The Solomon Effect

by C. S. Graham

  “Is it?”

  By the time they reached the coast, a brisk wind had blown away all but a few wisps of the low-hanging clouds that had made the morning so bleak. The sky that arched above them now was a vast, pastel blue reflected by the waters of the Curonian Lagoon to their right and the Baltic Sea to the north.

  They followed a narrow road that cut through vast dunes ranging from thirty to sixty feet high. Most had been planted with pine forests in an effort to overcome the dunes’ habit of swallowing entire villages. But some were still wind-sculpted, shifting mounds of bare golden sand.

  They found the village of Rybachy just a few kilometers short of the Lithuanian border. Seagulls wheeled, screeching, above rows of wooden fishing boats rocking beside a pier that stretched far out into the waters of the lagoon. Nearby, the ruins of an old Teutonic Knights’ castle stood guard over a few hundred houses, many of them still showing the carved wooden fronts of a different age and different inhabitants.

  “There,” said October, pointing to a white stucco house with a red tiled roof about halfway down a leafy street. “That’s where Captain Baklanov’s widow lives.”

  Jax pulled into the shelter of a spreading elm and killed the engine. The curtains at the house’s windows were all tightly drawn, the neatly tended yard deserted.

  “I wonder if she speaks English,” said October, thrusting open her car door.

  “Probably not. Why?”

  A soft smile touched her features. “I was just trying to figure out how I’m supposed to let you do the talking if she only speaks Russian.”

  “Oh? Like you let me do the talking with Andrei?”

  “I did.”

  “You didn’t.”

  They walked up a brick path to the house’s shallow front steps. Jax noticed her limp was getting better. She said, “What if she doesn’t want to talk to us?”

  “We tell her we’re from her husband’s insurance company. She’ll talk to us.”

  October stopped in the middle of the walk. “But that’s mean. What if Baklanov didn’t have any insurance? We’d get her hopes up for nothing.”

  He groaned. “You have way too many scruples to work for the CIA. Tell her we’re journalists from the AP doing a story.”

  “On what?”

  “Crime? Modern pirates?” He rang the bell. “Make something up. It’s what spies do, you know. We lie.”

  Heavy footsteps sounded on the other side of the door. “But—”

  The door swung inward to reveal a stout woman with graying hair and a full, puffy face, her features blurred by grief. “Yes?” she said, her eyes narrowing with suspicion.

  “Dobrih dyen,” said October, giving the woman a wide smile. “Uhhh…” For a moment, she froze. Then she cleared her throat and said in her flawless Russian, “We’re journalists with the Associated Press.”

  She chose the modern Baltic pirates angle. Jax’s Russian was just good enough to enable him to follow most of what was being said. When Anna Baklanov turned her watery gray stare from Tobie to Jax, he slipped out his wallet and presented her with his press card.

  While October stared at him in wide-eyed wonder, the captain’s widow took the card between two fingers and scowled. He had no way of knowing if she could read it or not, but her jaw hardened and she started to close the door. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”

  Jax stuck his foot in the rapidly closing gap and said to Tobie, “Tell her we’ll pay.”

  October translated.

  The widow sniffed. “I’ve no time for this. I’m on my way to stay with my mother-in-law.”

  “A thousand rubles,” said Jax. In a province where over half the population made less than four thousand rubles a month, a thousand rubles was a lot of money. In the States, it would buy you a tank of gas.

  Anna Baklanov sniffed again and opened the door.

  She led them into a bizarrely furnished sitting room that looked more like Arabian Nights than Russian Revolution. Massive mansaf trays a meter wide, made of copper coated with tin, hung above olive wood chests inlaid with mother of pearl. There were scimitars from Turkey and Syria, daggers from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, colorful thick carpets from the land of the Hindu Kush. This was a side of Jasha Baklanov they hadn’t been expecting. At the far end of the room, dominating it all, stood an easel proudly displaying a framed black-and-white photograph of a little girl with wild hair presenting President Brezhnev with a bouquet of white roses. If Jax squinted, he could see the ravaged remnants of that little girl in Anna Baklanov.

