“The World Bank is helping them with development loans,” Khoklov said. “The World Bank loves their Kaliningrad idea.”
“Plus the European Union, man. Euros love duty-free zones.”
“And the Finns, too,” Khoklov said. “That’s the very worst of it. The Finns have bought us out. Russia used to owe every Finn two hundred dollars. Now, Russia owes every Finn one hundred and ninety dollars. In return for a rotten little fifty million dollar write-off, my bosses sold us all to the Finns. They told the Finns about our plans, and they sold us just as if we were some lousy division of leftover tanks. The Finnish Special Weapons and Tactics team is flying over here right now to annihilate us.”
Raf’s round and meaty face grew dark with fury. “So you’ve betrayed us, Khoklov?”
“It’s my bosses who let us down,” Khoklov said sturdily. “Essentially, I’ve been purged. They have cut me out of the Organizatsiya. They liked the idea much more than they like me. So I’m expendable. I’m dead meat.”
Raf turned to Starlitz. “I’ll have to shoot Pulat Romanevich for this. You realize that, I hope.”
Starlitz raised his brows. “You got a gun, man?”
“Aino has the guns.” Raf hopped up from his lounger and left.
Khoklov and Starlitz hastily followed him. “You’re going to let him shoot me?” Khoklov said sidelong.
“Look man, the guy has kept up his end. He always delivered on time and within specs.”
They found Aino alone in the basement. She had her elk rifle.
“Where’s the arsenal?” Raf demanded.
“I had Matti and Jorma take all the weapons from this property. Your mercenaries are terrible beasts, Raf.”
“Of course they’re beasts,” Raf said. “That’s why they follow a Jackal. Lend me your rifle for a moment, my dear. I have to shoot this Russian.”
Aino slammed a thumb-sized cartridge into the breech and stood up. “This is my favorite rifle. I don’t give it to anyone.”
“Shoot him yourself, then,” Raf said, backing up half a step with a deft little hop. “His mafia people have blown the Movement’s program. They’ve betrayed us to the Finnish oppressors.”
“Police are coming from the mainland,” Starlitz told her. “It’s over. Time to split, girl. Let’s get out of here.”
Aino ignored him. “I told you that Russians could never be trusted,” she said to Raf. Her face was pale, but composed. “What did American mercenaries have to do with Finland? We could have done this easily, if you were not so ambitious.”
“A man has to dream,” Raf said. “Everybody needs a big dream.”
Aino centered her rifle on Khoklov’s chest. “Should I shoot you?” she asked him, in halting Russian.
“I’m not a cop,” Khoklov offered hopefully.
Aino thought about it. The rifle did not waver. “What will you do, if I don’t shoot you?”
“I have no idea what I’ll do,” Khoklov said, surprised. “What do you plan to do, Raf?”
“Me?” said Raf. “Why, I could kill you with these hands alone.” He held out his plump, dimpled hands in karate position.
“Lot of good that’ll do you against a chopper full of angry Finnish SWAT team,” Starlitz said.
Raf squared his shoulders. “I’d love to take a final armed stand on this territory! Battle those Finnish oppressors to the death! However, unfortunately, I have no arsenal.”
“Run away, Raf,” Aino said.
“What’s that, my dear?” said Raf.
“Run, Raffi. Run for your life. I’ll stay here with your stupid hookers, and your drunken, naked, mercenary losers, and when the cops come, I’m going to shoot some of them.”
“That’s not a smart survival move,” Starlitz told her.
“Why should I run like you? Should I let my revolution collapse at the first push from the authorities, without even a token resistance? This is my sacred cause!”
“Look, you’re one little girl,” Starlitz said.
“So what? They’re going to catch all your stupid whores, the men and the women, in a drunken stupor. The cops will put them all in handcuffs, just like that. But not me. I’ll be fighting. I’ll be shooting. Maybe they’ll kill me. They’re supposed to be good, these SWAT cops. Maybe they’ll capture me alive. Then, I’ll just have to live inside a little stone house. All by myself. For a long, long time. But I’m not afraid of that! I have my cause. I was right! I’m not afraid.”
