The Outcast (44 page)

“You really believe that?”

“Maybe. He was betrayed in the end by a half-baked lunatic, but he couldn't have foreseen that.”

“A lunatic who was working for his friends over the border.”

“So we surmise. But we'll never prove it. We think he had too many friends and resources to have been acting alone, but who knows? We'll never know for sure.”

“It's worrying, though, if they really were behind it.”

“It's the way it is. The price of our autonomy and potential.”

“And you think we'll retain our independence?”

“It depends what you mean by independence. When I look at some of the deals we're doing, I wonder whether commerce is just subjugation by other means.”

“You sound like Odbayar.”

Nergui laughed. “Odbayar's is one vision of the future.”

“His vision?” Doripalam gestured towards the massive image of Genghis Khan. The poet was still chanting somewhere below.

“He's just a symbol now. He means whatever we want him to mean. For this poet, he's a romantic ideal who inspires some dull verse. For Sam, he was a romantic ideal who justified the overthrow of our government. For most of us, he's something we cling on to. He gives us a sense of identity in a world that seems to have few ideals left.”

“That doesn't sound like you.”

“I look back at Battulga and Bakei, and I don't know what to think.” He was quiet for a moment. “I'm sorry. I'm not thinking. Speaking of Battulga, how is Solongo? How is she taking everything?”

There was a long pause. Doripalam had been waiting for and dreading this question. The truth was that he did not know the answer. He shook his head. “Badly, I think. It was all a shock: the kidnapping, finding out about her father. She's thrown herself back into her work at the museum over the last couple of days, getting all the final stuff ready for the launch. She's exhausted. She was already feeling the strain. We both were. Now—well, I don't know.”

Nergui looked hard at him. The expression on his immobile face was as close to sympathy as Doripalam had ever seen it. “It's hard,” he said. “It will be, I know. If there's anything I can do?”

“I'll let you know,” Doripalam said, more brusquely than he had intended.

“Do that,” Nergui said, his voice unexpectedly gentle. “Make sure you let me know. Before it's too late.”

Doripalam turned to him, suddenly lost for words, unable to equate this man with the imperious figure who had burst into Tunjin's hospital ward, days before.

The poet had been replaced now by the keening sound of the
Morin Khuur
, the horse-head fiddle, being played expertly below. The stern image of Genghis Khan was still on the screen. Just a
symbol, then, with countless different meanings, conflicting visions of the state and its future.

And behind all that, people like Nergui and himself. Bringing those visions to life, doing the dirty work needed to keep things clean. Keeping the show on the road.