A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  Vorovskoe blago, the thieves’ code, is all about maximising profits without drawing unnecessary attention to yourself, working in the shadows, preying on the weak and paying off the powerful. If you need to make a statement, you make it with a Makarov; you don’t slaughter and mutilate pregnant women.

  So this wasn’t an ordinary criminal enterprise. There had to be big money involved, enough to jeopardise the international heroin trade, the corrupt taxation kickbacks, the bribes, even the regular daily extortion that feeds the Circle.

  When one hand is washing the other, it takes an awful lot of cash to make you throw the towel away.

  My thoughts were disturbed by a knock on the door.

  When I opened it, Saltanat was standing there, frowning, a look on her face I didn’t recognise. I stepped out on to the landing and opened my mouth, but before I could speak, a fist the size of a small horse slammed into the side of my head.

  The world stopped and twisted with a dazzling firework display that blinded me to everything, and then I was falling into blackness as deep and dark as Chinara’s grave.

  Chapter 40

  I didn’t know how long I’d been out when eventually I resurfaced, but I was no longer in my apartment. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I was in an unheated empty building, in another dismal basement, but this time I was chained by my ankle to the wall, both my hands cuffed to a table. No sign of Saltanat, but three stocky men standing in front of me made up for her absence.

  The thug who seemed to be the leader of this mini gang leant forward and pinched my cheek, with just enough force to show he could do a lot worse if he decided to.

  ‘Well, sweetheart, good to have you back. I was afraid Azad here might have hit you a little too hard. Before we got some answers out of you. And then where would we be, Inspector?’

  He grinned, revealing an uneven row of gold teeth. Underneath his leather jacket, I could see the bulge of a shoulder holster, and I didn’t think it was for carrying a water bottle.

  ‘On the run, I would think?’

  All three men laughed as if I’d told the planet’s funniest joke. Leather Jacket patted my cheek, not too gently.

  ‘You think your colleagues give a fuck about a pussy like you? Mister Cleanest Arse on the Planet? Every greased palm who’s found his throat dry and his pocket light at the end of the month, thanks to a self-righteous cop like you? Every uniform who enjoys a little taste of the girls behind Panfilov Park but hasn’t had a free mouth? There’ll be a dozen of them claiming credit when your body turns up; not for solving the crime but for personally giving you the big headache.’

  He cocked his fingers, aimed at my head and then spat in my face to emphasise his contempt for police, honest and bent alike. I ignored the thick phlegm trickling down my face, and flexed my shoulders to ease out some of the stiffness. The chain tugged at my leg like a demanding child.

  ‘So that’s your big plan? Kill a Murder Squad? That’s really going to please whichever boss has the misfortune to lead a troupe of clowns like you. You’ll bring down heat on yourselves like you can’t imagine.’

  ‘Heat you won’t know anything about, once Syrgak has finished with you. You wouldn’t think to look at him that he’d had three years’ medical training, would you? Very talented with a scalpel. But then you saw some of his handiwork, didn’t you? A master craftsman; he’ll keep you in agony for hours.’

  The trio gave that peculiar mirthless cackle low-grade thugs use to terrify the cell bitches on to their knees when they’re behind bars. It wasn’t too hard for me to appear unimpressed.

  ‘Heat you won’t know anything about,’ he repeated, nudging his comrades, who dutifully responded as if they’d never heard anything so witty in their lives.

  ‘Circle of Brothers? Circle of Idiots, more like,’ I said, with a confidence I was far from feeling.

  ‘So you know who we are?’

  ‘Well, I know who your boss’s bosses are,’ I answered, ‘and even they aren’t big enough to be Circle. As for who you work for, well, you don’t any more, do you? Unless the evil old lizard’s giving orders from the slab.’

  The blow hurled me back against the wall, where my feet got all tangled up in the chain. Leather Jacket rubbed at his knuckles; obviously he was no expert, but I could see he was planning on some serious practice.

