Performance Anomalies (4 page)

Xiao Li’s rough life had made her prickly, an eye-catching rose with not a single thorn missing. Her goodness showed itself rarely, and usually by accident. But no matter how long the passage of time since they had last seen each other, Cono felt a pull toward her. He could call it duty, or honor, or affection; he preferred not to put a word on it. Worrying for her, setting out in this way to try to ensure that she saw this round of life a little longer, was strange to him. Personal. It was a world apart from the trips he made for others who needed his talents. He did
their
bidding by impersonal choice, and for his own amusement and occasional gratification, for he had no need of the money they gave him for his trouble.

Xiao Li was unique. But there were many other unique women in his nomadic life, who together formed a network of sorts. It wasn’t a formal network; it had just emerged and grown and changed over time. And it wasn’t fashionable in the Western world—a man at the center of a web of women. They lived in varied spots around a shrunken globe, in cities or towns or villages. Some traveled, and some were trapped in place by poverty or tradition or family or men, or even by wealth and position.

At times Cono thought it was he who was trapped by this carousel of women, despite his freedom to go anywhere on the planet he chose. Trapped by his desire for them, his admiration of them, his adoration of their strength and beauty. And they in turn persisted in their allegiance to him, an allegiance of spirit that was hardened by the intensity of their encounters with Cono, who offered each a different relief from her circumstances.

Cono’s meditation faltered. Rather than going deeper, as if tied to a heavy stone sinking into a dark river, it leveled out, then began to bob and rise, tugged toward the surface by his aching worry for Xiao Li.

3

Cono’s seatmate, Anvar, was still asleep, his hands resting palms-up on his crotch, when Cono pressed a finger into one of the palms to wake him and tell him the plane was at the gate.

As Cono walked briskly among the passengers in the dim airport corridor, he spotted his friend Timur in wraparound sunglasses at the side of the brand-new immigration booths. The two did not greet each other, but Timur signaled to the official to let Cono pass. “It’s the gray Mercedes, to the right,” Timur said softly without looking at Cono. As Cono passed the customs desk he glanced behind him at the bag man, the pigeon, next to Timur, still standing beside the immigration stall. The bald man holding the case passed through, leaving the other passengers in a jostling crowd. Timur was always doing double duty.

Cono got into the back seat of the Mercedes. In less than a minute, Timur opened the car door and climbed in next to him. Without instruction the driver pulled into the trickle of cars and vans exiting the airport. When they were on the lightless road heading into the city, with whitewashed tree trunks flashing by in the headlights, Cono looked at Timur’s face, still concealed by his wraparound shades. Timur extended his hand to the seatback in front of him, where the driver couldn’t see it through the rear-view mirror. He made a thumbs-up. Xiao Li had been spared.

It would be at least another half hour before they got to the center of the city. There would be no conversation during this time—no further information about Xiao Li, no news of their friend Muktar, no details shared about the twists and turns of their lives since last they had last seen each other. Four years. Had it been that long already? And before that, another four years since their first meeting. Cono was startled by the realization that Timur was one of his oldest friends.

Timur had grown into a big-time player, but when they first met he’d been just a soldier on furlough, singing his own form of Tupac-inspired rap in mangled English, drunk on warm afternoon beers.

It was a week after two of Timur’s buddies had been shot through the head next to him on night patrol at a southwest border. “Wahhabis,” he’d explained to Cono. “They take Afghanistan, then they move into Uzbekistan, now they want Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.” Timur had had to give the bad news to the mother of one of the dead comrades. “She cried. She screamed, ‘Why did he die and not you?’ Fuckeen good question. She’d begged Zaman to stay out of the service, just like my mother begged me. But I say only a man who has been in the military and seen the worst is a man. Really lived. Just like the prostitutes,” he said. “They have nothing except their bodies. Their bodies are money. They know like a soldier knows.” Timur turned away, and then abruptly looked back at Cono. “Okay! Now we talk no more military. We talk women! And rap! And next bar!”

Back then, when they’d first met, Cono had been an even freer bird, not yet swept up by one tontería, one foolish mission, after another, and another. He was already a rich young man, but keeping to his simple ways. Hitchhiking down to Almaty from Russia, he had noted in some of the women shades of the Slavic features of Antonina, his mother’s mother. Those hints of her face brought her voice to his mind, her precise speech in Russian and French and late-acquired Portuguese. Through her meticulous care with words she preserved the elegance and dignity of her childhood in Russia, before her family was obliterated in the Bolshevik uprisings, before poverty became her new way of life and the path to her early death.

Cono loved the hitchhiking—the open roads, the expanse of countryside in summertime as he walked beneath lost white clouds drifting across high blue skies. Often he wouldn’t bother to wave down a car or truck when he heard it approaching, preferring instead to walk, to feel the strength in his legs and the tranquility in his mind. He would sleep in fields of hay or barley or sugar beets, clearing a spot for himself so he could see the stars, which he knew by heart in both hemispheres. He would talk to Antares and Alrisha and Denebola as if they were friends until his unnatural need for sleep began to sweep over him. No matter what dew or dust or insects of the field made his body their home, he slept like a buried stone, and was replenished when morning came.

Before that first visit to Almaty eight years ago, Cono had walked from the Russian town of Chelyabinsk all the way to the Kazak frontier, where three border guards were surprised to see a traveler on foot. After many rounds of vodka, a show of juggling skills, and several wads of cash delivered in enthusiastic handshakes, Cono won a visa stamp to enter the vast, infant nation of Kazakhstan.

It was much farther south, on his first day in Almaty, that Cono met Timur, and that same evening he met Timur’s friend Muktar, the painter. Despite being several years younger than the two Kazaks, Cono was adopted as an equal. The three caroused together for weeks, bedding girls, exchanging them, drinking a lot.

