FELIX: First
Citizen
When the First
Citizen has a bad night’s sleep, he likes to share.
You have been
recalled to the capital on urgent business—certain
currency-triangulation transactions require your personal biometric
signature, as one of the trustees of the national bank—and so it is
no major surprise when your morning starts with the plaintive
tweedle of the satphone. It sits on one of the fake Louis Quatorze
bedside tables in your hotel suite. You roll over, dislodging the
blonde Ukrainian girl from her death grip on the bolster (Why is
she still here? Doesn’t she have a bed of her own to go to?), and
pick up the handset.
“Colonel Datka, sir?
This is Eagle’s Nest.”
“Yes, yes,” you say
irritably, trying to focus on the illuminated dial of the alarm
clock. It’s four thirty, but when the Eagle’s Nest calls, it is
rash to hang up. “What is it?”
“His Excellency is
asking for you. Are you presentable? We have a car en
route.”
Shit, you think. Is Bhaskar
all right? You recognize the voice at the other end of the
line: It’s one of the First Citizen’s regular bodyguards, Dmitry
something, an ethnic Russian. (Minor reassurance: A stranger’s
voice would be worrying.) “I will be ready in five minutes,” you
say, and stifle a fear-threaded yawn. “Is there anything I should
be prepared for?”
“I don’t think so.”
Dmitry sounds uncertain. “He had a very disturbed night. The usual,
is all.”
“I’ll be ready,” you
reassure the man, and hang up. The brunette has noticed your usual
morning stiffening and is rubbing her lips against your manhood,
but you have other needs: You shove her face away and clamber
across her, pad past the empty champagne bucket towards the
en suite bathroom. The solid silver
urinal in the shape of a gaping, open-mouthed cherub swallows your
steaming piss-stream. “Make yourselves useful and find me some
clean underwear,” you grunt at the girls. “I have an appointment
with the First Citizen.”
“Yes, Colonel,” they
echo, with the precisely correct degree of respect tinged with awe.
They’re almost annoyingly well-trained. Say anything you like about
the plumbing: The Erkindik Hotel front desk supplies the best
whores in Bishkek, if not the whole of Kyrgyzstan.
Ten minutes later,
you’re presentable, in the uniform of a colonel in the Army
Intelligence Directorate, gold braid and red shoulder tabs and
three rows of brightly polished medals—no less than is your due—as
you head downstairs to the hotel lobby. (Bhaskar offered to promote
you to lieutenant general a couple of times, but only halfway down
the vodka bottle: Tact—or prudence—has kept you from reminding him
of this when he’s sober. In any case, chief of military overseas
intelligence is a colonel’s position in these half-assed times: You
don’t want to give General Medvedev cause to think you’re making a
play for his job.)
Two black-suited
fellows from the presidential security detachment are waiting for
you in the lobby. Four more stand on the sidewalk by the
beetle-shiny armoured Mercedes. They see you safely on board, and
seconds later you’re slamming through the deserted predawn
boulevards of the capital in the middle of a convoy of armed
pick-up trucks, blue lights flickering off the concrete frontages
to either side, your armed guards scanning for threats with
gunsight eyes.
The American has
weaselled his way into your entourage again. (Let him have his
illusory privilege of access: It’s so much easier to keep an eye on
him when he thinks he’s keeping an eye
on you.) He’s sitting in the middle
jump-seat opposite, clutching his pad in both hands like a
determined chipmunk who refuses to give up his nut. “What is it
this time?” you ask, staring pointedly at him.
“It’s the exchange
rate.” Blue fireflies flicker and gleam inside his rimless glasses.
“All it takes is a two-point fluctuation, and we lose a hundred
million on the exchanges.” He doesn’t smile. How long is it since
you could always tell an American by their smile? Good dentistry is
expensive: Flashing bright teeth in these straitened times is like
wearing a jacket that says MUG ME. “Can you talk him out of
it?”
You suppress a sigh.
“You seem to think Bhaskar is a tame bullock, to be herded this way
and that. He isn’t, and if you persist in this mode of thinking, he
will give you a nasty surprise.”
The American’s lips
curl. “Who’s running this, you or the Operation?” he asks. “Without
our collateral, you’d be—”
You smile without
showing your teeth. He stops chittering, gratifyingly fast.
