Zeitgeist (12 page)

“No, thank you.” His visitor coughed politely. “I had to quit.”

“You don’t have a spare lighter, do you?”

“No.”

Starlitz hunted through several drawers and found a paper book of Meridien hotel matches. He lit up with a flourish. “So, what can G-7 do for you?”

Mr. Patriarca perched neatly on the edge of his chair. “Travelers have many hazards. It would be a shame if your company had an accident. My people, we can help you. We can insure that you have no security problems.”

Starlitz exhaled and scratched his head. “So is this, like, a
kryusha
pitch you’re giving me here?”

“What?”

“
Kryusha
, you know. Like,
Tambovskaya kryusha
, or
Fizba kryusha
?”

“What are those words, Russian words? I don’t understand Russian.”

Starlitz smiled helpfully. “Sorry, man, I just assumed a
protection racket
had
to be Russian. So, who are these insurance people of yours? Ndrangheta?”

Patriarca scowled. “The Ndrangheta are Calabrian!”

“How about Camorra?”

“The Camorra are Corsicans!”

Starlitz stared at him in wild surmise. “Don’t tell me you’re Sicilian Mafia.”

“We never use that word,
Mafia,
” said Patriarca with dignity. “That is an old, ugly word, invented by police! We are businessmen of honor. We have many restaurants, shipping companies, construction companies. And we have excellent insurance policy—just for you.”

“Wow! Really? This is too good! Just one moment. Let me contact my business associate.” Starlitz picked up the desk phone and dialed the penthouse. After a brief interregnum with Ozbey’s staff he got through.

“Leggy,” Ozbey grated, his voice thick with hangover. “How glad I am that you returned to us. I was concerned.”

“Mehmetcik, you’re not gonna believe this. I got a soldier from the Sicilian Mafia down here. Right here in my office, right now!”

Ozbey was skeptical. “In Turkish Cyprus? Is this a joke?”

“No, man, he’s serious! And he isn’t Turkish ‘Maffiya’ or Russian ‘Maphiya,’ this guy is good old-fashioned, traditional,
mafia
Mafia! He’s shaking us down!”

“What a surprise!” said Ozbey, his voice rising in an eager arc. “I have to see this Mafia man right away!” It had clearly been a long, eventful, decadent night for Ozbey, but the new business prospect was cheering him right up.

Starlitz hung up. “My associate wants to discuss your proposal.”

“Is he bringing money?”

“Money? You bet! He’s very well-to-do. Has checkbooks like you wouldn’t believe. Has his own banks, even.”

Starlitz tapped ash from his cigarette. Then the office door slammed open. Frosted glass shattered and fell out
of it. Three of Ozbey’s goons catapulted through the doorway, carrying Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns. They were breathless from racing down the stairs, but they gave Patriarca three cheerful grins, so redolent with evil that the room’s stuffy air seemed to crystallize.

Drey held up his right hand, making a gang sign with his scarred fingers: the two middle fingers touching the thumb for a muzzle, and the forefinger and pinky lifted for the wolf’s ears. Drey gazed at Mr. Patriarca quizzically as Patriarca went pale with recognition and terror. Then Ali, lumbering silently forward, punched Mr. Patriarca in the head. Patriarca fell from his chair. The three Turks stomped him lavishly and removed two handsome pistols from his belt and his armpit. Drey took his pulse, and then they stomped him some more.

At this point Ozbey arrived from the elevator.

Ozbey chided the boys gently in Turkish. “Sorry about the glass door, Leggy.”

“I’ll have Turgut Altimbasak look after that.”

“Mr. Altimbasak is not with us anymore. Get a better office. We leave Cyprus soon anyway.” Ozbey looked down at the prostrate Patriarca. He bestrode him. He prodded him with a polished shoe. “ ‘Sicilian Mafia.’ The very idea.” Ozbey shook his head. “How old and tired he looks! He’s very weak. And so dishonored! This is sad.” Ozbey glanced up, brown eyes gleaming. “Isn’t it? It’s sad!”

THE HOTEL’S MANAGER HAD VANISHED DURING THE night. Khoklov was also nowhere to be found.

A brand-new crew of Turkish hotel consultants had flown in overnight from Istanbul. To judge by the terrific racket, they were already fully engaged in remodeling the casino. The local Cypriot staffers were petrified by this powerful offshore intervention. They were hunched and hopping like rabbits, scampering from wing to wing and room to room.

