Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

I waited until his rage subsided enough for him to pour a generous one and give me the nod to sit down.

‘Have you actually found out anything while you’ve been on your winter holiday? I know you’re an idiot, but you’ve never let a sniff of pizda hang you up before.’

I didn’t know where he’d got the notion that I was a womaniser, but I supposed I ought to be flattered.

‘What’s interesting, Chief, is what I don’t know.’

He tipped the bottle, nodded at me to continue.

‘I know it’s not a serial killer. Too many deaths, too many locations, too little time to get from one to another, especially this time of year. The murders are connected, but the pattern changes. These women have nothing in common, no social links, no friendships, not even the same nationalities. According to Usupov, Yekaterina Tynalieva’s murderer had some sort of surgical training, but Marina Gurchenko’s corpse looks as if a drunk had swung an axe in the dark. So not the same murderer; not the same psychologically driven modus operandi behind the killings.’

‘“Modus operandi”,’ the Chief repeated, mock-impressed. ‘You’re a hunter of killers, not a university don. Spare me the fancy stuff.’

I ignored him, and carried on.

‘There are the other deaths to consider. Gulbara, the girl in Osh; she wasn’t pregnant. And Tyulev and Lubashov in the shoot-out outside Fatboys: what triggered that? And what made Gasparian take a header into traffic?’

Secretly, I was sure Gasparian’s suicide had been one of those assisted ones, where two burly policemen throw you off a bridge, but I kept that thought to myself.

‘The biggest puzzle? Find a motive and you usually find your killer, but no one’s claimed responsibility, no one’s stood up and blamed the ills of modern society, or the Russians, or the full moon for why they did it. So that tells me it’s about business, putting the frighteners on people; showing they can get away with anything, so get out of their way.’

The Chief nodded. He may well have thought all this through himself, but he was shrewd enough to know when a pat on the head would get him further than a kick up the arse.

‘The Circle of Brothers?’

It was my turn to nod.

‘Hard to see who else. The question is: why choose this way of sending out messages?’

‘Drugs?’

‘That’s where the serious money is.’

An officer in the Anti-Drug Trafficking Department told me there are a couple of dozen drug cartels across Kyrgyzstan, mostly based on ethnic origins: Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kurd, Gipsy, Chechen, Turkish, Armenian, Uighur and Tajik. Everybody wants a slice of our only growth industry.

‘But they’ve already got their territories agreed upon and divided up,’ the Chief said. ‘So why kick up all this shit storm now?’

I sat back and watched him sip his vodka.

‘Uzbek Security have a theory that it’s political. Someone stirring up trouble between our two countries. You know how Uzbeks always think that Osh should be theirs.’

The Chief pulled a sour face, as if his vodka was too warm, and pursed his lips. Osh is an enclave, housed on a narrow strip of land that lies next to Uzbek territory like a bridegroom’s yelda . Half the population are ethnic Uzbek and resent being Kyrgyz; the other half are Kyrgyz and resent Uzbeks getting above themselves.

‘Your girlfriend says there have been Uzbek women killed in the same way?’ the Chief asked.

‘She’s not my girlfriend, but yes.’

‘Deliberate misinformation, my guess,’ the Chief pronounced, stumbling a bit over the words.

I figured he’d had enough vodka, and wearily poured the heeltaps of the bottle into his glass.

‘But why?’

‘If those Uzbek fuckers want a fight, they should come out into the open.’

‘So you think it’s about land, not drugs.’

‘That’s what I pay you to find out, fool.’

I stood up. The Chief stayed slumped where he was, eyes looking like boiled eggs.

‘I’ll ask around about any new alliances, fresh fallouts in the drugs trade, see if that gets us anywhere. But war with another country? I think you’d better talk to the Minister for State Security about that.’

I might as well have been talking to the eagle on the desk. The Chief’s eyes were closed, and he was starting to whistle through his nose.

I put on my ushanka , buttoned up my coat and headed out of the building back towards Ibraimova, at a loss about what to do next.

I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories. I believe the Americans did walk on the moon, there was nobody on the grassy knoll, and the shots fired outside the Kremlin at Brezhnev’s motorcade came from an army deserter, not a deep-cover CIA operative. But this case was a line of distorting mirrors, each reflecting the truth away from me. There was a reason behind the killings; I just had to work out what it was.

I spent the next two days criss-crossing the city, putting the arm on pharmaceutical drug smugglers in Osh bazaar, giving a little muscle to a couple of Uzbek pimps working the parks, treating Alamedin’s biggest heroin dealer to the sight of my Yarygin.

Kursan put me back in touch with Abdurehim Otkur; I told him what I needed and who I wanted to meet. At first he was reluctant to help, but I pointed out the benefits of peace and quiet for everyone on both sides of the border. Then I reminded him that Tynaliev could send a battalion of soldiers to make his life miserable; all it needed was a word from me in the Minister’s ear. Sometimes all it takes is a couple of hints here, a whisper in the right guy’s ear.

Which is how I found myself back at the Kulturny, in the same chair as before, watching the alkashi drink themselves into a stupor not even the moorzilki can stir. I wouldn’t have minded a glass of the good stuff myself, but I needed my wits sharp about me for the meeting I was about to have.

I checked my watch. Eleven. Already ninety minutes behind schedule. Maybe I should have posted some plain-clothes uniforms nearby, but I wasn’t dealing with idiots like the late unlamented Gasparian this time. My Yarygin was safely locked up back home; for a meeting like this, carrying would be a sure sign I wasn’t there just for the conversation.

Contrary to what a lot of people believe about the Circle of Brothers, all most of them want is a quiet life, free to pillage and loot and corrupt and steal. Killing each other might be good for business in the short term, but in the long term it gets in the way of the profit motive, and attracts unwanted attention. And the last thing you want to do is wipe out civilians. After all, they’re your customers. That doesn’t mean that the Brothers are good people to do business with, just that they won’t kill you unless there’s a reason.

The muscle who pushed his way through the door looked like his weapons of choice were his bare hands. Blue prison tattoos danced down his fingers, and his palms looked dipped in ink. A church with three spires was tattooed on the back of his right hand, each spire representing a prison term; just as a church is the House of God, so prison is the home of the thief. From the way his shoulders stretched his leather jacket, when he wasn’t spending his time away getting inked he was lifting home-made weights.

He might have been bulky, but he wasn’t clumsy. He checked out the dazed clientele, spotted me, jerked his thumb towards the door. His boss wasn’t going to walk down into any shithole like the Kulturny with only one exit, so I trailed behind the giant up into the night air.

No fresh snow, for a change, but what had already fallen crunched under my boots as we walked towards the SUV parked across the road, in the darkness under the trees. Street lights are a luxury in Bishkek at the best of times. But no muscle would ever give a rival a clear shot, anyway.