Tom Callaghan - A Summer Revenge

Maybe Lin thought that seeing her maternal side would win me over. She was wrong. I took her chin between my thumb and forefinger, applied just enough pressure for her to realize I was all business, and that pleasure wasn’t part of any potential bargain.

“Natasha? The Kyrgyz girl. The one I’m looking for. You have any idea where she is? Think carefully now, Lin. I’m only going to ask you once. And I’ll be very unhappy if you lie to me.”

I don’t like threatening women, but when it comes to getting the truth in a hurry, soft words aren’t enough. You need soft words backed by a knuckleduster to get your point across.

I thought of Natasha’s severed finger, of the likelihood that she’d been beaten, raped, maybe even killed and dumped as somewhere as anonymous and pathetic as Jamila and Lev’s grave. I didn’t have time for courtship and a slow dance.

“Time’s up, Lin. Time to talk. Or time to…” And I let my silence spell out my message, her options, or lack of them.

It’s the quiet menace that gets the answers, I’ve always found. Shout and yell and scream, people think you’re angry, that the storm will pass. Make them believe you’re not issuing threats but promises, the words pour out like an avalanche high in the mountains when the ice starts to melt in the spring.

And that’s how it was with Lin.

“I liked Natasha,” she said. “I mean, she wasn’t Vietnamese, and she didn’t work like the rest of us, but she wasn’t stuck up. She must have had money not to work, but she didn’t throw her money around, try to look flash with the cash. She’d buy you a drink, maybe; a couple of times she lent me a taxi fare, money for supper, that kind of thing. But she was always interested in how you were, how things were at home, if your kids were doing well at school, you know.”

I hadn’t thought of Natasha as the world’s most considerate person, but maybe knowing she’d been hooked up with a bastard like Tynaliev had prejudiced me. But I remained unconvinced. Like hookers, mistresses learn to become mirrors, reflecting what a man wants to see, to hear, to believe. As amateur psychologists, the two professions have no rivals. A man’s ego and desires can be unpicked, analyzed and replaced without him even noticing. And then it’s the turn of his wallet.

It’s not that I don’t believe in love; I just know how hard it is to find, and more importantly to keep.

Lin looked around nervously. The police in Dubai aren’t keen on working girls meeting customers on the streets, and if she had any condoms in her bag, that could get her into serious trouble, maybe even deported.

“The thing is,” she continued, “Natasha only came to the bar to blend in with the other Kyrgyz girls. Socializing was only part of it. She believed in finding safety in a crowd. I knew she was afraid of something, or someone, but she wasn’t the sort of person who’d confide in you. She always hid behind a mask.”

I realized Lin was more perceptive than I’d given her credit for. Stay in my job long enough and you run the risk of confusing the person with the profession. It was a mistake I’d made in the past, one I always intended never to repeat. I smiled, hoping to reassure her.

“Did she ever mention anyone specific?” I asked. “Someone who was out to find her, maybe to hurt her?”

“Not really, but she was always very careful who she talked to. Men, I mean.”

“In the bar?”

“Most of the time the guys are OK, for arseholes. They get lonely, they get drunk, they get horny. Some of them paw at you like a piece of meat that they’re considering buying, but you’d be amazed how many are quite well behaved, considering.”

“But the guys she wanted to avoid?” I persisted.

“She didn’t want to talk to anybody Russian or Chechen. I guess she must have had a bad experience once.”

Remembering the severed finger delivered to my hotel, I thought “bad” was probably an understatement, but I didn’t enlighten Lin. She was scared enough already.

I decided that I wasn’t going to get any more information out of Lin unless she thought I was one of the good guys, in Dubai to help Natasha. It was something of a long shot, but right then I didn’t have a lot to lose.

I took a step back, taking away the threat of being so close, shrugged.

“You’re right about Natasha,” I said, lying with all the fluency a career in the police force will give you. “She did have a bad experience. With a boyfriend back in Bishkek. Older, married and quite important. She broke off the relationship, and he couldn’t accept her decision. That’s why she came to Dubai, to get away from him.”

“So why are you here?” Lin asked. “You’re here to drag her back to him, even though she doesn’t want to go?”

“No, he realizes he’s lost her and just wants her to know that it’s all water under the bridge as far as he’s concerned.”

I knew that the only way Tynaliev would be happy was if his money was back in his hands, tucked up in an offshore bank somewhere warm and private, and Natasha was somewhere cold and painful. But there was no need for Lin to know that.

“Do you know if she met any Chechen men?” I asked as casually as I could manage.

“I saw her talking to one man a few days ago, in Russian, but I don’t know where he was from. Not Asian though, I could tell that.”

There was no way I could know if that had been Boris, or perhaps one of his men, but it was the only assumption I could go on.

“You remember what he looked like?”

“Black hair, slicked back, and a beard. Wore a leather jacket, an expensive one. Maybe in his mid-thirties. Handsome enough but not my type.”

As if to let me know what was her type, Lin pressed her breast back against my arm, pouting at my lack of response.

The description certainly fitted Boris—and probably most of the men in Chechnya as well—but it was all I had to go on. I fumbled in my pocket, gave Lin a handful of notes.

“Get a taxi home,” I said, “and stay there for a couple of days. I think Natasha might be in trouble, and you don’t want to get involved, I promise you.”

As I walked away, I didn’t think she’d follow my suggestion. And when I looked back, she was already making her way back to the bar, hoping for one more customer. I guess for some people money trumps everything, even life.

I hadn’t really expected to get any fresh information from Lin, but it was dispiriting all the same. Sometimes you hear the vital link in a case from the most unexpected mouth, but more often it’s a long trudge with no clear destination at the end. It’s not the glamorous career the Russian crime soaps show. And they don’t show the dirt and the death that goes with it either.

Back at my hotel, I put in a call to Saltanat, gave her my news, which took approximately thirty seconds, even speaking slowly.

“So you’re no further forward,” she said. Again, not a question. And I noted the “you” rather than the “we.”

“You’ve run down any leads?” I asked in my most innocent voice.

“They’ll stay submerged as long as they think I’m after them,” Saltanat said. “It’s you they’ll try to find. They’ve got ten million reasons to get in touch.”

I had the horrible feeling that I was nothing but a Judas goat, staked out in the open, waiting while Saltanat hid in the shadows with a sniper’s rifle, ready to take out the wolves as they came down from the mountains to feast. And if a shot accidentally came my way, I wondered if she’d lose any sleep over it.

“I should give it a day or two,” I said, “otherwise they’ll get suspicious. They’ll be watching me, so I should look as if I’ve given up, decided to go back to Bishkek.”