A Spring Betrayal (29 page)

Saltanat’s phone rang. As she listened, her face changed from shock into anger. She put the phone back in her pocket and turned to me.

“That was my embassy. Elmira, the woman looking after Otabek? She’s been shot, she’s dead. And the boy’s missing.”

And then she was out of the car, walking without haste toward the base of the statue. Albina emerged from the shadows, turned and beckoned Saltanat to join her. I got out of the car, following the two women further under the trees. Lenin ignored them, obviously dreaming about the irresistible rise of the proletariat.

Finally, we came to a spot away from the park paths, where carved stone statues stood in a ring, as if refereeing the fight. Their faces in the shadows were cruel or uncaring, as if they’d seen it all before and remained unmoved. Albina held up a hand toward me, indicating I should come no further. I nodded my acceptance.

Across the far side of the clearing, Otabek stood, his arms wrapped around a slender birch tree, wrists tied together. Even from a distance, I could see the despairing slump of his shoulders, the dried tear tracks on his cheeks.

“Will you be able to carry this bitch’s body back to your car on your own, Akyl? I imagine that foot of yours is giving you a little trouble!” Albina shouted. “You’ll need to make two trips if you’re going to carry the boy’s body as well.”

“We’ll be leaving your body where it falls,” Saltanat said. “Unless you’d like Graves to fetch you to star in his next major motion picture? A non-speaking role, obviously.”

“You always were a difficult child, Saltanat, you’ve grown up to be a troublesome woman.”

The two women, one blond, the other raven-haired, both dressed in black, crouched and started to circle each other. What little sunlight
came through the trees reflected off the blades of the knives, the way ice skates spark and dance on winter lakes.

The two women moved sideways, placing each foot down, testing the ground, as if treading barefoot on glass. I’d been present at the aftermath of several knife fights, but those had been drunken, messy, brutal affairs, more bravado than an intent to kill. This was different, like watching two ballerinas performing to music only they could hear. There was a grace and elegance about the whole thing, a ritual no one but the participants could understand. There was none of that nonsense of tossing the knife from hand to hand you get in movies. If the knife isn’t in your hand, you’re unarmed. Drop it and you’re not just a bad juggler, you’re a dead one.

Albina skipped forward, light as a cat on her feet, flicked out with her blade, before stepping back. Saltanat twisted to stand sideways, and I thought the blow had missed her. Then I saw the cut in her sleeve, blood rising through the dark material. I slid my hand inside my jacket, loosened the Yarygin. At that distance, taking Albina down would be easy. Taking her alive? Rather more difficult.

Albina raised one leg and aimed a Thai-style kick at Saltanat’s hip, the knife as a follow-through aimed at the throat. Saltanat swayed backward, stabbed down with her own knife. The blade’s tip nicked the webbing of Albina’s thumb and forefinger, blood hanging in the air like a shower of rose petals.

Albina fell back, her face a mask of anger and pain, raising her hand to suck on the wound. When she took her hand away, the blood that smeared her face and teeth reminded me of the wolf I’d once seen shot in the mountains. But this wolf’s eyes were ferocious, alive with hate and bloodlust.

“You used to be good at this,” Saltanat taunted. “Old age finally caught up with you?”

“Good enough to have killed your friend, the orphanage director. Good enough to have given you that scar,” Albina said, pointing at Saltanat’s face.

The dance never stopped, a step forward, a step back, block, move, thrust, both women swaying from side to side to hide their next attack.
Albina leapt forward two paces, catching Saltanat just below the earlier wound, deeper now, blood staining the grass. But the leap had caught Albina off balance and as she stumbled, Saltanat plunged her knife into the bicep of Albina’s knife-arm. Even as Albina registered the shock of the blow, Saltanat twisted the blade and drew it down the length of the arm.

The dance was coming to its inevitable conclusion, as Albina dropped her knife and fell to her knees. With her other hand, she tried to pull the edges of the wound together, but blood continued to spurt, and I realized Saltanat had hit an artery.

I stepped forward, but Saltanat turned on me, enraged, raising her knife at my face.

