Baltic Gambit

by E. E. Knight

  Ahn-Kha would be eating heartroot all weekend, which would give him gas, which would make the hotel untenable.

  She decided to send a message to Von Krebs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Bothnian Coast, July: Long stretches of the heavily forested Finnish coast are almost uninhabited. Few have the resources to live in a remote home through the long, dark winter, so most of the vacation and year-round homes of the pre-Kurian era are empty of everything but bears, red foxes, and other wildlife.

  Still, there are a few fine homes left on the coast, mostly near towns of year-round activity such as Kokkola, as well as smaller, more humble dwellings around villages devoted to fishing and sealing on the coast. The Gulf of Bothnia has its charms for some, including the fact that the low-salinity water freezes over for several months out of the year, making it one of the largest expanses of ice outside of the Arctic and Antarctic regions—an ice fisherman’s paradise, if you have the ability to cross the sometimes treacherous sheets and drill your way through to water. In the summer, the small, isolated beaches see a rush of campers and fishermen taking advantage of the mild weather and long sunlit dawns and dusks. Through the other seasons one might consider it an ideal climate for a philosopher or writer, with opportunities to spend weeks on end quietly and warmly indoors, if you have the resources, though the market for writing and philosophy is much lessened in the dark days of the Kurian Order.

  She dropped a message for Von Krebs at the conference center first thing the next morning, before she lost her resolve to do so.

  Wandering briefly through the conference center, overhearing conversations she couldn’t understand, she wished in vain to be on her way home. Even Pistols seemed to be enjoying the conference. He called the atmosphere “stimulating,” a word she doubted he had used often before their trip.

  Not that the trip wasn’t good for her. She’d put on weight. The Finns used a lot of sour cream in their soups and dressings, and after an initial bout of indigestion, she was thriving on regular meals with plenty of fresh veggies. There wasn’t much of what she considered fruit at these latitudes, but the berries made up for it.

  She wasn’t mentally stimulated, either. To be honest, she was bored.

  It wasn’t for the lack of characters attending. There were a few big, burly, savage-looking Scandinavian guerillas who were either Bears or such beasts personally that they could have given the Bears a tougher time than they’d seen outside of a Reaper conclave.

  One in particular caught her eye. He was a blond giant, like some hero out of an epic who was just waiting for a Valkyrie to carry him off from the field of the slain. He’d been partially—well, there was no other word for it but “scalped” in some encounter or other, and it left him with a huge pink patch where his hair should have been on the left side. As if to compensate, he’d let the right side grow into a long fall, giving his head an asymmetrical but strangely appealing look. He wore a thick fur jacket and what looked like wolfskin boots; he’d left the wolf faces atop the shoes, as a matter of fact. She quietly inquired about him at the security desk.

  “Rolf, that one is. A Norwegian. The last survivor of an entire company of Bears. You know Bears?”

  “I know Bears.”

  “All died but him at Trondheim. A terrible fight, but Trondheim now, no more Kurians. Oslo and Bergen and the south coast of Norway is all they have.”

  “And they’re welcome to it,” the security woman at the desk said. “Damn stupid Norwegians.”

  The activity woke her appetite. She went back the hotel, wondering what she’d do with herself until the afternoon. She expected Von Krebs to get the message by noon. It was in her nature and her training to observe people’s routines. She’d seen Von Krebs most days around lunchtime in the hotel, having drinks with friends. He usually hit the convention center first.

  She decided to use the hotel buffet.

  Meals came in two varieties—free buffets for the attendees, and personally funded meals that could be delivered to your home or eaten at an elegant table near a romantic fire.

  The only head-scratcher for her was the monitors. The hotel lobby set up six big, brilliant electronic screens that produced pictures and video so sharp that they were hard to distinguish from real life. One of the hotel workers said they were Finnish-made; there was a substantial electronics remanufacturing industry closer to Helsinki and Turku.

  So, with all that amazing technology, what did they do? Ran conference updates about schedule and speaker changes in between reruns of Noonside Passions, the ubiquitous Kurian Zone daytime drama. Duvalier couldn’t stand it, but Valentine would sit quite happily, drink coffee or tea, and soak up plot points about infertile women and black market scoundrels, leavened with plenty of New Universal Church sermonizing.

  It was popular around the world, so they could get broadcasts of the day’s show in several languages. Moreover, since it was propaganda masquerading as entertainment, it was broadcast everywhere. Valentine liked to pick the story lines apart sometimes, trying to pick up hints about what the Kurian Order was worried about this particular month. They would do a series about energy rationing and conservation, or add a subplot about why it’s important to keep your teeth clean, or to report privately owned transmitters.

  Still, every day there were little groups of men and women watching one of the several broadcasts and rebroadcasts. Some worked on notes held in their laps, others grabbed a hasty meal and watched, and still more talked and chuckled as the show proceeded.

  As Duvalier idled and wondered whether she should go to the pharmacy in town for more stomach powder (her cranky gut was improving with the ample dairy and fiber), she sipped some watery fruit punch and watched the watchers. One German woman grew so excited at a Passions plot point that she hopped up and ran to one of the lobby phones to call over to the conference center. All Duvalier could get of the conversation was a character’s Germanicized name mentioned a couple of times.

  People get worked up about strange things. She’d known Bears who would read Jane Austen novels to one another, crying openly at the little heartbreaks of the books’ heroines.

  She’d rather spend her time sleeping. Dreams were better than anything a television writer could create. Now that she’d been eating well for a few weeks, her dreams had quit being about banquets and switched over to sunny fields, music, and sex.

  Then she’d get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, pass through the front room of their suite on the way to the toilet, holding her breath against the funk swirling around Valentine and Pistols (did they secretly hold farting competitions?), and return to her bed to drop into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  Von Krebs broke his usual routine. She didn’t see him around the hotel for lunch, and when she checked back in with the message center, she found that he hadn’t come in for his notes yet.

  With nothing better to do, she saw Valentine off at the train station. There was a Finnish holiday of some sort on Friday and a few of the conference attendees were taking advantage of the light schedule to see Helsinki. The Helsinki train, on turnaround, was having a twenty-minute break and crew change. The sailor rather pointedly looked at a map and timetable in a display window.

  Down the straight-shooting line, the tracks vanished into the pine forest. Duvalier thought Finland could supply much of the world’s population with wood if it had to; everywhere she looked in this country there were beautifully tall pines, as straight as if they were designed with an architect’s T square.

  “I’m getting out for a long weekend, too,” she said. “I’m taking Von Krebs up on his offer to see the coast from his friend’s house.”

  Valentine had just a small canvas bag, the one he used for his pistol, ammunition, holster, knives, and the cleaning kit for his weapon. He made a show of adjusting the strap. “Glad to hear it. Get a little sea air and sun.”

  “What’s with the gun? You’re not really taking a train across the country for art,” Duv
alier said.

  “My gun’s in there, yes. The rest is shaving kit and a change of underwear.”

  “A Southern Command packet of weekend-leave condoms, too, I hope,” she said. “Remember the daughter you left on Jamaica.”

  “I do. Too bad she doesn’t remember me. Why do you bring that up?”

  “Thought I’d remind you to keep your weapon on safety this weekend,” she said, but there was a laugh in her voice as she did so.

  “Not that it’s really your business, but I really am going there to see her art collection,” Valentine insisted. “It’s a day there, two days around Helsinki, and a day back. I can’t get in that much trouble. I’m not interested in her beyond the paintings. I don’t know that she has a physical interest in me. You have sensitive antennae—would you say she’s into women?”

  “I left my lesbian-detection kit in the stable at Seng. Sorry.”

  “She knows her art.”

  “I’ve seen better ‘art’ beckoning from a New Orleans balcony,” Duvalier said.

  Valentine ignored the jibe. “Just think. People used to spend their whole lives involved with… art. You’d study it at school, tour museums, get to know artists and gallery owners. Write books about it. Isn’t it incredible?”

  “If you go in for that sort of thing, yeah. A frog in a frying pan doesn’t give a squirt about who owns how many Renoirs, and we’re frogs in frying pans. That’s easy to forget up here.”

  Valentine looked down the tracks. The train had arrived and the conductors were helping people find their cars. “Wonder if we’ll ever get to a world again where people can build a life out of art.”

  “When did you get this art bug? Usually you’re going on about some book or other that’s interesting you.”

  “We’ll have to cut this short, Ali. Train’s boarding. You have fun, too. I’m a little surprised. Von Krebs doesn’t seem—”

  “He’s not. I just want to be on the ocean.”

  “It’s a gulf of a sea, technically.”

  “Well, whatever. Saltwater shoreline. Never had much of a chance for it since our trip to the gulf waters. Be careful, Val.”

  “You, too.”

  He gave her a nudge with his elbow as he picked up his bag and joined his fellow passengers in going up onto the train. Duvalier saw Eva Stepanek waiting for him by one of the cars.

  That evening a messenger tapped on their door as she was brushing her teeth. She was alone. Pistols was out on the town; he’d also made local friends. A couple of the Finnish police working security in the area around the hotel and conference center had found a fellow marksmanship enthusiast and Pistols had gone to the range with them. They were having a boys’ night in one of the bars, trying the local vodkas.

  The conference center messenger handed her an envelope made of thick, expensive-looking paper. Her name was written on it in a rather bold, all-capital hand.

  She opened it and read the contents.

  Wednesday, 7 p.m.—So pleased you decided to come. Boat has been refitted, just finished giving it a test in the open sea. Arrive whenever you like tomorrow.

  He included a map and an address. The house was on the coast south of town. Apparently the home even had a name: Summerset House. She assumed Von Krebs had translated the name from Finnish for her.

  She’d kept up with her laundry, so she had plenty of clean clothes. She spent an extra half hour in the tub, enjoying having the hotel room to herself.

  The next day she took one of the city bikes out to the house. It was only a dozen kilometers outside of town, and her legs enjoyed the exercise.

  The houses on this part of the coast road were discreetly hidden by trees at the end of long driveways. A few of the driveways were closed by new growth or gates.

