A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  Which is how I found myself back at the Kulturny, in the same chair as before, watching the alkashi drink themselves into a stupor not even the moorzilki can stir. I wouldn’t have minded a glass of the good stuff myself, but I needed my wits sharp about me for the meeting I was about to have.

  I checked my watch. Eleven. Already ninety minutes behind schedule. Maybe I should have posted some plain-clothes uniforms nearby, but I wasn’t dealing with idiots like the late unlamented Gasparian this time. My Yarygin was safely locked up back home; for a meeting like this, carrying would be a sure sign I wasn’t there just for the conversation.

  Contrary to what a lot of people believe about the Circle of Brothers, all most of them want is a quiet life, free to pillage and loot and corrupt and steal. Killing each other might be good for business in the short term, but in the long term it gets in the way of the profit motive, and attracts unwanted attention. And the last thing you want to do is wipe out civilians. After all, they’re your customers. That doesn’t mean that the Brothers are good people to do business with, just that they won’t kill you unless there’s a reason.

  The muscle who pushed his way through the door looked like his weapons of choice were his bare hands. Blue prison tattoos danced down his fingers, and his palms looked dipped in ink. A church with three spires was tattooed on the back of his right hand, each spire representing a prison term; just as a church is the House of God, so prison is the home of the thief. From the way his shoulders stretched his leather jacket, when he wasn’t spending his time away getting inked he was lifting home-made weights.

  He might have been bulky, but he wasn’t clumsy. He checked out the dazed clientele, spotted me, jerked his thumb towards the door. His boss wasn’t going to walk down into any shithole like the Kulturny with only one exit, so I trailed behind the giant up into the night air.

  No fresh snow, for a change, but what had already fallen crunched under my boots as we walked towards the SUV parked across the road, in the darkness under the trees. Street lights are a luxury in Bishkek at the best of times. But no muscle would ever give a rival a clear shot, anyway.

  We stopped, he patted me down to ensure I wasn’t carrying a piece or a recorder, and the rear window slid open. The man inside was invisible, but I could picture him from a dozen mugshots over the years. Old, bald, liver spots coating his head and hands like scorch marks. Eyes that gave away only cold calculation. A razor scar down one cheek, furrowing white and jagged into creased skin. And a voice like ice clawing across rock, the result of a bleach gargle administered by a rival now long dead and at the bottom of Lake Issyk-Kul.

  The pakhan, the boss.

  ‘Get in,’ the voice dictated.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’m Murder Squad, not some fucking baby uniform you own, not some cell bitch on his knees in front of you.’

  ‘Big talk, Inspector. I’ve been asking around. What they all say about you? Good at putting down useless fuckheads like Tyulev and Lubashov. My mother could have taken those two. Me, I think that’s all there is to you, talk. When you come up against real men? If you’re trouble to me when you’re sniffing around, maybe you should be head to toe beside your wife.’

  It was the kind of threat I’d expected, just talk, dancing to show that neither of us was intimidated. Except I was. All I had to do was not show it.

  ‘You know whose murder I’m investigating? The only daughter of the man who can shit on your head and flush you down the toilet. It’s in your interests to listen, then give your mouth some serious exercise.’

  The muscle beside me didn’t like the way I was talking. He took a step towards me, and I could see I was in for a three-spired church smashing my jaw. I gave him the cold stare and beckoned him forward.

  ‘Arsehole! You think you can take me? Fuck your mother!’

  He didn’t like that, but he had just enough discipline not to do anything without an order.

  ‘Let me tell you something. You think I’d come looking for you with just my dick in my hand? Check out the roof; maybe you’ll see the night sight of my sniper.’

  The muscle’s eyes darted upwards, in the direction I’d indicated. Biceps are one thing, but you can’t outpunch a bullet. He didn’t spot my sniper, which was hardly surprising, since there wasn’t one.

  The voice from the back of the car was surprisingly patient, but then, this was a guy who’d been smart and ruthless enough to have outlived all his enemies and most of his friends.

  ‘Enough of this shit. I’m not going to put you back in your marriage bed, Inspector. Not yet, anyway. You want to stay out there in the cold, fine. We can talk like this. So tell me.’

