The City & the City - China Mieville [46]
“No one’s condoning attacks, but Miss Geary”—the man with the phone said the name with exaggerated American accent, and stood between us and all the others—“had form and a reputation among patriots. We’d not heard from her for a while, true. Hoped she might have gained some perspective. Seems not.” He shrugged. “If you denigrate Besźel, it’ll come back to bite you.”
“What denigration?” Corwi said. “What do you know about her?”
“Come on, Officer! Look at what she worked on! She was no friend of Besźel.”
“Alright,” Yellow said. “Unif. Or worse, a spy.” I looked at Corwi and she at me.
“What?” I said. “Which you going to go for?”
“She wasn’t…” Corwi said. We both hesitated.
The men stayed in the doorway and would not even bicker with us anymore. Mullet seemed minded to, in response to my provocations, but Bodybuilder said, “Leave it, Caczos,” and the man shut up, and only watched us from behind the bigger man’s back, and the other who had spoken remonstrated with them quietly and they backed a few feet away but still watched me. I tried to reach Shenvoi, but he was away from his secure phone. It occurred to me that he might (I was not one of the few who knew his assignment) even be in the building before me.
“Inspector Borlú.” The voice came from behind us. A smart black car had pulled up behind ours, and a man was walking towards us, leaving the driver’s door open. He was in his early fifties, I would say, portly, with a sharp, lined face. He wore a decent dark suit without a tie. What hair had not receded was grey and cut short. “Inspector,” he said again. “Time for you to leave.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Of course, of course,” I said. “Only forgive me … who in the name of the Virgin are you?”
“Harkad Gosz. Barrister for the True Citizens of Besźel.” Several of the thuggish men looked rather startled at that.
“Oh terrific,” whispered Corwi. I took Gosz in ostentatiously: he was clearly high-rent.
“Just popping by, are you?” I said. “Or did you get a call?” I winked at the phone-man, who shrugged. Amiably enough. “I take it you don’t have a direct line to these donkeys, so who did it come through? They put the word to Syedr? Who dropped you a line?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess why you’re here, Inspector.”
“A moment, Gosz … How do you know who I am?”
“Let me guess—you’re here asking questions about Mahalia Geary.”
“Absolutely. None of your boys seem too cut up about her death. And yet lamentably ignorant about her work: they’re labouring under the delusion that she was a unificationist, which would make the unifs laugh very hard. Never heard of Orciny? And let me repeat—how do you know my name?”
“Inspector, are you really going to waste all our time? Orciny? However Geary wanted to spin it, whatever foolishness she wanted to pretend to, whatever stupid footnotes she wanted to stick in her essays, the thrust of everything she was working on was to undermine Besźel. This nation is not a plaything, Inspector. Understand me? Either Geary was stupid, wasting her time with old wives’ tales that manage to combine being meaningless with being insults, or she was not stupid, and all this work about the secret powerlessness of Besźel was designed to make a very different point. Ul Qoma seems to have been more congenial for her, after all, didn’t it?”
“Are you joking with me? What’s your point? That Mahalia pretended to be working on Orciny? She was an enemy of Besźel? What, an Ul Qoman agent…?”
Gosz came close to me. He motioned the TC-ers, who backed into their fortified house and half closed the door, waiting and watching.
“Inspector, you have no Entry and Search. Go. If you’re going to insist on this, let me dutifully recite the following: continue this approach and I’ll complain to your superiors about harassment of the, let’s recall, entirely legal TC of B.” I waited a moment out. There was more he wanted to say. “And ask yourself what you’d infer about someone who arrives here in Besźel; commences research on a topic long and justifiably ignored