“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.”