Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  “I just want …” Half panicked with star worship, Zeta’s eyes filled with tears. “You’re the star! I just want you to be the star for me! Tell me what it’s all about!”

  Betsy paused with her leopard top half-lifted. “What what is all about?” she said guardedly, skinning her top back down. “What pop music’s all about?”

  “Yeah! Sure! Okay! That’ll do!”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “Stand close to me and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the one big secret. I’ll tell you the one thing we pop stars ever say that really, really matters.” Betsy leaned down, tall, shining eyed, and impossibly confident, and kissed Zeta on the forehead. “You don’t have to be like your parents.”

  Then she kicked her way through the doors and strode off, with never a glance back.

  “Wow.” Zeta was stunned.

  Starlitz scratched his head. “Honey, that’s not really that big a revelation.”

  “It is to me,” Zeta said. “Nobody ever told me that before.” Zeta began to cry with joy, tears streaking the corners of her gappy smile. “I’m so happy that somebody finally told me.”

  STARLITZ WANDERED THE UPPER FLOOR OF THE YALI until he located another G-7 girl. She happened to be the German One, who was sitting alone in a former harem boudoir, watching Deutsche Welt satellite coverage of the Balkan War, and nervously gnawing at her lacquered nails. The German One was wearing a Turkish bathrobe and her blond hair was in curlers. She had a sliced apple and half a salad.

  “Betsy’s walking out,” Starlitz announced. “Looks like I’ve lost us another American One.”

  “Oh, you, you,” grumbled the German One, her bloodshot blue eyes riveted to the screen. “What does one girl matter now, when there are thousands of war refugees in Europe, children and poor people thrown from their homes, with no place to sleep.” The German One was both grave and jittery. “Every one of those dirty loafers wants to take the first bus to Berlin! I hope Joschka Fischer can handle this terrible crisis, that big Green hippie.”

  Starlitz put his hands on his daughter’s quaking shoulders. “Where is Mrs. Dinsmore?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Dinsmore. Tamara. Tamara the G-7 Chaperone.”

  “Oh, her,” said the German One, nodding absently. “We had to leave her in Azerbaijan. She had bad problems there with her passport.”

  Starlitz swallowed this dire news with gloom, but without much surprise. “Listen, German One, the kid here is all worn out. Can you keep her company a little while? I need a word downstairs with Mr. Ozbey.”

  The German One looked at Zeta indifferently. “Okay. If she stops crying. I hate it when they cry.”

  “Are you the German One?” Zeta ventured bravely.

  “Ja. Ich bin. So far.”

  “You’re the original German One! I have your plastic action figure! I have your platform shoes and your lollipop! I think I even know your real name.”

  The German One perked up. She patted the side of the sofa. “Okay. Sit here. Would you like a nice lamb salad?”

  Starlitz left.

  The palace lost most of its tenacious grip on his soul, if he just marched resolutely through it with his eyes half shut. The place was unbelievably lovely. It would be fatally easy to stick around in the palace for quite a while, maybe for several languid, corrupt Ottoman centuries.

  He heard Ozbey’s voice, barking reassuringly into a telephone. Starlitz knocked at the door. Ozbey shouted a welcome in Turkish.

  Starlitz stepped inside. Ozbey hung up the phone at once, slapping it down as if a vital state secret might escape through the earpiece.

  “Good to see you, Mehmetcik.”

  “What a sight you are,” said Ozbey thoughtfully, looking him up and down. Ozbey’s new office was truly spectacular. The place had framed Ottoman decrees inscribed by left-handed craftsman-calligraphers. Hand-smithed copper banquet plates. A wall-mounted collection of curved Janissary daggers.

  Ozbey placed one hand on his natty blue lapel, vaguely in the area of his heart. “I swear I’ve missed you.”

  “That’s kind of you, man. I appreciate that sentiment.”

  “I thought you’d never return.”

  “Well, I had no choice. It was part of the narrative arrangement, basically.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Ozbey, nodding. “I thought that problem might bring you back to haunt us. The Dead One, you know.”

  “The two Dead Ones, man.”

  Ozbey winced. “I was just on the telephone now, and …”

  “You’re kidding. Which one is it this time?”

