Performance Anomalies (21 page)

Bulat nudged him. “Have you fallen asleep with your eyes open?”

Cono shrugged. “I am from nowhere, really. Everywhere and nowhere.”

“You are teasing me, I think.” Bulat frowned.

“I couldn’t tease the man who saved me with a brick. Sorry, but there’s no good answer to your question.”

Bulat was silent for a while. “Tell me this,” he said at last, “What is your religion? I am Muslim, a Kazak version of Muslim, like my father and his father and his father. What are you?”

“I don’t know much about religions.” Cono ran his fingers over his chest, mapping the most damaged portions by feel. “When I was young, someone asked me if I knew Jesus. I said, ‘Isn’t he the one who swam for forty days and forty nights in a river called the Ganges?’ ”

“Really?” Bulat was intrigued. “I didn’t know he did that. Forty days and forty nights … But after all, he was a prophet. Tell me though, without a religion or a family, how do you know what to fight for? What principles?”

“Principles change as fast as an octopus ripples its colors, depending upon who makes up the principles,” Cono said. “It’s easier to fight for friends.” He planted his knees between tufts of weeds and lifted his torso. He put his palms on the outsides of his thighs and arched backward, then rounded forward, repeatedly, breathing deeply as each movement pumped lymph from his damaged body back to his heart and onward to his kidneys, cleansing him from the inside.

Between arching movements he said, “And I find women to be better friends, more reliable, like you said of Miss Oksana.”

Bulat seemed glad that the subject had returned to his employer. “Miss Oksana says you have been doing
this
for a long time, and yet I see you are so young.”

Cono was not accustomed to talking about himself. It always led to dead ends thrown up by precaution. But Bulat had put himself on the line that night for Cono, and he was still at risk. Cono finished his abbreviated exercises and stretched out on the ground.

“This is the only life I’ve ever known,” he said, “taking risks for food or friends or fun.”

“Fun? Risks for fun?” Bulat clasped his hands. Cono heard the rubbing of keratin, like wet dust. “How strange.”

“You’re a man with an education,” Cono replied. “I’m not, except for the languages that stuck on me, and what I picked up from wandering and living to the next day. The thing you call
this
began to grow like a snowball. Now it’s what I do.

“Yesterday,” Cono continued after a moment, “yesterday I killed four men.” He heard Bulat’s hand snapping off a few stems of weeds. Cono was relieved that the darkness made it difficult to read the expressions on Bulat’s face. The darkness itself was a reprieve, and Cono felt his brain searching for sleep.

“Four men,” Bulat repeated.

“Four men. The first three were of necessity, by reflex.”

“And the fourth?”

“The fourth was of necessity, and yes, there was reflex, but there was also anger, and pleasure.”

“Well,” Bulat said, trying to maintain a whisper, “it seems your career is progressing.” Cono searched for irony or contempt in Bulat’s statement but couldn’t find them. “You are violent, but you are honorable in your violence,” Bulat added. “Let’s just hope that you can control your killing … your killing reflex.”

The comment disturbed Cono and jerked him out of drowsiness. He was worried that he had told Bulat too much. He stood up slowly, less shaky now, and walked toward the dim outline of a tree. His fingers jittered as he opened his pants. He urinated, recalling what little he could of the frenzy and confusion that had ensued when the brick came through the window: The bewilderment on the trio’s faces as the alarm blared. Zheng with the Makarov, hesitating, calculating the repercussions of the sound of a gunshot and the discovery of a tortured body in the bank. A knife cutting Cono’s limbs free.

He could have slaughtered all of them right there. Wresting the knife away from the hand that had cut him loose had been a simple matter, as was kicking the Makarov out of Zheng’s grasp. He could have left corpses there on the marble floor, but the reflex said no, or said nothing. Maybe it was still under control. Or maybe it had been short-circuited by the torture.

He had let Zheng and his men scatter and had hobbled down the grand interior staircase and into the fresh air of night, guided by his grandmother Antonina’s imperious voice in his head saying, “Lift your eyes, straighten your back, let fear and pain walk away like the turtles they are.”

Cono finished relieving himself against the tree. His tongue involuntarily rubbed the sharp-edged strangeness of his newly broken tooth as he sat down next to Bulat.

“You said Miss Oksana wants my help. For what?”

“I will tell you what she
should
want your help for. But perhaps I would be speaking inappropriately.”

“You saved my life. You can be inappropriate.”

Bulat nodded. “I have friends in the Kazak military, middle rank,” he began. “They say several generals have been buying new houses—much larger houses than their outside sources of income would normally support.”

“You mean graft.”

“That is what I wish to say.”

“Big houses.”

“Yes. A month ago, Major General Baldeev, head of Special Forces, moved his family into a fancy chalet on the road that goes up to Chimbulak, the ski resort, the road where all the rich people are moving. It’s not just big houses. The generals are dining and whoring with military attachés from Beijing. I need not tell you who pays for these activities. And, in the past six months the Kitais have sent enough military attachés here to start their own army.”

“Sounds like the usual diplomatic schmoozing,” said Cono, now wishing he could examine Bulat’s face.

