Spring Betrayal

by Tom Callaghan

  “What’s wrong with you, Akyl?” Saltanat snapped. “She needs help.”

  I sighed and turned back up the stairs.

  “Take her other arm,” I ordered. “We can at least get her away from the bodies.”

  Between the two of us we helped the weeping girl stagger down the stairs into the hotel dining room. Saltanat opened a liquor cabinet, poured a glass of vodka. Rosa choked as she drank it, but her tears slowed and she grew slightly calmer.

  “Now can we go?” I asked, and started for the door. Saltanat gave me a look that would melt snow off Mount Lenin, but followed me. I unlocked the gates while Saltanat made a call.

  “Murder Squad?”

  “Ambulance. For Rosa,” she said, and pushed past me toward the car, her shoulder slamming into mine. She climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine. As the car pulled away, she used her phone to take a photo of the hotel sign; I had to scramble to get into the passenger seat.

  “What the fuck? Were you about to leave me?” I snarled, grabbing at the dashboard to prevent myself going headfirst through the windshield.

  “The asshole you seem to have become, I can well live without. I can be over the border in a couple of hours, and then you can get yourself killed without my help.”

  I stared out of the window, lit two cigarettes, passed one to Saltanat. I wound down my window to let the spring air cool me down.

  “Sorry,” I said, tried to make it sound genuine. Saltanat took the cigarette, took a long draw. The adrenalin was starting to slacken off, and I felt as if my shoulders had been beaten with iron bars.

  The Lexus bounced around on what was not much more than a potholed track, pushing forward between one-story shacks with corrugated-iron roofs hiding behind mud-brick walls and tumbledown gates. I had only the vaguest idea of where we were, somewhere north and east of Ala-Too Square, but Saltanat clearly knew where we were headed.

  “Sorry,” I repeated, and this time put a little sincerity into it. Saltanat gave me a suspicious glare, then seemed to relent slightly.

  “The hotel’s blown, and we can’t go to your apartment, obviously,” she said, hurling the car into a ninety-degree turn that lifted two tires off the road. “We’ll use my safe house, at least for a couple of days, while we decide what to do next.”

  I remembered the safe house from the Tynaliev affair. We’d taken a pakhan, a mafia boss, there, threatened to torture him and have his granddaughter raped, then sent him on his way, promising his revenge. That never happened though, because twenty minutes later one of Saltanat’s Uzbek security colleagues put two bullets in him. One in the back of the head to denote an execution, one in the mouth to say he’d talked beforehand. I’d not been back since, and the thought of returning didn’t ease the gloom.

  The safe house was on the eastern edge of Bishkek, three stories surrounded by a two-meter wall and blue ornamental sheet-metal gates. Saltanat unlocked the heavy steel door and we entered. It was no more cheerful than I remembered it, though not quite as bitterly cold. Unfurnished rooms, stained wallpaper peeling in places, spots and blisters of mold seeping through damp plaster, bare wooden floorboards. And beneath us, the cellar and furnace room, with everything required to make a man betray his family, his friends, anything to stop the pain. Simple things for the most part: coal tongs, a hammer, chisels and screwdrivers, kitchen scissors, boiling water. It doesn’t take much to persuade someone of the righteousness of your cause.

  Then I remembered Graves’s cellar, the blood-soaked butcher’s slab, the thick leather belts, the straps, and video equipment to capture every scream, every spasm. For a moment, my head was spinning, I thought I was going to vomit again and rested one hand against a clammy wall.

  Saltanat saw my distress, helped me slide down the wall until I sat on the floor, knees drawn up toward my shoulders, my hands shaking as if I had a fever.

  “Sorry,” I said, for the third time in an hour, as if apologies could ever change things, ever heal the sick or bring the dead back to life. Sorry means clutching at hope the way a man swept away by a raging river tries to grasp an overhanging bough. Sorry sounds good, but it changes fuck-all.

