Performance Anomalies (3 page)

Cono chortled as he read these last sentences. He’d had enough personal experience with the “countries seeking access” to Kazakhstan’s resources to know the wealth they were spreading around went mostly into a few pockets. He lowered his eyes and read the editor’s postscript.

Note to travelers:

As in all of the former Soviet Republics, petty extortion, especially by local authorities in the largest city, Almaty (population one million), should be mitigated by avoiding encounters with police or other employees of the government. It should also be noted that recent arrests of Islamic terrorists operating in the country have led to increased security measures, which may cause inconveniences for the traveler.

“Perfect for a vacation,” Cono muttered as he folded the newspaper and put it back on the rack. He heard his flight being called.

Before handing his boarding pass to the attendant at the gate, Cono again called the mobile number Xiao Li had given him; a hoarse male voice responded unintelligibly after the first ring. In the background an alarm was clanging, then there was shouting. Cono could make out the yelling in Mandarin: “Quick. Get the body down to the car. And take the whore!” He also heard orders barked in Russian. One of the voices was Timur’s. There was a clapping sound as if the phone had fallen to the floor, and then the signal was dead.

So Timur had put himself into the fray, Cono thought. He hadn’t just sent his minions. Even so, it was clear from the noise that Timur didn’t have things under control. And Xiao Li was still like the baby mouse, about to be eaten. Cono felt a flushing sensation run up the back of his neck. He was suddenly sweating, unbearably hot. It wasn’t like him; he never worried like this.
It’s just another tontería, another mission,
Cono told himself. But the flushing continued and turned into a wave of prickly irritation across his entire body. It was going to be a very long flight.

2

“You really must get on now,” said the attendant, reaching for Cono’s boarding pass.

The plane was nearly full, with portly white men in front, Asian faces in back, and a smattering of Turks in both sections. The majority of the men in front, Cono knew, were Brits and Americans and other Westerners in the oil business, soldiers in the corporate armies that were tapping into Kazakhstan’s newly proven Caspian fields. Most of the other white faces would be Canadians who would transit at Almaty and go on to Kyrgyzstan for its gold and silver mines. As Cono walked through business class he casually let his knee bump an aluminum case held by a bulky man with a shaved head standing in the aisle in front of him. The man turned and glared, and Cono saw the individual pulsations of blood filling the tiny vessels in the man’s bulbous cheeks. Cono smiled and said in Portuguese, “My, what a heavy load of greenbacks you carry.” The beefy man didn’t understand, and twisted to confront Cono directly, but he was put off-guard by Cono’s beaming smile with its rows of white teeth. He was a bag man, Cono knew, one of the frequent pigeons on these flights, carrying hard-cash payroll for oil company employees—never more than a million at a go, so the deliveries were frequent. Cono smiled again and the bag man took his seat, planting the case upright on the floor behind his thick calves.

Cono walked on to the back, amid the central Asians, most of whom he guessed worked the oil fields and the mines; others had somehow gotten enough money to leave the country and were returning to visit their kin, loaded with gifts and electronics to sell or barter. Cono took his aisle seat, next to a stout man with thick palms. The man was surprised when Cono said hello to him in Russian.

“You don’t … look Russian,” he said with a puzzled smile.

“Nor do you. What
is
a Russian, after all?” replied Cono with an easy laugh that brought the startled man’s eyes directly into Cono’s gaze, where the man found himself lost for a moment.

He was Kazak, he told Cono. He had a broad face and tilted dark eyes and full cheeks pinched close around his fleshy nose. A handsome, robust man with jet-black hair.

They spoke for a few minutes before the plane took off. Cono learned that his name was Anvar and that he worked for the Finance Ministry. As he said those words, Cono saw the fleeting tension at the corners of his mouth that betrayed something amiss—probably just the slight discomfort of having an undeserved job that entitled him to off-the-books income.

“A small, small job,” Anvar said, putting his thumb and forefinger together to show something the size of a pea.

Anvar seemed relieved when Cono said he wasn’t a businessman, and was only going to Almaty to visit distant relatives. He relaxed even more when Cono spoke of the pretty women who went every night to the Cactus bar at the Hotel Ratar.

“So you know Almaty?”

“A beautiful town of overgrown trees, the whole place flat like a tabletop, but tilted—upward toward the shining Tian Shan Mountains,” Cono said as the plane rumbled off the runway. “And on the other side, downward, toward the steppes, the desert, the oil.”

The two were silent until the jet had leveled off. Cono proposed that he should take Anvar’s number in case there was a night free for an outing at the Cactus. “Some of the girls there even know how to dance salsa,” he said, moving his hips in his seat and raising his arms to show a dancing embrace.

“Yes, yes,” Anvar said with hesitant enthusiasm as he wrote his number on a napkin. Cono took it and slipped it into his undervest. Made from a lightweight synthetic fabric, the vest was crafted with pockets and sheaths, some concealed, that contained bank account and telephone numbers in code, identity cards in separate sealed envelopes, several mobile phones, a stack of untraceable SIM cards, three passports, antibiotics, a wafer-thin alarm clock, credit cards and stashes of various currencies.

The dark-haired woman serving the first round of refreshments paused as she reached to give Cono his orange juice. She appeared mildly disturbed by the large and placid blue-green eyes she had just seen. The eyes didn’t match his slightly Asiatic, slightly bronze-colored visage. He’d spoken to her in English, but with an accent that was as hard to place as his face.

