The Outcast

by Michael Walters

  “So what happened?”

  “Not much. We turned him over. Someone gave him artificial respiration. We’d placed him under arrest, but I don’t think he was conscious enough to know that.”

  “You got him medical treatment?” Doripalam prompted, hoping that the answer was going to be in the affirmative.

  To his relief, the officer nodded. “We’d called for some ambulances, along with the fire support. One of them turned up in the middle of all this. So he must have been put on to it, I suppose.”

  “You saw him put into the ambulance?”

  The officer blinked. “Yes, I think so.” He stopped. “There were a couple of uniformed officers with him. I’m not sure, exactly. It was all a bit chaotic.”

  “It sounds it,” Doripalam said. “So where do you think he was taken?”

  “To the city hospital, presumably,” the policeman said. “I mean, where else?”

  “Where else,” Doripalam repeated, tonelessly. “And some of your people—these officers—they went with him?”

  There was a longer pause this time. “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “Two officers went with him. Two uniforms. I suppose the chief must have told them to … yes, the chief must have told them to.”

  “The chief was overseeing all this?”

  The officer clearly suspected he was being led into some sort of trap to incriminate his boss. “No, not exactly. He was behind us. I think he got there a few minutes later.”

  “While this man was still there?”

  A pause. “No. He’d gone. I didn’t see him after the chief arrived. Didn’t really think about him, to be honest. Assumed he was being dealt with, I suppose.”

  “Lucky for your chief that you didn’t manage to shoot this guy,” Doripalam pointed out. “Given that he wasn’t even there to take command. So who were these officers who went off in the ambulance.”

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t recognise them.”

  “But they were from your division?”

  “I don’t—” He frowned, as if suddenly making a mental connection. “There was no one else here. Not till you arrived. So no they weren’t. Part of our division, I mean. I hadn’t seen them before. I thought—”

  “You thought what?” Doripalam glanced behind him, trying to read Batzorig’s expression.

  “Well, I don’t know. It was dark, there was a lot of smoke. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Maybe some backup had arrived from another division.”

  “Had you called for backup?”

  “Not as far as I knew. But the chief might have, without telling us.”

  “But there isn’t any backup here? No one else you don’t know.”

  The officer shook his head. “No, there’s nobody else. Just us.”

  “So who took this man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Doripalam looked past the officer towards Batzorig, who was staring back at him, his expression neutral. “I’ll get a call back to HQ,” Batzorig said. “Get them to check the hospitals. See who’s been brought in.”

  Doripalam nodded. “And tell them to get hold of this guy’s bloody chief. Tell him to get his backside into our offices. Immediately, if he doesn’t want to be disciplined.” He turned back to the officer, who was listening to all this with evident interest. “What about the gun?”

  “Gun?”

  “The gun. You said he dropped it. Where is it?”

  “It—I think someone took it. Bagged it up as evidence. It was all done by the book.” There was a note of pleading in his voice now, as he recognised that there was something serious behind all of this. “But, well, I’m not sure.”

  Doripalam turned to look at him. “You’re not sure what?” Batzorig had already moved away and Doripalam could hear him talking on his cell phone, liaising with his counterparts back at HQ.

  “Well, I’m not sure how much it really matters, sir. The gun, I mean.” He hesitated, clearly unsure now about the significance of anything he might say. “It’s just that—well, we had a look at it before it was bagged up. And—well, it wasn’t real.”

  Doripalam stared at him. “What do you mean it wasn’t real?”

  “Just that, sir. It looked pretty convincing, but it wasn’t.” He looked back at Doripalam, as if trying to find the means to convey a complicated idea, then he went on, “It was just a replica.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was nearly dawn by the time Nergui left the hospital. To the east, the clear sky was lightening, shading to a deep rose pink in the minutes before the sun appeared. It was set to be another hot day. The unchanging weather was beginning to wear Nergui down—day after day of unfamiliar heat. Hotter than the average summer this far north, and without the familiar relief of the breezes from the mountains.

  He wasn’t built for this. He felt much more comfortable in the winter, even in this country’s frozen depths. That was his natural habitat, wrapped up, sheltered, watchful. The world slowed down to its essence.

  He scraped together the necessary handful of tugruks and grabbed a coffee from a machine in the hospital lobby. As he sipped the scalding drink, he stared down the empty street towards the central square. The skyline was altering. You hardly noticed as each day passed, but the centre was unrecognisable from even a few years before. There had been a time when the angular monolith of the Chinnghis Khan Hotel had stood out, a unique edifice in a low-rise city. But now it was surrounded by a growing number of equally striking tower blocks, dotted with the neon of Western brand names. The horizon was littered with tall cranes, a visible manifestation of the investment pouring into the country.

  He had no great problem with that. Things were lost, things were gained. Some of the losses he mourned, some he celebrated. Some of the gains he regretted, some he welcomed. It was how things were.

