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    The City & The City
    The City & The City
    The City & The City
    Ebook385 pages8 hours

    The City & The City

    By China Miéville

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, the multi-award winning The City & The City by China Miéville is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

    'You can't talk about Miéville without using the word "brilliant".' – Ursula Le Guin, author of the Earthsea series.

    When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other.

    Adapted into the BBC Two series The City And The City starring David Morrissey.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9780330520102
    The City & The City
    Author

    China Miéville

    China Miéville lives and works in London. He is a three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His novel Embassytown was a first and widely praised foray into science fiction.

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    Reviews for The City & The City

    4/5

    2,353 ratings197 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Not sure why I read this book, it must fit somewhere, just not sure where. I enjoyed every book I've read by Mieville. This is a police procedural set in a world of overlapping cities and the problem is where did the murder occur and why. I think the book is a social commentary about how we don't always "see things", that we choose to "unsee".
    • 4/5
      This is a propulsive noir detective story above all else, but the dual-city setting is fascinating, highlighting as it does social constructs (almost literal) and how we can choose not to see what’s right in front of us. Like a good noir, greed and corruption are at the heart of the story, in this case it’s the corruption of global capitalism.
    • 5/5
      Nearly perfect, Mieville has isolated some of the contradictions of globalization and drilled down until the liberal world under capitalism begins to show fatality. Although some of the conversation writing felt stilted or lazy, I would like to see more of this.
    • 2/5
      I couldn't find any aspect of this book that really worked or engaged me. I finished it out of duty, to see if I really was missing something.

      The place was good, but more "gritty" than real. The "unseeing" thing wasn't convincingly possible, especially because he refuses to say how the cities got to that point. The cops had way too much time on their hands and no particular urgency, they interviewed about one person per day and spent the rest of the time drinking coffee or surfing the internet for clues. The plot was a pile of mysteries wrapped up with a Inspector Borlú Explains It All that went on for six pages (!). There weren't enough clues to engage the reader in solving it, we were just along for the ride.

      It echos and combines a lot of other work but the result doesn't add anything. It is just an echo. The "unseeing" is a close cousin of Doublethink, but without any of the intensity. It is just another weird thing that the citizens do. The interleaving of the city is clever, but just doesn't add that much. It would not be hard to recast the story in East and West Berlin, and it just wouldn't lose that much. It might become more concrete, more real.

      Overall, a rather cold reading experience, but not interestingly so.
    • 3/5
      The central conceit is clever, and I enjoyed trying to figure out exactly where the two cities are situated - somewhere between Turkey and the Balkans? - but Mieville mars his novel with lots of canned copspeak, especially the gratuitous and excessive use of the F-bomb distracts the reader from any real character development. If Mieville could share some of the ingenuity he uses in creating his setting to writing realistic dialogue, _The City and the City_'s thematic heft would be easier to accept.
    • 3/5
      I liked this, but it was not as immersive as The scar or Perdido street station. It was entertaining, but to me, not his best work.
    • 4/5
      Intriguing plot whose sci-fi setting is revealed slowly and organically, with no thudding exposition. The writing sometimes gets a little dry in parts, but the tone reminded me, in a good way, of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold -- you at first feel like you're being held at an arm's length from the main character (despite the narration in this case being first-person), yet somehow you find yourself deeply invested in their quest. Maybe it's the coincidence of current events while I read it, but it feels like a parable for Israel/Palestine.
    • 3/5
      Conceptually great and a wonderfully fleshed-out setting - crime noir just ain't my thang, or I'd have given it a higher rating.
    • 3/5
      I just love a book in which the writer takes a fairly simple idea entirely too far. At times I asked myself if the commentary on real split cities (Jerusalem, Budapest, [Berlin]) and the absurdity of their existence by Miéville was real or imagined by me. It didn't seem like he wanted to make a strong statement there, but I can hardly imagine that there was no criticism at all.
      All in all, I loved the ideas and wordplay but I could not get myself to really care about the murder-story and while the ending was in no way badly conceived, it did feel like a letdown.
    • 4/5
      Interesting plot and fascinating premise, though the writing was a bit hard sometimes due to some extremely bizarre and random grammatical errors. The foundational idea of the book--how two bordering city-states co-exist in a state of recognition/non-recognition resonates so powerfully with a number of geo-political hot spots from Yugoslavia to Palestine and Israel. For most of the book I was convinced it was a commentary on the latter, but by the end it seemed a more generalized statement.
    • 5/5
      This book is freakin' brilliant. Mieville is probably my favorite author for mind-bending concepts and this one tops his list. Second time through reading it I realized he tipped his hand toward the end: he says it's about a Schrodinger's city. Two cities occupy the same space but are separate cities as long as there is no observation. Easy enough to say, isn't it? But not so easy to describe how it works, or how it's enforced when it fails. Brilliant, is all. People who demand resolution will not like this book.
    • 3/5
      This book gets 3 stars because it is an obvious experiment and it almost succeeds. It explores the idea that two cities can exist separately in the same space 'grosstopically' without resorting to the typical alternate dimension bromide. In order to accomplish this, the separation of the two cities is itself a thought experiment that has been maintained and nurtured by the people for centuries. A murder intrudes and seems to threaten the future of the separation.

      But 'almost' does not get it a recommendation. I found the writing to be almost haphazard throughout. That may have been a stylistic choice. I found it hard to stay with. After a while, the idea that at least two complete cultures could live so intermingled, yet so separate, for so long did not resonate as even remotely feasible.

