Performance Anomalies (22 page)

In his sleep, amid the patter of raindrops, Cono did not hear the intruder’s soft footsteps, not even the squeak of sneakers on the tiled floor near him. He didn’t feel the shift of the spray as the nozzle was turned toward the wall next to the tub.

It was a brushing sensation running up his battered left thigh that jarred him out of sleep. He opened his eyes to find his left hand already clamping a throat, just as his rigid right hand was en route to strike the philtrum of a face. But the face was Katerina’s. The traveling right hand deflected itself, touching her ear as she tried to duck. He saw her fist hooking toward his brow, but he didn’t try to stop it. It landed on one of Zheng’s wounds. His arm, the one still attached to her throat, acted by itself, crashing down until Katerina’s face landed on his knees. She bit in, just above a kneecap. Cono raised his head quickly and glanced over the edge of the tub. No one else. He loosened his grip on Katerina’s neck slightly. The pressure from her jaws slackened almost imperceptibly. Cono further relaxed his grip, and her jaws loosened a little bit. Less grip on her throat, less penetration of her teeth—less and less on both sides until Katerina’s mouth was free of the bleeding skin and she was sucking in air.

Cono felt her breath on his wet thigh. “I guess you like it rough,” she murmured.

“We don’t know each other that well,” Cono replied, folding his arms across his chest and lying back. “But I see you prefer chewing on legs. Doesn’t that complicate intercourse?”

She wore a gray cotton sweat suit, as if she’d just been to the gym. It absorbed the drops of water bouncing off the wall. Katerina pulled herself up and away and sat on the edge of the bathtub, dripping.

“And this is a thank-you?” she asked.

“You interrupted my dreams.” Cono’s eyelashes batted away the water spattering his face.

“I’m sure they were nightmares anyway.” She inspected Cono’s body. “You look like the meat in Zelyony market.”

“Just the price of waiting until nightfall. But I thank you nonetheless for arranging to save me from the dreariness of a bank. Bulat was very kind to me.”

“Bulat?”

“Teacher, then.”

“Teacher.” Katerina smiled as if she had just gotten some inside joke. “I know him by another name. His real one is Slem, not uncommon for men of his generation. It stands for Stalin Lenin Engels Marx. He’s always making up new names for himself—wouldn’t you? But he is a worthy man.”

“Yes, a worthy man. What about the high-U? The transfer to the jihadis is still tomorrow?”

Katerina let her hand fall onto Cono’s leg where she had first touched him. She traced her hand in a line just below the tapering ends of the welts, lightly following his thigh, his hip, up the side of his chest, along the fold of his armpit and onto his shoulder. Her fingers briefly touched the back of his neck, and then she sat erect, perched on the tub’s edge.

“We know it’s set for ten in the morning,” she said.

“Who is ‘we’? The Americans or Minister Kurgat?”

Katerina was distracted. She pulled off her top and tossed it out the doorway of the bathroom. It was followed quickly by her bra. “‘We’ means ‘I.’ At last I’ve got a stringer on your nasty friend Timur Betov. The stringer says your friend looks a little roughed-up, but he’s on the move again. He’ll lead us to the uranium, the transfer, and we’ll take care of it from there.” She was unlacing her shoes with one hand and untying the drawstring at her waist with the other. She shed the sweatpants and her training underwear and stood naked above Cono. “So we don’t need you after all.”

Katerina knelt on the floor and leaned over the edge of the tub to caress Cono’s organ with her hands and mouth, her breasts swaying with her movements.

“Don’t need you …” said Cono. “Is that
we
, or
I
, don’t need you?”

Katerina was in the tub, straddling Cono’s hips. Her head was bent down; her hands and eyes were fixed on his hardness. “Well, maybe I do … need you … right now.” She was rocking back and forth over him, in short arcs that became longer and longer as she forced the entry and brought him deeper inside.

“And where will the high-U go if you intercept it?” Cono tried to keep his breathing regular, to make it seem that he didn’t want her, that he hadn’t wanted to seize her from the very first moment of their encounter at the pool in Barcelona.

