A Summer Revenge

by Tom Callaghan

  “What have you got to lose?”

  Natasha spoke, her voice as cold as the ice in my glass.

  “Better you should ask yourself what you have to lose, Inspector. Winding up dead in a Dubai doorway isn’t going to advance your career. And you won’t be my first.”

  I didn’t bother to tell her I was no longer on the police force, that I was now strictly little people. Any leverage you can get comes in useful at some point, and I didn’t want her to think no one would give a fuck if my brains were soaking into desert sand.

  “Marko Atanasov, the Bulgarian guy, right?”

  Natasha nodded. “Scum.”

  “You really went to work on him. Who would have thought it of a shy young thing like you, cutting him that way?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Natasha said, and I could see she was puzzled, perhaps a little afraid.

  “He was sliced and diced like a sausage. His room had more bits and pieces of flesh on the floor than a Tajik butcher’s shop. No eyes, so he couldn’t see. No ears, so he couldn’t hear. No tongue . . . Well, you get the idea.”

  Natasha stared at me, a mix of anger and bewilderment apparent on her face.

  “I shot him, yes—he deserved it, you don’t know the way he treated his girls—but I wouldn’t touch his body, let alone mutilate it; why would I?”

  “I suppose you didn’t write SVINYA on the wall either? In glorious scarlet letters?”

  “Not a bad description. And a pretty fitting epitaph. But no, I went to see him in his pigsty of an apartment, told him what a shit he was, put two shots into him, then went home and slept like a baby.”

  I didn’t believe the last part; taking a human life is a different kind of lullaby. The faces of the dead, of the people I’ve killed, come and visit me in the night, watching from the foot of the bed as I sweat and toss and moan. You never stop seeing them—in the patterns of leaves against a sky, in the reflection of a shop window, in the ripples spreading out on a river. I was sure that Natasha hadn’t enjoyed her beauty sleep that night. But I admire bravado, even when I can see through it. And when people start to brag and boast, they usually let slip more than they intend.

  “How did Atanasov get mixed up in all this? I’m sure you weren’t auditioning for a place in his stable. The chance to be a purse or a punchbag, depending on the night’s takings.”

  Natasha looked at me, obviously wondering how I’d risen to the dizzying heights of inspector.

  “You may not believe it, but even prostitutes stick together and look out for each other when they’re in trouble and in a foreign country.”

  “The sisterhood of sin?” I suggested and got a sour look in reply.

  “When I arrived in Dubai, I knew that the best place to hide would be with other Kyrgyz women. And where is that likely to be? In a bar with a bunch of working girls who don’t trust men and who close ranks whenever one comes asking questions.”

  She paused, tapped a manicured nail on the handcuffs.

  “If you men only knew how much we hate you, despise you. Much more than we fear you. If we had our way, you’d all be wearing chains around your necks.”

  I wasn’t going to enter into a debate; there wasn’t time to discuss something that wasn’t going to change very soon.

  “So you weren’t in the bar to earn—” I began.

  “I was a minister’s mistress, not some piece of street meat. Mikhail gave me an allowance every month that was more than you earn in a decade. Why would I want to haggle with a curry-stinking drunk over three hundred dirhams? No, it was a disguise.”

  “Staying hidden by being in plain sight?”

  “I hoped that if I waited long enough, you might say something intelligent, Inspector. Perhaps that was it.”

  I couldn’t be bothered to start a duel of snappy one-liners; we weren’t in some hard-boiled movie with an unhappy ending guaranteed. It was time to move on.

  “So why did you bring me back here, if you’re not on the game?”

  “I’m not a whore. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need money. You’ll have discovered for yourself that Dubai’s expensive.”

  “So why did you kill Atanasov?”

  Natasha paused, set fire to another cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “One thing you don’t realize when you decide to go on the run is, you never know who to trust.”

  I said nothing, watched gray ash lengthen.

  “I had the memory stick, but I needed to get the information from it. And I’m no computer expert. I needed to dump the information—the account numbers, the passwords, the access codes—somewhere it couldn’t be found by anyone else.”