      Ultimately, the story, though was about Inspector Borlu and his investigation. Did he change by the end of the novel? Yes. Did he solve the crime? I won't spoil it. At least he was a reasonably amiable partner in the journey. Trouble is, he is so well written, in a way, that it was often difficult to distinguish between people and places. He was too close to it. To familiar with it all. So description was mostly glossed over and muddled. I found it hard to visualize most of the secondary characters and none of the tertiary. And only a couple of places stick out in my memory and even they are muddled. Perhaps, again, that was a stylistic choice.

      In the end, I can only applaud the author for his attempt and for his managing to keep me with him through the whole thing. But that's about it. I wanted to like this book so much more.
    • 3/5
      How much does perception shape reality? Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad finds a deadly conspiracy beneath a routine murder, and joins Detective Qussim Dhatt of his sister city Ul Quoma in trying to untangle the sordid web of nationalism and unificationism in twin cities that just happen to occupy the same space.

      This was an incredibly China Mieville novel, if that makes sense -- and its concept, while interesting, was incredibly confusing for a good long while. It was both fascinating and overwhelming, and it absolutely overshadowed the story in a lot of ways.
    • 3/5
      The most interestingly boring book I have read.

      The City and the City is the rare book to make a better movie than a book. The core conceit, the two cities laid on top of one another and existing in the same physical space, is intellectually interesting. Visually, it would make for some great CGI-based cinematices with 'unseeing' and the strange way two cultures try to aggressively ignore one another.

      But China Mieville is today's Philip K. Dick. The book is philosophically interesting but the characters are dull, the conversations flat, and the noir crime novel buried within this philosophical puzzle has no energy. The characters sit lifeless on the page spouting mostly meaningless dialogue amidst lush backgrounds of imaginative environmental twists and turns. It seems cool but the actual story part of the story gets short shrift. I had to force myself to finish the book and, multiple times, it was the conduit for a quick nap.

      The City and the City gets bonus points for being funky science fiction but almost no points as an actual crime novel. Rated: meh.
    • 1/5
      I read about 1/4 of the way and gave up. Interesting premise and of course the jacket blurb makes it sound like it is the best book ever written. I thought it would be a traditional-type mystery but set in a science fiction world, what with all the weird names, locations etc. That's the way it began. But it soon degenerated so I felt life 's too short to try to slog through something that's out of my comfort zone anyway. Too pretentious for me and too artificial. It felt like the author was showing off. Also, dated. Avoid.
    • 5/5
      It's amazing that the author can make this ridiculous conceit work as a book. The ending is a total let-down but hardly any crime novel ends on a high and it doesn't matter. Ending might suggest a possible sequel but that'd be pushing it. Consider this clever idea well and truly explored.
    • 2/5
      I felt completely cheated and let down by this book. It sucked me in with a complicated, invented world -- whose set-up had nothing, in the end, to do with anything. The City & the City is just another murder mystery; the alien sci-fi angle is just window dressing. The only reason I give it two stars, instead of one, is the beauty of the set-up -- which made the let-down hurt even more.
    • 4/5
      This is pretty much a standard mystery involving the murder of a young woman who was killed in one city and her body dumped in another city. What makes this a fantasy is that both cities, Beszel and Ul Qoman, occupy the same piece of geography. For the cities to safely co-exist, their citizens must master the art of unseeing the other. While this forms the foundation of the story, it's never fully explained how this can be. No mention of phasing or alternate realities are mentioned, hence the fantasy element rather than this being science fiction, I suppose. To see the unseeable, or to cross any of the boundaries separating the cities is to breach, invoking the justice of the Breach, the mysteries beings who oversee the integrity of the two cities.

      As Inspector Borlu of Beszel investigates the murder, he is forced into working with Detective Dhatt of Ul Qoma, an investigation that suggests the victim was killed because she knew too much about the long rumored entities that live between the cities, something scarier than Breach.

      This would have made for a decent mystery without the fantasy element, but the setting does factor into the resolution and provides for intriguing character tensions and suspense. Still, I wish the set-up of the cities had been more scientific. Stronger characters would have gone a long way to flesh this out. Only Borlu seemed fully realized and most of the characters speak in similar patterns, in both cities, in choppy, incomplete sentences. This was good enough for met to wish it were better.
    • 4/5
      Delightfully odd and complex. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
    • 4/5
      The City & The City Initially I struggled with the concept of this and found it confusing but after a bit I picked it up and really enjoyed it.

      I can't remember the last time I read a book that bent my head a wee bit and it reminded why I like Sci-Fi but left me wondering why I so seldom read it these days?

      Simply put it is about two cities that share the same physical space, one superimposed upon the other. Both cities have different administrations, dress codes and cultures. It is illegal to "see" the other city. Grace is given for children but for adults the penalties are swift and sharp for transgressing this simple law. People train themselves to "unsee" any glimpses of this other city. Confusing? You bet but not for long.It took me a while to twig to the fact that we do this all the time anyway without really being aware of it!Wrapped in a detective/thriller story, this incredibly well written and paced novel is well worth the effort.
    • 5/5
      A detective novel in a wholly unfamiliar setting, two cities that occupy the same space. This fantasy has a great premise and it is a pleasure to read.. The Mystery of the crime is far outweighed by the mystery of the Breech, or even the mystery of how these peoples can coexist in such a precarious situation. Simply outstanding!
    • 4/5
      So this is the first of Miéville I've read, and I have to say it's made me keen to read more. This even though the book is very complicated, and the denouement had me frowning in confusion – I feel like the last quarter all unfolded too fast, or else that I wasn't taking enough time to read it.

