Spring Betrayal Read online

  The seven bags lay in a row, with the least decayed near the door.

  “Why not in the order we dug them up?” I asked. “Or by size?”

  Usupov polished his glasses, snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and moved toward the table.

  “The freshest ones will contain the most information; what I learn from them might shed some light on the others, where the evidence is less clear.”

  He paused, gave me his death’s-head smile, thin lips forming a vivid scar, turned, and set to work.

  Usupov was nothing if not thorough. For almost seven hours we waded through an assortment of bones, skin, and teeth, all the shapeless and unseen mechanics of life. By the time we reached the smallest and most decomposed body, all we could do was extract the bones from a mucus-gray soup and hope that we hadn’t lost too many clues. The stench in the room was eye-watering, in spite of the open windows and the face masks we were wearing. We were no longer in a police station, but in a slaughterhouse in hell.

  Finally, Usupov assembled the last of seven small skeletons, daubed here and there with cartilage, muscle, tissue, but relatively intact. He gave a half-smile, whether of satisfaction at a job well done or relief it was over, I couldn’t tell.

  I walked to the window and thrust my head out, desperate for clean air. I was dazed by the carnage, by the knowledge I had no idea where to start this investigation. I turned back to Usupov, held up my cigarettes, nodded toward the door. I’ve always thought it disrespectful to smoke in front of the dead, though it seems unlikely they care. And anyway, what more harm could anyone do to them?

  As I went out into the corridor, I read the health warning on the cigarette pack. None of the children had ever smoked, and they were the ones lying dead, about to be shoveled into a communal hole. Suddenly, I was laughing at the cosmic injustice of it all. A ment, one I didn’t recognize, scandalized by my reaction, swiveled his head around the corner, withdrew it at once when I stared back at him. Someone else determined to make sure they weren’t involved.

  Nice to have had the option.

  I finished my cigarette, thought longingly about the bottle of good stuff I would have had waiting for me in my hotel room in the days when I drank, suddenly discovered I was hungry, starving, in fact. Hunger is one way of pushing death back into its box and slamming down the lid. Feeding, fighting, fucking: they’re all shouts of defiance against our final unwanted visitor.

  Usupov called me back into his makeshift morgue.

  “In their condition, it’s hard to tell the gender at such an early age, as you know, and the skulls are soft, with the fontanelle still unfused.”

  I looked down at the skeletons, lined up as if for a school photo. I thought of the children Chinara and I had promised ourselves, of the child we aborted, and my eyes blurred.

  “The bleach you use could peel paint off a door,” I said, and made a point of coughing. Usupov stared at me, a rare look of sympathy on his face.

  “You take it all too personally, Inspector.”

  “Someone has to, Kenesh,” I said. “And if not me, then who?”

  We were silent for a moment, and then Usupov turned back into his emotion-free pathologist persona, and I reverted to being Murder Squad.

  “No clothes, no papers, nothing. So tell me how I’ll find out who they were.”

  Usupov said nothing, but held up several small evidence bags. In each one there was a thin strip of plastic, with some kind of writing on it. They were stained and hard to read, but I didn’t have any problem recognizing what they were. After all, I’d worn one myself for two years.

  “Identity bands. From an orphanage,” I said, and heard my voice splinter and crack.

  Chapter 3

  I was twelve, the first time I stood in this room. It was just a few months after we declared independence while the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, a brutal time for everyone in Kyrgyzstan. My father had gone to Moscow two years earlier to look for work, so my mother and I left Bishkek to live with my grandfather and his second wife in his small farm north of Karakol.

  The two women loathed each other with the endless simmering resentment that comes from bad food, cheap clothes, and recognizing something of themselves in each other’s failures. Long silences would settle over the three-room farmhouse the way rainclouds brooded over the mountain peaks to the north, then burst like thunder into a tirade of faults and grievances. Finally, my grandfather declared himself sick of the skirmishes, and my mother packed our cheap plastic suitcase with the split handle and set off to find work in Siberia. I didn’t see or hear from her for almost three years.

