“Besides,” Cono continued, “no person is just one person. Everyone is a crate of fruits, a crate of mixed fruits. The apple in there may have worms, a peach may be mildewed, a banana may be too green, a pear may be in perfect ripeness, and a melon may have the sweetest smell. And do you know, Timur,” Cono’s voice slowed again, almost imperceptibly, “do you know, the expression the Kitais have for friends? They say, to make a friend you must close one eye. And to keep a friend, you must close both eyes. And so, Timur.” The huskiness of Cono’s voice was soothing, melodic. “I will close both eyes, for you, for now, because … we are friends.”
Timur’s eyes were back on Cono’s, suddenly glazed and droopy. Cono raised his right hand and rubbed his ear, breaking the dull, hypnotic stare. Timur blinked and was reaching for another drink when the stillness was cracked open by a moaning muezzin’s call to midday prayer. The powerful loudspeakers of the mosque wailed on for minutes.
Finally it was quiet. Timur’s body had tensed with the sound of the muezzin, and now it relaxed. “Our friend …” he said. “Muktar, our painter friend—he went that way. I should tell you. You asked me on the phone.” He was wistful, as if he had lost a real brother, but slight asymmetries in the ripples of his facial muscles caught Cono’s eye.
“From painting to Islam?” Cono thought of the grotesquely fascinating painting of deformed faces he had bought from Muktar back then, and that now hung on an otherwise blank wall in Cono’s terrace apartment at Repulse Bay, Hong Kong.
“You know how lost he was,” Timur said. “That’s how it happens. Unsettled, aimless, alone, so you make some visits to the mosque, find a new and better family, a family of believers. All the questions answered. All those words fill the vacuum. Imagine—he doesn’t even take women anymore.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s lost to me. Gone to the other side. It’s better I don’t know.” There it was again: a slight unevenness in the modulation of Timur’s voice. He was not telling the truth.
Timur lifted the bottle. “He liked you. Strange guy. He was a good friend.”
“How far has he gone?”
“All the way. Fanatic, with all the jihad blabber of a central-Asian caliphate. He’s on the Bureau’s terrorist watch list.” Timur shook his head. “His mother thinks her boy might as well be dead. If he has to be a fanatic I wish he would be just a freelance one like you.”
“Ah, Timur, if it’s not one god it’s another. Allah or oil. Jesus or Jewels. Lenin or lust.”
“Nice lines, Tupac. I know you’ve got no religion.”
Cono looked at Timur with a wide-open face. “Oh, but I do.”
Timur was puzzled.
“I believe in the goddess of mystery. And she’s always pregnant,” Cono laughed.
“Fuck religion. Let’s get on with it,” Timur said, scowling. “These will be busy days for you. Some of the dogs are the same, some are different from last time.” He ran through the list of the dogs—what he called the official and unofficial go-betweens employed by the oil companies, the sows. Dogs and sows, Cono thought. What does that make me?
“And why the gifts in cash instead of bank wires?”
“The Americans have a saying: ‘Cash is king.’”
“And what do the Kitais say?”
“Back off. It’s a simple auction. And you are the auctioneer,” Timur said.
“No, you are the auctioneer, and I am the bag boy.”
“No one better, brother.”
Timur handed Cono a restaurant receipt. The first names of the go-betweens, phone numbers, and a password for each one, in English, were written on the back. There were four names on the list.
“It’s short.”
“The two American sows don’t want to play this way anymore—they’re counting on their government to provide the grease. And the Russians aren’t going to pay enough because they’re drowning in Siberian oil. Besides, they still think they own my country. The dogs on the list work for the Italians, the French, the Anglos, the Dutch. I’ve stepped up the schedule to take advantage of your presence.”
“It looks like a busy week’s work.” Cono held up the list so he could view Timur’s face at the same time. “I hope I don’t have to take each of these distinguished men to dinner.”
“We don’t have that much time. You want to spring the girl, after all.”
