A Killing Winter (2 page)

‘This child isn’t hers, Inspector. She wasn’t pregnant. Someone killed her, sliced her open, hollowed her out, and then placed another woman’s foetus there.’

The
light was fading, or at least the grey sludge that passes for light in a Bishkek winter, and it was starting to snow again by the time I unlocked the steel outer door to my apartment, and then the wooden inner door behind that. Most apartments here have the same system; when you don’t have much to steal, you guard what you do have with a passion. Anyone who breaks in here is welcome to the old TV with rabbit ears or the Chinese microwave. I couldn’t care less, as long as they leave the box of photos. I put my gun in the small lockbox by the front door, turned the key and retreated into the kitchenette.

I pulled the window open and checked that the half-litre I had left out on the sill was still there. I could have kept it in the freezer of my fridge but there’s something pleasing about the thought of vodka chilled by the elements rather than electricity. Not that I drink any more, not since Chinara died. I fished out a tumbler from the chaos of the sink, rinsed it, poured a good-sized shot. I stared at the glass for a long time, remembering the days when I drank, the reason why I stopped. A sort of penance, I suppose. Then I tipped it down the sink, rinsed the glass once more, took three steps to the bedroom and lay down.

Years of turning up at crime scenes hadn’t made me stamp on the bottle cap; I’d wrestled with the odd nightmare, sure, the occasional double take as someone walked past me on Chui Prospekt who I could swear I’d stood over the week
before, shot, stabbed, kicked to death. And there were nights drinking beer in some bar with other detectives, telling war stories, and hazy memories of getting back home. Putting the dead at arm’s length. But I told myself I had to do that to keep my edge, to stay on the side of the angels, one of the good guys, an avenger.

Until the day Chinara came back from the hospital.

I knew it was bad from the way she thrust a glass of vodka into my hand before I could sit down, wouldn’t look at me, stared out of the window at the play area below. The rusted slide and climbing frames had been embedded in concrete, but any metal parts that could be stripped had long since disappeared. It looked like some ancient skeleton half unearthed and left to bleach. But the children still found a way to play there – tag or hide and seek – living in the moment, not worrying about crime or where their next meal would come from.

When she finally spoke, it was almost a whisper, so I had to strain to hear.

‘They say it’s a growth. In my right breast. Cancer.’

The vodka seared the back of my throat; I felt anger, confusion and finally fear. Years of visiting apartments at all hours, saying the facts that no one wanted to hear, watching the reactions of others to unexpected death: none of it had prepared me for when death picked the locks and tiptoed into my home.

‘They must be wrong. We’ll get a second opinion. The X-rays must have been mislabelled, it happens all the time . . . they must be wrong.’

Chinara shook her head, and the curtain of long black hair folded back on itself like a crow’s wing. She still didn’t look at me, but continued to stare out over the ravaged playground.
I wanted to hug her, shake her, anything to make this all go away.

‘But what if they’re not?’

Her tone was almost resigned, even worried that I might blame her for being sick.

‘They’re wrong, I’m sure. You’ve never even smoked. We ought to go to Moscow, see specialists. I’ll ask about emergency leave tomorrow.’

‘And how would we pay them? On what you earn? With what we’ve saved?’

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t catch my breath; my heart jerked and kicked in my chest like a terrified animal. I could call in favours from all over town, from other cops, from politicians I’d helped out of a jam, even mafia I’d dealt with. But there was no negotiating with the third person who had just joined us in the room.

‘I saw the X-rays. The tumours. A lot of them. The doctor said he’d stopped counting.’

The sunlight in the room was very bright, so strong my eyes watered. I could hear the children in the park calling out to each other, shrieking with laughter, and I wanted to open the window and yell at them to be quiet. Because my world was collapsing in on itself, because I was afraid, because it seemed so unfair that anyone in the world should be happy.

‘They want to operate this week. Remove what they can.’

I sat down beside her, my arm around her shoulders. I tried to turn her face towards me, but she stiffened, and looked away.

‘You’re going to be OK, it happens to a lot of women . . .’

I heard my voice tail away. Somehow, I couldn’t conjure up the same air of reassurance that I’d used so many times before scared, shocked, devastated faces.

