The City & the City - China Mieville [81]
He watched me without expression. “Right,” he said eventually.
“Two out of two students with special interests in Orciny are out of the picture. And now we’ve got a bomb to Mr. Between Cities.”
We looked at each other.
After a moment, louder now, I said, “Well done, Aikam. That was really something that you did.”
“Have you held a bomb before, Aikam?” Dhatt said.
“Sir? No.”
“Not in national service?”
“I haven’t done mine yet, Officer.”
“So how do you know what a bomb feels like?”
Shrug. “I didn’t, I don’t, I just… It was wrong. Too heavy.”
“I bet this place gets a lot of books in the mail,” I said. “Maybe computer stuff too. They’re pretty heavy. How did you know this was different?”
“… Different heavy. It was harder. Under the envelopes. You could tell it wasn’t paper, it was like metal or something.”
“Matter of fact is it even your job to be checking mail?” I said.
“No, but I was in there, just because. I was thinking that I could bring it out. I wanted to, and then I felt that one and it was … there was something about it.”
“You have good instincts.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you think about opening it?”
“No! It wasn’t to me.”
“Who was it to?”
“It wasn’t to anyone.” That outer envelope had named no recipient, only the dig. “That’s another reason, that’s why I looked at it, maybe, because I thought that was weird.”
We conferred. “Okay, Aikam,” Dhatt said. “You gave your address to the other officer, in case we need to get hold of you again? When you go out would you send in your boss and Professor Nancy, please?”
He hesitated in the doorway. “Do you have any information about Geary yet? Do you know what happened yet? Who killed her?” We told him no.
Kai Buidze, the chief guard, a muscular fifty-year-old, ex-army I’d guess, came in with Isabelle Nancy. She, not Rochambeaux, had offered her help in any way she could. She was rubbing her eyes. “Where’s Bowden?” I said to Dhatt. “Does he know?”
“She called him when the bomb squad opened the outer envelope and there was his name.” He nodded at Nancy. “She heard one of them reading it out. Someone’s gone to get him. Professor Nancy.” She looked up. “Does Bowden get a lot of mail here?”
“Not so much. He doesn’t even have an office. But a bit. Quite a lot from foreigners, a few from prospective students, people who don’t know where he lives or who assume he’s based here.”
“Do you send it on?”
“No, he comes in to check it every few days. Throws most of it away.”
“Someone’s really …” I said quietly to Dhatt. Hesitated. “Trying to outrun us, know what we’re doing.” With everything that was happening, Bowden might be wary now of any packages to his home. With the outer envelope and its foreign postmark discarded, he might even have thought something with only his name written on it an internal communication, something from one of his colleagues, and torn the strip. “Like someone knew he’d been warned to be careful.” After a moment I said, “They’re bringing him in?” Dhatt nodded.
“Mr. Buidze,” Dhatt said. “You had any trouble like this before?”
“Not like this. Sure, we get, you know, we had some letters from fuckups. Excuse me.” A glance at an unruffled Nancy. “But you know, we get warnings from Leave-the-Past-Alone types, people who say we’re betraying Ul Qoma, all that shit, UFO watchers and junkies. But an actual … but this? A bomb?” He shook his head.
“That’s not true,” Nancy said. We stared at her. “This happened before. Not here. But to him. Bowden’s been targeted before.”
“Who by?” I said.
“They never proved anything, but he got a lot of people angry when his book came out. The right. People who thought