The Adversary

by Michael Walters

  “Well, let’s say it was strained,” Doripalam said. “Not entirely clear why. The father was a soldier. Fought as part of our force alongside the Russians in Afghanistan.”

  “And that’s where he was killed?” Nergui said.

  Doripalam leaned back in his chair and looked at the older man. Nergui gazed back at him impassively, his bright blue eyes revealing nothing of his thoughts. Doripalam had the uneasy sense, as he so often did with Nergui, that he was somehow being played with—possibly to his own benefit, but played with nonetheless. How much did Nergui really know about all this? “Yes,” Doripalam said, finally, “killed by a sniper, supposedly. Gavaa would have been little more than a baby at the time, so would hardly have remembered his father. But he grew up with—at least according to his mother—a rather idealized version of what his father had been like. He idolized him. The military allowed them to stay on in army accommodation after the father’s death so Gavaa was brought up in army houses, in sight of the parade ground. Saw his father as part of the great Mongolian martial tradition. Wanted to follow in his footsteps.”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “That was part of the problem. His mother didn’t want him to follow in his father’s footsteps—perhaps understandably, given what happened to the father. So she blocked and discouraged him. Then, when he was old enough, he went off without her consent and tried to join. And ironically enough he failed the medical. Suffered badly from asthma. So they wouldn’t have him anyway. And that of course only made things worse. No doubt his mother couldn’t conceal her relief.”

  “Complicated things, children,” Nergui observed. “I’ve generally managed to steer clear of them.”

  “I imagine this wasn’t helped by the fact that Gavaa was faced every day with the sight of a world he couldn’t be part of. So, as soon as he could, he took the opportunity to get out there and find himself a job in the city.”

  “How did the mother end up out on the steppes?”

  “She came from a family of herdsmen. After it became clear that Gavaa wasn’t going to return to the family home, she decided to return to her own family. Gavaa had already been in the city for six or seven months then, and it looks as if there wasn’t much contact between them.”

  “Is it possible that he was responsible for his mother’s death?”

  Doripalam nodded. “I can see that your razor sharp mind hasn’t been blunted by your time in the Ministry,” he said, smiling faintly. “Yes. We’re also looking at that possibility.”

  “In any case, perhaps the news of his mother’s death will bring him out into the open,” Nergui said.

  “Perhaps. It will certainly receive enough coverage. I am sure that Mrs. Tuya’s cousin will see to that.”

  “It’s always good to have friends in high places,” Nergui said. He half rose, as though about to leave, then paused, holding out the box file. “Speaking of which, you haven’t asked me about the inquiry. I assume you’re interested in its progress.”

  Doripalam smiled. “Of course. But I knew that if I didn’t ask, you wouldn’t be able to resist telling me about it anyway.”

  Nergui sat down again, nodding slowly. It was impossible to tell from his smoothly carved features whether or not he was amused. “You are right,” he said. “Young people today are much too smart for their own good.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The apartment was a mess, there was no doubt about that. In fact, looking round it, he had to admit that that would be a polite description. The room was—there was no way of avoiding this conclusion—squalid. There were dirty plates and dishes piled in corners, gathering mold and perhaps worse. There was a large pile of unread newspapers, stacked unsteadily on the seat of the worn sofa. There was a bog-like pile of apparently unwashed clothes, outerwear and underwear, squashed haphazardly against the filthy sink. There were arrays of glasses and cups, most half filled with vodka or other spirits, lined up across the table, chairs and floors. Several empty bottles lay under the table.

  And, most of all, right in the middle of this panorama of filth, there was him. Spread-eagled, barely sentient, probably smelling worse than the rest of this mess put together.

  How the hell had this happened?

  He sat up slowly—he was incapable of moving with any greater acceleration—and looked slowly around him. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Admittedly, he had never been the tidiest of men. Some might say, he reluctantly acknowledged to himself, that he was one of the least tidy. But he had never found himself living in a state like this.

  And, at least for the moment, he still couldn’t quite remember how he had reached this point.

  He had, he realized, a severe headache, pounding at the rear of his skull. His throat was parched, and tasted as if he might have tried to chew some of the discarded clothing before his collapse. As he stared at the stacked rows of empty and half empty glasses, the source of his condition became clearer. He was fortunate only that much of the contributory liquor remained unconsumed.

  He pulled himself very cautiously to his feet, blinking as the sunlight from the uncurtained window caught his eyes. The cheap clock was still there above the sink, he noticed, its crimson plastic as gaudy as ever. Ten past eight. He assumed that was morning, though at this time of the year it could still be light at eight in the evening. In any case, he had no idea how long he had been unconscious.

  He dragged himself across to the sink, found a relatively clean looking glass, rinsed it out and filled it with water from the tap. He drank the water down in one, then refilled the glass and emptied that one in the same fashion. He repeated the process a third and then a fourth time. By that point, he felt slightly more human, though now nausea was beginning to replace thirst as the dominant sensation in his body.

  As he moved away from the sink, he caught sight of himself momentarily in the full-length mirror he kept propped behind the main door of the apartment. The mirror had been his wife’s, and he couldn’t for the life of him think why she had decided to leave it with him. Possibly only to maximize the unpleasantness of moments like this.

