Xiao Li was sprawled across Cono’s lap, one bat of an eyelid away from sleep.
“Cono, thanking me … there is no need,” Dimira said. “I feel Asel when you are here. Your presence is a gift.” Dimira saw that Xiao Li’s eyes were closed, her breathing deep. Dimira whispered to Cono, “If only my daughter had a father like you.”
Like me? Cono thought. Like me? He saw in his mind the hairy legs of the man he had just killed and castrated. There had been no choice, he told himself.
“We must sleep,” Cono said. He laid Xiao Li on the mattress that had been Asel’s. He said he would lie on the floor, it was his preference, and that he hoped it wouldn’t disturb Dimira if he did his exercises in the dark before sleeping.
Dimira lingered in the far corner of the room, standing next to her mattress, observing Cono’s movements. She unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall from her shoulders, then stood for another minute, watching, until she blew out the last candle.
An hour later Cono’s disrobed body cooled with the evaporation of his sweat. Lying on his back, he inhaled through his nostrils, his arms outstretched on the floor. He inhaled again, smelling the tea, the carbon of the extinguished candles, the sausage grease, the gardenia, the mustiness of the wool carpets, the scents of two different women. All was dark. And silent, except for the rhythmic breathing of Xiao Li and Dimira, faint whooshings that were out of sync, but which together formed a constant, slow beat. Sleep fell upon him like a blanket made of lead.
8
“Cono, wake up.” Xiao Li’s lips were brushing his cheek. The pungent aroma of frying onions was teasing his nose; the sputtering of eggs in a hot pan danced in his ears. Xiao Li was wearing a loose T-shirt with silk-screened latex that rubbed against his nipples as she wiggled on top of him, kissing him again and again. His hand fell to her hip and felt the slippery synthetic fabric of running pants. He reflexively squeezed her there, feeling the beginnings of his arousal.
She slipped off him. Something sharp whacked against his semi-erect member, snapping him to alertness. “Not now, Cono,” Xiao Li said, waving an envelope over his startled eyes. “What’s this? It’s in Russian. I opened it. It was under the door. What does it say? Wake up, Cono!”
Cono felt pain in his wounded shoulder when he rolled onto his side and pulled the note from the stiff envelope. His kept his face expressionless as he read it.
“I know you will help. You are addicted to the thrill of it. The public swimming pool on Abay, 10:00 this morning. You will know me by the scar on my shoulder. Freedom is so hard to come by. For us all.”
“What does it say?” Xiao Li asked again, more urgently.
“We’ve been discovered. You must fly, like a falcon. Go to your apartment, get your passport and only the things you absolutely need and don’t waste time. Fly home.”
Cono checked his watch. 9:40 a.m. If he hurried, there was just enough time to get to the swimming pool.
“And Dimira?” Xiao Li demanded. “We just leave her?”
“If I help them, Dimira will be safe.”
The note was from his friend Katerina or someone pretending to be Katerina, that much was clear. Xiao Li had nothing to fear from Katerina, and neither did Dimira. But if Katerina had been able to track them, surely the Chinese or Timur’s thugs at the General could have done the same.
Cono stood up and strode quickly to the kitchen. “After we leave, Dimira, take your passport and money and go straight to the school. Stay there all day. I will get word to you if you are not to return here tonight. If you don’t hear from me, it’s safe to come home.”
Dimira nodded, a wooden spatula in her hand. “I gave Asel’s sneakers to Xiao Li,” she said. “Asel had big feet for her age.”
As Xiao Li wolfed down breakfast, Cono reviewed the escape route he had described the night before—Xiao Li would hide among the crowd on the bus to Bishkek, then take a plane to Urumqi, and continue on to the village of some distant relatives.
“You must leave immediately, Xiao Li,” Cono said. “Promise me.”
“I promise, Cono. I promise.”
“And I must go too.” He opened the three locks on the door. Xiao Li smothered him with kisses and pressed against him, whispering that he must find her soon and hold her in his arms over a high balcony with the moon in the sky. “And you must come visit your son,” she added in Mandarin. She watched with jealousy as Cono said goodbye to Dimira and pecked her on both cheeks. Then he was gone.