“You know,” said Khoklov brightly, “if we took that speed launch we could be on the Danish coast in three hours.”
Spray whipped their faces as the Ålands faded in the distance.
“I hope there aren’t too many passport checks in Denmark,” Khoklov said anxiously.
“Passports aren’t a problem,” Raf said. “Not for me. Or for my friends.”
“Where are you going?” Khoklov asked.
“Well,” said Raf, “perhaps the Ålands offshore bank scheme was a little before its time. I’m a visionary, you know. I was always twenty years ahead of my time—but nowadays maybe I’m only twenty minutes.” Raf sighed. “Such a wonderful girl, Aino! She reminded me so much of … well, there have been so many wonderful girls.… But I must sacrifice my habit of poetic dreaming! At this tragic juncture, we must regroup, we must be firmly realistic. Don’t you agree, Khoklov? We should go to the one locale in Europe that guarantees a profit.”
“The former Yugoslavia?” Khoklov said eagerly. “They say you can make a free phone call anywhere in the world from Belgrade. Using a currency that doesn’t even exist anymore!”
“Obvious potential there,” said Raf. “Of course, it requires operators who can land on their feet. Men of action. Men on top of their profession.”
“Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Khoklov breathed, turning his reddened face to yet another tirelessly rising sun. “The new frontier! What do you think, Starlitz?”
“I think I’ll just hang out a while,” Starlitz said. He gripped his nose with thumb and forefinger. Suddenly, without another word, Starlitz tumbled backward from the boat into the dark Baltic water. In a few short moments he was lost from sight.
SACRED COW
He woke in darkness to the steady racket of the rails. Vast unknowable landscapes, huge as the dreams of childhood, rumbled behind his shocked reflection in the carriage pane.
Jackie smoothed his rumpled hair, stretched stiffly, wiped at his mustache, tucked the railway blanket around his silk-pajamaed legs. Across the aisle, two of his crew slept uneasily, sprawled across their seats: Kumar the soundman, Jimmie Suraj his cinematographer. Suraj had an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear, the thin gold chains at his neck bunched in an awkward tangle.
The crew’s leading lady, Lakshmi “Bubbles” Malini, came pale and swaying down the aisle, wrapped sari-like in a souvenir Scottish blanket. “Awake, Jackie?”
“Yaar, girl,” he said, “I suppose so.”
“So that woke you, okay?” she announced, gripping the seat. “That big bump just now. That bloody lurch, for Pete’s sake. It almost threw us from the track.”
“Sit down, Bubbles,” he apologized.
“ ‘Dozens die,’ okay?” she said, sitting. “ ‘Stars, director, crew perish in bloody English tragic rail accident.’ I can see it all in print in bloody Stardust already.”
Jackie patted her plump hand, found his kit bag, extracted a cigarette case, lit one. Bubbles stole a puff, handed it back. Bubbles was not a smoker. Bad for the voice, bad for a dancer’s wind. But after two months in Britain she was kipping smokes from everybody.
“We’re not dying in any bloody train,” Jackie told her, smiling. “We’re filmwallas, darling. We were born to be killed by taxmen.”
Jackie watched a battered railway terminal rattle past in a spectral glare of fog. A pair of tall English, wrapped to the eyes, sat on their luggage with looks of sphinxlike inscrutability. Jackie liked the look of them. Native extras. Good atmosphere.
Bub
bles was restless. “Was this all a good idea, Jackie, you think?”
He shrugged. “Horrid old rail lines here, darling, but they take life damn slow now, the English.”
She shook her head. “This country, Jackie!”
“Well,” he said, smoothing his hair. “It’s bloody cheap here. Four films in the can for the price of one feature in Bombay.”
“I liked London,” Bubbles offered bravely. “Glasgow, too. Bloody cold but not so bad … but Bolton? Nobody films in bloody Bolton.”
“Business, darling,” he said. “Need to lower those production costs. The ratio of rupees to meter of filmstock exposed …”
“Jackie?”
He grunted.
“You’re bullshitting me, darling.”
He shook his head. “Yaar, girl, Jackie Amar never bounced a crew check yet. Get some sleep, darling. Got to look beautiful.”