  He made his way slowly down the steps, wondering whether he was wise to leave Tunjin in the hospital ward. He had left the sleeping figure in the charge of two trusted agents, with Lambaa and another agent on their way to relieve them for the morning shift. Even as things stood, all this resource was being deployed to no clear purpose, and many in the ministry team no doubt already thought Nergui eccentric. But he knew his track record spoke for itself.

  There was little he could do now at the hospital, and he couldn’t ignore Sarangarel’s summons. He had to take seriously anything that might affect the minister. And even if the matter had not involved the minister—well, he told himself that he would have responded in the same way to any call from Sarangarel. He did not want to think too deeply about whether or not that was really true.

  He was almost back at Sukh Bataar Square, and the first red rays of the sun were appearing between the clusters of surrounding buildings. His car was still in the parking lot behind the ministry where he had left it the previous evening. He stopped for a moment in the centre of the deserted square, gazing at the imposing blocks of the new memorial, the government buildings, the towering statue of the great leader. Not for the first time, he wondered quite what Genghis would have made of this modern nation.

  He bounded up the steps of the government building, heading towards the ministry block. And that brought him suddenly back to the object of his journey. Bakei’s son. Who had supposedly been arrested in mysterious circumstances. Sarangarel had told him little more on the phone, except that she was with someone who had witnessed the arrest. It was a complicated story, she said, and it would be better if Nergui heard it for himself.

  As he climbed into the car, Nergui heard the first sounds of the birds in the trees surrounding the ministry. There was no other traffic and he cruised uninterrupted up University Street, out to the orbital road designated the Big Ring. Sarangarel’s apartment was relatively close, up in the north of the city in the area near to the US embassy.

  He was unsure how to approach this meeting with Sarangarel. He was even a little nervous about the encounter—and less about the potential subject of their discu
ssion than simply about the prospect of seeing her again. How long was it since he had last seen her? Six, seven months? Probably longer.

  At one stage, Nergui had thought that their relationship might develop into something more serious. But that had come to an abrupt end after what had happened with Muunokhoi. It had been a combination of factors, Nergui supposed. His own confidence had been shaken, even though it was hardly his first experience of that kind. Sarangarel had been shattered by the events, and had felt that her own conduct had been far from impeccable. Even if that were true, Nergui—ever the pragmatist—felt she applied standards to herself that could not reasonably be expected of any human being.

  Whatever the reasons, she had resigned her judicial role and returned to private practice as a lawyer. She had initially rejoined her old firm, but had subsequently moved on to one of the US-owned practices that were increasingly opening branches in the city. She was clearly doing well enough. Nergui had not visited her new apartment, but the address was in one of the more upmarket areas of the city, in a block largely occupied by foreign diplomatic staff and other visitors with access to Western currencies.

  The apartment block was a striking, newly constructed building, with rows of shaded glass windows giving on to views of parkland and the mountains in the far distance. It was a long way from the squalid state apartment where he had first encountered Sarangarel many years before.

  He pulled his car into the curb and parked outside the main entrance. He realised that, consciously or not, his thoughts about Sarangarel had been a distraction from the real focus of his visit here. The minister’s son.

  Nergui had met Bakei’s son only once, as far as he could remember, and his superficial impressions had not been positive. The encounter had been at some ministerial reception, two or three years before. The son—Nergui was struggling to recall his name—had been in his early twenties, not too long out of university, but confident of his own impending worldly success.

  The confidence was probably not misplaced. The young man had all the qualities that he would expect of the minister’s offspring: a ferocious, if ill-focused, intelligence; boundless self-assurance; and a general disregard for others’ feelings or sensitivities. It was no surprise to discover that the young man had, like his father, ambitions to follow a political career.

  However, it had been more of a surprise to discover that the son’s political aspirations were rather different from his father’s. The minister had been a communist, and was now a reformer, one of those who felt that the only feasible way forward for the country was through the gradual introduction of Western capitalist ways, ideally supported by matching Western capitalist investment.

  But that wasn’t how the son saw things. Nergui remembered the young man holding court at the reception, surrounded by listeners who, individually and collectively, had a breadth and depth of political experience far beyond that possessed by the callow graduate. Somehow the young man had held their attention and his words had been greeted with evident respect.

  There was nothing new about the words themselves. Nergui had heard the same sentiments from drunken bar-room philosophers and street-corner demagogues, as well as from the far-right politicians who appeared, garnering some public support, at every election. In Nergui’s view, it was all based on the most irresponsible kind of political delusion, the belief that it was possible to recreate a unique grandeur and glory from eight centuries before. Of course, this prospect was attractive to those struggling to eke out an existence in the face of economic privation and the unrelenting demands of a pitiless climate. It was attractive to those who had seen their homes and livelihoods destroyed, or who had found that the challenges of freedom were even greater than the penalties of oppression.

  It was just a dream. And Nergui believed that any serious attempt to pursue that dream would lead the country back into the dark ages—back into subordination to one of its larger neighbours or into the economic and political chaos that now seemed endemic in many of the former Soviet satellites.

