Spring Betrayal

by Tom Callaghan

  “Is that why she came to my orphanage?” I asked.

  Saltanat shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. For a start, you’re Kyrgyz, not Uzbek, so you would never have been accepted, never trusted. Maybe then, she was looking for a son. But later, once the family put pressure on her, she toed the party line.”

  “Then why pick you, why pick a girl?” I asked.

  Saltanat stared at me for a moment, her black eyes impenetrable.

  “Because my mother had been in the security services, trained by her father. She died in a car accident outside Samarkand, which is how I ended up in the orphanage.”

  “Why didn’t her family look after you?” I asked, guessing the answer even as I asked the question.

  “Because she wasn’t married to my father. She was their shame, and I was hers. So, off to the orphanage with Saltanat, and forget there was ever a little girl of that name.”

  Now I understood the depth of bitterness within her, realized why she was so reticent about her past life. I knew no words could comfort her. Instead, I stared at our joint reflection in the ornate gilt mirror.

  “How old were you when you left the orphanage?”

  “Nine.”

  “And Albina trained you?” I said.

  “In her own image,” Saltanat said, a wry smile breaking through the mask of composure, “until the pupil outdid the master. To start, it was about getting me physically fit; you know what orphanage food is like.”

  For me, the food in my orphanage had been better than the food I’d been given at home, but it didn’t seem tactful to mention that.

  “Then it was about learning skills; swimming, running, climbing. All the things kids want to do anyway, but with Albina it was an obsession. Stopwatches, records, and punishment if you didn’t do better than the time before.”

  “She was cruel to you?”

  “Not cruel,” Saltanat said, “more that her interest in me was entirely practical, the way you might train a guard dog, or teach someone how to cook. I think she only became cruel later.”

  I saw her face tighten with memories, wondered about holding her hand, sat still.

  “After that, it was learning to shoot, rifles, pistols, arrows. Stationary targets at first, then moving ones. How to fight with a knife, unarmed, with anything that came to hand. How to defend yourself, how to track someone, disguise yourself, live off the land. All the skills that might one day come in handy.

  “The only time we stopped was when Albina had to go away on a mission. I never knew in advance, just one day I’d wake up and she wouldn’t be there. But I’d practice anyway, in case she came back and caught me lazing around.”

  “It sounds terrible,” I said.

  “Not really,” she said. “We lived better than most people: good food, good housing, the best teachers. When it comes to defending the status quo, nothing’s too good for the top guys. And remember, it was what my family did. I’d have had the same training if my mother had lived.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about her role as a trained killer, but it wasn’t as if I’d ever been under any illusions about Saltanat as a placid housewife.

  “Every few months, Albina would go on road trips, not just Uzbekistan but Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, looking for potential recruits, children she could train up to be foot soldiers to the elite. It must have been on one of those trips that she visited your orphanage.”

  I was silent, wondering how different my life would have been if I’d taken Albina’s hand, been led into a new way of living, perhaps of dying. And how I would have felt about Saltanat if we’d grown up together.

  “So what made it go wrong?” I asked.

  “I was fifteen when Albina went away, didn’t come back for five months. I never found out the details, but she’d been hurt working undercover, shot twice, thigh and shoulder. She healed, but she was never quite as supple, maybe a pace behind her best. I was better than she was, and she resented that.”

  “What happened then?”

  “We’d always pulled back in practice before then, held the knife a centimeter away, got the neck hold but didn’t snap the spine. No point in training an agent if you lose them before they go out into the field.

  “One day, we were practicing with knives, close quarters. We used blunted knives so we might get the odd scratch or two, but nothing serious. But when we started, I saw Albina was using a real blade, razor-edged on both sides. And that’s how I got this.”

  Saltanat ran her fingernail down the length of her scar.

  “You know how much head wounds bleed,” she said. “It looked like I’d been slaughtered. I thought she was going to cut my throat.”

