“What’s this?”
“For you. To say thanks for letting me stay at your place.”
“Hey, man, it’s too much. You don’t have the money for this.”
“I didn’t pay money for it.” Cono looked at Todd in amazement. “Of course I didn’t.”
“Some girl give it to you? The one at Michael’s who keeps giving you the eye?”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“I took it.”
“You stole it?”
“I feel a little guilty, because it was so easy. The man at the store left it there.”
“On the counter top, you mean.”
“Yes,” Cono said, “then he went to help someone else.”
“And you helped yourself.” Todd rubbed his fingers across his forehead, hard.
“Too easy, you’re right,” Cono said. “Didn’t have to use any tricks.”
Todd scolded Cono. It was the only time Cono had seen Todd’s eyes get lit up by anything other than their discoveries.
“Cono, I don’t want to commute all the way to San Quentin to continue our collaboration. You have to get a job. No more stealing.”
Cono got a day job, “serving petrol,” as he put it, at a station on the other side of the highway that kept the blacks and Latinos a safe distance from the mandarins of the university. Todd and Cono continued their evening sessions.
“Cono, when you hear things, how do you hear things?” And on and on.
Three months later they knocked on the door of a patent lawyer down the street from Todd’s apartment. The next day the attorney said he was so interested in their data compression techniques that he would work for them for no fee and wait to get paid out of downstream licensing fees. To Cono’s eye, the creases above the attorney’s mouth seemed to quiver too much, and there was a lack of smoothness as ripples of expression flowed across his face; Cono told Todd the guy couldn’t be trusted. Todd disagreed. A month later Todd said, “He’s a schmuck.”
“Schmuck?”
“Like you noticed the first time. What the hell did you see, anyway? Maybe there’s another algorithm there …”
On a Sunday morning at Michael’s Café a man with thick, white hair overheard one of their bizarre conversations and approached them. Jim became their Silicon Valley godfather. He was a lawyer, a local figure with a storied past who seemed to know everyone. He set up a company to hold the patents for them, and soon everyone, it seemed, was interested in their data-compression algorithms: a chip company that wanted to provide video on demand; a consortium that intended to leap-frog videotape technology; a company hoping to send pictures using a new fad called the Internet.
Try as he might, Cono couldn’t perceive any telltale shimmying of facial muscles that would signal him not to trust Jim.
“Jim, what do you want?” Cono asked him square on.
“I want you to succeed!”
They did succeed, but neither Todd nor Cono was interested in business. Cono was restless and had had enough of California; his hands still smelled of gasoline because he hadn’t given up his day job, despite the mounting income from numerous technology firms. “Jim,” he said, “I want to move on. Change the business papers so Todd gets more of the money. He did all the work.”
Todd stopped chewing his pencil and threw it like a dart across the room. “No way, Jim,” he said. “I’m not a schmuck. Don’t change anything. Cono and I did it together.”
Cono did move on, though, and in time their algorithms for manipulating and compressing images became more than popular; they became essential. The mathematical inventions soon crept into countless devices, including something called Digital Versatile Disc. It also turned out that a system named MPEG worked best when using their methods. The patent royalties made the two young men rich, in a recurring fashion. In Chinese, Cono called this compounding windfall his “zìyóu lĭwù.” His freedom gift.
The wealth meant nothing to Cono, except that he decided to resist the urge to steal, and he felt freer to travel. And he could help friends when he wanted to. Friends like Xiao Li, and Irina, and a schoolteacher named Dimira.
Cono looked up and searched for a familiar landmark. He smiled when he realized that he had gradually made his way toward Zelyony, the sprawling bazaar. It was in this neighborhood that Dimira had lived, in one of the squat rows of apartments on the fringe of the vast open market. It must be why he had thought of her. He walked in a zigzag path through streets lined with uneven concrete sidewalks and finally found the mottled amber-colored building that had been her home. He recognized it by a tree whose roots had cracked the bottom of the front wall.
