Performance Anomalies (13 page)

“Your friends?” Cono asked in Russian.

“Not friends,” the man said, shaking his head, his nostrils flaring. “Not friends. Just money, a call.” Cono pulled a cell phone from the chest pocket of the driver’s patched denim jacket. “I have family. Just work,” the driver said. His face was dull except for the fear; Cono saw no flickering micro-expression of contrivance. He kept the cell phone and told the driver to get out and lie down on the road.

Cono went back to the Toyota and folded Timur’s long frame so he could push him into the passenger seat. Metal creaked against metal as Cono backed the car out from beneath the truck and swung it around to face their original direction, toward the city. The darkness intermittently yielded to oncoming headlights that caught the fractures in the Toyota’s windshield and momentarily blinded Cono with their flashes. His head began to pound.

They were well up Satpaev Street, near the army sports club, when Timur came to and spit out saliva laced with blood.

“Where to now, Genghis?” Cono asked. “You took a bad knock, but you’ll be back for more conquests after a good rest.”

With slurred speech, Timur directed Cono to take the next right onto Dostyk and head up toward the mountains, to the National Security Bureau’s training barracks. It was a low fortress behind a high spiked fence.

“I have friends here,” Timur mumbled as Cono supported him on the short walk to the barricaded gate.

“You have only one friend, and that friend, your friend of long years, is asking where to find the girl.”

Timur hesitated, almost lapsing into a faint. Cono grabbed him with a steely grip. “Your friend needs to know.”

Timur sputtered out a street name. “It’s above the General,” he added, unsteady against Cono’s shoulder, “but you’ll have to get her out yourself. Don’t lose the gun, my Makarov. It’s my first piece.” Cono lifted Timur’s arm and placed it on the shoulder of a young man in uniform who looked frightened by the burden of propping up his terrifying hero, an icon to all the elite young recruits, a hero whose forehead was smeared with blood.

7

Cono veered back down Dostyk Street in the battered car, knowing there was a risk in keeping it, but in need of the speed it provided. He cut through the city using the smaller streets, which were uniformly dark except for dimly lit intersections. He knew the General; it had been popular in Almaty four years ago, and he was surprised it was still in operation in a town where nightclubs and casinos appeared and disappeared regularly, like the flashing lights on their garish marquees. When Cono had known it, the General was a casino and disco and more—it was the luxury joint favored by Russian mafia high rollers and the most fashionably dressed working girls, of all ethnic flavors.

He stopped three blocks short of the club, backed the Toyota into a narrow side street, and walked beneath a row of oak trees until he was opposite the gray building. The General’s façade was the same, except that the black plate glass was spider-webbed by cracks and a string of red lights had fallen from the marquee and was waving lazily in the slight breeze. The club was surviving, but on its way to an unrecorded demise.

Cono eyed the structure above the casino, which was part of a seamless row of pre-World War II buildings fronted by trees and broken sidewalks. The third-story windows above the General were black; the others glowed with either yellow incandescence or a fluorescent blue haze. Cono knew that the backsides of these old stone buildings—narrow, unlit alleys or car parks—had made them easy break-in targets after the collapse of Soviet state security, so the rear doors and exterior staircases were now secured by iron caging and heavy locks. He’d have to go in through the front door. He considered tossing the Makarov, but decided to keep it.

Cono crossed the street, feigning a limp. He leaned heavily on the railing as he mounted the front stairs and extended his hand toward the chubby-cheeked bouncer for help with the last step. As the oversize man gave him an indignant once-over, Cono thanked him profusely in English.

“Can I throw some dice in here?” Cono added, using the bland accent he had learned in California. “Wudya want for gettin’ in?”

Chubby Cheeks held up nine fingers, for 900 tenge. Cono pulled a wad of bills from his hip pocket and gave him triple that. The bouncer opened the door and Cono limped in, smiling at the two grim black-clad security men inside. He bumped into one of the vertical risers of the metal detector, setting off its bleeping alarm. One of the guards waved his thick arm to signal Cono to pass through the detector.

“I’ve got metal in my bone here,” Cono said in English, slapping his lame leg. “That’s me
tahl
,” Cono said with a sloppy Russian accent. “Me
tahl
,” Cono pointed to his hip. The detector bleeped as he limped through it.

“Give me phone,” said one of the guards, holding out a fleshy hand. Cono reached beneath his shirt to pluck out the cell phone he’d taken from the truck driver and handed it to the guard. The metal detector objected again. Cono struck an awkward, crippled pose.

“Come, come,” barked the guard. From outside, Chubby Cheeks waved his hand to show his approval. The guard gave Cono a cursory frisking. “Okay, okay. Go make money.” He gave the phone back to Cono and swept his arm toward the red velvet entrance. Cono limped forward, the Makarov’s handgrip tormenting his testicles as he brushed through the curtain.

It was early. Rotating spotlights stroked a small, empty dance floor. Four croupiers wearing red satin bustiers raised their eyes briefly from the clutches of clients gathered around their green gaming tables. Cono heard the riffling of betting chips and the clatter of a roulette wheel.

To his left, at a horseshoe-shaped bar, a beefy man was cursing the barman for putting triple sec in his drink, and he smashed the glass in the barman’s sink. The General hadn’t lost its Russian
raket
clientele, who probably owned the whole building.

A waitress in low-cut purple-laced lingerie asked Cono what he’d like to order; he smiled and signaled that he’d visit the toilet first. His hobbling diminished as he walked up three shadowed steps at the far side of the dance floor. Past the restrooms, the back corridor was illuminated by a single wavering ultraviolet light. Cono transferred the gun to his waistband, pushed open an exit door and stepped into a dark exterior stairwell surrounded by grillwork.