      But regardless. This is more than a crime novel; it's an illustration of this weird concept Miéville has come up with, the uneasy coexistence of the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These cities don't just intersect, but parts of them (the "crosshatched" areas) are parts of both, and citizens of each city go out of their way to "unsee" or "unsense" whatever's taking place in the other, lest they "breach" – the most grievous crime that exists in this society. It's really complicated, but as you read the novel it becomes clear how things work. It also becomes clear that the cities are kept apart as much by nationalism, capitalist ideology, as by geographical quirk; the fact that this setting is not quite divorced from our own world, and comments on social issues affecting our Eastern Europe as well as the one here, appealed to me.

      So for fans of fantasy or crime fiction (but preferably both) I really recommend this. Just to comment on the quality of the Kindle edition though, for some reason it always shows the name of Besźel as "Besel" (sometimes broken between the 's' and the 'e' over a line break), and the font had me thinking Ul Qoma was UI Qoma until about halfway through the novel. I can't really blame the publisher or the Kindle platform for my inability to decipher 'Ul Qoma', but misspelling 'Besźel'? Seriously? I guess Miéville depicted a place just too foreign for my Kindle, hey…
    • 5/5
      A two-in-one police procedural in a pair of cities unlike any other. This is my favourite of the books I've read by Miéville.
    • 5/5
      As a lifelong city dweller and lover, this pushes all the right buttons for me. This book is a manifesto of urban life, the beautiful and the frightening and the unjust.
    • 4/5
      Weird fiction is his thing and this certainly fits the billing. The story centers on a murdered PhD student in the fictional country of Beszel, one of two cities that occupy most of the same "grosstopical" location in Eastern Europe. It begins with a lot of jargon words, and it is deliberately set in a foreign land and language that occasionally seeps into the text. This makes it hard to "see" what is happening initially, but once you become accustomed to the parlance and the idea of two distinct cities in the same space, "unseeing" each other, it starts to gel. It is basically a crime story, with strange elements. Once I got comfortable with the language it sped up considerably and began to make sense. It holds a feeling of mystery right up to the ending, which although it does not qualify as happy, it is satisfying. I finished it in three days, which is pretty fast for me. I did have to google the book to get a sense of the unseeing stuff, and it helped me adjust more quickly. Overall, it was very well crafted, and if you can stay with it, it will pay off in the end.
    • 5/5
      The City and the City by China Mieville disguises itself as a run of the mill detective novel. It begins with the body of a murdered woman being found in the city of Bezel (which is located somewhere in Europe). Inspector Tyador Borlu is assigned to the case. As he investigates, he learns that there is something more to this woman's death and it is way bigger than he is. Borlu's investigation is complicated by the fact that his city, Bezel, exists in the same space as another city, Ul Qoman. The cities crosshatch one another and the citizens of each city "unsee" the other city. Borlu's murder crosses the boundaries of both cities and puts him at odds with unificationists, nationalists, and the ominous Breach.

      This book was my first experience with China Mieville although it looks like he has won a number of awards. He tells this story that at it's heart is a detective novel but it has elements of science fiction but doesn't quite cross-over to full fledged science fiction. All in all, it's impossible to put the story in any type of genre which is good. That makes it unique. This is a short review because I don't know how to describe the book except to say that it was good and worth your time.
    • 5/5
      China Mieville is one of the more clever writers in any genre. In The City and the City he as written a murder mystery, but one in a place like no other. The cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma reside in the same temporal space connected by crosshatches. And in-between is a shadowy nowhere, the Breach. The boundaries of the two cities are strictly enforced, mostly, so the citizens of each city have learned to “unsee” the other city to avoid entering the wrong temporal space that would put them in Breach. Being in Breach is a bad thing. It can make you disappear. Sound confusing? That’s okay. You’ll get used to it once you’ve inhabited the cities for a time.

      Within these cities, well, Beszel is where it starts, a horrific murder of a young woman takes place and we are introduced to our interlocutor, detective Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. Borlu’s search for the mysterious killer takes us across the cities, across unseen boundaries, in what is in the end, a rather intricate but not atypical murder mystery. As it turns out, the murder takes place in Ul Qoma but the body winds up in a desolate area of Beszel. This makes the murder even more mysterious as it’s not easy to pass through the cities without breaching.

      Borlu’s investigation becomes a political hot potato and takes him to the shadowy underworlds of fringe political groups like the “unifs” who want to unify the two cities, to the True Citizens, who are ultra-nationalists wanting power for their particular city. It also takes him to Ul Qoma where the murdered young lady last resided, working on a doctorate at an archeological dig that predates the splitting of the cities. It turns out she was into some rather strange beliefs herself, one of which was there is yet a third and all powerful city, Orciny, occupying this same temporal zone. That put her in a lot of hot water with a lot of fringe political groups so she had plenty of enemies and the suspects abound. And it introduces us to a mystery within a mystery. Does Orciny really exist, or is just an urban legend? And what might the murdered young lady’s search for Orciny have to do with her violent demise? I guess we’ll have to find that out too.

      Borlu is a dedicated detective and wants justice for the murdered young woman so he works tirelessly to that end doing what most detectives do – poking his nose all over the place until some type of pattern or answers emerge. And slowly they do emerge and they get very weird indeed. As simply a very good mystery story, this novel works extremely well. Its setting and complexity make it superb.
    • 4/5
      A decent murder mystery with an interesting voice, set in a vaguely Easternish European locale where the major defining feature is that two nations exist right on top of each other. The conceit is actually a simple one, and sometimes gets a little over-emphasized as its fundamental concepts are reiterated by the narrator almost every other paragraph, but its novel worldbuilding concept is still used expertly. It has real influence on the plot, dictating what the problems are, how the detective is constrained in solving those problems, and how satisfying the solution is. A good mystery is driven less by the mechanics of the setting and more by all the ways the players try to outdo themselves by using those mechanics, and as a mystery I thought this was satisfying. There were twists and turns, revelations that were foreshadowed but subtly enough to evoke either surprise or a self-satisfied nod, and lively characters that all clashed with each other in engaging ways, all without tripping itself up.

