Tom Callaghan - An Autumn Hunting

I nodded. Better to shoot myself, get it out of the way, than reach the same conclusion after a few hours or days dark with pain.

‘You’re not worried Zakir might have betrayed this location as well?’ I asked, genuinely curious.

‘He didn’t tell anyone about the underground safe house,’ Aliyev said, his nonchalance surprising me.

‘But you still blew his brains out.’

Aliyev shrugged.

‘Loyalty will only take a man so far, then he starts remembering the humiliation, the begging in front of his comrades. Then because the pain isn’t there to remind him he’s weak, he gets ideas above his station.’

‘So you shot him?’

‘What would you have done? Waited until he pressed a gun barrel into the back of your neck?’

I said nothing. Aliyev shook his head.

‘Your scruples hold you back, our survival drives us forward. You want the sunlight and the mountains, but we live in the dark, in the shadows.’

He rubbed at one of the streaks of blood on the floor with his shoe.

‘Zakir was a piece of shit anyway,’ he said, dismissing a man’s life the casual way you stub out a half-smoked cigarette.

We spent the next four days cooped up in the house, while Aliyev questioned me about every aspect of the police force. What I’d learnt, what corners could safely be cut, what was a no-go area that would pull down the wrath of the law upon his head. To my surprise, he didn’t seem interested in which police officers would be willing to look the other way, or make a quick phone call to warn of future trouble. Perhaps he’d already bought everyone worth knowing.

I’d once watched Leonid Yurtaev, the first Kyrgyz grand master, play a series of games in a chess tournament; the way Aliyev thought reminded me of Yurtaev’s approach. Always aggressive, ready to smash forward, confident he could see ahead more clearly than his enemies, thanks to his deeper knowledge and understanding. If it ever came to the endgame between Aliyev and myself, he would sweep the board clean.

Every night I would crawl into my bed exhausted, wondering if I’d made a fatal mistake, a flaw in my defence that would conclude the game with a midnight opening of the door, the bark of a shotgun. It didn’t make for a restful night’s sleep.

Then one morning, as I stood naked by the window, staring out at the high brick wall, wondering what was taking place in the world beyond, I heard the door open. I didn’t turn round, concentrated on what looked like the first snow clouds of early autumn race across an ice-blue sky.

‘I’ve seen more muscles on a chair.’

Aliyev. Perhaps I wasn’t going to be executed after all.

‘Brains beat brawn. Your words, not mine,’ I said, still gazing out at the sky.

‘Get dressed, ten minutes for chai and khleb , then we’re out of here.’

I heard the door shut behind me, let out the breath I’d been holding in without even knowing it. Once outside the high walls, my chances of surviving – even escaping – might improve.

The bread was stale, the tea tasteless; whatever Aliyev spent his millions on, elegant dining wasn’t one of his weaknesses.

‘Time to move on,’ he announced, dropping a single cube of sugar into his cup. I helped myself to my customary three.

‘You’ve heard something?’ I asked. ‘A police raid?’

‘The police aren’t my only enemies,’ Aliyev said, giving the twisted smile that somehow made him seem more human, more likeable. ‘But I don’t believe in waiting until anyone makes a move on me before I react. One step ahead for preference, two for advantage, three to make sure I win.’

Very different from the old pakhan , I thought, an attitude that might even see Aliyev climb into his grave as an old man, grandchildren gathered around.

‘So where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Rule Number Two. Know everything, tell nothing until it suits you.’ Aliyev gave me an interrogative stare. ‘Right now, you don’t need to know. And why is it so important to you anyway?’

I tried to make my tone flippant.

‘I just wanted to make sure I packed the right clothes. No point in taking a swimsuit to the mountains, is there?’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll find everything there you need,’ he said.

Breakfast over, Aliyev led the way outside. A battered marshrutka , one of the minibuses used by everyone as cheap transport around the city, was waiting for us, exhaust giving the depressing cough of a dying chain smoker.

‘Stylish,’ I said.

‘Safe,’ Aliyev replied, as the side door squealed in protest. ‘You’d rather be dead sitting in leather seats?’

‘I’d rather be somewhere warm, preferably several thousand kilometres away.’

‘Interesting,’ Aliyev said, beckoning me into the darkness of the vehicle. ‘That’s exactly what I have in mind for you.’

Aliyev’s bodyguards clambered into the marshrutka , and the driver placed a worn sign announcing this was the 188 to Tungush on the outskirts of the city.

‘We’re going there?’ I asked, only to get a withering look from Aliyev.

‘I always tell my enemies where I’m heading,’ he said. ‘It makes it easier for them to kill me.’

I shrugged, concentrated on staring out of the grime-encrusted window. No need for tinted glass here, not with several seasons of dust and mud to shield us.

The sky was still clear, with the mountains rising up to meet it on the horizon, but I could sense the possibility of snow later on, even this early in the autumn. Like most Kyrgyz, I’m constantly aware of the weather. We watch it with all the attention of a farmer or a goatherd, people whose livelihood depends on it. Get it wrong, and you face inconvenience, delays, problems. Get it badly wrong and you could find yourself in serious, even fatal, trouble. Weather in Central Asia isn’t the mild-mannered polite affair you find in lots of countries. We joke we spend six months of the year outdoors in the heat of summer, the other six months trying not to freeze to death. Like most of our jokes, it’s not really a joke at all.

I didn’t know if Aliyev had a fleet of Ferraris tucked away somewhere in a villa on the North Shore, but he certainly knew how to travel around Bishkek with a complete lack of style. The engine of the marshrutka had advanced lung cancer, the tyres were smoother than an adolescent’s first shave, and the seats had endured generations of overweight babushki planting their over-wide arses on them. I settled back and tried to relax, treating the bouncing around as a form of rough massage therapy.

Eight of us had clambered into the bus, sprawling across uncomfortable seats, staring out of the windows or demonstrating cool by trying to nap. We were headed out of the city up into the mountains. The air turned colder as we climbed, the clouds beginning to darken and gather like mourners at a funeral. I felt a chill the marshrutka ’s heating failed to combat; perhaps it was saving its strength for the return journey.

The scenery was familiar; we were on our way to Issyk-Ata, the old Soviet-period sanatorium still used by the locals for the hot springs and cold baths. I’d been there once before, to solve the murder of a prominent member of the nomenklatura found floating face-down one Sunday morning in a hot springs pool with his bathing trunks around his knees, a wrist-thick mountain ash branch inserted into his backside.

My enquiries gave me a number of leads, but all the suspects I questioned had rock-solid alibis, their wives testifying that their husbands were not only indoors on Saturday night, but inside them as well. I never solved the case, and the inquest decided the deceased had ‘accidentally impaled himself while diving into the pool while drunk’. No mention of the three empty vodka bottles and a hundred cigarette butts at the scene of the ‘accident’. A warning for us all.