Performance Anomalies (8 page)

“It’s a tiny problem. We have bigger ones.” Cono shifted his eyes toward the car, then back to the panoramic view.

Timur tapped his fingers on the stone wall. “Are you sure the two in the car were part of it? The shots that got you off?”

“If they hadn’t ducked just before the others started firing I wouldn’t have been sure. I see things a little differently. Time. It separates itself.” Cono nodded. “I am sure.”

“And I’m sure you’re a freak of nature.”

“That’s the same word the doctors used. Freak.”

Timur was gazing far away. “Look down there, Cono—all green except for a few trees that have already turned. You never know which ones will turn yellow or orange first. It seems to happen overnight, with no warning. There’s a forest of green and then one day the first one changes color. No fuckeen warning. Another one turns, then another, but you never know which one is next.

“There’s a tree down there on Gogol Street, a big one.” Timur pointed with certainty at the middle of the city below. “I walked by it for years when I was a kid. Climbed it often, to take a look around, to get higher than everybody else. It made me late for school, so they whacked me. It was worth it. Sometimes that tree was first to turn, sometimes it was last, sometimes it was somewhere in between. But always, by the end of October, it and all the others were yellow or naked. I suppose the unnatural one that didn’t lose its leaves wouldn’t survive for the next season’s go-around.” Timur turned toward Cono.

“It all depends on the climate,” Cono said with a smile. “In Brazil the trees never lose their green. You should see Brazil, after you’ve had your pee in Paris.” Cono paused. “What about your two dedicated employees?”

“It’s tempting. They both deserve a nine-miller to the head. But if I start with them, it won’t finish. Better to know where they stand and use it later. Their leaves have just started to turn, not yellow or red yet. And next season they might remember I didn’t put a bullet in them. Changing sides—it’s the custom here. You live with it. You try to live with it.” Timur looked at the rip in Cono’s shirt. “I’ll tell you where the china doll is, but I can’t be there to help you spring her. Politically unwise. And if I do tell you, you’ll still have to help me get through the forest.”

“Agreed. As long as all three of us get through the forest.”

“More of a jungle than a forest. You know that.” Timur was tapping his fingers again. “But I won’t tell you where she is until after you get the gift money and the bid from the Beijing sow. They are the tough ones, and you speak Chinese, you get the nuances. No need for a troublesome talkative translator. It really would be such a waste if you skipped out before collecting from them. You’re even part Kitai. Maybe that’s what makes you chase around the world for her.”

“Right, brother, don’t trust me with those fellow Kitais who kill their own countrymen. Italian in me too, so I’ll play for them as well. Don’t forget the Russian genes and whatever the rest was. Do I care who sucks the oil out of the Caspian?”

Timur was taken aback by Cono’s sharpness. “Sounds like you’re applying for the job.”

“For a government employee you’re pretty quick,” Cono said. “But I saw that from the first day. No wonder you can shoot to the top and shake off your assassins.”

“Would-be assassins.”

“Them too.”

As they turned toward the cool air oozing down from the mountains and walked toward the Mercedes, the driver and the other guard scrambled into the car.

The ride down from Koktyube was long and silent until Cono began fiddling with the hinged metal cover of the ashtray next to his arm. It made a clinking sound as he opened and closed it, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it resembled chattering teeth. Timur looked at Cono with annoyance. The chattering slowed and stopped.

Even from a foot away, Cono could sense the tension in his companion’s muscles. He started to lean back in his seat but something clinging to Timur’s lower pant leg caught his eye. It was a long shred of gristle, a reminder of the pile of garbage that had saved their lives. He leaned forward and plucked it off, then handed it to Timur, who frowned at it for a moment before lowering the window and flicking it outside. The window whirred shut again, sealing the car in a silence that stretched out until they glided onto the city streets below.

5

Timur instructed the driver to stop in front of the Arasan Baths. He and Cono got out on the sidewalk where vendors watched over their stacks of cut-and-bound branches—myrtle, linden, oak, birch. The vendors were barking their wares to the trickle of men in search of their favorite branches with which to beat themselves in the steam rooms. Cono smiled at his nostalgia for this stretch of sidewalk, where he had met Xiao Li, but he pushed the feeling away.

Timur was the first to break the silence. “Call the Chinese now. Tell them your meeting has to be within two hours. In back of the musical-instruments museum—the old officers’ hall—all the way up the driveway, where it ends in the park. Use this. It’s clean.” He handed Cono a cell phone. “I’ll leave these two idiots back at the garage. Later I’ll be following you in something beat-up, maybe a Toyota. Luxury has its downsides.”

Cono tapped in the numbers written on the tenge note Timur had given him. The phone rang several times. Then there was an answer. “
Wei
?”

Cono conversed in Mandarin while Timur stood next to a big oak rooted in concrete and turned slowly right and left, glancing at Cono and the waiting car. At last Cono laughed and flipped the phone shut.

“He was telling me the old joke about the Dalai Lama coming to visit the Forbidden City. Sounds like a charming thug.”

“Are we on?”

“In two hours—ten after five. He says the gift will be in four cases.”

A tottering Russian who had just bought his bundle of myrtle leaves bumped into Timur. Timur jabbed an elbow into the man’s ribs. “We have manners here in Kazakhstan! Fuck off.”

The old man shuffled on. “And you learned them from us Russians,” he muttered, the myrtle in one hand and a colorless frayed towel in the other.

“Four cases,” Timur mused. “It’s a good sign, maybe three, maybe five million. Good for starters.”

“I hope the cases have labels, to make it easier. ‘For Mr. K, For Mr. Premier, For Mr. Timur.’ Each with ‘Greetings from the Forbidden City’ on a postcard inside.”

