The City & the City Read Online Free PDF Page A

with dragging her along. The wear and tear of murder.”
    Hamzinic opened his mouth, closed it again. I glanced up at him. He sadly shook his head: No nothing .

Chapter Three
    THE POSTERS WERE UP . Mostly around the area our Fulana was found but some in the main streets, in the shopping streets, in Kyezov and Topisza and areas like that. I even saw one when I left my flat.
    It wasn’t even very close to the centre. I lived east and south a bit of the Old Town, the top-but-one flat in a six-storey towerlet on VulkovStrász. It is a heavily crosshatched street—clutch by clutch of architecture broken by alterity, even in a few spots house by house. The local buildings are taller by a floor or three than the others, so Besź juts up semiregularly and the roofscape is almost a machicolation.
    Laced by the shadows of girdered towers that would loom over it if they were there, Ascension Church is at the end of VulkovStrász, its windows protected by wire grilles, but some of its stained panes broken. A fish market is there every few days. Regularly I would eat my breakfast to the shouts of vendors by their ice buckets and racks of live molluscs. Even the young women who worked there dressed like their grandmothers while behind their stalls, nostalgically photogenic, their hair tied up in dishcloth-coloured scarves, their filleting aprons in patterns of grey and red to minimise the stains of gutting. The men looked, misleadingly or not, straight off their boats, as if they had not put their catches down since they emergedfrom the sea, until they reached the cobbles below me. The punters in Besźel lingered and smelled and prodded the goods.
    In the morning trains ran on a raised line metres from my window. They were not in my city. I did not of course, but I could have stared into the carriages—they were quite that close—and caught the eyes of foreign travellers.
    They would have seen only a thin man in early middle age in dressing gown at his morning yoghurt and coffee, shake-folding a copy of a paper —Inkyistor or Iy Déurnem or a smudgy Besźel Journal to keep my English practiced. Usually alone—once in a while one or other of two women about his age might be there. (An economic historian at Besźel University; a writer for an art magazine. They did not know of each other but would not have minded.)
    There when I left, a short distance from my front door on a poster stand, Fulana’s face watched me. Though her eyes were closed, they had cropped and tinkered with the picture so that she did not look dead but stupefied. Do you know this woman? it said. It was printed in black and white, on matte paper. Call Extreme Crime Squad , our number. The presence of the poster might be evidence that the local cops were particularly efficient. Maybe they were all over the borough. It might be that, knowing where I lived, they wanted to keep me off their back with one or two strategic placements, especially for my eyes.
    It was a couple of kilometres to ECS base. I walked. I walked by the brick arches: at the top, where the lines were, they were elsewhere, but not all of them were foreign at their bases. The ones I could see contained little shops and squats decorated in art graffiti. In Besźel it was a quiet area, but the streets were crowded with those elsewhere. I unsaw them, but it took time to pick past them all. Before I had reached my turning on Via Camir, Yaszek called my mobile.
    “We’ve found the van.”
    I PICKED UP A CAB , which sped-stalled repeatedly through the traffic. The Pont Mahest was crowded, locally and elsewhere. I hadminutes to look into the dirty river as we edged toward the western bank, the smoke and the grimy dockyard ships in the reflected light of mirrored buildings on a foreign waterfront—an enviable finance zone. Besź tugs bobbed in the wakes of ignored water taxis. The van was skew-whiff between buildings. It was not a lot that it was in, but a channel between the premises of an