The City & the City - China Mieville [80]
I promised her all the things she wanted me to, rubbing my forehead and staring at Ul Qoma’s silhouettes.
Not later enough, I was woken by Dhatt’s phone call.
“Are you still in fucking bed? Get up.”
“How long before you …” It was morning, not that early.
“I’m downstairs. Hurry up, come on. Someone sent a bomb.”
Chapter Seventeen
IN BOL YE’AN men of the Ul Qoma bomb squad lounged outside the tiny ersatz postroom, talking to several awed security guards, chewing, squat in their protective clothes. The squad wore their visors up, angling from their foreheads.
“You Dhatt? It’s cool, SD,” one said, glancing at Dhatt’s insignia. “You can go in.” He eyed me and opened the door onto the cupboard-sized room.
“Who caught it?” Dhatt said.
“One of the security boys. Sharp. Aikam Tsueh. What? What?” Neither of us said anything, so he shrugged. “Said he didn’t like how it felt; he went out to the militsya outside, asked them to take a look at it.”
Pigeonholes covered the walls, and large brown parcels, opened and unopened, lay in corners and plastic bins, on tabletops. Displayed on a stool in the centre, surrounded by ripped envelope and fallen letters trodden with footprints, was a package splayed, electronic innards jutting like wire stamens from a flower.
“This is the mechanism,” the man said. I read the Illitan on his Kevlar: his name was Tairo. He spoke to Dhatt, not me, pointing with a little laser pen, red-dotting what he referred to. “Two layers of envelope.” Scribbling with the light all over the paper. “Open the first one, nothing. Inside’s another one. Open that…” Clicked his fingers. Indicating the wires. “Nicely done. Classic.”
“Old-fashioned?”
“Nah, just nothing fancy. But nicely done. Not just son et lumiere either—this wasn’t made to scare someone, it was made to fuck someone up. And I tell you what also. See this? Very directed. It’s linked up with the tag.” The remnants of it visible in the paper, a red strip on the inner envelope, printed in Besź Pull here to open. “Whoever does is going to get a faceful of bang and fall down. But short of pretty bad luck, anyone standing next to them’s only going to need a new hairdo. The blast is directed.”
“It’s defused?” I asked Tairo. “Can I touch it?” He did not look at me but at Dhatt, who nodded him to answer.
“Fingerprints,” Tairo said, but shrugged. I took a ballpoint from one of the shelves and took out its cartridge, not to mark anything. I prodded gently at the paper, smoothing down the inner envelope. Even scored open by the defusers, it was easy to read the name written on it: David Bowden.
“Check this,” Tairo said. He rummaged gently. Below the parcel on the inside of the outer envelope, someone had scribbled, in Illitan, The heart of a wolf. I recognised the line but could not place it. Tairo sang it and grinned.
“It’s an old motherland song,” Dhatt said.
“It wasn’t a scare and it wasn’t for generalised mayhem either,” Dhatt said to me quietly. We sat in the office we had commandeered. Opposite us, trying politely to avoid eavesdropping, Aikam Tsueh. “That was a kill-shot. What the fuck?”
“With Illitan written on it, sent from Besźel,” I said.
Dusting didn’t turn anything up. Both envelopes had been scrawled on, the address on the outer and Bowden’s name on the inner in a chaotic script. The package was sent from Besźel from a post office that was grosstopically not far from the dig itself, though of course the package would have been imported a long way round through Copula Hall.
“We’ll get the techs on it,” Dhatt said. “See if we can trace it backwards, but we’ve got nothing to point to anyone. Maybe your lot’ll turn something up.” The chances were low to nil we could reconstruct its journey backwards through both the Ul Qoman and Besź postal services.
“Listen.” I made sure Aikam