The Outcast
Page 19
“What about Tunjin?” Doripalam said.
Nergui was working his way painstakingly through the reports of the previous night’s incidents. “What about him?”
“I understood he was being detained.”
“He is,” Nergui said. “Or, rather, he was. Now he’s absconded. I have people looking for him.”
“None of my people,” Doripalam said.
“I think this falls within the ministry’s jurisdiction.”
Doripalam opened his mouth to respond, then shook his head. There was no point in debating any of this. Nergui would reveal his hand, if and when he chose to.
Nergui waved the wad of reports in the air. “What do you make of this?” he said.
“Which in particular?”
“All of it,” Nergui said. “We have a city in quiet chaos.”
It was a good phrase, Doripalam thought. There was a sense of unreality to it, as if the surface of things remained unchanged while turmoil bubbled beneath. He recalled a newspaper image he had seen a year or two before of a run-down apartment block somewhere in the city which had partially collapsed after years of structural neglect. The block had been uninhabited and there had been no casualties. But, according to the experts, the collapse could have happened at any time over a number of years, while its residents had continued their daily lives unaware of the instability of the building in which they lived.
Nergui flicked through the papers on his knee. “How long do you think we have before this really hits the media?”
“We’re doing the best we can from our side to contain it,” Doripalam said. “Your people saw to it that nothing was reported about the incident in the square. I don’t know how you managed to swing that.”
“National security,” Nergui said. “The usual excuse. It stills works with the respectable media because they depend on us. They can’t be bothered to go and hunt out any stories of their own.”
“What about the yellow press, though?” Doripalam asked, referring to the mass of cheap scandal sheets that now dominated the newsstands.
“We can’t do much about that. But they’re generally not too interested in this sort of story unless they can find an excuse to illustrate it with a photograph of a half-naked woman.”
“But people must be talking about it.”
“Probably. There were plenty of people about. People saw the shooting. There’ll be a thousand and one paranoid explanations doing the rounds. But they won’t be surprised that it wasn’t reported.”
Another hangover from the old regime. People didn’t expect the media to report the truth. Or, at least, they expected the media to report only the most boring, uncontroversial truths. And it wouldn’t matter if the story did get reported in the yellow press since no one would believe that either. The rumour-mill would churn away, but no one would take it seriously. Doripalam had once assumed that a free press would bring dramatic changes to the national culture, but it had never really happened. The media had simply polarised—on the one hand, dutiful and dull reports of proceedings in the Great Hural; on the other, wild unsubstantiated scandals about transitory celebrities. But nothing in the middle. Real, significant stories tended to emerge only when someone—usually a member of one of the opposition parties—took the trouble to leak them.
“What about the bomber?” he said. “The supposed bomber, I mean. Have you identified him?”
There was a silence. “It’s the usual,” Nergui said, finally. “Endless legwork. We’re making some progress.”
It wasn’t quite the equivalent of a formal statement to the media, but it sounded far from candid. This was Nergui going native, or perhaps reverting to type. Despite his endless capacity to surprise, Nergui remained at heart an apparatchik of the old school.
“You think he’s a local, or a foreign national?” Doripalam persisted.
“We’re pursuing all lines of inquiry,” Nergui said. “As you would expect.”
“I’m sure you’ll let us know if we can be of assistance.”
As always, Nergui seemed impervious to irony. “What about your own inquiries? The two bodies.”
“The same legwork,” Doripalam said. He wondered whether, if they really had made any substantive progress, he would be prepared to share it with Nergui. In practice, the question was academic. “But we’re not getting very far. We have the pathology reports, but they don’t tell us much we didn’t already know. The first was literally kicked to death. Chillingly so, in fact—I’d assumed some sort of frenzied attack, but it seems to have been more systematic.”
“The victim was dead before being wrapped in the carpet,” Nergui said. It was not a question, and Doripalam was left wondering, yet again, about Nergui’s access to supposedly confidential police reports.
“It looks like it. There are lesions on his wrists and ankles. The assumption is that he was tied up in some way, and then—”
“Kicked to death.”
“Carefully placed kicks, at that. Maximising the pain. Eking out the time until the assault would prove fatal. And substantial damage to the face.”
Nergui gazed at him, unblinking. “And what about the second body. At the hotel.”
“Stabbed. The weapon was left behind. A fairly ornate dagger—like something from the golden age of Genghis himself. We thought it might tell us something, but it’s just a cheap ornament. They’re selling them all over the city during the anniversary celebrations. There are hundreds out there. Made in China, ironically enough. Not much chance of finding out precisely which market stall it was purchased from. We’re having it checked for prints and DNA, but I’m not optimistic.”
“He was killed in the storeroom?”
“As far as we can tell. There’s no evidence that the body was moved after death.”
