The old city was named that for a reason. It had been there two hundred and fifty years ago when Fergana was established and its presence stretched millennia farther back. It had stood waiting for them like an Eden when the weak, the ill, and the exhausted had staggered out of the northern mountains into Fergana. The yurt-dwelling nomads who had taken in too many refugees had brought them here and deposited them, probably glad to be rid of so many extra mouths and so many angry young men. It had probably looked the same then, with its stone and mud walls, high windows, and lonely doors that gave onto the street. Its stout walls, like egg shells, holding the life inside.
He had been inside a house or two and they had always surprised him with the light and tile and garden-filled courtyard even though what had once been a stately family home now was a ghetto of three, four, and sometimes five or six families crowded into apartments that had once been single bedrooms. With the arrival of the Russians and the diminishment of the Silk Road, the fortunes of the trading families who had lived here had faded.
There was a tea house he knew of that might help him. Men met there in the evenings to drink their tea and their vodka. He’d arrested men there a time or two. He drove slowly through the winding, narrow streets that pressed in at the vehicle and finally parked the car and climbed out. Ahead the street became too narrow.
Snow swirled into his face, but the wind was less here. Flakes melted on his hair and water ran down his scalp as he paused, then pulled his phone from his pocket and tossed it under the seat of the car. If they could track his phone this far, well, tracking him in the maze of streets that made up the old city would still be daunting, especially in this weather. Head down against the flakes, he struck out through the ankle-deep snow.
The Blue Corner Tea House sat a junction of five streets, each no wider than two donkey carts could comfortably pass. Where the streets met, they formed a small community square where a trickling fountain on one wall provided water for the local houses. The Blue Corner Tea House filled one odd-angled building that stuck out into the square. During the day in the summer, a bright striped awning spread shade to small tables, but at night the awning was furled and a sturdy blue door marked the entrance. The scent of burning charcoal and wood filled the chill air.
Kazakov pushed inside into firelight, dragging snow and a gust of cold into wood-fire warmth. He stomped his feet at the door and knocked the snow off his shoulders, then looked up into silence. Twenty men in worn trousers and woolen work shirts with small white embroidered skull caps perched on their heads sat on three-legged stools around small wooden tables in the narrow room. The place had blue-washed walls that gleamed like clear water and would give a sense of cool in the hot summers. Benches sat along the walls covered in woven and felted pillows in faded colors. The men all looked at him, their expressions unfriendly. The owner, he knew from a previous case, was a bull of a man with a thick dark beard. He stood at the back of the place beside the fireplace stacking cheap glasses beside a large teapot on a table beside the fire. A blackened kettle hung in the hearth.
Ignoring the men at the tables, Kazakov crossed to the owner and pulled out his badge.
The owner waved his identification away.
“I know who you are. I remember.” He turned away to adjust the wood on the small fire. Low conversation started behind them as the owner straightened. “What do you want?” He mumbled something unintelligible in Kyrgyz under his breath.
“I’m investigating the death of Semetai Manas,” Kazakov said, stretching the truth slightly.
The room went still behind him.
The bullish owner turreted back to him. “The case is closed with no suspects. That is what the family has been told. The police have moved on.”
And the family had moved away was what his investigation had told him at the time. Kazakov stepped in closer.
“Is there somewhere else we can speak?” He nodded at the other men. They eyed him closely and he wished that he’d not said what he had. If there were Chinese men who looked western, how easy would it be to have spies in a place like the Blue Corner?
The bullish man must have read his urgency. He wiped his hands and tossed his rag on the counter before leading Kazakov through a narrow, unpainted door at the rear of the room. Kazakov found himself in a storeroom that might have been a hallway, for at the far end a curtain held back electric lights and the noise of a distant radio.
“I repeat. What do you want?” The bullish man seemed to fill the space, and though Kazakov was a big man, the bearded owner towered over him. He must have Uzbek blood in his ancestry. They were bigger men than the more slightly built Kygyz.
