I stood up, my knees protesting, and examined the tooth. Part of the pulp and root was still embedded in it. I’m always amazed that such small things can cause so much pain. A sliver of glass or a splinter of wood can make a woman scream in agony, a bucket of water can make a man spill all his secrets. The trick to torture is simplicity on the part of the torturer and anticipation on the part of the victim. And having being tortured myself, with burn scars on my hands and feet to prove it, I can testify to how effective it can be in the hands of a master.
I dropped the tooth, ground it into the dirt under my heel. If only you can erase memories as effortlessly.
Lin and I waited outside in the shade while Saltanat used all her charms on the security man. She was looking for the friend of a friend—Mr. Boris? Was he staying here? Because her friend had accidently scraped some of the paint off his car, a big black car, tinted windows, very smart, and she wanted to apologize. Maybe you noticed a car like that, perhaps yesterday lunchtime? Very little would escape your attention, right?
We both knew it was unlikely the security guard would have noticed a herd of elephants dancing a tango outside his building, but we had to ask. With no answers forthcoming apart from a sheepish smile that said, “I know nothing,” Saltanat gave up the struggle and joined us outside.
“Boris isn’t stupid,” I said. “Probably just used here as somewhere quiet to find out what Lin knew, grab himself a freebie into the bargain.”
“But why would he go out of his way?” Saltanat asked. “He’s just used his fists, he’s just had sex, he wants to get home, shower, tell his friends what fun he’s just had.”
“So you figure he’s somewhere nearby?”
Saltanat shrugged. “We don’t have any evidence. So we have to start with assumptions.”
“And how many black cars with tinted windows do you think we’re going to find around here?” I asked. “Probably no more than two or three hundred.”
It was then that Lin spoke: “But there won’t be many with a long scratch along the passenger door.”
We both turned and stared at her, and Lin gave a smile that for a swift moment disguised the wreckage that had once been her face. Saltanat raised an eyebrow, her idea of an urgent question.
“I used my heel on the car door as he was pulling away, stripped the paintwork back to the metal,” she said. “I don’t even think he noticed.”
I nodded; a woman like Lin wasn’t going to take any shit thrown at her without hitting back.
“The bastard didn’t pay me,” Lin said, “but a respray will cost more than any Vista bar hooker. Wish I’d been able to slice up the seats as well.”
“So now we look in every basement car park until we find the car?” Saltanat asked. I smiled. For once I was a step or two ahead of her.
“I think I know a quicker way,” I said, “but we’ll need to use your phone.”
Chapter 45
“Hello?”
I listened, my ear pressed to one side of Saltanat’s phone as the call was answered. I nodded; it was Boris’s voice all right.
“Good day, sir,” Saltanat said, her voice the bouncy insinuating tones of the born telemarketer. “I’m calling on behalf of the Bishkek Pizza Company, the home of Asia’s finest pizzas, conquering the world even faster than Ghengis Khan. And you’ve been selected at random to join our Privilege Pizza Club, offering a lifetime’s free membership, a twenty percent discount on our regular menu and a host of special offers including free delivery.”
I was impressed; Saltanat was surprisingly good at this. If she ever decided to stop killing people, she had a bright future in thin-crust toppings.
We knew that Boris had my mobile number, but not hers. Tempt him with enough free offers, together with a seductive female voice, and the odds were that he’d give away his location.
“Our delivery vans are in the Bur Dubai area now,” Saltanat continued, dropping her voice to a husky, breathless tone that reeked of sex, “and we’d love to deliver one of our special pizzas to you, as a free incentive to join.”
She paused; the trick is knowing when to leave the bait floating and when to jerk the line.
The silence told me that Boris was thinking it over; offers that sound too good to be true are usually just that. But greed usually overcomes any misgivings, and I already knew that Boris was happy not to pay for something when he didn’t have to. Lin’s face was testimony to that.
“OK,” he finally grunted.
