Zeitgeist (15 page)

“What,” said Starlitz, chewing, “the rogue billionaire’s hippie media freaks? Oh, yeah, they’re way hard to miss.”

“They’re not spies, exactly. A network without national allegiances. A ‘Nongovernmental Organization.’ ”

“ ‘
Post
governmental Organization.’ ”

“Yes, that’s right, exactly. So I was drinking with this Soros operative, one of those ‘economic analysts’ that our country is infested with. The ‘English-speaking thieves.’ He began to confide in me.… Out came this
document
he had prepared.… All about our Russian
demographics
.”

“Uh-oh,” Starlitz said.

“Yes. He explained it to me. It was horrible beyond words. Our soaring Russian death rate. Our crashing Russian birth rate. Alcoholism. Outmigration. Life expectancy for Russian men, fifty-seven years. Much worse than under the czars! We are finally free, democratic, in command of our own destiny—and we are emptying the nation. We’re liquidating ourselves.”

“Aw, that’s NATO scare talk. He was pulling your leg, ace.”

“No, he wasn’t lying to me. He was very drunk and honest, he went to puke five minutes later. No, that was
my own portrait
that little functionary had in his little papers.
I
drink too much.
I
rob the Russian nation. I’m in the bankers’ maphiya, so I shoot the stupid people who get in the way of the big thieves. And then, I myself, I abandoned Russia. I erased myself from my Motherland. I’m over here, lost in a foreign country, drinking beer in the sunshine, and running some silly hustle, while the Turks are trying to kill me.”

“Hmmmph.”

Khoklov lifted his poet’s eyes at Zeta. “It would be different if
I
had a child. I know that now: if I had a true stake in the world, if I had a future that mattered, then somehow my life would become different.”

“Maybe.”

Khoklov’s fond gaze soured. “But then there would be the mother. Oh, my God. I can’t imagine that: chained for life to some aging, sagging, boring woman.… I love them when they’re pretty and eager, but what if they were … old, and wrinkled, and bitter! Or desperately pasting themselves together, like that evil Dinsmore woman in your entourage.… Oh, my God, if a woman I had loved turned into something like that.… That would be my worst nightmare.”

“I
like
ugly women,” Starlitz blurted.

“Really?”

“Yeah, ugly women are my type. Because I’m an ugly guy.”

Khoklov examined him, full of thoughtful pity. “I suppose that, in some very basic, animal level, they are all the same in the dark.…”

“No, man, that’s not it at all. It’s a lifestyle choice.” Starlitz finished his beer. “If you’re a wandering guy like we are, and you’re bound and determined to screw so many different women that you lose count … Well, there aren’t many ways to love ’em and leave ’em without hurting their feelings. The best way is to leave them thinking:
I could have had all of that I wanted, but I had too much self-respect
. You know? That’s what always works for me.”

“You never tell them: ‘I must leave you here in comfort and safety, darling, to return to my harsh life of danger’?”

“Come on! Let’s face it: if they’re spreading it for some character like me, they’re desperate and courting ruin. Fuck, I
am
their life of danger.”

“Hey, Dad,” said Zeta.

“What?”

“Hey, Dad.”

“What is it?”

“Hey, Dad!”

“I’m listening, Zeta.”

“I’m stuffed now. Can we go? I wanna see the band!”

“We’ll leave in just a minute. You need to go to the bathroom or anything?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Okay, the bathroom’s in there,” said Starlitz, pointing into the pub. “Make sure you don’t have any of this guy’s crappy C-notes left inside your backpack, okay? I got plenty more for you back at the hotel.”

Zeta bumped her plastic chair back and left at a skipping trot.

“She likes you,” Khoklov observed.

“Not really, man. She’s just suckin’ up to me because she’s dead tired of living with Mom.”

“No, she
does
like you. She even
looks
like you. I didn’t see the resemblance at first. Mostly it’s that cunning monkey look she gets on her little face when she’s trying to puzzle out what we say.”

“Speaking of which, where is Viktor?” Starlitz said.

“Oh, yes,” said Khoklov glumly, “the Viktor issue.” The departure of Zeta had changed Khoklov’s mood. Khoklov was visibly collapsing, as if he had sprung a slow leak. He reached inside his jacket and began counting cash into his lap.

