Performance Anomalies (5 page)

“They’re bringing her,” Timur said.

Cono heard the voice of the doorman snapping in English, telling a woman she would have to pay to get in, like all the other girls. Then Cono was startled to hear Xiao Li’s voice, arguing back in ferociously vulgar Mandarin before adding sweetly in English: “Here just friends. No business.” Cono heard the clack of her stiletto heels as she stepped in; it was a full minute before her head, elevated with haughtiness, turned toward Cono. His heart lost its rhythm when he finally saw all of her, now even more breathtaking than before, but his elation was checked by the momentary alarm in her eyes as she spotted Timur. Yet she kept her composure and stepped toward them briskly and sat next to Cono.

Cono pressed her good hand in his. Her other hand was bandaged, and at the edge of a light sweater she had wrapped around her neck like a makeshift scarf, Cono could see a small flap of white gauze. They greeted each other with their eyes. When little glistening crescents appeared on Xiao Li’s lower lashes, she looked down abruptly to search her purse. Cono lit her cigarette and she tapped his forearm with two fingers to say thank you, as she had always done.

“Your friend saved me, but …” Xiao Li spoke in Mandarin before Cono cut her off. He looked at Timur, who was eyeing the dance floor and taking another hit of vodka.

“She says you saved her. Let’s speak in English so Timur understands. Timur, she says thank you for keeping her alive.”

Timur raised his glass in a silent toast, still looking toward the dance floor, and downed the drink.

Xiao Li’s palm was moist in Cono’s hand.

“Mister, you good man. So good. So powerful.” Xiao Li reached across Cono to touch Timur’s arm with her bandaged hand. He withdrew his arm and said, “All for my friend.” Xiao Li pulled Cono’s hand into her lap; with her finger she drew in his palm the Chinese character 蛇. It meant
snake
.

Timur waved the waitress over for another vodka and leaned closer to Cono. “I never should have been seen head-to-head in public with the Chinese at the Svezda.” His voice was low and tense. He switched to Russian, which he knew Xiao Li wouldn’t grasp. “I could have just sent my toads. I went myself. All for a tart. All for you.”

Xiao Li had lit another cigarette by herself, with a huff and a twist of Cono’s thumb, but she was listening intently, trying to recognize a word or two in what they said.

“Here’s how you pay me back,” Timur said. “We’re taking bids from the oil companies for the readjustment of the contracts that you helped with four years ago. I need a go-between I can trust. You did such a good job last time. No leaks.”

Cono leaned closer.

“This time you’ll get the numbers from the Chinese, too, and an advance gift in cash, a show of goodwill. Then you can make the rounds of the other guys you know so well from last time—the Anglos, the French, the Italians—and see what their numbers are, how much goodwill they are offering. Then I’ll give the numbers to Kurgat, our esteemed minister of the interior, and he and the premier can decide how to reallocate my country’s resources in the most advantageous way. The minister hates the Chinese, but they’re pushing hard and hinting big numbers so they can finally get in.

“And then you go back to wherever your two feet want to be,” Timur concluded. “And everyone will be happy.”

“The Chinese you packed off are no doubt already happy,” Cono said, his mind racing to understand what Timur was really asking of him. “By killing their own delivery man they showed the minister they’re not like their competitors. These guys are working for Beijing after all, not just another oil company. It will be hard for Kurgat to say no to them.”

“It’s lucky for him that you’re in town,” Timur said, smiling. “Even a minister needs help sometimes.”

“Poor Minister Kurgat.”

“You
will
help.”

“Do I have a choice?”

The club was now crowded and beginning to seethe. The Brazilian music had given way to Celia Cruz roaring “Azúcar!” through the speakers. Cono pushed back the table and leaned toward Timur. “Can’t resist this. Just a quick dance before we go.” He stood and grinned at the scowl on his friend’s face. “Not with you, brother—not your kind of music. I meant with her.” Cono pulled Xiao Li up and joined the rhythm with his hips well before the two reached the dance floor. He saw a pair of Timur’s men glancing toward their master as he guided Xiao Li along the railing, and recognized the tall one with the thin white face as the brute who had nearly beaten to death two of Xiao Li’s working girlfriends the last time Cono was in town.

