A Good Old-Fashioned Future (12 page)

Starlitz nodded. He’d seen the shortlist of potential candidates for a Russian offshore banking set-up. The Ålands offered the tastiest possibilities.

Aino sat up straighter. “The inhabitants are Swedish-speaking ethnics. In 1920, against their will and against a popular plebiscite, they were ceded to Finland as part of a negotiated settlement by the now-extinct League of Nations. In truth these oppressed people are neither Swedes nor Finns. They are Ålanders.”

“The islands’ national liberation will proceed along two fronts,” said Raf, deftly setting a coffeepot to boil. “The first is the Åland Island Liberation Front, which is, essentially, my operation. The second front is Aino’s people from the university, the Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells, who make it their cause to end the shameful injustice of Finnish imperialism. The outbreak of armed struggle and a terror campaign will provoke domestic crisis in Finland. The cheapest and easiest apparent solution will be to grant full autonomy to the Ålands. Since the islands are an easy day-trip from Petersburg, this will leave the Organizatsiya with a free hand for their banking operations.”

“You’re a busy guy, Raf.”

“I’ve been resting on my laurels long enough,” said Raf, carefully rinsing three spanking-new coffee mugs. “It’s a new Europe now. Many fantastic new opportunities.”

“Level with me. Do any of these Åland Island hicks really want independence? They seem to be doing okay just as they are.”

Raf, surprised at the question, smiled.

Aino frowned. “Much work remains to be done in the way of raising revolutionary consciousness in the Ålands. But we in the Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells will have the resources to do that political work. Victory will be ours, because the Finnish liberal-fascist state does not have the
capacity to restrain a captive nation against its will. Or if they
do
—” She smiled bitterly. “That will demonstrate the tenuousness of the current Finnish regime and its basic failure as a European state.”

“Who have we got on the ground in the Ålands who can speak their local weirdo version of Swedish? Just in case we need to, like, phone in a claim or something.”

“We have three people,” Raf said. “The new premier, the new foreign minister, and of course the new economics minister, who will be in charge of easing things for the Russian operations. They are the shadow cabinet of the Ålands Republic.”

“
Three
people?”

“Three people are plenty! There are only twenty-five thousand of them total. If the projections are right, the offshore bank will be clearing twenty-five million dollars in the first six months! Those islands are little rocks. It’s potatoes and fish and casinos for rich Germans. The locals aren’t players. The mob and their friends can buy them all.”

“They matter,” Aino said. “They matter to the Movement.”

“But of course.”

“The Ålands
deserve
their nation. If they don’t deserve their nation, then
we Finns
don’t deserve our nation. There are only five million Finns.”

“We always yield to political principle,” said Raf indulgently. He passed her a brimming mug. “Drink your coffee. You need to go to work.”

Aino glanced at her watch, surprised. “Oh. Yes.”

“Shall I cut the hash into gram bags? Or will you take the brick?”

She blinked. “You don’t have to cut it, Raffi. They can cut it at the bar.”

Raf opened one of the sports bags and passed her a fat brick of dope neatly wrapped in a Copenhagen newspaper.

“You work in a bar? That’s a good cover job,” Starlitz said. “What kind of hash is that?”

“Something very new in Europe,” Raf said. “It’s Azerbaijani hash.”

“Ex-Soviet hash isn’t really very good,” sniffed Aino. “They don’t know how to do it right.… I don’t like to sell hash. But if you sell people drugs, then they respect you. They won’t talk about you when cops come. I hate cops. Cops are fascist torturers. They should all be shot. Do you need the car, Raf?”

“Take the car,” Raf said.

Aino fetched her purse and left the safehouse.

“Interesting girl,” commented Starlitz, in the sudden empty silence. “Never heard of any Finn terror groups before. Germans, French, Irish, Basques, Croats, Italians. Never Finns, though.”

“They’re a bit behind the times in this corner of Europe. She’s one of the new breed. Very brave. Very determined. It’s a hard life for terrorist women.” Raf carefully sugared his coffee. “Women never get proper credit. Women kidnap ministers, women blow up trains—women do very well at the work. But no one calls them ‘armed revolutionaries.’ They’re always—what does the press say?—‘maladjusted female neurotics.’ Or ugly hardened lesbians with a father-figure complex. Or cute little innocents, seduced and brain-washed by the wrong sort of man.” He snorted.

