Zeitgeist (11 page)

“You had to open the case,” Starlitz said kindly.

“Of course,” Viktor muttered. His pale Slavic eyes looked quite blind.

“Get in the car,” said Starlitz. He led Viktor forward.

At Viktor’s uncanny presence the taxi groaned in
mechanical protest. Its shocks popped audibly. The paint blistered. A stick of chrome trim snapped loose.

Starlitz got in.

“Give me a drink,” groaned Viktor.

“That won’t help you, kid. Not in these conditions.”

“I’ve seen death before,” said Viktor hollowly. “But
never
death like
that
.”

“There’s death, and there’s death,” Starlitz told him. “When you bury a century, a whole lot has to go down with it. Spirit of the times, brother.”

“Yes,” Viktor said weakly. “My artist friends in Petersburg always say that. ‘Even spirits die.’ That’s what they say … my friends, the Necro-Realists.”

“Spirits die
first.
” Starlitz started the engine, laboriously turned the taxi in the narrow, rutted lane, and flicked on the radio again. Their situation called for something nice and loud. Something mawkish. Something mundane, that would restore them to the default position of human banality, circa 1999. Celine Dion singing the theme from
Titanic
. Perfect.

“You wanna to stay off the booze and the dope for a couple days,” Starlitz advised. “Just be normal, okay? Order room service, and watch bad TV in a cheap hotel.”

“Will that help me?” Viktor croaked.

“Absolutely. Just ride it out, man. We’ll be leaving this island soon. Once we’re out of here, none of this will matter. Because it’s over now. We buried it. It’s off the agenda. Not on the record. It’s yesterday.”

Viktor’s teeth were chattering. With a visible effort he got his jitters under control. As they passed the pale lights of Lapta, something like a human color was returning to the resilient flesh of the young Russian. “I can’t let my uncle see me like this,” he said. “There would be questions.”

“Not a problem. I’ll check you into a hotel in Lefkosa. I gotta do an errand in that town, anyway.”

Viktor leaned his shaggy head against the window glass and stared into the night. “Is it always like this? So horrible?”

Starlitz turned around over the driver’s seat, slinging
back his elbow. “How do you feel, kid? You feel like you’re gonna die?”

“No, I’m a Necro-Realist,” Viktor said stoutly. “I know what death is. But I don’t die easily. Dying is for other people.”

“Then, no, it isn’t always this horrible.” Starlitz turned back with a grunt. “ ‘Horrible’ would be too simple. The world isn’t simple or pure. It isn’t any one thing. The real world, the true reality … it literally isn’t what it is. ‘
A
is not A,’ right? In the real world
A
can’t even fuckin’ bother to be A. You ever read any Umberto Eco?”

Viktor stirred restlessly. “You mean those big, fat popular novels? No, I can’t abide that sort of thing.”

“How about Deleuze and Guattari? Derrida? Foucault? You ever read any Adorno?”

“Adorno was a fucking Marxist,” Viktor said wearily. “But of course I’ve read Derrida. How could one not read Derrida? Derrida revealed that the Western intellectual tradition is riddled with logical aporias.” Viktor looked up. “Have
you
read Jacques Derrida, Mr. Starlitz?
En français
?”

“Uh … I don’t exactly
read
those guys,” Starlitz confessed. “I had to pick it all up on the street.”

Viktor grunted in disdain.

“I do read Jean Baudrillard sometimes. Baudrillard’s a real comedian.”

“I don’t like Baudrillard,” said Viktor, sitting up straighter. “He never made it clear how a political intervention can avoid being recuperated by the system. ‘Seduction,’ ‘fatal strategies,’ where does that get us?” He sighed. “We might as well go get drunk.”

“Well, see, the basic deal there is,” mused Starlitz, “that when the master narrative collapses and implodes, everything becomes undecidable.”

Viktor leaned forward intently. “Tell me. Where does one find this ‘master narrative’? I want some of it. Do you
buy
it? Is that the secret?”

Starlitz waved one meaty hand. “Millennium’s almost over now, kid. The narrative is increasingly polyvalent and
decentered. It’s become, you know, way
rhizomatic
, and all that.”

“Yes. So they tell me. All right. So what? Where is my part of the action?”

“Well, I dunno if you’ve got any action or not, but you’re not gonna find it here in Cyprus. This is a tiny, unrecognized, outlaw republic. We’re among the excluded, out here. We are very, very peripheral. And besides that—there’s a big cusp coming. A major narrative crisis. It’s gonna wipe a lot of slates clean. Bury the walking zombies.”

