The Outcast

by Michael Walters

  “Which is still a problem for most of our countrymen,” Batzorig said.

  “As you say,” Nergui was unperturbed. “And which was even more of a problem in those days. There were, as I’m sure you’re aware, no homosexuals in the former Soviet Union.” He smiled. “So I am assured, anyway.”

  Batzorig looked as if he was about to speak, but then closed his mouth.

  “We’re not really sure what happened in this case,” Nergui went on. “We later received some information that our academic had propositioned a number of young male students—”

  “But you had him under surveillance?” Batzorig said.

  “To a degree. But we weren’t really interested in his private life.” Nergui gazed impassively at the young man, as if daring him to respond. “That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that there was some apparent falling out between him and one of the young men in question. We don’t know why.”

  “A lover’s tiff?” Batzorig said, sardonically.

  “We don’t know why,” Nergui repeated. “But whatever the cause, the student was killed.”

  There was silence in the room. It was as if a light-hearted anecdote had suddenly been transformed into tragedy.

  “Killed?” Doripalam echoed. “By this … ?”

  Nergui nodded. “Wu Sam. Well, apparently. The circumstances weren’t clear. It may have been manslaughter. I suppose it may even have been an accident. The student’s head was crushed, as if struck with some heavy object.” He paused. “I am not telling this story very well. It was only later that we linked the death to Wu Sam. And by then there were other considerations.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “The student’s body was found up in the north-east; in the area reputed to be the birthplace of Genghis Khan. The local militia received an anonymous tip-off. They sent out a couple of officers and their dogs discovered the body. At first, they assumed he was the victim of an accident—that he had somehow fallen from the path and struck his head. But the head was too badly damaged. It was difficult to see how a blow of sufficient force could have been administered by accident, unless the body had fallen from a greater height than was suggested by the surrounding terrain.” Nergui sounded as if he were quoting from some long-remembered forensic report.

  “So the tip-off came from the killer?” Doripalam said.

  “Maybe. But perhaps just some herdsman who didn’t want to get involved. People usually tried to steer clear of the police in those days.”

  “So what made you connect this death with Wu Sam?” Doripalam asked.

  “Nothing, at first. It took a while even to identify the victim. He had papers with him, an identity card that confirmed he was from the city, but communications were not so good in those days. It was a few days before the locals contacted the city police, and some days after that before he was identified. A university student, son of two low-ranking Party members. No one knew that he had been out of the city. No one had any idea why he was visiting that area, or who might have been with him.”

  “I thought you kept close tabs on everyone in those days,” Doripalam said.

  Nergui shrugged. “Everyone was paranoid, everyone thought they were under surveillance. But the truth was—”

  “That someone could get murdered without you having a clue who’d done it.”

  “Quite so. Whatever the nature of the crime, we assumed that the motive would be trivial. Petty robbery or a brawl. Tunjin was the investigating officer.” Nergui allowed the silence in the kitchen to build. “One of his first cases as a detective. He’d recently joined us from the uniformed team. Very capable, of course. And he made the breakthrough, eventually. He went through the usual routine. Tracking down anyone who knew the victim, anyone who might have known the victim. It took us a long while to reach Wu Sam. Their subject areas were different—the victim was a scientist. Wu Sam had never taught or worked with him. But we received some information that the two men had been seen talking. There was a suggestion that the relationship might have been more than simply an acquaintance.”

  “It hardly sounds like the basis of a robust prosecution,” Doripalam pointed out.

  “It wasn’t,” Nergui agreed. “It was just a lead, the first indication we’d had of anything out of the ordinary.” His eyes flickered momentarily across to Batzorig. “But it was little more than gossip.”

  “But surely you’d have been keeping some sort of track of Wu Sam’s movements?” Doripalam said.

  “Up to a point. But we weren’t that bothered in constraining his travel out of the city, particularly as he’d shown no interest in visiting the areas that might have given us cause for concern, such as the mineral-bearing regions. He’d made a couple of trips, both sponsored by the university and both to areas appropriate to his work—to Karakhorum, for example. As far as we knew, he’d not left the city during the period when the student had been killed.” He smiled. “Which just shows how pitiful our surveillance was. It’s fortunate that our great populace never realised this, or the democratic revolution might have arrived much earlier.”

  “So he did leave the city?” Doripalam asked.

  “So it appeared, yes. Tunjin eventually uncovered a witness—one of the university’s records clerks, someone with an eye for detail—who remembered seeing Wu Sam driving out of the university in the passenger seat of a truck. A truck driven by the student who subsequently became the victim. We identified another student—a family friend of the victim—who had lent him his parents’ truck, supposedly for a weekend trip to the mountains. We found another witness who talked about a friendship between the two men—with some innuendo about how close the friendship might have been. And then we found two more students who claimed to have been propositioned by Wu Sam.”

  “An unreciprocated proposition, presumably?” Batzroig said.

  Nergui shook his head. “I’ve no idea. We were only interested in Wu Sam. We had taken our eye off the ball. We had not taken him seriously as a spy. We had not taken him seriously at all.” He stopped, his eyes staring into the far distance, as though his mind was replaying the events of twenty years before. “Which was a mistake. A serious mistake.”

