We had gone on the low flyovers through Besźel Old Town into the convolutes of Copula Hall’s outskirts, and down at last into its traffic quadrant. Past and under the stretches of facade where caryatids looked at least somewhat like figures from Besź history, towards where they were Ul Qoman, into the hall itself, where a wide road overlit by windows and grey lights was sided at the Besź end by a long line of pedestrians seeking day entry. In the distance beyond the red taillights we were faced by the tinted headlights of Ul Qoman cars, more gold than ours.
“Been to Ul Qoma before, sir?”
“Not for a long time.”
When the border gates came into view Dyegesztan spoke to me again. “Did they have it like this before?” He was young.
“More or less.”
A policzai car, we were in the official lane, behind dark imported Mercedeses that probably carried politicians or businesspeople on fact-finding missions. A way off was the engine-grumbling line of quotidian travellers in cheaper cars, spivs and visitors.
“Inspector Tyador Borlú.” The guard looked at my papers.
“That’s right.”
He went carefully over everything written. Had I been a tourist or trader wanting a day-pass, passage might well have been quicker and questioning more cursory. As an official visitor, there was no such laxity. One of those everyday bureaucratic ironies.
“Both of you?”
“It’s right there, Sergeant. Just me. This is my driver. I’m being picked up, and the constable here’ll be coming straight back. In fact if you look, I think you can see my party over in Ul Qoma.”
There, uniquely at that convergence, we could look across a simple physical border and see into our neighbour. Beyond, beyond the stateless space and the backwards-to-us-facing Ul Qoman checkpoint, a small group of militsya officers stood around an official car, its lights stuttering as pompously as our own, but in different colours and with a more modern mechanism (true on-off, not the twisting blinder that our own lamps contained). Ul Qoman police lights are red and darker blue than the cobalt in Besźel. Their cars are charcoal and streamlined Renaults. I remember when they drove ugly little local-made Yadajis, more boxy than our own vehicles.
The guard turned and glanced at them. “We’re due about now,” I told him.
The militsya were too far for any details to be clear. They were waiting for something though. The guard took his time of course—You may be policzai but you get no special treatment, we watch the borders—but without excuses to do otherwise eventually saluted somewhat sardonically and pointed us through as the gate rose. After the Besź road itself the hundred metres or so of no-place felt different under our tires, and then through the second set of gates and we were on the other side, with uniformed militsya coming towards us.
There was the gunning of gears. The car we had seen waiting sped in a sudden tight curve around and in front of the approaching officers, calling out one truncated and abrupt whoop from the siren. A man emerged, putting on his police cap. He was a bit younger than me, thickset and muscular and moving with fast authority. He wore official militsya grey with an insignia of rank. I tried to remember what it meant. The border guards had stopped in surprise as he held out his hand.
“That’ll do,” he shouted. He waved them away. “I got this. Inspector Borlú?” He was speaking Illitan. Dyegesztan and I climbed out of the car. He ignored the constable. “Inspector Tyador Borlú, Besźel Extreme Crime, right?” Shook my hand hard. Pointed to his car, in which his own driver waited. “Please. I’m Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt. You got my message, Inspector? Welcome to Ul Qoma.”
COPULA HALL HAD OVER CENTURIES SPREAD, a patchwork of architecture defined by the Oversight Committee in its various historic incarnations. It sat across a considerable chunk of land in both cities. Its inside was complicated—corridors might start mostly total, Besźel or Ul Qoma, become progressively crosshatched along their length, with rooms in one or other city along them, and numbers also of those strange rooms and areas that were in neither or both cities, that were in Copula Hall only, and of which the Oversight Committee and its bodies were the only government. Legended diagrams of the buildings inside were pretty but daunting meshes of colours.
