Khan shrugged. “Who knows? Human Resources. They say there is an election coming and they need to prove that they are cost cutting. They can pay this new girl less than Darya.”
“But you do not believe that.”
Khan shook his head.
“To keep an eye on what happens here?” Kazakov asked softly.
Khan shook his head again, but it was more resignation than denial.
“But why? The people who come through these doors are mostly dead.” Khan’s lips curved sadly. “Except you, of course. But then, you have a dead career.”
Kazakov managed a smile. “I thank you for that. But I already know. Tell me something I don’t.”
Shuffling papers on his desk, Khan avoided Kazakov’s gaze. “I don’t know if I can do this any longer. I also have a family to feed.”
“You do your job. That is all that I ask.”
“But is that what my employers want?” Khan whispered and finally looked at Kazakov. “Sometimes I fear they wish us to just go through the motions. Imaginary autopsies. Imaginary evidence to build illusions.” He shook his head. “Things have changed around here and not just with Darya leaving. I come in, in the morning, and find strange men reviewing my files—not all the files, just those I have worked on. Bodies have disappeared before I could complete my reports. What is happening, Kazakov? This would not bode well for anyone in this job, but for a minority like me…”
Khalil Khan was about the most stoic, philosophical man Kazakov had ever met, but now he was clearly worried. Kazakov shook his head. “Could it be office politics? The hospital administration?”
“They would not take bodies.”
“You’ve done nothing but your job, so you have nothing to fear. Without you, there would be few reliable medical examinations in the city and most likely the country.”
“Darya did her job, too, old friend. So do you. Perhaps reliable medical examinations are no longer what’s wanted—the kind that has their content controlled are already preferred.” Khan sighed and then shook his head. “But there is nothing you can do about it.” He took a deep breath. “I finished examining our friend from the park. As you know, there was no identification on him, but he bears very distinct marks.”
He flipped open a file on his desk. On the right side was a photo of the dead man, hair still spiked with filth, features still blunted from alcohol and death. A white sheet pulled up to his naked waist. An envelope with Kazakov’s name on it rested in the file.
“Photos for you and a copy of the preliminary report. I knew you’d want them.”
Frowning, Kazakov picked up the envelope and pulled the file closer. “Strange. Look at his skin. His face, neck, and shoulders are far paler and pinker than his lower chest. It transitions gradually until his belly is faintly sallow looking. Usually it is the other way around.”
“A good observation, but that is not all. Our drunk had other surprises beyond the fact that he had no alcohol in his stomach.” Khan sat back in his old wooden desk chair, the joints squealing under him.
Kazakov scanned the file. No tattoos, which was odd given they were almost a rite of passage among the men of Fergana. Kazakov had gotten his first when he was just fifteen—an eagle under a waterfall on his biceps that his father had paid for—much to his mother’s horror. He had three others on various parts of his body.
There were, however, scars on the dead man. Small ones around the nose and eyes not atypical of wounds received from fights on the street. He came to the part about the skin and stopped.
“What does this mean?” he asked, tapping the offending paragraph with his finger.
“It means that his face neck, upper torso, and legs—anything that might reasonably be exposed—had probably been subjected to a cosmetic procedure—a bleaching process of some sort.” Khan produced a second photo of the body, naked on the autopsy table. The skin across the groin was darker.
Kazakov frowned. “Strange. Are you certain?”
Khan nodded. “There are procedures and creams you can use to keep the skin pale.”
Kazakov sat back in his chair. “But why would someone do that? It makes no sense.”
Khan huffed and pushed up from his chair. “Why indeed.” He studied the books behind his chair and shook his head. “I do not like this, friend. Not at all. You read the file—the marks on the face. The ones around his eyes I checked—they are not often seen in Fergana but they are typical of cosmetic surgery found elsewhere. And then there is the nose. When I did the autopsy, I found a prosthetic.”
“A prosthetic?” Kazakov felt like he’d entered a different world with a different language.
