Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  “Hey!” Starlitz said, recoiling as if stung. “What’s with the videocam? I don’t like that.”

  “You don’t want to fuck with the heroin postmen,” Khoklov advised. “The camera’s good for biznis. The people respect a security camera. It calms them down.” Khoklov unbuttoned his shirt. A large bandage was taped to his prominent ribs. He dug inside the bandage with one bony finger and produced a cardboard claim chit. “Here you go, my boy.”

  Viktor looked at the ticket numbly. Viktor was wrapped in an Ecstasy rush moment, when the user feels quite superb but has lost all concept of initiative.

  Khoklov scowled. “Don’t drop that claim check! And don’t drop the package either. Go on down there now, hurry. Try to be careful.”

  Viktor scampered down the beach.

  “He’s better when he’s high on the drugs,” Khoklov said in frank despair. “He’s happier. When the boy gets all depressed … Well, you don’t want to see Viktor depressed. Then he gets all poetic.”

  “Kids.” Starlitz grunted. He put his head in his hands.

  The local syndicate had disemboweled their bladder now, and they were dragging the shipment into the swarming light of handheld lamps. Starlitz could smell the unholy weight of the packaged white powder: the bone-warping gravity of smack. The almighty presence of the world’s most fiercely sought commodity. Cordite for the weltanschauung. Whole kilograms of fiercely concentrated damage. Reality had a new lacquer on it suddenly: the cold blue shimmer of junk sickness. The consumer God of Pain and Fear from the red-hot spoon, scourge of and from the century’s boards, syndicates and governments, filthy deals consummated in a million lavatories, the needle people the insect people the vegetable people, hi-fi junk note metal fixes on a twentieth-century nod-out.…

  Khoklov looked at Starlitz in surprised concern. “You understand about children, eh, Lekhi? You have a child of your own.” Khoklov was struggling to achieve some sense of human engagement. “How is she? Tell me, how is your little girl?”

  “I have no idea,” Starlitz said, lifting his sick head with an effort. “I don’t hear much lately, out of Mom One and Mom Two. It’s kind of a bad scene there, over in New Age Lesbian Land.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Khoklov drew a deep breath and winced. “That’s a shame for you. Life is hard.”

  “Well, there’s always some kind of trouble, ace. Only people out of time have no troubles. But, hell, life doesn’t have to be so hard.” Gathering strength, Starlitz straightened. “Because I’ve got a major revenue stream with backing at the highest levels of the Turkish government! It’s taken me three years to develop this thing, but it’s the sweetest scam I’ve ever pulled. I’m living large, pal. I’m so rich right now, it’s almost legal.”

  Khoklov was astonished. “You’re telling me you’re rich, Lekhi?”

  “Yeah, that’s the story line, man. I got a full-time accountant and thirty employees.”

  Khoklov’s threadbare eyebrows buckled on his sunburnt forehead. “That’s interesting news. I hadn’t expected that from you.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it. See, I finally wised up. We had it all wrong in the past. You don’t make a big commercial success by engaging in all kinds of underground intrigue and taking big brave risks.”

  “No?”

  “No! You don’t even want to be the cool guy in on the heavy spy action. That’s all for kids and suckers! You don’t want to be exciting. You don’t want to be a man of mystery or a front-line hero. You just make people want things, and then you give them what they want. That’s the secret, man. That’s the secret of success.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s as simple as that, ace. You create demand, and you supply it. Then people give you a truckload of money, and they’re proud and happy to do it. They love you for it. They want you to have a car, and a house, and a girl. They want you to be on the city council, they want you to be a congressman. They’ll powder your ass and publicly kiss it. It’s amazing.”

  “So you became a big commercial success?”

  “Exactly, man. I’m a hit maker.”

  Khoklov considered this. “I don’t trust the Turks. I don’t like Moslems, and I never have, and I never, ever will.”

  Starlitz nodded helpfully. “I don’t trust anybody either. That’s why I’ve got a job here for you, Pulat Romanevich. Distrust. That’s your angle, flyboy.”

  “So it’s a security job?” Khoklov winced. “Lekhi, I can’t do any muscle work. I have one lung left.”

  “So did Doc Holliday. This is not about muscle. It’s about nerve.”

  “Who is this Doctor Holliday? Is he a cancer specialist?”

