The Adversary (6 page)

“But he didn't tell her what it was?”

“No, in fact, she said that he seemed very secretive. Kept hinting that there was more he could tell her but that he had to keep it confidential. That kind of thing.”

“Not a Government job,” Nergui said. It was not a question.

Doripalam smiled faintly. “Well, I imagine you would know. But, yes, we did check that, because we couldn't think what kind of role might have any requirement for confidentiality.”

“If not a Government role, that suggests something more dubious,” Nergui said.

“Maybe. That is, if we take what the mother said at face value. By that time, she seemed keen to stir up as
much trouble as possible. I wasn't directly involved, but I read all the transcripts of the interviews and I couldn't decide whether or not she was exaggerating what Gavaa had said. Making it sound more mysterious than maybe it was.”

“But he still vanished?” Nergui ran his fingers slowly through his thick black hair.

“Well, in the sense that we don't know where he is, yes. But his disappearance doesn't seem to have been particularly sudden. He'd given his landlord a month's notice on the apartment, so was clearly expecting to move. He'd also given notice in his job, telling them that he'd found something that paid better, though he didn't say what. But he left both the job and the apartment a couple of weeks earlier than expected. The landlord came to drop in some mail one day and found the place deserted.”

“Like the
gers
?” Nergui said.

“Well, yes, I suppose so. It was a furnished apartment, and, from what the landlord said, I don't think Gavaa had many personal belongings in any case. Just some clothes, a few books and pictures. They'd all been stripped away, but I imagine they would have fitted into a small suitcase. The landlord was surprised he hadn't said goodbye, as they'd gotten along fairly well, but just assumed Gavaa had decided to move early for some reason. When we spoke to him, he seemed to think the whole thing was just a fuss about nothing.”

“What about the friends? If Gavaa had just moved to a new apartment or a new job, surely they'd know where he was?” Nergui crossed his legs and rested one ankle delicately across his other knee. His socks, Doripalam
noted, were pale blue today, matching the shirt and tie beneath his standard dark gray suit. Doripalam wondered vaguely how many color combinations Nergui had in his wardrobe.

“You'd have thought so, wouldn't you?” Doripalam said. “That's the only bit of the story that doesn't hang together, where the mother's concerns were understandable. He'd been out drinking with a group of the friends the night before he vanished—pleasant evening, no indication of anything unusual, no sign that he wasn't intending to go to work in his civil service role the next day. But he never turned up at work. Like the landlord, his employers just assumed that he'd decided or been required to take up his new job earlier than expected. They were a bit annoyed, but people often don't work out their notice, so they weren't surprised.”

“And the friends?” Nergui prompted.

Doripalam shook his head. “We've spoken to all of those who were with him the night before he vanished, plus a few others who were known to be acquainted with him. They all claim they've not seen him since. I don't know whether they're telling the truth. Again, I wasn't directly involved, but I get the impression from the interview transcripts that maybe some of them were a little surprised to find themselves on the end of a police investigation.”

“You think they might have been lying?”

“Well, not all them. It's hard to imagine that they'd all have managed to stick to a consistent story. But I suppose it's possible that some of them are not telling us everything.”

Nergui frowned. “But why would they bother keeping it quiet if they knew where he was? You don't think they're responsible for his disappearance?”

“I think it's more likely that, if he has just decided to make himself scarce for some reason, one or two of them might know where he's gone to.”

“Presumably we put some pressure on them in the interviews?”

Doripalam nodded, noting the “we.” “Of course. All the usual stuff. We told them that withholding information from the police is potentially a very serious offense—impeding the course of justice and all that. We also told them that this had the potential to become a murder investigation—which is certainly the direction that his mother was pushing us, even without a body. But looking at the transcripts, I don't think they were all that impressed.”

“That's the trouble with the youth of today,” Nergui said. “No respect.”

Doripalam smiled. “I think the trouble with the youth of today is that they're generally a bit too smart for their own good. And for ours. If any of them did have any information, they didn't see any reason to share it with us, and nothing we could say was going to influence that.”

“In my day,” Nergui said, “you could have thrown them in jail until they decided to co-operate.”

“In your day, Nergui, I'm sure you could have done much worse than that if you'd chosen to,” Doripalam said. “But things have changed.”

“Oh, I know,” Nergui said. “But don't expect me to like it.”

“Anyway, that's where we are with it. Until now, I'd assumed that Mrs. Tuya was over-reacting, that Gavaa had simply taken this as an opportunity to leave home properly, cut all the ties, that kind of thing. I thought he'd pop up again in his own time.”

“And maybe he will,” Nergui said, though with an ominous note in his voice. “What about the relationship with the mother? What do we know about that?”

“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.”

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.