A Spring Betrayal

Chapter 52

The banya at the far end of Ibraimova is one of the better legacies from our not-so-glorious days as part of the Soviet Union. Recently renovated, it’s a great place to relax, with two different sauna rooms, massage tables, and a circular ice-cold pool under a white tiled hemisphere. There’s even a snack bar where you can buy horse-meat sausage and cold beer, and if you want to get a haircut, there’s a small salon run by two women whose indifference to the naked men who use the banya suggests they’ve seen everything, from long and tall to short and small. It’s the ideal place to meet if you want to make sure no one’s hiding a gun or a tape recorder.

I undressed, put my clothes in one of the lockers, and making sure no one was looking, slipped some papers onto the top of the lockers. I walked into the shower room, where I paid a thickset middle-aged woman for a thin cotton sheet, wrapping it around my waist. She looked at my damaged shoulder, at the blood-crusted furrow whose edges were already starting to look inflamed, infected.

“You can’t go in the pool, not with that,” she said.

“I’m only going to use the heat,” I replied. My answer seemed to satisfy her; I was only grateful she didn’t look down at my foot.

“How did you get that, anyway?” she asked, nodding at my shoulder.

I shrugged, did my best to look browbeaten. It wasn’t too hard.

“The old woman, she’s got a temper on her. Tatar,” I explained. “And maybe I’d had a couple of beers too many, got home late.”

The attendant pursed her lips.

“You’d have gotten worse from me if you were my husband,” she said, and turned away, convinced once more about the fecklessness of men. I nodded, decided not to buy a bottle of Baltika, in case she hit me with it.

I was early, so I took a long hot shower, then endured ten minutes in the hottest of the steam rooms, surrounded by naked men, most of whom were slapping themselves or each other with birch twigs. We have some strange customs in Central Asia. Some of the men were also wearing tall kalpak felt hats, which must have added to the heat. The wooden slatted floor was littered with leaves, and they stuck to my feet when I finally couldn’t take the heat any longer. I was pouring buckets of cold water over myself when a voice behind me called my name.

“How are you, Akyl?”

“Well, you know,” I said, turning to face Kenesh Usupov, Bishkek’s chief forensic pathologist. “There’s nothing I like more than getting myself into deep shit, then trying to get out of it. So I thought I’d give my old friend a call, arrange a reunion.”

“I didn’t expect to hear from you again,” he said, wiping his face dry with a towel. “Not until you’d sorted out all that business about child porn in your apartment.”

“I’m working on that,” I said, “but things keep getting in the way. Like being beaten up, tortured, being hunted by my former colleagues, having old friends turn their faces away from me.”

To his credit, Kenesh looked ashamed for a few seconds.

“I have to think of my family first, Akyl. And how could I help anyway?”

I nodded; if I wanted Kenesh to help me, I had to show him I wasn’t one to bear a grudge.

“I got the word, from someone very senior,” I said, not wanting to mention Tynaliev by name. “They said the Be On The Lookout for me was being unofficially scaled down.”

“There’s talk you were set up,” Kenesh said. “Maybe by people who supported the chief before he went away. You know, revenge.”

I knew that wasn’t the case; the people who’d backed the chief wouldn’t have rolled him in a snowdrift if he’d been on fire. Those people move on, to the next deal, the next scam, the next ass to kiss.

“I want you to do me a favor,” I said, and watched as Usupov immediately looked cautious. “Don’t worry, you can see I’m not wearing a wire.”

“Not unless you’ve hidden it in a very uncomfortable place,” Usupov said, in a rare flash of humor.

“Well, if I was, you don’t want to speak into the microphone,” I said, and the tension in the air seemed to ease. I scooped another bucket of cold water out of the tub, poured it over my head. The shock was like a punch in the face, but it gave me a moment to work out how to convince Usupov to do what I was about to ask.

“We should leave separately,” I said, “but before you go, there’s something I want you to collect from my locker.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing to worry about,” I reassured him, “but I’ve done a lot of digging about the dead children we unearthed. I’m pretty sure I know what happened to them, and why. But in case someone’s digging a hole for me, I’ve made some notes, and I want you to hang onto them.”

I paused, staring into Usupov’s eyes to reinforce the seriousness of what I’d just said.

“Then if I don’t turn up, or if they find me after someone’s given me a Makarov kiss, send them to the editor of Achyk Sayasat. You know how antigovernment they are; they’ll publish right away, and you can’t close all the mouths. An anonymous tip-off. You won’t be implicated.”

“I suppose I can do that,” he said. “But why don’t you just send the information to Tynaliev? You’d get rehabilitated, the porn charges would go away, you’d have the minister backing you all the way.”

I didn’t want to let Kenesh know Tynaliev was possibly involved in the murders; he’d be out of the banya and down Ibraimova without stopping to get dressed. I told him where I’d hidden my notes, watched as he headed toward the changing room. I decided to give him ten minutes before leaving, just enough time for one more shower to ease some of the stiffness out of my joints.

That was when I saw the burly guy with a shaven head and a chest full of prison tattoos as he came into the shower room.

And when he noticed me.