A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  We headed east along Chui Prospekt, past the power station with its veil of smoke hanging in the air. I kept one eye on the mirror, but traffic was light, and I was pretty sure we weren’t being followed. Saltanat directed me to the outer edge of Bishkek, towards where a rash of new houses was springing up. The potholed road was replaced by a rutted dirt track, and we bounced and lurched from side to side. Now would have been the time for Aydaraliev to make his move, but Saltanat had her gun pressed firmly into his belly, ready to cut him in half if he tried anything.

  We arrived at a large three-storey house, surrounded by a two-metre wall. Someone must have been watching for us, because the blue ornamental gates swung open as we approached, and I steered the car through the gap. The gates immediately closed behind us. I parked beside the front door, and got out of the car.

  A guard immediately frisked me, while another pointed his Kalashnikov in my direction. They dragged Aydaraliev out of the car and searched him, much more thoroughly. When they were satisfied, they led the two of us inside. A wooden staircase spiralled up to the first floor and down into the cellar. Other than that, the entrance hall was completely empty. We were pushed forward into one of the rooms at the back, told to sit on the floor. For a safe house, the place seemed pretty basic. There was no heating, and our breath hung in the sour air like steam.

  Saltanat walked in and leant against the wall. She’d left her Kalash in the car, but the two guards who flanked her had more than enough firepower. It struck me that the pakhan wasn’t their only prisoner, and Saltanat had no more reason to feel friendly towards me than she did towards the old man. I remembered she had been sent to kill me, and my stomach gave a lurch.

  ‘No point trying to remember your way here again, Inspector.’

  Maybe she meant I wouldn’t be leaving here again, or the place was only a temporary bolt-hole. I suspected that the pakhan wouldn’t be leaving at all. If so, he was showing no signs of it worrying him. He was a murdering bastard, but I had to admire his balls.

  He levered himself up from the floor and walked towards Saltanat. The guards tensed, and I braced myself for catching a bullet in the crossfire, but Aydaraliev held his hands apart, stood in front of her.

  ‘I know you’re a torpedo, you know I’m top boss, a vor v zakonye. Let’s not pretend. I don’t expect you to let me walk out of here with my cock in my hand. It’s not in my nature to give out information. You put a bullet in my head, then you get it quick from my followers. Same shot, behind the ear, guaranteed.’

  He paused and looked at Saltanat without blinking. His face could have been chiselled out of granite for all the emotion he showed.

  ‘Or, you give me shit. The pliers. The hammer. The usual. I know. I’ve used them myself. That happens, they find my body, you get worse. Nipples scissored off. Make a movie of you getting gang-fucked front and back by my boys and your tits hacked off, send it to your family.’

  He told her this with as much emotion as if he’d been explaining how to distill extra-strength home brew, then gave a gesture of resignation; all this was out of his hands now.

  ‘Or one last option. I should be grateful, you showed me that I’ve let things slide, maybe got a bit complacent in my old age. Employing useless pricks like Yuri, and those two clowns who let you stroll up and take them. You let me walk, all is peace.’

  He looked around the bare room, weighing up whether the beatings and killings, the drugs and the bribes, the dacha and the money, had all come down to this, dying against stained and peeling wallpaper in a bitterly cold house.

  ‘You drive me back into town, we draw a line under all this nonsense. But I have to have a little taste of something for my trouble, you know that. Otherwise, someone starts whispering, “Maksat, he’s getting soft, lets some pussy take him for a ride, and in his own fucking car.” And I can’t have that.’

  ‘So what do you want, top boss?’

  The pakhan gave another of his mirthless smiles, his eyes considering the odds that he might get out of here alive. He looked over in my direction.

  ‘His head.’

  Chapter 34

  Saltanat looked as if she was considering the option. I wondered what my chances were of getting a Kalash off one of the guards, giving the room and everyone in it a severe chastisement, then getting out and through the gates alive. I didn’t rate them. I didn’t like the long silence from Saltanat either. I’m not stupid enough to think that a night passed out drunk next to someone constitutes romance, but she and I were at least supposed to be on the side of the men with the white hats.

