An Autumn Hunting Read online

  ‘Quang thinks I set him up with the Thai police,’ I continued, ‘which, of course, means he thinks I was acting under orders from Aliyev. Aliyev thinks I deliberately set Quang up to sabotage the deal, probably because I wasn’t offered a big enough slice of the cake. So they’ll battle it out, maybe wipe each other out.’

  Tynaliev gave the kind of smile a shark does at the split second before it hits its prey.

  ‘Which we’ve agreed would be a good result, Inspector?’ he said, emphasising the last word to reassure me of my regained status.

  ‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘Although there is one thing that still puzzles me. I can understand why you want to break Aliyev and his organisation. A threat to state security, a major source of corruption and crime, a threat to the harmonious relations we enjoy with our neighbours.’

  I paused, decided it wasn’t the time to ask if I could smoke. Instead, I adopted my most innocent and puzzled expression, the look of a small child when told where babies come from.

  Tynaliev poured himself a giant vodka, threw it down his throat.

  ‘Getting rid of two criminal gangs, even if one of them is based abroad, well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it, Inspector?’ Even more emphasis on the last word this time: what’s been bestowed can also be taken away.

  I had a pretty shrewd idea someone else would soon be filling the gap, but I wanted to live, at least until Quang or Aliyev, or both, caught up with me. After that, all bets were off.

  ‘If that’s all,’ Tynaliev said, waving a finger at the door behind me. I thanked him once again. I had my hand on the door handle when he spoke again.

  ‘I expect your silence on this, Inspector.’ No mistaking the threat. ‘And don’t try to pull the “information lodged with people in case of my death” stunt, like you did after our business in Dubai.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Minister,’ I said. ‘You can never rely on most people to do as you ask them, particularly when you’re past caring.’

  Tynaliev nodded.

  ‘On the other hand, when someone one trusts implicitly hears of one’s death, well, they’re bound to take it very personally,’ I said. ‘I would hate to think of walking around wondering if that headache is from a sniper’s cross-hairs, that sudden stabbing pain in the ribs from a hunting knife. After all, what’s the point of having a bank vault full of money if you’re not alive to enjoy it?’

  Tynaliev recognised the threat, shrugged it away.

  ‘Then we’ll have to keep you alive, won’t we?’ he said. ‘You’ve already quit the vodka, maybe time to bin the smokes as well?’

  It was time to show my hand.

  ‘I’ve never found it easy to give up,’ I said, and he knew I wasn’t talking about nicotine, ‘and I’m not the only one.’

  ‘The Uzbek woman,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘No parables, no unspoken meanings, Minister. If you kill me, she’ll kill you. She’s the very best at what she does. You probably won’t feel a thing.’

  I stood up, headed for the door, watched Tynaliev reach for the vodka bottle. I suppose we all take comfort where we can find it. I only wished I knew where to find mine.

  Chapter 56

  There are always taxis loitering outside Tynaliev’s house, dogs waiting to be thrown scraps from the master’s table. They all know how to reach central Bishkek, and a few of them will have taken reluctant passengers to Sverdlovsky station for further ‘discussions’.

  I waved to the nearest one, clambered into the back seat, lit a cigarette to soothe my nerves. Meeting Tynaliev always had that unsettling effect on me, like crossing a field and hoping the bull is in a good mood. The driver glared at me as I lit up, said nothing when he saw me stare back. As a concession, I cracked open a window, let cold air take my smoke away.

  The driver continued to glare at me until I told him my destination: the Kulturny Bar. His attitude immediately dissolved into fawning obedience, at the thought of being behind the wheel for a gangster who could give him a thousand som note or a bullet behind the ear, depending on his mood. I couldn’t say being mistaken for a thug made my day worthwhile, but at least it meant I didn’t have to listen to the radio.

  I paid the driver off with a five hundred som note, and before he could say he had no change, told him to keep it, left him staring after me still unsure whether I was a mobster or not. He watched as I kicked at the graffiti-smeared door until it opened a crack, then drove off, leaving a thin trail of exhaust fumes to remember him by.

