Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

‘Brother, I’m family, remember. Would I let anything happen to you? Don’t forget, I know people.’

He grinned, and lit another of his stinking papirosh . Somehow, I didn’t think that Kursan’s ‘people’ would want to take on the might of the State Security Office, but I kept my doubts to myself.

‘You know a little about my business, da ? How I can get things at the right price for the right people, without those wolves in the White House taking their piece and leaving nothing for honest folk? Fuck your mother, that’s what I tell them!’

He looked round at me, genuinely indignant. I smiled at the thought of Kursan telling a set of strait-laced bureaucrats about his assignations with their mothers, and pointed in the direction of the windscreen, just as a gentle hint about his driving. He gave a dismissive snort.

‘Don’t worry, only an arsehole would be out driving on a day like this. Me, I know this road like I know my old woman’s tits.’

He wrenched at the wheel as a giant truck loomed out of the whiteness, and I bounced against the door as the wheels locked and skidded. I had visions of us being dug out of a snowdrift in about three months’ time, but Kursan set us back on the road, and brought us to a halt.

‘Fuck off!’ he yelled into the blizzard, then turned to me and grinned. ‘Told you I could drive, nyet ?’

Despite myself, I had to grin back.

‘Anyway, I do a little trading, a little bobbing and weaving, you understand. Takes all sorts. A little weed, it grows by the side of the road around here, and it’s herbal, natural. But you know I never touch any of the hard shit. You sell krokodil , to me you’re scum. Same with pimps. Arseholes!’

Kursan’s always told me he doesn’t handle pills or injectables. And unlike a lot of smugglers, he’s totally opposed to trafficking; it’s the reason I’ve been able to turn a familial blind eye to his activities for all these years.

‘There’s other shit I won’t touch as well. Parts.’

‘Parts?’

‘Animal parts, you know, all that stuff those slant-eyes over the mountains take, to make their little yellow dicks stand up.’

Cross over the Tien Shan Mountains into China and head to the market in Urumchi, and you can find all sorts of strange medicines. Everybody knows about the belief that rhino horn cures impotence, and tiger bones help with arthritis. But that’s just the start of a long list of ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine: syrup of bile extracted three times a day from captive Asian bears, dried seahorses crushed into a powder, bitter herbs used to make tea, and who knows what else.

I sensed Kursan was hinting at something. But although I was family, I was also ment , and it went against the grain to tell a cop anything. I said nothing; I’ve always known the value of patience. When he was ready to tell me, he’d talk. There was a reason why he was dragging me out towards the mountains. And so far, he was the only lead I’d got. I stared out at Lake Issyk-Kul over to my right; even this high up in the mountains, it never freezes, which is how it gets its name, ‘Warm Lake’.

In the summer, the place is packed with holidaymakers enjoying the clear water and clean air. Expensive sanatoria are filled with Russians coming to take a health cure; the bureaucrats stay in government-owned dachas . By the roadside, the locals sell buckets of glistening cherries and apples picked fresh from their gardens. Headscarved women stroll up and down the beaches selling smoked fish. You might even glimpse a two-humped Bactrian camel, trudging gloomily along the shore, a couple of screaming children on its back.

Winter, though, that’s a different story. In the sour grey light, with the wind blasting down from the Celestial Mountains, the old stories about sacred rocks and rivers, ancient armies riding through the night, the sack of villages and the slaughter of the locals, seem only too real. The only sensible course of action is to hole up somewhere warm with a bottle of vodka and wait for the spring to stumble back in four months’ time. The Kyrgyz winter reminds us that the past is never dead, simply waiting to ambush us around the next corner.

‘The thing is,’ Kursan continued, ‘I know this Uighur, from Urumchi. Not a bad type, not a shithead like most of them are. We’ve managed to do a bit of business in the past. He called me up a couple of days ago, and asked if I’d heard anything about girls being shipped over the border into Bishkek. You know there’s lots of demand in Dubai, not so much in Moscow, but why would you drag someone all the way over the Tien Shan in this weather? Plenty of young bitches in Panfilov Park, if that’s what you’re after.’

‘And?’

‘Well, he was a bit concerned about this woman because he said she was pregnant, long way gone, and with her time almost due, when she disappeared.’

I began to get a very bad feeling about this.

‘And when you heard about the murder?’

‘And the baby in the belly, right, I wondered if there was a connection.’

‘We’re on our way to meet him?’

‘Right.’

‘A phone call might have been easier.’

Kursan laughed at my naivety.

‘Get a smuggler to talk to the filth on a mobile? With State Security and the Chinese Border Police tracking every call? Sure. Nothing he’d like more than fifteen years in Bishkek Penitentiary Number One catching TB from all the lifers. Or a bullet in the back of the head, depending which side of the border they catch him.’

‘So where are we meeting him?’

‘I know where. So you don’t need to.’

And with that, he turned his attention to driving through the blizzard, peering to see the road ahead, while I stared into the murk and gloom for any idea where the case was going.

For the last hour, I’d been blindfolded, at Kursan’s insistence, bouncing from side to side as the car drove over what was clearly no more than a dirt track. I was bruised, sore and pissed off. My gun was locked in the trunk, ‘to be on the safe side’.

Finally, I sensed the car slowing to a halt. Some shouting outside, then Kursan removed my blindfold. I blinked, and looked through the windscreen. Fuck knew where we were; it was hard to make anything out, with the falling snow. I suspected I’d fallen off the edge of the earth. Two men, both Uighurs and clutching Makarov semi-automatic pistols, beckoned me out of the car. They both looked as if you could beat them with a scaffolding pole for a day and still not get anything out of them. I opened the door slowly, making sure my hands were always in view. It was freezing, and I pulled my fur ushanka tight over my ears. Right then, a vodka would have been very welcome.

The thug on the left, whiskery and sullen, reeking of garlic, patted me down, then pointed to the black Mercedes parked nearby. Kursan and I made our way over, the rear window sliding down as we approached.

‘Abdurehim Otkur,’ Kursan made the introduction, reaching out to clasp the hand of the man in the back seat. I noticed no one wanted to shake my hand. Abdurehim Otkur was one of the great poets of the Uighur language; clearly I wasn’t supposed to know the real identity of the man in front of me. Reassuring, in a way; if he’d wanted to have me killed, he wouldn’t have bothered with a false name. I watched as he got out of the car, fastening his coat as he did so.

‘“We were young when we started our journey”,’ I said, quoting the only line of Otkur I remembered from school.

‘“Now our grandchildren can ride horses”,’ he finished the quotation. ‘I’m impressed, Inspector, I wasn’t expecting a man of culture.’