A Spring Betrayal (28 page)

“Each time you get a referral, that there’s a child in the system that can be adopted, a couple of thousand dollars gets left in an envelope, as a ‘present.’ Getting the paperwork sorted out is another thousand. So the costs are rising. And then the foreigners enter the picture.”

Saltanat looked around, but all the tables nearby were empty, and I didn’t imagine Graves’s caution would extend to bugging the Metro Bar.

“Imagine you’ve been married for twelve years, trying for a child for the last ten. The tests can’t point to a specific problem, IVF hasn’t worked out for you, her biological clock batteries are almost exhausted. What do you do?

“You go to the adoption agencies in your own country. They say you’re too old, you’ve been married before, there aren’t any children available in your ethnic group. Come back next year, but no promises.

“You’re spending your evenings arguing about this, you don’t have sex anymore, it’s splitting you apart. Then you read an article about the orphans in Kyrgyzstan. Beautiful Asian children living in poor conditions, horrible surroundings you wouldn’t keep a dog in, poorly fed, barely educated, often with physical or mental handicaps, no one to love them, care for them.”

“It wasn’t like that where I grew up—” I started to say, when Saltanat held up her hand to silence me.

“Akyl, ‘poor conditions’ to these people means not having Wi-Fi and a 42-inch flat-screen TV in every room. Their heart goes out to these orphans, of course it does. So they get in touch with an agency, like Hoping For Love, and are told to fly to Bishkek or Osh, to meet some of the children. And once they do that, they’re hooked.”

“Once they’ve found a child, they can’t walk away,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course not. The smart ones, they find a lawyer to help deal with the agency, to keep the bribes down to a minimum and to make sure the paperwork’s legitimate.”

“How much are we talking about?” I asked.

“Maybe as much as fifty thousand dollars,” Saltanat said, rubbing thumb and forefinger together to emphasize her point.

Fifty thousand dollars. That’s a lifetime’s earnings for a lot of people in Kyrgyzstan, years of rooting up potatoes, growing fruit to sell by the wayside, slaughtering a goat or a sheep and hacking it up to sell in the market you set off for before dawn, with a cold wind coming down off the mountains.

“The thing is,” Saltanat continued, “if you’ve paid that sort of money, you end up with a child to take back to your country. It’s expensive, but you get what you paid for. And compare it to the cost of surgery if it’s needed, school fees, college, it’s not that much if a child is all you’ve ever wanted.”

I nodded. I didn’t like the idea of children being taken from their roots, detached from their culture, never knowing their birth brothers or sisters, but I wasn’t stupid enough, or patriotic enough, not to realize it could be a ticket to a better life.

“So everyone feeds their beak, everyone gets what they want?”

Saltanat stared at me, and shook her head.

“Say you don’t have the fifty thousand? Or before you can lawyer up, someone says, we can cut out the paperwork, get things sorted faster.”

I knew I wasn’t going to like hearing what was to come next.

“We know it’s expensive, that’s the government, but for thirty thousand, paid direct to us, we can get you a child from outside an orphanage, better looked after, healthier, yours to take home, no complications.”

I reached over, took the last cigarette from Saltanat’s pack. Time to reclaim my gun; I wanted to be tooled up when I next met these fuckers.

“Imagine you’re a family over in Karakol, or up in Talas or way down in one of the villages past Osh. Poor, but honest. The only crop you’re good at growing is children. Too many mouths to feed, clothes, shoes, no money coming into the house.

“An agency approaches you. Chance of a new life for your new baby. Wealthy foreigners. They’re looking for a handsome
malysh
or a
beautiful
malyshka
. Boy or girl, whatever you’ve got. They show you pictures of the big white house outside Vancouver, the farm in upstate New York, places you’ve never even heard of, luxury you can’t imagine. That’s where your baby’s going to grow up. Of course you’ll miss them, but there’ll be photographs, letters, maybe even visits over the years. How can you deny them that?”

Saltanat took the cigarette out of my fingers, inhaled, handed it back, waved her empty glass at the waitress for another beer.