  Starlitz shook his head. “Look, I know you’re not the guy you once were, when you were flying hashish out of Kabul for the nomenklatura. But I’m not asking you for any supersonic airstrikes here. This is a very simple gig. It’s all about seven girls who sing and dance. I just need a street-smart guy who can watch my back, while I’m taking these Turks for some cash. And I’m taking the Turks for a reasonable cut of the gross. So it’s not something that the Turks need or want to get all upset about.”

  Khoklov thought it over. “There’s a lot of money in this?”

  “Enough. And it’s tax free. I need you to do two things for me, ace. Use your instincts, and look like you’re willing to kill some people. I know that you have instincts. And you are willing to kill some people, so this should all work out just dandy.”

  Viktor now returned with a large white carton, neatly wrapped in waterproof duct tape. It had a bar-coded tracking tag and a paste-on address label in Cyrillic, Turkish, and Arabic.

  “You got a pocketknife?” Starlitz asked Khoklov.

  Viktor groped down the leg of his enormous jeans and produced an eight-inch steel pigsticker with its handle wrapped in string. With clumsy enthusiasm he chopped and slashed his way through the watertight wrappings.

  Inside the wrapping was a flip-top Soviet ammo case. The metal case was lavishly stuffed with finely shredded Cyrillic newspaper. Viktor dug in with abandon, gleefully scattering packing-trash across the beach. He finally produced a large glass bulb.

  “You know vacuum tubes, kid?” Starlitz said.

  “Sure,” nodded Viktor. “I used to deejay at ‘Fish Fabrique’ in Petersburg. I know all about tube amps and tube mikes.”

  “Swell. So are those babies true-blue, sixties-vintage, Soviet ‘Svetlana Five eighty-ones’?”

  Viktor shrugged. “It’s too dark to read the labels.”

  “They’re military vacuum tubes, all right,” Khoklov assured him earnestly. “Straight from the tracking computers in Magnitogorsk. They sell everything out of the missile sites now, the chips, the connectors, they sell everything they can steal. They cannibalized all the ballistic routers.” Khoklov coughed. “If we want to nuke New York, we’ll ship the warheads over in a rental truck.”

  Viktor looked up. “I count nine of them. We said ten, but nine is close enough. So where’s our money?”

  “Not so fast, Vik. I gotta make sure all this rough handling hasn’t fucked up those delicate diodes and triodes. Where you guys staying?”

  The two Russians exchanged glances. “You could call it a beach house,” Khoklov offered feebly.

  “If you’re on the G-7 payroll, you’ll be in the Meridien Casino in Girne.”

  “We could live in a five-star casino,” Khoklov said. Viktor shrugged and slapped the case shut.

  “Consider yourselves hired.” Starlitz looked at them. “Now listen. There’s one crucial G-7 rule. I take that back. For you two guys there’s two crucial rules. Number one is that the whole enterprise shuts down before New Year’s Day 2000. Absolutely, no exceptions. Rule number two is no hard liquor before seven P.M. You guys got any problem with those rules?”

  “Yes,” said Viktor.

  “No,” said Khoklov. “He meant no.”

  “You guys got a car?”

  “We hitchhik
ed,” Viktor said artlessly.

  Starlitz loosened his tie and scratched his neck. “Well, let’s see if we can pay off some local to sneak us past the militia. And for Christ’s sake, don’t drop that case.”

  G-7 SPECIALIZED IN PROMOTIONAL STUNTS, SINCE they never bothered to sell their music. Six hundred people were attending G-7’s Cyprus farewell bash. The casino mogul Turgut Altimbasak was a lavish host. Tonight Altimbasak was laying it on with a wheelbarrow and trowel. Most of the guests were young, and new to the ancient temptations of casinos. Leggy had seen to it that the band received a tidy cut of the night’s slot and roulette action.

  Altimbasak’s favorite high rollers all had gilded invitations to the bash. These cheerful losers were mostly Lebanese and Gulf Arabs. At any public appearance by a glitzy Western girl-group, these playboys could be counted on to hoot and chew the carpet, with all the eye-popping gawk of Tex Avery cartoon wolves.

  At the carpeted edge of the glittering ballroom lurked a damp cluster of Turkish Cypriot party apparatchiks. They were all political clients of Ozbey’s uncle, Lefkosa ward heelers in glasses, mustaches, polished shoes, and cheap suits, attempting with mixed success to get down and boogie. The Turkish Cypriot press had also turned out in force. Like journalists anywhere, they were cordially ignoring the main attraction and methodically filling their pockets with hors d’oeuvres.

