracturedcity.org .

My copy of Between the City and the City was old and bruised, intact but with the cover folded back and its pages stained and annotated by at least two hands. I had paid an outrageous price for it despite these deficits because of its illegality in Besźel. It was not much of a risk, having my name on the dealer’s list. It had been easy for me to ascertain that the book’s status was, in Besźel at least, more a mildly embarrassing throwback than due to any ongoing sense of sedition. The majority of illegal books in the city were only vaguely so: sanctions were rarely applied, even the censors rarely cared.

It was published by a long-gone anarcho-hippy press, though judging by the tone of the opening pages it was far drier than its florid, druggy cover would suggest. The print wobbled rather up and down the pages. There was no index, which made me sigh.

I lay on the bed and called the two women I saw, told them I was going to Ul Qoma. Biszaya, the journalist, said, “Cool, make sure you go to the Brunai gallery. There’s a Kounellis exhibition. Buy me a postcard.” Sariska the historian, sounded more surprised, and disappointed that I might be gone for I did not know how long.

“Have you read Between the City and the City?” I said.

“When I was an undergrad, sure. My cam-cover was The Wealth of Nations.” During the 1960s and ’70s, some banned literature could be bought bound in the stripped covers of legal paperbacks. “What about it?”

“What did you think?”

“At the time, that it was amazing, man. Plus that I was unspeakably brave to be reading it. Subsequently that it was ridiculous. Are you finally going through adolescence, Tyador?”

“Could be. No one understands me. I didn’t ask to be born.” She had no memories of the book, in particular.

“I cannot fucking believe this,” Corwi said when I called her and told her. She kept repeating it.

“I know. That’s what I told Gadlem.”

“They’re taking me off the case?”

“I don’t think there’s a ‘they.’ But unfortunately, yes, no, you can’t come.”

“So that’s it? I’m just dropped off?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Son of a bitch . The question,” she said after a minute we’d spent without saying anything, only listening to each other’s silence and breath, like teenagers in love, “is who would have released that footage. No, the question is how did they find that footage? Why? How many fucking hours of tape are there, how many cameras? Since when do they have the time to go through that shit? Why this one time?”

“I don’t have to leave immediately. I’m just thinking … I’ve got my orientation the day after tomorrow …”

“So?”

“Well.”

“So?”

“Sorry, I’ve been thinking this through. About this footage that’s just slapped us upside the head. Do you want to do a last little investigating? Couple of phone calls and a visit or two. There’s one thing in particular I have to sort out before my visa and whatnot comes through—I’ve been thinking about that van swanning over to foreign lands. This could get you in trouble.” I said this last jokingly, as if it were something appealing. “Of course you’re off the case, now, so it’s a bit unauthorised.” That wasn’t true. She was in no danger—I could okay anything she did. I might get in trouble but she would not.

“Fuck, yes, then,” she said. “If authority’s stiffing you, unauthorised is all you’ve got.”

Chapter Eleven

“YES?” Mikyael Khurusch looked at me more closely from behind the door to his shabby office. “Inspector. It’s you. What… Hello?”

“Mr. Khurusch. Small point.”

“Let us in, please, sir,” Corwi said. He opened the door wider to see her, too, sighed and opened to us.

“How can I help you?” He clasped, unclasped his hands.

“Doing okay without your van?” Corwi said.

“It’s a pain in the arse, but a friend’s helping me out.”

“Good of him.”

“Isn’t it?” Khurusch said.

“When did you get an AQD visa for your van, Mr. Khurusch?” I said.

“I, what, what?” he said. “I don’t, I have no—”

“Interesting that you stall like that,” I said. His response verified the guess. “You’re not so stupid as to out-and-out deny it, because, hey, passes are matters of record. But then what are we asking for? And why aren’t you just answering? What’s the trouble with that question?”

“Can we see your pass, please, Mr. Khurusch?”

He looked at Corwi several seconds.

“It’s not here. It’s at my house. Or—”

“Shall we not?” I said. “You’re lying. That was a little last chance for you, courtesy of us, and oh, you pissed it up a wall. You don’t have your pass. A visa, Any Qualified Driver, for multiple entry-reentry into and out of Ul Qoma. Right? And you don’t have it because it’s been stolen. It was stolen when your van was stolen. It was, in fact, in your van when your van was stolen, along with your antique street map.”

