The City & the City - China Mieville [96]
“You said Mahalia had already made enemies back in Besźel. I thought you wanted them for this.”
“The nats? That doesn’t make much sense anymore. A, all this is way beyond Syedr and his boys, and B, Yolanda hasn’t pissed off anyone back home; she’s never been there. I can do my job there.” I could go beyond my job, I meant—could pull strings and favours. “I’m not trying to cut you out, Dhatt. I’ll tell you what I know if I get any more from her, maybe even come back and we can go hunting criminals, but I want to get that girl out of here. She’s scared to death, Dhatt, and can we really say she’s wrong to be?”
Dhatt kept shaking his head. He was neither agreeing nor disagreeing with me. After a minute he spoke again, tersely. “I sent my crew back to the unifs. No sign of Jaris. We don’t even know the little fucker’s real name. If any of his mates know where he is or that he was seeing her they’re not saying.”
“Do you believe them?”
He shrugged. “We’ve been checking them out. Can’t find anything. Doesn’t look like they know shit. One or two of them it’s obvious ‘Marya’ rings a bell, but most of them never even met her.”
“This is all beyond them.”
“Oh, they’re up to all kinds of shit, don’t you worry; we’ve got moles say they’re going to do this and that, they’re going to break the boundaries, planning all sorts of revolutions …”
“That’s not what we’re talking about. And you hear that stuff all the time.”
He was silent while I listed for him again what had happened on our watch. We slowed down in the dark and sped up in the pools of lamplight. When I told him that according to Yolanda, Mahalia had said that Bowden was in danger too, he halted. We stood in that freezing silence for seconds.
“Today while you were fucking around with Little Miss Paranoid we searched Bowden’s flat. There’s no sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle. Nothing. Food left on the side, books page-down on the chair. We did find a letter on his desk.”
“From who?”
“Yallya told me you’d be onto something. The letter doesn’t say. It’s not in Illitan. It was just a single word. I thought it was in weird-looking Besź but it isn’t. It’s in Precursor.”
“What? What does it say?”
“I took it to Nancy. She said it’s an old version of the script she hasn’t seen before and she wouldn’t want to swear to it yadda yadda, but she’s pretty sure it’s a warning.”
“A warning of what?”
“Just a warning. Like a skull-and-crossbones. A word that is a warning.” It was dark enough that we could not see each other’s faces well. Not deliberately, I had steered us close to an intersection with a total Besź street. Those squat brick buildings in their brown light, the men and women walking beneath them in long coats under the swinging sepia signs that I unsaw bisected the Ul Qoman sodium-lit strip of glass fronts and imports like something old and recurrent.
“So who might use that kind of…?”
“Don’t fucking tell me about secret cities. Don’t.” Dhatt looked haunted and hunted. He looked sick. He turned and bundled himself into the corner of a doorway, punched his own palm furiously several times. “What the fuck?” he said, looking into the dark.
What lived like Orciny would live, if one indulged Yolanda’s and Mahalia’s ideas? Something so small, so powerful, lodged in the crevices of another organism. Willing to kill. A parasite. A tick-city, quite ruthless.
“Even if… even if, say, something is wrong with my lot and your lot, whatever,” Dhatt said at last.
“Controlled. Bought.”
“Whatever. Even if.”
We whispered under the foreign shriek of a flap above us in Besźel swinging in the wind. “Yolanda’s convinced that Breach is Orciny,” I said. “I’m not saying I agree with her—I don’t know what I