Ascendancies (56 page)

“I hadn't heard that, man.”

“Of course they have one! They've had it for fifteen years. They bought the uranium from the South Africans during apartheid, when the Boers were desperate for money. And they built the trigger themselves. Singaporeans will take that kind of trouble. They are very industrious.”

“Makes sense to me.” Starlitz paused. “I'm still getting a general handle on your proposal. Give me the long-term vision, Raf. Let's say that you get what you want, and they somehow let you keep it. What then? Give me ten years down the road.”

“People always asked me that question,” Raf said, sipping. “You want one of these cloudberries? Little golden berries off the Finnish tundra, it surprises me how sweet they are.”

“No thanks, but don't let me stop you, man.”

“In the old days, people would ask me—mostly these were hostage negotiators, all the talking would get old and we'd all get rather philosophical sometimes.…” Raf screwed the cap precisely onto the liqueur bottle. “They'd say to me, ‘Raf, what about this Revolution of yours? What kind of world are you really trying to give us?' I've had a long time to consider that question.”

“And?”

“Did you ever hear the Jimi Hendrix rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner?'”

Starlitz blinked. “Are you kidding? That cut still moves major product off the back catalog.”

“Next time,
really listen
to that piece of music. Try to imagine a country where that music truly
was
the national anthem. Not weird, not far-out, not hip, not a parody, not a protest against some war, not for young Yankees stoned on some stupid farm in New York. Where music like that was social reality. That is how I want people to live. People are sheep, and they don't have the guts to live that way. But if I get a chance, I can make them do it.”

Starlitz liked speed launches. Piloting them was almost as much fun as driving. Raf s contacts had stolen one from Copenhagen and motored it across the Baltic at high speed. Since it was a classic dope-smuggler's vehicle, the Danish cops would assume it had been hijacked by dope people. They wouldn't be far wrong.

Starlitz examined the nautical map.

‘I shot a cop today,” Aino said.

Starlitz looked up. “Why do you say that?”

“I shot a cop dead. It was the constable in Mariehamm. I went into his little office. I told him someone stole the spare tire from my car. I took him around the back of his little office to see my car. I opened the trunk, and when he looked inside for the tire, I shot him. Three times. No, four times. He fell right into the trunk. So I threw him in the trunk and shut it. Then I drove away with him.”

Starlitz folded the nautical map very carefully. “Did you phone in a credit?”

“No. Raf says it's better if we disappear the cop. We'll say that he defected back to Finland with the secret police files. That will be a good propaganda coup.”

“You really iced this guy? Where's the body?”

“It's in this boat,” Aino said.

“Take the wheel,” said Starlitz. He left the cockpit and looked into the launch's fiberglass hold. There was a very dead man in uniform in it.

Starlitz turned to her. “Raf sent you to ice him all by yourself?”

“No,” said Aino proudly, “he sent Matti and Jorma with me, but I made them keep watch outside.” She paused. “People lie when they say it's hard to kill. Killing is very simple. You move your finger three times. Or four times. You imagine doing it, and then you plan it, and then you do it. Then it's done.”

“How do you plan to deal with the evidence here?”

“We wrap the body in chains that I bought in the hardware store. We drop him into the Baltic between here and the little old lady's island. Here, take the wheel.”

Starlitz went back to piloting. Aino hauled the dead cop out of the hold. The corpse outweighed her considerably, but she was strong and determined, and only occasionally squeamish. She hauled the heavy steel chains around the corpse with a series of methodical rattles, stopping every few moments to click them tight with cheap padlocks.

Starlitz watched this procedure while managing the wheel. “Was it Raf's idea to send along a corpse with my negotiations?”

Aino looked up gravely. “This is the only boat we have. I had to use this boat. We don't seize the ferries until later.”

“Raf likes to send a message.”