  Kiddie toy store people wandered along the flocked velvet walls, enchanted by the splendid ranks of beeping, blinking poker slots. Clothing retailers from the local bazaars had also succumbed to the G-7 lure. A couple of Turkish radio DJs had flown over from Istanbul to cover the scene, live.

  The neon bar was heavily clustered with hard-drinking Finns and Danes from the UN peacekeeping contingent. Amid the crowd of muftied blue-berets, teenage contest-winners were sneaking free brandy sours. These underage girls were the core G-7 demographic. It was the pink pocketbook of their generation that was basically supporting all this hustle. The girls looked suitably impressed and disoriented.

  A cluster of Eurotrash rave kids had sneaked past the casino security. These tattered, sunburnt youngsters were dominating the dance floor, since they had all the best Ibiza party moves. They gorged themselves on Lucozade and chopped squid, between bouts of energetic writhing.

  The legendary G-7 girls were, of course, attending the event by stark necessity. The American, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Canadian Ones were painstakingly tarted up in their trademark spandex-and-cleavage national costumes. As they’d done in a hundred towns before, the G-7 girls were gamely mugging, vamping, and pawing one another, their antics drenched by flashbulbs.

  The girls were the formal focus of attention, but they were just the buxom front-women, a kind of glitter-clad visible iceberg for the dark looming bulk of the G-7 enterprise. The act’s hard-bitten working staff included a dozen G-7 roadies, a sound man, a voice coach, two choreographers, the makeup crew, and a gaggle of lighting guys. The seven girls themselves further supported a hopping flea circus of personal assistants, suck-up cronies, stage moms, and boyfriends.

  The true linchpin of the G-7 crew, however, was Nick the G-7 Accountant.

  Nick the G-7 Accountant commanded the full personal attention of Starlitz, because Nick was signing the checks. The girls and the road crew were expendable commodities, but Nick possessed a core skill-set and was hard to replace. Nick was a thirty-two-year-old London banking whiz who had run into a dire spot of trouble in the Bangkok derivatives market. Nick was very gifted financially. He was seriously overqualified for the cheesy business affairs of a dodgy midlist girl-group. But G-7 was favored with Nick’s exclusive services anyway, because Nick faced swift arrest for embezzlement if he ever set foot in any locale with a hotline to Scotland Yard.

  Starlitz was holding court behind a long banquet table draped in red linen, where cut-glass platters the size of roulette wheels held generous heaps of dolmas and pastry rolls. Starlitz spotted Nick the G-7 Accountant as Nick emerged unsteadily from the men’s room.

  Starlitz beckoned him over. “So, Nick, how’s the nut hanging?”

  Nick wiped his cocaine-crusted nose and sipped his Italian spumante. “Well, our funds look very sound, as long as we don’t export them off this island.”

  “Come closer, Nick, I can’t fuckin’ hear you. Sit down over here, man. Eat something.”

  Liam the G-7 Soundman was violently pounding a medley into the crowd. Over three years of steady touring the act had compiled an extensive signature playlist. Tonight Liam was spooling the G-7 catalog through a full set of his specialty remixes: trance, trip-hop, Balearic, jump-up, Chicago house, hard-step, speed garage, and various other species of the digital-disco jungle.

  Though their music was not for sale, G-7’s mixes were rather well-known on white-label vinyl twelve inches, East European pirate cassettes, and MP3 pirate audio Websites. G-7’s sampled sonic product was infested with other people’s cool, stolen break-beats; it had more catchy hooks than the barbed wire around Verdun. The best-known G-7 hit worldwide, which Liam was pitilessly pumping into the crowd at the moment, was the anthemic “Do As I Say (Not As I Do).”

  Tonight’s G-7 playlist also included the insistent “Speak My Language.” The upbeat “Free to Be (Just Like Me).” The pulse-pounding “We’ve Got the Power,” and the ominous, techno-heavy “Remote Control.” The girlishly assertive “It’s the Only Way to Live” had won many converts worldwide in the eight-to-twelve age bracket. G-7’s showstopping encore, a regional hit from Taiwan to Slovakia, was “Shut Up and Dance.” (The forthcoming G-7 effort, destined for their Teheran debut, was a crossover Iranian folk/calypso number called “Hey, Mr. Taliban, Tally Me Banana.”)