“Any clue as to the bodies’ identities?”
“Not so far. No matches to their fingerprints. They weren’t Mongolians. Not ethnically, at any rate.”
“So unlikely to be Mongolian citizens?”
“Yes.”
“Visitors?”
“Probably. Not likely to be illegals. Not from there.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult to identify, then.”
Doripalam shrugged. “We’ve asked immigration to find potential fits, males who’ve entered the country in the last month. But it won’t be easy to match the photographs.” He gestured towards the photograph of the Chinese man. “Particularly if that’s the quality of the images we have to work with. I don’t know how they came up with that one so quickly,” he said. “They’ve told us it’s likely to be tomorrow before they have a list of possibles.”
“It’s who you know,” Nergui said, smiling. “I’ll rattle the cage for you, if you think it would help.”
“Anything would help. We don’t have much.”
“But it wasn’t too difficult to find this one,” Nergui said. “They were looking for males of Chinese origin who’d not entered from China.”
“Why not from China?” Doripalam said. “You didn’t know—you still don’t know, if this isn’t him—that Wu Sam wasn’t still living in China.”
Nergui shrugged. “One of my wild hunches. I don’t think the Chinese wanted him back. I think they made arrangements for him to exit discreetly, so they could make use of him elsewhere and, if necessary, let some other government pick up the problem. Anyway, I was being pragmatic; it would take for ever to work through all the Chinese males entering from China. I thought we might as well start by looking at those who’d come in from elsewhere.”
Typical Nergui, Doripalam thought, that mix of off-the-wall intuition and common-sense practicality. “I don’t think ours are going to be so easy to pinpoint. We can’t even be sure about the ethnic origin, not yet, anyway. We think Indian sub-continent, but I don’t know if we can really narrow it down beyond Central Asia, or even Eastern Europe. They could have come from anywhere. We can look for suitable surnames, but their names might be totally Westernised. It’s not
a lot as the basis for a shortlist.”
“I see your problem.”
“And the real question,” Dorilpalam said, “is whether any of this is connected. At a mundane level, I don’t even know where to focus the resource. I mean, the urgent issue is Odbayar’s disappearance, but we don’t even know whether he’s really disappeared.”
“Or whether it’s some kind of stunt, you mean?”
Doripalam nodded.
“If so, we should know soon enough. There’s not much point in publicity stunts unless you want publicity.”
“Is that why you’re holding off breaking the news to his father?”
“Maybe,” Nergui said. “Or maybe it’s just another wild hunch.”
Gundalai remained hunched in a corner of the sofa, his arms wrapped tightly around his knees, staring fixedly into space.
“Gundalai, it’s going to be all right.” Sarangarel didn’t really even believe this herself, so there was no reason why Gundalai should. But there was no option other than to be positive. “We don’t even know that anything’s happened to Odbayar.”
“I know what I saw.” His voice was quiet and steady.
She shook her head. “I didn’t learn much from my time in the judiciary. But I learnt one thing. You can never be sure what you saw. I lost count of the cases where witnesses gave diametrically opposed accounts of the same event. Everyone swearing blind they were telling the truth.”
“People lie in court,” Gundalai said, bluntly.
“Most people don’t. They’re just witnesses, with no axe to grind. They still disagree.”
“I know what I saw,” he repeated.
“Maybe,” she said, doubtfully. “But, even if you do, you don’t know what it means.”
“Odbayar was being taken away.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t even know for sure that it was Odbayar.” Even to herself, her words sounded unconvincing.
“So where is he?”
It was a question she couldn’t answer. She turned back to the window. “You’re very close to him, aren’t you?” she said, finally. “He means a lot to you?”
She looked back and realised that Gundalai was nodding, his eyes still staring at the floor. “More than you know,” he said.
She nodded. “I think I know,” she said.
She was not surprised, though many of her fellow citizens would be simply baffled by the idea. Homosexuality was not illegal now, though its existence was barely acknowledged. But it was a country with a young population, and she had no doubt that many engaged in activities, legal or illegal, which would have been unknown—or at least unacknowledged—in her generation.
“Do you trust him?” she said.
He looked up at her, the question clearly taking him by surprise. “Trust him?”
It occurred to her that, in fact, she had intended to ask whether Gundalai loved him, but she had not been able to articulate the words. But, now it had been asked, the question seemed to be the right one.
“Of course I trust him,” he went on, without waiting for her to respond. “Why wouldn’t I trust him? You don’t know—”
“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I don’t know you, really. My nephew. My sister’s son. I haven’t seen her for five, six years. I haven’t seen you for even longer. I’ve never met Odbayar. Do you trust him?”
This time, he didn’t respond immediately. “I think so,” he said. “He means well. He has good intentions …”
“But do you trust him?” she persisted.
Finally, he said: “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know.”
