Tom Callaghan - A Spring Betrayal

“Of course, they’re all very reputable, vetted by the ministry,” he said. “That won’t be a problem.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “What about the ones who help you afford a BMW and your lovely dacha? The ones who work off the books, pockets stuffed with more money than you’ve ever earned in your life.”

To reinforce my point, I let my hand fall against the Yarygin’s butt.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sakataev mumbled, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Director, we’re not accusing you of anything,” Saltanat said. “But if the inspector here doesn’t get the answers he wants, he can become rather emotional. And while you’re discovering just how much a police interrogation can hurt, I’ll be making an anonymous call to the authorities.”

Saltanat paused, lit a cigarette, the smoke doing nothing to mask the stink of sweat and fear in the room. Her smile, when it came, was no sweeter than mine, and twice as dangerous.

“After I make that call, once the people you deal with hear about it, I don’t think you’ll be working with them anymore.”

She paused, ground the cigarette out on the fake leather desktop.

“I wonder who’ll inherit the dacha.”

“You’re really not going to blow the whistle on that shithead?” I asked. We were driving back to the hotel while I looked through the folder Sakataev had thrust into my hands.

“Of course not,” she said. “A promise is a promise, right?”

“If you’re sure,” I replied.

Saltanat looked over at me, then laughed.

“You can be trustingly naive at times, Akyl, you know that? Of course I’m going to burn the fat fucker as soon as we get this sorted. He’ll either end up in the pen or in the ground, I don’t really care which.”

“He did offer us the dacha and the car, though.”

“I’ve got a car, and I’m allergic to the countryside,” she said.

“Pollen?”

“And animals and trees and outhouse toilets.”

“City life it is, then,” I said. “But how did you know he was the guy to question?”

Saltanat stared at me as if unable to believe what I’d just asked.

“Akyl,” she said, her voice pitying, “why wouldn’t he be?”

The way it works in Bishkek, you bribe an official to do what you want. He takes the money. Then you blackmail him forever after, just to make sure he keeps quiet about the first time. The amazing thing? They fall for it every time.

Sometimes you have to decide how you want to live your life, and if you’re lucky, you find someone to share it with. I’d loved Chinara, and lost her. I didn’t know if Saltanat and I had a future to share. One part of me hoped so, if we managed to get through this alive.

We parked outside the hotel; Saltanat hit the horn to summon Rustam to open the gates. We waited for a couple of moments, sounded the horn again, but the gates remained shut.

“I don’t like the look of this,” Saltanat said, taking out her Makarov from the glove compartment. She backed the Lexus against the gate, and we scrambled onto the car roof.

I peered cautiously over the top of the wall. There was no sign of Rustam, or any of the other staff. I swung my leg over the gates, dropped to the ground, Saltanat covering me from above. Yarygin in my hand, I opened the side door, and Saltanat joined me. Her face showed she felt as uneasy as I did.

I ran up the steps, looked through the glass panel of the door leading into the kitchen. In the hallway beyond, I could see a pair of legs, a woman, one shoe on, the other lying nearby.

I put my finger to my lips as Saltanat joined me, and we cautiously made our way into the building. I recognized the body, one of the hotel maids, a young Russian girl called Alina, pretty, with long black hair and a shy smile. She wasn’t pretty anymore. Her body sprawled on the floor, her head pillowed on a mat of blood from where a bullet had split her forehead. Her dress had been pulled up to her waist and her underwear lay twisted around one ankle. She stared up at the ceiling, searching for a rescue that wasn’t ever going to arrive.

I quickly checked the room, then Saltanat and I searched the rest of the hotel. Urmat, the Kyrgyz cook, lay on the first-floor landing, his head twisted at an impossible angle, the fingers on both hands broken, blood leaking from the bullet wound in his temple.

We found Rustam in the last of the bedrooms. Saltanat stared at the turmoil of his body while I turned away and retched. As always, when you believe you’ve seen the very worst that human beings can do to each other, someone prepares you a fresh horror to populate your nights and make you wish for dawn.

Rustam had been crucified to the wardrobe door. Thick steel spikes through both wrists held his arms high above his head. His bare chest had been repeatedly slashed and scored, with gobbets of meat scattered around the floor. Where his eyes had once been, deep caves were smeared with congealing blood and matter. He stank of blood and shit and meat on a spit.

I felt my legs go weak, sat down on the bed.

“Saltanat…” I started to say, realized I had no words. My hands were shaking, and I put the Yarygin down on the duvet, worried I might pull the trigger by mistake. With the strange clarity that comes with shock, I noticed the duvet was patterned with red roses on a white background. Like the wounds on Rustam’s body. I managed to make it as far as the bathroom, gripped the bowl’s cool porcelain, resting my head against the mirror.

I rinsed my mouth and spat, vomit and bile sour in my throat. Saltanat stood in front of Rustam, her face expressionless, looking at him with the same intense scrutiny you might give a famous painting, as if deciphering a hidden code or a private symbolism.

“We need to call this in,” I heard myself say. “A massacre. We can’t just leave them here to rot.”

Saltanat shook her head.

“Not yet,” she said. “They’re dead. Past all pain. But whoever did this, they’re not.”

“They will be,” I heard myself saying.

Saltanat looked at me as if she was seeing a new person, one she didn’t like or admire. There was no way she would allow anyone to take this case away from her. I knew she felt guilty about not being able to save Rustam’s daughter, Anastasia. And now she and I had led Rustam to his death. I’m not the only one who believes in justice for the dead.

“Akyl, we know who did this.”

She reached over and handed me back my gun. I tucked it away, nodded. I was beginning to recover some composure.

“And we know what to do about it, right?”

I nodded again. The woman was a force of nature, a hurricane, a winter blizzard, ice cold and unstoppable.

“But first,” and the break in her voice was so slight, I could have sworn I imagined it, “first we have to get him down.”

I shut the door and we stripped to our underwear to avoid bloodying our clothes. I held Rustam’s body in place in a bizarre imitation of a waltz while Saltanat pulled at the spikes that held him aloft. Finally, they came free with a disgusting squelch, and I took the weight of his broken body in my arms. Together, we laid Rustam’s body on the bed, and covered it with the duvet. At once, fresh roses began to blossom on the cotton.

“What do you think happened?” I asked, as we got dressed. Saltanat stared down at the mound on the bed for a moment or two, before replying.

“The iPhone. I think Rustam must have switched it on,” she said. “Just curious, or maybe wanting to see how it worked, what was on it. And they were able to trace the signal.”

I’d forgotten about the iPhone, but it was nowhere in sight, and I felt sure Saltanat was right. So not only had we lost our one piece of evidence, but we’d brought a world of shit upon our heads, and death upon Rustam and his staff.