“You don’t know how vulnerable we are. If they bite the top, they can feast on everything.” Bulat pawed his hand toward Cono and grasped the younger man’s wrist. He was strong for a schoolteacher. “All this talk about Beijing going after Taiwan, a little island with nothing but computer factories—they have thousands more factories in China. It’s a diversion. Just look at the map. Taiwan is out in the sea. Kazakhstan is a hundred times bigger and right next door, stretching all the way to Europe. ‘We’re neighbors,’ the Kitais say all the time. Our leaders have knuckled under to Beijing and are giving long-term leases to Kitai farmers. Those lands are ours! But do you think the Kitais will ever give them back? And now they’re building a railway and a
pipeline
to connect us, boasting about being even closer neighbors.” Bulat checked the volume of his speech. “They want our oil fields, and now. If they waited until the spigot is wide open, when it’s gushing in a few years, then the Americans would put up a fight. If Beijing waited until then, it would be too late.”

Cono was silent, thinking about the faded globe of the world his grandmother had given him for his sixth birthday. It was an old globe, long out of date. Antonina would spin it and Cono would stop it with his finger. She would explain, with her knobby hand on his shoulder, what she knew about each country or sea his finger landed on. The seas always seemed simple, but the countries, rimmed in faint lines of varied pastels, always led Antonina to tell complicated stories of how this one or that one now had a different shape, which she would trace with a long, yellowed fingernail. Some of the countries were bigger, some were smaller, and some had disappeared altogether.

“Nana, what happens when a country disappears?” he had asked. “My dear grandson, when that happens, the good people have to leave.” The hand left his shoulder. He looked back and saw Nana in a chair, covering her face with her hands. He had never seen her cry before.

Bulat slapped at Cono, hitting the shoulder that had been nicked by the bullet a day and a half earlier. “Hey, Mr. Cono, are you here, in Almaty?”

Cono snapped away from his memory. “The Kitais. You don’t like them, I guess.”

“Would you be happy if your homeland was about to be grabbed and milked by foreigners?”

“I don’t have a homeland,” Cono said. “Besides, it’s all in one’s mind.”

Bulat released his grip and patted Cono’s arm. “I feel sorry for you, my friend. A kite only flies if it’s tethered.”

Cono reached out into the blackness, breaking stalks of weeds and releasing their bitter scent. “And Miss Oksana wants help with …”

“Unfortunately she is buying the American paranoia about the nuclear materials and the jihadis. It is nonsense. Travel across my country and you can find uranium in many places. Biological agents too. The Russians used us very well. What do the Americans think they can do? Seal up the whole country, like meat stuffed and tied in a horse’s rectum? Because of that obsession, the blind Americans will wake up one day and find we are a province of China.”

Cono perceived no obfuscation in Bulat’s voice, and guessed that the teacher was unaware of the high-U specifics Katerina had talked about at the swimming pool. “And the note?” He left his question open and vague, like a psychiatrist’s query.

“The note?” Bulat shifted his weight off his heels and sat on the ground.

“The note I received, in a fancy envelope, at my friend’s apartment. Written like poetry, in Russian.”

“It wasn’t from me. I’m not a poet.”

“Another Almaty mystery.” Cono brushed his fingers over his face, feeling where the skin had split. So Bulat hadn’t been the one to leave the envelope under Dimira’s door. Cono had wanted somehow to extract from him an assurance of Dimira’s safety. The note must have been left by one of Katerina’s other stringers. She was compartmentalizing, of course. It occurred to Cono that he and Katerina were mirror images of each other—she had her network of men, he had his carousel of women.

Cono saw the faint light of a digital watch as Bulat held it close to his face. The greenish glow accentuated the spokelike creases radiating from the corners of Bulat’s eyes into the meatiness of his broad face.

“History is running very fast in my country,” Bulat said. “Time to go.”

11

“It’s that one, the door next to the lathe shop. Up one flight, to the back, on the right.” Bulat handed two keys on a string to Cono. “Miss Oksana said you would need a rest. That is my opinion also.”

Cono scanned the two-story building in a row of nearly identical dwellings across the street. The lathe shop and the floor above it were dark; about half the windows left and right were lit, in shades of yellow and amber. It was a poor district, but tidy. A pack of five dogs, as variable in size and shape as humans, trotted in a veering path toward the two men; they sniffed and growled and nipped at one another, then broke into a lope down the street, with the smallest mutt in the lead.

“So, it’s a safe house for the Americans,” Cono said, combing Bulat’s face with his gaze.

“I’ve never been here before.” Bulat winked. “I should think that Miss Oksana has no desire to share you with the Americans, and that she maintains these humble quarters for emergencies. She has a budget that doesn’t require signatures, I suppose. But on this matter, I am in the dark.”

“Goodbye then.
Rakhmet
.” Cono said thanks in Kazak as their hands met and shook, tightly.

Bulat blinked several times as he looked into Cono’s swollen eyes. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I am glad you are still alive.”

“Thanks to you, my friend. It’s a heavy responsibility, having saved someone’s life. You feel an allegiance because you saved them, but it’s hard to know if you did the right thing.”

The stocky man walked away, slow and steady, his hands in the pockets of his bulky jacket. When the faint glow of a solitary street lamp released him, he vanished.

Climbing the stairs to the apartment brought on the pangs of the torture, but Cono made his way up with the help of a drooping railing. Inside there was a bathroom with a tub and a high shower nozzle. Cono refused to look at himself in the corroded mirror as he undressed. He turned on the shower. There was a bar of soap, but he couldn’t seem to keep it in his shaking hands. He sat down, hugging his knees with his arms as the hot water pummeled his head and broad shoulders. He was thirsty and lapped up the falling droplets, each of which he felt distinctly on his outstretched tongue. His arms released his knees and his legs partly straightened as he slid down into the tub. Each drop that hit his flesh was a piercing spear and yet also a warm kiss on the endless fields of inflamed neurons. Furrowed rows and rows, acres upon acres, a wide vast terrain that soaked in the rain, drop by drop …