Then Timur got called back to duty, and Cono fell into the arms of a young woman named Irina. Muktar was left to find his own amusement, and returned to his old ways of brooding in his tiny apartment filled with pencil drawings, solvent fumes and half-finished oil canvases.

The Mercedes cruised past the hardscrabble shanty flats at the edge of the city and started to rise on the constant incline of the Almaty grid. The driver stopped the car a block down from the Hotel Ratar, leaving Timur and Cono to walk in the darkness of Panfilov Park. When they reached the festooned and dilapidated Zenkov Cathedral in the center of the park grounds, they stepped into the moonlight shadow of the church. The trees were musty, hinting of approaching autumn.

“Cono, my brother!” Timur exclaimed. The two embraced and slammed their hands against each other’s shoulders. Cono felt the pistol sheath beneath Timur’s expensive leather coat, at his left armpit, and his hand lightly grazed the bulge of another gun wedged into the belt at Timur’s spine.

“Such a good-news friend,” Cono said in Russian as they pushed each other apart, smiling. Timur took off his shades.

“She’s safe, a little cut up. And still beautiful, your tart friend. How could she bring you all the way to Almaty? There must be more—some unfinished business.”

“Ah, Timur, there is always unfinished business, and tides are always turning. Where is she?”

“Right there.” Timur pointed at the bright block of lights spelling the name of the Ratar through the branches. The “T” was burned out.

“And the Chinese, the Kitais?”

“All happy, gone away. I made them take their dead friend with them, in a bag.” The slight change in the timbre of Timur’s voice told Cono it was a half-truth. “So, Cono, why the trouble of flying to Almaty on such short notice, a man with so many women? Didn’t think I could spring your girl?”

“I came to say thanks, and to show the flag.”

“The flag of which country? Hah! I know,” Timur rolled his eyes. “The country around your own two feet.” Timur looked Cono up and down, searching for changes in his appearance since last time; there weren’t many. “And by the way, the bomb scare wasn’t necessary.”

“Just a little insurance, in case you had been tied up. Busy guy like you, chief of the whole damn National Security Bureau, keeping the entire country safe.”

The pleasant scent of mulch was suddenly poisoned by a stench like that of burning hair. A few trees away, five figures were squatting around an open fire. They were roasting pigeons on sticks, and the feathers were crackling in the flames; filaments of singed plumage floated up through the branches.

Cono and Timur walked in a loop past the World War II monument of elephant-size bronze faces lit by an eternal kerosene flame. When they were beyond the glow of the war memorial, Timur broke the silence.

“Your friend, she’s going to be in trouble.”

Cono cocked his head. Again, the timbre of Timur’s voice had shifted. “What do you mean?”

“She saw too much. Maybe heard too much, too.”

“Traders disappear all the time in this town, part of the business risk. She’s smart enough not to say anything,” Cono said. He knew the murder of Xiao Li’s client wasn’t the problem; it was something else.

“Her customer was in a delicate position.” Timur cleared his throat. “He had a heap of cash, probably working as a carrier, just meant to give and go. Apparently he didn’t make the delivery on time and was dipping into the purse to pay for his pleasures. Unfortunately, he had no idea who he was working for.”

“Ah,” Cono murmured. “So the dead man’s comrades weren’t just doing business. They were Beijing boys, working for their government. Probably aiming to buy off somebody high up. Maybe even a minister or two.” In the faint light Cono saw the clenching of Timur’s jaw muscles, the pulsing of his temporal artery.

“Probably.”

Cono pulled a thick envelope from his back pocket and with a whip of his hand lodged it in Timur’s armpit, next to his gun strap. Timur jolted as he stabbed his right hand into his jacket, reaching for the handgun. The envelope dropped with his movement. He picked it up and handed it back to Cono.

“Thanks, swifty. Those gifts aren’t necessary anymore. The girl’s for free. But you owe me.”

Cono slid the envelope into his vest, keeping his surprise to himself; this was a generosity Cono had never seen in his friend. “Very charitable of you, brother.”

“I’ll get her down from the hotel now,” Timur said. “Then I’ll meet you around back at the Cactus.” Timur snapped open his phone to dismiss his driver for the time being, and the two men waited among the trees to see that the car had driven off.

One of the Pakistani doorkeepers at the Cactus stifled a fleeting sense of recognition as Cono walked in, his bag on his shoulder and a two-day growth on his face. The Cactus was done up like a ranch from America’s Wild West, with yellow pine posts and hip-high railings dividing the dark, low-ceilinged space into little corrals with benches and wooden chairs. Here the Russian and Kazak and Uzbek and Kyrgyz working girls would gossip until the men arrived—the Turkish entrepreneurs, the mafia thugs, both Russian and Kazak, the oilmen from Europe and America, and the embassy functionaries from all corners of the world. The atmosphere was lightened by the trickle of college students who loved to dance—many of them sons and daughters of the regime, who were occasionally surprised and embarrassed by the presence of their fathers.

It was a place where the Chinese merchants never came. They always met their women in more private settings.

Cono asked the Pakistani bartender to put on the old salsa and Brazilian music he knew they had. As he turned away from the bar, a Tsingtao in hand, a Kazak girl flashed her smile of silver front teeth and asked him to dance. It was a custom in this part of the world for women to cast their teeth in gold or silver, a remnant of the need for portable wealth. Cono admired the broad, angular structure of her youthful face. “Not now, bright flower,” he replied in Russian, and went to a seat in a corner that was darker than most. It was early, but there was already an intermittent stream of men stepping through the doorway onto the creaky floorboards. Timur came in alone and went to the bar. He’d seen Cono, but ordered a vodka and drank it all before coming to sit at Cono’s table.