A Drop of Chinese Blood (23 page)

Tuya smiled again, modestly.

“All by herself, she’s stopped several suspects dead in their tracks. No need for weapons, no need to chase them down the street. Next thing they know, Tuya has them in handcuffs. One of them fainted when he saw where she’d put her head.”

I replaced the glass of tea on the table nearby. “Well, this has been interesting. Wonderful snacks, but if we’re done, I’ll be going. My tour bus leaves in a few minutes.”

“I wouldn’t try to leave. Even if Bazar is napping outside the door, he is a light sleeper. Bazar, you awake?”

“Yeah, boss, wide awake.”

“Good, stay that way.” The man rubbed his hands together. “Let’s begin. For the record, Tuya, please insert the standard opening about how the subject walked into the office on his own and asked to speak to someone in authority, etc., etc.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Who walked in where? Let’s simplify the process. Why don’t you write the whole thing and have me sign later? You can bring it—two pages, six pages, makes no difference—to my hotel room tomorrow morning. My room faces Lenin’s posterior. That way will save everyone a lot of trouble. Tuya can probably write it by heart, with one hand behind her back. I mean, in a manner of speaking.”

The man looked shocked. He had an unusually expressive face, though I couldn’t be sure if it was expressing what he felt or what he wanted me to think he felt. Otherwise, there wasn’t anything about him that stood out. Medium height, medium build; I wouldn’t have looked twice at him except that he was standing directly in front of me. “This isn’t a confession we’re talking about. Tuya wouldn’t even know where to start, other than the standard opening. That’s why you’re here, to tell us why you’re here. It wouldn’t do me any good to make something up, would it? Don’t worry about the intro. That’s just boilerplate. If I put down we beat the stuffing out of a suspect and dragged him by his hair into headquarters, it upsets the magistrates. They’re trying on democracy for size, and no one has figured out yet that police work isn’t democratic. It’s coercive, though we’re not supposed to use that word anymore.”

“I’m in custody? Under some sort of arrest? Preventive detention? I’m a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, and I’d advise you as a new-made friend to keep that in mind. You can look at the first page of my passport, if you don’t believe me. Incidentally, we haven’t introduced ourselves.”

“Oh, don’t worry. We’ve already looked at every page of your passport upside down and backward. As for advising, let me advise you that this is Mongolia. Friendly as I am, it saddens me to say you don’t have any rights here, no rights, no jurisdiction, no status. In other words, I don’t give a damn about your People’s Republic, and I don’t care who is supposed to show up in a couple of days.”

I was about to ask what he meant, but at this point he had a full head of steam and wasn’t going to stop for a simple question.

“Maybe the rabbits in the Foreign Ministry would twitch their noses and swoon in fright if you waved your august Chinese nationality at them, especially this week, but I don’t care. Bazar doesn’t either, do you, Bazar?”

“No, boss, I had Chinese for lunch.”

Tuya put her arm behind her back and picked a couple of cheese stones off the tray. “Tell me when we start. You want all this stuff included, or do I wait some?”

“I think we’re ready.” The man turned a chair around and sat down, resting his chin on the back. It wasn’t much of a chair, all plastic and metal. My uncle would have scoffed at it.

“Something the matter?” The man waved his hand in front of my face. “Are you with me?”

“Yes, I’m with you, but I still don’t know who you are.”

“Good. It’s not important. You can call me Bat Man.” He nodded slightly at me. I nodded slightly back. “This really isn’t difficult. All I want to hear is what you’re doing in my country. Simple, yes? Simple Simon met a pie man.” He grinned. “I watch movies; you want to hear my imitation of Clint Eastwood?” Then he frowned. “You rented a big car, drove out to the national park, went in circles a little, stayed overnight at one of those camps, then rushed back to Ulan Bator early the next morning. How come? You didn’t like the scenery? Incidentally, you shouldn’t use your horn out there in the countryside, it scares the livestock.”

“I liked the scenery fine.” There was no sense relating the conversations with my uncle in the car about the landscape. Maybe he already knew.

“When you got back, you made contact with a yak.”

“I did?” This threw me off.

“The funny little man with the postcards. He’s a yak, someone who isn’t what he seems to be. Then you went to the Irish bar and met a known Kazakh agent.”

