by James Church
2
An hour later, my uncle was up and dressed. The sun hadn’t come anywhere near the horizon. He sang loudly in the shower, some song about an affectionate bosom. When I buried my head in the pillow, he bumped into the bed a couple of times walking back and forth.
“You must have had quite a time last night,” he said when I was finally awake. “You were talking in your sleep.”
“What did I say?”
“Mostly incoherent, but very emphatic. Do you have a guilty conscience? Don’t bother; it isn’t worth a bad night’s sleep, whatever it is. Let’s go get the car.”
“I’m exhausted and hungry. I think we should talk about it over breakfast.”
“You stay here and sleep if you want, it doesn’t matter to me. I’ll drive myself.”
“You aren’t authorized to drive the car, and you can’t go five hours out of town without me.”
He smiled. “Want to bet?”
I showered and dressed in a hurry.
“Been with cows?” My uncle pointed at my shoes as we stepped outside into the first signs of sunrise. The light was pale gold; each building it touched took on the hue of the earth so that, for an instant, the city seemed a dream of the past. The new glass buildings stopped preening, the streets were quiet, and from somewhere nearby a horse whinnied.
“Cows?” I looked down at my shoes. “Can’t avoid them,” I said “They wander around everywhere. Let’s find the damned transportation.”
My uncle was partially right about the car—it had been moved to the side. To the side and a kilometer away on a field next to a solitary ger. For a moment I worried it might be the same field I’d been in the night before, but there wasn’t any shed in sight. I decided fields all looked pretty much the same at this time of the morning.
We only found the car because a traffic cop walking along the road remembered seeing it being pushed by a couple of men he recognized from an argument the two of them had been having in the middle of the street a week ago.
“They gave me a lot of gas about their rights. I told them to get out of the street or I’d make them collect all the pony crap from here to Chinggis Khan’s tomb.”
“I thought no one knew where the tomb was,” my uncle said.
“Yeah, well, that’s sort of the point.” The cop looked peevishly at my uncle. “Lucky for you I didn’t ticket your car. Next time I will.”
When we finally spotted the car, my uncle was in favor of knocking on the door of the ger and finding out who the hell these people were. I was for getting in and clearing out. The problem was settled when a wiry man with a mustache emerged from the ger.
“Welcome,” he said. “Admiring the vehicle? Quite something, isn’t it? Red like the blood of the sun, burly as an ox, runs like a camel in heat. I hate to sell it, but my cousin’s house burned down and I want to help him out.” He hitched up his trousers and then reached in his back pocket for a small blue book. “Make me an offer, in dollars.”
He waved the book at us.
“We can’t pay,” my uncle said.
“No funds?”
“Plenty of funds. But it’s ours, we own it, and where I come from, you don’t buy back from crooks what you already own.”
The man smiled. “If it’s yours, why is it sitting in my field?”
“You said it was in heat?” My uncle smiled back. “Maybe it was attracted to something in your person.”
“Good way to die, talking like that,” the man replied evenly. He returned the little blue book to his pocket. He didn’t seem to be armed, but there was no sense standing around to find out.
I showed the man the keys. “We’re going to get in the car and drive away. I’m betting you don’t want any trouble. Find yourself another car to sell illegally.”
“You have the keys, good for you. Bet you wish you had the spark plugs, too. What will you give me for them?”
“This car doesn’t need spark plugs. It’s diesel.”
“You don’t say.” He frowned. “In that case, take it off my property. Diesel attracts a lot of the wrong sort of people.” He stared at my uncle, nodded at me, and disappeared back into the ger.
Once we had maneuvered through the early morning traffic and were out of the city again, I turned to my uncle, “You know where we’re going?”
“This road is fine. Don’t turn off onto one of those dirt paths. We’ll be in Ondorkhaan before dinner. Maybe before lunch.”
“Where we will be doing what?”
“The name of the town means nothing to you?”
“Should it?”
“Hell of an education system you have in China.”
“Yours is superior, I take it.”
“It leaves inquiring minds. That’s a plus, I’d say.”
“My mind is inquiring, which is how we got into this conversation. I enquired what we’d be doing in the town of Ondorkhaan.”
“It’s near where Lin Piao’s plane supposedly crashed.”
I nearly drove us off the road. “You’re investigating Lin Piao’s plane crash? That was 1971!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just remarking on the irony. A town in the middle of nowhere, site of one of the most fateful assassinations in recent history, and that is where we are headed to stop an assassination of possibly similar import, if lesser profile.”
“First of all, Lin Piao wasn’t assassinated, his plane went down. Sometimes planes do that. The KGB investigated and said there was no evidence of foul play.”
“Good for the KGB. You believe those lying thugs?”
“It was a long time ago, uncle. Lin Piao had to leave in a hurry, before Mao got to him. Maybe the plane hadn’t been serviced right; maybe the fuel hadn’t been topped off.”
“Just dropped out of the sky, did it?”
“That’s not why we’re on this road. We’re not going to see a doctor; we’re not going to visit a clinic. This has to do with Madame Fang and whoever came to Mongolia with her.”
“No, you’re wrong. We are going to see a doctor.”
