Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  Viktor sighed theatrically. “I love the UN because they’re not democratic. They’re not advanced, and market driven, and high tech. They’re crooked. One never imagined a badly organized, clumsy, crooked, squalid World Government. Yet here they are at the end of the century, see them there?—chain-smoking, and eating goats.”

  Viktor set down his tarnished spoon and steepled his fingers. “By its rhetorical nature ‘World Government’ seems pure, abstract, utopian. But this is not a merely conceptual World Government. This is an actual World Government we are eating lunch with here. A government with bored soldiers from Ukraine and Sri Lanka, who pass their careers in rotting zones of warlords and piracy. The UN is a global empire, but it’s a weak empire of corruption, pretense, smoldering rebellion. It’s very like the empire of the Ottoman sultans. Or the Russian czars.”

  Zeta stared raptly at Viktor, eyes shining. She understood not a word of Russian, but Viktor’s basic message seemed to be coming across to her with thrilling immediacy.

  “As Pelevin points out in his novel Lives of the Insects,” said Viktor analytically, “we live like vermin. Why is that? Because we prefer it that way. Law, order, justice, those vast abstractions are too smooth and modernist for human beings who still possess souls. Most people in this world live like rats in the cracks in the walls. Crooked empires contain more cracks. There may be more killing, but there are also more places to hide.”

  “I’m with that,” grunted Starlitz. “Russian theory is a beautiful thing. But since they busted Nick the G-7 Accountant, all my favorite banks around here are full of mousetraps. Therefore, I got a hands-on, practical problem, Viktor. Disposing of my two valises here.”

  Viktor grinned around his spoon. “Another trip with your luggage through the Green Line, Mr. Starlitz?”

  “Viktor, I need a money laundry in Greek Cyprus. Turkish Cyprus is over, it’s yesterday. I want you to mule my cash to a laundry over the border. If the banks in Greek Cyprus are good enough for the Milosevic family, they’re bound to be good enough for me.”

  Starlitz and Viktor entered into direct negotiations. Young Viktor had enjoyed an eventful year. He had certainly not been wasting his time in the absence of Starlitz and Khoklov. On the contrary: the lack of adult oversight had fully unleashed Viktor’s entrepreneurial instincts. Viktor had built a thriving career for himself, silently sneaking back and forth through the Cyprus Green Line.

  The ethnic apartheid had created a tremendous osmotic pressure between the little island’s two economies. Conventional goods couldn’t make it to market through the ethnic-hate taboo, so Viktor had come to specialize in transporting women. In the prosperous Greek half of Cyprus, an Orthodox Slavic hooker was worth five or six times what she could pull in Turkish territories. Entering Turkish Cyprus required few formalities, but formally entering Greek Cyprus by ship or aircraft required annoying documentation. So Viktor was a growing expert in moving illegal female flesh directly through the mud, the searchlights, and the barbed wire. There was always good money in this practice, but rarely so much money as in the year 1999. Severe political disruption always produced a much better class of hooker.

  Viktor excused himself for a cigarette and a cell-phone call.

  “What was Viktor saying, Dad?”

  “We’re discussing Viktor’s percentage. And the safety and liquidity of the funds.”

  “Dad, is Viktor a nice guy?”

  “No.”

  “I knew that,” said Zeta triumphantly. “I just knew it. I mean, I get it about Viktor now. Viktor is the guy that Mom One and Mom Two never wanted me to meet. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “I mean, besides you, Dad. Mom and Mom sure didn’t want me to meet you, but they totally didn’t want me to meet Viktor.”

  “I’m glad you get it about Viktor. You should have a good look at Viktor. He’s every mother’s nightmare.”

  Zeta put her elbows on the table, clasped her hands, and rolled her wrists around loosely. “Dad, can I tell you something? Viktor is just the coolest guy, Dad. I used to think guys in rock bands were cool, but Viktor Bilibin is just the coolest, dreamiest, gangster guy. He has just such amazing eyes. They look just like my pet snake’s.”

  Starlitz considered this artless confession. At first glance this was a very alarming development, but she wasn’t his own child for nothing. “You don’t need Viktor,” Starlitz informed her carefully. “I got you a fully legal American passport, in your own name. The whole world is yours, babe, except for Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Serbia, and Montenegro.”

  Viktor returned, sat down, and ordered Turkish coffee. “I think we can do biznis,” he said in Russian. “As long as the bills are not bogus.”

