Potboiler

Dragomir Zhulk, the prime minister of West Zlabia, was dead. He had been killed by a sniper’s bullet while walking to work. While most security analysts presumed that his death was retaliation for the attempted assassination of Kliment Thithyich, others believed that the killers belonged to a splinter group within Zhulk’s own party. The splinter group itself had released a statement blaming the Americans. The secretary of state refused to dignify this accusation with a response, reiterating instead his country’s support for East Zlabia (“our longtime and historical ally”) and cautioning that the use of force by either side could be considered cause for intervention. The Russians had released a statement denouncing “these acts of terroristic aggression.” The Swedes had convened a fact-finding committee. The Chinese had taken advantage of the momentary distraction to execute a jailed dissident. A prominent French intellectual had written that the situation “inarguably supplied a manifest example of the shortcomings of reactionary identity politics as applied to the realpolitik of statecraft during a post-structural epoch.” It was front-page news.

Pfefferkorn felt frayed. He was having a hard time keeping track of all the players. Worst of all—or best, he couldn’t decide—nobody had discerned the truth, which was that Dragomir Zhulk had been killed by a thriller that had just that morning hit number one on the best-seller list.

“Morning,” his media escort said. “Coffee?”

Pfefferkorn gratefully accepted the proffered cup and climbed into the waiting car.

An hour later he was sitting in the first-class lounge with the obituaries spread out before him, staring at the grainy image of the man he had murdered. Dragomir Ilyiukh Zhulk was wiry and bald, with small black eyes set behind efficient-looking steel-rimmed glasses. An engineer by training, he had studied in Moscow, returning to his homeland to help build West Zlabia’s nuclear power plant, for many years the world’s smallest working reactor, until an accident forced it to close. He had climbed the Party ladder, becoming first minister of atomic research, then minister of science, then deputy prime minister, and finally prime minister, a title he had held for eleven years. He was widely regarded as an unrepentant ideologue, a man for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall had proven only that the Russians were not fit to inherit the Marxist-Leninist mantle, and whose greatest vice, if it could be called that, was a passion for Zlabian poetry. He lived monkishly, shunning the large security force favored by his East Zlabian counterpart, a decision that had proven costly. His first marriage, to a schoolteacher, had ended with her death. Five years ago he had remarried, this time to his housekeeper. He left no children.

The flight to Los Angeles was called. Pfefferkorn walked to the jetway, discarding the paper in the trash.

52.

His Los Angeles reading was on the small side—a blessing in disguise, as Pfefferkorn wanted to get it over with as fast as humanly possible. Afterward, his media escort drove him to the restaurant Carlotta had picked out. He went straight to the bar to order a stiff drink. The television was tuned to images from the Zlabian front. Troops marched. Mini-tanks rolled. A commentator in a corner box was explaining that no fence separated East and West Zlabia, only an eight-inch-high concrete median strip running down the middle of Gyeznyuiy Boulevard. “You have to remember,” he said eagerly, “this is a conflict that has been raging in one form or another for four-hundred-plus years. Ethnically speaking, they’re one people.” The byline identified him as G. Stanley Hurwitz, Ph.D., author of A Brief History of the Zlabian Conflict. He appeared exhilarated by the carnage, as though he had been waiting all his life for his moment to shine. The anchor kept trying to cut him off but he went right on talking, citing lengthy passages of some little-known Zlabian poem that was apparently the source of all the fighting. Pfefferkorn asked the bartender to change the channel. The bartender found a baseball game. At the end of the inning, Pfefferkorn checked his watch. Even for Carlotta, thirty minutes was unusually late. He draped his jacket over the bar stool and stepped outside. Her home phone rang and rang. Her cell phone went straight to voicemail. He returned to the bar and asked for a third drink. He nursed it as long as he could bear before trying Carlotta again. There was still no answer. By this time he had been waiting for more than an hour. He paid his tab, apologized to the maître d’, and asked him to call a cab.

53.