  However, my mother’s departure didn’t calm her rival; instead she transferred the battle to me. And after the potato harvest, when I’d outlived my usefulness, she bundled me into the back of my grandfather’s ancient Moskvitch. Through the scratched rear window, I watched my grandfather shut the gate behind us, unable to meet my bewildered stare. That was the first time I realized just how quickly men will surrender almost anything for a quiet life.

  During the twelve-mile drive into Karakol, I wondered if my mother had sent for me, and whether I would recognize her, or she me. Even then, I didn’t have much trust in memories.

  I spent just over two years in the orphanage, during which I ran away three times. Very few of the children were there because their parents had died. We were known as “social orphans”; in the chaos of independence, our families had split up, gone off to Russia to look for a job, or simply disappeared. So what little remained of the state authorities got the task of caring for us. And because we couldn’t complain, didn’t have anywhere else to go, and were only children, they took as little care as they needed.

  “Pashol na khui.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been sworn at; it wasn’t even as if none of my superiors had ever said it to me. But I’d never had a one-armed man hug me, then tell me to fuck off.

  I glanced around the orphanage director’s office. There had been some changes: the scuffmarks of children’s shoulders against the wall had darkened, and a different president scowled down from an ornate gilt frame. And there was a different man behind the desk from the last time I’d stood in front of it, waiting to be punished.

  However, Gurminj Shokhumorov wasn’t your typical official. For a start, he was Tajik, a rarity in our government’s ethnic mix, and if you saw him in the street, you’d think he was a farmer, maybe a builder, who’d lost his right arm to an accident or a car crash.

  It was shrapnel from an RPG fired by a mujahideen warrior in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul that smashed Gurminj’s shoulder and arm into fragments and ended his career in the Red Army. To Gurminj, it was a massive joke that the Panjshir is where the majority of Tajiks in Afghanistan live. As he always used to say, back in the days when we’d opened the second bottle of vodka and crushed the cap underfoot, “If you’re going to lose an arm, you want it to be a relative that fucks you up.”

  It had been over a year since we’d last met; he was one of the mourners who stood by me as we buried my wife, and he had been with me the following day, when the women came down to the grave and scattered bread and milk on the hard earth.

  “Do you honestly think I’ve got the time to track down some ancient identity bands?” he asked, lifting up the evidence bags Usupov had dropped off the day before.

  “You know the right places to go, the right people to ask. Right now, I’m as welcome in Bishkek as a dose of clap half an hour after the town’s only pharmacy has closed down. No one will risk their neck to give me the whisper.”

  “And if it’s me that does the asking, it shouldn’t set off any alarm bells; is that what you mean?”

  “That too,” I admitted. “But someone has to do it. Those children didn’t get a chance at life; they deserve better than being left to rot by some stinking canal.”

  “You know how many people I have to kneel in front of, just to keep this place warm, and stew and bread on the table?” Gu
rminj asked, throwing his one arm wide. “I’ll tell you, a fuck of a lot.” He smiled, his teeth dazzling white in a thick black beard.

  I nodded. My memories of the orphanage weren’t great, but I knew Gurminj was a good man. He’d told me once, in the days when I was still drinking, that there was no such thing as a child that couldn’t be helped, sometimes even saved. I was drunk in the way I used to get then, with enough anger and despair bubbling under to turn the world into a fleapit hotel with blood on the carpet and screams soaked into the wallpaper. But I wasn’t drunk enough to tell him that I’d seen some of the children he cared for grow up to be robbed or raped or murdered. Or to do those things themselves.

  He already knew.

  Gurminj pushed the evidence bags back toward me, distaste evident on his face.

  “Not the nicest present I’ve ever had.”

  “Try being given one when you’re twelve,” I said.

  He stared back at me, perhaps unsure if I was insulting him.

