Tom Callaghan - A Spring Betrayal

“There hasn’t been an official report, so I’m wondering how you know.”

Saltanat simply smiled, enigmatic as ever. I wondered for a moment if she’d been behind Gurminj’s murder, dismissed the idea out of hand. I couldn’t fathom any motive she might have had, and Saltanat has never done anything without a good reason.

As if reading my mind, she turned the full intensity of her gaze upon me. I felt my breath catch in my chest.

“When I first met you, Inspector, I wasn’t certain whose side you were on, whether I should kill you or not. I didn’t know whether or not you were wetting your beak with the help of the bad guys.”

I tried to smile.

“I hope I convinced you. And call me Akyl, no need for ceremony, surely?”

Saltanat raised one impeccably plucked eyebrow.

“Maybe. Later. But first, cards face up?”

It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. Saltanat has never shown a full hand in her life. But if it gave me a lead to solving the case of the dead children and the murder of my friend, who was I to argue?

She gave a smile that punched me in the heart. Who can name the exact moment when a woman’s smile reminds you of your dead wife? A woman who made the act of living worthwhile, whose breath you stole away, and buried on a snow-covered hill?

“You’re the investigating officer, right?”

“Officially? The dead children. Unofficially? I’m putting Gurminj’s killer on my to-fuck-someone-up-beyond-belief list.”

I told her about the dead infants, the puzzle of the orphanage identity bands, Usupov’s belief that I’d been exiled to Karakol on the orders of Mikhail Tynaliev, the sham autopsy that Usupov had been forced to sign off. She nodded as I told her about seeing Gurminj sprawled dead at his desk, the apparent suicide note, her mobile number hidden beneath the balance.

I paused, looked over at Saltanat.

“Your turn,” I said. Saltanat folded her arms and sat back, her face set in the determined look I remembered from our previous encounters. If anything, she looked even more deadly than when she smiled.

“I hope you weren’t followed back to Bishkek, Akyl. And that nobody knows you’re here.”

She paused, lit a cigarette, uncoiled pale gray smoke into the air.

“We could both be in a world of trouble.”

I stared at Saltanat, and she looked back, her gaze unwavering. I don’t know much about women. I’d met Chinara when we were both at school. There hadn’t really been anyone else besides her. She was all I ever wanted. But it was getting hard to remember her, radiant, beautiful, as she had been before the cancer feasted on her. Loss is like that, submerged rocks that from time to time break the surface of the water. It looks safe to dive in, then you break your neck.

“I don’t see where you fit into all this,” I said. “Or me, for that matter.”

Saltanat looked down and began to pick at the label on her beer bottle with her fingernails. I’d only ever once seen her looking vulnerable, after the rape. Now she gave off a sense of uncertainty, unwilling perhaps, or unable, to tell me what she knew.

“I never told my bosses what happened to me,” she said. “They don’t give you medals for failing, for getting into situations you can’t control. The only people who know about what happened are you and me. Best that way.”

“Didn’t you talk to anyone?”

She looked up, stared at me. A tear in her eye? The air was cold, and it’s easy to make mistakes like that.

“My decision not to tell,” she said. “My right.”

I looked down at her hand. Out of reach, out of range.

“Three months ago, we arrested a guy shipping a consignment of DVDs out of Tashkent to Frankfurt. We’d had a tip-off, nothing too specific, just saying there was a box that we might be interested in. The guy was nothing special, low-level, but the box was interesting. We put the pressure on him, a bit of a slap now and then, a friendly punch or two, but he wouldn’t tell us anything. He was more scared of his bosses than of us, and believe me, that takes some doing.”

I nodded, remembering the basement of Sverdlovsky police station, with its easy-clean tiled floor and wash-down walls, the kind of interrogations that had been carried out there. Down there, you were a very long way from help of any kind.

“We sent him to one of our safe houses, to keep him quiet, maybe make him change his mind about singing to us.”

Saltanat paused and lit another cigarette.

“Two days later, someone got past our security, over a three-meter wall, drove an icepick through his forehead. No clues, nothing. And of course, he hadn’t sung a single note.”

“And the shipment of DVDs?”

“We found maybe fifty DVDs, all called Welcome to Uzbekistan , with pictures of Tashkent and Samarkand on the covers. The first one we played had five minutes showing the Guri Amir, Tamerlane’s mausoleum, then it cut to a scene in a bedroom.”

“Porn?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, “but mild, all soft focus, kisses, wistful stares and romantic music. Nothing I hadn’t seen before.”

“Until you hit fast-forward, right?”

Saltanat stared at me, suspicious, then nodded.

“Pretty obvious,” I said. “A double bluff. Put people off by pretending to be a travelogue, then make them think they’re watching some mild stuff. I take it what followed was a lot harder?”

“I’d never seen anything like that before.”

She took another mouthful of her beer, then stubbed out her cigarette. Putting the bottle down, she wrapped her arms across her chest.

“Children, tortured, raped, with men queuing to take their turn. Boys and girls, begging for help.”

Saltanat looked at me, her face white, her eyes wide with disgust.

“Help that didn’t come.”

I swallowed the nausea that rose in my throat. I’ve seen my share of porn films. It’s hard not to, when you’re a serving police officer. And I know there’s big money to be made. But I hadn’t encountered anything as extreme as the films Saltanat described.

I reached over, took a cigarette out of her pack, lit it, blew cancer at the air.

“That’s terrible,” I said, thinking that it must have felt like death, watching such things, having been raped herself. “But I’m not sure why you were talking to Gurminj.”

“There was nothing in the DVDs to show where they’d been shot. The children, they were naked, so no clues there, but they were all Asian.”

I nodded. There was nothing I could say. When I think about what so-called humans do, perhaps being born is a criminal offense, with a life sentence to follow.

“At the end, one man, wearing a leather mask, burly, tattoos down both arms, would come forward, while the others held the child down.”

She paused, picking at the beer label. Her voice was low, hoarse.

“And then he’d kill them.”

The label came free from the bottle, and Saltanat smoothed it out on the bar top, gently, the way you might stroke the forehead of a small child lying in bed with a fever.

“So why did you contact Gurminj?”

She paused, looked over at me, as if I were the enemy, not a former lover.

“I knew his reputation, he was quite a legend in his field. Honest, incorruptible. And because the children in the films were all wearing Kyrgyz orphanage identity bands.”

I stubbed out my cigarette, feeling the tightening in my stomach that leads to anger. Anger at the random cruelties we impose on those weaker than ourselves, anger at a deity who either leaves us drowning in shit or doesn’t exist. Anger at my own helplessness, my inability to make amends, for Chinara, for the victims who needed me, for myself.