Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

Unable to sleep, I decided that anything was preferable to a night of memories and silence. My work doesn’t keep office hours, so I locked the door and headed out into the dark.

The far end of Chui Prospekt was deserted as I crossed the road and headed towards the Kulturny Bar. It was after midnight, no one around, my boots crunching on newly fallen snow. That part of town, snow’s pretty much the only virginal thing you’ll find. All the trees on the side of Panfilov Park have had their trunks whitewashed, so they seemed to float in mid-air, as if being lowered into place by an invisible crane. A Ferris wheel flickered through the mist, like the memory of a long-past spring.

I’d stopped off at the Metro Bar and watched some drab local girls playing pool, their arses stuck up in the air in case an off-duty Marine from the US base happened to wander in. That got old fast, so I decided to walk back to Ibraimova by way of the Kulturny.

The name, in case you don’t know, is Russian for ‘culture’. But kulturny has a much wider significance than art, music and literature, important though they are. It’s a way of behaving, an attitude to life and other people, of graciousness and appreciation of the finer things in life. If you can quote Pushkin, hum Rachmaninoff and drink your chai from delicate porcelain cups, then you probably count yourself as kulturny .

Of course, Russians love a paradox, particularly the cosmic sort, which reassures them that they alone are the butt of some universal joke. How else could they have convinced themselves for eighty years that they were privileged and superior to the West, as they stood in line for hours to buy bread or milk or shoes, or whatever was at the sharp end of the queue? Which is why they also recognise – and appreciate – antikulturny , low life at its most uncompromising.

The Kulturny Bar is one of Bishkek’s best jokes, and one of its best-kept secrets. No sign, no welcoming neon, just a battered steel door, scarred and scuffed from years of being attacked with boots, spade handles and, on one memorable occasion, a petrol bomb. Nothing as elaborate as CCTV to screen would-be drinkers, just a Judas hole and the knowledge that the bouncer inside is probably drunk, violent and armed.

I unfastened my jacket, tapped my hip, felt the reassuring heft of my gun. Not the standard issue Makarov pistol, but a Yarygin I liberated from a hash smuggler over in Karakol. More kick, and seventeen rounds in the magazine. Kulturny .

I stared at the door, gave it an experimental kick and waited. Nothing: silence bounced off the snow. I raised my hands in the air, and beckoned for the door to be opened. Still nothing. I pantomimed looking at my watch, shrugged and made a cutting gesture across my throat. But just as I was about to head to the station and return with a sledgehammer, the door swung outwards. With it came an unholy reek of piss, fried pelmeni dumplings and stale beer.

A shaven head emerged, dotted with blue-black cobwebs – prison tattoos. Steroid-built muscles coiled and wriggled down arms bare in spite of the cold. A ripped T-shirt and greasy camo pants. Almost two solid metres of thug. Mikhail Lubashov, ‘of interest to Sverdlovsky Police Department’, as they say in court.

I’d sent him down once before for administering a beating that left an Uzbek gang member in a coma, so Mikhail wouldn’t have taken kindly to me tapping on his door. But he’d have more sense than to keep me out, if he wanted the bar to stay open. Losing money wouldn’t sit well with his masters, and a coma of his own would be the least he could hope for if I shut the place down for a week or two.

‘Inspector –’

‘ Past’ zahlopni, packun! ’

Mikhail didn’t take kindly to being told to shut his mouth, or to being called a little prick, but I thought I could live with the disappointment. Being pretty antikulturny myself when I choose to be, I decided it was best to let Mikhail know what was what from the off. I didn’t mind him hating me, as long as he feared me.

‘The usual collection of alkashi downstairs?’

The naked Madonna on Mikhail’s biceps flexed her tits as he shrugged. Not one to give anything away, Mikhail settled for giving me the prison-yard stare. He liked to hint that he had been involved in the kidnap and disposal of Chechen mafia boss Movladi Atlangeriyev in Moscow a few years ago, but that was strictly to impress the punters. The cobwebs on his skull might have boasted to the world that he was a murderer, but Mikhail kept the tattoo on his belly that told the world he had a thing for kids well hidden. You don’t want everyone to know you’re a sex criminal, especially if you’re a paedo.

I looked around and down the street. Empty, no one to witness any trouble, and that suited me just fine. I pulled my jacket open, let Mikhail see that I was on official business and tooled up. I knew about the baseball bat behind the door. And he knew I didn’t fuck about, not any more.

‘Mikhail, don’t take the piss.’

He still said nothing, but stepped aside. The stairs down into the bar looked as inviting as a trip into the sewers. No lights; the darkness gaped like a broken mouth.

‘If any shit comes my way, Mikhail, I won’t take kindly to it, understand? Especially from an aborted shit like you. A single turd and I’ll cut you a new hole.’

Mikhail pondered this for a moment, as if studying a particularly hard sentence about dialectical materialism, then nodded.

I pushed past and headed downstairs into the dark, like falling into a nightmare.

At the bottom of the stairs, a corridor that stank of piss and fear led towards another battered door, this one half open and as tempting to enter as an old hooker’s mouth.

I went in.

Two of the five overhead lights were blown, and another two simply lacked bulbs, so the atmosphere reminded me of my office back at the station. But my office didn’t boast a collection of thugs, alcoholics and prostitutes. Well, not every day, at any rate.

A ripped and torn poster showed the ravages of drugs on a young girl’s face, her front teeth missing, blackened stitches above one eyebrow, deadness in her eyes. The headline read: ‘BEFORE KROKODIL, I HAD A DAUGHTER. NOW, I HAVE A PROSTITUTE.’ Underneath, someone had written in a shaky hand: ‘SO I’VE BEEN ABLE TO GIVE UP THE DAY JOB.’ Very kulturny .

There were several mugshot faces dotted about the room, and a couple of hookers stroking a drunken civilian’s hair, but I finally spotted the guy I was hunting. Even in this light, leaning by the bar, glass of bootleg vodka in hand, Vasily Tyulev wasn’t difficult to pick out. Half the Kumtor gold mine’s annual output hung around his thick acne-spattered neck or pushed his stumpy fingers apart.

‘Vasily, how are you, whoreson?’

Now the funny thing was that Vasily really was the son of a whore, but he preferred not to be reminded about it whenever we met. So I saw it as part of my official duty to protect the public by citing him on every occasion as an example of the awful consequences of unsafe sex.

Vasily kept up his mother’s tradition by running a string of second-rate girls out of a run-down apartment over on Jibek-Jolu, but until the last revolution he’d also had a neat scam, telling the gullible he was the nephew of the president, a fixer without compare, the man to make magic happen and problems disappear. Not true, of course, but I was always amazed how many people would hand over a bundle of som in the hope it would buy some favours. Of course, after the last revolution – when the president fled the country, taking only a dozen large suitcases and the country’s savings with him – Vasily got a fair number of threats from people who suddenly wanted their money back. Which was why he kept Mikhail Lubashov around, as a head bodyguard and thug.