Ascendancies (51 page)

“Now that's attitude,” Starlitz said admiringly, watching them go. “Those gals have got some real dress sense, too.”

“But we're done here now, Leggy,” Vanna said. “I thought you couldn't wait to go see the kid.”

Starlitz grunted.

Mr. Judy took Vanna by the wrist. “I've got to level with you about that issue, Leggy.”

Starlitz stopped gazing in admiration and looked up. “Yeah?”

“There isn't any kid.”

Starlitz said nothing. His face clouded.

“Look, Leggy, think about it. We're abortionists. We know what to do about unwanted pregnancies. There never was a kid. We made up the kid after you came back from Europe.”

“No kid, huh,” Starlitz said. “You burned me.”

Mr. Judy nodded somberly.

“It was all a scam, huh? Just some big scheme you came up with to lead me around with.” He laughed sharply. “Jesus, I can't believe you thought that would work.”

“Sorry, Leggy. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Don't hold it against us.”

Starlitz laughed. “You did it just because I got absentminded that time, and didn't bring you back your dope. I got a little distracted, so you shaft me! Well, to hell with you! Good-bye forever, suckers.”

Suddenly Starlitz ran downhill, headlong, after the retreating Japanese. “Hey!” he bellowed. “Girls! Nineties Girls!
Matte ite kudasai!
Roadie-
san wa arimasu ka?”

Vanna and Judy watched as Starlitz vanished with the Japanese behind a line of trees.

“Why'd you lie to him like that?” Vanna said. “That was terrible.”

Mr. Judy pulled a jingling set of keys from her pocket. “'Cause we need that van of his, that's why. Let's drive it off back to Oregon while we've got the chance.”

“He'll get mad,” Vanna said. “And he knows where we live. He'll come back for all his stuff.”

“Sure, we'll see him again all right,” Mr. Judy said. “In four years or something. He'll never miss the stuff, or us, in the meantime. When he sees something he really wants, he doesn't have any more sense than a blood-crazed weasel.”

“You're not being very fair,” Vanna said.

“That's just the way he is…We can't depend on him for anything. We don't
dare
depend on him. He can't think politically.” Mr. Judy took a deep breath. “And even if he
could
think politically, he's basically motivated by the interests of the macho-imperialist oppressor class.”

“I was thinking
mechanically,”
Vanna said. “We had a really rough ride through the desert, and we just lost our only mechanic. I sure hope that van starts.”

“Of course it's gonna start!” Mr. Judy said, annoyed. “You think we did all those years of work, and organizing, and consciousness-raising, and took all those risks, just to end up here in the world capital of reactionary family-values bullshit, with our engine grinding uselessly, unable to move one inch off dead center? That's ridiculous.”

Vanna said nothing. Contemplating the possibility had made her go a little pale.

“We're gonna drive it off easy as pie,” Mr. Judy insisted. “And we'll change the paint first thing. We'll lose that dumb-ass televangelist logo, and paint it up as something really cool and happening. Like a portable notary service, or a digital bookmobile.”

Vanna bit her lip. “I'm still worried…The kid's gonna want to know all about her father someday. She'll
demand
to know. Don't you think so?”

“No, I don't,” Mr. Judy said, with complete conviction. “She'll never even have to ask.”

The Littlest Jackal

“I hate Sibelius,” said the Russian mafioso.

“It's that Finnish nationalist thing,” said Leggy Starlitz.

“That's
why
I hate Sibelius.” The Russian's name was Pulat R. Khoklov. He'd once been a KGB liaison officer to the air force of the Afghan government. Like many Afghan War veterans, Khoklov had gone into organized crime since the Soviet crackup.

Starlitz examined the Sibelius CD's print-job and plastic hinges with a dealer's professional eye. “Europeans sure pretend to like this classic stuff,” he said. “Almost like pop, but it can't move real product.” He placed the CD back in the rack. The outdoor market table was nicely set with cunningly targeted tourist-bait. Starlitz glanced over the glass earrings and the wooden jewelry, then closely examined a set of lewd postcards.

“This isn't ‘Europe,'” Khoklov sniffed. “This is a Czarist Grand Duchy with bourgeois pretensions.”

Starlitz fingered a poly-cotton souvenir jersey with comical red-nosed reindeer. It bore an elaborate legend in the Finno-Ugric tongue, a language infested with umlauts. “This is Finland, ace. It's European Union.”