  ‘Not good enough, Maksat,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t help me get what I want to know. Who’s killing these people, and why? You walking out of here with your mouth shut isn’t going to happen. You think your shitty little gang can get to me? I had no trouble getting to you, did I?’

  She cracked her knuckles and I realised I was involved with a truly dangerous woman.

  ‘Give me your hand.’

  He stretched out his right arm, and she took his hand in hers, almost tenderly.

  ‘You know, us Uzbeks, we’re pretty straightforward people, not like you shaman-following Kyrgyz. To us, a storm is just a storm, a mountain just a hill grown too big for its own good. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look into the future.’

  She turned his hand over and ran her forefinger over the scars on his palm, inspecting the twisted and ripped flesh where his fingernails had once been. When she spoke, it was with sadness.

  ‘You suffered a great deal at the hands of the Inspector’s predecessors. Your hands are testament to that. But I can read more than your past here, Maksat. I can see your future, see you opening your heart to me. Because you’ve finally arrived at the place where we bury strangers. You’ve been brought here by the voices of the dead.’

  She nodded at the two guards, who took the pakhan by his arms. His face was a mask of resigned defiance, as if he’d always known that this is how it would end. For a moment I was reminded of my mother, the same absolute refusal to submit, the identical unwillingness to accept that anything can exist greater than your own strength of will.

  ‘I had seventy years. A lot more than you will have.’

  Saltanat remained unmoved, then one corner of her mouth twitched upwards, and I realised that I’d never seen her smile.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to look around the house. Not very interesting architecturally, and the decor leaves a little to be desired.’

  She reached for a corner of the paper peeling away from the wall and tugged at it. The paper was damp and ripped with no resistance, revealing spots and blisters of mould and damp seeping through the plaster. I thought of the nails torn out of the pakhan’s fingers, and felt sick.

  ‘I thought we might start with the cellar.’

  *

  We were at the top of the stairs when Aydaraliev made his move. The stairs wound down around a central post, and there was no handrail on the inner edge. So it wasn’t difficult for the old man to elbow one guard off-balance, then smash his fist into the guard’s shocked and open mouth. The Kalash skittered and tumbled down the stairs, and came to rest on the half-landing. The pakhan moved fast, hands reaching out for the barrel.

  But the other guard was just as fast, and launched a savage kick at Aydaraliev’s ankle. The old man grunted in pain, and lurched back towards the wall. And by then the first guard had recovered, jumping down on to the landing and sweeping his gun back into his arms.

  ‘Surely you don’t want to leave already, Maksat? The tour’s only just begun.’

  And then we were at the bottom of the stairs, pushing through a doorway, along a narrow unpainted hallway, and towards the furnace room at the back. Smudges and smears of coal streaked the floor, while the walls were black with coal dust. The furnace was made from rough cast iron, with a small glass window where coals would normally glow and burn. But that night, the furnace, like the house, was cold and empty.

  A coal hammer, a pair of
pincers with which to feed the furnace, and a heavy spade leant against one wall. Aydaraliev’s eyes widened as he spotted them. He’d been in cellars like this before, used tools in ways for which they were never meant.

  It takes very little to hurt a man to the point where he talks, wants nothing more in the world than to say the words that make the agony go away. Small, innocent things: a sliver of wood, a pair of nail scissors, a needle. That’s all you need to make a man weep and scream and piss himself.

  Small things, like the rogue cells that feasted on Chinara’s breast, devouring it like a child turned cannibal, dragging her down into the earth.

  I could taste raw meat in my mouth at the thought of what was to come.

  ‘If I’d known we were having guests, I’d have had the furnace lit, Maksat. Keep you warm; at your age you don’t want a chill.’

  Her use of his first name belittled him, stripped him of the prestige and dignity he’d taken as his due for so long. She spoke patiently, as if talking to a retarded child, someone who needs everything explained from start to finish using single-syllable words.

  ‘Saltanat, this isn’t going to help.’

  She turned to look at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Aydaraliev set his jaw.

  ‘No?’ she said.