“I did?” It was starting to sound complicated, hard to explain. “I never saw her before in my life. How would I know she was an agent?”

“In fact, the little Kazakh group was having its monthly meeting when you walked in. It was going to be an important meeting—unusual, extremely urgent, tip top. We were worried it was going to be a problem for us in view of the special security arrangements that are supposed to be in place. You and that uncle of yours interrupted the proceedings, and the birds flew away before we could find out what they had in mind. The presidential security people are hopping mad. If they had gotten to you before I did, things wouldn’t be as pleasant as they are at this moment.”

“A thousand pardons.” What special security arrangements? Which brought us back to the question I hadn’t asked: Who was showing up in a couple of days? Not counting the North Koreans, I hadn’t seen signs of anything unusual. “It wasn’t intentional, believe me. We didn’t even know those Kazakhs would be there. We just stopped in for a drink.’

“Is that a fact? Then why did the yak send you?”

Excellent question, I had to admit. Another excellent question: How did this Mongolian cop know what was on that postcard? Unless they’d dragged the funny little man in and dunked his head in a water pail until he talked. Or maybe he was working for them, part-time.

“This yak fellow kept showing up, unbidden,” I said. “It got to be a little annoying. If you know so much, you ought to know we had no connection to him.”

The man smacked his forehead. “Yeah, I should know that, but I don’t. Why don’t I? Maybe you have an explanation. See, that’s all I’m after, a simple explanation. You must have a dozen of them, prestamped and ready to drop in the mail. How about you try them out one at a time? I’ll give them ratings, sort of like they do at the Olympics. It’s a democratic approach; I’ll even throw out the lowest score, the one from the East German judge. How’s that? We’ll look at the top three, maybe get them in rank order, and then put them to a vote at the national elections. When are the elections, Tuya, this coming December?”

“Year after that.”

“OK, year after that.” The man took a couple of cheese stones and handed one to me. “Meanwhile, you can stay in a hole in the ground and rest at our expense. We haven’t fixed up the jails yet, but the old ones are pretty nice even in their original state. Well, for holes, they’re nice all except in winter, which lasts pretty much from October through April. Don’t worry, it’s easy to count sheep in this country. Believe me, you’ll have no trouble getting to sleep. How about it?”

He poured himself a glass of salty tea and drank it down noisily. “Or, we can do it different if that doesn’t sound good. Like, maybe you tell me something I can believe from the start. See, I’m reasonable, I’m open to alternatives. I’m good cop, bad cop all rolled into one. We’re shorthanded these days, no one has the budget to hire enough staff, but that’s all right. It means I get to choose. Three days a week good cop, three days a week bad cop. And on the seventh day I rest. What am I tonight, Tuya? What does it say on the rota on the wall next to the desk?”

“Ummmm, good cop.”

“How about that!” He radiated goodwill. “You, my friend, are in luck. Tomorrow might not have been nice.” The man shouted out the door. “How about it, Bazar? What are you today?”

“I don’t know, boss. I lose track.”

The man turned back to me. “So, over to you. I’m listening, Tuya is listening, the hidden recorder that we got for half price from Russia on the Internet is listening. Talk to me.”

I thought about it. I wasn’t here working against the Mongolians. They hadn’t caused me any trouble. As far as I knew, there wasn’t a single Mongolian living in my district at home, though lately we’d noticed a few of them riding the train from Tumen into North Korea. Taking the long view, I didn’t particularly care if they had occupied Beijing a few hundred years ago. Right now, they were minding their own business. I liked what little I’d seen of their operations. They seemed to have a pretty good handle on what happened within their borders. What I couldn’t figure out was what had them so rattled.

“Maybe if we work together, we can help each other out,” I said, feeling my way along. “We both seem to be running out of time, and we might actually be in the same sinking boat. There’s no reason not to cooperate.” Actually, that was not quite true. There was one reason of undeniable weight—I didn’t have approval to cooperate with the Mongolian police. Beijing wouldn’t like my getting into its liaison shorts, creating a working relationship with a foreign service on the spot without proper say-so. The explanation that there hadn’t been time to fill in all the forms would cut no ice.

