The City & the City - China Mieville [109]
The picture went still on the wall. The interrogators looked at me in the light of Dhatt’s oversized monochrome snarl.
“So,” the older man said. He nodded at the wall. “You heard Bowden. What’s happening. What do you know about Orciny?”
THE BREACH WAS NOTHING. It is nothing. This is a commonplace; this is simple stuff. The Breach has no embassies, no army, no sights to see. The Breach has no currency. If you commit it it will envelop you. Breach is void full of angry police.
This trail that led and led again to Orciny suggested systemic transgression, secret para-rules, a parasite city where there should be nothing but nothing, nothing but Breach. If Breach was not Orciny, what would it be but a mockery of itself, to have let that go for centuries? That was why my questioner, when he asked me Does Orciny exist?, put it like this, “So, are we at war?”
I brought our collaboration to their attention. I, daring, bargained. “I’ll help you …” I kept saying, with a drawn-out pause, an ellipsis implying if. I wanted the killers of Mahalia Geary and Yolanda Rodriguez and they could tell that, but I was not too noble to bargain. That there was room to barter, a way, a small chance that I might get out of Breach again, was intoxicating.
“YOU ALMOST CAME for me once before,” I said. They had been watching, when I came grosstopically close to my house. “So are we partners?” I said.
“You’re a breacher. But it’ll go better if you help us.” “You really think Orciny killed them?” the other man said. Would they finish with me when there was even a possibility that Orciny was here, emerging, and still unfound? Its population walking the streets, unseen by the populations of Besźel and Ul Qoma, each thinking they were in the other. Hiding like books in a library.
“What is it?” the woman said, seeing my face.
“I’ve told you what I know, and it’s not much. It’s Mahalia who really knew what was happening, and she’s dead. But she left something behind. She told a friend. She told Yolanda that she’d realised the truth when she was going through her notes. We never found anything like that. But I know how she worked. I know where they are.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
WE LEFT THE BUILDING—the station, call it—in the morning, me in the company of the older man, Breach, and I realised I did not know what city we were in.
I had stayed up much of the night watching films of interrogations, from Ul Qoma and from Besźel. A Besź border guard and an Ul Qoman, passersby from both cities who knew nothing. “People started screaming …” Motorists over whom bullets had gone.
“Corwi,” I said, when her face appeared on the wall.
“So where is he?” A quirk of recording made her voice far away. She was angry and controlling herself. “What the fuck has boss-man got himself into? Yes, he wanted me to help him get someone through.” That was all they established, repeatedly, her Besź questioners. They threatened her job. She was as contemptuous of that as Dhatt, though more careful how she phrased it. She knew nothing.
Breach showed me brief shots of someone questioning Biszaya and Sariska. Biszaya cried. “I’m not impressed with this,” I said. “This is just cruel.”
The most interesting films were those of Yorjavic’s comrades among the extreme nationalists of Besźel. I recognised some who had been with Yorjavic. They stared sulky at their questioners, the policzai. A few refused to speak except in the company of their lawyers. There was hard questioning, an officer leaning across the table and punching a man in the face.
“Fuck’s sake,” the bleeding man shouted. “We’re on the same fucking side, you fuck. You’re Besź, you’re not fucking Ul Qoman and you’re not fucking Breach …”
With arrogance, neutrality, resentment or, often, compliance and collaboration, the nationalists denied any knowledge of Yorjavic’s action. “I’ve never fucking heard of this foreign woman; he never mentioned her. She’s a student?” one said. “We do what’s right for Besźel, you know? And you don’t have to know why. But …” The man