Now they came less often or not at all and those who came were poor relations of what he’d seen as young man. The herds were diminished due to government taxation, and the young people were drawn like flies to the heap of New Moscow.
The isolated log and stone house amongst the copse of walnut trees became his permanent home at the end of his marriage—a retreat where he could momentarily forget the world around him.
Before he reached the turn to the dacha, he turned off into an overgrown, narrow lane through the naked aspen, walnut, and snow-laden pines, following a soft glow of lantern light that glimmered through the forest. He pulled to a stop before an ancient dacha that looked more like it was part of the forest floor than a house. The builder of the house had long ago built up soil and stone around the house’s walls so that the light through the windows appeared to gleam out of a mound of earth. The snow was a white veil across the darkness as Kazakov climbed out of the sedan, carrying a small shopping bag.
He waded up the snow-covered stairs and knocked at the low, wooden door.
“Just a minute. Just a minute.” Agafya Ryabkov pulled the door open and looked up at him with eternal suspicion on her face. “What do you want?”
Kazakov held up the bag. “I went to the store and picked you up some things.”
She still blocked the door to him. Her memory was clearly getting worse.
“Remember? You said that if I was near a store, you could use some more flour and tea? And I brought you a bottle of vodka as well.”
“Vodka.” Her small black eyes gleamed. “I didn’t ask for vodka. I won’t pay you for things I didn’t ask for.”
He smiled down at her. She hadn’t actually asked for anything, but this was the only way he could check on her. She was the fiercest woman he’d ever known, a tiny Kyrgyz woman dressed in thick, felted skirt and leggings, with a dowager’s hump and the last few strands of her fine gray hair braided and wound around the crown of her head. Through some chance of fortune or fate, she had done the unthinkable and fallen in love with a Russian. The two had married against their parents’ wishes and they had spent their lives here together, scraping a life out of their gardens and Joseph’s hunting skills. Joseph had died five years past and Agafya had become more reclusive with each passing year since then. Still, Kazakov tried to look out for her.
“Shall I help you put these things away?” He held up the bag again and finally she relented, allowing him to duck through the doorway into the snug one-room cabin that was her home. He toed off his boots and then unloaded the bag onto the scrubbed top of the board table her husband had built for her. Flour. Tea. A few apples. A bunch of twisted winter kale. A package of sausage. The clear bottle of vodka.
Her bird gaze pecked amongst the items and landed on the bottle. Her expression made it clear that she wanted it, but the cost was the issue. She shuffled over to a desk on one wall and pulled a small purse out of the top drawer, digging through the contents. She pulled out coin after coin; little enough, but all she had. Kazakov had been subsidizing her grocery bill since her husband died.
“Enough.” He waved her purse away and picked up a few coins. “There was a sale today. And the vodka—consider it a gift.”
She eyed him as if she would argue, but then seemed to think better of it. Her creased face managed a gap-toothed smile. “My Joseph said you were a good boy. I suppose I should listen to him.”
Kazakov took the compliment with a smile and glanced around the room. Wood was stacked near the woodstove and the place was warm. “The water is still running?”
He had made sure its insulation was adequate earlier this fall, before the first snow.
“It runs.”
“Then I will leave you to your evening, but one of these days I am going to come over and ask you to sing for me. Okay?”
The suspicion in her eyes slowly faded. Singing the old songs was something she loved and it was something he loved to hear. The old tribal songs reminded him of his childhood—a time when the world still seemed good and pure.
She nodded and Kazakov let himself out as Agafya began humming to herself as she sorted through the groceries. He had no idea what she usually survived on. The woman was mainly sinew and bone from what he could tell. But for a few days at least he could take comfort in her having adequate food.
He climbed into the sedan and returned to the road for the short distance to the turn to his home.
The dirt lane into the dacha wound through the darkness under the shelter of poplar, aspen, and blue spruce. The lane ended in the clearing where the house stood like a hunkered old man against the snow. He could imagine that the rest of Fergana did not exist. Or perhaps that was his wishful thinking. Through the thin layer of snow, the tires crunched on the hidden stones and potholes as he pulled the car to a stop at the rear of the house. Technically the government vehicle should not come home with him, but on the scale of infractions he’d engaged in today, it was small change.
He turned the vehicle off and stepped out into silence except for the ticking of the cooling engine. The snow fell heavier here at the slightly higher elevation. The dacha was situated on a slight bluff in the hills to the east of New Moscow so that the lights of the city spread across the plain in the distance and placed a glow on the lowering clouds through the barren walnut trees. Once it had seemed like he was the only person in the world out here. Now, as the wealthy of Fergana sought retreats from the summer heat of the city, they and the rest of the world threatened his and Agafya’s small bastions of comfort.
