I paused, looked over at Saltanat.
“Your turn,” I said. Saltanat folded her arms and sat back, her face set in the determined look I remembered from our previous encounters. If anything, she looked even more deadly than when she smiled.
“I hope you weren’t followed back to Bishkek, Akyl. And that nobody knows you’re here.”
She paused, lit a cigarette, uncoiled pale gray smoke into the air.
“We could both be in a world of trouble.”
Chapter 14
I stared at Saltanat, and she looked back, her gaze unwavering. I don’t know much about women. I’d met Chinara when we were both at school. There hadn’t really been anyone else besides her. She was all I ever wanted. But it was getting hard to remember her, radiant, beautiful, as she had been before the cancer feasted on her. Loss is like that, submerged rocks that from time to time break the surface of the water. It looks safe to dive in, then you break your neck.
“I don’t see where you fit into all this,” I said. “Or me, for that matter.”
Saltanat looked down and began to pick at the label on her beer bottle with her fingernails. I’d only ever once seen her looking vulnerable, after the rape. Now she gave off a sense of uncertainty, unwilling perhaps, or unable, to tell me what she knew.
“I never told my bosses what happened to me,” she said. “They don’t give you medals for failing, for getting into situations you can’t control. The only people who know about what happened are you and me. Best that way.”
“Didn’t you talk to anyone?”
She looked up, stared at me. A tear in her eye? The air was cold, and it’s easy to make mistakes like that.
“My decision not to tell,” she said. “My right.”
I looked down at her hand. Out of reach, out of range.
“Three months ago, we arrested a guy shipping a consignment of DVDs out of Tashkent to Frankfurt. We’d had a tip-off, nothing too specific, just saying there was a box that we might be interested in. The guy was nothing special, low-level, but the box was interesting. We put the pressure on him, a bit of a slap now and then, a friendly punch or two, but he wouldn’t tell us anything. He was more scared of his bosses than of us, and believe me, that takes some doing.”
I nodded, remembering the basement of Sverdlovsky police station, with its easy-clean tiled floor and wash-down walls, the kind of interrogations that had been carried out there. Down there, you were a very long way from help of any kind.
“We sent him to one of our safe houses, to keep him quiet, maybe make him change his mind about singing to us.”
Saltanat paused and lit another cigarette.
“Two days later, someone got past our security, over a three-meter wall, drove an icepick through his forehead. No clues, nothing. And of course, he hadn’t sung a single note.”
“And the shipment of DVDs?”
“We found maybe fifty DVDs, all called Welcome to Uzbekistan, with pictures of Tashkent and Samarkand on the covers. The first one we played had five minutes showing the Guri Amir, Tamerlane’s mausoleum, then it cut to a scene in a bedroom.”
“Porn?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied, “but mild, all soft focus, kisses, wistful stares and romantic music. Nothing I hadn’t seen before.”
“Until you hit fast-forward, right?”
Saltanat stared at me, suspicious, then nodded.
“Pretty obvious,” I said. “A double bluff. Put people off by pretending to be a travelogue, then make them think they’re watching some mild stuff. I take it what followed was a lot harder?”
“I’d never seen anything like that before.”
She took another mouthful of her beer, then stubbed out her cigarette. Putting the bottle down, she wrapped her arms across her chest.
“Children, tortured, raped, with men queuing to take their turn. Boys and girls, begging for help.”
Saltanat looked at me, her face white, her eyes wide with disgust.
“Help that didn’t come.”
I swallowed the nausea that rose in my throat. I’ve seen my share of porn films. It’s hard not to, when you’re a serving police officer. And I know there’s big money to be made. But I hadn’t encountered anything as extreme as the films Saltanat described.
I reached over, took a cigarette out of her pack, lit it, blew cancer at the air.
“That’s terrible,” I said, thinking that it must have felt like death, watching such things, having been raped herself. “But I’m not sure why you were talking to Gurminj.”
