Zheng was already pushing the door open when the attendant said: “Hey! You have to pay.” Zheng turned back and faced the upstart.
“Who owns this place?”
“My mom and dad.” The attendant was blustery and perturbed. He planted his hands on his hips and stuck out his chest.
“So you are a good son. Where is your family from in China?”
“Why do you want to know? We live here now. Where are you from?” The young man had an accent from the south, perhaps Yunnan. His Mandarin was shabby, and it grated on Zheng’s ear.
“I’m from Beijing.” Zheng pulled a business card from his suit coat and held it in front of the young man’s eyes.
The attendant snatched it and read. “So, big man, this isn’t China,” he said. “We already cough up enough cash to the raket for our roof here. You try to butt in on the action and they’ll fuck you good.” The card landed on the toe of Zheng’s shoe. “Now pay up.”
The only other customer in the café, a middle-aged Chinese woman wearing socks and sandals, placed a bill on the desk and eased around the two men in order to leave.
With a look of disgust, Zheng pulled a few tenge notes from his pants pocket and let them drop on the floor. As he walked out the door the attendant shouted: “Hey! You take care of that guy. And … and fuck Beijing!”
Zheng emitted a low growl as he turned back to the door and opened it, a fresh smile on his face.
“Tell me, young man, where is the toilet, please? Bodily functions. I’m sure you understand.”
The attendant pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Pee or shit? There’s no toilet paper.”
“No need for toilet paper, thank you. Where is the bathroom?”
“It’s back there.” The young man waved his hand impatiently.
“Where exactly? Can you show me? I need to go.”
The young man strode to a narrow door wedged between two computer terminals and opened it. “You have one of those prostate problems, big man?”
“You’re so cruel, speaking that way. Age comes to all of us.”
They were now on the threshold of a small hallway crowded with stacks of partly dismantled computers. Zheng walked ahead.
“Show me the toilet please—it’s urgent.”
“It’s down there on the left. I’m not a tour guide. And if you’re one of those perverts, you’ll just have to shake it off yourself.” The young man turned to go back into the shop.
Zheng rotated swiftly on his heel. His left arm encircled the young man’s neck like a noose. He flicked open a knife in his right hand and swung it around, plunging it into the young man’s chest just below the sternum. Zheng squeezed with both arms, so hard that his victim could not cry out.
“You are an insult. Your family too. Hear me?” Zheng probed deeply with the blade, up to the heart for two swipes. “An insult to our people, to my people, to all we have suffered through. Quitters.” Zheng pushed the blade all the way back to reach the descending aorta; he felt its pulsations through the knife. “Ah, there you are.” One more sweep of the blade. Computer screens crashed to the floor. The young man’s kicking stopped. His hands released the snarl of computer cables he’d been trying to loop backward around his assailant’s head, and he slumped over.
Zheng withdrew the knife and let the boy fall to the floor, face down.
“Peasant trash,” Zheng said as he spat and wiped the blade on the young man’s shirt. He clicked the knife shut and slid it into the pocket with his business cards. He rolled his head right and left, tugged on his coat sleeves to make them straight again, adjusted the white trim on his breast pocket, and strolled out of the shop.
It was cool when Cono opened his eyes again, but his wrists and ankles were warm. He felt as if he were arched in a backward swan dive, looking up at a ceiling with fluorescent lights. There was a cold, hard surface under his back, and the chill of it against his shoulders and buttocks told him that he was naked. He moved, and found that his wrists and ankles were tightly bound, and that the surface underneath him was too small to support the full length of his body. His head draped off one end of what turned out to be a desk, and his legs were dangling off the other end toward the floor. He felt like a slab of meat on a butcher’s block.
Something brushed against his cheek and eased with greater pressure toward the corner of his lips. A knob wedged between his teeth and into his mouth. The taste was of oil and smoke. The knob went deeper until he was choking.
“It’s quite an old gun, but still very useful.” Zheng’s carefully cropped head was just a silhouette against the bright ceiling lights. The Makarov barrel was withdrawn with a snap, breaking off the point of one of Cono’s canines.
