The suit drew level. Even though it was a dull day, he had already slipped on a pair of sunglasses. ‘You know,’ he said, suddenly addressing us, ‘what’s-his-face down in Dalanzagad is putting together an anthology of Mongolian folk stories. It’s a quaint idea. He’s hoping to get it translated into English and flog them to tourists. He put a proposal to the state printing press last year. It was turned down — no paper. But he’s been doing some lobbying, and at the next meeting he might pull it off.’
The suit went. I thanked him.
‘Now, Jargal Chinzoreg,’ said the curator, ‘will you please get lost? It’s lunchtime.’
The manager shut his office door with a loud sigh of relief. Jargal looked at the curator’s watch. ‘But it’s only ten-thirty.’
‘Exactly. We’ll reopen at about three.’
The moon was in the morning sky, a globe of cobweb.
‘Sir!’ Jargal ran across the empty road in front of the museum. The suit was getting into a Japanese-made four-wheel drive. Jargal was nervous: the owner of such a car must be a powerful man. ‘Sir!’
The suit turned, his hand twitching inside his jacket. ‘What?’
‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but would you try to remember the name of the gentleman you just mentioned? The folklorist? It might be very important to me.’
The suit’s guard went up. I used the wrong register of speech for a truck driver. The suit touched his forehead, and dropped his keys. Jargal picked them up and handed them to him. I make sure they touch, and I transmigrate. Like Gunga’s, it was a hard mind to penetrate. Unusually viscous, like jumping through a wall of cold butter.
I didn’t need to scan my new host’s memory for long. ‘His name is Bodoo.’
Some passers-by were staring at the immobile government man. My new host regained control. ‘Now, you’ll excuse me, I have important business that won’t wait.’
Oh yes it will. Here’s a picture. Bodoo is a short, balding man with glasses, sideburns, and a tufty moustache. We are going to meet, you and I, Bodoo. You are going to direct me to my birthright.
I watched Jargal walk away, a man awakening from a strange dream.
My new host was Punsalmaagiyn Suhbataar, a senior agent of the Mongolian KGB with a disdain of vulnerable things. We sped south, his four-wheel drive spewing up clouds of dust. He chewed gum. The grass grew sparser, the camels scraggier, the air drier. The road to Dalanzagad wasn’t signposted, but there was no other road. The checkpoint guards saluted.
I would feel guilty for using my host so selfishly, but as I read Suhbataar’s past I feel vindicated. During his career he has killed over twenty times, and supervised the mutilation or torture of ten times that number of prisoners. He has accrued a medium-sized fortune in a vault in Geneva at the expense of his old overlords in Moscow, and his new ones in Petersburg. Even I can’t see into the hole where his conscience should be. Outside this hole, his mind is cold, clear and cruel.
As night fell I let Suhbataar stop to stretch his legs and drink some coffee. It was good to see the stars again, the whole deep lake of them. Humans thicken the skies above their cities into a broth. But Suhbataar is not a man given to astral contemplation. For the fiftieth time he wondered what he was doing there, and I had to snuff out the thought. We spent the night at a truck drivers’ boarding house, scarcely bothering to talk to the owner whom Suhbataar didn’t intend to pay. I made enquiries about Bodoo the folklorist curator of Dalanzagad museum, but nobody knew him. While my host slept I broadened the Russian I acquired from Gunga.
The following day the hills flattened to a gravel plain, and the Gobi desert began. I was getting weary of it all. Another day of horses and clouds and mountains nobody names. Suhbataar’s mind didn’t help. Most humans are constantly writing in their heads, editing conversations and mixing images and telling themselves jokes or replaying music. But not Suhbataar. I may as well have transmigrated into a cyborg.
Suhbataar drove over the body of a dog and into the dusty regional capital of Dalanzagad. An unpainted place that dropped from nowhere onto a flat plot of dust-devils. Doomed strips of turfless park where women in headscarves sold eggs and dried goods. A few three-or four-floor buildings, with suburbs spilling around the edges. A dirt-strip runway, a flyblown hospital, a corrupt post office, a derelict department store. Beyond stories of black-market dinosaur eggs fetching $500 and snow-leopard pelts from the Gov’-Altai Mountains to the south fetching up to $20,000, Suhbataar knew less about the southernmost province of Mongolia than he cared about it.
There’s a police office he could go and scare, but I took Suhbataar straight to the museum to enquire after Bodoo. The door was locked, but Suhbataar can open any door in Mongolia. Inside was similar to the last museum, booming with silence. Suhbataar found the curator’s office empty. A large, stuffed buzzard incorrectly labelled as a condor hung down from the ceiling. One of its glass eyes had dropped out and rolled away somewhere.
There was a middle-aged woman knitting in the empty bookshop. She didn’t seem surprised to see a visitor in the locked-up musuem. I doubted she had been surprised by anything for years.
‘I’m looking for a “Bodoo”,’ Suhbataar announced.
She didn’t bother looking up. ‘He didn’t come in yesterday. He didn’t come in today. I don’t know if he’ll come in tomorrow.’
Suhbataar’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘And may I ask where the esteemed curator is vacationing?’
‘You can ask, but I dunno if I’ll remember.’
For the first time since I transmigrated into Suhbataar, he felt pleasure. He slipped his gun onto the counter, and clicked off the safety catch. He aimed at the hook suspending the buzzard.
BANG!
The thing crashed to the floor, disintegrating on impact into a cloud of plaster, powder and feathers. The noise of the gunshot chased its own tail through all the empty rooms.
The woman threw her knitting high into the air. As her mouth hung open I saw how bad her teeth were.
Suhbataar whispered. ‘Look, you tapeworm-infested dungpuddle peasant bitch — with bad teeth — here is how our little interview works. I ask the questions: and then you answer them. If I feel you are being just the least bit evasive, you will spend the next ten years in a shit-smeared prison, in a distant part of our glorious Motherland. Do you understand?’
The woman blanched and tried to swallow.
Suhbataar admired his gun. ‘I don’t believe I heard you.’
She whimpered yes.
‘Good. Where is Bodoo?’
‘He heard that the KGB man was coming. He did a runner. I swear, he didn’t say where. Sir, I didn’t know you were the KGB man. I swear, I didn’t.’
‘And where does Bodoo reside in your fine township?’
The woman hesitated.
Suhbataar sighed, and from his jacket pocket pulled out a gold lighter. He set fire to the card No-Smoking sign on the counter. The quivering woman, Suhbataar and I watch it shrivel and burn up into a flapping black flap. ‘Maybe you want to be locked up and maimed in prison? Maybe you want me to castrate your husband? Maybe you want your children to be taken into care by a Muslim-run orphanage in Bayan Olgii with a nasty reputation for child abuse?’
Beads of sweat sprang up through her mascara. Idly, Suhbataar considered ramming her head through the glass counter, but I interceded. She scribbled an address on the margin of her newspaper and handed it over. ‘He lives there with his daughter, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ Suhbataar yanked the phone line out of the wall. ‘Have a nice day.’
Suhbataar circled the house. A prefabricated little place on the edge of town with only one door. There was a barrel for rainwater, which falls ten times in a good year, and an optimistic herb garden. The wind was loud and dusty. My host pulled out his gun and knocked. I clicked the safety catch on without Suhbataar noticing.