“Is Viktor okay?”

“At the moment Viktor’s up on those castle ramparts,” said Khoklov, glancing across the harbor at the postcard-worthy stone bulk of a twelfth-century Crusader fortress. “He’s watching over us, with his binoculars.”

“Why would Viktor wanna do that?”

“Because I told him to stake out this rendezvous and watch out for trouble. But also because he’s been stupid.” Khoklov sighed. “That first day you met him, at the beach, when we acquired those vacuum tubes … Well, there were ten tubes in the shipment, not nine. Viktor filched one of them.”

Starlitz blinked. “No kidding.”

“Yes, and later the rascal secretly sold it to that musician in your entourage, for a full fifteen hundred dollars!” Khoklov shrugged in pained embarrassment. “It was bad of Viktor—though it was good to have the cash. It let me get my little plane back. Then, I did some flying money-laundry work for the Lithuanian, and I picked up your girlfriend and daughter as well. So now, we’re back in Cyprus safe and sound, and here is your money back. Fifteen hundred.”

“Viktor fenced that vaccum tube for one thousand five hundred?”

“Yes! I could not believe that English fool would pay that much money! Western musicians, they’re all drug addicts, they’re totally addled.”

Starlitz accepted the cash and jammed it into his clip.
“Next time, check out the auction scene on eBay dot com. Those matryoshka dolls, the little Kremlin badges—you savvy hustlers could clear some big money that way.”

“I apologize for Viktor’s stupid act of thievery. He did it without my permission.”

“I accept your apology, Pulat Romanevich. Consider the matter closed.”

Khoklov brightened somewhat. “You’re not going to shoot him? I told him you’d be within your rights to shoot him.”

“I’m not saying I would never want to kill Viktor, but I’m not going to have him whacked over some fucking piece of stereo equipment. For one thing, I got too much dignity. And for another, that’s the exact sort of shit I used to pull when I was Viktor’s age. The old palm-it-and-pocket routine—man, those were the days! Christ, when I was Viktor’s age, they didn’t even have tracing tags.”

“That’s very good of you, Lekhi! I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so indulgent about this. I know that Viktor is reckless hooligan scum, but I think, perhaps, he’s improving a little. Viktor’s quite different since you took him to that brothel in Lefkosa.” Khoklov grew thoughtful. “You showed him some of the ropes, eh? You knocked some of the snot out of him.”

“Oh, yeah. No question there.”

“It’s good of you to take such personal trouble with my sister’s boy. I appreciate that. I wanted to do this little favor for you in return, eh? I wanted to do a favor for you that was just between the two of us, man to man. Not about the cash. Not part of the stinking market.” Khoklov turned his pale, chiseled face to one side, elegantly raised the brim of his hat, and spat on the pavement.

Zeta emerged from the pub, shrugging on her backpack. As she walked to join them, a taxi driver arrived at the pub, searching for his client. The driver called aloud, at the slumbering crowd of Britons. “Mister Hawcliffe?”

“ ‘Mister Hawcliffe,’ ” said Khoklov, rising from the table and brushing crumbs from his pants. “That would be me.”

“You called us a taxi?” said Starlitz.

“No, that would be Viktor. Viktor has a new cell phone.”

“You know something?” Starlitz said. “I think that kid of yours has got the stuff!”

STARLITZ AND HIS DAUGHTER CLIMBED IN THE BACK of the taxi. Starlitz handed Zeta a toothpick and a mint. Khoklov rode shotgun.

“Ercan,” Starlitz ordered.

“Why the airport?” said Khoklov.

“To catch the girls before their flight to Istanbul. The kid wants to see the property.” Starlitz grinned and lit a cigarette.

Khoklov frowned and rolled his window down.

Starlitz sheepishly flicked the burning cig on the taxi’s rubber mat and mashed it under his heel. They jounced uphill, away from the harbor. Despite the island’s lasting drought it was a pretty day. With many a honk and pothole crunch the cab left the outskirts of Girne. They wove their way up across the spine of the island, toward the highway pass through the Pentadactylos.