Chipmunk-American has seen a pit viper. “We are duly grateful to
our investors. Nevertheless, you will
refrain from discussing the First Citizen in language more
appropriate to cattle. Without his continuing patronage, your
operation is nothing. We are not
stupid, Mr. White. If you didn’t need our special expertise, you
wouldn’t be engaged in this joint venture with, ah, those ‘crazy
Kyrgyz.’”
It’s hard to tell if
Mr. White blanches in the strobing glow of the street-lamps and the
blue LEDs of the lead escort, but your choice of words echoes his
own language. Stupid little geek probably imagines you’ve cracked
the encryption on his secure VoIP link, forgetting who owns all the
bandwidth in and out of both countries—both Kyrgyzstan and the
recession-hit sock puppet in the East that he’s using for his
little logistics operation. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Leave Bhaskar to
me,” you reassure him. “And leave the currency-stabilization talks
alone. Your concerns are noted, and I agree—it would be absolutely
deplorable to lose a hundred million euros of your money through
inattention. Nevertheless, attempting to micromanage the First
Citizen would be unwise. Trust me on this: I’ve known him for more
than forty years.” Since you were both in the Young Pioneers
together, back in the dog days of the Soviet Union.
You consider saying
more to the creep, promising a little something to sweeten the deal
and keep suckering him in, but at that point the convoy slows, and
the car turns sharply, nosing over a recessed barrier and down a
steep ramp into an underground security check-point and parking
garage. It’s under the back of the New Wing, across the street from
the White House—Bhaskar’s office and bachelor pad, a hideous lump
of white marble that looks like a tax office fucking an airport
terminal.
You leave the
Operation’s representative sitting in the limo as the guards salute
and wave you forward across the crimson carpet and into the
elevator with the best Korean terahertz radar and explosive
sniffers hidden in its walnut-veneered walls. Then it’s into the
corridor under the road, and another elevator that whisks you
upstairs—then down another corridor that serves as a security
firebreak for the guards on Bhaskar’s private quarters to check you
out, and finally another elevator. Then the doors slide open, and
you’re in Xanadu.
Xanadu is three
stories high, ten metres on a side, and occupies about an eighth of
the presidential palace’s floor-plan. It’s mounted on
shock-absorbers driven into bed-rock and hermetically sealed from
the rest of the White House by steel plates embedded in the walls:
an insulated bubble of purest lunacy, the personal quarters of the
First Citizen of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. Whoever designed it
was clearly channelling Samuel Coleridge on dodgy pharmaceuticals
by way of Norman Foster rather than the ghost of Kublai Khan, but
beggars—and First Citizens—can’t be choosers: It came to light
after you’d finished kicking that bum Adskhan into exile in Prague.
Personally, if it had been you, you’d have demolished the thing
rather than sleep in it, but after the second assassination
attempt, Bhaskar got the message and retreated inside his
predecessor’s hermetically sealed pleasure dome.
You find him sitting
in the sunken circular seat with the fish-tank floor and pink
leather cushions, wearing one of those Japanese dressinggown things
and looking morose. There are bags under his eyes, and he has
neglected to shave. His big, bony feet splay across the glass,
footprints for the rainbow carp to gape and mouth at from beneath.
“Is it morning?” he asks hopefully.
“It will be, soon.”
You carefully descend the steps—you’ve never trusted that glass
floor not to dump you in the water—and embrace, cheek to cheek.
“Are you well, brother? What’s troubling you?”
“I can’t sleep.” The
First Citizen—you remember playing “tag” in the woods out behind
the apartment block you both lived in—looks despondent. “The pills
aren’t helping. I feel like I’m going mad at times, let me tell
you. It’s this artificial light: I never see the sun these days.
Bad dreams, whenever I manage to get to sleep.” He rubs his index
finger alongside his crooked, slightly splayed nose.
“We should get you a
woman—” You stop when you see the look in his eyes. He hasn’t been
the same since Yelena died. Some men need all the women they can
get, but for others, one is all they want for a lifetime. “Or a
bottle of vodka? And some dirty videos. When did we last kick back
with a good movie?”
