Tom Callaghan - A Spring Betrayal

“How did it go?” Saltanat asked, an hour later. I’d taken off the kalpak , adjusted my collar, but as I looked in the rearview mirror, a no-hoper still stared back out at me. I gave myself a jovial wink I was very far from feeling, grinned at her.

“I imagine the car took the worst of the blast,” I said. “It’s a start, but we can’t sit here chattering. Places to go, people to fuck up.” And then I told her to drive east, toward the bus station.

On the way, Saltanat explained she’d handed Otabek over to Elmira, a junior colleague at the embassy. She was right in thinking Otabek would probably be frightened of strange men.

“Right now, he’s safe. Perhaps the best thing is if I organize an Uzbek passport, get him out of the country and away from Graves. What do you think?”

I nodded; it was a plan, and I couldn’t think of a better one.

After half an hour, the bus station loomed ahead, depressing in its ugliness. Most cities put their public transport in the less expensive parts of town, and Bishkek is no exception; our bus station is where lots of minivans and marshrutki congregate, as well as shipping containers, clustered together as if shipwrecked on the shore of a long-dried-up sea. Saltanat had made a couple of calls while waiting for me, bought some bits and pieces I’d asked her to get.

We parked near a container with the initials MG stenciled in Cyrillic on the sides and doors. I took the five-liter can of gas Saltanat had bought, together with a couple of towels, and sauntered over toward the container. As I reached it, as I’d expected, a guard turned the corner and glared at me. Cheap sneakers, dirty jeans, and a greasy leather jacket straight out of Osh bazaar. But the Makarov in his hand was the real thing.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked, not unreasonably, I thought.

“Message for Mr. Graves,” I said, holding my hands wide to show I posed no threat. “It’s about this can.”

“Yes?” he said, and then recognition made his jaw drop. I’d last seen him watching us drive away from Jalalabad, and I was willing to bet his Makarov had already fired at us once before.

He grunted as I swung the gas can in a wide arc into his face. The trick is to aim behind the person you want to hit, so the can is traveling with maximum impact when it hits. To say the blow caught him by surprise was an understatement. There was a sound like a meat hammer pulverizing a juicy steak, and the man’s jaw moved about fifteen degrees up and out of true. His eyes crossed, rolled up in his head, then he fell backward, giving himself a second concussion as he slammed against the side of the container. I liberated his Makarov, poured some of the gas onto one of the towels. I stuffed it under the container, near the bricks that supported it from the ground, poured the remainder of the gas into one of the ventilation grills. I threw the can away, lit a match to the corner of the remaining towel. Once it was fairly alight, I threw it to join its cousin under the container. The petrol caught, and I made my way back to the car.

“What about him?” Saltanat asked, pointing to the unconscious guard, his jacket already beginning to smolder.

“What about him?” I asked, giving her the hard stare. “He might be one of the guys in the videos. Maybe the one who fucks the little girls. Or truncheons the boys into a pulp. He’ll wake up. Or not. I don’t give a fuck about him.”

She gave me a look I couldn’t fathom. Maybe impressed, maybe worried. She got out of the car, pulled the thug away from the side of the container.

“I’ll tell you who he is,” I said. “And then maybe you’ll push him into the flames yourself.”

“You know him?”

“Knew him. At the orphanage when I was a kid. You remember I told you about Aleksey Zhenbekov? The bully who beat up the little ones?”

“This is him?”

“A lot older, a lot uglier, a whole lot more dangerous. He was the one who shot at us in Jalalabad.”

Saltanat thought about it for a few seconds.

“How did he know where we were?” she asked.

“A leak in Tynaliev’s staff? Or maybe Tynaliev himself. The higher-ups will always fuck you one way or another. We’re little people, pawns, of no importance. But now it’s my turn to fuck someone up.”

“So no more Mr. Nice Guy, Upholder of Law and Order?” Saltanat said, turning the ignition and steering the car back toward the market.

“He’s on vacation. Maybe permanently,” I said, glaring out of the window. The sky had become jammed with rain clouds, black and oppressive.

“Who are you? And what do you want?”

The Voice. Snarling, filled with anger, incredulity that anyone should dare to challenge him.

“You don’t need to know. What do we want? The folding stuff, of course.”

“You’re not Circle, I know that. They’ve all filled their beaks from me.”

I laughed, making the sneer evident. Nothing annoys a pakhan , a big man, more than thinking someone would have the temerity to fuck them over, think they could get away with it. The big man becomes angry, and that means reckless. Then you have him.

“Times change. People get hungry, prices go up.”

“Not when I make a deal.”

“Who said you’d made a deal with us?” I asked.

Silence on the other end of the phone.

“Think about what you’ve got. Think about how much you’re prepared to lose. Not just containers stuffed with questionable goods, but staff, bodyguards. Once they think you’re losing control, they’re out the door and you’re all alone. Keeping that has to be worth something, don’t you think? So think; we’ll be in touch.”

Saltanat looked across at me as I switched off the phone. It was one of a dozen pay-as-you-go mobiles I’d bought at an Internet café near the railway station, onto which I’d copied Graves’s number. I didn’t know if Graves had the muscle to get them tracked, but I’ve never been one for unnecessary risks. I could see she wasn’t happy. The hotel room had never seemed more cramped.

“So what exactly is your master plan?” she asked, her voice like a steel bar hitting a table. “I’m assuming—hoping—you’ve got one?”

“This Graves; he’s got businesses, restaurants, shops, and not a big enough crew to protect them all. Gas bombs, drive-bys, we can keep him hopping from foot to foot, until he doesn’t have the muscle or money to keep himself protected.”

I slapped my hands together, the way you do when you squash a fly.

Saltanat shook her head in disbelief.

“You want to start a war? A one-man war, I might add, because I’m not going to take part in it,” she said.

I looked at her, shrugged as if to say it was no concern of mine.

“I thought Gurminj was your friend. My mistake, I guess,” I said. “The identity band on the kid’s wrist links Gurminj’s killers with the rapes and murders. All we have to do is hunt them down.”

“I know you can be a bastard, Akyl,” she said, and I heard both anger and pity in her voice, “but I never thought you’d be a stupid one.”

She lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling.

“This isn’t about revenge for Gurminj. Or justice for all those dead children. This is about you wanting to die, taking as many of the bad guys with you as you can.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “Why would I want to die?”

She stubbed her half-smoked cigarette out, jabbed her finger at me.

“Because your wife is dead and you’re not. Because your friend died and you couldn’t protect him. Because of tortured and murdered children, and you can’t give them justice. Because you can’t work out whether you want to fuck me or leave me. Because you think you’ve failed and there’s nothing left.”