Timur ignored Cono’s remark and rapped on the darkened window of the Mercedes. He took a cell phone from each of the employees inside. “These little things are dangerous,” he said to Cono. “More dangerous than guns. And a little hard to get in my dear country. Losing one is like having your dick cut off.”

Timur stuffed the phones into his coat. He pointed his dark eyes at Cono’s. “The Kitais know that if they help me they can play both sides. The minister and the premier, split or no split. Isn’t that worth a little compensation?”

“A man of your talents—why would the Kitais pay anyone but you? The trouble is, one side or the other, either the minister or the premier, is trying to rub you out. And I hope they don’t succeed, at least not until the wildcat princess is free from your safe-keeping.”

Timur walked over to the beige stone wall encircling the monumental baths and sat on it. He lit a cigarette as Cono sat next to him. More old men sauntered past, Kazaks and Russians, to climb the broad steps nearby. Timur took a hip flask from his coat and quickly jerked it to his lips; then it disappeared again.

“It’s a delicate situation, Cono. Minister Kurgat is grabbing more and more power, and tightening his grip on the oil contracts; he’s become too powerful for the premier’s comfort. And there’s a court case in the U.S. that is complicating things here. A longtime American adviser to our government has been indicted for corrupt operations, or whatever they call it—just normal grease for oil contracts. The case could bring out a few details that reflect poorly on our fine leaders. This will hurt bidding prices, both the ones on the record and the ones off the record, because the sows are following the story every day and they don’t want to end up in court in their own countries. That’s why we’ve gone back to the Stone Age, like apes, carrying money in suitcases and trucks. It all has to be untraceable.”

“And the unflattering details, like the American grease case, get no play in the papers here at home, I guess.”

Timur snorted. “Little brother, sometimes I think you’ll never learn. All the press is under the regime’s thumb. There won’t be any coverage of it here. And if it did somehow get out, the people would just write it off as an American scheme to insult all Kazaks.
So what
if the chief is taking his cut, and is a tyrant, and plenty brutal? The people need a strong leader. They feel insecure if they don’t know who to fear. Isn’t that why god was invented?”

Cono laughed at his friend’s distillation of human nature.

“The premier wants to deal with the Americans through diplomacy,” Timur said, “which means buying as many politicians in Washington as he can. Getting the American oil companies to crank up the pressure at home on his behalf. And maybe leasing some land to their air force. Then there’s Minister Kurgat.”

Timur sucked his cigarette again and exhaled the smoke slowly. “Kurgat has other ideas. He wants to box, to stick it to the Americans. And with help from Beijing, he might just be able to knock our premier out of the ring. How convenient for him.”

“If he clears away a few obstacles—like you—in advance?”

“I’ve got you to thank for that, Cono. The run-in at the Svezda to save your tart, with my squad and the Chinese Embassy team all together like we’re having some fuckeen Politburo meeting, and the hotel staff swarming around? Fuckeen mess. No way Kurgat wouldn’t know about it and suspect I’m trying to cut my own deal with Beijing.”

“Aren’t you?”

Timur ignored the comment and stepped toward the waiting car. “You’ll have to walk to your date with the Kitais, Cono. Take a roundabout way, and try not to get robbed. Almaty is a dangerous place—nothing’s nailed down in my country. I’ll be waiting nearby, not too close. I would send someone else to pick you up, but they might take the money themselves and dump your corpse on the side of the road. Both results would be unpleasant. Put the cases under the trees by the drive-up to the museum and tell the Kitais to go away. Then wait. No one’s ever there, except for the old guy who sweeps the place. He’s my uncle—worse scum than my old man.”

Timur got into the Mercedes and drove off.

Cono looked south and upward, toward the Tian Shan range, the mountains catching the afternoon sun on their iced and glowing edges. He turned and walked north, down sloping Karl Marx Street, then east beyond the central avenues where the high-end-business fronts behind the trees wore new façades of fake marble and chrome. Each was lettered with big Cyrillic signs—banks and medical suppliers, apparel shops and travel agents, followed by more modest stores selling industrial pumps, electrical fixtures, and spooled cables.

With almost two hours on his hands, Cono found himself wandering without direction, replaying the events of the day in his head—his old friend’s request for help with the bribes; the assassination attempt; the promise that Xiao Li’s whereabouts would be revealed; the bullet wound that caused less discomfort than being called a freak.

Freak
. Cono had been trying to get used to that word ever since the doctors had first spoken it a decade ago.

The clinic physician in São Paulo who had started it all had no idea what he had set into motion. He had been treating Cono for recurring headaches, and was intrigued by the results of the neurological exams he performed on the unusual, ragtag young man who had just returned to Brazil after years of roaming alone across several continents.

In order to satisfy his own curiosity, and to get his name on a case report in a prestigious medical journal, the Brazilian doctor offered, at his own expense, to send Cono to a medical-research lab at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. The intention was for Cono to spend a few days there to determine which rare syndrome he exhibited, then return to Brazil. But the stay in California dragged on and on.

It was in the first battery of tests that Cono learned of his susceptibility to certain types of lights. The scientists asked him to give the exact count of rapid flickers he was being exposed to, in intervals as infinitesimal as hundredths of a second. Cono’s count was always accurate. They tested the flashing lights over a wide range of frequencies, and at different distances. Once, when a high-frequency light was positioned an arm’s length away from Cono’s face, it had thrown him into a seizure. Afterward, when he had regained consciousness and was connected to an intravenous line, Cono was told by two of the self-assured doctors that they had predicted this response.