A Killing Winter

Chapter 47

Two in the morning, and the last remaining waitress had been giving me the moody eye for the last hour. I dumped a couple of thousand-som notes on the table, waved away the half-hearted offer of change. The bar lights immediately dimmed; she was taking no chances on a thirsty customer strolling by for a nightcap.

The snow had stopped falling, as heartless and final as a whore’s kiss. The sky was a delicate tissue of stars, suspended in the stillness and clarity that follows a storm. I checked my mobile; a dozen messages, all from the Chief. I already knew what they contained: a long litany of my various faults, sins and transgressions, ending with an offer of forgiveness, as long as I solved the case.

I remembered the rookie’s words: day or night. But at this hour, the Chief would be snoring his way towards a furred tongue and a rough head in the morning. So it was the ideal time to show that I’d obeyed orders by reporting in, without actually having to see him.

A taxi was heading up Tureshbekov with its light on, a real worthless heap with every panel clearly from a different vehicle, maybe even a different decade. But it was bitterly cold, and I’d no intention of walking. I flagged him down, badged him, made him wait while I told the hotel desk clerk to go home and keep his rot firmly shut. When I came out, the taxi was still there, to my amazement, all three of the working windows wound up, the driver creating a cancer cloud that spilt out into the night air.

As we drove down Chui Prospekt, just before we got to the White House – where some of my country’s biggest criminals work out new ways of prising money out of the people – I told the driver to stop and wait.

The avenue was empty as I walked towards the monument commemorating the people massacred here during our last revolution, shot down as they demonstrated against the president. At the time, they were described as anti-social forces of lawlessness. Now, they’re martyrs in the name of democracy. It’s a see-saw; who knows who will get to write the final word?

I stood out of the wind, looked past the marble slabs attached to the White House railings, bearing the names of the dead, and up at the monument. A giant block of a wall, split into two halves, one white, one black, with three men in between them, pushing the black slab away and over on to its side. It’s a little old-fashioned – three heroic Stakhanovite sons of toil overthrowing dark repression – but it never fails to move me. Maybe it’s the simple division of the world into a good half and a dark half, the belief that people have the power, and can unite to overcome greed and tyranny, terror and confusion. It’s a belief I wish I could share, that things can be made better, people whole again, not just slithering around in endless shit and blood and death, the way I do.

The snow was an ermine ushanka on the heads of the bronze figures, while the street lights turned the white block a half-glimpsed ghostly grey, floating against the night. And that was a more accurate reflection of the world I inhabit, neither black nor white. I pictured Chinara’s grave, under a blanket of ice and snow until the spring thaw, and wondered how soundly I’d sleep when my time came.

I lit a cigarette, smoked that down to the last half-inch, extinguished it in the snow and put the butt in my pocket. It seemed disrespectful to litter this place, where dreams fell and the gutters had carried away the blood.

I sifted through all the evidence again, for patterns, trying to attach motives to actions. Maybe I should have brought a couple of hundred grams away from the Dragon’s Den.

Patterns, shapes, epitaphs and reasons.

One by one, they dropped into place, like five-som coins into a beggar’s grimy hand.

Finally I called Usupov, watching the soft and faithless snow flurry and shimmer in the moonlight, before it buried everything and everyone.