“So sorry,” Zheng cooed in Mandarin. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He stroked the tip of the gun against Cono’s cheek. “I want to help you. I want to help you out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into.” Zheng’s voice was cool and smooth, like the gun muzzle that caressed Cono’s face.
Cono’s eyes rolled, trying to register the scene; he was still dazed in the aftermath of the seizure. Zheng’s features were coming into focus, but a pulsing pressure in Cono’s head made it hard for him to take in anything else. He thought he could make out two more cropped-hair silhouettes, one at each side. Were there others? He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
“Ah! You are thirsty. I forget my responsibilities as a host. Please, forgive me.” Zheng motioned to one of the silhouettes, who presented a glass. Zheng put down the gun, cradled Cono’s head in one hand, and with the other tipped the water glass carefully so Cono could drink. “Is that better, my friend?”
Cono swallowed repeatedly, but the water came too fast. He coughed and jerked his head away from Zheng’s hand.
“Thanks for the drowning,” Cono said groggily in Mandarin, looking around the room. “How can I help you, my friend?”
“Let me begin by saying that you are such an intriguing personality. I knew it the first day we met, so at ease, so charming. I don’t even know what to ask first. Maybe you can just talk to us, tell us what is on your mind, what attracts you to Almaty. You seem to have many friends here.”
“I’m attracted by the women. What attracts you to Almaty?”
Zheng sighed and paced from one end of Cono’s bound body to the other. He picked up the Makarov and stroked the muzzle lightly along Cono’s chest, slowly down his abdomen, and then along the inside of his left thigh and all the way to his instep. “I am very, very curious about who you are working for here in Almaty. It’s a simple question.”
The stroke on Cono’s thigh had reflexively caused his cremaster muscle to pull up the testicle on that side, and Zheng had noticed. Cono feared his genitals would be the first part of his body to suffer.
“I said I like the women here, so I don’t think I’m the right one to help you,” Cono said. “But I can arrange to get you laid by a horse-hung teenager working at Hotel Ratar.” The angle of the light on the face to his right allowed him to perceive one of the henchmen half-smirking.
The pistol slammed against Cono’s jaw.
“So you’re an S&M guy,” Cono said, his senses recovering. “Go ahead and suck the iguana, but don’t bite too hard.” The half-faces on both sides compressed their lips to contain either their amusement or their shock at Cono’s nerve.
Zheng ignored the remark; he took off his suit coat and laid it neatly across the back of a desk chair. His white shirt was sweat-stained beneath the armpits. Cono’s eyes had regained their focus, but to see anything he had to lift his head up, and his neck muscles were already feeling the strain. He saw that the white trim at the breast pocket of Zheng’s suit coat wasn’t a handkerchief; it looked like stiff paper, the size of a postcard.
“What’s that, your torture notes?” Cono asked, his eyes on the pocket. “And I thought you were a pro.”
Zheng’s body tensed. The blood vessels in his forehead became engorged; it seemed that he wasn’
t breathing. Finally he closed his eyes and let out a long exhalation. He reached for his suit coat, carefully folded it so that the breast pocket was covered, and placed the coat on the shelf behind him.
“It’s a shame,” Zheng said, still recovering his breath, “that in this primitive outpost we don’t have the drugs at hand to make this easier for you. But being such a reasonable and experienced man of the world, I’m sure you’ll tell us what you are doing in this backward place.” Zheng lit a cigarette and took a long drag, speaking as the smoke veiled his silhouette. “Who are you?”
Cono tried to find Zheng’s eyes within the shadow of the face. “I’m a swimmer, like Mao in those old pictures—all that paddling around. A surfer too,” Cono said. He tried to find an equivalent of surfer dude in Mandarin, but failed and laughed.
“Well, my dear friend, you are very far from the waves. In fact, you couldn’t be more distant.” Zheng filled his mouth from another glass of water and spit it out on Cono’s face.
