Tom Callaghan - An Autumn Hunting

It was only as I was getting into the taxi that I realised someone was staring at me from the pavement. Staring hard.

Kenesh Usupov.

I’d worked too many times with Bishkek’s chief forensic pathologist to have any hope he wouldn’t have recognised me. The look on his face was one of shock, even fear.

I made the ‘I’ll call you’ gesture with my fingers, looking back at him as we drove away. I only had one question: would he tell Tynaliev I was back?

We drove down Chui Prospekt, maybe not the quickest way home, but one that reminded me of how much I’d missed simply being able to walk around the centre of my city.

The apartment smelt musty, unloved, but as far as I could tell, there had been nobody watching the building. I put water on to boil for tea, remembering how Chinara would always have a cup ready for me when I came home from work and I hadn’t had too much vodka on the way. I took my tea into the main room and stared at the framed photo of her I’d taken at Lake Issyk-Kul a lifetime ago. Hers, and perhaps mine.

I wondered what she would have made of the news about Saltanat’s pregnancy, the disappointment at it not being our child, resignation at the thought I’d found someone else to love while she slept cold in her grave.

‘I never planned to meet someone,’ I said out loud. ‘I still miss you more than I can say. You’ll never leave me, I’ll never forget you, but life’s a river that carries you along.’ But in the silence, I found no sign of acceptance, heard no whisper of an answer.

Chinara always came to me when I least expected her. And that’s how it was that evening, when she woke me with her fingertips stroking my face, her breath warm on my cheek. I tried to sit up, felt the palm of her hand pressing me back down to the mattress with surprising strength.

I tried to speak, but no words came. All I could do was put my arm around her shoulder, pull her head against my chest, and stare up into the darkness only broken by car headlights on the road, their beams like searchlights hunting for me.

She took my hand and pressed it against the warm skin of her stomach where our baby had lived for so short a time. She gave a barely heard sigh that might have been sorrow, regret, or merely resignation. Then I felt her slipping out of my arms, and I knew she would never return, that the link remaining between us had dissolved like mist into night air. She knew another woman had replaced her.

The fridge was as empty as my heart, so I decided to go out for breakfast. A couple of samsi , hot tea, then it was time to face the music. The only question was who would be playing the tune: Tynaliev or Aliyev.

I debated spinning a coin, made a phone call. I arranged a meeting under the giant Ferris wheel in Panfilov Park at seven that evening, after dark, when the spokes of the wheel light up with flashing colours. A meeting in the open air, with people around, seemed a little safer, unless someone organised a sniper from somewhere under the trees. If I didn’t make it to the meeting the following day with Saltanat, she’d know I wasn’t ever going to turn up.

The rest of the morning and early afternoon passed in a haze. Wondering if you’re still going to be alive that evening has a curiously disorienting effect, as if all the minutes have drained out of your life and the only thing left to do is wait for the end. Sometimes hours pass while you think only five minutes have gone by; sometimes the minutes become hours. When the walls of my apartment closed in I knew I had to get out.

I looked around at the apartment that had housed my marriage, at the photograph of Chinara. I debated locking the door behind me, decided it didn’t matter one way or another. There was nothing to steal I’d miss, and if I didn’t return, someone else would live there soon enough.

The weather had turned cold as I walked down Ibraimova and turned on to Chui Prospekt. The park was a good forty minutes’ walk away, and part of me relished the idea of exercise after being cooped up for so long. A glance at the darkening sky hinted at snow in the near future. Autumn was coming to an end and the death of the year was at hand.

I avoided the cracks in the pavement as I walked, in much the same way as I’d skipped over them as a child, hoping to avert bad luck, not wanting the demons who lurked there to spring up and snatch me away. Maybe I was trying to avert my death, habit being so strong.

I reached the edge of the park after a brisk walk that somehow raised my spirits. I was unarmed; there hadn’t seemed much point in bringing the gun I kept in a lockbox in the apartment. Dead is dead, as I kept reminding myself.

The wheel loomed above everything else in the park, the spokes moving slowly, lifting the carriages in an endless vertical circle to offer a view of all Bishkek before bringing their occupants back to earth. As a summing up of life, I thought it was pretty accurate; at the end of your ride, you have to get off, whether you want to or not.

There aren’t many lights in the park, so there are long stretches under the trees where all you can see is the outline of benches, each with its couple of lovers with nowhere else to go, impervious to the cold in the warmth of each other’s company. I’d sat there myself, a lifetime ago, when a lifetime seemed to last for ever, a future filled with promise.

As the lights on the wheel’s spokes danced up and down, turning from white to green, blue to red, pulsing like some giant heartbeat, the leaves on the trees turned matching colours. I passed a couple deep in some silent argument, the girl weeping, the boy trying to comfort her. I thought of Saltanat back in Tashkent, wondering if she was considering terminating her pregnancy.

The wheel was surrounded by railings, with one gap leading to the entrance. It was there I could see the outline of the man I was due to meet, dark against the ever-changing lights. A little way away, two other figures waited, watching, their body language telling me they were bodyguards, poised for violence. If there were to be any trouble, it would come from them, and it would be coming my way.

I walked up to the waiting man, bulky in a thick overcoat, hair hidden in a fur ushanka . I didn’t try to hide my footsteps, watched as he turned round to meet me, his face unreadable as it turned white to green, blue to red.

I stopped a couple of metres away. He stood motionless, arms by his side, his body solid, square. He could have been one of the statues dotted around the park. I waited for some kind of acknowledgement, a sign he was aware of my presence. Finally, I spoke.

‘Hello, Minister. Kak dela ?’

Tynaliev merely grunted, fumbled in his overcoat pocket, pulled out a hip flask and took a deep drink. I was pretty sure it wasn’t hot chocolate. He didn’t offer it to me.

‘Those blanks really bruised me,’ he said. ‘I had the marks for weeks. And the fake blood bags ruined that suit as well.’

‘You wanted it to look authentic,’ I pointed out. ‘No point in it looking like something in a fifties Mosfilm shootout, where you clutch your side and carry on as normal.’

‘Usupov told me you were back, said he’d seen you at the airport. I don’t think he would have the balls not to tell me.’

‘He’s got a wife, children, a career,’ I said. ‘None of which I have. And as far as he knew, I was an enemy of the people. Or at least, an enemy of you.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ Tynaliev said. I didn’t reply.

‘Didn’t you ever wonder about putting proper bullets in the gun, Inspector? It’s not as if you and I are friends. You can bring me down if you want to, if you live long enough. And vice versa. A couple of slugs in my back and you’d have had one less enemy to worry about.’