Performance Anomalies (7 page)

“Look, brother,” Timur said. “Last time I helped you and you helped me. We can do it again.”

“Maybe with more help you will have your own oil empire,” Cono said. “I already gave you ammunition for it, last time I was here. It seems you’ve sat on the fact that your leaders like the Alps. I even gave you the paper trail that proved they’ve been stashing hundreds of millions in Zurich.” Cono was reading every minute twitch of Timur’s body across the table.

Timur placed his hand around the bottle and gripped it tightly. “Paper trails are made of paper. It was nice work, even if it was just a lucky extra take from your job for the Americans and the Ukrainian bitch. Thanks for the reminder. You’re just angling for the girl.”

“A maiden for a kingdom. A small price.”

“Brother, you are a strange man.”

“And you, brother, breathe ambition. Let’s call you Genghis.” Cono smiled.

“You’re all the more strange because you are still friendly even while I’ve got your girl locked up. Maybe she’s not such a big deal, after all.”

“You and I go way back, Timur, my friend. I know the forces that twist you. I’d help you anyway, and that’s why,” Cono softened his voice and slowed his cadence. “That’s why you should let her go.”

Timur caught himself being lulled by Cono’s open gaze and the rhythm of his speech, which kept tempo with Timur’s breathing. He unlatched his eyes from Cono’s and looked up at the ceiling again.

“Besides,” Cono continued, “no person is just one person. Everyone is a crate of fruits, a crate of mixed fruits. The apple in there may have worms, a peach may be mildewed, a banana may be too green, a pear may be in perfect ripeness, and a melon may have the sweetest smell. And do you know, Timur,” Cono’s voice slowed again, almost imperceptibly, “do you know, the expression the Kitais have for friends? They say, to make a friend you must close one eye. And to keep a friend, you must close both eyes. And so, Timur.” The huskiness of Cono’s voice was soothing, melodic. “I will close both eyes, for you, for now, because … we are friends.”

Timur’s eyes were back on Cono’s, suddenly glazed and droopy. Cono raised his right hand and rubbed his ear, breaking the dull, hypnotic stare. Timur blinked and was reaching for another drink when the stillness was cracked open by a moaning muezzin’s call to midday prayer. The powerful loudspeakers of the mosque wailed on for minutes.

Finally it was quiet. Timur’s body had tensed with the sound of the muezzin, and now it relaxed. “Our friend …” he said. “Muktar, our painter friend—he went that way. I should tell you. You asked me on the phone.” He was wistful, as if he had lost a real brother, but slight asymmetries in the ripples of his facial muscles caught Cono’s eye.

“From painting to Islam?” Cono thought of the grotesquely fascinating painting of deformed faces he had bought from Muktar back then, and that now hung on an otherwise blank wall in Cono’s terrace apartment at Repulse Bay, Hong Kong.

“You know how lost he was,” Timur said. “That’s how it happens. Unsettled, aimless, alone, so you make some visits to the mosque, find a new and better family, a family of believers. All the questions answered. All those words fill the vacuum. Imagine—he doesn’t even take women anymore.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He’s lost to me. Gone to the other side. It’s better I don’t know.” There it was again: a slight unevenness in the modulation of Timur’s voice. He was not telling the truth.

Timur lifted the bottle. “He liked you. Strange guy. He was a good friend.”

“How far has he gone?”

“All the way. Fanatic, with all the jihad blabber of a central-Asian caliphate. He’s on the Bureau’s terrorist watch list.” Timur shook his head. “His mother thinks her boy might as well be dead. If he has to be a fanatic I wish he would be just a freelance one like you.”

“Ah, Timur, if it’s not one god it’s another. Allah or oil. Jesus or Jewels. Lenin or lust.”

“Nice lines, Tupac. I know you’ve got no religion.”

Cono looked at Timur with a wide-open face. “Oh, but I do.”

Timur was puzzled.

“I believe in the goddess of mystery. And she’s always pregnant,” Cono laughed.

