The Littlest Jackal

by Bruce Sterling

  The Littlest Jackal

  Bruce Sterling

  bruce Sterling

  The Littlest Jackal

  When Bruce Sterling called me last year to say he could no longer do a science column on a regular basis, I begged him to continue. I pleaded with him. (Remember, we mentioned the art of editorial begging in a previous issue.) When it became clear that I could not change his mind, I asked that he send us an occasional short story.

  "The Littlest Jackal" is not an occasional short story. It is a strong novella, bringing Bruce's continuing character, Leggy Starlitz, back to our pages.

  * * *

  I hate sibelius," said the Russian mafioso.

  "It's that Finnish nationalist thing," said Leggy Starlitz.

  "That's why I hate Sibelius." The Russian's name was Pulat R. Khoklov. He'd once been a KGB liaison officer to the air force of the Afghan government. Like many Afghan War veterans, Khoklov had gone into organized crime since the Soviet crackup.

  Starlitz examined the Sibelius CD's print-job and plastic hinges with a dealer's professional eye. "Europeans sure pretend to like this classic stuff," he said. "Almost like pop, but it can't move real product." He placed the CD back in the rack. The outdoor market table was nicely set with cunningly targeted tourist-bait. Starlitz glanced over the glass earrings and the wooden jewelry, then closely examined a set of lewd postcards.

  "This isn't 'Europe,'" Khoklov sniffed. "This is a Czarist Grand Duchy with bourgeois pretensions."

  Starlitz fingered a poly-cotton souvenir jersey with comical red-nosed reindeer. It bore an elaborate legend in the Finno-Ugric tongue, a language infested with umlauts. "This is Finland, ace. It's European Union."

  Khoklov was kitted-out to the nines in a three-piece linen suit and a snappy straw boater. Life in the New Russia had been very good to Khoklov. "At least Finland's not NATO."

  "Look, fuckin' Poland is NATO now. Get over it."

  They moved on to another table, manned by a comely Finn in a flowered summer frock and icily shoes. Starlitz tried on a pair of shades from a revolving stand. He gazed experimentally about the marketplace. Potatoes. Dill. Carrots and onions. Buckets of strawberries. Flowers and flags. Orange fabric canopies over wooden market tables run by Turks and gypsies. People were selling salmon straight from the decks of funky little fishing boats.

  Khoklov sighed. "Lekhi, you have no historical perspective." He plucked a Dunhill from a square red pack.

  One of Khoklov's two bodyguards appeared at once, alertly flicking a Zippo. "No proper sense of culture," insisted Khoklov, breathing smoke and coughing richly. The guard tucked the lighter into his Chicago Bulls jacket and padded off silently on his spotless Adidas.

  Starlitz, who was trying to quit, hummed a smoke from Khoklov, which he was forced to light for himself. Then he paid for the shades, peeling a salmon-colored fifty from a dense wad of Finnish marks.

  Khoklov paused nostalgically by the Czarina's Obelisk, a bellicose monument festooned with Romanov aristo-fetish gear in cast bronze. Khoklov, whose politics shaded toward Pamyat rightism with a mystical pan-Slavic spin, patted the granite base of the Obelisk with open pleasure.

  Then he gazed across the Esplanadi. "Helsinki city hall?"

  Starlitz adjusted his shades. When arranging his end of the deal from a cellar in Tokyo, he hadn't quite gathered that Finland would be so relentlessly bright. "That's the city hall all right."

  Khoklov turned to examine the sun-spattered Baltic. "Think you could hit that building from a passing boat?"

  "You mean me personally? Forget it."

  "I mean someone in a hired speedboat with a shoulder-launched surplus Red Army panzerfaust. Generically speaking."

  "Anything's possible nowadays."

  "At night," urged Khoklov. "A pre-dawn urban commando raid! Cleverly planned. Precisely executed. Ruthless operational accuracy!"

  "This is summer in Finland," said Starlitz. "The sun's not gonna set here for a couple of months."

  Khoklov, tripped up in the midst of his reverie, frowned. "No matter. You weren't the agent I had in mind in any case."

  They wandered on. A Finn at a nearby table was selling big swollen muskrat-fur hats. No sane local would buy these items, for they were the exact sort of pseudo-authentic cultural relics that appeared only in tourist economies. The Finn, however, was flourishing. He was deftly slotting and whipping the Mastercards and Visas of sunburnt Danes and Germans through a handheld cellular credit checker.

