by Martha Carr
At the house people milled about, sucking down bits of a gifted feast brought a dish at a time by friends and neighbors. Grandma had laid it out on the long table as well as the wide buffet surface against the dining room wall. The early afternoon sun spread beams of light across the steaming plates of food, illuminating what for many would be the last big meal they had for a while as the depression slowly tightened its grip on the country, particularly in their part of the Midwest agricultural belt.
Joe understood nothing of the financial woes bearing down on America, all he knew was that his grandpa Torvald was dead. He’d been old, but Joe did not know how old. Grandpa had not been particularly loving or kind to him, especially after the outhouse prank, but he’d not been mean to him either. After Joe’s parents died in a car crash, Grandpa had taken him and his little brother Pete in to raise them. They’d learned farming, animals, physical labor, even finance and management, at least, as much as a seventy-five-year-old man could teach a pair of young boys. They’d both received lickings with the leather strap, always deserved, but they’d also learned a lot more than many boys their age, few of whom even got schooling past the third or fourth grade. Joe was already in fifth grade. Grandpa had promised he and Pete that he’d pay for school through eighth grade, a solid education for most Dakota boys at the time.
The only thing grandpa held back from them were the contents of the old suitcase under his bed. His aunts and uncles had no idea what was in it either. Everyone knew they were not to touch it.
While the adults busily chatted at the wake downstairs, Joe and Pete snuck into grandpa’s bedroom. They dropped to their knees and peered beneath the heavy quilt draped across the bed. There it was, just the right size to fit under the iron bedframe. Joe grabbed the handle, and slid it out. Sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating its brown leathery patina.
“You can’t open that Joey,” Pete said. “Grandpa will be mad.”
“Grandpa’s dead,” said Joe.
“His ghost might come and haunt you if you make him mad,” Pete hesitated, “I heard about ghosts from Jimmy Bjorklund last week at school. He said his grandma haunts his house and sometimes bites people on the behind when they do things she doesn’t like.”
“That’s nonsense,” Joe said. “Dead people are in the ground and their teeth are with them. Ghosts are just spirits, they don’t have teeth.”
“Jimmy said he had a mark on his butt where she bit him,” Pete pointed to his own rear end.
Joe thought about this for a moment. He’d not considered a haunting or Grandpa’s ghost coming after them.
“Grandpa ain’t coming back,” he made up his mind. “He even said…”
The door suddenly opened and in walked their Aunt Elsa. Both boys started, eyes wide with guilt. Joe tried to push the trunk back under the bed with his foot.
“What are you boys do…oh…you have father’s suitcase out.”
Elsa walked around the bed. The boys stood at terrified attention. Elsa was the nicer of their aunts, a thirty-year old unmarried maiden, she was the youngest of their two aunts and two uncles.
“What are you thinking coming in here to look in there on a day like today?”
“I’m sorry Auntie,” said Pete, “it was Joey, he made me do it.”
“I did not make you do it,” Joe shot Pete a cross look.
“Yes you did! You said ‘come and let’s look in Grandpa’s trunk’.”
“But you didn’t have to!”
“But you said you’d…”
“Enough boys,” Elsa stepped closer and put a hand on each of their shoulders. “No one is in trouble.”
She smiled down to them, then turned toward the trunk. She stared at it for several seconds, gave a quick look back to the boys, then walked across the room and closed the bedroom door.
“Well,” she paused, took in a breath and continued, “I’ve always wondered too.” She gave a mischievous wink, then reached down and hefted the trunk onto the bed. “He brought the family here to America before I was born, and he kept the contents of this thing secret for all of our lives. I think now is a good time to open it, don’t you?”
The boy’s faces immediately shone bright with anticipation.
“Yes Auntie, yes,” Pete blurted, “do you think there is treasure in it? Is there pirate gold or maybe a king’s crown or something?”
“I don’t know, but let’s find out.”
She studied the brass clasps for a moment, then pushed the button in the middle of each. It did nothing.