  “He was the killer?” Doripalam said. “He’d killed the student?”

  “We never knew for sure. The evidence was there, but it was purely circumstantial. He’d been seen leaving the city with the student. It was presumed they’d been together when the student was killed. But it was little more than anecdote. Even the one who’d seen them couldn’t be sure if they were really travelling together, or if they’d just encountered each other leaving the campus. There was no forensic evidence to link them. We didn’t have access to DNA analysis in those days.” He spoke with evident regret. “So we never knew for sure. We interviewed him, but he claimed to have no idea what we were talking about. We couldn’t prove otherwise.”

  “But you were sure?” Doripalam said. It was the curse of the policeman’s life. The instances when you knew—you knew with absolute certainty—who the perpetrator was, but lacked the evidence to substantiate it.

  Nergui shook his head. “I can’t even say that. But all of that was superseded in any case.”

  “Superseded?” Doripalam repeated. It was a perfect piece of Nergui terminology—formal, precise, euphemistic, undeniably ironic.

  Nergui’s eyes were sharp, though Doripalam still felt that they were focused on something he would never see. “You remember the murders that winter? Two years ago?”

  It was an entirely rhetorical question. Neither of them would forget that tortuous sequence of events.

  “At the time,” Nergui said, “I said that that was the first real serial killer I had encountered in this country. But I still don’t know if that was true.”

  “And it wasn’t quite a serial killer,” Doripalam pointed out. “Not in the sense that people would normally understand.”

  “Not a straightforward psychopath,” Nergui agreed. “Whereas Wu Sam—”
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br />   “Was a straightforward psychopath?”

  “I don’t know what he was. All I know is that, too soon, we had another corpse on our hands.”

  Doripalam was staring at Nergui, his brain belatedly making the connections that had been implicit in the narrative from the start. “Another corpse?” he prompted, already knowing and dreading what Nergui was going to say.

  “Another student, barely out of his teens. An exchange student. He’d come here from one of those eastern republics—Turkmenistan, I think. Had hardly been here long enough to make any friends.” His voice faltered, as though even he was struggling to make sense of his own memories. “But you know how he died. Twenty years ago. He was wrapped in a carpet and kicked to death.”

  There was a protracted silence. And then Gunlundai dropped his head into his hands and began to weep.

  WINTER 1988

  No one had warned him.

  But it was worse; more than just a sin of omission. Out here in the frozen night, the truth was suddenly clear to him, and it chilled him more than the biting wind.

  He had been set up.

  He had thought that he was so clever, that he had spotted an opportunity others had missed. He would forge new alliances, build a new world. A new empire. But they were laughing at him all along. They had spotted his pretensions and taken the steps needed to steer him here.

  This man was behind it all. A man with certain predilections. And, to keep him sweet, from time to time they would feed him a young tidbit. A young man who would do what he was told, go along with it for the sake of his career.

  He could see exactly how it worked. It kept the contact happy, made him feel valued. But it kept him vulnerable, too—engaged in acts that were illegal here. Exposure would be devastating for one of his seniority. It was like feeding heroin to a user. It kept him dependent, kept him wanting more. It meant they had the contact exactly where they wanted him.

  The contact was smiling. “They really should have warned you,” he said, again. “Although perhaps then you wouldn’t have come. And that would have been a pity.”

  He had no words to respond. Repulsion was rising in him, like bile in his throat. He was repelled by the prospect of acts that he had been taught were abhorrent, that were illegal in his own country as here. And he was angry and resentful at being used in this way.

  But it wasn’t only that. There was something else. A creeping contempt for his own stupidity, his naivety, for allowing himself to walk into this. For wanting to walk into this.

  He had no idea where the unexpected thought came from. And at that moment the contact reached out and began gently to stroke his face again, his gloved fingers harsh against the cold skin.

  “There is a place we can go,” the contact said. “It is warm and discreet. No one will know we are there.”

  It was all suddenly too much. He thrust the contact’s hand away from him, and turned on his heels, walking with increasing speed back down the path to the road.

  He half expected that the contact would follow, try to change his mind. But when he reached the park gates and glanced back, the contact was still there, a motionless silhouette against the paler dark of the sky.

  He hesitated a moment, almost considering going back. His role was to obey, to be one of the pawns in this unfathomable game. But he knew that he could not.

  There was no way out of this now. He would not be allowed to remain here, a walking threat to the contact’s reputation. And he would have no career to return to. Failure might be tolerated but disobedience—and he had disobeyed, even though no orders had ever been articulated—was beyond the pale.

  He looked back again, but the contact had gone, melted back into the icy darkness. He stayed for a moment, peering into the blackness, but he could feel the cold cutting through his clothes, eating into his skin and bone.

  He pulled his coat around him, and began the lonely walk through the empty streets towards the central square.

  PART 2

  WINTER 1988

  He had been expecting it. The only question was how soon.

