Performance Anomalies (23 page)

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 have 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.

Cono climbed into the car. The driver initially challenged his destination, up toward the mountains; Cono didn’t mention the quarry, only saying he wanted to go about three miles past the power plant.

“Why do you want to go there?” the driver asked as he wheeled away from the Cactus.

“I love the stars. You can’t see them through the haze down here. I have to go up higher, above it all, and before the sun says hello.” For a few seconds Cono considered redirecting the driver to pass first by Dimira’s apartment, which wasn’t so far away; he wanted some certainty that she was fine. He quickly dismissed the idea. What would he find out, anyway? And if he tried to do anything more, like knocking on her door at 4:30 in the morning, he might only be putting her in further danger. And even if he did find her safe and sound, he still would have no assurance that Xiao Li had made it out of the country.
And Zheng was out there trying to track her down.
Cono grimaced.
I should have taken Xiao Li straight to Bishkek myself
.