      While the science fictional elements are what a lot of people talk about when they talk about The City and The City, as an exercise in worldbuilding it really only provides just enough for the mystery to work, and that mystery is where the meat was.
    • 5/5
      Nothing I write here is going to prepare you for your visit to the city, or the city. It’s enough to know that two cities exist, that they co-exist, but that they never intrude upon each other, even in the cross-hatched space that they ostensibly share. They don’t intrude or protrude because the citizens of each are circumspect, they unsee and unhear all protuberances from the city which they are not themselves in. They do it instinctually after years of practice. They also do it because it’s the law. Not the law of the city, or of the city. But rather the law of Breach. To see the other city, to go there without a visa and through the normal bureaucratic channels (and training), to interact with those others illicitly is breach. When you breach, Breach comes for you, silently, irrevocably, and you are never going to be seen by anyone in either city again. So when a murder appears to have been committed in one city and then that body is deposited in the other city, it looks, on the surface, like a clear case of breach. But what detective Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad will shortly discover is that in this case almost nothing is what it appears to be, whether seen or unseen.

      This is an astounding feat of careful craftsmanship from China Miéville. I dread to think what pains he must have taken not to get lost in the labyrinthine circumlocutions needed to describe his characters’ actions, thoughts, and the cities themselves. Honestly, it makes the book a real struggle to read at first, but eventually, and then increasingly, you simply sit back in awe at what he is doing. I am not easily impressed. Here I was entirely impressed.

      There’s not much more to say. Go and give this book a try. But be patient with it. Don’t give up. It will eventually make sense even if your head hurts at the end of it all.

      Certainly recommended.
    • 3/5
      The concept of the two cities was interesting, but I had a hard time connecting to the characters. (Almost like they were in the other city).

    Book preview

    The City & The City - China Miéville

    PART ONE

    BES EL

    CHAPTER ONE

    I COULD NOT SEE THE STREET or much of the estate. We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course – a child’s mimicking of geography. Maybe they had been going to wood it and put in a pond. There was a copse but the saplings were dead.

    The grass was weedy, threaded with paths footwalked between rubbish, rutted by wheel tracks. There were police at various tasks. I wasn’t the first detective there – I saw Bardo Naustin and a couple of others – but I was the most senior. I followed the sergeant to where most of my colleagues clustered, between a low derelict tower and a skateboard park ringed by big drum-shaped trash bins. Just beyond it we could hear the docks. A bunch of kids sat on a wall before standing officers. The gulls coiled over the gathering.

    ‘Inspector.’ I nodded at whomever that was. Someone offered a coffee but I shook my head and looked at the woman I had come to see.

    She lay near the skate ramps. Nothing is still like the dead are still. The wind moves their hair, as it moved hers, and they don’t respond at all. She was in an ugly pose, with legs crooked as if about to get up, her arms in a strange bend. Her face was to the ground.

    A young woman, brown hair pulled into pigtails poking up like plants. She was almost naked, and it was sad to see her skin smooth that cold morning, unbroken by gooseflesh. She wore only laddered stockings, one high heel on. Seeing me look for it, a sergeant waved at me from a way off, from where she guarded the dropped shoe.

    It was a couple of hours since the body had been discovered. I looked her over. I held my breath and bent down toward the dirt, to look at her face, but I could only see one open eye.

    ‘Where’s Shukman?’

    ‘Not here yet, Inspector . . .’

    ‘Someone call him, tell him to get a move on.’ I smacked my watch. I was in charge of what we called the mise-en-crime. No one would move her until Shukman the patho had come, but there were other things to do. I checked sightlines. We were out of the way and the garbage containers obscured us, but I could feel attention on us like insects, from all over the estate. We milled.

    There was a wet mattress on its edge between two of the bins, by a spread of rusting iron pieces interwoven with discarded chains. ‘That was on her.’ The constable who spoke was Lizbyet Corwi, a smart young woman I’d worked with a couple of times. ‘Couldn’t exactly say she was well hidden, but it sort of made her look like a pile of rubbish, I guess.’ I could see a rough rectangle of darker earth surrounding the dead woman – the remains of the mattress-sheltered dew. Naustin was squatting by it, staring at the earth.

    ‘The kids who found her tipped it half off,’ Corwi said.

    ‘How did they find her?’

    Corwi pointed at the earth, at little scuffs of animal paws.

    ‘Stopped her getting mauled. Ran like hell when they saw what it was, made the call. Our lot, when they arrived . . .’ She glanced at two patrolmen I didn’t know.

    ‘They moved it?’

    She nodded. ‘See if she was still alive, they said.’

    ‘What are their names?’

    ‘Shushkil and Briamiv.’

    ‘And these are the finders?’ I nodded at the guarded kids. There were two girls, two guys. Midteens, cold, looking down.

    ‘Yeah. Chewers.’

    ‘Early morning pick-you-up?’

    ‘That’s dedication, hm?’ she said. ‘Maybe they’re up for junkies of the month or some shit. They got here a bit before seven. The skate pit’s organised that way, apparently. It’s only been built a couple of years, used to be nothing, but the locals’ve got their shift patterns down. Midnight to nine a.m., chewers only; nine to eleven, local gang plans the day; eleven to midnight, skateboards and rollerblades.’