“Look,” he said, “I’ve told you, I wasn’t there, I don’t have a street map, I have GPS on my phone. I don’t know anything—”

“Not true, but true that your alibi checks out. Understand, no one here thinks you committed this murder, or even dumped the body. That’s not why we’re ticked off.”

“Our concern,” Corwi said, “is that you never told us about the pass. The question is who took it, and what you got for it.” Colour left his face.

“Oh God,” he said. His mouth worked several times and he sat down hard. “Oh God, wait. I had nothing to do with anything, I didn’t get anything …”

I had watched the CCTV footage repeatedly. There had been no hesitation in the van’s passage, on that guarded and official route through Copula Hall. Far from breaching, slipping along a crosshatched street, or changing plates to match some counterfeit permission, the driver had had to show the border guards papers that raised no eyebrows. There was one kind of pass in particular that might have expedited so uncomplicated a journey.

“Doing someone a favour?” I said. “An offer you couldn’t refuse? Blackmail? Leave the papers in the glove compartment. Better for them if you don’t know anything.”

“Why else would you not tell us you’d lost your papers?” Corwi said.

“One and only chance,” I said. “So. What’s the score?”

“Oh God, look.” Khurusch looked longingly around. “Please, look. I know I should’ve taken the papers in from the van. I do normally, I swear to you, I swear. I must have forgotten this one time, and that’s the time the van gets stolen.”

“That’s why you never told us about the theft, wasn’t it?” I said. “You never told us the van was stolen because you knew you’d have to tell us eventually about the papers, and so you just hoped the whole situation would sort itself out.”

“Oh God.”

Visiting Ul Qoman cars are generally easy to identify as visitors with rights of passage, with their licence plates, window stickers and modern designs: as are Besź cars in Ul Qoma, from their passes and their, to our neighbours, antiquated lines. Vehicular passes, particularly AQD multiple-entry, are neither cheap nor effortless to get hold of, and come hedged with conditions and rules. One of which is that a visa for a particular vehicle is never left unguarded in that vehicle. There’s no point making smuggling easier than it is. It is, though, a not-uncommon oversight, or crime, to leave such papers in glove compartments or under seats. Khurusch knew he was facing at the very least a large fine and the revocation of any travel rights to Ul Qoma forever.

“Who did you give your van to, Mikyael?”

“I swear to Christ, Inspector, no one. I don’t know who took it. I seriously do not know.”

“Are you saying that it was total coincidence? That someone who needed to pick up a body from Ul Qoma just happened to steal a van with pass papers still in it, waiting? How handy.”

“On my life, Inspector, I don’t know. Maybe whoever nicked the van found the papers and sold them to someone else …”

“They found someone who needed trans-city transport the same night they stole it? These are the luckiest thieves ever.”

Khurusch slumped. “Please,” he said. “Go through my bank accounts. Check my wallet. No one’s paying me dick. Since the van got taken I’ve not been able to do fucking anything, no business at all. I don’t know what to do …”

“You’re going to make me cry,” said Corwi. He looked at her with a ragged expression.

“On my life,” he said.

“We’ve looked up your record, Mikyael,” I said. “I don’t mean your police record—that’s what we checked last time. I mean your record with the Besźel border patrol. You got random audited a few months after you first got a pass. A few years ago. We saw First Warning marks on several things, but the biggest by far was that you’d left the papers in the car. It was a car at the time, right? You’d left it in the glove compartment. How’d you get away with that one? I’m surprised they didn’t revoke it there and then.”

“First offence,” he said. “I begged them. One of the guys who found it said he’d have a word with his mate and get it commuted to an official warning.”

“Did you bribe him?”

“Sure. I mean, something. I can’t remember how much.”

“Why not? I mean, that’s how you got it in the first place, right? Why even bother?”

A long silence. AQD vehicle passes are generally advertised as for businesses with a few more employees than Khurusch’s sketchy concern, but it is not uncommon for small traders to help their applications with a few dollars—Besźmarques being unlikely to move the Besź middlemen or issuing clerks at the Ul Qoman embassy.