He waded through the six inches of new snow and up the three steps to the porch of the small house. Inside, it was cold and dark and smelled of garlic and wood smoke, and the cedar shavings in his cat’s litter box. He fumbled matches and lit a lantern, then lit the iron stove in the corner for heat. The dacha was one room, the walls rough stone and timbers decorated in the corner kitchen with wooden shelves that seemed to grow directly from the walls. The kitchen table sat near the door and two small windows flanked the door and reflected the lantern light back at him. During the day they let in the sun. He tugged their flowered curtains closed.
Koshka, his rebellious female black cat, stood and stretched and leapt down from her favorite perch to butt his leg for a head scratch and a leg rub in the hopes of dinner as he settled onto a chair at the scarred wooden table and pulled off his boots. He slid his feet into worn leather slippers as he slipped off his coat and his chest holster and hung them on a wood peg set into a timber by the door. His cell phone he tossed on the small kitchen table. A tattered burgundy sweater completed his ensemble against the chill in the room.
The rest of the room was functional and Spartan. An old battered couch with sprung springs in faded burgundy against one wall; the small, square kitchen table and four chairs that his father had made in the center of the room by the door, the top smoothed by years of use; a bed against the back wall.
Once there had been two beds, but he had removed one and replaced it with a second wooden table that served as a desk beside the woodstove. Above the desk, the wall was filled with everything he knew and suspected about the Weber-Manas murder. A single shelf above the bed held the vacant spot where Koshka usually laid, and a small, heavily-insulated flap door at the rear of the kitchen provided the little cat with the opportunity to go out hunting whenever she pleased. It also meant that he frequently found small dead gifts she had brought for him.
He put a kettle on the stove to boil and filled a tea bulb with loose tea, then fed Koshka before settling at the desk in his old wooden chair to stare up at the evidence wall. He was not supposed to have any of it, but he’d had the foresight early in the case to make copies of most of the documents before Rostoff had confiscated everything and, in the month since the murders, he’d learned a lot more about Yekaterina Weber and Semetai Manas. Quietly, he’d spoken to Yekaterina’s friends, first at the restaurant and then catching them alone. He had stayed away from Yekaterina’s funeral so as not to
arouse Boris Bure’s ire and to keep news of his questions from Rostoff.
Yekaterina had been a first-class student with a passion for music and song. She had met Semetai through a music conference that had brought together Russian, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek students from across New Moscow and beyond—the only time such an inclusive conference had been held.
Plans to annualize the event had been canceled after the murders.
Her girlfriends said the romance was a secret at first, but had bloomed so bright that everyone noticed and Yekaterina came to a point where she didn’t care. She hadn’t even cared that her parents knew and that the scandal had been a point of serious contention, but for the girl in the pink fluffy sweater in the picture on his wall, this had been important enough to stand up to her parents. Her best friend had revealed that there had been terrible fights and that Yekaterina had come to school with bruises. Of course, given the prominence of her family, no one had done anything.
The kettle whistled and he stumbled up out of his chair and poured hot water into his teapot. Three cubes of sugar in his chipped china cup awaited until he poured the deep brown liquid. Slowly the sugar cubes melted away and he stirred, took a sip, and sighed. It was not quite the smoky flavored water from the new-fangled samovars that had been imported from the Crimea, but it was his old standard—better than vodka for thinking, too.
Semetai Manas had been in his final year at the Muslim high school that lay at the edge of the old part of the city. Once the old town had been the only town, a sprawling ancient city that had gone by a different name and had resisted the brutalization of the most recent despot in a region where too many successive empires had risen and fallen. When the Russians arrived, they found a proud people in a city of gardens who had taken pity on the survivors who had lost their homeland to war.
That welcome had long ago worn away under the friction of a Russian people determined to remake their new country in the image of the old. Very quickly the Russian immigrants had built businesses that only served Russians. At first it had been because what they served only appealed to the Russians. Gradually it changed to exclude those local people who had not assumed Russian ways and then to where it was now—non-Russians excluded because of their race.
Except for a few stubborn souls like Khalil Khan who had been too good at their profession to be turned away.
Had falling in love with a Russian girl been so heinous it required Semetai’s death?
Kazakov shook his head. To a traditional family of a culture that had lost so much, what could be worse than falling in love with a Russian girl?
But then Agafya and Joseph had done it. As a result, they had spent most of their married life hidden here in the forested foothills.
Seduction? Clearly Semetai had slept with her given her pregnancy—unless the girl had a secret lover and none of her friends had reported any suspicion of such a thing. Fathers were known to do terrible things to the youngster who deflowered their daughters prior to marriage. But Boris Bure was not the girl’s father. Why kill the girl, too?
Kazakov leaned back in his chair. Yekaterina and Semetai were questions that he could not answer and there was another murder to solve. What had led to the death of a man who might be a Chinese spy who had gone by the Anglo name of Collin?
Kazakov sipped his tea feeling, oddly, the absence of his ex-wife though she was seven years gone and apparently happily married to a businessman of substance and successfully climbing her way up the government communications ladder.