  “I had the militia here two days ago,” she said, fumbling with a pack of cigarettes. “Wanting to know who hired Jasha to raise that old U-boat. As if I knew.”

  October nodded sympathetically. “Jasha didn’t talk about his business much, did he?”

  “What man does talk about business when he comes home? Hmmm? That’s why he comes home, to get away from business. Eat his dinner, drink his vodka.” She paused to light her cigarette and drew hard. “You’d like some vodka?”

  “No, thank you,” said October.

  Jax smiled, “One glass.”

  Anna Baklanov heaved to her feet and disappeared through a door.

  October whispered, “I hate vodka.”

  “Russia runs on vodka. You’ll never get her to talk if you don’t drink with her.”

  The widow was back in a moment bearing a tray with three glasses, a bottle of vodka, and slices of dark bread. She filled their glasses to the brim.

  “It must be tricky raising an old submarine,” said October, taking her glass with care.

  “Jasha was the best.” Vodka in hand, Anna Baklanov leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He’d done it before, you know. Sold the sub itself for the steel, and auctioned everything from Kraut helmets to belt buckles and gas masks on eBay.”

  October took a sip of her vodka and choked. “Someone hired him for that?” she asked, her voice a raw rasp. “Or was it his own plan?”

  “Of course it was his plan.” Anna Baklanov upended her own glass and let the vodka slide down her throat in an easy motion that made Tobie’s eyes widen. “He got the idea from something he read on the Internet, about the British salvaging the old German U-boats they sank off the coast of Ireland.”

  “Smart man,” said October.

  Jasha’s widow nodded and fumbled for a handkerchief to blow her nose.

  October said, “So he had experience raising World War II submarines. I suppose that’s why these men came to him.”

  Anna Baklanov tucked her handkerchief out of sight, lit another cigarette, and nodded. “They’d heard about him.”

  “They were Russians?”

  She shook her head. “Two of them spoke Russian, but they weren’t Russian.”

  “Ah. Foreigners.”

  The widow filled their glasses again. “There’s no point asking me where they were from because I don’t know. Jasha was always secretive. Why, just last month he left on a trip for four days without telling me a thing. If I hadn’t found the receipt from that Beirut restaurant in his pocket when I was washing his trousers, I’d never have known where he’d been.”

  October’s hand jerked, nearly spilling her vodka. “He went to Lebanon?”

  “He goes there a couple of times a year.” The widow paused, then corrected herself. “Used to go.”

  “Do you still have the receipt?”

  “For the restaurant? No. Why?”

  “Do you remember the name?”

  “No.” She polished off another vodka and sniffed. “Poor Jasha. The militia keeps refusing to release his body to me. Can you imagine? They haven’t let any of the families see the bodies.”

  Jax thought about the condition of the bodies he’d seen in those big glossy militia photographs, and figured that was probably a good thing.

  Anna Baklanov dabbed the pad of one finger at the corner of each eye. “It’s so hard on Jasha’s poor old mother, losing the two of them.”

  “The two of t
hem?”

  She nodded. “Jasha’s nephew was on the Yalena with him, you know. Jasha’d been like a father to the boy, ever since his brother died. And now Stefan’s dead, too.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said October. “I had no idea.”

  Lurching to her feet, the widow reached for a snapshot in a cheap brass frame that rested with a collection of others atop a nearby piano. “This was taken last year,” she said, holding it out.

  “But he’s so young,” said October, holding the picture in both hands.

  Peering over her shoulder, Jax found himself staring at a skinny, dark-haired boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen. The picture was taken on a rocky beach on a cold, overcast day, the sea a sullen gray in the background. But the boy was rosy-cheeked and laughing, with one arm thrown affectionately around the shoulders of the big shaggy mutt panting happily beside him.

  “Nice dog,” said Jax.

  Anna Baklanov sniffed. “Stefan’s father got him for Stefan when the boy was just a little thing. Broke the poor boy’s heart when the dog died, not more’n a month after this picture was taken.”

