once.”
“Whoring it for the Yankee dollar.”
“Don’t knock it. If they’re getting the Yankee dollar here that’ll do me. But they’re not going to rush for you, no matter who’s died. Did someone die?”
IT DID NOT TAKE CORWI LONG to find what I had sent her to find. Late the next day she came into my office with a file.
“I just got it faxed over from Ul Qoma,” she said. “I been trail-chasing. It wasn’t even so hard, when you knew where to start. We were right.”
There she was, our victim—her file, her picture, our death mask, and suddenly and rather breathtakingly photographs of her in life, monochrome and fax-smudged but there, our dead woman smiling and smoking a cigarette and midword, her mouth open. Our scribbled notes, her details, estimated and now others in red, no question marks hesitating them, the facts of her; below her various invented names, there her real one.
Chapter Six
“ MAHALIA GEARY .”
There were forty-two people around the table (antique, would there ever be question?), and me. The forty-two were seated, with folders in front of them. I stood. Two minutes-takers transcribed at their stations in the room’s corners. I could see microphones on the table, and translators sat nearby.
“Mahalia Geary. She was twenty-four. American. This is all my constable’s doing, Constable Corwi, all this information, ladies and gentlemen. All the information’s in the papers I sent.” They were not all reading them. Some did not have them open.
“American?” someone said.
I did not recognise all of the twenty-one Besź representatives. Some. A woman in her middle ages, severe skunk-stripe hair like a film-studies academic, Shura Katrinya, minister without portfolio, respected but past her moment. Mikhel Buric of the Social Democrats, official opposition, young, capable, ambitious enough to be on more than one committee (security, commerce, arts). Major Yorj Syedr, a leader of the National Bloc, the rightist grouping with whom Prime Minister Gayardicz controversially worked in coalition, despite Syedr’s reputation not only as a bully but a less than competent one. Yavid Nyisemu, Gayardicz’s under-minister for Cultureand committee chair. Other faces were familiar, and with effort more names would come. I recognised none of the Ul Qoma counterparts. I did not pay close attention to foreign politics.
Most of the Ul Qomans flicked through the packets I had prepared. Three wore headphones, but most were fluent enough in Besź at least to understand me. It was strange not to unsee these people in formal Ul Qoma dress—men in collarless shirts and dark lapel-less jackets, the few women in spiral semiwraps in colours that would be contraband in Besźel. But then I was not in Besźel.
The Oversight Committee meets in the giant, baroque, concrete-patched coliseum in the centre of Besźel Old Town, and of Ul Qoma Old Town. It is one of very few places that has the same name in both cities—Copula Hall. That is because it is not a crosshatched building, precisely, nor one of staccato totality-alterity, one floor or room in Besźel and the next in Ul Qoma: externally it is in both cities; internally, much of it is in both or neither. All of us—twenty-one lawmakers from each state, their assistants, and I—were meeting at a juncture, an interstice, one sort-of border built above another.
To me it was as if another presence were there: the reason for the meeting. Perhaps several of us in the room felt watched.
As they fussed with their papers, those who did so, I thanked them again for seeing me. A little political gush. These meetings of the Oversight Committee were regular, but I had had to wait days to see them. I had despite Taskin’s warning tried to convene an extraordinary meeting to pass over responsibility for Mahalia Geary as quickly as possible (who wanted to think of her murderer free? There was one best chance of sorting that), but short of epochal crisis, civil war or
Kathy Reichs, Brendan Reichs