He walked up the stairwell to the second-floor door, pressed an ear against it, then knocked. No answer. He searched for signs of a change in the flaking paint, the three locks, the doorjamb marred by grooves of forced entry. They were all the same as before. Cono sat on the stairs above the landing and looked at his watch.
He had met Dimira four years earlier, on his second stay in Almaty, before encountering Xiao Li outside the Arasan Baths, and before starting his job for Katerina and the Americans who used her. He’d given Dimira a “Hi” and a smile as they passed each other on Avenue Abay in the screeching sunlight. Only when they sat down for beers at a cottage pub did he notice the deformed, miniature ears that had been hidden beneath her long, black hair. They were like the ears of a wrestler or boxer who had been smacked or squeezed with too much force.
Dimira was happy to meet a foreigner, and proudly told Cono she had a young daughter, beautiful, smart and perfect, but too dark to be accepted by the people of her country. She always referred to it that way—“my country,” with the word my stressed and elongated. Dimira came from near Balkhash, in the flat rural middle of the country, and had fallen in love with an Ethiopian man who was studying there in the last days of Soviet-sponsored educational exchange. Dimira’s family threw her out when she became pregnant. The Ethiopian was threatened with death and fled. Dimira gave birth, alone, in a nearby small town. She and the baby rode the train to Almaty and lived on the floor of the railway station for months as the Soviet Union collapsed and chaos reigned.
Somehow Dimira pulled herself out of this despair. She got a job teaching the Kazak language, newly required in all the country’s schools, and was brimming with happiness that summer when she and Cono met.
They had kissed once, and nothing more.
The door at the bottom of the stairwell creaked open and banged shut. Cono went up the next flight of stairs and looked down at the door of the apartment. A woman with wide hips and slender legs appeared. She had twisted a key in the third lock when Cono whispered her name, leaning over the railing, behind and above her. As she turned, she held out a canister of pepper spray and fired it.
“You missed,” Cono said, still whispering.
Dimira dropped the pepper spray and put her hand on her mouth. She dropped her purse, too, and leaped to hug Cono on the staircase.
She took him into the apartment without speaking. When the door was shut and triple-locked, Dimira disappeared into the kitchen without meeting Cono’s gaze. “I’ll make some tea,” she called from the other room. A few moments later there was a crashing sound of falling plates and utensils.
“Is that another Almaty earthquake?” Cono joked.
“It’s okay. Just a minute.”
Cono sat down on one of the carpets in the single room that was her living space. The apartment was largely as he remembered it. There were two small mattresses covered by hand-woven blankets, a chest of drawers, two lamps, and a rod suspended from the ceiling that was hung with clothes. The wall around the chest of drawers was a patchwork of photos of Asel, Dimira’s daughter, from her toddler days up to when she was gangly with beginning puberty. Cono got up to look at the pictures and saw only two photos that included Dimira, beaming, standing next to her child. He recognized those pictures because he had taken them years ago, after insisting over Dimira’s
protests. On the other walls were paintings drawn by a child’s hand, some in simple frames, some tacked directly into the plaster.
The home was the same, except that it seemed too tidy.
Dimira emerged from the kitchen with a tin tray in her hands. As she approached, the tray shook and two spoons clattered to the floor. She stood before Cono, the teacups rattling, her head lowered.
“Let me help you,” Cono said. He placed the tray on the floor and turned back to Dimira. With two hands, he raised her head so he could see her face. She was crying.
She fell against him, pressed her head to his chest and dissolved into violent sobbing. Cono held her for long minutes, lightly swaying from side to side, until her gasping and crying gradually subsided.
“Cono, she’s gone. Asel is dead.” Dimira let out one long, piercing cry. Suddenly it stopped. She hugged Cono and stepped back. She looked at him, her face streaked with tears. “Asel was murdered on the street, stabbed, two blocks from here. Six months ago. I wanted you to know but I had no way to contact you. She …” Dimira’s voice caught and she bowed her head.
Cono pressed his lips against Dimira’s hair and held her until she slipped away to wipe her face. They sat down next to the tray, Dimira folding her legs to one side. Cono righted the cups and poured tea. He grasped Dimira’s hand.