‘
He’ll turn up safe and sound when he’s hungry
.’

‘
He’s in the operating theatre now
.’

‘
We’ll find whoever did this
.’

And sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn’t.

I set my glass down carefully, as if the slightest noise might set off some terrible explosion, and hugged Chinara from behind. Her hands came up at once to cover her breasts, as if to protect them from my grasp, or to prevent me catching some awful contagion. Strange what goes through the mind at such a time. All I could think of was that, a week from now, there would be nothing there for me to hold and caress.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I know, it’s all right. It’ll be fine.’

The words we use to reassure ourselves that it’s not yet time to join the long procession, not our turn to fall off the conveyor belt and into the darkness.

I moved my hands up to her shoulders. I could tell by the way they trembled that she was silently crying.

The rest of the evening was a blur, and then a blank. Glass after glass, tears, self-hatred, empty reassurances. Passing out, the half-full glass spilling out on to the rug. A role model for being supportive, there when Chinara most needed me . . .

*

I locked the memories back into their cupboard, shut my eyes and focused on the dead woman lying in the snow under the trees. And on the dead child stowed away inside her. I’m not overly sentimental about children. Chinara had had an abortion not long after we got married, when we were still living out at Alamedin, in a decaying cement slab of an apartment block, the kind of place where I’d spent most of my career kicking in doors, gun in hand. We’re not ready for this, she’d
said, career first, then family, there’ll be time later. But there wasn’t.

I don’t bang a drum about a foetus having a soul, but I don’t believe in contraception by abortion either, the way a lot of people do. If my job is about anything, it’s about protecting the vulnerable from the predators, the ones who circle around the herd, waiting for a stray to be separated before they pounce. And I can’t imagine anything more vulnerable than an unborn child.

Maybe I’m a fool to take on responsibility for people I never knew in life, and who reveal their secrets only in death: the wardrobe full of shoplifted clothes; the hidden stash of porn, straight or gay; the empty vodka bottles stashed under the bed. I’ve found them all. Sometimes I tell the relatives, more often I take their weaknesses away with me, burying them in files that gather dust in the Sverdlovsky basement. That’s if the death isn’t suspicious, of course; any hint that it is, and all bets are off. You can’t shame the dead with their past, but you can make damn sure that the living don’t join them.

*

I opened my eyes, stared up at the ceiling. No chance of sleep, and I’d work to do. I pulled myself to my feet, looked at myself in the mirror on the front of the wardrobe door. A face as rumpled and creased as my clothes. One that’s won a few fights in its time, but started none of them. Stocky, not tall, black hair cut close to my scalp, black eyes staring out from under thick eyebrows. You can see a hint of my mother’s Tatar genes in my cheekbones, higher and more slanted than the average moon-faced Kyrgyz. My grandfather, her father, was Uighur, and I’ve inherited my flat, impassive stare from him.

‘Don’t show your character,’ my mother used to say, whenever I got cross or unhappy. ‘Don’t reveal any emotion or weakness, keep it to yourself, lock everyone else out. What they don’t know can’t hurt you.’

She’d watched, not a hint of any feeling on her face, as they carried her father’s body and, years later, that of my father, out of the three-room apartment we called home. Not a tear, not a clue that she was feeling anything. None of my colleagues, even the ones who prided themselves on their powers of ‘interrogation’, could have got my mother to talk if she’d decided to stay silent.

For weeks after Chinara died, I could smell her perfume, her shampoo, her neck, on the pillow next to mine. I’d lie there telling myself she’d just gone to the bathroom, that she was away for the weekend visiting her brother, making one of her endless cups of
chai
. And sometimes it would work and I’d drop off to sleep, my arm reaching over in the night to seek a warmth that wasn’t there.

But then, in the morning, a split second of happiness before it hit me like a speeding, out-of-control car. Dead.

Dead.

I stared out of the window. The rusted climbing frame was invisible in the darkness, but I knew it was there. Just as I knew Chinara lay under a mound of earth, in the grave her brothers laboured over for hours, smashing the frozen soil to make her bed.

Unable
to sleep, I decided that anything was preferable to a night of memories and silence. My work doesn’t keep office hours, so I locked the door and headed out into the dark.

