Mirage tof-9 Read online

  “Mr. Smith, yes?”

  “I’m Smith,” Cabrillo said, and accepted an outstretched hand for an enthusiastic shake.

  “I am Osman,” the young man said with an almost impenetrable accent. “Welcome to Uzbekistan. You are indeed most welcome. I am told to meet you here with my most fine desert truck, and, as you can see, she is a beautiful.”

  Russian was the universal tongue among the various tribes and subtribes in the region, and Cabrillo could have saved the rental representative from speaking tortured English, but there were few Canadian photojournalists fluent in it, so he stuck to English.

  “She is beautiful,” Juan replied, casting a sidelong glance at the small trickle of oil that oozed from under the chassis.

  “I am not told that you will need driver, yes?”

  That was the guy’s angle, Juan realized. Hiring out a 4×4 was one thing, a nonnegotiable fee listed on the company’s archaic website. Osman wanted the lucrative contract to be Cabrillo’s driver and personal tour guide for the four days Cabrillo had contracted for the UAZ.

  “You were not told that because I do not need a driver.”

  Then Cabrillo threw him a bone. “I would be happy to pay you if you can get me extra cans of gasoline.”

  “So you go deep into desert?”

  “Not so deep that I cannot return.”

  The Uzbek thought this was a grand joke and laughed until he coughed. He lit another smoke.

  Juan enjoyed an occasional cigar so didn’t begrudge anyone a hit of nicotine, but he couldn’t imagine smoking cigarettes in a dust bowl, choking with so much grit that his teeth felt like sandpaper and his lungs like two half-empty bags of cement.

  “Okay,” Osman replied decisively, then asked, a bit shier, “Maybe after you drop me at my office in town?”

  It was something Cabrillo had always enjoyed about the Middle East and Central Asia, everyone was always fishing for something more out of a deal. Didn’t matter how insignificant so long as the other guy gave up just a fraction more than you. To most Westerners, it was seen as deceitful and greedy, but, in truth, such negotiations were a test of each other’s character. Accept too quick and you were dismissed as a rube; push too hard and you were a snob. The balance defined what kind of person you were.

  “Agreed.” Cabrillo nodded and held out a hand to finalize the deal, then said, as their palms touched, “But only if you have a glass of tea for me back at your office.”

  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 Oregon but 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 h
ome 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.

  Cabrillo let the cigarette smolder in his fingers while Kamsin dragged deep on his and allowed feathers of smoke to drift from both nostrils.

  Hospitality rituals complete, the man leaned forward so his belly spilled over his imitation leather belt. “Your associate was somewhat vague about why you wanted to meet with Karl’s widow.”

  That reality still hadn’t sunk in because Mina flinched at the word.

  “Why was he in Moscow?” Juan evaded the question with one of his own.

  “Research,” Kamsin replied.

  “What type?”

  “Technical research on the old Soviet systems of canals. Much of that information is archived in Moscow.”

  Cabrillo had to take a gamble. He didn’t know if Kamsin was here to protect his employee’s widow or his own ministry, and without laying cards on the table, he and the Uzbek could verbally spar for hours without getting anywhere.

  “May I be blunt?” he asked. Kamsin made an inviting gesture with his hands and leaned back into the plastic-covered sofa. It crinkled like old newsprint. “I represent a Canadian environmental group. We believe that Mrs. Petrovski’s husband was deliberately killed because of something he found here and was researching in Moscow.”

  Cabrillo had played his hole card. It was up to Kamsin to finish the game.

  He and Mina exchanged a look, and Juan knew immediately that this possibility had been discussed already and that it was most likely the truth.

  “How is it that you speak Russian so well, Mr. Smith?” Kamsin asked when he’d glanced back at the Chairman.

  “I have an ear for languages,” Juan told him truthfully. “Give me a few weeks and I will be able to speak Uzbek.” That too was the truth.

  “But you do not speak our language now?”

  “No.”

  “I will trust you.”

  He then turned to Mina, and the two of them spoke for several minutes. It was clear the conversation was distressing the widow. What was less clear was Kamsin’s tones and intentions. Was he telling her to keep quiet and get this foreigner out of her house or was he being convinced by her that they finally had an ally who believed her husband’s death had been anything but accidental?

  Finally, it was Mina who took up the thread of the conversation. “We don’t know what Karl found. A few days before he went off to Moscow he had been surveying the lake bed north of here as part of his job. He came back very excited about something but wouldn’t tell me what he had found until he had verified his discovery.”