Pulling a well-worn, cloth-covered book from the stacks on his shelves, Khan thumped it onto the desk and flipped it open to a page that showed step-by-step photos of the reshaping of a nose, including the insertion of a small piece of plastic bone that made a flat nose suddenly have a high bridge.
“But why do that?” He looked up at Khan.
“A very good question and one you will not like the answer to.” Khan resettled himself in his chair and the seat squeaked as if welcoming him. “Someone has gone to a great deal of work to change this man’s appearance. They have whitened his skin. They have given him a nose like a Russian or Anglo-German, and they have done work on his eyes.”
Kazakov waited. There was something Khan wasn’t saying.
Finally, Khan sighed and tapped his face. He was a handsome enough man with the dark hair and slightly oriental eyes of the Kyrgyz. “They have removed the epicanthic folds. Once, this man had East Asian eyes.”
Kazakov swallowed, his mind floundering, trying to understand the meaning. “Chinese.”
The Chinese Kingdom of Heaven had expanded over southern Asia, only coming to a halt where their mountains abutted the Indian subcontinent. The Anglo-Germans held the Australian continent. The Ottomans controlled the rest of Eurasia and most of northern Africa.
Except Fergana.
He tilted his head toward the mountain ranges he couldn’t see at the moment, but that had always loomed over his life. If anything, Fergana existed, on sufferance, as a free market enclave where the Chinese and Ottomans and their allies could meet and plot their subterfuge. The length and breadth of Fergana was a hotbed for spying. Even the upstart Americans had strategists here, when here was a world away from the former colony. Was this murder somehow related to all that activity?
“A spy? But why would the Chinese send such a spy to Fergana?I have never heard of such a thing. It would cost a great deal to create such a disguise. And why would a spy dress as a drunkard? That makes no sense.”
“Give me a better theory,” Khan said.
Kazakov thought about it. “Perhaps he was a businessman who fell on hard times. There are enough Chinese here, buying up the country. They and the Ottomans are like locusts devouring Fergana though we are a sovereign country. But that doesn’t explain the need for a spy. Corporate espionage?”
Khan’s eyes widened as if he was surprised at the vehemence of Kazakov’s opinion. In fact, Kazakov, too, was surprised.
“The Chinese would say that they are threatened by the Ottomans and their influence here. They only seek to have their own point of view heard by our people,” Khan said softly. “But then the Ottomans would likely say the same. A spy could help spread such viewpoints.”
“You talk as if we know for certain that this man was Chinese. There are men in Fergana with your epicanthic fold from their Mongol ancestors. They have it removed so racial barriers are removed when they do business.”
Khan just looked at him. Then he sighed. “There is more. Read the report.”
Kazakov rolled his gaze heavenward. Yekaterina preserve him from pig-headed medical examiners.
“If he is a Chinese spy, what does he spy upon? Fergana has nothing—hardly a military since the Ottomans blocked the purchase of military equipment from that Anglo-German company.”
Shaking his head, Khan retrie
ved his book and the file. “You do not usually choose to be blind. Perhaps you should think on this as you conduct your investigation—yes, I know you won’t quit. When have you ever? But now I have work to attend to. There are other bodies to be buried in Fergana.”
He stood behind his desk and shelved the book. The file he closed and slipped into a drawer.
Kazakov climbed to his feet and stood facing the much smaller M.E. Things had changed between them. In the past Khan had always been there, seeking the truth with him, but this time fear had shrunken the small man’s frame.
“I’ll try not to bother you so much, old friend. You have a family. I understand.” Kazakov let himself out into the hallway and closed the door softly.
Khan’s last words floated out at him through the glass transom. “Be careful, Alexander. Be very careful.”
Outside, he climbed into the cold sedan. The car was old enough that its many drivers had sprung the springs in the seat. One of them poked him in the small of his back.
