Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

As I sipped my tea, I made connections. Terror and confusion was the instruction given by the Circle of Brothers. But that went against every rule they normally followed.

Vorovskoe blago , the thieves’ code, is all about maximising profits without drawing unnecessary attention to yourself, working in the shadows, preying on the weak and paying off the powerful. If you need to make a statement, you make it with a Makarov; you don’t slaughter and mutilate pregnant women.

So this wasn’t an ordinary criminal enterprise. There had to be big money involved, enough to jeopardise the international heroin trade, the corrupt taxation kickbacks, the bribes, even the regular daily extortion that feeds the Circle.

When one hand is washing the other, it takes an awful lot of cash to make you throw the towel away.

My thoughts were disturbed by a knock on the door.

When I opened it, Saltanat was standing there, frowning, a look on her face I didn’t recognise. I stepped out on to the landing and opened my mouth, but before I could speak, a fist the size of a small horse slammed into the side of my head.

The world stopped and twisted with a dazzling firework display that blinded me to everything, and then I was falling into blackness as deep and dark as Chinara’s grave.

I didn’t know how long I’d been out when eventually I resurfaced, but I was no longer in my apartment. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I was in an unheated empty building, in another dismal basement, but this time I was chained by my ankle to the wall, both my hands cuffed to a table. No sign of Saltanat, but three stocky men standing in front of me made up for her absence.

The thug who seemed to be the leader of this mini gang leant forward and pinched my cheek, with just enough force to show he could do a lot worse if he decided to.

‘Well, sweetheart, good to have you back. I was afraid Azad here might have hit you a little too hard. Before we got some answers out of you. And then where would we be, Inspector?’

He grinned, revealing an uneven row of gold teeth. Underneath his leather jacket, I could see the bulge of a shoulder holster, and I didn’t think it was for carrying a water bottle.

‘On the run, I would think?’

All three men laughed as if I’d told the planet’s funniest joke. Leather Jacket patted my cheek, not too gently.

‘You think your colleagues give a fuck about a pussy like you? Mister Cleanest Arse on the Planet? Every greased palm who’s found his throat dry and his pocket light at the end of the month, thanks to a self-righteous cop like you? Every uniform who enjoys a little taste of the girls behind Panfilov Park but hasn’t had a free mouth? There’ll be a dozen of them claiming credit when your body turns up; not for solving the crime but for personally giving you the big headache.’

He cocked his fingers, aimed at my head and then spat in my face to emphasise his contempt for police, honest and bent alike. I ignored the thick phlegm trickling down my face, and flexed my shoulders to ease out some of the stiffness. The chain tugged at my leg like a demanding child.

‘So that’s your big plan? Kill a Murder Squad? That’s really going to please whichever boss has the misfortune to lead a troupe of clowns like you. You’ll bring down heat on yourselves like you can’t imagine.’

‘Heat you won’t know anything about, once Syrgak has finished with you. You wouldn’t think to look at him that he’d had three years’ medical training, would you? Very talented with a scalpel. But then you saw some of his handiwork, didn’t you? A master craftsman; he’ll keep you in agony for hours.’

The trio gave that peculiar mirthless cackle low-grade thugs use to terrify the cell bitches on to their knees when they’re behind bars. It wasn’t too hard for me to appear unimpressed.

‘Heat you won’t know anything about,’ he repeated, nudging his comrades, who dutifully responded as if they’d never heard anything so witty in their lives.

‘Circle of Brothers? Circle of Idiots, more like,’ I said, with a confidence I was far from feeling.

‘So you know who we are?’

‘Well, I know who your boss’s bosses are,’ I answered, ‘and even they aren’t big enough to be Circle. As for who you work for, well, you don’t any more, do you? Unless the evil old lizard’s giving orders from the slab.’

The blow hurled me back against the wall, where my feet got all tangled up in the chain. Leather Jacket rubbed at his knuckles; obviously he was no expert, but I could see he was planning on some serious practice.

He took off his jacket, under which he was wearing a stained and torn T-shirt. His bare arms were pitted with track marks, some already turning black and green. He’d been bitten by the krokodil , and the sweet stink of gangrene hung in the air.

‘No wonder your pakhan ’s in the morgue, if he can’t even stop his people shooting up that shit.’

The flurry of blows that followed hurt, but the krokodil had obviously sapped a lot of his strength. After a couple of minutes, Leather Jacket stopped for breath and I inspected myself for damage. Nothing that a week in an Issyk-Kul sanatorium with a stockpile of the good stuff couldn’t cure.

‘Now I know how tough you’re not, why have you brought me here? And where’s Saltanat?’

‘The bitch? She’s upstairs, in the master boudoir, waiting for Azad and Syrgak to show her what real men are like. Answer my questions and you can have what’s left, if you like. Mind you, after Azad,’ and he held his hands a foot apart, ‘I don’t know if there’ll be much left worth having.’

‘I don’t care what you do to the bitch,’ I lied, ‘she led you to me. She deserves all she gets.’

‘We caught her on the road outside your apartment. We were coming for you already, and we guessed you’d open the door to her. Kicking down doors gets old very fast.’

Leather Jacket jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

‘Don’t keep the bride waiting, guys.’

Azad and Syrgak headed out of the room, leaving me alone with Leather Jacket.

‘You can manage me without backup?’

He smiled.

‘Good chain, that. Strong. Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve got a few questions, and your answers aren’t necessarily for everyone’s ears.’

‘Those two? They wouldn’t understand if you drew them pictures.’

Leather Jacket considered that, and nodded. The trio obviously didn’t sit around discussing the novels of Chingiz Aitmatov when they weren’t terrorising babushki out of their pensions. He walked over to a wall cupboard, and paused, his hand on the door.

‘The last events, you remember them?’

He meant the riots that burnt down a good part of central Bishkek in anger about the government, with the department stores looted as a sideline. Who says protest doesn’t pay?

I nodded.

‘I was in Beta Stores, thinking I could pick a few things up. Saw this and thought it could come in handy. For when I met people like you.’

I listened, wondering where this was going, as he opened the cupboard. I was beginning to get a very bad feeling.

‘But you know what they say: get mare’s milk, make kymyz .’

He produced a bottle of cooking oil and a hinged metal contraption. He lifted the lid to show two non-stick enamelled and grooved surfaces. An electrical cable ran from the machine and I watched as he connected it to a portable generator near the door. He pulled the starter cord, and the engine grumbled into a slow pulse.

‘It’s called a health grill, must be an American thing. These plates here,’ and he waggled the jaws of the grill as if it was a small steel crocodile, ‘they’re slightly tilted so the fat runs out. But both the plates get good and hot; you just put the meat in between, close it, and it cooks in half the time.’