  Summerset House on the gulf was low and lean, architecturally fashioned like a glass sandwich between thin roof and foundation. She recognized the style by now as exaggeratedly Scandinavian.

  Apart from a few walls and a white brick fireplace, you could see right through most of the house on the ground floor. The angle didn’t reveal whether the same was true on the small second floor, sitting like a pillbox atop the house, with its own rooftop garden.

  It was surrounded by a sort of patio made of smoothed river stones. The well-tended look to the house and grounds whispered discreet wealth.

  She’d been kind of hoping for a cute little A-frame lodge. She’d seen a few along the coast that looked cozy, the perfect place to return to after enjoying a day in the gloriously invigorating summer sun of the far north. This house looked more like it was waiting for the photographer from Architectural Digest—yes, she’d glanced through old copies a few times in her travels, though the super-glossy pages made for unsanitary wiping.

  Of course, she didn’t know what she’d get with Von Krebs. There was a kind of phoniness about him. He put on lordly airs, as if he were a colossus astride the world, when he actually was just a good Baltic sailor who knew a lot of people on the various old Hanseatic coasts. She’d been half expecting a shack with old bedding stuffed in the holes to keep out the wind, half expecting a towering manor house made of dark volcanic rock. Either seemed to be possible with him.

  Instead, the clean-lined, sprawling little house exhibited a refined sensibility. There wouldn’t be any silly little brightly colored gnome or troll statues of the style she’d seen decorating the doorsteps and lawns of the ordinary people of this part of the coast. Which was too bad; she’d have been much more at home with those sorts of people.

  She was met by the owner, a man who spoke only a little English, but he made the point that Von Krebs was out with his wife and daughter on his yacht and was expected back soon. He mostly communicated with “the” plus “noun” constructions. When he gestured out the vast windows looking toward the gulf, he said, “The sea.” When he took her into the kitchen, where he was puttering around with a knife and some vegetables, he said, “The cooking.”

  He called himself “Harald,” but whether that was a first or last name Duvalier could only guess. Finnish names, especially surnames, were brutal, so she believed it to be his first name.

  In the living room there was a stereo in a heavy wooden cabinet. An old-fashioned phonograph for playing vinyl records and a device that played large tapes interested her for a half hour or so while he rattled around in the kitchen. The open interior of the house let them share the space in such a way that he still was able to act the host while making dinner. Every now and then he held up a glass—the first for water, the second for wine—making pantomime inquiries if he should pour her a drink. She smiled and declined.

  The bathroom and toilet were in a deep red with white accents that reminded her of fresh beef. She used the toilet and briefly luxuriated in the waterfall-style fixture for the sink, using liquid soap that filled the room with a summery aroma she couldn’t quite identify.

  The house was set well back from the shore, perhaps two hundred yards or so, and the ground sloped down sharply (she assumed, she didn’t make the walk right away) to the actual shore. The stretch of plain, unbroken grass between the two lines of trees reminded her a little of a bowling alley or some kind of sports arena. Whoever had built the house must also have had the grounds leveled.

  Someone kept the lawn intact—it looked like it was mowed at least weekly. Again, that bespoke wealth. Nobody these days kept more than little patches of grass; grounds tended to be put to use growing vegetables or keeping turkeys or pigs.

  Feeling oddly like a character in a Swedish film about upper-middle-class ennui, she paged through a book on art, wondering how Valentine was getting on with Stepanek’s paintings in Helsinki. She wondered if he was enjoying the nightlife in the big city, if “nightlife” was the right word for a place where the sun didn’t set until it was approaching midnight.

  Every now and then Harald wandered through the room, inquiring about her needs in a labored fashion, as though he’d just been in another room consulting an English
phrasebook. Finally, she saved him the trouble by curling up in a comfortable chair and pretending to sleep. The pretense turned into reality.

  She woke when Von Krebs returned with the wife and daughter, typical Finnish blond specimens of skin and hair that made her feel like a thin, freckly mess.

  They smelled like wind and sea. They’d been checking out the post-refit Windkraft.

  They ate a nice dinner of just-caught lobster, with some kind of cream-based sauce. It was delicious, but a rather awkward party since the family refrained from all but necessities in Finnish out of well-mannered regard for their guest, not wishing to exclude her from the talk. Von Krebs was the only one capable of speaking fluently to both sides. They asked polite questions about America and the suffering of the areas under Kurian control.

  She wasn’t sure how to answer that. Drawing any kind of an honest picture would ruin everyone’s dinner.

  The conversation moved on to the loveliness of the coast and the health of the Finns living on it, with the mixture of fresh seafood and a land diet. It appeared that Harald’s family chose to live here for his health. She mentioned her frequently sour stomach.

  “You need a night on the water,” Von Krebs said. “Salt water cures everything; did you not know this?”

  “Seems like it’s tough on the skin, but I’ll take your word for it,” Duvalier said.

  “Do you remember the little lighthouse we passed on our way into the harbor?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is a lovely spot. We can take the Windkraft and visit it tomorrow, if you like. It has a small garrison of the Finnish defense forces. But they do not mind visitors. We can make an outing of it. The sunsets are spectacular from there. Shall we go?”