“If Allah takes you, your family will be compensated,” said the woman, raising her head, the dark slots of her eyes flashing at both of them. “You should be proud to be following the path of our fallen brothers.”
The lanky young man jumped to his feet. “Men don’t follow women. Especially one who treats us like sheep. My family has suffered. What will they get? Where is the uranium going? Do you know how much it is worth, Tamaris?”
Tamaris picked up a rifle magazine. He already knows too much, she thought. “We have all suffered.” She slammed the magazine into its catch. “You know they tortured my brother to death. My brother who brought me under Allah’s beneficent hand. We do this for our fallen brothers and sisters, and for the return of this land to Allah’s law. Not for things you buy in the market.”
The watchful cow swung her head low in search of more hay, nudging against the fresh mound that the lanky man had sat on. Her head retreated with the swat of his hand.
“Almaz, Azmat, you are brave men. Warriors chosen by Allah, bless his name. He will guide us.” With a solemn voice Tamaris led the three of them in prayer. Almaz, the lanky one, cut it short. He sucked on another cigarette and blew the smoke toward the imperturbable eyes of the cow. “Why has the timetable been moved up?”
Tamaris glared at the two young men. “You know about the work of our brothers in Tashkent—the bombings last week. And the uprising in Osh. What you don’t know is that eight of ours, three men and five of their wives, were taken in Taraz, before they could serve as Allah’s sword here in the city.” Tamaris stared at Almaz. “It was the wives who were wearing belts of explosives when they were caught, not the men. Women who have children, like me. Have you worn a belt? Do you have children who will be left behind, Almaz? Do you, Azmat?” She slashed each of them with her gaze. “And now there is worry about a crackdown on our group. They have eyes everywhere. We may not have another chance. Speed is our ally.”
The serene cow emitted gas in a small explosion that startled all of them.
“Azmat, check your gun and the grenades—we may need them. But don’t be too eager to use them. Almaz, your gun looks like you bury it in the dirt. And your skullcap will be a liability in the morning. You will be known as Omar on our mission. Azmat, you shall be Mansour. I will be known as Nargiz.” She snapped a few more commands and then her voice became softer. “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate, let us pray for our fallen brothers and sisters.”
Cono lifted cold chicken chunks and cashews to his mouth with chopsticks, hungrily surveying the take-out dishes Katerina had left for him. They were arrayed on the bare floor of the one-room apartment: glass noodles, Sichuan beef, broccoli in oyster sauce, almond jelly, the chicken and cashews, and three American-style fortune cookies. Between bites he reached into the little pile of his vest on the floor and pulled out a bubble pack of antibiotics. He swallowed two pills. The bullet nick on his shoulder was beginning to fester. The cuts on his face would probably be next, even though he had washed them well. No matter what position he assumed, he was in pain. The curative powers of sex were formidable, he knew, even better than meditation, but they had had little effect this night.
Katerina had left him there in the warm rain. Whatever else she had said as she stepped out of the tub and vanished was overshadowed by the words that kept repeating themselves. We don’t need you.
Cono placed a nest of noodles in his mouth, thinking that in fact, no one really needed him. Intermittently there were emergencies—panicked requests for his talents that brought him into an amusing tumble, into a game that was fun to play. Maybe he was just another Bulat, with his puzzle-solving fascination. A lesser kind of Bulat, without a clan, without an anchor, whipped by the seas. Yet Cono loved those seas of uncertainty—and his freedom as he rode upon them.
And this mission had been for someone who needed him. With some luck, Xiao Li would be in China, in Xinjiang, by now. Maybe there was a son there after all, but a son by someone other than Cono. A child wouldn’t keep her in China; Xiao Li would be eager to get back to Almaty as soon as she guessed the heat was off. She had her career here, and despite her flashes of tenderness and romanticism, she would not be able to sustain the patience required by parenthood.
