A Drop of Chinese Blood

by James Church

  “I never realized how exciting it was around here,” he said. “Plenty to do.” He looked over at us. “Your trip was good? I wish you wouldn’t launch out of town without informing me. It burns a hell of a lot of gasoline.”

  “We haven’t met.” My uncle put out his hand. “You must be Batbayaar. I figured you’d come by at some point. Might be a good idea if we went out for a drink and a chat. Plenty of good places to go. A nice Irish bar around the corner not far from here, maybe you know it.”

  Batbayaar stood up and shook hands. “A pleasure, Inspector. We have things to discuss.” He turned to me. “You must have business to attend to, threads to tidy up, that sort of thing. Try not to lose Bazar this time. You never lived on a farm, did you?”

  “No, why?”

  “You don’t know the right way to put on a harness. That’s got some people mad at you, and I don’t want the disagreement to go any further, not around here anyway. If you have scores to settle, take them across the border.” He smiled, though it was that grim sort of smile, like a mounted archer reaching for his best barbed arrowhead. “Don’t test me on this, and don’t bother waving your passport in front of me. I’m not impressed.”

  “I can’t wave it at you. You never gave it back.”

  “Oh?” Batbayaar reached into his breast pocket and came out with my passport. He threw it on the bed. “Must have slipped my mind. You have twenty-four hours to leave. That’s already been entered in the system. I’d suggest you not think about an overland route. You definitely don’t want to go through Ondorkhaan again. Such a long ride with so many empty stretches.”

  “The airport?”

  “Exactly what I had in mind.”

  “What if I said I had a few things I needed to do and it would take me a couple of extra days to do them.”

  Batbayaar gave me a doleful look. “Tell it to the wind.”

  “For the record, are you forcibly deporting me? Declaring me persona non grata? Only hours before my prime minister arrives? How do you think that will look?”

  “I don’t throw people out of the country, if that’s what you mean. I’m inviting you to catch a plane. Actually, I don’t give a camel’s ass how it looks. Image is not at the top of my list of concerns at the moment.”

  “We’ll see about that. All right, twenty-four hours.” I looked at my watch. “I’ve got plenty to wrap up before that, and I’m not going to duckwalk just so Bazar can keep up. If he wants to follow me, then he’ll have to pick up the pace. Oh, and say good-bye to Tuya, will you?”

  “If I see her before you leave, I will. She’s on assignment. Hell of an asset.”

  My uncle was waiting impatiently at the door. “Pity,” he said. “Such a lovely country. I was just getting used to it. I even thought of going for a few throat-singing lessons. Maybe on the next trip.”

  As they walked down the hall together, I heard my uncle say, “You shouldn’t be too hard on him; he’s only part Chinese.”

  2

  Getting two tickets on the next day’s afternoon flight wasn’t easy, but Batbayaar must have had a lot of pull because after the reservation clerk put us on hold for a long while, she came back with the news that a couple from Australia had canceled and we could have their seats. At the airport, my uncle waltzed through the immigration check; I was held at the desk for nearly forty minutes while they examined my passport, made several phone calls, and stood around uncomfortably waiting for instructions.

  “I’ve got to board the plane,” I said at last, pointing down the passageway to the departure gates. “The whole idea is for you to kick me out, not hold me here. You’re not sticking to the script.”

  “Try not to interrupt,” said one of the immigration officials. “We can’t stamp your passport until the final checks come through, and nothing is moving. Relax, we’ll get you out of here one way or another.”

  “I work with your Special Service. Does the name Batbayaar mean anything to you?” It obviously didn’t. “What about Tuya?” One man smiled to himself. He was my target. “You know her?”

  “She came through my line once. No one ever handed me a passport like that before, I’ll tell you that. You a friend of hers?”

  “You might say.”

  “OK.” He stamped the passport. “Don’t show your nose around here again. That’s friendly advice.”

