Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  Therefore, in a lethal century thick with the rust of tinpot personality cults—Nasser, Ceausescu, Díaz, Pol Pot, about a hundred and five others—Atatürk was the lone psychic survivor. Atatürk was the only one of the twentieth century’s strutting throng of self-appointed Saviors of the Nation who had no reason at all to flinch at Y2K. The grateful Turks would not rename his streets, bulldoze his airport, topple his ten thousand bronze busts and his macho equestrian statues. Atatürk’s steely glare would scan the dark recesses of the nation’s psychic landscape for decades to come. Atatürk simply wasn’t over yet, not by a long chalk.

  At length the limo arrived at a glorious rose-colored palace, perched like a jewel on the Asian coast of the Bosphorus.

  This traditional summer retreat, locally known as a yali, had been built by a nineteenth-century Ottoman vizier. Atatürk had been no fan of decadent royal fripperies, so Turkey’s twentieth century had been rather unkind to this little seaside palace. Marauding Greek soldiers had looted it after World War I. In the 1930s Kim Philby had roomed upstairs. In the forties it had been a party headquarters for a sinister Turkish-German friendship bund. Through the fifties and sixties it had been a gloomy hostel for paranoid Soviet commercial travelers. In the seventies and eighties the imperial relic seemed finally and fatally outdated. Its elegant cantilevered porches had sagged like a dowager’s chin. The barge dock had rotted out. The roof, swarming with bats, had shed a generous scattering of its handsome curvilinear tiles.

  However, Ozbey’s Uncle the Minister had decided that the ever-expanding business affairs of Turkish Intelligence required a silent safe house that could handle high-speed boats. The Black Sea of the 1990s was the Black Market Sea, washing the maphiya-ridden shores of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia. Not a single one of these several nations had any idea how an honest government functioned. Their populations had scarcely a shred of respect for a customs agent, a tax man, a narc, or a gun-control officer.

  Buoyed by this fabulous newfound opportunity, the withering Ottoman yali suddenly blossomed anew. A fantastic wealth of narco-spook dope and arms wealth had boated deftly through it. As its secret masters prospered and grew bold, so did the spry little palace. It had sprung back to flourishing life, glowing in the nouveau-riche light of a fin de siècle sunset, its sturdy walls freshly stuccoed in the dusky, traditional “Ottoman Rose.” Ornate iron railings, crowned with security videocams, surrounded the palace grounds. Uniformed Turkish paratroopers, crisply attired in white helmets, white chin straps, white dress gloves, flanked its electrified gates.

  The gates opened and shut around the passing limousine with an automatic clang.

  Starlitz and Zeta clambered out, hefted their bags, and worked their way past the gleaming facades of a vintage Aston Martin, a monstrous armored Mercedes, and a fire-engine-red little sports car.

  Starlitz and Zeta trudged wearily through twin inlaid doors into a palatial reception room of nigh-hallucinogenic elegance. The walls were towering spans of dizzying arabesque wallpaper, all poppy-red and gilt. Red velvet sofas. Blue silk divans. Octagonal coffee tables of tortoiseshell and faience. A secretary toiled over a vast rosewood escritoire, with inlaid mandalas of glimmering mother-of-pearl.

  The secretary discreetly ushered the two of them into a side alcove, a bay-windowed nook with slender columns and carved balustrades, gilt mirrors, and a tiled ceramic ceiling as rich as marzipan. He supplied them with a silver Turkish coffee service, with dainty cups and heaps of sweetmeats.

  To his muted astonishment Starlitz suddenly recognized their attendant as Drey, Ozbey’s favorite street thug. Drey was a strapping peasant kid from some one-mule burg in upper Anatolia, a sharecropper with big scarred mitts best suited to a pair of pliers or a skinning knife. Yet here was Drey, all kitted out to the nines in a tailored Italian suit, his jowls shaved, his teeth capped, and his hair oiled, just like a parliamentary attaché. Strangest of all, Drey seemed perfectly cozy about all this, as if putting casino owners into cement was the straight-and-narrow ladder to a cushy sinecure as an aristo flunky.

  Drey silently accepted Starlitz’s business card and vanished down a carpeted hall. Starlitz found himself distinctly embarrassed. The card’s long stay on his ass in his wallet hadn’t done the typography much good.