  I remembered the sheep we’d sacrificed for Chinara’s forty-day toi, the ceremony commemorating her life, how the sheep had bleated as we dragged it toward the waiting knife.

  “What stopped her?”

  “One of the other trainers saw what had happened, stopped the fight. Of course, Albina swore she didn’t know the knife was for real. But I knew. And we never fought like that again. But that’s when she really started to hate me. For being stronger than her, for having seen her weakness.”

  “She was shot here?” I asked. “In Kyrgyzstan?”

  Saltanat gave me the “are-you-stupid?” look I’d grown to know so well.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “And even if I did, you don’t expect me to tell you?”

  I shrugged.

  “It was a long time ago. And besides, she’s dead,” I said.

  “Secrets stay secrets. In my country, anyway.”

  I rolled over to look at her, at the raven’s wing of hair splayed out on the pillow, at the dark eyes whose depths I could never fathom.

  “My country’s not as good at keeping secrets,” I said. “That’s why we have revolutions. And the news a foreign agent’s corpse has been found in the center of Bishkek, that’s going to be a secret for maybe twenty seconds.”

  “So?”

  “That means I have to go and see Tynaliev, explain the situation, before he wonders if I’ve gone rogue and puts a TOS out on me.”

  Saltanat nodded; she knew what TOS meant.

  Terminate On Sight.

  Chapter 58

  I finally managed to persuade Saltanat it would be better if I went to see Tynaliev on my own.

  “It’s going to be hard enough to get to see him myself,” I argued. “You think he’s going to allow a trained foreign assassin to get within two hundred meters? We’ll both get shot, no questions asked.”

  “He’ll want to know where I am, what I know,” she said.

  “I’ll tell him I haven’t seen you for the last two days, you crossed the border yesterday, you had nothing to do with Albina’s death.”

  “He’s going to believe that?” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter what he believes,” I replied, “as long as whatever happens is to his benefit. He’ll call his counterpart in Tashkent, offer his deepest condolences on the Uzbek ex-member of his staff who fell afoul of a group of pornographers and was murdered. Then he’ll assure him everything possible is being done to catch the authors of this terrible crime. Honor satisfied, crisis averted, case closed.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” Saltanat said.

  “Wait here until I call you. If you don’t hear from me in a couple of hours, go somewhere, but don’t tell me where, and take the battery out of your phone. Call me from a throwaway in twenty-four hours, and if I don’t answer, head across the border.”

  “And from there?”

  “If I’m not answering, you’ll know I’m dead or locked up. That means Tynaliev is tied in with Graves and the porn. If he is, contact Usupov, get him to send the material I gave him to the papers. Better still, you send it to the Uzbek papers, and the BBC and CNN. There’s no way Tynaliev could survive a media strike like that.”

  “Why not do that anyway?” she asked.

  “I need to know if Tynaliev’s invol
ved or not. Bring him down and he’s innocent, the stability of my country is threatened. It’s not as if we’re Switzerland to begin with.”

  “Twenty-four hours, right?”

  “Unless I call you first.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  I stumbled for the right movie cliché, pulled her close to me, hugged her. I pushed the image of Chinara on the Ferris wheel out of my mind, thought only of the here and now, the woman in my arms.

  “Then we’ll always have Bishkek.”

  I felt a lot less confident when I arrived at Minister of State Security Tynaliev’s town house. The one time I’d been there was when I came to tell Tynaliev that his daughter, Yekaterina, had been found butchered above Ibraimova, near the Blonder Pub. In daylight, the place still looked like a mafia pakhan’s armed compound, with more guards than the White House. Two men with Uzis tracked my progress as I parked the Lexus at a suitable distance to prove I was suicide-bomb-free. The armed guard at the gatehouse inspected my police pass as if looking for a reason to shoot me, handed it back to me, thumbed toward the scanner. “Trust no one” was the motto of the day.

  I handed over my gun, walked through the scanner, and a guard led me to the front door.