  “You want some water?” Saltanat asked. I shook my head, then reconsidered. My throat was too dry to speak, so I simply nodded. Saltanat returned from the kitchen with a bottle of water. It was warm, and flat, but I emptied the bottle in a few desperate gulps. I rinsed my mouth, spat out the last of the water, looked up at Saltanat. The words I wanted to say were trapped in my throat, handcuffed by sorrow and fear.

  She stared down at me, pity in her face, for what I had once been and what I had now become. I knew what I had to do, knew it would change everything.

  “I want you to go back home, Saltanat, back to Tashkent. This isn’t your battle, the dead aren’t your people, there’s no reason why you should risk your life on our behalf.”

  Saltanat opened her mouth to speak, but I held up a silencing hand.

  “This is hard enough for me to say, without you making me change my mind and keeping silent. I’m a coward, you see, and by not telling you the truth, I’m betraying how I feel for you, how you might feel for me. So I have to speak.”

  I looked up at her, remembering my past, which lay between us like a river in full flood between two banks.

  “Believe me, Akyl, I know you’re not a coward. I’ve seen that over and over, ever since I first met you. You care too much for other people ever to be that.”

  “You mean I care too much for the dead,” I said.

  “You care about justice, not just for the dead, like Gurminj and Rustam, Alina and Urmat and Yekaterina Tynalieva, but for everyone without a voice. Justice for everyone who wakes up wondering what new pain will appear when the sun rises,” she said, and I felt my heart splinter against her words.

  “Let me tell you about being a coward,” I said, making my voice ugly, harsh. “It’s about hiding from the truth, doing anything to avoid being confronted by something that terrifies you. It’s about doing something wrong because you can’t bear the situation you’re in to continue.”

  I stopped for a moment, trying to put the words together in my head that would force her to abandon me.

  “When Chinara was in the hospital for the last time, and we both knew there was no hope of her ever coming back home . . .”

  I paused, unable to speak.

  “I know what you did, Akyl,” Saltanat said, with a gentleness I’d never suspected of her. “I guessed it almost from the moment I met you. You demand justice for the dead, but you also want mercy for the living.”

  I was silent, my palms sweating, my heart the loudest thing in the universe.

  “I know, because when I was raped, you didn’t blame me, you didn’t agonize about what you could have done to prevent it. You got me medicine, you gave me clothes and shelter. You helped avenge me.”

  Saltanat put her hand on my shoulder, the way you comfort a child newly frightened out of a nightmare. I felt her breath warm and sweet on my cheek.

  “It must have hurt like hell to see me wearing your dead wife’s clothes. I remember the hope on your face when I walked into the room, and the pain when you saw I wasn’t her. And how we sat in silence watching the moon pick out the snow on the mountains.

  “You eased Chinara out of her pain and onto her journey. And now you hate yourself for it, and blame yourself for living when she died.”

  Saltanat slid down beside me, placed her arm across my shoulder, held me, while I thought of nothing. We listened to the silence of the house, and I hoped that would bring some kind of grace and absolution.

  Chapter 39

  By silent consent, neither of us discussed what turned out to be a confession, perhaps even a declaration of sorts. We shared a mattress on the floor of an upstairs room, Saltanat sleeping with her head on my shoulder while I lay awake for hours, staring at the faces that emerged from the stains on the wall.

  We spent the next day discussing what to do. I
voted for a quick headshot and a high-speed exit over the border into Kazakhstan. Once there, we could work out what to do next. My desire for revenge was fierce, on behalf of Gurminj, Rustam, the dead children. At night, I dreamed of seeing the sudden terror in Graves’s eyes, heard the half-uttered scream and watched his brains spatter gray and viscous against a bloodstained wall. I could almost taste his fear. And if a bullet came my way, perhaps that made a suitable end for an endless struggle.

  Saltanat was calmer, more rational. She wanted to see Graves punished, but, smarter than me, she thought ahead, wanted to prove me innocent of the child pornography charges. Hour after hour, we debated strategy, tactics, but all the time I could feel the tension on a trigger, imagined my finger tightening and then the recoil. The muscles in my jaw pulsed with the need for sudden blood.

