SCENE 6
“Loose Lips Sink the Ships”

Explains Maria Silverrtova, looking all Russian and hot and shit. She’s just sat with Sebastian at the bar or the tavern for about two hours, listening, pretending her English is only rudimentary. He tells her more than he should.

“Rudely almost arbitrarily, we have introduced Sebastian Adonaev without presenting the Z.O.B. in greater detail. It is the clandestine organization of closet communists and mostly ambulance workers. You can’t be a communist in America, you’re done something wrong to even talk about it. Also of West Indian black market entrepreneurs. A fertile breeding ground for anarchist bomb makers, Russian petty criminals, Irish terrorists, reformed and active sex workers, strippers, vagabond utopian theorists and the secret forces of the great unwashed. A brotherhood and sisterhood that binds many of our friends together into a pact of lawless, perhaps degenerative mutual aid. Masquerading at times in the disguises of workers’ rights, human rights and maybe, maybe sometimes direct democracy the Z.O.B. spawns acronyms as if Kurdish trained to do so. This outfit is known to be persistent and hard to entrap.”

The secret police and intelligence circles focused initially on its bombing campaigns which extend back to 1999. First, using non-lethal white phosphorous smoke ordinances directed against slave labor textile depots. Later early during the Afghan & Iraq war years between 2003-2008, improvised explosive devices in its strategic bombing campaign against brothels and sex trading. Finally using Irish acquired military grade explosives against the cartels bringing cocaine and heroin into the City. The Z.O.B. almost never civilians. Never killed any cops, dirty or straight. Everyone also knew they had infiltrated Corrections and the New York City Police Department which is why the FBI Joint Terrorism task force got involved in 2005.

Steps were taken to suppress its underground newspaper distributed out the backs of ambulances to all the hidden places it went out to. The secret police tried to eliminate the flow of instructional pamphlets and curb the growing number of foreign expeditions its members trained their cadre on mostly in Latin and Central America. But the organization is dynamic, and it never let its members stay in jail very long, though several were martyred over the decade called the War Years; 2001 to 2011. This club and the clusters spun out of it is often called the Banshee Association. That name either came from the FDNY EMTs and paramedics who founded a branch called that or it came from the police. Since they never killed cops, never killed civilians and only blew up things that didn’t contain people, well the local police many admired it. Since everyone knew that anyone could be in it; a ghost shirt operation; hitting things that you couldn’t hit in you were in the system.

The original core of the underground according to the FBI was communists and anarchists, mostly from upper Middle-Class families. It absorbed several large student groups in 2004 who when they graduated infiltrated high and low. They suspected a foreign funding or training connection, but they never verified one. Then in 2009, the bombings slowed down, and the international deployments began. But by then the underground was too decentralized and too deep under the skin of the country to crack.

But these three letters; Z, O, and B better indicate the club’s inner most circle, and its place in the international freedom movement. Its linkage to the rest of the world on fire down the mountain.

“It’s a human rights version of the ‘Westies,’ that’s all I can tell you for now,” says Sebastian when asked. None of the other eight officers in the cadre cared to know for it was not just mere ideas but lived experiences that brought anyone into its ranks.

Taking a revolutionary between your legs does not induce belief via osmosis, or even diffusion.
On the contrary, nothing could make one quite so utterly antagonistic to the ideas of Marxist-Leninism quite like loving or fucking for any prolonged period a determined revolutionist. For both male and female revolutionaries are insane, highly demanding people. They must be as they have set out to make impossible things work as if, possible. And many are also demented by that failure and by protracted murder disguised as ideas.

“The rhetoric has always been ridiculous and dynamic,” once explained Trickovitch, “people began joining when we threw good parties then began punctuating those parties by invading beleaguered countries and executing pimps, bankers and other enemies of the working class.”
“We never kill anyone who doesn’t deserve to die,” Sebastian liked to say, “Just like in EMS.”
“What’s the Westies again,” people sometimes ask. Quite a lot of people have passed through the front groups and splinter groups, the business fronts and the house parties. The bedrooms solidify the rank and file as well, that is almost always a thing. There are always nine at the very core, almost always strangers. The Politburo, the Shura Council, and the Executive Committee all act on the policy created by this hidden leadership. Call it whatever since they always change the name. The FBI thinks it’s called the Committee for Public Safety, but that is further disinformation. The people who make the decisions about surviving the years until the ground war. In actually constitutional terms; the Steering Committee.

“The Westies were a small but ultra-violent, hyper efficient Irish gang from the 1980’s,” he often adds then distracts with some other story.

“What’s that stand for then, the Z.O.B.?” people ask Adon. People on the inner, outer circle, or people that see the pamphlets or the posters on the work trains. People that do associate Banshee with ZOB have put not too much circumstantial evidence together.

“If I told you….” and then he orders a round of water shots. He likes red wine. He likes Rum. He enjoys Vodka all by itself, or with a big feast, but when it is time to do business he is at his most serious, almost sober man. Close to Muslim in his discipline, but of course these are not religious people we are dealing with. Believers, but certainly not answering to imaginary friends in the sky.

People once heard him refer to the “Zealots of Brooklyn,” but sometimes they drank and took amphetamines for days and entered whole new unrealities. Parallel states of being that Sebastian drew and wrote stories about lying on the floor of the Penthouse with huge green eyes that didn’t blink after the third day in wake field. It had been a long time since they locked the Penthouse doors and tried to see the future in seven days.

So many people just call them the Banshee Association, the name of their largest political arm and Newspaper which came out irregularly as funds became available. They were described as ‘an emergency medical service proto-union underground’ in a recent write up expose about them first in DNA Info, later vice and still later in the New York Times. They are always being accused of being Communist infiltrators in the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.

Regardless, some civil servants just called it “the Club.” People come and go, they disappear, and some die. Sometimes people get tortured. Sometimes there is drinking and dancing, often enough to be called fun. There are always glorious toasts. There is always Afro-Caribbean music. Sometimes innocent people get shot up or blown up. That’s a thing. It isn’t ever taken lightly. The battle of ideas was lost a long, long time ago. The dubious morality of their political violence, the future being fought for; is all drowned in the terrors of the past and also present. But tonight was a casual night to talk about Russian women and or girls.

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
Is it true you got manhandled?

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
If it is true you were terrorized, I’m sorry I wasn’t there.

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
I’m sorry you got water fire boarded and there was nothing I could do.

Maria:

But, let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation. It happened to Daria not to me. I never suffered for your idealism, at best, I’ll call it. What’s a midnight rape at the hands of the boss? You sure terrorized those Albanians for no reason, imagining if you didn’t something terrible was going to happen to me. Nothing terrible happened to me, they called me a cab.

Sebastian:
I’m sorry anyone knew that part of me, or ever came across me crazed like that. When the gun arrives I’ll bring an end to all of the bullshit as fast as one spinning bullet can allow.

Maria:
I won’t let you Russian roulette yourself on my watch. I’m not heartless about you. I’m actually a little sentimental about the way you go crazy over me. You have a futuristic future being something great, probably. Something heroic or if not just heroic, artistic and recognized. If you take salt pills and stop giving away yourself to a tragic world. Maybe more people would listen to your songs. Maybe Polina and you will be re-united and it will be the Russian American Dream for you both; a condo in Brighton Beach! Maybe, just maybe you don’t have to be antagonist-protagonist; you can just live your life. Stop playing with guns and building bombs! Live your life and make yourself happy.

Sebastian:
These aren’t songs for people who build bombs.

Maria:
I won’t let you kill yourself. The capitalists can’t rid of you that easily!