A Spring Betrayal (13 page)

“Don’t be a
gopnik
, you,” she said, her accent thick with the slurred vowels of the south, harsh from a lifetime of smoking strong
papirosh
and working in the bazaar. “A low-class like you should give one of his balls that a woman like this should even speak to you, not scrape you off her shoe.”

She slammed another bottle of beer down in front of Saltanat, gestured at me with a grimy forefinger.

“You get a
devotchka
like her once in your lifetime, you, listen to me.”

I risked a glance at Saltanat, and though I couldn’t catch her eye, I could tell by the way her shoulders shook she was amused.

“Listen to me, boy, I know you think I’m just a peasant, a nothing. But I tell you this. I lost a father in the Great Patriotic War, defending Moscow. I lost two sons in infancy. I’ve buried two husbands. If there’s one thing I know, if you can’t find room for someone, then there’s no room for anything else worth having. Go on, laugh at me.”

“Forgive me, Granny,” I said, reached for one of her hands, wrinkled and clawed with arthritis. “I am a stupid man, who doesn’t know when a wonderful person has stepped into his life. You’re kind to teach such a lesson to such a fool.
Spasibo
.”

I turned to Saltanat, removed the sunglasses that hid her eyes. “I ask your forgiveness for my rudeness, stupidity, bad manners. If it happens again, just pull the trigger before I shoot myself anyway.”

She said nothing, merely nodded, and my heart twisted in my chest as she gave one of her rare smiles, intoxicating, like sunrise sliding across snow. She took my hand and squeezed it, and I felt the burden on my life, the obsession to avenge the dead, lift for a moment. I knew it would return—none of us change that easily or so quickly—but at
least I now had someone to keep me company part of the way on my journey.

I paid the
babushka
for the food and drink, left a generous tip, turned to Saltanat.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Back to the car,” she said, “and then find a hotel.”

Chapter 25

We lay fully clothed on the double bed, having checked into the Roza Park Hotel and demanded a suite. I’d produced my police ID, which got a favorable discount as well as the promise that we had the best room in the place. We’d walked up the stairs, holding hands, locked the door behind us, decided it was time to talk.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” I said. “Not after you killed Sariev and disappeared.”

“No?”

“I thought you’d decided ‘Mission Accomplished’ and gone back to your life.”

“I knew I couldn’t stay in Bishkek, not then. I didn’t know what had happened to you, and murdering a serving police officer wouldn’t have gone down well with your people, would it?”

“I don’t think too many people were upset by Sariev taking the long trip. They probably had a ‘free beer all night’ celebration in every bar in Bishkek,” I said.

“Were you angry with me?” she asked, her eyes never leaving my face, searching for signs of hesitation.

I thought about it for a moment.

“Hurt. Confused,” I said. “Scared you might kill me. Afraid you might leave me. Which you did.”

“But I’m back now,” she said, and kissed the corner of my mouth. Her breath was sweet on my face. I pulled her toward me, but she put her hands on my chest, laughing, fending me off.

“We’ve got work to do,” she said, and walked toward the bathroom. “I need to shower. I might even save you some hot water.”

I emerged from the bathroom to find Saltanat already asleep, fully clothed, on top of the bed. I lay down beside her and drifted off into that aimless half-sleep that you fall into in the middle of the day.

It was still light when Saltanat shook me out of a confused dream about being trapped in a maze of thorn bushes. My mouth was dry, sour, and I regretted the absence of a toothbrush.

“We have to go back to Bishkek,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

I winced. I love my country as much as the next Murder Squad detective, but that doesn’t mean I want to bounce up and down for hundreds of kilometers on twisting mountain roads twice a week.

We took the stairs down to the hotel lobby, handed the key in to reception. Outside, we stopped to savor the sunshine’s warmth, the pale blue sky above us.

“The iPhone is state of the art,” Saltanat said. “The e-mails and contact numbers are all encrypted, impossible to crack, supposedly.”

“So what did you find?” I asked.

“All incoming calls were from a blocked number,” Saltanat answered. “And any attempt to reopen any sent or received e-mails automatically deleted them.”

“So we’ve come all this way for nothing?” I said.

