A Drop of Chinese Blood (28 page)

“My border?”

The doctor took a small bottle from a shelf, then locked the cabinet. “You’re not Mongolian. You aren’t Korean, not all Korean, anyway. I don’t need X-ray vision to tell me that.”

6

“That does it.” The doctor washed his hands in the sink. “You can put your shirt and trousers back on, Inspector. When you’re dressed, take a seat over there and we’ll talk about what you need to do for your back.” He pointed to a desk in the corner. “Your colleague is welcome to join us.”

My uncle sat up from the examination table. “That nurse of yours is very efficient. I assume she called someone in the police agency in Ulan Bator.”

“I think your back might be a problem because you are prone to sticking your nose into other people’s business,” the doctor said evenly.

“Better there than up someone’s backside.” My uncle retrieved his trousers and his shirt. “Let’s not get at each other’s throats, Doctor.”

“She didn’t talk to the police,” I broke in before they could begin their courtly dance again. “She talked to some fellow from the Special Service. His name is Bat something.”

“Batbayaar.” The doctor didn’t look up from the form he was signing. “The man’s name is Batbayaar. You’re going to ask how I know him, so I’ll tell you and spare everyone the trouble of a game of hide-and-seek. The Chinese prime minister is about to visit Ulan Bator, as you no doubt know. Every time an important foreign visit is planned, the Special Service sends a notice to police in the outlying areas to be alert for unusual events, shady figures lurking on street corners, that sort of thing. Our local police pass these alerts on to us. The motorcycle accident must have caught Batbayaar’s attention. I say that because he sent an urgent follow-up request for us to be on the watch for strangers seeking medical attention or people posing as family members or acquaintances inquiring after accident victims. I couldn’t tell you what piqued his interest, though I assume he keeps tabs on the undeclared North Korean teams.” The doctor put down his pen and looked casually at me. “As he does any undeclared Chinese operations.”

“How do you know your nurse didn’t tell Batbayaar about the suddenly departed Naranbaatar when he first showed up?” My uncle slipped a little steel into his voice. “For that matter, how do you know she didn’t tell the North Koreans?”

“Because I didn’t.” The nurse stepped into the room. She gave my uncle a nasty look. “I wouldn’t do such a thing. The doctor insists on confidentiality for the patients. If there were some reason to breach that, it would be up to the doctor to decide. It’s not a decision I would take on my own.”

“Of course not,” said my uncle. “Certainly not for fifty dollars.”

This caused some bad feelings, but there wasn’t much the nurse could do other than to glower and stalk out of the room.

“Doctor, you took something from the cabinet before we walked in here. Would you mind showing it to me?” I planted myself next to the desk.

“You’re a little out of area to be throwing your weight around like this, I’d think. You realize, of course, I don’t have to show you anything. I’ve told you more than enough already, and then only because I have respect for the Inspector here.” He turned to my uncle. “These are some pills I want you to take.” He held up the small bottle he had removed from the locked cabinet. “Once a day at bedtime. Take them until they’re all gone. I’m sure they’ll do you some good.”

“What are they, if I may ask?”

“Just a traditional herbal mixture.”

“Very good of you, Doctor.” My uncle stood up, took the pills, and looked the doctor in the eye. “I must say, I admire your work out here. Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”

“Perhaps.” The doctor walked us to the front door. “Drive carefully on your way back. Don’t hesitate to call me if you need anything else. Good-bye.”

When we were in the car and on the main road again, I told my uncle to look at the bottle the doctor had given him. “It’s not just a regular old herbal concoction,” I said. “He had it under lock and key.”

“Is that so? I wonder if it belonged to poor Mr. Naranbaatar.”

“You were awfully chummy with the doctor. Old friend of yours?”

“Never saw the man in my life. Something wrong with countrymen being polite?”

Neither of us spoke for the next several monotonous miles. “You’re sure Naranbaatar was who you think he was?”

“Give me some credit now and then. I’m sure. A little older and thinner, but he had an unusual way of squinting his eyes whenever he got excited. He still had it.”

“I have a bad feeling about this. For one thing, how do I explain to Beijing that he died in my presence?”

“He didn’t die in your presence, he died in my presence.”

“Even worse.”

“You won’t get a medal, I suppose. At least you kept him from falling back into the hands of the North Koreans. That’s something.”

“Someone is going to say I killed him.”

“You? Why would you do something like that? You don’t have any motive.” My uncle adjusted his seat belt. “Do you?”

I hit the next rut in the road with considerable precision.

“No, I thought not. On the other hand, your friends might say I had a reason to do away with him. If they think I still work for Pyongyang, they could reason that I was sent here to make sure he never made it home.”

“Except Pyongyang didn’t send you here, Beijing did.”

“We both know they’ll never admit that.”

“What about the seal? He must have had it someplace he thought was safe. What about that Kazakh woman in the bar? How would she know where he put it?”

“Best way to find out is to ask. We’ll go back to that Irish bar. She seems to know how to drink.”

“You really think he died of natural causes?” I thought about it. “I don’t know if I trust that doctor. I certainly don’t trust that nurse.” I thought about it some more. “So much for not using seat belts,” I mused.

My uncle gave me a quizzical look. “All this open sky is making you cryptic. You want me to drive?”

“No, I don’t.”

“If we go by that statue of Chinggis Khan again, let’s stop. It says in the booklet in the hotel that you can climb up inside it and look into the ‘vastness of history.’ Who writes things like that?”

“I have a hypothesis for you about that motorcycle team.”

“Did you hear what I said about the statue?”

“Yes, I heard, but I still have a hypothesis. While you were in the examination room, the doctor and I had a brief conversation.”

“You didn’t rough him up, I hope.”

“No, not even figuratively. I was very polite.”

“He dodged.”

“Some. Finally he told me that the two riders who died were part of a team to watch a refugee transit camp.”

“He said that? I thought doctors never lied. They were obviously sent out to run down rumors that the redefector was hiding out in the countryside around here. One of them must have been someone who knew what Naranbaatar looked like, someone who could recognize him. That’s what caused Naranbaatar to go into shock; he knew Pyongyang had located him, and he figured he was trapped. When we showed up, he had a momentary surge of hope.”

“Surges of hope don’t kill people,” I said, and that ended the conversation for the next fifty kilometers, when a lone motorcycle roared past us going toward Ondorkhaan at a high rate of speed.

“In a great hurry,” my uncle observed, “to get nowhere special.”

Halfway to Ulan Bator we passed a truck pulling a heavy bulldozer on a trailer.

“There’s some paper and a pen in my bag on the floor in the back. Get it out and write the note to Miss Du. It will give you something to do for the next three hours.”

“I can’t.” My uncle shook his head. “Writing makes me carsick. Don’t worry, we’ll do it tonight.”

Chapter Seven

The room was not unoccupied when we got back to our hotel. It hadn’t been cleaned either, but the main problem was Batbayaar, lying on my uncle’s bed. His head was propped up with several pillows, and he was breezily going through the brochure on local nightlife.

“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.”