  “The bills are fine. I don’t think Ozbey Effendi would be passing me any bogus Bulgarian.”

  “Mehmet Ozbey?” said Viktor, sitting up in alarm.

  “Yeah, him. Who else do you know with white calfskin valises full of cash?”

  “But Mehmet Ozbey is dead.”

  Starlitz laughed. “You’re fuckin’ delusionary, pal. I saw Ozbey last night. He was throwing a video party with flaming Kurds and lingerie models.”

  Viktor went pale. “I know he’s dead. I had Ozbey hit,” he insisted. “Nobody could have survived that.”

  Starlitz looked around the little grill. The temperature in the establishment had dropped by ten degrees, but no one else seemed to notice. Conversations including an eleven-year-old child rarely attracted sinister eavesdroppers.

  “Dad,” Zeta said thoughtfully, “did Viktor kill somebody?”

  “No.”

  “He thinks he killed somebody.”

  “There’s a big difference.”

  Viktor lifted his right hand with two fingers outstretched and his thumb as a revolver hammer. “I killed somebody,” he told her in English, his voice gone resonant and spooky. “He wanted to kill me, because I know too much. He put me on his hit list. So, I took revenge on him. I had him liquidated. Boom-boom-bang.”

  “Wow,” Zeta marveled, eyes like saucers and goose bumps all over her arms. “That’s so corrupt!”

  “It was the naked justice of the streets,” Viktor intoned.

  “He’s full of it,” Starlitz said, and switched to Russian. “Viktor, I thought you were keeping a low profile here. You can’t have that guy hit. You’re a teenage punk, and he’s in Istanbul in a fucking palace walking around like a minister. If you’re strutting around in some doped stupor claiming that you took out Mehmet Ozbey, you are fucking radioactive. I don’t want to be anywhere near you.”

  Viktor was wounded. “I didn’t shoot him myself! I never claimed that! But I know when Ozbey comes to Cyprus—because everybody knows when Ozbey comes to Cyprus. So I followed Ozbey. I watched his movements. I squealed on him. I ratted him out. I fingered him to a multinational apparatus of elite killer agents. And they blew him to pieces.” Viktor smiled triumphantly.

  “What? Who? How? Like, you’ve got contacts with hit-squad superninjas of some kind?”

  “Exactly.”

  Starlitz leaned back. “You’re mental.”

  “I’m not! Why would I make this up? They were secret agents from Guh-ooh-am.”

  “From what?”

  “From Guh-ooh-am. I’ll write it down for you.” Viktor produced a cheap pen from a Greek Nicosia hotel and scribbled on a badly stained napkin.

  “This is Cyrillic and it’s not a Russian word,” Starlitz complained.

  “I’ll write it in Roman capitals.” Viktor carefully printed GUUAM.

  “Guam?” Starlitz hazarded. “I’ve been to Guam.”

  “No,” Viktor said stubbornly, “it’s a multinational league of formerly Soviet countries. Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. GUUAM.”

  “What the hell are you on?” Starlitz scoffed. “They’re a bunch of basket cases!”

  “They hate Ozbey in GUUAM. Ozbey is on the rampage across their territories. Ozbey blackmailed th
e son of the president of Azerbaijan. Ozbey car-bombed the junior defense minister of Uzbekistan. They know that Ozbey is dangerous, and who is supposed to help them? NATO? Ozbey is NATO! Russia? The people in GUUAM are nationalists, they all hate Russia.”

  Viktor’s soup bowl jumped as he banged the table. “I can’t help it if you’ve never heard of GUUAM! GUUAM exists! GUUAM is huge. GUUAM is as big as Europe, almost! Are they supposed to act like a bunch of faggots when some Turk is fucking with them?”

  “You’re telling me that Moldova runs offshore hit squads? They don’t even have a functional stock market!”

  “They’re in GUUAM! They can split the expenses five ways.”

  Starlitz narrowed his eyes. “Mmmph.”

  “GUUAM can fight! Those countries have armies and navies. They have thousands of Red Army veterans, who never had a chance to fight under their own flag.”

  Starlitz thought about the proposition. Though totally unprecedented, it didn’t seem, on the face of it, out of the question. After all, this was 1999. The planet was busting its strangeness budget.

  “Where did this hit go down?” he said.

  “I can show you.”

  “We’d better go look,” Starlitz agreed.