Cono let his neck muscles relax and his head tilted back over the edge of the desk. The water trickled into his hair. He was now fully alert. “You can find a wave to ride anywhere.”
“A philosopher, and a bad one at that. Tell me, so that you don’t suffer, what wave or waves you are surfing here in this mangy town.” Zheng’s voice had become soft and coaxing again. “With all these passports in your finely tailored vest, it seems you are a well-traveled man, one who must know when harm is near.”
“Harm?” Cono raised his head and looked across his stretched nakedness. “I feel quite comfortable here with you, my friend, basking under your gaze.”
Zheng grunted and tossed his head as a signal to his henchmen. Arms swung from both sides. Shot-filled rubber hoses slammed onto Cono’s chest. The sensation of each blow was divided in time—the deflections of hairs in their follicles, the pressure on the dermis, the inward flexing of ribs near their breaking point. There was pain, but there was something else too. The blows continued in a syncopated drumbeat that reverberated against the bare walls of the room. The beat of the drum went on and on.
It stopped. Cono breathed and felt the vertebral joints in his neck popping with the weight of his head as his muscles relaxed. He was glad there was not yet any taste of blood in his throat.
“There is no harm, you are right,” said Zheng, surveying the burgeoning welts arrayed like zebra stripes on Cono’s torso. “It is only persuasion, for a good cause—the health of your face and other parts of your physique. The questions are very simple for an intelligent man like you. Who are you working for and what do they want? Such a sophisticated man cannot merely be collecting flowers for a Kazak who wants to be king. Why this fascination with uranium, and the American scheme? Project Sapphire—what a gem of a code name. Surely the Americans are trying to insert themselves into the struggles for this tin-pot dictatorship.” Zheng sucked on his Dunhill. “Who is your CIA runner?”
Cono groaned. “Now I hurt. Putting me in that kind of company. We both know their type. Sloths that can’t find the way down from their own tree.” Cono breathed in again. There was no wheezing. The duo who had beaten him were experts; they knew precisely what force would snap a rib and puncture a lung. “The Americans are nothing against your breed,” Cono said, “but they have the same erotic love of torture.”
“You mean our breed.” Zheng smiled just as Cono raised his head. “You’re really one of us, after all.” Zheng glanced at his assistants with a strained grin in search of agreement. “Part of the great Chinese diaspora, unable to resist your glorious cultural heritage.” The duo gave tepid nods.
“I’ve known Chinese fathers who …” Cono laughed through the pain cutting like barbed wire across his chest. “Who are losers. Who couldn’t even feed their families. Good reason for a diaspora.”
Zheng pressed the cigarette to his lips and inhaled deeply. His forearm ratcheted down step by step, like a tree branch that was yielding to the weight of snow. The burn of the cigarette on Cono’s left nipple was stretched out in time as if it would never end. A network of involuntary neurons conducted the sensations of pain and pleasure radiating from the nipple until Cono’s whole body was tingling within an electrified dermal web. The tingling reached his perineum and engulfed his organ. Cono felt the redistribution of blood with every heartbeat. He heard a snicker from the man to his right.
“Shut up!” Zheng barked.
Cono lifted his head and looked down at the rising spectacle. “Oh, Mr. Zheng, you are such a good lover.” Cono pursed his lips in a kiss. Zheng was shocked equally by the sound of his own name and the response of Cono’s body.
“Shut up, you pervert!” Zheng whacked the pistol against Cono’s temple.
“Let me strap you down naked like this,” Cono said. “Then you’ll see what a pervert I am.”
Zheng gave sharp looks to his henchmen and smashed the gun two more times.
The bars of light above Cono were multiplied in his vision. As he tried to focus and see only one of everything, he was relieved to observe that he was in an old building, with ceilings high enough that the flicker of the lights above didn’t disrupt his brain. He was lucky—unless Zheng was holding that tool in reserve. Cono wondered in half-confusion if Zheng’s intelligence apparatus could have somehow found its way to the medical lab in Palo Alto that housed the details of his performance anomalies. Performance anomalies. Cono laughed to himself at the term, at his erectness, at the years of absurdities that had delivered him, naked, precisely to this uncomfortable old desk.
