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.
Chapter 3
I was twelve, the first time I stood in this room. It was just a few months after we declared independence while the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, a brutal time for everyone in Kyrgyzstan. My father had gone to Moscow two years earlier to look for work, so my mother and I left Bishkek to live with my grandfather and his second wife in his small farm north of Karakol.
The two women loathed each other with the endless simmering resentment that comes from bad food, cheap clothes, and recognizing something of themselves in each other’s failures. Long silences would settle over the three-room farmhouse the way rainclouds brooded over the mountain peaks to the north, then burst like thunder into a tirade of faults and grievances. Finally, my grandfather declared himself sick of the skirmishes, and my mother packed our cheap plastic suitcase with the split handle and set off to find work in Siberia. I didn’t see or hear from her for almost three years.
However, my mother’s departure didn’t calm her rival; instead she transferred the battle to me. And after the potato harvest, when I’d outlived my usefulness, she bundled me into the back of my grandfather’s ancient Moskvitch. Through the scratched rear window, I watched my grandfather shut the gate behind us, unable to meet my bewildered stare. That was the first time I realized just how quickly men will surrender almost anything for a quiet life.
During the twelve-mile drive into Karakol, I wondered if my mother had sent for me, and whether I would recognize her, or she me. Even then, I didn’t have much trust in memories.
I spent just over two years in the orphanage, during which I ran away three times. Very few of the children were there because their parents had died. We were known as “social orphans”; in the chaos of independence, our families had split up, gone off to Russia to look for a job, or simply disappeared. So what little remained of the state authorities got the task of caring for us. And because we couldn’t complain, didn’t have anywhere else to go, and were only children, they took as little care as they needed.
“Pashol na khui.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been sworn at; it wasn’t even as if none of my superiors had ever said it to me. But I’d never had a one-armed man hug me, then tell me to fuck off.
I glanced around the orphanage director’s office. There had been some changes: the scuffmarks of children’s shoulders against the wall had darkened, and a different president scowled down from an ornate gilt frame. And there was a different man behind the desk from the last time I’d stood in front of it, waiting to be punished.
However, Gurminj Shokhumorov wasn’t your typical official. For a start, he was Tajik, a rarity in our government’s ethnic mix, and if you saw him in the street, you’d think he was a farmer, maybe a builder, who’d lost his right arm to an accident or a car crash.
It was shrapnel from an RPG fired by a mujahideen warrior in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul that smashed Gurminj’s shoulder and arm into fragments and ended his career in the Red Army. To Gurminj, it was a massive joke that the Panjshir is where the majority of Tajiks in Afghanistan live. As he always used to say, back in the days when we’d opened the second bottle of vodka and crushed the cap underfoot, “If you’re going to lose an arm, you want it to be a relative that fucks you up.”
It had been over a year since we’d last met; he was one of the mourners who stood by me as we buried my wife, and he had been with me the following day, when the women came down to the grave and scattered bread and milk on the hard earth.
“Do you honestly think I’ve got the time to track down some ancient identity bands?” he asked, lifting up the evidence bags Usupov had dropped off the day before.
“You know the right places to go, the right people to ask. Right now, I’m as welcome in Bishkek as a dose of clap half an hour after the town’s only pharmacy has closed down. No one will risk their neck to give me the whisper.”
“And if it’s me that does the asking, it shouldn’t set off any alarm bells; is that what you mean?”
“That too,” I admitted. “But someone has to do it. Those children didn’t get a chance at life; they deserve better than being left to rot by some stinking canal.”
“You know how many people I have to kneel in front of, just to keep this place warm, and stew and bread on the table?” Gurminj asked, throwing his one arm wide. “I’ll tell you, a fuck of a lot.” He smiled, his teeth dazzling white in a thick black beard.
I nodded. My memories of the orphanage weren’t great, but I knew Gurminj was a good man. He’d told me once, in the days when I was still drinking, that there was no such thing as a child that couldn’t be helped, sometimes even saved. I was drunk in the way I used to get then, with enough anger and despair bubbling under to turn the world into a fleapit hotel with blood on the carpet and screams soaked into the wallpaper. But I wasn’t drunk enough to tell him that I’d seen some of the children he cared for grow up to be robbed or raped or murdered. Or to do those things themselves.