“This is
my
message. I killed this cop. I put him in this boat. He's a uniformed agent from the occupying power. He's a legitimate hard target.” Aino tossed back her braids, and sighed. “Take me seriously, Mister Starlitz. I'm a young woman, and I dress like a punk because I like to, and maybe I read too many books. But I mean what I say. I believe in my cause. I come from a small obscure country, and my group is a small obscure group. That doesn't matter, because we are committed. We truly are an armed revolutionary strike force. I'm going to overthrow the government here and take over this country. I killed an oppressor today. That is a duty of an armed revolutionary.”

“So you take the islands by force. Then what?”

“Then we'll be rid of these Åland ethnics. They'll be on their own. After that, we Finns can truly be Finns. We'll become a truly Finnish nation, on truly authentic Finnish principles.”

“Then what?”

“Then we move into the Finno-Ugric lands that the Russians stole from us! We can take back Karelia. And Komi. And Kanti-Mansiysk.” She looked at him and scowled. “You've never even heard of those places. Have you? They're sacred to us. They're in the Kalevala. But you, you've never even heard of them.…”

“What happens after that?”

She shrugged. “Is that my problem? I'll never see that dream fulfilled. I think the cops will kill me before then. What do you think?”

“I think these are gonna be kind of touchy book-contract negotiations.”

“Stop worrying,” Aino said. “You worry too much about trivial things.” She gave a last methodical wrap of the chain, and heaved the dead cop overboard. The corpse bobbed face-down in the wake of the boat, then slowly sank from sight.

Aino reached over the fiberglass gunwale and cleaned her hands in the racing seawater. “Just talk slowly to her,” she said. “The old lady writes in Swedish, did you know that? I found out all about her. That's her first language, Swedish. But they say her Finnish is very good. For an Ålander.”

Starlitz pulled up at the little wooden dock. The entire island, shored in weed-slimed dark granite, was about twenty acres. The little old lady lived here with her even older and frailer brother. They'd both been born on the island, and had originally lived with their parents, but the father had died in 1950 and the mother in 1968.

The only access to the island was by boat. There were no phones, no electricity, and no plumbing. The home was a two-storey stone mansion with a steep slate roof, a stone well, and a wooden outhouse. The eaves were carved and painted in yellow and red. There were some chickens and a couple of squat little island sheep. A skinny wooden derrick had a homemade lighthouse, with an oil lantern. A lot of seagulls around.

Starlitz yelled a loud ‘ahoy' from the dock, which seemed the most polite approach, but there was no answer from the house. So they trudged up across the rocks and turf, and found the mansion's door and knocked. No response.

Starlitz tried the salt-warped door. It was unlocked. The windows were open and a faint breeze was playing through the parlor. There were hundreds of shelved books in Finnish and Swedish, some fluttering papers, and quite a few cheerily demented oil paintings. Some quite handsome bronze statuary and some framed Finnish theater posters from the 1930s. A wind-up Victrola.

Starlitz opened the hall closet and looked at the rough weather gear—oilskins and boots. “You know something? This little old lady is as tall as a house. She's a goddamned Viking.” He left the parlor for the composition room. He found a wooden secretary and a fine velvet chair. Dictionaries, a Swedish encyclopedia. Some well-thumbed travel hooks and Nordic photography collections. “There's nothing in here,” he muttered.

“What are you looking for?” said Aino.

“I dunno exactly. Something to explain how this works.”

“Here's a note!” Aino called.

Starlitz went back into the parlor. He took the note, which had been written in copperplate longhand on lined Speffy the Nerkulen novelty notepaper.

“Dear Mister Starrins,” read the note. “Please pardon my not here being. I go to Helsingfors to testify. I go to Suomi Parliament as long needing for civic duty call. I regret I must miss you and hoping to speak with you about my many readers in Tokio another much more happier time. Sorry you must row so far and not have meet. Please help your self(s) to tea and biscuits all ready in kitchen. Goodbye!”

“She's gone to Helsinki,” Starlitz said.

“She never travels any more. I'm very surprised.” Aino frowned. “She could have saved us a lot of trouble if she had a cellphone.”

“Why would they want her in Helsinki?”

“Oh, they made her go there, I suppose. The local Ålanders. The local collaborationist power structure.”

“What good do they think she can do? She's not political.”