At ground level, though, where the wide road jutted into the first set of gates and wire, where the Besź Border Patrol waved arrivals to a stop in their separated lines—pedestrians, handcarts, and animal-drawn trailers, squat Besź cars, vans, sub-lines for various kinds of passes, all moving at different speeds, the gates rising and lowering out of any phase—the situation was simpler. An unofficial but ancient market where Copula Hall vents into Besźel, within sight of the gates. Illegal but tolerated street hawkers walked the lines of waiting cars with roasted nuts and paper toys.
Beyond the Besźel gates, below the main mass of Copula Hall, a no-man’s-land. The tarmac was unpainted: this was neither a Besź nor an Ul Qoman thoroughfare, so what system of road markings would be used? Beyond towards the other end of the hall the second set of gates, which we on the Besźel side could not but notice were better kept than our own, with weapon-wielding Ul Qoman guards staring, most of them away from us at their own efficiently shepherded lines of visitors to Besźel. Ul Qoman border guards are not a separate wing of government, as they are in Besźel: they are militsya, police, like the policzai.
It is bigger than a coliseum, but Copula Hall’s traffic chamber is not complicated—an emptiness walled by antiquity. From the Besźel threshold you can see over the crowds and crawling vehicles to daylight filtering in from Ul Qoma, beyond. You can see the bobbing heads of Ul Qoman visitors or returning fellow countrymen approaching, the ridges of Ul Qoman razorwire beyond the hall’s midpoint, beyond that empty stretch between checkpoints. You can just make out the architecture of Ul Qoma itself through the enormous gateway hundreds of metres off. People strain to see, across that junction.
On our way there I had had the driver take us, to his raised eyebrows, a long way round to the Besźel entrance on a route that took us on KarnStrász. In Besźel it is an unremarkable shopping street in the Old Town, but it is crosshatched, somewhat in Ul Qoma’s weight, the majority of buildings in our neighbour, and in Ul Qoma its topolganger is the historic, famous Ul Maidin Avenue, into which Copula Hall vents. We drove as if coincidentally by the Copula Hall exit into Ul Qoma.
I had unseen it as we took KarnStrász, at least ostensibly, but of course grosstopically present near us were the lines of Ul Qomans entering, the trickle of visitor-badge-wearing Besź emerging into the same physical space they may have walked an hour previously, but now looking around in astonishment at the architecture of Ul Qoma it would have been breach to see before.
Near the Ul Qoma exit is the Temple of Inevitable Light. I had seen photos many times, and though I had unseen it dutifully when we passed I was aware of its sumptuous crenellations, and had almost said to Dyegesztan that I was looking forward to seeing it soon. Now light, foreign light, swallowed me as I emerged, at speed, from Copula Hall. I looked everywhere. From the rear of Dhatt’s car, I stared at the temple. I was, suddenly, rather astonishingly and at last, in the same city as it.
“First time in Ul Qoma?”
“No, but first time in a long time.”
IT WAS YEARS since I had first taken the tests: my passmark was long expired and in a defunct passport. This time I had undergone an accelerated orientation, two days. It had only been me and the various tutors, Ul Qomans from their Besź embassy. Illitan immersion, the reading of various documents of Ul Qoman history and civic geography, key issues of local law. Mostly, as with our own equivalents, the course was concerned to help a Besź citizen through the potentially traumatic fact of actually being in Ul Qoma, unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice.
“Acclimatisation pedagogy’s come a long way with computers,” said one of the teachers, a young woman who prais
ed my Illitan constantly. “We’ve got so much more sophisticated ways of dealing with stuff now; we work with neuroscientists, all sorts of stuff.” I got spoiled because I was policzai. Everyday travellers would undergo more conventional training, and would take considerably longer to qualify.
They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besźel with the Besź buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbours minimised with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besźel would recede and Ul Qoma shine.
How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. There were folktales of renegades who breach and avoid Breach to live between the cities, not exiles but insiles, evading justice and retribution by consummate ignorability. Pahlaniuk’s novel Diary of an Insile had been illegal in Besźel (and, I was sure, in Ul Qoma), but like most people I had skimmed a pirated edition.