The far end of Chui Prospekt was deserted as I crossed the road and headed towards the Kulturny Bar. It was after midnight, no one around, my boots crunching on newly fallen snow. That part of town, snow’s pretty much the only virginal thing you’ll find. All the trees on the side of Panfilov Park have had their trunks whitewashed, so they seemed to float in mid-air, as if being lowered into place by an invisible crane. A Ferris wheel flickered through the mist, like the memory of a long-past spring.

I’d stopped off at the Metro Bar and watched some drab local girls playing pool, their arses stuck up in the air in case an off-duty Marine from the US base happened to wander in. That got old fast, so I decided to walk back to Ibraimova by way of the Kulturny.

The name, in case you don’t know, is Russian for ‘culture’. But
kulturny
has a much wider significance than art, music and literature, important though they are. It’s a way of behaving, an attitude to life and other people, of graciousness and appreciation of the finer things in life. If you can quote Pushkin, hum Rachmaninoff and drink your
chai
from delicate porcelain cups, then you probably count yourself as
kulturny
.

Of course, Russians love a paradox, particularly the cosmic
sort, which reassures them that they alone are the butt of some universal joke. How else could they have convinced themselves for eighty years that they were privileged and superior to the West, as they stood in line for hours to buy bread or milk or shoes, or whatever was at the sharp end of the queue? Which is why they also recognise – and appreciate –
antikulturny
, low life at its most uncompromising.

The Kulturny Bar is one of Bishkek’s best jokes, and one of its best-kept secrets. No sign, no welcoming neon, just a battered steel door, scarred and scuffed from years of being attacked with boots, spade handles and, on one memorable occasion, a petrol bomb. Nothing as elaborate as CCTV to screen would-be drinkers, just a Judas hole and the knowledge that the bouncer inside is probably drunk, violent and armed.

I unfastened my jacket, tapped my hip, felt the reassuring heft of my gun. Not the standard issue Makarov pistol, but a Yarygin I liberated from a hash smuggler over in Karakol. More kick, and seventeen rounds in the magazine.
Kulturny
.

I stared at the door, gave it an experimental kick and waited. Nothing: silence bounced off the snow. I raised my hands in the air, and beckoned for the door to be opened. Still nothing. I pantomimed looking at my watch, shrugged and made a cutting gesture across my throat. But just as I was about to head to the station and return with a sledgehammer, the door swung outwards. With it came an unholy reek of piss, fried
pelmeni
dumplings and stale beer.

A shaven head emerged, dotted with blue-black cobwebs – prison tattoos. Steroid-built muscles coiled and wriggled down arms bare in spite of the cold. A ripped T-shirt and greasy camo pants. Almost two solid metres of thug. Mikhail
Lubashov, ‘of interest to Sverdlovsky Police Department’, as they say in court.

I’d sent him down once before for administering a beating that left an Uzbek gang member in a coma, so Mikhail wouldn’t have taken kindly to me tapping on his door. But he’d have more sense than to keep me out, if he wanted the bar to stay open. Losing money wouldn’t sit well with his masters, and a coma of his own would be the least he could hope for if I shut the place down for a week or two.

‘Inspector –’

‘
Past’ zahlopni, packun!
’

Mikhail didn’t take kindly to being told to shut his mouth, or to being called a little prick, but I thought I could live with the disappointment. Being pretty
antikulturny
myself when I choose to be, I decided it was best to let Mikhail know what was what from the off. I didn’t mind him hating me, as long as he feared me.

‘The usual collection of
alkashi
downstairs?’

The naked Madonna on Mikhail’s biceps flexed her tits as he shrugged. Not one to give anything away, Mikhail settled for giving me the prison-yard stare. He liked to hint that he had been involved in the kidnap and disposal of Chechen mafia boss Movladi Atlangeriyev in Moscow a few years ago, but that was strictly to impress the punters. The cobwebs on his skull might have boasted to the world that he was a murderer, but Mikhail kept the tattoo on his belly that told the world he had a thing for kids well hidden. You don’t want everyone to know you’re a sex criminal, especially if you’re a paedo.

