Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

He held his hand above the metal, testing for heat, poured a little oil on to the lower surface. We listened to the oil hiss and spit as it hit the metal.

‘Supposed to be good for cooking steaks, that sort of thing, but I haven’t tried it out yet. Well, not for cooking anything I want to eat.’

I looked at the metal surfaces. There were fragments of what looked like charred meat, and black stains dribbling down the centre grooves. The knot in my stomach got tighter.

Leather Jacket took hold of my chin and forced me to stare into his eyes. I could smell the krokodil sweat on him, the rot of flesh. He looked at me, unblinking, hoping to see fear in my face.

‘I’ll tell you what it does cook to perfection. Fingers. And the occasional cock, if someone’s deciding to be a hero.’

And with that, he forced my left hand between the metal plates and slammed them shut.

My hand was only trapped between the two hot plates for maybe twenty seconds, but long enough for the pain to flash through my arm and emerge as a scream from my throat. I tugged desperately at the handcuffs. But I was held tight. Then the pain was out of control, and I smelt the flesh on my hand as it cooked.

Leather Jacket opened the grill, uncuffed my hand and plunged it into a bucket of water. The shock was so great, I screamed. My heart felt ready to throw itself out of my chest.

‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You’d send that back in a restaurant for being underdone.’

I took my hand out of the bucket and looked down. Dark crimson burn lines followed the pattern of the raised grooves of the grill, deeper across my knuckles. My skin had already started to blister and turn an angry red. The soft meat of my palm looked raw, skinned, like a peeled blood tomato. I tried to clench a fist, and the effort flooded my mouth with vomit.

As soon as I could coax breath back into my lungs, I sat very still. The entire centre of the universe had become the closeness of my hand to the grill. Nothing else was in focus; not the killings, not Saltanat, not Chinara.

Leather Jacket poured more oil on to the machine.

‘Not hot enough yet, give it a couple more minutes and then we can really get cooking.’

I did my best to muster some courage, some defiance.

‘Shouldn’t you ask me the questions first? I refuse to answer, then you start to torture me.’

Leather Jacket grinned, and his gold teeth glinted under the bare light bulb.

‘You call this torture? Anyway, once they’ve had a little taste, people get much more cooperative. Why waste time?’

The reek of my hand was making me nauseous, and I wondered if I was going to faint.

‘I get the message. You can turn that off and ask away, droog ,’ I said.

Leather Jacket considered this, and pushed the grill to one side. He raised the lid, so I could see the oil bubbling on the metal, and then spat. His phlegm splashed and sizzled, burnt off in seconds. I thought of the krokodil bodies I’d seen, with flesh gnawed away down to bare grey bones, and knew that would happen to my hand next time. I wished George Foreman had stuck to making his money hitting other black men in the ring.

‘We’ll leave the grill just here. If I don’t like your answers.’

He cocked his head and looked up at the ceiling.

‘Your girlfriend’s obviously the well-brought-up type, doesn’t talk with her mouth full, eh?’

I didn’t reply, but the silence from upstairs hung over us like a shroud.

I remembered the smoothness of her back under my hand. I wondered if my hand would feel it again, ever feel anything again. I wondered who would find my body, and if they’d bury me next to Chinara, in the clean air and solitude of the mountains.

‘What do you want to know?’ I asked.

‘For a start, who killed vor v zakonye Aydaraliev?’

I didn’t see any point in lying. I’d no loyalty to men who came to my country and acted as executioners.

‘Uzbek Security Services. Two men. I don’t know them, never seen them before. Probably halfway to Tashkent by now.’

He nodded. My answer made some sort of sense.

‘Who gave the order? That pizda upstairs?’

I didn’t answer; I hadn’t yet reached the point where I’d betray anyone or anything to keep the hot metal away from my hand. But I was close. So I shrugged.

‘Well, she’ll wish she was dead after Azad and Syrgak finish with her.’

He sucked his teeth, considering his next question. I could tell he’d never done this before: a good interrogator says as little as possible. Silence, as much as anything else, makes the accused betray themselves.

‘What do you know about the murders?’

‘Your pakhan boasted about spreading “terror and confusion”. It’s a quote from a speech by Lenin before the Revolution. About how to overthrow the Tsarist government. And how to keep power once you’ve gained it. That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?’

Leather Jacket rubbed at his arm, and I suspected that the krokodil ’s teeth had just taken a tighter grip.

‘Go on.’

‘This is too big, too dispersed, for it to be a single team. Killings in Osh, Karakol, here in the city. Across the border. Maybe even on the Russian airbase. There’s big money behind this, for sure. But more important, there’s also big ambition.’

‘Go on. Whose?’ Leather Jacket said, but I sensed the uncertainty in his voice.

‘That’s all I have. You’ll know more than me; after all, you were close to the pakhan .’

‘Not as close as his tongue was to his teeth.’

Now I realised why they were here, why my hand throbbed with a raw pain that pulsed with each beat of my heart. It wasn’t revenge for the loss of their beloved leader. It wasn’t some obscure part of the criminal’s code demanding blood for blood.

It was the hunt for money.

‘He didn’t tell you where the payment is, did he?’ I said. ‘All that cash, stashed away, waiting for somebody to stumble on it by accident, and buy the villas and BMWs that should be yours.’

And I laughed, and I kept on laughing even after his punch snapped my head back.

It was all starting to come clear; finally, I spotted a motive behind everything.

‘Your pakhan was a fool,’ I said, wiggling my tongue against a loose tooth, ‘so greedy, he couldn’t see he was selling his own downfall. And not just his, yours too. All the gangs in Kyrgyzstan, all working for the big guy who will wipe you all out.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he snarled. ‘You’re full of shit.’

‘Put the grill away and I’ll tell you. Explain in simple words that even a krokodil like you can understand.’

‘Why don’t I just cook you one bite at a time? Put your fingers on a plate and make you chew the meat off them? You’ll talk then.’

‘But maybe I’ll collapse, have a heart attack, die without you hearing what you want to know. Where will that have got you? And just how pleased will your bosses be? All those millions missing because you like to smell meat cooking?’

I saw that Leather Jacket wanted to press my face against the sizzling grill. Thug he may have been, but he wasn’t stupid. Reluctantly, he took the grill off the table and went to disconnect it from the generator.

Which is when I grabbed the bucket with my free hand and hurled it at him.

The water hit him, the grill and the generator at the same time, conducting direct current through him and to earth. The plastic casing of the socket exploded, and he fell backwards, his fingers frying and fusing to the grill. The room filled with the sour scent of iodine and boiling blood.