Eight minutes later, while Xiao Li was lacing up Asel’s sneakers and Cono was two miles away, gulping blood-red pomegranate juice that had just been pressed by a boy with a pushcart off Avenue Abay, there was a gentle knock on the apartment door.
Xiao Li looked with alarm at Dimira.
“Maybe someone came from the school,” Dimira said quietly in English, “to ask why I’m late.” She set down the tray she was holding.
Xiao Li grabbed Dimira’s arm. “No,” she whispered, plucking a knife from the tray. “Don’t open.”
There was another knock, a little louder.
“Other door?” Xiao Li whispered. “Way to go out?” She pointed the knife around the apartment, examining the windows; the only two in the apartment looked out on the front of the building. Xiao Li tried to recall if the bathroom had a window. “Toilet?”
Dimira shook her head no.
“Don’t say nothing, no one home.” Xiao Li whispered. She reached to hand another knife to Dimira; it clinked against a teacup on the tray, tipping it over.
“You have gun?”
Dimira shook her head again.
There was another knock, more insistent. And a voice from the other side of the door, too quiet to understand.
Dimira edged softly to the door. She put her ear near it.
“Mr. Cono sent me.” The man spoke in English with a heavy Kazak accent. “Mr. Cono said to come help you.”
Xiao Li touched Dimira’s shoulder and shook her head violently, holding her knife in a dagger grip. Memories of the two days in chains swept like a cyclone through her mind.
“Mr. Cono said this place is not safe anymore. He says you need to leave now, go home.”
The two women exchanged glances. Xiao Li’s dagger hand gradually fell to her side. Dimira put her fingers on one of the locks.
“Mr. Cono said there is not much time. He wants you to be safe.”
Dimira unlocked one of the bolts. Xiao Li stifled a short gasp. Dimira’s hand reached for the second lock and clicked it open. Xiao Li looked down at Dimira’s quavering fingers on the third lock. She forced Dimira’s hand away from it.
The door exploded open, ripping the last bolt from the jamb and sending the two women to the floor. Two large men jumped on them. Xiao Li tried to stab her attacker but the knife didn’t penetrate his leather jacket; a fist smacked her in the face and she lay stunned for a moment. Then she began kicking and biting. Dimira was crushed under the weight of the heavier man as he wound duct tape around her arms and legs, and finally around her screaming mouth. From the corner of her eye, Xiao Li saw Dimira being hoisted up. She yelled in Mandarin, then in English, “Good Kazak mother! Good mother, little daughter! Don’t hurt …” Then her mouth, too, was sealed with tape.
9
The public swimming pool on Avenue Abay was fronted by a large building containing volleyball and basketball courts. Almost hidden behind the flank of the utilitarian gray structure was the entrance to the pool: two small doors, one for women and one for men, with a ticket stand between them. Cono paced in a circuitous route around the sports complex before quickly walking across an open space between a large promotional tent for Marlboro cigarettes and the pool doors. He bought his ticket from a sleepy woman whose vastness spread beyond her chair and onto the wooden desk at her side. She had reason to be bored—the pool had only just opened, and there would be little traffic on this day, one of the last of the season.
Cono undressed. His blue-and-green striped boxer shorts would h
ave to double as swimming trunks, and after more than two days on his body they would benefit from the cleansing chlorine, as would his cuts. The few other clothes he’d brought, along with some toiletries, were probably now in the lost and found of the Hotel Tsarina, along with Xiao Li’s high heel. Katerina’s choice of the swimming pool reassured him somewhat, even though there was no reason to view her as a threat. And yet, four years after the tontería he had performed on her behalf, there was no way to know what were her current allegiances in the mutating patchwork of interests that hid beneath the overgrown trees of Almaty. “You never know when this tree or that tree will go yellow,” Timur had said. First or last or in between. But they always did, eventually. And then they waited, to foliate again in the next season. Brother Timur.
Addicted, the note had said.
