A Killing Winter (19 page)

My
hand was only trapped between the two hot plates for maybe twenty seconds, but long enough for the pain to flash through my arm and emerge as a scream from my throat. I tugged desperately at the handcuffs. But I was held tight. Then the pain was out of control, and I smelt the flesh on my hand as it cooked.

Leather Jacket opened the grill, uncuffed my hand and plunged it into a bucket of water. The shock was so great, I screamed. My heart felt ready to throw itself out of my chest.

‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You’d send that back in a restaurant for being underdone.’

I took my hand out of the bucket and looked down. Dark crimson burn lines followed the pattern of the raised grooves of the grill, deeper across my knuckles. My skin had already started to blister and turn an angry red. The soft meat of my palm looked raw, skinned, like a peeled blood tomato. I tried to clench a fist, and the effort flooded my mouth with vomit.

As soon as I could coax breath back into my lungs, I sat very still. The entire centre of the universe had become the closeness of my hand to the grill. Nothing else was in focus; not the killings, not Saltanat, not Chinara.

Leather Jacket poured more oil on to the machine.

‘Not hot enough yet, give it a couple more minutes and then we can really get cooking.’

I did my best to muster some courage, some defiance.

‘Shouldn’t you ask me the questions first? I refuse to answer, then you start to torture me.’

Leather Jacket grinned, and his gold teeth glinted under the bare light bulb.

‘You call this torture? Anyway, once they’ve had a little taste, people get much more cooperative. Why waste time?’

The reek of my hand was making me nauseous, and I wondered if I was going to faint.

‘I get the message. You can turn that off and ask away,
droog
,’ I said.

Leather Jacket considered this, and pushed the grill to one side. He raised the lid, so I could see the oil bubbling on the metal, and then spat. His phlegm splashed and sizzled, burnt off in seconds. I thought of the
krokodil
bodies I’d seen, with flesh gnawed away down to bare grey bones, and knew that would happen to my hand next time. I wished George Foreman had stuck to making his money hitting other black men in the ring.

‘We’ll leave the grill just here. If I don’t like your answers.’

He cocked his head and looked up at the ceiling.

‘Your girlfriend’s obviously the well-brought-up type, doesn’t talk with her mouth full, eh?’

I didn’t reply, but the silence from upstairs hung over us like a shroud.

I remembered the smoothness of her back under my hand. I wondered if my hand would feel it again, ever feel anything again. I wondered who would find my body, and if they’d bury me next to Chinara, in the clean air and solitude of the mountains.

‘What do you want to know?’ I asked.

‘For a start, who killed
vor v zakonye
Aydaraliev?’

I didn’t see any point in lying. I’d no loyalty to men who came to my country and acted as executioners.

‘Uzbek Security Services. Two men. I don’t know them, never seen them before. Probably halfway to Tashkent by now.’

He nodded. My answer made some sort of sense.

‘Who gave the order? That
pizda
upstairs?’

I didn’t answer; I hadn’t yet reached the point where I’d betray anyone or anything to keep the hot metal away from my hand. But I was close. So I shrugged.

‘Well, she’ll wish she was dead after Azad and Syrgak finish with her.’

He sucked his teeth, considering his next question. I could tell he’d never done this before: a good interrogator says as little as possible. Silence, as much as anything else, makes the accused betray themselves.

‘What do you know about the murders?’

‘Your
pakhan
boasted about spreading “terror and confusion”. It’s a quote from a speech by Lenin before the Revolution. About how to overthrow the Tsarist government. And how to keep power once you’ve gained it. That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?’

Leather Jacket rubbed at his arm, and I suspected that the
krokodil
’s teeth had just taken a tighter grip.

‘Go on.’

‘This is too big, too dispersed, for it to be a single team. Killings in Osh, Karakol, here in the city. Across the border. Maybe even on the Russian airbase. There’s big money behind this, for sure. But more important, there’s also big ambition.’

‘Go on. Whose?’ Leather Jacket said, but I sensed the uncertainty in his voice.

‘That’s all I have. You’ll know more than me; after all, you were close to the
pakhan
.’

‘Not as close as his tongue was to his teeth.’

