Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

As his body slammed backwards and down against the wall, blood splashing on the dirty snow, I’d already stood up and got the Yarygin out from under the newspaper, double-handed, looking out on to Chui.

Vasily’s bodyguard, Mikhail Lubashov, was there, about four metres away, by the bus stop, holding a Makarov in that stupid sideways grip that wannabes learn from American films. The recoil can snap the bones in your wrist, it’s awkward to sight and it makes a usually accurate handgun unreliable.

One of the surest ways to waste ammunition is to fire on the move, so I didn’t hurl myself through the air, firing backwards over my shoulder in the hope of hitting someone. Instead, I locked my knees, crouched slightly, fixed my shoulders behind the line of the barrel. I looked down the gun’s muzzle, centred on to Lubashov’s chest, where diagonal lines from each shoulder to the opposing elbow would meet.

His next shot smashed chips out of the brick wall to my right, and I watched as the recoil pulled his arm to one side. Before he could regain his balance, I squeezed the trigger once, resighted, fired again, and then a third time, each shot hitting Lubashov in the sternum, driving spear-shaped fragments of bone tissue into both lungs. Never go for head shots or fancy ‘shoot in the leg and watch him go down’ tricks.

Centre chest, triple tap, each time.

Lubashov’s mouth opened and a look of hesitation came into his eyes, as if he’d been asked a question to which he didn’t know the answer. Each bullet punched him back half a step, until he hit the low fence separating the pavement and the road, and simply flipped backwards, his legs sticking up in the air like an abandoned shop mannequin.

I took a quick look around, saw no further threat. Then suddenly my knees abandoned me, and I sat back down heavily. With the clarity of adrenaline vision, I noticed that the splatter pattern of Vasily’s blood fanned out in a triangle of splashes across the table, and the shoulders of my jacket were covered in dandruff. But when I tried to brush it away, I discovered that I was covered in fragments of Vasily’s teeth and jaw.

That’s when I started to vomit up my breakfast, thick mealy ropes of half-digested food, head down between my knees, while the whine and howl of sirens grew ever nearer.

One of my shots had travelled through Lubashov and lodged itself in the shoulder of an irate Tajik carpet seller in town to visit his first cousin, so there was a lot of yelling and abuse going on when the Chief arrived. The Fatboys waitress, with admirable sangfroid, had cleared away the vodka and teeth cocktail I’d invented, and offered me a hundred grams on the house.

Lubashov’s legs still pointed skywards, but I’d draped my copy of Achyk Sayasat over what remained of Vasily’s head. His blood was soaking through a report of the killing of a plain clothes down in Osh. Poetic justice of some sort, I suppose.

The Chief was overjoyed, of course. Two pieces of shit scooped off the pavement, and a brutal crime with major political implications solved in just a couple of days. Better than his birthday.

‘I’ll contact the Minister right away and give him the good news.’

I was genuinely puzzled.

‘What good news?’

‘You’ve found the killers of his daughter, and they’ve been brought to summary justice,’ the Chief said, defying me to contradict him. ‘Of course, Tynaliev may not be too pleased that he didn’t get to… question them himself. But it’s clear you shot in self-defence. This piss-drinker pulled a gun on you,’ he added, giving Vasily’s newspaper-clad face a kick, ‘and that shit-eater tried to shoot you, missed, hit his boss, and you cleared him away. Simple.’

‘Vasily didn’t have a gun,’ I objected.

The Chief looked around, reached into his coat pocket and dropped an automatic next to the body.

‘What’s that, a pencil sharpener?’ he said, and laughed.

‘Motive?’ I asked.

‘Maybe Vasily thought State Security were on to him, wanted to get his retaliation in first.’

‘Chief, Vasily Tyulev was a second-rate, no, a third-rate pimp, who couldn’t get State Security interested in him if he chained himself naked to the gates of the White House and claimed he was Stalin come back to life.’

‘Still waters,’ the Chief said, and tapped the side of his nose. ‘State secrets. Not for an Inspector, Murder Squad, to be party to.’

He looked around, and caught the eye of the waitress.

‘Darling girl!’ he beckoned, and she came over cautiously, looking worried. Another example of the healthy relationship ordinary Kyrgyz citizens have with their police force.

‘You’ll be wanted as a witness, of course, but it’s just a formality. You’ve seen a hero of the Republic in action, and you can tell everyone how the police force is here to guard every law-abiding citizen, day or night.’

The waitress looked at me; hero wasn’t exactly how she’d describe me right then, bloodstained, sweating and stinking of my own vomit. The Chief shook my hand again, and headed down the steps to his waiting car.

‘He’s a hero, mark my words,’ he called out, ‘bring him another hundred grams, shit, make it a bottle!’ And then he was gone, the car doing a screeching U-turn against traffic and speeding back to Sverdlovsky.

I shook my head at the waitress, and sat back to wait for the clean-up crew. The Chief’s theory had a lot of appeal. An end to the case, no irate boss or minister giving me grief. A neat solution. Or it would have been, if it had added up. Why those two women, separated by class and an entire country? Why the mutilations? And why the business with the foetus, assuming it’s the same dead child transferred from one corpse to another. I would have loved to say ‘case solved’ and gone home. But I kept seeing Yekaterina’s eyes staring up at the sky, the dead child inside her. And a terrified woman up on the border, begging her killers to spare her baby, as they close in with butcher’s knives. And however hard I shut my eyes, those images weren’t going away.

‘Inspector?’

I opened my eyes, reluctantly. The waitress was standing in front of me, holding a piece of paper. For one ridiculous moment, I thought she was going to ask me for my autograph.

‘The chyoht ?’

She was right, of course; there’s always a bill, and somebody always has to pay. I fumbled for a handful of som , which I handed over, waving away my change.

‘Thanks,’ she said, and daintily stepped over Vasily.

I started laughing then, and I was still laughing when the morgue waggon arrived to take Usupov’s next two guests away.

A few hours later, I was showered and changed and thinking about going into the station when Kursan called me. The grapevine had been working overtime, and he wanted to know if the stories he’d heard were true. I told him that as shoot-outs went, it wasn’t much to write home about; a total of five shots fired, rather than the eight dead and ninety wounded in the story going around town.

‘They won’t be missed. Low life, both of them,’ he told me, before adding that someone would step up to take their place straight away.

‘One thing people will always barter: pussy,’ he said. ‘It’s the way of the world. Men want to buy it, women want to sell it. What can you do?’

‘Make sure nobody’s forced to sell it, for a start.’

‘Kids to feed, no husband, no money, what if it’s all you’ve got to sell?’

Suddenly, I felt very tired. The aftermath of the shock, of course, but I was tired to my heart of all the crap, the politics, the unrelenting grime, the endless seeing people at their worst.