He pressed his hands against the earth to lift himself up. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard another voice.
Dimira must have heard it too. She looked up, immediately grasping the pistol with which she had shot Zheng. As a head appeared above them on the crest of the granite block, she took aim.
“No!” Cono shouted. “It’s a friend.”
“Come over to the rope!” Bulat called out. “I’ll pull you up. Come around to the other side.”
With Dimira’s help, Cono struggled to his feet. She was still shaking, but had been far enough away from the explosion that she had only been smattered with grit and blood. Together they walked along the ledge toward the hole that had been Zheng. Pieces of flesh and silver fabric adhered to the ground around the depression.
“Don’t look at the mess,” Cono told Dimira as they stepped around the debris. “Don’t look or it will be with you forever.” But Cono kept his own eyes open. Xiao Li’s left lower leg was lying against the granite face, with Asel’s sneaker still snug on the foot.
You have my shoe? Cono grimaced at the sound of Xiao Li’s words in his head.
He bent down and pulled the pink sneaker off her foot. Near it Cono saw a small piece of paper lying in the dirt. He picked it up. It was a torn black-and-white photo, somewhat fuzzy, of a man and woman kneeling, with placards hanging from their necks. Cono turned it over. The writing was in classical Chinese calligraphy: “Always in the service of your memory. Your devoted son, Lu Peng.” Cono read again the words “Your devoted son.” He looked over at the indentation in the ground left by the explosion, thinking he would tear up the photo and throw it to the breeze, but he couldn’t. Cono read the message another time, folded the picture and slid it into one of the pockets of his vest.
His eyes returned to the face of rock before him, a collage in blood and body tissue. “Don’t look, Dimira,” he repeated. “Instead, look up to the bright blueness of the sky. And when we get to the top, look to the clean white snow of the mountain peaks.”
17
“Hurry up!” Bulat said from above. “With all this noise we won’t be alone for long.”
Cono looped the rope around Dimira’s waist and thighs and knotted it. “Dimira first. Then both of you can pull me up.”
Dimira braced her feet against the rock and rose quickly. Cono heard Bulat’s grunts and Dimira soon disappeared as she approached the top.
The rope came down again. Cono wedged the sneaker into his vest and rose in fits and starts. He looked over his shoulder at the broad quarry crater, infested by the praying mantis machines, all quiet, the heat of the sun creating liquid mirages over the cones of ground-up rock. The tops of some of the cones sparkled in the sunlight—reflections from bits of digested canister metal and the chopped-up innards of the high-U itself, which in a few more days would be glazed by oxidation and made dull like the rest of the quarry’s contents. He looked at the building that held the two dead jihadis and the other near death. And lying on top of Muktar’s sister was Timur. Cono imagined him still breathing in his palace. I should have made sure it was his end. Cono fingered the knot in the rope, thinking to drop back down and run along the ledge, back through the broken door, behind the cylinders, to take the knife out of Tamaris’s brain and slide it into Timur’s.
“You are much heavier than you look.” Bulat was panting as Cono reached the gradual slope where he was able to partly support himself. The rope was digging into Bulat’s waist and Dimira was tugging from behind. “I am sorry about the girl, your brave woman,” Bulat said. “Your friend here says she saved you both.”
“Yes.” Cono refused to think more about Xiao Li. “Dimira is not safe here anymore. And you, Bulat, you don’t have much time to go down, load up the money, and get away. You have your own fight to prepare for.” Cono scrabbled up to the plateau of the bald rock, then looked down to survey the edges of the quarry, the building, and the road leading up to it. “Dimira, do you have a friend who has keys to your apartment, who can remove the things you can’t lose, just in case?” Dimira nodded yes. “Bulat, the phone on me is dead. Let her call on the other one.”
Dimira’s voice on the phone was shaky at first, but she composed herself. She asked her friend first to take all the photos from the wall, and Asel’s paintings; then an envelope of money and a passport and her teaching certificates from beneath the carpet in the corner near her bed. Finally, she asked for some of Asel’s clothes. “Yes,” she said, “I have my identity card. Yes, that’s all. Thank you.”
