Terraplane (3 page)

"You haven't been in ten years," I said.

"Russia and America both bloody lands," he said, frowning.
"We transfuse ours. You spill yours. One day you learn as we did."

INTERCEPT THIS MORNING GAVE NEW INFO.

The curtain rose. The lights brightened. The orchestra's flaccidity drooped over a synthesizer bank, cracking knuckles, scratching himself.

"A toast. Na zdorovye!" cried Skuratov, lifting his cup, tapping
mine, rubbing it against Jake's box of Pepsi. "Tomorrow you do
business in best business place in world. To Vladamer."

DEVICE IS PROBABLY NOT WEAPON AS SUCH.

WHAT? I tapped.

POSSIBLE TRANSFERRAL DEVICE.

No set showed onstage. Two yellowed posters of New York's
skyline hung from the back wall; a green Statue of Liberty molded
from one of the lesser plastics stood at stage center. The Drama
Advisers chose to rouse at once; their production-West Side
Story-opened with `America."

"Songs left in original tongue to preserve purity of text,"
Skuratov noted.

TRANSFERRAL WHERE? I tapped.

WHERE ALEKHINE WENT.

The Puerto Rican girls wore nuns' habits and flapping wimples,
and possibly came as if from a convent to attempt conversion of the
male dancers, boys of Sakhalin shoeblacked to appear more tropical. Backgrounders repeatedly slammed together as if following
choreography's demand. The synthesizist, orchestra's iconoclast,
lent a sixty-piece unit's sound.

"They've punched up the lyrics," I whispered to Skuratov, noticing a variorum libretto in use.

"Public domain," he explained. The women tore off their black
cloaks during the first bridge, prancing thereafter in glitter and
G-strings, headpieces affixed topside. Bending, they wiggled
towards us. Russians loved shoving acres of flesh into centimeters
of cloth and studying the result.

"What is this agitpop?" asked Jake, unable to pull his look from
the action. One of the nuns swung over the stage on a rope, felling
the statue as she hit her mark.

"Muzhiki!!" came a cry rearward. At this alert Jake moved; we
were up before the splintering rang. A Mongol shattered empties
floorways. Before his bottle shards impressed full, the bouncers
buried him beneath their tonnage. Onstage nuns wrapped young
men around them as if to keep warm. The song concluded with an
atonal thud. The clientele-Skuratov, too-stood, applauding.

"All was intentional?" I asked.

"How else?" said Skuratov, reseating with watchful look. Kidin
turned his attention from us back to the Kazakhs. The principals
onstaged for the next number. Tony seemed not to be of troublesome Polish descent in this adaptation. Maria's paint, mahogany
dark, offset her blond curls. Neither danced; of good voice, they
sang "One Hand, One Heart." Audience murmur supplanted
audience roar. Looking up I saw Jake's face radiate as if lit from
within. A tear dropped from his dead-coal eye, perhaps fearful that
if seen it might be blown away. His pox-scarred expression fixed
solid; he could have been zooing, watching baby ducks at play, or
viewing that little girl of whom Skuratov spoke tumble as the echo faded. Hypnotized, I watched that tear shuffle along his cheek into
darkness. It was like seeing a tank cry.

"Ochen krasiva!" Jake, drawn from his mourn, swiveled round;
the commentator was already set upon by the bouncers, who
entwined him like vines strangling a tree. Kidin perked; with
fellow Krasnayaviki, advantaging the sitch, they leapt up to beat the
Kazakhs with their heavy knouts. The room's tension peaked. The
song's last bars were swallowed in curse's roar and crockery's rattle.

"Khulighani-" Rifles showed, clicked, weren't yet fired. The
performers stepped forward to view the floor show

"A delicious dinner," said Skuratov, rising. "Shall we?"

We jostled through the crowd, stamping the fallen when
needed, until we exited. Between interior and exterior one hundred degrees vanished. My lungs rustled like paper when I drew in
air. Snow powdered the long blue line of people awaiting entry.

"You're staying where?" Skuratov asked, thrusting hands into
furry pockets. Trim as he was, the type of coat he wore, a shuba,
impressioned his look as three hundred kilos heavier. Ten bears
gave their lives to warm his final years.

"Sheraton Kremlin," I said, "on Kitajski Prospect."

"Not the Moskva?"

"My choice." A firetrap; too obvious, besides.

