Matthew Palmer - Enemy of the Good

“Zamira? Aunt Zamira? It’s me. It’s Kate.”

Her aunt was as Kate had left her, sitting on a stool and staring at the wall. Her blue prison uniform was worn and faded from years of use. Her once jet black hair was white and feathery, as though all the color had been leeched out by the dark.

“Zamira?” Kate said again in the kind of soft voice she might have used to coax a pet or a frightened child out of its hiding place.

She turned to face Kate.

“Oh god.”

A thousand different emotions assailed Kate, competing for a grip on her heart until one came to dominate. Grief. She recognized it easily, as she might an old friend. Kate’s knees buckled. Even with her vision blurred by tears, there was no denying the awful truth.

This woman was not Zamira.

Kate had been so certain. The disappointment was crushing.

“I’m sorry,” the stranger said in Kyrgyz, her voice slow and deliberate as though she were struggling to keep her focus. “Do I know you?”

“No,” Kate said sadly. “You don’t.”

She sat on the bed across from this woman who looked enough like her aunt to fool her from a distance, at an angle, and across twelve years of imagined suffering. But she did not have Zamira’s fiery black eyes or the sharp chin she shared with Kate’s mother. It had all been a maskirovka . A deception.

Kate looked at the wall where the picture of her and her mother had been taped to the wall. The photograph was gone, but a small piece of tape had been left behind.

It would have been easy enough as part of the deception, Kate knew, to break into her apartment to look for something like that photo. A small keepsake, the kind that a prisoner might be allowed to hold on to. Something personal and intimate that would connect Kate to this stranger on an emotional level, make her see what she wanted to see. Torturers were, at the end of the day, really psychologists of a sort. Leaving the photo somewhere where Kate would have to find it on her own and recognize its significance was a master touch. It made it all seem that much more real.

Chalibashvili knew that Kate’s mother had never lost faith that her sister was alive. It was easy enough to conclude that that belief had been passed on to Kate. And he had set her up for exactly what she had hoped and expected to find. He was an evil genius. She was a fool.

And Zamira was dead.

“I thought you were somebody else,” Kate said.

“I am somebody else. What year is it? Please?”

Kate told her.

“So long,” she said. “So long.”

Kate could see the faintly narcoleptic look of disengagement in the woman’s eyes from whatever drugs had been mixed in with her food.

“Is it over now?” she asked.

“Yes,” Kate said. “It’s over.”

“I’d like to go home then.”

“All right. I’ll take you there.”

They drove for almost three hours. Spring had turned to early summer and the countryside was lush and emerald green. Murzaev insisted on listening to his music, and Kate indulged his penchant for syrupy Russian folk songs as she pushed the Touareg up the narrow twisting roads in the lower Ala-Too mountains.

“Are you sure you know where we’re going, Askar?” Kate asked. Murzaev had not once looked at a map or consulted the GPS.

“Quite sure. Yes.”

“Thank you for doing this.”

“We owe you this and more. Without you, this new Kyrgyzstan might never have been possible. I’m pleased they let you stay.”

“Me too. The interim government’s naming Val to head the base negotiations didn’t hurt. The ambassador saw value in keeping me on, and Washington ultimately agreed.”

“So all is forgiven?”

“More or less. My uncle and Crespo kept D.C. in the dark about most of what happened.”

“It’s better that way for everyone. How are the talks going?”

“We’re almost done. A few loose ends to tie up. But we’ll have the agreement ready in a week or two at the most.”

“And then what?”

“It needs to be approved by the new government, once it’s formally installed. After the elections, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of days to put together a cabinet. Then the parliament can vote on the agreement up or down and it’ll come into effect when Ruslan—or whoever wins the presidency—signs it.”

“Or whoever?”

“Okay, Ruslan’s going to win with some ridiculous percentage of the vote. But it’d be good if someone credible at least runs against him. Kyrgyzstan needs a democracy, not a monarchy, and that requires a functioning opposition.”

“That may take time,” Murzaev said with a trace of regret. “We Kyrgyz have gotten too used to a strongman in the palace.”

“We have time.”

“Once he’s elected, President Usenov will have significant representational responsibilities. These would be so much easier with a First Lady, don’t you think?”

Kate downshifted into a sharp turn, forcing Murzaev to grab the dashboard to keep from being thrown against the door.

“He’s asked me,” Kate admitted. “But it’s a huge change. I’d have to leave my job, for one thing. The junior officer in the political section probably shouldn’t simultaneously be married to the president of the country to which she is accredited. Too many conflicts of interest.”

“So take leave. You can always go back.”

“Maybe,” Kate said, but she was still dubious. She loved Ruslan and she knew that he loved her. But was that enough? Would their passion cool in the absence of danger? Could Kate abandon her American-ness and embrace her Kyrgyz identity wholeheartedly as the wife of the president? Could she accept a role presiding over tea with the wives of visiting dignitaries? Ruslan would never ask this of her, but Kate knew it would be her responsibility. How would she feel? She pushed it all aside. There would be time to wrestle with those questions later.

“Turn here,” Murzaev said, pointing to a dirt track just barely wide enough for the Touareg.

Kate drove carefully down the rutted road. A flat tire out here would be a major inconvenience. A broken axle would be a disaster. After two kilometers, Murzaev told her to stop.

They were in a djailoo , a high mountain pasture, and flowers bloomed in the high grass of the meadow. A small stream cut across the field and ran through a culvert under the road before flowing down the mountain in a series of cascades.

Kate and Murzaev got out of the car and walked over to the edge of the field. The sky was blue with a few cotton-ball clouds. A hawk circled overhead. A goshawk, Kate wanted to believe, although the bird was flying too high to say for certain. A small red deer that had been nibbling on the grass raised its head to look at Kate, locking eyes with her for a brief moment before bounding up the hill and out of sight.

“Where is it?” Kate asked.

“This is it,” Murzaev answered.

“The whole thing?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Eighty-seven.”

“And you know who they all are?”

“Most of them. The government kept remarkably detailed records of its atrocities. A holdover from the Soviet days. This is it, Kate. This is where your aunt is buried.”

It was a beautiful place and it was hard to believe that it was a cover pulled over so much ugliness. The last resting place of almost ninety of the innumerable victims of Eraliev’s reign of terror.