  “Eat some baklava, Nick. Try some of this walnut chicken.” Starlitz forced a fork into the accountant’s jittery hand. “Any more trouble shipping the boss’s cut to Hawaii?”

  “Yes, that’s very troublesome!” shouted Nick politely. “The shell companies, no problem! Fund transfers to and from Istanbul, no problem! Tax avoidance, no problem!” Nick helped himself to a grape-leaf dolma. “Large sums of Euroyen from the Akdeniz Bankasi to a Japanese bank branch in Hawaii, yes, that is a definite challenge!”

  Starlitz grew intent. “We need you to handle that, Nick.”

  “The locals don’t like it!” Nick objected. “I don’t like it either!” Enlivened by the excellent dolma, Nick leaned forward to spear an aubergine in peppered olive oil. “Japanese banks are dreadful this year! They’re held together with sticking plasters! They have coppers coming through the front doors and VPs flying out windows!”

  “All the more reason that the boss needs ready money. Screw anybody you have to, Nick, screw the Turks, screw the girls, screw the road crew, but don’t ever screw Makoto. I want Makoto fat and happy, man, I want him in his aloha shirt puffing Maui Wowie.”

  Nick scowled. “Makoto’s a bleedin’ rock musician. He never checks his books, he can’t even read them! We could take Makoto for anything we want! He’d never know, and he doesn’t even care!”

  “Nick, that’s a great wideboy’s analysis there, and I agree with you totally. I love you for that, Nick; I’m glad we have a relationship here. You’re a pro; you’re the tops. Just one thing.” Starlitz plucked the fork from Nick’s hand. “You do what I fuckin’ tell you, or you’ll be eating off a plastic tray in Wormwood Scrubs.”

  Nick laughed nervously. “Look, Leggy, I have it under control, okay? Istanbul will work out for us! Even Iran looks all right! It’s all in line, no problem!”

  Starlitz nodded tautly. He left Nick and worked his way through the party toward Liam’s mixing station.

  Starlitz plowed through a crowd of young, sweating, half-deafened Cypriots. These kids had the dazed, rootless, half-breed, malleable look of core G-7 fans. Half the population of Turkish Cyprus lived in London. The children of exile had one leg perched on each island; they were teenagers who were uniformly surly and unhappy anywhere in the world. The litt
le hybrid kids were bopping like maniacs, gamely struggling to follow a global beat.

  Liam the G-7 Soundman lurked in the shadows behind his massive blinking stacks and keyboards. Liam was a fat, balding musician in a backward baseball cap and a dashiki, with a Players A smoldering in his yellowed fangs.

  Starlitz picked up a padded headphone-and-mike rig and plugged in to Liam’s system, so that they could talk inside the almighty din.

  “How’s the new hardware, Liam?”

  Liam turned and grinned at him. “Can’t you feel that, man?” Liam patted his bulky gut, which was visibly shaking with the bass track.

  “I’m tone deaf,” Starlitz reminded him. “Tell me about the vacuum tubes.”

  Liam flicked switches and turned down their headphone treble to a muted squeak. “Legs, for two years I’ve been limpin' along with friggin’ Mullards and Tung-Sols! I’ll never use that shit again! Listen to the rich, brilliant spank off these Russki missile tubes! They got big fat midrange furriness, and a big girthy magic down in the low ends!” Liam knocked the side of his skull with his nicotine-stained knuckles. “The top end still sounds a bit thin, but that’s because they haven’t burnt in proper yet!”

  “So the tubes are okay?”

  “They’re brill!” Liam gurgled. “I put one tube up for auction, on-line. Just to see what the pros would do for it, eh? Latest bid is five thousand!”

  Starlitz raised his thick brows. “Five thousand bucks for a friggin’ vacuum tube? Jesus, I’m in the wrong business.”

  Liam grinned hugely. “Five thousand pounds, boss! Yankees don’t know from tubes!”

  Starlitz offered a hearty thumbs-up. He plugged out, submerging himself in the racket again. Liam was useful. Liam was predictable. Once upon a time Liam had toured four continents, lugging his guitar as a Tantric monk of British psychedelic blues. But Liam had survived the sixties; Liam was past the fame, long past the groupies, he had even survived the awesome Niagara of drugs and booze. Liam had fully recovered from rock ‘n’ roll, except for one fatal addiction: his equipment jones. Being a career musician, Liam didn’t require a salary, a roof, dental care, or health insurance. But he couldn’t face himself without an exclusive kit.