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—
“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.”