“That's true, but they are very proud of her here. After all, the children's clinic—The Flüüvin's Children's Clinic in Föglö?—that was hers.”

“Yeah?”

“Also the park in Sottunga. The Flüüvin Park in Brändö and the Grand Flüüvin Festival Playground. She built all of those. She never keeps the money. She gives the money away. Mostly to the Flüüvin Pediatric Disease Foundation.”

Starlitz pulled off his shades and wiped his forehead. “You wouldn't know exactly which pediatric diseases in particular have caught her fancy, right?”

“I never understood such behavior,” said Aino. “Really, it must be a mental illness. A childless spinster from the unjust social order…Denied any healthy sex life or outlets.… Living as a hermit with all her silly books and paintings all these years…No wonder she's gone mad.”

“Okay, we're going back,” Starlitz said. “I've had it.”

Raf and Starlitz were outside in the woods, slapping at the big slow-moving Scandinavian mosquitoes. “I thought we had an understanding,” Raf said, over a muffled chorus of bestial howls from the sauna. “I told you not to bring her back here.”

“She's your lieutenant, Raf. You straighten her out.”

“You could have been more tactful. Invent some little deception.”

“I didn't wanna get dumped off the boat.” Starlitz scratched his bitten neck. “I face a very serious kink in my negotiations, man. My target decamped big-time and I got a very limited market window. This is Japanese pop culture we're talking here. The Japanese run product cycles in hyperdrive. They can burn out a consumer vogue in four weeks flat. There's nobody saying that Froofies will move long-term product like Smurfs or Seuss.”

“I understand your financial difficulties with your Tokyo backers. If you can just be patient. We can take steps. We'll innovate. If necessary the Republic of the Ålands will nationalize literary production.”

“Man, the point of this thing is to sue the guys in Japan who are
already ripping her off
. We gotta have something on paper that looks strong enough to stand up and bark in the courts in The Hague. You gonna strong-arm people anywhere over vaporous crap like intellectual property, it's gotta look heavy-duty, or they don't back off.”

“Now you're frightening me,” Raf said. “You should take a little time in the sauna. Relax. They're running videos.”

“Videos right in all that goddamn steam, Raf?”

Raf nodded. “These are some very special videos.”

“I fuckin' hate videos, man.”

“They're Bosnian videos.”

“Really?”

“Not easy to obtain. They're from the camps.”

“You're showing those mercs atrocity videos?”

Raf spread his arms. “Welcome to twenty-first-century Europe!” he shouted at the empty shoreline. “Brand-new European apartheid regimes! Where gangs of war criminals abduct and systematically rape women from other ethnic groups. While the studio lights blaze and the minicams roll!”

“I'd heard those rumors,” Starlitz said slowly. “Pretty hard to believe them though.”

“You go inside that sauna, and you'll believe those videos. It's quite incredible, but it's all quite real. You might not enjoy them very much, but you need to see this video documentation. You must come to terms with these practices in order to understand modern political developments. It's video that is like raw meat.”

“Must be faked, man.”

Raf shook his head. “Europeans always say that. They always ignore the rumors. They always discover the atrocities when it is five years too late. Then they act very shocked and concerned. Those videos exist, my friend. I've got them. And I've got more than that. I've got some of the women.”

“You're kidding.”

“I bought the women. I bartered them for a pair of Stinger missiles. Fifteen Bosnian abductees. I had them shipped up here in sealed cargo trucks. I went to a lot of trouble.”

“White slavery, man?”

“I'm not particular about color. It wasn't me who enslaved them. I'm the man who saved their lives. There were many other girls who were more stubborn or, who knows, probably less pretty. They're all dead in a ditch with bullets in the backs of their heads. These women are survivors. I wish I had more than fifteen of them, but I'm only getting started.” Raf smiled. “Fifteen human souls! I rescued fifteen people! Do you know that's more people than I've ever personally killed?”

“What are you going to do with these women?”

“They'll entertain my loyal troops, first of all. I needed them for that, which gave me the idea. I admit this: it's very hard work in the sex-labor industry. But under my care, at least they won't be shot afterward.”