“There was nothing in the DVDs to show where they’d been shot. The children, they were naked, so no clues there, but they were all Asian.”
I nodded. There was nothing I could say. When I think about what so-called humans do, perhaps being born is a criminal offense, with a life sentence to follow.
“At the end, one man, wearing a leather mask, burly, tattoos down both arms, would come forward, while the others held the child down.”
She paused, picking at the beer label. Her voice was low, hoarse.
“And then he’d kill them.”
The label came free from the bottle, and Saltanat smoothed it out on the bar top, gently, the way you might stroke the forehead of a small child lying in bed with a fever.
“So why did you contact Gurminj?”
She paused, looked over at me, as if I were the enemy, not a former lover.
“I knew his reputation, he was quite a legend in his field. Honest, incorruptible. And because the children in the films were all wearing Kyrgyz orphanage identity bands.”
Chapter 15
I stubbed out my cigarette, feeling the tightening in my stomach that leads to anger. Anger at the random cruelties we impose on those weaker than ourselves, anger at a deity who either leaves us drowning in shit or doesn’t exist. Anger at my own helplessness, my inability to make amends, for Chinara, for the victims who needed me, for myself.
“Gurminj must have found out something,” I said, “and it earned him a bullet in the brain. Why didn’t he say anything to me?”
I sat back, put my feet up on the stool next to me. I’d always done that when I was living in the orphanage, used to tell the teachers it helped me to concentrate. Truth was, I was just looking for an argument, a clip around the ear, a reason to hate them all the more. Funny, over the years, the lie gradually became the truth. Maybe something to do with the flow of blood to the brain. Or from it.
Saltanat looked away from me. I stared, knowing there was a problem.
“I spoke with Gurminj about getting you involved,” she said. “We both wondered if there would be a problem.”
“What kind of a problem?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm and measured.
“Your involvement with Tynaliev. The summary execution of your old boss. We both know he didn’t die in a car crash.”
I stared at her, didn’t reply.
“There’s money, big money, involved in this sort of filth. And if it’s connected to senior government people in some way, then they have a hold over you.”
Saltanat didn’t look me in the eye. The sort of body language that says I don’t know whether you can be trusted.
I felt a surge of anger, because in her position I’d have wondered exactly the same thing.
“I’m a cop in exile. Not because I can be bought off, but because I can’t.”
She nodded.
“I understand. But—”
“But you don’t know me that well,” I interrupted. “You slept with me but you don’t know if you can trust me.”
Saltanat held up her hand, but I was in full flow, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“I get threatened by the Circle of Brothers, I kill my wife’s uncle when I find out he works for them, I get tortured,” and I held up my scarred hand as evidence, “then I get shipped out to the ass-end of nowhere. But hey, I might still be selling kiddie snuff movies. Thanks, Saltanat, a real vote of confidence.”
I turned my face away from her, not wanting her to see the anger, the sorrow, that crossed my face.
“I should have known,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
“Known what exactly?” I replied. “What I’m like in bed? Why I carry on doing this shitty job? What?”
“Akyl, someone has to want to make a difference, or there’s no hope for any of us. Like it or not, you’re the designated carer.”
So much burden, so much effort, to make the dead sleep soundly.
I thought of the fragments of barely begun lives unearthed next to a stinking canal at the far ends of the earth.
And of Chinara, lying in earth only now beginning to thaw.
Chapter 16
I’d used up the day’s ration of self-pity, turned to face Saltanat.
“We both want to find who killed Gurminj,” I said.
“And the babies you uncovered. And the children butchered in those films,” she added. I nodded agreement.
“We put the past behind us?” she asked.
“All of it?” I replied, remembering the warmth of her body next to mine on the one occasion that we’d slept together. She didn’t blush, or smile at the memory. Tough to the core.
“Let’s clean this mess up first, see where we stand after that. Right now, I want Gurminj’s killers far more than I want you.”