  A week went by. He spent it crouched in his tiny apartment, trying to work but unable to make sense of the words in front of him. He had been passionate about this history, about Genghis Khan, the legacy of the empire, the potential for the future. The vision that would unite their two nations. But now none of this meant anything to him any more.

  He sat at the rickety desk, waiting for the knock that would announce the end of his trip here, the beginning of his expulsion back to—what? He had no idea, except that his career would be finished.

  But the week went by and nothing happened. Finally, he regained the confidence to leave his apartment. He had barely eaten for days, surviving on the remnants of a stale loaf of bread and some old biscuits. Now, he felt able to visit the university refectory, eagerly wolfing down a plateful of their bland, fatty mutton stew. And later he took a walk into the city. The sky was a clear empty blue, the air fresh and sharp, and he felt alive again. He had spent the week tense with anxiety, convinced that he would be picked up at any moment. Now he decided that he had been deluding himself, more idiotic self-aggrandisement.

  As he returned from his walk, he saw two men in heavy coats and trilby hats, emerging from the apartment block. One of them—a heavily built man, already lighting up a cigarette, his hands cupped against the chilling wind—gazed at him, as though with mild curiosity. “Your name Wu Sam?” he said, his voice gentle around the bobbing cigarette.

  Wu Sam nodded. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

  The man raised his eyebrows slightly and glanced across at his colleague. “Have you?”

  Wu Sam felt it was necessary at least to state his position clearly. “You can see my papers,” he said. “Everything is in order. I have permission to stay for three months. My visa—”

  The man held up his hand, with the air of one accustomed to directing traffic. “That’s not why we’re here.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’re here to ask you some questions.” The man shook his head, an expression of vague regret crossing his face. He took another drag on the cigarette, and then tossed it, barely smoked, into a lingering pile of grimy snow. “About a dead body.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SUMMER

  Out here there was nothing. Just endless undulating grassland, miles of dusty dirt road, and occasionally a copse of fir trees providing the only shade. Earlier in the morning, with the first sunlight appearing above the low-lying eastern hills, they had passed a nomadic camp. There was no sign of human life but a scattering of tethered goats and horses had simultaneously raised their heads as the truck sped past. Since then, more than an hour later, they had seen no further evidence of habitation.

  “How long do we give them?” Odbayar said. He flicked his cigarette butt out of the truck window.

  The Chinese man, Sam, glanced at him irritatedly. “If you have to smoke, at least use the ashtray. The grass out there is dry enough to ignite.”

  “There’s hardly any grass to ignite,” Odbayar said. “I’ve never known it so dry this far north.”

  “We are ruining the planet,” Sam said, piously. “We will pay the price.”

  “That’ll be your country ruining the planet. And the rest of us who pay the price.”

  “And which country would that be?” Sam said. His knuckles were white around the steering wheel as he held the truck straight on the uneven road.

  “Either. Both.” Odbayar shrugged. “You tell me. They’re both the same in that respect. Each as bad as the other.”

  Sam nodded solemnly, considering the merits of this judgement. “No doubt,” he said. “And not just in that respect.”

  Odbayar pulled another cigarette from the packet in the breast pocket of his shirt and lit it carefully, blowing the first stream of smoke expertly out of the window. “So,” he said again, “how long do we give them?”

  Sam’s eyes were fixed on the long stra
ight road. It stretched out apparently as far as the mountains, though in the far distance it was lost in the deep green shade of the forests. The shadow of the truck extended lengthily behind them, an endless black companion to their journey. “Not too long,” Sam said finally. “We need to get far enough away. And give them time to become uneasy.”

  “That could take a while,” Odbayar said. “They probably don’t even realise I’m missing.”

  “That’s true,” Sam agreed. “It was all too chaotic last night. Maybe we overplayed that a little.”

  “It would have been too risky otherwise. If things had been calmer—well, either we wouldn’t have been able to stage it at all, or it would have been spotted too quickly. I think it was just right, with the gun and everything. Dozens of people must have seen us, even if they didn’t understand what they were supposed to be seeing.”

  Sam laughed. “No doubt they will realise quickly enough when the police come to collect their witness statements. Which the police will do as soon as they register what has happened. What has apparently happened,” he corrected himself.

  “What if the police can’t identify any witnesses? I don’t imagine they’ll have been collecting names and addresses last night.”

  Sam glanced at the young man, mentally reminding himself that Odbayar did not know the full detail of the previous night’s events. “They’ll be asking for witnesses to the bombing to come forward,” he said. “There won’t be any shortage of busybodies. And some of them will remember what they saw. Your performance was noticeable enough.” He smiled. “But that’s the icing on the cake. Worthwhile, but not essential.”

  “I hope it was worthwhile,” Odbayar said. “I was nearly gunned down. Probably would have been if I hadn’t pretended that the smoke had gotten to me. And I still have bruises from where those goons grabbed me.”

  “They had to think it was for real, just like the police did. If they’d known it was staged, that would have been two more people we’d have had to trust.” Two more loose ends, Sam added to himself, to be dealt with. Just as he had dealt with the others.