“But I need your help. And I need to make sure you stay here to give it to me. You got me into this stinking mess. If the premier or Minister Kurgat thinks I was at the Svezda to work my own deal with Beijing … you can see where that might lead.”
Cono remained silent.
“Hey,” Timur said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I had the hotel bump out an American so you could have your favorite room, with the view. Want me to call a companion for you? Help you forget your friend?”
“Another time, brother. I’m a working man. Working for you.”
“Suit yourself.” Timur climbed into the idling Mercedes. “We’ll get started in the morning.”
Upstairs, Cono yanked back the curtains and opened the sliding doors. The nearby amusement park was still lit up, the rides spinning with primary colors but no passengers. As he watched, the rides gradually slowed and stopped. The tinny recordings of calliope music were switched off one by one. With rhythmic precision, the garish lights went out in stages, as if a giant were squashing each ride with his steps until only a skeleton of pale lampposts was left. Farther to the east was the great bland square, illuminated with floodlights that made the government buildings glow. At the top of a rising lawn littered with shadowed monuments was the flat-faced Stalinist palace. It leaned forward in the stark white glow of the lights as if it were about to slide down the whole tilting mantle of Almaty.
Cono stripped off his clothes, stretched out on the balcony and began his exercises. The fatigue crept away from him and was replaced by a fresh rush of the joy he’d felt when Xiao Li walked into the Cactus, alive and stunning. Then he was swamped by imaginings of how Timur’s men might treat her. In his mind, hundreds of minutely differentiated images of Xiao Li’s panicked face began to flash, like freeze-frames taken milliseconds apart. In each, she was calling to him from behind the car window.
He looked out toward the city lights to stop the flashing pictures plaguing his brain and concentrated on his rhythmic breathing. It was over the railing of this balcony or one near it that he had held Xiao Li in midair; they had left the stodginess of the Hotel Svezda for the glossy newness of the Tsarina on that second stay in Almaty, when he’d recklessly given himself over to her even though it had been a working visit.
It was a working visit that had begun with a phone call from a woman who said she and Cono had a friend in common, Irina. The woman spoke in Russian, but with a Ukrainian accent like Irina’s. Cono was surprised to hear that Irina had friends at all, but in fact he knew little about her life. “Why ruin the present by talking about the past?” Irina had said. On the other hand, she knew perhaps too much about Cono’s tonterías; when he occasionally saw her on layovers in Berlin, he diverted her from her studies by recounting vignettes from his exploits. Names and locations obscured, to be sure, but all the same, he had not been terribly discreet.
The friend of Irina’s said she was merely a messenger for a large company that needed his help to make things right.
“What for you is right?” Cono asked. He heard the pursing and unpursing of her lips as she weighed her answer over the phone.
“It is better that we meet in person,” she said.
Two days later they sat in the sun with their feet dangling in a seafront swimming pool in Barcelona, where Cono kept one of his austere apartments. He had suggested they swim and have their conversation in the water. It was mid-afternoon at the tail end of the season, and the pool was mostly empty, as was the adjacent beach. The sunlight skittering on the surface of the water was mildly unpleasant to Cono. They slid into the water.
She called herself Katerina. It was a simple matter, she explained as they stood in the shallow end. A couple of offices needed to be entered, a few electronic taps placed, a few friends newly made, certain documents stolen or copied … originals would be better. An American oil company felt too hemmed in by its country’s laws against bribing for business overseas, and wanted to level the playing field by threatening to expose its European competitors’ generosity toward Kazak officials. The companies were all hungry for a piece of the giant oil reserves under and around Kazakhstan’s portion of the Caspian Sea.
Cono interlaced his fingers and put his hands into the pool, pulling water into the space between his sealed palms. He lifted his hands and squeezed a stream of water into Katerina’s face. She laughed and splashed back.
“You mean the other companies give gifts to the top men?” Cono said.
Katerina cocked her head and smiled. She knew he must be joking, but he sounded so very sincere. “Well, only the top part counts in some countries.”
“Like asparagus, then.”
“Yes.”
“Not like an iceberg, where what counts is below.”
She grinned. “No.”
“So you need a faceless man who knows some languages,” Cono said after a moment.
“And who is free and fearless and trustworthy. Irina said those things about you. And that you are addicted to the thrill of your work.”
“Irina is free and fearless and trustworthy.”
“She is free, thanks to you. She will always be grateful for how you helped her.”
“And you? Are you free?” Cono lowered himself into the water except for his head so that the sun would be blocked by Katerina, allowing him to clearly see her face. Her eyes twitched only so slightly left and right, then met Cono’s. The sun’s shielded light made a corona around her head.
“Not free,” she said. She lowered her head, tipping the sun’s glare into Cono’s eyes, and making him squint. “Not yet.”
Cono stood up and clapped his hands on the surface, sending a spray onto Katerina’s face. He took her hand. “Water is a great freedom. You can glide wherever you want through it, bury yourself in it, and come out alive, as long as you know which way is up.” Cono took her under and they swam beneath the surface until Katerina came up for air. Kicking like a dolphin, Cono made a complete underwater circuit of the edges of the pool before rejoining Katerina in the center.