  "Our man arrives tomorrow morning on the Copenhagenferry," Khoklov announced.

  "You ever met this character before?" Starlitz said. "Ever done any real business with him?"

  Khoklov sidled along, flicking the smoldering butt of his Dunhill onto the gray stone cobbles. "I've never met him myself. My boss knew him in the seventiess. My boss used to run him from the KGB HQ in East Berlin. They called him Raf, back then. Raf the Jackal."

  Starlitz scratched his close-cropped, pumpkin-like head. "I've heard of Carlos the Jackal."

  "No, no," Khoklov said, pained. "Carlos retired, he's in Khartoum. This is Raf. A different man entirely."

  "Where's he from?"

  "Argentina. Or Italy. He once ran arms between the Tupamaros and the Red Brigades. We think he was an Italian Argentine originally."

  "KGB recruited him and you didn't even know his nationality?" Khoklov frowned. "We never recruited him! KGB never had to recruit any of those Seventies people! Baader-Meinhoff, Palestinians... They always came straight to us!" He sighed wistfully. "American Weather Underground --how I wanted to meet a groovy hippie revolutionary from Weather Underground! But even when they were blowing up the Bank of America the Yankees would never talk to real communists."

  "The old boy must be getting on in years."

  "No no. He's very much alive, and very charming. The truly dangerous are always very charming. It's how they survive."

  "I like surviving" Starlitz said thoughtfully.

  "Then you can learn a few much-needed lessons in charm, Lekhi. Since you're our liaison."

  Raf the Jackal arrived from across the Baltic in a sealed Fiat. It was a yellow two-door with Danish plates. His driver was a Finnish girl, maybe twenty. Her dyed-black hair was braided with long green extensions of tattered yam. She wore a red blouse, cut-off jeans and striped cotton stockings.

  Starlitz climbed into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and smiled. The girl was sweating with heat, fear, and nervous tension. She had a battery of ear-piercings. A tattooed wolf's-head was stenciled up her clavicle and nosing at the base of her neck.

  Starlitz twisted and looked behind him. The urban guerrilla was scrunched into the Fiat's back seat, asleep, doped, or dead. Raf wore a denim jacket, relaxed-fit Levis and Ray-Bans. He'd taken his sneakers off and was sleeping in his rumpled mustard-yellow socks.

  "How's the old man?" Starlitz said, adjusting his seat belt.

  "Ferries make him seasick." The girl headed up the Esplanade. "We'll wake him at the safe-house." She shot him a quick sideways glance of kohllined eyes. "You found a good safe-house?"

  "Sure, the place should do," said Starlitz. He was pleased that her English was so good. After four years tending bar in Roppongi, the prospect of switching Japanese for Finnish was dreadful. "What do they call you?"

  "What did they tell you to call me?"

  "Got no instructions on that."

  The girl's pale knuckles whitened on the Fiat's steering-wheel. "They didn't inform you of my role in this operation?"

  "Why would they wanna do that?"

  "Raf is our agent now," the girl said. "He's not your agent. Our operations coincide -- but only because our interests coincide. Raf belongs to my movement. He doesn't belong to any
kind of Russians."

  Starlitz twisted in his seat to stare at the slumbering terrorist. He envied the guy's deep sense of peace. It was hard to tell through the Ray-Bans, but the smear of sweat on his balding forehead gave Raf a look of unfeigned ease.

  Starlitz pondered the girl's latest remark. He had no idea why a college-age female Finn would claim to be commanding a 51-year-old veteran urban guerrilla.

  "Why do you say that?" he said at last. This was usually a safe and useful question.

  The girl glanced in the rear-view. They were passing a sunstruck green park, with bronze statues of swaggering Finnish poets and mood-stricken Finnish dramatists. She took a comer with a squeak of tires. "Since you need a name, call me Aino."

  "Okay. I'm Leggy... . Or Lekhi... . Or Keggae." He'd been getting a lot of "Reggae" lately. "The safe-house is in Ypsallina. You know that neighborhood?" Starlitz plucked a laminated tourist map from his shirt pocket. "Take Mannerheimintie up past the railway station."

  "You're not Russian," Aino concluded.

  "Nyet."

  "Are you Organizatsiya?"

  "I forget what you have to do to officially join the Russian mafia, but basically, no."

