Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “We are?”

  “Of course we are! We must pass this information to the securities trading department at once! We have a week, two, maybe three, to unload our shares in the companies that are going to be affected before the bottom drops out!”

  Ilya’s eyes lit up. “Oh,” he said simply. “Yes, of course you are right. Well done, Sonya, well done!” And he grabbed her by the hand, pulled her to her feet, and started dragging her back along the walkway toward the balcony.

  “What are you doing, Ilya? Where are we going?”

  “To find Lev Kaminev!” Ilya told her. “He’s down there somewhere. . . .”

  The party had ripened considerably despite the bad news, or indeed, perhaps in part because of it. People had taken to slugging back shots of vodka in the old traditional style rather than sipping at it. The band had started up again, and there were dancers out on the floor, including a group of louts attempting to demonstrate their inebriated athletic skills by doing the kazatski and laughing uproariously when they fell on their butts. Ties were askew, jackets had been discarded, and yes, there was terrible off-key group-singing going on too.

  It seemed impossible to find anyone in this melee, except by random fortune, but once Ilya Pashikov was aroused, he took the bit in his teeth, demanding the whereabouts of the head of the trading department from all and sundry in a loud commanding voice until they finally found Kaminev, standing by one of the bars refilling his glass.

  “A word with you, Lev, it’s quite urgent,” Ilya said, grabbing him by the arm.

  Lev Kaminev’s eyes were on the bloodshot side, but his elegant powder-blue suit was still unwrinkled, his red tie still neatly tied at the collar of his well-pressed white shirt, and not a lock of his thinning gray hair was out of place. He simply nodded and let Ilya lead him off to an empty table near the circumference of the hall, where the holopanorama, all too appropriately, seemed to place them squarely in the middle of the Siberian tundra.

  “Tell him, Sonya,” Ilya said, and Sonya did.

  Kaminev’s frown grew deeper and deeper as she went on, his lips began to tremble, and by the time she was finished, he had turned rather pale.

  “What a nightmare!” he moaned. “We stand to lose billions!”

  “Not if we act quickly,” Sonya babbled at him. “Not if we start selling our shares at once, you must get to a terminal immediately and begin—”

  Kaminev shook his head. “It’s not at all that simple,” he said. “If we just suddenly start dumping massive blocks of everything, we’ll knock the bottom out before the Americans even do a thing. This has got to be done as slowly and subtly as possible. Buy puts where we can first. . . . Sell calls at market prices where it’s feasible. . . . Then start unloading in reasonable-sized blocks gradually. . . . Keep the market from collapsing by trading options through dummies while we do it. . . . We can’t be greedy and expect to come out ahead, or we’ll start a panic ourselves, but maybe we can hold our losses under 20 percent, if . . .”

  He ran his hand nervously through his carefully coifed hair, ruffling it into a scraggly rat’s nest. “What a mess!” he groaned. “Our departments are going to have to work together on this, Ilya, and we’re going to have to work day and night. We’re going to have to model the whole damned situation and construct a trading program to get us out of it. . . . Lord, the variables involved . . . And if we’re wrong, if we go ahead with all this, and the Americans don’t expropriate . . .”

  He looked over his shoulder nervously at the ersatz wastes of deepest Siberia, took a deep breath, and stared directly at Sonya. “If my department trades on this information and it turns out to be incorrect, the Supreme Soviet will reinvent the gulag just to have a place to ship us all to,” he said. “You are sure this is not simply vodka talking?”

  “Well . . . ,” Sonya muttered uncertainly, contemplating the vista now herself and shivering. Yuli clearly had been drinking, and—

  “The Ambassador is still here,” Ilya said forcefully. “Put it to him in no uncertain terms! And if he hasn’t been told about it, which would hardly surprise me, I will make some calls to Moscow in the morning. To people who will see to it that the Foreign Minister himself will be called on the carpet if need be. If they have been withholding information like this from Red Star—”

  “Indeed!” Kaminev snapped. “That such information had to be winkled out by our own intrepid economic strategy department will be quite a black mark for them. If it’s true, this may be just what it takes to get their obstructionism out of our hair for good and all.”

  He rose to his feet. “Keep this under your hats, you two,” he said. “I’m going to go have a word with his Excellency. Can you get me a preliminary breakdown on our holdings in the affected companies by noon tomorrow, Ilya? Along with their holdings in the United States?”

  “It’ll take some doing,” Ilya told him, “but we’ll be on top of it!”

  “I’m sure you will!” Kaminev said, and disappeared into the crowd in search of Ambassador Tagourski.

  Ilya Pashikov sat there grinning at Sonya.

  Sonya grinned back.

  “You really should have my job, Sonya,” he said.

  “Who knows, if this goes well, maybe you’ll get a nice promotion, and I will!” Sonya declared.

  “Indeed!” Ilya exclaimed. “Why not?”

  And he stood up, took her hands, pulled her to her feet, hugged her, and kissed her exuberantly on both cheeks. “If you weren’t a married woman, I’d give you the kiss you really deserve for this!” he said.

  He shrugged. He grinned. “On second thought, under the circumstances, why not?” he said, and planted a quick hard one on her lips.