“At least they didn’t rape her,” she said. “I don’t think so. That’s what the doctor told me.”
Asel had come home from school at this same hour of the day. Her mother had been delayed at work because of an argument with another teacher who accused Dimira of being too easy on the students, for why else would she be so popular with them? It was Dimira herself who found the child, still just barely alive as her liver bled inside.
Dimira collapsed onto Cono’s knee. “She was all I have. She was all I am.” Cono put his hand in her hair and stroked it as her tears dripped onto his thigh. He considered the chances of finding Asel’s murderer in this city where murders were commonplace, a city full of motives and random nonmotives. Murders here were like waves slapping at a shore. He could offer nothing more than his stroking hand.
Dimira sat up and wiped the wetness from her face with delicate fingers. “Cono, you helped us so much. I thank you.”
“Dimira, it was only money.”
“No, no, no! Cono, she adored you. You drew puppets on your hands for her. You showed her how to paint with her fingers. You taught her how to juggle. She always asked when you were coming back.” Dimira covered her face and began to cry again, slumped on Cono’s leg. He lightly twirled a finger in her thick black hair and began to sing in a soft, clear voice that came from deep in his chest. The words and the tones emerged immediately, coming to him from a place beyond his awareness.
Even now, I feel your arms around me
My breath is your breath and yours mine
Even now, I hear you laughing like bells …
You sing to me and I sing to you
Dear child of my womb, my love,
Time has left us, left us forever together.
The two of them were silent for several moments, Dimira’s head resting heavily on Cono’s thigh. “She still lives in our memories,” Cono said. “She told me that she wanted to grow up to be like you and to teach, that she was lucky to have you as her mother.”
They sat quietly for a long time, occasionally sipping the tea, until there was no more water in the pot.
Cono unbent his legs and stood up. They hugged at the door. When he was outside and the last lock had clicked, he heard a muffled shriek of grief.
6
Less than an hour remained before the meeting with the Beijing men. Cono made his way to Zelyony Bazaar and entered between tables laden with audiocassettes and CDs. Rows of boomboxes were blaring out the wares simultaneously—Russian pop and American hip-hop competed with nostalgic strains from a Kazak zither. Farther down, a Turkish crooner was drowned out by a Hong Kong diva who had been all the rage during Cono’s last trek in the People’s Republic.
The path narrowed as he approached the heart of the bazaar. Canvasses stretched between low poles were protecting stacks of socks and baby clothes from the sun, as narrow-faced Tajik women watched over them. He turned a corner and collided with the breasts of a rotund Russian shopper carrying several heavy plastic bags. He apologized in Russian as she laughed flirtatiously and ambled on. In the next aisle, two angular tea-colored men barked at Cono in Pakistani-accented Russian, coaxing him to have a look at the shirts and jeans hanging like rows of curtains. Cono ducked his head to avoid raking off a T-shirt featuring Madonna’s gap-toothed face and the words “Material Girl”; just behind it he brushed against a shirt emblazoned with the bearded muzzle of bin Laden.
The next intersection of aisles was partly blocked by an old Russian man singing and holding a cup, his eyes vacant with blindness. The stooped woman at his elbow accompanied him with an accordion. Cono recognized the tune, and after listening for a minute, sang along until the couple finished. Quietly, he put a 50-tenge note in the cup. The blind man reached forward until Cono clasped the knotty hand.
“Your voice paints the air with beautiful colors,” Cono said.
“Young man, you sing well,” said the blind man. “Sing! Sing! That’s all there is!”
Cono squeezed the old man’s hand, contemplating the truth of his words. Singing gave him slowness, a gift that little else was able to confer. As his body vibrated with sound, the world gradually receded until it almost disappeared, and Cono felt that he himself almost slipped away into nothingness. The old man is right—when singing, that’s all there is.