Now his shoulders
relax. “I’m supposed to tutor a meeting of the All-Republic
Commission on Finance this afternoon,” he says quietly. “Most of
those fucking peasants wouldn’t know a credit default swap if it
bit them on the bell-end. And listen, they aren’t paying me to
teach macroeconomics at the state academy anymore. Those bastards,
if they were my students, they’d be heading for a ‘fail.’ All they
can think of is lining their own pockets. What the fuck do they
care about the future?”
“The committee will
still be there tomorrow, and the day after,” you point out. “Send a
reliable deputy . . .” Now you
understand the expression. “What is it?”
“What indeed?” He
raises an eyebrow. “It’s the future. I’ve been thinking about it a
lot lately.”
“What?”
“Listen.” The First
Citizen glances away. “Suppose I ordered you to arrest the
American, the investment agent. No reason given, just shut his
little crime syndicate down right now
and bugger the big picture. Would you do it?”
“For you, boss? Of
course, in a split instant.” You shrug. “Of course, it would make a
real mess,” you add, conspiratorially: Subtext, you’d completely fuck over our past two years’
work.
“Right, right.”
Bhaskar limply punches the open palm of his left hand, winces
slightly from the carpal tunnel syndrome that’s plagued him for
decades. “You’d do it, but first you make sure I am fully informed
as to the consequences.” (Little does he truly appreciate the real
risks involved: It’s your job to protect your unworldly genius of a
childhood friend from the real-world consequences of such a whim.
To ensure that when it’s time for you to bring the hammer down and
Bhaskar to fix the deficit, there are no overlooked survivors with
enough money to pay for assassins.) “I’m not asking you to do that.
But the point is, at least I know where you stand. You’re not
afraid to tell me. But those fuckers on the all-state council? That
rat-bag Kurmanbek smiles like a vulture and makes nicey-nicey
noises, but do you think he’d lend me a horse if my pony was
lamed—”
Kurmanbek is the
vice-president—or rather, the ethnic Uzbek counterweight in the
ruling coalition Bhaskar presides over: in other words, Nuisance
Central. And, of course, Bhaskar’s right: If he asked Kurmanbek the
time, the answer would be whatever was most convenient for the
veep. “Is the committee’s immediate agenda critical?” you ask.
“Because if not—why not send Kurmanbek
to deputize? I’ll have someone listen in”—you’re talking about
bugging a state committee—“and compare the minutes to what actually
gets said. Worst case, you skip class. Best case, Kurmanbek hands
you some live ammunition. But either way, you need a couple of days
off, boss. Kick back with a couple of bottles and some decadent
Iranian musicals. Maybe a game—when did you last go on an epic
quest?”
The First Citizen
brightens. “You’re right, Felix. I should skip school more often!”
You nod, encouraging.
It’s got to be a
horrible life, trapped here in a hermetically sealed bubble inside
a presidential palace, unable to go out in daylight without a
platoon of soldiers with fixed bayonets on all sides, children
grown up and wife dead of a stroke these past three years. Not to
mention that fucking annoying Georgian extradition warrant floating
around Interpol like an unexploded bomb—you know Bhaskar didn’t order the guards to fire on
that crowd; it was a horrible fuck-up by an idiot second
lieutenant—but the upshot is he’s stuck here in the middle of
Bishkek, not even able to go to the casinos in St. Petersburg for
an evening at the roulette table. (Or whatever it is that he
enjoys: Knowing Bhaskar, given the choice he’d probably disguise
himself as a professor, sneak into the university campus, and teach
a seminar on the history of monetarism. If all the Republic’s
previous presidents’ vices were as recondite as his, Moscow would be coming to you for loans.)
You’ve had a ringside
seat, seen what it’s doing to your childhood friend, watched him
reduced to fishing for assurances that he’s still loved, shuffling
around his carpeted pleasure-prison in the dark. If any smiling
bastard tried to convince you to front a coup, you’d shoot him
yourself, you think, just to stay out of the presidential padded
cell.
Then the First
Citizen puts a friendly arm around your shoulder and drops you in
it head first:
“But tell me now, how
is the Przewalsk business coming along? I’ve been fielding
questions from the EU ambassador’s office, but they’re becoming
more insistent, and that whining louse Borisovitch in State is
starting to give me back-chat . . .”