Starlitz, adapting to the confusion, helped himself to a fine new suite on the second floor of the seaside wing.
He called the operator to have his phone rerouted. No one was working the phones. Instead Starlitz found himself confronting the hotel’s voice-mail service.

The digital phone service spouted a brief canned intro in Turkish, and then horribly disgorged its mangled contents.

A woman’s intonation, her voice chopped and jerky. Bouncing off the ionosphere. Blistered by buckling software. The nemesis voice of a pursuing Fury:

“…  in an area of total killer creep conditions—the agency of shadow stock bubble—cut evil empires gray dust of broom heavy—heavy blue twilight exit visa smoke bones—cut you … in for suckers dirty marks expelled the airport laughing and pointing come and get … set your watch by it, Leggy … ohmigawd are we ever in Hicks-ville … ”

Starlitz put the phone down, hands tingling with dread.

Starlitz sat frozen behind his empty desk, feeling dislocated terror sink into his flesh. A thumb had come from dark futurity to nail him. There could be no safety here. There could be no such reprieve.

Itchy urgency overcame him. Spooked and restless, Starlitz began to tour the hotel. Mrs. Ross was undergoing radical image surgery, but the other G-7 girls looked okay. They’d been burnt out like matchsticks when they’d first hit Turkish Cyprus, but they were bored by their vacation now, they were jittering to hit the stage again. They’d packed up for their final limos to the airport, while their groupies engaged in the traditional status battle to see who got to sit next to the star. The sound and lighting guys had been the first G-7 agents to go; they were already settling into the Istanbul Stadium Hotel, flopping down the jaws of their cell phones, demanding fifty-amp fuses, manufacturing brand-new road hassles.

Ozbey was in fine fettle. He was keeping the Meridien’s penthouse on indefinite personal loan. The next floor down had been freshly given over to a brand-new,
gathering thundercloud of Turkish television technicians.

Down at the front desk the Meridien’s guests were being reshuffled en masse. They were cheerful about it, since the new owners were canceling their outstanding bills, in an eerie gush of sinister generosity.

It all looked far too good. Starlitz ground his teeth and returned to the emptiness of his new office. There was no Khoklov, and no Viktor. And no answers. Time was short, and he could feel the pressure building steadily.

After a stiff interior battle Starlitz plucked a crisp
meishi
business card from the innermost depth of his wallet. He made a phone call.

The phone was answered in Japanese. It was one of the eccentric millionaire’s glamorous uniformed staffers.

Starlitz requested an audience with Makoto.

“How it hanging, Reggae?” said Makoto. “Is there good news?” Makoto had amazing, uncanny English. Makoto’s grasp of English grammar was a little uneasy, but he was the world’s most polished vocal mimic of American pop-music diction. Give him a glass slide and a cheap guitar, and Makoto could outslur Robert Johnson. He could sound more lonesome, tunesome, and tubercular than Jimmy Rodgers. He even had better slack-key guitar and falsetto Hawaiian pidgin than Bradda Iz. Makoto was perfectly capable of calling Leggy “Leggy.” He called him “Reggae” just for old times’ sake.

“No, Makoto, there’s a problem. A big problem. I can smell it. Is there something awful on your end? Anything really weird happening? Major earthquake, nerve gas in the subways, something like that?”

“No, no! Everything beautiful here!”

“Then, yeah, it’s just like I thought,” Starlitz said. He stared out his new window at the tops of the swaying palms. “The time has come for me to pay some kind of dues.”

“A money problem? Don’t worry so much about money! Because we are friends.”

“It’s not the money, no. That would be too simple.”

“A talent problem. I’ll send you new Japanese One. Someone cute and shiny. I keep telling you, Reggae, hire real musicians! Pay scale! You know? It’s easier.”

“The girls are fine. The act is fine. No, this awful thing, it has gotta be”—Starlitz sighed—“a
personal
problem.”

There was a long silence on the line. Makoto was stunned. “But you are
Reggae
!” he protested at last. “You don’t
have
personal! No personal at all.”

“Well, normally that’s true. But this is a funny time, man. It’s the end of an era. This is, like, my Y2K personal problem. It’s, like, looming up here.”

Makoto sucked air between his teeth. “Well! I don’t know what to say.”

“This is dead serious, man. I’m not sure I can hold up my end. I might have to take some kind of … leave of absence.”

“ ‘Leave of absence’? What is
that
? That’s not in our agreement, Reggae.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m calling you, right now. You are the honcho, and I’m the line worker. I gotta have a vacation. That’s my pitch. I need some personal time. How about it?”

