The Adversary

by Michael Walters

  Doripalam waited a moment, but when it was clear that the man did not intend to continue, he said: “Who did you think we were?”

  The man looked around at his companions, as if looking for support. “It’s a long story,” he said at last. “You said your companion was injured. Can we do anything for him?”

  Doripalam hesitated, not wanting to lose control of the situation, but recognizing that Yadamsuren did need attention. He looked at Luvsan. “He’s right. There’s a first aid kit in the truck. Go and get Yadamsuren bandaged up as best you can. I’ll look after this bunch.”

  One of the men leaned forward. “I have some medical skills,” he said. “I trained as a nurse. I can help.”

  The situation was, Doripalam thought, drifting toward the surreal. But he found it hard to believe that these cowering men constituted any kind of a threat. “Okay,” he said to Luvsan. “Take him with you.”

  He turned to the man on the left of the group. “We’re investigating a murder,” he said. “In a nomadic camp close to the capital. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “My sister,” the man said. “We saw it in the newspapers a few days ago. It was not a surprise but it was—a shock. I did not really believe it.”

  “You didn’t know she was dead?”

  “Not for sure. Not until we saw the report. We thought she might have escaped somehow. But we did not really believe that she would.”

  “Escaped what? What’s this all about?”

  “It is a long story,” the man repeated. “We do not even know the whole story.”

  Doripalam was becoming irritated with the cryptic responses. “You’ll have plenty of time in custody to go through it all,” he said. He began to intone the formal charges of attempted murder, following the prescribed procedure and wording, while the three men stared at him aghast.

  “But we are not criminals,” one of them said, as he finished.

  “I would advise you not to say more until you’re in custody,” Doripalam said. “We can organize legal representation for you.”

  “We are not criminals,” the man repeated.

  “You have fired repeatedly on officers of the law, with no warning or provocation. You have injured a police officer. You have—and I mention this in passing—damaged a police vehicle. Whatever your motivations, these are serious crimes.”

  “But we did not intend—”

  “That will be for the courts to decide. I can only work on the outcomes.”

  Doripalam sighed and pulled out his cell phone. He was going to have to call backup from the local police to take these characters into custody in Bulgan. All this would take time, and the rain was continuing to fall.

  “If you’re prepared to co-operate, we can perhaps short-circuit some of the formalities. And I may be prepared to reconsider the charges, so long as my young companion does not wish to press charges.” This, he thought, was all very unorthodox. Still, pouring rain in the middle of the steppe was not conducive to orthodoxy.

  “Let’s get inside and talk,” he said, gesturing with his pistol toward the nearest ger.

  The three men filed slowly into the tent. Doripalam followed them, still holding his gun at chest height, keeping them all carefully in view. It might be worth being unorthodox, but it certainly wasn’t worth being reckless.

  Inside, the ger was comfortable enough but very sparsely furnished, as if the men were traveling with the minimum of equipment. The first man gestured Doripalam to sit on one of the two wooden seats, while he and his companions crouched on the floor. The ger was lit dimly by two oil lanterns, but the tent was well enough illuminated for Doripalam to discern the anxiety on the men’s faces. Doripalam held his gun casually, but kept it trained on the three men.

  “Okay,” he said at last, “so what’s the story?”

  “It’s my sister,” the first man said.

  “Mrs. Tuya?”

  The man nodded. “I’m Tseren.” He gestured. “Damdin is also my brother. Kadyr is our cousin. Another cousin, Ravhjik, is assisting your colleagues.”

  Doripalam nodded. “Tell me about your sister,” he said.

  Tseren hesitated, as if unsure where to begin. “I suppose it starts with her husband,” he said.

  “The soldier?”

  Tseren nodded. “Khenbish. The great war hero,” he snorted, ironically. “Yes, with him.”

  “You did not have a high opinion of him?” Doripalam watched Tseren quizzically, wondering quite where this was going.

  “He was a bad man,” Tseren said, simply. “In every way. I have been amused reading the press coverage. The great war hero.” He laughed, bitterly. He glanced at the other two men who looked back at him, stony-faced.

  “What do you mean?” Doripalam said.

  “You name it. He was a violent man. He drank too much.”

  “He was violent with your sister?”

  Damdin began to speak but Tseren cut him off. “I think he was. She always denied it, but I have seen her with bruises. I am sure he was.”

  Doripalam looked at Damdin, wondering whether he was about to contradict his brother. Damdin shrugged. “I do not know,” he said. “I do not like to condemn people without evidence. But I think Tseren is right.”

  “You are too generous,” Tseren said. “Khenbish was a bad man. He was trouble for our sister. He was involved with bad people.”

  “What sort of bad people?” Doripalam looked between the three men. He had the impression that Tseren was keen to talk, but that the others were uneasy about saying too much.

  Tseren looked at the others. “I cannot name names,” he said.

  “This is a murder inquiry,” Doripalam said. “If you have information, it is your duty to give it to the police. If I think you’re withholding evidence, we may once again need to revert to the formalities.”

  Tseren shook his head. “I am not trying to withhold evidence. I genuinely don’t know the names of these people. I’ve no desire to know them.”