“Hrm…it must need a key to….”
Before she finished the sentence, Joe reached up and flicked the buttons to one side then the other. There was a click and a quiet whoosh of air as the lid popped up a fraction of an inch. All three of them stared wide eyed at the trunk, as if it had come alive.
“Or a special touch,” Elsa muttered.
They leaned in to peer inside.
“Papers,” Joe said in a defeated voice.
“Where’s the pirate gold?” Pete whined.
Elsa reached in and picked up some of the papers inside, glancing over them, “These look like ledgers or accounting sheets for a business.”
As she shuffled through them the bottom of the suitcase wobbled slightly.
“What’s this?”
She pulled out the rest of the papers and tugged at one corner of the case’s bottom panel. It gave way. Beneath was a hidden compartment filled with very different items. Some were folded single sheets, others were small bound booklets. Most had pictures of younger versions of her father, mother and siblings. Many had the same picture of the individual persons, but each had writing in different languages. They were passports from when her parents were young, in their thirties. She opened another Swedish passport that showed her father a little older, closer to forty, his age when they moved to America but with a different name beneath his picture. She found more passports, and some birth certificates. Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Russia, Estonia, and Poland. Her mind spun. Beneath that were several bundles of money. Swedish krona, Danish and Norwegian kroner, Polish zloty, Russian rubles, German marks, and British pounds, as well as others she could not identify. She had no idea their value, but each nation, at least a dozen, was represented by an inch-thick wad of cash.
“What in the world was Dad up to,” she whispered to herself.
Pete looked up at her, “No pirate treasure?”
“Oh,” Elsa started, “there is definitely treasure in here.”
“Are we rich,” asked Joe.
“We’re…uh…,” Elsa paused, “something.”
Alley near the Swedish Riksdag
(Parliamentary Building)
Stockholm Sweden
May 30th, 1896
The coppery taste of blood rushed through his mouth, forcing him to suck air across his teeth, for fear his own blood would come gushing out. He got that same sensation whenever he killed. In this case, the knowledge that he’d killed a professional like himself heightened the sensation. Mitrofan Budurov stood watching the shimmer of life giving fluid as it oozed onto the street, he was near ecstasy. Months of work, come to fruition in a flash of steel and crimson and a song of moans and splashes. Randall Jorgenson, secret agent for the Swedish Ministry of War, squirmed in the puddle at Mitrofan’s feet. Reflected light shimmered off the walls of the alley like flickering splashes of flame in the bright sub-arctic summer evening sunlight. Mitrofan squatted to peer into Jorgenson’s eyes, studying him, caressing the old scar on his own jaw, comparing it to the Joregenson’s smooth skin.
“Randy, old boy,” Mitrofan said, his Russian accent mocking, “you are neither a real warrior, nor a good liar my friend. To survive in this business, you must be able to kill without thought, and to lie as if it were your native tongue.”
Randall let out a pain filled grunt as his assailant rifled through his pockets. His hand came out clutching a folded paper. Mitrofan opened it, glancing o
ver the text.
“This is most expensive lesson you’ve ever had Randy,” he laughed out loud. “A list like this should never have existed, and now you know why.”
Randall’s gasps grew weaker, small pauses hung between sucking breaths, as his life oozed out onto the cobblestones of the alley.
“Oh well, mate,” Mitrofan grasped the Swedish agent’s collar, “Perhaps if your ancestors were not just full of pickled herring and mead their stories will have some truth to them,” the dying man looked up at him with bleary eyes, “and maybe, we will see each other again in Valhalla as brothers.”
Randall’s hands shook as his fingers crawled toward the pistol in his belt. He knew he could not raise it, no strength, he merely wanted to touch it, to grasp the handle. In the old belief, a warrior found his admission to the Viking heaven, Valhalla, only if he died with his hand grasping his weapon.
“Oh no,” said Mitrofan kicking the pistol away with a booted foot, “I forgot the rules on that, maybe you don’t get to go to Valhalla after all.”
