A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  Four men began crossing the street. They wore jeans, jogging shoes, and, despite the heat, box-cut Giorgio Armani blazers. Two of them were carrying dainty little videocams. All of them were carrying guns.

  “Zionists,” Raf announced. Briskly, but without haste, he retreated to his arsenal on the kitchen floor. He slung an AK over his shoulder, propped a second assault rifle within easy reach, then knelt around the corner of the kitchen wall, giving himself a clear line of fire at the front door.

  Starlitz quickly weighed various possibilities. He decided to keep watching the window.

  With swift and deadly purpose, the hit-team marched to the adjoining duplex. The door broke off its hinges as they kicked their way in. There were brief yelps of indignant surprise, and a quiet multiple stuttering. A burst of Uzi slugs pierced the adjoining wall and embedded themselves in the floor.

  Raf rose to his feet, his plump face the picture of glee. He touched one finger to his lips.

  Footsteps clomped rapidly up and down the stairs in the next apartment. Doors banged, drawers opened. A bedside telephone jangled as it was knocked from its table. In three minutes the hit-team was out the door.

  Raf scurried to the window and knelt. He’d grabbed a small pocket Nikon from his sports bag. He clicked off a roll of snapshots as the hit squad retreated. “I’m so tempted to shoot them,” he said, hitching the sling of his assault rifle, “but this is better. This is very funny.”

  “That was Mossad, right?”

  “Yes. They thought I was the neighbor.”

  “They must have had a description of you and the girl. And they know you’re here in Finland, man. That’s not good news.”

  “Let’s phone in a credit for their hit. The Helsinki police might catch them. That would be lovely. Where is that cellphone?”

  “Look, we were extremely lucky just now. We’d better leave.”

  “I’m always lucky. We have plenty of time.” Raf gazed at his arsenal and sighed. “I hate to abandon these guns, but we have no car to carry them. Let’s carry the guns next door, before we go! That should win us some nice press.”

  Starlitz met with Khoklov at two A.M. The midnight sun had given up its doomed attempt to sink and was now rising again in refulgent splendor. The two of them were strolling the spectrally abandoned streets of Helsinki, not too far from Khoklov’s posh suite at the Arctia.

  As European capitals went, Helsinki was a very young town. Most of it had been built since 1900, and quite a lot of that had been leveled by Russian bombers in the 1940s. Nevertheless the waterfront streets looked like stage sets for the Pied Piper of Hamelin, all copper-gabled roofs and leaded glass and quaint window turrets.

  “I miss my boys,” Khoklov grumbled. “Why did they have to ice my boys? Stupid bastards.”

  “Lot of Russian Jews in Israel now. Israel’s very hip to the Russian mafia scene. Maybe it was a message.”

  “No. They’re just out of practice. They thought my boys were guarding Raf. They thought that poor fat Finn was Raf. Raf makes them nervous. He’s been on their hit-list since the Munich Olympics.”

  “How’d they know Raf was here?”

  “It’s those hackers at the bank. They’ve been talking too much. Three of our depositors are big Israeli arms dealers.” Khoklov was tired. He’d been up all night explaining developments by phone to an anxious cabal of millionaire ex-Chekists in Petersburg.

  “Since the word is out, we’ve got to move this into high gear, ace.”

  “I know that only too well.” Khoklov opened a gunmetal pillbox and dry-swallowed a pink tab. “The Higher Circles in Organizatsiya—they love the idea of black electronic cash, but they’re old-fashioned and skeptical. They say they want quick results, and yet they give me trouble about financing.”

  “I never expected those nomenklatura cats to come through for us,” Starlitz said. “They’re all ex-KGB bureaucrats, as slow as hell. If the Japanese shakedown works, we’ll have the capital all right. You say they want results? What kind of results exactly?”

  “You’ve met our golden boy now,” said Khoklov. “What did you think of him? Be frank.”

  Starlitz weighed his words. “I think we’re better off without him. We don’t need him for a gig like this. He’s over-qualified.”

  “He’s good though, isn’t he? A real professional. And he’s always lucky. Lucky is better than good.”