Dimira handed the phone back to Cono. “You’re not safe here either,” she said. “There are trails, up into the mountains. Kyrgyzstan. There’s no border—just the mountains. It’s still warm enough up there, barely. Then down to the road at Lake Issyk-Kul. All in three days, maybe. We should leave now.”
Bulat’s face creased as he looked at Dimira, Cono, and again at Dimira. “He will need a big rest when you’re up in the Tian Shan,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll have to think for him.”
Dimira grabbed Cono’s arm. “No time, Cono,” she said. The words echoed in his mind, but with the voice of Xiao Li: No time, Cono.
“She is correct.” Bulat was looking at his watch. “No time.”
Dimira and Cono were a hundred yards up the rise, winding between spiny scrub and outcroppings of stone untouched by the hand of man when Bulat yelled, “Miss Dimira, remember—we will need you back in Kazakhstan!”
18
The air of the thinning atmosphere was cooler, but the sun was hot on their necks when Dimira and Cono spoke for the first time.
“Did they hurt you?”
Dimira, marching ahead, stopped without turning around.
“No.” She seemed about to say more, but instead resumed the climb.
The rhythm of their inhalations and exhalations formed a soothing patterned overlay that calmed Cono’s mind. Breathe in, step, breathe out, step, breathe in. The alternating sound and tension in his legs were the only things keeping Cono from collapsing on the mountainside.
He knew they would be chased eventually, and he worried about the coming pursuit, but the carnage they had left below had given them some lead time, and besides, the steepness of the terrain made a faster ascent impossible. They marched under the cover of sparse pines when they could, but Cono scanned the sky, thinking that they were too exposed.
After several hours they reached a ridgeline and stopped to rest. Below them, spanning a canyon, was a dam made of dirt and concrete. Half a mile wide, it had been built in Soviet times to hold back the floods and colossal mudslides that the mountains sometimes unleashed on the city. Beyond the dam was the hazy, tilted sprawl of Almaty, its quilt-work of low buildings and trees tinged with the colors of autumn. The city frayed at its edges into the grayness of the empty, flat expanse that blended with the far reaches of the sky. The horizon was a blur.
Cono had to keep moving. Dimira sensed his weariness, but they both knew that stopping to rest would be unsafe, so they turned to face the mountain peaks again. After another hour they reached the base of a steep rise; far to the right was a depression filled with trees that merged with a dense, narrow forest trailing up a ravine like a green highway leading to the next shelf of the mountain.
Dimira saw Cono’s gaze turning toward the spruce and pine trees. “In case there are helicopters,” she said.
“Yes.”
The blanket of needles beneath the pines crunched softly underfoot as they made their way through the trees, which shrouded a fast-running stream. When they came to the stream, they knelt. Before they drank, Cono dipped a finger into the water and flicked drops up into the air. “To the skies.” He dipped and flicked again, this time sending drops to his side. “To the winds.” He wet his finger again and let the drops fall to the ground. “To the earth and sea.” He dipped his finger a final time and placed a drop on Dimira’s forehead, then one on his own. “And to their child, Xiao Li.”
They cupped their hands
and drank from the stream. Dimira turned her head away when she saw the rubber toe of Asel’s sneaker protruding from a pouch in Cono’s vest. Cono realized what she had seen and handed her the shoe.
They sat cross-legged in silence for several minutes.
“I should ask you now, and get it out of the way,” Cono said. “What happened after I left your apartment? How did they get you and Xiao Li?”
“Xiao Li …” Dimira choked as she said the name. “… was getting ready to leave. She told me what they had done to her, chained up for two days. She was tired. She was sad that you were gone.” Dimira lowered her eyes.
Cono said nothing. The word “sad” floated in the still air.
“Go on, please.”
