CORWI COMPLAINED, more dutifully than with fervour. “What’s this all about, sir?” she said. “Aren’t they going to be invoking Breach any minute?”

“Yes. In fact they’re taking their time. They should’ve done it by now; I don’t know what the holdup is.”

“So what the fuck, sir? Why are we in such a rush to do this? Mahalia’ll have Breach hunting for her killer soon.” I drove. “Damn. You don’t want to hand it over, do you?”

“Oh, I do.” So …

“I just want to check some things first, in this unexpected little moment we have.”

She stopped staring at me when we arrived at the headquarters of the True Citizens. I had called in and got someone to check the address for me: it was as it was written on Mrs. Geary’s paper. I had tried to contact Shenvoi, my acquaintance undercover, but couldn’t get him, so relied on what I knew and could quickly read on the TCs. Corwi stood beside me, and I saw her touch the handle of her weapon.

A reinforced door, blocked-off windows, but the house itself was or had been residential, and the rest of the street remained so. (I wondered if there had ever been any attempt to close the TC down on zoning charges.) The street almost looked crosshatched, its random-seeming variation between terraced and detached buildings, but it was not, it was total Besźel, the variation of styles an architectural quirk, though it was only a corner away from a very crosshatched area.

I had heard it alleged by liberals that this was more than irony, that the proximity of Ul Qoma gave the TC opportunities to intimidate the enemy. Certainly no matter how they unsaw them, the Ul Qomans in physical proximity must have registered at some level the paramilitary fatigues, the Besźel First  patches. You could almost claim it was breach, though of course not quite.

They were milling as we approached, lounging, smoking, drinking, laughing loud. Their efforts to claim the street were so overt they might as well have been pissing musk. All but one were men. All eyed us. Words were spoken and most of them ambled into the building, leaving a few by the door. In leather, denim, one despite the cold in a muscle top his physiology deserved, staring at us. Bodybuilder, several men with cropped hair, one affecting an antique Besź-aristo cut like a fussy mullet. He leaned on a baseball bat—not a Besź sport but just plausible enough that he could not be done for Possessing Weapon with Intent. One man muttered to Haircut, spoke rapidly on a cell phone, clicked it shut. There were not many passersby. All there were of course were Besź, so they could and did stare at us and the TC crew, though most then looked away.

“You ready for this?” I said.

“Fuck off, boss,” Corwi muttered back. The bat holder swung it as if idly.

A few metres from the reception committee I said loudly into my radio: “At TC headquarters, four-eleven GyedarStrász, as planned. Check-in in an hour. Code alert. Ready backup.” I thumbed the radio off quickly before the operator had the chance to audibly respond along the lines of What on earth are you on about, Borlú?

The big man: “Help you, Officer?” One of his comrades looked Corwi up and down and made a kiss-kiss noise that might be the chirrup of a bird.

“Yes, we’re coming in to ask a few questions.”

“I don’t think so.” Haircut smiled, but it was Muscles doing the talking.

“We really are, you know.”

“Not so much.” This was the man who had made the call, a blond suede-headed man, pushing in front of his big acquaintance. “Got Entry and Search papers? No? Then you will not be coming in.”

I shifted. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why keep us out?” Corwi said. “We’ve some questions …” but Muscles and Haircut were laughing.

“Please,” Haircut said. He shook his head. “Please. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

The close-shorn man gestured him to shut up. “We’re done here,” he said.

“What do you know about Byela Mar?” I said. They looked without recognition, or uncertain. “Mahalia Geary.” That time they knew the name. The telephoner made anah  noise; Haircut whispered to the big man.

“Geary,” Bodybuilder said. “We read the papers.” He shrugged, que sera . “Yes. A lesson in the dangers of certain behaviours?”

“How so?” I leaned against the doorjamb companionably, forcing Mullet to back up a step or two. He muttered again to his friend. I could not hear what.

“No one’s condoning attacks, but Miss Geary” —the man with the phone said the name with exaggerated American accent, and stood between us and all the others—“had form and a reputation among patriots. We’d not heard from her for a while, true. Hoped she might have gained some perspective. Seems not.” He shrugged. “If you denigrate Besźel, it’ll come back to bite you.”

“What denigration?”  Corwi said. “What do you know about her?”

“Come on, Officer! Look at what she worked on! She was no friend of Besźel.”

“Alright,” Yellow said. “Unif. Or worse, a spy.” I looked at Corwi and she at me.

“What?” I said. “Which you going to go for?”

“She wasn’t…” Corwi said. We both hesitated.

The men stayed in the doorway and would not even bicker with us anymore. Mullet seemed minded to, in response to my provocations, but Bodybuilder said, “Leave it, Caczos,” and the man shut up, and only watched us from behind the bigger man’s back, and the other who had spoken remonstrated with them quietly and they backed a few feet away but still watched me. I tried to reach Shenvoi, but he was away from his secure phone. It occurred to me that he might (I was not one of the few who knew his assignment) even be in the building before me.

“Inspector Borlú.” The voice came from behind us. A smart black car had pulled up behind ours, and a man was walking towards us, leaving the driver’s door open. He was in his early fifties, I would say, portly, with a sharp, lined face. He wore a decent dark suit without a tie. What hair had not receded was grey and cut short. “Inspector,” he said again. “Time for you to leave.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Of course, of course,” I said. “Only forgive me … who in the name of the Virgin are you?”

“Harkad Gosz. Barrister for the True Citizens of Besźel.” Several of the thuggish men looked rather startled at that.

“Oh terrific,” whispered Corwi. I took Gosz in ostentatiously: he was clearly high-rent.

“Just popping by, are you?” I said. “Or did you get a call?” I winked at the phone-man, who shrugged. Amiably enough. “I take it you don’t have a direct line to these donkeys, so who did it come through? They put the word to Syedr? Who dropped you a line?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess why you’re here, Inspector.”

“A moment, Gosz … How do you know who I am?”

“Let me guess—you’re here asking questions about Mahalia Geary.”

“Absolutely. None of your boys seem too cut up about her death. And yet lamentably ignorant about her work: they’re labouring under the delusion that she was a unificationist, which would make the unifs laugh very hard. Never heard of Orciny? And let me repeat—how do you know my name?”

“Inspector, are you really going to waste all our time? Orciny? However Geary wanted to spin it, whatever foolishness she wanted to pretend to, whatever stupid footnotes she wanted to stick in her essays, the thrust of everything she was working on was to undermine Besźel. This nation is not a plaything, Inspector. Understand me? Either Geary was stupid, wasting her time with old wives’ tales that manage to combine being meaningless with being insults, or she was not stupid, and all this work about the secret powerlessness of Besźel was designed to make a very different point. Ul Qoma seems to have been more congenial for her, after all, didn’t it?”

“Are you joking with me? What’s your point? That Mahalia pretended  to be working on Orciny? She was an enemy of Besźel? What, an Ul Qoman agent…?”