Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  “You never tell them: ‘I must leave you here in comfort and safety, darling, to return to my harsh life of danger’?”

  “Come on! Let’s face it: if they’re spreading it for some character like me, they’re desperate and courting ruin. Fuck, I am their life of danger.”

  “Hey, Dad,” said Zeta.

  “What?”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “What is it?”

  “Hey, Dad!”

  “I’m listening, Zeta.”

  “I’m stuffed now. Can we go? I wanna see the band!”

  “We’ll leave in just a minute. You need to go to the bathroom or anything?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Okay, the bathroom’s in there,” said Starlitz, pointing into the pub. “Make sure you don’t have any of this guy’s crappy C-notes left inside your backpack, okay? I got plenty more for you back at the hotel.”

  Zeta bumped her plastic chair back and left at a skipping trot.

  “She likes you,” Khoklov observed.

  “Not really, man. She’s just suckin’ up to me because she’s dead tired of living with Mom.”

  “No, she does like you. She even looks like you. I didn’t see the resemblance at first. Mostly it’s that cunning monkey look she gets on her little face when she’s trying to puzzle out what we say.”

  “Speaking of which, where is Viktor?” Starlitz said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Khoklov glumly, “the Viktor issue.” The departure of Zeta had changed Khoklov’s mood. Khoklov was visibly collapsing, as if he had sprung a slow leak. He reached inside his jacket and began counting cash into his lap.

  “Is Viktor okay?”

  “At the moment Viktor’s up on those castle ramparts,” said Khoklov, glancing across the harbor at the postcard-worthy stone bulk of a twelfth-century Crusader fortress. “He’s watching over us, with his binoculars.”

  “Why would Viktor wanna do that?”

  “Because I told him to stake out this rendezvous and watch out for trouble. But also because he’s been stupid.” Khoklov sighed. “That first day you met him, at the beach, when we acquired those vacuum tubes … Well, there were ten tubes in the shipment, not nine. Viktor filched one of them.”

  Starlitz blinked. “No kidding.”

  “Yes, and later the rascal secretly sold it to that musician in your entourage, for a full fifteen hundred dollars!” Khoklov shrugged in pained embarrassment. “It was bad of Viktor—though it was good to have the cash. It let me get my little plane back. Then, I did some flying money-laundry work for the Lithuanian, and I picked up your girlfriend and daughter as well. So now, we’re back in Cyprus safe and sound, and here is your money back. Fifteen hundred.”

  “Viktor fenced that vaccum tube for one thousand five hundred?”

  “Yes! I could not believe that English fool would pay that much money! Western musicians, they’re all drug addicts, they’re totally addled.”

  Starlitz accepted the cash and jammed it into his clip. “Next time, check out the auction scene on eBay dot com. Those matryoshka dolls, the little Kremlin badges—you savvy hustlers could clear some big money that way.”

  “I apologize for Viktor’s stupid act of thievery. He did it without my permission.”

  “I accept your apology, Pulat Romanevich. Consider the matter closed.”

  Khoklov brightened somewhat. “You’re not going to shoot him? I told him you’d be within your rights to shoot him.”

  “I’m not saying I would never want to kill Viktor, but I’m not going to have him whacked over some fucking piece of stereo equipment. For one thing, I got too much dignity. And for another, that’s the exact sort of shit I used to pull when I was Viktor’s age. The old palm-it-and-pocket routine—man, those were the days! Christ, when I was Viktor’s age, they didn’t even have tracing tags.”

  “That’s very good of you, Lekhi! I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so indulgent about this. I know that Viktor is reckless hooligan scum, but I think, perhaps, he’s improving a little. Viktor’s quite different since you took him to that brothel in Lefkosa.” Khoklov grew thoughtful. “You showed him some of the ropes, eh? You knocked some of the snot out of him.”

  “Oh, yeah. No question there.”

  “It’s good of you to take such personal trouble with my sister’s boy. I appreciate that. I wanted to do this little favor for you in return, eh? I wanted to do a favor for you that was just between the two of us, man to man. Not about the cash. Not part of the stinking market.” Khoklov turned his pale, chiseled face to one side, elegantly raised the brim of his hat, and spat on the pavement.

