I took refuge from the sun in a small coffee shop that looked as if it had been there since Dubai was founded and hadn’t been cleaned since, and ordered iced tea. I knew my first priority was finding and rescuing Natasha. Quite how I could do that was a little unclear, but I knew that, given Kulayev’s unavoidable absence, I had to initiate something to bring Natasha’s captors out into open ground.
But first of all there was something I had to do, something that couldn’t be put off any longer.
I picked up my phone and started to dial.
Chapter 24
I’d been beaten up, verbally at least, by Tynaliev before. He was a master of the brutal insult, the unconcealed threat. But this time was different. I’d found the girl, then lost her, and Tynaliev wasn’t the sort of man who let failure go unpunished. At the same time, Natasha wasn’t his priority. If I’d let someone run away with ten million dollars, a girl wouldn’t be top of my list either.
“You’ve got the information?”
I admitted that I had.
“And have you read it?”
“No, that wasn’t part of the job. And besides, it’s been encrypted.”
“What do you mean, encrypted?”
“Natasha got someone to change the file access, so only she can open the documents, with a new code that only she has.”
Tynaliev paused for a moment. Even over the international line I could hear the suppressed rage in his voice.
“Let me understand you correctly, Inspector. You have the files, but they’re useless without the girl to open them?”
I was waiting for Tynaliev to order me back to Bishkek, bringing the file with me. Of course, once I’d done that, he couldn’t take the risk of me having read them, so I’d be found face down with my gun in my mouth and a bullet in the brain. TOP MURDER SQUAD EX-INSPECTOR IN DEPRESSION SUICIDE. I had to make the minister realize I was still indispensable.
“You could bring the files here; I’m sure we can have them hacked,” Tynaliev said, replacing rage with an even more worrying façade of calm.
“There’s a problem with that, Minister,” I lied. “The girl told me that during the encryption she’d had a fail-safe destruct mechanism installed. Without the right code number, the documents are automatically wiped.”
I listened to Tynaliev rage on about me being an incompetent bastard and Natasha being a deceitful whore. Then he moved on to what he would do to both of us once we were back in Bishkek. The phone line must have been red hot, but at least I was two and a half thousand kilometers from the basement in Sverdlovsky police station where Tynaliev liked to conduct his “questioning.” Finally, Tynaliev calmed down for long enough to start issuing orders, rather than threats.
“Contact Kulayev; get him to use his contacts to find the girl.”
I explained that would be difficult, given that Kulayev was currently housed in a morgue. I was sure the news would not please the minister, and I was right.
“This isn’t Kyrgyzstan,” I said. “I can’t just wander into a bar and beat the information I need out of one of our stool pigeons. The Dubai authorities are very big on law and order, and they wouldn’t look kindly on a foreign ex-policeman running around causing trouble.”
I decided not to mention the incident in the mall, or the fact that I’d killed one of Kulayev’s men in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses. I didn’t want to bring up the potential connection to Chechen terrorists either, not before I’d managed to find Natasha at any rate.
“I’ve got a couple of leads I want to follow up, Minister. Give me a few days and I’m sure I’ll be able to find the girl,” I said. Telling Tynaliev that one of the leads just happened to be Saltanat Umarova didn’t strike me as being particularly constructive, unless provoking the minister into a stroke would be useful.
I was about to end the call when Tynaliev did it for me, switching off his mobile. I didn’t know if our conversation had been recorded, but it wasn’t like Tynaliev not to think of every way of making himself secure. And that included disposing of an ex-police inspector who knew rather more than was healthy.
Saltanat was my most obvious lead to finding the Chechens, and through them Natasha, but I didn’t know enough about Saltanat’s mission to feel entirely happy about contacting her. She would certainly regard Natasha’s safety as surplus to requirements, and completely irrelevant if it got in the way of dealing with the terrorist threat. I wasn’t even sure if Saltanat wouldn’t consider me expendable, if it came to it. I was under no illusions about romantic love when it came to our relationship. When it suited her, which it did most of the time, Saltanat was all steel and no heart.