  They paid up, bought a dozen grape-wrapped dolmades and a gooey chunk of baklava for the road. They picked up Starlitz’s Japanese rental car in the shadow of a Lefkosa mosque. The mosque had once been a French Crusader cathedral; it was an offshore Notre Dame, retrofitted with minarets.

  A pleasant forty-minute drive took them to a ruined village near the Green Line. The backwoods of Turkish Cyprus were dotted with little ghost towns. Their natural roads had been cut, their Greek inhabitants had fled in terror, and years of economic embargo had finally finished them off.

  Viktor nervously directed them down a dirt road, overhung with untrimmed trees, toward an old textile mill. The mill’s corrugated metal sides were rust streaked, and the walls were thickly shrouded by thriving subtropical shrubbery. The place had the eerie, Faulknerian look of an abandoned cotton gin. “Why the hell would Ozbey come out here?” Starlitz said.

  “I don’t know. But he comes here often. He brings his men, sometimes he brings his girlfriend.… I assumed they were processing heroin in there.”

  “That would make sense.”

  “What’s that burning smell?” Zeta said, lifting her chin from the toothmarked rim of her white valise.

  Starlitz locked the two valises in the boot of the rental car and pocketed the keys. “You got a gun?” he asked Viktor.

  “No, you?”

  “I got an Iridium satellite phone,” Starlitz offered, hefting it from beneath the seat. Its tough case and monster battery gave it the heft of a blackjack.

  “Let’s go buy some big guns!” Zeta suggested chirpily. “We’ve got lots of money.”

  The little mill village had not been entirely deserted. There were trimmed orange trees here and there, stone walls still kept up, a couple of modest truck farms. Since it was broad daylight—late afternoon, breezy, partly cloudy, full of wholesome Mediterranean clarity—it seemed ridiculous to skulk. Besides, an eleven-year-old girl attempting to skulk was among the most flaunting and melodramatic spectacles known to man.

  Matters swiftly complicated themselves. A helicopter had tumbled out of the sky and fallen into the hillside woods, quite near the old industrial mill. This was no small helicopter. The aircraft was almost the size of a London double-decker, with big rubber landing wheels and a vast five-bladed rotor. The oblong hull was done in typically Soviet “sand-and-spinach” camouflage, but it had no national colors and no registry numerals.

  “Hey, Dad, Dad, hey, Dad, don’t look inside there,” Zeta quavered. “Hey, Dad, what if there’s dead people in there!”

  “Maybe you better go back to the car, honey.”

  Zeta wasn’t having any of it. They crept silently into the trees and undergrowth. “Ooh, Dad, Dad,” she whispered, “what if it’s really gruesome. What if somebody got their arm cut off.” Zeta swallowed noisily as a damp wind rustled the treetops. “Ooh, Dad, what if there was like a cut-off guy’s arm in there. What if it was a dead guy’s arm, and it had like a really cool watch on it, but you couldn’t touch it because, ooh, ugh, yuck!”

  Viktor stopped dead, clutching a branch. “Why did we bring her?”

  “Hey, Dad,” Zeta babbled, “I couldn’t touch a dead guy’s arm if it was cut off. No way! Not ever! Yuck! Unless it had, like, a collector Beanie Baby in it. Like ‘Peanuts,’ the royal-blue Elephant Beanie Baby. That one’s worth like five thousand dollars!”

  “Zeta, I’m trying to think.” Starlitz patted her scrawny back reassuringly. “Viktor, where the hell did this chopper come from? How could former Soviets fly this far south? Turkey’s crawling with NATO radars.”

  “Syria,” Viktor said. He pointed due east. “Syria is very near.”

  Starlitz considered this. His interior conception of the planet had just spun ninety degrees. “You’re telling me that Hafez al-Assad … lets some confederacy that nobody ever heard of … launch paramilitary assaults … from Damascus airspace … against Turkish client states?”

  “Wake up, old man. The Cold War ended when I was nine years old. Everybody hates everybody now.”

  “Yeah, no, maybe,” muttered Starlitz.

  The chopper lay in the crushed trees at a canted angle, its blades snapped like the dragonfly wings on the wipers of a high-speed car. The chopper had no obvious antiaircraft damage. The loss of a military craft this big, ugly, and powerful usually required heat-seeking missiles. Or multiple ack-ack ground-fire cannon holes. Perhaps its thirty-year-old, piece-of-shit, analog, Russian-made, Cold War engines had finally given out.