Now I realised why they were here, why my hand throbbed with a raw pain that pulsed with each beat of my heart. It wasn’t revenge for the loss of their beloved leader. It wasn’t some obscure part of the criminal’s code demanding blood for blood.

It was the hunt for money.

‘He didn’t tell you where the payment is, did he?’ I said. ‘All that cash, stashed away, waiting for somebody to stumble on it by accident, and buy the villas and BMWs that should be yours.’

And I laughed, and I kept on laughing even after his punch snapped my head back.

It was all starting to come clear; finally, I spotted a motive behind everything.

‘Your
pakhan
was a fool,’ I said, wiggling my tongue against a loose tooth, ‘so greedy, he couldn’t see he was selling his own downfall. And not just his, yours too. All the gangs in Kyrgyzstan, all working for the big guy who will wipe you all out.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he snarled. ‘You’re full of shit.’

‘Put the grill away and I’ll tell you. Explain in simple words that even a
krokodil
like you can understand.’

‘Why don’t I just cook you one bite at a time? Put your fingers on a plate and make you chew the meat off them? You’ll talk then.’

‘But maybe I’ll collapse, have a heart attack, die without you hearing what you want to know. Where will that have got
you? And just how pleased will your bosses be? All those millions missing because you like to smell meat cooking?’

I saw that Leather Jacket wanted to press my face against the sizzling grill. Thug he may have been, but he wasn’t stupid. Reluctantly, he took the grill off the table and went to disconnect it from the generator.

Which is when I grabbed the bucket with my free hand and hurled it at him.

The water hit him, the grill and the generator at the same time, conducting direct current through him and to earth. The plastic casing of the socket exploded, and he fell backwards, his fingers frying and fusing to the grill. The room filled with the sour scent of iodine and boiling blood.

Leather Jacket danced from foot to foot, to an unseen, insane rhythm, jaw wrenched open by the voltage racing through him, a tuneless song spilling from his mouth. His jacket started to char and smoulder, as the lining caught alight. Then his hair was a torch, small flames dancing like a crown around his head. His hips jerked backwards and forwards, in a manic imitation of fucking, the grill still gripped tight in his hands.

A final grunt drove the air from his body, which performed one last convulsive spasm and lay still.

I knew better than to go through his pockets for the handcuff keys; the grill was still plugged into the generator, with the cable’s bare wires emitting blue-white sparks and flashes. Instead, I focused on pulling the chain around my leg away from the clasp set into the wall.

With the chain wrapped around my free hand, I used what leverage I could get with my feet against the wall. I tried to ignore the pain from the chain cutting into my burnt flesh,
but there was no give at all. I kicked at the steel of the wall hook, but it was sunk deep into the brickwork.

I was still kicking, hoping to dislodge some of the plaster, when I heard it.

A scream from the bleakest, blackest depths. Coming from upstairs.

For
a couple of seconds, I froze, and I was in the hospital, beside Chinara as she screamed for the morphine to dull the bite of the tumours devouring her.

I was yelling down the corridor, ready to kill whichever uncaring attendant had slipped out for a few drags of a
papirosh
. I was lying beside her, holding her while her nails, made brittle and thin by the drugs, splintered and cracked as they dug into my arm.

She’d howled over and over again, unaware of anything but the fire consuming her, the noise from her throat sounding as if a wolf had made its way down from the mountains and was roaming the hospital in search of food . . .

*

Syrgak burst through the door, his mouth open, streaming with blood, white stumps of shattered teeth glinting through a crimson mask.

‘Boss, the bitch, she just –’

He stopped at the sight of the
vor
, flames flickering from his jacket, blue flashes from the grill sparking against his body.

I tugged on the chain with the last of my strength, felt the plaster finally give way, lost my balance, tumbled back against the table. I swung the chain over my head, building up momentum, took aim, then released my grip. The metal reeled out across the room, the sharp spikes that had held it in place embedding themselves in Syrgak’s face.

He gave a high-pitched gasp of surprise, then a howl of anguish as he tried to dislodge the spikes wedged deep in his right eye and cheek. He whimpered over and over, a keening wail that made me sick to my stomach, calling to his mother to help him.