  She took the photograph back and stared at it soulfully before carefully returning it to its place on the piano. “He could sing like an angel, you know. Sang in the church choir from the time he was small. Jasha used to say it made him weak, like his father. But then, Jasha had no use for the church. Russia might not be Communist anymore, but Jasha was a member of the Party until the day he died.”

  Jax lifted his vodka in a silent toast. To Jasha Baklanov. Smuggler. Thief. Proud Party member. He had the glass halfway to his lips when a thought occurred to him. “How old was the boy?” he asked in his fractured Russian.

  He obviously got it wrong because Anna Baklanov’s bleary eyes squinted into a frown. “Excuse me?”

  October repeated the question for him.

  Anna Baklanov blew a stream of blue smoke out her nostrils. “Just sixteen.”

  They wavered back to the car in a haze of vodka fumes.

  “What are you doing with a press card?” said October.

  Jax frowned at two big Kawasakis parked at the end of the lane. “It comes in handy sometimes.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Funny, I never thought about it, before.”

  “About what?”

  “How much spies lie.”

  He gave a sharp laugh. “Don’t like it, do you? See, there are some advantages to letting me do the talking.”

  “When you know the language.”

  “When I know the language,” he agreed, his attention drawn again to the men at the end of the block. Both riders had the visors on their helmets down. He could hear the motorcycles’ powerful roar as they revved their engines impatiently.

  She said, “It’s sad about the boy.”

  “Baklanov’s nephew? Maybe more curious than sad.” Jax opened the door for her. “I looked at the photographs of every man killed on that salvage ship. I could be wrong, but I didn’t see anyone who looked like young Stefan. In fact, I’d say none of those men was under twenty-five.”

  Closing her door, he went to slip behind the wheel, aware of the Kawasakis pulling away from the curb. He thrust the key in the ignition and listened to the old Lada grind painfully over and over again without catching.

  “Shit,” he whispered under his breath.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He threw a quick glance in the rearview mirror. “See those two motorcycles behind us? I think we’re in trouble.”

  26

  The Lada coughed. Caught.

  Jax threw the old car into gear and stepped on the gas as the motorcyclists came up behind them. October skewed around in her seat to watch them out the back window. The Kawasakis were nearly identical, one dark blue, the other black.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “What are they doing?”

  “At the moment, they’re just following us. It’s when we get out of town we’ll need to worry.”

  She cast a quick glance around at the dwindling houses. “This is a very small town.”

  “I’d noticed.”

  Leaving the last straggling houses behind, they cut through wild dunes of soaring sand that disappeared beneath a thickly planted pine grove. But beyond the trees the sandy dunes reemerged, untamed and windblown. Deserted.

  “Shit,” said Jax as the leather-jacketed men gunned their engines, roaring right up on his ass. He already had the accelerator floored.

  “Why are they getting so close?” she shouted over the whine of the engines.

  He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as the bumps and dips on the pavement bounced the old car wildly from side to side. “Because this road’s so bad, they’re going to need to get close to get a good shot at us.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw one of the riders reach beneath his coat. He jerked the steering wheel violently to the left and yelled, “Get down!”

  The rear windshield shattered in a rain of glass.

  Tires squealing, he spun the wheel to the right again, careening back and forth across the centerline to keep the motorcyclists from getting a steady shot. He heard a ping, then another as bullets buried into the Lada’s metal frame.

  “Sonofabitch,” he swore. “Brace yourself!”

  He stood on the brakes. The Lada’s backend broke loose, sending the heavy car into a sideways skid that filled the air with the screech of tires and the stench of burning rubber.

  Too close to stop, the thug on the blue motorcycle jerked to the right, laying down a line of black rubber as he shot off the side of the road to crash head-on into a massive pine tree. They heard a whooshing explosion, and rider and bike disappeared in a ball of fire.

