Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

She produced her cigarettes, offered the pack around, then lit up. Her smile was encouraging, her eyes trusting.

‘So tell me. Who? And, more importantly, why?’

Aydaraliev hesitated. He’d spent his entire life living by vorovskoe blago , the thieves’ code, and talking about Circle of Brothers business was a major taboo for him. Saltanat remained silent: she knew that this was the point where he would either break and talk or defy her to do her worst.

‘I can’t tell you why,’ he finally said, ‘and I can’t tell you very much about who. Wait –’ and he held his hand up as Saltanat frowned. ‘I’ll tell you what I can. And after that, I walk.’

He lit one of her cigarettes, inhaled deeply.

‘You know I’m one of The Twenty,’ he said, ‘one of the Circle of Brothers. That’s no secret; every cop between here and Moscow knows that. I’m inner circle, but not the Inner Circle. And when they ask me to do something, I tell my boys and it gets done.’

‘Like a servant?’ Saltanat asked, and there was a mocking tone in her voice.

Aydaraliev frowned, but decided to ignore it.

‘I give my advice to the Inner Circle, they appreciate my knowledge, act on my suggestions. And we all make money. But sometimes, they want a particular course of action following, without the need for explanation. And that’s how it was in this case.’

Saltanat leant forward, her eyes never leaving the old man. Maybe I was being cynical, but I suspected we were about to get a bigger snow-job than Bishkek gets all winter.

‘You were ordered to kill Yekaterina Tynalieva?’

‘No one orders me to do anything,’ the old man snarled. ‘We’re a brotherhood, we help each other, one hand washes the other. Say my brother in Tashkent or Almaty needs a favour doing here in Kyrgyzstan. He asks me, respectfully, and if I can, I help him. Then, if I need something – or someone – taking care of in their country, well, that’s what brothers are for.’

‘So you killed Yekaterina?’

The pakhan shrugged.

‘I was also asked to supply a dead child, one unborn, a boy. I didn’t ask why, and no one volunteered to tell me.’

His matter-of-fact tone sickened me. He knew that I’d seen the carnage under the trees, the humiliation and mutilation, the frozen stare searching for stars between the trees. For a moment I wondered if it was Aydaraliev who had stolen my photo of Chinara, and I pictured myself squeezing that chicken neck until his eyes burst and his head rolled loose upon a snapped spine. I dug my nails into my palms, reminded myself that the most effective interrogations are when you only have to keep quiet to hear the whole story. But sometimes, you have to speak out.

‘That would be from the woman murdered over by Karakol? Umida Boronova? Nineteen years old? Pregnant, alone, in the dark, terrified? You didn’t even know her name, did you? Just another piece of meat to you, thrown to the wolves you pretend are your friends. But really, you’re shit scared of them, aren’t you? Just another fucking bully saying that the big boys did it and then ran away.’

Saltanat flashed me a warning glance, but I was sick of pretending that we were in an ordinary interrogation. Right then, I wanted him to move, stand up, say something, anything that would allow me to beat him to death with my naked hands.

Aydaraliev stared at me.

‘I’ve butchered men who’ve spoken to me with more respect than that. But,’ and he gestured towards the two guards, ‘it’s easy to be brave when someone else can pull the trigger for you.’

‘I’d put one between your eyes if I thought I’d hit anything human in there, not just a lump of tissue floating in shit.’

‘We’ll discuss this another time, Inspector,’ he said, his voice calm and emotionless, ‘when things are a little more evenly balanced.’

I spat, with all the contempt I could show. I thought of all the dead bodies that Aydaraliev had put into the ground, of the agonies of withdrawal from the drugs he’d smuggled, young women he’d pimped dying of AIDS because he refused to let them use condoms with their customers. I put my face close to his, staring into his eyes.

‘Think of your granddaughter when they rip up her insides, screaming for her grandfather to come and rescue her. Begging them to stop, no, please, don’t, please. And the knife, moonlight shining off the blade, cold metal stinging against her skin, trimming and slicing away. Because that’s what you had done to a nineteen-year-old woman carrying her first child.’

‘Inspector,’ Saltanat said, ‘your outrage isn’t getting us anywhere. And I still want to know what’s behind all this.’

Aydaraliev shrugged, and dropped his cigarette to the floor, grinding it out with his shoe.

‘I told you, I didn’t ask, they didn’t tell.’

He smiled, and I wanted to take a hammer to his face.

‘Is this something to do with Chinese medicine? Smuggling? Supplying raw materials?’ Saltanat asked, and I knew she was thinking about the stories of vitamin pills coming over the Tien Shan Mountains, the ones that contained ground-up human foetuses.

Aydaraliev laughed.

‘You think the Chinese don’t have enough dead babies on their hands? With their one-child policy? They scrape out enough mistakes to fill a thousand pharmacies. No, it was done to create fear. Uzbeks fearing Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz fearing Uighurs. Uighurs fearing Chinese. A circle of mistrust and hatred, you could call it.’

‘What could you hope to achieve?’ Saltanat asked, and there was genuine disgust in her voice.

‘What did I achieve? I got paid, that’s what I achieved,’ the old man said. ‘Don’t ask me what anyone else was hoping for. You want answers to that, talk to them.’

‘So you murdered two women on behalf of the Circle of Brothers?’

He nodded.

‘The other two, I didn’t order their deaths, someone else decided to perform a clean-up.’

I wondered for a moment who he meant, then remembered Shairkul and Gulbara, butchered in their homes, women barely more than girls, who’d not known much else than abuse in their lives, hoping for very little and receiving even less. Shairkul, shivering in the cold outside the Kulturny; I felt a wave of shame at having threatened her. And Gulbara, a nobody who found a body, stole a handbag and ended up with her body hacked in half. I closed my eyes, and wondered if this would ever end.

‘They were working for you?’ I asked.

‘Every pussy you can buy in Bishkek puts a few som in my pocket,’ he answered, ‘it’s the way the world turns. Men pay money to fuck, women fuck to get money. But their deaths were not at my hands.’

I pushed the two prostitutes to the back of my mind, a case to solve in the future.

‘I understand that you killed Umida to… harvest her. But Yekaterina? She wasn’t pregnant. And you must have known who she was, the shit storm it would bring down upon your head.’

‘She was the one that the contract was taken out on,’ Aydaraliev explained. ‘The other girl, well, it could have been anyone in the same condition, that didn’t matter.’

‘How much was the contract worth?’ Saltanat asked.

‘Two hundred fifty thousand US.’

Even to a pakhan like Aydaraliev, it wasn’t small change.

‘And now, unless there’s anything else, you can drive me back to the Kulturny.’

Saltanat considered for a few seconds, then nodded.

‘If there’s anything you haven’t told us, and I find out about it, then we’ll be having another little chat. With your granddaughter’s head listening in.’

‘Listen. I’m not a sadist. I don’t take any pleasure in having anyone extinguished. It’s business, understand? My men were under strict instructions: a swift kill, painless as possible. The rest, the cutting and so on, well, the dead don’t feel what’s done to them. I was asked to cause terror and confusion. Which I did. And that’s all I can tell you.’