  “I missed my mama, my grandfather, even the sour-faced bitch he married. I wasn’t a country boy, I didn’t know anyone, and they all laughed at my city accent. So I told them they were all myrki, stupid peasants. I lost the first few fights, but then I learned it was easier to just get along with what they said. Or to punch first when I had to.”

  “No one ever said living in an orphanage is easy,” Gurminj said, “but sometimes it has to be better than what went before. You remember the silent ones?”

  I nodded. The children who didn’t speak, the ones who never caught your eye or smiled or joined in playtime games. The ones who did their best in the showers to hide the scars and burn marks on their arms and backs. And then there were the ones whose scars were all on the inside, who’d given up trying to understand why the world was treating them with such cruelty.

  I picked up the envelopes with the identity bands, all that we had to give names, faces to the bodies.

  “Seven more silent ones,” I said, memories vivid behind my eyes.

  “There’s one thing you need to know, Inspector,” Gurminj said, pointing at the bags.

  “You’ve traced the children already?” I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said, producing a sheet of paper from a pile on his desk. “As you know, I’ve got contacts in other orphanages. Mainly, we keep each other posted on the latest nomenklatura bullshit from Bishkek. But you know, Akyl, there’s a market for the children we look after.”

  I could sense the anger coming off Gurminj; no one cared more for the orphans under his care, no one was more aware of the need for vigilance against the predators that circle the pack.

  “I don’t really approve of foreign adoptions,” he said. “I know all the arguments about finding a better life in America, in Europe. And God knows, anyone that can love a child that isn’t their own is a good person. But why should Kyrgyzstan become a baby farm for rich foreigners? What if you lose that sense of who you are, what it means to be Kyrgyz?”

  I nodded, although I’ve often wondered if being Kyrgyz simply means being chained to an endless supply of misfortune.

  “We watch out for the traffickers, the illegal adoptions. We’ve all heard about children being harvested for their organs, or for medicine. Does it happen? Maybe a myth, but who knows? There’s no end to the ways in which scum exploit the helpless, so they can have a fancy car, expensive vodka, a bleach-blond Russian whore with silicone tits. So I keep in touch with some of the security people in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and we watch.”

  Gurminj gave a mirthless smile that bared his teeth, held up the paper in his hand. God help anyone who abused a child under his care.

  “The identity bands are genuine, no doubt about that. And the different colors show that they come from different orphanages as well as this one, as far away as Naryn and Osh. But that’s where the problem begins.”

  He paused, and I stared across the desk at him, wondering at his silence.

  “The numbers and the orphanages all tally. For once, Central Records didn’t screw it all up. But the children who wore them? Your problem is, they’re all still alive. And they all left their orphanages at least ten years ago.”

  Chapter 4

  For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of what Gurminj told me. The bands had to be genuine, untampered with. When you were deposited at an orphanage, you were given a band to wear on your right wrist, the number already written on it, the number that tracked your progress or lack of it through the system. Then a lighter was held under the two ends of the plastic to melt them together. There was no way you could remove it without cutting it in half. And when the band got too tight, the old one was destroyed and a new one sealed in its place.

  Tamper-proof: what the system captures, it doesn’t easily relinquish. The only thing more permanent would have been a tattoo, and even the government wouldn’t go that far.

  “I don’t understand,” I said; this was the first solid fact I’d uncovered so far.

  I looked more closely at the bands: I should have realized that they were far too big for such small children. As if he’d read my thoughts, Gurminj nodded.

  “It was the first thing Usupov told me, that the bands were too big for the bodies.”

  “So why didn’t he tell me? I could have started a check on identifying the bands.”

  Gurminj shrugged, and pushed his palms toward the ceiling in a gesture of resignation.

  “You said he flew up here? In a helicopter? So the case must be important to someone with plenty of pull, wouldn’t you say? Someone who wants the bodies identified. Or maybe wants them staying unknown.”