“Why do you say that?” Starlitz said.

“I’m a man of my generation, you know.” Raf sipped his coffee. “Once, I wasn’t advanced in my feminist thinking. It was being close to Ulrike that raised my consciousness. Ulrike Meinhof. A wonderful girl. Gifted journalist. Smart. Eloquent. Very ruthless. Quite good-looking. But Baader and that other one—what was her name? They treated her so badly. Always yelling at her in the safehouse—calling her a gutless intellectual, spoilt child of the bourgeoisie and so forth. My God, aren’t we all spoilt
children of the bourgeoisie? If the bourgeoisie hadn’t made a botch of us, we wouldn’t need to kill them.”

A car pulled up outside. The engine died and doors slammed.

Starlitz walked to the front window, peeked through the blind.

“It’s the yuppies from next door,” he said. “Looks like they’re home early.”

“We should introduce ourselves,” Raf said. He began combing his hair.

“Uh-oh, scratch that,” Starlitz said. “That’s the guy who lives next door all right, but that’s not the woman. He’s got a different woman.”

“A girlfriend?” Raf said with interest.

“Well, it’s a much younger woman. In a wig, net hose, and red high heels.” The door in the next duplex opened and slammed. A stereo came on. It was playing a hot Cuban rhumba.

“This is a golden opportunity,” said Raf, shoving his coffee mug aside. “Let’s introduce ourselves now as his new neighbors. He’ll be very embarrassed. He’ll never look at us again. He’ll never question us. Also, he’ll keep his wife away from us.”

“That’s a good tactic,” Starlitz said.

“All right. Let me do the talking.” Raf went to the door.

“You still got that Makarov in the back of your belt, man.”

“Oh yes. Sorry.” Raf tossed the pistol onto the sleek Finnish couch.

Raf opened the front door. Then he back-stepped deftly back into the apartment and shut the door firmly. “There’s a white rental car on the street.”

“Yeah?”

“Two men inside it.”

“Yeah?”

“Someone just shot them.”

Starlitz hurried to the window. There were half a
dozen people clustered across the street. Two of them had just murdered Khoklov’s bodyguards, suddenly emptying silenced pistols through the closed glass of the windows. The street was not entirely deserted, but killing people with silenced pistols was a remarkably unobtrusive affair if done with brio and accuracy.

Four men began crossing the street. They wore jeans, jogging shoes, and, despite the heat, box-cut Giorgio Armani blazers. Two of them were carrying dainty little videocams. All of them were carrying guns.

“Zionists,” Raf announced. Briskly, but without haste, he retreated to his arsenal on the kitchen floor. He slung an AK over his shoulder, propped a second assault rifle within easy reach, then knelt around the corner of the kitchen wall, giving himself a clear line of fire at the front door.

Starlitz quickly weighed various possibilities. He decided to keep watching the window.

With swift and deadly purpose, the hit-team marched to the adjoining duplex. The door broke off its hinges as they kicked their way in. There were brief yelps of indignant surprise, and a quiet multiple stuttering. A burst of Uzi slugs pierced the adjoining wall and embedded themselves in the floor.

Raf rose to his feet, his plump face the picture of glee. He touched one finger to his lips.

Footsteps clomped rapidly up and down the stairs in the next apartment. Doors banged, drawers opened. A bedside telephone jangled as it was knocked from its table. In three minutes the hit-team was out the door.

Raf scurried to the window and knelt. He’d grabbed a small pocket Nikon from his sports bag. He clicked off a roll of snapshots as the hit squad retreated. “I’m so tempted to shoot them,” he said, hitching the sling of his assault rifle, “but this is better. This is very funny.”

“That was Mossad, right?”

“Yes. They thought I was the neighbor.”

“They must have had a description of you and the girl.
And they know you’re here in Finland, man. That’s not good news.”

“Let’s phone in a credit for their hit. The Helsinki police might catch them. That would be lovely. Where is that cellphone?”

“Look, we were extremely lucky just now. We’d better leave.”

“I’m always lucky. We have plenty of time.” Raf gazed at his arsenal and sighed. “I hate to abandon these guns, but we have no car to carry them. Let’s carry the guns next door, before we go! That should win us some nice press.”

Starlitz met with Khoklov at two
A.M
. The midnight sun had given up its doomed attempt to sink and was now rising again in refulgent splendor. The two of them were strolling the spectrally abandoned streets of Helsinki, not too far from Khoklov’s posh suite at the Arctia.