I looked around and down the street. Empty, no one to witness any trouble, and that suited me just fine. I pulled my
jacket open, let Mikhail see that I was on official business and tooled up. I knew about the baseball bat behind the door. And he knew I didn’t fuck about, not any more.

‘Mikhail, don’t take the piss.’

He still said nothing, but stepped aside. The stairs down into the bar looked as inviting as a trip into the sewers. No lights; the darkness gaped like a broken mouth.

‘If any shit comes my way, Mikhail, I won’t take kindly to it, understand? Especially from an aborted shit like you. A single turd and I’ll cut you a new hole.’

Mikhail pondered this for a moment, as if studying a particularly hard sentence about dialectical materialism, then nodded.

I pushed past and headed downstairs into the dark, like falling into a nightmare.

At the bottom of the stairs, a corridor that stank of piss and fear led towards another battered door, this one half open and as tempting to enter as an old hooker’s mouth.

I went in.

Two of the five overhead lights were blown, and another two simply lacked bulbs, so the atmosphere reminded me of my office back at the station. But my office didn’t boast a collection of thugs, alcoholics and prostitutes. Well, not every day, at any rate.

A ripped and torn poster showed the ravages of drugs on a young girl’s face, her front teeth missing, blackened stitches above one eyebrow, deadness in her eyes. The headline read: ‘B
EFORE
K
ROKODIL,
I H
AD
A D
AUGHTER.
N
OW,
I H
AVE
A P
ROSTITUTE
.’ Underneath, someone had written in a shaky hand: ‘S
O
I’
VE
B
EEN
A
BLE
T
O
G
IVE
U
P
T
HE
D
AY
J
OB
.’ Very
kulturny
.

There were several mugshot faces dotted about the room,
and a couple of hookers stroking a drunken civilian’s hair, but I finally spotted the guy I was hunting. Even in this light, leaning by the bar, glass of bootleg vodka in hand, Vasily Tyulev wasn’t difficult to pick out. Half the Kumtor gold mine’s annual output hung around his thick acne-spattered neck or pushed his stumpy fingers apart.

‘Vasily, how are you, whoreson?’

Now the funny thing was that Vasily really was the son of a whore, but he preferred not to be reminded about it whenever we met. So I saw it as part of my official duty to protect the public by citing him on every occasion as an example of the awful consequences of unsafe sex.

Vasily kept up his mother’s tradition by running a string of second-rate girls out of a run-down apartment over on Jibek-Jolu, but until the last revolution he’d also had a neat scam, telling the gullible he was the nephew of the president, a fixer without compare, the man to make magic happen and problems disappear. Not true, of course, but I was always amazed how many people would hand over a bundle of
som
in the hope it would buy some favours. Of course, after the last revolution – when the president fled the country, taking only a dozen large suitcases and the country’s savings with him – Vasily got a fair number of threats from people who suddenly wanted their money back. Which was why he kept Mikhail Lubashov around, as a head bodyguard and thug.

Vasily was a pretty shitty human being, but he kept his ears to the ground, his eyes open and his mouth shut, except when I wanted answers.

Which is what he did then, as he took a final drag of his
papirosh
, dropped the butt to the floor, ground it out with his heel and spat on the floor. He looked over at me, one bushy eyebrow raised, and jabbed at his mouth with his
thumb. I nodded at the unspoken question, and snapped my fingers at the barman as he reached for a particularly dodgy bottle.

‘
Nyet
, top-shelf stuff, the Vivat.’

The barman reached for a half-empty square bottle, and I shook my head.

‘Unopened.’

The barman nodded, and put a full bottle in front of me. He didn’t ask for money; there was never any question of me paying in there. In dives like the Kulturny, the house ‘vodka’ is one part petrol, one part piss, two parts poison: with an unopened branded bottle, you stand a slight chance of making it home before cirrhosis or blindness set in.

I picked up the glass before the barman had time to pour, gave it a wipe with my shirt tail, holding it up to the light, checking for smears. I took my time, reminded everyone who was the boss around here. We do things my way, in my time, or we all pay a visit to the tiled and soundproofed room in the basement of the Sverdlovsky Station.

