Zeitgeist (29 page)

Starlitz shrugged. “No more than anybody else.”

“Was I really magic? Is that the real truth?”

“The truth is that you’re an idol, Barbara.”

“He’s not happy,” Barbara said, lower lip trembling. “We have little idol problems, sometimes.”

“Look, you’re shacked up with a crazy musician, babe. Get over it.”

“I’m an idol. Is he going to break me?”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s going to break me, isn’t he? He always wants me to read those stupid books of his where perfect women die.”

“I guess Makoto could break you, but no, I’m pretty sure he won’t.”

“Then will he leave me? For some other goddess?” Barbara pursed her lips below the sunglasses.

“Yeah, he’ll leave you. When you bury him. Then he’ll be gone a long, long time.”

“But not for some other goddess.”

“No.”

“Well.” She seemed much happier now.

“Look, Barbara, stop fretting. The situation has advantages, okay? Makoto doesn’t see you getting old. He doesn’t see you changing at all. Because he never fuckin’ saw you in the first place. He can only see the magic.” Starlitz drew a breath. “People love idols because of the stars in front of their own eyes. Your boyfriend is your biggest fan. It’s a drag in some ways, but live with it.”

“I always have to live on a pedestal.”

“Yeah, sure, but just till he’s dead.”

Barbara scratched at her cheek.

“Think about that. You’re doing hula aerobics three times a week, while Mr. Ukelele Boy is in there chowing on Spam and huffing pakalolo unfiltereds. There’s only one end to that story line. The odds say you outlive Makoto by twenty, twenty-five years. Then you get everything, whatever’s left. No more idol. No more crowds. So then it’s just you. A little old lady. No sex appeal, no flashbulbs, no wolf whistles, no encores. When you’re an old woman with lots of money of your own, it’s a very different life. There’s not a man on earth that can tell you to do a damned thing—men don’t give you orders anymore, because men don’t even
notice
you. That’s when you come totally into your own. Whatever you are, whoever you are, under there.”

“That’s my future? They say you can tell the future.”

“Give me your hand, to make sure.” Hiding a yawn, Starlitz looked cursorily into the lines of her palm. “Oh, yeah. That’s it, all right.”

Barbara pulled her hand back and rubbed it uneasily. “I’ll have to think about that.”

“Yeah, I would advise that. Think pretty hard. It’s way hard to become yourself when you’ve been pleasing other people all your life.”

Barbara gazed at the garden. The conversation was taxing her heavily. “I hate these evil roses. They’re the future, but they’re not
my
future. I’m glad I killed them all.”

Starlitz nodded silently.

Barbara caught his eye. “If I give you some money, would you go away, and not come back here for a long, long time?”

ON THEIR ARRIVAL AT ATATURK INTERNATIONAL IN Istanbul, Ozbey had them met by a government limo. The leather upholstery had been smoothed sleek by the rumps of high-ranking Turkish bureaucrats. It reeked of chain smoking and generous three-raki lunches.

Zeta flung her G-7 backpack on the limo’s floor and slumped fitfully behind the nicotine-yellowed lace curtains.

Worn out from repeated jet flights, Starlitz stared murkily out his curtained window.

So it was back to Istanbul, finally. He’d never meant to spend so much time here. The place had a fatal attraction for him. It had been so much stronger than he was, so far beyond his ability to help. The city was neck deep, chin deep, nose deep, in the darkest sumps of history. Istanbul was the unspoken capital of many submerged empires: it had called itself Byzantium, Vizant, Novi Roma, Anthusa, Tsargrad, Constantinople.…

Stuck in dense Turkish traffic, their driver clicked on his radio and began to curse a soccer game. The variant districts of Galata, Pera, Beshiktas, and Ortakoy inched beyond the bumpers. It was the Moslem London, the Islamic New York, crammed neighborhoods of millions with as much regional variety as Bloomsbury or The Bronx.

Istanbul. Crumbling ivy-grown Byzantine aqueducts with Turkish
NO PARKING
signs. Smog-breathing streetside vendors with ring-shaped breadrolls on sticks.
Rubber-tired yellow bulldozers parked under the carved stone eaves of mosques.