“Of course, they want to compensate you for your loss. A thousand dollars, look, I have the money right here, clean new hundred-dollar notes, never even been folded. Pay off your debts, new clothes for the older children, maybe a new dress for the wife. What are you going to do?”

I could picture the father, hands roughened by years in the fields, the mother, worn out before her time by too many children and the endless battle against mud and hunger. I thought of my mother with her cheap plastic suitcase with the split handle leaving for Siberia, my grandfather unable to meet my eye as we arrived at the orphanage, the dormitory where I covered my head with a blanket and silently wept, night after night.

“The agency takes pictures of the child, sends them on to prospective parents. They always want a baby or a toddler, someone who won’t remember their earlier life, never a sulky teenager. And one couple will say, yes, that’s the baby for us, then the money changes hands and so does the kid. Probably handed over to Albina, pretending to be caring and maternal, to reassure the mother.”

There was a question I knew I had to ask, dreaded hearing the answer.

“And then what happens?”

“A lot of the time, it goes through, the foreigners get a cut-price baby, the parents have some spare cash for the first time in years. A couple of thousand buys the baby a passport and adoption certificate, allowing it to leave the country, and we hope it all ends happily.”

I could follow the logic; if official channels were bypassed, that only meant fewer beaks got dipped.

“But?” I asked, certain there would be more to the story, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.

“It often depends on the foreigners, how gullible they are,” Saltanat said. “Sometimes the same baby gets sold to four or five couples; one of them gets the child, the other ones are told the child has died, or the parents have backed out at the last minute. Of course, it’s impossible to offer a full refund, and, having broken the law, the couples can hardly go to Sverdlovsky station and lodge a complaint. They’ve heard too many horror stories about Kyrgyz jails to consider that.”

“So they fly home to an empty cradle and a bank account light by thirty thousand dollars?”

Saltanat nodded.

“But the worst if no one buys the child?”

Her face grew hard, and I waited for her to speak.

“Better not to risk returning the child. The parents are told all went well, and they keep the thousand dollars.”

“And the child?”

“You dug seven of them up in a field outside Karakol. And I shouldn’t imagine that’s the only dumping ground. If they’re lucky, they get killed quickly. If not, they star in one of Graves’s home movies.”

I said nothing, remembering the pathetic bundles in that cold field, the sun turning the mountain snow the color of blood. I wanted to vomit, to blow the story to the newspapers and see
nomenklatura
heads on spikes. Most of all, I wanted to kill Morton Graves.

While we sat there in grim silence, the waitress brought over a fresh beer for Saltanat. She was young, pretty, and I couldn’t remember her name.

“You’re looking very serious, Akyl. Hope there wasn’t something wrong with the pizza?”

“It was fine.” I smiled, and made sure I didn’t watch as she walked back to the bar. However, that didn’t stop Saltanat.

“Pretty girl,” she said, in a nonchalant tone that didn’t lower my defenses for a moment. “You’ve known her for a long time?”

“She’s a waitress. In a bar. That I used to drink in. She’s seen us both in here before. I need a hard time about it right now?”

Saltanat was silent, but I knew that conversation wasn’t over.

Her phone rang, startling us both.

She listened, then broke the connection. She looked over at me, her face betraying absolutely nothing, professional, a trained killer.

“Albina,” she said. “With a time and a place.”

“You think she wants to give up Graves?” I asked. “Cut some kind of immunity? Do you trust her?”

Saltanat shook her head.

“Not a chance; I know what she wants. To kill me. As she always used to say, the hard bit is knowing who to trust. And when.”

Chapter 56

“What you just said about knowing who to trust? I just remembered where I’d heard that before,” I said. “Albina was the woman who came to visit the orphanage. Those were her exact words: I thought she looked familiar.”

“You didn’t recognize her from before?” Saltanat asked, never taking her eyes away from the traffic in front of us. We’d decided there wasn’t time to go to the lockup for more weapons; the Uighur knife would have to do.

“It was one incident one afternoon a long time ago, in a time I’ve tried to forget.”

Saltanat nodded, said, “I can understand that.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I was brought up in an orphanage too, Akyl. You’re not unique. But I did get adopted.”