  My uncle was in the passenger waiting area, thumbing through a small book. He held it up for me to see. “Instructions on how to build a ger,” he said. “Very interesting. Maybe I’ll try when I get home.”

  “You going home?”

  “Sooner or later. I might have to wait a few centuries for your little confrontation with the North Koreans to blow over.”

  “Batbayaar told you.”

  “He held back a lot of detail, but he said that after Bazar told him about the man with the bad hand he got so mad that he thought of wrapping you in a blanket and letting horses loose to trample it. Fortunately for you, some woman named Tuya changed his mind.”

  “He was angry.”

  “Furious.”

  “I thought he didn’t like North Korean squads roaming around his kingdom annoying people.”

  “He’s not fond of them, no. Organized intrusions on his territory rub him the wrong way, but he doesn’t have anything against North Koreans as individuals. He prefers them to Chinese, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m not reacting, if you’ll notice.”

  “North Koreans and Mongolians are a lot alike, though since they’re deemed to be underfoot, the illustrious dragon throne in Beijing doesn’t notice such things. A shared danger of being squashed by the Middle Kingdom tends to bring out shared traits. We had an interesting chat about that, that and a few other things.”

  “Should I ask about what? Or do I just dismiss it as the mice squeaking among themselves?”

  “He had a few observations about that Kazakh woman in the Irish bar.”

  “Like maybe she is a congenital liar and a drunk.”

  “No, actually she is a PhD in mining engineering, a devotee of the English operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and a successful collector of weak-willed men.”

  “Then it’s lucky we got out of there when we did. I’m going to the little bookstore to pick something up, a memento from the trip. That book on how to build a ger looks useful, since my house probably won’t be there anymore. I wonder if Miss Du’s cousin took your tools or if he just smashed them along with everything else.”

  “You worry too much. Go buy a postcard or something.”

  I was in the bookstore, browsing through the picture books, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I tensed.

  “Calmati, Inspector. It’s only me.”

  “I don’t know Italian,” I said, “but I hope that means we’re going to run away together to a cabin in the Swiss Alps.” I caught myself. “No, not the Swiss Alps. The Italian Alps. Can you cook? Never mind. Food is irrelevant.” I turned around.

  “Very nice to see you,” Tuya said. “I hurried over here to say good-bye. My boss was angry when he found out about what happened in that shed. You OK?” She was standing naturally, all limbs properly arrayed.

  “Fine,” I said. “Too bad I have to leave in a hurry like this. I was hoping we’d have a chance for a cup of salty tea or something.” I wondered if I could fold her up and put her in my carry-on bag.

  “I can’t stay; I have to get back to the office. Nice thought about the cabin, though. Maybe I’ll call you sometime. Or you can call me.”

  “I don’t have your number.”

  She put something in my hand. “Now you do.” She pulled a book from the shelf. “This one is nice. It will help you remember.”

  “You going to roll out of here?”

  She smiled. “I think I’ll walk. Good-bye, Major. Take care of yourself.”

  When I got back to where my uncle was sitting, he was sketching on a small piece of paper. “It’s a collapsible bookshelf for a ger. See how broaden
ing travel is?”

  “We’re boarding,” I said. “You want the window seat?”

  3

  My uncle was tense and distracted until we took off. “These things…” He indicated the airplane. “Very ungainly looking until they leave the ground. I hope they’ve done the math right on flight.”

  “Put your seat back and relax. There’s nothing we can do about it now.” I figured I’d make conversation for a few minutes until the sound of the engines calmed him down. “What was the story about that Kazakh woman’s missing mother?”

  “A tale she tells strangers on whom she has set her sights, according to Batbayaar. She got that locket she pulls from her blouse from an itinerant vendor near a place called Tsambagarav Mountain where her people live. Maybe it’s in that book you bought at the airport. They train eagles, which goes a way toward explaining the looks those men gave us.”

  “We’re supposed to think she didn’t know anything about the seal?”