I ignored the NO SMOKING sign and lit a cigarette. I stared at the traffic flowing down Sheikh Zayed Road in an endless procession of wealth and wondered what Tynaliev would do to me if I failed to get his money back. I thought it might be easier just to kill myself on the spot, and save myself a world of pain. On the other hand, if there was a way to pry the money out of whichever Swiss bank looked after it, I’d always wanted to visit South America. I could wear a crumpled white linen suit and fedora, and drink caipirinhas in some Rio bar until Tynaliev tracked me down.
And with that cheerful alternative in mind, I decided it was time to return to reality and the Vista Hotel, to question a whore or two. Maybe even get some answers, if I was lucky.
Chapter 25
There’s something singularly uninviting about a half-empty bar during the day, where the stink of last night’s beer and sweat and smoke still lingers like cheap aftershave. The atmosphere wasn’t helped by a row of working girls staring with vacant eyes at the few potential customers, who were really only there to get drunk and wonder why their life had turned so sour. Maybe a white linen suit wasn’t the answer after all.
A few heads turned to inspect me for possibilities, dismissed my badly cut suit, my cheap shoes. Clearly, no one thought they would get rich by luring me into their bed.
I sat down at one of the empty tables by the dance floor, looked over at the corner where the Kyrgyz women sat. There were three of them, all in their early thirties, I guessed, talking about whatever it was that got them through the day. I doubted that it was the latest events in Central Asian current affairs.
A waitress took my order for an orange juice, asked if I wanted it freshly squeezed. I said I hadn’t realized there was another way of making orange juice, hoping for a smile. Her look said “country idiot,” and when my drink came, the accompanying bill said “newly poor country idiot.”
I paid the waitress and sipped at my drink, ice chiming against the glass. If Tynaliev didn’t kill me for not finding Natasha, he might well inflict serious damage on me when he saw my expenses.
I smiled and nodded at the least ugly of the Kyrgyz woman. Maybe my smile wasn’t that reassuring, as she took a cigarette out of the pack in front of her and fumbled in her bag for a light. I held up my lighter, and she stood up and walked over, putting a little extra sway into her hips for that hot babe look. She held my hand steady for a beat longer than was necessary, inhaled as if on life support, blew the smoke out of the corner of her mouth in my direction. Perhaps that counted as sexy in the village she came from.
“Spasibo,” she said in a voice low enough to make me wonder what exactly she had between her legs.
“Pozhaluysta,” I replied, trying to suggest that time spent with her would be very welcome.
“Kyrgyz?” she said, looking puzzled, maybe suspicious. “We don’t get many Central Asians in here.”
I shrugged as if to say that I didn’t care either way. I offered to buy her a drink, made sure she saw the dollar bills when I paid. As always, the way to a whore’s heart is through her purse. She moved her stool a little closer to me, her hand on my arm, leaning forward to give me a better view of her breasts.
“You’re from Bishkek?” I asked, watched her nod, heard an accent that had never been within a hundred kilometers of Chui Prospekt. “Mikhail,” I lied,
shaking her hand, then pressing it to my lips. I wanted to appear the kind of misguided fool who believes you can find love in a hookers’ bar and romance in stale perfume.
“You’re very handsome, Mikhail. I’m Jamila.”
Clearly, Jamila didn’t believe in a long courtship. We could probably get engaged, married and divorced in the space of an afternoon.
“A beautiful name for a beautiful lady.”
We gazed meaningfully into each other’s eyes, before she looked down at my right hand. No wedding ring, no pale band of skin to show I’d been married right up to the moment I walked into the bar. I was ripe for the taking. Jamila moved even closer, so that her breast pressed against my arm. It felt heavy, fleshy, firm. I would have been lying if I said I hadn’t noticed it, maybe even felt a little aroused. It wasn’t as if I encountered an apparently eager woman every day. Perhaps I needed to change my line of work.