Timur watched closely from the shadows, but the couple were not talking, only lost in their swirling embraces.

The music climaxed and Xiao Li arched backward toward the floor as Cono held her head and the small of her back. He made her rise in a sweeping spiral, and as his body blocked Timur’s view he slid one of his cell phones under the sash around her waist.

“It’ll be as hot as July for a few weeks,” Cono said as he kissed her sweaty temple. “Keep the baby mouse out of the chopsticks. Get out of Almaty. I put five thousand in your purse. My cell number is under the address Sleeper.”

Xiao Li wrapped her arms around Cono and pressed her cheek to his chest. She squeezed him lightly at first, then harder and harder, until Cono saw Timur approaching.

They bumped through the crowd back toward the table. Xiao Li took her purse. Cono lifted his traveling bag. “I think we’ll take a room at the Hotel Tsarina,” Cono said. “A high room with one of those broad balconies and a view of the premier’s palace.”

Timur shrugged. “Sure.”

He led the way as they pressed through the odors of perfume and sweaty groins toward the door. The two toads in black leather jackets hustled in behind them. There were two more guards waiting for them as the group exited onto the veranda and down the steps to a patch of trees lit by the sparks of a shashlik brazier. Cono saw the shashlik man glance up and then quickly look down again to be sure he saw nothing. There were two cars waiting, neither one the gray Mercedes that had driven them from the airport, and more toads.

Timur flashed a lighter, but was holding no cigarette. At the signal, two of his men grabbed Xiao Li and thrust her into one of the cars. She cried out for Cono as they closed the door on her kicking legs. A high-heeled shoe fell to the ground before they managed to slam the door shut.

Xiao Li was pressing her face against the inside of the window, panic in her eyes. “Just a little insurance, to make sure you don’t change your mind about being my helper,” Timur said. “She’ll be at a good hotel, good service.” He bent down to pick up the fallen shoe and gave it to Cono. Cono was dazzled by the sharpness of the spike he held in his hand. In the fraction of a second in which he glimpsed Timur’s face and measured the distance of the men around him, Cono swung the point of the heel into the neck of the tall guard he’d recognized, the thug who had brutalized Xiao Li’s friends. Cono’s own awareness of his action, the idea of it, appeared in his mind only after it was done. He had pulled out the stiletto before the others could see the sweep of his arm, and they had noticed no more than a quick change in his posture. The man crumpled to the asphalt, clutching his neck, blood seeping out in a dark stream. Only Timur took a step backward from Cono and pulled the gun from his armpit. The others quickly crouched against the cars, looking for snipers as their injured comrade lost consciousness.

“I’ll keep the shoe until I see her again,” Cono said. “And if she’s touched by anyone, they’ll go down like the toad who swallowed this.” Cono rotated the shoe so the dagger-like heel was pointing up.

“Cinderella will be safe as long as you do your job,” Timur said, putting his gun away. He screamed at his men in a mixture of Kazak and Russian, and the car holding Xiao Li sped off. Cono got into the other car with Timur and two of his men. As the Mercedes accelerated, Cono’s head was thrown back against the seat.

“Not so fast, slow it down,” Timur barked to the driver. To his right Cono saw the raised eyes of the shashlik cook shaking his head. The bloodied thin-faced man was left for others to pick up.

Cono mentally replayed the scene in the Cactus, and the earlier one in the park. Timur’s discomfort, his agitation, had been obvious, but his duplicity—Cono couldn’t fathom how he’d missed that. Feelings of guilt and incompetence made the small shoe in his hand seem heavy. Cono wiped the shoe’s heel on the carpeted floor of the car. He’d been blind to the truth on Timur’s face, but his reflexes were intact. He wondered, in fact, if his reflexes were leaving his thoughts behind. And yet the attack couldn’t be just a reflex—he had struck the brute he recognized, no one else. Maybe the thinking had been done long before, and the reaction was already primed. What other thoughts had already taken hold without his awareness, and had already primed a reflexive trigger?

