Pursuit

by Alex Preston

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have to fix this music.’

  Getting up, he strode to the jukebox. In his steel-capped cowboy boots and New York shirt he cowed the pool players into acquiescence. Soon, the steely strains of ‘Apache’ met their ears and they stopped for a moment to watch the Mongol exile from New Jersey lope back to his stool. The barman came over and said that ‘Apache’ was his favourite song on the box, a true Mongolian classic.

  ‘My father loved that song,’ Jalsa said to Chittleborough. ‘But he never saw Mongolia and he never learned to read. That’s how it is.’

  ‘He would be proud of you now.’

  They clacked glasses. Chittleborough talked a bit more about himself. He had been a high roller of sorts back in his day. He had made his millions, invested them wisely and then, in his way, grown bored of them. He lived in Hong Kong and London but no longer cared which. He owned a small mansion on The Peak in Hong Kong and spent his days managing distant charities. He was divorced; his grown up children lived in the States and seemed to despise him. It was a common fate of driven men. What compensations, then, did boundless wealth offer? All the world’s cities, he explained, were becoming indistinguishable from each other. What he craved most these days was an open road, but they were increasingly few and far between. Then one day he had seen the website for the New World and he had read that at Mongolia’s foremost eco-resort one could ride horses to the horizon and sleep in a tent. The roads there were so wild that no one could honestly call them roads.

  Jalsa was about to bring up the delicate subject of shamans, but before he could do so Chittleborough brought it up himself. He had seen flyers for telephone shamans slipped under his door at the Ulaanbaatar Shangri-La the night before. Could they really foretell the future?

  ‘I believe they can,’ Jalsa confessed, ‘but the news is never good. I do believe everything they say, though.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘I’ll take you to one tonight if you like. There are several in Dalanzadgad. Are you sure about it?’

  ‘I’ve heard they are great mindreaders. I need it.’

  Chittleborough paid for the shots and they went back outside into the whirling cement dust. Jalsa called ahead to a shaman who worked on the outskirts of the town, a woman he knew quite well, and they drove there without saying a word.

  The stars had now come out and, once they had driven beyond the perimeter of the town, the light was all in the sky. At the edge of the desert they came to a cinderblock shack with prayer flags around it flapping in the wind and the soft sound of a television coming from the interior. They knocked and an old woman in tracksuit bottoms and an outer coat pegged with animal furs opened it. She was prepared for them and already heating milk. Behind her, a fire with coals warmed the room to the temperature of a sauna. The price was thirty dollars.

  The woman had them sit and she greeted Jalsa as if she knew him well. They talked while Chittleborough sat on his haunches taking in the rags spattered with sour milk on the walls and the pelts hanging from nails. Desert foxes or rats and rabbits. A tattered calendar lay on the floor. Jalsa finally turned to him.

  ‘She wants you to mark your birthdate on this calendar.’

  When he did so, she said to Jalsa, ‘Birthdate 1960. Element water – picky rat.’

  ‘How can a rat be picky?’ Chittleborough objected.

  ‘It’s in the zodiac.’

  Then the ceremony began. She donned a headdress with feathers and a leather mask, drank some milk mixed with vodka and began beating a small drum with moons painted on the skin. Soon she was swaying.

  It went on for fifteen minutes. Then she threw a bowl of her milk onto the pelts on the wall and turned again to Jalsa. He translated for Chittleborough. The spirits wanted to know what the Englishman was doing in their land. Why had he come there and what did he want? Why was he wearing black, a cursed colour? Did he not like milk?

  Chittleborough calmly answered that he had come to see snow leopards and to visit a shaman, which he was now doing, and that most of his clothes were black. He liked milk. The shaman herself then turned and threw yet more milk over him and then reached out and laid her hand on top of his head. The spirits were curious about him and they could see everything, past and future. Drenched in sour milk, Chittleborough asked the spirits what lay in store for him over the next few days.

  ‘He will sleep for two days,’ the shaman said to Jalsa. ‘He will wake up on the third day.’

