"And Take My Pain" by Chingiz Abdullaev, summary

A crime detective story unfolds around the death of a Chechen drug lord and the wanderings of his underage daughter across an unfamiliar metropolis. The harsh law of blood feud collides with the selfless compassion of random citizens. The author completed this book in 1997, focusing on the fresh aftermath of the First Chechen War and the contract killings of the era of primitive capital accumulation.

This work is part of a series of investigations by the Special Bureau for Coordination of Law Enforcement Agencies of the CIS countries. In this series, police lieutenant colonel Sabelnikov, counterintelligence officer Dvoeglazov, and captain Kerimov wage war against transnational syndicates, following the plots of the novels "Ocean of Hatred" and "Conspiracy in Madrid."

Ambush at a warehouse and assault on a country house

On a remote highway outside Moscow, police officers discovered a police car riddled with machine-gun fire, containing the bodies of two murdered men under a tarp. The syndicate’s debts were not forgiven. Arriving Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Tsapov immediately identified one of the dead men as Afanasy Sergeyevich Stepanovich, a high-ranking courier. The shipment had been intercepted a year earlier. A huge shipment of heroin worth over one hundred and fifty million dollars had vanished without a trace with the assistance of the secret services, so ruthless foreign creditors immediately started a deadly financial meter for everyone involved in this thwarted deal.

Influential businessman Ismail Makhmudbekov arrived on a flight from Baku to the government hall at Sheremetyevo Airport.

The father was accompanied by his daughter, Irada. Former criminal investigation captain Vyacheslav Stolnikov had been in charge of the influential Chechen’s security for many years after serving a six-year prison sentence for a falsified bribe. The call disrupted the scheduled routine. Assistant Kyazim took the security chief to inspect the warehouses at Kursky Station, where the white-coated robbers engaged in a barrage of grenade fire.

The pistol’s ammunition ran dry. A heavy crate crushed the officer’s spine during a grenade explosion, forcing the wounded man to crawl along stacks of flour toward the creaking doors of the locked gate. A gray-haired guard came to his aid. The elderly duty officer hid the bleeding defender in an adjacent room, carefully propped him against a wooden partition, and ran to the telephone to alert the dacha security.

The assault on the dacha began suddenly. Heavy jeeps belonging to Mikhail Zherebyakin’s group smashed down the wrought-iron gates of the residence, opening continuous fire with automatic weapons and grenade launchers on the residential outbuildings. Svetlana Mikhailovna rescued the girl. Through a narrow gate, she led the seventeen-year-old orphan to the safety of the thicket, locked the cast-iron interior door with her own key, and took a deadly volley of lead shots in her back, blocking the pursuers’ path at the cost of her own life. Ismail fell on the stairs. Downstairs, the seriously wounded owner of the house shot the greedy robber near the American safe, after which the surviving bodyguard, Jafar, urgently called an ambulance from the city.

Police patrols surrounded the ashes. Lieutenant Colonel Sabelnikov from the coordination bureau recorded a pattern of attack similar to last year’s raid on the residence of crime boss Gorely, which involved the use of heavy military weapons. The girl vanished into the dense undergrowth without a trace. A German shepherd dog confidently led the detectives through the trampled forest grass to the asphalt highway, where the fugitive’s trail suddenly ended near a dusty roadside ditch before the long turnoff to Mozhaisk.

The wanderings of a fugitive and the sale of Swiss watches

A morning forest near Moscow led a shivering runaway, undocumented and penniless, to the side of a busy highway heading toward the capital. A compassionate surgeon picked her up. The hospital’s deputy chief physician, Albert Petrovich, fed the frightened orphan hot sandwiches and sheltered her from prying eyes on his modest dacha plot. The shelter proved short-lived. A noisy visit from the doctor’s brazen stepson and his loud-mouthed friend forced the embarrassed guest to hurriedly leave the strange house and board a regular bus.

The watch remained the only valuable property.

A gold chronometer from the prestigious Swiss brand Cartier astounded the greedy watchmaker Alexei Syroezhkin, so the watchmaker immediately called in the elderly jeweler Naum Kirshbaum for an appraisal. He was stunned by the sheer magnificence of this rare piece, worth at least twenty thousand dollars. The old man took in a lonely girl. In the kitchen, the gray-haired watchmaker reminisced at length about the Leningrad siege, when an enemy air strike sank the overcrowded evacuation barge carrying his beloved wife, Sarah, and their six-year-old twins. Irada revealed a personal secret. Before his death, her father had managed to reveal the code for a secret bearer account in a German bank, where an emergency reserve of one million US dollars was kept.