Zeta tongue-levered her toothpick through her missing canine tooth.

“So,” Starlitz offered in Russian, “I understand you’ve been having trouble with Ozbey’s boys, back at the hotel.”

“That’s true,” said Khoklov.

“Ozbey’s boys are too enthusiastic.”

“Yes, they are.”

“How’d you get in so much trouble with Ozbey? I mean, how could you even manage to bother him? You’ve been flying to Budapest when I was paying you to watch that guy.”

“Watching Ozbey required specialists,” Khoklov told him. “I found a subcontractor for the job. I hired a Turkish Communist who is nostalgic about the KGB.”

Starlitz stroked his rubbery, freshly shaven chin. “There are working Communist cells around here?”

“Of course! There are thousands of Communists in Turkey. Turkey is a land where it’s always the 1960s. An international, proletarian revolutionary … it’s a fine career. I hired a Communist gentleman from the violent, leftist Devrimci Sol movement. In fact, since he worked so cheap, I hired his entire Devrimci Sol cell. The Communist cell watched Ozbey for me. They were willing to do that for ideology, but they were happy to do it for cash.”

“And?”

“Well, how much do you want to know? A trip to the airport only takes twenty minutes.”

“Frankly, I don’t want to know very much. It would just spoil the beauty of the deal.” Starlitz lifted his meaty hands. “I mean, the magic of a hustle like G-7—it’s all about skipping right across on the surface, very light and easy. Too much involvement on the ground, and it gets all grimy.”

“All right,” said Khoklov, shifting in his ragged taxi seat and coughing into his fist. “I’ll tell you one important detail. Why Ozbey’s boys want to shoot me. It’s about the casino owner, Mr. Altimbasak.”

“Yeah? What’s Altimbasak’s problem?”

“Well,” said Khoklov, “he was a very kind host, and he told me some useful things about the situation here. But he was also a leftist, you see? So, his body is inside his crashed Mercedes, at the bottom of a cliff. But Mr. Altimbasak’s
head
—well, his head had several bullets in it, so his head is in a bucket of cement.”

Starlitz said nothing.

“Have you ever heard of the ‘Turkish Gray Wolves’?”

“They shot the pope,” Starlitz recited by reflex.

“Yes, Mehmet Ali Ağca. That business was about banks. The Vatican’s Banco Ambrosiano. A very holy bank. They
were laundering money for the Polish anti-Communists, while they also brokered arms for the anti-Communist Turks. They got very excited about Poland, and neglected to pay the Gray Wolves. So, the pope was punished for defaulting.”

Starlitz grunted.

“Ozbey gave Ağca the pistol that shot the pope. He didn’t call himself ‘Ozbey’ then. Ozbey has at least six official identities. I know for a fact that he has six Turkish diplomatic passports. He also commonly uses special passports from intelligence agencies in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Mr. Ozbey has outgrown the old Gray Wolf militia. He has prospered in his investments, and moved into the highest circles of Turkish government. Nowadays he does a great deal of oil, guns, and drug biznis in the formerly Soviet Turkic countries. His ‘Uncle the Minister’ is the chief of clandestine operations for MIT, the Turkish Central Intelligence Agency.”

“I could have glided right past all this,” Starlitz mourned. “This didn’t even have to come up on the agenda.”

“There’s more. There’s much, much more. My Turkish Communist revolutionary friends have been fighting their government for fifty years. They have been losing, because their truck bombs are always badly parked. But they have many secret dossiers on Ozbey. They have dossiers on his friends, his donors, his sponsors, his mentors. They keep all their files in computers in Holland, because inside Turkey the MIT has the Communists jailed, tortured, and shot.”

“Hey, Dad,” said Zeta. “Hey, Dad!”

“Hey what?”

“Hey, Dad, how come you talk so much Russian? I feel carsick!”

Starlitz gazed at her in alarm. Zeta spat out her half-sucked peppermint; she had gone all pale and greenish. “If we stop the car,” Starlitz told her, “we might not make it to the airport in time to catch the G-7 girls.”

Zeta’s brow knitted crankily. “Well, I can’t
help it
when I’m
feeling carsick
! I feel like I’m gonna
throw up
!”