  ‘And beyond that?’

  She spoke very quietly so that the foreigner would not be suspicious.

  ‘He is sick. The spirits say he has a terminal cancer. Did he not tell you? Otherwise they say he will be prosperous.’

  ‘It’s what you say to everyone.’

  ‘In his case, it’s a strong message. He will be prosperous but he will die. It’s up to you if you want to tell him.’

  They went outside for a smoke afterwards and Chittleborough said that he had enjoyed the ritual. But what had the shaman said about his future?

  ‘She said you’ll live to be a hundred and make another fortune.’

  ‘Really? That’s a very nice message from the spirit world for thirty dollars. But what do the spirits have against the colour black?’

  ‘It’s an unlucky colour here. I should have told you before you came.’

  In reality, Jalsa was filled with a cool dread. He did believe what the spirits said, for all his American upbringing, and had he not already intuited that the Englishman was mortally sick?

  Back at the gas station the Cruiser was ready and they continued their journey over open desert. Five miles beyond the little airport the surfaced road expired. They turned on the jeep’s big roof lights as they drove. Low gers lay in the light, surrounded by thorn fences and tamarisks, and around them shone ancient chalk covered by feather grass and winterfat.

  As the thermometer dropped, they set their teeth and waited for the lights of New World to appear out of the nothingness, like those of a Christmas play on a night of snow. Jalsa called ahead to the staff, and as they pulled up to the resort four boys in nomad dress stood at the head of a path lit by toadstool lamps. Since Chittleborough had paid handsomely for his privacy, they were the only arrivals that week.

  Chittleborough’s bags were carried on shoulders to his ger. At a glance, he thought there were maybe two dozen of these felt tents on stone foundations. Their doors opened onto the desert. A kind of clubhouse sat in the middle of it, with curved and painted eaves. ‘The end of all roads,’ he thought with satisfaction. The clubhouse turned out to be a whisky bar stocked with Vegas trifles. It had an open fire and was filled with Gobi dinosaur teeth. He had intended it to evoke a cosy hotel in the Highlands. Even the rafters had been built with his own bare hands.

  Above the resort a tumulus rose to a plateau of volcanic rock. It was covered with prehistoric tombs marked by low piles of rocks which had slumbered there for three thousand years. On their smoothed surfaces were carved pictographs of archers and gazelles, sun and moons. Chittleborough lingered there for a while before dinner, marvelling at these images. Then he went back down to the steps of the clubhouse on his way to his accommodation. The wind had already chilled his ears to numbness.

  Inside, the staff were dancing by themselves, thinking no one could hear them. Teenage students from Ulaanbaatar. The bar didn’t open officially for another hour and they had it all to themselves. He sat on the steps and felt a great delight. The road by which they had come was just a scratch mark on the surface of the icy desert. Here a cluster of wild horses stood in the moonlight flicking their tails. He sat and reflected on his long day, which, after all, had begun in Hong Kong. Many things had happened since his pre-dawn breakfast overlooking the South China Sea. A shaman had told him that he would make another fortune and that he was a fool for wearing black. Shaking his head and chuckling, he made his way down to his ger and ran a long lukewarm shower, then lay on the bed covered with nomad qui
lts. The staff came in every four hours to re-fuel the stove whose metal chimney kept the tent warm, and they were there then. Two boys carrying a brazier and tongs. After they had left, he stretched out and enjoyed the suffocating heat. He had forgotten about dinner and simply fell asleep.

  In the dining room, meanwhile, Jalsa sat alone with a bottle that he had also won in Las Vegas. He opened it morosely and began to drink. By ten, he thought that the Englishman had maybe forgotten about dinner altogether and sent a boy down to check up on him. Sure enough, the boy reported back, the visitor was fast asleep. So asleep that nothing could wake him. ‘Then let him sleep,’ Jalsa said, and ate his khorkhog alone. From the middle of the mutton he picked up the hot stone and rubbed his hands in sheep fat. His mood had darkened. So the foreigner had fallen asleep after all, though in the circumstances it was understandable. Perhaps the road had exhausted him.