I did the tests, pointing with a cursor at an Ul Qoman temple, an Ul Qoman citizen, an Ul Qoman lorry delivering vegetables, as quick as I could. It was faintly insulting stuff, designed to catch me inadvertently seeing Besźel. There had been nothing like this the first time I had done such studies. Not very long ago the equivalent tests would have involved being asked about the different national character of Ul Qomans, and judging who from various pictures with stereotyped physiognomies was Ul Qoman, Besź, or “Other” (Jewish, Muslim, Russian, Greek, whatever, depending on the ethnic anxieties of the time).
“Seen the temple?” Dhatt said. “And that there used to be a college. Those are apartment blocks.” He jabbed his finger at buildings as we passed, told his driver, to whom he had not introduced me, to go various routes.
“Weird?” he said to me. “Guess it must be strange.”
Yes. I looked at what Dhatt showed me. Unseeing, of course, but I could not fail to be aware of all the familiar places I passed grosstopically, the streets at home I regularly walked, now a whole city away, particular cafés I frequented that we passed, but in another country. I had them in the background now, hardly any more present than Ul Qoma was when I was at home. I held my breath. I was unseeing Besźel. I had forgotten what this was like; I had tried and failed to imagine it. I was seeing Ul Qoma.
Day, so the light was that of the overcast cold sky, not the twists of neon I had seen in so many programmes about the neighbouring country, which the producers evidently thought it easier for us to visualise in its garish night. But that ashy daylight illuminated more and more vivid colours than in my old Besźel. The Old Town of Ul Qoma was at least half transmuted these days into a financial district, curlicued wooden rooflines next to mirrored steel. The local street hawkers wore gowns and patched-up shirts and trousers, sold rice and skewers of meat to smart men and a few women (past whom my nondescript compatriots, I tried to unsee, walked on their way to Besźel’s more quiet destinations) in the doorways of glass blocks.
After mild censure from UNESCO, a finger-wag tied to some European investment, Ul Qoma had recently passed zoning laws to stop the worst of the architectural vandalism its boomtime occasioned. Some of the ugliest recent works had even been demolished, but still the traditional baroque curlicues of Ul Qoma’s heritage sights were made almost pitiful by their giant young neighbours. Like all Besźel dwellers, I had become used to shopping in the foreign shadows of foreign success.
Illitan everywhere, in Dhatt’s running commentary, from the vendors, taxi drivers and insult-hurling local traffic. I realised how much invective I had been unhearing on crosshatched roads at home. Each city in the world has its own road-grammar, and though we were not in any total Ul Qoma areas yet, so these streets shared the dimensions and shapes of those I knew, they felt in the sharp turns we took more intricate. It was as strange as I had expected it would be, seeing and unseeing, being in Ul Qoma. We went by narrow byways less frequented in Besźel (deserted there though bustling in Ul Qoma), or which were pedestrian-only in Besźel. Our horn was constant.
“Hotel?” Dhatt said. “Probably want to get cleaned up and have something to eat, right? Where then? I know you must have some ideas. You speak good Illitan, Borlú. Better than my Besź.” He laughed.
“I’ve got a few thoughts. Places I’d like to go.” I held my notebook. “You got the dossier I sent?”
“Sure did, Borlú. That’s the lot of it, right? That’s where you’re at? I’ll fill you in about what we’ve been up to but”—he held up his hands in mock surrender—“truth is there’s not that much to tell. We thought Breach was going to be invoked. Why didn’t you give them it? You like making work for yourself?” Laugh. “Anyway, I only got assigned all this in the last couple of days, so don’t expect too much. But we’re on it now.”
“Any idea where she was killed yet?”
“Not so much. There’s only CCTV of that van coming through Copula Hall; we don’t know where it went then. No leads. Anyway, things …”
A visiting Besź van, one might assume, would be memorable in Ul Qoma, as an Ul Qoman one would be in Besźel. The truth is that unless someone saw the sign in the windscreen, people’s assumption would be that such a foreign vehicle was not in their home city, and accordingly it would remain unseen. Potential witnesses would generally not know there was anything to witness.