    ‘They carrying?’

    ‘One of the boys has a little shiv, but really little. Couldn’t mug a milkrat with it – it’s a toy. And a chew each. That’s it.’ She shrugged. ‘The dope wasn’t on them; we found it by the wall, but’ – shrug – ‘they were the only ones around.’

    She motioned over one of our colleagues and opened the bag he carried. Little bundles of resin-slathered grass. Feld is its street name – a tough crossbreed of Catha edulis spiked with tobacco and caffeine and stronger stuff, and fibreglass threads or similar to abrade the gums and get it into the blood. Its name is a trilingual pun: it’s khat where it’s grown, and the animal called ‘cat’ in English is feld in our own language. I sniffed it and it was pretty low-grade stuff. I walked over to where the four teenagers shivered in their puffy jackets.

    ‘’Sup, policeman?’ said one boy in a Bes -accented approximation of hip-hop English. He looked up and met my eye, but he was pale. Neither he nor any of his companions looked well. From where they sat they could not have seen the dead woman, but they did not even look in her direction.

    They must have known we’d find the feld, and that we’d know it was theirs. They could have said nothing, just run.

    ‘I’m Inspector Borlú,’ I said. ‘Extreme Crime Squad.’

    I did not say I’m Tyador. A difficult age to question, this – too old for first names, euphemisms and toys, not yet old enough to be straightforward opponents in interviews, when at least the rules were clear. ‘What’s your name?’ The boy hesitated, considered using whatever slang handle he’d granted himself, did not.

    ‘Vilyem Barichi.’

    ‘You found her?’ He nodded, and his friends nodded after him. ‘Tell me.’

    ‘We come here because, ’cause, and . . .’ Vilyem waited, but I said nothing about his drugs. He looked down. ‘And we seen something under that mattress and we pulled it off.

    ‘There was some . . .’ His friends looked up as Vilyem hesitated, obviously superstitious.

    ‘Wolves?’ I said. They glanced at each other.

    ‘Yeah man, some scabby little pack was nosing around there and . . .

    ‘So we thought it . . .’

    ‘How long after you got here?’ I said.

    Vilyem shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Couple hours?’

    ‘Anyone else around?’

    ‘Saw some guys over there a while back.’

    ‘Dealers?’ A shrug.

    ‘And there was a van came up on the grass and come over here and went off again after a bit. We didn’t speak to no one.’

    ‘When was the van?’

    ‘Don’t know.’

    ‘It was still dark.’ That was one of the girls.

    ‘Okay. Vilyem, you guys, we’re going to get you some breakfast, something to drink, if you want.’ I motioned to their guards. ‘Have we spoken to the parents?’ I asked.

    ‘On their way, boss; except hers’ – pointing to one of the girls – ‘we can’t reach.’

    ‘So keep trying. Get them to the centre now.’

    The four teens looked at each other. ‘This is bullshit, man,’ the boy who was not Vilyem said, uncertainly. He knew that according to some politics he should oppose my instruction, but he wanted to go with my subordinate. Black tea and bread and paperwork, the boredom and striplights, all so much not like the peeling back of that wet-heavy, cumbersome mattress, in the yard, in the dark.

    STEPEN SHUKMAN AND HIS ASSISTANT Hamd Hamzinic had arrived. I looked at my watch. Shukman ignored me. When he bent to the body he wheezed. He certified death. He made observations that Hamzinic wrote down.

    ‘Time?’ I said.

    ‘Twelve hours-ish,’ Shukman said. He pressed down on one of the woman’s limbs. She rocked. In rigor, and unstable on the ground as she was, she probably assumed the position of her death lying on other contours. ‘She wasn’t killed here.’ I had heard it said many times he was good at his job but had seen no evidence that he was anything but competent.

    ‘Done?’ he said to one of the scene techs. She took two more shots from different angles and nodded. Shukman rolled the woman over with Hamzinic’s help. She seemed to fight him with her cramped motionlessness. Turned, she was absurd, like someone playing at dead insect, her limbs crooked, rocking on her spine.

    She looked up at us from below a fluttering fringe. Her face was set in a startled strain: she was endlessly surprised by herself. She was young. She was heavily made up, and it was smeared across a badly battered face. It was impossible to say what she looked like, what face those who knew her would see if they heard her name. We might know better later, when she relaxed into her death. Blood marked her front, dark as dirt. Flash flash of cameras.

    ‘Well, hello cause of death,’ Shukman said to the wounds in her chest.

    On her left cheek, curving under the jaw, a long red split. She had been cut half the length of her face.

    The wound was smooth for several centimetres, tracking precisely along her flesh like the sweep of a paintbrush. Where it went below her jaw, under the overhang of her mouth, it jagged ugly and ended or began with a deep torn hole in the soft tissue behind her bone. She looked unseeingly at me.

    ‘Take some without the flash, too,’ I said.

    Like several others I looked away while Shukman murmured – it felt prurient to watch. Uniformed mise-en-crime technical investigators, mectecs in our slang, searched in an expanding circle. They overturned rubbish and foraged among the grooves where vehicles had driven. They lay down reference marks, and photographed.

    ‘Alright then.’ Shukman rose. ‘Let’s get her out of here.’ A couple of the men hauled her onto a stretcher.

    ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘cover her.’ Someone found a blanket I don’t know from where, and they started again towards Shukman’s vehicle.

    ‘I’ll get going this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Will I see you?’ I wagged my head noncommittally. I walked towards Corwi.