“You’d only been gone a few minutes. There was a knock at the door. The man said that Mr. Cono had sent him to help us. Xiao Li didn’t want to open the door, but the man kept saying he was sent by you to make us safe, and that there wasn’t much time.” Dimira splashed water on her face. “Cono, I was the one who unlocked the door.”
Cono put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
“Two men broke the door down,” she said. “I hadn’t opened the last lock. I didn’t think … I didn’t know … I …”
“They would have broken down the door anyway.”
“Xiao Li fought so hard. She yelled at them. She screamed that I was a good Kazak mother with a little daughter and not to hurt me.” Dimira was sobbing now.
“I know it’s hard,” Cono said. “But I must know. Because I am to blame.”
“They took us to some sort of warehouse. We had tape all around us, on our mouths, too. It was hard to breathe. They left us there all day and all night. All we could do was twist our fingers together, and look at each other, until the lights went out.”
“And this morning?”
“They put us into a car.” Dimira paused, trying to calm herself. “There were three Kitai men—the ones who brought us to the quarry. The ones who are dead now. The boss man kept laughing. It was a scary laugh.”
“Did you see a white woman—a Ukrainian? You must have.”
“There was a woman, a beautiful, tall, nervous woman.” Dimira’s breathing was steadier now. “We were in the car, driving up from the city. It stopped in back of Hotel Khan and she got in. She sat right next to me. The Kitai boss told her not to talk. She was sweating. When we stopped above the quarry, we all got out. She talked on a telephone, but I was too far away to hear. When they started putting the ropes on our necks, she shouted at the boss. She said it wasn’t the plan. She told him to take off the ropes. He laughed at her. She said she wouldn’t be part of it and walked away, back down the road we had come on. She was cursing at him in Russian and English with the crudest words. She said, ‘You don’t know what kind of man you are fucking with.’ The boss man kept laughing. A gun went off. I thought they were shooting at us. Then I thought they were shooting at her. But the man with the rifle—he was pointing it down toward the quarry.”
“He was sending me an invitation to come out of the building.” Cono put his hand on Dimira’s shoulder again and looked into her eyes. “You have suffered because of me. And your road will be rough, because of me. I am sorry.”
Dimira’s hollowed brown eyes filled with tears again. “Xiao Li … she was so strong. I think …” Dimira swallowed. “I think if I hadn’t shot the gun …”
“No!” Cono shook her. “He was going to kill us all. You had no choice. Look at me. You had no choice.”
A distant whomping halted their conversation. The sound grew louder and was joined by two harsh, continuous whistles. Dimira scrambled beneath a thick juniper tree, with Cono on her heels. They huddled against the trunk and looked up. Two military-green helicopters passed over them, so low that the prop wash shook all the trees around them. Cono motioned for Dimira to give him the pistol that had been glued to her hand during the climb.
“Just in case,” he yelled over the deafening noise.
The whistles of the engines shifted to a lower tone as the copters rose up the mountainside. Only a few minutes passed before the popping of blades against the air again destroyed the trickling sound of the nearby stream. The copters were higher this time, and their noise receded quickly as they veered down the mountain.
The search seemed half-hearted. Maybe Zheng’s embassy had pressured a reluctant Kazak military to find the murderers of their diplomatic personnel. Cono imagined Bulat saying: “We are most fortunate that Beijing does not have its own helicopters in my city. Yet.”
Or maybe the Bureau had localized the cell phone calls made from the quarry and found their leader’s corpse on top of a dead woman, and then followed up with a perfunctory reconnaissance.
Or perhaps Katerina had fled back to the Americans and claimed credit for the foiling of the jihadis and the destruction of the high-U, which duly provoked the Americans to pressure the Kazak military to make a sweep for any jihadis who might have escaped.
Cono wondered what options Katerina had left. She probably had another card yet to be played, a new role, perhaps with the Russians. Such a superb actor. For all her worries about her family back home in Ukraine, she could have left the drama behind long ago. But she liked the stage. “Addicted,” she had written. Cono tried to hate her, to form feelings of what people called revenge, but they didn’t come. The only time he’d had a fully formed thought of revenge was when he’d wanted to kill his father. But he never got the chance.