  “Look, Pulat Romanevich. We’ve known each other quite a while, so I’m going to level with you. This guy is not right for the job. This Ålands coup is a business thing, we’re trying to hack the structure of multinational cash-flows. It’s the Infobahn. It’s the nineties. It’s borderless and it’s happening. It’s a high-risk start-up, sure, but so what? All Infobahn stuff is like that. It’s global business, it’s okay. But this is not a global business guy you’ve got here. This guy is a fuckin’ golem. You used to arm him and pay him way back when. I’m sure he looked like some Che Guevara hippie poet rebel against capitalist society. But this guy is not an asset.”

  “You think he’s crazy? Psychopathic? Is that it?”

  “Look, those are just words. He’s not crazy. He’s what he is. He’s a jackal. He feeds on dead meat from bigger crooks and spooks, and sometimes he kills rabbits. He thinks straight people are sheep. He’s got it in for consumer society. Enough to blow up our potential customers and laugh about it. The guy is a nihilist.”

  Khoklov walked half a block in silence, shoulders hunched within his linen jacket. “You know something?” he said suddenly. “The world has gone completely crazy. I used to fly MiGs for the Soviet Union. I dropped a lot of bombs on Moslems, and I got medals. The pay was all right. I haven’t flown a jet in combat in eight years. But I loved that life. It suited me, it really did. I miss it every day.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “Now we call ourselves Russia. As if that could help us. We can’t feed ourselves. We can’t house ourselves. We can’t even exterminate a lousy bunch of fucking Chechnians. It’s just like with these fucking Finns! We owned them for eighty years. Then the Finns got smart with us. So we rolled in with tanks and the sons of bitches ran into their forests in the dark and the snow, and they kicked our ass! Even after we finally crushed them, and stole the best part of their country, they just came right back! Now it’s fifty years later, and the Russian Federation owes Finland a billion dollars. There are only five million Finns! My country owes every single Finn two hundred dollars each!”

  “It’s that Marxist thing, ace.” They walked on in silence.

  “We’re past the Marxist thing,” said Khoklov, warming to his theme as the pill took hold. “Now it’s different. This time Russia has a kind of craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the whole world. Massive, total, institutional corruption. Top to bottom. Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that will sell anything: the flesh of our women, the future of our children. Everything inside our museums and our churches. Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We’ll sell the soil and the forests and the Russian sky. We’ll sell our souls.”

  They passed the bizarre polychrome facade of a Finnish-Mexican restaurant. “Listen, ace,” Starlitz said. “If it’s the soul thing that’s got you down, this guy won’t help you there. It was a serious mistake to break him out of mothballs. You should have left him nodding-out in some bar in Baghdad listening to Bee Gees on vinyl. I don’t know what you’ll do about him now. You might try to bribe him with some kind of major ransom money, and hope he gets too drunk to move. But I don’t think he’ll do that for you. Bribes just flatter him.”

  “Okay,” Khoklov said. “I agree. He’s too dangerous, and he has too much past. After the coup, we kill him. I owe that much to Ilya and Lev, anyway.”

  “I appreciate that sentiment, but it’s kinda late now, ace. You should have iced him when we knew where he was staying.”

  There was a distant hollow thump.

  The Russian cocked his
head. “Was that mortar fire?”

  “Car bomb, maybe?” In the blue and lucid distance, filthy smoke began to rise.

  Raf claimed that the abortive Israeli hit had been the twelfth attempt on his life. This might have been stretching the truth. It was only the second time that a Mossad hit-team had shot the wrong man in a neutral Scandinavian country.

  Russians hated to commit themselves fully to a project. Seventy years of totalitarianism had left them with a terrific appetite for back-tracking, doublespeak, and doublecross. Raf, however, delighted in providing quick results.

  Granted, his Ålands liberation campaign had had a few tactical setbacks. He’d had to abandon most of his favorite guns with the loss of his first safehouse. The Mossad team had escaped apprehension by the dumbfounded Finnish police. The car-bombing at the FinnAir office had cost Raf his yellow Fiat.

  The Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells excelled at spraying radical political graffiti, but their homemade petrol bombs at the Jyväskylä police station had done only minor damage. The outspoken Helsinki newspaper editor had survived his kneecapping and would probably walk again.

