Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (29 page)

With him sat three other men: a Laplander with his furs puddled around his hips and a look of furrowed confusion on his big face that said he had been drinking for some time; a short grizzled Finn with the callused hands of a long-liner; and a dark, greasy looking man with a wool cap squashed down over his head and a winter’s worth of dirt worked into every line and crevice of him. Some sort of disagreement was brewing at the table, a dispute over the cards they each held. The man in the wool cap had tipped over the bottle of vodka that stood in the middle of the table in a brutish gesture of hostility toward the big blond man, and then slapped his cards out of his hand. The blond giant stood and slapped the table so hard the sound reported like a gunshot. It was a mark of the toughness of the tavern’s clientele that they barely flicked an eye in the direction of imminent violence.

The woolen cap of the fisherman bobbed, his words delivered with force and apparent insult, for the big Swede backed up, fists balling in fury. Vasily was certain the big man was Swedish, for from the side he looked like a snow-cloaked Viking with that fastidious air so many of his countrymen seemed to be born with.

The fisherman was a Finn. Vasily recognized a few words even through the slurring. A drunken Finn—well, they never had been able to hold their drink like a Russian could—drunk and losing money like a cod sieve, if he understood the insults that were flying thick and furious. The lack of dignity was what appalled him. Even the louts in this place were watching the grubby creature with distaste. The Swede slapped the filthy Finn, knocking him off his chair.

Curled up on the floor like a wool-clogged shrimp, the fisherman spat at the Swede and said something in Swedish that to Vasily’s ear sounded like a very discourteous statement about the man’s mother. However, his Swedish was limited so it was just as likely that he had said something about a moose and a goat. Still, from the great roar that was now issuing from the Swede, Vasily thought perhaps he’d been right in his first assumption.

The big Swede grabbed the other man by the tatty collar of his navy peacoat and shook him to his feet before batting him away with a hand the size of a dinner plate. The fisherman’s legs windmilled backwards, and in a vain effort to keep his balance, he upset the table and the parrot, knocked burning wood into the room, and lifted the fur hat off the Laplander before landing, with no small impact, in Vasily’s lap.

The parrot was shrieking obscenities that were somehow translatable from any language, without necessarily needing to know the exact organs to which the person, or parrot, as it were, was referring. The fisherman patted Vasily’s face, eyes bleared with drink and muzzy confusion.

Vasily curled his nose up in distaste. The man smelled as though he’d been soaked in a vat of Kossu for several days and then left to dry in a barrel of herring. He shoved at him, certain the smell would be impossible to remove from his greatcoat.

The man fell to the floor, a stinking heap, mumbling to himself in a polyglot of languages that Vasily could make neither head nor tail of. He was a pitiful creature, and Vasily, a soft-hearted boy at his core stood, and with a grunt of disgust helped the crabbed fisherman to his feet. Oddly, he was a good deal taller than Vasily had originally thought, and somewhat more straight-bodied. Seen up close he appeared younger, the dirt more of a smear than an actual settling into creases.

The fisherman smiled at him, revealing a set of teeth that were startlingly white and straight. Vasily began to get an uneasy feeling. Just then, a doe-eyed girl walked past him, skin aglow against her white furs like a night-bloomed peach. She glanced at him with a slow, fluid smile that made his knees want to drop in worshipful prayer, though like most good little Soviet boys the only god he was familiar with was Josef Stalin. He got a funny feeling at the nape of his neck, a small prickling that told him somewhere amongst this motley and filthy crew, was his quarry. But where? The girl was his only clue that the package was actually in the vicinity, because certainly she wasn’t here with any of these brutes. Strange, but she was looking back over her shoulder now, as if beckoning him over.

Later he would blame the vodka, for after all the vodka wasn’t likely to refute the accusation and he couldn’t think of any other reason that he would agree to accompany the filthy fisherman into the sauna, housed in a small building out back of the tavern. That and the fisherman. When asked if he was aware whether a man with golden hair and a reputation for being a bit of a bastard was anywhere in the vicinity, he had assured Vasily that this man was one he knew but who wasn’t likely to appear until the sun had disappeared into the sea.

