Osman’s smile returned, and it was much more genuine than the salesman’s smarm he’d displayed before. “I like you, Mr. Smith. You are A-okay.”
The diversion of having tea with Osman would only take up a few minutes, but being called A-OK by this young Uzbek hustler made Juan smile for the first time since Borodin’s death.
The road north to the former seaside town of Muynak was a kidney-jarring ribbon of cracked asphalt, made worse by the UAZ’s nonexistent suspension.
The terrain was flat, windswept desert with the occasional clump of faded vegetation. The only thing Cabrillo saw of any interest were double-humped Bactrian camels. They were shorter than their single-humped cousins and had tufts of heavy fur along their necks and crowning each fatty hump. He wasn’t sure if these belonged to anyone or were wild. But by the way they passively regarded him as he drove along the lonely highway, it was obvious they were used to man.
Muynak was only a hundred twenty miles from Nukus and yet the trip took almost four hours. Evening was still some time off, so the air remained hot and acrid, and the closer he got to his destination, the more it tasted of salt, not the refreshing sea air he enjoyed from the bridge wings of the Oregonbut a dry bitterness like vinegar.
The town had once been the Uzbeks’ major port on the southern reach of the Aral Sea. Now that the lake was some hundred miles farther north, Muynak was an isolated speck of civilization with no right to exist today. Once thriving with commerce, it was virtually dead, its population a fraction of what it had been. Driving past abandoned houses and commercial blocks, Cabrillo came to what had once been the main wharf. A tower crane set on rails stood sentinel over a weedy trench that had once been the harbor.
Rusted husks of fishing boats littered the basin in the most otherworldly display Cabrillo had ever seen. He’d once discovered a ship buried in the sands of the Kalahari, but somehow the juxtaposition of a harbor without water and the derelict hulls really jarred the senses. Like Salvador Dalí’s painting Persistence of Memory. Adding to the surrealism was the presence of yet another camel, this one nibbling grass that grew out of a hole in the side of a sixty-foot trawler.
Around him were abandoned fish-processing plants, slab-sided metal buildings that the elements were slowly dismantling. Each had strips of siding missing like smiles lacking a few teeth. It was obvious the town had died slowly, as though it were a cancer patient withering away until all that remained were skin and bones and despair.
There were few people about and they moved with the listlessness of zombies. Cabrillo saw no children playing in the street, a first for him in any Third World town.
Somehow, the sun seemed harsher here, brassier, as though it were a hammer, the desert an anvil, and the town was being pounded between the two.
Across the border, at Aralsk, Kazakhstan, they had tried to keep the town connected to the lake by dredging a channel that eventually stretched twenty-odd miles, but here it looked like the citizens of Muynak had succumbed to their fate without a fight.
There was so little left inhabited that it took him only a couple of minutes to find his destination, the home of Karl Petrovski’s widow, a Kazakh woman. His timing had been fortuitous because in another week, he’d learned, she was moving back to live with her family.
The house was a single-story cement block of a building that once had a stucco veneer, but wind had eroded it until it resembled flaking skin. The yard was weed-choked, though a scrawny goat was doing its best to keep ahead of the growth. The place looked like a snapshot out of the 1920s, with the glaring exception of a satellite dish mounted on a pole stuck in the ground. Getting out of the truck, Cabrillo noticed that even this modern convenience was wearing away. Bare wires were exposed at its receiver hub, and wooden pins revealed its primary function now was to act as a rack for drying clothes.
He took off his sunglasses as he approached the door. It swung open before he had a chance to knock.
Mina Petrovski had once been a beautiful woman, it was there in the structure of her face, and she still retained a slim and firm body, but the sheer effort of living had taken a toll on her. She no longer stood erect but had the slouch of a woman thirty years her senior. Her skin was sallow and her face heavily etched with lines. Her hair was more salt than pepper and had the dry, brittle texture of old straw.
“Mrs. Petrovski, my name is John Smith,” Cabrillo said in Russian. “I believe a Mr. Kamsin told you to expect me.”
Arkin Kamsin had been Petrovski’s boss with the newly formed Bureau of Reclamation of the Aral Sea. Eric Stone had traced the widow through the agency he headed. As she had no telephone of her own, negotiating this meeting had taken some doing.
A man appeared over her shoulder, older than her, with dark, intense eyes and a tobacco-stained mustache. He wore the uniform of a government functionary in this part of the world, black slacks made of some indestructible poly blend and a short-sleeved white shirt so heavily stained at the collar and under the arms that even a bleach bath couldn’t clean it.
“Mr. Kamsin?” Cabrillo asked.
“Yes, I am Kamsin. Mina asked me here today.”
“I want to thank you both for taking the time to speak with me,” Juan said with a warm smile. Kamsin’s presence was a wild card. As a man who could have made a comfortable living playing poker, Cabrillo hated anything that shifted the odds.
“Please,” Mina Petrovski said in a timid voice, “won’t you come in. I am sorry about the house…”
“My associate explained you are moving home soon,” Juan said to cover her embarrassment at a parlor stuffed with packing boxes and furniture covered in protective plastic wrap. If anything, it was hotter in the room than it was standing under the blazing sun.
“Let me first say how sorry I am for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Mina said perfunctorily.
Just then, two little girls entered the room from someplace farther back. One was about eight, the other six. It was clear by the amount of wear and fading of her clothes that the youngest was forced to wear the elder’s hand-me-downs. They gaped, wide-eyed and openmouthed, at the bald stranger.
“Sira, Nila, go back into the kitchen,” Mina Petrovski said sharply.
The girls dawdled for a few seconds, giving Cabrillo an opening. He reached into his shoulder bag and removed two semimelted Hershey bars, in their distinctive brown-and-silver wrappers. The power of American advertising had even reached this remote outpost, and both girls’ eyes widened to impossible dimensions when they recognized the candy.
“May I?” Juan asked, and knew immediately that Eric Stone’s in-depth research that showed Karl Petrovski had two children had paid off.
The saddened widow gave a smile that showed she hadn’t exercised those particular muscles in months. “Of course. Thank you.”
He presented one bar to each of the little girls and received an over-the-shoulder thanks as they scampered out of view. Melted or not, every last molecule of chocolate, he suspected, would vanish in moments. If there was such a thing as a chocolate atom— chocosium, perhaps — the very last one would likely be licked clean from the inner wrapper.
“Please, sit,” Mina invited. “May I get you some tea?”
“I find tea upsets my stomach,” Juan said. It was a lie, but he didn’t want this woman putting herself out on his behalf, and an outright refusal was considered rude. “And I just finished off a bottle of water.”
Mina nodded neutrally.
Arkin Kamsin offered a pack of Pakistani-made cigarettes to Cabrillo. Refusing this wasn’t a gesture of rudeness but unmanliness. One-upping the man, Juan produced a pack of Marlboros, a currency as universal as gold. He plucked one for himself and handed the pack to the Uzbek, then made a cutting gesture when Kamsin wanted to give it back after taking one for himself. The gesture brought a small smile to the functionary as he tucked the pack into a shirt pocket.