His head rose and he exhaled slowly. “How do you know Irina?”
“From Almaty.”
Cono didn’t ask more, but she went on.
“We had the same … client. He liked to have two girls at the same time. He had favorites. But, then, after a while, he wasn’t nice.” Katerina tentatively reached upward, paused, and finally scooped her hair off her back, showing Cono a scar the length of a finger at the base of her neck. She turned slightly. On her right shoulder there was another scar—a double band of teeth marks. Cono had seen that type of mark only once before, on Irina. He had traced his fingers over it and wondered without asking.
“And your work for the Americans?” Cono said.
“It’s my chance to be free. I’m just a go-between, a scout. They hired me because of my client. Mr. K, Minister Kurgat, runs most of Kazakhstan.”
Cono breathed deeply now as he stood on his left leg on the balcony, extending the other leg straight out in front of him, with a finger hooked around his big toe. Even the lights marking the skeleton of the amusement park were now extinguished. He finished his exercises and went to bed, where he tried to fight his restlessness by chiding himself for his sentimentality. It didn’t work.
Xiao Li’s call came an hour later. She was whispering, her voice hard to make out.
“Where are you?” Cono interrupted.
“They put a bag over my head in the car. We made lots of turns. I don’t know where I am. No windows. It’s very noisy below.”
“Xiao Li, tell me details, what you hear, any smells, any …”
“Cono, I dream about you. I want to make love on a balcony again …”
“Xiao Li, don’t worry. We will dance again and sing together.” Cono told her to do what the thugs said, not to fight or they would beat her, or worse, and to call him only when she found out her location. “It’s safer that way.”
“Cono, the Beijing men wanted to kill me too,” Xiao Li whi
spered. “I heard them say they were worried about what my client might have told me. The dead man, he had a lot of money.” Xiao Li’s voice became shaky. “Cono, they came in … they came in and pulled him off me, then broke his neck.”
“What did the client tell you, Xiao Li?”
“He said China wanted to get something more than oil. He was bragging. He laughed about how easy it was to buy top military men in this country. I didn’t want to listen. He wasn’t a nice man.”
“Better not to speak any more right now. Dream of me tonight, Xiao Li. I will dream of you.”
“Cono, listen. Our son is strong and smart. He has your eyes and your lips. Mother takes good care of him. You never believed he was yours. When you see you will believe.”
“We will talk about that later, when you are free,” Cono said.
“You have my shoe?”
“I have your shoe.” The phone clicked off.
Cono did dream of Xiao Li that night, and of the smell of a warm evening ocean, and of streaks of moonlight swallowed by the waves as they crashed and receded, pulling him, sweeping him, into the sea.
His bare feet patter on the red dirt road. They are big for a boy of five. Slap-slap, go the plastic thongs on his mother’s feet. Her hand is tight on his, too tight, and he tries to shake free. She squeezes harder and marches faster, lifting red dust with every slap. There’s a tug of his arm and a turn into a big white room full of rows of people, with words painted on the walls. They sit on a bench next to a fat lady who answers the questions of the angry man in front. His mother says she must leave him there, to talk to a man about a dancing job. The family needs money. His father will be happy. Stay, listen to the preacher, I’ll be back in an hour. She is wearing her only dress. The flowery fabric brushes his bare knees as she leaves. He looks over his shoulder but his mother does not turn her head.
The angry man in front shouts and waves his arms in the air. The fat lady and the other people make noises, sounds he cannot understand. It is another language, or no language. The people stand up and more strange sounds come from their mouths. He stands up, too. The fat lady shakes and shouts, and he makes the same sounds come out of his mouth as soon as they come out of hers. Her brown head looks down at him. Maybe she, too, is angry.
People stumble up to the man in front, like a magnet is pulling them. They shout the sounds that make no sense and the man hits them on the head, but they do not fight back. They shout and cry and shake and move away to make room for the next person.
His hand feels the dampness of the lady’s big fingers as her flesh wraps his wrist. He is dragged by her to the front, to the angry preacher man swaying like the trees do in the big storms. He looks up to the shouting man and repeats the sounds as they emerge from the man’s mouth, an instantaneous echo. The preacher stops swaying, bends down, staring. The noise of the people gets softer, then there is silence. He looks up to the eyes of the preacher; the man seems afraid, like an octopus making itself big before the hunting wire snags it.
He is back on the bench and his hand is free of the wet-liver grip. The preacher is shouting again, but now the sounds are words, real words. The fat lady is holding a book and starting to sing. All the different voices make his ears sting.
He leaves the singing, and the light outside hurts his eyes. Blinking, blinking against the brightness. His mother. She is standing across the big open square, standing next to a man in a brown jacket, the same color as his pants. There is money in his hand as it comes out of his pocket. The other hand tries to touch his mother’s face. She takes the money quickly from his hand and pushes him away. The man’s moustache lifts up to show white teeth.
His mother turns away. Little red clouds follow her feet.
Back inside the hall, darkness. He sits still, waiting for his eyes to work again. His mother sits down next to him. His hand feels the trembling of her palm. She has a smell he has never smelled before.
