Chapter Fifteen

“STILL NO LUCK WITH THE VAN?” I said.

“Not pitching up on any cameras we can find,” Dhatt said. “No witnesses. Once it’s through Copula Hall from your side it’s mist.” We both knew that with its make and its Besź number plates, anyone in Ul Qoma who glimpsed it would likely have thought it elsewhere and quickly unseen it, without noticing its pass.

When Dhatt showed me on the map how close Bowden’s flat was to a station, I suggested we go by public transport. I had travelled on the Paris and Moscow Metros and the London Tube. The Ul Qoma transit used to be more brutalist than any—efficient and to a certain taste impressive, but pretty unrelenting in its concrete. Something over a decade ago it was renewed, at least all those stations in its inner zones. Each was given to a different artist or designer, who were told, with exaggeration but not as much as you might think, that money was no object.

The results were incoherent, sometimes splendid, variegated to a giddying extent. The nearest stop to my hotel was a camp mimicry of Nouveau. The trains were clean and fast and full and on some lines, on this line, driverless. Ul Yir Station, a few turns from the pleasant, uninteresting neighbourhood where Bowden lived, was a patchwork of Constructivist lines and Kandinsky colours. It was, in fact, by a Besź artist.

“Bowden knows we’re coming?”

Dhatt lifted a hand for me to wait. We had ascended to street level and he had his cell to his ear, was listening to a message.

“Yeah,” he said after a minute, shutting the phone. “He’s waiting for us.”

David Bowden lived in a second-floor apartment, in a skinny building, giving him the whole storey to himself. He had crammed it with art objects, remnants, antiquities from the two cities and, to my ignorant eye, their precursor. Above him, he told us, was a nurse and her son: below him a doctor, originally from Bangladesh, who had lived in Ul Qoma even longer than he had.

“Two expats in one building.” I said.

“It’s not exactly a coincidence,” he said. “Used to be, before she passed away, that upstairs was an ex-Panther.” We stared. “A Black Panther, made it out after Fred Hampton was killed. China, Cuba and Ul Qoma were the destinations of choice. When I moved here, when your government liaison officer told you an apartment had come up, you took it, and blow me if all the buildings we were housed in weren’t full of foreigners. Well, we could moan together about whatever it was we missed from home. Have you heard of Marmite? No? Then you’ve obviously never met a British spy in exile.” He poured me and Dhatt, unbidden, glasses of red wine. We spoke in Illitan. “This was years ago, you understand. Ul Qoma didn’t have a pot to piss in. It had to think about efficiencies. There was always one Ul Qoman living in each of these buildings. Much easier for a single person to keep an eye on several foreign visitors if they were all in one place.”

Dhatt met his eye. Fuck off, these truths don’t intimidate me , his expression said. Bowden smiled a little bashfully.

“Wasn’t it a bit insulting?” I said. “Honoured visitors, sympaticos being watched like that?”

“Might have been for some of them,” Bowden said. “The Philbys of Ul Qoma, the real fellow travellers, were probably rather put out. But then they’d also be the ones most likely to put up with anything. I never particularly objected to being watched. They were right not to trust me.” He sipped his drink. “How are you getting on withBetween , Inspector?”

His walls were painted beiges and browns in need of renovation, and busy with bookshelves and books and the folk art in Ul Qoman and Besź styles, antique maps of both cities. On surfaces were figurines and the remnants of pottery, tiny clockwork-looking things. The living room was not large, and so full of bits and pieces it was cramped.

“You were here when Mahalia was killed,” Dhatt said.

“I have no alibi, if that’s what you mean. My neighbour might have heard me puttering about, ask her, but I don’t know.”

“How long have you lived here?” I said. Dhatt pursed his lips without looking at me.

“God, years.”

“And why here?”

“I don’t understand.”

“So far as I can tell you have at least as much Besź stuff as local.” I pointed at one of the many old or reproduction Besź icons. “Is there a particular reason you ended up here rather than Besźel? Or anywhere else?”

Bowden turned his hands so that his palms faced the ceiling.

“I’m an archaeologist. I don’t know how much you know about this stuff. Most of the artefacts that are worth looking at, including the ones that look to us now like they were made by Besź craftsmen, are in Ul Qoman soil. That’s just how it’s always been. The situation was never helped by Besźel’s idiotic willingness to sell what little heritage it could dig up to whoever wanted it. Ul Qoma’s always been smarter about that.”

“Even a dig like Bol Ye’an?”

“You mean under foreign direction? Sure. The Canadians don’t technically own any of it; they just have some handling and cataloguing rights. Plus the kudos they get from writing up, and a warm glow. And dibs on museum tours, of course. The Canadians are happy as Larry about the US blockade, believe me. Want to see a very vivid green? Tell an American archaeologist you work in Ul Qoma. Have you seen Ul Qoma’s laws on antiquities export?” He closed his hands, fingers interlocking like a trap. “Everyone who wants to work on Ul Qoma, or Besźel, let alone if they’re into Precursor Age, ends up here if they can get here.”

“Mahalia was an American archaeologist…” Dhatt said.

“Student,” Bowden said. “When she finished her PhD she’d have had a harder time staying.”

I was standing, glancing into his study. “Could I …?” I indicated in.

“I … sure.” He was embarrassed at the tiny space. It was if anything even more cramped with the tat of antiquity than his living room. His desk was its own archaeology of papers, computer cables, a street-finder map of Ul Qoma, battered and several years old. Amid the mess of papers were some in a strange and very ancient script, neither Illitan nor Besź, pre-Cleaved. I could not read any of it.

“What’s this?”

“Oh …” He rolled his eyes. “It arrived yesterday morning. I still get crank mail. Since Between . Stuff that people put together and say is in the script of Orciny. I’m supposed to decode  it for them. Maybe the poor sods really believe it’s something.”

“Can you decode that one?”

“Are you kidding? No. It doesn’t mean anything.” He closed the door. “No news of Yolanda?” he said. “This is seriously worrying.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Dhatt. “Missing Persons are on it. They’re very good. We’re working closely with them.”

“We absolutely have to find her, Officers. I’m … This is crucial.”

“Do you have any idea who might have any grievance against Yolanda?”

“Yolanda? My God no, she’s sweet, I can’t think of anyone. Mahalia was a bit different. I mean … Mahalia was … what happened to her was utterly appalling. Appalling. She was smart, very smart, and opinionated, and brave, and it isn’t quite so … What I’m saying is I can imagine Mahalia getting people angry. She did that. It’s the kind of person she was, and I mean that as a compliment. But there was always that fear that Mahalia might one day piss off the wrong person.”

“Who might she have pissed off?”

“I’m not talking specifics, Senior Detective, I have no idea. We didn’t have very much contact, Mahalia and I. I hardly knew her.”

“Small campus,” I said. “Surely you all knew everyone.”

“True. But honestly I avoided her. We hadn’t spoken for a long time. We didn’t get off to a very auspicious start. Yolanda, though, I know. And she’s nothing like that. She’s not as clever, maybe, but I cannot think of a single person who doesn’t like her, nor why anyone would want to do anything to her. Everyone’s horrified. Including the locals who work there.”