  ‘Look at him. He’s tough, he won’t talk easily. But he’s old. Probably a bad heart, vodka, a papirosh in his mouth for the last sixty years.’

  Now there was an amused look on her face.

  ‘Don’t tell me Murder Squad’s finest is worried about his civil liberties. I’m surprised you’re not insisting on the first punch. Or maybe you’ve forgotten about the headless cops?’

  ‘I’m just saying killing him throws more shit at the fan. How many more enemies do we need while we try to solve this?’

  She raised her eyebrow, and the scar that furrowed it gleamed bone-white.

  ‘We, Inspector? I don’t recall us partnering up.’

  She looked over at Aydaraliev, then back at me.

  ‘What makes you think you’re not in for more of the same? Remember, I told you I was sent to deal with you, da?’

  I hadn’t forgotten, but I had hoped she might have.

  She took down the pincers from the wall, tested them by snapping the jaws together. The snick of the blades meeting was thin, unremarkable. You wouldn’t hear it above a scream or a curse.

  She ran her thumb along one edge.

  ‘The trouble with these is they get blunt so easily. So it’s much harder to cut through something, takes longer too.’

  ‘Just get on with it,’ Aydaraliev snarled. ‘If this is meant to terrify me, try harder.’

  Saltanat flashed a brilliant smile, and I could have sworn that her eyes sparkled.

  ‘I wouldn’t waste my energies, pakhan. Everyone in the stans knows how tough you are. So I thought we’d just chat, and I could persuade you to do the right thing.’

  Aydaraliev gave a sharp bark of a laugh and spat on the floor, his phlegm quickly absorbed by coal dust.

  Saltanat’s smile never faltered as she reached into her pocket and took out her phone.

  ‘I’m a long way from home, pakhan, you know how it is, you miss your family and friends. But these new phones, you can even get real-time video on them now.’

  She held the phone in front of Aydaraliev, angling it so that we could both see the screen.

  ‘Of course, I’m not old enough to have a grandchild. But you are.’

  It was hard to see from where I stood, but I could see that an image of a young girl filled the screen. Aydaraliev said nothing, but his lips narrowed.

  ‘Ayana, isn’t it? Such a pretty name. A real charmer. Nearly twelve, she’ll be a woman soon.’

  The girl on the screen waved and was suddenly pulled away off-screen. Her image was replaced by that of a burly man, who grinned, revealing a row of gold teeth. He was unshaven and thuggish, and neither I nor her grandfather were in any doubt about the implied threat, or what would happen if he didn’t talk.

  Saltanat switched off the phone, and stood in front of the pakhan. He stared back at her, his eyes black with hate, but there was a tremor in one corner of his mouth. She pulled the hammer off the wall; one face was flat and blunt, the other tapered to a point.

  ‘It’s your own fault really, Maksat. I know that we could give your spine the xylophone treatment, play dentist’s visit, even smash your balls into pancakes with this hammer, and you wouldn’t sing to us. You’d bite your own tongue out and spit it at me first, right?’

  Aydaraliev said nothing, but from the slump in his shoulders I could see Saltanat had won.

  ‘So here’s the deal. You tell us what you know – everything you know – and she’ll go home tonight. And still be a virgin, to be bride-stolen by some idiot with more balls than sense. Otherwise,’ and she pounded one fist on another, the Russian gesture for fucking, ‘well, my guys have cameras, and all the other equipment to make a very special film, the sort that’s very popular on the internet. Nipples scissored off, tits hacked off, I believe you said. They’re small of course, her still being just a girl, but they’ll be sensitive enough. What would your gang say about that? Must be hard to owe allegiance to a pakhan who can’t protect his own family.’

  Aydaraliev nodded.

  I felt vomit rise in my gut and burn my throat, imagining a devochka screaming, begging, her parents being held down and forced to watch as their world was stripped bare of everything decent and innocent. I wondered if Saltanat was human, or merely a psychopath. If she was a torpedo who kills to order, you’d have to be on her hit list, money in the bank. If she was a psycho, then no one would be safe until she’d been put down without mercy.