Cono closed the locker in the changing room; instead of putting the key’s rubber bracelet on his wrist, he hid it atop the row of lockers nearest the stairway that led up to the pool. He stood at the top of the stairs, still shaded from the morning glare. The mountains in the distance were gleaming with sun on snow. The pool deck was empty except for a gaggle of kids on the far end being taught how to dive by a woman pointing her arms as she stood on the edge, snapping at the children, who paid little attention and continued kicking water at each other. There were no buildings around the rest of the pool, only open sky; no roosts for observers or snipers. It was a good day to be alive, to have a swim. Cono waited.
A lime-green towel was the first image to invade his left eye. A bright-orange bikini followed. Long, slim arms unfurled the towel; it fluttered from Katerina’s fingertips, creating a progression of ripples that instantly entranced Cono’s eyes, absorbing and transporting him as each ripple was slowed by his mind and became a wave—advancing, rising, preparing to curl. That one’s mine. Paddle, hop up. Slide and torque, make it last. He felt the spray and the breeze streaming through his hair until the last crash and tumble onto the foaming sands of his childhood.
The towel fell without a single fold onto the deck at the pool’s edge, and Cono returned to the present. Katerina stretched herself out, face up, and dropped her left arm into the water, swirling it with lazy fingers. She squinted as she glanced around and then closed her eyes against the brightness.
Cono walked soundlessly to the right side of the pool and slid into the water. He swam across the bottom until he saw Katerina’s fingers dangling above him, then rose slowly and bit one of them. The hand jerked away, but not before Cono gripped her wrist. Still submerged, he braced his feet against the pool’s wall and pulled her into the water. She struggled ferociously on the bottom and had a thumb jabbing Cono’s larynx before he brought her up. The knee hitting his groin was slowed by the water’s viscosity, but her forehead, now above the water, butted against his brow with no impediment. Cono floated away, only slightly stunned. He stood and squeezed a stream of water from his clasped palms into her murderous face.
“You didn’t know they have sharks in Kazakhstan?” he said, grinning.
Katerina’s face slowly relaxed, and her long eyelashes blinked away the water in little flecks of airborne light. “There are good sharks and bad sharks.”
“And what for you is a good shark?”
“A good shark is one that hunts for its food elsewhere.” She gazed at him a moment, then smiled.
“Well, this shark says, ‘Peace.’”
“Cono, thank you for coming.”
He nodded. Katerina’s voice had lost the lilting timbre of four years before, and her smile was less ready, less coquettish. She seemed to have an inner steadiness that had been missing before. Her body was still long and lithe, and the shape of her erect nipples just above the waterline was the same.
“‘Addicted,’ you wrote.”
“Why else would you be here, in this messy city?”
“To help a friend. Or two,” he replied, moving closer to her.
“‘Better to fight for friends than countries,’ you told me in Barcelona.”
“But first, help yourself, I said.” Cono reached for her hand, and she took it. They walked through the water to the steps at the shallow end and sat down shoulder-to-shoulder, their torsos warmed by the sun.
“So you’re still here,” Cono said. “You must like those mountains.” He nodded toward the faraway peaks. “I don’t think it’s the cuisine that keeps you.”
“I’m still here because freedom is hard to come by.” Katerina clasped her hands together and rubbed one thumb against the other. “The Americans made promises—just do this one more thing, that one more thing, then you’ll get the passport. The money was another lure, but just enough to keep me biting. And the little hints that they knew all about my family back in Ukraine ...” Katerina massaged the base of her neck, near one of her scars. “I was so close, the promises were hardening, with specific dates. Then my handler was sent away, back to Washington. And now more promises. More empty promises to me, the only one they have here who knows, who has the network … that’s what they call it, ‘a network,’ when they ass-kiss in reports to their bosses.”
“A network good enough to find me,” Cono said as a child belly-flopped at the other end of the pool.
“My stringers are good. Men with kids and wives and a lot to lose. And usually relatives in jail because they wrote something honest or stood up for themselves. The one who followed you keeps an eye on the Bureau’s little love hotel above the General, among other popular destinations.” Katerina put her hand into Cono’s under the water.
