A Killing Winter (14 page)

As
the Colonel said, a uniform was waiting for us at the main gate. Kursan climbed into the front, as if by right. He’d been in a police car before, but this was almost certainly the first time he’d not been handcuffed and chained to the D-ring on the floor. Saltanat and I sat on the back seat, as the driver turned the heat down to merely stifling, then headed towards Bishkek.

For the rest of the journey, I tried to work out how a police ID card with my name on it had ended up in someone else’s hands. For a few thousand
som
, paid under the counter, it’s easy enough to get false documents, birth and even death certificates, but no one would run the risk of producing fake police papers unless there was big money or a lot of influence behind it. And, of course, it would be all too easy to set me up if I got too close to something – or someone – I wasn’t supposed to suspect. My ID found under another body, carelessly lost in a rage of lust, for example.

I decided that there was nothing I could do apart from report it, and switched on my phone for the first time in hours. For the next ten minutes, I endured a string of messages from the Chief, each one more hysterical than the last. They started off quite mildly with ‘arsehole’ and progressed to ‘stinking fuckhead’ over the course of a few minutes. It didn’t seem like much of a promotion, but at least it showed he cared. I switched off the phone, and decided to surprise him. That way, we were less likely to have a reception committee waiting.

We were only twenty kilometres outside Bishkek, so I didn’t bother trying to sleep. We bounced around quite a lot, what with the potholed road and the ice on what little tarmac there was. I made sure some of my bouncing included colliding with Saltanat. I was wondering if she’d want to retry the experiment of sleeping with me, but she wasn’t giving off any encouraging signs. Then I pictured the hacked and mutilated woman back in the air force base, and felt ashamed of myself. I’d always sworn I’d never get desensitised to death, and I knew the pain of losing Chinara would never leave me. But the others? It was all too easy to see them as evidence of a crime, part of a puzzle to be solved, rather than ordinary people turned into victims against their will. None of us want to die.

I realised that I had no idea where Saltanat lived. Or, indeed, even her patronymic and family name.

‘Where do you want us to drop you?’ I asked, perhaps too casually.

‘Anywhere you see a taxi,’ was her reply, frosty as usual.

‘No problem to take you home,’ I said.

She simply threw me the hard stare, and I gave up. I decided to organise a plain-clothes guy to follow her, the next time we met.

Even though the storm had stopped, with just a few flecks of snow turning up late like drunks at a party, Chui Prospekt was deserted. The lights were still on at the Metro Bar, with a couple of hopeful taxis loitering with intent, hoping to overcharge a foreigner. She tapped our driver on the shoulder, and we pulled to a halt.

‘I’ll call you,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother following me.’

So we followed her taxi down Chui as far as Tynystanov, where it did an abrupt right, in the direction of the Uzbek
Embassy. As the tail lights disappeared, I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

‘Some woman, that,’ said Kursan. ‘If I was twenty years younger –’

‘And washed more than once a year, and didn’t hang out with every crook in Bishkek, I’m sure she’d look at you with love in her eyes,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t have to be love,’ Kursan said. ‘More than one way to get a
pizda
wet,’ and he spat out a throaty laugh.

‘You want to come and see the Chief with me?’ I asked, changing the subject and knowing that Sverdlovsky Station was the last place on earth that Kursan would want to be.

‘Drop me at Ibraimova; I’ll stay at your place,’ he said.

I started to tell him I didn’t have a spare key, then remembered Kursan’s lock-picking skills. I sighed and nodded.

As we pulled up outside my apartment block, Kursan jerked his head as a sign for me to get out with him.

‘I didn’t want to ask when she was with us,’ he said, and his face was serious, his voice almost a whisper, ‘but what was it you noticed about the body?’

I debated about telling him, then decided he knew so much already, a little more wouldn’t be a problem. We walked a few paces so the uniform couldn’t hear us.

‘A tattoo, very small, professionally done. A Greek letter A.’

Kursan sucked air between his teeth.

‘
Spetsnaz
. Russian Special Forces.’

I nodded.
Spetsnaz
are the toughest, fiercest bastards in the whole Russian armed forces. If Marina had been one of them, whoever killed her must have been a stone-cold butcher. Every way I turned, this case got murkier and more dangerous. At the rate things were going, it wouldn’t be long
before I was lying next to Chinara up in the mountains. Right then, that didn’t seem like a bad idea.

I got back in the car and yanked the door shut against the cold.

‘I’ll see you when I get back from the station,’ I said.

‘If you get back,’ he said, and laughed again, this time with no warmth in his voice.

*

‘Just who the fuck are you working for? Is it that Uzbek bitch? Gave you the starry eyes, and a flash of tit? You’re a fucked-up pussy-head!’

The Chief was closer to the truth than he knew, but that didn’t endear him to me. I stood before his fancy landing-strip-size desk, and wondered how much the eagle statue had cost. He was pissed off with me for not declaring Yekaterina’s death sorted, for getting the Russians mixed up in everything, for following a trail of death all over the country. But most of all, he was pissed off at the grief he was getting from the
nomenklatura
who held his career in their palms.

