The City & the City - China Mieville [0]
King Rat
Perdido Street Station
The Scar
Iron Council
Looking for Jake: Stories
Un Lun Dun
Contents
Cover
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Part 1 - BESŹEL
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part 2 - UL QOMA
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Part 3 - BREACH
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Part 4 - Coda BREACH
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Reader’s Guide
Excerpt from Kraken
About the Author
Copyright
In loving memory of my mother,
Claudia Lightfoot
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For all their help with this book I’m extremely grateful to Stefanie Bierwerth, Mark Bould, Christine Cabello, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Simon Kavanagh, Penny Haynes, Chloe Healy, Deanna Hoak, Peter Lavery, Farah Mendlesohn, Jemima Miéville, David Moench, Sue Moe, Sandy Rankin, Maria Rejt, Rebecca Saunders, Max Schaefer, Jane Soodalter, Jesse Soodalter, Dave Stevenson, Paul Taunton, and to my editors Chris Schluep and Jeremy Trevathan. My sincere thanks to all at Del Rey and Macmillan. Thanks to John Curran Davis for his wonderful translations of Bruno Schulz.
Among the countless writers to whom I’m indebted, those I’m particularly aware of and grateful to with regard to this book include Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka, Alfred Kubin, Jan Morris, and Bruno Schulz.
“Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious and delusive streets.”
—Bruno Schulz, The Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories
Part One
BESŹEL
Chapter One
I COULD NOT SEE THE STREET or much of the estate. We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course—a child’s mimicking of geography. Maybe they had been going to wood it and put in a pond. There was a copse but the saplings were dead.
The grass was weedy, threaded with paths footwalked between rubbish, rutted by wheel tracks. There were police at various tasks. I wasn’t the first detective there—I saw Bardo Naustin and a couple of others—but I was the most senior. I followed the sergeant to where most of my colleagues clustered, between a low derelict tower and a skateboard park ringed by big drum-shaped trash bins. Just beyond it we could hear the docks. A bunch of kids sat on a wall before standing officers. The gulls coiled over the gathering.
“Inspector.” I nodded at whomever that was. Someone offered a coffee but I shook my head and looked at the woman I had come to see.
She lay near the skate ramps. Nothing is still like the dead are still. The wind moves their hair, as it moved hers, and they don’t respond at all. She was in an ugly pose, with legs crooked as if about to get up, her arms in a strange bend. Her face was to the ground.
A young woman, brown hair pulled into pigtails poking up like plants. She was almost naked, and it was sad to see her skin smooth that cold morning, unbroken by gooseflesh. She wore only laddered stockings, one high heel on. Seeing me look for it, a sergeant waved at me from a way off, from where she guarded the dropped shoe.
It was a couple of hours since the body had been discovered. I looked her over. I held my breath and bent down toward the dirt, to look at her face, but I could only see one open eye.
“Where’s Shukman?”
“Not here yet, Inspector…”
“Someone call him, tell him to get a move on.” I smacked my watch. I was in charge of what we called the mise-en-crime. No one would move her until Shukman the patho had come, but there were other