A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  I began to get a very bad feeling about this.

  ‘And when you heard about the murder?’

  ‘And the baby in the belly, right, I wondered if there was a connection.’

  ‘We’re on our way to meet him?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘A phone call might have been easier.’

  Kursan laughed at my naivety.

  ‘Get a smuggler to talk to the filth on a mobile? With State Security and the Chinese Border Police tracking every call? Sure. Nothing he’d like more than fifteen years in Bishkek Penitentiary Number One catching TB from all the lifers. Or a bullet in the back of the head, depending which side of the border they catch him.’

  ‘So where are we meeting him?’

  ‘I know where. So you don’t need to.’

  And with that, he turned his attention to driving through the blizzard, peering to see the road ahead, while I stared into the murk and gloom for any idea where the case was going.

  Chapter 11

  For the last hour, I’d been blindfolded, at Kursan’s insistence, bouncing from side to side as the car drove over what was clearly no more than a dirt track. I was bruised, sore and pissed off. My gun was locked in the trunk, ‘to be on the safe side’.

  Finally, I sensed the car slowing to a halt. Some shouting outside, then Kursan removed my blindfold. I blinked, and looked through the windscreen. Fuck knew where we were; it was hard to make anything out, with the falling snow. I suspected I’d fallen off the edge of the earth. Two men, both Uighurs and clutching Makarov semi-automatic pistols, beckoned me out of the car. They both looked as if you could beat them with a scaffolding pole for a day and still not get anything out of them. I opened the door slowly, making sure my hands were always in view. It was freezing, and I pulled my fur ushanka tight over my ears. Right then, a vodka would have been very welcome.

  The thug on the left, whiskery and sullen, reeking of garlic, patted me down, then pointed to the black Mercedes parked nearby. Kursan and I made our way over, the rear window sliding down as we approached.

  ‘Abdurehim Otkur,’ Kursan made the introduction, reaching out to clasp the hand of the man in the back seat. I noticed no one wanted to shake my hand. Abdurehim Otkur was one of the great poets of the Uighur language; clearly I wasn’t supposed to know the real identity of the man in front of me. Reassuring, in a way; if he’d wanted to have me killed, he wouldn’t have bothered with a false name. I watched as he got out of the car, fastening his coat as he did so.

  ‘“We were young when we started our journey”,’ I said, quoting the only line of Otkur I remembered from school.

  ‘“Now our grandchildren can ride horses”,’ he finished the quotation. ‘I’m impressed, Inspector, I wasn’t expecting a man of culture.’

  I did my best to seem modest, while looking Otkur up and down. Burly, above average height for an Uighur, dark, expressionless eyes, with a long face made longer by a knife scar running from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. He noticed my gaze, and drew his index finger down the length of the scar.

  ‘You won’t find my picture in your files, Inspector,’ he said, ‘and you won’t find the son of a whore who gave this to me, either. Not in one piece, anyway.’

  The grin he gave wasn’t reassuring, his scar twisting across his cheek.

  ‘I wasn’t planning on looking for your mugshot, not if you can help me out. Anyway, I assume some obliging squealer back in the Prosecutor’s Office managed to spill coffee on your dossier?’

  ‘Law, always suspicious,’ Otkur said, turning to his thugs, who smiled obligingly. ‘Who can say how these unfortunate accidents occur?’

  ‘The case I’m investigating wasn’t an accident,’ I said, my voice harsh. Back to the business in hand. I was cold, hungry, and my arse felt like I’d been thrashed after eight hours on the road. My gun might have been in the boot of Kursan’s car, but I was still an Inspector, Murder Squad, and people shouldn’t ever forget it.

  Otkur’s face grew serious. He would be a ferocious enemy, cunning, implacable. But then there were plenty in Bishkek Number One who might say the same of me.

  ‘Inspector, Kursan and I do business together now for many years. I don’t like Kyrgyz, he doesn’t like Uighur. But we understand each other. No drugs except for weed, no girls. It’s straightforward, business. But sometimes, shit happens you can’t ignore. That’s when you stand up, be a man. Make sure the scum, the low life know their place, bottom of the shitpile.’

