Ascendancies (44 page)

“You mean, like an ethnic, nationalist mass movement, demanding self-determination and a devolution of centralized state power?” Khoklov said. “No, comrade; a serious political analysis will show that's not the true case at all. I'm sure that a measured restructuring of state resources, and a cautious but thorough redressing of their economic grievances, will soon lead the Armenians back to the path of socialist cooperation.”

“Nice to know somebody still reads
Pravda,”
Starlitz said. He brightened. “Look, ace, we're in luck. Here come some cops!”

An open-topped jeep came tearing across the plaza, crammed with uniformed local police in riot helmets. Khoklov went pale and shrank down in his seat, but Starlitz stopped the ZIL and climbed out.

The jeep screeched up short. A militia sergeant jumped out and menaced Starlitz with a riot baton. “Your papers!”

“Never mind that crap,” Starlitz told him. “Where have you been? We've been waiting.”

“What?” the sergeant said.

“This is a special shipment for the Boss,” Starlitz said, pointing at the truck. “Aren't you our police escort?”

“No! What are you doing here at this hour?”

“Isn't it obvious?” Starlitz said. “I can't drive a black-market truck in broad daylight, through streets full of thieving, rioting Armenians! There've been enough delays in this shipment already! If you're not our special escort, then where the hell are they?”

“Everyone's doing overtime,” the cop said wearily. “Perhaps we somehow lost track of our Party Chairman's whims. We're trying to keep order here. There's been confusion.”

“Hell,” Starlitz said, kicking at a pried-up cobblestone. “I'm gonna catch it for this…Look, stop whatever you're doing, and take us straight to the Boss, okay? I'll make it worth your while. Come round to the back of the truck. Nobody'll miss a little off the top.”

The sergeant grinned slowly. He waved the other cops into the back of the ZIL. After some gleeful argument, they decamped with a video recorder and six bottles of J&B Scotch.

“You're robbing me,” Starlitz complained.

The jeep led the way. This was useful, as it got them past the nervous police checkpoints around the Boss's urban headquarters.

Officially, this place was a Workers' Palace of Culture, built years ago for a puppet trade union of textile workers. The textile workers now existed only on paper, as the Azerbaijani cotton crops had been disastrous for years. The Boss had put the building to his own uses, and improved it considerably, with lavish use of stolen state materials and impressed labor. The Boss's five-story city palace looked like a diseased wedding cake, brilliantly lit and painted in ghastly pastels.

Inside the courtyard the palace grounds were clustered with the black limousines of Party notables. The Boss's customary caravan of brushedaluminum tour buses was parked on the lawn, next to a gaily frilled pavilion with picnic tables and fire-blackened shish-kebab pits. It was very late, and a meeting was in the final throes of dissolution. Vomiting Azerbaijani bigwigs tottered to their limos, assisted by mistresses and functionaries.

Starlitz parked the ZIL atop a fragrant row of oleander bushes.

“What's going on here?” Khoklov said, staring in disbelief. “Some kind of
festival?”

“Yeah.” Starlitz looked at Khoklov critically. “Straighten up that tie you're wearing, or whatever it is.” Starlitz leaned from the window to peer into the ZIL's rearview mirror. He scrubbed grease from his face with his sleeve, then licked his hand and smeared at his hair. “We gotta pass for Beautiful People, okay?” he said. “Smoke those Marlboros like you get 'em every day, and make sure everybody sees you've got a Walkman.”

The double doors of the palace were propped wide open. Starlitz and Khoklov swaggered in boldly. They followed music to a ground-floor workers' gymnasium, refitted to mimic a ballroom. A homemade mirror-ball wobbled on the ceiling before a lighted stage with heavy canvas draperies. Small tables lined the walls under chintzy fake gas lamps with forty-watt reddish bulbs.

The band had played its final set; they were packing up their
bazoukis
and a brace of slotted microphones the size of bread loaves. The velvet sound of a smuggled Mel Torme tape came from the speakers. Most of the Party bigwigs were already gone; there were a dozen tired teenage Armenian hookers, dance girls, sitting in a line of folding chairs. At the sight of Khoklov's air force jacket, and Starlitz's bogus Red Army get-up, they started chattering and elbowing each other.

A sinuous woman with dark, high-piled hair approached them across the dance floor. She wore sequined velvet trousers, high-heeled pumps, and a fancy embroidered jacket. Starlitz straightened warily.

