My heart was doing a drum solo deep in my chest, and the heat haze in the air did nothing to diminish my worries. When a Kyrgyz hunting eagle circles the air and rides the thermals to spot its prey, its vision is sharp enough to spot the slightest movement on the horizon. I didn’t have that clarity or that unthinking will, that single-minded determination.
Don’t think, I told myself, act. To think is to delay. To delay is to be weak. And to be weak is to wrap yourself in your own shroud.
My shirt stuck to my back, and not all of the sweat came from the heat of the sun. I felt as if I were walking in slow motion, or wading in water that reached my thighs. Stay in the moment, focus.
Don’t look at his eyes, Saltanat had told me, they’ll tell you nothing; watch his hands, watch for when they move. Don’t shift your gaze, don’t look down for your gun; draw, point your finger, not the gun; don’t fire too early or you’ll miss. Don’t fire too late or you’ll die. Make him disappear. All very easy for her to say, and do, but I’m not the trained assassin.
I was a third of the way across the bridge when I saw Boris walking toward me, a tall figure by his side. This far from the shore, a light breeze was doing its ineffectual best to cool the air. I started to speed up, wanting this to be over. Once I had Natasha, I planned to return to my hotel, pack and be on a plane that evening. It would be no problem getting a flight to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, then heading over the border. A diplomatic passport, no matter how temporary, smooths out any ethnic difficulties, even if you’re a former Bishkek Murder Squad inspector with a history.
I still didn’t know if I’d be able to persuade Natasha to come back to Bishkek with me, but I didn’t think she had a lot of alternative futures lined up. And if Tynaliev didn’t get any of his money back, I guessed neither of us would have a pleasant future, or a long-lasting one.
As we drew closer, I saw that Boris was wearing a tight-fitting T-shirt, to show that he wasn’t carrying, his hands clasped behind his head to emphasize the point. He was wearing sunglasses so I wouldn’t be able to see his eyes, even if I’d wanted to. Natasha walked behind him, dressed in one of the long, black, all-covering burkas that women wear in the Gulf. It made sense to make Natasha as inconspicuous as possible; a figure as spectacular as hers was bound to be noticed and commented upon. A scarf completed her outfit, together with sunglasses and scarlet lipstick.
A woman tourist was standing near the point where we would meet, large sunhat, even larger straw bag and one of those shapeless dresses that suggest middle age and multiple children. She was taking photographs of the creek, and I hoped she’d move on in the next couple of minutes. Otherwise she could become a complication, or even a victim if things turned difficult.
I turned to look behind me. No one, and no way of anyone taking me by surprise. My mouth was dry, whether with fear or expectation, I couldn’t tell. All I had to do was hand over the SIM card as Natasha walked past me and to freedom, albeit most likely short-lived.
Then, just as Boris and Natasha passed the woman photographer, I realized that something was wrong, that she was walking with a limp. Instead of her trademark heels, Natasha was wearing simple leather sandals and shuffling along as if unused to wearing them. My hand started to go for my gun, then froze as Natasha reached into her bag and pulled out a Glock 23, holding it down by her side, but aiming it at my chest. At the same time Boris stepped forward and to one side to give Natasha a clear shot.
In that instant I knew I was dead, that the .40 caliber bullet would tear through my lungs, my spine, snapping my life off as quickly and efficiently as breaking a rotten tree branch. I wondered if Natasha had made a deal with Boris, if he’d persuaded her that they could share the money and be rid of the Kyrgyz inspector at the same time. Maybe she could buy a luxury villa in Grozny, protected by the Chechens and all that money, free to go shopping on Fifth Avenue, Bond Street, the rue de Rivoli.
Then I realized that the figure in the burka wasn’t Natasha at all. I blinked, bracing myself for the impact of the shot, a blow I knew I could never survive at such close range.