Cono entered the market’s food hall and strolled past the mounds of dates, open sacks of spices and dried beans, and pyramids of fruit watched over by plump Kazak and Korean women waving away the flies and flashing silver teeth as they chattered. Cono smelled the meat stalls before he reached them. The lateness of the day had released the iron-tinged odors of entrails and hanging shanks. Pink rabbit carcasses, with the fur still on their feet, shined beneath the overhanging fluorescent lights. Whole cows’ tongues, still attached to the larynx, wagged from hooks. Bowls of rippled intestines jiggled to the pounding of a nearby cleaver. Suspended goat carcasses extended their limbs as if leaping up to the skylights. A woman with her hair tied in a kerchief was stuffing meat into a glistening arc of fresh horse rectum to make kazy. A row of skinned sheep heads stared at the dwindling number of shoppers.
It was here, four years before, that Cono had caught a knife an instant before it would have entered Timur’s abdomen. A diminutive Uzbek man in a rectangular skullcap had approached, saying he had an important confidential message for Mr. Betov. As the man moved close to whisper in Timur’s ear, Cono saw the motion of his arm and caught the knife by the blade in a movement that was completed before any thought of the action could appear in his mind.
A surprised Timur saw the knife in Cono’s hand and quickly grabbed the man in a chokehold and lifted him, kicking, down the steps to the urinals behind the beef tongues. Timur smashed the man’s head once into a sink and pressed him face down on the grimy floor tiles. He barked at him in Russian and in Kazak, demanding to know who he was and whom he worked for. The man coughed and spit blood and yelled: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”
Timur planted his knee in the man’s back and pushed his arms upward until one shoulder dislocated with a pop, and then the other one. “Who?”
“Allahu Akbar …” The man’s response was muted by the crush of his mouth against the floor. Timur heaved him, his head landing in the urinal.
“One more time. Who?”
“Yes,” the man gurgled. “Allahu …”
Timur stomped his foot on the back of the man’s neck until Cono stopped him.
“Cono, your hand is bleeding.” Timur reached down and ripped off the tail of the dead man’s shirt. “Wrap this around it. Thanks, brother, thanks a lot.”
That was on Cono’s second stay in Almaty. T
imur Betov was already an important man.
Cono glanced at the doorway to the toilets, then at the scars on his fingers, and exited the food hall. He wove a different route through the tin pots and hardware until he emerged from the sprawling network of tents onto a dusty road, full of people going home, that pointed him toward the clapboard building with the peaked copper roof that housed the Museum of Musical Instruments.
The road veered to connect with the pavement of Kaldayakov Street. Cono followed the rising sidewalk, lowering his head to avoid the tree branches. Two boys were collecting fallen chestnuts and competing to toss them into a metal pail.
“Throw one to me!” Cono called.
The younger one lobbed a nut, which Cono caught in his mouth. Just as quickly, he blew it out and kicked it with his instep like a hacky sack, aiming it directly into the pail. The boys came nearer, tossing more chestnuts toward him. Cono caught three of them and started juggling. And a fourth, and a fifth. The boys were now pulling chestnuts out of the pail and throwing them. He caught two more for the whirling circle. Then, as the boys watched, all the chestnuts disappeared. Cono leaned down, put his finger in the older boy’s ear, and pulled out a chestnut, which he tossed into the pail. The smaller boy pushed his brother away and looked up at Cono expectantly. Cono knelt and took the boy’s hand. When he released it the boy held a chestnut and a blue button.
The boy reminded him of the one he and Xiao Li encountered years before at the amusement park in Almaty, during their first few days together. They were eating ice cream near the rollercoaster, and Xiao Li drifted closer to watch. A little boy, maybe six years old and looking like a street urchin who had snuck in, saw a popsicle fall from one of the cars high on a curve. He began to run across a stretch of ground-level track to grab his good fortune. But the coaster cars were swooping down the same rails. Xiao Li leaped and snatched the boy into her arms. The two of them would have been hit but for inches. Xiao Li shouted at the boy and slapped him hard and kissed him on the cheek. Then she bought him an ice cream cone. And all the while she was wearing her high heels.
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