“Fuck religion. Let’s get on with it,” Timur said, scowling. “These will be busy days for you. Some of the dogs are the same, some are different from last time.” He ran through the list of the dogs—what he called the official and unofficial go-betweens employed by the oil companies, the sows.
Dogs and sows
, Cono thought.
What does that make me?

“And why the gifts in cash instead of bank wires?”

“The Americans have a saying: ‘Cash is king.’”

“And what do the Kitais say?”

“Back off. It’s a simple auction. And you are the auctioneer,” Timur said.

“No,
you
are the auctioneer, and I am the bag boy.”

“No one better, brother.”

Timur handed Cono a restaurant receipt. The first names of the go-betweens, phone numbers, and a password for each one, in English, were written on the back. There were four names on the list.

“It’s short.”

“The two American sows don’t want to play this way anymore—they’re counting on their government to provide the grease. And the Russians aren’t going to pay enough because they’re drowning in Siberian oil. Besides, they still think they own my country. The dogs on the list work for the Italians, the French, the Anglos, the Dutch. I’ve stepped up the schedule to take advantage of your presence.”

“It looks like a busy week’s work.” Cono held up the list so he could view Timur’s face at the same time. “I hope I don’t have to take each of these distinguished men to dinner.”

“We don’t have that much time. You want to spring the girl, after all.”

Timur plucked the restaurant receipt out of Cono’s hand. “Before we get to these old reliables, you have to tend to the new bidders, from Beijing. They’ll be less predictable—better to take them on first. Here.” Timur handed Cono a 100-tenge note with writing along one edge, a number, and a pass phrase.

Cono nodded, studying Timur’s face carefully. “And after all the bids are in, the girl is freed.”

“The girl is freed,” Timur echoed as his cell phone started vibrating in a jacket pocket. “Yes.” Timur listened for a moment. “Then get some cuffs on her. Send him on the holiday. Yeah, that holiday. He knew the rules.” Timur snapped the phone into his jacket.

“Your tart is a wildcat. Nearly scratched the eyes out of one of my employees who tried to misbehave. You seem to like them like that.” Timur smiled.

“She’s stronger than either of us.”

Timur took another swig and went into the bathroom to piss. Cono studied the only decoration in the room, a frameless canvas of rough brush strokes propped up against the wall. The tortured faces, harshly rendered, had to be the work of Muktar.

While Cono listened to Timur’s drizzle, he wondered what prank he could pull—a jest like those they used to play on each other years ago, usually followed by a bout of brotherly wrestling. In the early days, Timur
had
treated him as a brother, helping him navigate rough-and-tumble Almaty with hard advice and sharp humor, supplying a little piece of family that Cono hadn’t known since childhood, rescuing his spirits and bringing him out of one of the deepest troughs of his aloneness. Cono suddenly felt embarrassed—embarrassed by the thought that he might have been just another pitiful orphan trying to turn friends into family, and that he might still be blinded by his need, a need that colored his whole life, that ache to offer worth to someone. Wasn’t that the constant engine for his bizarre career, servicing the ambitions of the reputable and disreputable—all the same to him as long as they acknowledged the necessity of having him and only him do the job?

Cono spotted an electrical box on the wall of the main room and lifted its lid, then twisted out two fuses. The apartment went pitch black. As Timur hurried back into the room, Cono ripped down the plastic from one window, letting the daylight stream in. Timur’s pants were still undone, urine dripping on his leg. And a pistol was staring at Cono from the end of Timur’s arm. Pranks were a thing of the past.

“Timur, friend, you were made for Paris, where they pee in the streets.”

Timur’s arm gradually lowered. The gun went back to his armpit. He zipped his pants and fumbled for the key to the lock he had secured from the inside. “If you weren’t a friend, I’d kill you now,” Timur said as they went into the stairwell. He kicked a beer can and sent it flying ahead of them.