“We just need your name, apartment number and building address,” Saltanat prompted. “We can have the pizza with you in thirty minutes.”
Boris gave out the details, then hung up. No word of thanks, not that I’d expected any. Chechens make even the Kyrgyz look demonstrative.
Saltanat switched off her phone, turned to me. “Now what?”
“The first thing we do,” I said, “is order a thin-crust pizza diavolo, all the toppings, extra onions and peppers, plus Coke.”
Lin and Saltanat stared at me.
“You’re hungry?” Lin asked.
“Yes, starving,” I said. “But if Boris doesn’t get the pizza he’s expecting, don’t you think he’ll get rather suspicious?”
I decided against checking out the location straight away. If we were to do anything, we needed the element of surprise, and Boris would smell a rat if he saw us loitering outside his building. Add the police CCTV cameras everywhere, plus the building’s own security, and it was obviously better to appear only once, when we arrived to hit the place.
We dropped Lin off back at the Vista; as she said, there’s someone for everyone, even with a face like mine. And I supposed two hundred dirhams was a better result than no dirhams at all.
Back at the Dôme, where our ever-present waitress brought coffees without us even needing to order, it was time to decide what to do next.
“You don’t even know if Natasha’s there,” Saltanat objected when I proposed that we raided Boris’s apartment.
“I don’t even know if she’s alive,” I answered. “But if she is, and I manage to get her out in one piece, I’ve done what Tynaliev asked me to do. Which saves my skin, at least for another day. And even if she’s not, you still get a chance to wipe out your jihadi hit squad. With any luck, we both get lucky.”
I could see that Saltanat wasn’t convinced, but in the absence of a better suggestion had decided to stay silent. I looked around the room; everything seemed so normal, affluent, free from poverty, corruption, desperation. No working girls in one corner, no lonely sex-starved men in another. The noise was subdued, polite chatter about children, schools, the new car or the next vacation. It was a world I knew existed, even in Bishkek, but not one I’d ever been part of. If you’re Murder Squad, then you’re excluded from polite circles as efficiently as if you were a leper. And in some ways, dealing with the fallout and being scarred by it, that’s what you become.
“We don’t know how big Boris’s team is,” Saltanat said. “We don’t have the people, the firepower to do this.”
I shrugged, raised my hands in a what-to-do gesture. “I’m dead if I go back to Tynaliev without Natasha, or at the very least, his money,” I said. “He’s not going to let me live to sell what I know to the highest bidder. So I don’t really have a lot of choice, do I?”
I took a tiny sip of my espresso. Refined, genteel, just like everyone around me, with only one exception, the one sitting opposite me.
“How many rounds do you have for your Makarov?” Saltanat asked in the tone of a hostess asking if you’d like another slice of chocolate cake with your coffee.
“A few. Back at my hotel. Right now, here and now? I’m not even firing blanks.”
“Which suggests what?”
“That we need to get hold of some proper artillery?”
“Which you don’t know how to find, with your only contact here having been burned to a crisp,” Saltanat said.
“Which leaves me with what?” I asked. “A kamikaze
mission?”
“As plans go, one that leaves a little to be desired,” Saltanat said, finished her espresso and waving for another. I could tell by the way that her fingers flexed that she wanted a cigarette. Either that or to throttle me.
“You’d prefer a plan where I survive?” I asked, wondering if this was Saltanat’s idea of a declaration of love, or at least intent.
“You sometimes have your uses,” Saltanat said and allowed the merest hint of a wink to slip across her face.
The knowledge that you may be approaching your death, voluntarily, long before you’re supposed to wait in your bed for death to slip in under the sheets beside you and embrace you, has a curiously erotic effect. Life has a habit of persisting, demanding that you pay attention and hoping that the future is still infinite. Which is how I found myself in my hotel bed, but with Saltanat lying beside me, as far removed from death as it’s possible to get.