Half an hour later, as she served him a glass of water, she made a point of asking him what country he was from.

“I am from … Where am I from?” he replied, his eyes fixed on hers. “I am from where these two feet meet the ground.” He circled his scuffed shoes with a pointed finger, smiling.

“But we are flying,” she declared.

“It’s a winged country then!” Freed momentarily from his worries about Xiao Li, Cono laughed deeply, openly.

The flight attendant’s impatience with the remark was tranquilized by Cono’s broad grin.

“Your accent hints of Spanish,” Cono said. “Where are
you
from?”

“You’re right, I’m from Granada. Are you familiar with it?”

“I know an old woman there who sells flowers in Plaza Santa Ana. She mostly complains about the Gypsies, but once in a while she claims to see the ghost of a dead local poet stealing her red zinnias. She’s nearly blind, but she told me where to find the music academy, a fine place to sit on a hot afternoon. Her name is Concepción. Maybe you know her?”

The young woman standing with the tray in her hand seemed amused by the non-sequitur, and by Cono’s manner; perhaps she had never seen a person talk while staring directly at her. Not exactly staring, but gazing without blinking, and without the murky boundary that usually separates strangers, and even friends. She struggled to release her eyes from Cono’s, saying, “No, I don’t know Concepción.”

The plane dipped suddenly and the water pitcher lurched off the flight attendant’s tray. Before she could even gasp, Cono had caught it.

She stared at him in disbelief. “How … ?”

The young man grinned. “Practice,” he said, handing the still-full pitcher back to her, along with three packets of peanuts she hadn’t seen slide off the tray. “Lots of practice.”

She looked at him again, uncertain what to make of him. Finally she nodded slowly, thanked him, and moved on.

Cono’s practice had originally taken the form of stealing pieces of meat or bread or fish or fruit when he was a child in Fortaleza, a poor town in the far northeast of Brazil. He had preferred to hunt octopus on the reefs, but he could not always fill his belly that way, or the bellies of his mother and father.

It was through these minor thefts of food that he first became aware of a peculiar ability of his mind and muscles that his mother had noted much earlier as she taught him to dance. Any movement he chose to learn took only one viewing to register in his mind, captured as if it were presented in slow motion and then replayed through his body at normal speed.

He could perceive motion in infinitesimal detail, as if he were looking at the world through a high-speed camera, and could direct his body movements with a corresponding swiftness. It was a simple matter to snatch an orange from a display crate in the moment the shopkeeper was distracted, even as he and Cono stood facing each other. From Cono’s perspective, the movement—the reach of his arm, the extension of his fingers, the grasping of the orange, the retraction of his arm—proceeded in minutely segmented stages. But others would see only the beginning of his movement, and the end, as if he had merely adjusted his stance; the rest of his motion was as imperceptible as a single missing frame in a film reel, or the flick of a frog’s tongue when it seizes a damselfly.

During a private walk with his mother when he was seven, hand in hand beneath clacking palm trees, she had told him that his father was afraid of him, afraid of how quickly a child with almost no schooling could absorb languages, even those of passing foreigners; of how he could recite, syllable by syllable, long pieces of overheard conversation; of how casually he learned to write the Chinese characters his father laid before him; of how effortlessly he could catch a coffee cup falling from a table.

Cono’s father, a math teacher who was occasionally forced during his itinerant career to also teach reading, had his own theory to explain the strangeness in Cono. He had encountered children who had great difficulty learning to read and who pushed his impatience into a rage of disgust. “Their brain clock is too slow!” he told his wife and son as they sat in plastic chairs around a rickety table. He was drinking
cachaça
heavily and pounding the table. “And your damn brain clock is too fast!” He leered at Cono, his eyes wet and bloodshot. He grabbed a pen and scribbled mathematical formulas on a paper napkin to explain, jabbing his finger into each line, saying, “This is the slow ones! This is us! This is you!” Cono’s eyes met his mother’s in the light of the hanging bulb surrounded by fluttering moths; he could see the insects’ swishing woolly wings as if they weren’t moving at all. And he saw his mother’s almond-shaped eyes lower themselves in segmented steps, each one a separate snapshot of her guarded pride.

The flight attendant from Granada smiled at Cono as she passed by his seat; his eyes were closed, almost, and his breathing was slow and deep. He was sunk in meditation, hands loose in his lap, spine erect. Xiao Li was there with him, kicking with delight as he held her supple body, suspending her in the air beyond the railing of the balcony. He heard her giggling and could feel the weight of her in his outstretched arms, with eight stories of open air between her and the ground. She fluttered her legs with abandon toward the night sky. “See the moon? Do you see the moon, Cono?” Just as Xiao Li turned her body and reached toward the moon as if trying to cuddle it, Cono lifted her back to the safety of the balcony, where they spent the night—Xiao Li wanted to see the moon while they climaxed together.

She was like him, trying to embrace the moon while making her way in the world through instinct and drive that came only from within, because she had only herself. Yes, she had spoken of a mother. A mother who, when Xiao Li was thirteen, had thrown her out of their home with the words: “My man looks at you too much. I’m saving you from him. Now get out and make some money, get your own life. I’m sure men will pay you plenty.” And yet Xiao Li always spoke of her mother as if her image were mounted in a red-and-gold picture frame resting on a shrine in the corner of a tidy house, to be venerated and pleased at all times, like a deceased ancestor ever-present and scrutinizing her progeny.