Khoklov was kitted-out to the nines in a three-piece linen suit and a snappy straw boater. Life in the New Russia had been very good to Khoklov. “At least Finland's not NATO.”

“Look, fuckin' Poland is NATO now. Get over it.”

They moved on to another table, manned by a comely Finn in a flowered summer frock and jelly shoes. Starlitz tried on a pair of shades from a revolving stand. He gazed experimentally about the marketplace. Potatoes. Dill. Carrots and onions. Buckets of strawberries. Flowers and flags. Orange fabric canopies over wooden market tables run by Turks and gypsies. People were selling salmon straight from the decks of funky little fishing boats.

Khoklov sighed. “Lekhi, you have no historical perspective.” He plucked a Dunhill from a square red pack.

One of Khoklov's two bodyguards appeared at once, alertly flicking a Zippo. “No proper sense of
culture,”
insisted Khoklov, breathing smoke and coughing richly. The guard tucked the lighter into his Chicago Bulls jacket and padded off silently on his spotless Adidas.

Starlitz, who was trying to quit, bummed a smoke from Khoklov, which he was forced to light for himself. Then he paid for the shades, peeling a salmon-colored fifty from a dense wad of Finnish marks.

Khoklov paused nostalgically by the Czarina's Obelisk, a bellicose monument festooned with Romanov aristo-fetish gear in cast bronze. Khoklov, whose politics shaded toward Pamyat rightism with a mystical pan-Slavic spin, patted the granite base of the Obelisk with open pleasure.

Then he gazed across the Esplanadi. “Helsinki city hall?”

Starlitz adjusted his shades. When arranging his end of the deal from a cellar in Tokyo, he hadn't quite gathered that Finland would be so relentlessly bright. “That's the city hall all right.”

Khoklov turned to examine the sun-spattered Baltic. “Think you could hit that building from a passing boat?”

“You mean me personally? Forget it.”

“I mean someone in a hired speedboat with a shoulder-launched surplus Red Army panzerfaust. Generically speaking.”

“Anything's possible nowadays.”

“At night,” urged Khoklov. “A pre-dawn urban commando raid! Cleverly planned. Precisely executed. Ruthless operational accuracy!”

“This is summer in Finland,” said Starlitz. “The sun's not gonna set here for a couple of months.”

Khoklov, tripped up in the midst of his reverie, frowned. “No matter. You weren't the agent I had in mind in any case.”

They wandered on. A Finn at a nearby table was selling big swollen muskrat-fur hats. No sane local would buy these items, for they were the exact sort of pseudo-authentic cultural relics that appeared only in tourist economies. The Finn, however, was flourishing. He was deftly slotting and whipping the Mastercards and Visas of sunburnt Danes and Germans through a handheld cellular credit checker.

“Our man arrives tomorrow morning on the Copenhagen ferry,” Khoklov announced.

“You ever met this character before?” Starlitz said. “Ever done any real business with him?”

Khoklov sidled along, flicking the smoldering butt of his Dunhill onto the gray stone cobbles. “I've never met him myself. My boss knew him in the seventies. My boss used to run him from the KGB HQ in East Berlin. They called him Raf, back then. Raf the Jackal.”

Starlitz scratched his close-cropped, pumpkin-like head. “I've heard of
Carlos
the Jackal.”

“No, no,” Khoklov said, pained. “Carlos retired, he's in Khartoum. This is Raf. A different man entirely.”

“Where's he from?”

“Argentina. Or Italy. He once ran arms between the Tupamaros and the Red Brigades. We think he was an Italian Argentine originally.”

“KGB recruited him and you didn't even know his nationality?”

Khoklov frowned. “We never recruited him! KGB never had to recruit any of those Seventies people! Baader-Meinhoff, Palestinians… They always came straight to us!” He sighed wistfully. “American Weather Underground—how I wanted to meet a groovy hippie revolutionary from Weather Underground! But even when they were blowing up the Bank of America the Yankees would never talk to real communists.”

“The old boy must be getting on in years.”

“No no. He's very much alive, and very charming. The truly dangerous are always very charming. It's how they survive.”

“I like surviving,” Starlitz said thoughtfully.

“Then you can learn a few much-needed lessons in charm, Lekhi. Since you're our liaison.”