  “That’s what I wondered. Batbayaar’s view was that she probably did know something. She and the doctor’s nurse are related in some obscure and distant way. They both work, off and on, for the South Koreans, who, as I told you, are nosing around for investment opportunities.”

  “What? Batbayaar told me she was part of a Kazakh intelligence team.”

  “That, too. And, for a while, they were apparently both working for someone Batbayaar could identify only as ‘K.’” My uncle closed the window shade. “You wouldn’t know who that was, I don’t suppose.”

  “Are we still in Mongolian airspace?”

  “Funny, that’s the same question Lin Piao asked.”

  “Never mind Lin Piao. What about that bottle of pills the doctor gave you? Have you opened them yet?”

  “They’re in my suitcase.”

  “They’re where? Your suitcase went into checked baggage. We’ll probably never see it or that bottle of pills again. I told you, there was something funny about them.”

  “Maybe one or two.” He looked around. “Where are the exits on this plane? Is there one up front? I don’t like the thought of having to crawl backward in an emergency.”

  “We’re not going to fall out of the sky, don’t worry.” I thought it over. “So, Mr. Naranbaatar didn’t die of natural causes after all.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The nurse?”

  “You can speculate; I’m not going to bother at this altitude. What’s clear is that your predecessor didn’t have much luck under the cloak of Naranbaatar, that he had a lot of people hoping he would drop dead, and that there was no way he was going to get home.”

  “You don’t care who killed him?”

  “There were a hundred arrows in the air at the same time, all aimed at him. It really doesn’t make much difference which one actually hit a vital spot.”

  “Maybe not, but maybe if we knew it would tell us where the seal is. We still have to worry about the seal, you know. You said Batbayaar told you the nurse and the Kazakh woman are related. The Kazakh woman said she knew something about the seal. I’d say she knew because the nurse told her.”

  “Reasonable, but the South Koreans could have mentioned it to them. Seoul seems to have had some inkling about the seal. There is probably a need to put it under a microscope to see if it is really counterfeit and, if so, who dropped it into their carry-bag on the way to Ulan Bator last month.”

  “The list can’t be infinitely long. Who had motive? Who had expertise to forge a government seal? Who had access to the prime minister’s official baggage?”

  “I know a fish who had the answer to all of those questions.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “As a doorknob.” My uncle raised his window shade again and looked out at the featureless landscape below. “Next time we’re here I want to go to that statue we passed, and then to the mountains out west.” He pulled a postcard from his pocket and waved it at me. “A lot of interesting trees there.”

  PART III

  Chapter One

  My first day back at work, no one would look me in the eye. Li Bo-ting seemed especially out of sorts. He didn’t come to my office to say hello. There wasn’t even the standard short memo from him on the desk welcoming me back. When I called him to ask for the past several days of daily logs in order to catch up on what had happened in my absence, Li paused and then said they weren’t available.

  “Not available? Where are they, getting their nails done? I’d like to see the logs, Bo-ting, now. If they’re not up-to-date, don’t worry. Just bring them over. And tell Mrs. Zhou to bring in some tea.” Mrs. Zhou responded more favorably to Li Bo-ting than she did to me.

  There was another pause, this one definitely more uncomfortable than the first.

  “Li? You there?”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting something to eat. Why don’t we meet in five minutes out front?”

  As a rule, there’s no sense barking at people, least of all my deputy. “Fine, I’ll look at the logs when I get back. Where is the new man, Jang, by the way? He wasn’t at the duty desk when I came in. He’s supposed to be here by 7:00 A.M., or is he doing his nails, too?”

  “See you in five minutes.”

  Li was always efficient, and sometimes brisk, but he was rarely this abrupt. Whatever was bothering him wasn’t trivial. I thought longingly of Tuya’s ability to get out of tight spots. The phone rang, and for an instant I hoped by some miracle it might be Tuya.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “You made it back, I see.” The sultry voice of Madame Fang reached out and caressed my right ear.