“Get back,” she said. “It’s not over.”

Albina’s clothes were drenched in blood, and I knew that even if Saltanat had let me approach, it would have been too late to save Albina. She knew she would bleed out in just a few minutes, but the expression on her face said she wasn’t ready to submit. She intended to face death as it ran through the trees toward her, scooping her up and carrying her off to feast at its leisure.

“Saltanat,” I said, tried to put my arm around her. She pushed me away, lowered her blade, walked over to where Albina still knelt, upright by some miracle of will.

“We always knew it would end this way,” Saltanat said, “ever since I was a little girl.” And there was a softness in her voice that sounded almost like love.

“You made me what I am, Albina, for good or bad. Good for me, bad for you.”

Albina’s eyelids drooped, her head swaying. She started to speak, but only disjointed sounds emerged.

“I suppose you killed Gurminj when he caught you abducting Otabek,” Saltanat said. “A decent man, who only wanted to help children. Even if I could, I wouldn’t help you. Now all that’s left for you is to rot in the earth.”

Saltanat spat onto the ground, wiped her mouth with the back of one bloodstained hand, walked toward Otabek.

I watched as Albina’s face went slack, and death began to flood her eyes. She made one ineffectual grab for her knife, missed, tried again, and then fell forward onto her face.

And then Saltanat was walking back to me, carrying Otabek, who clung to her neck as if nothing could ever break his grasp. They passed Albina’s body without sparing it even a glance as I picked up the knives. I saw Saltanat’s face was filled with a haunting mix of love and sorrow. Perhaps mine was as well.

Chapter 57

The three of us managed to sneak through the hotel lobby and up to our room without attracting too much attention. I’d managed a makeshift bandage for Saltanat’s arm, and her dark clothing hid the blood fairly effectively. I bathed the cut, shallow and just above the elbow, poured the remaining hydrogen peroxide over the wound. I remembered how much it had hurt when Saltanat had done the same for me and couldn’t help smiling.

“Revenge?” she said, gritting her teeth.

“Something like that,” I said, rolling a bandage around her arm. Saltanat gave me one of her specialty suspicious scowls.

“So, do you want to tell me about it?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About Albina and you, what there was between the two of you,” I said.

Saltanat sighed in exasperation, stretched out on the bed, staring at the ceiling. We’d already taken the room next to ours, with a connecting door between the two suites. Saltanat had bathed Otabek and held his hand while he curled up under the covers and escaped into sleep. I dry-swallowed a handful of the extra-strong painkillers I’d managed
to cajole out of the pharmacist, waited for the pain in my shoulder and foot to also take a nap.

“I told you I was adopted,” she began. I nodded.

“Well, Albina didn’t choose you to be her pet. I wasn’t so lucky.”

“She adopted you?”

“That’s right.”

“But why? She was young, she could have had children of her own.”

“I don’t think Albina had the slightest interest in sex,” Saltanat said. “Oh, she knew how to use the promise of it as a weapon, sometimes it was all she needed to get what she wanted. But actually carrying out the deed, that would have made her vulnerable, and she couldn’t abide that.”

Saltanat stopped, turned away from me.

“You don’t have any cigarettes, do you?”

“No, I only smoke yours,” I said, hoping to make her smile. “And besides, they’re bad for your health.”

A grunt was Saltanat’s only answer.

“So Albina adopted you?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think. She didn’t want a child to love, but one she could train.”

I looked puzzled, and Saltanat began to explain.

“In my country, the authorities are very cautious, and they value loyalty very highly. What they don’t believe in is trust. Some families have always supplied the elite in the security services, because it’s a lot easier to guarantee loyalty if you have a hold over someone’s children, parents, grandparents. She’d been trained by her father to fight, spy, kill, just as he’d been trained by his father. That’s how it’s done.

“Albina married very young, a marriage of convenience to the son of one of the other families. He was killed during ‘an anti-Uzbek rising of disloyal citizens,’ leaving Albina a childless widow.”

“Is that why she came to my orphanage?” I asked.

Saltanat shook her head.