  I didn’t recognise the guard at the door, but he’d obviously done enough stints as face patrol security to recognise me. A grunt, a nod of his head, and I was inside, looking down the staircase into the darkness. I’d been inside this shithole too many times, seen too much trouble there, wondered if I’d ever have to traipse down those stairs again, my feet sticking to the soiled concrete.

  I walked past the torn and faded poster of the heroin-addicted girl still staring at the camera in dead-eyed opioid despair. Underneath, someone had scribbled a new phone number and ‘ALL HOLES AVAILABLE’. Romance, Kulturny-style. The door didn’t have ‘Abandon hope’ written over it; anyone who entered here had disposed of that luxury long ago.

  The main bar stank of sweat, spilt cheap beer and fried chicken, although I’d never seen anyone risk the food. There are limits, even when you’re an alkash putting away two litres of vodka a day. The barman saw me, started to fumble under the counter. Maybe he was just reaching for a clean towel, if the place had such a thing. Maybe. He paused when I raised a warning finger. Perhaps he saw the Makarov under my jacket.

  The room was almost empty, apart from a drunk in the far corner, staring into space, trying to remember who he once had been. I pulled up one of the bar stools, inspected the seat for stains, sat down.

  ‘Inspector.’

  No love lost, but no change to the status quo. It felt good getting my old title back, but I thought the gun had more to do with any respect I’d been shown.

  ‘Vodka?’

  ‘Two small bottles,’ I said. ‘The good stuff. Unopened.’

  He nodded, his face giving nothing away, a good Kyrgyz. He pulled down two half-litre bottles, set them in front of me. I pretended to reach for my wallet, he pretended they were free, shook his head. I picked one bottle up, took it over to the drunk, placed it within reach. He didn’t acknowledge the gift, but I knew if I tried to take it back, a chicken claw of a hand would reach out and stop me. I sat back down at the bar, slid the remaining bottle into my jacket pocket.

  ‘You don’t want a glass?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Just get on the phone, you know who to call,’ I said, made my voice brutal and set for violence.

  ‘You know who he’ll hurt if he doesn’t want to talk to you,’ the barman said, his face taut with anxiety.

  ‘You know who I’ll hurt if I don’t talk to him,’ I said, gave him the hard stare.

  Using his body to hide the number he dialled, the barman listened for a moment, looked increasingly worried as the ringtone continued, finally whispered into the mouthpiece for a couple of moments, handed the phone to me.

  ‘Inspector.’

  Aliyev’s voice was measured, precise, perhaps even a little amused.

  ‘Pakhan,’ I replied. We were obviously going to be formal.

  ‘Time to meet.’

  ‘Better sooner than later, don’t you think?’ I said, listened to the silence for thirty seconds.

  ‘You know Mr Quang is no longer in police custody?’ Aliyev asked.

  ‘Locks everywhere have a habit of springing open when you pick them with a big enough banknote.’

  ‘Of course, there are situations where no amount of money buys you a way out,’ Aliyev said. There it was. No veiled threats, no suggested alternatives. I knew he meant to kill me. And he knew I was intent on killing him.

  ‘One of my representatives in Bangkok has already discussed your visit with Quang. I regret to
say he holds you responsible for the temporary loss of his liberty. Not to mention the damage to his villa, the kilos of product that were seized and then “disappeared”. The death of his “friend” whose reappearance in a basket at a Bangkok laundry created quite a stir. Oh, and he seemed particularly angry that the Cambodian government is taking steps to recover a sculpture stolen from Angkor Wat. They’re also threatening to extradite his father for the theft.’

  ‘No point in telling him I’m not to blame,’ I said.

  ‘No point at all,’ Aliyev agreed. ‘In fact, he’s offered me a substantial reward if I can manage your return to Bangkok.’

  ‘Drugged and in a packing case, I suppose.’

  ‘It may have to be something uncomfortable and disagreeable like that,’ Aliyev said, ‘but then again, not as disagreeable as you staying here.’

