Performance Anomalies Read Online Free Page B

begged me. But I say only a man who has been in the military and seen the worst is a man. Really lived. Just like the prostitutes,” he said. “They have nothing except their bodies. Their bodies are money. They know like a soldier knows.” Timur turned away, and then abruptly looked back at Cono. “Okay! Now we talk no more military. We talk women! And rap! And next bar!”
    Back then, when they’d first met, Cono had been an even freer bird, not yet swept up by one tontería, one foolish mission, after another, and another. He was already a rich young man, but keeping to his simple ways. Hitchhiking down to Almaty from Russia, he had noted in some of the women shades of the Slavic features of Antonina, his mother’s mother. Those hints of her face brought her voice to his mind, her precise speech in Russian and French and late-acquired Portuguese. Through her meticulous care with words she preserved the elegance and dignity of her childhood in Russia, before her family was obliterated in the Bolshevik uprisings, before poverty became her new way of life and the path to her early death.
    Cono loved the hitchhiking—the open roads, the expanse of countryside in summertime as he walked beneath lost white clouds drifting across high blue skies. Often he wouldn’t bother to wave down a car or truck when he heard it approaching, preferring instead to walk, to feel the strength in his legs and the tranquility in his mind. He would sleep in fields of hay or barley or sugar beets, clearing a spot for himself so he could see the stars, which he knew by heart in both hemispheres. He would talk to Antares and Alrisha and Denebola as if they were friends until his unnatural need for sleep began to sweep over him. No matter what dew or dust or insects of the field made his body their home, he slept like a buried stone, and was replenished when morning came.
    Before that first visit to Almaty eight years ago, Cono had walked from the Russian town of Chelyabinsk all the way to the Kazak frontier, where three border guards were surprised to see a traveler on foot. After many rounds of vodka, a show of juggling skills, and several wads of cash delivered in enthusiastic handshakes, Cono won a visa stamp to enter the vast, infant nation of Kazakhstan.
    It was much farther south, on his first day in Almaty, that Cono met Timur, and that same evening he met Timur’s friend Muktar, the painter. Despite being several years younger than the two Kazaks, Cono was adopted as an equal. The three caroused together for weeks, bedding girls, exchanging them, drinking a lot.
    Then Timur got called back to duty, and Cono fell into the arms of a young woman named Irina. Muktar was left to find his own amusement, and returned to his old ways of brooding in his tiny apartment filled with pencil drawings, solvent fumes and half-finished oil canvases.
       
    The Mercedes cruised past the hardscrabble shanty flats at the edge of the city and started to rise on the constant incline of the Almaty grid. The driver stopped the car a block down from the Hotel Ratar, leaving Timur and Cono to walk in the darkness of Panfilov Park. When they reached the festooned and dilapidated Zenkov Cathedral in the center of the park grounds, they stepped into the moonlight shadow of the church. The trees were musty, hinting of approaching autumn.
    “Cono, my brother!” Timur exclaimed. The two embraced and slammed their hands against each other’s shoulders. Cono felt the pistol sheath beneath Timur’s expensive leather coat, at his left armpit, and his hand lightly grazed the bulge of another gun wedged into the belt at Timur’s spine.
    “Such a good-news friend,” Cono said in Russian as they pushed each other apart, smiling. Timur took off his shades.
    “She’s safe, a little cut up. And still beautiful, your tart friend. How could she bring you all the way to Almaty? There must be more—some unfinished business.”
    “Ah, Timur, there is always unfinished