“Why to seek him?” the fisherman had asked in extremely mangled Russian. “This is very bad man you are finding, young friend.” He gave Vasily a look of pity that hadn’t done a great deal to shore up Vasily’s shaky spine.

“Come, we will sweat the poisons out while you wait for this…” the fisherman spat as though ridding his mouth of a vile poison, “…bastard.” His new friend then all but dragged him by the lapels of his coat out back. Vasily felt a small trickle of unease but the alcohol had relieved him of actually paying attention to the feeling. Also, being Russian, he firmly believed in a sauna as a cure for almost all the bodily and mental ills the world could inflict upon a man.

The low-roofed hut looked as if a good wind would send it scuttling straight out into the frigid embrace of the Barents Sea. He eyed the sun still hovering on the horizon. He would have time to steam and go back into the tavern to await the package.

Inside, the hut was lathe and plaster, with a low roof and steam so thick that he couldn’t find his own hand once the door was shut behind them. It clogged his lungs and lent a torpor to his head that increased the effect of the Kossu exponentially.

The fisherman could talk, that much was clear. Not that Vasily, neatly folding his uniform and placing it on a bench in the tiny vestibule, could follow much of what he said. He had a feeling it wasn’t necessary and that the man would chatter glibly no matter whether his audience listened or not.

Vasily clambered up to the top of the two-tiered bench and settled himself against the wall. The fisherman handed him a bottle, his hand disembodied so that Vasily giggled, for it looked as though the bottle were floating to him out of the fog, a Russian dream come to life. He leaned back after several lusty swallows, allowing the vodka to lubricate his every cell. Later, he would think he must have drifted into a short sleep, for he had no recollection of the fisherman leaving. Yet leave he must have, for when Vasily next noticed, the fisherman was nowhere to be found though streams of dirt were running down to the floor, testifying to his recent occupation of the seat beside Vasily. With senses severely impaired by the litre of Kossu, Vasily felt little cat feet run up his spine and then he sensed a presence in the sauna that felt in no way benign.

He glared blearily through the steam and saw someone with hair slicked to his head in translucent streams of guinea gold and skin that had recently drunk sun in quantities not found in this hemisphere. He peered through the steam, the Kossu settling in sweet pools in all his joints, muscles and senses. A pair of eyes, cutting as viridescent steel, looked back at him. Somewhere far down inside his brain an alarm bell rang, but the tinny sound was quickly submerged in the river of vodka that kept emerging hospitably from the steam.

“You do know the old Finnish drinking game, don’t you?”

One part of his mind noted with surprise that he was now addressed in flawless and stone-cracking Russian.

“
Nyet
,” he said, the word acquiring the length of several slippery syllables in its traverse over his tongue.

“It goes like this—three Finns go into a sauna with a half litre of Kossu each, one leaves and the other two have to guess who left. Got it?”

“
Da
.” He wiped a trickle of sweat from his cheek and was vaguely worried that he couldn’t feel his fingers on his face until he realized he still had his mittens on. This in itself was worrying because he didn’t remember putting them back on after removing his uniform.

“The advanced version goes like this—two men enter a sauna with a half litre of vodka each, they drink the vodka and one leaves, and the one left behind has to guess who left. So guess which one of us left,” the voice said, floating disembodied through the steam.

Vasily scratched his face again, mittens sodden with Kossu and steam… and another scent… peaches or limes or something that he couldn’t quite locate in his memory.

“I don’t know your name,” he said plaintively, feeling put upon by this game that he didn’t understand. Silence greeted him through the steam.

“
Skazheete pozhluista
, (can you tell me please)” he said, with the inbred politeness that came of having far too many superiors in one’s life. Still silence, and he moved over on the bench unsteadily, only to be jerked back unceremoniously by his mittens which appeared to be attached to a long set of threads that wove like an inebriated spider all over the small room. His inebriated state, however, made it imperative to follow each thread singly to its ultimate destination. This endeavor took some time, until finally the last thread led to the door of the sauna. But the door wouldn’t move. It too seemed to be threaded shut in some ingeniously perverse fashion. He thought sinkingly of the messenger from last year and the year’s worth of Siberian potatoes he had peeled.