“You mean Y2K,” said Viktor, leaning back.

Starlitz nodded silently. The night was going well. The kid would be okay now. The kid had made his bones tonight. Now he was in the know.

STARLITZ PARKED VIKTOR BY THE HOUR IN A FLEABAG Lefkosa
pansiyon
. The place was locally known as a “Natasha house,” thanks to its staff of expatriate Ukrainian working girls. It was five in the morning. The staff were all asleep. They were exhausted from their bone-grinding, hands-on labor, underpricing Turkish whores.

Starlitz dumped the taxi in the tall weeds of an abandoned Turkish trench works, west of the capital. As he walked back toward the divided city, a Homeric dawn gnawed at the Nicosia skyline with her rosy gums.

Starlitz lit one of Viktor’s cigarettes, put his hands in his pockets, and began to drift.

Midmorning found Starlitz sitting on a bus bench, eating from a large bag of chocolate croissants and sipping a Styrofoam Nescafé. Urban crowds went about their business, men in flat hats and patterned sweaters, women heaving baby carriages along the black-and-white-striped curb.

A rust-spotted jitney pulled over. A backpacking American woman climbed out of it. Her skin was the color of a Starbucks frappuccino, and she had black, kinked hair in
big clusters of thread-knotted twists. She wore a nylon tropical shirt, knotted at the midriff, and chocolate-chip desert-camo cutoffs, unconvincingly cinched up with a gleaming concho belt.

Starlitz rose from his bench and trailed her.

The Yankee tourist opened a small gate and walked up the steps of a whitewashed suburban home. A plaque at the door read BARBARLIK MUZESI. She read a framed, typed announcement on the wall, and pulled a change purse out of her bellows thigh pocket. She carefully counted the zeros on a slender stash of Turkish lira. Then she scuffed her lug-soled boots on the welcome mat, yanked the iron-grilled door, and stepped inside.

An aged museum guard silently accepted her money. Starlitz pulled a fat money clip from his pocket and paid up as well.

Lefkosa’s Museum of Barbarity had once been a private home. A famous Cypriot atrocity had taken place inside it. The place had been consecrated to the murders. It had become a neat and dainty little atrocity exhibition.

The walls were hung with pedantic care, with many period photos showcasing a stark variety of Greek inhumanities to Turks. There were many burnt and bulldozed homes, schools, mosques, and shops. There were profaned flags, smashed windows, and vile graffiti. There were dead people dug out of pits, with filthy improvised clothesline still binding their mummified wrists. Even Turkish statues had been shot in the head.

Starlitz edged a little closer to his target.

The woman spoke first. “I sure ain’t with this! Why didn’t we cluster-bomb these sons of bitches? How hard could that be?”

Starlitz proffered his bakery bag. “Chocolate croissant?”

“Yeah!” She dived her hand into the bag, removed a flaking pastry, and munched with gusto. Then she jabbed at a ghastly photograph with a tooth-severed croissant horn. “Look at them dead kids! Where was CNN when
that was goin’ down? fuckin’ media creeps are never around when you need one!”

“Been in-country long?” said Starlitz.

“Nope! Just cruisin’ by to see the local sights.”

“Where you from?”

She shrugged. “All over! I’m an army brat.”

“What do your friends call you?”

She stared at him. “My
friends
call me Betsy. But
you
can call me ‘Mrs. Ross,’ fella.”

“My name’s Lech Starlitz, Mrs. Ross.” Starlitz dug into his pocket and removed a hundred-dollar bill. He smoothed it between two fingers and handed it over.

“What’s this about?” she said warily.

“It’s for listening to me for a minute.”

“Okay.” She tucked the bill in her pocket. “Talk.”

“You ever heard of a girl group named ‘G-7’?”

“Heck, yeah, I heard of G-7! I’m down with all that shit, NATO, UNPROFOR, Gulf Coalition, you can name it!” She scowled. “You’re not dressed well enough to be a pimp, mister. You look like you slept in those clothes.”

“I have a business proposal for an American female expatriate. Somebody just like you.”

“So what’s the deal with you, you some kind of intel puke?”

“I’m a pop-music producer, Mrs. Ross. I manage a touring act.”

Mrs. Ross blinked in surprise. “Huh.”

“I need you to be a performer. You get gophers, a makeover, hair extensions, and a total new wardrobe. Plus limos, big hotels, free food, free travel, and big screaming audiences of teenage girls. The works. I wanna make you a star.”

“Ooh-rah,” she said slowly. She looked him up and down. “What’s your real problem, exactly? You’re insane, right? You’re mental.”

