Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (25 page)

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?”

That sea-hardened face of his was hiding something. He might just want to spread her out on a lonely beach and use her just to see what sex with an American was like—she’d heard a joke once about a Frenchman making love to a corpse on a beach thinking she was an American—or perhaps he was seeking an in with Sime, though what good either could do the other was beyond her.

“We’ll make you a hamper,” Harald said. “Some wine, too.”

“You are all so very kind. Honestly, this is the big surprise of the trip.”

They set out the next day, early, with her as the only passenger. Thanks to a few delays with the
Windkraft
, they didn’t actually leave for the lighthouse until it was after ten in the morning.

Only two of his white-pants crew remained on the
Windkraft
.
They were sufficient to handle the boat under Von Krebs’s direction. He let her take the wheel while they adjusted the sails.

He seemed strangely alive. Maybe it was the influence of being at the wheel of his own boat; but if so, why did he employ someone like Stepanek?

They arrived at the island, wooded like the rest of Finland’s Bothnian coast, after an hour’s sailing, thanks to fluky winds. Docks with skewed, weather-beaten planks led up to the edge of the little island settlement like a fun-house path.

The lighthouse island had a steepish, rocky slope up from the beach and the tiny marina. But the navigational tower wasn’t the only sign of habitation. She could just make out some big, barnlike roofs above the trees and weather-beaten old houses. The lighthouse itself was nonfunctional, according to Von Krebs, but still served as a landmark for Kokkola harbor. It was painted in red and white stripes. They had faded over the years, but the contrast was still striking enough that they were the first colors you could distinguish from the blue of the sky and the green of the island.

She’d learned to trust her intuition over the years. The fishy smell on the island unsettled her.

“Wow. I was in an agricultural fertilizer plant once. They used ground-up bits of fish. It’s the same smell.”

“I suspect someone had a catch go bad in the summer warmth. This is a mostly unvisited anchorage. The Kokkola harbormaster would go mad if you dumped your load of rotting fish to bob around in his harbor.”

They skirted the depressingly abandoned buildings and made for the lighthouse. Von Krebs said there were animals living in the abandoned buildings and he feared rabies and hantavirus. So they took a more picturesque path through the trees, climbing the lighthouse hill.

Other than a little more wind than she liked, it was a perfect day, with not a cloud in the sky.

They found a few tables and benches of a design common the world over beneath the striped lighthouse. It had a marvelous view of the bay.

“Here’s a nice spot for our picnic.”

“You’re unhappy here. Homesick?” Von Krebs asked.

“I’d like to head home, to tell the truth. There’s nothing for me to do here, at least nothing more important than what I could be doing back home.”

He looked up, nodded.

Nets, heavy and wet, fell all across her. She struggled, and the more she fought, the heavier and more entangled she became.

They rolled her up in the nets like a rug, with a few kicks for good measure, and she felt herself being hoisted across two men’s shoulders.

Three strong men helped secure her. They had that same horribly fishy smell she’d noticed earlier. They put her in handcuffs before unwrapping her from the nets. She was put into a cheap tube-steel chair, with her arms around one of the metal supports for the wooden back brace.

“What the fuck is this?” she asked.