  He took off his jacket, under which he was wearing a stained and torn T-shirt. His bare arms were pitted with track marks, some already turning black and green. He’d been bitten by the krokodil, and the sweet stink of gangrene hung in the air.

  ‘No wonder your pakhan’s in the morgue, if he can’t even stop his people shooting up that shit.’

  The flurry of blows that followed hurt, but the krokodil had obviously sapped a lot of his strength. After a couple of minutes, Leather Jacket stopped for breath and I inspected myself for damage. Nothing that a week in an Issyk-Kul sanatorium with a stockpile of the good stuff couldn’t cure.

  ‘Now I know how tough you’re not, why have you brought me here? And where’s Saltanat?’

  ‘The bitch? She’s upstairs, in the master boudoir, waiting for Azad and Syrgak to show her what real men are like. Answer my questions and you can have what’s left, if you like. Mind you, after Azad,’ and he held his hands a foot apart, ‘I don’t know if there’ll be much left worth having.’

  ‘I don’t care what you do to the bitch,’ I lied, ‘she led you to me. She deserves all she gets.’

  ‘We caught her on the road outside your apartment. We were coming for you already, and we guessed you’d open the door to her. Kicking down doors gets old very fast.’

  Leather Jacket jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t keep the bride waiting, guys.’

  Azad and Syrgak headed out of the room, leaving me alone with Leather Jacket.

  ‘You can manage me without backup?’

  He smiled.

  ‘Good chain, that. Strong. Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve got a few questions, and your answers aren’t necessarily for everyone’s ears.’

  ‘Those two? They wouldn’t understand if you drew them pictures.’

  Leather Jacket considered that, and nodded. The trio obviously didn’t sit around discussing the novels of Chingiz Aitmatov when they weren’t terrorising babushki out of their pensions. He walked over to a wall cupboard, and paused, his hand on the door.

  ‘The last events, you remember them?’

  He meant the riots that burnt down a good part of central Bishkek in anger about the government, with the department stores looted as a sideline. Who says protest doesn’t pay?

  I nodded.

  ‘I was in Beta Stores, thinking I could pick a few things up. Saw this and thought it could come in handy. For when I met people like you.’

  I listened, wondering where this was going, as he opened the cupboard. I was beginning to get a very bad feeling.

  ‘But you know what they say: get mare’s milk, make kymyz.’

  He produced a bottle of cooking oil and a hinged metal contraption. He lifted the lid to show two non-stick enamelled and grooved surfaces. An electrical cable ran from the machine and I watched as he connected it to a portable generator near the door. He pulled the starter cord, and the engine grumbled into a slow pulse.

  ‘It’s called a health grill, must be an American thing. These plates here,’ and he waggled the jaws of the grill as if it was a small steel crocodile, ‘they’re slightly tilted so the fat runs out. But both the plates get good and hot; you just put the meat in between, close it, and it cooks in half the time.’

  He held his hand above the metal, testing for heat, poured a little oil on to the lower surface. We listened to the oil hiss and spit as it hit the metal.

  ‘Supposed to be good for cooking steaks, that sort of thing, but I haven’t tried it out yet. Well, not for cooking anything I want to eat.’

  I looked at the metal surfaces. There were fragments of what looked like charre
d meat, and black stains dribbling down the centre grooves. The knot in my stomach got tighter.

  Leather Jacket took hold of my chin and forced me to stare into his eyes. I could smell the krokodil sweat on him, the rot of flesh. He looked at me, unblinking, hoping to see fear in my face.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it does cook to perfection. Fingers. And the occasional cock, if someone’s deciding to be a hero.’

  And with that, he forced my left hand between the metal plates and slammed them shut.

  Chapter 41

  My hand was only trapped between the two hot plates for maybe twenty seconds, but long enough for the pain to flash through my arm and emerge as a scream from my throat. I tugged desperately at the handcuffs. But I was held tight. Then the pain was out of control, and I smelt the flesh on my hand as it cooked.

  Leather Jacket opened the grill, uncuffed my hand and plunged it into a bucket of water. The shock was so great, I screamed. My heart felt ready to throw itself out of my chest.

  ‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You’d send that back in a restaurant for being underdone.’

  I took my hand out of the bucket and looked down. Dark crimson burn lines followed the pattern of the raised grooves of the grill, deeper across my knuckles. My skin had already started to blister and turn an angry red. The soft meat of my palm looked raw, skinned, like a peeled blood tomato. I tried to clench a fist, and the effort flooded my mouth with vomit.

  As soon as I could coax breath back into my lungs, I sat very still. The entire centre of the universe had become the closeness of my hand to the grill. Nothing else was in focus; not the killings, not Saltanat, not Chinara.

  Leather Jacket poured more oil on to the machine.

  ‘Not hot enough yet, give it a couple more minutes and then we can really get cooking.’

  I did my best to muster some courage, some defiance.

  ‘Shouldn’t you ask me the questions first? I refuse to answer, then you start to torture me.’

  Leather Jacket grinned, and his gold teeth glinted under the bare light bulb.

  ‘You call this torture? Anyway, once they’ve had a little taste, people get much more cooperative. Why waste time?’

  The reek of my hand was making me nauseous, and I wondered if I was going to faint.

  ‘I get the message. You can turn that off and ask away, droog,’ I said.

  Leather Jacket considered this, and pushed the grill to one side. He raised the lid, so I could see the oil bubbling on the metal, and then spat. His phlegm splashed and sizzled, burnt off in seconds. I thought of the krokodil bodies I’d seen, with flesh gnawed away down to bare grey bones, and knew that would happen to my hand next time. I wished George Foreman had stuck to making his money hitting other black men in the ring.

  ‘We’ll leave the grill just here. If I don’t like your answers.’

  He cocked his head and looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Your girlfriend’s obviously the well-brought-up type, doesn’t talk with her mouth full, eh?’

  I didn’t reply, but the silence from upstairs hung over us like a shroud.

  I remembered the smoothness of her back under my hand. I wondered if my hand would feel it again, ever feel anything again. I wondered who would find my body, and if they’d bury me next to Chinara, in the clean air and solitude of the mountains.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ I asked.

  ‘For a start, who killed vor v zakonye Aydaraliev?’

  I didn’t see any point in lying. I’d no loyalty to men who came to my country and acted as executioners.

  ‘Uzbek Security Services. Two men. I don’t know them, never seen them before. Probably halfway to Tashkent by now.’

  He nodded. My answer made some sort of sense.

  ‘Who gave the order? That pizda upstairs?’

  I didn’t answer; I hadn’t yet reached the point where I’d betray anyone or anything to keep the hot metal away from my hand. But I was close. So I shrugged.

  ‘Well, she’ll wish she was dead after Azad and Syrgak finish with her.’

  He sucked his teeth, considering his next question. I could tell he’d never done this before: a good interrogator says as little as possible. Silence, as much as anything else, makes the accused betray themselves.

  ‘What do you know about the murders?’

  ‘Your pakhan boasted about spreading “terror and confusion”. It’s a quote from a speech by Lenin before the Revolution. About how to overthrow the Tsarist government. And how to keep power once you’ve gained it. That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?’

  Leather Jacket rubbed at his arm, and I suspected that the krokodil’s teeth had just taken a tighter grip.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘This is too big, too dispersed, for it to be a single team. Killings in Osh, Karakol, here in the city. Across the border. Maybe even on the Russian airbase. There’s big money behind this, for sure. But more important, there’s also big ambition.’

  ‘Go on. Whose?’ Leather Jacket said, but I sensed the uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘That’s all I have. You’ll know more than me; after all, you were close to the pakhan.’

  ‘Not as close as his tongue was to his teeth.’

  Now I realised why they were here, why my hand throbbed with a raw pain that pulsed with each beat of my heart. It wasn’t revenge for the loss of their beloved leader. It wasn’t some obscure part of the criminal’s code demanding blood for blood.

  It was the hunt for money.