This place needed a woman to make it complete, but Annushka had never been happy here. Too far from her friends in the city, she’d said when they first got married and he’d brought her to his favorite place. They’d gotten an apartment in the city and she’d never come back, though Kazakov had—more frequently as the marriage failed. In the divorce, his name and the dacha were the only things he’d retained as his own.
Scanning the low beams of the ceiling, he supposed the dacha was a good place to hide from the world. The original Russian dacha had been gifts from the original Yekaterina to her favored nobles. Now they were mainly escapes.
Had Maria di Maria escaped somewhere similar?
He thought of her warming those long-fingered hands of hers by a fire like his. The light would catch in her raven hair and her eyes would glimmer. But a foreign girl who worked in the Red Veil would not have many allies. If she had some knowledge of Collin’s death and it involved the Red Veil, and if she had truly left on her own and not been taken, then he doubted she would have somewhere like this to hide. She would not trust anyone she knew from the Red Veil. She could not afford to. She either knew something about the murder or someone thought she did and she’d been smart enough to go to ground.
And the fact that she had run would tell whoever had come for her that she did, indeed, know something.
“Derr 'mo!” he sat up straight and barked his knees on the support under the table. What was he thinking! He was an idiot! His brain had turned off when he thought he’d been shocked awake by the presence of Boris Bure at the Red Veil. Boris Bure was not the issue at the moment, though Kazakov had taken an instant dislike to the man. Maria di Maria was out there alone and there was no question that they—whoever they were—would be looking for her.
He should have done more to find her—followed what he thought were her tracks in the snow.
Quickly he set the teapot and cup in the sink and then dampened the fire to slow the flame. He hauled on his boots, holster, and coat again, grabbed his phone, and stepped out into the cold night. The snow fell more thickly now, the wind hauling it off the mountains in thick, driving white flakes. Already his footsteps from the car to the door were half filled and the dark tree branches sagged under the weight as he trundled around the house to the car. Winter had come far earlier this year and was bringing far more snow than usual.
The old sedan roared to life and he aimed the vehicle toward the dark space between the trees that was all that he could see of the lane in the blindness of the snow glare in headlights. The tires squeaked on the snow. The undercarriage grated until he reached the partial shelter of the trees. He picked up speed, still berating himself as a fool and idiot. The woman had nowhere to go.Why else would she make sure he saw her? Why else be so circumspect when he questioned her, other than she knew something and she could not let Prae know. The Thai woman was quickly becoming something far more than what she seemed, but that should not surprise him. Nothing in this case was what it seemed.
He came out of the trees into drifts of snow blowing across the road. The wind came from the mountains to the southeast and seemed intent on drifting the snow over the road and erasing the scars on Fergana. There were legends whispered in the old town that said the hills were full of the ghosts of all those displaced by the Russians, and that one day Kurmanjan Datka, the legendary female leader who had led her people to freedom from the brutal Kokand khanate, would rise to lead them to take back their land. Most Russians took it as old men’s wishful thinking. These days Kazakov found himself not so sure. At least the Kyrgyz were looking forward—unlike their Russian brethren.
By the time he had driven the long road downhill and arrived at the end of the long line of houses that had spread like mushrooms up into the hills, the snow fell heavier and seemed to form a wall around them, as if intent on keeping more people out of the hills. He eased the gas pedal down and made better time, sliding around the corners down toward central New Moscow and the five hidden peaks of Yekaterina Mountain.
The stucco and glass apartment blocks rose out of the swirl of snow like mounds of dirty gray boulders. He skirted the narrow roads that ran into the remains of the old oasis town and came onto the broad back of Suvarov Way that ran north-south along the river.
Maria was smart, that was clear. Both from her reading material and the fact that she had known to get clear of the Red Veil. Perhaps even leaving her phone behind was good, because he’d heard rumors that the government had t
he technology to track a person through their mobile. He pulled his out of his pocket and considered. Surely no one would be tracking him—at least not yet—and if they were, it would mean that he’d fallen into a case far bigger than he’d thought.
Deep enough it could involve a Chinese man altered to look like something else?
He shivered though the little sedan’s heater pumped out more exhaust-stained warmth.
So where would a smart woman go in the city? She dared not go to the train station. That would surely be watched. So would the buses. A hotel? She might have the money, but even that might be chancy given the need to show ID when she registered. Initially she might have stayed in the park, thinking that they could connect there, but he had gone inside too quickly and then there had been the limousine and Bure, so if she’d been there she’d had no chance to connect.
If a connection was what she’d been seeking.
He slowed the sedan. Why had she left? If she was looking to connect with him, why hadn’t she stayed? Did she suspect that he was not her friend? Either way, if he was her and with the snow falling in an unfriendly city, he wouldn’t have hung around.
Now that he considered, there was only one place in all of New Moscow that she might go to ground with some sense that she might not be found. He slowed the car and checked the rear view mirror. There were no other cars about at this hour.
He turned the car around and cruised back the way he’d come, turning off Suvarov into the narrow streets of the old city.
After Yekaterina Page 8