  “I did, and I’m glad to be home.” I would have been less surprised if it had been Tuya. “Can I be of service?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  I looked up at the clock behind my desk, with the junction box and all its special connections. This was a conversation I didn’t need recorded. “I’m about to leave for an appointment. If there’s something you need to discuss, maybe we can meet later today. You want to come in here?” I knew she wouldn’t.

  Throaty laughter over a phone is never appealing, but hers managed to break the mold.

  “In that case,” I said, “let’s meet somewhere else.”

  “Two o’clock,” she purred. “Should I bet that you won’t be on time?”

  “Don’t bother.” I hung up.

  It would have been smarter to tell her to get lost. Meeting Fang Mei-lin at Gao’s place, which was the only thing she could have meant by asking about making a “bet,” was a very bad idea no matter which way I looked at it. What was she doing calling me, anyway? Her links were with my uncle. If she wanted to see him, why didn’t she go over and knock on his door? She’d been there before.

  Li Bo-ting threw away a cigarette as I came out the door. He rarely smoked, so if I hadn’t already known he was nervous, the cigarette would have told me.

  “Not good for you, Bo-ting.”

  “Better than a bullet in the back of the head,” he said, but he didn’t laugh. “Come on, just walk for a bit.”

  I figured he wanted a chance to think, so I fell in step beside him without another word. After fifteen minutes of turning into alleys, doubling back, and ducking into rear entrances and coming out the side doors of old buildings, I thought it was fair to say something.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “You’ll see. Getting tired?”

  “I’m right beside you, aren’t I?” Only I wasn’t. He had vanished. I stopped to look around. There was a low whistle, and as I turned to locate the source, I saw Li’s head barely above ground level.

  “Stay with me,” he hissed. He had gone down a stairway into what looked to be the basement entrance of an abandoned warehouse. The door was old, but judging from the way it glinted in the sun, the lock had been replaced not long ago. Li found a key in his pocket and motioned me to go ahead of him.

  2

  When I came to, it occurred to me that the Mongolian way of
putting someone down had its advantages. My head was throbbing so hard that my jaw ached, but after I opened my eyes I saw I was much better off than Li. He was lying next to me, with a bullet hole in the back of his head.

  “Too bad about your deputy.”

  The voice rang a bell, but a bell wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the moment. I closed my eyes again and thought about all of my creditors that would never get paid. “Never smart, murdering an MSS officer,” I said quietly in order not to give my headache more noise to feed on.

  “If killing one is bad, imagine what sort of trouble two will cause.”

  That brought forth a low chuckle to my left. To my right, a throat was cleared. If I had to guess, I’d guess there were three of them, but I didn’t really care. It wouldn’t take three of them to pull the trigger if that’s what they wanted to do next.

  “Untie the bastard.” The bell had turned into a gong parading back and forth across the room, reverberating in my skull.

  “What?”

  “I said, untie the bastard. How come I have to repeat things for you all the time? Are you deaf? Maybe we should cut off an ear and show it to the doc.”

  “I heard you fine. You said untie him. I just don’t think it’s such a good idea, that’s all. But you’re the boss.”

  “You bet your tattooed ass I’m the boss. And I’m not kidding about your ear.”

  Out of the haze that was clearing from my vision, I recognized the man standing over me as a member of the noodle shop quartet. “Hey, Wong,” I said feebly. “Long time no see.”

  “Fuck your mother,” he said. He pulled a knife from his belt and cut the terrycloth ties around my wrists. “Get up.”

  “You mind if my head stops spinning first?”

  He kicked my leg. “Yeah, I mind. Get up.”

  “Easy.” The voice across the room stopped driving marlinspikes into my brain. “We’ll deal with him later. Let’s move out. I don’t like it here. Too confining. Reminds me of prison. Go on, help him up.”

  Wong grabbed my collar and yanked me to a standing position. “Don’t even move sideways without my say-so.”