  I told him about the murders in both countries, about the mutilations.

  ‘We had nothing to do with any of this,’ he said. ‘We’re businessmen. Nobody needs this on our doorstep.’

  ‘There’s one more killing you maybe don’t know about, and it’s going to fall on us all like a mountain.’

  I described the murder of the female Spetsnaz. I didn’t need to labour the point. Moscow could come back in and smash us into pieces, if doing so would give them an advantage. Don’t believe me? Talk to the Chechens, the Georgians, and see what they have to say. The Kremlin was pissed off enough already about the American airbase; if we had anything worth stealing, they’d descend on us like winter wolves hitting the flocks outside Naryn.

  Silence hung inside the car like the scent of rotting meat. When he finally spoke, it was with an air of resignation.

  ‘Apart from a bit of piss, the world is full of shit.’

  Secretly, I agreed with him, but I also knew who helped make it that way.

  ‘Thanks to your life’s work,’ I replied, tensing in case the three-spired church decided to show me what disrespect can get you.

  ‘I do what I do, you do what you do. We carry the stink of the grave, both of us.’

  I heard him cough, a brutal, rasping hack dragged out of his lungs with meathooks. Maybe cold air didn’t agree with him. Maybe a cancer even more malignant than he was had chosen to lodge inside him, on a strictly short-term basis.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think, shall I?’

  No answer from the SUV, so I carried on.

  ‘Tynaliev’s daughter? Maybe a sex crime, but it didn’t have that smell of testosterone and lust. No frenzy, the way the womb was sliced open. So I figure one of Daddy’s political opponents, or a revenge killing. God knows enough people who would like to piss on his grave. You included.’

  ‘Da, me included,’ and I could hear the scars from the bleach in his words. The voy said nothing, but cracked his knuckles with the same glee he’d use on my skull.

  ‘The girl in Karakol, Umida Boronova. We found her body, not her child. The obvious assumption was that she’d been killed for her baby. I got the whisper that there might be Chinese medicine involved, people paying big money for bigger dicks.

  ‘Then the prostitute, Shairkul, the one sliced and diced. Again, not her baby, so maybe the Chinese medicine theory is right. But why kill women who aren’t pregnant when you can just harvest the babies of those who are? A warning?’

  I shrugged, to hint that I was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Then an Uzbek Security officer warns me off. That’s before someone sets me up, and Tyulev and Lubashov end up on a metal bed. Joy all round; the killer of Yekaterina taken out by brave police officer, end of story. Everyone happy. Except the killings don’t stop. Different places, no connection between the victims. It’s not sex, it’s not revenge, it’s not a solo crazy guy, and it’s not hawking traditional medicines.’

  Silence.

  And then, ‘Go on.’

  ‘The Uzbek woman tells me her government thinks we’re stirring up trouble down in Osh, and my boss thinks it’s the other way round. More dead women, including the one who went south to keep safe. And now the Russian military are involved.

  ‘So I ask myself: the Circle of Brothers don’t want the Kremli
n coming down all mob-handed, looking for revenge and calling it restoring public order. No reason to shit all over what’s kept everybody sweet and plump all these years, is there?’

  A few flakes were starting to fall, tentative, unwilling to settle on the car and provoke the boss’s anger. It would be a long time until dawn, and I wondered if I was going to see it.

  Then the voice scrawled some instructions into the air, breath pluming out of the open window into the dark.

  ‘Hurt him.’

  Chapter 32

  The falling snowflakes, the distant headlights, the wind hustling its way through bare branches had all stopped, frozen into a single moment, slow motion gliding to a complete halt.

  Even before the breath of his pakhan’s order dissolved into air, I’d swung round to face the muscle, my boot slamming into the side of his knee. His whole leg buckled inward at the joint, bent in a way nature never intended, and I heard the kneecap split, like kindling broken to make a fire. At the same time, the heel of my fist shattered his nose, not so hard as to drive splinters of bone into his brain, but enough to stop him in his tracks. His leg unable to support his weight, he toppled sideways. And as he put his hand out to break his fall, I stamped down on it, bending his fingers back to the wrist.