Randall Jorgenson, operative in the Royal Swedish Ministry of War’s ‘Special Administrative Office’, watched his Russian counterpart raise his boot. His eyes tracked a flash of movement and the arctic summer sky was swallowed in a darkness that would know no dawn.
Copenhagen Denmark
June 1st, 1896
Torvald Balch kept a brisk pace as he moved down the street to the office of Pedersen Import/Export Limited, suitcase in hand. As the senior manager of the eastern market for Pedersen Ltd. he had crucial business to complete in Estonia regarding a deal for a very lucrative lumber contract between that country, Latvia, and Denmark, the latter being critically low on usable lumber for building, and the others being in plentiful supply. The envelope in his pocket insisted he be on a boat to the Estonian capital of Reval that afternoon to ensure everything went as smoothly as possible. Lucky for him his work at Pedersen happened this once to coincide with his other job, the job the Danish executives of Pedersen knew nothing about.
Finally, serving both masters without tearing myself in two.
He slid his watch out of the fob pocket, snapped open the polished silver lid and glanced down at the gothic watch face. Eight a.m. on the dot, he had three hours to get the office work done, hustle to the docks, buy a ticket and be on board a steamer to Reval.
He hurried through the work then rushed to the port buying a ticket on a steamer to Reval just in time. Torvald stood at the rail, catching his breath after running up the ramp. Men on the dock drop the mooring ropes with a splash, he watched them be pulled up into their storage place high above the water line. He opened the timepiece open again with a thumb press. The following morning he would be at his destination, which he’d only learned about the previous afternoon when the agent from Sweden’s Ministry of War contacted him. He noted the time on the dial. His thoughts froze as his eyes fell on the image of his wife Elisabet looking up from the watch cover. Her golden tresses shone silver in the black and white photo, the expression on her face enchanted him. She’d bore him two sons and a daughter, and in her thirties still had the beauty and endless vigor of the sixteen-year-old bride he’d taken home so long ago.
We’ve been married for almost twenty years already, how is that possible?
He let out a deep breath, the argument they’d had when he told her he had to make a short notice trip for work had been fierce. Their oldest son Mikael, thirteen, was to have his first violin solo with the Swedish Children’s Orchestra of Denmark, a very prestigious event for the Danish king himself. He’d promised he would be there. She’d refused to cook his dinner and kept her back to him the whole night in bed. What could he do? His country had called on him to serve the greater good of Sweden in a major way. He closed the clamshell watch, hefted his suitcase and made his way to his stateroom.
Once in his room, he locked the door and hefted his luggage onto the bench beside the bed. He snapped it open and lifted out the file the armed courier had given him. A small desk folded down from the bulkhead next to the bed. Sunlight coming through the small porthole over the bed provided enough illumination to see, but as he drew nearer to forty reading had grown harder. He snapped on the electric lamp that jutted from the wall above the desk. The new technology from an American inventor had swept the world into what people were calling “The Electric Age”. Regardless of the hype, it was definitely a convenience to have light without the dangers of oil or open flame. Torvald hoped the technology would stick around. Under the yellow glow he glanced over the half dozen pages for the tenth time since receiving the sealed package. On top was a memo with his orders, addressed to the code name only his secret boss in the Ministry of War’s clandestine services division knew.
The message had been encoded via simple replacement cypher, using the text of a book only the sender and receiver knew. It was extremely simple, although time consuming to decode, but very reliable. The source text for the code was a Swedish translation of the Sherlock Holmes novel A Study In Scarlet. He returned the book, it would be used several more times, creating unique codes for each day of the year by moving the letter sequence two places over each subsequent day, allowing for a different code almost to infinity from the same source.
Fox,
A Russian agent stole a list of intelligence assets in Eastern Europe and Russia. The list is encoded, he did not get the cypher along with it. Fast action will prevent serious damage. Proceed to Reval, Estonia on the soonest ship. Retrieve that list before it can be deciphered. Attached pages and photograph identify the Russian agent. I believe you know him. He killed Rabbit to get the list.
