The City & the City - China Mieville [14]
Corwi sat rather stiff, waiting for me to say something. All the rubbish had done was roll into the dead woman and rust her as if she, too, were old iron.
Chapter Four
BOTH OF THE LEADS WERE BOGUS. The office assistant had resigned and not bothered to tell them. We found her in Byatsialic, in the east of Besźel. She was mortified to have caused us trouble. “I never hand in notice,” she kept saying. “Not when they’re employers like that. And this has never happened, nothing like this.” Corwi found Rosyn “The Pout” without any difficulty. She was working her usual pitch.
“She doesn’t look anything like Fulana, boss.” Corwi showed me a jpeg Rosyn had been happy to pose for. We couldn’t trace the source of that spurious information, delivered with such convincing authority, nor work out why anyone would have mistaken the two women. Other information came in that I sent people to chase. I found messages and blank messages on my work phone.
It rained. On the kiosk outside my front door the printout of Fulana softened and streaked. Someone put up a glossy flyer for an evening of Balkan techno so it covered the top half of her face. The club night emerged from her lips and chin. I unpinned the new poster. I did not throw it away—only moved it so Fulana was visible again, her closed eyes next to it. DJ Radic and the Tiger Kru. Hard Beats. I did not see any other pictures of Fulana though Corwi assured me they were there, in the city.
Khurusch was all over the van, of course, but with the exception of those few hairs Fulana was clean of him. As if all those recovering gamblers would lie, anyway. We tried to take the names of any contacts to whom he had ever lent the van. He mentioned a few but insisted it had been stolen by a stranger. On the Monday after we found the body I took a call.
“Borlú.” I said my name again after a long pause, and it was repeated back to me.
“Inspector Borlú.”
“Help you?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you could help me days ago. I’ve been trying to reach you. I can help you more like.” The man spoke with a foreign accent.
“What? I’m sorry, I need you to speak up—it’s a really bad line.”
It was staticking, and the man sounded as if he was a recording on an antique machine. I could not tell if the lag was on the line, or if he was taking a long time to respond to me each time I said anything. He spoke a good but odd Besź, punctuated with archaisms. I said, “Who is this? What do you want?”
“I have information for you.”
“Have you spoken to our info-line?”
“I can’t.” He was calling from abroad. The feedback from Besźel’s outdated exchanges was distinctive. “That’s kind of the point.”
“How did you get my number?”
“Borlú, shut up.” I wished again for logging telephones. I sat up. “Google. Your name’s in the papers. You’re in charge of the investigation into the girl. It’s not hard to get past assistants. Do you want me to help you or not?”
I actually looked around but there was no one with me. “Where are you calling from?” I parted the blinds in my window as if I might see someone watching me from the street. Of course I did not.
“Come on Borlú. You know where I’m calling from.”
I was making notes. I knew the accent.
He was calling from Ul Qoma.
“You know where I’m calling from and that is why please don’t bother asking my name.”
“You’re not doing anything illegal talking to me.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. It is—” He broke off, and I heard him mutter something with his hand over the phone, for a moment. “Look Borlú, I don’t know where you stand on things like this but I think it is lunatic, an insult, that I am speaking to you from another country.”
“I’m not a political man. Listen, if you’d rather…” I started the last sentence in Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma.
“This is fine.” He interrupted in his old-fashioned Illitan-inflected Besź. “It’s the same damn-faced language anyway.” I wrote that he said that. “Now shut up. Do you want to hear my information?”
“Of course.” I was standing, reaching, trying to work out