The City & the City - China Mieville [130]
A few metres from him, Corwi watched me. She put her phone away and drew her weapon, but still would not look directly at Bowden, just in case he was not in Besźel. Perhaps we were watched by Breach, somewhere. Bowden had not yet transgressed for their attention: they could not touch him.
I held out my hand as I walked, and I did not slow down, but Corwi gripped it and we met each other’s gaze a moment. Looking back I saw her and Dhatt, metres apart in different cities, staring at me. It was really dawn at last.
“BOWDEN.”
He turned. His face was set. Tense. He held something the shape of which I could not make out.
“Inspector Borlú. Fancy meeting you … here?” He tried to grin but it did not go well.
“Where’s here?” I said. He shrugged. “It’s really impressive, what you’re doing,” I said. He shrugged again, with a mannerism neither Besź nor Ul Qoman. It would take him a day or more of walking, but Besźel and Ul Qoma are small countries. He could do it, walk out. How expert a citizen, how consummate an urban dweller and observer, to mediate those million unnoticed mannerisms that marked out civic specificity, to refuse either aggregate of behaviours. He aimed with whatever it was he held.
“If you shoot me Breach’ll be on you.”
“If they’re watching,” he said. “I think probably you’re the only one here. There are centuries of borders to shore up, after tonight. And even if they are, it’s a moot question. What kind of crime would it be? Where are you?”
“You tried to cut her face off.” That ragged under-chin slit. “Did you … No, it was hers, it was her knife. You couldn’t though. So you slathered on her makeup instead.” He blinked, said nothing. “As if that would disguise her. What is that?” He showed the thing to me, a moment, before gripping and aiming it again. It was some verdigrised metal object, age-gnarled and ugly. It was clicking. It was patched with new metal bands.
“It broke. When I.” It did not sound as if he hesitated: his words simply stopped.
“… Jesus, that’s what you hit her with. When you realised she knew it was lies.” Grabbed and flailed, a moment’s rage. He could admit to anything now. So long as he remained in his superposition, whose law would take him? I saw that the thing’s handle, that he held, that pointed towards him, ended in an ugly sharp spike. “You grab it, smack her, she goes down.” I made stab motions. “Heat of the moment,” I said. “Right? Right?
“So did you not know how to fire it, then? Are they true, then?” I said. “All those ‘strange physics’ rumours? Is that one of the things Sear and Core were after? Sending one of their ranking visitors sightseeing, scuffing their heels in the park for? Just another tourist?”
“I wouldn’t call it a gun,” he said. “But… well, want to see what it can do?” He wagged it.
“Not tempted to sell it on yourself?” He looked offended. “How do you know what it does?”
“I’m an archaeologist and an historian,” he said. “And I’m incredibly good at it. And now I’m going.”
“Walking out of the city?” He inclined his head. “Which city?” He wagged his weapon no.
“I didn’t mean to, you know,” he said. “She was…” That time his words dried up. He swallowed.
“She must have been angry. To realise how you’d been lying to her.”
“I always told the truth. You heard me, Inspector. I told you many times. There’s no such place as Orciny.”
“Did you flatter her? Did you tell her she was the only one you could admit the truth to?”
“Borlú, I can kill you where you stand and, do you realise, no one will even know where we are. If you were in one place or the other they might come for me, but you’re not. The thing is, and I know it wouldn’t work this way and so do you but that’s because no one in this place, and that includes Breach, obeys the rules, their own rules, and if they did it would work this way, the thing is that if you were to be killed by someone who no one was sure which city they were in and they weren’t sure where you were either, your body would have to lie there, rotting, forever.