“Oh,” the woman said, smiling with a flash of pointed teeth. “So it's you. What a pleasant surprise.”

Starlitz tried an ingratiating grin. “Good evening, Tamara Akhmedovna.”

“I thought you two were soldiers,” Tamara said. She fingered the lapel of Starlitz's secondhand Red Army jacket. “You shouldn't wear clothes like this into town. People will talk.”

“Who is this charming lady?” Khoklov said.

“This is the Boss's wife, ace,” Starlitz muttered. “‘The Sultana.'”

“Please!” Tamara said, dimpling. “No friend of mine calls me that. A simple ‘Madame Party Chairman' will do…” Tamara's kohl-lined, liquid eyes studied Khoklov with languorous attention. “Who is this mysterious young man, and why is he dressed like an airman?”

“Uh, we had a little trouble down by the airstrip, Tamara…Could we have a word outside, or something?”

Tamara's face went flinty for a moment. “Very well,” she said. “Wait here, while I see that the artistes are properly compensated…” She drifted away.

“Good God!” Khoklov whispered, grabbing Starlitz's elbow. “She's beautiful! What's she doing married to that old ogre?”

“Tamara's the biggest black-market hustler in Azerbaijan,” Starlitz said, brushing Khoklov's hand away. “Her husband does everything illegal in Tamara's name. She's got a million Moslem relatives; they're all on the take. They smuggle everything, from diamonds to bananas. They carry big, sharp knives, too. So keep your pants on.”

Tamara returned, having fee'd off the musicians and hookers. “May I suggest a stroll in the garden?” she said, arching her brows. “The Bukhara roses are in bloom.”

“That's swell,” Starlitz said. They went outside, away from the palace's lavish inner network of listening devices. Starlitz made introductions.

“So you're our brave pilot?” Tamara said. “How nice to meet you. If it weren't for you, Captain, I wouldn't have this Final Net hair spray.” She touched her coiffure. “It holds up even when I no longer can.”

“Your hair does look lovely,” Khoklov said. “And you speak such excellent Russian, too. It's a delight to the ear.”

“Listen, Tamara,” Starlitz broke in. “We need five hundred liters of aviation kerosene. Old Cross-Eyes, back at the farm, said the Boss might have some.”

“My husband is sleeping,” Tamara said. “He's had a very trying day. All this political turmoil. He deserves his rest, poor dear.”

“I must get fuel somehow, and fly back to Kabul tonight,” Khoklov said. “If I don't, the sacrifice of my career is perhaps a small matter. But I'm afraid it might cause you some inconvenience.”

“I'm sure I understand,” Tamara nodded. “You were right to come to me, Captain Khoklov. We can't have our Kabul shipments disrupted. We'll need proper lavish gifts, to curry favor with the generals, now that the army's coming.”

“The army, huh?” Starlitz said.

“They're invading tomorrow, to beat some sense into these ungrateful Christians,” Tamara said. “My husband just announced the news to the Azerbaijan Party regulars, at our little business meeting here tonight. Everyone's delighted about the military crackdown. I think our troubles are over!”

“Hey, that's exciting news,” Starlitz said. “We still need the fuel, though.”

“Let me think,” Tamara said. She touched her chin with one lacquered forefinger. “Aha! The military supply train. It's already here in town, prepared for the troops' arrival. I'm sure they wouldn't miss a few liters from their tank cars.”

“That's great,” Starlitz said. “I know the way to the railhead. We'll take the truck.”

“You didn't bring the ZIL, did you?” Tamara gazed at the olive-drab bulk atop the crushed oleander bushes. “Oh dear, you did, didn't you?”

“Had to improvise,” Starlitz said.

“We borrowed that Red Army truck from nice old General Akbarov, you know. We promised him that we wouldn't flaunt it around carelessly. People might talk.”

“It's a problem,” Starlitz admitted. “It's full of goodies, too. Coupla tons.”

“Three tons!” Khoklov declared. “The choicest wares and viands of the Khyber caravans, fit for a czarina!”

“Now, now,” said Tamara, favoring him with a smile. “We're simple servants of the People, Captain, doing what we can to keep our homeland prosperous, under very trying conditions…It's a pity you didn't come earlier. Your cargo would have made nice Party favors.” Tamara made a quick decision. “I'll have the servants—I mean the
service personnel
—unload the truck, here at our City Palace. There's plenty of storage room in our basement. And we'll take one of my husband's buses down to the train station, to get your fuel. I'm sure it won't take long.”

