The City & the City - China Mieville [57]
“Been to Ul Qoma before, sir?”
“Not for a long time.”
When the border gates came into view Dyegesztan spoke to me again. “Did they have it like this before?” He was young.
“More or less.”
A policzai car, we were in the official lane, behind dark imported Mercedeses that probably carried politicians or businesspeople on fact-finding missions. A way off was the engine-grumbling line of quotidian travellers in cheaper cars, spivs and visitors.
“Inspector Tyador Borlú.” The guard looked at my papers.
“That’s right.”
He went carefully over everything written. Had I been a tourist or trader wanting a day-pass, passage might well have been quicker and questioning more cursory. As an official visitor, there was no such laxity. One of those everyday bureaucratic ironies.
“Both of you?”
“It’s right there, Sergeant. Just me. This is my driver. I’m being picked up, and the constable here’ll be coming straight back. In fact if you look, I think you can see my party over in Ul Qoma.”
There, uniquely at that convergence, we could look across a simple physical border and see into our neighbour. Beyond, beyond the stateless space and the backwards-to-us-facing Ul Qoman checkpoint, a small group of militsya officers stood around an official car, its lights stuttering as pompously as our own, but in different colours and with a more modern mechanism (true on-off, not the twisting blinder that our own lamps contained). Ul Qoman police lights are red and darker blue than the cobalt in Besźel. Their cars are charcoal and streamlined Renaults. I remember when they drove ugly little local-made Yadajis, more boxy than our own vehicles.
The guard turned and glanced at them. “We’re due about now,” I told him.
The militsya were too far for any details to be clear. They were waiting for something though. The guard took his time of course—You may be policzai but you get no special treatment, we watch the borders—but without excuses to do otherwise eventually saluted somewhat sardonically and pointed us through as the gate rose. After the Besź road itself the hundred metres or so of no-place felt different under our tires, and then through the second set of gates and we were on the other side, with uniformed militsya coming towards us.
There was the gunning of gears. The car we had seen waiting sped in a sudden tight curve around and in front of the approaching officers, calling out one truncated and abrupt whoop from the siren. A man emerged, putting on his police cap. He was a bit younger than me, thickset and muscular and moving with fast authority. He wore official militsya grey with an insignia of rank. I tried to remember what it meant. The border guards had stopped in surprise as he held out his hand.
“That’ll do,” he shouted. He waved them away. “I got this. Inspector Borlú?” He was speaking Illitan. Dyegesztan and I climbed out of the car. He ignored the constable. “Inspector Tyador Borlú, Besźel Extreme Crime, right?” Shook my hand hard. Pointed to his car, in which his own driver waited. “Please. I’m Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt. You got my message, Inspector? Welcome to Ul Qoma.”
COPULA HALL HAD OVER CENTURIES SPREAD, a patchwork of architecture defined by the Oversight Committee in its various historic incarnations. It sat across a considerable chunk of land in both cities. Its inside was complicated—corridors might start mostly total, Besźel or Ul Qoma, become progressively crosshatched along their length, with rooms in one or other city along them, and numbers also of those strange rooms and areas that were in neither or both cities, that were in Copula Hall