“About an assassination?”
“I have a theory, nephew, and I’ll need your help once we get there. We’ll have plenty of time to go over the details while we sit in the doctor’s waiting room.”
“I ought to turn this car around and go back to Ulan Bator.”
“But you won’t.”
3
The drive was along a two-lane highway through mostly flat countryside. In the distance were windswept hills that never seemed to change; if it hadn’t been for the bumps and ruts, we might have thought we were standing still. It was not the sort of drive you want to take on one hour’s sleep. The land was dry, and the sky—need I mention—was enormously blue. I waited for my uncle’s inevitable comments.
“I’ve seen enough sky for a lifetime,” he said at last. “It’s unnatural. It may even be dangerous. With this much sky overhead, who can say it won’t just fall down and flatten us at any moment. Maybe that’s why this damned place is so flat, maybe it’s happened once before. Don’t stop moving, that’s probably the only thing that keeps us safe.”
“Listen, this was your idea, driving all the way out here. You’re worried the sky is going to fall on us? I can make a U-turn right here; you won’t hear any complaints from me. I should have done it an hour ago.”
My uncle was not about to be shaken off his focus. “Did you hear that girl singing the other night outside our hotel window? Talk about melancholic! This is where it comes from, all this emptiness.” He waved his hand out the open window. “These people must be lonely from the moment they’re born.”
“They don’t strike me as melancholic at all. They’re actually very good-looking and optimistic, I’d say. The girls especially. They have an independent stride, like a high-strung pony, nothing mincing about it.”
“Pah! Next you’ll insist this isn’t empty countryside. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a wormhole to the Universal Vacancy. It’s not even in
the middle of nowhere. To be in the middle of nowhere, nowhere has to be a place. This is not a place. It’s nothing.” He put his head out the window and looked at the sky for a few minutes as the wind blew against his face. “If I knew a melancholy song, I’d sing it right now,” he said and pulled his head back inside. He tilted the seat back slightly. “Wake me when we’re there, if there is a there there.”
4
“May I help you?” The nurse had on a pale green uniform. Her hair was short, dyed light brown. When she stood up from behind her desk, she was square, broad shouldered, maybe eighty kilos, though nothing fat about her. She was more like one of the huge boulders that lay scattered at the base of the hills we’d passed kilometer after kilometer during the long drive.
“Is the doctor in?” My uncle spoke to her in Russian. It surprised me when she answered in the same language.
“He’s out. He’ll be back by three o’clock. That’s when he sees patients. Would you like to wait?”
“Sure, we’ll wait.” My uncle took out his wallet. “How much is it to wait per hour?”
The nurse avoided his eyes. “It depends.”
“I need to walk around while I wait. That way my back doesn’t get bad. It’s why I’m here, my back. So if I wait and walk, that’s good therapy.” He pointed to the doorway behind her desk. “Walk into one room, walk into another room. Gives me a chance to stretch. Always a good idea to keep moving.” He pulled out fifty dollars and put it on the edge of her desk. “Good for a couple of hours?”
“Make sure you’ve walked back to this room by ten minutes to three.” She sat down and started going through a pile of charts on her desk. “Fifty gets you very little hereabouts.” The fifty-dollar bill seemed to walk by itself to her right hand. “Seeing as you are a stranger, you get a break, but only once. Don’t forget, ten minutes to three, make sure you’re sitting here.” She looked at me. “You got a bad back, too? Or another type of complaint?”
“Me? I’m fine. I’m just the old man’s driver.”
“Then go wait in the car. This room is for people who need to see the doctor.”
“I could stand to have my blood pressure checked. It goes up when I’m around bossy people.”
She smiled. It rearranged her features but not in the most flattering way. “How come a nice Chinese boy like yourself is all the way out here in this lonely place?”
“I told you, I’m a driver.”
“No, you’re not a driver.”
“Is that so?”
“Your left arm isn’t sunburned. All the drivers stick their left arm out the window on long trips. You’re a cop of some sort. He is, too. I can always tell.”
“Maybe I’m a Japanese driver. Right-side drive.”
She glanced at my right arm. “No sale.”
“In that case, maybe you can tell me why I’m here. The old man says that there was a plane crash nearby.”
“News to me. We had two motorcycles collide on the main highway near here a few days ago. It was a big mess. Last year in January a truck ran off the road during an ice storm. No one could get to it for weeks. You talking something recent?”
“Forty, forty-five years ago.”
“Forty-five years, and you’re only now getting to it? You must drive extra slow.”
“How come a smart woman like you is stuck in a lonely place like this?”
“The doctor needs a nurse to run his clinic. There isn’t much else around for the people when they get sick. Or lonely. It’s usually slow this time of year, but it gets busy in late summer.”
I began to wonder what my uncle was doing in the back room. “What sort of people do you get in here?”
“Normal people. Herders with sprains, children with fevers, a few TB cases.”
“Gunshots?”
“Not since I’ve been here. People aren’t all that angry, and they know how to handle weapons. The men go out hunting wolves in the mountains once in a while. The worst that happens is one of them slips on the ice and breaks his wrist.”