  I looked around the bar in all its cheap, shabby decay. Chipped Formica tables decorated with beer rings and scarred by cigarette burns. Mysterious stains on the threadbare carpeting. A subtle hint of vomit mingling with the scent of piss from the toilets. I didn’t think I’d miss the Kulturny, except it was a place I’d known for many years, and the familiar becomes more significant when you sense you’re approaching your death.

  ‘Inspector, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, feeling the solid weight of the gun at my belt, the vodka bottle in my pocket, ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Then I suggest we meet at—’

  ‘No, I’ll say where and when,’ I interrupted. ‘And I don’t want you bringing that troupe of badly trained halfwits you call your men along.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Aliyev said, and I could almost believe he felt affronted. ‘Where do you suggest, Inspector? Somewhere public, I imagine. Of course, your Uzbek lady friend isn’t invited; I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘She’s left the country,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Well, a woman like that, she was never going to hitch her wagon to a loser like you, was she?’

  ‘That sounds pretty accurate,’ I said, left it at that, wondered for a moment if he might be right.

  ‘You always think you know who your friends are, Inspector, until you look around and discover you don’t have any.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thought, pakhan.’

  ‘It’s the way of the world. A lesson I learnt very early on.’

  ‘You went to the wrong kind of school,’ I said. Aliyev merely laughed.

  ‘I’m the one with several million dollars in my bank account, Inspector. I’m not even sure you can afford to pay for the bottle of vodka you’ve just bought. Tell the barman to put it on my bill.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll share a toast. To old friends. If we had any,’ I said.

  ‘Where do you propose we meet?’

  Voice smooth as Thai silk, a shark homing in for the kill.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ I said. ‘Not in the city, too many people, we don’t want anyone to get hurt.’

  ‘The furthest thing from my mind,’ Aliyev lied.

  ‘Late afternoon, say four o’clock.’

  ‘Da, but where?’

  ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow, at the grave of our fathers,’ I said and put down the phone.

  Chapter 57

  I spent the early part of the morning at the lock-up I keep on the city outskirts, away from prying eyes, people who might disapprove of a serving police officer having a stash of fake passports, unauthorised weaponry, dollars, euros and roubles. Nothing unusual; I’d be surprised if most of my colleagues didn’t have a similar arrangement. Governments change or are overthrown, politicians rise and fall, and it’s always best to be prepared for a sudden change in your circumstances.

  I filled a black plastic carry-all, the sort gym freaks like to be seen with, locked up, looked around for a car to borrow. Technically, I was going to steal it, but since I had no intention of joyriding it to destruction or torching it for kicks, I preferred to think of it as a temporary loan.

  I wanted an older model, something unmemorable and reliable. Newer cars are much harder to hot-wire, expensive cars get noticed. After several blocks I found it, a four-door Lada 1200 sedan that looked as if it had been driven three times around the world. The doors were locked, of course – no one in Kyrgyzstan is stupid enough to leave anything unlocked unless it’s been nailed down – but it wasn’t hard to smash the quarter light. Two minutes later, I was on my way, looking in the rear-view mirror to make sure I hadn’t been spotted.

  In the summer, driving up to Chong-Tash is very pleasant once you’re out of the city. Fresh air drifting down from the mountains, passing through villages where excited dogs chase after your car and the local babushki sell buckets of plums, apples and cherries by the roadside. But that’s in the summer.

  By autumn, the mist clings to the hillsides and haunts the fields, the day darkens earlier, and the mountains take on a menacing look. The villages are empty with only an occasional light shining through net curtains to show the place is inhabited. We’re Kyrgyz; we know winter is creeping up on us, stalking us as if we were its prey. Perhaps we are.

  Ata-Beyit, Grave of our Fathers in Kyrgyz, is a memorial ground thirty kilometres south of Bishkek, near Chong-Tash. Every few months I go there, listen to the wind blowing from across nearby fields, watch tree branches shiver and their leaves tremble.

  In the 1930s, almost a hundred and forty political figures and intellectuals were ‘purged’ by the Soviet NKVD as ‘enemies of the people’, shot at night, bodies dumped in a brick kiln. Shamefully, the massacre only came to light when the USSR collapsed and the bodies were moved to a mass grave by Chingiz Aitmatov, our most famous author and diplomat. His father was amongst the victims.