  Young men were prone to dreaming, and the legacy of the Mongol empire—the power that conquered and ruled much of the known world—was a suitably romantic one. Above all, Nergui could easily understand how the young man would have rejected his father’s utterly unromantic cautious pragmatism.

  It was clear that the son was no less ambitious than the father. The difference was that—as he had declared to the admiring crowd—he did not expect to further these ambitions through the tedious conventional routes that his father had followed. He didn’t see himself scrambling up the greasy pole of party politics, or serving his political apprenticeship by paying sycophantic homage to those of less ability or talent. He didn’t see himself paying his dues listening to endless tiresome speeches in the Great Hural.

  He would by-pass all that. He would communicate directly with the people. That was the future of politics. Not today’s endless bureaucracy, the pointless time-serving, the futile passing of worthless laws that made no difference to anyone. That wasn’t how the empire had been built.

  No, Nergui had thought at the time, the empire had been built through murder and pillage and genocide and oppression. And, at the other end of the political spectrum, that was also how the Soviet empire had been built and sustained. Nergui knew more than enough about how that had worked. That was the problem with populism—perhaps it really was how change was achieved, but it transmuted all too quickly into tyranny and totalitarianism. The last two decades had confirmed to Nergui that, for all its faults, there was a lot to be said for the tedium of democracy.

  He had said none of that at the time, of course. He had simply watched with reluctant admiration as the boy had dominated a prestigious gathering with a string of platitudes and his own natural charisma. The young man will go far, Nergui had thought, though he was unsure about the likely direction of travel.

  The minister spoke of him from time to time, largely in tones of condescending amusement. Though their respective politics, and indeed their personalities, differed markedly, Nergui had the impression that the father and son remained fond of each other, if only from a cautious distance.

  Since then the son had followed a more activist political route, and had been involved in a number of protest movements—against government policy, against foreign investment, against the Russians or the Chinese or the Americans. Some of these protests had made an impact—in at least one case helping opposition parties to block legislation aimed at loosening restrictions on the movement of foreign capital into the country. But most were little more than short-lived publicity stunts, at best gaining a midpage headline in some of the private newspapers.

  Nergui had half-expected that at some point he would have to intervene to protect the minister’s reputation in the face of some half-baked antic of his son’s. There was, after all, some potential embarrassment in the minister’s offspring adopting such a defiantly anti-government stance. But nothing ever really arose. The son’s profile had not yet risen sufficiently to appear on the radar of the authorities—or even of the opposition parties.

  At least until now. Perhaps that moment had finally arrived. If so, it might prove to be the worst possible time.

  He climbed out of the car and walked across to the apartment-block entrance. The sun was over the horizon by now, throwing Nergui’s shadow the length of the deserted street. The distant mountains were glowing with the dawn, the summits sharp against the pearl of the northern sky.

  Odbayar, it suddenly came to him as he approached the entrance. That was the son’s name. Odbayar.

  *

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Doripalam demanded. “I mean, will somebody tell me?”

  Batzorig was sitting next to him in the back seat of the police car heading back towards HQ. “I couldn’t even offer a wild guess, sir.”

  Doripalam gazed at him for a moment, as if suspecting some irony. “We have an apparent bombing, we have a dead body—”

  “Two dea
d bodies, sir. Don’t forget the museum.”

  “Oh, yes, thanks for reminding me, Batzorig. It had entirely slipped my mind.” His own irony was, as always, inescapable. “Two dead bodies. One of them beaten to death inside a carpet. Let’s not forget that.”

  “No, sir,” Batzorig murmured.

  “And we have some bloody local police chief waving weaponry around as if he was in the wild west.”

  “Rather than the wild east.”

  “Quite. And then they manage to nearly shoot somebody who is half-dead from asphyxiation anyway—”

  “He was waving a gun around,” Batzorig prompted.

  “A replica gun,” Doripalam said. “And on top of all that, they manage to lose the man in question.”

  “We don’t know that for sure, sir.”

  “You called the hospital,” Doripalam pointed out. “What did they say?”

  “They said they had no record of anyone being brought in who met that description. But you know how reliable they are, sir.”

  It was true enough. The hospital was never a good source of information on anything that had happened recently—usually meaning within the last two or three days. Doripalam had never worked out the reasons. Perhaps the medics didn’t communicate with the administrators, or vice versa. Or perhaps they were slow in getting their records up to date. Or more likely they just didn’t like releasing information, even to the police, until they were compelled to. Doripalam had lost count of the times that the hospital had denied all knowledge of some patient who subsequently turned out to be sitting up cheerfully on one of the wards. It had even happened, briefly, with Tunjin, the previous afternoon. Which, Doripalam thought, took them back to where they’d started. “And then there’s the question of what happened with Tunjin.”

  Batzorig nodded. “If this was a bombing, then that means that the incident in the square—”

  “Might have been exactly what we feared it was. The start of something bigger.”

  “But I thought—”

  “You thought right,” Doripalam said. “For once the grapevine’s telling the truth. It wasn’t a real bomb yesterday. It was just—”