He heard footsteps and laughter behind him, on the other side of the door he had just passed through. He hopped up to the second-floor landing as the drunken voices of a man and a woman rose from the yawning door below. He flitted up to the next landing, and the next, keeping ahead of the couple as they stumbled up the stairs.

“Don’t pull so hard,” the woman whined. Peering down through the grate of the stairs, Cono recognized the man as one of the thugs who had driven off with Xiao Li. At the third-floor landing, below Cono, a door cracked open, sending a wedge of light across the prisonlike bars of the stairwell. The laughing man grabbed the woman by the neck and thrust her through the doorway.

“Here’s a fresh Uzbek, boys. Let’s prime her for her night’s work. Says she likes three at a go. It’ll make us all penis brothers.” The laughing man brayed again, this time joined by intoxicated cheers from two other men. There was a sound like that of a beer bottle skidding across a floor and hitting a wall.

“Let’s make the Kitai bitch watch us. Mama Uzbek Big Tits, you like Kitai pussy?”

“You pay for three, no discount,” the Uzbek woman said. “And me fucking a girl means you pay for four.” She was snapping like an experienced pro, but beneath her toughness she sounded scared.

“You’ll get it so good you’ll be dying to give a discount.”

There was a crashing sound, like a lamp falling over. The wedge of light disappeared as the door slammed shut. Russian pop music began blaring from within the apartment.

Cono stepped lightly down to the third-floor landing and onto the narrow balcony spanning the rear face of the building. All the windows of the apartment were blacked out, but there was a high, small window that had two faint lines of light, as if a coating of paint had been scratched. Alongside the window a sewer pipe ran down, joining another one that emerged from the wall. Cono planted a foot on the V formed by the two pipes, reached for the sill of the window and lifted himself up. The scratches were too thin to provide any view of the inside.

He climbed down from the V and examined a small water pipe that came out of the wall, encrusted with insulation that he quietly picked at, revealing a gap between the pipe and the hole it ran through. Yellow light began to glow on Cono’s fingers as he coaxed away more of the crumbly material. He tried to peer through the hole, but couldn’t see anything. He put his nose to the opening and inhaled. Mixed with the smells of an unclean bathroom and insulating foam was another barely perceptible scent, the residue of a perfume he knew well.

He pressed his ear to the hole. In the brief intervals between loud refrains being sung by a Russian pop star, Cono could make out a reedy second voice, singing, almost purring, a Chinese tune about the purity of young love.

He stepped again onto the V of the sewer pipes and rose up to the scratched window. He tapped a finger against the pane. There was a faint rattling from the insulated pipe. Cono tapped another time. The pipe jiggled rapidly. He heard a soft scratching sound at the window just in front of his nose. Another line of light appeared.

Balanced by one foot and a hand, Cono pulled out the pistol and wedged its nose into a bottom corner of the window. He pushed, grinding the barrel deeper into the wood of the frame; there was a muted pop as fine cracks arced outward from the broken corner, each crack forming a new thread of light. He plucked out shards of glass, tossing them into the black void behind him.

The small pipe below him was jangling again, rocking in its brackets. Cono quietly smashed most of the remaining glass edges with the butt of the Makarov. He felt for the window’s lock; it was screwed shut. The window’s frame was small, but might barely accommodate his shoulders. He lifted himself and peered over the sill.

Two recognizable fingernails, red with the tips painted white, grabbed at him in desperation. Only the instantaneous backward snap of his head saved his corneas.

“I can’t save you if I’m blind,” Cono whispered, just loud enough to be heard above the music wailing from the next room. The pipe jangled again.

This time Cono put his head fully through the window frame and looked down into the bathroom. Xiao Li’s bloodied right wrist was handcuffed to the pipe connected to the radiator. It must have been an acrobatic feat for her to have climbed on top of the radiator and reached up with her free arm to scratch the windowpane. Clothed in the same sashed black dress with purple frills on the neckline, crouching and shaking, she was looking up at Cono with the face of a beaten child. Her mouth was opening to emit a cry.

“Silence.” Cono put a finger to his lips, then reached into a slot in his vest and pulled out a coil of titanium-alloy abrading wire with a ring at each end. He wedged his arms through the window and pressed his elbows against the frame to bring his torso through. Small streaks of blood sprang up on his arms where they were cut by the spicules of glass remaining in the window.

He looped a finger into one ring of the wire and let the rest fall toward Xiao Li. “Take the end. Put it around the chain. Pull the wire back and forth with me.” Xiao Li’s left hand fumbled for the wire and grasped it. She tried repeatedly to wrap it around the cuff chain, but there wasn’t enough play in it. After four failed attempts her eyes filled with tears and her body started to shake in an effort to keep herself from crying. “Not enough,” she whispered.

By jamming his arms against the window frame and kicking his legs in the air, Cono was able to shift his torso farther inside. He extended his arm as far down as he could. Xiao Li got the wire around the cuff chain and hooked the loop with her finger. There was now enough play in the wire to allow an inch of back-and-forth, but it still wasn’t enough. A woman’s shrieks rose above the blasting music.

Cono pressed his palms against the interior wall and dove, landing in a handstand atop the radiator, his calves braced against the window frame. He lowered his body until his feet cleared the window and pushed off the radiator in a supple handspring that left him standing on the bathroom floor. He knelt next to Xiao Li, who touched his face with her free hand. Cono smiled and winked and went to work. His hands pumped the abrading wire, his arms a blur of movement to Xiao Li.