  If that was all, Ata-Beyit would still be a melancholy place. But in 2010, during our second revolution since independence, waves of protests and demonstrations against corruption and nepotism flooded the country. Over forty protesters, mainly young men, were shot dead by government forces in Ala-Too Square.

  It’s a day I would love to forget but cannot. Bullets tearing into flesh, blood from the dead a scarlet flood spilt on the road, the screams of the wounded, smoke from burning cars throwing a black pall over everything. Seeing the bodies stacked in the morgue like so much firewood as their families wept and begged for news was the worst day of my career, the day I realised the dead must always be avenged.

  Many of those who died on that day are buried at Ata-Beyit, a reminder of the price we’ve paid for democracy. They lie in a separate graveyard, two rows of identical black marble stones, each one showing a name, dates and sometimes an engraved likeness of a face.

  In April each year, the relatives of the young men killed in 2010 visit and clean around the graves, maybe bring a bouquet or a jar filled with flowers. Otherwise, the place is usually deserted, apart from the woman who works in the small yurt-shaped museum, a guard at the turn-off from the main road, an occasional tourist ticking the site off his list of things to see.

  Older tragedies are also commemorated. It was only in 2016 that a monument was built to remember the Urkun, the Exodus, when men, women and children fled during an uprising against the Russian Tsarist forces. Perhaps a hundred thousand people and their animals perished trying to escape over the Tien Shan mountains as winter set in and the mountain passes became snowbound killing grounds.

  Even now, a century later, at the Bedel Pass, four thousand metres above sea level near the Chinese border, you can wade through icy spring snowmelt and pick up human and animal bones, gleaming white where the water has brought them down and scrubbed them clean.

  Not many people visit Ata-Beyit. It’s a reminder, after all, of suffering, murder, lives lost. And people are busy, of course, with the day-to-day stuff that fills our lives: fields to plough, livestock to tend, getting the children off to school. Visiting the dead isn’t a priority.

  It was in this most sombre of places I’d decided to face Aliyev once and for all.


  Chapter 58

  The clouds were looking ominous as I stopped the car down a rutted path two hundred metres away from the entrance to Ata-Beyit. My watch said it was just after noon. Aliyev and his men would arrive soon, set up an ambush, gun me down as I arrived, innocent and trusting.

  I climbed over a fence to avoid the guard at the entrance, walked up to the main memorial ground, where the victims of the purges lie together underneath a symbolic tunduk, the round smoke hole at the top of every yurt. Our national symbol, it’s a sign of our nomadic heritage; you’ll even find it at the centre of our flag. Beyond the mass grave is the memorial and burial place of Chingiz Aitmatov. A metal bas-relief of his face hangs on a white marble wall behind his grave, also capped by a tunduk.

  I’m not the world’s greatest shot with a rifle, but it wasn’t as if my targets would be a kilometre away. I’d found the gun when I was searching an old warehouse used in a couple of murders. The decapitated corpses had been removed and all that remained was to find the heads. The gun was hidden under an old paint-stained tarpaulin, nothing to do with the murders. I replaced the rifle, came back that evening, gave it a new home in my lock-up. I didn’t imagine I’d ever need it, but in my line of work, you never know what hides around the corner.

  Now, with Aliyev coming mob-handed, as I knew he would, I needed every advantage I could get. I’d also got my service issue Makarov, and my Yarygin. If I needed more than the eighteen bullets it held, I was going to be dead by the end of the afternoon anyway. I told myself I’d save the last bullet for myself, if I had to, but I intended to make sure I was the last man standing.

  I checked my line of sight, making sure I could see the main road and the turn-off to the complex. There’s a small space for parking, with steps leading to the lower level where the gravestones stand in disciplined ranks. If I took up a space among the graves, I’d have a clear field of fire. I thought about shooting Aliyev first, dismissed the idea. Disposing of his troops first was not the sensible option, but I wanted this to be a duel between Aliyev and me.