But she spoke with a half-smile that said she knew she could control me, as long as we avoided getting killed first.
“There’s a squealer I want to talk to,” she went on. “Hangs out at one of your favorite bars.”
I winced. I don’t have fond memories of the Kulturny, Bishkek’s seediest, dirtiest bar. Lubashov, a thug I’d put in the ground, had been the bouncer at the Kulturny, and most of the current inmates at Penitentiary One had enjoyed a few shots of the good stuff there in their day. If I had my way, I’d weld the steel door shut, with all the regulars locked inside, and push a bowl of plov inside twice a day. To call it a shithole full of shits was to insult shits and shitholes everywhere. But it was the best place to push and shove, rattle some cages, see what shakes loose.
The sky had grown steadily darker while we’d been talking, storm clouds tumbling and spilling down from the mountains. The first drops of rain began to fall, cautiously at first, then with increasing violence. We ran back to the car, and I felt a curious exhilaration. The sense of helplessness I’d had ever since we unearthed the dead babies was melting away. I didn’t know if we’d solve anything, avenge anyone, but we were at the beginning of something fresh.
Saltanat was with me, as a comrade, if nothing more; the rain fell more heavily, and the windshield wipers could not sweep clear the blurred future that lay ahead of us.
After repeating the same series of alleyways and passages in reverse, we emerged onto Chui Prospekt, heading east. Pools of water that had already formed on the road reflected traffic lights, reds, yellows, and greens vivid against gunmetal gray. The giant red and yellow flag by Ala-Too Square flapped in desperation, threatening to rip apart and fly away. The air crackled with electricity, tense, dangerous. My Yarygin sat cold and heavy against my hip.
“I should check on my apartment, get some clothes,” I said. “What time are you meeting your squealer?”
“Not for a couple of hours. We’ve got time.”
The tires of the Lexus threw up sprays of water that sparkled in the air. We turned right, onto Ibraimova, toward my apartment block, a khrushchyovka pre-cast concrete relic from the country’s days as a far-distant outpost of the Soviet Empire, named after the Soviet premier who’d ordered their building throughout the USSR. As we drove up toward the top end of Ibraimova, to make a U-turn, I looked over toward my building.
“Don’t turn,” I said. “Keep going straight and go right at the top.”
Saltanat nodded, kept the Lexus over to the right, pulling into the filling station just beyond the Blonder pub, then down a narrow road lined with birch trees.
“Stop, but keep the engine running,” I instructed, looking out of the window back toward my building. We were parked very near where I’d found Yekaterina Tynalieva’s body a few months ago, and the coincidence didn’t escape either of us. Nothing left there now to show anything had ever happened. How quickly we die and are forgotten.
“Problem?” Saltanat asked. She opened the glove compartment, and I saw the dull metal sheen of a Makarov.
“Two police cars, tucked away by the trees next to my place.”
“Why would they be waiting for you?”
“A question I’d like answered,” I said, and reached in my pocket for my cell phone. I called up the contact list, memorized a number, removed the battery.
“Give me your phone,” I said. Saltanat reached into her jacket, pulled out an elegant smartphone, and handed it to me.
“Apple? Uzbek security must be raking it in. All those children forced to pick cotton instead of going to school,” I said.
Saltanat glared at me.
“Bought and paid for. By me. Okay?”
I raised a hand to appease her, dialed the number, heard the ringing tone, waited until a familiar voice answered.
“Usupov. You know who this is. No need to say my name. Can you talk?”
“Yes. Where are you? You’re in Bishkek?”
“No need to know exactly where right now. I just want answers to a couple of questions.”
“If I can.”
Usupov’s voice was strained, cautious. I’d always seen him, if not as a friend, then at least as an ally in the cause of doing the right thing. After our last conversation in Karakol, I wasn’t so sure where his loyalties lay anymore, but there was no one else I could ask.