“I will … decide, I will … I … I …” Katerina grabbed Cono’s hair with both hands and slid her tongue into his beaten mouth. Her hips pivoted with athletic force. One hand left its grip on his hair and reached down to their locked organs. Cono felt a fingernail grazing his pubis as she thrummed her clitoris. Her body was vibrating, her knees pressed by the tub’s walls into Cono’s welt-striped abdomen. The cascade of water bouncing off the wall prevented Cono from breathing through his nose, and his swollen lips were sealed against Katerina’s. In near-asphyxiation, Cono saw in his mind Bulat checking his watch. There had been an appointed time for this, and Cono had been delivered, with a wink. The fingernail dug deeper. Her other hand was behind his neck, pressing their faces together. She was a quivering vise. Cono had to breathe, and he felt his own wave surging, about to crest. Finally he grasped her buttocks and squeezed them and spread them. He wiggled a finger into her other orifice. Her strumming intensified. The pivoting of her hips became more forceful even as it slowed, until her body became entirely immobile, like a gun hammer that had been cocked back by a thumb. Cono pushed his finger in deeper. Katerina suddenly pulled her tongue out of Cono’s mouth. The hammer fired and Katerina’s body shuddered violently. Cono gasped for air.

“I, I, I …” Her yelling reverberated off the tiled walls. Cono’s tongue chased her hardened nipples as his member was squeezed within her. He bucked several times, each time raising her higher, and then exploded, with his back arched and Katerina collapsing upon him. Her shuddering subsided. To each of her contractions his organ responded with another pulse. Her cheek fell against his chest. She reached back to push his hand away from her rear and breathed deeply; their bodies were now entirely relaxed, except for the contractions and pulsations stretching out in time as the warm water rained down. Cono wrapped his arms around her and stroked her back in long sweeps from the nape of her neck to the far end of the curvature of her muscular rump. And the words
we don’t need you
echoed in his mind.

A few miles away, in a shed in the flats beyond the tilt of the city, as Katerina and Cono were being softly pelted by their private rain, a cow was grinding her teeth on hay and watching three humans with her big black placid eyes, occasionally blinking her long lashes.

“Where will we go when we’ve got it loaded?” The lanky young man glared at the big-boned woman cleaning an AK-47 with an oily rag, and ground his cigarette into the dirt.

“I will tell you, once we have it.”

A second young man, wearing a rectangular skullcap, twisted uneasily on a stool. “So, we are expected to follow a woman, not a man, a woman who dresses like you, like a Russian, not even covering her head, and you won’t tell us what happens after we go into the devil’s mouth?”

“If Allah takes you, your family will be compensated,” said the woman, raising her head, the dark slots of her eyes flashing at both of them. “You should be proud to be following the path of our fallen brothers.”

The lanky young man jumped to his feet. “Men don’t follow women. Especially one who treats us like sheep. My family has suffered. What will they get? Where is the uranium going? Do you know how much it is worth, Tamaris?”

Tamaris picked up a rifle magazine.
He already knows too much
, she thought. “We have all suffered.” She slammed the magazine into its catch. “You know they tortured my brother to death. My brother who brought me under Allah’s beneficent hand. We do this for our fallen brothers and sisters, and for the return of this land to Allah’s law. Not for things you buy in the market.”

The watchful cow swung her head low in search of more hay, nudging against the fresh mound that the lanky man had sat on. Her head retreated with the swat of his hand.

“Almaz, Azmat, you are brave men. Warriors chosen by Allah, bless his name. He will guide us.” With a solemn voice Tamaris led the three of them in prayer. Almaz, the lanky one, cut it short. He sucked on another cigarette and blew the smoke toward the imperturbable eyes of the cow. “Why has the timetable been moved up?”