  A warm glow of excitement and accomplishment suffused Sonya from head to toe. Under the circumstances, it seemed no betrayal of Jerry to kiss him briefly back.

  * * *

  A PAGE FROM STALIN’S OLD BOOK

  While it would certainly seem true that the United States has turned itself into a long-term pariah-nation by its massive expropriation of foreign property, unable to borrow on international markets or attract foreign capital for the foreseeable future, it is also true that with the stroke of a pen, the Americans have regained control of their own faltering economy, managed an indirect devaluation of the dollar in a manner politically acceptable to their own electorate, and made it abundantly clear that world opinion will no longer exercise even residual restraint over American policy in Latin America.

  Thus, in a sense, did Stalin build the Soviet Union into a major industrial power by sheer act of national will. Thus did Hitler rescue Germany from a state of total economic collapse. Internal autarchy and external imperialism is an old realpolitik formula for short-term national renewal.

  What happens later may be something else again. But when did American politicians ever look much further into the future than the next election?

  —Argumenty i Fakty

  * * *

  XII

  A line of American Marines stood almost shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk in front of the new cinder-block wall that had replaced the ironwork fencing on the Avenue Gabriel side of the American Embassy compound when Robert Reed arrived to pick up his American passport, the wall itself was crowned with rolls of razor-wire conspicuously wired for electricity, and there were neuronic disrupters mounted atop it at twenty-meter intervals. French Garde Républicain troops on horseback in the gutter cordoned the Embassy off from the park across the narrow street.

  Even the passport office had been moved inside the compound for security’s sake, and the security was heavy indeed. Bobby was gone over with a metal detector and a bomb-sniffer at the gate, then body-frisked before he was even allowed to join the line waiting to get into a temporary structure that had been thrown up to house the new passport office, and if there had been a place to do it conveniently, they probably would have made him drop his pants and looked up his asshole too.

  Bobby could well understand t
he paranoia. The park between Avenue Gabriel and the Champs-Élysées was already filling up with people when he emerged from the Concorde Métro stop, many of them carrying furled banners, others carrying what looked to be the usual covered buckets of blood and shit and brandishing throwing sticks rigged out of broom handles and plastic bowls, and the few flics in evidence were conspicuously conversing with the assembling demonstrators.

  Paris had been awash in anti-American demonstrations for the past week, ever since the United States had announced its expropriations of European assets, and the French police had done nothing more than hold it down to property damage; indeed, several cabinet ministers had even addressed more organized and semi-official demonstrations. Fortunately enough, examinations had just ended and the school year was over, so there were no arguments about whether or not it was safe for Bobby to attend classes, but Dad had backed up Mom in her insistence that the Dodgers jacket stay in the closet for the duration, and he had been told to stick close to home.

  Bobby had gotten to the mail first this morning, as he had been doing for two weeks in anticipation, and when he finally saw the letter from the American Embassy, he pocketed it before anyone else saw it, for he knew that he would be forbidden to go down to the Embassy to pick up his passport if he was foolish enough to ask permission.

  Everything else was set. He had been admitted to both UCLA and Berkeley, and since both were part of the California State University system, he had managed to bullshit them into giving him till August 25th to decide between them. He had an Air India ticket to New York for a week from Friday, and he even had a two-month prebought Air America travel card good for standby on all internal American carriers.

  So he was not about to let the last detail hang in the air until his parents thought it was safe for him to go to the American Embassy, whenever that might be, if ever. Mom was already making noises about how maybe this might not be a good time to go to America, and he wasn’t about to give her the chance to stop him by claiming it was too dangerous to pick up his passport until the departure date had passed.

  He simply waited around till two o’clock, when Franja finally went out and left him alone in the apartment, and then took the Métro to the Place de la Concorde. Once he came back with the passport, he could just play innocent. If he never dreamed he had to ask for permission to do such a simple thing, Mom could hardly contend that he had disobeyed her, and even if she did, well, he would already have what he needed, now wouldn’t he?

  Bobby was not about to let a bunch of stupid demonstrations keep him from picking up the necessary papers, and from the scene inside the compound, it seemed that no other American still remaining in Paris had been scared away either.

  The place was bedlam. The yard outside the passport office was mobbed with people, some of them actually lugging suitcases, demanding protection, demanding asylum, demanding to see the Ambassador or the commercial attaché, venting their spleen at the French, at the American government, at the Marines who body-frisked them, at each other, at the clerks trying to form them up into a line, all at the top of their lungs, and all at once.

  It took Bobby at least an hour to get into the building, another hour on another line to exchange his letter for some kind of stupid authorization form, and then two hours on yet a third line before he could exchange that for his precious passport.

  By then it was nearly seven o’clock, he was going to be late for dinner, Mom and Dad would already be home, and they had probably already stopped being worried and become furious. But at least he did have what he had come here for.

  In a truly foul mood by now himself, fatigued by the endless waiting, irritated by the snarling mob scenes, and more than a little worried by what he was likely to catch when he finally got home, Bobby kneed and elbowed his way past the people clogging the temporary passport office, and out into the courtyard.