  “And you asked Atanasov to help?”

  Natasha heard the disbelief in my voice, shook her head, stubbed out the cigarette.

  “Bulgarians are some of the best hackers in the world, Inspector. They can strip every secret of your life and put it out on the net for the world to discover. And I met a young Bulgarian guy the second time I went into the Vista Bar.”

  “This young Bulgarian came up, introduced himself and said, ‘Any important financial information you want me to hide for you?’”

  Natasha didn’t care for the sarcasm, but carried on.

  “He spent ten minutes staring at my tits, then asked if he could buy me a drink. I said I wasn’t in the mood for company, but I had a problem that was worrying me.”

  “What made you think he’d know anything about computers?” I asked.

  “Maybe it was the SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS logo on his T-shirt, and the word GEEK stenciled on his forehead, just above the bottle-bottom glasses,” she replied.

  Touché.

  “So you told him some unbelievable story he didn’t even listen to while he dreamt of visiting your Silicon Valley?”

  “He offered to solve my problem for me. Told me how many degrees he’d got, the games software he’d written. Of course I was so impressed, I let him buy me that drink. Freshly squeezed mango juice.”

  “So then you come back here, you start to make out, then he drinks your new and improved freshly squeezed mango juice.”

  “Watermelon, actually. And I didn’t use the handcuffs for when he woke up.”

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  “In the morning you told him what a wonderful lover he had been, but your husband was arriving that evening, so you wouldn’t be able to meet again. You explained that you needed his help to hide some financial accounts before you and your husband got divorced. And he was happy to oblige.”

  Natasha looked at me, gave a nod of grudging admiration. “Inspector, you should have been a detective.”

  I shook my head. I was out of my country, out of my depth.

  “What I should have been is a better one.”

  “You’ve got this far; you should take some credit for that.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “I suppose you’re wondering if there’s enough money there for both of us.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure if I cared for mango juice. Too sweet.

  “If I could find you, then it would be twice as easy for someone to find us. Someone who’s got the killing skills I seem to lack.”

  “I want you to go back to Mikhail. Tell him I’ll keep ten percent and he can have the rest back. In exchange for letting me live, not sending someone out after me.”

  “I don’t think he’d be too pleased if I brought him news like that. In fact, I might be the one ending up underground.”

  “I’m sure you have great powers of persuasion, Inspector. Or perhaps I should call you Akyl, now that we know each other so well?”

  She tilted her head to one side and gave me the sort of look romance novels call coquettish. If I hadn’t felt rather vulnerable without my trousers on, it might even have worked.

  “But why should I help you?”

  Natasha gave one of her trademark cold smiles. “Mikhail might be angry if you don’t return with h
is money, but he’ll certainly have you killed if he thinks we’re lovers. He doesn’t like to lose any of his prize possessions.”

  “Why would he think that?” I asked with a sudden terrible feeling that I was about to find out.

  “Because you’ve very photogenic, in a thuggish sort of way,” Natasha said, and threw some color prints on the bed. Photographs. Of two naked people, one of them with long blonde hair and big breasts, the other with a lot of scars. Apparently making love. I took a quick look, closed my eyes, lay back and thought of Kyrgyzstan. By the look of it, just as I had in the photographs.

  Chapter 15

  “Let me get dressed. I need coffee, aspirin, explanations. And not in that order.”

  Natasha nodded, pointed to my clothes on the chair, left me to put them on. She didn’t leave the gun.

  I took my time, washed my face, wondered what new and unpleasant surprise Dubai was going to drop on me. I knew Tynaliev would go crazy if he saw the pictures. If I were very lucky, he’d simply beat me to death with his bare fists. Or he’d get some psycho who would make sure I ended up in a quiet field or up in the mountains, with crows snacking on whatever had been left of my face.