“My dear Mr. Zheng,” Cono said as blood leaked down from his temple into his ear. “Can I call you Lu Peng? You tell me to shut up, but I understood that you wanted me to talk. Are you a … a confused man?” Cono darted his eyes at the two other men, his neck muscles cramping as he kept his head raised. “Everyone knows torturers are after sexual pleasure, Lu Peng. I’m sure you have an erection right now. A big one. Please, show it to me, Lu Peng.”
Cono heard Zheng’s exhalation and saw the sweep of the gun coming in micro steps toward his face. He relaxed his neck muscles and the gun missed his head, continuing into midair. Zheng lost his balance and landed across Cono’s bare chest. Zheng flailed with the gun, trying to find its mark, at the same time struggling to regain his footing. The assistant on the left tried to help his boss to his feet.
“Don’t touch me!” Zheng shrieked as he shook off the henchman and stood upright, waving the gun in the air. Cono registered the micro-expressions of embarrassment flashing across Zheng’s face. Cono’s eyes also caught the minute creases of shame and doubt on the faces of the two assistants.
The ash and the burned skin from Cono’s nipple had left a smudge on Zheng’s white shirt, which all but Zheng could see.
Zheng cocked his head and grunted and pointed to where the next blows were to be delivered. He did not direct the blows at Cono’s genitals, and all four of them knew why. Through his taunting, Cono had saved his most cherished parts.
The blows with the heavy hoses were mild at first, tempered by the ambivalence of the two underlings, but Zheng sensed their reticence and pointed the Makarov at each of them to reignite their vigor.
In intervals of consciousness Cono heard Zheng demanding to know who he worked for, who his CIA runner was, was he stringing for the Russians, what did he have to do with HEU and Project Sapphire, was he working with the Muslim separatists in Xinjiang, who was paying him. In his anger, Zheng sprinkled his interrogation with threats that anyone he dealt with in Almaty would have to know the punishment for noncooperation—a message that the naked mongrel would carry back, if he was allowed to survive at all. Cono responded intermittently, mechanically, by saying, “Yes, my dear Lu Peng, please suck it.”
Zheng pretended to ignore Cono’s refrains. “You’ve got no country, no one to save you. You are from nowhere,” he seethed. “You are a roach soon to be squashed.”
More blows to Cono’s dangling head sent him into a nether land tha
t made Zheng’s voice seem distant and garbled. In his mind, Cono saw Timur at his side in the car, giving a thumbs-up. And Xiao Li’s face with her bright-red lips hovering over him for a kiss and retreating as she laughed and started to sing for him. But the song was lost amid the ringing in his ears.
The swinging of the arms of the able assistants stopped with a grunt from Zheng. Cono felt his body swelling like a balloon that would soon burst. He managed to spit out most of the blood.
“Who are you working for?” Zheng began his rant again. “Why the uranium searches? Who are your jihadi contacts? Who is your American handler? You’re an American stooge, aren’t you? Trying to grab what isn’t yours, what is the natural right of the glorious People’s Republic, the kingdom of five thousand years!”
Cono lifted his head, and with his eyes still closed, began to sing in Mandarin.
Let us pull the oars together
The little boats cut through the waves
As the lake reflects the passing clouds …
“Enough!” Zheng slapped Cono’s face. Cono knew that all three of his tormenters would know the anthem by heart from their childhood years. They had sung it daily to belong to the elite future of their country, wearing around their necks the red ties of the Communist Party Youth Brigade, which had formed their beings and all that they would be and would ever believe, even as communism became a ghost and the party a web of corruption.
Our red ties are shining in the sun
The fish are watching us from below …
Zheng snatched a bludgeon from one of his assistants and pummeled Cono’s head, but Cono kept on singing.
I ask you, my comrades,
Who gives us the happy life?
Performance Anomalies Page 13