Timur plucked the restaurant receipt out of Cono’s hand. “Before we get to these old reliables, you have to tend to the new bidders, from Beijing. They’ll be less predictable—better to take them on first. Here.” Timur handed Cono a 100-tenge note with writing along one edge, a number, and a pass phrase.
Cono nodded, studying Timur’s face carefully. “And after all the bids are in, the girl is freed.”
“The girl is freed,” Timur echoed as his cell phone started vibrating in a jacket pocket. “Yes.” Timur listened for a moment. “Then get some cuffs on her. Send him on the holiday. Yeah, that holiday. He knew the rules.” Timur snapped the phone into his jacket.
“Your tart is a wildcat. Nearly scratched the eyes out of one of my employees who tried to misbehave. You seem to like them like that.” Timur smiled.
“She’s stronger than either of us.”
Timur took another swig and went into the bathroom to piss. Cono studied the only decoration in the room, a frameless canvas of rough brush strokes propped up against the wall. The tortured faces, harshly rendered, had to be the work of Muktar.
While Cono listened to Timur’s drizzle, he wondered what prank he could pull—a jest like those they used to play on each other years ago, usually followed by a bout of brotherly wrestling. In the early days, Timur had treated him as a brother, helping him navigate rough-and-tumble Almaty with hard advice and sharp humor, supplying a little piece of family that Cono hadn’t known since childhood, rescuing his spirits and bringing him out of one of the deepest troughs of his aloneness. Cono suddenly felt embarrassed—embarrassed by the thought that he might have been just another pitiful orphan trying to turn friends into family, and that he might still be blinded by his need, a need that colored his whole life, that ache to offer worth to someone. Wasn’t that the constant engine for his bizarre career, servicing the ambitions of the reputable and disreputable—all the same to him as long as they acknowledged the necessity of having him and only him do the job?
Cono spotted an electrical box on the wall of the main room and lifted its lid, then twisted out two fuses. The apartment went pitch black. As Timur hurried back into the room, Cono ripped down the plastic from one window, letting the daylight stream in. Timur’s pants were still undone, urine dripping on his leg. And a pistol was staring at Cono from the end of Timur’s arm. Pranks were a thing of the past.
“Timur, friend, you were made for Paris, where they pee in the streets.”
Timur’s arm gradually lowered. The gun went back to his armpit. He zipped his pants and fumbled for the key to the lock he had secured from the inside. “If you weren’t a friend, I’d kill you now,” Timur said as they went into the stairwell. He kicked a beer can and sent it flying ahead of them.
Cono stepped out of the building first, with Timur close by. The black Mercedes was in the same place to the left, with the driver and the other toad standing in front of it. Cono glimpsed a momentary tautness in their faces as they watched their boss emerge on the crumbling concrete steps. The scene was the same as when they had arrived—the row of green and russet trees, the kids chasing one another in the gravel enclosure formed by the looming buildings. It was all the same except for the shadows Cono saw cast by two trees to the right, shadows with irregularities that weren’t there before. Cono slammed his shoulder into Timur and the two crashed off the steps into a garbage pile. Automatic gunfire sprayed the face of the building. As Cono and Timur dug themselves frantically into the rubbish, Cono counted the rounds. Eventually he heard a voice shout “Khvatit!”—“Enough.” He also heard the individual steps of t
wo pairs of feet running until they were lost. Then a distant sound of wheels scratching gravel and fading away. Timur had his pistol in hand, but there was nothing to shoot.
“They’re gone,” Cono said. “But your friends’ faces showed they knew the future.”
They rose from the trash pile as Timur’s two comrades slowly stood up behind the Mercedes. Cono took note of the calmness of Timur’s body as he shook off the fetid debris of kitchen remains. Timur didn’t scream at his men. He simply got into the car, followed by Cono, and told the driver to go to the lookout point called Koktyube, on the southern fringe of the city, where the mountains started their rugged rise to snow-fed streams and the simpler lives of nomads.
“I guess they didn’t like our visitor,” Timur said to the driver, letting out a deep burp. “Anyone you recognized, or just the usual thugs dressed like you?”
“No sir. They came out of nowhere, from behind the trees.” The driver’s reply was slightly rushed.
