“Let’s retrace,” he said. “We’re not going to get anywhere hunting for this fucking van driver. Hopefully your lot are on that. We’ve got nothing except a description of the van, and who in Ul Qoma’s going to admit having even maybe seen a Besź van, with or without permit to be there? So let’s go back to square one. What was your break?” I looked at him. I looked at him carefully and thought over the order of events. “When did she stop being Unknown Corpse One? What started it?”
In my room at the hotel were the notes I had taken from the Gearys. Her email address and phone number were in my notebook. They did not have their daughter’s body nor could they return to collect it. Mahalia Geary lay in the freezer waiting. For me, you could say.
“A phone call.”
“Yeah? A snitch?”
“… Sort of. It was his lead got me to Drodin.” I saw him remember the dossier, that this was not how it was described there.
“What are you … Who?”
“Well this is the thing.” I paused a long time. Eventually I looked at the table and drew shapes in my spilled tea. “I’m not sure what to … It was a phone call from here.”
“Ul Qoma?” I nodded. “What the fuck? From who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why were they calling?”
“They saw our posters. Yeah. Our posters in Besźel.”
Dhatt leaned in. “The fuck they did. Who?”
“You realise that this puts me in—”
“Of course I do.” He was intent, spoke quickly. “Of course I do, but come on, you’re police, you think I’m going to fuck you over? Between us. Who was it?”
It was not a small thing. If I was accessory to breach, he was now accessory to accessory. He did not seem nervous about it. “I think they were unifs. You know, unificationists?”
“They said so?”
“No, but it was what they said and how they said it. Anyway, I know it was totally not-on, but it was that got me on the right track … What?” Dhatt was sitting back. His fingers drummed faster now, and he was not looking at me.
“Fuck, we’ve got something. I cannot fucking believe you didn’t mention this before.”
“Hold on, Dhatt.”
“Okay, I can really—I can see that this puts you in a bit of a position.”
“I don’t know anything about who this was.”
“We’re still in time; we can maybe hand it over and explain that you were just a bit late …”
“Hand what over? We don’t have anything.”
“We have a unif bastard who knows something is what we have. Let’s go.” He stood and jiggled his car keys.
“Go where?”
“Go fucking detecting!”
“OF BLOODY COURSE,” Dhatt said. He was tearing up Ul Qoma streets, the car’s siren gasping. He turned, shouting abuse at scuttling Ul Qoman civilians, swerved wordlessly to avoid Besź pedestrians and cars, accelerating with the expressionless anxiety foreign emergencies occasion. If we hit one of them it would be a bureaucratic disaster. A breach now would not be helpful.
“Yari, it’s Dhatt.” He shouted into his cell phone. “Any clue if the cc of the unifs are in at the moment? Excellent, thanks.” He slapped it shut.
“Looks like at least some of them are. I knew you’d spoken to Besź unifs, of course. Read your report. But what kind of fool am I”—slap slap of his forehead with the heel of his hand—“didn’t occur to me to go talk to our own little homegrowns. Even though of course those fuckers, those fuckers more than any other fuckers—and we have our share of fuckers, Tyad—are all talking to each other. I know where they hang out.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
“I hate those little sods. I hope … Goes without saying, I mean, that I’ve met some great Besź in my time.” He glanced at me. “Nothing against the place and I hope I get to visit, and it’s great that we’re all getting on so well these days, you know, better than it used to be—what was the fucking point of all that shit? But I’m Ul Qoman and I’m fucked if I want to be anything else. You imagine unification?” He laughed. “Fucking catastrophe! Unity is strength my Ul Qoman arse. I know they say crossbreeding makes animals stronger, but what if we inherited, shit, Ul Qoman sense of timing and Besź optimism?”
He made me laugh. We passed between ancient age-mottled roadside stone pillars. I recognised them from photographs, remembered too late that the one on the eastern side of the road was the only one I should see—it was in Ul Qoma, the other in Besźel. So most people said, anyway: they were one of the cities’ controversial disputed loci. The Besź buildings I couldn’t help fail to completely unsee were, I glimpsed, sedate and tidy, but in Ul Qoma wherever we were was an area of decay. We passed canals, and for several seconds I did not know which city they were in, or if it was both. By a weed-flecked yard, where nettles poked out from below a long-immobile Citroën like a hovercraft’s skirt of air, Dhatt braked hard and got out before I had even undone my seatbelt.
“Time was,” Dhatt said, “we’d have locked every one of these fuckers away.” He strode towards a tumbledown door. There are no legal unificationists in Ul Qoma. There are no legal socialist parties, fascist parties, religious parties in Ul Qoma. Since the Silver Renewal almost a century before under the tutelage of General Ilsa, Ul Qoma had had only the People’s National Party. Many older establishments and offices still displayed portraits of Ya Ilsa, often above “Ilsa’s Brothers” Atatürk and Tito. The cliché was that in older offices there was always a faded patch between those two, where erstwhile brother Mao had once beamed.
But this is the twenty-first century, and President Ul Mak (whose portrait you can also see where managers are most obsequious), like President Umbir before him, had announced certainly not a repudiation but a development of the National Road, an end to restrictive thinking, a glasnostroika , as Ul Qoman intellectuals hideously neologised. With the CD-and-DVD shops, the software startups and galleries, the bullish Ul Qoman financial markets, the revalued dinar, came, they said, New Politics, a very vaunted openness to hitherto dangerous dissidence. Not to say that radical groups, let alone parties, were legalised, but their ideas were sometimes acknowledged. So long as they displayed restraint in meetings and proselytisation, they were indulged. So one heard.
“Open!” Dhatt slammed on the door. “This is the unif hangout,” he said to me. “They’re constantly on the phone to your lot in Besźel—that’s kind of their deal , right?”
“What’s their status?”
“You’re about to hear them say they’re just a group of friends meeting for a chat. No membership cards or anything, they’re not stupid. Shouldn’t take a fucking bloodhound for us to track down some contraband, but that’s not really what I’m here for.”
“What are we here for?” I looked around at decrepit Ul Qoman facades, Illitan graffiti demanding that so-and-so fuck off and informing that such-and-such person sucked cock. Breach must be watching.
He looked at me levelly. “Whoever made that phone call to you did it from here. Or frequents this place. Pretty much guarantee it. Want to find out what our seditionist pals know. Open.” That to the door. “Don’t be fooled by their whole who us? thing; they’re perfectly happy to smack shit out of anyone quote working against unification unfuckingquote. Open.”
The door obeyed this time, a crack onto a small young woman, the sides of her head shaved, showing tattooed fish and a few letters in a very old alphabet.
“Who …? What do you want?”
Perhaps they had sent her to the door hoping her size would shame anyone out of what Dhatt did next, which was to shove the door hard enough to send her stumbling backwards into the grotty hallways.
“Everyone here now,” he shouted, striding through the corridor, past the dishevelled punkess.