  Something was very wrong.

  There was a crowd of people clustered around the compound gate peering out through the heavy iron bars, and the gate was shut, with two Marine guards backed against it with their M-86s at port arms. There were more Marines inside the wall manning the remote control consoles wired to the neuronic disrupters atop it.

  And then Bobby noticed what he had been hearing all along.

  There was an immense roaring tumult coming from the other side of the wall, and the ragged rhythmic stamping of massed feet. Behind this, like the vocal track of a max-metal cut badly mixed to overemphasize the bass line, he could barely distinguish the words of the chant.

  “AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN! AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN!”

  Bobby shoved his way to the front of the mob around the gate, and what he saw through the bars made his stomach drop and his knees tremble.

  The entire park across from the Embassy was clogged with people, all the way from the Champs-Élysées to the gutter of Avenue Gabriel, where the mounted Garde Républicain troops cordoned the mob off from the American Marines.

  A sea of pumping fists and screaming mouths and reddened pop-eyed faces. An Uncle Sam effigy with a death’s-head face hanging by a noose from a rude gibbet. An American flag on a pole, burning above the mob. A section of a long lettered banner he could not make out. Another banner that was a crude blowup of a thousand-dollar bill, smeared with blood and shit.

  “AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN! AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN!”

  Bobby had seen anti-American demonstrations before; indeed he had once marched in them himself. But he had never felt anything like the wave of hate washing over the Embassy wall. It went beyond politics, beyond economics, beyond rationality. It was an outpouring of animal rage.

  “AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN! AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN!”

  Bobby was afraid. Bobby was ashamed. Doubly ashamed—for America, and for the fantasy vision that flashed unbidden through his mind, an image of the American Marines firing into that sea of angry people, blowing the nightmare away with massed automatic-weapons fire.

  “AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN! AMER-I-CAN, AS-SAS-SAN!”

  And then a glob of something came sailing in a lazy arc over the wall and smacked up against the Embassy building, smearing the gray stone with a patch of brown. And another, falling just short and impacting in the courtyard in splatters of blood and turds.

  A Marine sergeant came dashing up to the guards at the gate, yelling something Bobby couldn’t make out. “Cocksuckers!” one of the gate guards shouted loud and clear.

  More boluses of shit and blood came sailing over the wall to splatter the Embassy. And then, for some reason, a great cheer went up from the mob outside, and a massed fusillade of ordure flew over the wall toward the building.

  A moment later Bobby saw why.

  The gate guards had leveled their M-86s at the mob outside. “Clear the gate! Clear the gate!” one of them shouted. There was a clatter of horses’ hooves on concrete. Marines within the Embassy compound began herding the crowd around the entrance away from the gate, and being none too gentle about it.

  Bobby had just a glimpse of what was happening before a black Marine yanked him backward away from the gate by the shoulders.

  The Garde Républicain horsemen were trotting their mounts up onto the near sidewalk and down the street to the left. They were leaving the Embassy to the mob. There was nothing between the wall and the mob now but the cordon of M-86-toting Marines. . . .

  Oh no, Bobby thought, they’re going to have to fire into the crowd! He didn’t know who he loathed more in that moment—the Americans who were about to gun down unarmed people, or the fucking flics who had deliberately provoked them into doing it by leaving.

  But it didn’t happen.

  Instead what happened was something that, at least for the moment, made Bobby proud to be an American.

  If the French had pulled the Garde Républicain in order to provoke an American atrocity, the Americans weren’t biting.

  The gate swung open, and two lines of Marines came double-timing through it rapidly but in orderly file, the
ir weapons leveled at the mob to hold it back, but not firing. The Marines were withdrawing into the compound.

  It took only a minute at most to accomplish the maneuver. Then the gate guards withdrew, slammed the gate shut, and threw a switch beside it.

  With a triumphant roar, the mob surged forward to press against the bars—

  —and reeled backward, staggering and screaming from the pain of the electric shock.

  There was total chaos within the compound. The civilians were dashing reflexively away from the wall as the roaring mob pressed up against it, and a squad of Marines formed up in front of the gate with their M-86s leveled just in case. Some of the civilians were making for the safety of the Embassy building itself, but another squad of Marines had formed up in front of the entrance to block them.

  Fusillades of shit and blood splattered against the façade of the Embassy and rained down into the courtyard. Bobby stood there transfixed in the middle of it all, not knowing what to do or where to run to, just trying to keep from being knocked off his feet by the panicked people running around in circles to no purpose.

  “Look out!” someone shouted behind him.

  Bobby turned toward the voice, but he turned the wrong way, and besides, it was too late. As he turned, something heavy and wet hit him on the left shoulder, splattering into his hair and onto his left cheek. He staggered, almost fell, righted himself, looked down at his windbreaker, saw it, smelled it, gagged, and vomited all over his shoes.

  The left side of his jacket was smeared with a congealing mess of thick red blood and half-dissolved brown shit. The stuff was in his hair and splattered all over his face. Spatters of it were all over his pants.

  He retched again, tore off the jacket, used the more-or-less clean part to wipe his face and neck, then toweled furiously at his hair, and tossed it away.