  “Listen to me, Akyl, killing Graves isn’t the answer. We haven’t even proved it’s him,” Saltanat argued, pounding one fist into another for emphasis.

  “He’s dirty, and you know it. You saw the films.” My voice flat.

  “Yes, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he wholesales the porn, buys it in, that makes him guilty of a lot of things. But maybe not murder.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about proving it. He doesn’t know what goes on in the cellar of his own house?”

  I heard my voice getting angrier, didn’t bother to rein it in.

  “When you scoop shit off the street, do you care whether it’s from the ass of a dog, a cow, or a horse? It’s still shit, and needs to be cleaned up.”

  Saltanat sighed in frustration, sat back on her heels.

  “If you’re looking for a gunfight, one in which you die heroically, gun blazing, the bad guys falling dead, that’s up to you. I can’t stop you. If you don’t mind everyone remembering you as a man who peddled the worst kind of filth for money, again, your call.”

  I shrugged, as if I didn’t care one way or the other.

  “First of all, we have to appear to back away. To convince Graves the slaughter at the hotel made us realize we were in too deep. Amateurs. And with him having the iPhone evidence of his involvement, we’re just going to disappear.”

  I had to admit it made a lot of sense, even if my anger and pride made it hard to swallow the truth.

  “So what do you want us to do?”

  “We call him,” Saltanat said. “We tell him we got the message, we’re crossing the border, he has nothing to be concerned about.”

  “He won’t believe that,” I said. “He’s made a lot of dirty money, dirty friends, dirty enemies. He won’t be happy until we’re in the cellar starring in his next home movie.”

  “That’s why I’m going to make the call,” Saltanat said. “He hears an Uzbek accent, we’re a gang from over the border. Especially when I tell him you’re dead. And send him the photos to prove it.”

  “I take it I’m not actually dead,” I said.

  “You’re face down, shot in the back, somewhere up in the mountains where it’s still snowy,” she said.

  “I hope it was quick,” I said.

  “You never knew what hit you,” Saltanat said.

  It’s as good a description of love as any I’ve ever heard.

  Chapter 40

  The following morning, we drove out of the city, up to Ala Archa, the national park that climbs up into the mountains. It’s a serene, beautiful place, with rowan and birch trees sheltering under the steep slopes of the valley. At weekends in the summer, it’s always busy with walkers, tourists, and people who just want to get out of the heat and dust of the city. Hike to the far end of the park and you might spot wolves, bears, perhaps even a snow leopard, while eagles and hawks patrol the sky. Saltanat parked in front of the small hotel marking the end of the road, and we started to walk.

  The air was crisp, the remnants of the winter still white underfoot, and the music of the river created a swirling soundtrack as we climbed up into the tree line. The snow got deeper, its chill creeping through the soles of my boots. I was out of breath, out of condition, but Saltanat strode ahead, making no concessions to my lack of speed or the leather case she was carrying.

  Finally, we stopped, in a natural clearing where birch trees clustered around us like onlookers at a road accident. Or perhaps witnesses at an execution. Saltanat put down the bag, looked around.

  “This is as good as anywhere,” she said. “Take off your jacket.”

  I felt a cold breeze brush across my chest. The upper branches of the trees quivered, and I felt a faint drift of snowflakes on my face.

  Saltanat opened the case, took out a glass jar and a plastic bag. A medium-sized raw steak glistened inside the bag, streaked with blood, marbled with fat. The jar was half full of a thick red fluid that was all too familiar. I decided not to ask where she’d acquired the blood.

  Saltanat unwrapped the steak, laid it on the snow, poured a little of the blood on and around the meat, then covered it with my jacket. I shivered and realized I should have brought a sweater. At least, that’s why I thought I was shivering.

  Saltanat pressed her Makarov against the bulge caused by the meat, and fired a shot. My jacket jerked as if I’d still been inside it, and some blood oozed out of the bullet hole, its edges blackened by powder burn. I could see charred flesh, smelled burned meat. I felt slightly sick.