  “She is not dead, Leggy. She’ll come out of her coma, they say. They promise she will walk again. Not dance … but she’ll walk.”

  “Oh, which one was it this time?” said Starlitz, stricken. “Please don’t tell me it was the British One. The British One had such a great propaganda line. You could always talk sense to the British One.”

  “Oh, this development is very bad, I don’t want to hide that from you,” said Ozbey stoutly, rising from his designer office chair behind the rosewood desk. He opened a stained-glass liquor cabinet and retrieved a silver cocktail shaker. “It was the Japanese One. Too many pills. A suicide attempt. She was being too Japanese.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “I don’t know what to do about the Japanese One. Replacing the other ones is so much easier. There is no oppressed Moslem minority inside Japan. Is there?”

  Starlitz thought about it from Ozbey’s point of view. It was a dead-easy thing to do, once you were inside the yali palace. Inside the palace the story line made a hell of a lot of sense. “Actually, there’s a pretty large diaspora of Iranian guest workers in Japan. Tokyo, mostly. Undocumented labor and all.”

  “Truly?” said Ozbey, brightening. “Maybe it was fated.”

  “I’m sorry about the way this situation has played out, man. Maybe I’m not the guy to ask for advice just now. Because I just lost you the American One.”

  Ozbey was nonplussed. “I can’t believe you killed the American One.”

  “She’s not dead, man.”

  “How could she be dead? She was huge, she was tough, she had a handgun. How could you kill her? How is that even possible?”

  “She’s not dead, Mehmetcik. Solo career.”

  “Oh.” Ozbey removed a cut-glass decanter of Cypriot brandy and a lemon mixer. “That bigmouthed Yankee cop. Well, she was tiresome, with all her rants about women and minorities.… I have to say I expected her to lose patience with us. Tell me, do you know any Black Muslims in America? They seem awfully stiff for American black people, with those little bow ties. Are they truly Muslims? Can they dance and sing?”

  “Wait a sec,” said Starlitz, touching his forehead. “I’m getting a brain wave here. Pakistani Silicon Valley girl. Dad’s a circuit engineer for Intel, or Motorola. There’s fuckin’ thousands of ’em.”

  Ozbey broke into a sunny smile. “Excellent! You see, that angle would never have occurred to me. An American CyberMoslem. Of course! And from California. That couldn’t be better!”

  “Might be a waste of time head-hunting one. Y2K is so close now, and all.”

  With an evasive grin Ozbey began agitating his shaker. “Sit down, please. You need a drink.”

  “I could go for a Cyprus brandy sour in a big way,” Starlitz admitted. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette around here, would you?”

  “I have a humidor. Fine Cuban cigars. Where is it?”

  They searched the desk’s extensive perimeter. Starlitz fell to his knees to peer in the cavity beneath the desk. He retrieved the fallen humidor, and a pair of abandoned Manolo Blahnik spike heels.

  Ozbey winced a bit as Starlitz produced the shoes. “Gonca’s been looking for those.”

  He offered Starlitz a crystal glass. Starlitz had a healthy slug. “Now, that’s a bracer,” Starlitz said. “I’m jet-lagged to hell and gone. I misplaced my soul in Hawaii. My personal time ghost is still flying somewhere o
ver the mid-Pacific.” Starlitz lit his cigar from a porcelain desk lighter. Life became very gratifying suddenly. Starlitz had to sit down.

  Ozbey tasted his drink and set it aside. “I like to mix drinks,” he said, lighting a cigar. “I like to collect the drink toys, the best decanters, and the nicest little swizzle sticks.… But I don’t like to drink anymore. I can’t get drunk. There is always a midnight phone call. Or a gunshot, or a siren. I can’t relax with a drink and be myself. I’m not myself anymore, that’s the truth of it.” Ozbey looked up mournfully. “Even my boys aren’t themselves anymore.”

  “It’s the price of success, man. Money changes everything.”

  Ozbey reached into his jacket pocket and produced a tinfoil pinch of cocaine. “This still works. Cocaine expands the personality. Cocaine makes you larger than life.” He dug in the foil with a manicured thumbnail and sniffed.