She nodded, as if this was the answer she had been expecting. “Why don’t you know?”
Gundalai was shaking his head, slowly, rocking backwards and forwards, as though trying to deny the world. “I—” He stopped, his head still moving, the words eluding him. “It’s not the same,” he said, at last. “He’s not like he was. Nothing is like it was.” He lowered his head into his hands, running his fingers through his hair repeatedly and fiercely, as though trying to remove some foreign body.
Sarangarel had lowered herself on the sofa beside him. “What’s not the same?”
“I thought we were drifting apart. I mean, it didn’t really surprise me. Odbayar was never really comfortable with …” He looked up at her, as if conscious for the first time of what he was saying. “Well, you know …”
“With your relationship?”
“Exactly. I mean, it was different when we were students. It didn’t really matter, even with Odbayar’s background. It made him feel rebellious. Knowing that it was something his father would have disapproved of.”
“You don’t think he took it seriously? Your relationship, I mean.”
“It’s hard to tell what Odbayar really thinks about anything. And now that he’s begun to take the politics more seriously, I thought —well, I thought it was probably going to end soon, anyway.” He seemed more composed now, as if he had unloaded some burden. “But it’s more than that,” he went on. “I think there’s something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I thought at first that Odbayar had found someone else. But that’s not the way he does things. Whatever else he might do, he’d be honest about that. If only because it wouldn’t occur to him to worry about my feelings.” He laughed, mirthlessly. “If there was someone else, he’d just have told me.”
“So what was it?” she prompted.
“He was distracted. I mean, we were going along with all the political stuff. But it was if his heart wasn’t really in it.” He frowned. “No, that’s not quite right. It was still important to him. But I don’t think he believed in what we were doing—the meetings, the speeches, the protests. It was as if he’d realised that he wasn’t going to achieve anything that way.”
“I thought he’d made quite an impact,” she said. “He got people out on the streets.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “He’s a brilliant speaker. Even when he was going through the motions, he could get people eating out of his hand. And you’re right—there was a movement starting to build. Not just through Odbayar, but he was part of it.”
There was genuine enthusiasm in Gundalai’s tone. For the first time, Sarangarel realised how seriously he had taken all this. “You really thought you could change things?” she asked, trying hard to keep any scepticism from her tone.
He looked up at her, trying to gauge whether she was mocking him. “I still think we can,” he said. “Things have to change.”
“Things have changed,” she pointed out. “More than you can imagine. In my lifetime.”
“I know,” he said. “And even in mine. But it’s not enough.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve had two decades of change. There was a time when I really thought this country was finished. You don’t remember; you were a child. There were people starving. People out on the steppes who were killing their livestock—their livelihood—to survive. People without a roof over their heads. There was economic disaster.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve read about all that.”
“But you don’t know what it was like to live through it,” she said. “You were a child. And things weren’t so bad for you. Your father had a government job. He was still being paid. There were countless people who had nothing.” She stopped, wondering why she was rehearsing all this, why it seemed to matter.
Gundalai was staring at her, surprised by the vehemence of her words.
“It was a strange time,” she said. “We’d all had so much hope at first. We all thought that at last the country was ours again.”
“But you knew it was going to be difficult,” Gundalai pointed out. “You must have known that once Russia withdrew its support.”
She nodded. “We knew how dependent the country was on the USSR’s money. A third of our GDP. But we had a sense of history. We had a sense of what this country had once been.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “I’m sure, in the long run, you are right. But it’s taken so long. We’ve had years of turmoil. We’ve had corrupt governments, incompetent governments. But, yes, things are improving. And, yes, things could have been much worse.” She leaned back in the sofa, feeling weary. She had been awake since the small hours dealing with Gundalai. “But it’s stability I want. Not more years of change.”
Gundalai nodded, as though reflecting on her words. “Odbayar says it’s the politics we need to change. And the politicians.”
“Including his own father?”
Gundalai smiled faintly. “Especially his own father. I think even Odbayar would acknowledge the Freudian undertones of what he wants.”
“And what does he want?” she said. She had assumed that Odbayar’s goals would be ill-defined, that he was a student activist interested in change primarily for its own sake.
“He wants politicians who are motivated by the interests of the country, not just by lining their own pockets. Who really want this country to be in control of its own destiny, not subservient to Russian, China or the West.” It sounded like a prepared speech, and Sarangeral suspected that the words were Odbayar’s.
“Not all politicians are self-seeking,” she pointed out.
“Maybe not. But even if they’re not, they don’t have a vision. They just bumble along from day to day.”
“And Odbayar has a vision?”
“You only have to hear him speak. He could make us great again.”
“When he becomes president?”
“You’re laughing at me,” Gundalai said, without bitterness. “We’re used to that. We’re still young. Time’s on our side.”