I sat back hard. “What? What?  What the hell …?”

His voice was flat. “Nyisemu for the committee informs us that they’ve reviewed the evidence presented and have concluded that there’s insufficient evidence to suppose any breach occurred.”

“This is bullshit.” I stood. “You saw my dossier, sir, you know what I gave them, you know there’s no way this wasn’t breach. What did they say? What were their reasons? Did they do a breakdown of the voting? Who signed the letter?”

“They’re not obliged to give any reasons.” He shook his head and looked disgusted at the paper he held in fingertips like tongs.

“God damn  it. Someone’s trying to … Sir, this is ridiculous. We need to invoke Breach. They’re the only ones who can … How am I supposed to investigate this shit? I’m a Besźel cop, is all. Something fucked is going on here.”

“Alright, Borlú. As I say they’re not obliged to give any reasons, but doubtless anticipating something of our polite surprise, they have in fact included a note, and an enclosure. According to this imperious little missive, the issue wasn’t your presentation. So take comfort in the fact that no matter how cack-handed you were, you  more or less convinced them this was a case of breach. What happened, they explain, is that as part of their ‘routine investigations,’” his scare quotes were like birds’ claws, “more information came to light. To whit.”

He tapped one of the pieces of mail or junk on his desk, threw it to me. A videocassette. He pointed me to the TV/VCR in the corner of his office. The image came up, a poor sepia-tinted and static-flecked thing. There was no sound. Cars puttered diagonally across the screen, in not-heavy but steady traffic, above a time-and-date stamp, between pillars and the walls of buildings.

“What am I looking at?” I worked out the date—the small hours, a couple of weeks ago. The night before Mahalia Geary’s body was found. “What am I looking at?”

The few vehicles sped up, beetled with tremendous jerky business. Gadlem waved his hand in bad-tempered play, conducting the fast-forwarding image with the remote control as if it were a baton. He sped through minutes of tape.

“Where is this? This picture is shit.”

“It’s a lot less shit than if it was one of ours, which is rather the point. Here we are,” he said. “Deep of the night. Where are we, Borlú? Detect, detective. Watch the right.”

A red car passed, a grey car, an old truck, then—“Hello! Voilà!”  shouted Gadlem—a dirty white van. It crawled from the lower right to the upper left of the picture toward some tunnel, paused perhaps at an unseen traffic signal, and passed out of the screen and out of sight.

I looked at him for an answer. “Mark the stains,” he said. He was fast-forwarding, making little cars dance again. “They’ve trimmed us a bit. An hour and change later.Hello!”  He pressed play  and one, two, three other vehicles, then the white van—it must be the same one—reappeared, moving in the opposite direction, back the way itcame. This time the angle of the little camera captured its front plates.

It went by too quick for me to see. I pressed the buttons on the built-in VCR, hurtling the van backwards into my line of sight, then bringing it a few metres forward, pausing it. It was no DVD, this, the paused image was a fug of ghost lines and crackles, the stuttering van not really still but trembling like some troubled electron between two locations. I could not read the number plate clearly, but in most of its places what I saw seemed to be one of a couple of possibilities—a vye  or a bye, zsec  or kho , a 7 or a 1, and so on. I took out my notebook and flicked through it.

“There he goes,” murmured Gadlem. “He’s onto something. He has something, ladies and gentlemen.” Back through pages and days. I stopped. “A lightbulb, I see it, it’s straining to come on, to glow illumination across the situation …”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Indeed fuck.”

“It is. That’s Khurusch’s van.”

“It is, as you say, the van of Mikyael Khurusch.” The vehicle in which Mahalia’s body had been taken, and from which it had been dumped. I looked at the time on the image. As I looked at it onscreen it almost certainly contained dead Mahalia. “Jesus. Who found this? What is it?” I said. Gadlem sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Wait, wait.” I held up my hand. I looked at the letter from the Oversight Committee, which Gadlem was using to fan his face. “That’s the corner of Copula Hall,” I said. “God damn it. That’s Copula Hall. And this is Khurusch’s van going out of Besźel into Ul Qoma and coming back in again. Legally.”

“Bing,” said Gadlem, like a tired game-show buzzer. “Bing bing bloody bing.”

AS PART, WE WERE TOLD—and to which, I told Gadlem, we would return—of the background investigations pursuant to any invocation of Breach, CCTV footage of the night in question had been investigated. That was unconvincing. This had looked so clear a case of breach no one had any reason to pore so hard through hours of tape. And besides, the antique cameras in the Besź side of Copula Hall would not give clear enough pictures to identify the vehicle—these were from outside, from a bank’s private security system, that some investigator had commandeered.

With the help of the photographs provided by Inspector Borlú and his team, we heard, it had been ascertained that one of the vehicles passing through an official checkpoint in Copula Hall, into Ul Qoma from Besźel and back again, had been that in which the deceased body had been transported. Accordingly, while a heinous crime had been committed and must be investigated as a matter of urgency, the passage of the body from the murder site, though it appears it was in Ul Qoma, to the dumping ground in Besźel had not, in fact, involved breach. Passage between the two cities had been legal. There were, accordingly, no grounds to invoke Breach. No breach had been committed.

This is the sort of juridical situation to which outsiders react with understandable bewilderment. Smuggling, they regularly insist, for example. Smuggling is breach, yes? Quintessentially, yes? But no.

Breach has powers the rest of us can hardly imagine, but its calling is utterly precise. It is not the passage itself from one city to the other, not even with contraband: it is the manner of the passage. Throw felid or cocaine or guns from your Besź rear window across a crosshatched yard into an Ul Qoman garden for your contact to pick up—that is breach, and Breach will get you, and it would still be Breach if you threw bread or feathers. Steal a nuclear weapon and carry it secretly with you through Copula Hall when you cross but cross that border itself?  At that official checkpoint where the cities meet? Many crimes are committed in such an act, but breach is not one of them.

Smuggling itself is not breach, though most breach is committed in order to smuggle. The smartest dealers, though, make sure to cross correctly, are deeply respectful of the cities’ boundaries and pores, so if they are caught they face only the laws of one or other or both places, not the power of Breach. Perhaps Breach considers the details of those crimes once a breach is committed, all the transgressions in Ul Qoma or Besźel or both, but if so it is only once and because those crimes are functions of breach, the only violation Breach punishes, the existential disrespect of Ul Qoma’s and Besźel’s boundaries.

The theft of the van and the dumping of the body in Besźel were illegal. The murder in Ul Qoma was horribly so. But what we had assumed was the particular transgressive connection between the events had never taken place. All passage had appeared scrupulously legal, effected through official channels, paperwork in place. Even if the permits were faked, the travel through the borders in Copula Hall made it a question of illegal entry, not of breach. That is a crime you might have in any country. There had been no breach.