Spring Betrayal

by Tom Callaghan

And with that, she jerked her arm back.

  A bolt of white fire screamed up my left leg, turning me sightless for a few seconds.

  I opened my eyes, wondering if I’d pissed myself, looked at my torturer. Kurmanalieva held up the pliers, my bloodstained toenail trapped in their jaws.

  “There, all done, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asked, in a terrible parody of maternal feeling, as if taking a splinter out of my finger or cleaning a cut on my knee.

  “Just be glad it wasn’t your big toe, that really does hurt. Or so I’ve seen.”

  She held the pliers close to my face. I could smell the blood, see the gleam in her eyes. I managed not to vomit, although messing up her designer suit was a temptation.

  “It’s not the sort of wound you can put a bandage on, but as long as you keep it clean and dry, the nail will grow back, and you’ll be fine in eighteen months.”

  Kurmanalieva reached into her bag, took out her cigarettes, lit one, placed it between my lips. I inhaled, dizzy as the smoke filled my lungs. She looked down at my foot, a worried expression carving lines in her forehead. She looked at the lit tip of her cigarette, and softly blew on it, until it flamed a rich orange.

  “I don’t think you can keep your toe clean and dry, Akyl, not being tied up and in this damp cellar. So it’s probably best if I cauterize the wound.”

  She knelt down again, and with a single stabbing movement, stubbed her cigarette out on the bare raw flesh where my nail had been.

  This time, I fainted.

  When I came round, Kurmanalieva was scrubbing the pliers clean with a cloth she soaked from an unlabeled bottle.

  “Vodka,” she explained. “I keep things hygienic. No point in questioning people if they’re going to die from blood poisoning first.”

  She held the bottle up in front of me, raised one eyebrow, held the thumb and forefinger of her other hand a couple of centimeters apart.

  “Just a small one, raise the spirits, loosen the tongue? Oh, of course, you don’t drink, do you?”

  She turned away, then splashed some of the clear liquid over my bare foot. I didn’t pass out, but I did vomit. Unfortunately, only on myself. Music suddenly filled the cellar. “Dies Irae,” the “Day of Wrath,” played in the cheap tinny tones of a mobile phone. Kurmanalieva rummaged in her bag, produced a smartphone, turned away to take the call. She listened without speaking for a moment, then spoke.

  “Thirty minutes. Don’t be late.”

  She ended the call, placed her phone back in her bag, turned to me.

  “I know it’s very rude of me to leave you, the sign of a poor hostess. But that was your delightful friend, Ms. Umarova. She wants to meet with me, maybe reminisce about when we worked together. And wants to make a trade for you. True love, Inspector?”

  She stared at me, at her handiwork. I stared back.

  Kurmanalieva shook her head at Saltanat’s taste in men, smiled, waggled her fingers in farewell. There was something I had to know before she left the room.

  “Why haven’t you killed me?”

  She stared at me, one foot on the stairs, before giving a slow smile that highlighted the crow’s feet around her eyes.

  “Because you’re not top of my list. Yet.”

  Then she switched off the light.

  Chapter 48

  I don’t know how long I was in Graves’s cellar, moving between a state of dazed half-consciousness and moments of simple terror. Pain gnawed at my foot, as if rats had emerged into the darkness to chew on my flesh. I never knew fear had a scent until then; a woman’s perfume strong with the ripeness of lilacs, the tang of rusting steel, the singe of burned meat.

  The leather straps binding me to the table made movement impossible, and cramps tore at my shoulders, back and legs. As my muscles spasmed, the straps bit deeper into me, reminding me of my helplessness.

  The darkness was endless; my eyes saw nothing but the splashes and stains of pure color caused by the pain that consumed me. I was going to die in that cellar, swallowed up in blackness. And part of me welcomed that.

  I heard death fumbling with the door at the top of the stairs, his key twisting in the lock, the tumblers falling into place. Presumably using a skeleton key. Heavy boots clumped down the wooden stairs. I didn’t know any prayers; that time was long past for me. I remembered my dream, falling into Chinara’s open grave, joining her in the long waltz, realized it wasn’t a dream but a prophecy.