Contrary to the doubts he’d expressed to Khan, he believed in the evidence of the little man. Scientific evidence didn’t lie—at least not Khan’s. It never had and never would. At least he’d never doubted that it would until now. In future, who was to say if there were threats on Khan’s family.
Not that Khan had said outright that his family had been threatened, but it was clear how he felt. Why now? There were many cases they had worked on where the outcome had not been popular with higher-ups.
His breath condensed in the car’s cold interior and began to lay a frost on the inside of the windshield that masked the cold landscape of plowed snow and naked maple branches. He started the car against its protests and sat there in the cold air blasting from the air vents, waiting for heat to return.
If it was true that the dead man was Chinese, it raised so many questions. Who was he here? Who was he in China, for there were surely many kinds of spies both corporate and military. Why was he here? Why now? Why was he killed?
He needed to answer all of those questions and he barely knew where to start. He hauled Khan’s envelope out of his pocket and unsealed it, pulling out three photos and a typewritten report. Along with the headshot he’d seen on the file, there was a close-up of the man’s hands and one of the dead man in the park, his milky gaze peering at the sky as snow gathered on his brows and nose. The park. No one had conducted a thorough search—at least he hadn’t, and the uniformed officers had torn down the police tape before anything of that kind had been done.
The car groaned from the cold when he dropped it in gear and the tires crunched over the packed ice and snow as he aimed back toward the city center.
The skyline of Fergana’s capital laid dark grey stunted silhouettes across the clouds. For some reason the city hadn’t grown the spires and towers of the great cities. Probably because Fergana had nothing in common with those glittering metropolises. Fergana was a backwater, an eddy, compared to Constantinople, Berlin, and London. It was less than a molecule of water compared to the vastness of the ancient Chinese capital of Nanjing and more akin to the photos he’d seen of the modest capital of Charleston that had grown up in the American south. A second-rate capital for a second-rate nation, perhaps. It was enough to give the country an inferiority complex.
And make it hold onto dreams of past glories.
Suvarov Way broadened around him as if welcoming him into the city, but at the moment the city didn’t feel safe. There were spies afoot. And now one of them had died.
The sunlight was failing by the time he pulled into the curb at the side of Yekaterina Park again and climbed out of the unmarked sedan. Along the street, the lights came on and the Red Veil had already lit the amber globes flanking its door. Lights shone through the golden curtains over the windows, as Frau Zelinka’s establishment readied itself for their evening patrons. But on the second floor a curtain twitched and perhaps that was a pale hand he saw.
Maria.
Of course, it could be his imagination, too.
He turned back to the park. The clouds and the failing light diminished the shadows, and lent a steely cast to the snow. Flakes had drifted into the indentation left behind by the body and his own and the uniformed police’s heavy tread. Two knee indentations were all that Khan had left behind. The little M.E. was meticulous at using someone else’s footprints to enter a scene.
Kazakov trudged through the snow to the body’s indentation. The temperature had dropped farther and now, instead of drifting flakes, the snow had become tiny ice crystals that stung his nose and ears. Again he wished for the hat he’d left behind.
With a gloved hand, he swept away the new snow that had fallen. The snow that had been under the body was pristine except for the blotch where the blood clot had fallen out of the man’s coat. Had the heavy wool simply held it all in or had the man been killed elsewhere and moved? But if moved, why here in front of the Red Veil? Surely, with all the parks in Fergana, there had to be a reason.
Like there had to be a reason for Yekaterina’s body being moved, too, but that was another case. Another case, another investigation, another story.
In the deepening dusk, he waded through the snow, brushing away the new skiff that had not been present this morning. Thankfully, there was a crust on the previous layer of snow, but there was nothing to find. He reached the bushes that had shielded the body from his view from the door, straining the snow through his fingers.
And came up with a cigarette butt with a pale striped filter. Interesting. Not one of the popular brands smoked in most of Fergana.
A cast-off from the attending police this morning?
