A Summer Revenge

by Tom Callaghan

  “Without the photograph, it may take a little longer to find your missing woman,” Lev warned. I knew that the price was going to rise, but that didn’t matter. I had no intention of paying anything anyway.

  I reached for my wallet, but, as I expected, Lev held up his hand. “Not in here,” he said. “You never know who’s watching. Maybe even undercover police. And you did say you wanted to be discreet.”

  So now I knew what the plan was. A walk down a quiet alley, one with no CCTV cameras or inquisitive neighbors, a punch in the stomach or maybe the face, then down on the ground, the boot going in, hands taking the wallet, and another idiot left to regret going into that particular bar.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  Except it was my fist in Lev’s belly, my slap across Jamila’s face and my hand taking his wallet. Lev wailed as I punched so deep that my knuckles must have scraped his spine. I waited for him to fall to his knees and start retching. When he didn’t, I kicked him between his legs, and that’s when he began vomiting. I used my feet a couple more times, sideways shots that tore a rip in his ear. Maybe I broke his cheekbone as well. All the rage and frustration of the past few days powered my anger, but I knew I had to stop before I killed him.

  Jamila knew what was good for her: she was off as fast as her heels would let her, hand pressed to her face, her cheek already swelling. I wondered if perhaps I’d broken one of her teeth, added a little blood to blend in with the lipstick. Probably bad for business.

  Lev tried to push himself up, but another kick, this time to his elbow, put a stop to that nonsense.

  “Lev,” I said, in the quiet, friendly voice I use when I want to scare people, “you really need to find a less obvious scam. You’ve used this one on too many people who didn’t know what was coming.”

  Lev acknowledged my advice by rolling onto his side and vomiting. I squatted down beside him, for all the world like a concerned passer-by.

  “Deep breaths, and just lie still for a couple of minutes. I want you rested and recovered before I hurt you some more. Properly this time.”

  “Fuck off, you bastard,” Lev swore, all his apparent calm long gone. “You’ve broken something inside.”

  “Probably just a rib or two, Lev. Painful but they mend easily enough. Mind you, I could hit you again, do some serious damage. Maybe life-threatening. Unless you tell me what I want to know.”

  Lev muttered something about making me pay for this.

  “It’s easy,” I said. “Tell me the truth, and I walk away, you limp away. The girl in the photo, do you know where she is?”

  Lev shook his head, winced at the pain this caused.

  “That bitch Jamila, she called me, said we’d a chicken ready to be plucked. Told me to come over, said you had plenty of money, that you’d be a pushover.”

  “I wouldn’t count on her judgment,” I said and reached into his pocket. My hand came out with a nasty-looking lead sap, a spring-powered piece with a handle bound in leather.

  “Not very nice, Lev. You might hurt someone with this.”

  To prove my point, a flick of the wrist, and Lev screamed as I tapped his kneecap. I looked round, but no one seemed to have noticed.

  “So you’ve no idea who the girl is, where she is? Right?”

  “No idea. Just another tart.”

  “That’s no way to speak about a lady,” I said, giving the other knee something to complain about. No one noticed that scream either. I stood up, threw the sap away.

  “Time to find a new business, Lev,” I suggested and took a few notes out of my wallet, let them flutter down beside him. “Never let it be said I don’t pay for information. Let me treat you to a taxi home. Or the hospital. Tell them you had a nasty fall.”

  A moment’s breeze blew the money away from his hand, and as he reached for it, I squatted down beside him again and broke the little finger on his right hand. It’s surprising how easily fingers snap if you twist them as you pull them back. The crunch and splinter sounded like a twig breaking underfoot during the autumn frosts in the Tien Shan mountains, and I realized how much I missed my country.

  “I don’t want to see you again, Lev. Remember, you’ve still got seven fingers and two thumbs intact, and after them I can always start on your toes.”

  I stood up, started to walk away, then turned back. Lev had managed to struggle to his knees, but sank back onto the ground, fear scarring his face.

  “You might pass the message on to Jamila as well,” I said. “Tell her I’m pretty good at hurting women as well when I have to.”