  “He wouldn’t tell me either,” Arkin Kamsin added. “But he managed to convince me to authorize the travel expense. Karl was like that. I trusted him completely. Any man who spent five minutes with him would.”

  “How far north?” Juan asked. With the Aral Sea shrunk to a quarter of its size, there were tens of thousands of miles of exposed seafloor between here and the Kazakh border.

  “We do not know.”

  That statement hung in the hot air for several seconds.

  “But there is someone who might,” Mina said.

  Juan cocked an eyebrow in her direction.

  “He often traveled with old Yusuf,” she explained. “He was once a fisherman on the Aral before the waters went away. Now he is just an old man, but Karl claimed that Yusuf knew the lake bed as sure as he’d once known its surface.”

  “Did you question him about where Karl had gone?”

  “Of course,” Kamsin said. “But like many of the old-timers, his directions were vague. He talked about certain islands and winds and how the earth felt. He could give us nothing concrete.”

  “And you didn’t want to go out and look for yourselves?” Juan asked, already suspecting the answer.

  “If what Karl found got him killed…” Kamsin replied, his voice trailing off.

  “I understand,” Juan said to both of them. Kamsin had a job, a life he would not want to jeopardize, and had probably been living in fear that his ignorance might still not keep him safe. Mina’s motivation for not investigating further was nibbling chocolate in the next room. “What about Yusuf? Would he be willing to go back?”

  Kamsin had to think for a moment. “It is possible. He didn’t volunteer when Mina and I first questioned him, but we didn’t exactly ask to be shown either.”

  “Of course,” Juan said, knowing both were embarrassed by not following through on what had gotten Karl Petrovski murdered.

  The Uzbek people had only been independent from Russia for twenty years. These two were old enough to remember what life was like under a Stalinist regime. People didn’t ask questions, didn’t make eye contact with strangers, and never made themselves noticeable to anyone else. It was the only way to stay safe. As much as Karl’s death hurt both Mina and Kamsin, they wouldn’t — couldn’t — do anything but accept the official ruling from Moscow and move on.

  “Does the term ‘eerie boat’ mean anything to either of you?” Cabrillo asked in the uncomfortable silence.

  The pair exchanged perplexed looks. “There are many boats out on the lake bed,” Kamsin replied. “I know none called Eerie.”

  “Karl never mentioned it to me either,” Mina added. “Is this what Karl died for?”

  “I don’t know, and it is perhaps best if you forget I asked.”

  They nodded knowingly.

  “Why don’t I take you to meet Yusuf?” Kamsin offered. “I am sorry, but he speaks only Uzbek. I would be more than happy to translate for you.”

  “You are most kind,” Juan said, getting to his feet. He pulled two more Hershey bars from his satchel and handed them to Mina Petrovski. “For y
our daughters. For later.”

  Wherever his investigation took him was a place she could not visit. Karl was dead. Knowing why would not bring him back. Ideology was for the others, her look said to him. I must be pragmatic.

  As soon as they were outside, Arkin grabbed Cabrillo’s arm and stared into his eyes. “Will there be justice?”

  Juan glanced back at the house, an already-empty shell, only its occupants hadn’t moved on. “For Mina?” he threw the question back at the academician.

  “For any of us?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Juan took a second, which surprised him. “Because a friend died in my arms and I thought that I could at least give him justice. Is that enough?”

  “For us? Here? I guess it has to be.”

  The two remained mostly silent on the drive to find Yusuf, the only words exchanged were directions as Cabrillo steered through the empty city. The buildings seemed little more than façades and lifeless husks.

  Yusuf lived down by the harbor in the rusted carapace that had once been a fishing boat. Arkin didn’t think the old man had owned this particular one, but he’d moved into the hulk nevertheless. The boat, like all the others in the harbor, sat on the ground, sand piled up to the gunwales in some places. Juan scanned a couple of the nearby craft and guessed the old fisherman had chosen this particular one because it sat a little more level than the others, many of which were canted over onto their sides.

  Cabrillo stopped in the dust next to the boat. The two men stepped out.

  Kamsin shouted a greeting to the derelict boat, and Cabrillo spotted movement through a porthole in the cabin below the pilothouse. Methuselah was a teenager compared to the man who trod out onto the craft’s broad rear deck. He wore robes and a head scarf and leaned on a cane made of gnarled wood. Wisps of pure white hair coiled from under the scarf while the lower part of his face was covered in a beard befitting a fairy-tale wizard. His cheeks and eyes were sunken. One eye was a dark brown, almost black, while the other was covered with the milky film of cataracts. He had an ancient AK-47 slung over one buzzard-like shoulder.