  He paused, and we lit cigarettes. He plumed the smoke out, and I watched the cloud flood through the snowflakes. I guessed we were somewhere the other side of Karakol, up towards the Kazakh border. Before we headed back to Bishkek, perhaps I’d have time to visit Chinara’s grave. Maybe permanently.

  ‘You know Chinese medicine.’

  It was a statement, not a question. I looked over at Kursan, who nodded.

  ‘Only what Kursan tells me.’

  ‘You fuck a Chinese pussy, they go crazy because you’ve got a dick like they’ve never seen before. So, naturally, they complain about their men. So after they’ve given their bitches a touch of muscle to quieten them, the guys start wondering about medicine.’

  ‘Rhino horn, tiger bones, that sort of shit?’

  Otkur laughed, and dropped his cigarette on to the snow, where it hissed for a second.

  ‘Shanghai? Beijing? Maybe you find the genuine article there. Urumchi? The arse-end of China, Inspector, so they make do.’

  I stayed silent.

  ‘Remember, people want to believe. Tell them something is good, it might even be true, if they believe it hard enough. And something they really want, they pay good money for.’

  ‘And they want what?’ I asked, having a good idea of the answer.

  ‘Remember what Genghis Khan said? “There is no greater joy than conquering your enemy, riding his horses, taking his wives and daughters.” Nothing changes; we all want long life, stiff dicks and many sons.’

  I looked over towards the mountains, where the last sunlight was turning the snow blood orange and red.

  ‘What has all this got to do with a murder in Bishkek?’

  ‘You can’t get rhino horn or tiger bones for sex, you go for the next best thing. Something you can harvest, with an endless supply, something that proves a man’s strength.’

  Otkur paused.

  ‘In the border villages, they believe nothing’s as powerful or as virile as an unborn baby boy. Energy untapped, undrained. Harvested fresh while the heart still beats, mother’s blood flowing through its veins.’

  I thought back to the morgue, the unborn child ripped from its mother’s womb, his eyes accusing me of betrayal, and my mouth filled with bile. When I spoke, I sounded weak, incredulous.

  ‘Human foetuses, you mean? Children?’

  He paused and spat. When he looked back at me, his face was grave.

  ‘Women don’t go missing around here. They’re always close to home. Unmarried, they could be bride-stolen. And once they’re wed, they’re a symbol of their husband’s strength, his property.’

  The thugs nodded in agreement. Kursan swore under his breath. Then silence, except for the wind.

  ‘A pregnant village girl goes missing. The other side of the country, the daughter of a member of the nomenklatura is murdered, and another woman’s dead child is dumped in her womb like so much trash. I don’t see the connection.’

  Otkur nodded his head, as if in agreement. The scar on his cheek stood out livid against the bitter cold. I blinked against the snowflakes and turned my collar up, but nothing could warm me against the sour feeling in my gut.

  ‘And you’d be right, Inspector.’

  Otkur’s face was unreadable, his eyes never leaving mine.

  ‘Except?’ I asked.

  ‘The village girl isn’t missing any more. But her unborn child is.’

  Chapter 12

  Otkur told me the story, leaving out no details, his voice calm, mea
sured, but with anger apparent in his eyes.

  Her name was Umida Boronova. Nineteen years old, married just ten months, to Omurbek Boronov. He’d been at school with her, and had asked her out repeatedly, always being refused, unable to stop hoping. So one evening, he and his best friend drank a litre of home-made for courage, drove his battered Moskvitch to the edge of the village, waited for two hours until Umida appeared.

  They grabbed her, screaming and kicking, and drove to Omurbek’s house, where his mother and three sisters were waiting. The women helped Omurbek wrestle the girl out of the car, and dragged her into the single-storey house with the whitewashed walls and pale blue window frames. All evening, they told her what a good catch Omurbek was, how he’d inherit the farm when his father died, about his kindness to his sisters, his respect for his mother and aunts. All the time, Omurbek waited outside in the car, finishing off a second bottle and wondering if the scratches on his face would leave a permanent scar.