  When he returned to his own ger, he lit incense and recited prayers to Buddha before finding sleep himself. That night, however, his dreams were not graced by the compassion of Buddha. Instead, he found himself walking the plain in a heavy snow that did not melt on his eyelashes. In the middle of the desolate plain he met the shaman again, who was squatting by a small fire and waiting for him. Though they spoke, their mouths did not open. He asked her if the spirits were watching over the Englishman and she said that during the night the stranger had disappeared from view. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing to footprints in the snow that trailed off into the mist. He had gone that way alone, taking his cancer with him. ‘Like the picky rat,’ she said, ‘that he is.’

  When Jalsa woke, the first thing he heard was a light snow pattering on the roof of the ger. On his cell phone he called the kitchen to bring him down his pu’er tea. He went outside to drink and before the boy left he asked him about the visitor. Had Chittleborough come up for an early breakfast?

  ‘No one has seen him, sir.’

  So he must be sleeping in late.

  ‘Let the fire in his ger go cold and it will wake him up.’

  Outside his ger’s hearth Jalsa sat on a folding chair and drank his tea as the plain around him turned white. After his dream he had been briefly woken by the howl of wolves, but as usual they had not come near the resort. He brooded over the strange Englishman. At last, the staff came to him and reported that Chittleborough was still asleep and that the chill of the ger had not roused him. He had by now been asleep for more than fourteen hours. Jalsa decided to go down and see for himself. When he got to Chittleborough’s tent, however, his dread returned and he hesitated before entering. Not for nothing do the spirits send us dreams when they want to warn us. And inside the tent the Englishman lay on his side, breathing softly. His passport sat on the night table along with a blister pack of Ultracet painkillers. Jalsa looked over the unopened bags and felt a sly desire to rifle through them. But a guest was a guest. Even if, in the end, he had no idea who this stranger really was.

  Chittleborough slept through the whole day and then into the evening. The staff gossiped about the Englishman who had not woken since he arrived. All through the night they stood guard over him, now periodically lighting the fire in his ger under new orders from the boss. The boys who made the fire in his room whispered that he was in a trance and would never wake up. Jalsa himself, sitting outside the ger during the night and listening to the far-off wolves, began to think that the shaman was far more powerful than even he had anticipated.

  The following day the clouds had cleared. Stilled by snow, the plain shone like silver. Jalsa waited all day by the satellite phone, equivocating. Then, as the light finally faded and brilliant stars scattered across the sky, there was a stirring from inside Chittleborough’s ger and the boy posted outside his door ran up to tell his boss.

  Jalsa went down and opened the door himself. In the gloom he saw Chittleborough sitting up in bed and rubbing his eyes.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I must be late for dinner. Did I oversleep? You should have woken me.’

  ‘We tried, but we thought you needed a good rest.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Time for dinner, I’d say. Are you hungry?’

  ‘I’ll say. Starving. And I could use a drink.’

  ‘Then get freshened up and I’ll meet you in the clubhouse.’

  It was an hour before Chittleborough appeared, his hair still wet and neatly combed, his beard oiled. The Englishman was now spruce, like a Victorian Arctic adventurer who has finally come home to hearth and home.

  ‘I had the damnest sleep,’ he said energetically, his eyes bright and wide. ‘Many dreams – but now I can’t remember them.’

  ‘Maybe it’s better.’

  ‘About tomorrow – are we driving out to the mountain range to see the snow leopards?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  For a moment Jalsa was confused. Then he realised that Chittleborough had no idea that he had been sleeping for two days.

  ‘Why, of course. It’s a long drive though. I hope you can deal with it.’

  ‘I’ve been sleeping solidly since I arrived. Tomorrow I’ll be in tremendous shape. Don’t worry. Why wouldn’t I be able to deal with it?’

  ‘In that case we’ll get up at four a.m., if it’s all right with you.’

  ‘It’s more than all right. I’ve never felt better.’

