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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.
    Cono interlaced his fingers and put his hands into the pool, pulling water into the space between his sealed palms. He lifted his hands and squeezed a stream of water into Katerina’s face. She