“In case,” he said hopelessly, “I ever needed help picking stuff up. My nephew’s done the test, couple of mates, could’ve driven it, helped me out. You never know.”

“Inspector?” Corwi was looking at me. She’d said it more than once, I realised. “Inspector?” She glanced at Khurusch, What are we doing?

“Sorry,” I said to her. “Just thinking.” I motioned her to follow me to the corner of the room, warning Khurusch with a pointed finger to stay put.

“I’m going to take him in,” I said quietly, “but something’s … Look at him. I’m trying to work something out. Look, I want you to chase something up. As quick as you can, because tomorrow I’m going to have to go to this damn orientation, so I think tonight’s going to be a long night. Are you okay with that? What I want is a list of all the vans reported stolen in Besźel that night, and I want to know what happened in each case.”

“All of them …?”

“Don’t panic. It’ll be a lot for all vehicles, but factor out everything but vans round about this size, and it’s only for one night. Bring me everything you can on each of them. Including all paperwork associated, okay? Quick as possible.”

“What are you going to do?”

“See if I can make this sleazy sod tell the truth.”

COEWI, through cajoling, persuasion and computer expertise, got hold of the information within a few hours. To be able to do that, so quickly, to speed up official channels, is voodoo.

For the first couple of hours as she went through things, I sat with Khurusch in a cell, and asked him in various ways and in several different formulations Who took your van? and Who took your pass? He whined and demanded his lawyer, which I told him he would have soon. Twice he tried getting angry, but mostly he just repeated that he did not know, and that he had not reported the thefts, of van and papers, because he had been afraid of the trouble he would bring on himself. “Especially because they already warned me on that, you know?”

It was after the end of the working day when Corwi and I sat together in my office to work through it. It would be, as I warned her again, a long night.

“What’s Khurusch being held for?”

“At this stage Inappropriate Pass Storage and Failure to Report Crime. Depending on what we find tonight I might add Conspiracy to Murder, but I have a feeling—”

“You don’t think he’s in on whatever, do you?”

“He’s hardly a criminal genius, is he?”

“I’m not suggesting he planned anything, boss. Maybe even that he knew about anything. Specific. But you don’t think he knew who took his van? Or that they were going to do something?”

I wagged my head. “You didn’t see him.” I pulled the tape of his interrogations out of my pocket. “Take a listen if we have a bit of time.”

She drove my computer, pulling the information she had into various spreadsheets. She translated my muttered, vague ideas into charts. “This is called data mining.” She said the last words in English.

“Which of us is the canary?” I said. She did not answer. She only typed and drank thick coffee, “made fucking properly,” and muttered complaints about my software.

“So this is what we have.” It was past two. I kept looking out of my office window at the Besźel night. Corwi smoothed out the papers she had printed. Beyond the window were the faint hoots and quietened mutter of late traffic. I moved in my chair, needing a piss from caffeinated soda.

“Total number of vans reported stolen that night, thirteen.” She scanned through with her fingertip. “Of which three then turn up burnt out or vandalised in some form or other.”

“Joyriders.”

“Joyriders, yes. So ten.”

“How long before they were reported?”

“All but three, including the charmer in the cells, reported by the end of the following day.”

“Okay. Now where’s the one where you have … How many of these vans have Ul Qoma pass papers?”

She sifted. “Three.”

“That sounds high—three out of thirteen?”

“There are going to be way more for vans than for vehicles as a whole, because of all the import-export stuff.”

“Still though. What are the statistics for the cities as a whole?”

“What, of vans with passes? I can’t find it,” she said after a while of typing and staring at the screen. “I’m sure there must be a way to find out, but I can’t figure out a way to do it.”

“Okay, if we have time we’ll chase that. But I’m betting it’s less than three out of thirteen.”

“You could … It does sound high.”

“Alright, try this. Of those three with passes that got stolen, how many owners have previous warnings for condition-transgressions?”

She looked through papers and then at me. “All three of them. Shit. All three for inappropriate storage. Shit.”

“Right. That does sound unlikely, right? Statistically. What happened to the other two?”