  Hunching miserably on the sofa, Starlitz slurped the coffee. It did not revive him, but on top of sleeplessness and jet lag it turned his head sideways. That rich taste of cardamom, Cairo style. This was truly excellent coffee. It was much better coffee than he deserved.

  Time crawled past them as they awaited any word from the great man. Zeta was in a state of abject collapse. Her nose was running. Her unbrushed hair was clumped and filthy. She fitfully knocked the heel of her soaping shoe against the meticulously carved and polished rosewood leg of her settee.

  Starlitz’s skin itched fiercely. His morale was crumbling utterly. He knew it would be fatal to kick up any kind of fuss. They were back on Turkish time. Rising from the couch with heroic effort, he convinced Drey to bring Zeta an orange Fanta. Zeta rapidly consumed her pop bottle, with a glug, a belch, and a final slurp, then dropped the sticky empty on the Trebizond hand-dyed carpet. Paralyzed with soul-devouring preteen boredom, she collapsed in a boneless heap. She was a dead ringer for an adolescent savage, purchased from the wilds of the Caucasus and dragged before an indifferent Sultan.

  A levered silver handle turned on an inlaid door. A superstar came out, with a billionaire in hot pursuit.

  Zeta sat up alertly. “It’s her!” she blurted.

  Gonca Utz wore drop earrings, bombe glacée upswept hair, and a peachy Alexander McQueen ballgown of taffeta with chain mail. The gentleman in pursuit was a sturdy, suntanned fellow with rose-colored aviator glasses, a linen banker’s suit, and a Windsor-knotted industrialist’s tie.

  “You,” said the billionaire, beckoning to Starlitz. “Young man.”

  “Yes?” said Starlitz, stunned to be called “young.”

  “Do you speak Turkish or French?”

  Zeta volunteered eagerly. “Hey, I know some French! I took home-school classes!”

  “Hello, Gonca,” said Starlitz, half rising.

  Gonca Utz studied him with Olympian pity.

  “You know Miss Utz?” said the man with incredulity.

  “We met. Some time ago.”

  “And are you in television?”

  “Pop music. I used to run a band.…”

  “Aha,” said the billionaire, nodding in crisp relief. “Very well, tell Miss Utz—I have a jet waiting. She must fly with me to São Paolo. Tonight.”

  With much backtracking, fractured grammar, and hand waving, Zeta managed to convey this message. Gonca put her tapered hand to her lips and emitted a musical laugh.

  “She is wasting her time in that Turkish game show,” the Brazilian insisted tautly. “In Brazil we are very big in global television. Sponsored by soaps. We are international. Number one domestic program in Moscow. Number two in Taipei. Brazilian soaps are huge in Beirut and Cairo. Tell that to Miss Utz. Make sure she understands.”

  Zeta gamely began another translation effort, but Gonca turned her glamorous back and fled into the palace gardens. The media mogul fled in pursuit, arms outstretched like a kiln-fired lover on a Keatsian urn. After a moment Zeta and Starlitz heard Gonca fire up her sports car with a Jaguar snarl. The stucco walls near their head emitted a machine-gun rattle as the car’s sturdy tires shot gravel.

  Starlitz sat down. Somehow his clothing had stained the silk divan.

  “She didn’t even say hi to me,” Zeta said, her sunburnt face crumpling. “And she signed my arm once, and everything. She is such a star! I loved her.”

  A loud military tramping came down a swirling flight of stairs.

  “Jesus, you’re a pair of sad sacks.”

  Starlitz looked up, twitching. The American One had landed. She wore a blue beret, a spangled leopard halter top, and ultrabaggy chemical-warfare drawstring pants.
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  “American One!” Zeta blurted, overcome with joy. “Dad, look! We’re saved!”

  “Hi, kid,” said the American One. “Leggy, what are you doing here?”

  “Waitin’ on the Man,” Starlitz muttered.

  “Get up,” she ordered. The American One stuck out a sinewy coffee-colored hand, put a handcuff pincer-grip around his wrist, and yanked him from the divan. “Before you talk to Ozbey, we gotta talk. Seriously. Time for a high-level diplomatic conferral, homeboy.”

  The American One herded Starlitz up the stairs. Zeta tagged behind. The three of them stepped through a shuttered door into the sunlight of a second-story palace balcony. Starlitz felt his jet-lagged pupils shrink in pain. He gripped the ornate wooden edge of the railing and gazed over the peacock-blue Bosphorus, a noble body of water with a slight irremovable sheen of spilled crude.