And then the woman seemed to stagger, slump sideways. The Glock fell to the ground. She lurched toward the railings, leaning against them as if faint. The woman photographer in the shapeless dress walked past her, discreetly kicking the Glock over the side and into the creek, putting something back in her straw bag. Something sharp and deadly, if I knew Saltanat.
She passed without acknowledging me, just another tourist storing up memories of her holiday trip, probably making her way back to her hotel for a cold drink following by a trip to the spa.
Boris was walking rapidly away, the sort of speed that says you’ve just remembered an urgent appointment. I wondered about going after him, but shooting him wouldn’t find Natasha for me, and there was always the chance it might be me that took the bullet.
The woman shooter slumped against the railing, staring down at an abra with eyes that saw nothing. From a distance, she was just admiring the view. And distance was just what I wanted to put between the two of us.
Sooner or later, someone would pass by and discover her, or the CCTV operator would start to wonder why the woman had stood still for long. I pulled my baseball cap a little further down over my eyes and returned the way I’d come, looking down, keen to get into the twisting and unmonitored back streets of Bur Dubai without being spotted.
The Dôme was doing great business between the two of us, and Saltanat should have been given whatever the equivalent of frequent-flyer miles for coffee is. I made do with apple juice.
“As they passed me, I could see that the woman wasn’t Natasha,” Saltanat said. “The feet were too big, the boobs not big enough. And the way she carried her bag with her hand resting on the top? That told me she had something heavy in there. So I guessed she was a hitter, just like me.”
She paused, took a mouthful of scalding coffee, the way only women seem able to do.
“Except not as good.”
“Naturally,” I said.
Saltanat’s eyes narrowed and she stared at me suspiciously. “Is that some sort of backhanded compliment?”
I held up my hands, the ever-misunderstood male.
“No, you saved me. It’s a shame the rest of the plan didn’t work out. We didn’t get Natasha back, and we still don’t know where Boris and his gang are hanging out.”
Saltanat debated with herself whether to have another coffee, decided against it.
“You didn’t do so badly yourself,” she said. “It takes balls to stand still with a Glock pointed at you.”
“That wasn’t courage, it was terror,” I said and meant it most sincerely.
“It was your idea to have me stationed there in case of trouble.”
“The downside is that Boris must have realized we were working together after you stabbed the shooter,” I said. “And now he knows what you look like.”
Saltanat shrugged.
“Keeps us on our toes. It might even mean he cuts his losses.”
“So he puts Natasha under the sand, heads for the airport, disappears. You don’t complete your mission, and I don’t get to return Tynaliev’s missing millions and mistress. I don’t foresee a joyful reunion with him.”
Saltanat reached for her cigarettes, put them back in her bag. Sometimes all you want with a strong coffee is the bite of nicotine. At least that’s one simple pleasure you can still enjoy in a bar in Bishkek.
“So what’s your plan, Inspector? I’m going back to my hotel. Alone,” Saltanat said, standing up, pulling her bag onto her shoulder, giving me the frosty eye. In return, I gave her my most winning smile.
“Oh, you know me,” I said. “I’ll think of something.”
Chapter 36
Investigations aren’t like the ones you see on TV, where a hard-bitten, hard-drinking maverick fists his way to a solution, or the latest computer technology and spy satellites track down the bad guys in nanoseconds. It’s usually all much more tedious than
that, like a color-blind man trying to spot the difference between red and green.
I remember the days of cheap music cassettes, where the tapes invariably got tangled inside the machine, and even if you managed to get the tape out in one piece, you spent hours trying to rewind it with a pencil. Finally, you gave it up as a bad job, sold the machine, went for a beer with the money.
Except if you’re investigating a murder, you can’t shrug your shoulders and walk away; at least, I can’t.
So you go over what you know, pushing the pieces together in different ways, trying to find connections that probably don’t exist, hunting for motives and clues with your eyes closed. Sometimes it’s hard to spot a pattern, the way all spilled blood looks the same, whatever the victim’s blood group. But you might see recurring elements: the same weapon, the same kind of passion and need, the same desire to end someone’s life. For sex, for power and, most of all, for money.
