“So she called?”
“No, that’s what I’m saying, the kid who called wouldn’t give us his name, but he was calling about Rodriguez. It seems like—and he was saying he’s not sure, could be nothing, et cetera et cetera. Anyway. No one’s seen her for a little while. Rodriguez. No one can get her on her phone.”
“She’s disappeared?”
“Holy Light, Tyad, that’s melodramatic. She might just be sick, she might have turned her phone off. I’m not saying we don’t go looking, but don’t let’s panic yet, right? We don’t know that she’s disappeared …”
“Yeah we do. Whatever’s happened, whether anything’s happened to her at all, no one can find her. That’s pretty definitional. She’s disappeared.”
Dhatt glanced at me in the mirror and then at his driver.
“Alright, Inspector,” he said. “Yolanda Rodriguez has disappeared.”
Chapter Thirteen
“WHAT’S IT LIKE, BOSS?” There was a lag on the hotel’s line to Besźel, and Corwi and I were stutteringly trying not to overlap each other.
“Too early to say. Weird to be here.”
“You saw her rooms?”
“Nothing helpful. Just student digs, with a bunch of others in a building leased by the university.”
“Nothing of hers?”
“Couple of cheap prints, some books complete with scribbled margin notes, of which none are interesting. A few clothes. A computer which either has really industrial-strength encryption or nothing germane on it. And on that I have to say I trust Ul Qoman geeks more than ours. Lots of Hi Mom love you emails, a few essays. She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”
“You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”
“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.” Perhaps one day we would be finished with I-don’t-understand-the-internet jokes. “On which topic she hadn’t updated her MySpace since moving to Ul Qoma.”
“So you didn’t figure her all out?”
“Sadly no, the force was not with me.” It really had been a star-tlingly bland and uninformative room. Yolanda’s, by contrast, a corridor over, into which we had also peered, had been crammed with hipster toys, novels and DVDs, moderately flamboyant shoes. Her computer was gone.
I had gone carefully through Mahalia’s room, referring often to the photographs of how it had been when the militsya entered, before the books and few bits and pieces had been tagged and processed. The room was cordoned, and officers kept the students away, but when I glanced out of the door over the little pile of wreaths I could see Mahalia’s classmates in knots at either end of the corridor, young women and men with little visitors’ marks discreetly on their clothes. They whispered to each other. I saw more than one weeping.
We found no notebooks and no diaries. Dhatt had acquiesced to my request for copies of Mahalia’s textbooks, the copious annotations of which appeared to be her preferred study method. They were on my table: whoever had photocopied them had been rushed, and the print and handwriting yawed. As I spoke to Corwi I read a few cramped lines of Mahalia’s telegraphic arguments with herself in A People’s History of Ul Qoma .
“What’s your contact like?” Corwi said. “Your Ul Qoman me?”
“Actually I think I’m his you.” The phrase was not best chosen but she laughed.
“What’s their office like?”
“Like ours with better stationery. They took my gun.”
In fact the police station had been rather different from our own. It did have better fittings, but it was large and open-plan, full of whiteboards and cubicles over which neighbouring officers debated and bickered. Though I am sure most of the local militsya must have been informed that I was coming, I left a wake of unabashed curiosity as I followed Dhatt past his own office—he was ranked enough to get a little room—to his boss’s. Colonel Muasi had greeted me boredly with something about what a good sign of the changing relationships between our countries, herald of future cooperation, any help at all I needed, and had made me surrender my weapon. That had not been agreed beforehand, and I had tried to argue it but had given in quickly rather than sour things so early.
When we had left it had been to another roomful of not-very-friendly stares. “Dhatt,” someone had greeted him in passing, in a pointed way. “Ruffling feathers, am I?” I had asked, and Dhatt had said, “Touchy touchy. You’re Besź, what did you expect?”
“Fuckers!” said Corwi. “They did not.”
“No valid Ul Qoman licence, here in advisory role, et cetera.” I went through the bedside cupboard. There was not even a Gideon Bible. I did not know whether that was because Ul Qoma is secular, or because of lobbying by its disestablished but respected Lux Templars.
“Fuckers. So nothing to report?”
“I’ll let you know.” I glanced over the list of code phrases we had agreed to, but none of them—I miss Besź dumplings = am in trouble, Working on a theory = know who did it —were remotely germane. “I feel fucking stupid,” she had said as we came up with them. “I agree,” I had said. “I do too. Still.” Still, we could not assume that our communications would not be listened to, by whatever power it was that had outmanoeuvred us in Besźel. Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?
“Same weather over here as back home,” I said. She laughed. That cliché witticism we had arranged meant nothing to report .
“What next?” she said.
“We’re going to Bol Ye’an.”
“What, now?”
“No. Sadly. I wanted to go earlier today, but they didn’t get it together and it’s too late now.” After I had showered and eaten, and wandered around the drab little room, wondering if I would recognise a listening device if I saw one, I had called the number Dhatt gave me three times before getting through to him.
“Tyador,” he had said. “Sorry, did you try to call? Been flat out, got caught tying up some stuff here. What can I do for you?”
“It’s getting on. I wanted to check about the dig site …”
“Oh, shit, yeah. Listen, Tyador, it’s not going to happen tonight.”
“Didn’t you tell people to expect us?”
“I told them to probably expect us. Look, they’ll be glad to go home, and we’ll go first thing in the morning.”
“What about What’s-her-name Rodriguez?”
“I’m still not convinced she’s actually … no, I’m not allowed to say that, am I? I’m not convinced that the fact that she’s missing is suspicious, how’s that? It’s hardly been very long. But if she’s still gone tomorrow, and not answering her email or her messages or anything, then it’s looking worse, I grant you. We’ll get Missing Persons on it.” So …
“So look. I’m not going to get a chance to come over tonight. Can you …? You’ve got stuff you can do, right? I’m sorry about this. I’m couriering over a bunch of stuff, copies of our notes, and that info you wanted, about Bol Ye’an and the university campuses and all that. Do you have a computer? Can you go online?”
“… Yeah.” A departmental laptop, a hotel Ethernet connection at ten dinar a night.