  The American One absorbed a fresh deep breath and tucked a hair extension under the leather rim of her beret. “I bet you feel a lot better now, right?”

  “Yeah, no, maybe. Thanks, American One.”

  “It’s Betsy, remember?” she said. “Betsy Ross.” Mrs. Ross plucked a Marlboro from the red cardboard pack tucked in her drawstring waist. She tore off the cigarette’s filter, lit the stump, and leaned over the balcony. As an afterthought she held out the pack to Zeta. “Want one, kid?”

  “Uh, no, thanks!” said Zeta, beaming with pride at the offer.

  With a negligent backswing of her gym-toned leg, Mrs. Ross kicked the rose-colored palace wall. “This joint sure ain’t our usual crap G-7 road hotel. I mean, all that classy glassware, and tile, and the crystal chandeliers and stuff.… This place fuckin’ does your head in.”

  “Yeah, it does.” Starlitz understood the overpowering spell of the palace, now that he was standing outside the building’s paralyzing semiotic grip.

  “This is the most beautiful building I ever saw. Ever. It’s another world in there, it is fantastic. I thought Grace-land was high class, before I saw this place. Boy, what a cheap hick I used to be.” Mrs. Ross puffed at her ruptured cigarette, lids narrowing beneath their vivid sheen of cobra-green eye shadow. “Some very heavy shit goes down inside there, though. You don’t wanna see the basement of this place. It’s haunted.”

  A Glastron speedboat approached the yali, its catenary bow cresting the water.

  “This place is, like, Gonca’s little harem, man. We G-7 chicks are like just passin’ through here, but Gonca hangs out here, it’s home for her, they’re lettin’ her redecorate all the bedrooms with shit she buys down at the Covered Bazaar. Y’know something? Gonca’s special. Compared to her, we suck.”

  “Well …” Starlitz hedged.

  “Don’t bullshit me, man. We suck. We do. I know it. That’s like our job. We make a career of it. Those Moslem hillbillies on the road, they can’t imagine how good we are at that. We suck in ways that are, like, totally beyond their understanding. We fuckin’ break them and bury them with how bad we suck. That’s what I understand about the pop business now. I never got that part before, but now I really get it.” Mrs. Ross turned to stare at him, her eyes like the lambent flames from two Kuwaiti oilfields. “It’s a genius fuckin’ scam, man. It’s a world beater. I’m all for it.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “Not that you’re any prize, either, man. You’re in this shit right up to your neck. You stink of it to high heaven.”

  Zeta, who had been listening with jaw-dropped astonishment to the solemn pronouncements of adults, flinched in anguish at this attack. She fled to the far end of the balcony, where she pretended great interest as the speedboat tied up at the dock below them.

  Mrs. Ross edged nearer to Starlitz, lowering her voice. “But you know what? You get it. I knew you got it, the first time I saw you. I said to myself, Betsy, I said, this bad mofo here is your ticket out of the barracks, girl. You should listen to the recruiter here. Be all you can be. Know what I’m saying?”

  “Absolutely, babe.” Starlitz felt obscurely proud.

  “I’m not sayin’ G-7 is a good act, Leggy. It’s a shit act. But you know what? I’m new at the pop biz, so I had to pay some dues, and a shit job like G-7 was just what I needed. Now I can sing. I mean, I’m never gonna be Mahalia Jackson, but I get the drill. I know what a chord is. I know what key to use. It’s not all that hard.”

  Starlitz nodded. She was right. Great music was hard. Music that wasn’t all that musical wasn’t really all that hard.

  Her voice vibrated with passion. She looked like she was about to burst out of her clothes, maybe right out of her skin. “Leggy, I need to be bigger than this. A big star for the whole wide world. Super big. Huge. I want to be a monster.”

  “You know what that means, right, Betsy?”

  “Yeah, it probably means I die young, fat, hooked, and stupid. But let me tell you something. I’ve been around the block with G-7. I just got off a pop tour through half of fuckin’ Islam. I’ve seen these solemn sons of bitches in their Ayatollah beards. I went eyeball to eyeball with them. I know what they mean. They are fuckin’ medieval. They’re a bunch of friggin’ tribal morons. There’s not room enough in the world for me and them. If I’m gonna be all I can be, those fuckin’ losers have got to shut up shop and go.”

