The City & the City - China Mieville [7]
Corwi did not try to disguise her police clothes because that way those who saw us, who might otherwise think we were there to entrap them, would know that was not our intent; and the fact that we were not in a bruise, as we called the black-and-blue police cars, told them that neither were we there to harass them. Intricate contracts!
Most of those around us were in Besźel so we saw them. Poverty deshaped the already staid, drab cuts and colours that enduringly characterise Besź clothes—what has been called the city’s fashionless fashion. Of the exceptions, some we realised when we glanced were elsewhere, so unsaw, but the younger Besź were also more colourful, their clothes more pictured, than their parents.
The majority of the Besź men and women (does this need saying?) were doing nothing but walking from one place to another, from late-shift work, from homes to other homes or shops. Still, though, the way we watched what we passed made it a threatening geography, and there were sufficient furtive actions occurring that that did not feel like the rankest paranoia.
“This morning I found a few of the locals I used to talk to,” Corwi said. “Asked if they’d heard anything.” She took us through a darkened place where the balance of crosshatch shifted, and we were silent until the streetlamps around us became again taller and familiarly deco-angled. Under those lights—the street we were on visible in a perspective curve away from us—women stood by the walls selling sex. They watched our approach guardedly. “I didn’t have much luck,” Corwi said.
She had not even had a photograph on that earlier expedition. That early it had been aboveboard contacts: it had been liquor-store clerks; the priests of squat local churches, some the last of the worker-priests, brave old men tattooed with the sickle-and-rood on their biceps and forearms, on the shelves behind them Besź translations of Gutiérrez, Rauschenbusch, Canaan Banana. It had been stoop-sitters. All Corwi had been able to do was ask what they could tell her about events in Pocost Village. They had heard about the murder but knew nothing.
Now we had a picture. Shukman had given it to me. I brandished it as we emerged from the car: literally I brandished it, so the women would see that I brought something to them, that that was the purpose of our visit, not to make arrests.
Corwi knew some of them. They smoked and watched us. It was cold, and like everyone who saw them I wondered at their stockinged legs. We were affecting their business of course-plenty of locals passing by looked up at us and looked away again. I saw a bruise slow down the traffic as it passed us—they must have seen an easy arrest—but the driver and his passenger saw Corwi’s uniform and sped again with a salute. I waved back to their rear lights.
“What do you want?” a woman asked. Her boots were high and cheap. I showed her the picture.
They had cleaned up Fulana Detail’s face. There were marks left—scrapes were visible below the makeup. They could have eradicated them completely from the picture, but the shock those wounds occasioned were useful in questioning. They had taken the picture before they shaved her head. She did not look peaceful. She looked impatient.
“I don’t know her.” “I don’t know her.” I did not see recognition quickly disguised. They gathered in the grey light of the lamp, to the consternation of punters hovering at the edge of the local darkness, passed the picture among themselves and whether or not they made sympathy noises, did not know Fulana.
“What happened?” I gave the woman who asked my card. She was dark, Semitic or Turkish somewhere back. Her Besź was unaccented.
“We’re trying to find out.”
“Do we need to worry?”
After I paused Corwi said, “We’ll tell you if we think you do, Sayra.”
We stopped by a group of young men drinking strong wine outside a pool hall. Corwi took a little of their ribaldry then passed the photograph round.
“Why are we here?” My question was quiet.
“They’re entry-level gangsters, boss,” she