Performance Anomalies (2 page)

With three phone calls Cono got the number for the Svezda and rang it. In slow and precise Russian, he told the receptionist that there was a bomb in the hotel, set to explode quite soon. “You have unwelcome guests,” he said. “I have given you time to open all the rooms and let them leave. Begin on the second floor, in the wing toward Karl Marx Street.” He hung up.

Cono gazed across the rooftops toward the waters of the Bosporus, thinking. At this distance the ships looked immobilized, but indeed they were moving, more than a hundred of them a day, in long, silent processions—either north to the Black Sea or south to the Mediterranean. Most were cargo ships that appeared to be enormous until they were dwarfed by the mammoth tankers squeezing through the twisting channel that was now a major conduit for the planet’s oil supply, carrying exports from the former Soviet republics to a world that demanded more and more. To the east, beyond the Bosporus and the Black Sea, beyond the Caucasus and the Caspian, were the deserts, the steppes, and then the mountains of Kazakhstan.

Cono turned away from the window and slung on his undervest, buttoned a shirt over it, and stuffed some toiletries into a small travel bag. After locking the apartment door and activating two alarms, he ran down the spiral staircase of centuries-old wood. He was tallish and muscular without being bulky, but he carried himself with the tensile swiftness of someone small and compact, like an acrobat or gymnast. If an observer stopped to think about it, he might be puzzled by the way such long limbs moved so quickly and efficiently. Watching Cono move was pleasing and yet slightly unsettling.

The cobblestone square around Galata Tower was bright with sunshine. A young man carrying a load of sesame-covered
simit
on his head recognized Cono and waved, as did the vegetable vendor next door. Cono smiled at both, nodded back, and instantly ducked. A soccer ball sailed over his shoulder and bounced against the wall behind him. Cono twirled and met it with his chest. He bounced the ball off his knees, keeping it in the air as he turned and faced the five boys and lone girl who were shouting at him. Cono caught the ball on the top of his foot and popped it up to his head, then let it dribble down his face, his chest, and the length of his right leg until it rested once again on his raised foot.

The ball wiggled on his suspended toe as the kids hollered and clapped. Cono glanced at the stone façade behind him, gauging its distance, then propelled the ball backward over his head. It rebounded off the wall and flew in a gentle arc straight into the arms of the laughing girl.

Cono sprinted across the square with the kids running after him, and the soccer ball hit him in the back of the head just as he dodged into a taxi. For several blocks the kids chased the cab, until they could no longer keep up, the sounds of their shouting and laughter quickly fading away.

Four minutes later, after several failed attempts, Cono reached Timur by phone.

“How is my spy-not-spy friend?” Timur asked.

“In a hurry. How’s my pimp?” Timur had taught him the word.

“Pimp is
much
bigger pimp now. Maybe a little thanks to you. Come to Almaty and you will see.”

“Good idea. I’ll be there in six hours.” Cono’s gaze was directed out the window, but it was the face of Xiao Li he was seeing. “In the meantime, some foreigners are being unpleasant to a friend of mine at the Hotel Svezda. Room 217. They need some company. Now.”

“My rich friend will need help at the airport.”

“Your friend has full pockets. Here’s the number to call. Tell them the lady they’re holding has a price. It’s almost as big as yours,” Cono said, reciting from memory the phone number Xiao Li had given him.

“I will make the call. You remember Gula? She still asks about you.”

“Lilia and Petra, too, don’t forget.”

“Okay, funny man. We’ll have a party. And good fuckeen. Which flight?”

“The one from Istanbul. And bring Muktar to the party.”

“Muktar ...” Timur’s voice trailed off. “I’ll tell you about him when I see you.”

The taxi sped along the coastal boulevard, around the thumb-shaped center of old Istanbul, the girding walls of Topkapi Palace on the right, the ship-studded flat blue of the Sea of Marmara on the left, stretching to the shores of Asia. Cono thought how strange it was that this seaside avenue, encircling the heart of the ancient capital, was named Kennedy. “He paid to get his name on it,” a taxi driver had told him. Sometimes it seemed to Cono that there was nothing in this world that wasn’t for sale.

He called Annika, the economics attaché at the Swedish consulate in Istanbul, his skydiving partner. They made their jumps from 10,000 feet or higher, with their feet bound to skyboards, which allowed them to ride the air as if it were one constant wave, a wave that permitted inversions and spirals and somersaults. They’d had a date set for weeks, after cajoling a Turkish air force pilot whose under-the-table tariff, Cono knew, was below market rates because it guaranteed the pilot a chance to again shine his charms on the lithe Swede. Annika and Cono were planning to jump from 12,000 and do their stunts to 4,000, when they would invert themselves, embrace, and kiss until the altimeters on their wrists vibrated with alarm.

Their landings were always followed by elongated lovemaking in a field beneath the parachutes.

“Halloah,” she said.

“Annika, I have to postpone.”

She didn’t respond.

“Annika, are you there?”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“I think you’re scared.”

“Of course I’m scared,” Cono said. “That’s the point. But it’s not the reason I have to postpone.”

“So who am I going to kiss upside down today?”

“It’s just a delay. We’ll fix it for another day.”

“A man with your reflexes should never be delayed, but it seems to happen all the time.”

“Annika.” Cono tried to clear his throat. He was worried that she would write him off altogether, because he had already cancelled or postponed so many outings with her, always with trepidation. “It’s important. An emergency.”

“Another one of your mysterious jobs?”

“No. It’s personal.”

The line was quiet for a few seconds, then Annika said tersely: “Just be sure to rip the cord in time and come back in one piece. I want us to jump from fourteen next time. Bring your oxygen—you’ll need it.”

She clicked off.

