Performance Anomalies (19 page)

“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 that 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?

The little boats are floating …

Zheng struck again several times, but he was flustered, and his blows were ineffectual; he had always relied on his underlings for this. He thrust the hose back into the hand of his puzzled henchman. “Finish him off. He’s worthless. Show these Kazak apes who is glorious.”

The two assistants shifted their footing. Cono sensed their hesitancy and sang again.

I ask you, my comrades,

Who gives us the happy life?

The little boats are floating …

“I said finish him!”

The punishers glanced at each other, both of them disturbed by the prisoner’s knowledge of the lyrics that had underpinned their careers and their devotion and their sacrifices to a crumbling ideal. By the look and sound of him, he had to be part Chinese, but …

“Kill him!”

As the two stood frozen, Zheng reached for the Makarov he had placed on a nearby shelf. He pointed it at the man on the other side of Cono’s battered body, and then at Cono’s head.

I ask you, my comrades …

The crackle of breaking glass behind Cono reached his ears well before the sharp pieces spread in dazzling sparkles above his face, accompanied by an arcing airborne brick that rotated just slowly enough for the imprint of the manufacturer to be seen and registered by Cono’s brain: “Xinjiang Export Factory Number 2.” The brick landed on his left foot and bounced to the floor just as the security alarm of the Far East Merchants Bank began to screech and wail.

Cono was hunched over and staggering at the top of the grand exterior steps that led to the bank’s massive front doors. Majestic stone columns rose on each side of him, dancing in the rotating blue lights of the three police cars that had driven over the curb and were now pointed toward the pillared entrance of the bank, like fish aimed into the mouth of a shark.

Cono’s shirt was only partly buttoned over his vest, his uncinched pants were loose and drooping from his hips, and he was shivering as he tried to fasten his belt. Turning, he half-expected to see Zheng and his men leering at him from behind, but he was alone, like a sole pilgrim who had climbed arduous stairs to a remote temple at night. He knelt down to pull his shoes toward him and nearly collapsed; bolts of pain shot from his forehead to his shins.

The screaming of the bank’s alarm nearly drowned out the commands being barked at him from below. Cono squinted and counted half a dozen Kazak policemen moving cautiously up the marble steps, guns trained on him. Their red-rimmed blue hats, wide as platters, appeared like strange low-flying birds hovering over the men’s heads in the strobing light from the police cars.

Slowly, Cono raised his hands over his head, inhaling sharply as new channels of pain coursed through his neck and shoulders and down his arms.

“Don’t move! Don’t move!” the officer nearest him shouted in Russian.

“Kind sir,” Cono spat and choked, “I am yours for the taking.” Then he slumped forward onto the cold, smooth marble.