“That’s the main thing I want to track down.”
“Absolutely. Tyador, or is it Tyad? Got a preference?”
“And I’d like to talk to her advisors, her friends. Can you take me to Bol Ye’an?”
“Dhatt, Quss, whichever’s fine by me. Listen, just to get this out of the way, avoid confusions, I know your commissar told you this”—he relished the foreign word—“but while you’re here this is an Ul Qoman investigation, and you don’t have police powers. Don’t get me wrong—we’re totally grateful for the cooperation, and we’re going to work out what we do together, but I’ve got to be the officer here. You’re a consultant, I guess.”
“Of course.”
“Sorry, I know turf bullshit is bullshit. I was told—did you speak to my boss yet? Colonel Muasi?—anyway, he wanted to make sure we were cool before we talked. Of course you’re an honoured guest of the Ul Qoman militsya.”
“I’m not restricted to … I can travel?”
“You’ve got your permit and stamp and all that.” A single-entry trip, a month renewable. “Sure if you have to, if you want take a tourist day or two, but you’re strictly a tourist when you’re on your own. Cool? It might be better if you didn’t. I mean shit, no one’s going to stop you, but we all know it’s harder to cross over without a guide; you could breach without meaning to, and then what?”
“So. What would you do next?”
“Well look.” Dhatt turned in his seat to look at me. “We’ll be at the hotel soon. Anyway listen: like I’m trying to tell you, things are getting … I guess you haven’t heard about the other one … No, we don’t even know if there’s anything there and we only just got sniff ourselves. Look, there may be a complication.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“We’re here, sir,” the driver said. I looked out but stayed in the car. We were by the Hilton in Asyan, just outside the Ul Qoma Old Town. It was at the edge of a total street of low, modern concrete Ul Qoman residences, at the corner of a plaza of Besź brick terraces and Ul Qoman faux pagodas. Between them was an ugly fountain. I had never visited it: the buildings and pavements at its rim were crosshatched, but the central square itself was total Ul Qoma.
“We don’t know for sure yet. Obviou
sly we’ve been up to the dig, talked to Iz Nancy, all Geary’s supervisors, all her classmates and that. No one knew anything; they just thought she’d fucked off for a couple of days. Then they heard what had happened. Anyway, the point is that after we spoke to a bunch of the students, we got a phone call from one of them. It was only yesterday. About Geary’s best friend—we saw her the day we went in to tell them, another student. Yolanda Rodriguez. She was totally in shock. We didn’t get much out of her. She was collapsing all over the place. She said she had to go, I said did she want any help, blah blah, she said she had someone to look after her. Local boy, one of the others said. Once you’ve tried Ul Qoman …” He reached over and opened my door. I did not get out.
“So she called?”
“No, that’s what I’m saying, the kid who called wouldn’t give us his name, but he was calling about Rodriguez. It seems like—and he was saying he’s not sure, could be nothing, et cetera et cetera. Anyway. No one’s seen her for a little while. Rodriguez. No one can get her on her phone.”
“She’s disappeared?”
“Holy Light, Tyad, that’s melodramatic. She might just be sick, she might have turned her phone off. I’m not saying we don’t go looking, but don’t let’s panic yet, right? We don’t know that she’s disappeared …”
“Yeah we do. Whatever’s happened, whether anything’s happened to her at all, no one can find her. That’s pretty definitional. She’s disappeared.”
Dhatt glanced at me in the mirror and then at his driver.
“Alright, Inspector,” he said. “Yolanda Rodriguez has disappeared.”
Chapter Thirteen
“WHAT’S IT LIKE, BOSS?” There was a lag on the hotel’s line to Besźel, and Corwi and I were stutteringly trying not to overlap each other.