    ‘Naustin,’ I called, when I was positioned so that Corwi would be at the edge of our conversation. She glanced up and came slightly closer.

    ‘Inspector,’ said Naustin.

    ‘Go through it.’

    He sipped his coffee and looked at me nervously.

    ‘Hooker?’ he said. ‘First impressions, Inspector. This area, beat-up, naked? And . . .’ He pointed at his face, her exaggerated makeup. ‘Hooker.’

    ‘Fight with a client?’

    ‘Yeah but . . . If it was just the body wounds, you know, you’d, then you’re looking at, maybe she won’t do what he wants, whatever. He lashes out. But this.’ He touched his cheek again uneasily. ‘That’s different.’

    ‘A sicko?’

    He shrugged. ‘Maybe. He cuts her, kills her, dumps her. Cocky bastard too, doesn’t give a shit that we’re going to find her.’

    ‘Cocky or stupid.’

    ‘Or cocky and stupid.’

    ‘So a cocky, stupid sadist,’ I said. He raised his eyes, Maybe.

    ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Could be. Do the rounds of the local girls. Ask a uniform who knows the area. Ask if they’ve had trouble with anyone recently. Let’s get a photo circulated, put a name to Fulana Detail.’ I used the generic name for woman-unknown. ‘First off I want you to question Barichi and his mates, there. Be nice, Bardo, they didn’t have to call this in. I mean that. And get Yaszek in with you.’ Ramira Yaszek was an excellent questioner. ‘Call me this afternoon?’ When he was out of earshot I said to Corwi, ‘A few years ago we’d not have had half as many guys on the murder of a working girl.’

    ‘We’ve come a long way,’ she said. She wasn’t much older than the dead woman.

    ‘I doubt Naustin’s delighted to be on streetwalker duty, but you’ll notice he’s not complaining,’ I said.

    ‘We’ve come a long way,’ she said.

    ‘So?’ I raised an eyebrow. Glanced in Naustin’s direction. I waited. I remembered Corwi’s work on the Shulban disappearance, a case considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared.

    ‘It’s just, I guess, you know, we should keep in mind other possibilities,’ she said.

    ‘Tell me.’

    ‘Her makeup,’ she said. ‘It’s all, you know, earths and browns. It’s been put on thick, but it’s not—’ She vamp-pouted. ‘And did you notice her hair?’ I had. ‘Not dyed. Take a drive with me up GunterStrász, around by the arena, any of the girls’ hangouts. Two-thirds blonde, I reckon. And the rest are black or bloodred or some shit. And . . .’ She fingered the air as if it were hair. ‘It’s dirty, but it’s a lot better than mine.’ She ran her hand through her own split ends.

    For many of the streetwalkers in Bes el, especially in areas like this, food and clothes for their kids came first; feld or crack for themselves; food for themselves; then sundries, in which list conditioner would come low. I glanced at the rest of the officers, at Naustin gathering himself to go.

    ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Do you know this area?’

    ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s a bit off the track, you know? This is hardly even Bes el, really. My beat’s Lestov. They called a few of us in when they got the bell. But I did a tour here a couple years ago – I know it a bit.’

    Lestov itself was already almost a suburb, six or so out of the city centre, and we were south of that, over the Yovic Bridge on a bit of land between Bulkya Sound and, nearly, the mouth where the river joined the sea. Technically an island, though so close and conjoined to the mainland by ruins of industry you would never think of it as such, Kordvenna was estates, warehouses, low-rent bodegas scribble-linked by endless graffiti. It was far enough from Bes el’s heart that it was easy to forget, unlike more inner-city slums.

    ‘How long were you here?’ I said.

    ‘Six months, standard. What you’d expect: street theft, high kids smacking shit out of each other, drugs, hooking.’

    ‘Murder?’

    ‘Two or three in my time. Drugs stuff. Mostly stops short of that, though: the gangs are pretty smart at punishing each other without bringing in ECS.’

    ‘Someone’s fucked up then.’

    ‘Yeah. Or doesn’t care.’

    ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I want you on this. What are you doing at the moment?’

    ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’

    ‘I want you to relocate for a bit. Got any contacts here still?’ She pursed her lips. ‘Track them down if you can; if not, have a word with some of the local guys, see who their singers are. I want you on the ground. Listen out, go round the estate – what’s this place called again?’

    ‘Pocost Village.’ She laughed without humour; I raised an eyebrow.

    ‘It takes a village,’ I said. ‘See what you can turn up.’

    ‘My commissar won’t like it.’

    ‘I’ll deal with him. It’s Bashazin, right?’

    ‘You’ll square it? So am I being seconded?’

    ‘Let’s not call it anything right now. Right now I’m just asking you to focus on this. And report directly to me.’ I gave her the numbers of my cell phone and my office. ‘You can show me around the delights of Kordvenna later. And . . .’ I glanced up at Naustin, and she saw me do it. ‘Just keep an eye on things.’

    ‘He’s probably right. Probably a cocky sadist trick, boss.’

    ‘Probably. Let’s find out why she keeps her hair so clean.’

    There was a league-table of instinct. We all knew that in his street-beating days, Commissar Kerevan broke several cases following leads that made no logical sense; and that Chief Inspector Marcoberg was devoid of any such breaks, and that his decent record was the result, rather, of slog. We would never call inexplicable little insights ‘hunches,’ for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

    Officers Shushkil and Briamiv were surprised, then defensive, finally sulky when I asked them what they were doing moving the mattress. I put them on report. If they had apologised I would have let it go. It was depressingly common to see police boots tracked through blood residue, fingerprints smeared and spoiled, samples corrupted or lost.