  “Wait here,” he ordered, with all the politeness you’d expect from a man with a machine pistol in his hand.

  “I called the minister earlier, said I was on the way,” I said.

  The information didn’t send the guard into a fit of groveling; I couldn’t have said I was entirely surprised. I didn’t add I’d given a list of conditions for coming in, the most pressing of which was not being gunned down on sight.

  “Wait here,” he repeated, letting his hand rest on the Makarov on his hip just to make sure I’d fully understood. I was finally escorted into the hallway, and from there into the same small, overheated study where I’d first met Tynaliev. The minister stood there, cracking his knuckles in a way I didn’t find reassuring.

  “You’ve sorted this business out, I hope, to everyone’s benefit?” he barked.

  “In a manner of speaking, Minister,” I said. “I can tell you where the porn films were made, point you to the main suspect. I’m sure you’ll be able to spin the case so you come out of it with the maximum credit, without embarrassing us or your Uzbek counterparts.”

  “Sit,” the minister said, and it wasn’t a request. He poured himself a small vodka, picked up a second glass, looked at me.

  “You don’t, if I remember,” he said. “I was always told never to trust a man who doesn’t drink.”

  “My mother always said never to trust a man who does,” I said.

  He tossed back the vodka, poured another, and smiled, the same wolfish grin I’d seen before.

  “Perhaps you should have listened to your mother,” he said, and sat down behind his desk.

  “If I could remind you—” I began, before he interrupted me with an impatient gesture.

  “Yes, yes, the order’s already gone out, the Circle of Brothers was trying to discredit you by planting kiddie porn in your apartment, you’re reinstated with no loss of pension, pay, or seniority.”

  “I’m grateful, Minister,” I said, and for once when talking to a government official, I meant it.

  “There is a problem, though,” I went on, “with the making of the film, the bodies we found, and, of course, the murder of Gurminj Shokhumorov.”

  “What sort of a problem?”

  “There had to be a considerable investment in making those films, the equipment.” I shuddered, thinking of the belts and knives in Graves’s cellar. “Finding the victims, ensuring they weren’t missed, not to mention the distribution, the bribes that had to be paid all along the line. So obviously, this wasn’t the work of a poor man.”

  “You’ve found links to the Circle of Brothers? Something we can use to smash them?” Tynaliev asked.

  “I’ve no doubt they helped with the distribution, at least some of it,” I said, choosing my words with care, “but this isn’t the sort of thing they would get involved with. Too unpopular.”

  “Explain,” Tynaliev said.

  “The Circle makes its money through what most people consider facts of life. Bootleg vodka, gambling, trafficking drugs to Russia and the West, prostitution. Men pay money to fuck, women fuck for money, the way of the world, oldest profession and so on. People say, well, if not them, someone else. And everybody likes to take a drink now and then. But something like this isn’t acceptable to most people. And that weakens the Circle in all their other activities. The money starts to dry up. And the foot soldiers in the Circle, they start to wonder if it’s the turn of their daughters, their sons to become film stars, meat for the mincing machine. So everyone’s unhappy. Bad for business.”

  I stood up and took one of the bottles of sparkling mineral water. I held it up to the minister, asking his permission. He nodded, I unscrewed the top, drank. Now came the time when my mouth would be dry, and I’d have to fight to keep the fear out of my voice.

  “So you need someone powerful and rich to do all this. Someone with som in his pocket to make people look the other way, to buy his way out of any trouble. And if people won’t be bought, then get rid of them with no consequences.”

  “That sounds like half the people I know.” Tynaliev smiled.

  Now came the hard part, and I took another drink before speaking.

  “The problem is, Minister,” I said, “I know who is responsible. People you know as well.”

  “Are you fucking with me, Inspector?” Tynaliev said, and his voice conjured up images of tiled interrogation rooms, blood spatter on the walls, broken teeth on the floor crunching underfoot.