We’d made love before, so we didn’t have that sense of tentative surprise, wondering what the other liked or didn’t like. But we were still new enough to each other’s bodies to discover fresh choices, a sense of maps not yet charted, of routes not yet explored. And afterward, as the afternoon light started to diminish and collapse into dusk, I felt alive, more so than since Chinara’s death. The lights of the city started to appear, casting a glow that spilled across the sky. In my air-conditioned room it was easy to forget the brutal heat outside, the wet air that snatched at the lungs. The buildings opposite hung in the air like motionless flags, and I felt as if all the clocks in the world had silently come to a halt.
I must have dozed off, because when I looked around I was alone in the bed. Saltanat sat by the window, naked, staring out at the city, a half-drunk bottle of beer by her elbow.
“I made a couple of calls,” she said. “Ordered some hardware for later.” She stared across the room at me, as if puzzled by my presence. “Akyl, why is it you always rush into situations unprepared?” she asked, then answered her own question: “You need the adrenalin that badly, or you just can’t stand the thought of staying alive long enough to become an Aksakal?”
I’ve never relished the prospect of being a white beard, a village elder, but dying young has strictly limited charms for me as well. But I realized it was a serious question, and Saltanat deserved a serious answer.
“I learned a few things during my time in Murder Squad,” I began, sure that my explanation would sound lame. “One of them is that most murders are unplanned. A blow in a drunken argument over nothing, resentment toward a husband or wife that finally spills over into seizing a knife from the kitchen drawer. Of course there are also the psychopaths, the Morton Graves of this world, who kill for pleasure and plan every detail so they can relive it over and over, but even they make mistakes, fail to anticipate what will cause their downfall.”
Saltanat stared at me, wondering where this might lead.
“I’ve found that if you plan too far ahead, work out every possible move as if you’re sitting opposite your opponent, wondering how to move your pieces toward checkmate, then they’ve already moved on. Because it’s not a game; there are no rules. So you don’t give them the advantage, you strike before they expect it. And that way you win. Sometimes.”
Saltanat said nothing, simply looked at me as if inspecting an hitherto unknown species. I felt uncomfortable at having revealed an approach I knew she would regard as amateur, even dangerous in a partner. But sometimes you have to go with instinct.
A knock on the door of my room broke an uncomfortable silence. Saltanat pulled on a robe, opened the door, exchanged a few words with someone in the corridor, came back carrying an army-issue dark green duffel bag with the name CHUSOVITINA stenciled in white along its length.
The bag was obviously heavy, and I could hear metal strike metal as Saltanat swung the bag onto the table.
“Chusovitina?” I asked.
“You think I’m going to carry around a bag full of weapons with my name in large white letters?” Saltanat said, taking my question as yet another example of how I couldn’t be trusted not to fuck up.
“What if you’re stopped, asked to show ID?” I said.
Saltanat reached into the bag, pulled out a black Glock 19, waved it worryingly in my direction.
“All the ID I need,” she said and carried on unpacking the weapons.
“You’re planning a siege or expecting an army?” I finally asked, surveying the guns, stun grenades and packs of ammunition that covered the table. It was a very peculiar sensation to witness the transformation from gentle, passionate lover to deadly weapons instructor. And not one that promised a long future ahead for both of us.
“Your plan may consist of charging in as if you were in a Steven Seagal movie,” Saltanat said, checking the Glock, “but I think we can do rather better than that. In fact, I think we couldn’t do any worse.”
“And your grand strategy is?” I asked.
“Two of us is not enough,” Saltanat answered. “We need one more person. Someone to get us in through the front door. Someone expendable if we need to bail out fast.”
I had a suspicion that definition might apply to me, but decided not to ask.
And then I understood what Saltanat was planning.
“You mean . . .?” I asked.
Saltanat nodded.
“That’s right. We need Lin.”
Chapter 46
“She’ll never agree to it,” I said, pacing up and down, my agitation apparent. “Why would she? And if you think I’m an amateur, what does that make her?”
