A Spring Betrayal

Chapter 4

For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of what Gurminj told me. The bands had to be genuine, untampered with. When you were deposited at an orphanage, you were given a band to wear on your right wrist, the number already written on it, the number that tracked your progress or lack of it through the system. Then a lighter was held under the two ends of the plastic to melt them together. There was no way you could remove it without cutting it in half. And when the band got too tight, the old one was destroyed and a new one sealed in its place.

Tamper-proof: what the system captures, it doesn’t easily relinquish. The only thing more permanent would have been a tattoo, and even the government wouldn’t go that far.

“I don’t understand,” I said; this was the first solid fact I’d uncovered so far.

I looked more closely at the bands: I should have realized that they were far too big for such small children. As if he’d read my thoughts, Gurminj nodded.

“It was the first thing Usupov told me, that the bands were too big for the bodies.”

“So why didn’t he tell me? I could have started a check on identifying the bands.”

Gurminj shrugged, and pushed his palms toward the ceiling in a gesture of resignation.

“You said he flew up here? In a helicopter? So the case must be important to someone with plenty of pull, wouldn’t you say? Someone who wants the bodies identified. Or maybe wants them staying unknown.”

I’d always thought of Usupov as one of the good guys. We’d worked well in the past, and I owed him. But there’s always a first time for everything. The first kiss, the first fuck, the first betrayal, the first death.

Gurminj opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle and two glasses. Not easy with one hand, but he’d had a lot of practice.

“You still don’t… ?” he said, looking down at the glass he’d pushed toward me.

“Not today,” I answered, the familiar words a lie against the sudden craving I felt. The raw scent of the vodka, the oily look as it swirled around the glass and caught the light, the burn on my tongue and throat, the shudder as the alcohol hit.

“You won’t mind if I do?” he asked, poured himself a shot, threw it back.

“Your liver,” I said. “God help whoever gets it as a transplant.”

“When this shit happened,” he said, pointing at his empty shirtsleeve, “I used to feel my missing hand wanting to throw a punch all the time. At anyone who got in my way, who felt sorry for me, who assured me that it didn’t make a difference but she’d met someone.”

He poured another brimful, let it sit.

“I could imagine the cuts on my knuckles from someone’s teeth, feel the blow travel up my arm. The morphine didn’t take the pain away, it only pushed it aside, made it seem unimportant, like hearing a TV in the next room. But when it wore off, it was back to having life as my sparring partner.”

This time he sipped, the glass hidden in his one hand.

“So I quit the morphine, hit the vodka, hard at first, then tapered it down to a couple of glasses every two or three days. A kind of equilibrium.”

He tossed the rest of his drink back, made a face, smiled.

“Hardly doctor’s orders, but it gets me through the week.”

I knew the feeling.

“How about you, tovarich? How do you keep things balanced?”

The concern he felt showed in his face.

I picked up the evidence bags, stuffed them in my pocket, stood up, put my left hand out, a clumsy unfamiliar way to shake hands.

“Balance? It’s overrated, Gurminj, hadn’t you heard?”