“Okay! No problem! Come to Kauai!” Makoto coaxed. “Good vacation here! Sandy dancing on beach. Barbara taking hula lessons! Barbara love Hawaii, I love Barbara, so it’s beautiful Pacific paradise.”

“Later, man. I just want you to know that I haven’t forgotten that mah-jongg game we had in Guam. I might have to drop a stitch or two with the G-7 act, but I’m standing by that bet we made.”

“Of course you are stand by our bet,” said Makoto pleasantly. “You are my friend, you are honest.”

“Right.”

“Why worry? You worry too much.”

“No, I don’t,” Starlitz muttered. “I should have been worrying a lot more, earlier. I forgot what time it was.”

“The Man can’t bust our music, babe,” crowed Makoto
eerily. “If you bereave in magic, in the young girl heart!”

“Yeah, sure, Makoto. Whatever works for you, man.”

“You call me again, when you more one-love, upful, righteous positivity.” Makoto hung up.

STARLITZ CALLED THE PANSIYON IN LEFKOSA TO SEE if Viktor had survived the night. He had a long, fatally confusing phone encounter with a young hooker from Belarus whose parents had been jailed by the Lukashenka regime. This Belarus girl had one of the most interesting Russian accents Starlitz had ever heard, but she had never heard of ‘Viktor Bilibin,’ and she couldn’t find anyone who had. As for Khoklov, he no longer had a room in the Meridien. Khoklov wasn’t even in the hotel register. Khoklov had become a Turkish Cypriot nonperson.

The sense of impending doom was acute. Starlitz abandoned his office and sought sanctuary in the Meridien lobby bar. He ordered a double shot of port-finish Glenmorangie and bought two packs of red Dunhills. He patted his pockets. No matches.

“Here.” A female tourist in a baggy dashiki passed him a Cricket lighter.

“Thanks!” Starlitz lit up, exhaled gratefully, and stared at his benefactor. “Christ!”

She tucked a witchy mass of gray-blond hair behind the earpiece of her wire-rim glasses. “Have I changed that much, Leggy? You didn’t even reckanize me.”

“No, Vanna,” Starlitz lied immediately. “No, you look great.”

Vanna picked morosely at her damp paper napkin. “Yeah, what a bullshit artist.”

“When did you get into town?”

“Aw, just this morning. I’ve been in Budapest. Trying to get my head together, with some net dot friends from the ‘Faces’ list.… But you wouldn’t know about that.”

“Yeah, no, maybe,” Starlitz hedged, sipping his whiskey. Now the situation was falling into place. It was tumbling
onto him with bone-snapping force, pinning him to earth, like a great, boxed, avalanching closetful of aging
Ms
. and
Playboy
.

Starlitz knew instantly from the crushed, portentous look of Vanna that this latest development was about as bad a thing as he could imagine. He could already feel it, ruining everything he had worked for and cruelly derailing his life. But at least, knowing that it was Vanna, getting some working parameter on the wrecked and wretched story line, that was a major relief. The panic was behind him now. He would just have to deal with the consequences.

“They’re ‘cyberfeminists,’ ” Vanna continued.

“It’s been a little hard to keep up with developments,” Starlitz said stoutly. “Press of business and all.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure, man.” Vanna sucked down the frosty dregs of her brandy sour and rapped the bar with her plastic lighter. “Hey, you, Mister Turkey-guy! Gimme another one of those chick turista drinks! And put more sugar in it this time.”

The Turkish barman gave Vanna a skeptical frown. In his local version of reality, women didn’t order their own booze. Least of all jittery, baggy-eyed, makeup-free, West Coast hippie women who were sixty pounds overweight and wearing drawstring stretch pants. Starlitz quickly made the universal money-pinching gesture and tapped himself on the chest. The barman nodded reluctantly.

“So,” Starlitz said, passing cash and tapping ashes, “how’s life on the separatist commune?”

“That life’s all over. They busted us.”

“You’re kidding. With your White House connections? How the hell could that happen?”

“Aw, they set us up like a bowling pin. We were dealing Viagra point-and-click off the Website. Why we got out of RU-486 and into boner drugs, that I’ll never know. Those silly bitches in the central committee, it was all about return on investment all of a sudden.… I mean, once the Movement’s just about the money … It’s
over,
that’s all. It’s just all over.” Vanna’s slack face clouded behind her bifocals. She looked ready to cry.

“Aw, c’mon, Vanna,” Starlitz said consolingly, “even Clinton got set up in a fundie sex-bust. It’s kind of an honor, really.”