Tourist-trap nightclubs featuring potbellied Ukrainian dancers. Vast sunshine-yellow billboards imploring bored Turkish housewives to learn English. Cash-card bank machines in prefab kiosks, built to mimic minarets. Pudding shops. Chestnut trees. Spotted wild dogs of premedieval lineage on their timeless garbage patrol.

Istanbul had more vitality than Sofia, or Belgrade, or Baghdad. Despite its best efforts, the twentieth century had not been able to beat the place down. Istanbul had lost its capitalship, but Istanbul had always walked on its own sore feet. It had not been crushed, conquered, and carpet bombed, it had never been forced to exist at the sufferance of others.

This had everything to do with the scary omnipresence of Turkey’s own native version of the Twentieth Century Personified. He was a bizarre, anomalous entity self-named Kemal Atatürk. He was a jackbooted, pistol-packing generalissimo. He had founded the Turkish Republic, kicked out the pashas, shot the Greeks dead in heaps on the battlefield, given Turkey a new name, a new alphabet, new constitution, a new flag. He was a Moslem Mussolini who made the local trains run, but somehow, miraculously, refused to debase himself with fascist crap.

Therefore, in a lethal century thick with the rust of tinpot personality cults—Nasser, Ceausescu, Díaz, Pol Pot, about a hundred and five others—Atatürk was the lone psychic survivor. Atatürk was the only one of the twentieth century’s strutting throng of self-appointed Saviors of the Nation who had no reason at all to flinch at Y2K. The grateful Turks would not rename his streets, bulldoze his airport, topple his ten thousand bronze busts and his macho equestrian statues. Atatürk’s steely glare would scan the dark recesses of the nation’s psychic landscape for decades to come. Atatürk simply wasn’t over yet, not by a long chalk.

At length the limo arrived at a glorious rose-colored
palace, perched like a jewel on the Asian coast of the Bosphorus.

This traditional summer retreat, locally known as a
yali
, had been built by a nineteenth-century Ottoman vizier. Atatürk had been no fan of decadent royal fripperies, so Turkey’s twentieth century had been rather unkind to this little seaside palace. Marauding Greek soldiers had looted it after World War I. In the 1930s Kim Philby had roomed upstairs. In the forties it had been a party headquarters for a sinister Turkish-German friendship bund. Through the fifties and sixties it had been a gloomy hostel for paranoid Soviet commercial travelers. In the seventies and eighties the imperial relic seemed finally and fatally outdated. Its elegant cantilevered porches had sagged like a dowager’s chin. The barge dock had rotted out. The roof, swarming with bats, had shed a generous scattering of its handsome curvilinear tiles.

However, Ozbey’s Uncle the Minister had decided that the ever-expanding business affairs of Turkish Intelligence required a silent safe house that could handle high-speed boats. The Black Sea of the 1990s was the Black Market Sea, washing the maphiya-ridden shores of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia. Not a single one of these several nations had any idea how an honest government functioned. Their populations had scarcely a shred of respect for a customs agent, a tax man, a narc, or a gun-control officer.

Buoyed by this fabulous newfound opportunity, the withering Ottoman yali suddenly blossomed anew. A fantastic wealth of narco-spook dope and arms wealth had boated deftly through it. As its secret masters prospered and grew bold, so did the spry little palace. It had sprung back to flourishing life, glowing in the nouveau-riche light of a fin de siècle sunset, its sturdy walls freshly stuccoed in the dusky, traditional “Ottoman Rose.” Ornate iron railings, crowned with security videocams, surrounded the palace grounds. Uniformed Turkish paratroopers, crisply attired in white helmets, white chin straps, white dress gloves, flanked its electrified gates.

The gates opened and shut around the passing limousine with an automatic clang.

Starlitz and Zeta clambered out, hefted their bags, and worked their way past the gleaming facades of a vintage Aston Martin, a monstrous armored Mercedes, and a fire-engine-red little sports car.

Starlitz and Zeta trudged wearily through twin inlaid doors into a palatial reception room of nigh-hallucinogenic elegance. The walls were towering spans of dizzying arabesque wallpaper, all poppy-red and gilt. Red velvet sofas. Blue silk divans. Octagonal coffee tables of tortoiseshell and faience. A secretary toiled over a vast rosewood escritoire, with inlaid mandalas of glimmering mother-of-pearl.

