The City & the City - China Mieville [95]
I know how to watch to ensure I am not followed. I walked quickly through the byway meanders of the project, between its bins and cars, graffiti and children’s playgrounds, until I made it out of cul-de-sac land into the streetscape of Ul Qoma, and Besźel. With relief at being one of several pedestrians rather than the only purposeful figure in sight, I breathed out a little, I took on the same rain-avoidance gait as everyone else, and at last turned on my phone. It scolded me with how many messages I had missed. All from Dhatt. I was starving and uncertain of how to get back to the Old Town. I wandered, looking for a Metro but finding a phone box. I called him.
“Dhatt.”
“It’s Borlú.”
“Where the fuck are you? Where’ve you been?” He was angry but conspiratorial, his voice quieter as he turned and muttered into his phone, not louder. A good sign. “I’ve been trying to call you for fucking hours. Is everything … Are you alright? What the fuck’s going on?”
“I’m alright, but…”
“Something happened?” Anger but not only anger in his voice.
“Yeah, something happened. I can’t talk about it.”
“The fuck you can’t.”
“Listen. Listen. I need to talk to you but I don’t have time for this. You want to know what’s been going on, meet me, I don’t know”—flipping through my street map—“in Kaing Shé, in the square by the station, in two hours, and Dhatt, do not bring anyone else. This is serious shit. There’s more going on here than you know. I don’t know who to talk to. Now are you going to help me?”
I made him wait an hour. I watched him from the corner as he must surely have known I would. Kaing Shé Station is the city’s major terminus, so the square outside it bustled with Ul Qomans in cafés, by street performers, buying DVDs and electronics from stalls. The topolganger square in Besźel was not quite empty, so unseen Besź citizens were grosstopically there too. I stayed in the shadows of one of the cigarette kiosks shaped in homage to an Ul Qoman temporary hut, once common on the wetlands where scavengers sifted through the crosshatched mud. I saw Dhatt look for me, but I stayed out of sight while it grew dark and watched to see if he made any calls (he did not) or hand signals (he did not). He only set his face more and more as he drank teas and glowered in the shadows. At last I stepped into his line of sight and moved my hand in a little regular motion that caught his eye and beckoned him over.
“What the fuck is going on?” he said. “I’ve had your boss on the phone. And Corwi. Who the fuck is she anyway? What’s happening?”
“I don’t blame you being angry, but you’re keeping your voice low, so you’re being careful and you want to know what’s going on. You’re right. Something’s up. I found Yolanda.”
When I would not tell him where she was he was enraged enough to start threatening an international incident. “This is not your fucking city,” he said, “you come here and use our resources, you fucking hold up our investigations,” and so on, but still he kept his voice low and walked with me, so I let his anger ebb out a bit and began to tell him how Yolanda was afraid.
“We both know we can’t reassure her,” I said. “Come on. Neither of us knows the truth about what the hell’s going on. About the unifs, the nats, the bomb, about Orciny. Shit, Dhatt, for all we know …” He stared at me, so I said, “Whatever this is”—I glanced around to indicate everything that was happening—“it goes somewhere bad.”
We were both silent a while. “So why the fuck are you talking to me?”
“Because I need someone. But yeah, you’re right, it might be a mistake. You’re the only person who might understand … the scale of what might be going on. I want to get her out. Listen to me: this is not about Ul Qoma. I don’t trust my own lot any more than you. I want to get that girl out, away from Ul Qoma and Besźel. And I can’t do it from here; this isn’t my patch. She’s watched here.”
“Maybe I could.”
“You volunteering?” He said nothing. “Right. I am. I