The morning raid shattered the peace. Vitya Syroezhkin, who had arrived with his accomplice, roughly swept the jewelry off the table, allowing the nimble owner to rush out onto the landing before the armored door slammed shut. The robbers were left empty-handed. In a panic, the watchmaker rushed to sell the stolen item to the criminal fence Grigory Mironenko, falling under the suspicion of the influential thief boss Filipp Krivoy.

Kyazim’s betrayal and the targeted shot in the hospital

A random student in round glasses handed the confused runaway some paper money for a subway ticket. The city greeted the orphan with suspicion. A blue Japanese car parked suspiciously near the trading company’s office on Akademika Vavilov Street, manned by three burly lookouts. A call from a pay phone turned out to be a trap. Her father’s trusted assistant, Kyazim, answered her cell phone with a saccharine voice and lured the girl to the nearby quiet Lyapunova Street, where a militant ambush immediately arrived, gunning down two patrol officers who had intervened in the kidnapping.

The pursuit petered out in panic. A night’s shelter in the stairwell of a high-rise building in Novogireevo ended with a brief visit to the studio of the drunken artist Savely, where he was shown erotic sketches on the walls. An attempt at sexual assault was met with a furious response. Early in the morning, the orphan called the front desk of the Silver Spear restaurant, summoning Vyacheslav Stolnikov, who had been seriously wounded in the shoulder, to the metro station platform.

The meeting turned into another massacre. Kyazim accompanied the head of security, secretly summoning a white Korean car carrying armed gangsters belonging to Moscow region crime boss Mikhail Zherebyakin. Stolnikov opened fire accurately on the attackers. Two attackers collapsed on the pavement, after which the treacherous Kyazim shot his wounded defender point-blank, saving a fleeing girl from death. Another bullet pierced his right shoulder. The traitor managed to escape in someone else’s car, while Irada, crazed with fear, dashed across the intersection and was crushed by the heavy bumper of a braking van.

The victim was taken to the emergency room. At Hospital No. 32, doctors diagnosed a concussion in the unidentified patient, placing her on the dented wire mesh of a corner bed. The enemy reached the room. From the street, mercenary Boris accurately fired a shaped charge from a grenade launcher directly into the intensive care unit window, instantly ending the life of the helpless Ismail Makhmudbekov in his hospital bed.

The night news of his father’s death completely deprived the orphan of his last spiritual strength.

Stolnikov took the orphan home. The veteran searcher rushed to the hospital building by night taxi, laid the crying fugitive on the leather sofa in his quiet bachelor apartment, and patiently listened as she confessed her hardships. A morning meeting brought a solution. Lieutenant Colonel Tsapov, who arrived at the apartment, reported the overnight elimination of the militant leader Boris and agreed to listen to his former partner’s daring plan to end the nascent criminal war using reputable intermediaries. The risk remained mortally high.

Elimination of the top brass and retribution in Izmir

European biathlon champion Inga, who had just arrived from Baku, cold-bloodedly shot the leader of the robbers, Boris, with a silent Belgian pistol right in his elite bedroom. War erupted in the capital. The explosion of a grocery box filled with TNT at the Silver Spear restaurant killed Adalat Makhmudbekov, who was thirsty for revenge, triggering a series of street shootings across the city. The secret prison masquerade had its effect. Lieutenant Colonel Tsapov masterfully played the role of a foreign courier for a syndicate with millions in commissions to his cellmate Mironenko, forcing the influential shadow arbiter Philip Krivoy to hastily convene a meeting of the thieves’ kingpins and force the banker Kolosov to capitulate completely.

The traitor met his retribution. In the party boss’s office, a mercenary put two bullets into the back of the head of the overconfident Zherebyakin, bringing a bloody end to a protracted gang feud. The fence Mironenko was captured again. Near the old Kirshbaum’s house, operatives ambushed the bandit, preventing another bloody massacre of the defenseless jeweler and sending the repeat offender to pretrial detention.

A special government flight departed Vnukovo. The Chechen Deputy Prime Minister took his orphaned niece to the Caucasus, and Tsapov handed Stolnikov a belated prosecutor’s order completely overturning the sentence falsified thirteen years ago. In Izmir, retribution overtook the fugitive Kyazim. On an autumn day, two of Jafar’s envoys ended the life of their former comrade with three shots in the middle of a kebab shop open for bloody silver coins.