“They were … Hold on. Belonged to Gorje Feder and Salya Ann Mahmud. Vans turned up the next morning. Dumped.”

“Anything taken?”

“Smashed up a bit, a few tapes, bit of change from Feder’s, an iPod from Mahmud’s.”

“Let me look at the times—there’s no way of proving which of these were stolen first, is there? Do we know if these other two still have their passes?”

“Never came up, but we could find out tomorrow.”

“Do if you can. But I’m going to bet they do. Where were the vans taken from?”

“Juslavsja, Brov Prosz, and Khurusch’s from Mashlin.”

“Where were they found?”

“Feder’s in … Brov Prosz. Jesus. Mahmud’s in Mashlin. Shit. Just off ProspekStrász.”

“That’s about four streets from Khurusch’s office.”

“Shit.” She sat back. “Talk this out, boss.”

“Of the three vans that get stolen that night that have visas, all have records for failing to take their paperwork out of their glove compartments.”

“The thief knew?”

“Someone was visa-hunting. Someone with access to border-control records. They needed a vehicle they could get through Copula. They knew exactly who had form for not bothering to take their papers with them. Look at the positions.” I scribbled a crude map of Besźel. “Feder’s is taken first, but good on Mr. Feder, he and his staff have learnt their lesson, and he takes his paperwork with him now. When they realise that our criminals use it instead to drive here , to near where Mahmud parks hers. They jack it, fast, but Ms. Mahmud keeps her pass in the office now too, so after having made it look like a robbery, they dump it near the next in the list and move on.”

“And the next one’s Khurusch’s.”

“And he’s remained true to his previous tendency, and leaves his in the van. So they’ve got what they need, and it’s off to Copula Hall, and Ul Qoma.” Quiet.

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s… looking dodgy, is what it is. It’s a very inside job. Inside what, I don’t know. Someone with access to arrest records.”

“What the fuck do we do? What do we do?” she said again after I was quiet too long.

“I don’t know.”

“We need to tell someone …”

“Who? Tell them what? We don’t have anything.”

“Are you …” She was about to say joking , but she was intelligent enough to see the truth of it.

“Correlations might be enough for us, but it’s not evidence, you know—not enough to do anything with.” We stared at each other. “Anyway … whatever this is … whoever …” I looked at the papers.

“They’ve got access to stuff that…” Corwi said.

“We need to be careful,” I said. She met my eyes. There was another set of long moments when neither of us spoke. We looked slowly around the room. I do not know what we were looking for but I suspect that she felt, in that moment, as suddenly hunted and watched and listened-to as she looked like she did.

“So what do we do?” she said. It was unsettling to hear alarm like that in Corwi’s voice.

“I guess what we’ve been doing. We investigate.” I shrugged slowly. “We have a crime to solve.”

“We don’t know who it’s safe to talk to, boss. Anymore.”

“No.” There was nothing else I could say, suddenly. “So maybe don’t talk to anyone. Except me.”

“They’re taking me off this case. What can I …?”

“Just answer your phone. If there’s stuff I can get you to do I’ll call.”

“Where does this go?”

It was a question that did not, at that point, mean anything. It was merely to fill the near noiselessness in the office, to cover up what noises there were, that sounded baleful and suspicious—each tick and creak of plastic an electronic ear’s momentary feedback, each small knock of the building the shift in position of a sudden intruder.

“What I would really like,” she said, “is to invoke Breach. Fuck them all, it would be just great to sic Breach on them. It would be great if this weren’t our problem.” Yes. The notion of Breach exacting revenge on whomever, for whatever this was. “She found something out. Mahalia.”

The thought of Breach had always seemed right. I remembered though, suddenly, the look on Mrs. Geary’s face. Between the cities, Breach watched. None of us knew what it knew.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“No?”

“Sure, it’s just… we can’t. So … we have to try to focus on this ourselves.”

“We? The two of us, boss? Neither of us knows what the fuck’s going on.”

Corwi was whispering by the end of the last sentence. Breach were beyond our control or ken. Whatever situation or thing this was, whatever had happened to Mahalia Geary, we two were its only investigators, so far as we could trust, and she would soon be alone, and I would be alone, too, and in a foreign city.