“Where are you staying, Mikhail?”
“I’m thinking of moving into a suite at the Fairmont,” I lied.
“Won’t that be expensive?”
“Of course, but what’s the point of having money if you don’t spend it on beautiful things. Or people.”
I gave her my most sincere smile, the one that always worries suspects toward the end of an interrogation.
“I’m sure you’re a very generous man,” Jamila murmured, her voice now so deep it seemed to be coming from beneath her ludicrously high stilettos. A smear of lipstick had rubbed itself onto her front teeth, and this made Jamila seem human, slightly vulnerable.
I didn’t need to hear her life history to be able to picture it. Bride-stolen by a guy who grabbed her off the street, a stranger who she had to marry for fear of shaming her family, pregnant at sixteen, abandoned at seventeen by a husband who took off for Moscow and was never seen or heard from again. The decision to leave Kyrgyzstan, the loan at astronomical interest rates, the first time flying, the dingy flat shared with seven other girls. The boredom, sitting for hours in a bar, only to go home with no customer. Then when she did meet someone, the body odor, the halitosis, the weight of a strange body on top of hers, the grunting, the punches, the washing herself clean using the toilet hose in a bathroom festooned with drying underwear. And always the fading hope that she might meet a man who would take care of her, respect her, treat her like a human being.
A suite at the Fairmont would have seemed like heaven.
“You’re not married?”
I felt a sudden pain in my chest, the memory of Chinara’s last hours before the cancer robbed her of her dignity and I robbed her of breath and life. I suddenly realized with remorse that I thought of her less and less as time passed, that her face would become ever more indistinct, the way photographs fade in sunlight. I thought about lying to Jamila, thought of the respect I owed to Chinara.
“Not anymore,” I said and looked away to show that the subject was painful to me.
“You must be very lonely,” Jamila said, stroking my knee with a single white-tipped fingernail. Her cleavage seemed suddenly more pronounced, the shadow between her breasts darker.
“Of course, and I’d be honored to spend some time with you, once I’ve finished my business here.”
“I’m sure you have time for business and pleasure.”
I was pretty sure that Jamila considered pleasure to be her business, but all I wanted from her was information. And if I could get it simply by handing over a few dollar bills, so much the better. Love and lust sometimes lie, but cold cash never does.
“Let me explain, Jamila darling. My boss is a very rich, important man back in Kyrgyzstan. I can’t tell you his name, but you’ll have heard of him. He asked me to come to Dubai to find his fiancée. They had a stupid argument about where to hold their wedding, in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and she threw the ring back at him and stormed off. Her mother said her daughter had come here, and I was sent over. So I need to find her, or I’ll be looking for a new job when I get back to Bishkek.”
As a story it seemed pretty thin to me, but at least it had the virtue of touching on the truth in one or two places. It’s always easier to hide a lie among a few scraps of honesty.
“What makes you think she would come in here?” Jamila asked, not unreasonably. “If she’s got a rich boyfriend and she just wants to teach him a lesson?”
I looked around the bar and had to admit that Jamila had a point. Well-connected young women with rich and powerful boyfriends tend not to hang out in bars where people go to remain anonymous and the potential for drunken violence coils in the air like cigar smoke.
“She doesn’t know anyone in Dubai, and people in Bishkek have heard of this place. They know Kyrgyz ladies like to socialize here, and my boss thinks she might have come here to make friends.”
Jamila clearly didn’t believe a word, but the dollar bills in my wallet were singing an irresistible song.
“What’s this girl called? Maybe I’ve met her in here.”
I did my best to look shifty; Jamila was more likely to believe I was up to no good than fall for some love story out of a bad movie.
“She probably won’t be using her real name,” I said. “She’s from a well-known family, and she wouldn’t want people to know she’s broken up with her boyfriend. But I do have a picture of her.”
