“I don’t know.” Decker took a small sip of his tea. “The fact that he came here makes me think he might be after Dr. White as well. If that’s the case, maybe White’s hiding someplace.” Decker shrugged. He took another sip. English Breakfast. “Can you think of anywhere he might have gone, some place he likes to be when he wants to get away? A weekend cabin? Or a boat?”
Swenson shook her head. “I’ve looked everywhere,” she said. “It’s like he’s vanished off the face of the earth.”
“Don’t worry,” Decker said. “I’ll make a few calls. He’ll turn up.” Then he stood, and stretched, and added, “Come on. I think we’d better go.”
“You don’t think that creep is coming back?” Swenson stood up, so close to him that he could smell the fear on her skin.
“I doubt it. Not by himself at least.” He handed her his tea.
Swenson put the mugs down in the sink. She turned the water on. The faucet coughed and sputtered. Air bubble, Decker speculated. He noticed a handful of clean dishes stacked tidily in the plastic dish drain. The knives were all in one compartment. So were the spoons. So were the forks. Yet there were unwashed dishes in the sink. It looked like Dr. White had left in quite a hurry.
They walked together through the living room, back to the front door. Swenson checked to make sure it was locked behind them before turning and looking at Decker on the porch. “Well, thanks,” she said. “Although I’m not exactly sure what for,” she added, reaching up and massaging her neck.
“Thank you, Emily.” It was the first time Decker had used her Christian name and it felt comfortable in his mouth, strangely familiar. “Here,” he said, reaching into his jacket. “Take my card. If anything unusual happens, anything at all. If you feel you’re in danger, or you just want to talk. My cell is with me twenty-four seven.”
She examined the card, looked up at him and smiled. It was a brittle smile, still fragrant with fear. “Thanks,” she said. Then she walked away.
Decker followed her with his eyes. When she had gone about ten yards, she turned, and lifted her hand, and waved a little wave.
Decker stood there for a moment longer as Swenson vanished around the corner. Her wave reverberated deep inside him like the strumming of a lone guitar. He shook his head, stepped off the porch, and shuffled back along the walkway toward his car.
It had been a long, long time since he had felt something for a woman. The other night had just been sex, a grim release, a plea for human contact. Far too long. And, as luck would have it, since he was working this case — and she was involved — there was nothing he could do about it.
Chapter 23
Gulzhan Baqrah dreamed of torture. He often dreamed of his most intimate encounters, of the battlefield at night, up close inside a ditch, with a knife against some foreign throat; or down an alley, under a new moon; or in a dark interrogation room, searching for answers. But this dream was different. Someone had accused his foremost protégé of collaborating with the Zionists. And there he was, trussed up like that by his elbows, simply hanging there from the ceiling like a side of camel meat. Gulzhan ducked his head, stepped through the narrow doorway, and descended down the concrete steps into the cell.
When he finally straightened up, he rose through dank olfactory layers of fetid rank humidity, of human feces, blood and vomit. But Gulzhan didn’t care. He was staring at the prisoner, admiring his physique, the solid graceful contours of the muscles in his back.
Such a waste, he thought. Gulzhan sighed and turned and noticed a pair of rimless tires on the floor. He recognized them instantly. They were standard interrogation fare: two rubber, non-conductive footstools designed to keep the innocent inquisitor at bay, above the flooded concrete floor whenever the jumper cables were in use. This made him recollect the scent of burning human flesh, a smell that he had hated once, found nauseating — a long, long time ago — but to which Gulzhan had grown accustomed over the years, until now the sweetness brought to mind a simpler time, one of diminished ambiguity, like the aroma of freshly baked bread, or the perfume of some favorite aunt, just back from Akmola by train. After a while, the brain adapts.
Gulzhan stared absently at a nearby table festooned with horsewhips and leather straps, and riding crops and razor blades, scalpels and freshly sharpened knives, and copper-headed jumper cables, bright as ten-tenge pieces, newly minted, lying there neatly in rows.
He picked up a horsewhip. He flicked it once to feel its weight, and the end snapped with uncompromising certitude. The prisoner arched his back. It was a Pavlovian response. He was several yards away, on the other side of the cell.
Gulzhan flicked the long black whip behind him, letting it uncoil, relax, until with a firm flip of the wrist, the whip came up and over, and nicked an almost imperceptible nugget of raw flesh from the prisoner’s naked back.
He screamed and writhed as the whip came down again, again, and again. Blood seeped out of the wounds, into tiny tributaries, rivulets of life that coursed around and down into the tight crack of his buttocks. Then it was over.
Gulzhan laid the whip back on the table, curling it into coils. He approached the prisoner. He let his fingers play along the back, along the bleeding indentations in the no-longer-perfect skin. The man winced.
“Tell me,” Gulzhan said. “Is it true? If you tell me, I will end it quickly. That, I promise you. Are you working with the Zionists?”
The man’s head and upper torso lolled over to the side. It was difficult to tell whether he was nodding or shaking his head. He moaned again, this time with less conviction. He was almost spent.
Gulzhan grasped him by the nape of the neck, by his short black shiny hair, and pulled. He brought his own mouth close to the prisoner’s skin, breathing him in.
“Are you working with the Zionists?” he repeated. And then he shook the prisoner’s head from side to side, clamping it in his short but powerful fingers, like a puppeteer testing the neck of a doll. “Do you deny it?” he said with mock surprise.
There was little point in killing him. If he lived. Gulzhan stared at the bloody livid welts across his back. He wondered at the dislocated shoulders, the way the figure hung there by the tendons and the nerves, without the benefit of bone or muscle. This beautiful young man had once been one of Gulzhan’s best recruits. Indeed, the Kazakh leader had often looked upon him as a possible successor. The accusations were serious; this much was true. But Gulzhan knew, with an absolute conviction — unsullied by romance, by personal delusion, and grounded too by more than thirty years of grim experience at his craft — that the prisoner would remain loyal to him for the rest of his days. Something bound them now, with a greater intimacy than he had ever shared with any of his wives, or with his mistresses, or even with his closest friends.
Gulzhan leaned against the prisoner, caressed his neck and whispered, “‘No one can bear the burden of another. If a heavily laden one should call another to carry his load, naught of it shall be carried by the other, even though he be a kinsman… Turn ye to your Lord and submit yourselves to Him before the punishment overtakes you and no one is able to help you.’”