But they had stood by their vehicles smoking. He recalled how an officer had stubbed his cigarette out before approaching the body—old training apparently died hard even if the current regime didn’t seem to support careful police procedures.
If not the police, then whose was it? Kamil Khan rarely smoked and would never do so at a scene—that was a line he didn’t cross. And Kazakov hadn’t either.
A passerby after the police had left was a possibility, but whoever it was would have had to come to the site right after he left judging by the depth of snow over his find.
Bagging the cigarette butt, he continued his search through the snow. Nothing else came to light so anything else would have to await the spring to be recovered and by then the dead man would have been forgotten. The snow dragged on his feet as he waded back to the road. The natural light was almost gone. What was left placed a cold, nacreous glow on the evening. The wind picked up, driving the ice crystal snow into his face and eyes. On the stairs to the Red Veil he stomped the snow off his shoes and brushed his pant legs clean, then climbed the measured stairs to the door again, wondering where the doorman was.
The door opened after the first knock and a whiff of sweet incense was stripped away by the wind. It was the Thai girl again, but this time dressed in traditional Thai silks of rich orange with overlong sleeves to hide her withered hand. Her hair was tied up in a thick coil at the back of her head. Makeup accented her perfect features and the demure gaze that widened just the barest of fractions when she saw him. This one was all about self control. Her mastery of it suggested that she was older than the fifteen or sixteen years that he’d credited her with.
“You should not be here,” she said and tried to close the door, but he shoved inside and stood brushing his shoulders free of snow. He hauled the heavy door closed behind him.
“Tell Frau Zelinka that I wish to interview Maria and the staff.”
“But…but…this is not the time.”
“Go. Now. Tell her.”
For an instant he thought he read fury in her black gaze, but then she turned and scurried down the hallway. Her silks whispered like ghosts in the air.
The place had changed; the room lighting had dimmed, no more than candles on tables or thickly veiled light fixtures. The sweet-scented incense lay heavy on the air and classical music rich with the zither,
mandolin, and sitar played softly over hidden speakers even in the room designed like an old tavern. In this light, the rows of bottles and glassware glittered as if they were crystal. A few drinks and no one would ever notice the lesser quality. After a long day, this place offered everything a tired man would require to enjoy himself.
“Detektiv. This is most inappropriate.” Frau Zilinka strode toward him down the hall, this time dressed as the diva in a low-cut, black silk evening dress that skimmed her body. Her hair was swept up in a loose pile of blonde curls that fell in a sultry disheveled tangle around her face. She wore full warpaint of kohl-lined eyes, defined high cheekbones, and vivid lipstick, reminding him of a windup doll. She stopped in front of him, her hands on her hips. “What are you doing?”
“My job. I’m investigating the death of the man in the park. I told your girl, here, that I need to speak to Maria and to the staff who worked here last night—doormen, security guards, kitchen staff who might have seen something when they left.”
Her crimson mouth firmed into a line. “This is not the time. The Red Veil is open. My patrons arrive soon.”
He shrugged. “Surely Maria isn’t the only girl they ask for. I’ll talk to her first and then to the others in between their duties.”
She glanced at the Thai girl and gave an adamant head shake. “You cannot. This will not do.”
“Frau. This is police business—an investigation. It cannot be stopped because someone comes whoring.”
It was as if he had slapped her. Her face went rigid. Beyond her, the Thai girl’s inscrutable expression was etched on her features. Frau Zelinka glanced from Kazakov to the girl once more. Did it matter what the girl thought? Or was Kazakov’s demand undermining her place with her employees? Frau Zelinka’s throat worked and finally she nodded. “You may interview the employees.”
She turned and started back along the hallway, her shoulders square and forbidding as a mountain massif.
“And Maria? I need to speak to her first.”
At that she turned and looked at him, her gaze at once furious and afraid. “Think about what you are doing, Detektiv. You bring down doom on all of us. As for Maria, she’s gone.”
After Yekaterina Page 6