Starlitz widened his eyes. “Great! I always wanted to drive one of those special buses.”

Starlitz and Khoklov stacked the empty jerry cans into the back of the bus, while Tamara made arrangements. Soon they were in the bus together, behind a vast windshield expanse of smoked glass. Starlitz seized the driver's seat and gleefully fired the engine. Khoklov sat in the passenger's side, behind a bulky radiotelephone set. Tamara sat cross-legged between them, on a flat vinyl couch, which led, behind her, to a vast plush-padded nest with cozy bunk beds, brocade curtains, and a kitchenette. The bus reeked pleasantly of hashish and shish-kebab.

Starlitz rolled it smoothly out of the compound. “Now, don't show off,” Tamara chided. “I know you're a very good driver, but don't scratch my husband's nice machine, or he'll shout at me.”

“Can't have that,” Starlitz said, spinning the wheel one-handed. He grinned. “This is living, though, isn't it, ace? We can drive anywhere in the province, at any speed we like, and no one will dare to touch us! Everybody knows this bus belongs to the Party Chairman. What a great setup!”

“You're a rascal,” Tamara said. “You shouldn't talk like that; people listen, you know. You'll have to forgive him, Comrade Captain.”

“Please,” Khoklov said. “Call me Pulat Romanevich.”

Tamara gazed limpidly out the windshield as they rolled past a long concrete-block wall splattered with angry Armenian graffiti. “Come now,” she said softly. “We scarcely know each other, Captain.”

“I'm a lonely warrior far from home,” Khoklov told her. “If I seem too bold, forgive me. Friendship comes quickly in wartime. It's how we pilots live, you see. A flyer never knows if he will greet the dawn.”

“Oh yes,” Tamara mused. “There is a war on, isn't there?”

“My next assignment will be bombing bandit camps over the Pakistani border,” Khoklov said. “‘Unofficially,' of course.”

“That's a tough one,” Starlitz nodded. “Some of those refugees have guns.”

“It's nothing,” Khoklov scoffed. “In the Panjgur Valley, they fire down onto the planes, from high on their mountainsides. And you must fly low, because the bandits hide their huts in little crevices.”

Khoklov showed Tamara a gold-rimmed mission patch. “I got this one for the Panjgur campaign. The bandits there stopped nine different ground assaults: tanks, artillery, infantry columns…Finally we air boys stepped in. Just flattened the place, you see; there was nothing left, so resistance stopped.”

“What about this patch?” Tamara said, touching his sleeve.

“That was the siege of Herat,” Khoklov said. “The bandits there were total fanatics! We had to carpet-bomb half the city before we could save it.”

“I can see that you love to flirt with danger,” Tamara said.

Slowly, Khoklov smiled. “I'm a career officer, with close ties to the KGB. I'm a political liaison with the Afghan Air Force. It's a very…
special
kind of game.”

Tamara's eyes sparkled. “What was the most
dangerous
thing that ever happened to you?”

“Ah,” Khoklov said, “that would be the time a Chinese heat-seeker hit my aft engine in the Wakhan Corridor…I almost nursed my bird back to Bagram Air Base, but I had to hit the silk in bandit territory. After three days in the wilderness, a Spetsnaz ranger team picked me up with their helicopter gunship…” Khoklov suavely lit a Marlboro and gazed dramatically out the window. “I wouldn't want you to think it's something special, Tamara. For us, it's a job, that's all; our socialist duty. Those Spetsnaz rangers, the elite black berets…now, those sons of bitches are what I call brave men! I owe them my life, you know.”

Khoklov felt inside his pocket. “They were good friends. One of them gave me this souvenir…oh hell,
you've
got it now.”

“Yeah,” Starlitz said. “And I've been meaning to ask you about that jacket you're wearing, Tamara Akhmedovna. It's really beautiful.”

“This?” Tamara said, spreading her arms. “Just a little homemade nothing.”

“That's actually a black Levi's jean jacket, imported from the West, right?” Starlitz said. “Only, it's been lined with virgin wool, it's got a tanned sheepskin collar, and somebody—somebody really good with a needle—has blind-stitched an embroidery picture of a combine harvester across the back.”