  “No, Minister,” I said, pleased I sounded unafraid, confident even. “There wouldn’t be any point in me doing that. We both want whoever did these awful crimes to be punished, don’t we?”

  “Who?” he said, his voice the sound of prison doors slamming shut.

  “Obviously, I’ve got documentary evidence to back up my case,” I said.

  “You mean you’ve taken out insurance? Left the files with someone you can trust?”

  “I’m dealing with a powerful man, Minister. I wouldn’t want the case to fizzle out if an ‘accident’ happened to me, I’m sure you agree.”

  I didn’t need to spell out that my “insurance” would pour a world of shit on Tynaliev if he was involved and had me put in the ground.

  “I ask again. Who?”

  “Morton Graves. And a woman. Albina Kurmanalieva.”

  The names hung in the air like distant smoke. Tynaliev looked at his vodka, then pushed the glass away.

  “I have met Ms. Kurmanalieva, just once. A striking woman, very single-minded. If my tastes were to run to more mature women, I have no doubt that ours would be a friendship on many levels. I trust you can back your claims with evidence?”

  I nodded.

  “And also against Morton Graves? He’s one of this country’s major foreign investors. He’s brought trade here, exports what little we have, brings foreign currency in, provides jobs, even medical care and housing. And you know how good we are at doing all that for ourselves.”

  “I know, Minister. But that’s not all he does.”

  “You don’t like rich people, do you, Inspector? Or foreigners? Or me?”

  I stood up, and I saw Tynaliev’s hand move under his desk. Panic button, or maybe a gun. But I didn’t care.

  “This isn’t about what I do or don’t like, Minister. And I can’t imagine someone as important as you cares what I think. It’s about justice. For seven dead babies dumped in a field to rot. For an honest orphanage director who was shot for protecting children. For the boys and girls whose final hours were nothing but pain, shame, and humiliation. That’s what it’s about, Minister.”

  Tynaliev sat back, and I heard the expensive leather of his chair creak.

  “You’re either a very brave man, Inspector, or a remarkably stupid one. It hasn’t occurred to y
ou that you might have been sent on a wrong track by your Uzbek lady friend? Maybe shift any blame from them to us?”

  I shook my head, my legs suddenly feeling weak. I saw my hand shake as I raised the bottle to my mouth. I sat down and finished the water.

  “I think you’d better explain, Inspector, don’t you?”

  It wasn’t a question, more like a death sentence. I just didn’t know for whom.

  Chapter 59

  Over the next hour, I outlined the points in the case I had against Morton Graves, reducing Saltanat’s involvement to that of an occasional helper, omitting her role in Albina’s death entirely. If I was going to sink without a trace, I wasn’t going to drag her down with me. He listened in silence, only interrupting occasionally to clarify individual points or the sequence of events.

  I finished and looked at Tynaliev. He didn’t look convinced.

  “You obviously are aware that I know Morton Graves?” he said. “That we share certain business interests? So I suppose you’re wondering if I’m involved in his other activities? If I enjoy watching rape and murder porn? Maybe even join in with the fun and games? That’s why you’ve taken out insurance?”

  I shrugged, noncommittal.

  “I don’t think you knew anything about the porn, Minister, or the illegal adoptions, or the rapes and murders,” I said.

  I’ve interrogated enough suspects to know when they’re lying to me, and I watched Tynaliev for his reaction.

  “But you’re not sure?” he said.

  “I’m a policeman,” I said. “Murder Squad. You once said I was the best. That’s because I suspect everyone. Including you.”

  Tynaliev stood up and walked toward the window, his back to me as he spoke.

  “You did me a great service once, Inspector, in the tragedy of my daughter’s murder. You brought me the man behind her death, in such a way as to minimize scandal and political upheaval. I owe you for that.”

  He turned and walked to the door.

  “More to the point, Yekaterina owes you that, for giving her justice,” he added, and a hint of sorrow crossed his face, quickly replaced by the mask of a politician.