I threw up, uncontrollably, emptying my guts. And I remembered how Chinara would vomit after each treatment, her body shaking with the retching that overwhelmed her, how I would hold the bowl up to her mouth, and wipe the rank sweat away from her face.

Syrgak had both hands covering his eyes and cheek, working out just how ruined his face was.

I still had one hand cuffed to the table, but I used my free hand to pull the leg chain towards me, making sure it didn’t touch the water on the floor. I grasped it about a metre from the business end, and got ready to swing it once more if Syrgak came over to finish me off. The adrenaline was hurtling through me; one of these two shitheads must have butchered Shairkul, Yekaterina, Gulbara – and who knew who else?

But if I killed Syrgak, the trail died. And this wasn’t just about avenging the dead women.

I gripped the chain tighter, picturing how the heavy steel links would coil around Syrgak’s face, and I realised I wanted to flog the
sooksin
and flay every inch of skin off his worthless hide.

Once he’d told me what I needed to know.

Syrgak let out a bellow of pain and rage as his fingers told him he’d never be a male model, and he glared at me with his one remaining eye. Unless he was armed, it was a stand-off – at least, until one of us was overwhelmed by pain.

I thought of Saltanat lying dead and butchered upstairs at the hands of these two, and began to wonder if revenge wasn’t enough of an ending. Fuck catching the big guys.

That was when the door swung open again.

‘I
thought you were dead,’ I said, as Saltanat staggered through the door.

‘Sorry to disappoint,’ she rasped, her voice sounding torn and ripped. She looked like shit, a long streak of blood smearing her cheek and around her mouth. Her shirt was ripped and her bra hung in two halves, dangling where it had been torn apart. There was a purple bruise on her forehead and the knuckles of her left hand were swollen and dislocated. She was also naked from the waist down.

There was no time to swap anecdotes, because Syrgak lumbered towards her, face streaming blood down his cheek. He swung at Saltanat, who ducked, pivoted and lashed out with her foot. She connected with Syrgak’s groin and, as he doubled over in pain, grabbed his shoulder, slammed him head first into the wall, once, twice, and then brought her elbow down on to the nape of his neck.

Syrgak’s vertebrae splintered and cracked like twigs snapping in a midnight frost. As he collapsed to the floor, his face dragged down the wall and left a vivid red smear, like a child’s first attempt at painting. And then the only sound to be heard in the room was the breathing of the two people left alive, and the sizzle of flesh cooking on the grill.

‘Handcuff keys are in his jacket pocket. But careful, he’s hooked up to the mains.’

Saltanat grabbed a chair and threw it against the generator, dislodging the bare wires and breaking the circuit. She
checked one pocket, rolled Leather Jacket’s corpse over with no sign of disgust, and found the keys. Half naked, dazed, bleeding, she still seemed more focused and professional than half the uniforms I’ve worked with.

Once she’d freed me from the cuffs and ankle chain, I made a tentative move to hug her. Not out of desire but to offer some comfort, for myself as much as for her. But she held up a warning hand, palm towards me, and I let my arms drop by my side.

Saltanat seemed to realise for the first time that she was almost naked, and looked around for something to cover herself. Streaks of blood on her face dripped down, and I saw that she was crying.

‘Is Azad . . .?’

‘He won’t bother us.’

‘You killed him?’

Saltanat wiped some blood from the corners of her mouth, then nodded.

‘Did they . . .?’

‘Yes.’

Her voice flat, expressionless.

‘Let’s find you a blanket, or something.’

‘I’m not going back upstairs.’

I nodded, understanding. If you’d just been beaten, raped and God knows what else by two psychotic thugs, the last thing you’d want to do is revisit the scene.

‘I’ll go.’

I edged past the bodies on the floor, held out my hand, but Saltanat stared down, totally absorbed. It doesn’t matter how many times you kill a man, whether in the line of duty or not, the dead stay with you, visit you in the long hours before dawn and in the brightest of sunlight. Their eyes stare
at you from the reflections of shop windows, car windscreens, ripples on water. They live with you like elderly relatives with nowhere else to go, sneaking up on you unawares with a tap on the shoulder or a half-heard question. All you can do is remind yourself it was them or you, and keep on keeping on.