    A little group of journalists was gathering at the edges of the open land. Petrus Something-or-other, Valdir Mohli, a young guy called Rackhaus, a few others.

    ‘Inspector!’

    ‘Inspector Borlú!’ Even: ‘Tyador!’

    Most of the press had always been polite, and amenable to my suggestions about what they withhold. In the last few years, new, more salacious and aggressive papers had started, inspired and in some cases controlled by British or North American owners. It had been inevitable, and in truth our established local outlets were staid to dull. What was troubling was less the trend to sensation, nor even the irritating behaviour of the new press’s young writers, but more their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born. Rackhaus, who wrote for a weekly called Rejal!, for example. Surely when he bothered me for facts he knew I would not give him, surely when he attempted to bribe junior officers, and sometimes succeeded, he did not have to say, as he tended to: ‘The public has a right to know!’

    I did not even understand him the first time he said it. In Bes the word ‘right’ is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning he intended. I had to mentally translate into English, in which I am passably fluent, to make sense of the phrase. His fidelity to the cliché transcended the necessity to communicate. Perhaps he would not be content until I snarled and called him a vulture, a ghoul.

    ‘You know what I’m going to say,’ I told them. The stretched tape separated us. ‘There’ll be a press conference this afternoon, at ECS Centre.’

    ‘What time?’ My photograph was being taken.

    ‘You’ll be informed, Petrus.’

    Rackhaus said something that I ignored. As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

    With a hard start, I realised that she was not on Gunter-Strász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

    Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.

    CHAPTER TWO

    I HAD A CONSTABLE DROP ME north of Lestov, near the bridge. I did not know the area well. I’d been to the island, of course, visited the ruins, when I was a schoolboy and occasionally since, but my rat-runs were elsewhere. Signs showing directions to local destinations were bolted to the outsides of pastry bakers and little workshops, and I followed them to a tram stop in a pretty square. I waited between a care-home marked with an hourglass logo, and a spice shop, the air around it cinnamon scented.

    When the tram came, tinnily belling, shaking in its ruts, I did not sit, though the carriage was half-empty. I knew we would pick up passengers as we went north to Bes el centre. I stood close to the window and saw right out into the city, into these unfamiliar streets.

    The woman, her ungainly huddle below that old mattress, sniffed by scavengers. I phoned Naustin on my cell.

    ‘Is the mattress being tested for trace?’

    ‘Should be, sir.’

    ‘Check. If the techs are on it we’re fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.’ Perhaps she was new to the life. Maybe if we’d found her a week later her hair would have been electric blonde.

    These regions by the river are intricate, many buildings a century or several centuries old. The tram took its tracks through byways where Bes el, at least half of everything we passed, seemed to lean in and loom over us. We wobbled and slowed, behind local cars and those elsewhere, came to a cross-hatching where the Bes buildings were antique shops. That trade had been doing well, as well as anything did in the city for some years, hand-downs polished and spruced as people emptied their apartments of heirlooms for a few Bes marques.

    Some editorialists were optimists. While their leaders roared as relentlessly at each other as they ever had in the Cityhouse, many of the new breed of all parties were working together to put Bes el first. Each drip of foreign investment – and to everyone’s surprise there were drips – brought forth encomia. Even a couple of high-tech companies had recently moved in, though it was hard to believe it was in response to Bes el’s fatuous recent self-description as ‘Silicon Estuary.’

    I got off by the statue of King Val. Downtown was busy: I stop-started, excusing myself to citizens and local tourists, unseeing others with care, till I reached the blocky concrete of ECS Centre. Two groups of tourists were being shepherded by Bes guides. I stood on the steps and looked down Uropa-Strász. It took me several tries to get a signal.

    ‘Corwi?’

    ‘Boss?’

    ‘You know that area: is there any chance we’re looking at breach?’

    There were seconds of silence.

    ‘Doesn’t seem likely. That area’s mostly pretty total. And Pocost Village, that whole project, certainly is.’

    ‘Some of GunterStrász, though . . .’

    ‘Yeah but. The closest crosshatching is hundreds of metres away. They couldn’t have . . .’ It would have been an extra-ordinary risk on the part of the murderer or murderers. ‘I reckon we can assume,’ she said.

    ‘Alright. Let me know how you get on. I’ll check in soon.’

    I HAD PAPERWORK ON OTHER CASES that I opened, establishing them a while in holding patterns like circling aircraft. A woman beaten to death by her boyfriend, who had managed to evade us so far, despite tracers on his name and his prints at the airport. Styelim was an old man who had surprised an addict breaking and entering, been hit once, fatally, with the spanner he himself had been wielding. That case would not close. A young man called Avid Avid, left bleeding from the head after taking a kerb-kiss from a racist, ‘Ébru Filth’ written on the wall above him. For that I was coordinating with a colleague from Special Division, Shenvoi, who had, since some time before Avid’s murder, been undercover in Bes el’s far right.

    Ramira Yaszek called while I ate lunch at my desk. ‘Just done questioning those kids, sir.’

    ‘And?’

    ‘You should be glad they don’t know their rights better, because if they did Naustin’d be facing charges now.’ I rubbed my eyes and swallowed my mouthful.

    ‘What did he do?’

    ‘Barichi’s mate Sergev was lippy, so Naustin asked him the bareknuckle question across the mouth, said he was the prime suspect.’ I swore. ‘It wasn’t that hard, and at least it made it easier for me to gudcop.’ We had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them. Naustin was one of those who’d switch to hard questioning too easily. There are some suspects that methodology works on, who need to fall down stairs during an interrogation, but a sulky teenage chewer is not one.

