A Spring Betrayal

Chapter 2

We excavated the site at dawn, to deter the curious. Usupov troweled away the damp earth, a few grams at a time, while I stood behind him, taking photographs, using a collapsible ruler to indicate scale. I tried to ignore the smell, a sour confusion of rotting leaves and decaying meat, until I finally stumbled to the canal and vomited into its sluggish brown water, wondering once more what drove me to places like these, to such endings.

The sky was cloudless, the air fresh and clear with the promise of an untroubled future. A couple of red kites circled above us, riding the thermals, scouring the ground for prey. I could hear Usupov behind me, the scratch and scrape of his trowel unsettling and relentless, the echo of a grave being dug.

You never get used to the nearness of death. It taps you on your shoulder when you’re least expecting it, breathes a sickening whisper in your ear. “Could have been you,” it whispers. “And one day it will be.” You taste the familiar fear in your stomach as you examine the gaping knife wounds, the intestines draped like ropes across the unmade bed, the spatter from gunshots dripping from cheap wallpaper in dismal rooms. Nothing could make you more certain that we’re all just bags of guts and bones, whistling in the night to comfort ourselves as the wind mutters threats and the curtains flap like shrouds.

“Inspector, we can take the bodies down now.”

There was no way we could get the ambulance up here, so we had to move the bundles by hand. Unearthed, they looked forlorn, reminders that cruelty is easily forgotten and time erases almost everything.

I picked up the largest bag, trying not to picture the body inside. Chinara was buried just a few miles away, and I pictured her wrapped in the simple shroud in which we Kyrgyz bury our dead, earth and stones gradually settling through her as roots weaved around her bones and mice colonized her skull.

I told the ment to take one of the bodies, but he simply folded his arms and stood motionless. I repeated the order, and he simply said, “Pashol na khui.” If I’d been in his place, perhaps I’d have told me to fuck off as well.

It took the two of us the best part of an hour to load the ambulance, and by the end I was convinced the reek of rot and slime would never leave me. I wanted to go back to the Amir, hand over my clothes to be burned, then shower until I’d stripped myself down to raw flesh. It’s easy enough to clean your body, harder to scrub images of dead children from your mind.

Usupov had turned the meeting room in the local police station into a makeshift morgue, long tables covered in plastic sheeting against one wall, and—a rarity in any Kyrgyz government building—working lightbulbs in every socket, to give him the light he needed. I reflected there was something wrong when a pathologist had more clout than a Murder Squad inspector, then realized why. The local officers were afraid of the death that had entered their lives. A wife-beating, a fight over the last drops in the bottle, or a brawl over a stolen sheep, that was in the nature of things. But dead children, gathered together and hidden where no one could mourn them, revealed an evil outside their experience. I would have liked to say the same.

“I want you to take notes and photographs, Inspector,” Usupov said, his sense of protocol undiminished by being away from his regular slab. “I’ll record my observations, naturally, but it may take some time to get them transcribed. And I’m sure you’ll want to press on with your investigation.”

We both knew this case would be mine and mine alone: no one back at Sverdlovsky station in Bishkek would be keen to drag this one along behind them. Dead children, no obvious suspects, all the makings of a career-breaker, one of those failures that outweighs any past triumphs. The chief had many friends before his fall, and they’d all be happy to see me stumble and break my neck over this case. I’ve learned over the years that every good deed earns you enemies.

The seven bags lay in a row, with the least decayed near the door.

“Why not in the order we dug them up?” I asked. “Or by size?”

Usupov polished his glasses, snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and moved toward the table.

“The freshest ones will contain the most information; what I learn from them might shed some light on the others, where the evidence is less clear.”

He paused, gave me his death’s-head smile, thin lips forming a vivid scar, turned, and set to work.

Usupov was nothing if not thorough. For almost seven hours we waded through an assortment of bones, skin, and teeth, all the shapeless and unseen mechanics of life. By the time we reached the smallest and most decomposed body, all we could do was extract the bones from a mucus-gray soup and hope that we hadn’t lost too many clues. The stench in the room was eye-watering, in spite of the open windows and the face masks we were wearing. We were no longer in a police station, but in a slaughterhouse in hell.

Finally, Usupov assembled the last of seven small skeletons, daubed here and there with cartilage, muscle, tissue, but relatively intact. He gave a half-smile, whether of satisfaction at a job well done or relief it was over, I couldn’t tell.

I walked to the window and thrust my head out, desperate for clean air. I was dazed by the carnage, by the knowledge I had no idea where to start this investigation. I turned back to Usupov, held up my cigarettes, nodded toward the door. I’ve always thought it disrespectful to smoke in front of the dead, though it seems unlikely they care. And anyway, what more harm could anyone do to them?

As I went out into the corridor, I read the health warning on the cigarette pack. None of the children had ever smoked, and they were the ones lying dead, about to be shoveled into a communal hole. Suddenly, I was laughing at the cosmic injustice of it all. A ment, one I didn’t recognize, scandalized by my reaction, swiveled his head around the corner, withdrew it at once when I stared back at him. Someone else determined to make sure they weren’t involved.

Nice to have had the option.

I finished my cigarette, thought longingly about the bottle of good stuff I would have had waiting for me in my hotel room in the days when I drank, suddenly discovered I was hungry, starving, in fact. Hunger is one way of pushing death back into its box and slamming down the lid. Feeding, fighting, fucking: they’re all shouts of defiance against our final unwanted visitor.

Usupov called me back into his makeshift morgue.

“In their condition, it’s hard to tell the gender at such an early age, as you know, and the skulls are soft, with the fontanelle still unfused.”

I looked down at the skeletons, lined up as if for a school photo. I thought of the children Chinara and I had promised ourselves, of the child we aborted, and my eyes blurred.

“The bleach you use could peel paint off a door,” I said, and made a point of coughing. Usupov stared at me, a rare look of sympathy on his face.

“You take it all too personally, Inspector.”

“Someone has to, Kenesh,” I said. “And if not me, then who?”

We were silent for a moment, and then Usupov turned back into his emotion-free pathologist persona, and I reverted to being Murder Squad.

“No clothes, no papers, nothing. So tell me how I’ll find out who they were.”

Usupov said nothing, but held up several small evidence bags. In each one there was a thin strip of plastic, with some kind of writing on it. They were stained and hard to read, but I didn’t have any problem recognizing what they were. After all, I’d worn one myself for two years.

“Identity bands. From an orphanage,” I said, and heard my voice splinter and crack.