  Zeta emerged from the pub, shrugging on her backpack. As she walked to join them, a taxi driver arrived at the pub, searching for his client. The driver called aloud, at the slumbering crowd of Britons. “Mister Hawcliffe?”

  “ ‘Mister Hawcliffe,’ ” said Khoklov, rising from the table and brushing crumbs from his pants. “That would be me.”

  “You called us a taxi?” said Starlitz.

  “No, that would be Viktor. Viktor has a new cell phone.”

  “You know something?” Starlitz said. “I think that kid of yours has got the stuff!”

  STARLITZ AND HIS DAUGHTER CLIMBED IN THE BACK of the taxi. Starlitz handed Zeta a toothpick and a mint. Khoklov rode shotgun.

  “Ercan,” Starlitz ordered.

  “Why the airport?” said Khoklov.

  “To catch the girls before their flight to Istanbul. The kid wants to see the property.” Starlitz grinned and lit a cigarette.

  Khoklov frowned and rolled his window down.

  Starlitz sheepishly flicked the burning cig on the taxi’s rubber mat and mashed it under his heel. They jounced uphill, away from the harbor. Despite the island’s lasting drought it was a pretty day. With many a honk and pothole crunch the cab left the outskirts of Girne. They wove their way up across the spine of the island, toward the highway pass through the Pentadactylos.

  Zeta tongue-levered her toothpick through her missing canine tooth.

  “So,” Starlitz offered in Russian, “I understand you’ve been having trouble with Ozbey’s boys, back at the hotel.”

  “That’s true,” said Khoklov.

  “Ozbey’s boys are too enthusiastic.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “How’d you get in so much trouble with Ozbey? I mean, how could you even manage to bother him? You’ve been flying to Budapest when I was paying you to watch that guy.”

  “Watching Ozbey required specialists,” Khoklov told him. “I found a subcontractor for the job. I hired a Turkish Communist who is nostalgic about the KGB.”

  Starlitz stroked his rubbery, freshly shaven chin. “There are working Communist cells around here?”

  “Of course! There are thousands of Communists in Turkey. Turkey is a land where it’s always the 1960s. An international, proletarian revolutionary … it’s a fine career. I hired a Communist gentleman from the violent, leftist Devrimci Sol movement. In fact, since he worked so cheap, I hired his entire Devrimci Sol cell. The Communist cell watched Ozbey for me. They were willing to do that for ideology, but they were happy to do it for cash.”

  “And?”

  “Well, how much do you want to know? A trip to the airport only takes twenty minutes.”

  “Frankly, I don’t want to know very much. It would just spoil the beauty of the deal.” Starlitz lifted his meaty hands. “I mean, the magic of a hustle like G-7—it’s all about skipping right across on the surface, very light and easy. Too much involvement on the ground, and it gets all grimy.”

  “All right,” said Khoklov, shifting in his ragged taxi seat and coughing into his fist. “I’ll tell you one important detail. Why Ozbey’s boys want to shoot me. It’s about the casino owner, Mr. Altimbasak.”

  “Yeah? What’s Altimbasak’s problem?”

  “Well,” said Khoklov, “he was a very kind host, and he told me some useful things about the situation here. But he was also
a leftist, you see? So, his body is inside his crashed Mercedes, at the bottom of a cliff. But Mr. Altimbasak’s head—well, his head had several bullets in it, so his head is in a bucket of cement.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “Have you ever heard of the ‘Turkish Gray Wolves’?”

  “They shot the pope,” Starlitz recited by reflex.

  “Yes, Mehmet Ali Ağca. That business was about banks. The Vatican’s Banco Ambrosiano. A very holy bank. They were laundering money for the Polish anti-Communists, while they also brokered arms for the anti-Communist Turks. They got very excited about Poland, and neglected to pay the Gray Wolves. So, the pope was punished for defaulting.”

  Starlitz grunted.

  “Ozbey gave Ağca the pistol that shot the pope. He didn’t call himself ‘Ozbey’ then. Ozbey has at least six official identities. I know for a fact that he has six Turkish diplomatic passports. He also commonly uses special passports from intelligence agencies in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Mr. Ozbey has outgrown the old Gray Wolf militia. He has prospered in his investments, and moved into the highest circles of Turkish government. Nowadays he does a great deal of oil, guns, and drug biznis in the formerly Soviet Turkic countries. His ‘Uncle the Minister’ is the chief of clandestine operations for MIT, the Turkish Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “I could have glided right past all this,” Starlitz mourned. “This didn’t even have to come up on the agenda.”