“And that’s how you knew I was here.”
“I’m glad that you are here.” She momentarily squeezed his fingers. “The stringer called in. A handsome foreigner was leading a Chinese girl out of the alley behind the General.”
“Handsome foreigner. Well, thank you. So your stringer must have also seen her being dragged there in the first place, kicking and biting.” Cono turned to examine Katerina’s face.
“Cono, there are so many … who go in that way.” Katerina half-winced. “How would we know she was a friend of yours?”
The momentary tugs of muscles beneath the soft creamy-white skin of her face confused Cono. Apprehension, certainly. Suspicion, desperation, and even ambivalence—they were there, too.
“Come on. Let’s swim.” Cono pressed himself against her, pushing her away from the stairs. They breaststroked to the other end. As Cono treaded water, he watched a child diver standing on the edge, her hands nervously pancaked together, head tucked between her arms.
“Fly, fly, little bird!” he called. The girl plopped headfirst into the pool and surfaced quickly, sputtering and wiping strings of black hair from her face. Cono clapped his hands in applause.
Katerina did the crawl back toward the steps; Cono swam beneath her, facing upward, kicking like a dolphin, his body covered with polygons of refracted light. When they reached the other end and sat again, he slipped the dislodged strap of Katerina’s bikini back on her shoulder. Her face was serious, worried.
The Americans, she told him, were alarmed about leftover HEU—highly enriched uranium, weapons-grade. Her slang for it was high-U. Kazakhstan had been the major producer of it for the Soviet Union, mining the uranium ore and enriching it for submarine reactors and nuclear weapons. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the new lords of Kazakhstan cut a deal to let the Americans ship it out.
Katerina examined Cono’s face. “But maybe you know all about this. Maybe that’s why you’re here.”
Cono laughed and scooped water onto his hot shoulders. “I’m here for a friend, not geopolitics or radiation. Radiantly beautiful women, of course, are a different matter.”
The twitching creases at the corners of Katerina’s eyes relaxed. She continued. The deal, called Project Sapphire, involved an undisclosed payment—$25 million, possibly more; a modest sum because of those cash-strapped times, before the oil was discovered.
“And I’m sure the money was put to the service of the f
ine citizens of Kazakhstan,” Cono said.
“Only fools doubt that it got divvied up at the top.”
“I understand now,” Cono chuckled. “The American government can bribe officials, but American companies cannot. That makes for a level playing field.”
As with all deals, there was a catch, Katerina told him. The inventory numbers didn’t match what was flown out on C-5 transporters to the U.S. Hundreds of pounds of high-U had remained in Kazakhstan, unaccounted for. The U.S. government had downplayed the discrepancy, saying it was a matter of who was doing the counting. Now, years later, the Americans had indications that jihadis were maneuvering to get access to it. But it wasn’t clear who controlled it. Infighting at the top in Kazakhstan made things even more uncertain. Kurgat, the powerful interior minister, who had purview over everything from the oil contracts to the security service, was threatened by an ambitious rival who was courting the jihadis. The high-U would be valuable currency for a usurper.
“Sounds like the rival is a good soldier,” Cono said. “Like the Russians say, a bad soldier is one who doesn’t try to become a general.”
“You tell me if he’s a good soldier.” Katerina bobbed her head, sending drops of water from the ends of her locks onto Cono’s chest. “You know him—Timur Betov, the head of the National Security Bureau. Your friend.”
Cono squinted in the direction of the mountains. “A drinking buddy. And a very good soldier. But he’s not the one I came to help.” He turned to look squarely at Katerina. “I came to help a woman. I’m sure jihad is the last thing on her mind. And the only reason I’m not on a long flight out of here right now is your note. And your radiance.”
A small smile played on Katerina’s lips, but the tension in her face remained. The communications being picked up by the Americans, she continued, suggested that the rivalry was coming to a head, that Betov already had the high-U and was under pressure to make the transfer to the jihadis quickly. He needed the jihadis to back him and get rid of the minister before the minister eliminated him. The transfer was imminent.
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