  He gave a surprisingly high-pitched scream, then I was pulling him upright, using him as a shield for whatever might come out of the car, pulling his jaw back to snap his neck if he put up any more fight.

  A long gout of blood spasmed out of the remains of his nose, spattering across the snow, and from the smell, he’d pissed himself. With my free hand, I wrestled the gun out of his jacket pocket and pointed it at the open window.

  ‘Enough, Inspector,’ the voice said, unmoved by the sudden violence. ‘Yuri might be no opposition for you, but you know what I’ll have to do if you kill him.’

  ‘Out of the car, fucker,’ I said.

  I didn’t give a shit how old he was, I wouldn’t have cared if he died shrieking from cancer in front of me. He knew something, and I’d kick it out of him if I had to, until he bled from every hole.

  The door locks clicked open, and the boss slowly dismounted.

  ‘Gun on the floor, now,’ I ordered, taking the gun barrel out of the muscle’s ear and rapping it against his pakhan’s jaw. He held his hands up, showing he was unarmed.

  ‘You think this is a good idea?’ he said. ‘Just as well you have no living relatives.’

  ‘I’ve fucked around too long on this,’ I said, resisting the urge to hammer his crooked stained teeth out of his face.

  The pakhan looked around, slightly puzzled, wondering where the rest of his crew were. I let Yuri slump to the floor, and gave him a little steel-toed kiss just to keep him quiet for a while. Then I focused on the pakhan.

  Maksat Aydaraliev. Seventy years old, deadly as distilled snake venom. He’d ruled the heroin trade through Chui province since before independence. He’d survived the KGB, the State Police, the Anti-Corruption Police, the Drug Squad, two revolutions and anyone in the underworld stupid enough to take him on. His mobile had the private numbers of anyone who was anyone in the White House. He owned sanatoria for Russian oligarchs on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul, and a dozen restaurants and clubs around Bishkek. He was decisive and pitiless. I knew for a fact that he’d beheaded two undercover law officers and sent his trophies to their wives. He was a man ready to kick over the table any time, and fuck the consequences.

  All this in a man who only hit 160cm on tiptoe, who looked as if a strong wind would hurl him as far as the Pamir Mountains, and who had never been seen in anything other than a hand-tailored suit.

  He stared at me, then spat.

  ‘You underestimated me, pakhan.’

  I gave Yuri another peck, this time somewhere between his navel and his balls, and a little more piss stained the snow.

  ‘Is that why you didn’t bring any more brothers along? You thought I’d be easy? Or you know Tynaliev will slice you from arse to armpit if I die before I’ve found his daughter’s killer?’

  Aydaraliev reached into his pocket, and I tensed. He brought out his mobile, and offered it to me, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Want to call him now and ask?’

  It might have been a bluff – anything was possible with Aydaraliev – but right then, I preferred not to tell the Minister that I was no nearer solving his daughter’s murder.

  Aydaraliev’s smile was as brutal as one of our mountain wolves as he put away his phone. Then he looked off to his right, gestured for someone unseen to join us. I was pretty sure Aydaraliev wouldn’t shit in his home territory by killing a Murder Squad, but I tensed myself for what looked like an inevitable bruising.

  We waited for a moment, and then he beckoned again, impatient this time.

  ‘Can’t get the staff?’ I asked. If I was in for a beating, I decided to get a few cheap gibes in first.

  He looked around, ever so slightly thrown off balance. For the first time in who knows how long, things weren’t going according to his very precise and explicit engineering.

  ‘Don’t worry, they’re out there,’ he said. ‘And if they’re not, well, heads will roll.’

  Remembering what he did to the two undercover law officers, I had no reason to disbelieve him. He laughed, the low rustle on the night air like death creeping up on tiptoe.

  ‘So what now, Murder Squad? A tango together in the Sverdlovsky basement? Hope I shit myself with fear? Tell me if I sing like a bird, I’ll live in a cage with wider bars.’

  Suddenly, he was in my face, flecks of spittle landing on my cheeks.