  Doripalam decided to let that one go for a moment. “So what kinds of people are we talking about?” he said.

  Tseren shrugged. “Mostly small-time crooks, I think. Organized crime, though not on a grand scale—protection rackets, smuggling, robbery. Some pretty unsavory types. I met them occasionally when I went to visit my sister. Some of them were ex-soldiers, which I guess is how Khenbish had gotten to know them.”

  Doripalam nodded. Once the USSR had withdrawn its support, the military, like most other parts of the economy, had collapsed. There were many soldiers who found themselves back out on the street, with no pension, no skills and few prospects. It was also common knowledge that a substantial proportion of the military armory had found its way back on to the street with them.

  “But I think there were other things he was involved in. Deals he got involved in during his time in Afghanistan—”

  “You mean drugs?”

  Tseren shrugged. “Well, he certainly had access to them for his own use. Openly boasted about it. So, yes, I think he was probably involved in some sort of operation.”

  “Drug smuggling?” It sounded far-fetched to Doripalam. Would it be possible for a soldier, even in those chaotic postcommunist days, to be involved in smuggling drugs into the country?

  “I don’t know for sure,” Tseren said. “I just know that he seemed to get himself caught up with some unpleasant people. I was frightened for what might happen to his family—”

  “You met these people?”

  “Sometimes. Again, when I went round there, he’d be engaged in what he described as business meetings, though he’d never tell us what kind of business was involved. But I got the impression that the meetings weren’t always comfortable ones. If I know Khenbish, he’d have promised more than he could deliver. I don’t know for sure, but there were a couple of occasions when I thought he was in serious trouble.”

  “He died in combat?”

  Tseren laughed. “Is that what the records say?”


  Doripalam shook his head. “I’ve not looked at the records myself,” he said, “but that was what I understood.”

  “He was drunk,” Tseren said, “and maybe more than drunk. Fell into the path of a truck. They hushed it up, but that was the real story. The best way it could have ended, really. The family got an army pension—not a great deal but something—and were rid of him. That was when they moved back out to live with us.”

  “But what does this have to do with Mrs. Tuya’s death?” Doripalam said. “He’d been dead for a long time by then.”

  “Gavaa idolized his father,” Tseren said, as though changing the subject.

  “Gavaa? The son? The one who went missing?” Doripalam said.

  Tseren nodded. “Thought his father was marvelous. Well, I suppose every son has a right to do that, though not every father deserves it. Wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.”

  “As a soldier?”

  “Yes. At first. But he wasn’t cut out for it. But he saw his father as the great hero. Thought that everything he did was marvelous.”

  “What are you saying? That he followed his father—” For the first time, Doripalam lowered the gun and stared at Tseren.

  “I don’t know for sure what happened, but his mother thought he’d fallen in with a bad crowd in the city—”

  “Mothers always think that,” Doripalam pointed out. “Mine thought it when I joined the police.”

  “No, it was more than that,” Tseren said. “She didn’t say so to me, but I think she knew some of the people he’d gotten in touch with. I think he was trying to make contact with some of his father’s business contacts.”

  “Mrs. Tuya said nothing about this when she came to us about his disappearance,” Doripalam said.

  “No, well, I don’t think she wanted to believe it,” Tseren said. “She didn’t really have any concrete evidence—just hints he’d dropped on the few occasions when he’d spoken to her.”

  “I understand they didn’t get along at the end,” Doripalam said. “Surely that’s the kind of thing that any teenager might say to bait his mother?”

  “That’s what she thought at first.” Tseren paused. “It’s certainly what I told her. It was only when he disappeared that she thought there might have been something more in what he’d said.”

  “And what had he said?”

  “Something about job prospects. She was saying the usual stuff about wasting his life in some dead end job, and he started telling her that he had real prospects. Stuff she couldn’t even dream of.”

  “Doesn’t sound very plausible,” Doripalam said. “We’ve no evidence he did get another job. And his mother didn’t mention it when she spoke to us.”

  “I don’t think any of us took much notice of it, even when Gavaa went missing. We all thought it was just teenage bravado. To be honest, my concern was simply whether Gavaa could survive in the city. He had a high opinion of himself, but I’m not sure many other people shared it.”

  “Including you?”

  “Including me. And, I think, even including his mother. He treated her badly—knew she hadn’t really gotten along with his father and thought that was her fault. But he saw his father as a hero, whereas we all saw him as a drunken bully. But she was his mother. She loved him. I think that was why she was so worried when he vanished. Because she just thought that he wouldn’t be able to cope.”

  “Did you take his disappearance seriously?”

  Tseren shrugged. “Not at first. I don’t imagine the police did, either. I was a bit embarrassed by the press coverage. But when we continued to hear nothing from him, I began to get more concerned.”

  “You’d have expected him to contact you?”

  “If only to ask for money. He was always short. And then, when the men came—”

  Doripalam looked up sharply and stared at Tseren across the dim expanse of the tent. “Men?”

  “I wasn’t there myself. We’d all made a trip into the city and left Bayarmaa—Mrs. Tuya—by herself looking after the animals.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of weeks before her murder, I suppose.”

