The Gearys were coming in to Besźel Halvic at ten in the morning. I had already made Corwi break the news of their daughter’s death to them over the phone. I told her I would escort them to see the body myself, though she could join me if she chose. She did.
We waited at Besźel Airport, in case the plane came in early. We drank bad coffee from the Starbucks analogue in the terminal. Corwi asked me again about the workings of the Oversight Committee. I asked her if she had ever left Besźel.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to Romania. I’ve been to Bulgaria.”
“Turkey?”
“No. You?”
“There. And London. Moscow. Paris, once, a long time ago, and Berlin. West Berlin as it was. It was before they joined.”
“Berlin?” she said. The airport was hardly crowded: mostly returning Besź, it seemed, plus a few tourists and Eastern European commercial travellers. It is hard to tourist in Besźel, or in Ul Qoma—how many holiday destinations set exams before they let you in?—but still, though I had not been I had seen film of the newish Ul Qoma Airport, sixteen or seventeen miles southeast, across Bulkya Sound from Lestov, and it got vastly more traffic than us, though their visitor conditions were not less strenuous than our own. When it had been rebuilt a few years previously, it had gone from somewhat smaller to much larger than our own terminal in a few months of frenetic construction. From above its terminals were concatenated half-moons of mirrored glass, designed by Foster or someone like that.
A group of foreign orthodox Jews were met by their, judging by clothes, much less devout local relatives. A fat security officer let his gun dangle to scratch his chin. There were one or two intimidatingly dressed execs from those gold-dust recent arrivals, our new high-tech, even American, friends, finding the drivers with signs for board members of Sear and Core, Shadner, VerTech, those executives who did not arrive in their own planes, or copter in to their own helipads. Corwi saw me reading the cards.
“Why the fuck would anyone invest here?” she said. “Do you reckon they even remember agreeing to it? The government blatantly slips them Rohypnol at those junkets.”
“Typical Besź defeatist talk, Constable. That’s what’s doing our country down. Representatives Buric and Nyisemu and Syedr are doing precisely the job with which we entrust them.” Buric and Nyisemu made sense: it was extraordinary Syedr had got into organising the trade fairs. Some favour pulled in. The fact that, as these foreign visitors showed, there were even small successes was even more remarkable for that.
“Right,” she said. “Seriously, watch these guys when they come out—I swear that’s panic in their eyes. Have you seen those cars ferrying them around town, at tourist spots and crosshatchings and whatever? ‘Seeing the sights.’ Right. Those poor sods are trying to find ways out.” I pointed at a display: the plane had landed.
“So you spoke to Mahalia’s supervisor?” I said. “I tried to call her a couple of times but can’t get through and they won’t give me her mobile.”
“Not for very long,” Corwi said. “I got hold of her at the centre—there’s like a research centre that’s part of the dig in Ul Qoma. Professor Nancy, she’s one of the bigwigs, she has a whole bunch of students. Anyway I called her and verified that Mahalia was one of hers, that no one had seen her for a while, et cetera et cetera. I told her we had reason to believe dot dot dot. Sent over a picture. She was very shocked.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. She was … kept going on about what a great student Mahalia was, how she couldn’t believe it, what had happened, so on. So you were in Berlin. Do you speak German then?”
“I used to,” I said. “Kin bisschen.”
“Why were you there?”
“I was young. It was a conference. ‘Policing Split Cities.’ They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.”
“Fuck!”
“I know, I know. That’s what we said at the time. Totally missing the point.”
“Split cities? I’m surprised the acad let you go.”
“I know, I could almost feel my freebie evaporating in a gust of other people’s patriotism. My super said it wasn’t just a misunderstanding of our status it was an insult to Besźel . Not wrong, I suppose. But it was a subsidised trip abroad, was I going to say no? I had to persuade him. I did at least meet my first Ul Qomans, who’d obviously managed to overcome their own outrage, too. Met one in particular at the conference disco as I recall. We did our bit to ease international tensions over ‘99 Luftballons.’” Corwi snorted, but passengers began to come through and we composed our faces, so they would be respectfully set when the Gearys emerged.
The immigration officer who escorted them saw us and nodded them gently over. They were recognisable from the photographs we had been sent by our American counterparts, but I would have known them anyway. They had the expression I have seen only on bereaved parents: their faces looked clayish, lumpy with exhaustion and grief. They shuffled into the concourse as if they were fifteen or twenty years older than they were.
“Mr. and Mrs. Geary?” I had been practicing my English.
“Oh,” she said, the woman. She reached out her hand. “Oh yes, you are, you’re Mr. Corwi are you, is that—”
“No, ma’am. I’m Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel ECS.” I shook her hand, her husband’s hand. “This is constable Lizbyet Corwi. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, I, we, are very deeply sorry for your loss.”
The two of them blinked like animals and nodded and opened their mouths but said nothing. Grief made them look stupid. It was cruel.
“May I take you to your hotel?”
“No, thank you, Inspector,” Mr. Geary said. I glanced at Corwi, but she was following what was said, more or less—her comprehension was good. “We’d like to … we’d like to do what it is we’re here for.” Mrs. Geary clutched and unclutched at her bag. “We’d like to see her.”
“Of course. Please.” I led them to the vehicle.
“Are we going to see Professor Nancy?” Mr. Geary asked as Corwi drove us. “And May’s friends?”
“No, Mr. Geary,” I said. “We can’t do that, I’m afraid. They are not in Besźel. They’re in Ul Qoma.”
“You know that, Michael, you know how it works here,” his wife said.
“Yes yes,” he said to me, as if they had been my words. “Yes, I’m sorry, let me … I just want to talk to her friends.”
“It can be arranged, Mr. Geary, Mrs. Geary,” I said. “We’ll see about phone calls. And …” I was thinking about passes through Copula Hall. “We’ll have to get you escorted into Ul Qoma. After we’ve dealt with things here.”
Mrs. Geary looked at her husband. He stared out at the buildup of streets and vehicles around us. Some of the overpasses we were approaching were in Ul Qoma, but I was certain he wouldn’t forebear staring at them. He would not care even if he knew not to. En route there would be an illicit, breaching, view to a glitzy Ul Qoman Fast Economy Zone full of horrible but big public art.
The Gearys both wore visitors’ marks in Besź colours, but as rare recipients of compassionate-entry stamps they had no tourist training, no appreciation of the local politics of boundaries. They would be insensitive with loss. The dangers of their breaching were high. We needed to protect them from unthinkingly committing acts that would get them deported, at least. Until the handover of the situation to Breach was made official, we were on babysitting duty: we would not leave the Gearys’ sides while they were awake.
Corwi did not look at me. We would have to be careful. Had the Gearys been regular tourists, they would have had to undergo mandatory training and passed the not-unstringent entrance exam, both its theoretical and practical-role-play elements, to qualify for their visas. They would know, at least in outline, key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colours and gestures, obligatory details—and, depending on their Besź teacher, the supposed distinctions in national physiognomies—distinguishing Besźel and Ul Qoma, and their citizens. They would know a little tiny bit (not that we locals knew much more) about Breach. Crucially, they would know enough to avoid obvious breaches of their own.