  Then I went in search of a taxi.

  Back at the hotel I took a long cold shower. I was starting to feel some remorse at slapping Jamila. I really don’t like hitting women, unless I’m in danger of getting stabbed or sliced. I even rather regretted the beating I’d given Lev. Then again, his sap could have dug a finger-wide ditch in my skull.

  I’d been pretty sure as soon as I met her that Jamila was running a scam, but I couldn’t risk not following up on a potential lead. So I knew I’d be back at the bar sooner rather than later, and I reminded myself to watch out for Lev suddenly looming out of a doorway. Maybe he’d think he’d have better luck next time. Or maybe he’d bring something deadlier than a sap with him.

  I switched on the TV, wondering whether there would be any news coverage of the bookshop shoot-out or the fire at the Denver Hotel, but all I could find were black and white Egyptian movies with bad singing and worse acting. I thought I spotted an improbably young Omar Sharif in the obligatory shisha café scene. Finally I decided the authorities probably wouldn’t want tourists to worry that Dubai was anything other than wonderful and switched off the set.

  I decided I had to contact Saltanat, although I wasn’t sure if we could work together. The last time we’d seen each other in Bishkek, when I’d been warmed off the Morton Graves case, she’d accused me of betraying everything I stood for. Then she’d taken Otabek, the small Kyrgyz boy we’d rescued from a glittering if short career in snuff movies, away with her to Uzbekistan.

  I felt ashamed that I hadn’t asked Saltanat how the boy was doing, hadn’t even given him a moment’s thought in all the chaos and confusion. Sometimes you get so focused on an investigation that all the important things in life recede into obscurity. It’s a good trait for a Murder Squad inspector, but a pretty damning characteristic in everyone else.

  I placed the call, got voicemail, suggested meeting up that evening. I didn’t want to reveal where I was staying, and I was pretty sure Saltanat wasn’t going to invite me to spend the night with her, so I suggested meeting at the Dôme for coffee; so far I hadn’t seen much of Dubai’s legendary nightlife, and I was running out of Tynaliev’s money.

  That reminded me to check the wallet that I’d taken from the body of the boy I shot in the bookshop. A couple of fifty-dollar notes, which would help out with expenses, a travel card for the Metro and an ID card in the name of Khusun Todashev. It told me that he’d lived in Chechnya’s main city, Grozny, and that he’d died two weeks short of his nineteenth birthday. Tucked behind the ID card was a passport photo of a young woman—dark-haired, smiling, pretty. A girlfriend or perhaps a sister. I didn’t feel good about robbing her of a lover or a brother, wondered if she’d ever find out what happened, or whether she’d come to believe he’d abandoned her for someone else. But when it comes to you or him, it’s the one who doesn’t hesitate that comes out ahead.

  I stared at my face in the lift mirror as I headed down to the lobby. I was starting to age, no doubt about that, a few more lines and crevices. Short black hair starting to silver at the sides, a few white hairs sprinkled in thick eyebrows. And the flat, unrevealing stare that I had inherited from my Uighur grandfather. Not a handsome face, but a determined one. But I was starting to tire of my self-appointed mission of bringing justice to the dead. After all, it didn’t bring any of them back.

  The nearest Metro station was only a couple of minutes’ walk away, but
I was already sweating when I stepped out of the Arctic lobby and into the sun. I squinted against the glare, told myself I should buy sunglasses, remembered how much they cost and decided to narrow my eyes instead. Make myself look tough, menacing, in case there were any more people I needed to hurt.

  The Metro carriage was crowded, mainly with Filipina shop assistants in white blouses and black trouser suits, and the air was thick with their sing song voices, like the flocks of birds in Panfilov Park in the summer. The memory conjured up warm evenings sitting under the trees, eating ice cream, maybe drinking a Baltika beer and believing the world was a safe and eternally happy place.

  I got off at Burjuman station, made my way up the escalators, heading for the exit, lost in sudden homesickness for Kyrgyzstan, hardly aware of the people around me.

  And that was when I felt the gun in my back.