Cono devoured the broccoli. While he chewed it he fiddled with the red paper that had wrapped the chopsticks. He read the small print at the end of the wrapper: “Please try your Nice Chinese Food with Chopsticks, traditional and typical of Chinese Glorious History and Culture.” It made him think of Bulat and his worries about the Kitais, but then Cono’s mind turned to the uranium, imagining what would play out at the quarry, if indeed that was where Timur held his radioactive treasure, as well as the oil companies’ cash that he’d been squirreling away.
If Katerina chose to surprise Timur at the quarry with a gang from the American embassy, there was a high risk they would botch it. It was likely that the only operatives on the payroll who could speak Russian or Kazak well enough to confront the jihadis with a language other than guns were Katerina and her stringers. He doubted that she would sacrifice herself or her loyal network to such a visible mess.
It was more likely that Katerina would tip her hand to Minister Kurgat, whose monitoring of jihadis had probably provided the details on when the transfer was to take place. And yet this meant that Kurgat, too, was relying on Katerina and her band to track Timur, and that he didn’t have sufficient reach to trail Timur through his own means. Maybe Kurgat’s power was already diminishing, or perhaps Katerina had persuaded him that she could get the job done. If Katerina served up the high-U for Kurgat, what would he do with it? Hand it over to his rival, the premier? Or destroy it—destroy a bargaining chip that he could use against the premier and his other rival, Timur, whom he was trying so earnestly to exterminate? No, Kurgat would employ the precious high-U for his own purposes, and cut his own deal with the next wave of jihadis, or keep it in the bank for the future, as Timur seemed to have done.
And what if Timur brought his own toads to the quarry? Which of them would stand by him? The young and inept recruits to the Bureau? Timur, Cono knew, was a lone and hungry wolf who could trust no one. The new Genghis, but lacking the hordes. The perfect tool for Zheng and Beijing. No, Cono thought, Timur would arrive at the quarry without his thugs, none of whom had even been trusted to see his palace.
In each scenario Cono would be a highly unwelcome presence.
He finished off the food. Only the fortune cookies remained. He sat up and removed them from their plastic wrappers. Then, with difficulty, he began to juggle them. One by one they were caught by his mouth and were crunched and eaten, slips of paper and all. Cono didn’t believe in fortunes.
The quarry. Anyone who intruded in search of the HEU without Timur’s consent would trigger the explosives he had wired, if Timur’s talk hadn’t been just a ruse. If Timur had rigged the explosives only above ground, inside the building, and the high-U was below, in the tunnels, the consequences would be mild. But if the HEU was topside, or if it was below and the tunnels had also been rigged, the explosions would send up a radioactive cloud. The cloud would be hemmed in by the sparkling high mountains, just as the industrial smog of the city was barricaded by those peaks. The plume would rise and drift a little east or a little west, but mostly north, floating over the heart of the city until the radioactive specks lost their buoyancy and settled onto the flourishing trees, onto streets and houses and flaking apartments and shops and government buildings and schools and mosques and parks and casinos, and even onto the love nest above the General.
The radiation would not kill anyone for a long time, but the chaos would, in the trampling panic of an evacuating city. A city that thereafter would have only trees and rats and insects as inhabitants.
The quarry, the metal building there, the tunnels—they were Timur’s palace. He would have rigged it all. Cono replayed in his mind the tones he had heard when Timur punched in numbers on the touch
pad, activating the protection on the shed. Each of the six sounds was actually a unique double-tone. The oscillations of the tones played like vibrating colors in Cono’s mind. He replayed them again and knew he could call them up if he went to the quarry in the morning. He could only hope that Timur had encoded the same numbers for each access point. Timur managed well despite his vodka slurping, but given the risks, he probably played it safe and had only one series of numbers to remember.
And what would his old friend do if he was caught there, outside the quarry, and was forced at gunpoint to stand aside as whatever group Katerina had favored battered down the gate? Timur would calculate, and walk a safe distance from the impending explosions. He would stroll away as the intruders blew themselves up and sent the deadly cloud into the air. Almaty was but a small patch of a vast land that would be his. The oil fields, the chief prize, were a thousand miles away and would be untainted. His Bureau network of minions was more reliable out there anyway, and in the provinces generally. A dead Almaty and emergency martial law would only strengthen Timur’s hand. He could even use the obliteration of the infidel city to further curry favor with the jihadis, saying it was his own humble act for Allah, that he had proved his credentials as a brave warrior for the caliphate.
