“Yes, it’s mine.” I waited for him to complain about how ill it had been used, but that was obviously its usual colour. “Why can’t I have it? I need it.”
“As I keep saying, it’s a crime scene. You’ll get it when I’m ready. What’s all this for?” He was huffing and grumping, looked into the back of the van. I held him back from touching anything.
“This shit? I don’t fucking know.”
“This, I’m talking about.” The ripped-up cord, the pieces of junk.
“Yeah. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t put it here. Don’t look at me like that—why would I carry garbage like this?”
I said to Corwi in my office afterwards: “Please, do please stop me if you have any ideas, Lizbyet. Because I’m seeing a may-or-may-not-be working girl, who no one recognises, dumped in plain sight, in a stolen van, into which was carefully placed a load of crap, for no reason. And none of it’s the murder weapon, you know—that’s pretty certain.” I prodded the paper on my desk that told me.
“There’s rubbish all over that estate,” she said. “There’s rubbish all over Besźel; he could’ve picked it up anywhere. ‘He’ … They, maybe.”
“Picked it up, stashed it, dumped it, and the van with it.”
Corwi sat rather stiff, waiting for me to say something. All the rubbish had done was roll into the dead woman and rust her as if she, too, were old iron.
Chapter Four
BOTH OF THE LEADS WERE BOGUS. The office assistant had resigned and not bothered to tell them. We found her in Byatsialic, in the east of Besźel. She was mortified to have caused us trouble. “I never hand in notice,” she kept saying. “Not when they’re employers like that. And this has never happened, nothing like this.” Corwi found Rosyn “The Pout” without any difficulty. She was working her usual pitch.
“She doesn’t look anything like Fulana, boss.” Corwi showed me a jpeg Rosyn had been happy to pose for. We couldn’t trace the source of that spurious information, delivered with such convincing authority, nor work out why anyone would have mistaken the two women. Other information came in that I sent people to chase. I found messages and blank messages on my work phone.
It rained. On the kiosk outside my front door the printout of Fulana softened and streaked. Someone put up a glossy flyer for an evening of Balkan techno so it covered the top half of her face. The club night emerged from her lips and chin. I unpinned the new poster. I did not throw it away—only moved it so Fulana was visible again, her closed eyes next to it. DJ Radic and the Tiger Kru. Hard Beats. I did not see any other pictures of Fulana though Corwi assured me they were there, in the city.
Khurusch was all over the van, of course, but with the exception of those few hairs Fulana was clean of him. As if all those recovering gamblers would lie, anyway. We tried to take the names of any contacts to whom he had ever lent the van. He mentioned a few but insisted it had been stolen by a stranger. On the Monday after we found the body I took a call.
“Borlú.” I said my name again after a long pause, and it was repeated back to me.
“Inspector Borlú.”
“Help you?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you could help me days ago. I’ve been trying to reach you. I can help you more like.” The man spoke with a foreign accent.
“What? I’m sorry, I need you to speak up—it’s a really bad line.”
It was staticking, and the man sounded as if he was a recording on an antique machine. I could not tell if the lag was on the line, or if he was taking a long time to respond to me each time I said anything. He spoke a good but odd Besź, punctuated with archaisms. I said, “Who is this? What do you want?”
“I have information for you.”
“Have you spoken to our info-line?”
“I can’t.” He was calling from abroad. The feedback from Besźel’s outdated exchanges was distinctive. “That’s kind of the point.”
“How did you get my number?”
“Borlú, shut up.” I wished again for logging telephones. I sat up. “Google. Your name’s in the papers. You’re in charge of the investigation into the girl. It’s not hard to get past assistants. Do you want me to help you or not?”
I actually looked around but there was no one with me. “Where are you calling from?” I parted the blinds in my window as if I might see someone watching me from the street. Of course I did not.
“Come on Borlú. You know where I’m calling from.”
I was making notes. I knew the accent.
He was calling from Ul Qoma.
“You know where I’m calling from and that is why please don’t bother asking my name.”
“You’re not doing anything illegal talking to me.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. You don’t know what I’m going to tell you . It is—” He broke off, and I heard him mutter something with his hand over the phone, for a moment. “Look Borlú, I don’t know where you stand on things like this but I think it is lunatic, an insult, that I am speaking to you from another country.”
“I’m not a political man. Listen, if you’d rather…” I started the last sentence in Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma.
“This is fine.” He interrupted in his old-fashioned Illitan-inflected Besź. “It’s the same damn-faced language anyway.” I wrote that he said that. “Now shut up. Do you want to hear my information?”
“Of course.” I was standing, reaching, trying to work out a way to trace this. My line was not equipped, and it would take hours to go backwards, through BesźTel, even if I could get hold of them while he was speaking to me.
“The woman who you’re … She’s dead. Isn’t she? She is. I knew her.”
“I’m sorry to …” I only said this after he was silent many seconds.
“I’ve known her … I met her a time ago. I want to help you, Borlú, but not because you’re a cop . Holy Light. I don’t recognize your authority. But if Marya was … if she was killed, then some people I care about may not be safe. Including the one I care about most, my very own self. And she deserves … So—this is all I know.
“Her name’s Marya. That’s what she went by. I met her here. Ul Qoma-here. I’m telling you what I can, but I never knew much. Not my business. She was a foreigner. I knew her from politics. She was serious—committed, you know? Just not to what I thought at first. She knew a lot; she was no time-waster.”
“Look,” I said.
“That’s all I can tell you. She lived here.”
“She was in Besźel.”
“Come on.” He was angry. “Come on. Not officially. She couldn’t. Even if she was, she was here. Go look at the cells, the radicals. Someone’ll know who she is. She went everywhere. All the underground. Both sides, must have done. She wanted to go everywhere because she needed to know everything. And she did. That’s all.”
“How did you find out that she’d been killed?” I heard his hiss of breath.
“Borlú, if you really mean that you’re stupid and I’m wasting my time. I recognized her picture, Borlú. Do you think I’d be helping you if I didn’t think I had to? If I didn’t think this was important? How do you think I found out? I saw your fucking poster.”
He put the phone down. I held my receiver to my ear a while as if he might return.
I saw your poster . When I looked down at my notepad, I had written on it, beside the details he had given me, shit/shit/shit .
I DID NOT STAY in the office much longer. “Are you alright, Tyador?” Gadlem said. “You look …” I’m sure I did. At a pavement stall I had a strong coffee aj Tyrko —Turkish style—a mistake. I was even more antsy.
It was, not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me—cathedrals, bars, the brick flourishes of what had been a school—that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried.