“One definite murder and now two disappearances,” I said. I watched him very carefully. “All people who are known to have looked at this stuff.”

“There is no fucking Orciny.”

“Dhatt, I’m not saying that. You said yourself there are such things as cults and lunatics.”

“Seriously fuck off. The most culty lunatic we’ve met just fled the scene of the crime, and you gave him a free pass.”

“I should have said first thing this morning, I apologise.”

“You should’ve called last night.”

“Even if we could find him I thought we didn’t have enough to hold him. But I apologise.” Held my hands open.

I stared at him some time. He was overcoming something. “I want to solve this,” he said. The pleasant burr of Illitan from the customers. I heard the clucks as one or two saw my visitor’s mark. Dhatt bought me a beer. Ul Qoman, flavoured with all kinds of whatnot. It would not be winter for weeks, and though it was no colder in Ul Qoma than in Besźel, it felt colder to me. “What do you say? If you won’t even fucking trust me …”

“Dhatt, I’ve already told you stuff that—” I lowered my voice. “No one else knows about that first  phone call. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand any of this. I’m not solving anything. I’m by some fluke that I do not know the whys of any more than you, being used. For some reason I’ve been a repository for a bunch of information that I don’t know what to do with. I hope there’s a yet  after that, but I don’t know, just like I don’t know anything.”

“What does Jaris  think happened? I’m going to track that fucker down.” He would not.

“I should’ve called, but I could … He’s not our guy. You know, Dhatt. You know. How long you been an officer? Sometimes you know , right?” I tapped my chest. I was right, he liked that, nodded.

I told him what Jaris had said. “Fucking crap,” he said, when I was done.

“Maybe.”

“What the fuck is  this Orciny stuff? That’s  what he was running from? You’re reading that book. The dodgy one Bowden wrote. What’s it like?”

“There’s a lot in it. A lot of stuff. I don’t know. Of course it’s ludicrous, like you say. Secret overlords behind the scene, more powerful even than Breach, puppetmasters, hidden cities.”

“Crap.”

“Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe. And”—I opened my hands at him—“something  big’s going on, and we have no idea what it is.”

“Maybe I’ll take a look at it after you,” Dhatt said. “Who the fuck knows anything.” He said the last word carefully.

“Qussim.” A couple of his colleagues, men of about his age or mine, raising their glasses to him, just about to me. There was something in their eyes, they were moving in like curious animals. “Qussim, we’ve not had a chance to meet our guest. You’ve been hiding him away.”

“Yura,” Dhatt said. “Kai. How’s tricks? Borlú, these are detectives blah and blah.” He waved his hands between them and me. One of them raised his eyebrow at Dhatt.

“I just wanted to find out how Inspector Borlú was finding Ul Qoma,” the one called Kai said. Dhatt snorted and finished his beer.

“Fuck’s sake,” he said. He sounded as amused as angry. “You want to get drunk and get into an argument with him, maybe even if you’re far gone enough, Yura, a fight. You’ll bring up all manner of unfortunate international incidents. The fucking war might get dusted off. You might even say something about your dad. His dad was in the UQ Navy,” he said to me. “Got tinnitus or some shit in a fucking idiot’s skirmish with a Besź tugboat over some disputed lobster pots or whatever.” I glanced, but neither of our interlocutors looked particularly outraged. There was even a trace of humour on Kai’s face. “I’ll save you the trouble,” Dhatt said. “He’s as much of a Besź wanker as you think, and you can spread that around the office. Come on, Borlú.”

We went via his station’s garage and he picked up his car. “Hey …” He indicated me the steering wheel. “It never even occurred to me, maybe you want to give the Ul Qoman roads a go.”

“No, thanks. I think it would be a bit confusing.” Driving in Besźel or Ul Qoma is hard enough when you are in your home city, negotiating local and foreign traffic. “You know,” I said. “When I was first driving … it must be the same here, as well as seeing all the cars on the road you’ve got to learn to unsee all the other cars, the ones abroad, but unsee them fast enough to get out of their way.” Dhatt nodded. “Anyway, when I was a kid first driving we had to get used to zooming past all these old bangers and stuff in Ul Qoma, donkey carts in some parts and what have you. That you unsaw, but you know … Now years later most of the unseens have been overtaking me.”

Dhatt laughed. Almost embarrassed. “Things go up and down,” he said. “Ten years from now it’ll be you lot doing the overtaking again.”

“Doubt it.”

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll shift; it always does. It’s already started.”

“Our expos? A couple of little pity investments. I think you’ll be top wolf for a while.”

“We’re blockaded!”

“Not that you seem to be doing too bad on it. Washington loves us, and all we’ve got to show for it is Coke.”

“Don’t knock that,” Dhatt said. “Have you tasted Canuck Cola? All this is old Cold War bullshit. Who gives a fuck who the Americans want to play with, anyway? Good luck with them. OhCanada  …” He sang the line. Dhatt said to me, “What’s the food like at that place?”

“Okay. Bad. No worse than any other hotel food.”

He yanked the wheel, took us off the route I’d come to know. “Sweet?” he said into his phone. “Can you chuck some more stuff on for supper? Thanks, beautiful. I want you to meet my new partner.”

Her name was Yallya. She was pretty, quite a lot younger than Dhatt, but she greeted me very poised, playing a role and enjoying it, waiting at the door of their apartment to triple-kiss me hello, the Ul Qoman way.

On the way to the house, Dhatt had looked at me and said “You okay?” It was quickly obvious that he lived within a mile, in grosstopic terms, of my own house. From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya’s rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Besźel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents’ whispered strictures to unsee the other. Children are sacks of infection. That was the sort of thing that spread diseases. Epidemiology was always complicated here and back home.

“How you liking Ul Qoma, Inspector?”

“Tyador. Very much.”

“Bullshit, he thinks we’re all thugs and idiots and being invaded by secret armies from hidden cities.” Dhatt’s laughter was not without edge. “Anyway we’re not getting much chance to exactly go sightseeing.”

“How’s the case?”

“There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there’s a dead girl at the end of it all.”

“Is that true?” she said to me. They were bringing out food in bits and pieces. It was not home cooking, and seemed to include a lot of convenience and prepackaged food, but it was better quality than I’d been eating, and was more Ul Qoman, though that is not an unmitigated good. The sky darkened over the crosshatched park, with night and with wet clouds.

“You miss potatoes,” Yallya said.

“Is it written on my face?”

“It’s all you eat, isn’t it?” She thought she was being playful. “This too spicy for you?”

“There’s someone watching us from the park.”

“How can you tell from here?” She glanced over my shoulder. “Hope for their sake they’re in Ul Qoma.” She was an editor at a financial magazine and had, judging by the books I saw and the posters in the bathroom, a taste for Japanese comics.