I poured a glass, left it untouched; it’s not been unknown for someone to slip a knockout into a likely punter’s drink, then roll them once they’ve passed out. I ran my finger round the cold rim of the glass and looked over at Vasily. Expensive leather jacket, Versace jeans, spotless white Nikes. But he still looked like a third-rate thug, the ’roid-rash covering his neck, the gold-coin rings rapping on the bar as he raised his glass and put the contents down with one swift, practised swallow.

‘So, Inspector, a social call?’

I rolled my eyes, poured him another shot.

‘I heard about your wife. If you ever need, you know, a spot of physical relaxation, just call me. On the house.’

I winced at the thought of fucking one of Vasily’s skank
hookers, and resolved to rip his tongue out with pliers if he ever mentioned my wife again. Vasily mistook my look for one of anguish at my loss, and tried to look sympathetic.

‘It’s about a girl.’

Vasily shrugged.

‘It usually is when you come to see me, Inspector.’

‘Murdered.’

‘If she was strolling down Sovietskaya without a care in the world, you wouldn’t be looking me up, would you?’

A hint of cheek, which I lost no time slapping down.

‘A prick up your arse, Vasily.’

‘The girl on Ibraimova?’

I nodded. Whatever else Vasily was, he was well informed. Maybe from a squealer back at the station, given a bonus every week for a few bites of information here and there.

‘Nasty.’

I nodded again, waiting for Vasily to volunteer more, but he just shrugged again.

‘Not good for your business, a killing like that.’

‘It’s got my girls worried, I can tell you that. I’m giving Mikhail a few extra
som
to keep an eye on the place.’

‘You’re all heart, Vasily.’

‘A businessman is all, Inspector.’

He paused and looked at me more closely.

‘Not a regular sex killing, then? We don’t usually see the police as concerned as this when a crazy guts a
moorzilka
.’

‘Someone else been asking?’

‘No.’

But the way he hesitated before speaking made me think that I wasn’t the only one on the trail.

‘The word is that she was cut up bad, real bad. So you’re looking for her killer?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Then what are you looking for?’

‘The other victim. Another woman.’

Vasily looked knowing. About the woman not being a regular street girl. About her gutted womb. And the foetus dumped inside her. Vasily’s squealer deserved an extra wad of
som
that month.

‘Who told you?’

I was getting very tired of Vasily’s shrug. Disrespectful. And more important, wasting my time.

‘Word gets about, you know how people gossip.’

I decided it was time to hunt down Vasily’s little blabbermouth, and tweak his tongue. Then Vasily surprised me.

‘Have you thought there may not be another victim? Maybe the baby was newborn, unmarried mother decides to dump the shame, killer finds it and decides it’s time to start cutting?’

I lit another cigarette, gave myself time to consider.

‘Maybe she was his girlfriend, he wants kids, she won’t give him a son, he goes crazy, they fight, it gets out of hand, and she ends up under the birch trees.’

No, I’d already convinced myself that this wasn’t a spontaneous murder, no blood-stained knife thrown away in a panic, no tyre tracks or footprints to give us a clue. There was someone out there who loved the power; the resistance and give when you took the knife that you’ve lovingly whetted and honed and drew it across someone’s flesh. But there was no reason why Vasily needed to know that.

‘Save the detecting for me. You hear anything? Anybody kinky giving your girls a weird feeling?’

Vasily half laughed, revealing a set of teeth that were half grey, half gold.

‘My clientele as killers? It’s the best they can do to get a stiff one most of the time, they’re so drunk. I swear, when they come, it’s not spunk, it’s
pivo
.’

He paused, remembered and started to reminisce.

‘There was a guy, couple of years back, he had a thing for Irina – you know, the Uzbek from Jalalabad, the one with only one tit? Wanted to bite her remaining nipple off. Total crazy. Offered to pay, took out a roll of notes big enough to stuff a cushion. But I said to him, what use is damaged goods to me? Didn’t like that, tried to cut up rough.’

‘This pork-chewer, you know his name? Where he is?’

‘First question? No idea. Second? You know the runway extension out at Manas Airport? The one for the transport planes at the US base? Couldn’t say where exactly, but he’s under it. Happy digging.’