Jackie did not title his own movies. He had given that up after his first fifty films. The studio in Bombay kept a whole office of hack writers to do titles, with Hindi rhyming dictionaries at their elbows. Now Jackie kept track of his cinematic oeuvre by number and plot summary in a gold-edged fake-leather notebook with detachable pages.
Jackie Amar Production No. 127 had been his first in merrie old England. They’d shot No. 127 in a warehouse in Tooting Bec, with a few rented hours at the Tower of London. No. 127 was an adventure/crime/comedy about a pair of hapless expatriate twins (Raj Khanna, Ram Khanna) who cook up a scheme to steal back the Koh-i-noor Diamond from the Crown Jewels of England. The Khanna brothers had been drunk much of the time. Bubbles had done two dance numbers and complained bitterly about the brothers’ Scotch-tainted breath in the clinch scenes. Jackie had sent the twins packing back to Bombay.
No. 128 had been the first to star Jackie’s English ingenue discovery, Betty Chalmers. Betty had answered a classified ad asking for English girls 18 to 20, of mixed Indian descent, boasting certain specific bodily measurements. Betty played the exotic Brit-Asian mistress of a gallant Indian military-intelligence attaché (Bobby Denzongpa) who foils a plot by Japanese yakuza gangsters to blow up the Tower of London. (There had been a fair amount of leftover Tower footage from film No. 127.) Local actors, their English subtitled in Hindi, played the bumbling comics from Scotland Yard. Betty died beautifully in the last reel, struck by a poisoned ninja blowdart, just after the final dance number. Betty’s lines in halting phonetic Hindi had been overdubbed in the Bombay studio.
Events then necessitated leaving London, events taking the shape of a dapper and humorless Indian embassy official who had alarmingly specific questions for a certain Javed “Jackie” Amar concerning income-tax arrears for Rupees 6,435,000.
A change of venue to Scotland had considerably complicated the legal case against Jackie, but No. 129 had been born in the midst of chaos. Veteran soundman Wasant “Winnie” Kumar had been misplaced as the crew scrambled from London, and the musical score of No. 129 had been done, at hours’ notice, by a friend of Betty’s from Manchester, a shabby, scarecrow-tall youngster named Smith. Smith, who owned a jury-rigged portable mixing station clamped together with duct tape, had produced a deathly pounding racket of synthesized tablas and digitally warped sitars.
Jackie, despairing, had left the score as Smith had recorded it, for the weird noise seemed to fit the story, and young Smith had worked on percentage—which would likely come to no real pay at all. Western historicals were hot in Bombay this year—or at least, they had been, back in ’48—and Jackie had scripted one in an all-night frenzy of coffee and pills. A penniless Irish actor had starred as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, with Betty Chalmers as a White House chambermaid who falls for the virile young president and becomes the first woman to orbit the Moon. An old film contact in Kazakhstan had provided some stock Soviet space footage with enthusiastic twentieth-century crowd scenes. Bubbles had done a spacesuit dance.
Somewhat ashamed of this excess—he had shot the entire film with only five hours sleep in four days—Jackie gave his best to No. 130, a foreign dramatic romance. Bobby Denzongpa starred as an Indian engineer, disappointed in love, who flees overseas to escape his past and becomes the owner of a seedy Glasgow hotel. No. 130 had been shot, by necessity, in the crew’s own hotel in Glasgow with the puzzled but enthusiastic Scottish staff as extras. Bubbles starred as an expatriate cabaret dancer and Bobby’s love interest. Bubbles died in the last reel, having successfully thawed Bobby’s cynical heart and sent him back to India. No. 130 was a classic weepie and, Jackie thought, the only one of the four to have any chance in hell of making money.
Jackie was still not sure about the plot of No. 131, his fifth British film. When the tax troubles had caught up to him in Scotland, he had picked the name of Bolton at random from a railway schedule.
• • •
Bolton turned out to be a chilly and silent hamlet of perhaps sixty thousand English, all of them busy dismantling the abandoned suburban sprawl around the city and putting fresh paint and flowers on Bolton’s nineteenth-century core. Such was the tourist economy in modern England. All the real modern-day businesses in Bolton were in the hands of Japanese, Arabs, and Sikhs.
