The City & the City - China Mieville [101]
“You see?” he said.
A man on the opposite side of a nearby lock, half-hidden in people and little urban trees, was looking straight at us. I met his eye—for a moment I was not sure but then decided he must be in Ul Qoma, so it was not breach—until he looked away. I tried to watch where he went, but he was gone.
When I expressed choices between the various sights the driver proposed, I made sure the resulting route crisscrossed the city. I watched the mirrors as he, delighted with this fare, drove. If we were followed it was by very sophisticated and careful spies. I paid him a ridiculous amount, in a much harder currency than I was paid in, after three hours of escorting, and I had him drop me where backstreet hackers abutted cheap secondhand shops, around the corner from the estate where Yolanda and Aikam hid.
For moments I thought they had skipped out on me, and I closed my eyes, but I kept repeating in a whisper up close to the door, “It’s me, it’s Borlú, it’s me,” and at last it opened, and Aikam ushered me in.
“Get ready,” I said to Yolanda. She looked dirty to me, thinner and more startled like an animal than even when I had last seen her. “Get your papers. Be ready to agree with whatever me or my colleagues say to anyone at the border. And get lover-boy used to the idea that he’s not coming, because we’re not having a scene at Copula Hall. We’re getting you out.”
SHE MADE HIM STAY IN THE ROOM. He looked as if he would not do as she asked, but she made him. I did not trust him to be unobtrusive.
He demanded to know again and again why he could not come. She showed him where she had his number, and she swore that she would call him from Besźel, and from Canada, and that she would call for him there. It took her several such promises until he stood at last miserable as a neglected thing, staring as we closed the door on him and walked fast through the shadowing light to the corner of the park, where Dhatt was waiting in an unmarked police car.
“Yolanda.” He nodded to her from the driver’s seat. “Pain in my arse.” He nodded to me. We set off. “What the fuck? Who exactly have you pissed off, Miss Rodriguez? You’ve got me fucking my life and collaborating with this foreign wacko. There’s clothes in the back,” he said. “Course I’m out of work, now.” He very well might not be exaggerating.
Yolanda stared at him until he glanced into the mirror and snapped at her, “For fuck’s sake, what, you think I’m peeping?” and she scootched down in the rear seat and began to wriggle out of her clothes, replacing them with the militsya uniform he had brought for her, that almost fit.
“Miss Rodriguez, do as I say and stick close. There’s fancy dress for our possible-other-guest too. And that’s for you, Borlú. Might save us a bit of shit.” A jacket with a fold-down militsya blazon on it. I made it visible. “I wish they had rank on them. I’d’ve fucking demoted you.”
He did not meander, nor make the mistake of the guilty nervous and drive more slowly, more carefully than the cars around us. We took the main streets, and he flicked on and off the headlights at other drivers’ infractions as Ul Qoman drivers do, little messages of road-rage code like aggressive Morse, flick flick, you cut me up, flick flick flick, make up your mind.
“He called again,” I said to Dhatt quietly. “He might be there. In which case …”
“Come on, pain in my arse, say it again. In which case he’s going over, right?”
“He’s got to get out. Did you get spare papers?