“I don’t think so. For a start, you’re Kyrgyz, not Uzbek, so you would never have been accepted, never trusted. Maybe then, she was looking for a son. But later, once the family put pressure on her, she toed the party line.”

“Then why pick you, why pick a girl?” I asked.

Saltanat stared at me for a moment, her black eyes impenetrable.

“Because my mother had been in the security services, trained by her father. She died in a car accident outside Samarkand, which is how I ended up in the orphanage.”

“Why didn’t her family look after you?” I asked, guessing the answer even as I asked the question.

“Because she wasn’t married to my father. She was their shame, and I was hers. So, off to the orphanage with Saltanat, and forget there was ever a little girl of that name.”

Now I understood the depth of bitterness within her, realized why she was so reticent about her past life. I knew no words could comfort her. Instead, I stared at our joint reflection in the ornate gilt mirror.

“How old were you when you left the orphanage?”

“Nine.”

“And Albina trained you?” I said.

“In her own image,” Saltanat said, a wry smile breaking through the mask of composure, “until the pupil outdid the master. To start, it was about getting me physically fit; you know what orphanage food is like.”

For me, the food in my orphanage had been better than the food I’d been given at home, but it didn’t seem tactful to mention that.

“Then it was about learning skills; swimming, running, climbing. All the things kids want to do anyway, but with Albina it was an obsession. Stopwatches, records, and punishment if you didn’t do better than the time before.”

“She was cruel to you?”

“Not cruel,” Saltanat said, “more that her interest in me was entirely practical, the way you might train a guard dog, or teach someone how to cook. I think she only became cruel later.”

I saw her face tighten with memories, wondered about holding her hand, sat still.

“After that, it was learning to shoot, rifles, pistols, arrows. Stationary targets at first, then moving ones. How to fight with a knife, unarmed, with anything that came to hand. How to defend yourself,
how to track someone, disguise yourself, live off the land. All the skills that might one day come in handy.

“The only time we stopped was when Albina had to go away on a mission. I never knew in advance, just one day I’d wake up and she wouldn’t be there. But I’d practice anyway, in case she came back and caught me lazing around.”

“It sounds terrible,” I said.

“Not really,” she said. “We lived better than most people: good food, good housing, the best teachers. When it comes to defending the status quo, nothing’s too good for the top guys. And remember, it was what my family did. I’d have had the same training if my mother had lived.”

I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about her role as a trained killer, but it wasn’t as if I’d ever been under any illusions about Saltanat as a placid housewife.

“Every few months, Albina would go on road trips, not just Uzbekistan but Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, looking for potential recruits, children she could train up to be foot soldiers to the elite. It must have been on one of those trips that she visited your orphanage.”

I was silent, wondering how different my life would have been if I’d taken Albina’s hand, been led into a new way of living, perhaps of dying. And how I would have felt about Saltanat if we’d grown up together.

“So what made it go wrong?” I asked.

“I was fifteen when Albina went away, didn’t come back for five months. I never found out the details, but she’d been hurt working undercover, shot twice, thigh and shoulder. She healed, but she was never quite as supple, maybe a pace behind her best. I was better than she was, and she resented that.”

“What happened then?”

“We’d always pulled back in practice before then, held the knife a centimeter away, got the neck hold but didn’t snap the spine. No point in training an agent if you lose them before they go out into the field.

“One day, we were practicing with knives, close quarters. We used blunted knives so we might get the odd scratch or two, but nothing
serious. But when we started, I saw Albina was using a real blade, razor-edged on both sides. And that’s how I got this.”

Saltanat ran her fingernail down the length of her scar.

“You know how much head wounds bleed,” she said. “It looked like I’d been slaughtered. I thought she was going to cut my throat.”

I remembered the sheep we’d sacrificed for Chinara’s forty-day
toi
, the ceremony commemorating her life, how the sheep had bleated as we dragged it toward the waiting knife.

“What stopped her?”

“One of the other trainers saw what had happened, stopped the fight. Of course, Albina swore she didn’t know the knife was for real. But I knew. And we never fought like that again. But that’s when she really started to hate me. For being stronger than her, for having seen her weakness.”