Of course, maybe Timur hadn’t put the high-U in the quarry tunnels at all. In that case, if Cono went in the morning, there was no worry of a dirty explosion. He would merely have a jolly time hoping he didn’t blow himself up while he searched for absent high-U. If he survived, and there was no HEU, he would lick his many wounds, hope that Katerina’s plans for freedom had worked out, and finally leave Almaty. He would leave and go to … the choices were endless.
Cono rose to his feet, hobbled to the kitchen, and dropped the remains of his meal into a plastic bin. There was a large wooden cutting block on the countertop next to the sink. It was deeply scored and indented in the middle, where a small cash register receipt was lying. Cono picked it up. On one side in faint blue Cyrillic print it said, “Golden Dragon Restaurant.” Cono turned it over. Written in the same careful cursive lettering that had been on the note left beneath Dimira’s door, it said, “We are always getting wet together.”
Cono smiled and tore it into small pieces, which he poked into the trash bin. Katerina was as much an enigma to him as he was to her.
He found a folded blanket in a corner of the otherwise bare room and spread it out on the wooden floor. He slowly dressed himself, knowing that after a brief sleep, the simple motions of putting on clothes in the morning would be a prolonged agony. He switched off the light and reached in the dark for the miniature alarm clock in his vest. It lit up and he set it for 4 a.m. Without the alarm, there was a danger that his brain and body would bundle him in rehabilitating sleep until it was too late. In these circumstances sleep could take him down for twenty hours at a stretch, but this was not the night for it. He was going to the quarry in the morning, in time to beat the parade, he hoped. All his reasoning and second-guessing about whether to go there were buried, just as he would be buried by sleep. He was going to the quarry because his naked impulses said so, and because for his entire rootless and unmolded life he had always relied upon those impulses.
Slumber pulled him down as soon as he put the clock on the floor next to his ear, and the dreams crept in as his muscles relaxed and his breathing became slow and deep.
The crumpled old woman beckons strollers on the sidewalk. For a little money they can weigh themselves on her scale. Xiao Li takes her hand out of Cono’s and puts money into the woman’s palm, then steps out of her high heels and onto the scale. Barefoot Xiao Li chatters with the woman, laughs with her, thanks her, and skips away like a gazelle.
She is halted by the sound of a violin, by the sight of a long-haired man with no legs. His straight torso stands on the concrete, a violin beneath his chin. Pant legs are curled up like jelly rolls. The stroking of the bow. The troubled eyes of Xiao Li. The mournful melody. Xiao Li sits down next to the legless man. Cono sits at her side. People ignore the scrap of paper folded into a cup to receive coins. Xiao Li sings, without words, matching the mournful cries of the rosined horsehair on the wire strings. Feet shuffle by. Cono is lifted. Lifted by the vibration of the strings, by the gliding voice of Xiao Li. The strings are singing their top notes and Xiao Li’s voice rises and soars; Cono is flying on wings whose feathers are buffeted by every lifting puff. The sounds are pushing him aloft higher and higher.
The rising becomes sinking. Xiao Li’s voice is hovering in an extended cry that matches the last union of strings, rosin, hair. The bow is taking a long, vibrating ride across the low string. Cono feels the struggling of the wings as he is pulled down and down. He lands. The wings fold themselves. His eyes veer toward the rolled pant legs. There are tears on Xiao Li’s cheeks, tears of joy or tears of tenderness or tears of pain. The legless man puts his violin aside. He leans to kiss Xiao Li on the cheek, and he is smiling, as if in love.