I didn’t know if Tynaliev had killed anyone while acquiring his ten million secret dollars, and even if I found out, there would be nothing I could do about it. He was too powerful, too ruthless, and he had incriminating files on everyone who mattered or might pose a threat. Untouchable.
Tynaliev had coerced me into playing the role of pimp in order to get my job back, but once the killings started, it became a very different sort of job, one that suited my skills much more.
Kulayev was dead for sure, a blackened roast joint, and so was Atanasov, hacked into glistening chunks of fat, meat and bone in his seedy apartment. Saltanat had just slaughtered some anonymous Chechen woman, and I’d gunned down a young man, Khusun Todashev. It was all getting out of hand.
The odds were that Natasha was dead as well, maybe floating face down in the sea. And someone had certainly tried to shoot first Saltanat, and then me.
There was no way I could walk away from that much blood, that much pain. Maybe there were no innocents among the dead, no one for whom a brutal ending came as a complete surprise. That made no difference. It was time to get back to doing what I did best. Avenging the dead.
It was pointless thinking that I could reach out to Boris again, try to reconcile our mutual needs with his inevitably increasing desire for revenge. The problem was that I didn’t know how many soldiers he had, whereas he had probably guessed that Saltanat and I were flying alone. Even worse, I had no idea what any of his men looked like, so I could expect a sudden step too close, a quick turn nearby, and then I’d be joining Kulayev on ice in the morgue.
There’s only one way to proceed when you’ve got no leads, no suspects, no authority. You go out and you stir up some shit, flicking allegations that stick to the wall like blood in a slaughterhouse. You ask questions that get you into trouble, about things no one wants to talk about or have discovered, crimes no one wants to confess to. Then, when you’ve asked the question, you stay silent, keep your mouth zipped, watch people take a string of words from their own mouths, twist the fibers into a rope, tie one end to a slowly rotating ceiling fan and then step off the chair.
I knew I had to get out of my hotel room. It wasn’t just driving me crazy with its impersonal perfection, but the answers I wanted weren’t going to tap on the door like room service arriving. I tucked my gun back into my pocket, pulled the key card out of its holder, hit the lift.
I couldn’t remember the address of Natasha’s bolt-hole, but I knew it was in one of the rows of faceless seven-story apartment blocks that made up a large part of Bur Dubai. Functional, charmless and as easy to pick out a specific building as choosing a shirt with your eyes shut.
It took me a good two hours of wandering around, soaked in sweat, doubling back from time to time to make sure I wasn’t being followed, but finally I found it. No sign of the watchman, so I headed up to the apartment. The door was locked, of course, but the plastic card I keep in my wallet proved as good as a regular key. I’ve never claimed to play entirely by the rules.
At first glance, the apartment looked much the same as when I left it, but somewhere so sterile always turns up a clue or two if you know how to find it. These are places married men let for a month or two in the summer, when the wives and children go abroad to escape the Dubai summer. Sometimes a group of working girls rents one for three months, cramming four to a bedroom using cheap metal bunk beds, sharing the bills between them. As long as they’re discreet, don’t bring clients home and the neighbors don’t complain, the management looks away and out to sea and charges four times the going rate.
Time was all I had in my favor, so I checked the linings of her suitcases, the undersides of drawers, on the tops of wardrobes. I would have peered under the rugs, but there weren’t any. The fridge and freezer looked as if they’d never been used, and there were no toiletries in the bathroom, no makeup bottles and creams in front of the mirror.
Finally, I gave up, poured a glass of lukewarm water from the tap, sat down to think.
And it was then that I heard a knocking on the hall door.
I drew my weapon, stood to one said, said, “Yes?”
“It’s the caretaker. Someone just left me a parcel. Urgent, they said, please take it upstairs right away.”
“Ms. Sulonbekova isn’t here at the moment,” I explained. “Perhaps you can give the parcel to her when she returns.”
