“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 .