“She’s Vietnamese,” Saltanat said. “She’d be very happy to get her revenge on the man that ruined her livelihood. Remember, when she stops earning, her family stop eating. Think of the shame attached to that back in her village.”
“But why her? Apart from the fact that we don’t know anyone else? How about whoever you got the guns from?”
Saltanat shook her head. “Embassy staff; no way they’d get involved in an active operation.”
“So to repeat, why Lin? Boris knows her, remember?”
“All the more reason to use her. She goes to the building, says she has some information that Boris will want. He tells her which floor to go to; we make sure we’re already in the building; he opens the door for her and in we go.”
“I don’t like it,” I objected. “It’s not as if he’s not done enough damage to her already.”
“From what I saw of Lin,” Saltanat said, “he’ll wish he’d done a lot more before she’s through with him.”
I sighed, knowing when I was beaten. And to be honest, I didn’t have a better idea in any case.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Lin said. “I know you can afford it.”
“Are you crazy?” I said. “Do you think we’re millionaires?”
“No, but I think Natasha is. Or she has something that makes twenty-five thousand dollars like a tip on the bedside table in the morning.”
“It’s too much, Lin,” I said.
“Deal,” Saltanat said. Overruled.
Now that the pecking order of our team had been established, I decided to sit down, shut up and pretend not to sulk. Saltanat outlined her plan, which seemed just as thin as earlier. Lin was obviously not overwhelmed by it either.
“How will I know if you’ve managed to get in the building once I’m inside?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about that,” Saltanat said. “And we’ll be on either side of the front door when you knock on it.”
“What if he sees you through the spyhole?”
“He won’t. Especially if you get up close to the door.”
“Or he starts shooting through the door?”
“We’re not paying you twenty-five grand because we’re in the business of rehabilitating Asian hookers,” Saltanat said. “There’s a little risk for you that comes with a big reward.”
I’d heard the good cop bad cop routine before, and I was sure Lin had sat through it a few t
imes as well. But Saltanat gave it an extra air of menace and grace all her own.
“Besides,” Saltanat continued, “you’ll be armed.”
I winced inwardly. Putting a gun in the hands of someone who’s used to firearms is bad enough. Giving a weapon to a novice is almost a stone tablet guarantee that things will go messily wrong.
To give Lin credit, she didn’t look as if she cared for the idea of being weaponed up. I was certain she would have a blade in her bag for the kind of protection that doesn’t need condoms, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t freeze when it came to slicing a cheek or an arm.
“I’m not carrying a gun, no way,” she said, and the finality in her voice was as harsh as a punch in the mouth. “I get caught, I maybe get away with a beating. Carrying, I’m dead for sure.”
“You know how to use a knife?” Saltanat asked. I could see that, like me, she didn’t want Lin to carry a gun. All too often you can get shot by your own side. Assuming they’re on your side, that is.
In a move as swift as any I’d ever seen, Lin’s hand swerved like an out-of-control speeding car, dived toward her waist, surfaced with steel glittering at her fingertips. There didn’t seem to be any more questions that needed answers. I held my hand out for the knife. The handle looked like an ornate buckle, and I realized that Lin’s wide leather belt acted as a sheath. As concealed weapons went, it was pretty impressive, so I handed it back to her, reminding myself once again of that old line about the deadlier of the species. I was with two prime examples of the breed.
“We’ll be using silencers,” Saltanat told Lin, watching her put the blade away, “so there shouldn’t be any noise to alarm the neighbors or summon the police, not if we’re quick.”
Quick killing everyone and everything that moved was what Saltanat meant, but I didn’t think Lin realized that’s how far we would have to go. Maybe she anticipated giving Boris a beating in return for his football match with her face, maybe even give him a scar to remember her by every time he shaved. But not seeing him lying face down, with blood and brains pooling around his head like vomit.
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