  “Now the fun part,” Saltanat said. “Put your jacket back on.”

  I did as I was told, and waited for instructions.

  “Fall forward, and don’t use your hands to break your fall,” Saltanat said. “We need this to look convincing.”

  I was convinced she was enjoying this rather too much, but I fell forward, my face buried in the snow, arms flung out. Saltanat placed the steak under the bullet hole, and I could feel a clammy sweat on the back of my neck. Saltanat spattered some of the blood by my side, and I could taste its rich scent in the back of my throat.

  “Stay still,” she commanded. I didn’t move for four or five minutes, until she told me to get up.

  I lumbered to my feet, brushing snow and dirt off my face, out of my hair.

  “My jacket’s fucked, I suppose,” I grumbled, wiping the worst of the blood against a clean patch of snow.

  “Not at all,” Saltanat said, scrolling through the photos she’d taken. “A bullet hole, what could give you more street cred than that, a Murder Squad inspector who survived an assassination attempt?”

  It would be all too easy for someone to repeat the exercise, next time for real. I’d seen too many bodies sprawled out on pavements, in fields, under birch trees, to think the same fate could never await me.

  “Won’t they want to see my face?” I asked. “Find out who I am, I mean, was?”

  “The last thing we want is for someone to recognize you,” Saltanat said. “Better to say we decided to turn you into food for the crows. By the way, you make a lovely corpse.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said, started back down the hillside toward the car, until I slipped and landed on my ass, felt the snow seeping wet into my trousers. Saltanat’s laughter followed me all the way down.

  Chapter 41

  The Voice at the other end of the phone was guarded.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Graves?” Saltanat said.

  Silence.

  “You spoke to a former colleague of mine the other day.”

  “Did I?”

  “Regarding a series of financial transactions that, in the event, never happened,” she said. Her tone was officious, impersonal. Saltanat could play the ice queen to perfection.

  “And?”

  “There was a series of cancelations at a local hotel. Perhaps you read about them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  The voice was noncommittal, giving nothing away, not even confusion or misunderstanding.

  “The colleague who spoke to you is no longer with our organization, ever since we discovered he was acting on his own, without our authority. His employment was terminated. And so wa
s he.”

  More silence.

  Saltanat continued, the frost in her voice amplified by the formality of her language.

  “As a gesture of our commitment to an amicable solution, we’re sending you photographs of his resignation. We hope this ends any unpleasantness between our two organizations. Please accept our apologies.”

  After a moment, the Voice spoke.

  “Damage was done, costs incurred. I would expect some form of compensation.”

  Discussing death, violence, crime, in the language of the boardroom. Not for the first time, I wondered if the entire world was greedy and corrupt. The biggest thieves sit at boardroom tables discussing takeovers and share options. And the only handcuffs they ever get to put on are golden.

  “I quite agree, Mr. Graves,” Saltanat continued, “but my superiors feel the quickest way to deal with this problem is to simply let the matter drop, and we both continue to go about our respective businesses as before.”

  The Voice started to speak, but Saltanat abruptly broke the connection. She handed the cell phone to me.

  “You might want to have a look at your corpse,” she said. “That’s not something you get to do every day. And then take a hammer to the phone.”

  I thumbed through the images of my dead body in the snow. They looked pretty convincing, and it wasn’t as if I’d never seen such things before. The close-up of the bullet hole with the charred meat and powder burn was particularly effective.

  “So Graves gets these, and decides the problem’s over. Then what?”

  Saltanat took the phone back from me, and started to dial a number.

  “His problem is just starting, whether or not he believes it’s been sorted out. Once I send a photo of the hotel, together with your holiday snaps.”

  “Sending them where?”

  “To your old colleagues at Sverdlovsky station. Together with a text that the very dead body in the photo is yours, that the hotel massacre is involved, and that our friend Mr. Graves knows something about both. Let’s see what they do then.”