  “I don’t suppose the minister would believe I was unconscious,” I said to myself, looked again at the pictures. My eyes were closed, but that might have been in passion. The sheets had been positioned to hide any lack of interest on my part, but Tynaliev obviously believed in paying for the best for his companions. God knows why he’d picked me.

  I emerged from the bedroom to find Natasha ready to leave, bag slung over her shoulder. From the weight of it against her hip, she was obviously keeping the Makarov.

  “We’re going out?”

  “Coffee.”

  I looked at the kitchen. As empty as a hooker’s heart. Clearly Natasha wasn’t the homemaking type.

  Outside, the air was just as unrelenting, like hot wet towels wrapped around my head. The air tasted of cinders, car fumes, sweat. Small sand devils danced and swirled in the roadway, lifted and spun by the breeze that meandered between the buildings.

  “Does it ever get any cooler?” I asked.

  “The winters are nice. And everywhere has air conditioning. Even the taxis.” And she put up her arm to hail a cab.

  I was sure she was right, but no one had told our driver. Obviously he liked the heat, because he was wearing a T-shirt under his uniform, and probably had a scarf and coat in the trunk, in case the weather got suddenly chilly, down to about ninety degrees. I asked about the air con and he gave me several enthusiastic nods but just closed the windows. He was obviously a big garlic fan as well, and so we made our happy way with me feeling both seasoned and cooked.

  We arrived at Burjuman, the mall where I’d had coffee with Kulayev what felt like years before. I paid off the driver, with a tip for him to put toward buying a pair of winter gloves, and we went inside. The chill of the air was like a slap around the head; obviously Dubai took temperature control very seriously.

  I ordered coffee and fizzy water, watched Natasha take a couple of foil-wrapped tablets out of her bag. She pushed them across the table.

  I raised an eyebrow. “I’m still recovering from the last medicine you gave me.”

  “Aspirin. Still in the packaging, you’ll notice, being a detective. But if you don’t want . . .”

  I popped the tablets out of the plastic, chased them down with the water. After all, I’d survived the Rohypnol, right?

  “You never told me why you shot Marko Atanasov.”

  Natasha gave an offhand gesture, dismissing him as if of no importance. “Nothing to do with this, OK?”

  “But still,” I persisted, “you must have had a reason.”

  I guessed that the gun she’d used was somewhere in the muddy waters of the creek, but I decided not to ask her. The less she knew about what I did and didn’t know about her, the better. I particularly didn’t want her to know I used to be Murder Squad. Trust’s a very valuable thing—probably because it’s so rare, and for good reason. Natasha had killed at least one man that I knew of, stolen millions of dollars, dragged me three thousand kilometers from Bishkek, drugged me, and was blackmailing me about my boss. I liked her, but trust didn’t enter into the equation.

  Natasha fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes, realized that she couldn’t smoke unless she went outside into the heat.

  “I didn’t know anybody when I came here,” she began, taking a sip of her espresso, “but I knew that a lot of Kyrgyz girls went to the Vista Hotel, some to meet customers and some just to socialize. I got friendly with a few of them, heard their stories.”

  Natasha paused, finished her coffee, stood up. “Let’s go outside. I really want a cigarette.”

  We stood in the shadow of the Metro station, and I watched as Natasha lit up. Even in the shade, it was stifling, and sweat dribbled down my back. I missed the weight of the Makarov in my pocket, sensed the CCTV cameras everywhere, wondered if we were being watched and by whom. Tobacco smoke mingled with car fumes; it was a perfume I was beginning to dislike. Along with pretty much everything else about Dubai, about this job.

  “Atanasov wasn’t much of a manager. He was loud and aggressive, scary. So he put a lot of the punters off. You’re out for a bit of illegal fun, you don’t need trouble, right? Because trouble brings the law, and then you’re in deep, with no lifebelt.”

  She paused, took another hit on her cigarette as if it was pure oxygen.

  “So the money didn’t come in as fast as he wanted, and of course it was never his fault. He blamed the girls. Not dressing sexily enough. Not working hard enough. Not smiling enough. Being choosy about who they fucked. All the usual.”