  Nevertheless, Raf’s ex-KGB sponsors back in Petersburg were impressed with the veteran’s initiative and cando spirit. They’d supplied another payoff.

  With a brimming war-chest of mafia-supplied Euro-yen, Raf was on a roll. Raf had successfully infiltrated six Yankee mercs from the little-known but extremely violent American anarcho-rightist underground. Thanks to relaxed cross-border inspections in Europe and the dazed preoccupations of America’s ninja tobacco inspectors, these Yankee gun-runners had boldly brought Raf an up-to-date and very lethal arsenal of NATO’s remaindered best.

  Raf also had ten Russian thugs on call. These men were combat-hardened mercenaries from the large contingent of thirty thousand ex-military professionals who guarded Russia’s bankers. Russian bankers who were not mafia-affiliated were shot down in droves by the black marketeers. Russian bankers who were mafia-affiliated were generally killed by one another. These bankers’ bodyguards were enjoying a booming trade. Being bodyguards, they naturally excelled at assassination.

  These dangerous cliques of armed alien agitators would have been near-useless in Finland without the protection of locals on the ground. Raf had the Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells to cover that front. The Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells consisted of five hard-core undergraduates, plus a loose group of young fellow-travelers who would probably offer aid and shelter if pressed. The Cells also had an ideological guru, a radical Finnish nationalist professor and poet who had no real idea what his teachings had wrought among his nation’s postmodern youth.

  So Raf had twenty or so people ready to use guns and bombs at his direction. To the uninitiated, this might not have seemed an impressive force. However, by the conventional standards of European terrorism, Raf was doing splendidly. National movements such as ETA, IRA, and PLO tended to be somewhat larger, due to their extensive labor-pool of the embittered and oppressed, but Raf the Jackal was a creature of a different breed: a true revolutionary internationalist, a freelance with a dozen passports. His Åland Island Liberation Front was big. It was bigger than Germany’s Baader-Meinhof. It was bigger than France’s Action Directe. It was about as big as the Japanese Red Army, and considerably better financed. A group of this sort could change history. A far more primitive conspiracy had murdered Abraham Lincoln.

  Starlitz was listening to international Finland Radio on the shortwave. It was tough to find decent English-language coverage of the ongoing terror campaign. Despite their continued selfless service in the UN blue-helmet contingent, neutral Finland didn’t have a lot of foreign friends. The internal troubles of a neutral country didn’t compel much general interest.

  This would likely change, however, now that Raf had brought in outside experts. Raf was giving his Yankee new-hires an extensive rundown on the theory and practice of detonating acetylene bottles.

  Aino had rented the state-supported handicrafts center through the good offices of her student activist group. The walls of the terrorist hideaway were covered with weird woolly hangings, massive hand-saws, pine-tar soaps, and eldritch Finnish glassware.

  Aino was fully up-to-speed on improvised demolitions, so she had been appointed a look-out. She sat near a second-floor window overlooking the driveway, with a monster Finnish elk-rifle at hand. The job was tedious. Aino was leafing through a stack of English-language Flüüvin books which Starlitz had picked up at a Helsinki bookstore. Helsinki boasted bookstores half the size of aircraft hangars. The book thing was something to do during those long dark winters.

  “How many of these did she write?” Aino said.

  “Twenty-five. The hottest sellers are Froofies Go to Sea and Papa Froofy and the Mushroom Tigers.”

  “They seem even stranger in English. It’s strange that she cares so much about her little blue creatures. She worries about them so much, and gets so emotionally touched about them, and they don’t even really exist.” Aino flipped through the pages. “Look, here the Flüüvins are walking through the fire-mists on big stilts. That’s a good picture. And look! There’s that cave creature that carries the harmonica and complains all the time.”

  “That would be Speffy the Nerkulen.”

  “Speffy the Nerkulen.” Aino frowned. “That isn’t a proper Finnish name. It isn’t Swedish, either. Not even Åland Swedish.”

  Starlitz turned off the shortwave, which was detailing Finnish agricultural production. “She imagined Speffy, that’s all. Speffy the Nerkulen just popped out of her little gray head. But Speffy the Nerkulen sure moves major product in Hokkaido.”