“And you, Mazhit, proud father of little six-year-old Amira?”
“Nothing to see, sir. It was so quick,” said the other guard.
The car stopped at the top of a long rising road with a concrete barrier on one side that held the foothills at bay. Timur and Cono got out and walked to the edge of a broad terrace rimmed by a stone wall overlooking Almaty. It was a strikingly clear day, with a sky of such bright blueness that it hurt the eyes. The overgrown greenness of the city grid was splotched here and there with yellow and orange. In the distance the vegetation and low buildings gave way to a flat grayness that met the blue sky in a sharp line. Just below the terrace was a small café with red parasols. It was empty.
Timur spoke first. “There are not so many clear days like this. Usually the haze cuts off the view.”
“A good clean day for an assassination.”
“Assassination? You make me out as some government prince.” Timur lit a cigarette.
“Someone thinks you are.” Cono stood so he could glance at the car as they spoke. “You can’t blame them. You carry yourself so nobly, with that ambition in your eyes. If only they could see you grovel at the feet of pretty women like I have!” Cono laughed, and as he did so he saw the driver through the car window, speaking on a cell phone.
Timur ignored the humor. “There may be a split, Cono. Between the premier and Minister Kurgat.”
“Which one is your boss?”
“I could say I’m a patriotic employee of the republic, but you would laugh.”
“How could I laugh when your patriotism almost got you killed?”
“Almost. Only almost. Thanks to you. A second time. Thanks, brother.” Timur took a long drag on his cigarette.
“Don’t thank me now,” Cono said. “It depends on whether future life makes you happy you didn’t die.”
“That’s the question every day, I suppose.” Timur flicked his cigarette ash over the edge of the wall.
“And, every day, you have to wonder who you work for, poor bastard,” Cono said, laughing. “Okay, enough philosophy!” He spanked his knee in self-amusement. The men in the car were looking at them.
Timur breathed out a stream of smoke. “Why the fuck are you so happy all the time?”
“Life and death—doesn’t the sharp edge between them make you happy?” Cono asked. “It makes me ecstatic. Only sex can give as much pleasure. I nearly came when they nicked my shoulder.”
Timur was startled. He looked closely at Cono for the first time since the shooting and saw the stained rip in his shirt, on the bulge of his deltoid.
“It’s only a cut,” Cono said, “a reminder of this day. A reminder to ask every day, Why am I doing this?”
“Cono, you are a fanatic. Sometimes I think you’d make a great terrorist.” Timur raised his hand to examine the wound, but Cono waved him away.
“It’s a tiny problem. We have bigger ones.” Cono shifted his eyes toward the car, then back to the panoramic view.
Timur tapped his fingers on the stone wall. “Are you sure the two in the car were part of it? The shots that got you off?”
“If they hadn’t ducked just before the others started firing I wouldn’t have been sure. I see things a little differently. Time. It separates itself.” Cono nodded. “I am sure.”
“And I’m sure you’re a freak of nature.”
“That’s the same word the doctors used. Freak.”
Timur was gazing far away. “Look down there, Cono—all green except for a few trees that have already turned. You never know which ones will turn yellow or orange first. It seems to happen overnight, with no warning. There’s a forest of green and then one day the first one changes color. No fuckeen warning. Another one turns, then another, but you never know which one is next.
“There’s a tree down there on Gogol Street, a big one.” Timur pointed with certainty at the middle of the city below. “I walked by it for years when I was a kid. Climbed it often, to take a look around, to get higher than everybody else. It made me late for school, so they whacked me. It was worth it. Sometimes that tree was first to turn, sometimes it was last, sometimes it was somewhere in between. But always, by the end of October, it and all the others were yellow or naked. I suppose the unnatural one that didn’t lose its leaves wouldn’t survive for the next season’s go-around.” Timur turned toward Cono.
“It all depends on the climate,” Cono said with a smile. “In Brazil the trees never lose their green. You should see Brazil, after you’ve had your pee in Paris.” Cono paused. “What about your two dedicated employees?”