“Whose cell phone are you using? This isn’t your regular number. It’s a foreign number.”
I laughed. Even in Kyrgyzstan, we know how to track a mobile’s location, and any of the service providers would be happy to earn points by helping the police. Or anyone else with enough clout.
“There are two police cars packed with menti outside my apartment block. Any idea why?”
There was a long silence before Usupov spoke, in little more than a whisper.
“There was a call last night. Anonymous. A tip-off. Saying you were involved in something pretty bad, that there was some illegal material stashed in your apartment. So Sverdlovsky sent a couple of men around. You weren’t there, otherwise they’d have arrested you. And given you a good kicking down every flight of stairs.”
There wasn’t anything in my apartment that could have been a problem. But anyone who knows how to pick a couple of locks can leave something incriminating and then call it in.
“What was it they found? Drugs? You know that’s not my thing.”
Usupov paused for even longer. When he spoke, there was a note of disgust in his voice.
“We go back a long way, Inspector. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. For the moment.”
My stomach tensed, and when I spoke, my voice was hoarse.
“Go on.”
“DVDs. Child porn, I heard on the grapevine. Stuff you couldn’t imagine, the sort that visits you in nightmares. Torture, rape. And murder.”
Saltanat watched as I failed to hide the disgust on my face.
“Kenesh, this is a setup, believe me, I know nothing about this. Maybe it’s because I’m investigating all the deaths in Karakol? Maybe linked to the fake death certificate you had to sign?”
There was a long pause before Usupov spoke.
“They know you’re not in Karakol. Orders are to stop and arrest you. Maximum force permitted, if necessary.”
I knew what that meant. Maximum force obligatory. Whatever it was someone high up thought I knew, they’d make sure I couldn’t spread the word. Relentless rain hammered against the car roof.
“Akyl, if I were you, I’d head for the border. Any border.”
Chapter 17
I explained the situation to Saltanat, saw concern cloud h
er face.
“I’m being stitched up,” I said. “Think about the timing. If I was involved in any of this—and I’m not—I’d know about you arresting the porn mule in Tashkent. The last thing I’d do is raise my head above the parapet.”
Saltanat nodded, seeing the logic of what I was saying.
“But why would someone go to all this trouble?” she asked. “They could simply put a bullet in the back of your head. Or a car accident. A fire in your apartment because of faulty wiring.”
“Kill me, and it doesn’t end there,” I explained. “The case is on file now, so it has to be investigated. And so does Gurminj’s death, now I’ve reported it as suspicious. Some other inspector takes over, and if they were close to uncovering the truth, then they’d have to be dealt with. But if I’m discredited as a notorious pornographer and child murderer it all dies with me. Case solved, the culprit’s shot resisting arrest, end of story, everyone’s happy.”
“So now what?”
“Right now, we need to put some distance between us and my apartment. They’re expecting me to show up. If they’d had any sense, they’d have been waiting inside. Their carelessness gives us a few hours. Let’s head over to the Kulturny, see what your whisperer has to say.”
I slumped down lower in my seat, grateful for the tinted windows of the Lexus. Saltanat handed me a baseball cap from the glove compartment, and I completed my temporary disguise with sunglasses.
The scarred and battered steel door of the Kulturny looked as uninviting as ever when Saltanat parked outside. A steroid junkie disguised as a doorman in a cheap leather jacket slouched against the wall. He looked appreciatively at Saltanat as she climbed out of the car.
“No need to go in there, darling, not if you’re looking for a man. He’s right here in front of you,” he said, patting his crotch just in case Saltanat might have misunderstood him.
Saltanat smiled, walked up to him, pouted, blew a kiss, then kicked him in the balls. As he dropped to his knees, eyes bulging, gasping with shock and pain, she stepped around him and pushed at the steel door. The unlit stairs down to the basement bar looked horribly like a mouth, ready to devour us, and I remembered that there was no other way in. Or out.
Spring Betrayal Page 6