4
“Cono, you’re a wreck.” Timur was at the door of the hotel room, trim and tall, wearing the same jacket he’d worn the night before, with two of his men behind him. Cono was dressed but hadn’t shaved or showered.
“Embarrassed to be seen with me?”
Timur snorted. “I’ve put up with worse.”
They drove in a zigzag course, up toward the mountains, then down through scarred and decrepit apartment blocks with kids kicking balls on broken sidewalks, and then west to the outer edge of Almaty, where the driver had to steer around several cows searching for grass. They passed a row of scarfed women seated on the edge of the road, each with a pyramid of apples for sale, each pyramid a different color, running from shades of red to burnished gold, amber and on to bright yellow. Ahead was a roadblock, with two cars stopped, trunks open, their drivers waving papers at the policemen. Timur’s driver slowed to let an officer approach. Timur rolled down the window. Seeing his face, the officer saluted and frantically waved at another policeman to let the car proceed.
“There have been some incidents,” Timur said, not looking at Cono. “The fundamentalist wave has landed on my country.”
Finally the car pulled into the courtyard of a gray complex of apartment buildings, the city’s last reach of Soviet-era construction, and stopped alongside a fence formed by tractor tires half-buried in the dirt. Timur got out and opened a steel door covered with graffiti. There were beer cans in the stairwell. Timur kicked them aside as he and Cono climbed the stairs and unlocked the door of a second-floor apartment. The driver and the other guard were left outside.
“It’s not luxurious, but it’s clean of all sorts of insects, including the kind that have ears,” Timur said as he switched on the light. “Welcome to my home away from home.” The windows were covered with sheets of black plastic and the corner of a mattress was visible on the floor of an adjoining room. Timur grabbed a chair and shoved it toward Cono, then sat down across from his friend. Between them was a large brown folding table on which rested a solitary bottle of vodka.
Cono whistled. “So life has been good to you. With a view like this we could be in Paris.” He nodded at molasses-colored marks on the wall behind Timur. “But you really should tell the maid to clean up the blood stains.”
“You should tell me about blood. I’d offer you a drink but I know …”
“I’m a hops and grapes pussy wimp from the West.”
Timur chuckled. “You don’t forget a thing, Cono.” He took a quick swig from the bottle. “No glass for you here anyway.” His face became serious again, his eyebrows drawn together in a single line of black fur.
The lay of the land had changed, Timur explained. The Tengiz field that had had the oil companies salivating during Cono’s last Kazak enterprise had proved out well. Too well, in fact, for the government, particularly for Kurgat, the interior minister, who was dissatisfied with the price of the stakes they had sold to the oil companies—the “sows,” as Timur called them. And now the exploration of the new Kashagan field showed reserves of such magnitude that the companies and the top officials were giddy with greed, and its handmaiden, suspicion. The Kashagan held the largest reserves found in the world in a generation, and was expected to be the second-largest source of oil on the planet, after the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. Now it wasn’t only Kazak officials who were forecasting the country’s momentous daily output; petroleum experts around the world had joined the chorus as well.
The newfound reserves gave the government leverage to renegotiate the old Tengiz allotments while extracting higher prices for further exploration agreements, with another round of commissions flowing to the top of the government. The sows at the trough this time around were mostly the same, although a few had merged, or sold their stakes to others. And there was a new one, from Beijing.
“They grow them big there in China, you know,” Timur said, taking another gulp from the bottle. “They get bigger by the day. Very hungry.” Despite the periodic sloshes of vodka, Timur’s speech never slurred.
“Better to keep the big ones happy. And at a distance.”
“And the distance is for me to provide.” Cono fixed his eyes on Timur’s. He saw the minuscule squeeze of the aperture of his pupils before Timur tilted back his head to gaze at the water-stained ceiling.
“Look, brother,” Timur said. “Last time I helped you and you helped me. We can do it again.”
“Maybe with more help you will have your own oil empire,” Cono said. “I already gave you ammunition for it, last time I was here. It seems you’ve sat on the fact that your leaders like the Alps. I even gave you the paper trail that proved they’ve been stashing hundreds of millions in Zurich.” Cono was reading every minute twitch of Timur’s body across the table.
Timur placed his hand around the bottle and gripped it tightly. “Paper trails are made of paper. It was nice work, even if it was just a lucky extra take from your job for the Americans and the Ukrainian bitch. Thanks for the reminder. You’re just angling for the girl.”
“A maiden for a kingdom. A small price.”
“Brother, you are a strange man.”
“And you, brother, breathe ambition. Let’s call you Genghis.” Cono smiled.
“You’re all the more strange because you are still friendly even while I’ve got your girl locked up. Maybe she’s not such a big deal, after all.”
“You and I go way back, Timur, my friend. I know the forces that twist you. I’d help you anyway, and that’s why,” Cono softened his voice and slowed his cadence. “That’s why you should let her go.”
Timur caught himself being lulled by Cono’s open gaze and the rhythm of his speech, which kept tempo with Timur’s breathing. He unlatched his eyes from Cono’s and looked up at the ceiling again.
Performance Anomalies Page 4