  Chapter 27

  It’s impossible to turn quickly on a crowded escalator, so I simply stood still until we reached the top. I didn’t think I’d be able to push my way through the people in front of me fast enough to escape a bullet in the spine. Instead, I wondered just how painful being shot would be and whether it was better to die than to end up in a wheelchair.

  I raised my arms just far enough away from my sides to show that I didn’t have any plans to reach for my gun, stepped off at the top of the escalator, walked slowly to the exit. Had the Chechens managed to track me down? Was this revenge for killing Khusun Todashev? Someone from Tynaliev showing me the price of failure? Or was the person who torched Kulayev the one with the gun in my back?

  “Just there will do, Akyl. But no sudden moves.”

  A voice I knew all too well.

  Saltanat.

  I turned round in slow motion. Saltanat was fast enough to pull the trigger before I could knock the gun aside, and a stray bullet wounding someone in a crowded station wasn’t the kind of attention I needed.

  Saltanat looked as poised as ever, her hand with the gun back inside her bag, presumably finger ready to fire, happy to shoot through the material if that was how it had to go down.

  “Couldn’t you have just tapped on my shoulder, like a normal person?” I asked. “We were due to meet here in half an hour anyway. Why the amateur dramatics?”

  “Coffee first,” she said, “and then we can talk, and I can decide.”

  “Decide what?” I asked.

  “Remember when we first met?”

  I could hardly forget. I’d ended up face down in the snow, expecting a bullet in the brain.

  “I told you then that I wasn’t sure whether to kill you or not.”

  I nodded. There didn’t seem to be a snappy reply to that.

  “Well, now I’m not sure again.”

  A smiling waitress took our order, and we sat in a booth away from the other customers. Saltanat sipped at her espresso while I stared moodily at a glass of black tea. I looked around for jam to sweeten it, but made do with sugar instead. The taste did nothing to lighten my mood. Time to ask the big question, the one that could wrap me in a shroud.

  “Why would you want to kill me?”

  I think I succeeded in not sounding plaintive or frightened, but sitting opposite a trained assassin doesn’t help anyone’s confidence.

  “The woman I saw you with, the one with the udders? She’s the reason.”

  I couldn’t help smiling, but stopped when I saw Saltanat frown.

  “You’re not jealous, are you? It’s hardly as if you and I are girlfriend and boyfriend, bound together with undying love.”

  “Akyl, you’re not a bad-looking man, for a Kyrgyz. And I seem to recall you weren’t bad in bed either. But you need a serious reality check if you think I’m crazy about you, or jealous of that plumped-up bitch.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  Saltanat caught the attention of the waitress, pointed to her empty cup. Unlike most people, caffeine seemed to relax Saltanat, but that’s maybe because she remained alert at all times, never letting her concentration slip or dimming her awareness of the people around her.

  “The problem is that I think your friend is working with the Chechen terrorists I’m trying to stop. And if she’s working with them, then you might be working with her. Which means you’re on the side of the bad guys.”

  “You think Natasha supports terrorism, that she wants to spread jihad through Central Asia? You’re crazy. The only things she’s passionate about are shoes, lipstick and hand-bags.”

  I could have added ten million dollars belonging to the Minister for State Security to the list, but decided to keep that particular nugget of information to myself for the moment. I decided to try another tack.

  “When I left you, it was because I’d got a text saying Natasha was being followed in the Dubai Mall. When I got there, she’d disappeared. I got into a gunfight, shot a young Chechen guy before he could shoot me.”

  “Maybe you were being set up,” Saltanat said.

  I shook my head, remembering the sight of Natasha being bundled into the black Prado.

  “She was pushed into the same car that the people who shot at us used in their getaway. If someone had wanted me dead, all they had to do was wait until I turned up at the bookshop looking for her. If she was involved with them, she needn’t have even been there.”

  My mouth suddenly dry, I took another sip of my tea, now lukewarm and unappealing. I had no way of predicting how Saltanat would react.

