Performance Anomalies (11 page)

It was here, four years before, that Cono had caught a knife an instant before it would have entered Timur’s abdomen. A diminutive Uzbek man in a rectangular skullcap had approached, saying he had an important confidential message for Mr. Betov. As the man moved close to whisper in Timur’s ear, Cono saw the motion of his arm and caught the knife by the blade in a movement that was completed before any thought of the action could appear in his mind.

A surprised Timur saw the knife in Cono’s hand and quickly grabbed the man in a chokehold and lifted him, kicking, down the steps to the urinals behind the beef tongues. Timur smashed the man’s head once into a sink and pressed him face down on the grimy floor tiles. He barked at him in Russian and in Kazak, demanding to know who he was and whom he worked for. The man coughed and spit blood and yelled: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

Timur planted his knee in the man’s back and pushed his arms upward until one shoulder dislocated with a pop, and then the other one. “Who?”

“Allahu Akbar …” The man’s response was muted by the crush of his mouth against the floor. Timur heaved him, his head landing in the urinal.

“One more time.
Who
?”

“Yes,” the man gurgled. “Allahu …”

Timur stomped his foot on the back of the man’s neck until Cono stopped him.

“Cono, your hand is bleeding.” Timur reached down and ripped off the tail of the dead man’s shirt. “Wrap this around it. Thanks, brother, thanks a lot.”

That was on Cono’s second stay in Almaty. Timur Betov was already an important man.

Cono glanced at the doorway to the toilets, then at the scars on his fingers, and exited the food hall. He wove a different route through the tin pots and hardware until he emerged from the sprawling network of tents onto a dusty road, full of people going home, that pointed him toward the clapboard building with the peaked copper roof that housed the Museum of Musical Instruments.

The road veered to connect with the pavement of Kaldayakov Street. Cono followed the rising sidewalk, lowering his head to avoid the tree branches. Two boys were collecting fallen chestnuts and competing to toss them into a metal pail.

“Throw one to me!” Cono called.

The younger one lobbed a nut, which Cono caught in his mouth. Just as quickly, he blew it out and kicked it with his instep like a hacky sack, aiming it directly into the pail. The boys came nearer, tossing more chestnuts toward him. Cono caught three of them and started juggling. And a fourth, and a fifth. The boys were now pulling chestnuts out of the pail and throwing them. He caught two more for the whirling circle. Then, as the boys watched, all the chestnuts disappeared. Cono leaned down, put his finger in the older boy’s ear, and pulled out a chestnut, which he tossed into the pail. The smaller boy pushed his brother away and looked up at Cono expectantly. Cono knelt and took the boy’s hand. When he released it the boy held a chestnut and a blue button.

The boy reminded him of the one he and Xiao Li encountered years before at the amusement park in Almaty, during their first few days together. They were eating ice cream near the rollercoaster, and Xiao Li drifted closer to watch. A little boy, maybe six years old and looking like a street urchin who had snuck in, saw a popsicle fall from one of the cars high on a curve. He began to run across a stretch of ground-level track to grab his good fortune. But the coaster cars were swooping down the same rails. Xiao Li leaped and snatched the boy into her arms. The two of them would have been hit but for inches. Xiao Li shouted at the boy and slapped him hard and kissed him on the cheek. Then she bought him an ice cream cone. And all the while she was wearing her high heels.

The brothers were fighting over the button as Cono continued up the sidewalk, the bright mountain peaks etched with shadows high in the distance. When he reached the corner of Panfilov Park nearest the museum, he made a wide loop, just close enough to watch the building and its driveway between the tree trunks. Halfway through his return on the same loop, he saw a silver Mercedes slowly gliding up. It came to a stop close to the pine trees, where the final curve rose to the steps of the wood-gabled museum.

A Chinese man in a shiny gray suit that almost matched the color of the car emerged from the front passenger seat. His coat was buttoned and the stiff white edge of a handkerchief in his breast pocket caught the sunlight before he stepped into the shade.

Cono began whistling the national anthem of the People’s Republic as he walked across the mulch. The man in the suit turned his trim body, scanning the darkness beneath the trees. He had a square, handsome face, and although he was squinting, his features showed no perturbation. Cono appeared, still whistling, and tossed a chestnut toward the man. He snatched it with a downward flick of his hand and threw it in a high arc back to Cono, who caught it with the top of his foot and let it drop. The Chinese man nodded his head slightly at Cono.

“Too bad we don’t have a soccer ball,” he said in English.

Cono responded in Mandarin. “And who would keep score?”

“The game’s the thing, after all.” The Chinese man stuck to English.

“Ah, the game. Let’s begin with tennis in Tulufan.” The obtuse pass-phrase that Timur had chosen caused the man to smile in a quick, well-practiced motion. His teeth seemed to be newly polished. He held out his hand and Cono shook it. Cono felt no faint twitches of trepidation in the man’s grip. He was a man at ease.

“Let’s sit down,” Cono said. They sat cross-legged on the carpet of pine needles a few paces away from the car. The Chinese man unbuttoned his suit coat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Cono declined his offer of a smoke, and the man lit a Dunhill, dragging on it deeply.

“My friend,” he said in Mandarin, “you have dirt on your face.”

Cono wiped the specks of dirt left on his lips by the chestnut husk he had caught in his mouth. “The measure of a true friend …”

“… is whether he will tell you when your face is dirty,” said the Chinese man. “Well, we are not friends. There is too much business in front of us. And your boss has given us such short notice—I was supposed to have this pleasure weeks from now. I wonder why the rush. No time for niceties before getting to the details.”

“The details. How many flowers are you offering?”

“The gift is six million. Dollars, I should say. And, for the oil contract when it’s done, ten times that, on top of the first six. Even though you look like a strong young man, you will have a hard time carrying the flowers through the park, especially with that wound on your shoulder.” The man held the cigarette to his mouth but did not inhale. He was waiting for Cono to speak.