Her voice told me it hadn’t been an idyllic childhood, that questions would not be welcome.

“How soon after Albina saw you did you get to go home?” she asked.

“My grandfather came down to Karakol about three months later and met me at the bus station. He bought two tickets to Bishkek and we headed west in a beat-up old
marshrutka
. Nine hours until we arrived, and I don’t think my
dedushka
said more than five words. He certainly didn’t say why we were going to Bishkek. We walked for about half an hour—my grandfather wasn’t one for spending unnecessary
som
on taxis—until we came to Panfilov Park and sat down on one of the benches near the amusement park.

“We waited for about an hour; grandfather bought me an ice cream with black cherry juice on top. I’d never had one before, and I tried to make it last as long as possible, until finally the ice cream started to melt and run down my arm and onto my shirt.

“I was licking the last of the juice off my fingers when I heard a woman’s voice. ‘I can’t leave you alone for a minute, Akyl Borubaev, can I? You think clean shirts grow on apple trees?’ and I looked up and there was my
mama
. She looked tired, older, her shoulders more stooped, but it was her. I think my mouth fell open in surprise, and then she opened her arms, and I was hugging her waist and we were crying. Everybody stopped to stare, but I didn’t care, and I thought my heart was going to burst with happiness.”

I sat still, remembering that day, how we’d stayed with one of her cousins until we could find a place of our own, in Alamedin, just behind the market, so our three-room apartment always smelled of newly picked fruit and fresh vegetables. It was the last time my mother ever showed me any emotion, any clue to her feelings. Whenever I was cross or unhappy, she would scold me, saying, “Don’t show your character.” She watched without comment, without emotion, as my grandfather’s body was carried out of our apartment, followed years later by that of my father, on one of his rare visits. She didn’t approve of me joining the police force, a staunch supporter of the widely held belief that all policemen are corrupt. My mother died not long after meeting Chinara. She approved of our marriage, said Chinara was too good for me. And when her time came, my mother fought her own death with an unwillingness to accept anything stronger than her own strength of will.

“That’s a good story, Akyl, you were lucky, believe me,” Saltanat said. I knew any attempt to interrogate her would lead only to silence and a distancing that would take hours to break down. If she told me, I might understand her motives, her attitudes. If she didn’t, she was still Saltanat, with all her mysteries.

“How dangerous is Albina?” I said.

“Hand to hand? The best.”

“Why don’t I wait just out of sight?” I said. “Then put her down with a single shot?”

Saltanat looked over at me, and smiled.

“One, you’re not that good a shot. Two, you’d never get near her, her instincts for a trap are superb. She’s relied on them for twenty-five years, they’ve never let her down. She’s as cautious as a snow leopard. Three, you wouldn’t see her coming until she’d brought death to your side. And four, this is between her and me, something waiting to be settled for a long time.”

“Personal stuff,” I said. She nodded.

“Very personal.”

We parked on Orozbekova, just beyond the statue of Lenin at the back of the Historical Museum, his new home since 2003. We don’t deny his influence, we just don’t give it the prominence it once had. His arm is still outstretched, pointing to the future, but his face is always in shadow, thanks to the tall trees that now surround him, trees that have lasted longer than his glorious revolution.

I looked across to the trees, but there was no sign of Albina.

“What makes you think she won’t just shoot you the moment you step out of the car?” I said.

“She’d see that as a failure,” Saltanat said. “She needs to show she’s still the best at what she does.”

“She’s pretty good at lots of things,” I said, feeling the burn in my toe, the tightness of the linen pad we’d bandaged it with earlier. “I’ve got something for you,” I added, handing over my Uighur knife. “Albina has its twin, and it’s only fair you’re as well-armed as she is.”

Saltanat took the blade, felt the heft, the balance, nodded approvingly.

“If I think she’s getting the better of you, or she’s going to kill you,” I said, reached for my gun under the seat, held it up, “then I’m going to blow her fucking head off.”

Saltanat started to protest, but I put a finger to my lips. She leaned forward, kissed my cheek, and I could smell the freshness of her perfume, the lemon shampoo of her hair.