The secretary discreetly ushered the two of them into a side alcove, a bay-windowed nook with slender columns and carved balustrades, gilt mirrors, and a tiled ceramic ceiling as rich as marzipan. He supplied them with a silver Turkish coffee service, with dainty cups and heaps of sweetmeats.

To his muted astonishment Starlitz suddenly recognized their attendant as Drey, Ozbey’s favorite street thug. Drey was a strapping peasant kid from some one-mule burg in upper Anatolia, a sharecropper with big scarred mitts best suited to a pair of pliers or a skinning knife. Yet here was Drey, all kitted out to the nines in a tailored Italian suit, his jowls shaved, his teeth capped, and his hair oiled, just like a parliamentary attaché. Strangest of all, Drey seemed perfectly cozy about all this, as if putting casino owners into cement was the straight-and-narrow ladder to a cushy sinecure as an aristo flunky.

Drey silently accepted Starlitz’s business card and vanished down a carpeted hall. Starlitz found himself distinctly embarrassed. The card’s long stay on his ass in his wallet hadn’t done the typography much good.

Hunching miserably on the sofa, Starlitz slurped the coffee. It did not revive him, but on top of sleeplessness and jet lag it turned his head sideways. That rich taste of
cardamom, Cairo style. This was truly excellent coffee. It was much better coffee than he deserved.

Time crawled past them as they awaited any word from the great man. Zeta was in a state of abject collapse. Her nose was running. Her unbrushed hair was clumped and filthy. She fitfully knocked the heel of her soaping shoe against the meticulously carved and polished rosewood leg of her settee.

Starlitz’s skin itched fiercely. His morale was crumbling utterly. He knew it would be fatal to kick up any kind of fuss. They were back on Turkish time. Rising from the couch with heroic effort, he convinced Drey to bring Zeta an orange Fanta. Zeta rapidly consumed her pop bottle, with a glug, a belch, and a final slurp, then dropped the sticky empty on the Trebizond hand-dyed carpet. Paralyzed with soul-devouring preteen boredom, she collapsed in a boneless heap. She was a dead ringer for an adolescent savage, purchased from the wilds of the Caucasus and dragged before an indifferent Sultan.

A levered silver handle turned on an inlaid door. A superstar came out, with a billionaire in hot pursuit.

Zeta sat up alertly. “It’s her!” she blurted.

Gonca Utz wore drop earrings, bombe glacée upswept hair, and a peachy Alexander McQueen ballgown of taffeta with chain mail. The gentleman in pursuit was a sturdy, suntanned fellow with rose-colored aviator glasses, a linen banker’s suit, and a Windsor-knotted industrialist’s tie.

“You,” said the billionaire, beckoning to Starlitz. “Young man.”

“Yes?” said Starlitz, stunned to be called “young.”

“Do you speak Turkish or French?”

Zeta volunteered eagerly. “Hey, I know some French! I took home-school classes!”

“Hello, Gonca,” said Starlitz, half rising.

Gonca Utz studied him with Olympian pity.

“You
know
Miss Utz?” said the man with incredulity.

“We met. Some time ago.”

“And are you in television?”

“Pop music. I used to run a band.…”

“Aha,” said the billionaire, nodding in crisp relief. “Very well, tell Miss Utz—I have a jet waiting. She must fly with me to São Paolo. Tonight.”

With much backtracking, fractured grammar, and hand waving, Zeta managed to convey this message. Gonca put her tapered hand to her lips and emitted a musical laugh.

“She is wasting her time in that Turkish game show,” the Brazilian insisted tautly. “In Brazil we are
very big
in global television. Sponsored by soaps. We are international. Number one domestic program in Moscow. Number two in Taipei. Brazilian soaps are huge in Beirut and Cairo. Tell that to Miss Utz. Make sure she understands.”

Zeta gamely began another translation effort, but Gonca turned her glamorous back and fled into the palace gardens. The media mogul fled in pursuit, arms outstretched like a kiln-fired lover on a Keatsian urn. After a moment Zeta and Starlitz heard Gonca fire up her sports car with a Jaguar snarl. The stucco walls near their head emitted a machine-gun rattle as the car’s sturdy tires shot gravel.