"Let me offer you warm ride." The wind scarred us. Skuratov's
official car, a Chaika, was curbsided on Chudozestvannogo Teatra
Prospect. Russian limos resembled America's; Gorki-Detroit factories built both and supplied both countries as a rare joint venture.
Chaikas, Krasnaya's preferred vehicle, retained the styling of cars
forty years old. The Czara, the Politburo, leading members of
Krasnaya and old Heroes of the State, all prone to nostalgia in weak
moments, rode Chaikas.

"Look. Perhaps we shouldn't interrupt such pleasure." The
chauffeur reclined in the back seat, eyeing a movie on the TVC. A
vodka bottle, full only of air, lay next to him. "Out!" shouted
Skuratov, opening the door. "Do your duty." The chauffeur tumbled forth, slinking frontways. "Ten minutes, we're there." But in
vidding time away the chauffeur had drained the battery. Switch ing from idle to drive, he stalled the car. Striving to restart it, he
succeeded in making the engine wail as if it were being beaten.
Even while arrnied I allowed myself to be driven but twice, during
state funerals. I felt safer when I guided the wheel, once another
started the engine.

"Let us have brisk walk, then," muttered Skuratov, decarring.
"Call for new limo from hotel's comfortable lobby. Leave this zek
here. By morning he'll feel ice below instead of balls. Come."

Frost ferns sprouted across the windshield as we cruised away
down Gorki. Moscow's streets dichotomized after the sun fell from
daily grace. Krasnaya sealed and patrolled all avenues holding
government Buros, the homes of notables, banks and the larger
business blocks. Gorki Street, so wide as to allow passage of five
tanks tread to tread, was of the secular world, and provided trade's
entertainment nightlong. It might have been noon, so peopled and
trafficked was the boulevard. Most businesses on the main strips
followed the seven/twenty-four plan, forever open to handle
unceasing demand. Citizens passed as if on enforced parade,
many pushing red carts topful with freezers, washers, T'VCs,
copiers; all manner of technologic flotsam. Staring into their puffy,
bloodshot eyes disconcerted. Refugees' faces held similar looks in
every land I'd troubled; the look of these fit naught but for breathing and running, forced by us to abandon home and race the roads
before the other team, purposeful and timeshort, landed to steal
their days away.

"What demands the wait?" Jake asked, spotting one store's queue
running down Gorki and then Belinskogo to a length of sixty
meters. "Bread?"

Skuratov perused the storewindowed posters. "Electronic food
reconstitutors. "

By using those one metamorphosed sawdust into bread; transmogrified dust into spice. So long as the machines worked, they
enabled any semiusable to become the near-real. Russia, as did all
countries, traded homegrown goods through standard barter,
simultaneously balancing the unpayable debts and obtaining
desired goods. With Krasnaya overseeing, the system's efficiency was twice redoubled. Peru needed no caviar in exchange for guano
but that was what reached the Andes in return; Krasnaya ran the
homegrown with equally just rationale. For every Odomovana
dishwasher assembled, fourteen DL-50 mortars entered inventory
as well; for every Chaika rolling off the line, thirty Turgenev rocket
launchers showed on the field. By controlling all, Krasnaya kept all
bottomlined, and all citizens, if not happy, then quiet.

"A lovely night," said Skuratov, sliding on sanded ice underfoot.
"The stars are so clearly seen in our hemisphere."

Sparrows flocked solid on pavement grates, warming chilled
feathers. Red stars apexed Kremlin towers downstreet as they had
for a century, everstable amidst the nine floodlit domes of
Blagovashchenski Cathedral, the Telespire and the three-pronged
unistructure blossoming above the Hotel Moskva. Nature gave
Moscow little light overall; Krasnaya compensated. Red neon
delineated each building's form along both sides of Gorki. Centerlaned were long-legged metal bugs on tiptoe, balancing upon
their backs huge arc lamps similar to those we'd used in our camps,
lamps so hot that birds flying into them vaporized. At every second
corner a searchlight slashed the sky. Each building's facade shone
with fluorescence and plasmalight and argon gas; holograms and
vidscreens displayed vast quantities of purchasable stuff. Signs'
light-formed slogans never reiterated pedantic messages or antiAmerican saws but sent forth instead the world's standard litany:
Drink Pepsi, Use Bulat, You Deserve, This Is It. Some few phrases
showed in no place other than Russia; We Know, said one, But Tell
Us. One vast screen hid eight floors; bore nothing but a frozen
headshot of the Big Boy, drawn oldstyle, so that he looked to sit not
at the hand of God, but on it. The eyes didn't follow your progress,
but if you were guilty-you always were-you thought that they
did. The letterscroll continually running beneath read: POSTBIRTH-
DAY MADNESS AT GRIGORENKO FURNITURE MART. The birthday
was three months past.