I waited until his rage subsided enough for him to pour a generous one and give me the nod to sit down.

‘Have you actually found out anything while you’ve been on your winter holiday? I know you’re an idiot, but you’ve never let a sniff of
pizda
hang you up before.’

I didn’t know where he’d got the notion that I was a womaniser, but I supposed I ought to be flattered.

‘What’s interesting, Chief, is what I don’t know.’

He tipped the bottle, nodded at me to continue.

‘I know it’s not a serial killer. Too many deaths, too many locations, too little time to get from one to another, especially this time of year. The murders are connected, but the pattern changes. These women have nothing in common, no
social links, no friendships, not even the same nationalities. According to Usupov, Yekaterina Tynalieva’s murderer had some sort of surgical training, but Marina Gurchenko’s corpse looks as if a drunk had swung an axe in the dark. So not the same murderer; not the same psychologically driven modus operandi behind the killings.’

‘“Modus operandi”,’ the Chief repeated, mock-impressed. ‘You’re a hunter of killers, not a university don. Spare me the fancy stuff.’

I ignored him, and carried on.

‘There are the other deaths to consider. Gulbara, the girl in Osh; she wasn’t pregnant. And Tyulev and Lubashov in the shoot-out outside Fatboys: what triggered that? And what made Gasparian take a header into traffic?’

Secretly, I was sure Gasparian’s suicide had been one of those assisted ones, where two burly policemen throw you off a bridge, but I kept that thought to myself.

‘The biggest puzzle? Find a motive and you usually find your killer, but no one’s claimed responsibility, no one’s stood up and blamed the ills of modern society, or the Russians, or the full moon for why they did it. So that tells me it’s about business, putting the frighteners on people; showing they can get away with anything, so get out of their way.’

The Chief nodded. He may well have thought all this through himself, but he was shrewd enough to know when a pat on the head would get him further than a kick up the arse.

‘The Circle of Brothers?’

It was my turn to nod.

‘Hard to see who else. The question is: why choose this way of sending out messages?’

‘Drugs?’

‘That’s where the serious money is.’

An officer in the Anti-Drug Trafficking Department told me there are a couple of dozen drug cartels across Kyrgyzstan, mostly based on ethnic origins: Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kurd, Gipsy, Chechen, Turkish, Armenian, Uighur and Tajik. Everybody wants a slice of our only growth industry.

‘But they’ve already got their territories agreed upon and divided up,’ the Chief said. ‘So why kick up all this shit storm now?’

I sat back and watched him sip his vodka.

‘Uzbek Security have a theory that it’s political. Someone stirring up trouble between our two countries. You know how Uzbeks always think that Osh should be theirs.’

The Chief pulled a sour face, as if his vodka was too warm, and pursed his lips. Osh is an enclave, housed on a narrow strip of land that lies next to Uzbek territory like a bridegroom’s
yelda
. Half the population are ethnic Uzbek and resent being Kyrgyz; the other half are Kyrgyz and resent Uzbeks getting above themselves.

‘Your girlfriend says there have been Uzbek women killed in the same way?’ the Chief asked.

‘She’s not my girlfriend, but yes.’

‘Deliberate misinformation, my guess,’ the Chief pronounced, stumbling a bit over the words.

I figured he’d had enough vodka, and wearily poured the heeltaps of the bottle into his glass.

‘But why?’

‘If those Uzbek fuckers want a fight, they should come out into the open.’

‘So you think it’s about land, not drugs.’

‘That’s what I pay you to find out, fool.’

I stood up. The Chief stayed slumped where he was, eyes looking like boiled eggs.

‘I’ll ask around about any new alliances, fresh fallouts in the drugs trade, see if that gets us anywhere. But war with another country? I think you’d better talk to the Minister for State Security about that.’

I might as well have been talking to the eagle on the desk. The Chief’s eyes were closed, and he was starting to whistle through his nose.

I put on my
ushanka
, buttoned up my coat and headed out of the building back towards Ibraimova, at a loss about what to do next.

I’m
not a fan of conspiracy theories. I believe the Americans did walk on the moon, there was nobody on the grassy knoll, and the shots fired outside the Kremlin at Brezhnev’s motorcade came from an army deserter, not a deep-cover CIA operative. But this case was a line of distorting mirrors, each reflecting the truth away from me. There was a reason behind the killings; I just had to work out what it was.

I spent the next two days criss-crossing the city, putting the arm on pharmaceutical drug smugglers in Osh bazaar, giving a little muscle to a couple of Uzbek pimps working the parks, treating Alamedin’s biggest heroin dealer to the sight of my Yarygin.

Kursan put me back in touch with Abdurehim Otkur; I told him what I needed and who I wanted to meet. At first he was reluctant to help, but I pointed out the benefits of peace and quiet for everyone on both sides of the border. Then I reminded him that Tynaliev could send a battalion of soldiers to make his life miserable; all it needed was a word from me in the Minister’s ear. Sometimes all it takes is a couple of hints here, a whisper in the right guy’s ear.

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 Kremlin 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.’