“And that is your final number?” Cono stroked his cheek with a pine needle and held it to his nose to enjoy the scent.

“Yes, but the gift comes in halves. Half now and—there is a little bump in the road.”

“A bump?”

“They have a Chinese girl who could make everything slightly dirty, like your face. Just a whore who knows too much and needs to be returned to her homeland, where she belongs, where she will be safe. The other half of the gift, three million, comes when we have her.” The Chinese man settled his hands on his knees and looked at Cono.

“Sounds like a high-priced whore. You’ve lost your business sense for a pretty face. She must be quite appealing.”

“I’ve never seen her. Those are just my orders.” He sighed. “Otherwise you would be right—there are many more just like her, at bargain rates.”

Cono was twirling the pine needle in his mouth. “I’ll convey the news, with your wishes for the whore’s safety.”

The Chinese man slapped Cono’s knee and stood up. He was tall for a Chinese, tall like Cono’s father had been, but well built, with real shoulders, not just suit-coat padding.

“You don’t look very Chinese,” the man said, staring down at Cono. “But you speak Mandarin like a native. How is that?” He snapped his cigarette butt into the pine mulch.

“I watch a lot of China Central TV.”

“I never watch TV. Especially not something as dull as CCTV. It leaves too little room for thinking. And doing.” The man’s suit pants were barely creased from the sitting. He paused before walking to the car. “It seems strange they would trust a, shall we say, ragtag foreigner like you with this small fortune and not a Kazak.”

“Yes, it is a
small
fortune. As for Kazaks, even
they
tell me it’s a country where nothing’s nailed down. Maybe a neutral party was needed.”

“Is there such a thing as neutral?”

“Then, shall we say, a buffer.” Cono’s voice was only slightly mocking.

“Good thinking. That’s why we want the girl. To get our buffer back.” The Chinese man stepped to the trunk and opened it. “It’s in four cases. Four more are waiting.” Cono reached for one case and the Chinese man grabbed another. They dropped them in the shade where they had been sitting, followed by the other two.

The man in the suit put his hand on the door handle and paused. “By the way, did you like my joke about the Dalai Lama?”

“I’ve heard it before. Next time you tell it, make it Kazakhstan instead of Tibet. But yes, I did laugh.”

The man forced a smile.

“Tell me,” said Cono, “how do your people trust a well-dressed man like you with this very small fortune?”

“We have so many checks and balances. It makes the system work. Not like here in this country. Maybe they could use our help.”

“It seems they’re already getting some help from you.” Cono tore a sprig from the overhanging branch and stroked it with his fingers. “Although it is quite modest.”

“The world, even this empty piece of it, is full of competition from people wanting to help. Are you saying our bid is unsatisfactory?”

“It’s not alligator hands. But for pumping rights it will get only a frog’s glance at a gnat while dragonflies are hovering. And as a bid for larger influence, the frog will only croak at you and swim away.”

The Chinese man turned his face to avoid the bright reflections from the windows of an apartment block at the far edge of the park. “You wear those sloppy clothes, and you are very, very impolite, but you see where the future lies.”

“Only one of several possible futures. It depends on who you back and whether you insult them with half-gifts.”

The Chinese man let out a long sigh. “A neutral party. We could use a neutral party like you.”

“Ah, but the competition …”

“Tell your boss—is that what he is?—that the bidding is not over yet, and that we have a strong interest in talking further with a man of vision, who can see the benefits of a closer relationship, both for his dear, ragged country and for himself.”

Cono twitched the pine sprig in a dismissive little wave goodbye, to acknowledge that he had heard. The man got into the car without looking again at Cono, and the Mercedes slowly backed away.

In a room high in the deteriorating apartment building that overlooked the park, Katerina Rulova kept her face at the tripod-mounted binocular scope as she spoke. “Yes, it’s him.”

“How do you spell his name?” asked the blond-bobbed woman seated next to her writing on a notepad. They spoke in English.

“Z-h-e-n-g L-u P-e-n-g. Pronounced
Jung
. Arrived seven months ago. Previous station was Urumqi, for four years, running the campaign against Uyghur separatists, the Muslims. Infiltrated the first Xinjiang uprising and ordered the retaliatory slaughter at the second one. Reportedly he had lots of opportunity there to make use of his interrogation training.”

“What else?” said the other woman.

“Your predecessor, Mr. Simmons, had a whole profile on Zheng, said he’s a useful pit bull that Beijing brings in for the dirty work. He came from a rich family, elite, all well educated. During the Cultural Revolution, when Zheng was a boy, they were sent to shovel dung, and worse. His parents were paraded like pigs on hands and knees, made to eat from a trough. An ex-colleague of his, a defector, said Zheng always carries a photo taken that day, of his parents eating slop. Then they were beaten to death. Zheng’s background was a drag on his career. And he had another black mark—he’s only half Chinese. Mother was from some place north, Korea or Mongolia. Not pure. He couldn’t advance in the party. So he became an eager tool for the government, trying to prove his worth to them, and to his China. Mr. Simmons told me …”

“Enough psychobabble. Why has Zheng been posted here?” The blonde, Clara Hodgkins, had herself arrived in Almaty only two months previously, from Delhi. Her accent was northern Midwest American.

“He’s probably here because of the oil, like most of us,” Katerina said.

“And who’s the other man?”

“I couldn’t really see him. He was beneath the trees the whole time.”

“You said they took cases out of the trunk.”

“Four cases.”

“And you didn’t see the other guy?”

“He kept his head down, almost like he knew someone might be watching.”

“Maybe he knew we picked up the phone call, at least part of it,” Clara said as she stood up to look through the scope.