  “When you left me with the band,” Ozbey said, rubbing his sinuses thoughtfully, “I shook your hand. Remember? I swore I would protect those girls. Now I confess to you: I did not protect the girls. The girls died. They will all die. I don’t care. The man who told you that they mattered, that man wasn’t me. The girls don’t matter. I matter.” He looked around his splendid office. “This matters.”

  Starlitz tapped clean white ash from the tip of his cigar. “It’s a point of view,” he admitted.

  “You said to me once, that I had to decide who I was. It was a wise thing to say. But it’s not easy. My name’s not Mehmet Ozbey,” Ozbey said. “My name is Abdullah Oktem.”

  Starlitz lifted his brows sympathetically. “Is that supposed to make some kind of big difference to me?”

  “Do you know a Turkish Cypriot named Alparslan Turkes? A military man? The former head of Turkish State Security? Did you ever hear of General Alparslan Turkes? He was one of the greatest men in the world. He was like a father to me.”

  “Sorry, man, can’t say I ever knew him.”

  “I saw him mobbed by crowds in Turkish Cyprus. In Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan they kissed his hands and wept. He had nine children, that man. He was the father of the Gray Wolves.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have nine children, Starlitz?”

  “Nope.”

  “I have four children.”

  “That’s a pretty good start.”

  “I don’t know what to say to my own sons. Their family name is Oktem. They are the sons of Abdullah Oktem, not the sons of Mehmet Ozbey. How do I tell them that their father’s friends are men with names like ‘Terminator,’ who work for organizations like the ‘Turkish Revenge Brigade’?”

  Ozbey sat at his desk, opened a drawer, and removed a gilt-framed photo. He propped it on the desktop and observed it, his eyes large, wet, and melancholy. “Poor little Merel … when she married me, I was a youth brigade leader. We used to go camping in the woods, singing, with the Gray Wolf Youth. Target shooting. Patriotic Turkish songs. We used to tie knots, and build campfires, and beat up labor demonstrators. It was a modest life, very devoted to the nation. Merel gave me sons … but it’s no wonder that I outgrew her.”

  “I’ve never been able to make that work out either,” Starlitz admitted. “I’ve never seen it done. You know something? I’m pretty sure that men and women with a happy home life can never even fuckin’ meet me.”

  “I knew you would understand this,” Ozbey told him, deeply gratified. “Because you are a philosopher. The only time in my life when I was serious about philosophy … I took courses in the American University, but … well, it was that seven-year sentence in the Swiss jail. Four kilos of heroin in our bags at the Zurich airport. The enemy informed against us. ASALA, the Armenian Secret Army. We were busy liquidating them at the time.”

  “The Swiss busted you? And after you testified in Italy at the Mehmet Ali Ağca trial? Man, that took a lot of nerve.”

  “They arrested Mehmet Sener first. But he never talked. I never talked. He’s a very good man, Mehmet Sener. A patriot, a man you can trust. I still see him socially, though he has another name now. Not one word did we give to those Swiss bastards. A year. Two years. Three years. Four years. Five years, and finally the CIA comes through for us, and puts us back into their GLADIO system. I was a boy when I went into that prison. Fresh out of university. Prison hardened me. Prison made me a hard man.”

  “That’s the truth about prison,” Starlitz mused. “Václav Havel said that too.”

  “I think about those five years in prison,” said Ozbey. “When I have Gonca Utz—on that divan there, commonly—she moves her bottom for me, she moves her pretty legs, she cries out in that sweet voice.… I spent five years in jail, as a very lonely man, looking forward to a moment like that. And now, I take that moment from Gonca whenever I please, but … I have to say this … I’m never quite there in that moment. I’m the man who is planning that moment. I’m the man boasting of it afterward. But I never seem to be the man who is there and enjoying that moment. Where did I lose myself, eh? Life seems so perfect. Where did the story go wrong? Why am I like this, Starlitz? What has the world done to me? Can you tell me that?”

  “There are a lot of guys who would kill to have a story like that.”