  Umida fought, wept, begged the women to let her go home. Again and again, they told her how lucky she was, tried to put the white scarf over her hair to show her acceptance of Omurbek as her husband. They pointed out the fine china, the white linen, the elaborate brass samovar. And finally, worn down, terrified, wanting nothing more than her ordeal to end, Umida agreed.

  And now, a year later, she’d faced something much worse. Missing for two days. The whole village turning out to look for her, knowing that an eight-months-pregnant woman out in a Kyrgyz winter stood no chance of surviving the night. Then the finding of her body, face down in a snowdrift, already half shrouded, arms and legs frozen into position. Lifting up the body, hearing her fingers snap like twigs, blood half frozen into a thick black puddle beneath her, squelching like a boot being pulled out from thick mud. And then seeing the belly sliced open, the gaping wound and absence, the placenta torn, amniotic fluid spilling out in a grotesque imitation of birth.

  Even before the police were called, the word reached Otkur. An important man, a chelovek who could organise the hunt, track down the killer, bring him back to the village to face a justice more determined and brutal than anything a cynical uniform would hand out.

  ‘Can you find out if she’d seen a doctor? Maybe her blood group is on file?’ I suggested, knowing that it was unlikely. Umida was a poor girl from a poor village, with no money for doctors; her mother and the old women would have cared for her during her pregnancy. If you die in childbirth in this part of the world, that’s just how it is.

  Otkur shrugged, walked away a little, made a call. When he turned back, it was to shake his head. There was no easy way to find out if the dead child in the Bishkek morgue was Umida’s foetus.

  I called Usupov, telling him to liaise with the local authorities, to drop Tynaliev’s name into the conversation, terrify the police into action. We were a long way from Bishkek, but not as far as Tynaliev’s reach.

  ‘If you find the man who did this, call me. I’ll make it worth your while,’ Otkur said. So now the Head of State Security and the boss of the Uighur mafia were both after the same man. I would have felt sorry for him if I hadn’t been the one stuck in the middle, with both sides ready to look for a scapegoat if the killer wasn’t found.

  There was no point going to look at the woman’s body. The local custom is to bury someone as soon as possible, and I didn’t need to offend any more people by suggesting an exhumation. The effort of digging a grave in weather like this would have been immense; lighting a bonfire on the hard earth, raking it back to scrape away a few inches, then starting all over again. And the cold would keep the body preserved until the spring thaw; time enough to get someone else to dig her up, if necessary.

  I thought of Chinara, just a few miles away, and winced at the thought of a carelessly handled spade smashing through her cheekbones, or severing the one breast that remained.

  Otkur went back to his car, got into the back seat. His thugs climbed into the front, their Makarovs still vaguely pointed in our direction. A snake of dirty blue exhaust smoke plumed upwards. The number plates were smeared with mud and unreadable; Otkur took no chances.

  ‘What do you think?’ Kursan asked as we got into our own car. He started the engine and turned the heater up, but it had minimal effect.

  ‘The business about harvesting foetuses for traditional medicine? You ever hear of anything like that?’

  Kursan opened his door and spat.

  ‘The slants? Those fuckers will eat anything. I don’t put anything past them.’

  ‘It’s a clever theory, but I don’t believe it.’

  ‘No?’

  Kursan turned to me, interested.

  ‘We’ve got one dead child. And no one would have known whether it was a boy or a girl until after the . . . harvesting. One baby boy isn’t going to build you an international illegal drug empire, is it?’

  Kursan muttered something about his dick being big enough to stiffen the resolve of the entire Chinese nation. I ignored his bravado and looked out of my window. The snow was falling faster now; our footprints were hardly visible. Maybe there were more dead children out there, harvested and then discarded, open mouths silently screaming as they filled with snowflakes. It was a terrible thought.

  ‘Kursan, let’s fuck off out of here before we end up being found in the spring.’

  It was too far for us to drive back to Bishkek, but Kursan knew a woman in Karakol who’d happily give him a bed for the night.

  ‘Listen, and you might pick up a few hints,’ he grinned. The idea of listening to Kursan’s sex life didn’t fill me with relish. But if we didn’t get out of this cold, the only thing that would get stiff was us. Kursan set off down the rutted track.

  ‘No blindfold?’ I asked.