  The brutality of the light dazzled me, but the room slowly swam back into focus. A burly man stood in front of me, a scowl tattooed on his face. We’d never met, but I knew his name.

  Morton Graves.

  “You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, Inspector.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it,” I said, the words raw from my dry throat.

  “Trouble is perhaps an exaggeration,” Graves said. “I probably shouldn’t rank it higher than an inconvenience, a nuisance.”

  Graves’s face was oddly asymmetrical, as if steel plates had been inserted under his skin and badly welded together. His eyes were the dark blue of a winter dusk, with all the warmth and compassion of an ice cube. His left eye had a slight cast, as if even he was unable to look at his handiwork without squinting.

  “Albina give you a hard time? Make you all sorts of promises and nonsense about how this hurts me more than it hurts you? We’re all in this together?”

  I would have shrugged, if I’d been able to.

  “I’ve had worse,” I said, thinking back to that other cellar, where my hand had been sandwiched between the hotplates of a portable grill.

  “Heard you were old-school tough, told Albina her usual methods would be wasted on you.”

  “You should have whispered it louder,” I said. “She might have heard you,” then winced as a fresh bolt of pain shot through my foot. I knew it would be worse later on, when the throb of infection kicked in, but right now it was just about bearable.

  Graves looked down at my bare foot. His expression didn’t change as he saw the burn.

  “If you’re going to stub out your cigarettes on the floor, best keep your shoes on next time,” he said, gave a mirthless smile at his own humor.

  He reached out toward my forehead, and I shut my eyes in preparation for the slap or punch. But instead, I felt his fingers working at the buckle of the strap around my head. Graves swore under his breath, but continued to pull at the strap until suddenly I could move my head.

  “Easier, eh?” he asked, and turned my head from side to side. I felt the muscles and tendons pull and stretch, heard my neck bones creak. For a moment, I wondered if he was going to snap my neck, but he seemed to have other plans.

  A few moments later, he’d undone all the restraints, held me up by my armpits, helped me slide down to the floor when my legs gave way. I slumped there for a while, gingerly flexing my arms and legs. The burn on my foot throbbed like a bad toothache. My shoes were on the floor beside me, and Graves gestured at me to put them on. That made the throbbing considerably worse.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, and I didn’t. “Why are you letting me go?”

  “Who said I was doing that?” he asked.

  “Then what are you going to do with me?”

  “Kill you, of course. Stamp on you like an insect. One not worth wasting shoe leather on.”

  My hands were still numb, but my knife pressed against the small of my back. Maybe I’d be flexible enough to show Morton Graves just how skilled a Uighur craftsman can be.

  “So why untie me?” I asked. Graves leaned forward, crouching so his face was almost level with mine. I smelled mint toothpaste on his breath, expensive cologne on his skin. I knew I smelled like an outside long-drop shithole, with an undernote of charred meat.

  He looked at me, his gaze intense, unblinking. It suddenly occurred to me this must be how madness looks at the world, distorted, invincible.

  “You’re a Muslim, right?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t anything. I’d giv
en up on faith and belief and salvation with the first murder scene I attended, an old man beaten to death by his nephew, smashed on vodka, arguing over some forgotten nonsense.

  “Well, you’ve been in a mosque? Or a church? Somewhere sacred?”

  I nodded, to break the monotony of shaking my head.

  “Well, this place is my church, if you like. This is where I do the things that matter to me. The rites, you might say. These walls,” and his arm swept in a grand gesture, “these walls hold the essence of everything that’s important to me.”

  I watched his mouth move, noticed how spittle gathered in the corners, saw a rivulet of sweat worm its way down his cheek.

  He stood up; his knees didn’t creak, the way mine would.

  “I wouldn’t taint them with your blood, with your death. You see, what I do here protects the young, the innocent, by keeping them innocent, forever young. After I’ve finished with them, no one can rob them of that. I’m not a hunter, but a savior. And I get to fuck them as well. You understand?”