“It’s not for her,” the watchman said, either puzzled or pointing a gun at the door. “It’s for an Inspector Akyl Borubaev.”
I hid my hand with the gun behind the door, turned the handle, looked at the elderly Indian man standing in front of me.
“I’m Borubaev,” I said, holding out my hand for the parcel. The watchman handed it over, after looking over my shoulder to try to see if I’d murdered Natasha. He started to say something incomprehensible, so I smiled politely as I shut the door in his face.
The parcel was small, maybe the size of a bulky fountain pen, and surprisingly light. Probably not a remote-controlled bomb then, and if it was triggered by movement, it obviously didn’t work.
The box was plain white cardboard, of the sort you might use to send someone a small gift or memento. My name had been written using a fountain pen and jet-black ink, rather stylishly.
I opened the box as carefully as if it contained a deadly spider or some spring-loaded poison-delivering device straight out of a James Bond film.
Nothing so high tech or imaginative. On top of a bed of white cotton wool lay the severed right-hand ring finger of a young woman. The nail had been painted with multicolored dots on a clear nail polish, obviously done professionally at an expensive nail salon. The finger was still wearing a diamond ring that sparkled and flashed under the ceiling lights.
A ring that I recognized.
Chapter 37
I examined the severed finger, aware that I’d last seen the ring being worn by Natasha Sulonbekova, back at her apartment. There was no way of knowing if the finger was hers or not; I’m no forensic expert. But I was willing to gamble a week’s wages that my old friend Kenesh Usupov, Bishkek’s chief forensic pathologist, would have told me that it had once been attached to a young woman in her early to late twenties, the nail smooth enough to indicate a lifestyle that didn’t involve picking potatoes but went in for elaborate manicures on a regular basis.
The mutilation, or amputation if you wanted to be impersonal about it, suggested a high level of surgical skill, or at least experience. The white nub of the exposed bone was undamaged, and the flesh around it was cut rather than torn. That told me that the job had been done with a single action, without the tentative sawing and hacking of an amateur. Worrying to think that the man with the scalpel had enjoyed a lot of practice.
I held the box up to my nose and sniffed at the finger. The faint scent of blood and raw meat, with no underlying flavor of decay and a degree of rigor mortis told me that the finger had been severed recently, probably within the last twelve hours. The absence of any major bloodstain on the cotton wool suggested that the finger had been left to drain before bein
g carefully packed and delivered.
I looked underneath the cotton-wool bed, but there was no note in copperplate handwriting, no scrawled mobile number. I replaced the lid, wiped it free of my fingerprints using a kitchen towel, looked around and wondered where to put the box. Finally I decided on the fridge. Perhaps not very respectful, but I couldn’t think of a better alternative. It was that or the sink disposal unit. And if she was still alive, Natasha would certainly want to reclaim her ring, maybe even see if her hand and finger could be reunited.
I’d left too many fingerprints all over the apartment to consider trying to remove them all. I could always argue that Natasha was a fellow countrywoman, and that I had met her in my diplomatic capacity. If the police wanted to assume that was just a cover-up for an illicit affair, that was no problem for me. Which reminded me about the photos that Natasha had taken. Presumably they were still on her phone, and the phone was with her. Which meant they could be used as leverage to set Tynaliev against me.
I groaned; the case was growing ever more unlikely to do me any favors.
I pulled the door shut behind me, taking the back stairs so as not to give the watchman another opportunity to identify me in a line-up at some future date. Hopefully, all Kyrgyz people looked the same to him.
The street was empty, as such residential areas usually are late at night. The green illuminated sign of a cruising taxi was the only sign of life. I raised my arm, saw it pick up speed and move toward me. I let my hand drift toward my gun, just in case this was a set-up by the Chechens, but the Pakistani driver wore a taxi uniform and looked genuine enough.
I clambered into the back seat, the ice-cold air conditioning making the sweat on my body raise goose bumps, gave him an address.
The Vista Hotel.
A Summer Revenge Page 15
