Spring Betrayal Read online

  As I walked, I tried to find a possible motive behind the deaths. I was pretty sure Usupov would find a cause of death, at least for the less decomposed bodies. I was also pretty certain it wouldn’t be from natural causes. But why kill the children in the first place, then bury their bodies together, where the likelihood of them being uncovered was so much greater?

  Usupov was waiting for me in the reception area of the Amir. For once, his usual composure seemed to have slipped. I wondered if seeing so many dead children had slipped a scalpel under his skin, then remembered how he’d autopsied all the protesters shot dead by the government at the start of the last revolution. If there was one thing Usupov was hardened to, it was death.

  “Inspector,” he began, stopped to polish his glasses. His hands shook slightly; we might have worked together before, cut a few corners, done each other favors, but I was still Murder Squad. Which means I don’t have friends, only suspects.

  I jerked a thumb at the chairs furthest from the reception desk, and we sat down. The clock on the wall behind the desk stuttered away the minutes, but otherwise the room was quiet. I stared at him, not saying a word.

  Few things intimidate people more than silence. Their guilt hangs in the dead air, or they get a taste of what solitary confinement in a basement cell must be like.

  “Gurminj told you about the identity bands?”

  I showed him the face with the unreadable Uighur mask I’d inherited from my grandfather. A face sharpened by a thousand basement interrogations.

  “I’ll be looking into that,” I said. “Not easy, getting hold of those, from all over the country.”

  Usupov nodded. Tracking the original owners was going to be time-consuming, but it had to be done. Gurminj had given me the names, but interrogating them was strictly down to me.

  “Any thoughts on why the bodies were buried together?” Usupov asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Seven different dumping sites would mean seven different holes, seven times the risk of being seen, of someone plowing a potato field and unearthing a dead child,” I said. “So one burial place makes sense.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s what I would do. Maybe he was in a hurry, or there’s some kind of ritual involved, a psycho thing,” I said, wondered why the corner of Usupov’s mouth twitched, as if hooked. Fear. It was time to press home.

  “So what have you got to tell me, Kenesh?”

  He looked away. We’d known each other a long time, and I’ve learned from long experience how to tell when people lie. And he knew it.

  “I was under orders from the moment you called me. To tell you nothing right away, to report back direct first with whatever I found out.”

  I raised an eyebrow, looked disbelieving. I didn’t have many friends back at the station, but this seemed a complicated way of screwing up my career even more than it already was.

  “Sverdlovsky station.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Usupov shook his head.

  “Worse.”

  I waited. Until he said the name I really didn’t want to hear.

  “Tynaliev.”

  Mikhail Tynaliev. The minister of state security, probably the most dangerous man in Kyrgyzstan. The father of the dead and mutilated girl I’d knelt beside on a winter night, a brutal wind coming down off the mountains.

  I didn’t think anyone knew how I’d set up my old boss to admit to having Yekaterina Tynalieva killed. But in the dismal hours before dawn, I’d sometimes lie awake, wondering just how much he’d been hurt before Tynaliev had him put down. Imagining his fingernails being ripped out, his testicles crushed. Having seen Yekaterina Tynalieva’s body, and knowing her father’s reputation, I would hazard a bet that death was an escape, but not a quick one.

  Usupov wasn’t stupid; he would have linked Tynaliev with the disappearance of the chief. But he knew better than to inquire into matters that would bring him nothing but problems. I was Murder Squad; it was my job to get myself into trouble by asking the right questions.

  “It was the minister who organized the helicopter up here,” Usupov said. “He told me he wanted a full report, the matter dealt with quickly.”

  “Why would Tynaliev show an interest in a case like this?” I asked. “It’s going to reach the papers, but it’s not as if it threatens state security. A psycho, maybe a cult, but that’s all. So why?”

  Usupov finished polishing his glasses and put them back on, clearly more comfortable behind their shield.

  “Why is it so important to him?” I repeated.