  “And you never came forward—”

  “No. We should have done, I know. But we were afraid.”

  “Who were these men?”

  “We don’t know. They apparently arrived in a truck, two of them. Large, threatening men. The kinds of people that Bayarmaa’s husband used to associate with, she told us. They were asking for Gavaa. Said he was in some serious trouble. They tried to give the impression that they wanted to help him, but Bayarmaa’s impression was that if he was in trouble, they were probably the cause of it.”

  “But they didn’t know where he was?”

  “No, they were trying to track him down. They said it was some business deal that he’d been involved in but they wouldn’t say more. They were clearly convinced that he was hiding out with his mother.”

  “She told them he wasn’t?”

  “Of course. But it wasn’t clear that they believed her. From the way they spoke, it sounded as if they thought that, at the very least, she was in contact with him.”

  “Did they threaten her?”

  “Not overtly, I don’t think. She was a tough woman—I don’t think she was scared of them herself. But she was worried about Gavaa.”

  “And what about you? Were you worried?”

  Tseren nodded, crouched down on the rugs that were spread across the floor of the tent. “Yes, I knew the kinds of people that Khenbish had associated with. If these were some of those people, then—well, yes, I had reason to be worried.”

  “And you thought they might be?”

  Tseren shrugged. “I began to put two and two together. Remembered what Gavaa had said about having prospects. I thought he might well have approached some of his father’s old associates and gotten sucked into something that was over his head.”

  Doripalam had lowered the gun. “I wanted to get out of there,” Tseren continued. “Move on. I know these kinds of people. They don’t take no for an answer. If they thought Gavaa was hiding with us, then they’d keep watching us. If they thought we knew where he was, then they’d take whatever steps they could to get the information out of us.”

  “So you moved on? Without Mrs. Tuya?” It was hard not to make the question sound accusatory.

  Tseren shook his head. “Not immediately. I told myself I was just being paranoid, that there was no reason to be frightened. Then the following evening, I came out of the tent to see a truck parked some way away across the grassland. It was them. They were watching us. I could even see the binoculars. Worst of all, they weren’t making any effort to hide themselves. They wanted us to know they were there. They didn’t stay there long. But then a day or two later they were back again. Just watching. And that was when I knew that it would go on like that, that we really didn’t have a choice, that we really should get away.”

  “So you did?”

  “We did. The four of us left as quickly as we could to look for new pastures, somewhere far enough away that they wouldn’t easily be able to find us.”

  “Why didn’t you take Mrs. Tuya with you?”

  “She wouldn’t come. She thought there would be some news soon of Gavaa, and she didn’t want not to be there. And there was a policeman coming to talk to her—”

  “That was me,” Doripalam said quietly.

  “She thought you might have some news.”

  Doripalam shook his head. “I had nothing to tell her.”

  Tseren nodded. “I assumed that would be the case. I told her so. But she was desperate for any information.”

  Doripalam nodded, thinking back to how lightly he had treated Gavaa’s disappearance. “And none of you stayed with her?”

  Tseren dropped his head and stared at the floor. “We told ourselves that nothing would happen to her before we returned. She told us the same. And she said that the police were coming to visit her so the men wou
ldn’t dare do anything. But I think we were just cowards.”

  “And you didn’t go back?”

  Tseren nodded. “We started to. We found a good pasture for the family. We left the rest of the family there—another cousin and her husband, their two boys—and then we went back for Mrs. Tuya and the rest of the equipment. But when we got within sight of the camp, we saw that it was surrounded by police vehicles.”

  Doripalam looked up and stared at Tseren. “So why didn’t you come forward? Why didn’t you tell us what you knew?”

  “I don’t know. We were scared. We didn’t know what had happened. We thought—maybe that Bayarmaa had called you in or that she’d spoken to you about the men when you visited. But I think we knew from all the activity that—well, that that wasn’t really what had happened. So we panicked and fled. We’ve been running ever since.”

  Doripalam shook his head, watching the three cowering men in front of him. It was, he thought, a sight far removed from the Mongolian martial ideal. “You should have come forward,” he said. “We would have protected you.”

  “You were not able to protect Bayarmaa,” Tseren said. The statement was factual rather than accusatory. “You were not able to protect Gavaa.”

  Doripalam could hear the faint thudding of the rain on the roof. “We do not know that anything has happened to Gavaa,” he said.

  Tseren shook his head. “I do not believe we will see Gavaa again,” he said. “I think he is dead.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Nergui, working his distinctive brand of bureaucratic magic, had managed to organize an official car to take them home. He had originally assumed, without making any definite plans, that they would go on somewhere after the restaurant. Maybe just to a bar for a nightcap or two. He imagined that both of them were getting a little old for nightclubs.

  He had not thought what might happen beyond that. Quite probably nothing. He still wasn’t sure about the nature of this relationship, or where it might lead. He was enjoying the companionship, and Sarangarel seemed to have enjoyed the evening, if only because she so rarely socialized. Nergui was reluctant to look any further forward than that. He couldn’t imagine that romance was seriously on the cards for either of them, and he was still concerned about his own, possibly darker motives for re-establishing this relationship.