  "Why are you involved in the Alands operation? You don't look political."

  Leggy found the lever beneath the passenger seat and leaned back a little, careful not to jostle the slumbering terrorist. "You're sure you want to hear about that?"

  "Of course I want to hear. Since we are working together."

  "Okay. Have it your way. It's like this," Starlitz said. "I've been in Tokyo working for an all-girl Japanese metal band. These girls made it pretty big and they bought this disco downtown in Roppongi. I was managing the place... . Besides the headbanging, these metal-chicks ran another racket on the side. Memorabilia. A target-market teenage-kid thing. Fanmags, keychains, T-shirts, CD-ROMs... . Lotta money there!"

  Aino stopped at a traffic light. The cobbled crosswalk filled with a pedestrian mass of sweating, sun-dazed Finns.

  "Anyway, after I developed that teen market, I found this other thing. These cute little animals. 'Froofies.' Major hit in Japan. Froofy velcro shoes, Froofy candy, sodas, backpacks, badges, lunchkits ... Froofies are what they call 'kawai.'"

  Aino drove on. They passed a bronze Finnish general on horseback. He had been a defeated general, but he looked like defeating him again would be far more trouble than it was worth. "What's kawai?"

  Starlitz robbed his stubbled chin. "'Cute' doesn't get it across. Maybe 'adorable.' Big-money-making adorable. The kicker is that Froofies come from Finland."

  "I'm a Finn. I don't know anything called Froofies."

  "They're kids' books. This little old Finnish lady wrote them. On her kitchen table. Illustrated kid-stories from the Forties and Fifties. Of course lately they've been made into manga and anime and Nintendo cassettes and a whole bunch of other stuff... . "

  Aino's brows rose. "Do you mean Fluuvins? Little blue animals with heads like big fat pillows?"

  "Oh, you know them, then."

  "My mother read me Fluuvins! Why would Japanese want Fluuvins?"

  "Well, the scam was -- this old lady, she lives on this secluded island. Middle of the Baltic. Complete ass-end of nowhere. Old girl never married. No manager. No agent. Obviously not getting a dime off all this major Japanese action. Probably senile. So the plan is -- I fly over to Finland. To these islands. Hunt her down. Cut a deal with her. Get her signature. Then, we sue."

  "I don't understand you."

  "She lives in the Aland Islands. Those islands are crucial to your people, and the Organizatsiya too. So you see the general convergence of interests here?"

  Aino shook her green-braided head. "We have serious political and economic interests in the Alands. Fluuvins are silly books for children."

  "What's 'serious?' I'm talking plastic action figures! Cartoon drinking glasses. Kid-show theme songs. When a thing like this hits, it's major revenue. Factories churning round the clock in Shenzhen. Crates full of stuff into mall anchor-stores. Did you know that the 'California Raisins' are worth more than the entire California raisin crop? That's a true fact!"

  Aino was growing gloomy. "I hate raisins. Californians use slave ethnic labor and pesticides. Raisins are nasty little dead grapes."

  "I'm copacetic, but we're talking Japan here," Starlitz insisted. "Higher per-capita than Marin County! The ruble's in the toilet now, but the yen is sky-high. We get a big shakedown settlement in yen, we launder it in rubles, and we clear major revenue completely off the books. That's serious as cancer."

  Aino lowered her voice. "I don't believe you. Why are you telling me such terrible lies? That's a very stupid cover story for an international spy!"

  "You had to ask." Starlitz shrugged.

  They found the safehouse in Ypsallina. It was a duplex. The other half of the duplex was occupied by a gullible Finnish yuppie couple with workaholic schedules. Starlitz produced the keys. Aino went in, checked every room and every window with paranoid care, then went back to the Fiat and woke Raf.

  Raf wobbled into the apartment, found the bathroom. He vomited with gusto, then turned on the shower. Arno brought in a pair of bulging blue nylon sports bags. There was no phone service, but Khoklov's people had thoughtfully left a clone-chipped cellular on the bedroom dresser.

  Starlitz, who had been in the safehouse before, retrieved his laptop from the kitchen closet. It was Japanese portable with a keyboard the length of a cricket bat, a complex mess of ASCII, kanji, katakana, hiragana and arcane function keys. It had a cellular modem.

  Starlitz logged in to a Helsinki Internet service provider and checked the metal-band's Website in Tokyo. Nothing much happening there. Sachiho was doing TV tabloid shows. Hukie had gone into production. Ako was in the studio for a solo album. Sayoko was pregnant. Again.

