“I could provide remote support,” I said. “We’ll encrypt emails, I’ll send you the best stuff.”
She shook her head. “You can’t be our savior, Masha. We need to save ourselves. Look at them,” she said, and pointed.
It was the painters, the Colorful Revolutionaries, who took their inspiration from those nuts in Macedonia who’d gone around splashing all the public monuments and government buildings with brightly colored paint. Long after the “revolutionaries” had been chased away or arrested, the paint remained. It had built up a lot of hope (and made a ton of money for Chinese power-washer manufacturers). In Macedonia, “vandalism” was a misdemeanor and the worst they could do to you is give you a ticket for it. Slovstakia’s parliament hadn’t hesitated to make vandalism a felony, of course. They’d watched Macedonia just as closely as their citizens had.
Slovstakia’s painters had perfected the color wars, loading their slings with cheap latex balloons filled with different colors of long-lasting paint, swollen eggs they whirled in a blur over their heads before releasing them in flight, arcing toward their targets. It was like Jackson Pollock versus Goliath.
Like all the radical cells, they did their own thing, separate from Kriztina and her group. No one was sure where they’d show up or what they’d do when they got there. Litvinchuk had a fat file on known and suspected members, and I’d toyed with joining them when I got to Slovstakia, before deciding that they were too low-tech for me to work with. You couldn’t deny that they were effective: they’d been working their way along the top row of windows, egging each other on with feats of breathtaking long-distance accuracy, bull’s-eyeing each window in succession from left to right. The cops below them on the line, behind their shields and faceplates, flinched every time one of those bright balloons arced over their heads. The floodlights caught the colored mist that spread out from each bursting bladder, and I imagined that it was powder-coating the cops underneath in a rainbow of paint and glitter. Glitter was the pubic lice of the Colorful Revolutionaries, spreading inexorably through even the slightest glancing contact, impossible to be rid of.
The cops. I checked the time on my phone again. It had been sixteen minutes since I’d sent that email to Litvinchuk and there was no sign of the chaos that was supposed to ensue. Shit.
“I think we’ve got to find a place to sit down and plug in my laptop again,” I said, tilting my head at the cops.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
We looked around for a place to sit. There’d been benches in the square, two administrations ago. Then the first wave of protests hit, mild ones by day, that involved thousands of people sitting politely in the square on every single bench, eating ice cream. There was no law against eating ice cream, and you’re not loitering if you’re sitting in a designated sitting zone. The last act of the old prime minister—long since deposed after a no-confidence vote and a midnight flight in the presidential jet loaded with bales of paper euros, so much of it that they burned out six bill-counting machines before giving up and weighing it by the ton to estimate its value—had been to remove all the benches and replace them with waist-high “leaning benches” that tilted at a seventy-degree angle. That’ll teach those ice-cream-eating motherfuckers!
But there wasn’t anywhere to sit, so that naughty old Boris had the last laugh, I guess.
“Here,” Kriztina said, taking off her coat, leaving her in nothing but an oversized sweater that made her look even tinier and younger and more vulnerable. She folded the coat and set it down on a clean-ish patch of asphalt.
“You’re such a martyr.” I settled down onto it and dug in my bag for my phone. “And thank you.” Before I had my lid up, there was a commotion from the police line. A flying squad in Vader-chic riot gear had emerged from the parliament building with guns at the ready, and they now stood behind the line of rank-and-file cops, barking orders. “Holy shit.” I put my laptop away and Kriztina pulled me and her coat from the ground. Everyone in the crowd was holding up a phone to capture the commotion; the clever ones had the phones mounted backward on long, telescoping selfie sticks that towered over the crowd.
“I guess Litvinchuk got the email, huh?”
People were streaming past in all directions now, jostling us. The guns the new goons were pointing at their police colleagues were also pointed into the crowd. Any shots that missed (or pierced, I suppose) those cops would be headed straight at us. The crowd was sorting itself into a giant V shape with a clear space behind the police line, protesters crammed in on the side, selfie sticks and phones going like crazy.
We were also crammed in with the crowd, because Kriztina had all but lifted me off my feet and dragged me out of the potential line of fire.
It was a tense standoff. The cops were shouting at the goons, the goons were shouting at the cops, gun muzzles were out. One of the Colorful Revolutionaries stepped out into the empty V of space, a girl barely five feet tall, with that telling coltishness of early adolescence, and fitted a paint balloon to the pocket of her sling. She began to spin. The crowd held its breath, then someone shouted something that I semi-translated as “Don’t do it, you idiot,” in a voice that was half-hysterical twitter. The girl’s eyes were narrowed in concentration and the sling whirled around her head, its whistle cutting through the crowd noise, and she bared her teeth and grunted like a shot-putter as she let it fly, and it flew true, the crowd turning as one to watch it arc through the cold air and the harsh LED light to spatter, perfect dead center, on the ass of one of the riot cops. She pumped her fist and dove for the safety of the crowd as the cop spun with a yelp and instinctively reached for his besplattered ass—then brought his hands unbelieving to his eyes, the banana-yellow glitter paint sparkling on his Kevlar gloves. The goons behind him had, as one, aimed their guns at him and I swear I could see their fingers tightening on the triggers—but miraculously, none of them shot this dumb Boris fuck in the back and sent his lungs sailing over the square. When the paint-spattered cop went for his gun, his comrade had the presence of mind to slap it out of his hand, and it skated across the icy square toward the crowd, skittering and then gliding, revolving slowly.
There followed one of those don’t-know-whether-to-shit-or-go-blind silences as everyone—protesters, cops, elite goons, and let’s not forget the neo-Nazi skinheads—contemplated their next course of action.
The leader of Litvinchuk’s goons was faster than the rest of us. He barked an order and his boys all settled their muzzles back into an even distribution across the police lines, and the cops re-formed themselves back into an uneasy line, facing them. The chief goon barked out names—the names we’d provided—and pulled officers out of their line, one at a time, cuffed them, and led them away.
When the first one went, the crowd’s curiosity, already close to peak, blew through all its limits. But then as more and more were led away, that curiosity and the insistent buzz of people narrating the action into their phones reached a feverish intensity.
By the time it was done, half the cops on the line were gone. A few of the goons moved to fill in the empty spaces, standing shoulder to shoulder with the cops they’d just been pointing their guns at. The remaining cops were more freaked out than the crowd. I looked around for the neo-Nazis, easy enough to spot—skinhead uniforms, always clumped together, always glaring at anyone who glanced their way, always with cans of beer—and couldn’t spot them at first. Ah, there they were, way at the back, talking urgently among themselves, waving their hands, even shoving each other. They must have been in a fury: ready to rush the lines, keyed up for serious out-of-control violence, now trying to master all that psycho energy. Some were doubtless considering the short numbers on the police line and wondering if they could break through even without turncoats ready to help them with it; the others likely remembering the savage reputation of Litvinchuk’s private enforcers, the country’s most fearsome torturers and disappearers of political enemies, the only force whose pay was never delayed, let alone cut.