We had agreed there was a good possibility we would not hear from Bowden again, but I got a call on poor Yallya’s phone half an hour after midnight. I was sure it was Bowden though he said nothing. He called again just before seven the next morning.
“You sound bad, Doctor.”
“What’s happening?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Are you going? Is Yolanda with you? Is she coming?”
“You have one shot, Doctor.” I scribbled times on my notepad. “If you’re not going to let me come for you. You want out, be outside the main traffic gate of Copula Hall at seven p.m.”
I disconnected. I tried to make notes, plans on paper, could not. Bowden did not call me back. I kept the phone on the table or in my hand throughout my early breakfast. I did not check out of the hotel—no telegraphing of movements. I sorted through my clothes for anything I could not afford to leave, and there was nothing. I carried my illegal volume of Between the City and the City , and that was all.
I took almost the whole day to get to Yolanda and Aikam’s hide. My last day in Ul Qoma. I took taxis in stages to the ends of the city. “How long you staying?” the last driver asked me.
“A couple of weeks.”
“You like it here,” he said, in enthusiastic beginner’s Illitan. “Best city in the world.” He was Kurdish.
“Show me your favourite parts of town, then. You don’t get trouble?” I said. “Not everyone’s welcoming to foreigners, I heard …”
He made a pooh-poohing noise. “Are fools all over everywhere, but is the best city.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Four years and some. I was one year in camp …”
“A refugee camp?”
“Yeah, in the camp, and three years study for Ul Qoma citizenship. Speaking Illitan and learning, you know, not to, you know to unsee the other place, so not to breach.”
“Did you ever think of going to Besźel?”
Another snort. “What’s in Besźel? Ul Qoma is the best place.”
He took me first past the Orchidarium and the Xhincis Kann Stadium, a tourist route he had obviously taken before, and when I encouraged him to indulge more personal preferences he started to show me the community gardens where alongside Ul Qoman natives those Kurds, Pakistanis, Somalis and Sierra Leoneans who got through the stringent conditions for entry played chess, the various communities regarding each other with courteous uncertainty. At a crossroads of canals he, careful not to say anything unequivocally illegal, pointed out to me where the barges of the two cities-pleasure craft in Ul Qoma, a few working transport boats unseen in Besźel—wove between each other.
“You see?” he said.
A man on the opposite side of a nearby lock, half-hidden in people and little urban trees, was looking straight at us. I met his eye—for a moment I was not sure but then decided he must be in Ul Qoma, so it was not breach—until he looked away. I tried to watch where he went, but he was gone.
When I expressed choices between the various sights the driver proposed, I made sure the resulting route crisscrossed the city. I watched the mirrors as he, delighted with this fare, drove. If we were followed it was by very sophisticated and careful spies. I paid him a ridiculous amount, in a much harder currency than I was paid in, after three hours of escorting, and I had him drop me where backstreet hackers abutted cheap secondhand shops, around the corner from the estate where Yolanda and Aikam hid.
For moments I thought they had skipped out on me, and I closed my eyes, but I kept repeating in a whisper up close to the door, “It’s me, it’s Borlú, it’s me,” and at last it opened, and Aikam ushered me in.
“Get ready,” I said to Yolanda. She looked dirty to me, thinner and more startled like an animal than even when I had last seen her. “Get your papers. Be ready to agree with whatever me or my colleagues say to anyone at the border. And get lover-boy used to the idea that he’s not coming, because we’re not having a scene at Copula Hall. We’re getting you out.”
SHE MADE HIM STAY IN THE ROOM. He looked as if he would not do as she asked, but she made him. I did not trust him to be unobtrusive.
He demanded to know again and again why he could not come. She showed him where she had his number, and she swore that she would call him from Besźel, and from Canada, and that she would call for him there. It took her several such promises until he stood at last miserable as a neglected thing, staring as we closed the door on him and walked fast through the shadowing light to the corner of the park, where Dhatt was waiting in an unmarked police car.
“Yolanda.” He nodded to her from the driver’s seat. “Pain in my arse.” He nodded to me. We set off. “What the fuck? Who exactly have you pissed off, Miss Rodriguez? You’ve got me fucking my life and collaborating with this foreign wacko. There’s clothes in the back,” he said. “Course I’m out of work, now.” He very well might not be exaggerating.
Yolanda stared at him until he glanced into the mirror and snapped at her, “For fuck’s sake, what, you think I’m peeping ?” and she scootched down in the rear seat and began to wriggle out of her clothes, replacing them with the militsya uniform he had brought for her, that almost fit.
“Miss Rodriguez, do as I say and stick close. There’s fancy dress for our possible-other-guest too. And that’s for you, Borlú. Might save us a bit of shit.” A jacket with a fold-down militsya blazon on it. I made it visible. “I wish they had rank on them. I’d’ve fucking demoted you.”
He did not meander, nor make the mistake of the guilty nervous and drive more slowly, more carefully than the cars around us. We took the main streets, and he flicked on and off the headlights at other drivers’ infractions as Ul Qoman drivers do, little messages of road-rage code like aggressive Morse, flick flick, you cut me up, flick flick flick, make up your mind .
“He called again,” I said to Dhatt quietly. “He might be there. In which case …”
“Come on, pain in my arse, say it again. In which case he’s going over, right?”
“He’s got to get out. Did you get spare papers?”
He swore and punched the steering wheel. “Fuck I really wish I’d thought of a way to talk myself out of this fucking shit. I hope he doesn’t come. I hope fucking Orcinydoes get him.” Yolanda stared at him. “I’ll sound out whoever’s on duty. Get ready to crack out your wallet. If push comes to shove I’ll give him my fucking papers.”
We saw Copula Hall over the roofs and through cables of telephone exchanges and gasrooms many minutes before we arrived at it. The way we came, we first passed, as unseeing as we could, the building’s rear-to-Ul Qoma, its entryway in Besźel, the queues of Besź and returning Ul Qoman passengers siphoning in in patient dudgeon. A Besź police light was flashing. We were obliged not to and did not see any of it, but we could not but be aware as we did so that we would be on that side soon. We rounded the huge building to its Ul Maidin Avenue entrance, opposite the Temple of Inevitable Light, where the slow line into Besźel proceeded. There Dhatt parked—a bad job not corrected, skewed from the kerb with the swagger of militsya , keys hanging ready—and we emerged to cross through the night crowds towards the great forecourt and the borders of Copula Hall.
The outer guards of militsya did not ask a thing or even speak to us as we cut across the lines of people, walked over the roads weaving through stationary traffic, only ushered us through the restricted gates and on into the grounds proper of Copula Hall, where the huge edifice waited to eat us.
I looked everywhere as we came. Our eyes never stopped moving. I walked behind Yolanda, moving uneasily in her disguise. I raised my stare above the sellers of food and tat, the guards, the tourists, the homeless men and women, the other militsya . Of the many entrances we had chosen the most open, wide and unconvoluted under a vault of old brickwork, with a view clear through the yawning interstitial space, over the mass of crowds filling the great chamber on both sides of the checkpoint—though more, noticeably, on the Besźel side, wanting to come in to Ul Qoma.