  Starlitz tried his hotlist and found a new satellite JPEG file of developments on the ground in Bosnia. Starlitz was becoming very interested in Bosnia. He hadn't been there yet, but he could feel the lure increasing steadily. The Japanese scene was basically over. Once the real-estate bubble had busted, the glitz had run out of the Tokyo street-party and now the high yen was chasing the gaijin off. But Bosnia was clearly a very coming scene for the mid-90s. Not Bosnia per se (unless you were a merc, or crazy) but the surrounding safe-areas where the arms and narco people were setting up: Slovenia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania.

  Practically every entity that Starlitz found of interest was involved in the Bosnian scene. UN. USA. NATO. European Union. Russian intelligence, Russia mafia (interlocking directorates there). Germans. Turks. Greeks. Ndrangheta. Camorra. Israelis. Saudis. Iranians. Moslem Brotherhood. An enormous gaggle of mercs. There was even a happening Serbian folk-metal scene where Serb chicks went gigging for hooting audiences of war criminals. It was cool the way the Yugoslav scene kept re-complicating. It was his kind of scene.

  Raf emerged from the bathroom. He'd shaved and had caught his thinning wet hair in a ponytail clip. He wore his jeans; his waistline sagged but there was muscle in his hairy shoulders.

  Raf unzipped one of the sports bags. He tunneled into a baggy black T-shirt.

  Starlitz logged off.

  Raf yawned. "Dramamine never works. Sorry."

  "No problem, Raf."

  Raf gazed around the apartment. The pupils of his dark eyes were two shrunken pinpoints. "Where's the girl?"

  Starlitz shrugged. "Maybe she went out to cop some Chinese."

  Raf found his shades and a packet of Gauloise. Raf might have been Italian. The accent made this seem plausible. "The boot of the car," he said. "Could you help?"

  They hauled a big wrapped tarpaulin from the trunk of the Fiat and into the safe-house. Raf deftly untied the tarp and spread its contents across the chill linoleum of the kitchenette.

  Rifles. Pistols. Amino. Grenades. Plastique. Fuse wire. Detonator: Startitz examined the arsenal skeptically. The hardware looked rather dated.

  Raf deftly
reassembled a stripped and greased AK-47. The rifle looked like it had been buried for several years, but buried by someone who knew how to bury weapons properly. Raf slotted the curved magazine and patted the tarnished wooden butt.

  "Ever seen a Pancor Jackhammer?" asked Starlitz. "Modern gas-powered combat shotgun, all-plastic, bullpup design? Does four twelve-gauge rounds a second. The ammo drums double as landmines."

  Raf nodded. "Yes, I do the trade shows. But you know -- as a practical matter -- you have to let people know that you can kill them."

  "Yeah? Why is-that?"

  "Everyone knows the classic AK silhouette. You show civilians the AK --" Raf brandished the rifle expertly -- "they throw themselves on the floor. You bring in your modem plastic auto-shotgun, they think it's a vacuum cleaner."

  "I take your point."

  Raf lifted a bomb-clustered khaki webbing belt. "See these pineapples? Grenades like these, they have inferior killing radius, but they truly look like grenades. What was your name again, my friend?"

  "Starlitz."

  "Starlet, you carry these pineapples on your belt into a bank or a hotel lobby, you will never have to use them. Because people know pineapples. Of course, when you use grenades, you don't want to use these silly things. You want these rifle-mounted BG-15s, with the rocket propellant."

  Starlitz examined the scraped and greasy rifle-grenades. The cylindrical explosive tubes looked very much like welding equipment, except for the stenciled military Cyrillic. "Those been kicking around a while?"

  "The Basques swear by them. They work a charm against armored limos."

  "Basque. I hear that language is even weirder than Finnish."

  "You carry a gun, Starlet?"

  "Not at the mo'."

  "Take one little gun," said Raf generously. "Take that Makarov nine-millimeter. Nice combat handgun. Vintage Czech ammo. Very powerful."

  "Maybe later," Starlitz said. "I might appropriate a key or so of that plastique. If you don't mind."

  Raf smiled. "Why?"

  "It's really hard finding good Semtex since Havel shut down the factories," Starlitz said moodily. "I might feel the need 'cause ... I got this certain personal problem with video installations."