  Aino riffled the pages of the paperback. “I could make a book like this. She wrote this book fifty years ago. She was my age when she wrote and drew this book. I could do this myself.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  She looked up. “Because I could, I know I could. I can draw. I can tell stories. I’m always telling stories to people at the bar. Once I did a band poster.”

  “That’s swell. How’d you like to come along with me and brace up the little old lady? I need a Finnish translator, and a former Froofy fan would be great. Besides, she can give you helpful tips on kid-lit.”

  Aino looked at him, surprised. Slowly, she frowned. “What are you saying? I’m a revolutionary soldier. You should respect my political commitment. You wouldn’t talk to me that way if I was a twenty-year-old boy.”

  “If you were a twenty-year-old boy, you’d fuckin’ spit on Speffy the Nerkulen.”

  “No I wouldn’t.”

  “Yes you would. Young soldier boys are cheaper than dirt. They’re a fuckin’ commodity. Who needs ’em? But a young female Froofy fan could be a very useful cut-out in some dicey negotiations.”

  “You’re still lying to me. You should stop. I’m not fooled.”

  Starlitz sighed. “Look. It’s the truth. Try and get it straight. You think the Åland Islands are important, right? Important enough to blow up trains for. Well, Speffy the Nerkulen is the most important thing that ever came out of the Åland Islands. Froofies are the only Ålands product that you can’t obtain anywhere else. Twenty-five thousand hick fishermen in the Baltic are doing great to produce a major worldwide pop hit like Speffy the Nerkulen. If the Ålands were Jamaica, he’d be Bob Marley.”

  One of Raf’s new recruits entered the room. He was bearded and muscular, maybe thirty. He wore a Confederate flag T-shirt and carried a Colt automatic in a belt holster. “Hey,” he said. “Y’all speak English?”

  “Yo,” said Starlitz.

  “Where’s the can?”

  Starlitz pointed.

  “Hey, babe,” said the American, pausing. “That’s a lady’s rifle. You say the word, I’ll give you something serious to shoot with.”

  Aino said nothing. Her grip tightened on the rifle’s polished walnut stock.

  The American grinned at Starlitz. “She’s got no English, huh? She’s a Russian, right? I heard there’d be
lots of Russian chicks in this operation. Man. What a dollar’ll do these days.” He rubbed his hands.

  “Posse Comitatus?” Starlitz hazarded.

  “Aw hell no. We’re not militia. Those militia boys, they’re all in a sweat over UN black helicopters and the New World Order.… That’s bullshit! We know the New World Order. We got contacts. We’re gonna be inside the goddamn black helicopters. Shoulder to shoulder with Ivan, this time!”

  Finland had the most expensive booze in the world. This was Finnish social democratic policy, part and parcel with the world’s lowest infant mortality rate. Nevertheless, Finns were truly fabulous drunks. The little Kasarmikatu bar was jammed with Finns methodically transiting from modest self-effacement to chest-pounding no-brakes bravado. A television barked above the shining racks of vodka and koskenkorva, showing broadcast news from across the Baltic. Another parliamentary crisis in Moscow. A furious Russian delegate was pounding the podium in a blue vinyl jacket and a Megadeth T-shirt.

  The Japanese financier set down his apple juice and adjusted his sunglasses. “His Holiness the Master does not approve of drunkenness. Alcohol clouds the vision and occludes the flow of ki.”

  “I can’t believe we found a Japanese who won’t drink after a business deal,” Khoklov bitched in Russian. The Japanese money-man didn’t speak or understand Russian. The three of them were clustered in the darkest corner of the Helsinki bar.

  Starlitz spoke in Russian. “Our star depositor here has got a very severe case of that Pacific Rim New Age thing. These Supreme Truth guys are completely nuts. However, they’re richer than God.”

  Starlitz silently toasted the money-man with a shot of Finnish cranberry vodka. He’d convinced their backer that this pulverizing liquor was cranberry juice. He switched to fluent gutter Japanese. “Khoklov-san tells me that he admires your electric skullcap very much. He wants to try one for himself. He is seeking health benefits and increased peace of mind.”