12
The scream of the alarm clock sent Cono’s body jack-knifing into the air. Then the searing pain across his abdominal muscles and chest forced him to fall to his side in a fetal ball, shaking, struggling against the feeling that his body wouldn’t work, that he couldn’t possibly even stand up. He tried to make out something, anything, in the darkness, but his eyes closed in failure. He felt himself surrendering again, to the sweetness of Xiao Li’s face, to the gliding lift of tones from the vibrating wire strings of his dream. Wire. The cutting wire. The blood. The hairy legs.
Cono groped for the alarm and put it against his face. The fumbling pressure of his fingers made it light up. At last there was something his eyes could register, but the numbers were blurred. He willed himself to bring them into focus, but the numbers kept dancing.
A sound from outdoors penetrated Cono’s brain and gave him something to latch onto. It was a bird, with a song that was part whistle and part coo. He picked up the alarm again and smacked its sharp edge against the split swellings on his brow, trying to drag himself to consciousness. He pounded a fist on the wound in his shoulder and finally winced. He pounded it again, fighting the tide, swimming as hard as he could. The birdsong came again. Cono listened, then tried to imitate it. He found he couldn’t purse his damaged lips, but he could mimic the whistle by forcing air through the gap between his tongue and front teeth. He made a coo come from a deeper place, far down his throat. Whistle and coo, whistle and coo. The vibrations of the newfound sound traveled through him, coaxing him away from sleep.
He was almost fully awake now, vaguely amused that he had been resuscitated by a lonely bird seeking a mate in the predawn hours.
He put the clock to his face again, and the numbers were now legible, but he was still struggling to reconstruct what must happen this day, a day that he knew would be plagued by the shortness of his sleep and by his battered body, which in its healing promised only more pain. A dread crept in, a fear that his mind would be crippled by the paucity of rest. He regretted not having gone straight to the quarry the night before to get it all over and done with, but given his physical state, no, he couldn’t have managed it.
Cono started to crawl, taking account of the compromises demanded by each of his damaged muscles. He crawled until he found a window that might help him rise to his feet. His fingers grasped the sill, and the tension in his arms allowed him to pull one leg up under himself, then the other, until he was crouching. He pressed and pushed, again and again, and gradually made it to his feet.
He aimed his body toward where he remembered the kitchen was, and made it there, wavering with every step. He searched for a light switch, but decided it was too risky.
The jolts of pain seemed to diminish with each movement. He found the faucet in the little kitchen and slurped from it. He splashed water on his face; it stung at first, but then that sensation also disappeared. He felt his way out of the kitchen and traced the walls until he got to the apartment’s locked door. He realized he that didn’t ha
ve the keys, which he’d left in the bathroom before he slept. Surely Katerina would have taken them, and if so, was he locked in? He tested the two bolts; the locks released.
In the stairwell there was dim light from below. He saw no other way out of the building. He wondered whether Bulat, or “Slem,” or one of Katerina’s other stringers was watching for him, but he had no choice other than to go out the way he came in. Why was he worried about being trailed by one of Katerina’s men, anyway? She and Bulat had rescued him from Zheng and his thugs. The thought of Zheng was like electricity in his brain. The past day’s events and the layout of what he had to do at the quarry came back sharply, but then started to blur. Concentration, he needed concentration. I should have meditated before falling asleep.
Cono steadied himself with the loose railing, walked down to the ground floor, cracked open the door, and crawled out on all fours, taking care to let the door close softly. He continued his crawling for a full block along the row of small shops, surprising three rats in a garbage pile along the way. He stood up only after he’d crawled, just like a rat, he thought, to the next street corner. This time it was easier to get to his feet.
Cono dodged through the shadows. The streets were empty; there was little chance that a taxi was going to appear. But even at this hour there would be drivers at the Cactus, waiting for the last straggling men and women, hunters and hunted, trying to transact their business.
There was only one car on the curved driveway leading back around the Hotel Ratar to the Cactus, and it was parked just where Timur and his thugs had taken Xiao Li hostage. A stubby Russian man was sitting on the trunk of the car, smoking, waiting for passengers. Cono hustled against the pain in his thighs to get to him before an approaching couple could. He was lucky—they stopped to negotiate a price as the woman fondled the man’s zipper.
Performance Anomalies Page 16