“Nope. No bullshit. It’s a serious offer.”

“Well,” she admitted slowly, staring at the photo-studded wall, “I gotta admit it, that would be me all over.
That is my
vida loca
, right up and down. Me, the overnight sensation.”

“Here,” Starlitz said persuasively. He handed her another hundred dollars.

“You mean it,” she realized.

“That’s right. And there’s lots more where that came from.”

She narrowed her eyes warily. “Well, what’s the mission assignment, then? You better make it well defined, bubba.”

“You have to sing and dance. In public.”

“Well, I can dance. I dance great. I’m not real big on singing.”

“That’s okay. The G-7 act is a road show. It’s all done with tapes and computers.”

Mrs. Ross stuck her thumbs in her armored concho belt and rocked back onto her bootheels. “Come on, homeboy. I can tell you’re up to
something
you’re not telling me.” Suddenly, she grinned. “You’re not the bad boy that you think you are, know what I’m sayin’? I’ve seen worse dudes than you. I’ve even
done
worse dudes than you.”

“Get a grip, Mrs. Ross. I manage the G-7 act. I am the boss. I’m all about the game plan and the money. There are six other girls on the bus with you. You are just one of a crowd.”

Mrs. Ross looked down at the museum floor. The humble wooden boards were deeply scuffed with thirty years of constant foot traffic. Then she looked up resolutely. “How much money are we talking? Because I owe my hotel some money. Kind of a lot.”

“Not a problem, babe. We pay off hotels every day. We even wreck hotels, sometimes.”

“I had to pawn some shit too. Some personal shit.”

Starlitz nodded. “I will assign you a personal assistant, who will retrieve your personal shit.”

“I make a lot of long-distance phone calls. To Bosnia, mostly. Because my ex-husband’s in uniform there.”

Starlitz grinned. “Phones, we got.” He was really touched by the armed forces ex-wife thing. There was a very good, convincing smell about all this.

STARLITZ TOOK MRS. ROSS OUT FOR AN EARLY LUNCH. Footloose, broke, newly divorced, and half starved, she fell on her lamb kebab like a timber wolf. They dawdled over hot Turkish coffee until a large white limo arrived for them from the Meridien.

Once they were safely back in Girne, Starlitz handed the newly recruited American One into the capable hands of Tamara.

Tamara undertook a brief inspection of the merchandise, with all the delicate tact of a Balkan horse dealer. Then Tamara passed Mrs. Ross on to the G-7 makeup people. “There isn’t much time,” she told them coldly. “Do your best with her before you pack for Istanbul. Hurry.”

The new American One was rapidly hustled out of earshot. “So, what do you think of this one?” Starlitz asked Tamara. “Not bad for such short notice, eh? Great muscle tone.”

Tamara shrugged. “I like her skin. Very Jody Watley, very Mariah Carey. It’s a nice American color.”

“You seen Mehmet Ozbey around? Ozbey was bitching at me earlier. He didn’t think I could find a new American One overnight.” Starlitz chuckled falsely. “Shows what he knows.”

“I knew you’d get someone,” she told him, bored. “You always get somebody. I hope you didn’t get us another crazy one.”

“Any problems dumping the last American One?”

“Of course not. I took care of all that. She’s gone.” Tamara’s tight eyelids narrowed. “There is a new problem, with the Italian One. An Italian man is here, someone who knows her. I don’t like this Italian man. We’re trying to pack for Istanbul, and he’s bothering the staff.”

“Okay,” said Starlitz. “Send this problem to my office. I’ll square it away.”

Starlitz went to his hotel room and showered. He ripped the dry-clean plastic off a Carnaby Street bespoke ensemble in vivid chartreuse. He dressed and went to his office at the Meridien. It had a spectacular view of the rocky Cypriot coast, over a handsome balcony at the rim of the hotel gardens. Reaching across the rail to a straggling hibiscus, Starlitz snagged a boutonniere. Then he sat behind his borrowed desk, opened a drawer, and removed a large glass ashtray.

The Italian arrived. He was a silver-haired and courtly gentleman, who walked with a slight limp. He was wearing a Borsalino hat, a tailored seersucker shirt, and a pinstriped Milanese sport jacket. He carried a nifty Hugo Bosca hand-stained leather valise.

“Mr. Sarlinz?”

“Si?”
Starlitz half rose.

The man delivered a business card. “I represent a protective service. We are international security experts.…”

“Take a seat!” said Starlitz. He examined the card and tucked it in the desk. “Cigarette, Signor Patriarca?”