My hand throbbed as I climbed the stairs up to the ground floor, and then the bedrooms. It was already swollen up to twice its normal size, and the burn marks looked etched in. The muscles and tendons had tensed up, turning my fingers into a set of hooked claws, and I knew that if I didn’t get medical attention soon, the hand would be next to useless. I tried to remember if it said anything in my employment contract about disability pensions. But since I was weaponless, that wouldn’t matter if there was someone else up there waiting for me.

I followed a trail of blood spots back to an open door. I could see the edge of a bed and, just beyond that, a foot. It didn’t move, and I suspected neither would the body it was attached to. I looked round the doorframe but there didn’t seem to be anyone waiting to attack. There was a washbasin in the corner, with towels hanging from a row of hooks. As I took them, something crunched under my feet, and I looked down to see shards and fragments of a water glass, streaked and stippled with blood. That wasn’t all that was lying there.

I took a quick look at the thing that had been Azan, and saw that his shirt and hair were drenched in blood. I didn’t know who had made the terrible scream I’d heard earlier, but my money was on Azad.

Back downstairs, I handed the towels to Saltanat, looking
away as she knotted them around her waist. They looked like a rather stylish multicoloured skirt, at least from a distance.

‘Mobile?’

‘No. You?’

‘Smashed.’

‘And a gun?’

Saltanat shook her head. So we were without weapons, wounded and in pain, unable to call for help, we’d just killed three members of the most ruthless gang this side of the Caucasus, and I had no idea where we were.

I knew we’d have to get moving, find shelter somewhere. Leather Jacket’s best friend might be on his way over to share a finger or two of the good stuff, and maybe cook one of my fingers into the bargain. I went through Leather Jacket’s leather jacket and came up with a set of car keys. I waved them at Saltanat, with a look of triumph I was very far from feeling, and started to head for the front door.

‘Wait,’ she said, ‘we should search the place.’

‘You’re keen to wait for their friends to arrive?’

She looked at me without blinking, and I discovered again how her eyes had no end to their depths.

‘You’re Murder Squad. Maybe we might stumble across a clue or two?’

I paused, nodded.

‘Five minutes, then we’re out of here.’

In fact, it didn’t take five minutes to search the entire house. All the rooms were empty, except for the basement, which neither of us wanted to revisit, and the bedroom. Under the bed was a black holdall, containing tightly wrapped packages full of a rust-coloured powder.
Krokodil
,
I imagined, maybe twenty thousand dollars’ worth, enough to take a lot of addicts in Bishkek to a painful grave. There was also a gallon-sized plastic jar with a handwritten label in Chinese, full of thousands of small red and yellow capsules. I broke one open, and a grey-green powder spilt out. I sniffed at it, but there was no smell, and it wasn’t a drug I recognised.

I zipped the holdall closed and checked my watch; time to get out of there before the rest of the gang rolled up for their share of rape and torture.

Our good luck held; on a table in the hallway were a couple of Makarovs. We checked they were loaded, and I slung the holdall over my shoulder. If nothing else, I could use it as a bargaining tool.

I pushed the door open and a shaft of pure sunlight darted through the gap. As we stepped outside, I saw that we were only a few blocks away from my apartment. The sunlight was brutal, and my eyes throbbed in sympathy with my hand. A bus clanged past, startling us as we looked for the car.

Saltanat pointed at a beige four-door Audi. I pressed the lock control, and then we were speeding down Ibraimova. Five minutes later, I parked up the street, a discreet distance away from my building, and we headed for my apartment. A passing
babushka
stared at Saltanat’s unusual skirt, spotted the guns in our hands, and decided that none of this was any of her business.

Once inside, I locked the door and edged a chair against the handle for extra protection. Saltanat walked into the bedroom and took the stack of towels from the wardrobe. While she was showering, I laid some of Chinara’s clothes on the bed, wondering for the hundredth time when I was going to give them away, thankful that I hadn’t.

I called Usupov at the morgue, and explained to him that I was going to need the morning-after pill, some retrovirals and the strongest antibiotics he could lay his hands on. He agreed and didn’t ask why; his interest is only in the dead.

I bandaged my hand as best I could, made a couple more calls, put my gun on the kitchen table within easy reach, and waited.