  But such was not the case. Starlitz hoisted himself up the grainy, paint-peeling, armored wall of the toppled aircraft, and discovered that someone had deftly shot the helicopter’s pilot in the head. The pilot had been killed with a light-caliber small arm, derisively small civilian bullets that had somehow pierced through military bulletproof Perspex, and through the pilot’s armored radio helmet. Then the chopper had obligingly coasted into the hillside and the crash had killed the copilot.

  “It just can’t be,” Starlitz muttered, sliding down and spitting thoughtfully into a shrub.

  But there was much worse to come, for the dead chopper had only two corpses inside it. A workhorse chopper like the Mi-8 could carry up to twenty-four troops. The pilot had landed his troops successfully. When shot down, he had been coming back in a desperate effort to rescue his troops.

  The walls of the silent barn had grown distinctly uncanny. “Stay here on lookout,” Starlitz told Zeta. “If you see any locals showing up, whistle real loud, then look cute and act lost.”

  Someone had emptied an AK clip into the broken padlock and chain on the factory door. Starlitz and Viktor crept inside the place.

  The abandoned factory radiated fatal theater. Ozbey had set the place up as some kind of paramilitary training gym, a handy place to keep the good old superspy reflexes trained. There were weight-lifting benches, barbells, and big broken sheets of bullet-stenciled mirror. Workout bags dangled next to green army cots and padlocked gunmetal lockers. There was a private pistol range. There were a few dead bales of vintage Cypriot wool here and there, looking distinctly bogus and decorative, but the cavernous, overlit factory resembled nothing so much as a rust-spotted Disneyland thrill ride. Massive cranes overhead featured conveniently dangling hooks. There were working conveyor belts still in place. Exposed rafters with handy spools of rope. Giant hollow cargo drums, most of them graphically stenciled with rapid-fire bullet holes.

  Someone had driven a flying sports car through the wood and sheet metal of the far wall, leaving a perfect, airborne cartoon outline of a car’s silhouette.

  An utterly bizarre event had occurred within the structure. It could not be properly described as a firefight. Actual firefights could not possibly lead to one guy killing fifteen a
rmed soldiers. This had not been a battle, but some kind of heroic, semiotic ballet.

  The assassins had apparently shown up in good faith. They were traditional, Spetsnaz-style “diversionary troops,” rapid-deployment heavies who were trained to eliminate enemy leaders. They wore tropical camo, helmets, and flak vests. They carried serious, soldierly, functional, AKS-74 full-auto assault rifles, a plethora of belt-mounted hand grenades, big spooky silenced pistols, head-mounted burst-transmission radio sets.

  One of the squad, a young dead man with a particularly surprised and unhappy expression, was equipped with an SA-7 antitank launcher.

  Starlitz and Viktor migrated from corpse to corpse in a dual silent vigil. The dead men had not merely been killed, but killed in particularly extravagant and spectacular ways. They had been blown backward through disintegrating boards. Flung headlong into collapsing stacks of tumbling barrels. While firing their assault rifles helplessly into midair, they’d been blinded with paint and shot dead. One of them had died swatting and stumbling in a full-body burn.

  Actual dead people in conventional gunfights tended to have a certain classic, sack-of-meat, Matthew Brady, battlefield look. These dead guys had died in fabulous, balletic sprawls: tumbled onto their backs, their booted legs picturesquely propped up; spinning in midair to crumple to earth like broken puppets; knocked against walls with their necks slumped at theatrical dead-guy angles.

  Amazingly, a couple of the assailants had come back to life, or at least regained consciousness, in the latter stages of the event. Ozbey, somehow deprived of the unerring handgun that had killed most of the others, had climactically beaten them to death with his feet and fists.

  With a stricken expression Viktor bent and plucked up loose ropes and a scarf of orange chiffon. He sniffed at its perfume, and silently caught Starlitz’s eye.

  So it had been a trap all along. There were two of them. Ozbey had had Gonca Utz inside the place. But no, it was worse than that; the bad guys had seized the girl. Ozbey had rescued her.

  Ozbey and the girl had left the scene together, triumphantly, in the very same sports car that had previously flown through the air and smashed entirely through the wall. The rocketing car hadn’t lost any of its glass, not so much as a paint chip. But its burnt-rubber tire tracks were all over the place.