All use of force is authorized. Retrieve or destroy it.
Good luck Fox.
Lynx
Torvald slid the photo out from between the sheets of paper, dread filled his chest as he gazed on the photo of Mitrofan Budurov. In Russian his first named referred to an ancient Byzantine saint, his surname meant ‘blessed one’, or Mitrofan the Blessed. In Torvald’s covert circle of contacts he was known as Mitro the Murderer. Last time he and Budurov had met they’d nearly killed each other. He feared that this meeting would likely find a definitive victor.
He went through more of the information in the package, pocketing the counterfeit passport and travel documents that would allow him to travel through Estonia as a citizen of that country as well as the handful of Estonian marks and a few Russian rubles just in case. The Lithuanian and Russian documents, as well as the rest of the cash, went into the false bottom of his suitcase to keep them out of sight from prying eyes unless and until he needed them. He packed everything up, locked the suitcase and went to the ship’s restaurant for dinner followed by a nightcap at the outdoor bar on the upper deck, where he sipped on a sherry as he watched the sub-arctic ‘midnight sun’ lower to the horizon before it gradually rotated just above the surface of the water.
Reval Estonia
June 2nd 1896
The ship docked at Reval harbor just before noon, Torvald rushed to the Pedersen client’s office for an after-lunch meeting to sign the lumber contracts and finalize shipping details, as well as to receive the first payment towards product delivery. Within a few hours business was done and Torvald could attend to the greater business at hand, Sweden’s national security. As evening dinner crowds moved in and out of various restaurants and pubs making their way home after a long day’s work, Torvald made his way toward the less savory side of town Mitrofan tended to favour. Good Russian vodka and cheap Russian whores were a siren call for the big man. With a handful of bribes and a few free drinks the Swede had been able to open enough lips to find his mark before the clock tower at the city center struck midnight.
Madame Luba Sevrizy’s was apparently a fairly popular business establishment. Customers came and went, filling the lounge and bar, awaiting their turn with one of Luba’s girls. Torvald ambled up to the bar. The bartender leaned an elbow on the counter in his direction, eyebrows raised waiting for an ord
er.
“Akvaviit,” he said.
“Caraway or Anise,” asked the bartender, referring to the two most common herbal flavorings of the drink.
“Anise,” Torvald replied.
With a polite nod the man turned, pickup up a small sherry glass and poured a stiff shot of the clear hard liquor, then set it on the bar. Torvald lifted it to his lips, inhaled the licorice scent of anise seed infused into the amber vodka like beverage. He gave it a quick sip, pursed his lips and nodded appreciatively toward the smiling bartender, then knocked back the rest and set his glass back on the bar upside down, the signal for another. Luba kept a stock of high quality liquor in her establishment. The bartender brought a second shot and slid a small plate of smoked herring to him, a required item when ordering liquor in most Scandinavian countries. He also slid a copy of the ‘menu’ across the bar. The ‘menu’ contained the names and photos of the girls arranged with descriptions of their preferred activities, as if they were dishes to be had for dinner.
He took a small bite of the fish along with small sips of the refilled beverage, his eyes scanned the room, surreptitiously monitoring the stairs from which he expected to see Mitrofan descend at any time. He opened the leather binder and gazed at each of the pages, black and white pictures of the women in various stages of dress and undress. Some of the women wore demure expressions and conservative looking clothing that ranged from full corseted dresses to nothing more than their knickers. A handful had opted to go right to the question at hand by posing fully nude, sometimes actually performing a sex act in the image that left nothing to the imagination. He flipped to the last page in the menu and saw the full-sized advert for the Madame herself, posing in a breast enhancing bustier and corset, her eyes daring the viewer to drop the cash on her table and take a trip to paradise with the queen of pleasure. Madame Luba Sevrizy’s name literally meant ‘loving woman’. She apparently intended to define what love truly meant, as she was the most expensive item on the menu.