  ‘Weather like this, you’d never find this place again. Why I chose it. No distinguishing features.’

  Unlike the two dead women that I knew about, I told myself, and closed my eyes against the glare of the headlights reflected off the falling snow.

  Chapter 13

  It was a long drive back to Bishkek the next day, but the snow had stopped, and the light was dazzlingly bright, splashing off the Celestial Mountains over on the far side of Lake Issyk-Kul. I’d spent the night dozing on a shyrdak carpet while Kursan drove some elderly lady to vocal heights of delight in the room across the hall. The daylight might have been clear, about the only thing in this case that was. For a moment, I wondered why I put myself through the shit of trying to improve a world beyond redemption or relief. Then I remembered Yekaterina Mikhailovna, forever without a child of her own, snowflakes settling on her upturned face, her belly opened to an indifferent world. Her father, sitting behind a walnut desk that no longer had any grandeur, nor the power to bring his daughter back, cognac after cognac failing to blur the memory of her frozen face on the morgue slab. And fast following, like an autumn storm battling across the Tien Shan Mountains, I thought of Chinara and her last dreadful days in hospital, soiling the bed linen I carried in to replace the hospital’s threadbare sheets, recalling the soup and lepeshka flat bread I took every day that she was too weak to eat.

  Towards the end, as she asked, I brought the embroidered cushion that her grandmother had made as a wedding gift for us, the vivid colours and traditional pattern a dramatic splash against the white sheets and Chinara’s equally pale face. She would run her fingers over the intricate needlework, as if tracing our history together, tentative, the way a child or a blind man touches an unfamiliar face. It seemed to offer a comfort I was unable to provide.

  Every day of her final week, I held her hand, hoping she would squeeze mine, show that she knew I was there, that she recognised me.

  That she loved me, remembered me, even as she slid from her life into my memory.

  It crossed my mind to find the killer, watch his brains turn to fine red mist from a bullet in the back of his head, then turn the gun on myself, put an end to all this. But there’ll be other Yekaterinas, other Chinaras, other unnamed
children. And if I’m dead, who is there left to speak for them, to fight for them?

  ‘You need to find yourself a woman,’ Kursan announced, unexpectedly, after an hour of silent driving. ‘It’s not good to be alone for too long.’

  ‘And what would you know about that? Half the children in Tokmok are probably yours.’

  Kursan grinned at this compliment to his virility, then turned serious.

  ‘Chinara wouldn’t have wanted you to stay single. A man needs a woman, more than a woman needs a man.’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘I’m only saying.’

  ‘OK, and now you’ve said.’

  My temper wasn’t improved by the landscape we were passing through. On our right, empty fields stretching towards the Kazakh border; on our left, the cold slab of the lake. Dotted every few miles were the graveyards that served long-abandoned villages, the memorial stones and brick arches slowly crumbling under the assault of summer heat and winter cold. Sepia photos of babushki in headscarves and old men in black and white felt kalpaks fading under glass roundels, thin strips of weather-faded cloth flapping in the wind. Most of the graves were surrounded by railings, a small metal crescent moon at each corner. Chinara was buried in just such a place, on the outskirts of her village, on a stony outcrop overlooking the river below and the valley that stretches out before rising into the mountains separating Kyrgyzstan and China.

  A peaceful place, if you chose to see it like that.

  *

  Kursan dropped me off at Sverdlovsky Station, but it was well after nine, so the Chief wouldn’t be in his office, and I’d nothing much to report anyway. A dead daughter of one of the top nomenklatura trumps a dead peasant girl from Oblast Issyk-Kul any day. The Chief wasn’t a bad cop in his time but, at his level, the only thing that counts is politics. I didn’t want a drink, but I also didn’t want to be alone. The Metro Bar was too far, and I didn’t want to go to the Kulturny, in case I met Vasily and his crew, and gave them a couple of smacks. But tiredness kicked in and I decided it was time for home, then bed. One thing about the winters here: everything stays preserved, not just the corpses. I knew that, in the morning, I’d drag myself out of bed, hope there was enough hot water for a shower and a shave, reluctantly pull on all the layers of clothing I could find, and set out once more. Or I would if I knew where to go.