As European capitals went, Helsinki was a very young town. Most of it had been built since 1900, and quite a lot of that had been leveled by Russian bombers in the 1940s. Nevertheless the waterfront streets looked like stage sets for the Pied Piper of Hamelin, all copper-gabled roofs and leaded glass and quaint window turrets.

“I miss my boys,” Khoklov grumbled. “Why did they have to ice my boys? Stupid bastards.”

“Lot of Russian Jews in Israel now. Israel’s very hip to the Russian mafia scene. Maybe it was a message.”

“No. They’re just out of practice. They thought my boys were guarding Raf. They thought that poor fat Finn was Raf. Raf makes them nervous. He’s been on their hit-list since the Munich Olympics.”

“How’d they know Raf was here?”

“It’s those hackers at the bank. They’ve been talking too much. Three of our depositors are big Israeli arms dealers.” Khoklov was tired. He’d been up all night
explaining developments by phone to an anxious cabal of millionaire ex-Chekists in Petersburg.

“Since the word is out, we’ve got to move this into high gear, ace.”

“I know that only too well.” Khoklov opened a gunmetal pillbox and dry-swallowed a pink tab. “The Higher Circles in Organizatsiya—they love the idea of black electronic cash, but they’re old-fashioned and skeptical. They say they want quick results, and yet they give me trouble about financing.”

“I never expected those nomenklatura cats to come through for us,” Starlitz said. “They’re all ex-KGB bureaucrats, as slow as hell. If the Japanese shakedown works, we’ll have the capital all right. You say they want results? What kind of results exactly?”

“You’ve met our golden boy now,” said Khoklov. “What did you think of him? Be frank.”

Starlitz weighed his words. “I think we’re better off without him. We don’t need him for a gig like this. He’s over-qualified.”

“He’s good though, isn’t he? A real professional. And he’s always lucky. Lucky is better than good.”

“Look, Pulat Romanevich. We’ve known each other quite a while, so I’m going to level with you. This guy is not right for the job. This Ålands coup is a business thing, we’re trying to hack the structure of multinational cash-flows. It’s the Infobahn. It’s the nineties. It’s borderless and it’s happening. It’s a high-risk start-up, sure, but so what? All Infobahn stuff is like that. It’s global business, it’s okay. But this is not a global business guy you’ve got here. This guy is a fuckin’ golem. You used to arm him and pay him way back when. I’m sure he looked like some Che Guevara hippie poet rebel against capitalist society. But this guy is not an asset.”

“You think he’s crazy? Psychopathic? Is that it?”

“Look, those are just words. He’s not crazy. He’s what he is. He’s a jackal. He feeds on dead meat from bigger crooks and spooks, and sometimes he kills rabbits.
He thinks straight people are sheep. He’s got it in for consumer society. Enough to blow up our potential customers and laugh about it. The guy is a nihilist.”

Khoklov walked half a block in silence, shoulders hunched within his linen jacket. “You know something?” he said suddenly. “The world has gone completely crazy. I used to fly MiGs for the Soviet Union. I dropped a lot of bombs on Moslems, and I got medals. The pay was all right. I haven’t flown a jet in combat in eight years. But I loved that life. It suited me, it really did. I miss it every day.”

Starlitz said nothing.

“Now we call ourselves Russia. As if that could help us. We can’t feed ourselves. We can’t house ourselves. We can’t even exterminate a lousy bunch of fucking Chechnians. It’s just like with these fucking Finns! We owned them for eighty years. Then the Finns got smart with us. So we rolled in with tanks and the sons of bitches ran into their forests in the dark and the snow, and they kicked our ass! Even after we finally crushed them, and stole the best part of their country, they just came right back! Now it’s fifty years later, and the Russian Federation owes Finland a billion dollars. There are only five million Finns! My country owes every single Finn two hundred dollars each!”

“It’s that Marxist thing, ace.” They walked on in silence.

“We’re past the Marxist thing,” said Khoklov, warming to his theme as the pill took hold. “Now it’s different. This time Russia has a kind of craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the whole world. Massive, total, institutional corruption. Top to bottom. Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that will sell
anything:
the flesh of our women, the future of our children. Everything inside our museums and our churches. Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We’ll sell the soil and the forests and the Russian sky. We’ll sell our souls.”