“It’s tempting. They both deserve a nine-miller to the head. But if I start with them, it won’t finish. Better to know where they stand and use it later. Their leaves have just started to turn, not yellow or red yet. And next season they might remember I didn’t put a bullet in them. Changing sides—it’s the custom here. You live with it. You try to live with it.” Timur looked at the rip in Cono’s shirt. “I’ll tell you where the china doll is, but I can’t be there to help you spring her. Politically unwise. And if I do tell you, you’ll still have to help me get through the forest.”
“Agreed. As long as all three of us get through the forest.”
“More of a jungle than a forest. You know that.” Timur was tapping his fingers again. “But I won’t tell you where she is until after you get the gift money and the bid from the Beijing sow. They are the tough ones, and you speak Chinese, you get the nuances. No need for a troublesome talkative translator. It really would be such a waste if you skipped out before collecting from them. You’re even part Kitai. Maybe that’s what makes you chase around the world for her.”
“Right, brother, don’t trust me with those fellow Kitais who kill their own countrymen. Italian in me too, so I’ll play for them as well. Don’t forget the Russian genes and whatever the rest was. Do I care who sucks the oil out of the Caspian?”
Timur was taken aback by Cono’s sharpness. “Sounds like you’re applying for the job.”
“For a government employee you’re pretty quick,” Cono said. “But I saw that from the first day. No wonder you can shoot to the top and shake off your assassins.”
“Would-be assassins.”
“Them too.”
As they turned toward the cool air oozing down from the mountains and walked toward the Mercedes, the driver and the other guard scrambled into the car.
The ride down from Koktyube was long and silent until Cono began fiddling with the hinged metal cover of the ashtray next to his arm. It made a clinking sound as he opened and closed it, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it resembled chattering teeth. Timur looked at Cono with annoyance. The chattering slowed and stopped.
Even from a foot away, Cono could sense the tension in his companion’s muscles. He started to lean back in his seat but something clinging to Timur’s lower pant leg caught his eye. It was a long shred of gristle, a reminder of the pile of garbage that had saved their lives. He leaned forward and plucked it off, t
hen handed it to Timur, who frowned at it for a moment before lowering the window and flicking it outside. The window whirred shut again, sealing the car in a silence that stretched out until they glided onto the city streets below.
5
Timur instructed the driver to stop in front of the Arasan Baths. He and Cono got out on the sidewalk where vendors watched over their stacks of cut-and-bound branches—myrtle, linden, oak, birch. The vendors were barking their wares to the trickle of men in search of their favorite branches with which to beat themselves in the steam rooms. Cono smiled at his nostalgia for this stretch of sidewalk, where he had met Xiao Li, but he pushed the feeling away.
Timur was the first to break the silence. “Call the Chinese now. Tell them your meeting has to be within two hours. In back of the musical-instruments museum—the old officers’ hall—all the way up the driveway, where it ends in the park. Use this. It’s clean.” He handed Cono a cell phone. “I’ll leave these two idiots back at the garage. Later I’ll be following you in something beat-up, maybe a Toyota. Luxury has its downsides.”
Cono tapped in the numbers written on the tenge note Timur had given him. The phone rang several times. Then there was an answer. “Wei?”
Cono conversed in Mandarin while Timur stood next to a big oak rooted in concrete and turned slowly right and left, glancing at Cono and the waiting car. At last Cono laughed and flipped the phone shut.
“He was telling me the old joke about the Dalai Lama coming to visit the Forbidden City. Sounds like a charming thug.”
“Are we on?”
“In two hours—ten after five. He says the gift will be in four cases.”
A tottering Russian who had just bought his bundle of myrtle leaves bumped into Timur. Timur jabbed an elbow into the man’s ribs. “We have manners here in Kazakhstan! Fuck off.”
The old man shuffled on. “And you learned them from us Russians,” he muttered, the myrtle in one hand and a colorless frayed towel in the other.
“Four cases,” Timur mused. “It’s a good sign, maybe three, maybe five million. Good for starters.”
Performance Anomalies Page 5