  Usupov smiled, but it never climbed as high as his eyes.

  “That’s not the sort of question you ask a man like the minister,” he said. “But maybe it’s not about state security.”

  I waited for him to add to that. He shook his head, stood up, began to walk toward the elevator doors, turned and looked back at me.

  “Maybe you should ask if it’s about you.”

  Chapter 6

  I’d last seen Mikhail Tynaliev when his bodyguards had dragged my old boss out of his office to a painful, solitary death. I didn’t expect thanks—he wasn’t that sort of man—but I had hoped he would leave me alone. As I watched Usupov disappear into the elevator, I guessed it was the minister who had ordered me into this internal exile.

  I wasn’t going to tell the world about the chief’s death, but keeping hold of power means making sure the bag is securely tied when you drown those kittens you don’t want. If Tynaliev wanted to make sure my tongue stayed behind my teeth, he could have arranged it. A car accident, a shooting in the line of duty. But that wasn’t the minister’s style. Better to keep me alive but off balance, in case I came in useful later. Everyone said he was devious. No one ever said he wasn’t smart.

  I knew that since Tynaliev was involved, there was something political floating in the wind. Maybe a power struggle at the White House; I’d heard rumors of a potential palace coup. That was something Kyrgyzstan didn’t need; yet another president in less than twenty-five years, the country weakened and looking to Russia for help. But I couldn’t see any connection between dead children and whoever was going to be next in line to siphon off our taxes.

  At one time, I would have poured myself a couple of shots of the good stuff, oil to lubricate my thinking, push me in directions I wouldn’t consider when sober. But the last time I had a drink, it was to summon the courage to end my wife’s cancer with a cushion over her face. And ever since then, I knew vodka would only taste of bile and rot, a dead woman’s tongue thrust into my mouth.

  I lay back on the hotel bed, its lumpy mattress digging springs into my shoulders, smoked, wondered if I’d finally reached the edge of my abilities, if all the deaths I’d paid witness to had soured and staled me beyond all redemption. The hesitant afternoon light dwindled to black, headlights crisscrossing the bedroom ceiling like prison searchlights.

  The call came an hour before dawn, my cell phone summoning me from a dry-mouthed dream I couldn’t recall but which had left me apprehensive, as if something dreadful had happened while I dozed.

  “Inspector, there’s a car downstairs waiting for you. To take you to Orlinoye.”

  The voice was distant, mechanical, heartless.

  Orlinoye. The village where my wife Chinara grew up, and where she now lay in the small graveyard on a bluff overlooking the valley.

  “What’s this about?”

  “There’s been a development. New information regarding the death of your wife. The courts have ordered an exhumation, and you are ordered to attend it.”

  I shook my head, still fuddled with sleep, sure I’d misheard.

  “Some mistake.”

  “No mistake. It’s a direct order. Go now.”

  An elderly Moskvitch with a taciturn uniformed ment at the wheel took me past the potato field where the children’s bodies had been found. White crime scene tape still fluttered from the three apple trees, a warning to the curious, flags indicating a surrender of sorts
.

  We didn’t slow down, but turned north, onto the road to Orlinoye, passing through a couple of small hamlets, clusters of worn farm buildings surrounded by bare fields, their backs toward the mountains that mark the border with Kazakhstan. The car’s worn suspension was no help against the potholed road: I swayed left and right to avoid the worst of the ruts, feeling the holster of my gun rub against my hip with each turn.

  We drove for almost an hour until we reached Orlinoye’s one road that splits the village in two. With each kilometer we covered, the fear in my stomach grew more intense, a rat gnawing away at me. I was sure no one had seen me smother Chinara in her hospital bed, using the embroidered cushion that had been a wedding present from her grandmother. In those final hours of her life, I hadn’t been able to bear her pain, so with half a bottle of vodka inside me, I’d pushed her beyond any further suffering. I told myself it was a mercy killing, that she would have done the same for me. But that didn’t prevent her appearing in my dreams, her eyes hurt and accusing.