  There was no way round it. He looked an even worse mess than the rest of the apartment. He was dressed in a filthy cotton vest, stained with sweat under the arms and spilled food down the chest and stomach. Below that, he was wearing a pair of sagging old boxer shorts which were in a state some way beyond rational description. And he was even wearing a pair of socks with matching large holes through which each of his big toes protruded.

  But all of that was relatively reassuring compared with his face. He looked like death. No, he looked like death in an advanced stage of decomposition. He had never seen any living person, let alone himself, looking quite as awful as this. In fact, over the years he had seen one or two corpses that might have been in a healthier state.

  He was unshaven. That went without saying. Three or four days’ growth at least. His pendulous stomach served only to emphasize the filthiness of his yellowing vest. And his hair looked as if it had been dipped liberally in some deeply unpleasant viscous substance—possibly oil, or possibly something sweeter to attract the lice which he suspected were breeding enthusiastically somewhere in there—and then held in a wind-tunnel for a considerable length of time. It was, he reflected, quite possible that this was exactly, or at least approximately, what had happened.

  He couldn’t remember last night. That wasn’t unusual. What concerned him more was that he couldn’t remember any of the preceding ones either. He poured himself another glass of water, and then slumped down on the threadbare sofa, carefully moving a mold-encrusted plate out of the way first.

  So what did he remember?

  Well, he remembered being suspended, that was for sure. Now, how the hell had that happened?

  Partly, he’d just had enough. He put up with this crap, year in, year out, throughout his whole career, and he’d thought it was about time he did something about it. It wasn’t as if he didn’t take his job seriously. That was
the main problem. He took it all a bit too seriously. That was why he was in the mess he was. He looked again round the devastation of the apartment. One hell of a mess.

  So he’d tried to get smart. But smartness wasn’t his thing. Granted, he could call on some low cunning when he needed to, and he’d thought that would be enough to get him through. But he should never have tried to get smart. Not where Muunokhoi was concerned. That had been a big mistake.

  The thought of Muunokhoi made him uneasy. He wasn’t clear, even now, quite how much Muunokhoi knew. The word was that Muunokhoi knew everything, and on the whole Tunjin was inclined to believe that. He’d certainly managed to unravel Tunjin’s idiotic plan quickly enough, though Tunjin had no idea quite how. It was obvious that Muunokhoi had sources on the inside, though Tunjin had thought he’d had all that covered. But they’d clearly worked out what was going on, and it surely wouldn’t take them long to finger Tunjin as the perpetrator.

  His suspension hadn’t exactly been publicized—he was supposedly on sick leave—but he couldn’t believe that it wasn’t already common knowledge. And if Muunokhoi was getting the right information, it wouldn’t take long for him to put two and two together.

  And in the middle of all that Tunjin had taken the opportunity to render himself comatose for—well, who knew exactly how long? No, smart definitely wasn’t his thing.

  For a moment, panic almost overwhelmed him. If Muunokhoi was after him, he was finished. There was no question about that. He knew more than enough about what Muunokhoi could do to people who crossed him. He’d seen plenty of evidence of that, which is why he’d taken the steps he had. But all he’d done was make things worse, and put himself in the firing line.

  He breathed deeply and forced himself to relax. That was the one thing you could say about blind panic. It could take the edge even off a hangover like this. Suddenly a pounding headache and churning guts seemed a relatively small price to pay for staying alive.

  Okay, so he wasn’t smart. But he was cunning and streetwise. He knew this city, and he knew more than enough about the lowlifes who frequented it. He ought to be capable of staying one step ahead of Muunokhoi, at least for a while.

  But for how long? That was the question. He couldn’t keep hiding forever. And he knew enough about Muunokhoi to recognize that he was a patient man. Ruthless. Unforgiving. Implacable. Vengeful. All of those. But nonetheless patient. Unlike Tunjin, he wasn’t the kind of man who would rush into some half-formed scheme without a clue how it was going to end up. He would take as much time as it needed. Tunjin might make himself safe today, tomorrow, maybe a year or more from now. But at some point, probably when he was finally beginning to relax again, Muunokhoi would be there.

  And that, of course, was assuming that Tunjin managed to keep himself at least moderately sober. He shivered at the thought of just how vulnerable he’d been over the last few days, no doubt stumbling from bar to bar and then back here to knock back more dregs of vodka from all these scattered bottles. All things considered, it was surprising that he’d woken up at all.

  Tunjin staggered up from the sofa, trying to force himself to think clearly. It was possible, of course, that he was simply below Muunokhoi’s radar. Why would a big wheel like Muunokhoi concern himself with an insignificant mite like Tunjin? But then he knew the answer to that well enough. Muunokhoi would bother with Tunjin because he was the only person who had ever come close to putting him behind bars.

  Tunjin looked around the apartment. Maybe Muunokhoi’s people had already been here. Frankly, they might have ransacked the whole place and it wouldn’t look very different. Though maybe the smell would have been sufficient to discourage them. Taking care to avoid the scattered plates and bottles, Tunjin stumbled through into the bedroom. It was in a marginally better state than the larger living room, in that there were no plates of half-eaten food and only a single empty vodka bottle lying by the bed. The bed itself was disturbed, though he had no recollection of using it on the preceding nights. But then he had no clear recollection of sleeping anywhere else either.

