After Yekaterina

by K. L. Abrahamson

  For Yekaterina, my heart.

  Love, Semetai.

  There was his connection.

  That and a pink sweater that a young, infatuated girl would wear to meet her sweetheart.

  A chill ran up his back in the stillness of the room. From beyond the detective office came the sounds of life in the rest of the station. But not here. Here on his desk there was only death and destruction caused by young love.

  She’d been giddy, her mother had said. Foolish, in her stepfather’s words. All the signs of a schoolgirl crush, an infatuation. It was the kind of thing that a father would tease a daughter about.

  But an infatuation between a good Orthodox Catholic Russian girl, stepdaughter of a man on the rise in politics, and a boy named Semetai?

  That would be a problem. A problem the family would want to fix.

  Both families?

  Manas uulu Semetai was a name steeped in tribal traditions and there was no love lost between the tribes and the Russian newcomers—not anymore.

  The lashes on the girl’s back before she was stabbed. Could that be a scourging by an angry family—angry that she had seduced their boy?

  Had the Manas family run because they’d killed the girl? And was that why there was such strangeness in the Bure family? Had they done the same in return?

  “I need to understand!” He shoved back from his desk, stood, and then stabbed the desk phone with his finger. It buzzed in his ear and then clicked as someone answered.

  “Khan?”

  “Yes.” The calm voice of the M.E. soothed him over the phone. The M.E. would be nearing the end of his shift this evening.

  “I need to talk to you. Do you have time?”

  There was silence a moment and Kazakov heard the smile. “No. But you will come anyway. I will be here.” He hung up.

  As Kazakov pulled his coat on, the office door yanked open and Detektiv Chief Inspektor Rostoff pushed into the room. Once they had been friends. They had gone through police training together, but Rostoff had had a free ride because of his family connections. Those same connections had let him rise quickly in rank. Now his large red nose and bleary eyes tracked across the room and settled on Kazakov.

  “The others are out? Good. Busy men. Always busy. I like to see that.” Rostoff was a bear of a man in the old Russian style, with a heavy coat and fur hat in winter. In the fall it was just the coat that reeked of too much sweat leached into old wool. Rostoff pulled his gloves off and strode through the desks to Kazakov.

  “Good man.” He scanned the evidence on the desk. “A case. You are busy? Yes?” He pounded Kazakov’s shoulder and then hitched a leg over the corner of a neighboring desk and sat.

  Rostoff never showed his face in the detective section and certainly not at this hour. He was too busy rubbing shoulders with the bigwigs in the justice department. That he was here now was a worry.

  Rostoff grinned a big yellow smile. “My dear Kazakov. Look at the hour.”

  Kazakov did. Eight forty p.m. He had worked later many times. The question was what or who had brought Rostoff here.

  “You are a good man. You work hard, my old friend. Maybe sometimes you work too hard.”

  Kazakov went cold as Rostoff pointedly scanned the evidence again, then casually picked up the diary, the school schedule, and the bag and dropped them in the cardboard evidence box.

  “This case, it has you worried, yes? I can tell by the look in your eyes. Would it surprise you that it has others worried, too? Maybe you should not worry so much. Maybe sometimes you should let things go. Yes?” His yellow smile broadened as he settled the box top in place. “You see? Not so difficult.”

  Frozen, Kazakov just looked at him. What could he do that would not bring the weight of Rostoff’s sanctions down on him? What could he say? “It’s a double murder. Since when do we let such things go?”

  Rostoff said nothing but his thick lips curved in a semblance of a dismissive smile.

  Clenching his fists, Kazakov turned his back on the other man and headed for the door.

  §

  Rostoff might have handed down an official decree, but that didn’t mean Kazakov had to listen. It was a double murder. A murder of children. Surely to God, that meant something.