  “There’s more. There’s much, much more. My Turkish Communist revolutionary friends have been fighting their government for fifty years. They have been losing, because their truck bombs are always badly parked. But they have many secret dossiers on Ozbey. They have dossiers on his friends, his donors, his sponsors, his mentors. They keep all their files in computers in Holland, because inside Turkey the MIT has the Communists jailed, tortured, and shot.”

  “Hey, Dad,” said Zeta. “Hey, Dad!”

  “Hey what?”

  “Hey, Dad, how come you talk so much Russian? I feel carsick!”

  Starlitz gazed at her in alarm. Zeta spat out her half-sucked peppermint; she had gone all pale and greenish. “If we stop the car,” Starlitz told her, “we might not make it to the airport in time to catch the G-7 girls.”

  Zeta’s brow knitted crankily. “Well, I can’t help it when I’m feeling carsick! I feel like I’m gonna throw up!”

  “Stop the car,” Starlitz told the driver. They pulled over by the long stone railing of the pass through the mountains. Zeta flung herself out of the taxi with comic-opera emphasis, as if nausea had turned her bones to rubber.

  Starlitz and Khoklov stepped out for a breather. The spectacular Cypriot vista showed glamorous villas, gleaming swimming pools, the tall green spikes of many cedars-of-Lebanon, and the sprawling, elaborate campus of a phony-baloney offshore university. To apologize for the wait, Starlitz slipped the young driver several hundred thousand lira. The driver shrugged philosophically, opened his glove compartment, and had a long, thoughtful shot of Beefeater gin.

  Starlitz cupped his hands and lit a Dunhill.

  Khoklov watched the little ritual with an addict’s desperate eagerness. “Those cigarettes will put you in the hospital.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “Yes, they will. They may not look evil, but trust me, they are.”

  Starlitz blew smoke and gazed into the lilac-blue Cypriot distance. “He’s outmaneuvered me, hasn’t he? He’s cut me right out of the loop.”

  “Well, Lekhi … You’re a friend of mine, but your little music biznis is not a match for Ozbey’s biznis, understand? This fellow calling himself ‘Ozbey,’ he’s a career secret agent. He runs death squads. He has a national apparat behind him. He’s not a ‘pop music promoter’! He only looks like one.”

  “Well, I only look like one too.”

  “You don’t look very much like one,” Khoklov said sourly. “Ozbey looks much more like one than you do.”

  Zeta spoke up suddenly. “Secret agent,” she parroted in Russian. “Death squad, national apparat.”

  Starlitz rolled his eyes. “Zeta, don’t interrupt us grown-ups when we talk business, okay? It’s rude.”

  Zeta scowled. “Well, you shouldn’t be talking to him so much! What about me? You can talk to him anytime! I want you to talk to me!”

  “What did she say to you?” said Khoklov. “That sounded almost like Russian she was speaking just now.”

  “My daughter was telling me to pay more attention to family matters.”

  “That’s a wise little girl,” said Khoklov. “I think perhaps your time has come for some domesticity.” He looked at Starlitz thoughtfully. “Some fatherly time with this lovely young girl—or your big ugly head, in a bucket of Turkish cement—I think there may be useful signals here.”

  Starlitz turned to his daughter. “Zeta, I’m gonna talk to you, I promise. I’m gonna tell you a whole lot of things. It’s just that, well, you kinda caught your dad in the middle of something important, so I have to tie up some things first.”

  “Money,” Zeta said.

  “That’s right. Money. That’s why people run bands.”

  She looked up into his face, squinting. “Is that why people play music? Just for money?”

  “No, no! I said that’s why people run bands.”

  Zeta shrugged her skinny shoulders and looked at her shoes. “Okay, Dad. If you have to.”

  Starlitz looked at her with the first pang of sincere guilt that he could recall in his adult memory. It struck Starlitz suddenly that little Zeta was bearing up extremely well, considering. Hauled all over the world, dumped on his doorstep like unclaimed luggage … He was being clumsy. Starlitz put on his best, firmest, dealing-with-teenybop-fans voice. “You feel better now, Zeta? Not so carsick?”