  They drank a few brandies after dinner next to a roaring fire in their overcoats and fur hats. One of the boys came up and played his morin khuur. Jalsa could see the relief in his face that the foreigner had not remained in his trance. He showed Chittleborough his military survey map marked with the nomad tracks winding into the surrounding Gurvan Saikhan range. The Chinese border was only sixty miles to the south, a no-man’s-land filled with Soviet military ruins. In this wilderness, they would find the leopards.

  In the event, they rose earlier and left at four, just the two of them. They took with them a rifle, two binoculars, cameras, boxes of sandwiches, two traditional recurved bows with blunted arrows and a satellite phone. Before they left, Jalsa told his staff not to betray to Chittleborough that he had slept for two days. A man paying $8,000 had a right to his peace of mind, at least until he returned to the airport and discovered the truth. Then it wouldn’t matter. There was no internet in the Gurvan Saikhan.

  By first light they were alone on the steppe. In the distance, wild camels moved like caravels across the grassland and to the east; like something out of Ezekiel’s dreams, a black tornado appeared for a while and then faded away. As the snow melted under a clear sun, the track which Jalsa already knew by heart became visible to the eye, reaching to the far horizon, a path carved into grass that nomads had used for centuries.

  A hundred kilometres down it they stopped and drew out the two bows Jalsa had brought with them. They took it in turns to shoot the arrows high into the air and let them thud into the weakened snow. The sun blinded the Englishman and he covered his eyes. As they walked over to retrieve the arrows, Chittleborough said that he felt rejuvenated in some indefinable way. This was what he had come looking for. Space and grass.

  ‘And there was something I didn’t tell you previously,’ he added. ‘Before I left Hong Kong my doctor diagnosed me with a rare cancer which is apparently difficult to treat. Therefore, this might well be my last trip anywhere on earth. Since I thought this might be the case, I decided to come here. I certainly don’t regret it.’

  ‘That is sad news, Adrian. I’m very sorry to hear it.’

  But the Englishman didn’t seem sad at all. As he picked up the arrows his expression was childishly happy.

  ‘No, I feel marvellous, I have to admit. Shall we sit and have a sip of something?’

  ‘You’re asking a Mongol?’

  By the jeep they laid out a blanket and drank from a flask with strips of beef jerky. A rainbow had appeared in place of the come-and-go tornado, and the snow had almost completely disappeared. Chittleborough talked about his plans for what could be a very short futu
re, but without bitterness. Eventually, though, Jalsa asked him about his sleep. Had Chittleborough experienced something during it, an encounter of some kind?

  ‘What kind of encounter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes we believe that we have a glimpse of death in a dream. Did you?’

  But the Englishman’s eyes were blank.

  ‘I woke up very afraid, now that you mention it. But then I heard the fire and the wind and I was happy. Like I am now. I knew where I was.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. We’ll drive for ten hours today. And we probably won’t see a snow leopard.’

  ‘It’s neither here nor there.’

  ‘By the way,’ Chittleborough added, ‘did you hear the wolves last night?’

  ‘Of course. But they only attack during rain. It’s a known fact.’

  ‘Ah, is that so?’

  The Englishman looked confused for a moment but said nothing further. Indeed, they hardly spoke for the rest of the day, since everything that needed to be said had already been uttered. Inside the dry ravines of the Gurvan Saikhan they never saw a snow leopard. Even when Chittleborough had left the following day, Jalsa was unsure what to think about the long sleep of the visitor. He had meant to explain it to him when they got to Ulaanbaatar airport but to his surprise the Englishman said nothing about it. He glanced at his ticket, smiled, and got on the plane without a word.

  At the Shangri-La Hotel that night Jalsa went on the internet and googled Adrian Chittleborough. The visitor didn’t exist, however, not in that dimension anyway. The only Chittleborough he could find was a reputable tailor on Savile Row, maker of twill suits for gentlemen and mentioned frequently on the website Dashing Tweeds. How he wished now that he had discreetly opened his passport that night and found out his real name.