  “He used his fists to back his argument up?”

  “Usually. Leaving bruises where the customers would only see them when it was too late to back out. Loose teeth, maybe a clump of hair torn out. Standard, right?”

  I said nothing. Maybe killing a man like that had been pretty easy for Natasha. But in my experience, it never is.

  “I got friendly with this girl from Naryn. Nargiza. Country girl.”

  I nodded. I knew the type. Came from a one-goat bump in the road, thought Bishkek was glamorous, believed all the dreams that the movies sell. Dubai must have blown her mind.

  “She fell for the waitress-making-money line? ‘Just pay me back for the airfare and the visa when you can’ routine?”

  Natasha nodded.

  “She was an innocent. A sheep surrounded by wolves. Not too bright, but a decent girl, well brought up. So she was no good at the job. Used to cry when she was with a customer, beg them not to do it. And some of them didn’t.”

  “But one guy got angry, wanted his money back, went to complain to Atanasov?”

  “He showed up at the bar, dragged Nargiza out, screaming and raving about how no country cow was going to cost him money.” Natasha threw her cigarette butt to the pavement, ground it out with unnecessary ferocity.

  “The next time I saw her was when she came round to my apartment. That bastard had beaten her up, knocked out a couple of teeth, split her lips open. But that wasn’t enough for him.”

  I waited. It’s not easy to tell horror stories, and it’s not easy listening to them either.

  “He held her down, told her she’d enjoy it when a real man was with her. Nargiza told me he couldn’t get an erection, so he slashed at her with a razor, cut her face, her arms, sliced off both her nipples. She came to me when the cuts became infected. Running a fever, too afraid to go to a hospital, too afraid to call the police.”

  “What did you do?” I said. Bile rose to the back of my throat. In my time I’d seen a lot of bad things—people beaten to death over a bottle of homemade vodka, a woman who smiled at the wrong man, a debt unpaid—but you can never get accustomed to the kind of violence handed out to Nargiza.

  “I got her face cleaned up as best I could, offered to buy her a ticket back to Bishkek, but she wouldn’t take it. Sh
e didn’t want to bring shame on her family.”

  I nodded, unsurprised. If Nargiza went back to her village, everyone would talk, speculate about her scars. And people being people, the talk would take a nasty turn. No man would want to risk the shame of a tainted marriage; nobody would invite the family round for iftar to break their fast during Ramadan.

  “So where is Nargiza now?”

  Natasha lit another cigarette, puffed furiously, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth, fanning it away from her eyes.

  “In the Welcare Hospital. I took her there myself, explained she’d been in a car accident, paid for her treatment.”

  The anger in her face had turned into pure rage, like some demon unleashed from its chains, a fury willing to destroy everything to avenge her dead children.

  “Have you been to visit her?”

  “Not much point, Inspector. Nargiza hanged herself in the bathroom that evening.”

  Natasha threw away her half-smoked cigarette, walked past me back into the cool of the coffee shop.

  “She’s in the hospital morgue, enjoying the long sleep. And that’s why I shot him.”

  Chapter 16

  I ordered a double espresso, my hands shaking slightly as I put the cup to my lips. The coffee was thick, bitter, and I wasn’t sure if my nerves would withstand the caffeine overload.

  “You shot him, that’s all?” I said and wondered just how inured to violence I had become. I joined the force to prevent such things, not to condone them.

  Natasha said nothing, simply nodded. I didn’t have any sympathy for a piece of shit like Atanasov, but I was glad that she wasn’t responsible for the post-mortem mutilation of his body. It made liking her a little easier, made helping her seem more possible.

  “Have you told Mikhail that you’ve found me?” Natasha asked.

  “Well, what with being drugged, handcuffed and photographed apparently having sex with his mistress—the one who’s run away with all his money—I haven’t really been able to find the time,” I said.

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  No fear in her voice. Maybe Tynaliev had always been kind, romantic, courteous when he was with her. I knew the other side, the one that used bare hands to bloody the tiles in the soundproofed basement.