Cono took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He didn’t want to lose her. And it wasn’t just because of the jumping and the celebration under the parachutes. She was the only person he had ever been close to who had a normal life, and the only one with a normal life who had ever liked him and treated him, to his surprise, normally. He supposed it was normal for her to be mad.

The taxi veered between the construction pylons at Ataturk Airport and deposited Cono at the bustling curb. He bought his ticket, got a boarding pass, and again called the number Xiao Li had given him. No answer. Cono thought it was lucky that he’d gotten Xiao Li’s call when he was in Istanbul, rather than in one of his other roosts farther afield—Barcelona or Hong Kong or Rio. But the truth was, Almaty was far from anywhere, and the chances were small that he would be able to help at all. And yet he had never asked himself whether he should go to her. He hadn’t thought twice about it. He hadn’t even thought once.

Cono had thirty minutes before boarding. He took off his shoes in an empty corner of the departure hall next to an airbrushed portrait of Ataturk, closed his eyes, and started his daily ritual of tensed body postures and stretching. He guessed that Istanbul’s airport was the last one in Europe where something as innocent as exercising didn’t result in encirclement by an antiterrorist squad.

Memories of Xiao Li appeared and receded with the rhythms of his breath and movement. At first it was her singing that had captivated him, even more than her tantalizingly proportioned body or her face, which in one moment could be the Han version of Aphrodite, and in the next a distorted devil’s mask, depending on her mood. Xiao Li had been sitting on the low wall in front of the Arasan Baths, the massive multi-domed relic of Soviet times, selling the bundles of myrtle leaves with which the sauna customers would thrash themselves inside the labyrinth of superheated chambers. With no customers passing by, she was singing a Chinese pop song and Cono had joined in. She took it naturally and the two sang louder and louder, finally waving their arms in the air for the last exuberant refrain. Orchids leaped out of the summer dress that hung loosely from narrow straps on her shoulders.

Although she claimed she had a mother somewhere back in China, Xiao Li had grown up mostly without parents, as had Cono. Maybe that was part of their bond. Yes, it was. But they had never sulked about it—that wasn’t in either of their natures.

Xiao Li amateurishly asked him for money that first night after they made love, and Cono obliged. Then she had second thoughts and handed back the overly generous wad of bills, but Cono refused to take it. They made love again. Her smile was giddy as her sweaty body descended on his once more, taking him into her. She stayed the night with him there at the Hotel Svezda, and Cono stayed in Almaty much longer than his assignment, his
tontería
, required. That was years ago, during his second sojourn in Kazakhstan.

Cono was now standing on his hands in the airport lounge, toes pointing toward the ceiling, eyes closed; he heard soft steps nearby, followed by a tentative touch on his back. He opened his upside-down eyes and saw a toddler next to him and the boy’s mother pulling the child away. Cono lowered his feet to the ground and his exercises were over.

He stood up, his shirt patched with perspiration. He put on his shoes, hoisted his bag onto his shoulder, and ambled toward the boarding gate, singing a song about a beach town called Itapuã as his eyes followed a seam in the polished floor. His voice was strong, almost loud, and caused other travelers to look at him. He didn’t notice, though, and if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. When he finally looked up, he marveled at the somberness on all the faces he saw, with no hint of vitality or wonder—no savoring of the hot taste of life, nor even simple amusement at being alive on this day while others were dying, or about to die.

He stopped at a newsstand to glance at the headlines of the papers he could read—
Corriere della Sera
,
Le Figaro
, the
Financial Times.
At this moment he would have preferred something in Chinese or Portuguese, but there was nothing. Then he noticed a Russian paper—
Moscow Express
. Above its masthead were several frames with small pictures, directing readers to articles in a travel insert. The frame that caught Cono’s attention was for a new attraction, the Republic of Kazakhstan. He picked the paper off the rack and turned to the travel section. A sidebar accompanied a full-page spread dedicated to the destination for “adventurous vacationers.”

Kazakhstan in Perspective:

It’s bigger than all of Western Europe, spanning from China on the east to the fringe of Europe on the west, with Russia hovering across its entire northern border. Kazakhstan is a land of bounding steppes and desolate deserts, as well as majestic mountains to the south—a snow-capped wall that has so far protected it from fundamentalist influences in the neighboring “stan” countries.

In the aftermath of the Soviet rupture, its people have proudly renewed their lineage from the conquering hordes of Genghis Khan, whose nomadic lifestyle is maintained even today in the circular yurt dwellings and livestock herds that are hallmarks of the lives of the country folk. The noble, roaming spirit of these people is evoked by the very word
Kazak
, whose original meaning was “free warrior.”

You will find in Kazakhstan a melting pot of other peoples as well—Russians, certainly, and Volga Germans, Ukrainians, Tatars, and Koreans relocated during the Stalin years. Other neighboring countries have contributed their kind: Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Uyghurs. You will even find Pakistanis and, of course, Chinese, the last group having for some time recognized the commercial attractions of this vast territory.

The remoteness of this country unfortunately made it convenient ground for slave camps and forced labor during the Second World War. Kazakhstan also served as a home of exile to such celebrated figures as Dostoyevsky and Shevchenko, who wrote of their adopted land with affection. Trotsky and Solzhenitsyn, also former residents, had less favorable camp experiences there.

In more recent decades Kazakhstan served as the major Soviet source of uranium, as well as the venue for nuclear weapons testing at the renowned Polygon complex. It also serves as home to the Cosmodrome at Baikonur, from which even today multinational teams of cosmonauts are launched toward the International Space Station.

The sixteen-million-strong population of Kazakhstan may be facing a brighter future, thanks to recent discoveries of extensive oil and gas fields. Multiple countries seeking access to these resources have contributed to a Kazak economy that now shows signs of rebounding from its post-Soviet decline.