  ‘Listen, Comrade Cunt, all-important Comrade Prick Inspector, when I was twenty-three, they came to my village, took me away. I was just a yearling, years away from becoming top guy, bratski krug. I didn’t have clout, no one to look out for me, no one asking for a little sweetener in their pocket in exchange for me strolling down Chui watching the pretty girls in their summer dresses.’

  He paused and wiped his hand across his mouth.

  ‘You know what happened, Comrade? When I went waltzing in your basement?’

  He waved his hand in my face, and I saw the deformed fingers, missing nails, ancient scars trailing across his palm like albino slugs.

  ‘I didn’t just dance, I was taught how to play the xylophone. Not with a mallet, with a ball hammer. One knuckle, one bone, one joint at a time. And the next day, the next finger. Never knowing which one it would be. And as soon as they started to heal, all twisted and splintered, curved like an eagle’s claws, well, it happened all over again. Nine months before I danced the polka out of that basement. And you know what? I never sang a single note.’

  The same mirthless laugh.

  ‘Those shit-suckers, they broke my right hand in twenty-eight places. Just as well I write with my left hand, eh, Comrade? And once I got out, that wasn’t all I did with it.’

  He shaped his hand in a parody of a gun, jerked the finger, and then blew imaginary smoke from the tip.

  ‘You won’t find any of the uniforms who waltzed with me then walking around today. All in the line of duty, obviously. At least, that’s what the grieving widows and children were told. A tough career, but at least it’s a short one, right?’

  He looked up at me, and grinned, nothing but evil and death in his eyes.

  ‘What can you do to me, bitch, that the real experts couldn’t manage?’

  I heard the crunch of snow behind me, but I never took my eyes off Aydaraliev. My finger tugged back the trigger, up to the pulling point; if I got hit, then he’d be coming with me.

  ‘The Inspector may not be a real expert, Maksat. But don’t worry; I am.’

  A voice I recognised. A voice like honey over ice cream.

  Chapter 33

  Saltanat walked into the SUV’s twin circles of light, cradling a Kalashnikov.

  Aydaraliev looked puzzled for a few seconds, then nodded in recognition.

  ‘I suppose I’ve got Otkur t
o thank for you being here?’ I asked. ‘No secrets from you, eh?’

  ‘Just as well for you, Inspector,’ Saltanat said, her eyes never leaving Aydaraliev. ‘Our friend here always travels with precautions.’

  Aydaraliev jerked his head towards the darkness from which she’d just stepped, then raised an eyebrow. Saltanat nodded in return.

  ‘One of them will wake up tomorrow feeling like Mount Lenina fell on him. The other?’ She shrugged. ‘He won’t be waking up at all.’

  ‘No loss, if they didn’t have the balls to handle a whore like you.’

  Saltanat’s face didn’t register the insult, but she took a quick step forward and rammed the muzzle of the Kalash against his hip. He grunted in pain and put one hand out against the side of the SUV to support himself, staying upright.

  ‘You’re the Uzbek bitch?’ he said, and contempt dripped from every word. Contempt for her as an enemy, a cop and a woman, all three.

  ‘Think of it as warming up, Maksat, some light snacks before we get down to the main course,’ she said, and smiled without warmth.

  ‘It’s fucking freezing, let’s go and discuss this in the warm, over a bottle, pretend we’re friends.’

  ‘Sure,’ Saltanat agreed. ‘I want you to be my guest.’

  She reached down, never taking her eyes or aim off the pakhan, and patted Yuri’s pockets, finding the car keys, tossing them to me.

  ‘You drive,’ she said, ‘and I’ll snuggle up in the back with my true love.’

  And in case I mistook her meaning, she stroked the barrel of her gun.

  ‘Him?’ I asked, looking down at Yuri.

  ‘You give a fuck?’ she said, and motioned our captive into the car.

  Now that she’d mentioned it, I didn’t, but I didn’t want him to freeze to death either, even if he was gang muscle. I made an anonymous call, and organised a patrol car to pick him up and deposit him in a nice warm cell. Then I slid behind the wheel, fired up the ignition and we lumbered out into the night.