On the other hand, Beijing hadn’t done much in the way of briefing me about what I was getting into, much less how I was supposed to wriggle out if something went amiss, “amiss” being a fair description of the current situation. Something was amiss, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here. As a matter of fact, if I lingered on the thought, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that someone in my own ministry had set me up.

I took a deep breath. Lack of sleep, spending too much time with my uncle, something was getting to me. No one was trying to set me up … not today, anyway. I exhaled slowly and tried to look sincere. “I’m looking for a friend.” This was one of those times when I was going to have to roll the dice in the dark. “Maybe you know him.”

“Not likely.” The man gave me a puzzled look. “But what the hell, you can never tell. Try me.”

If my uncle was right, and I had to admit it was starting to look like he often was, Beijing obviously wanted that missing state seal back in South Korean hands very soon. Everyone was in a hurry; no one would tell me why. Ding said Beijing wanted the operation over in forty-eight hours. The Mongolians felt pressed by a special security window that seemed poised to open any moment.

The woman in the bar—a Kazakh who apparently drank early and often—wanted to locate her mother, for reasons that didn’t interest me. What mattered was that she also knew, or said she knew, where the state seal was,
both
the seal and my predecessor. What did someone from Kazakhstan care about either one? At first glance, I’d dismiss her as a crank, but then, why were the South Koreas following her around? Unless, of course, they thought she had the seal, or knew where it was.

That’s when it hit between my eyes. The Mongolians had been monitoring the meeting of that Kazakh foursome in the Irish bar. Even if it was just a tape, by now they would have transcribed my conversation with the woman, and they’d know I was looking for a seal, even if they didn’t know what sort or why. Yet none of that had come up so far in the little dance this man and I were doing. He was holding back that card, except in a curious way he’d turned it over for me to see. He was the one who had let me know they were watching the Kazakhs. He was enjoying himself, stringing this out. In his own way, the little bastard was as double-jointed as Tuya.

“I don’t know what my friend looks like anymore,” I said. “Haven’t seen him in a long time. We were boyhood chums, you might say, went through school together, and then lost touch a few years later. Maybe a phone call once in a while. He travels.”

“Sure, friends across the years, that sort of thing. What makes you think he’s here?”

“This I also don’t know, actually.” It helps to touch ground truth now and then in these sorts of sessions. “Someone told me they’d heard he was in Mongolia.” Overdoing the truth isn’t a good idea, but coming close twice couldn’t hurt. “Naturally, as soon as I heard that, I decided to come and see.”

“That happens a lot; missing Chinese turn up in Mongolia, and their friends pour over the border to restore old ties. People think we’re a backwater, but we’re not. We’re very modern. In fact, we’re thinking of starting a Web page, www.visitmongolia/findfriends. Only one problem. I think it should be dot org, but Bazar says it should be dot com. You still think it should be dot com, Bazar?”

“I’m thinking, boss.”

“This is part of our new ethos. Kicking around ideas instead of people. Not as much gets done, but no one’s nose gets out of joint. You may have noticed Bazar’s nose is broken in two places; that happened under the old regime.”

Tuya put down her pen. “I’m skipping that part about Bazar’s nose.”

“Tuya, believe me, if you don’t want to stick Bazar’s nose in this, we leave it out.” The man stood up and pushed the chair to one side. “Why don’t you admit it?” He parked his face close to mine.

“Sure,” I said. “Admit what?”

“That you’re here as a security advance for your premier.”

This was news to me. It shouldn’t have been. When someone at that level traveled, even if it was nowhere near our area, we were supposed to do a special check and report any rumors about threats. I never heard anything about the premier traveling, but it wouldn’t enhance my stature to admit that. “Is it a crime, to advance for a VIP?”

He smiled, probably the way a Mongolian wolf smiles at a lamb. “We’re supposed to have liaison agreements. Here we are, busy trying to prepare things to guarantee an uneventful visit for your man, and you are for some reason out on the street exciting the North Koreans. It’s like you put a stick in a beehive and stir it around. Already you have more security people in town than we have on our entire force. A lot of them are posing as journalists, but they don’t seem to know which end of the pencil to hold. I have a whole stack of reports about someone’s lady agent walking around in a lace dress that no one knows how to describe without getting into trouble.”