  I looked up at his eyes, realized he was quite mad, as he gave a smile that was almost angelic. Listening to this drivel, I decided enough was enough, and fuck the consequences.

  “If you could hear yourself mouth off, Graves: ‘keeping the innocent innocent.’ By terrifying them, by raping them, by killing them? You’ve got a very odd idea of protecting the young. And I don’t suppose the money hurts either, when you sell your shit on to other lunatic perverts.”

  He scowled again, one corner of his mouth turning up in a sneer. His contempt was like a blow to my chest.

  “Inspector, I’m a very rich man. Richer than you could imagine. I don’t do this for the money. Small minds like yours always think it’s about money; that’s because you don’t have any, and you envy anyone who does. I could buy this shitty little country with the change I’ve got in my pocket. I own the police, politicians, lawyers, I can do whatever or whoever I want, with no one to stop me. Especially not a minor policeman from the sticks who’s about to meet with an accident.”

  “All part of your master plan, is it? Power, terror, and a few free fucks thrown in?”

  “I wouldn’t expect a dumb ment like you to have a clue.”

  And with that, he cuffed my hands in front of me, reached for a large hessian sack from the nearest shelf, and dropped it over my head.

  Chapter 49

  “If you’re going to kill me, why bother with the bag?” I said as Graves half-pulled, half-dragged me up the stairs. I stumbled over a couple of the treads, and he tugged at my arm in irritation. I caught my thigh on what I assumed was the kitchen table, and Graves swore again, as if not being able to see where I was going was my fault, not his.

  “Because I don’t trust you,” he said, as if stating the merely obvious.

  Then we were outside, clean air biting into my lungs, refreshing after the damp claustrophobic cellar. My feet scuffled across gravel, and I was thrust against the side of a car.

  “Get in,” Graves ordered. I fumbled with the door handle, scrambled into the passenger seat, banging my shins as I did so. If they ever found my body, it would be a mass of bruises, scars, and wounds. I realized I was in the people carrier I’d seen earlier.

  “Don’t worry, Inspector, an accident en route is the least of your worries,” Graves said, hitting the ignition and the gate opener at the same time. “And besides, the air bag will save you. Which may prove not to be a good thing.”

  The metal gates scraped across the driveway, then we were moving forward, turning left, picking up speed at a rate that would get us stopped if the car didn’t have diplomatic plates.

  “I liked the photo of you lying dead in the snow,” Graves said. “Very imaginative, I thought. And it gave me a few ideas of my own. After all, if you’re already dead, who’s going to be looking for you now? And in a couple of years, there won’t be anything left to identify you anyway.”

  I didn’t care for the way the conversation was turning, so I stayed silent.

  “You know, Inspector, when I’m in my church, I often notice how my congregation changes at the end. They’ve gone through fear, then terror, to pain beyond anything they’ve ever imagined. They’ve been humiliated, shamed, helpless. For some of them, if they come, well, that’s just another way their bodies have betrayed them. Sperm first, blood later. Pleasures of the flesh, and so on. But there’s a moment, just before the end, when I see their hopes fade. Resignation takes over, maybe even a wish for a swift ending. Their eyes glaze over, ready for the final extinguishing of the light.”

  Graves’s voice took on a new tone, a preacher delivering a sermon, a politician offering promises he would never intend to keep.

  “You expect me to do the same, Graves?”

  “Why should you be any different, Inspector? You saw your wife die, didn’t you? I’m sure she went into darkness the way we all do. In pain and afraid.”

  At that moment I hated Graves with an intensity so great I wanted to grab the steering wheel, force us off the road or into the path of another car. I didn’t mind dying myself if it took him off the planet.

  He must have guessed what I was thinking, from the mocking tone when he spoke.

  “No heroics, Inspector. Remember, I’m the one with the seat belt, and I don’t think you’d enjoy a flight through the windshield.”

  “I’ll sit still, if you’ll take the bag off my head.”

  His only answer was a laugh.