  The black biker’s reactions were a split second slower. Hitting his brakes, he slammed into the Lada’s left rear fender with a tearing shriek of metal and a jarring thump that reverberated through the heavy old car. And then he was airborne, a black leather blur that sailed over the Lada’s trunk to land in a sprawling skid that carried him far down the old blacktopped road and ripped off his helmet. When he finally slid to a halt, he didn’t move.

  “Oh, my God,” whispered October.

  Jax was out of the car almost before it stopped. The air was thick with the black smoke from the burning bike down the road. A sickly sweet stench of charred flesh mingled with the smell of the pines and the briny breeze blowing in off the sea.

  Crouching down, he stared into the second cyclist’s wide, unseeing eyes. He glanced up and down the narrow deserted road and pushed to his feet. Walking back to the Lada, he straightened the rear fender enough to be sure the wheel would turn. Then he got back in the car, threw it into gear, and hit the gas.

  They drove on in silence, the Baltic a sun-struck shimmer of endless water on their right. Finally, Jax glanced over at October and said, “You all right?”

  She pushed the loose hair out of her face with a hand that wasn’t quite steady. “Yeah.”

  She was quiet for another moment, then said, “Someone seems to be pretty serious about making sure we’re dead. How can you be so positive it isn’t your buddy Andrei?”

  “Andrei is not my buddy. But if he wanted us dead, he’d do it quietly, in a basement, or an abandoned quarry somewhere, with a single shot to the back of the head. He wouldn’t send someone to hit us in the middle of the city or ambush us out on an open road.”

  “So who are these guys?”

  “Someone who thinks we’re getting too close for comfort.”

  “You’re kidding, right? We don’t know jack shit.”

  “Yeah. But they don’t know we don’t know jack shit.”

  She put her head down between her knees. After a moment, she said, “Do you ever rent a car without wrecking it?”

  They found the town of Zelenogradsk near the tip of the Sambian Peninsula, where the dunes of the spit just began to rise. It wasn’t on the map, and they’d driven right past it on their way to Rybachy.

  “I don’t see how an e
ntire town can be a military secret,” said Tobie as they rolled down weed-choked streets nearly empty except for the inevitable stalls selling amber. “The map makers must have left it off by mistake.”

  Once a thriving resort, Zelenogradsk did not appear to have fared as well under the Soviets as Rybachy. Most of its elegant, prewar seaside villas had been reduced to rubble by the fighting of 1945, while the few old houses that remained were largely abandoned and covered in moss.

  “I don’t know,” said Jax. “I think I’d be tempted to keep this place a secret, too.”

  Jasha Baklanov’s office lay on the second floor of a seedy, two-story Soviet-era concrete block a few hundred feet from the water. Leaving the car parked in the rubbish-strewn square out front, they entered the open street door and climbed a set of dirty concrete steps to a frigid second-floor hall lined with rows of battered slab doors. A small, chipped sign on the door at the end of the hall read BAKLANOV SALVAGE.

  “Why did he need an office?” she whispered, hugging herself against the chill of the concrete building. “A smalltime operator like this?”

  Slipping a silver pen from his pocket, Jax quickly disassembled it into a set of picks and eased a slim tension wrench into the lower portion of the keyhole. Applying a light torque to the wrench, he thrust a pick into the top of the keyhole, his eyes closing with concentration as he deftly eased each pin out of the way. There was a faint click, then the cylinder turned and the door opened. “I suspect the people our Jasha was doing business with weren’t exactly the type he wanted visiting his family.”

  Tobie watched him pack away the lock-pick set. “They teach you to do that in spy school?”

  “Yes.” He put a hand on the door and pushed it inward.

  The hinges squealed in protest. A single, uncurtained dirt-encrusted window on the far wall let in just enough light to show them a square cubbyhole sparsely furnished with a desk, a table with a couple of chairs, and a battered filing cabinet that looked as if it had been salvaged from an old ship. A chessboard, a half-empty bottle of vodka, and a couple of glasses littered the tabletop. But the chess pieces had been knocked into disarray; a glass lay on the floor, shattered. The drawers of the filing cabinet and desk hung open, their contents spilling out onto the floor.