    ‘Anyway, no harm done,’ Yaszek said. ‘Their stories tally. They’re out, the four of them, in that bunch of trees. Bit of naughty naughty probably. They were there for a couple of hours at least. At some point during that time – and don’t ask for anything more exact because you aren’t going to get it beyond ‘still dark’ – one of the girls sees that van come up onto the grass to the skate park. She doesn’t think much of it because people do come up there all times of day and night to do business, to dump stuff, what have you. It drives around, up past the skate park, comes back. After a while it speeds off.’

    ‘Speeds?’

    I scribbled in my notebook, trying one-handedly to pull up my email on my PC. The connection broke more than once. Big attachments on an inadequate system.

    ‘Yeah. It was in a hurry and buggering its suspension. That’s how she noticed it was going.’

    ‘Description?’

    ‘Grey. She doesn’t know from vans.’

    ‘Get her looking at some pictures, see if we can ID the make.’

    ‘On it, sir. I’ll let you know. Later at least two other cars or vans come up for whatever reason, for business, according to Barichi.’

    ‘That could complicate tyre tracks.’

    ‘After an hour or whatever of groping, this girl mentions the van to the others and they go check it out, in case it was dumping. Says sometimes you get old stereos, shoes, books, all kinds of shit chucked out.’

    ‘And they find her.’ Some of my messages had come through. There was one from one of the mectec photographers, and I opened it and began to scroll through his images.

    ‘They find her.’

    COMMISSAR GADLEM CALLED ME IN. His soft-spoken theatricality, his mannered gentleness, was unsubtle, but he had always let me do my thing. I sat while he tapped at his keyboard and swore. I could see what must be database passwords stuck on scraps of paper to the side of his screen.

    ‘So?’ he said. ‘The housing estate?’ Yes.

    ‘Where is it?’

    ‘South, suburbs. Young woman, stab wounds. Shukman’s got her.’

    ‘Prostitute?’

    ‘Could be.’

    ‘Could be,’ he said, cupped his ear, ‘and yet. I can hear it. Well, onward, follow your nose. Tell if you ever feel like sharing the whys of that and yet, won’t you? Who’s your sub?’

    ‘Naustin. And I’ve got a beat cop helping out. Corwi. Grade-one constable. Knows the area.’

    ‘That’s her beat?’ I nodded. Close enough.

    ‘What else is open?’

    ‘On my desk?’ I told him. The commissar nodded. Even with the others, he granted me the leeway to follow Fulana Detail.

    ‘SO DID YOU SEE the whole business?’

    It was close to ten o’clock in the evening, more than forty hours since we had found the victim. Corwi drove – she made no effort to disguise her uniform, despite that we had an unmarked car – through the streets around GunterStrász. I had not been home until very late the previous night, and after a morning on my own in these same streets now I was there again.

    There were places of crosshatch in the larger streets and a few elsewhere, but that far out the bulk of the area was total. Few antique Bes stylings, few steep roofs or many-paned windows: these were hobbled factories and warehouses. A handful of decades old, often broken-glassed, at half capacity if open. Boarded facades. Grocery shops fronted with wire. Older fronts in tumbledown of classical Bes style. Some houses colonised and made chapels and drug houses: some burnt out and left as crude carbon renditions of themselves.

    The area was not crowded, but it was far from empty. Those who were out looked like landscape, like they were always there. There had been fewer that morning but not very markedly.

    ‘Did you see Shukman working on the body?’

    ‘No.’ I was looking at what we passed, referring to my map. ‘I got there after he was done.’

    ‘Squeamish?’ she said.

    ‘No.’

    ‘Well . . .’ She smiled and turned the car. ‘Yo u’d have to say that even if you were.’

    ‘True,’ I said, though it was not.

    She pointed out what passed for landmarks. I did not tell her I had been in Kordvenna early in the day, sounding these places. Corwi did not try to disguise her police clothes because that way those who saw us, who might otherwise think we were there to entrap them, would know that was not our intent; and the fact that we were not in a bruise, as we called the black-and-blue police cars, told them that neither were we there to harass them. Intricate contracts!

    Most of those around us were in Bes el so we saw them. Poverty deshaped the already staid, drab cuts and colours that enduringly characterise Bes clothes – what has been called the city’s fashionless fashion. Of the exceptions, some we realised when we glanced were elsewhere, so unsaw, but the younger Bes were also more colourful, their clothes more pictured, than their parents.

    The majority of the Bes men and women (does this need saying?) were doing nothing but walking from one place to another, from late-shift work, from homes to other homes or shops. Still, though, the way we watched what we passed made it a threatening geography, and there were sufficient furtive actions occurring that did not feel like the rankest paranoia.

    ‘This morning I found a few of the locals I used to talk to,’ Corwi said. ‘Asked if they’d heard anything.’ She took us through a darkened place where the balance of crosshatch shifted, and we were silent until the streetlamps around us became again taller and familiarly deco-angled. Under those lights – the street we were on visible in a perspective curve away from us – women stood by the walls selling sex. They watched our approach guardedly. ‘I didn’t have much luck,’ Corwi said.

    She had not even had a photograph on that earlier expedition. That early it had been aboveboard contacts: it had been liquor-store clerks; the priests of squat local churches, some the last of the worker-priests, brave old men tattooed with the sickle-and-rood on their biceps and forearms, on the shelves behind them Bes translations of Gutiérrez, Rauschenbusch, Canaan Banana. It had been stoop-sitters. All Corwi had been able to do was ask what they could tell her about events in Pocost Village. They had heard about the murder but knew nothing.

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