A Killing Winter (16 page)

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 servant?’ 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.’

Saltanat flashed me a warning glance, but I was sick of pretending that we were in an ordinary interrogation. Right then, I wanted him to move, stand up, say something, anything that would allow me to beat him to death with my naked hands.

Aydaraliev stared at me.

‘I’ve butchered men who’ve spoken to me with more respect than that. But,’ and he gestured towards the two guards, ‘it’s easy to be brave when someone else can pull the trigger for you.’

‘I’d put one between your eyes if I thought I’d hit anything human in there, not just a lump of tissue floating in shit.’

‘We’ll discuss this another time, Inspector,’ he said, his voice calm and emotionless, ‘when things are a little more evenly balanced.’

I spat, with all the contempt I could show. I thought of all the dead bodies that Aydaraliev had put into the ground, of the agonies of withdrawal from the drugs he’d smuggled, young women he’d pimped dying of AIDS because he refused to let them use condoms with their customers. I put my face close to his, staring into his eyes.

‘Think of your granddaughter when they rip up her insides, screaming for her grandfather to come and rescue her.
Begging them to stop, no, please, don’t, please. And the knife, moonlight shining off the blade, cold metal stinging against her skin, trimming and slicing away. Because that’s what you had done to a nineteen-year-old woman carrying her first child.’

‘Inspector,’ Saltanat said, ‘your outrage isn’t getting us anywhere. And I still want to know what’s behind all this.’

Aydaraliev shrugged, and dropped his cigarette to the floor, grinding it out with his shoe.

‘I told you, I didn’t ask, they didn’t tell.’

He smiled, and I wanted to take a hammer to his face.

‘Is this something to do with Chinese medicine? Smuggling? Supplying raw materials?’ Saltanat asked, and I knew she was thinking about the stories of vitamin pills coming over the Tien Shan Mountains, the ones that contained ground-up human foetuses.

Aydaraliev laughed.

‘You think the Chinese don’t have enough dead babies on their hands? With their one-child policy? They scrape out enough mistakes to fill a thousand pharmacies. No, it was done to create fear. Uzbeks fearing Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz fearing Uighurs. Uighurs fearing Chinese. A circle of mistrust and hatred, you could call it.’

‘What could you hope to achieve?’ Saltanat asked, and there was genuine disgust in her voice.

‘What did I achieve? I got paid, that’s what I achieved,’ the old man said. ‘Don’t ask me what anyone else was hoping for. You want answers to that, talk to them.’

‘So you murdered two women on behalf of the Circle of Brothers?’

He nodded.

‘The other two, I didn’t order their deaths, someone else decided to perform a clean-up.’

I wondered for a moment who he meant, then remembered Shairkul and Gulbara, butchered in their homes, women barely more than girls, who’d not known much else than abuse in their lives, hoping for very little and receiving even less. Shairkul, shivering in the cold outside the Kulturny; I felt a wave of shame at having threatened her. And Gulbara, a nobody who found a body, stole a handbag and ended up with her body hacked in half. I closed my eyes, and wondered if this would ever end.

‘They were working for you?’ I asked.

‘Every pussy you can buy in Bishkek puts a few
som
in my pocket,’ he answered, ‘it’s the way the world turns. Men pay money to fuck, women fuck to get money. But their deaths were not at my hands.’

I pushed the two prostitutes to the back of my mind, a case to solve in the future.

‘I understand that you killed Umida to . . . harvest her. But Yekaterina? She wasn’t pregnant. And you must have known who she was, the shit storm it would bring down upon your head.’

‘She was the one that the contract was taken out on,’ Aydaraliev explained. ‘The other girl, well, it could have been anyone in the same condition, that didn’t matter.’

‘How much was the contract worth?’ Saltanat asked.

‘Two hundred fifty thousand US.’

Even to a
pakhan
like Aydaraliev, it wasn’t small change.

‘And now, unless there’s anything else, you can drive me back to the Kulturny.’

Saltanat considered for a few seconds, then nodded.

‘If there’s anything you haven’t told us, and I find out about it, then we’ll be having another little chat. With your granddaughter’s head listening in.’

‘Listen. I’m not a sadist. I don’t take any pleasure in having anyone extinguished. It’s business, understand? My men were under strict instructions: a swift kill, painless as possible. The rest, the cutting and so on, well, the dead don’t feel what’s done to them. I was asked to cause terror and confusion. Which I did. And that’s all I can tell you.’

Aydaraliev smiled; he knew he’d played his Get Out of Jail card.

Saltanat nodded at the guards, and they started to lead the old man out of the room. At the door, he paused and turned.

‘Tell me, Inspector, have you ever taken a woman? I mean, really taken her?’

My face must have reflected my disgust, but he carried on.

‘I don’t mean rape her,’ he said, ‘that’s for low life. But to pound into a woman, give it to her like she’s never had it before, over and over, however you want it, until you’ve broken her spirit, until you just have to snap your fingers and she’ll roll over and face the pillow and present herself. The way you tame a dog, or a horse. By breaking the core inside of them to your will. Until they surrender themselves because there’s nothing left of them that isn’t subservient to you.’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘Perhaps that’s how it was with . . . what was your wife’s name? Chinara?’

‘No.’

My answer was flat, deliberately emotionless, but I wanted to kick the brains out of the back of his head. I wanted to see the walls spattered with the filth that lay between his ears, and then I’d stamp on his foul carcass until I’d shattered
every bone in that wrinkled old flesh, ripped every sinew apart.