  I’d taken the cushion home, put it away at the back of the wardrobe. Perhaps it had saliva traces, evidence that could convict me. Or maybe this was a setup; a grave already opened in the hours before dawn, room enough for one more body when I knelt down and felt a gun barrel cold against my neck.

  Finally, we turned right down a muddy track past the village power station, and followed it until we reached the graveyard. My final destination? I almost hoped so.

  We Kyrgyz believe in paying due respect to the dead, but we don’t believe in wasting good farming land either. The Orlinoye graveyard isn’t fertile land that would otherwise be put to good use; it clings to the sloping edge of a small cliff, a river winding through the valley below. There are some eighty graves here, each marked by a headstone and bordered by slender metal railings, most with the Islamic hilal—crescent moon—in each corner. A peaceful place, with birds of prey riding the thermals and a spectacular view toward the mountains.

  We parked beside two more police cars, and I got out, the muscles across my shoulders tight with anxiety. Spring grass, still sprinkled with night frost and dew, crackled and whispered beneath my boots.

  Three men stood by Chinara’s grave, one of them Usupov, the other two uniformed officers I didn’t recognize. Two others were stripped to the waist, despite the chill of the dawn air, scooping shovelfuls of dirt to one side, the mound of raw earth already partly excavated, three or four feet down.

  The last time I visited Chinara’s grave, the mound had been stippled with tiny blue flowers, and a single long thorn with jagged blades. A careless beauty, together with a warning not to get too close.

  Watching the desecration of my wife’s grave, each blow of the spades approaching her body, a sense of finality replaced the fear in my belly. My fingers brushed the cold metal of the gun on my hip, and I undid the leather clasp, making sure everyone saw me do it. I pulled my jacket clear of my gun and walked toward the grave. A thin wind gusted down from the Tien Shan, a whisper of condolence from the Celestial Mountains.

  A good place to die, if this was where it was going to end.

  Chapter 7

  In the distance, high above us, indifferent to our presence, newly risen sunlight burned pale gold on the snow peaks of the mountains. In the crystal dawn air, my breath plumed and smoldered before vanishing. My eyes never left the men in front of me, watching for hands to make a sudden gesture, a turning away, a stepping apart.

  Finally I stopped five meters away, and stared at Usupov. His face was expressionless, unreadable.

  “Inspector—” he began, but I raised a hand to silence him.

  “There must be a very good reason why you’re doing this, and I want to know it. And if I’m not satisfied . . .”

  To finish my sentence, I let my fingertips brush the grips of my gun. I tried to keep anger out of my voice. Anger at the men in front of me, at myself for the failures and compromises that had brought me to this point, and shamefully, resentment at Chinara for dying and leaving me adrift, half submerged, like an abandoned rowboat on Lake Issyk-Kul.

  “You understand, this is where I laid my wife to rest, on her side, facing Mecca. Where I said my farewells. Kissed her forehead and looked at her for the last time before I shrouded her face with a white cloth. Then wrapped her body in the frozen earth and snow.”

  None of the men spoke. The diggers crouched down in Chinara’s open grave, watching, knowing they were trapped.

  I wondered if the simplest solution to everything I carried inside me was to start shooting, and let them extinguish me in a dozen heartbeats, place me next to my life’s love.

  I’d done my best to come to terms with the thought of Chinara’s decay. Cheeks collapsing to rest on teeth, eyes sinking back into their sockets, smooth belly distended by the gases of rot. Soft warm skin shrunk into rasping parchment stretched tight over bones before splitting. And slowly, over decades perhaps, turning back into the earth, with only her grave marker to show she’d ever lived and loved and made my heart bright.

  I looked at the simple marble plaque in front of the grave. Chinara’s profile, copied from a paper silhouette done by a street artist in Red Square beside the Kremlin walls, during the one visit we’d made there. Followed by her name, her dates, and a line she would often quote by one of her favorite poets: LOVE WEATHERS ALL STORMS. When we argued, she could always defuse the occasion, simply by saying it, raising an eyebrow and winning my heart once more with her smile.