  “I feel okay now that you’re talking to me.”

  They slammed the taxi doors and resumed their trip. “You know, Pulat Romanevich, it’s not the first time you and I have dealt with a heavy spook. There was Raf the Jackal, back in Finland. That guy was quite a piece of work.”

  “Are you joking? I’m still dealing with Raf the Jackal. That’s one reason why I’m anxious to leave this lousy Turkish island, and get back to the comfort and safety of Belgrade. Raf is in Belgrade—he’s working there now. It’s been peaceful too long in the Balkans. Something will tear loose soon. Then, Russians will be very popular in Serbia. Every time the Serbs go crazy, they discover that they love Russians.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”

  “Soon they will love us, and then, the president of Serbia will forgive me for running off with his special airplane.”

  “I gotta hand it to you, Pulat: that pitch makes a lot of sense. So, is there any pop band action in Belgrade? Or Novi Sad, maybe? I mean, besides all those Slavic turbo-folk chicks like Ceca Raznjatovic? We already did Croatia and Slovenia.”

  “Lekhi, take my advice: put the music biznis behind you. Don’t fight Ozbey: just sell out to him. He can pay you well; he has the Turkish state behind him, he can afford to be generous. The G-7 band is worth much more to Ozbey than it is to you. An international touring act is a perfect cover for a Turkish secret agent who needs to run arms and drugs. Those girls can carry him through the Mideast, the Balkans, all over Central Asia, just like seven camels.”

  “Yeah, sure, maybe—but, hey, scouring the marginal, emergent markets with a Spice Girls copy band, that was my original concept.”

  Khoklov looked at him with limpid eyes. “ ‘Your concept.’ Is this a professional talking?”

  “I also have a mah-jongg bet riding on it.”

  Khoklov shrugged, defeated. “There’s no accounting for you, Starlits. Sometimes you talk perfect sense, and sometimes you’re like a block of wood.”

  As an outlaw state the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus had no flight clearance with the world’s many grim, self-important civil air authorities. So the republic’s primary airport was, by necessity, a rather mode
st place. The terminal was flat and dusty, and surrounded by unkempt flowering shrubs. The airport’s rusty radar scanner resembled a barbecue grill.

  Starlitz abandoned Khoklov with the taxi. Starlitz and Zeta walked together, hand in hand, through the terminal’s cracked glass doors.

  The floor of the Ercan airport had a fine layer of windblown yellow dust. There was putty and duct tape aplenty on the magazine kiosks and the tatty souvenir stands. The little airport’s battered X-ray machines looked entirely decorative.

  Starlitz bought his daughter a whopping shrink-wrapped box of assorted Turkish delights.

  “Do people eat these?” Zeta said skeptically.

  “They’re like marshmallows.”

  “I only eat white marshmallows.”

  “Then only eat the white ones.”

  Starlitz spotted Wiesel, sitting on a stool at the airport bar.

  Wiesel was sipping fizzy gin-and-tonics, with big green wedges of the local limes. His sallow face was greasy with suntan oil; his upper lip was sprouting a new mustache. Wiesel sported a new haircut, new glasses, and brand-new equipment bags. A red-and-white Turkish Airlines ticket packet peeped from the pocket of his trench coat.

  Wiesel was visibly startled, but he braced himself. “Legs! Fancy meeting!”

  “How’s business, Wiesel?”

  “Lovely! Smashing! Can’t thank you too much for introducing me to Mehmetcik. Fellow’s got all kinds of photo work for me. His uncle’s a big wheel in Turkish media, you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  Wiesel displayed a laminated G-7 access tag, on a beaded neck chain. “He’s got me covering the band throughout the Turkish tour. It may not be the world’s biggest pop scene, but you know something? The Turks, they still care.”

  Wiesel retrieved a Turkish pop scandal-rag, which had been lying on the bar with a pile of its gleaming, pulpy brethren, beneath a plastic-bagged light meter and a fresh pack of Craven A’s. “Check out these candid Turkish shots! They peep down necklines, they peer up skirts.… If a star is in bed with a fellow, the Turks still make a big deal of it! It’s all straight out of La Dolce Vita!”