I showed Jamila the photograph I’d taken from Tynaliev, and she stared at it for a couple of minutes before handing it back.
“Impressive,” she said. “I suppose he paid for the boobs. Not as good as mine, mind you.”
“I didn’t ask,” I lied. “He’s not the sort of man to share details like that.”
“Well, if she’s dumped him, he can always give me a call. Since you don’t seem to be interested.”
She looked again at the photo, inspected it more closely.
“I think I’ve seen her in here a couple of times. Keeps herself to herself. A lot of the customers have offered to buy her a drink, but she just looks down her nose at them.”
I nodded; that pretty much fitted what I knew of Natasha.
“Let me make a phone call. And while I’m doing that, perhaps another drink? Thirsty work, talking to people. And expensive.”
Jamila squeezed my thigh as she slithered off her stool and headed for the door, her mobile already glued to her ear.
Unasked, the waitress brought over two more drinks, took the exact amount from the bundle of notes I presented to her, then waited until I handed over a tip. I don’t know how much I gave her, but from her scowl, she wouldn’t be giving up serving drinks any time in the near future.
Jamila returned and climbed back onto her stool, her hand once more squeezing my thigh.
“I made a couple of calls and found someone who thinks they might know where she’s living,” she said and gave me a mercenary smile. “The thing is, darling, they’ll probably want a little something for helping you. Dubai’s an expensive place. And I’ve been helpful too, and I’ve got rent to pay.”
Jamila pressed herself against my arm, took my hand and cupped her breast with it for a split second, her nipple visible above the thin material of her bra. I think I was supposed to go cross-eyed with desire. Instead I crossed my legs, turned slightly to face the door, slid my other hand into my pocket.
That way it was conveniently close to my gun for when Jamila’s friend came through the door.
Chapter 26
He was slim, not tall, and not wearing what I’ve always thought of as pimp clothes. No leather jacket, no cowboy boots, no ornate wristwatch. Faded jeans, a white T-shirt that showed a flat stomach, narrow hips. He looked around, spotted Jamila, gave a wave and walked over.
Jamila gave him an impersonal businesslike kiss on both cheeks, then gave me a much more passionate and lingering kiss that aimed for my mouth but just missed.
“Mikhail, this is my friend Lev. He might be able to help you find your boss’s missing girl.”
Her sarcastic tone didn’t escape me; I just wanted to find
out what kind of set-up I was walking into.
Lev shook my hand. His skin was damp with sweat, either from the heat or from wondering how best to empty my wallet. His grip was limp, almost boneless, and when he spoke, his voice had a flat, uninterested tone. He didn’t bother with the usual formalities but got straight down to business.
“She tells me you’re looking for a Kyrgyz woman,” he said, nodding at Jamila, who tightened her grip on my thigh. “My contacts here are excellent at finding people, particularly ones who don’t want to be found,” Lev continued. “But as you can imagine, it’s a specialist service. Which means it doesn’t come cheap.”
“I’m sure my boss will be willing to pay whatever he thinks reasonable,” I said.
“I believe you have a photograph?”
I handed it over and watched Lev study it. His face gave nothing away, no hint that he might have been involved in Natasha’s kidnapping. Not for the first time on this trip I would have liked to be in Sverdlovsky police station, down in the basement where even the most tongue-tied become eloquent.
“A striking woman,” Lev said and made to put Natasha’s photograph in his pocket. I put my hand out to stop him, took the photograph back.
“My boss would like everything to be very discreet,” I said. “So no pictures. All I need is an address, and I’m sure I can persuade her to return.”
“And if she doesn’t want to?” Lev asked, his voice as calm as if he’d been ordering a beer.
“Then I may have to call on your specialist services again.”
“For an additional fee.”
“Naturally,” I agreed, wondering which one of us was talking the most bullshit.
A Summer Revenge Page 10