  I’d always thought of Usupov as one of the good guys. We’d worked well in the past, and I owed him. But there’s always a first time for everything. The first kiss, the first fuck, the first betrayal, the first death.

  Gurminj opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle and two glasses. Not easy with one hand, but he’d had a lot of practice.

  “You still don’t . . . ?” he said, looking down at the glass he’d pushed toward me.

  “Not today,” I answered, the familiar words a lie against the sudden craving I felt. The raw scent of the vodka, the oily look as it swirled around the glass and caught the light, the burn on my tongue and throat, the shudder as the alcohol hit.

  “You won’t mind if I do?” he asked, poured himself a shot, threw it back.

  “Your liver,” I said. “God help whoever gets it as a transplant.”

  “When this shit happened,” he said, pointing at his empty shirtsleeve, “I used to feel my missing hand wanting to throw a punch all the time. At anyone who got in my way, who felt sorry for me, who assured me that it didn’t make a difference but she’d met someone.”

  He poured another brimful, let it sit.

  “I could imagine the cuts on my knuckles from someone’s teeth, feel the blow travel up my arm. The morphine didn’t take the pain away, it only pushed it aside, made it seem unimportant, like hearing a TV in the next room. But when it wore off, it was back to having life as my sparring partner.”

  This time he sipped, the glass hidden in his one hand.

  “So I quit the morphine, hit the vodka, hard at first, then tapered it down to a couple of glasses every two or three days. A kind of equilibrium.”

  He tossed the rest of his drink back, made a face, smiled.

  “Hardly doctor’s orders, but it gets me through the week.”

  I knew the feeling.

  “How about you, tovarich? How do you keep things balanced?”

  The concern he felt showed in his face.

  I picked up the evidence bags, stuffed them in my pocket, stood up, put my left hand out, a clumsy unfamiliar way to shake hands.

  “Balance? It’s overrated, Gurminj, hadn’t you heard?”

  Chapter 5

  I walked with Gurminj through half-lit corridors badly in need of a coat of paint, remembering my own time here, how sorrow had been overtaken by a kind of res
ignation, a belief this was how it was going to be for years to come. I wondered how many of the boys and girls under Gurminj’s care felt the same way.

  Gurminj stopped by the main door, put his hand on the shoulder of a young boy, maybe eight years old, with a strange, lopsided hairstyle as if he’d cut it himself, using blunt scissors and without the aid of a mirror.

  “Inspector, meet Master Otabek, our newest resident,” Gurminj said. “He joined our happy little gang just a couple of weeks ago.”

  I crouched down to look into the boy’s face and smiled.

  “I used to live here myself, Otabek,” I said, “and I made lots of friends. I’m sure you’ll like it here, and Director Shokhumorov will take very good care of you.”

  The boy said nothing, but simply stared back at me, the way I’d stared when I was told I wasn’t visiting, but staying. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t seem totally false, so I smiled again and stood up.

  At the gate, Gurminj shook hands again, then embraced me.

  “Quiet boy, that Otabek,” I said. “Reminded me of myself when I was here.”

  “He doesn’t say much,” Gurminj said. “In fact, he doesn’t say anything. I think whenever he tried to talk in the past, it was beaten out of him. Belts, fists, the usual loving parents. But we’ll help him find his voice, his way back.”

  I nodded. Gurminj always did his best, and the effort it took was stenciled in the lines on his face. If only everyone tried as hard to live a decent life, maybe I’d be out of a job.

  It took me twenty minutes to walk back to the hotel, past run-down shops and patches of muddy wasteland, stray mongrel dogs barking from a safe distance. Karakol feels like it crouches at the edge of the world, with mountains on three sides holding everywhere else at bay. Winter storms can cut the main road back to Issyk-Kul and Bishkek, but the isolation of the place lasts all year round. The people here are suspicious of strangers, and I got several hard stares from the people I passed. No one likes cops, but in Karakol it’s become an art form.