  “Look, Natasha is the reason I came to Dubai. The minister wanted me to reason with her, persuade her to come back to him. He’s in love; it happens. Maybe she’s the woman he’s always wanted, maybe it’s just sex. I don’t know.”

  Saltanat’s look of disbelief didn’t deter me.

  “He’s promised to reinstate me if I bring her back. Being Murder Squad isn’t just a job for me, you know that. It’s what I do, it’s who I am.”

  I didn’t need to add that after Chinara’s death it was all I had. And I knew that Saltanat could hear the passion in my voice. But she continued to look skeptical.

  “If she’s so innocent and wide-eyed, why would the Chechens bother with her?”

  “Maybe they want to put pressure on Tynaliev?” I suggested.

  Saltanat shook her head. “Not these people,” she said. “They aren’t into subtlety. If they wanted something out of him, they’d leave his wife’s head on his doorstep. They don’t make threats; they act.”

  She finished her coffee, waved for the bill.

  “They’ve run a lot of risks so far here in Dubai. It would have been much easier, and safer, to put a bullet in her back, let Tynaliev find out about her death from the consul here.”

  That was the Saltanat I knew, all heart.

  Saltanat reached into her bag. I hoped she was just looking for money.

  “She has something they want, and I think you know what that something is, Akyl. If you won’t—or can’t—tell me, then I don’t really think I can help you.”

  I realized it was time I came clean or at least gave Saltanat some idea of what was going on. “Why don’t we go back to your hotel? I can explain more there.”

  “I hope that’s not some line to get me back into bed with you,” Saltanat said.

  We made the journey back to her hotel in silence, apart from Saltanat telling the driver to turn off the Arabic singing on the radio. The air conditioning did its best, but the heat was still oppressive, stifling.

  I looked out of the window, and suddenly I was struck by how much I missed Kyrgyzstan—so much beauty crammed into so small a country. I remembered the long road from Bishkek to Osh, twisting and coiling back on itself as if a giant ribbon had fallen from the sky and draped itself across the mountains. Then there were the visits to Orlinoye, north of Karakol on the Kazakh border, to see family and to visit the people Chinara had grown up with.

  And of course I remembered the trip to Lake Issyk-Kul that Chinara and I had taken the summer before she fell ill. We’d stayed in a yurt at the
edge of the lake, eating fruit and cooking shashlik bought from the local village. The days were spent lying on the beach or swimming in water so crystal-clear the bottom seemed only a handspan away. The sun danced on the water, lit up the snow-capped mountains beyond the south shore. We call them the Celestial Mountains because their austere beauty seems as close to heaven as any of us are likely to get.

  I remembered the photo I had at home, with Chinara on the Ferris wheel at Bosteri, her hair tangled in the wind, laughing, joyous. But no matter how hard I tried to picture her face, it remained blurred, indistinct, as if a wet cloth had been smeared across the glass. Sometimes memories are all you have, and when they fade, you’re left with nothing.

  Perhaps Saltanat mistook my silence for annoyance, but all I wanted to do was work out how to find Natasha, get back to my country and restart my life.

  Chapter 28

  At Saltanat’s hotel we took the lift to the twentieth floor and found an identical suite waiting for us.

  “Why not change hotels?” I asked. “People already know you’re staying here.”

  “True, but since we didn’t know about this room until five minutes ago, it’s unlikely to have been bugged.”

  She opened the minibar, took out a bottle of Heineken and a mineral water for me. Saltanat sipped at her beer, waited for me to start.

  “I haven’t been entirely honest with you up to now,” I said. “Natasha did take something belonging to Tynaliev. Access to secret bank accounts. Access to ten million dollars, so she told me.”

  “So why doesn’t he just move the money to another account?”

  “Well, once she got to Dubai, she changed the access codes, so she’s the only person who can get to the money.”

  “It would have to be something like that to get Tynaliev so enraged.”

  “Natasha’s not stupid. She knows she’s a dead woman walking if she steals all the money. So she’ll give it back—less a million dollars for her trouble—if Tynaliev agrees not to hunt her down.”

  “And you think he’ll agree to that?”