It was almost an hour before Saltanat appeared, and the sight of her in some of Chinara’s clothes was an ice pick in my heart. Wearing something other than her customary uniform of black top and jeans, she looked more vulnerable, somehow younger. I had to remind myself that she’d just put down two of Bishkek’s most violent criminals.

‘How do you feel?’

She shrugged, opened the fridge door and pulled a face. A batchelor’s provisions: stale
lepeshka
, a couple of elderly tomatoes and a bottle of vodka. She took the top off the vodka and swilled some around her mouth before spitting it into the sink. She repeated this a couple of times, then recapped the bottle.

The rape hung between us like a curtain. I felt powerless, uncertain what to say or do. I’d seen more than a few sex crimes, but they’d always ended in murder. I didn’t know how to deal with a victim who’s still breathing.

‘I’ve organised some medicine,’ I said. ‘We can pick it up later. Or I’ll go and get it now, if you want.’

She said nothing, stared out of the window.

‘You want to call someone? To take you back to Tashkent?’

Still nothing.

When she did speak, it was in a flat, emotionless tone, as if describing the plot of a boring film peopled by bad actors in which nothing much happens.

‘The big one held me down while the other one ripped off my jeans.’

‘You don’t have to tell –’ I began, but she held up her hand to silence me, and continued to stare out of the window.

‘While he was inside me, he kept telling me about how they’d killed Yekaterina, how they’d just snatched her off Chui Prospekt when she was getting into her car. Outside a club, people walking past, but nobody did anything to help. They already had the foetus, in a Beta Stores plastic bag, like a joint of meat they were taking home to make
shashlik
. They’d driven from Karakol that morning, after killing the village girl. Their boss had told them who they were supposed to target. The Minister’s daughter, she was picked out to be the victim, she wasn’t a random choice.

‘He kept pushing and pushing in me, and he got faster and faster as he was whispering to me how he stabbed her, and how when they’d both had as many turns with me as they wanted, they’d cut me the way they’d cut her. And the big one kept sniggering, the way people do when they hear a dirty joke, and telling the other one to hurry up.

‘And he was telling me about how they sliced open Yekaterina’s belly, how hard it was to cut through the muscle, and then the knife just slid in and her blood spilt out over his wrist, hot and steaming in the night air. And she wanted to scream, as he took her life and spat it away, but his hand was over her mouth, and she could feel the cold snow against the back of her thighs start to melt as her blood warmed it, and her hips were pushing upward against the cold. And
then it all started to go dark for her and the stars started to go out, slowly at first and then faster. And finally they peeled her open and dumped the foetus inside, the way you’d throw spoilt meat into the garbage, and that’s when he came inside me.

‘And I kept telling myself that at least he hadn’t tried to kiss me, to force his filthy tongue inside my mouth.’

I said nothing, but couldn’t help thinking that they hadn’t died hard enough, or slowly enough, or with enough excruciating pain. My hand hurt, and I realised I’d clenched it into a fist.

‘He rolled off me, and the big one moved to take his place. But he couldn’t get hard, so he pushed it against my mouth. He pulled my jaw open, forced himself in. So I bit down, as hard as I could. And he screamed, he was punching the side of my head, and I had to let go. The other one dived at me, and I grabbed the glass on the bedside table and held it out. He tried to pull back, but the glass broke in his face. I slashed at his throat and missed, and he tumbled off the bed. So I used the glass on the big one, and I cut at his neck and suddenly there was blood spurting through the air, and he took his hands away from me and put them to his neck, but the blood kept spurting through his fingers, and down his shirt and on to the bed. He was grunting and choking, bleeding out, his eyes open with panic, and I kicked him away from me.

‘The other one got up off the floor so I lunged at him with the glass, and he turned and ran out of the door. I didn’t know where you were; I didn’t know if you were dead. So I went over to the big one and I stabbed him in the eyes, and then he stopped whimpering and started screaming like an
animal again, and I had to shut him up so I jabbed at his throat and he still wouldn’t stop so I cut his throat again with the jagged edge of the glass, and then he stopped.’

And then neither of us spoke for a long time, as she stared out of the window.

We watched the sky darken and turn all the different shades of blue into night.