Raf the Jackal arrived from across the Baltic in a sealed Fiat. It was a yellow two-door with Danish plates. His driver was a Finnish girl, maybe twenty. Her dyed-black hair was braided with long green extensions of tattered yarn. She wore a red blouse, cut-off jeans and striped cotton stockings.

Starlitz climbed into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and smiled. The girl was sweating with heat, fear, and nervous tension. She had a battery of ear-piercings. A tattooed wolf's-head was stenciled up her clavicle and nosing at the base of her neck.

Starlitz twisted and looked behind him. The urban guerrilla was scrunched into the Fiat's back seat, asleep, doped, or dead. Raf wore a denim jacket, relaxed-fit Levis and Ray-Bans. He'd taken his sneakers off and was sleeping in his rumpled mustard-yellow socks.

“How's the old man?” Starlitz said, adjusting his seat belt.

“Ferries make him seasick.” The girl headed up the Esplanade. “We'll wake him at the safehouse.” She shot him a quick sideways glance of kohl-lined eyes. “You found a good safehouse?”

“Sure, the place should do,” said Starlitz. He was pleased that her English was so good. After four years tending bar in Roppongi, the prospect of switching Japanese for Finnish was dreadful. “What do they call you?”

“What did they tell you to call me?”

“Got no instructions on that.”

The girl's pale knuckles whitened on the Fiat's steering-wheel. “They didn't inform you of my role in this operation?”

“Why would they wanna do that?”

“Raf is our agent now,” the girl said. “He's not your agent. Our operations coincide—but only because our interests coincide. Raf belongs to my movement. He doesn't belong to any kind of Russians.”

Starlitz twisted in his seat to stare at the slumbering terrorist. He envied the guy's deep sense of peace. It was hard to tell through the Ray-Bans, but the smear of sweat on his balding forehead gave Raf a look of unfeigned ease. Starlitz pondered the girl's latest remark. He had no idea why a college-age female Finn would claim to be commanding a 51-year-old veteran urban guerrilla.

“Why do you say that?” he said at last. This was usually a safe and useful question.

The girl glanced in the rear-view. They were passing a sunstruck green park, with bronze statues of swaggering Finnish poets and mood-stricken Finnish dramatists. She took a corner with a squeak of tires. “Since you need a name, call me Aino.”

“Okay. I'm Leggy.… or Lekhi.… or Reggae.” He'd been getting a lot of “Reggae” lately. “The safe-house is in Ypsallina. You know that neighborhood?” Starlitz plucked a laminated tourist map from his shirt pocket. “Take Mannerheimintie up past the railway station.”

“You're not Russian,” Aino concluded.

“Nyet.”

“Are you Organizatsiya?”

“I forget what you have to do to officially join the Russian mafia, but basically, no.”

“Why are you involved in the Ålands operation? You don't look political.”

Leggy found the lever beneath the passenger seat and leaned back a little, careful not to jostle the slumbering terrorist. “You're sure you want to hear about that?”

“Of course I want to hear. Since we are working together.”

“Okay. Have it your way. It's like this,” Starlitz said. “I've been in Tokyo working for an all-girl Japanese metal band. These girls made it pretty big and they bought this disco downtown in Roppongi. I was managing the place.… Besides the headbanging, these metal-chicks ran another racket on the side. Memorabilia. A target-market teenage-kid thing. Fanmags, key-chains, T-shirts, CD-ROMs.… Lotta money there!”

Aino stopped at a traffic light. The cobbled crosswalk filled with a pedestrian mass of sweating, sun-dazed Finns.

“Anyway, after I developed that teen market, I found this other thing. These cute little animals. ‘Froofies.' Major hit in Japan. Froofy velcro shoes, Froofy candy, sodas, backpacks, badges, lunchkits…Froofies are what they call ‘kawaii.'”

Aino drove on. They passed a bronze Finnish general on horseback. He had been a defeated general, but he looked like defeating him again would be far more trouble than it was worth. “What's kawaii?”

Starlitz rubbed his stubbled chin. “‘Cute' doesn't get it across. Maybe ‘adorable.' Big-money-making adorable. The kicker is that Froofies come from Finland.”

“I'm a Finn. I don't know anything called Froofies.”

“They're kids' books. This little old Finnish lady wrote them. On her kitchen table. Illustrated kid-stories from the Forties and Fifties. Of course lately they've been made into manga and anime and Nintendo cassettes and a whole bunch of other stuff.…”