“Not quite,” she replied. “He managed to trace the blocked number.”

I raised an eyebrow, not liking the idea of Uzbek security operating on Kyrgyz soil.

“It’s a Bishkek number, and we’ve located an address.”

“And a name?”

“Not yet. That’s why we have to go back to the city, stake the place out. Once we know the name, you can start kicking down doors.”

I was about to suggest that perhaps with her contacts, she could find a way of getting me on a plane without my name getting flagged and a squad car waiting to arrest me.

But then the shooting started. Again.

Chapter 26

For a second, I thought a nearby car was backfiring, a curious popping sound, like an old man coughing. Then glass shattered behind us, and I pushed Saltanat down to the ground, slamming myself down hard at the same time. The scab in my shoulder split open and began to bleed. Somewhere back in the hotel, a woman screamed.

I rolled left as Saltanat threw herself to the right, snatching at our weapons as we reached the cover of a couple of cars parked nearby. I released the safety on my Yarygin, peered beneath the car in the direction of the shots. I could see feet, but I couldn’t be certain if they belonged to the gunman. No point crippling an innocent passerby, getting myself into even more trouble.

I waited for a couple of moments, finger tense on the trigger. When no further shots came, I raised my head above the hood of the car, watched Saltanat do the same.

I didn’t see any masked gunmen waiting to pick us off, so I levered myself up off the pavement. The sleeve of my jacket was torn, and the material dark where fresh blood had joined the old stain. I felt the nausea of shock rise in my stomach, dread at the knowledge death can tap you on the shoulder with unexpected precision, accurate and inevitable.

“Nice way to treat tourists,” I said.

“See anyone?” Saltanat asked. I shook my head.

“I only heard the shots,” I answered. “And a scream from inside the hotel.”

I holstered my gun, walked back to the hotel. A middle-aged man sprawled on the floor by the reception desk, not moving, while a woman frantically rubbed at one flaccid hand thrown across his chest. No point in going in, nothing we could do to help. And the local
menti
were sure to be on their way.

“You need to buy me a new shirt, then I can dump the jacket,” I said as we walked back to the car, not running but not loitering either.

“There are some clothes in the car,” she replied, looking straight ahead, her gun hanging unobtrusively by her side. “Let me find a pharmacy so I can clean that slight scratch you’re complaining about.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were on the far side of Jalalabad, parked outside a pharmacy, from which Saltanat emerged with everything she needed to inflict a little torture on me.

The burn of the hydrogen peroxide hurt far worse than the bullet, as Saltanat used swabs to clean away the crusted black blood. After she had finished dressing the wound and getting to work with needle and thread, I felt as if I’d gone through a five-hour interrogation at the hands of one of the Sverdlovsky station’s best, complete with slaps, kicks, and punches. But at least now I didn’t look as if I’d been rolling around on the floor of a butcher’s shop.

I struggled into the oversized shirt Saltanat had produced from the trunk.

“And now back to Bishkek, I suppose?”

She nodded and I sat back, wondering when the painkillers would kick in, if there was any way of getting out of the mess we were in. As we drove down Lenina Street, a middle-aged man with cropped gray hair and a greasy leather jacket stopped to watch our car as we passed. There was something familiar about his face, a memory I tried and failed to tug out of my past and into the daylight. Then we turned a corner and he was gone.

Chapter 27

“You’re sure this is the right address?” I asked as we pulled up down the street from an imposing building a couple of blocks away from Chui Prospekt.

The journey back to Bishkek had been just as tiring as the outbound leg, and I needed a shave, a bath, and a bed, not necessarily in that order. I smelled like an old goat, but at least I didn’t detect any sign of my shoulder turning septic. Saltanat, as always, smelled divine, and looked as if she’d had an uninterrupted eight hours’ sleep in a five-star hotel.

The house was on Frunze, in the elite district of town, where money bought you privacy, CCTV cameras, and very high concrete walls. Sunlight sparkled off the broken glass that ran along the top of the wall, further reinforced by a wire fence that I was certain would be electrified. Solid steel gates kept the world out, brutal spikes mounted at the top to impale intruders.