“And I repeat, I am looking into Semetai Manas’s murder. It is unofficial. My superior has closed the case, but I believe the culprit may still be identified and caught.”
The man’s black eyes bored into Kazakov, but Kazakov held his ground. Finally, the man nodded. “I am Dasten Abdulin. I am Semetai’s uncle.”
“His uncle.” Kazakov considered the unlikely coincidence.
Abdulin shrugged. “His father and I were friends, as were our parents before us and their parents before them.”
An uncle, not by blood but by the extended clan connections of his people. Kazakov nodded.
“His death broke his mother’s heart. It killed his father. Semetai was a good boy—the first in his family to be accepted into the university. How can I help?”
“Thank you.” Kazokov studied the man. “May I ask why did you not come forward when I was asking questions before the case was closed?”
Dastan Abdulin’s gaze dropped to the floor. “Perhaps consider the situation. We are Muslim. We were certain we would be accused of the death. It has happened before. Always we are blamed.”
It was a truth Kazakov could not deny. He nodded. “Then what has changed now?”
Abdulin shrugged. “Time, perhaps. You are the first person who has shown any interest in Semetai’s death.”
And that was probably the truth as well, though Kazakov had mentioned Semetai Manas only as a ruse to get information about the woman. Kazakov checked over his shoulder. The door was closed. He had stretched the truth to get this far. Now he would stretch if further. “I am looking for a woman. She has information that I believe will help to solve Semetai’s murder.”
It was a very slim chance, one he did not quite believe in himself.
But Dastan Abdulin’s apparent willingness to help suggested that Kazakov might have to reconsider his first suspicion that Semetai Manas’s family had murdered the boy because of his involvement with Yekaterina Weber.
“The woman is on the run,” said Kazakov. “She has no friends or family in the city. I thought that, given she does not trust the authorities, she might have come to the old city.”
Abdulin’s dark gaze was unreadable. He began to straighten canned food on a shelf. “Why would I know if such a one came to the Islamic part of town? I am not an Imam or one of your psychics.”
“Aah, but many people pass through your doors and if they do not speak directly to you, they speak within your hearing. If something odd happened, you would know of it.”
Abdulin’s beard rose and fell as if he swallowed. “Perhaps that is true, but why would I tell such as you? If such a girl existed, would she not be afraid of police?”
“I’m trying to save this woman’s life. I believe she ran from someone. I don’t know who. I think she knows that if they find her, they will kill her.”
The bullish man turned to him then. “Then perhaps it is best if she is not found by anyone.”
Kazakov had to nod. “There is that. But I thought that she may wish to help bring a killer to justice. Perhaps—perhaps you might know a way to get a message to her, to tell her that I will help her. Tell her my name and that I, too, like to look beyond curtains.”
The beard rose and fell once more. Then the café owner shrugged. “If there were such a woman, it would be interesting to know what she thought
. But then, I have no way of knowing.”
Kazakov dug in his pockets and pulled out his battered hand-stitched wallet. From this he extracted a card. “If you should come across anyone who has seen her, perhaps you could pass along my contact information.” He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a pen and scratched out his office number, replacing it with his mobile phone number. “She should not identify herself. Tell her to say she is my cousin, visiting from out of town. Do you understand?”
The owner nodded. “I understand you are a man with a vast imagination. Some would say you must be drunk. I think you are a lost soul blown in by the storm and now I must send you out again.”
He reached across Kazakov’s shoulder and shoved open the door to the Blue Corner. The place was empty now; only one man remained, wiping a table with Abdulin’s cloth.
Kazakov preceded the owner out of the storeroom. “My apologies for interrupting your business,” he said.
The owner cocked an ear to the rising sound of the wind and shrugged. “There is a storm settling over us. It is best for a man to be home.”