  “One thing I’d like to know, Graves, before you shoot me. Just to put my mind at rest. The identity bands from all those orphanages. What was that all about? I already know they didn’t match the dead bodies.”

  Graves laughed.

  “Do you know anything about magic, Inspector? I don’t mean spells and incantations, I’m talking about conjuring, illusions, tricks.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, although maybe that wasn’t apparent under the hood.

  “Virtually all magic relies on misdirection, making your audience look in the wrong place while you perform the trick. Deceiving their eyes while stealing their wallet, you understand.”

  “So the bands were there to divert our attention, to go off on a search that wouldn’t take us anywhere?”

  Graves laughed again.

  “Only partly, although that was a welcome side effect. It’s really to help us in selling the films. Obviously, what we were offering wasn’t your average fuck and suck film. What you might call a specialist interest. And an expensive one. The collectors of such material are rich, able to spend big money. And for that, they want discretion, reassurance their local police force isn’t going to break down the front door of their mansion with a search warrant.”

  “So?”

  “So we reassure them by pointing out all our movie stars are orphans. No family to worry about them, demand an inquiry into their disappearance.”

  “And your customers’ desire for this shit makes them all too happy to believe your explanation,” I said. “Little head ruling big head.”

  “Exactly,” Graves said. “And the beauty of it is, quite a lot of them really were orphans. And since you stop being an orphan at sixteen, officially, the bands also provided evidence that even the older boys and girls were still underage when they made their cameo performances.”

  “And the bodies up in Karakol?” I asked.

  Graves paused before answering.

  “A bit of a mistake, I suppose. We were offered a great deal of money to make a one-off film, one customer only, to be shot outdoors over a period of a few months, up in the Jeti-Oguz valley, with the red sandstone rocks as a backdrop. I couldn’t attend the shoot myself, I was in Moscow, but I gave very precise instructions about the disposal of the bodies. Scatter them all over, I said. Instructions that weren’t followed, which is why you found them all together. Annoying, but the client still paid.”

  Seven infants slaughtered for a rich man’s whim. And all the other deaths that followed.

&n
bsp; “I understand; you’re a pedophile, a murderer, a rapist. You’re insane. But Graves, you’re rich, why risk everything by selling this shit?”

  Graves paused, and his voice was subdued when he spoke.

  “Of course I could have given the films away for free to other collectors. But it’s a law of nature that we only value something if we’ve had to pay for it. And the more we pay, the greater its value. So the more extreme the material, the more it costs. Surely that’s obvious?”

  I said nothing in the face of such twisted logic. I wondered why I didn’t grab the wheel, strangle him with my bare hands as the car rolled over and slid off the road. And then the answer came to me.

  Fear. Of pain, of falling into dark nothingness. I could imagine a tiny part of the terror of the children led into Graves’s cellar, perhaps enticed down steep steps with the promise of food, toys, a warm place to sleep.

  I reached up, managed to pull the bag over my head. Fuck it; what could Graves do that wasn’t already going to happen to me?

  I blinked, saw we were traveling east out of the city, back toward Karakol. Plenty of deserted spaces, overgrown cemeteries filled with the inhabitants of villages that had long since dwindled and died, fields no longer cultivated, paths no longer trod. This was where my life had led, my body left to the mercies of rain, sun, and snow. I felt nothing, knew it meant nothing.

  The car picked up speed, and I placed my hands on the dashboard to brace myself in case we braked suddenly. The road was deserted, and I wondered why Graves didn’t just pull over, drag me into a field and put a bullet in my ear.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, as if he were reading my thoughts. “I’ve got just the place in mind for you—think of it like going on holiday. Quiet, no one will disturb your bones.”

  We passed a farmer’s wooden cart, a sour-looking donkey trudging away at the front. Graves hit the horn, but the donkey plodded on, the farmer giving us a sideways scowl as we passed. The donkey didn’t even do that. A motorbike overtook us, its rider anonymous in leathers and a full-face helmet, revving the engine and disappearing into the distance.