  She tossed her cigarette into the Bosphorus. “It’s not half enough just to nuke ’em—they’ve got to lose everything they believe. I know they hate me. There’s nothing they hate worse than an uppity bitch. Bein’ an uppity bitch, I got myself one truly effective attack—I strip down to my scanties and sit on their face. Just put my butt-naked ass right into their satellite TV screen, man. Just straddle their big, beardy, Koran-quotin’ lips. That scares the shit out of ’em. They’re brave, they can give a shit about air strikes from Russia or NATO, but this”—she slapped her left buttock—“this is the one thing they know they can’t survive.”

  “Betsy, you ever heard of a national-security pitch called ‘Clash of Civilizations’?”

  “I don’t read much.” She scowled. “So are you gonna help me out with my culture war here, or am I gonna have to settle your fucking hash too?”

  “Yeah, no, maybe. I’m definitely with your basic story line. It’s way next-century.”

  “Listen: I’m telling you this, ’cause I want you to know where I’m comin’ from. I am comin’ down hard on every channel. I am raining down out the sky, everywhere. This isn’t quite my time just yet, but I am what’s next. After Y2K the Whore of Babylon is on her fuckin’ way, Jack. And I don’t come to bring peace. Because I am a bombshell.”

  Starlitz nodded helpfully. “What’s your career game plan, exactly?”

  “Well, step one is to ditch Ozbey Effendi in there. I mean, Mehmetcik is a cool guy and all, he has great dope connections, his security guys take no shit from anybody, I admire all that. He’s super polite to me since I fucked his uncle the minister. But I need some solo career space here.”

  “Betsy, you need a manager, a publicist, an accountant, and a lawyer. And somewhere down the list you need some hit music.”

  “I got this DJ kid in Britain,” she said reluctantly, “he wrote me a love song.”

  “DJ Dead White Eurocentric?”

  She laughed. “Yeah. Him. Little Limey knob-twiddler.… I had a couple days off after Kyrgyzstan, so I flew over to his studio and I kinda introduced myself to him, and I kind of, uhm … well, I blew him. Okay? Dumb little fuck wants to marry me now. But he’s a good musician, though, right? The guy’s got a lame-ass stage name, but he can chart dance hits.”

  “Yep. You can pick ’em. That guy is a studio wizard. He could turn you into a monster.”

  “That’s good. That’s just great. I knew you would know about stuff like that.” Mrs. Ross scratched her armpit languidly. “I don’t think Mehmetcik’s gonna fuss too much if I take a powder from his rockin’ little regional scene here. I mean, I get his picture all right. The French One snorted horse, so he got himself a French Arab girl. The Italian
One had herself a nasty accident, so he got this Italian Albanian refugee.…”

  “Go with the flow, babe.” Starlitz plucked a fountain pen from his jacket, ignoring the fact that airplane cabin pressure had caused it to hemorrhage ink down his shirt. “It so happens that I got the perfect promo guy for you. Big network guy. Super photographer. Name is Tim.”

  “Tim what?”

  “Tim from ECHELON.”

  “How come people in this business never have real names?” Betsy accepted the phone number on a crumpled bank slip.

  Attracted by a sudden bustle below, Starlitz peered over the balcony railing. The crew of the speedboat were unloading its contents. They were overseen by Mehmet Ozbey, who had arrived on the dock in spotless deck shoes, white duck trousers, and a double-breasted blue yachting blazer.

  The narrow fiberglass hull of the speedboat was packed with a seemingly endless cargo of white calfskin valises. The valises were all the same shape and size, and they were coming out of the boat with smooth, industrial, machinelike regularity. There were dozens of valises, every one with the unique shoulder-wrenching heft of tightly packed cash. How on earth had Ozbey gotten so many white calfskin valises? Maybe he owned the factory.

  “If I split tonight,” said Betsy cagily, “can you cover for me?”

  “Yeah. I’m up for that.”

  “See you around, then.”

  Mrs. Ross tossed her glossy mane and turned to go. Zeta hurried over, face tight with anxiety. “Hey, wait! Don’t leave!”

  Mrs. Ross hitched her pants. “Huh? Why not?”

  “Because you’re from G-7! G-7 is like my favorite band, my favorite band in the whole world!”

  Mrs. Ross looked at her with amused pity. “Okay, kid. I get the picture. So what do you want from me? My autograph?” She patted her leopard-dotted torso. “I got no pen on me. Tell you what. I’ll give you my favorite push-up bra.”