  The M.E.’s offices sat in the basement of Our Lady Yekaterina Hospital. It was a large, four-story building built with a fountain and garden in the front that briefly, in the springtime, could be called beautiful. But summer brought the winds off the mountains that drank the water from the fountain and leached the trees to the color of dust. In October, the fountain was brown with leaves. In November the snow would be falling. Kazakov left his sedan in the parking lot bathed in amber streetlight and strode through the stand of half-barren, night-bound trees under the half-grown moon. The trees were the tallest in Fergana—maples, while in most of the city it was generally aspen that survived the wind and snow of the winter. The red leaves were a particular treat in a town built mainly of concrete, and he liked the way they shuffled around his feet. Almost like snow, without the cold and the shoveling.

  He bypassed the hospital’s well-lit main door and went down a shadowed set of concrete stairs to one side of the structure. A metal door was locked, but he knocked and the door buzzed. He pushed inside into the stomach-clenching smells of blood and guts and formaldehyde. The middle-aged receptionist nodded him through.

  If Khalil Khan was busy, he had made time for Kazakov. He sat behind a small, scarred wooden desk in a small office as if he was waiting. He had two files closed before him on the desk and nodded Kazakov into the lone chair across from him. Behind Khan, the wall was lined with books.

  “Tell me what I don’t know,” Kazakov asked.

  “The boy was killed with an antique rifle. The bullet was of a type only used for some of the old Chinese makes.” He looked at his hands and let the news hang in the air. “It’s the kind the Kyrgyz use for hunting. They trade for them at the markets on the other side of the mountains—when the Ottomans and Chinese aren’t fighting.”

  “Any likelihood of a Russian getting their hands on such a weapon?” Given Khan was Kyrgyz, he would have an insight into such things.

  Khan pursed his lips and shrugged. “Maybe. It might be possible—from police evidence lockers perhaps—but otherwise unlikely. They aren’t licensed and they’re kept hidden. The Kyrgyz take their weapons seriously. These things are almost family heirlooms—reminders of a time before the Russians took over and regulated everything.”

  He said it carefully, no inflection in his voice. It must be difficult for a descendent of those proud tribal people to see how their world had become a Russian country.

  “So, what you’re saying is that Semetai Manas was likely killed by his own people.”

  Khan didn’t say anything, only met his gaze.

  “You know something,” Kazakov said softly.

  Khan shook his head. “Not know. At least not know-as-evidence know. But there are things in this culture, just as in yours. The sense of proper. The sense of place and the need for continuity of a people. You cannot let anything get in the way of that. Of the blood.”

  A sick feeling settled in the pit of Kazakov’s stomach. Such pride and sense of people ran strong in Russians too. It was bred into them. It was fed by schools with books such as Yekaterina’s diary and by the state in the names of hospitals and parks and streets and mountains that bore different names depending on who you spoke to.

  “The girl. The lashes.”

  Khan nodded. “They were deep. Made with rage. There were also deep bruises on her neck and shoulders. I’d say she was throttled in anger, then held down for the lashing before she was stabbed. Whoever did it buried the hilt of the knife deep in her. The edges of the wound were deeply torn.”

  The air was too close, the stench of death too strong as Kazakov heaved himself up out of the chair.

  “One more thing,” Khan said. “She was pregnant.”

  Feeling momentarily drunk
, Kazakov nodded. “How far along?”

  “First trimester.” Khan looked away at his desk and shook his head.

  “Thank you.”

  Kazakovleft the office feeling old and useless and climbed the stairs to the parking lot.

  A gust of mountain wind caught him and he staggered and thought he might be ill. Instead he turned his back on the lights illuminating Yekaterina’s mountain and fumbled for the lighter and the lone cigarette he kept in his wallet. Shielding them against the wind, he lit the cigarette and inhaled the warm acrid tar only to let it out in a long belch of smoke.

  The wind tore it away and the moonlight caught on the Tian Shan Mountains that loomed white but no longer so high. No longer so remote. With a sigh, he stubbed the cigarette out and headed for his car. He would need to be very careful or he could light a fire that would ignite his country. There was already too much division between Fergana’s Russians and the people whose country the Russians had occupied.

  War had found a new way across the mountains.