With no other ideas of where Maria would take cover, Kazakov drove once around New Moscow, skirting Saint Basil’s domed cathedral, the behemoth government buildings, and the ramshackle structures that made up the ancient open-air market—all darkened in the night snow—then took Dastan Abdulin’s advice and returned through the deepening snow to the dacha. He hoped Maria had truly found shelter from the storm.
The sedan, for all its age and battered fenders, had the weight to plow its way back to its resting place behind the dwelling. Kazakov stumbled out and through the snow, stamping his feet up the half-covered front stairs and inside to warmth, where snow fell off his boots, hair, and shoulders to puddle on the floor by the door. He once more lit the lantern and divested himself of coat, mobile phone, and weapon. Koshka uncurled and stretched her lean length on the bed before leaping down and padding across to him. She sniffed disdainfully at the melt water and mewed up at him.
“You’ve been fed, cat. I haven’t forgotten.” But out of habit he found the tin and spooned a little more into her dish. The room filled with happy cat licks.
Fortunately, the fire that he had banked still had embers. He hung his coat on its peg, then stirred the embers to life and added more wood. When the flames caught and crackled, he reheated his half-finished tea on the top of the woodstove and settled back in his desk chair.
He had learned nothing for certain, but he had left a message for Maria. Hopefully it would get to her. He placed his mobile on the center of his desk and closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids, dark men trudged through the darkness and the snow to take the message to her. At least he hoped that they were taking her the message.
They could just as well be going to kill her.
Chapter 6
It was a Baba Yaga dream like one he once had as a child. He was small and searching for something in a darkened forest. He had come upon a small house in the woods and the building was built of odd angles and danced on chicken legs in its yard. When he knocked at the door, a misshapen crone answered. She lay across her iron stove and when he asked for her help to find what was lost, she only laughed. It was shrill and biting and sent him stumbling back into the forest, her laughter taunting him.
Kazakov woke with a start to a shrilling sound and the undeniable sense that he had forgotten something. He stumbled up from his desk into the lantern-lit dacha, upsetting Koshka, who had been curled in his lap, into a squalling fur ball onto the plank floor. Not a forest, the dacha. He was at home. The fire had burned low—he’d forgotten to dampen the flue—and the room was cold. On his desk was a stone-cold cup of tea and the infernal, squawking, mobile phone.
He grabbed it up. “Hello?”
For a moment, he felt like he was asking the question across worlds, as if he’d be answered by Yekaterina Weber or the great tsarina herself.
“Kazakov?”
He settled back into the chair, recognizing the voice and looking at the phone. Khalil Khan almost never phoned him.
“Yes?” he answered.
“Where are you?” the M.E. asked. His voice was as cool as Kazakov had ever heard it—as if this was the coldest of professional calls.
“At home, of course.” He checked the small alarm clock on a shelf above the bed. “It’s the middle of night.” Three o’clock the clock said.
“I just got the results of some of the tests on our body. I thought you might want to come down and see.”
Kazakov stood and staggered to the window, both of his legs half asleep with pins and needles. Through the frost on the windows outside, in the darkness, the snow was still falling. He couldn’t see his front stairs anymore. “I’m not a hundred percent certain that’s possible at the moment.”
There was silence on the phone a moment, then: “If it is possible, you should make it happen.”
The line clicked and went dead from Khan’s end and Kazakov swore. He set the phone down and worked his neck, stiff from sleeping in the chair, then went to the sink and shocked himself awake with a palm full of cold water in his face. Koshka was awake and threading his legs for breakfast. He scooped her up.
“You will have to wait just like I must.” He stroked her soft black fur and settled her on the floor where she head-butted him once and then paced over to the bed, leapt up to her shelf, and curled up on her cushion to stare at him with disapproval. Such were the females in his life. Not one had approved of him in the long run.
He was tired enough he would have liked to join her on the bed, but instead he gulped down his cold tea, shuddered at the taste, then rebuilt the fire and dampened the flue. He pulled on his coat, a patchy, old, black fur hat, his boots, and his gloves; blew out the lantern; and stepped outside.
