The outer guards of militsya did not ask a thing or even speak to us as we cut across the lines of people, walked over the roads weaving through stationary traffic, only ushered us through the restricted gates and on into the grounds proper of Copula Hall, where the huge edifice waited to eat us.
I looked everywhere as we came. Our eyes never stopped moving. I walked behind Yolanda, moving uneasily in her disguise. I raised my stare above the sellers of food and tat, the guards, the tourists, the homeless men and women, the other militsya . Of the many entrances we had chosen the most open, wide and unconvoluted under a vault of old brickwork, with a view clear through the yawning interstitial space, over the mass of crowds filling the great chamber on both sides of the checkpoint—though more, noticeably, on the Besźel side, wanting to come in to Ul Qoma.
From this position, this vantage angle, for the first time in a long time we did not have to unsee the neighbouring city: we could stare along the road that linked Ul Qoma to it, over the border, the metres of no-man’s-land and the border beyond, directly into Besźel itself. Straight ahead. Blue lights awaited us. A Besź bruise just visible beyond the lowered gate between the states, the flashing we had unseen minutes before. As we passed the outer fringes of Copula Hall’s architecture, I saw at the far end of the hall standing on the raised platform where the Besź guards watched the crowds a figure in policzai uniform. A woman—she was very distant yet, on the Besźel side of the gates.
“Corwi.” I did not know I’d said her name aloud until Dhatt said to me, “That her?” I was about to tell him it was too far off to know, but he said to me, “Hold on a second.”
He was looking back the way we had come. We stood somewhat apart from most of those heading into Besźel, between lines of aspirant travellers and on a thin fringe of pavement vehicles travelling slowly. There was, Dhatt was right, something about one of the men behind us that was disconcerting. There was nothing about his appearance which stood out: he was bundled against the cold in a drab Ul Qoman cloak. But he walked or shuffled towards us somewhat across the directionality of the line of his fellow pedestrians, and I saw behind him disgruntled faces. He was pushing out of his turn, walking towards us. Yolanda saw where we were looking, and gave a little whimper.
“Come on,” Dhatt said, and put his hand to her back and walked her more quickly towards the entrance of the tunnel, but seeing how the figure behind us tried as far as the constraints of those around him would permit to raise his speed as well, to exceed our own, to come towards us, I turned around suddenly and began to move toward him.
“Get her over there,” I said to Dhatt behind me, without looking. “Go, get her to the border. Yolanda, go to the policzai woman over there.” I accelerated. “Go.”
“Wait,” Yolanda said to me but I heard Dhatt remonstrate with her. I was focused now on the approaching man. He could not fail to see that I was coming towards him, and he hesitated and reached into his jacket, and I fumbled at my side but remembered I had no gun in that city. The man backed up a step or two. The man threw up his hands and unwrapped his scarf. He was shouting my name. It was Bowden.
He pulled out something, a pistol dangling in his fingers as if he were allergic to it. I dived for him and heard a hard exhalation behind me. Behind me another spat-out breath and screams. Dhatt shouted and shouted my name.
Bowden was staring over my shoulder. I looked behind me. Dhatt was crouched between cars a few metres away. He was wrapping himself up in himself and bellowing. Motorists were hunched in their vehicles. Their screams were spreading to the lines of pedestrian travellers in Besźel and in Ul Qoma. Dhatt huddled over Yolanda. She lay as if tossed. I could not see her clearly, but there was blood across her face. Dhatt was gripping his shoulder.
“I’m hit!” he shouted. “Yolanda’s … Light, Tyad, she’s shot, she’s down …”
A commotion started in the hall a long way off. Over the sedately moving traffic I saw at the farthest end of the enormous room a surge in the crowd in Besźel, a movement like animal panic. People scattering away from a figure, who leaned on, no, raised, something in both hands. Aiming, a rifle.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ANOTHER OF THOSE ABRUPT LITTLE SOUNDS, hardly audible over the rising screams the length of the tunnel. A shot, silenced or muffled by acoustics, but by the time I heard it I was on Bowden and had pushed him down, and the explosive percussion of the bullet into the wall behind him was louder than the shot itself. Architecture sprayed. I heard Bowden’s panicked breath, put my hand on his wrist and squeezed until he dropped his weapon, kept him down out of the sightline of the sniper targeting him.
“Down! Everybody down!” I was shouting that. So sluggishly it was hard to believe, the crowds were falling to their knees, their cowering and their screams more and more exaggerated as they realised the danger. Another sound and another, a car braking violently and with an alarm, another implosive gasp as bricks took a bullet.
I kept Bowden on the tarmac. “Tyad!” It was Dhatt.
“Talk to me,” I shouted to him. The guards were all over the place, raising weapons, looking everywhere, yelling idiot pointless orders at each other.
“I’m hit, I’m okay,” he replied. “Yolanda’s head-shot.”
I looked up, no more firing. I looked up further, to where Dhatt rolled and gripped his wound, to where Yolanda lay dead. Rose slightly more and saw militsya approaching Dhatt and the corpse he guarded, and way off policzai running towards where the shots had come from. In Besźel the police were buffeted and blocked by the hysterical crowd. Corwi was looking in all directions—could she see me? I was shouting. The shooter was running.
His way was blocked, but he swung his rifle like a club when he had to, and people were clearing from around him. Orders would be going out to block the entrance, but how fast would they go? He was moving into a part of the crowd who had not seen him shoot, and were surrounding him, and good as he was he would drop or hide his weapon.
“God damn it.” I could hardly see him. No one was stopping him. He had some way to go before he was out. I looked, carefully, item by item, at his hair and clothes: cropped; grey tracksuit top with a hood behind; black trousers. All nondescript. Did he drop his weapon? He was into the crowd.
I stood holding Bowden’s gun. A ridiculous P38, but loaded and well kept. I stepped towards the checkpoint, but there was no way I could get through it, all that chaos, not ever and not now with both lines of guards in uproar flailing guns around; even if my Ul Qoman uniform got me through the Ul Qoman lines, the Besź would stop me, and the shooter was too far for me to catch. I hesitated. “Dhatt, radio help, watch Bowden,” I shouted, then turned and ran the other way, out into Ul Qoma, towards Dhatt’s car.