  Chapter 2

  It had been one month since Chief Inspektor Rostoff removed Kazakov from major crime investigations and made him the squad’s errand boy. Five weeks since the evidence of that most troubling case of Yekaterina had walked out the office door in Rostoff’s hands.

  The morning wind came out of the west, carrying an acrid scent and a thin haze of red dust from the Ottoman deserts and the fertile Fergana Valley. It placed a veil of pink across the blue morning sky and across the six inches of snow that had fallen overnight to erase the filthy coal dust that had stained the last snowfall—or perhaps it was just the aftermath of too much vodka that placed a bloody hue over everything.

  Kazakov rubbed the rough stubble of his beard and blinked up at the November sky. No, there was no such thing as too much vodka—not when he had been ordered to forget a murder case that ate at him and invaded his dreams. Instead of following orders he had tried to quietly interview school officials to continue the investigation, only to have those officials contact Rostoff. Since then, things had not gone well at work—the only good thing coming from it the fact that he had lost weight and found his muscles chopping wood at his dacha. But the tang in the air was the ozone bite of the factories that lay far down the valley sending up their thick smoke to join the dust. The pristine snow would be black soon enough. In Fergana, everything was stained.

  Once his people had thought this valley was a Garden of Eden—look at what they had done to it. This morning, on top of his burgeoning resentment, the view just made him angry.

  With the Tian Shan and Fergana Ranges to the east and north, and the Pamir Alay range to the south, New Moscow spread around the base of Yekaterina Mountain and besieged the remains of the old Uzbek and Kyrgyz villages and their Silk Road caravanserai that had stood here long before the Russian refugees came. At the base of Yekaterina Mountain along the Potemkin River, the new city was a pathetic sprawl of concrete copies of the glory of St. Basil’s Cathedral with its paint-peeled onion domes, the lovingly maintained façade of St. Petersburg’s royal palace that covered the concrete bunkers of Ferganese government, and the oozing suburbs of Anglo-German-style cottages gradually devouring the fields and ancient orchards around the city. Broad swaths of timber and minerals had been chewed from the flanks of the mountain ranges, leaving dark wounds. Even Yekaterina Mountain had felt his people’s heavy hand with an amusement park bulldozed into the rock at the base of the mountain.

  Instead of safeguarding the beauty of the Fergana that was, the people had dreamed only of the greatness of what they wished had been. Holy Russia.

  One of the first things the refugee Russians had done when they built their new city as a memorial to the vanished greater Russian Empire was to dedicate Yekaterina Park across the Potemkin River from Potemkin Park, so that the great Tsarina was still comforted by her old lover. At the heart of Yekaterina Park stood a larger-than-life statue of the great Yekaterina, the Tsarina who had raised Russia so high, to its intellectual and military zenith, that it had nowhere to go but to plunge into darkness.

  The Great Yekaterina had done that, too. And so Russia vanished and Fergana remained like a crumb left on the table of Asia. So far no one had bothered to sweep it away.

  In a way, the statue in the center of the park was fitting. It had been Yekaterina’s selfish need for glory that had brought about the great fall.

  Sighing, he turned away from the park to the Red Veil. The brothel sat on the eastern side of the park so that the peaks of the Fergana and Tian Shan mountains hung above it like a coronation crown. That seemed somehow fitting this red-stained morning.

  Unlike most of New Moscow, this house was of wood and modeled after fashionable Anglo townhouses, or so he’d been told. Its pristine white front rose up three stories, broadening as it went into faux turrets and filigree-adorned gables that crowded the roof so that it appeared to stand on an impossibly narrow base. Each window had curved lintels and each gable had arched eaves. With its low wrought iron fence, it looked like it stood on chicken legs. Its paint glowed strangely virginal considering what the place housed.

  Forty years ago, someone had financed this special house and paid off the politicians and the police ever since. The corruption left him sick to his stomach with emotions burbling like an angry stew. A brothel. That was what Rostoff was after: by having Kazakov collect the department bribes he would stain Kazakov’s soul, too. Control him and stop his personal investigation into the Weber and Manas murders—or so Rostoff thought.