Cono stepped out of the building first, with Timur close by. The black Mercedes was in the same place to the left, with the driver and the other toad standing in front of it. Cono glimpsed a momentary tautness in their faces as they watched their boss emerge on the crumbling concrete steps. The scene was the same as when they had arrived—the row of green and russet trees, the kids chasing one another in the gravel enclosure formed by the looming buildings. It was all the same except for the shadows Cono saw cast by two trees to the right, shadows with irregularities that weren’t there before. Cono slammed his shoulder into Timur and the two crashed off the steps into a garbage pile. Automatic gunfire sprayed the face of the building. As Cono and Timur dug themselves frantically into the rubbish, Cono counted the rounds. Eventually he heard a voice shout
“Khvatit!”—
“Enough.” He also heard the individual steps of two pairs of feet running until they were lost. Then a distant sound of wheels scratching gravel and fading away. Timur had his pistol in hand, but there was nothing to shoot.

“They’re gone,” Cono said. “But your friends’ faces showed they knew the future.”

They rose from the trash pile as Timur’s two comrades slowly stood up behind the Mercedes. Cono took note of the calmness of Timur’s body as he shook off the fetid debris of kitchen remains. Timur didn’t scream at his men. He simply got into the car, followed by Cono, and told the driver to go to the lookout point called Koktyube, on the southern fringe of the city, where the mountains started their rugged rise to snow-fed streams and the simpler lives of nomads.

“I guess they didn’t like our visitor,” Timur said to the driver, letting out a deep burp. “Anyone you recognized, or just the usual thugs dressed like you?”

“No sir. They came out of nowhere, from behind the trees.” The driver’s reply was slightly rushed.

“And you, Mazhit, proud father of little six-year-old Amira?”

“Nothing to see, sir. It was so quick,” said the other guard.

The car stopped at the top of a long rising road with a concrete barrier on one side that held the foothills at bay. Timur and Cono got out and walked to the edge of a broad terrace rimmed by a stone wall overlooking Almaty. It was a strikingly clear day, with a sky of such bright blueness that it hurt the eyes. The overgrown greenness of the city grid was splotched here and there with yellow and orange. In the distance the vegetation and low buildings gave way to a flat grayness that met the blue sky in a sharp line. Just below the terrace was a small café with red parasols. It was empty.

Timur spoke first. “There are not so many clear days like this. Usually the haze cuts off the view.”

“A good clean day for an assassination.”

“Assassination? You make me out as some government prince.” Timur lit a cigarette.

“Someone thinks you are.” Cono stood so he could glance at the car as they spoke. “You can’t blame them. You carry yourself so nobly, with that ambition in your eyes. If only they could see you grovel at the feet of pretty women like I have!” Cono laughed, and as he did so he saw the driver through the car window, speaking on a cell phone.

Timur ignored the humor. “There may be a split, Cono. Between the premier and Minister Kurgat.”

“Which one is your boss?”

“I could say I’m a patriotic employee of the republic, but you would laugh.”

“How could I laugh when your patriotism almost got you killed?”

“Almost. Only almost. Thanks to you. A second time. Thanks, brother.” Timur took a long drag on his cigarette.

“Don’t thank me now,” Cono said. “It depends on whether future life makes you happy you didn’t die.”

“That’s the question every day, I suppose.” Timur flicked his cigarette ash over the edge of the wall.

“And, every day,
you
have to wonder who you work for, poor bastard,” Cono said, laughing. “Okay, enough philosophy!” He spanked his knee in self-amusement. The men in the car were looking at them.

Timur breathed out a stream of smoke. “Why the fuck are you so happy all the time?”

“Life and death—doesn’t the sharp edge between them make you happy?” Cono asked. “It makes me ecstatic. Only sex can give as much pleasure. I nearly came when they nicked my shoulder.”

Timur was startled. He looked closely at Cono for the first time since the shooting and saw the stained rip in his shirt, on the bulge of his deltoid.

“It’s only a cut,” Cono said, “a reminder of this day. A reminder to ask every day, Why am I doing this?”

“Cono, you
are
a fanatic. Sometimes I think you’d make a great terrorist.” Timur raised his hand to examine the wound, but Cono waved him away.