There was no sign of bodyguards, sentries, no-necked men with bulges under cheap leather jackets. Only the upper part of the house was visible, shuttered windows glaring down at the street. A massive satellite dish squatted on the roof. Whoever lived here would
have enough clout to get Saltanat whisked back over the border, and me enjoying ten years no-star bed and board in whichever prison was most remote and unpleasant.

I said as much to Saltanat and she rewarded me with one of those enigmatic stares that lasted until I had to break eye contact.

“You want to drop this, Akyl?” she said, surprise in her voice. “Go back to your apartment and wait for your old colleagues to drag you down to the basement to discuss your crimes? And then life in prison, at least until your fellow inmates discover you were a policeman?”

I knew she was right. But we had to be more careful than going in guns blazing.

“No, I don’t want to drop it,” I said. “Gurminj was my friend as well as yours. There are the seven dead babies who deserve some justice. And the children in those films.”

I paused, swallowed. The saliva in my mouth tasted thick and oily, as if I’d gone for weeks without cleaning my teeth. Pain pressed into my shoulder, its fingers probing underneath the stitches, like a small creature trying to escape.

“Can you pass me the iPhone?” I asked.

Saltanat reached for her bag and handed it to me.

“What are you planning to do?” she asked.

I gave her the mirthless smile that had become my specialty ever since watching Usupov uncover those scraps of bodies in the field near Karakol.

“There’s such a thing as being too subtle, Saltanat. Sometimes you have to piss on the bushes and see what emerges. Like tethering a sheep up in the mountains and then lying in wait until the wolves come down.”

Saltanat raised an eyebrow. Perhaps I was being a bit too philosophical.

“I’m just going to make a quick call,” I said, and hit redial.

I listened to the dialing tone, which matched my heartbeat, rapid and worried.

And then I heard a voice.

“Da?”

A man’s voice, deep, cautious. Speaking in Russian, but not with a Kyrgyz or Russian accent. English or American, at a guess. The Voice. Raw, like skin scraped on gravel.

“A friend of yours lost his cell phone, and I’m sure he’d like it back.”

Silence. I cleared my throat and continued.

“These smartphones, not cheap, are they? So I’m sure there’s a reward for its safe return. With all its contacts, photos, and videos. Particularly the videos.”

More silence. Then the Voice again.

“What did you have in mind?”

“I was thinking maybe twenty-five thousand?”

“Twenty-five thousand
som
?”

“No,” I said. “Dollars.”

“
Pashol na khui.
”

“Well, I can certainly fuck off if that’s what you really want, but then you don’t get the smartphone back,” I said, putting a smile into my voice I certainly didn’t feel. “And then who knows whose hands it might fall into? Perhaps I should just hand it in at Sverdlovsky station. The police could probably trace the owner.”

“I’ll call you back,” the Voice said, broke the connection.

Saltanat looked over at me, genuine approval in her eyes.

“A small-time crook gets lucky, decides to try a spot of blackmail. Arranges a meet. Bites a bullet,” she said. “Except he’s not a small-time crook. And he doesn’t.”

I smiled again, the one that never reaches my eyes.

“Devious minds think alike, Saltanat. We’ve put the pot on the stove. Now we let the ingredients simmer. And speaking of which . . .”

“Yes?”

“I’m hungry.”

An hour later, back at the outside bar of the Umai Hotel, I finished off the last of the
pelmeni
dumplings a taciturn Rustam had brought us, sipped my
chai
. Saltanat had refused to eat, had instead worked her way through most of a Baltika beer, staring at me with obvious exasperation.

“Now your belly’s full,” she said, “how about we get back to work?”

I winked, knowing it would irritate her further.

“Wolves aren’t stupid, you know. When they see a sheep tethered, they wonder whether it’s a trap. So they hide up by the rocks or the trees, scenting the air to see if any hunters are nearby. Only when they’re satisfied there’s no danger do they race toward the sheep. Then the hunters open fire.”

“Thank you for the natural history lesson,” Saltanat said. “I understand the metaphor. But that’s not an answer.”

“We know where they are, not who they are. They don’t know who or where we are. So we have the advantage. But they know what we have, the danger it means for them. So they have to reach out to us.”