A word with the station master got their rail cars safely parked on an obscure siding and their equipment loaded into a small fleet of English pedalcabs. A generous offer to pay in rupees found them a fairly reasonable hotel. It began to rain.
Jackie sat stolidly in the lobby that afternoon, leafing through tourist brochures in search of possible shooting sites. The crew drank cheap English beer and bitched. Jimmie Suraj the cameraman complained of the few miserable hours of pale, wintry European light. The lighting boys feared suffocation under the mountainous wool blankets in their rooms. Kumar the soundman speculated loudly and uneasily over the contents of the hotel’s “shepherd’s pie” and, worse yet, “toad-in-the-hole.” Bobby Denzongpa and Betty Chalmers vanished without permission in search of a disco.
Jackie nodded, sympathized, tut-tutted, patted heads, made empty promises. At ten o’clock he called the studio in Bombay. No. 127 had been judged a commercial no-hope and had been slotted direct to video. No. 128 had been redubbed in Tamil and was dying a slow kiss-off death on the southern village circuit. “Goldie” Vachchani, head of the studio, had been asking about him. In Jackie’s circles it was not considered auspicious to have Goldie ask about a fellow.
Jackie left the hotel’s phone number with the studio. At midnight, as he sat sipping bad champagne and studying plot synopses from ten years back in search of inspiration, there was a call for him. It was his son Salim, the eldest of his five children and his only child by his first wife.
“Where did you get this number?” Jackie said.
“A friend,” Salim said. “Dad, listen. I need a favor.”
Jackie listened to the ugly hiss and warble of longdistance submarine cables. “What is it this time?”
“You know Goldie Vachchani, don’t you? The big Bombay filmwalla?”
“I know Goldie,” Jackie admitted.
“His brother’s just been named head of the state aeronautics bureau.”
“I don’t know Goldie very well, mind you.”
“This is a major to-do, Dad. I have the news on best private background authority. The budget for aeronautics will triple next Congress. The nation is responding to the Japanese challenge in space.”
“What challenge is that? A few weather satellites.”
Salim sighed patiently. “This is the fifties now, Dad. History is marching. The nation is on the wing.”
“Why?” Jackie asked.
“The Americans went to the Moon eighty years ago.”
“I know they did. So?”
“They polluted it,” Salim announced. “The Americans left a junkyard of crashed machines up on our Moon. Even a junked motor car is there. And a golf ball.” Salim lowered his voice. “And urine and feces, Dad. There is American fecal matter on the Moon that will last there in cold and vacuum for ten million year
s. Unless, that is, the Moon is ritually purified.”
“God almighty, you’ve been talking to those crazy fundamentalists again,” Jackie said. “I warned you not to go into politics. It’s nothing but crooks and fakirs.”
The hissing phone line emitted an indulgent chuckle. “You’re being culturally inauthentic, daddyji! You’re Westoxicated! This is the modern age now! If the Japanese get to the Moon first they’ll cover it with bloody shopping malls.”
“Best of luck to the damn fool Japanese, then.”
“They already own most of China,” Salim said, with sinister emphasis. “Expanding all the time. Tireless, soulless, and efficient.”
“Bosh,” Jackie said. “What about us? The Indian Army’s in Laos, Tibet, and Sri Lanka.”
“If we want the world to respect our sacred cultural values, then we must visibly transcend the earthly realm.…”
Jackie shuddered, adjusted his silk dressing gown. “Son, listen to me. This is not real politics. This is a silly movie fantasy you are talking about. A bad dream. Look at the Russians and Americans if you want to know what aiming at the Moon will get you. They’re eating chaff today and sleeping on straw.”
“You don’t know Goldie Vachchani, Dad?”
“I don’t like him.”
“I thought I’d ask,” Salim said sulkily. He paused. “Dad?”
“What?”
“Is there any reason why the Civil Investigation Division would want to inventory your house?”
Jackie went cold. “Some mistake, son. A mixup.”
“Are you in trouble, daddyji? I could try to pull some strings, up top.…”
A Good Old-Fashioned Future Page 13
