Tom Callaghan - An Autumn Hunting

The sound of the wind driving the clouds down from the mountains had been joined by a curious melancholy clatter. At the far end, a giant terracotta-coloured arch commemorates the dead of 1916. The top of the arch holds a giant tunduk , from which are suspended cables which end in oversized metal stirrups, evoking horses without riders. In the wind, the metal swayed and created the noise I’d heard. The desolation and sorrow of the noise was an appropriate soundtrack to the setting, and the situation I was in.

‘Akyl, this is crazy,’ I heard Aliyev shout. ‘We should talk, there’s no need for this nonsense.’

‘Walk towards me then,’ I shouted back. ‘I promise I won’t shoot.’ Yet, I added to myself.

After a couple of moments, Aliyev appeared, walking down the steps by the 1916 memorial, which was flanked on either side by bas-relief murals showing the suffering and death of the Kyrgyz people a century earlier. His hands were held out before him, to show he wasn’t carrying a weapon.

I was watching, expecting Aliyev to shoot me. But when the shots came, they were from the bridge of the entrance, where the inscription in raised bronze letters read ‘ Ak iyilet, birok synbait ’ – ‘The people: bowed but unbroken’.

I felt a force grab me by the wrist, flinging my right arm high into the air and away from me. When I looked at my hand, I realised I’d been hit. My ring finger had been smashed to pulp, the first two joints missing entirely, the rest a sodden mass of tissue from which bone protruded like an insult. It didn’t hurt, but I knew that would soon pass. It looked like I wouldn’t be getting married after all.

I pumped three shots in the direction of the bridge, heard them whine off marble, a scream of pain as I hit the third man with the second bullet. The Makarov clicked empty. I dropped it, took the Yarygin from my belt. I knew I needed the extra firepower; the killing hadn’t quite finished yet.

It felt like an afterthought that a bullet had bitten into my thigh. No pain yet, but plenty of blood, enough for me to bleed out fairly quickly.

‘I want to end this, Kanybek,’ I said, wincing as the pain began to gnaw at my hand. More blood on the ground now, and a fierce ache in my hand, as if someone had held my fingers to a naked flame.

‘You had me fooled, I admit that,’ Aliyev said. ‘Assassinating Tynaliev was the perfect way to show you weren’t a government plant. I give you credit for that.’

‘Tynaliev’s idea,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t be that devious.’

‘Shame you didn’t use live ammo; we could all have made a lot of money, lived happily ever after.’

I knew he was dragging things out, waiting for me to grow weak so he could finish me off.

‘You don’t have the balls to shoot me?’ I asked, making sure he saw the Yarygin.

‘Do I need to? All I have to do is watch; my hands stay clean.’

My eyes felt sore, the lids heavy, and the blood dripped onto the marble like melting roses.

‘You never saw the big picture, did you, Akyl?’ Aliyev laughed. ‘You were hunting me, I was hunting Quang, he was hunting me, and Tynaliev was out to fuck all of us. You didn’t have a clue; “Drunk on reckless might-have-beens”, that was you.’

The phrase sounded familiar, nagged at my mind.

‘Wasn’t your wife a poetry lover?’ Aliyev taunted. ‘You don’t have a memory for such things.’

It was then that the story turned sharp, pieces falling into place as if preordained from day one.

‘The dead girl down in Alamedin, the drug overdose, the one with the poem tucked into her clothing,’ I said. ‘You knew her?’

‘From the day she was born,’ Aliyev said. ‘My daughter, my Roza,’ and I could hear the madness in his voice. I said nothing, tried to see the bereaved parent in his face, glimpsed only rage.

‘She wasn’t a user, not ever,’ he continued. ‘I’d kept her away from that shit. My team was warned what would happen if it went wrong, if she got mixed up. The best schools, holidays, whatever she wanted, nothing was too good for Roza.’

Now I had a name to fit to the body; Roza Aliyeva, drug dealer’s daughter. I wondered if I’d live long enough to tell Usupov he could attach a name tag to her toe.

‘Don’t get me wrong; she knew who I was, what I was. Hard to pretend with the kind of money I had, with the way we lived. She knew.’

‘So what got her started?’ I asked. His face twisted into a mask of sorrow.

‘She went on holiday. Chiang Mai, Bangkok, the whole thing. She called it “finding herself”.’

Aliyev gave a mirthless laugh, the sort that usually means death for someone. I tightened my grip on my gun. Blood pooled on the ground below me; I could smell its metal sweetness, almost taste it on my tongue. I was dying by the glassful.

‘Instead Quang found her. Someone squealed, got an envelope under the table. Next thing I hear from her, she’s met this wonderful man. Guess who. I find out who it is, I go nuclear. Quang and I had already had some opening discussions about the business, but we hadn’t been able to agree. Then I discovered he was using my daughter to get at me.’

Aliyev shook his head, as if in wonder anyone could have been so foolish.

‘When I wouldn’t give in to his demands, he gave Roza the hot shot that killed her. Not him personally, but one of his employees. Adding to the pressure to reach a deal. He knew I had other children.’

‘You saw the autopsy report?’ I asked.

‘Dollars buy a lot of information,’ Aliyev said. ‘The blood spatter on her pants was just another humiliation, a defiling, blood from another dead junkie squirted onto her from a syringe, I imagine. One more way to insult me, prove how weak I was.’

That explained the different blood groups, reminded me once again that hate and violence against the weak never rests, never goes away.

Aliyev paused, looked into the sky as a few drops of rain danced across the ground.

‘The same with tucking those lines of poetry into her bra. Roza wrote that poem. She always wanted to be a writer.’

I said nothing, felt pity for her, perhaps even for him. I understood what he’d felt: I wrote the manual about the loss of love.

‘I was off the investigation almost before it had even started,’ I said. ‘We never found who gave her the hot shot.’

Aliyev gave a grim smile, and I felt my pity for the bereaved father melt away.

‘I did,’ he said, said no more. He didn’t need to.

‘Yet you sent me to broker a deal with Quang?’

Aliyev shook his head.

‘I sent you there to fuck him and his business over, not that you knew. Of course, I could have had him killed. But I didn’t want him to die fast, the way Roza did. I wanted him rotting in a Bangkok shitpit, his organisation destroyed. I wanted him to know I’d taken over from him, that I was running things, making the money, calling the shots.’

I thought about ripping the sleeve from my shirt to make a tourniquet, knew I didn’t have the strength, knew I couldn’t put the gun down, knew I had to keep it aimed at Aliyev. I only had a few moments of life left, and I had to use them.

‘Tynaliev will wipe you out, you know,’ I muttered, my voice thick and sour with pain. ‘He’ll take over everything you’ve worked for.’

‘He’d like to, I’m sure,’ Aliyev smiled, ‘but let me tell you a fact of life, Inspector. Politicians rise, politicians fall. Cemeteries are full of men who thought they could have it all, that the names on their graves now overgrown with weeds would never be forgotten. But crime and money? They go on for ever, hand in hand.’

He paused, reached into his pocket, took out a gun, pointed it. One of those .25 Berettas people carry as a hideaway. Tough guys think of them as a woman’s gun, but they’ll kill you just as dead as a .45. For a few seconds, I remembered the dream where Chinara had mimed shooting me.