“They’ve been gone awhile,” Dimira said. “I don’t think they’re coming back. We can go on.”
Sitting out the copters’ search had opened the floodgates of Cono’s fatigue, and Dimira’s words seemed dreamlike.
“Dimira, I need to rest.” He saw her worried eyes only hazily. “It will be cold. We’ll make the leaves into a pile.” Cono was having trouble even forming words.
They crawled away from the juniper to a stand of ash and pushed the crackling leaves into a mound. Although it was still daylight, they were already in the shadow of the mountain spur. They crawled into the pile, sweeping more leaves over themselves. They lay with their arms wrapped around each other. Dimira winced at a pain in her chest; she guessed she had broken a rib in the fall at the quarry, but she’d said nothing to Cono about it. She moved slightly, to a more comfortable position, with Cono’s face next to hers. She kissed Cono’s lips, but he had already passed into a sleep that not even dreams could enter.
19
Cono slept until the morning sun had breached the spine of the mountains to the east. From the angle of the light filtering through the branches above him, he guessed he’d been out for fourteen hours.
“Your friend Bulat was right. You needed sleep.” Dimira was washing mushrooms and wolfberries and wild walnuts in the stream and placing them on a slab of slate.
“Yes, he was right about many things.” Cono picked a piece of leaf from his eyelid and observed Dimira. “Looks like you know the fruits of the forest.”
“This is the way I lived with my baby, for almost a year, before I found work.”
“I also lived like this, in the wild, for a long time when I was little,” Cono said. “I miss it. I miss being wild.”
They ate, washed their faces and moved on, up the mountain. There was much ground to cover on this day.
The climb was painful for Cono at first, but gradually the pumping of his legs became pleasurable and made him want to climb faster. Dimira, too, seemed rejuvenated, only occasionally pressing her hand against her ribs and suggesting a stop to admire the view and catch their breath. They followed the ascending avenue of trees hugging the stream until it met a cascade falling over a cliff. Bathed by the spray, they pulled themselves up, searching for grips and footholds that could bear their weight.
At the top of the cliff an immense bowl of meadow spread before them, and the whiteness of the far peaks flashed in the sunlight. Two startled marmots raced away, their fur rippling with gold and amber. Dimira and
Cono walked quickly across the meadow, accelerating their pace with each step. When Dimira broke into a halting run, her arms outstretched as if she wanted to hug the entire landscape, Cono ran after her.
They stopped to drink from one of the strands of a stream weaving through the far side of the meadow, and splashed the cold water at each other until they were shivering.
The trail rising out of the meadow became steep. The thinner air begged more of their lungs. The larch and pine and fir became sparse and eventually disappeared. In a few more hours they reached the pass that would carry them over the snow-topped Zailiysky Alatau range and send them down toward the valley of Chong-Kemin, one more mountain range away from Lake Issyk-Kul. They were nearly in Kyrgyzstan now, but any notion of boundaries here, with summits in every direction, was absurd.
Once they were over the pass, the trail downward became a steep path of scree that shifted beneath their feet. In the air in front of them a long-legged buzzard glided slowly from one current to another.
“Cono, I think Xiao Li loved you.” Dimira was walking in the lead, so Cono barely heard what she’d said.
“We had much in common,” he replied. “And I admired her. I respected her.”
“What do you have in common? She was Chinese. You are … something else.”
“She grew up without rules. She had to make her own rules, mold her own life, carve her own dignity, out of nothing.”
“Like you?”
“Like me. But she was better.”
“She told me she had a son in China. Your son.”
The scree beneath Cono’s feet gave way. He rode the sliding rocks as if he were surfing, nearly bumping Dimira as he passed her, coasting to a stop several yards down the slope.
Cono turned his head back toward Dimira. “Maybe the idea of a child kept her going, gave her something solid. Without that idea, she was all alone.”
Performance Anomalies Page 22
