The City & the City - China Mieville [16]
I WOULD NOT, but who would not be tempted to burn or shred the notes of that conversation? Of course I would not, but. I sat up late at my kitchen table with them spread out in front of me, idly writing shit/shit on them crosswise from time to time. I put on music: Little Miss Train, a collaboration, Van Morrison duetting with Coirsa Yakov, the Besź Umm Kalsoum as she was called, on his 1987 tour. I drank more and put the picture of Marya Fulana Unknown Foreign Detail Breacher next to the notes.
No one knew her. Perhaps, God help us, she had not been properly here in Besźel at all, though Pocost was a total area. She could have been dragged there. The kids finding her body, the whole investigation, might be breach too. I should not incriminate myself by pushing this. I should perhaps just walk away from the investigation and let her moulder. It was escapism for a moment to pretend I might do so. In the end I would do my job, though doing it meant breaking a code, an existential protocol more basic by a long way than any I was paid to enforce.
As kids we used to play Breach. It was never a game I much enjoyed, but I would take my turn creeping over chalked lines and chased by my friends, their faces in ghastly expressions, their hands crooked as claws. I would do the chasing too, if it was my turn to be invoked. That, along with pulling sticks and pebbles out of the ground and claiming them the magic Besź mother lode, and the tag /hide-and-seek crossbreed called Insile Hunt, were regular games.
There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it. There is a sect in Besźel that worships Breach. It’s scandalous but not completely surprising given the powers involved. There is no law against the congregation, though the nature of their religion makes everyone twitchy. They have been the subject of prurient TV programs.
At three in the morning I was drunk and very awake, looking over the streets of Besźel (and more—the crosshatch). I could hear the barking of dogs and a call or two of some scrawny, wormy street wolf. The papers—both sides of the argument still as if it were that, an argument—were all over the table. Fulana-Marya’s face was wineglass-ringed, as were the illegal shit/shit/shit notes.
It is not uncommon for me to fail to sleep. Sariska and Biszaya were used to sleepily walking from the bedroom to the bathroom to find me reading at the kitchen table, chewing so much gum that I would get sugar blisters (I would not take up smoking again). Or looking over the night city and (inevitably, unseeing but touched by its light) the other city.
Sariska laughed at me once. “Look at you,” she said, not without affection. “Sitting there like an owl. Melancholy bloody gargoyle. You mawkish bugger. You don’t get any insight, you know, just because it’s night. Just because some buildings have their lights on.” She was not there to tease me though just then and I wanted whatever insight I could get, even spurious, so I looked on out.
Planes went over the clouds. Cathedral spires were lit by glass skyscrapers. Recurved and crescent neoned architecture across the border. I tried to hook up my computer to look some stuff up, but the only connection I had was dial-up and it was all very frustrating so I stopped.
“Details later.” I think I actually said it aloud. I made more notes. Eventually, at last, I called the direct line to Corwi’s desk.
“Lizbyet. I’ve had a thought.” My instinct as always when I lie was to say too much, too quickly. I made myself speak as if idly. She was not stupid though. “It’s late. I’m just leaving this for you because I’m probably not going to be in tomorrow. We’re not getting anywhere with the street-beat, so it’s pretty obvious it’s not what we thought—someone would’ve recognised her. We’ve got the picture out to all the precincts, so if she’s a street girl off her patch maybe we’ll get lucky. But meanwhile I’d like