  ‘He didn’t tell you where the payment is, did he?’ I said. ‘All that cash, stashed away, waiting for somebody to stumble on it by accident, and buy the villas and BMWs that should be yours.’

  And I laughed, and I kept on laughing even after his punch snapped my head back.

  It was all starting to come clear; finally, I spotted a motive behind everything.

  ‘Your pakhan was a fool,’ I said, wiggling my tongue against a loose tooth, ‘so greedy, he couldn’t see he was selling his own downfall. And not just his, yours too. All the gangs in Kyrgyzstan, all working for the big guy who will wipe you all out.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he snarled. ‘You’re full of shit.’

  ‘Put the grill away and I’ll tell you. Explain in simple words that even a krokodil like you can understand.’

  ‘Why don’t I just cook you one bite at a time? Put your fingers on a plate and make you chew the meat off them? You’ll talk then.’

  ‘But maybe I’ll collapse, have a heart attack, die without you hearing what you want to know. Where will that have got you? And just how pleased will your bosses be? All those millions missing because you like to smell meat cooking?’

  I saw that Leather Jacket wanted to press my face against the sizzling grill. Thug he may have been, but he wasn’t stupid. Reluctantly, he took the grill off the table and went to disconnect it from the generator.

  Which is when I grabbed the bucket with my free hand and hurled it at him.

  The water hit him, the grill and the generator at the same time, conducting direct current through him and to earth. The plastic casing of the socket exploded, and he fell backwards, his fingers frying and fusing to the grill. The room filled with the sour scent of iodine and boiling blood.

  Leather Jacket danced from foot to foot, to an unseen, insane rhythm, jaw wrenched open by the voltage racing through him, a tuneless song spilling from his mouth. His jacket started to char and smoulder, as the lining caught alight. Then his hair was a torch, small flames dancing like a crown around his head. His hips jerked backwards and forwards, in a manic imitation of fucking, the grill still gripped tight in his hands.

  A final grunt drove the air from his body, which performed one last convulsive spasm and lay still.

  I knew better than to go through his pockets for the handcuff keys; the grill was still plugged into the generator, with the cable’s bare wires emitting blue-white sparks and flashes. Instead, I focused on pulling the
chain around my leg away from the clasp set into the wall.

  With the chain wrapped around my free hand, I used what leverage I could get with my feet against the wall. I tried to ignore the pain from the chain cutting into my burnt flesh, but there was no give at all. I kicked at the steel of the wall hook, but it was sunk deep into the brickwork.

  I was still kicking, hoping to dislodge some of the plaster, when I heard it.

  A scream from the bleakest, blackest depths. Coming from upstairs.

  Chapter 42

  For a couple of seconds, I froze, and I was in the hospital, beside Chinara as she screamed for the morphine to dull the bite of the tumours devouring her.

  I was yelling down the corridor, ready to kill whichever uncaring attendant had slipped out for a few drags of a papirosh. I was lying beside her, holding her while her nails, made brittle and thin by the drugs, splintered and cracked as they dug into my arm.

  She’d howled over and over again, unaware of anything but the fire consuming her, the noise from her throat sounding as if a wolf had made its way down from the mountains and was roaming the hospital in search of food . . .

  *

  Syrgak burst through the door, his mouth open, streaming with blood, white stumps of shattered teeth glinting through a crimson mask.

  ‘Boss, the bitch, she just –’

  He stopped at the sight of the vor, flames flickering from his jacket, blue flashes from the grill sparking against his body.

  I tugged on the chain with the last of my strength, felt the plaster finally give way, lost my balance, tumbled back against the table. I swung the chain over my head, building up momentum, took aim, then released my grip. The metal reeled out across the room, the sharp spikes that had held it in place embedding themselves in Syrgak’s face.

  He gave a high-pitched gasp of surprise, then a howl of anguish as he tried to dislodge the spikes wedged deep in his right eye and cheek. He whimpered over and over, a keening wail that made me sick to my stomach, calling to his mother to help him.