“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.”