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.”