Cold slammed into him as he waded into the pine-scented night. He wrestled the dacha door closed against the snow that sifted in when the door was opened. A foot of snow covered his stairs and he used the shovel he kept beside the door to clear them and then a pathway around the side of the house to the vehicle. Fortunately, the shelter of the house had kept the worst of the blowing snow off the sedan, but it still looked like a snowdrift under six inches of snow. He used his arm to brush it off and then climbed in and started the engine. Back outside, he shoveled the route across the dacha’s clearing to the trees, tossed the shovel in the back seat, and climbed in.
The heavy old sedan rumbled over the snow and as he picked up speed under the trees, its tires thumped from the shape they’d frozen into. Luckily, the snow had lessened and provided only a lace curtain as he passed Agafya Ryabkov’s lane and came around a curve to the open and the view of the lights of New Moscow.
Thirty minutes later the sedan sent up almost blinding clouds of snow as it bulldozed its way through the silent streets. On Suvarov he saw his first sign of life—a lone plow futilely trying to clear the major thoroughfare. Typical Fergana—prepared to only scrape futilely at the surface. At times, he thought the entire country was no more than a patina of Russia layered onto something far older. Now the patina was wearing off, leaving a vacuum in its place. Fergana could never be the Russia that was, just as there would never be another tsarina or another Yekaterina clad in a pink fluffy sweater and the hope of her youth.
There was only Fergana, but what Fergana was had never been determined. It was an agglomeration of people with a Russian overlay and something rotten at the heart of it.
The fact that only he seemed to care about the deaths of the two young people and now the death of the spy seemed to prove it.
The hospital parking lot had not yet been plowed, and parked cars had become abandoned snowdrifts caught in the amber lights of the lot. Khan’s M.E. van sat pulled to the side of the building with a cleared front window and conspicuously less snow on its rooftop. Kazakov pulled the sedan in behind the van and climbed out into the amber-stained snow and waded to the stairs and down to the M.E.’s reception office. He stepped insid
e to the perennial stink of chemical air freshener and formaldehyde, pulled his threadbare hat off, and stomped off the snow.
The blue fluorescent glow of the lights flickered over pale green walls and the brown vinyl tile floor. The reception desk was empty, but that was normal at this hour and frankly, the last thing he needed was someone keeping track of his movements. The hallway leading back to the exam rooms was dimly lit. There was no sound, no movement except the fetid circulating air.
“Khan?” he called softly. There was no answer.
He headed toward the M.E.’s office and heard voices. Light spilled out the transom above Khan’s barely open door. He eased along the hall and kept to the shadows while he peeked into the room. Khan at his desk, a person hunched in a heavy man’s coat and hat sitting across from him, both now silent.
What the hell was Khan up to? The M.E. didn’t look happy—at all. Did he have another late-night visitor, or was this something more? Kazakov had two choices: go in and find out, or ease away from the door and let Khan think that he hadn’t been able to make it through the snow.
One way was a coward’s way—the way the unsuccessful hero acted in a fairy tale. One way he’d be walking away from the case just like Rostoff would want him to—if Rostoff even knew about the dead body in the park. He pushed open the door and stepped inside into the scent of warm wool and—lavender?
Khan looked up, startled, as Kazakov crossed to the desk and Khan’s companion.
Maria di Maria looked up at him, her brown eyes gone the color of honey in the blue fluorescent light.
“Detektiv Kazakov,” she said and bowed her head.
“How?” He turned to Khan with his question. Khan did not look happy to see him even if the M.E. had called him.
Khan pushed up from his desk chair. “How does not matter. You are here. Let’s just say that a friend of a friend of a friend asked me to bring her here and get in touch with you.” He held up his hand before Kazakov could speak. “I don’t wish to know anything. There is a file here on my desk that you may wish to read. Now I am going home. Please ensure the door is locked when you leave and don’t ask for my help again.”
After Yekaterina Page 9