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leads to anger. Anger at the random cruelties we impose on those weaker than ourselves, anger at a deity who either leaves us drowning in shit or doesn’t exist. Anger at my own helplessness, my inability to make amends, for Chinara, for the victims who needed me, for myself.
    “Gurminj must have found out something,” I said, “and it earned him a bullet in the brain. Why didn’t he say anything to me?”
    I sat back, put my feet up on the stool next to me. I’d always done that when I was living in the orphanage, used to tell the teachers it helped me to concentrate. Truth was, I was just looking for an argument, a clip around the ear, a reason to hate them all the more. Funny, over the years, the lie gradually became the truth. Maybe something to do with the flow of blood to the brain. Or from it.
    Saltanat looked away from me. I stared, knowing there was a problem.
    “I spoke with Gurminj about getting you involved,” she said. “We both wondered if there would be a problem.”
    “What kind of a problem?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm and measured.
    “Your involvement with Tynaliev. The summary execution of your old boss. We both know he didn’t die in a car crash.”
    I stared at her, didn’t reply.
    “There’s money, big money, involved in this sort of filth. And if it’s connected to senior government people in some way, then they have a hold over you.”
    Saltanat didn’t look me in the eye. The sort of body language that says I don’t know whether you can be trusted.
    I felt a surge of anger, because in her position I’d have wondered exactly the same thing.
    “I’m a cop in exile. Not because I can be bought off, but because I can’t.”
    She nodded.
    “I understand. But—”
    “But you don’t know me that well,” I interrupted. “You slept with me but you don’t know if you can trust me.”
    Saltanat held up her hand, but I was in full flow, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
    “I get threatened by the Circle of Brothers, I kill my wife’s uncle when I find out he works for them, I get tortured,” and I held up my scarred hand as evidence, “then I get shipped out to the ass-end of nowhere. But hey, I might still be selling kiddie snuff movies. Thanks, Saltanat, a real vote of confidence.”
    I turned my face away from her, not wanting her to see the anger, the sorrow, that crossed my face.
    “I should have known,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
    “Known what exactly?” I replied. “What I’m like in bed? Why I carry on doing this shitty job? What?”
    “Akyl, someone has to want to make a difference, or there’s no hope for any of us. Like it or not, you’re the designated carer.”
    So much burden, so much effort, to make the dead sleep soundly.
    I thought of the fragments of barely begun lives unearthed next to a stinking canal at the far ends of the earth.
    And of Chinara, lying in earth only now beginning to thaw.

Chapter 16
    I’d used up the day’s ration of self-pity, turned to face Saltanat.
    “We both want to find who killed Gurminj,” I said.
    “And the babies you uncovered. And the children butchered in those films,” she added. I nodded agreement.
    “We put the past behind us?” she asked.
    “All of it?” I replied, remembering the warmth of her body next to mine on the one occasion that we’d slept together. She didn’t blush, or smile at the memory. Tough to the core.
    “Let’s clean this mess up first, see where we stand after that. Right now, I want Gurminj’s killers far more than I want you.”
    But she spoke with a half-smile that said she knew she could control me, as long as we avoided getting killed first.
    “There’s a squealer I want to talk to,” she went on. “Hangs out at one of your favorite bars.”
    I winced. I don’t have fond memories of the Kulturny, Bishkek’s seediest, dirtiest bar. Lubashov, a thug I’d put in the ground, had been the bouncer at the Kulturny, and most of the