Tom Callaghan - A Spring Betrayal

“You know I can’t just walk away from this. I do and I’m fucked. Lavrov will have me up on the Torugart Pass, inspecting license plates on the trucks that cross over from China.”

Usupov said nothing, and I felt anger starting to rise.

“If you know something, and I don’t, you’re a witness, maybe even a suspect,” I said, “and no one’s going to question me if I put you up in a cell for a few days. Maybe with someone you’ve testified against.”

It was an empty threat, and we both knew it, but I needed to remind Usupov that this was a murder case, and there weren’t going to be any get-out-of-jail cards.

“I don’t know much,” Usupov said, staring down at his hands. I noticed that they shook slightly.

“So you do know something,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“Not know, more something I suspect.”

“You tell me what you suspect, I’ll find the evidence to back it up,” I said.

“You’re coming up against some very powerful men, Akyl.”

I shrugged; I’d expected nothing less. And putting a stone in the shoes of the rich and powerful is more satisfying than confiscating some alkash ’s bottle, or collecting breakfast money fines for speeding.

“It wouldn’t be the first time, Kenesh, you know that. It’s my career specialty.”

He shook his head, sucking his teeth at my criminal stupidity.

“They’ll brush you aside and forget about you the next minute. Traffic duty in Torugart Pass? You’ll be lucky not to be in a shroud lying next to your wife.”

Perhaps that was the meaning of my dream, a warning or a prophecy. The ticking of the clock behind the reception desk was very loud. Silence hung between us like a spider’s web, ready to snare the unwary.

“These powerful fuckers, what is it they want, Kenesh?”

Usupov stared past me, and I could have sworn there were tears in his eyes.

“You can’t fight them, Akyl.”

“Let me ask you again, and this time with my Murder Squad cap on. Chief Forensic Pathologist Usupov, what is it they want?”

Usupov paused, sighed, world-weary, sickened.

“Fresh meat, Inspector. Young meat.”

He stirred his lukewarm tea, raised the cup to his mouth, put it down again untasted. His eyes were bleak behind his glasses.

“They want children.”

“It was around this time, about a year ago,” Kenesh began, his eyes avoiding mine. “I’d been called out in the middle of the night by the duty officer at Sverdlovsky station. They’d found a body just off Chui Prospekt, it was being shipped to the morgue for me to examine. He wouldn’t give me any details, except to say it was important the autopsy be done right away.

“I wasn’t too pleased; we’d been celebrating the spring festival, Nowruz, and I knew I had a busy day ahead. But he told me orders from the top, with a police car outside my front door within ten minutes. So I got dressed, a ment drove me across town to the morgue.

“The body had already arrived, laid out on the table, covered, just as usual. But what was different was the man sitting on the next table. He was wearing a suit, smart, expensive, so I didn’t think he was a policeman; a lawyer maybe, a government official, whatever. But he didn’t have that nomenklatura look. He was thickset, maybe forty, with the face of a former boxer, all shadows and scars. He sat there on one of the tables, legs swinging, smoking as if he didn’t have a care in the world, in his favorite bar with a cold beer in front of him.

“I told him that I didn’t allow smoking in the operating room. He looked at me, then at the end of his cigarette, raised an eyebrow.

“‘You’re worried about his health?’ he said, waving the cigarette in the direction of the body.

“‘No, but I’m worried about mine,’ I said. He just smiled, looked at his cigarette again, and gusted a blue cloud in my direction. His smile never managed to climb as far as his eyes.

“‘I think you’ll find the cause of death was a heart attack,’ he said. ‘Tragic in such a young man.’

“I pulled back the sheets, and looked down at the body.”

Usupov paused, then reached over and took a cigarette from my pack that lay on the table. He lit it with the uncertain gesture of a nonsmoker, coughed as he swallowed the smoke.

“Bad?” I said.

Usupov nodded, swallowed, trying to recapture his normal air of detachment.

“I’ve seen a lot of shit that people do to each other, Akyl,” he said, and I watched the burning end of his cigarette tremble, as if caught in a sudden wind. I waited for him to speak. From a man who’d spent so much time in the presence of the dead, his silence told me more than I wanted to know.

“He was about twelve, I guessed, but hard to tell from the bruising on his face and chest. Small, undernourished, thin enough so I could see the broken ribs outlined against his skin. The left cheekbone shattered, so his face had collapsed in on itself. Two teeth on the right side slicing through his cheek. His facial injuries came from a hammer; I could see the circular imprint.”

Usupov paused, snapped his fingers to drag the receptionist away from her phone.

“Vodka, the good stuff,” he said. I shook my head, watched the girl walk away. We waited in silence until an open bottle and brimming glass sat in front of him. Usupov emptied the glass in one swift movement, shuddered as the alcohol blazed in his mouth and throat.

“Go on,” I said, quietly, not wanting to break Usupov’s rhythm.

“Bite marks—from more than one mouth—on the boy’s thighs. A compound fracture of the left tibia. And bruising from what looked like heavy boots. Not just kicking but stamping, so I could see the tread on the soles. More than one pair of shoes.”

He poured more vodka, watched it spill over the lip of the glass.

“All the time I was examining the body, the man watched without a reaction. I might have been preparing dinner. Then I turned the body over.”

Usupov emptied the glass in a single shot.

“He’d been raped, Inspector, by more than one man, from the amount of sperm I found. Penetrated with something sharp. There was blood on the back of his legs, more bite marks on his shoulders. Twelve, Inspector, that’s how young he was. The same age as my eldest.”

I said nothing. There are times when the dead bear witness to such horror that silence is the only possible alternative to a scream of despair. I pushed the thought of a vodka for myself to one side. The clock continued to tick, like a pulse refusing to give up.

“The man said, ‘I told you, a heart attack,’ and he stood up, mashed his cigarette out on the floor. It left a blue-black mark on the tiles, the same shade as the bruises on the boy’s face. The man stood in front of me, the tobacco on his breath heavy on my face. He had a killer’s cold eyes, black, impossible to read. He held up a crumpled piece of paper, pushed it against my chest.

“‘The boy’s death certificate. I’ve saved you the trouble of filling it in. Heart attack. Mitral stenosis. It says so in black and white,’ he said, ‘and if it bothers you, well, his isn’t the only blank death certificate I have. Understand?’

“I asked if the body was to be released to relatives, and he told me not to bother my head with things that didn’t concern me. ‘Concentrate on slicing up the dead,’ he said. ‘And avoid joining them.’”

Usupov stared at the wall, not seeing anything, and we sat in silence.

“What makes you suspect there’s a connection to the case we have here?” I asked.

“You saw the bodies we autopsied,” Kenesh said. “There were bite marks on some of them. Blows from a hammer. Similar wounds. Done in a frenzy, maybe rage, maybe sexual, I don’t know.”