  “I killed to have that story,” Ozbey insisted gravely. “That part about regret and guilt, that part of the story was always a lie. I have no regrets. You plant a bomb, bad people die. You shoot up a restaurant, bad people die.… I don’t like to kill colleagues of mine, like Oral Celik, after he betrayed us. I have to say that incident hurt my feelings. But the killing is not the story. We Turks have these two rival government death squads, you see, JITEM and OHP … well, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that, it’s regional bureaucracy, it’s rather boring.… My own sympathies are mostly with JITEM, but you know, when I kill enemies of the state for JITEM, I don’t take it seriously.”

  Ozbey tapped cigar ash and put his feet on the desk. “I mean, of course we still kill the state’s enemies, because they’re still Turkey’s enemies, but that’s not the central part of my career. Nowadays we build the new black market. We sell drugs, we sell guns. We build casinos and hotels throughout the Turkish-speaking world. We buy television stations, and newspapers. We finance the Kurdish War, and we finance political parties. We are very prosperous. Since the end of the Cold War we are rich. So don’t call me a hired killer, a political extremist, mafioso, and heroin trafficker. Those words can’t contain me anymore, not here at the end of the century. I’m a corporate officer in oil corporations. I’m on the board of three banks. I make the money that an Arab sheik makes. And I gamble it in my own casinos, so that I win even when I lose.”

  Starlitz rubbed his double chin. “I think I’m getting a fuller picture here, man. This is good material. Go on.”

  “You can’t pay me enough to kill an enemy of the state! I have to do that for patriotism, for the sheer love of it. Mostly, when I’m not on the road, I sit at my comfortable desk, here at the JITEM palace safe house. I make phone calls, on secure diplomatic lines. For instance, I recently sold five million dollars’ worth of jeeps and mortars to the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA earned that war chest by selling heroin in Switzerland, just as we Turks used to do, when we were young and stupid. They sell heroin that we gave to them. So we make money both ways. Three ways. Five or six ways. We can make money any way, as long as the money is black.”

  “That can’t be much of a business constraint nowadays. Especially with a war on.”

  “The best part is, this is NATO’s first real war, and we are NATO. Can you believe that? We are winning the war! The Turks are winning a Moslem war inside Europe for the first time in three hundred years! To have lived to see this day! There are times when I think my life is just too good to be true.”

  Starlitz nodded thoughtfully. “There is a new world coming, isn’t there? It takes your breath away sometimes.”

  Ozbey’s dilated eyes gleamed with enthusiasm. “Is the Turkish Army winning that war? The Turkish A
ir Force? No my friend, it is Turkish covert operations that is winning that war. When we captured Abdullah Ocallan in Kenya, that was the greatest Turkish victory in fifty years. Three men in black hoods kidnapped Ocallan in Africa. I know those men in black hoods. They are personal friends of mine. I get them girls and cars. They run a tab in my uncle’s casinos. Those men are like princes now.”

  “I am so with that,” said Starlitz, around his cigar. He took it out and waved it. “You know what I admire about your setup here? I like it that this is an actual fucking palace. I mean, it’s not like some five-eighths-scale Disney World palace, for mass consumption by the tourist trade. This is a no-kidding, fully authentic Ottoman scene you’ve got going down here, Mehmetcik. There’s like fabulous wealth, and masked executioners, and secret palace cabals, and grand viziers, and bribes, and shakedowns, and guys getting their throats cut in dark alleys. And you’ve even got a whole international harem full of dancing girls up there, eating sherbets and getting their toenails done. It’s a no-kidding privilege to see this thing done this way. I live for moments like this.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said Ozbey slowly. Some crucial junction had kicked over inside his head, or maybe the coke rush was on top of him. “Perhaps that’s a part of my identity problem.” He glowered.

  “Mmm.”

  “I consider myself quite a Western modernizer. Not an Ottoman. This is troublesome to me.”

  “Uh, well,” said Starlitz tentatively, “that’s just my input, man. Sometimes it takes an outside consultant to see these minor things for us.”

  “You know,” said Ozbey, “when you telephoned ahead to say that you were coming back, I made plans to have you killed.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “I was thinking of sewing you into a bag, and dropping you into the Bosphorus. It’s the traditional way. How hard could that be? There are thousands of unsolved political murders in Turkey. I feel sure that I could make you disappear into deep water—but there is another problem. Because I don’t believe that would kill you.”

  “Uh, why do you say that, man?”