  Aydaraliev looked round at us, stopping at me.

  ‘What do you think of this, Inspector? This is how you do your business? This makes you better than me? Maybe even worse?’

  ‘I don’t have any more to say than you do,’ I answered, knowing that it was a cheap answer; weak, the way that I seemed to be around Saltanat. I stumbled over my words, shut my mouth. I could have made an argument for this being the quickest way to solve the case. But silence is one, or both, of two things: consent and the desire to survive.

  ‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ Aydaraliev said, holding his hands wide. ‘If I’m going to talk, let’s not do it in a fucking coal cellar. If you’re going to plant lead in my skull, treat me like a man.’

  Chapter 35

  Saltanat led us up to the ground floor, into a room at the back of the house, bare as the others, with only three kitchen chairs for furniture. She motioned for the two of us to sit down, while the guards watched from the door.

  ‘It’s not a lot to ask for, pakhan,’ she said, and I noticed that she’d switched back to the honorific. ‘We want to sort all this trouble out and end it. It’s bad for my business, and it has to be worse for yours. In exchange? You get to foot the bill for your granddaughter’s wedding feast a few years from now.’

  She produced her cigarettes, offered the pack around, then lit up. Her smile was encouraging, her eyes trusting.

  ‘So tell me. Who? And, more importantly, why?’

  Aydaraliev hesitated. He’d spent his entire life living by vorovskoe blago, the thieves’ code, and talking about Circle of Brothers business was a major taboo for him. Saltanat remained silent: she knew that this was the point where he would either break and talk or defy her to do her worst.

  ‘I can’t tell you why,’ he finally said, ‘and I can’t tell you very much about who. Wait –’ and he held his hand up as Saltanat frowned. ‘I’ll tell you what I can. And after that, I walk.’

  He lit one of her cigarettes, inhaled deeply.

  ‘You know I’m one of The Twenty,’ he said, ‘one of the Circle of Brothers. That’s no secret; every cop between here and Moscow knows that. I’m inner circle, but not the Inner Circle. And when they ask me to do something, I tell my boys and it gets done.’

  ‘Like a serv
ant?’ Saltanat asked, and there was a mocking tone in her voice.

  Aydaraliev frowned, but decided to ignore it.

  ‘I give my advice to the Inner Circle, they appreciate my knowledge, act on my suggestions. And we all make money. But sometimes, they want a particular course of action following, without the need for explanation. And that’s how it was in this case.’

  Saltanat leant forward, her eyes never leaving the old man. Maybe I was being cynical, but I suspected we were about to get a bigger snow-job than Bishkek gets all winter.

  ‘You were ordered to kill Yekaterina Tynalieva?’

  ‘No one orders me to do anything,’ the old man snarled. ‘We’re a brotherhood, we help each other, one hand washes the other. Say my brother in Tashkent or Almaty needs a favour doing here in Kyrgyzstan. He asks me, respectfully, and if I can, I help him. Then, if I need something – or someone – taking care of in their country, well, that’s what brothers are for.’

  ‘So you killed Yekaterina?’

  The pakhan shrugged.

  ‘I was also asked to supply a dead child, one unborn, a boy. I didn’t ask why, and no one volunteered to tell me.’

  His matter-of-fact tone sickened me. He knew that I’d seen the carnage under the trees, the humiliation and mutilation, the frozen stare searching for stars between the trees. For a moment I wondered if it was Aydaraliev who had stolen my photo of Chinara, and I pictured myself squeezing that chicken neck until his eyes burst and his head rolled loose upon a snapped spine. I dug my nails into my palms, reminded myself that the most effective interrogations are when you only have to keep quiet to hear the whole story. But sometimes, you have to speak out.

  ‘That would be from the woman murdered over by Karakol? Umida Boronova? Nineteen years old? Pregnant, alone, in the dark, terrified? You didn’t even know her name, did you? Just another piece of meat to you, thrown to the wolves you pretend are your friends. But really, you’re shit scared of them, aren’t you? Just another fucking bully saying that the big boys did it and then ran away.’