“Nurse!” It was my uncle from somewhere inside the treatment area. I took off in that direction, but the nurse was quicker and blocked my way.
“Sorry, we have rules.”
I slipped around her. “So do I.”
My uncle’s voice came out of one of the rooms again. “Nurse!”
I followed the sound down the hall. The first room I passed had two women in it. One of them, sitting up and covering herself with a blanket, looked at me fearfully. The other seemed too sick to care. She raised her head slightly, then fell back. My uncle was in the next room, standing beside a bed on which a man lay, writhing. It was dark—no lights, and a heavy curtain covered the window.
“I think he’s been poisoned.” My uncle whirled around. “Get the nurse in here. Where the hell is she?”
The man seemed to leap up from the bed. He flailed his arms and bent backward so far I thought he would snap his spine. Then he fell heavily onto the bed again and was still.
“Damn,” my uncle said.
“What happened?” The nurse burst into the room. She looked at the man on the bed. “What have you done? Get out!” She put her fingers on the man’s neck to check for a pulse.
“Don’t bother,” my uncle said. He turned to me. “Your fish won’t make it home.”
The nurse whirled around. “What fish? This patient was perfectly fine. Not a thing wrong with him. Now look. What did you do?”
“Me?” My uncle was calm. “He wanted some water, so I gave him a glass from that pitcher.” He pointed. “Who else has been in here?”
“Get into the waiting room and don’t leave,” said the nurse. “I’m calling the doctor.”
“Maybe you’d better call the police,” my uncle said.
“I’ll handle things.” The nurse picked up the water pitcher and dumped the water down the small sink beside the door. “Do as I say.”
My uncle motioned for me to come with him. He sat down in the waiting room. I remained standing. “Let’s not wait around,” I said.
“And do what? Make a run for it? Bad idea. She’s not going to call the police.”
“How do you know that?”
“Blue Sparrow. Besides, she poured the contents of the pitcher down the sink. The police won’t like that. She’s calling the doctor right now. Didn’t I tell you? The vice minister called his political officer.”
“You mentioned a fish.”
“Yes, he was waiting here for us. He said he knew where the seal was, and that he’d be more specific once he was sure you’d protect him.”
“What was he doing here?”
“Pretty out-of-the-way place. He must have figured it was safe hiding right under their noses.”
“Under whose noses?”
“The North Koreans, who else? This is a North Korean clinic. The doctor is North Korean, part of a health agreement Pyongyang has with Ulan Bator. These clinics practice traditional medicine. People like it better than the modern stuff, mostly because they think it works.”
“I guess it wasn’t as safe as he thought.”
“We all make mistakes, though they’re usually not as fatal as his was. You think he misjudged all on his own?”
For once I was not just with my uncle, I was way ahead of him. “Someone lured him here. Rat takes the cheese. You think the doctor knew?”
“If he didn’t, the nurse seemed to.”
“She let you back there. We walked right into it.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she meant for me to keep him safe until the doctor showed up, and we figured out some way to get him out of here.”
“Didn’t he say anything else about the seal?”
My uncle did something I’d never heard him do. He groaned slightly. “lt was like a script from a bad movie. He said he knew where the seal was. He started to say something else, then his throat went dry and he pointed at the pitcher of water.”
“Why’d she pour out that pitcher right away?”
“You tell me.”
“Let’s go back and check his things. He must have brought some files with him to make himself more valuable.”
“Don’t bother. They won’t be in the room. He was too nervous. I think he had the feeling he was right on the edge of disaster.”
“So which was it, did he think it was safe here, or did he think it wasn’t safe?”
My uncle gave that some thought. “Maybe he figured it was safe until he saw something that changed his mind.”
It wasn’t a bad thought, so I followed it. “What if he saw someone he knew, someone he didn’t want to see?”
“Could be. Or maybe something that didn’t fit. He got agitated when I walked in, but he relaxed a little when he saw it was me.”
“How’d you know he’d be here?”
My uncle shook his head. “Not important.”
“Not to you, maybe, but it is to me. It was Madame Fang, wasn’t it? She brought him here.”
“At the moment, we don’t need to worry how he got here. We need to find what he carried with him. If he had files when he showed up on my side of the river, he’ll have taken files with him when he swam back. We’ll ask the doctor when he arrives.”
“The doctor? You said he was North Korean!”
“What is that supposed to mean? You think his heart doesn’t beat exactly like yours?”
“I wasn’t implying anything. I’m half Korean, you seem to forget.”
“No, I don’t forget. Sometimes I just don’t know where it’s hidden. Do you?”
Insanity! No matter where we were, no matter what was going on, the slightest spark could ignite this blaze. “Why are you always irrational on this point? I am who I am. Nothing is hidden.”
His lips tightened into a straight line, turned down at each corner. “I won’t raise it again.”
“Yes you will. You’ll keep at it forever and then some. I can’t help it if I have a drop of Chinese blood in me. In fact, I’m proud of it.”
My uncle looked away. He seemed drained. It was my fault; there was no need to have said that. We sat in the worst sort of silence for a few minutes. It was too much for me, so I broke it. “What now?”