And Timur? He could have shot Cono right there, because he knew the blow came from Cono, with his strange quickness—Timur had experienced it first-hand more than once. There must be desperation in Timur’s need for Cono. And maybe Timur, too, was happy to see the thin-faced man taken down, for different reasons.

They pulled into the shimmering driveway of the Hotel Tsarina. Cono and Timur got out and stood next to the car.

“Don’t worry about your little china doll,” Timur said. “Do you really think I would return her to you compromised?” He shook his head with a laugh. “I know you better than that, brother. You would hunt me down and find a way to make me pay. No.” He shook his head again. “She’ll be well taken care of. You have my word.

“But I need your help. And I need to make sure you stay here to give it to me. You got me into this stinking mess. If the premier or Minister Kurgat thinks I was at the Svezda to work my own deal with Beijing … you can see where that might lead.”

Cono remained silent.

“Hey,” Timur said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I had the hotel bump out an American so you could have your favorite room, with the view. Want me to call a companion for you? Help you forget your friend?”

“Another time, brother. I’m a working man. Working for you.”

“Suit yourself.” Timur climbed into the idling Mercedes. “We’ll get started in the morning.”

Upstairs, Cono yanked back the curtains and opened the sliding doors. The nearby amusement park was still lit up, the rides spinning with primary colors but no passengers. As he watched, the rides gradually slowed and stopped. The tinny recordings of calliope music were switched off one by one. With rhythmic precision, the garish lights went out in stages, as if a giant were squashing each ride with his steps until only a skeleton of pale lampposts was left. Farther to the east was the great bland square, illuminated with floodlights that made the government buildings glow. At the top of a rising lawn littered with shadowed monuments was the flat-faced Stalinist palace. It leaned forward in the stark white glow of the lights as if it were about to slide down the whole tilting mantle of Almaty.

Cono stripped off his clothes, stretched out on the balcony and began his exercises. The fatigue crept away from him and was replaced by a fresh rush of the joy he’d felt when Xiao Li walked into the Cactus, alive and stunning. Then he was swamped by imaginings of how Timur’s men might treat her. In his mind, hundreds of minutely differentiated images of Xiao Li’s panicked face began to flash, like freeze-frames taken milliseconds apart. In each, she was calling to him from behind the car window.

He looked out toward the city lights to stop the flashing pictures plaguing his brain and concentrated on his rhythmic breathing. It was over the railing of this balcony or one near it that he had held Xiao Li in midair; they had left the stodginess of the Hotel Svezda for the glossy newness of the Tsarina on that second stay in Almaty, when he’d recklessly given himself over to her even though it had been a working visit.

It was a working visit that had begun with a phone call from a woman who said she and Cono had a friend in common, Irina. The woman spoke in Russian, but with a Ukrainian accent like Irina’s. Cono was surprised to hear that Irina had friends at all, but in fact he knew little about her life. “Why ruin the present by talking about the past?” Irina had said. On the other hand, she knew perhaps too much about Cono’s tonterías; when he occasionally saw her on layovers in Berlin, he diverted her from her studies by recounting vignettes from his exploits. Names and locations obscured, to be sure, but all the same, he had not been terribly discreet.

The friend of Irina’s said she was merely a messenger for a large company that needed his help to make things right.

“What for you is right?” Cono asked. He heard the pursing and unpursing of her lips as she weighed her answer over the phone.

“It is better that we meet in person,” she said.

Two days later they sat in the sun with their feet dangling in a seafront swimming pool in Barcelona, where Cono kept one of his austere apartments. He had suggested they swim and have their conversation in the water. It was mid-afternoon at the tail end of the season, and the pool was mostly empty, as was the adjacent beach. The sunlight skittering on the surface of the water was mildly unpleasant to Cono. They slid into the water.

She called herself Katerina. It was a simple matter, she explained as they stood in the shallow end. A couple of offices needed to be entered, a few electronic taps placed, a few friends newly made, certain documents stolen or copied … originals would be better. An American oil company felt too hemmed in by its country’s laws against bribing for business overseas, and wanted to level the playing field by threatening to expose its European competitors’ generosity toward Kazak officials. The companies were all hungry for a piece of the giant oil reserves under and around Kazakhstan’s portion of the Caspian Sea.