Tamaris glared at the two young men. “You know about the work of our brothers in Tashkent—the bombings last week. And the uprising in Osh. What you don’t know is that eight of ours, three men and five of their wives, were taken in Taraz, before they could serve as Allah’s sword here in the city.” Tamaris stared at Almaz. “It was the
wives
who were wearing belts of explosives when they were caught, not the men. Women who have children, like me. Have
you
worn a belt? Do you have children who will be left behind, Almaz? Do you, Azmat?” She slashed each of them with her gaze. “And now there is worry about a crackdown on our group. They have eyes everywhere. We may not have another chance. Speed is our ally.”

The serene cow emitted gas in a small explosion that startled all of them.

“Azmat, check your gun and the grenades—we may need them. But don’t be too eager to use them. Almaz, your gun looks like you bury it in the dirt. And your skullcap will be a liability in the morning. You will be known as Omar on our mission. Azmat, you shall be Mansour. I will be known as Nargiz.” She snapped a few more commands and then her voice became softer. “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate, let us pray for our fallen brothers and sisters.”

Cono lifted cold chicken chunks and cashews to his mouth with chopsticks, hungrily surveying the take-out dishes Katerina had left for him. They were arrayed on the bare floor of the one-room apartment: glass noodles, Sichuan beef, broccoli in oyster sauce, almond jelly, the chicken and cashews, and three American-style fortune cookies. Between bites he reached into the little pile of his vest on the floor and pulled out a bubble pack of antibiotics. He swallowed two pills. The bullet nick on his shoulder was beginning to fester. The cuts on his face would probably be next, even though he had washed them well. No matter what position he assumed, he was in pain. The curative powers of sex were formidable, he knew, even better than meditation, but they had had little effect this night.

Katerina had left him there in the warm rain. Whatever else she had said as she stepped out of the tub and vanished was overshadowed by the words that kept repeating themselves.
We don’t need you.

Cono placed a nest of noodles in his mouth, thinking that in fact, no one really needed him. Intermittently there were emergencies—panicked requests for his talents that brought him into an amusing tumble, into a game that was fun to play. Maybe he was just another Bulat, with his puzzle-solving fascination. A lesser kind of Bulat, without a clan, without an anchor, whipped by the seas. Yet Cono loved those seas of uncertainty—and his freedom as he rode upon them.

And this mission
had
been for someone who needed him. With some luck, Xiao Li would be in China, in Xinjiang, by now. Maybe there was a son there after all, but a son by someone other than Cono. A child wouldn’t keep her in China; Xiao Li would be eager to get back to Almaty as soon as she guessed the heat was off. She had her career here, and despite her flashes of tenderness and romanticism, she would not be able to sustain the patience required by parenthood.

Cono devoured the broccoli. While he chewed it he fiddled with the red paper that had wrapped the chopsticks. He read the small print at the end of the wrapper: “Please try your Nice Chinese Food with Chopsticks, traditional and typical of Chinese Glorious History and Culture.” It made him think of Bulat and his worries about the Kitais, but then Cono’s mind turned to the uranium, imagining what would play out at the quarry, if indeed that was where Timur held his radioactive treasure, as well as the oil companies’ cash that he’d been squirreling away.

If Katerina chose to surprise Timur at the quarry with a gang from the American embassy, there was a high risk they would botch it. It was likely that the only operatives on the payroll who could speak Russian or Kazak well enough to confront the jihadis with a language other than guns were Katerina and her stringers. He doubted that she would sacrifice herself or her loyal network to such a visible mess.

It was more likely that Katerina would tip her hand to Minister Kurgat, whose monitoring of jihadis had probably provided the details on when the transfer was to take place. And yet this meant that Kurgat, too, was relying on Katerina and her band to track Timur, and that he didn’t have sufficient reach to trail Timur through his own means. Maybe Kurgat’s power was already diminishing, or perhaps Katerina had persuaded him that she could get the job done. If Katerina served up the high-U for Kurgat, what would he do with it? Hand it over to his rival, the premier? Or destroy it—destroy a bargaining chip that he could use against the premier and his other rival, Timur, whom he was trying so earnestly to exterminate? No, Kurgat would employ the precious high-U for his own purposes, and cut his own deal with the next wave of jihadis, or keep it in the bank for the future, as Timur seemed to have done.