  Kazakov climbed the ten steps to the front door with a weariness that all of Fergana seemed to exude this early morning. The thickly varnished front door was the last barrier before he began what was apparently to become his regular first-of-the-month rounds. He hesitated before knocking, because this time when he stepped through this door he would become a changed man.

  The boiling stew of his gut spread outward and frothed in his limbs. Rostoff was wrong if he thought he could blacken Kazskov’s ethics. He would find some way around this. Some way to make the whole thing work.

  This early in the morning the establishment patrons would be safely gone and Frau Zelinka, the proprietress, whom he had interviewed once before after an assault on one of her clients, would be enjoying a self-congratulatory cup of tea. Gritting his teeth, he knocked once on the thick wooden door and turned away, wishing he could take the knock back. Across the street waited the snowbound lawns and stately naked trees of the park. All the trees had been planted by hand, for once this space had been mostly grassland with a thin fringe of poplar along the river’s edge. According to what he’d learned in high school, this park with its paved paths and lilac bowers was modeled after what his people had left behind. It was as if, after two hundred years had passed, the entire country still carried a ghost branded on its soul.

  The door pulled open behind him. “Yes? It is you?”

  The girl at the door was Chinese, or perhaps Thai, though with the expansion of the Chinese Empire, was there really much difference? She appeared very young with perfect skin—too young to be working yet—but then what did he know? She wore a simple, chaste house dress of grey silk with a high collar and long sleeves that hid her pale skin like a cloud over the moon. Likely one of Frau Zelinka’s imports whose deflowering Frau Zelinka would auction off when it came time to add her to the brothel’s delights. Until then the girl would do light duties around the place, serving drinks, making the patrons covetous of her. She bowed gracefully, her palms together by her face, and he noticed that perfection was not quite hers. Her left hand was a twisted, withered thing. But the naturalness of the palm-together gesture marked her upbringing as Thai.

  “The mistress waits for you,” she said meekly and ushered Kazakov inside after he scuffed the snow off his boots.

  The place smelled of frankincense, sweet and spicy. This spoke well of Frau Zelinka’s connections with the Ottoman world that she could obtain such a rarity, and of the exotic nat
ure of her goods. But then the good Frau had been here twenty ears—long enough to forge links into both the Ottoman and the Chinese sides of the war, as well as the highest ranks of Fergana that sat like a pad of gristle between the grinding bones of the two ancient empires.

  He followed the girl down a wood-paneled hallway. The rooms he passed were draped in blue and green silks and held deep cushions and rich oriental carpets like an ancient caravanserai from the days of the Silk Road. Then tea, spice, and silk traveled by camel and horse across the Tian Shan mountains and across the deserts to Constantinople and places like Paris, Rome, and Barcelona when they could still call themselves the great capitals of Europe.

  The girl knocked once on a slickly painted black door and a voice spoke from within. She opened the door and a cloud of acrid-sweet smoke billowed into the hall. Ganja—technically illegal, but then the Red Veil was technically illegal, too, and Kazakov was treading a dangerous gray area.

  “Detektiv Kazakov,” the girl said and waved Kazakov past her into the smoky room. She closed the door behind him.

  “Aah, Detektiv. I was expecting you earlier. But then you are new to this job, yes?” Frau Zilinka peered up at him from her red brocade divan, her silk kimono artfully arranged to expose one long, slim leg. Before her was a red, tufted ottoman that carried a black lacquer tray painted with Chinese dragons and peonies. It held a green celadon tea pot and two cups.

  “You’re lucky I’m here at all,” he said.

  One artfully penciled brow arched over a cool gray-green eye. “You must sit with me and tell me of the rumors in this town.” She puffed on her ganja cigar and let loose with a string of smoke rings from full pink lips. Even in her fifties she was a beautiful Caucasian woman with long, silver-blonde hair. She had held onto her looks through her career, when so many others had not. Her trajectory to control of the Red Veil was well known. She had been the mistress of Fergana’s previous president and a rumored advisor on matters of social and economic policy. The calculation in her gaze as she studied him said she was no fool.