Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

For a time, like Chip, Gitanas glimpsed salvation in the person of Julia Vrais: in her beauty, in her American path-of-least-resistance quest for pleasure. Then Julia ditched him on a Berlin-bound jet. Hers was the latest betrayal in a life that had come to seem a numbing parade of betrayals. He was screwed by the Soviets, screwed by the Lithuanian electorate, and screwed by Julia. Finally he was screwed by the IMF and World Bank, and he brought a forty-year load of bitterness to the joke of Lithuania Incorporated.

Hiring Chip to run the Free Market Party Company was the first good decision he’d made in a long time. Gitanas had gone to New York to find a divorce lawyer and possibly to hire a cheap American actor, somebody middle-aged and failing, whom he could install in Vilnius to reassure such callers and visitors as Lithuania Incorporated might attract. He could hardly believe that a man as young and talented as Chip was willing to work for him. He was only briefly dismayed that Chip had been sleeping with his wife. In Gitanas’s experience, everyone eventually betrayed him. He appreciated that Chip had accomplished his betrayal before they even met.

As for Chip, the inferiority he felt in Vilnius as a “pathetic American” who spoke neither Lithuanian nor Russian, and whose father hadn’t died of lung cancer at an early age, and whose grandparents hadn’t disappeared into Siberia, and who’d never been tortured for his ideals in an unheated military-prison cell, was offset by his competence as an employee and by the memory of certain extremely flattering contrasts that Julia used to draw between him and Gitanas. In pubs and clubs, where the two men often didn’t bother to deny that they were brothers, Chip had the sensation of being the more successful of the two.

“I was a pretty good deputy prime minister,” Gitanas said gloomily. “I’m not a very good criminal warlord.”

Warlord, indeed, was a somewhat glorified term for Gitanas’s line of work. He was exhibiting signs of failure with which Chip was all too familiar. He spent an hour worrying for every minute he spent doing. Investors around the globe were sending him gaudy sums that he deposited in his Crédit Suisse account every Friday afternoon, but he couldn’t decide whether to use the money “honestly” (i.e., to buy seats in Parliament for the Free Market Party Company) or to commit fraud unabashedly and pour his ill-gotten hard currency into even less legitimate businesses. For a while he sort of did both and sort of did neither. Finally his market research (which he conducted by quizzing drunken strangers in bars) persuaded him that, in the current economic climate, even a Bolshevik had a better chance of attracting votes than a party with “Free Market” in its name.

Abandoning any notion of staying legit, Gitanas hired bodyguards. Soon Victor Lichenkev asked his spies: Why is this has-been patriot Misevičius bothering with protection? Gitanas had been far safer as an undefended has-been patriot than he was as the commander of ten strapping Kalashnikov-toting youths. He was obliged to retain more bodyguards, and Chip, for fear of getting shot, stopped leaving the compound without an escort.

“You’re not in danger,” Gitanas assured him. “Lichenkev might want to kill me and take over the company for himself. But you’re the goose with the golden ovaries.”

The back of Chip’s neck nonetheless prickled with vulnerability when he went out in public. On the night of Thanksgiving in America he watched two of Lichenkev’s men elbow through the crowd at a sticky-floored club called Musmiryté and put six holes in the abdomen of a red-haired “wine and spirits importer.” That Lichenkev’s men had walked past Chip without harming him did go to prove Gitanas’s point. But the body of the “wine and spirits importer” looked every bit as soft, in comparison to bullets, as Chip had always feared a body was. Bad overloads of current flooded the dying man’s nerves. Violent convulsions, hidden stores of galvanic energy, immensely distressing electrochemical outcomes, had clearly lain latent in his wiring all his life.

Gitanas showed up at Musmiryté half an hour later. “My problem,” he mused, looking at the bloodstains, “is it’s easier for me to be shot than to shoot.”

“There you go again, running yourself down,” Chip said.

“I’m good at enduring pain, bad at inflicting it.”

“Seriously. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Kill or be killed. It’s not an easy concept.”

Gitanas had tried to be aggressive. As a criminal warlord, he did have one fine asset: the cash generated by the Free Market Party Company. After Lichenkev’s forces had surrounded the Ignalina reactor and coerced the sale of Lithuanian Electric, Gitanas sold his lucrative stake in Sucrosas, emptied the coffers of the Free Market Party Company, and bought a controlling interest in the principal cellular phone-service provider in Lithuania. The company, Transbaltic Wireless, was the only utility in his price range. He gave his bodyguards 1,000 domestic minutes per month, plus free voice mail and caller ID, and put them to work monitoring calls on Lichenkev’s many Transbaltic cell phones. When he learned that Lichenkev was about to dump his entire position in the National Tannery and Livestock Products and Byproducts Corporation, Gitanas was able to short his own shares. The move netted him a bundle but proved fatal in the long run. Lichenkev, tipped off to the monitoring of his phones, switched service to a more secure regional system operated out of Riga. Then he turned around and attacked Gitanas.

On the eve of the December 20 elections, an electrical substation “accident” selectively blacked out the switching center of Transbaltic Wireless and six of its transceiver towers. A mob of angry young Vilniusian cell phone users with shaved heads and goatees attempted to storm Transbaltic’s offices. Transbaltic’s management called for help on ordinary copper-wire lines; the “police” responding to the call joined the mob in looting the office and laying siege to its treasury until the arrival of three vanloads of “police” from the only precinct that Gitanas could afford to pay off. After a pitched battle, the first group of “police” retreated, and the remaining “police” dispersed the mob.

Through Friday night and into Saturday morning the company’s technical staff scrambled to repair the Brezhnev-era emergency generator that provided backup power to the switching center. The generator’s main transfer bus was badly corroded, and when the senior supervisor jiggled it to test its integrity he snapped it off at the base. Working to reattach it in the light of candles and flashlights, the supervisor then burned a hole in the primary induction coil with his welding torch, and given the political instabilities surrounding the election there were no other gas-powered AC generators to be had at any price in Vilnius (and certainly no three-phase generators of the kind for which the switching center had been retrofitted for no better reason than that an old Brezhnev-era three-phase generator was available for cheap), and meanwhile electrical-parts suppliers in Poland and Finland were reluctant, given the political instabilities, to ship anything into Lithuania without first receiving payment in hard Western currency, and so a country whose citizens, like so many of their Western counterparts, had simply disconnected their copper-wire telephones when cell phones became cheap and universal was plunged into a communications silence of nineteenth-century proportions.

On a very gloomy Sunday morning, Lichenkev and his slate of smugglers and hit men on the Cheap Power for the People Party ticket claimed 38 of the 141 seats in the Seimas. But the Lithuanian President, Audrius Vitkunas, a charismatic and paranoid arch-nationalist who hated Russia and the West with equal passion, refused to certify the election results.