"Stalin vsegda s nami," said Skuratov, looking upward, safe
from the lure.

"Pardon?" Jake asked.

"He is always with us," he translated. "That is terrible difficulty
with our new mutual friend." By his squints and winks I secured
that, for the second, we might freespeak.

"Difficulty in what way?" I asked, my lips so stiffened by cold
that their vague movement could show nothing.

"Krasnaya knows value of symbiosis. The Big Boy suits our
purposes so long as his like never again arrives. But our friend iscurrent phrase? Retrovert. Unnatural love of the past. Commercial
images seen as those of great beings, rather than of useful idiots."

"That problematicked?"

"Certainly. She believes he was-" Skuratov danced across possible phrases. "She digs him the most, we said as teenagers. I myself
was great fan of Abba and of your own Dean Reed. Our policies
work too well sometimes."

The Czara served as figurehead for imagined popular affection,
but no one knew, or cared, how he, or she, manifested; every fool
knew every pore on the Big Boy's face.

"Watch!" said Jake, drawing us close as a man passed full tilt
downstreet, two others heeling close, bearing in. "Politicals?"

"Chuchmiki," said Skuratov. "Asian trash."

Moscow was no more dangerous than any American city.
Between the restaurant and Marx Prospect we traveled six blocks,
passing seven robberies, three assaults and something of gray
nature, half spat and half rape. Unless political infractions evidenced, on uncontrolled streets all was watched and nothing
stopped. Though their vehicles' sirens forever sent their synthetic
pig's squeals across the dark, no police-not the General Militia,
the Krasnaya Guard, the Consumer Patrol, the City Druzhinhas,
the Okhranha, certainly never the Dream Team-interfered with
hooligans' free enterprise. As in America, one of Russia's myriad
charms was that you could be murdered without reason and not
even God would notice, or care.

"We cross under here," said Skuratov, pausing before a stairway
that led to a tunnel below-street. I considered situational inherencies. "We will miss terrible Marx Prospect traffic. Follow."

The tunnel's bone white walls seemed never to have suffered the
human touch. Concealed vents at each end deflected the piercing wind rushing through from above; the tunnel light cowered along
the ceiling's edge. At the halfway point someone marched down
the cracked, stained steps we'd hoped to approach.

"Possible problem," said Skuratov. The one new-appeared wore
checkered trousers, a cloth cap and a knee-length leatheresque
coat, and looked to be of the southern mountains, perhaps from
Armenia. At five meters distant he extracted a blue-metal longbarrel Omsk. 44, a make availabled only through official channels.
Most Russian guns reaching citizens' hands were poptoys, worthless even if usable, and illegal in any event. An Omsk could bring
down a small plane.

"Public defender," said Skuratov, which was local slang for such
a mugger. "This might be final moment, friends. Beg for mercy if
you wish."

"Zdrastye," said the man, in shivering voice. "Such fine clothes.
Shuck them, please." His Russian was inept; his wrists, where
visible, were no larger than mailing tubes. "Off!" Skuratov slipped
off his shuba, tossed down his astrakhan.

"Do as desired," said Skuratov, eyeing me with calm. "If we
don't live it will not matter if we freeze."

"It will," said Jake, doffing his own, lighter coat, showing the
white linen three-piece he wore yearround, standing in apprehensive reverence as if the national anthem rushed through his ears.
Jake wasn't big, though he impressioned such; wasn't slow, though
he moved so deliberately that he seemed forever to be gliding across
gelatin; wasn't stupid, though until you believed you knew him
you wouldn't have figured. He didn't seem dangerous at all.

"Uncoat! Please obey, please."

Our terrorist seemed unnerved and amateurish; any delay might
suffice. "What gives, friend?" I asked, wording Turkish, a language
unfamiliar to both Skuratov and Jake, but not, I hunched, to him.

"Asian brother," he replied, in like tongue. "I regret." Interesting; but before more might pass Jake raised his foot, kicking the
pistol downtunnel. He shouted and brokeaway.

"Don't scream!!" yelled Jake, his voice ringing along the walls.
To see his rolling flip was to watch an angel descend from heaven.
Leaping up, Jake heeled him twixt the scapulae, felling him timber-style. Jake booted him onto his back, then swung his fist
sharply against the Adam's apple. The fellow's limbs thrashed as if
on motor overload; spasms blurred his features. Close in, he
showed fewer than twenty years agrowing; reminded me of one of
my many lost sergeants. Jake kneeled over him as if to pray,
smoothing the boy's long hair away from his brow.