  He moved slowly into the bedroom, shaking his head to try to clear his thoughts, swallowing the panic that was once again beginning to well up in his stomach. And then he stopped, and for a moment the fear overwhelmed him.

  There was something lying in the center of the unmade bed. A gray cardboard file, bound with an elastic band. A file he recognized. A file he had last seen sitting, apparently unregarded, on the Chief’s desk.

  The case file relating to Muunokhoi.

  He walked forward slowly and reached out to touch the file, as though suspecting that it was a hallucination. Stranger things had happened, he imagined, after the consumption of this much alcohol. But there was no question that it was real.

  Had he somehow contrived to bring it home with him? Maybe sometime over the last few days, his drunken logic had somehow led him back to police headquarters with the aim of stealing the evidence. Though it was difficult to imagine that anyone would have let him in, and he couldn’t believe that he had been in a state to enter without being spotted.

  Maybe he’d somehow picked it up on the day of the interview with the Chief. Picked it up off the Chief’s desk, without either of them registering the fact. It didn’t seem very likely.

  Or maybe someone else had stolen the file on his behalf and brought it here as—well, as what? As a warning? To incriminate him in some way?

  He leaned over and carefully picked up the file, a wave of nausea sweeping over him as he did so. He pulled off the elastic band and opened the file, rifling through the stack of papers inside.

  They were exactly as he recalled them. Including those notes and documents that he had either forged himself or had had painstakingly prepared by one of his contacts, a former fraudster, who had worked for nothing other than a few mild blackmail threats. Tunjin wondered, in passing, whether Muunokhoi might have expressed any interest in the person who had actually carried out this skilled work.

  But Tunjin’s more immediate concern was his own well-being. The papers in the file were almost as he had seen them last. But not quite. There was one small, but highly significant, difference. Slipped into the front of the file, on top of the pile of documents, was something new, something which Tunjin was sure had not been there when he had last seen the file.

  It was a photograph. A high quality photograph, apparently taken in a photographer’s studio, with the subject carefully posed. If the subject of the photograph had been, say, an actor or a singer, this might have been the shot selected for sending out, over the artiste’s signature, to fans. There was no need for a signature here, though, since Tunjin recognized the subject only too well. It was Muunokhoi. His eyes were empty, but his mouth, as always, seemed to be smiling.

  “I’m here to report a crime. Or a potential crime, I’m not sure. Is this the correct place?”

  Sangajav, sitting uncomfortably at the reception desk, looked up confusedly. He had been working painstakingly through a series of statistics that Doripalam had requested and now he had lost his place. “I’m sorry?”

  The woman before him presented an impressive figure. Probably around forty, he thought, with a severe haircut and features that were striking rather than conventionally attractive but still with a very decent figure. Very fashionable clothes, too, he noticed—an expensive-looking dark business suit, probably imported from the West somewhere. Sangajav had little aptitude for mathematics, but, at least in his own mind, he was highly experienced when it came to appraising women.

  “Is this the right place to report a crime?”

  Sangajav carefully gathered up his papers and looked up at her. “Well, no, not really. I think you want the police station.”

  “Isn’t this the police station?”

  Sangajav shook his head, as though dealing with a very elementary error. “No, this is police headquarters.”

  “And you’re not a police station as well?”

  “Well, no. This is m
ainly administration, and some specialist units—”

  “But you are the police?”

  “Yes, we are, but—”

  “So why can’t I report a crime here?”

  “It’s just that—well, you have to go to the police station.”

  “But since I’m here, can’t you deal with it anyway?”

  “That’s not really the way—”

  “But why not? If you’re the police and I want to report a crime, why can’t I do so?”

  Sangajav sighed. Why did this sort of thing always happen when he was around? This wasn’t even really supposed to be a reception. The building wasn’t strictly open to the public, so the desk was really just here for greeting official visitors. But visitors were so few that there was little point in employing a permanent receptionist, so the informal procedure was that one of the officers rostered for administrative duties would sit here just in case anyone turned up. As far as Sangajav could judge, this only ever happened on his watch and it was always people like this.

  “It just doesn’t work like that,” he explained patiently. “We’re not an operational police station. That’s on the other side of the square. As I say, we’re mainly admin people here, and one or two specialist units like the Serious Crimes Team—”

  “The Serious Crimes Team,” she interrupted. There was a faint hint of a smile around her mouth. “Well, what if I wanted to report a serious crime? Could I do that here?”

  Sangajav was beginning to suspect that, despite her impressive appearance, the woman was deeply insane. He wasn’t sure quite how to respond. “Do you want to report a serious crime?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “What constitutes a serious crime?”

  Sangajav shook his head, despairingly. His only thought now was how he might get rid of this woman. It didn’t seem appropriate simply to throw her out. “It’s difficult to say,” he said at last. “Perhaps if you tell me what the crime is, I can tell you whether it’s serious. But you’ll still have to report it at the police station.”