‘Well, if you ever took a woman like that, you’d know what power feels like. Like the best orgasm you could ever have. But better than sex, controlling destiny, the little people, all under your sway.’

I said nothing.

‘You’ve held a gun on a man, Inspector, decided if his life is worth the squeeze of a trigger or not. You’ve sent men to hell with the twitch of a muscle. Maybe that’s how you see power, how you achieve it. Are we so very different?’

I remained silent. The trouble is, I know the feeling of invulnerability that a gun gives, knowing you can make people do what you want simply by being the one with the power to kill. Some detectives never fire their weapon in their entire careers; others, like me, only shoot when they have to. But there are one or two just waiting for the wrong move to unholster and start blasting. They’re the ones you don’t want minding your back.

‘The more power you have, and then you lose it, the more you’ll do to restore it, the more you need terror and confusion.’

Another word and I’d slaughter him with my hands, fuck the consequences.

‘I hope we don’t meet again,
devochka
, for your sake,’ he said to Saltanat, and then turned his gaze on me.

It was like staring into the heavy-lidded eyes of a crocodile, unblinking, hungry and totally amoral.

‘And you, Inspector? That I look forward to.’

And with that, he adjusted the hang of his jacket, straightened his shoulders, and walked out of the door, his sneer announcing that, once again, he’d won.

We
sat without speaking until the front door closed. Silence hung over us like an axe poised to descend.

‘You know he won’t rest until he comes after you?’ I said. ‘And if he doesn’t manage to find you, then the Circle in Tashkent will track you down.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Saltanat replied.

‘He’s going to take you threatening his family and just shrug it off?’

‘Of course not. I know he’s not a man to leave a threat or an insult unavenged. He’d have cut my head off right now, if he’d had the chance.’

‘So why won’t he set his team on you?’

Saltanat consulted her watch.

‘Because in about twenty minutes, he’ll be lying face down in a snowdrift outside the Kulturny. Two taps, one in the back of the head to show he was executed, one in the mouth to say he’d talked.’

She raised an eyebrow, the scar curled like a question mark.

‘No one saw me take him, no one knows I had anything to do with his disappearance.’ She pointed an elegant finger. ‘But his gang will remember he had a meeting this evening. At the specific demand of a Bishkek Murder Squad inspector. Think there’ll be any prizes for guessing who they’ll come looking for?’

She was right; a bullet or a blade or a simple hit and run would be just a matter of time. But there’s one thing she
didn’t know. I really didn’t care. I stared at the bare room, the peeling wallpaper, the stained chairs, and I couldn’t imagine a more accurate portrait of my life.

Chinara wasn’t the only one who died that day; I just didn’t stop walking. The weight of death is too great a burden. It had only taken the deaths of five more women for me to discover that.

Yekaterina, Umida, Shairkul, Gulbara, Marina; they were all watching me, just outside my vision, waiting, wondering if I would avenge them. We have an obligation to the dead, a chance at redemption, the price for continuing to live. Six bullets in the Yarygin, one to avenge each of them, and one to spare. And I knew who it was for.

Saltanat surprised me by placing her hand over mine, her touch shockingly warm in the chill of that desolate room.

‘I owe you an apology, Inspector,’ she said, and her voice was, for the first time, hesitant. ‘You understand that I couldn’t know whose side you were on. Everyone can be turned, you know that. For revenge, fear, greed. And for love.’

‘It’s a corrupt world,’ I agreed. ‘Why should I be any different?’

‘I sent Tyulev to find out what you knew, to send you in the wrong direction if I thought you were getting too close to us. I told Lubashov to keep an eye on things. I shouldn’t have relied on a fuckhead like that. He saw Tyulev all secretive and confidential with you, jumped to conclusions, started shooting.’

One mystery solved; I’d thought that I’d been set up by Yekaterina’s murderer, that it might even have been Lubashov, acting under Tyulev’s orders. That still didn’t make me feel any better about killing him.

‘That’s not all,’ Saltanat added. ‘The bullet left in your coat;
a warning to dump the case and leave it to us. We didn’t know where you stood in all this, what you’d been ordered to do.’

I felt a quick wave of anger smash down on me, as if a snow-laden branch had suddenly spilt its burden.

‘And my wife’s photo?’

Saltanat winced at the venom in my voice.

‘Safe. Look on the top of your fridge when you get home. It never even left your apartment. I’m not that much of a bitch. But I had to warn you off, to be sure.’

I reached for my phone, and she took hold of my hand.

‘Who are you calling?’

I smiled, but she could see that it didn’t reach my eyes.

‘I’m Murder Squad, remember? If your boys haven’t already killed him, it’s my job to stop them. Face down? If he’s already dead, I want him facing Usupov on the slab.’

‘He killed a lot of people, Inspector, some of them your own. Isn’t Bishkek a better place with him gone?’

‘I’m not an executioner, Saltanat. It’s not for me to say whether he dies or not.’

‘I don’t think the two dead women he had butchered would think that way,’ she replied, pulling her hand away.

Silence flooded the room again.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, getting up and heading for the door.

‘How exactly? With Aydaraliev in the car, getting ready for his trip to the morgue?’

She laughed.

‘What sort of safe house would this be, if there wasn’t more than one escape route? We’ll go to your apartment.’

As she reached the door, she turned.

‘You can make sure your wife’s photograph is still there.’