  But I’ve never been convinced that love can weather a storm as overwhelming as death.

  I bent down and brushed the loose soil from one of the blue flowers that had adorned the grave. Sunlight turned the tiny petals turquoise and a gust of wind snatched it from my fingers. It was time.

  I like to think I’m not a violent man. I hope the power a police badge, a gun, and a basement interrogation room bestow hasn’t changed my views on right and wrong. But I also know the clarity when the dice have been thrown, and the speed of your reactions and your willingness to pull the trigger are all that stand between you and a hole in the ground.

  Don’t think. Act.

  It’s a clarity that’s helped me put people in their graves. So perhaps it’s all too easy to deceive ourselves as to who we really are.

  The older of the two uniformed officers stepped forward, his hands held palm forward, as if to reassure me that he meant no disrespect.

  “Inspector, we received a call from a very senior government official, ordering us to undertake this regrettable action.”

  I looked at Usupov. His imperceptible nod confirmed my suspicion: Mikhail Tynaliev, Minister of State Security. I turned my attention back to the officer. He had taken a step forward, so that my view of his colleague was partially obscured. I beckoned him to move back, ready to pull out my gun if I had to.

  “Go on.”

  “He told us you’re working on a very important case. One with consequences that go to the highest government levels, if you solve it. The very highest. And vital evidence has been concealed in your wife’s grave.”

  He paused, shrugged.

  “He didn’t tell us where he got the information. And we were ordered to ask you here, to show that nothing disrespectful to your wife’s remains or to your feelings would take place.”

  He reached into his pocket, stopped when I shook my head.

  “A cigarette, that’s all.”

  He looked down at the grave.

  “This isn’t what I signed on for.”

  I shook my head again and he withdrew his hand, before beckoning to the diggers to climb out of the grave. They did so, standing well away from the other three. Maybe they didn’t know that a Yarygin holds seventeen 9mm Parabellum bullets, more than enough to go around.

  I looked down into the dark mouth of the grave. My wife’s shroud was smeared and stained with earth, torn in places, the soil around it raw and freshly turned. The roots of the nearby thorn had coiled themselves around the body,
as if defending it against incursions such as this one. The white cloth stirred as if caught by a sudden breeze. But the air was still.

  Then, a sudden movement, quick, intense. The gray muzzle and black snout of a rat, alert at our intrusion. A rat that had made a home in my wife’s body, her ribcage its roof rafters, her belly its nest. The rat stared back at me, unafraid, baring long yellow teeth in a snarl of defiance. Then I was pumping bullet after bullet into the grave, and as the earth gave way under my feet, I fell, to embrace Chinara for a final time.

  Chapter 8

  I’d had the nightmare before, but its familiarity did nothing to stop me waking, bathed in sweat, heart pounding and my mouth filled with the taste of bile. I switched on the bedside lamp and drank from a bottle of water. Its chill punched my stomach, and I thought I was going to vomit.

  I looked around the room, bland, unremarkable, but couldn’t shake off the impression that something vile had retreated into the shadows, awaiting its moment. I sat there, hands shaking, until my heart slowed and the terror in my mind subsided.

  I knew the dream was offering me some sort of clue, dredged out from the day’s events by my subconscious. When you live in a country governed by the seasons and the power of nature, there’s a deep-seated belief in the sacredness of the world around you. To survive in a land this harsh, you need respect. There’s an element of shamanism buried deep in Kyrgyz culture, a knowledge that recognizes mystic places, sacred mountains, the superstitions and beliefs that underscore the way we live. We never place the round flatbread lepeshka upside down on a plate or fill a cup to the brim with chai, we don’t disturb brightly colored cloths tied to a branch or a rock. To do so is to insult the gifts of nature, or to issue a challenge to forces we don’t even comprehend.