Putting a shoulder to the plastered wall, he found it disturbingly solid. A small thrum of panic rose in his stomach though the Kossu was still numbing most of his bits into stoic acceptance. He rushed the door but his slippery flesh slid off with little effect. Still, he had the innate stubbornness of his forebears who had been farmers in the Ukraine for several generations.

He heard the roar of the UAZ and gave one last frantic rush on the door, which gave suddenly like a hot knife through butter and he shot out, naked as a cherub, into the blue banks of snow in time to see a man turn and wave at him—a man with guinea gold hair and a bastard’s smile on his face. A man who wore the perfectly groomed uniform of a Soviet Red Army soldier, winter greatcoat and all.Vasily noted furiously that it looked better on the bastard than it did on him.

With a heart already lurking in the region of his appendix, he noted the doe-eyed stunner, furs framing her peachy face, blowing him a kiss from the passenger’s seat before the jeep tore off in a spray of Finnish snow.

Beside him, the big Swede waved to the jeep, a broad grin on his face.

“You know him?” Vasily asked in the passable bit of Swedish he had learned during his Army training.

“
Ja
, is Jamie—I know him many years—he is—how to say—madman.”

He noted then how cold his feet were and the interest with which several pairs of fishermen’s eyes gazed upon his bare behind. Pulling together what dignity could be found nude and shorn of both his uniform and vehicle, he turned, pulled the threads of his unraveled mittens to him, and carefully bunching them over the area that was taking greatest offense at the cold, he walked back into the tavern, certain that anything was better than telling the Captain he’d failed. There wasn’t, Vasily thought with sudden dark clarity, enough fucking Kossu in a glacier to make that palatable.

Chapter Twenty-three
The Dacha in the Woods

Several hours later, while Vasily slept curled up
in an Astrakhan rug in front of the tavern fire, the chancy bastard who had stolen his jeep and his clothing was pulling up to a long, low-eaved dacha heavy with snow and ice, his lips still tasting sweetly of peaches and vodka. Whether this cabin was on the Soviet or Finnish side of the border was debatable. He was in favor of it being on the Russian side because the stars here were closer to the ground and that seemed to him a Russian state of being. Cold beauty, seemingly within reach, but in truth not anywhere within the grasp of a man at all.

Russia—the very name was a dark, rich perfume upon his tongue. He had never been able to bring himself to call this country by its official name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. No, she was Russia, indomitable and cruel, much like the nature of her own people. She was mysterious, dark, and unfathomable: from the far west where the city of St. Petersburg still hung like a sugar-spun fairytale of European architecture, European manners and European decay, a city of water, stone and sky, Russia’s own Venice; to the east, Kiev, its outlines laid down in white marble and etched upon the skies in airy domes, so beautifully constructed they seemed like teacups awaiting the discerning tongues of angels on high to drink their exotic depths.

The Russians themselves were descended from the great horse warlords with their scythe-like cheekbones and ice-blue eyes. To the far north, with its vast, dark forests, tracts of which no man had ever walked within nor touched upon, was the land of fable, of Baba Yaga and the Firebird, the land of the sweeping amber-skinned hordes of Ghengis Khan… Siber, the very name conjuring icy steppes and dark-eyed women in wind-torn furs.

The armies of Ghengis Khan had numbered in the tens of thousands, men feared from one ocean to the other for their famed indestructibility. Neither hunger, nor cold, nor mighty Russian princes stood against them, the reach of their hooked swords extending from the frozen tundra to the warm-blooded waters of the Black Sea. They had shaped the modern body of Russia.

Ah, yes, the vast bloody, beautiful, terrible body of Mother Russia. No mother had ever been less nurturing to her children. She had succored her young on blood from the very beginnings of human memory. Never more so than now, with the heartless steel of the Soviet Empire and all its tin soldiers illustrating her might and fury. James Kirkpatrick stood in the cold embrace of her harlot’s heart and knew himself ten kinds of fool for keeping this meeting as he did each year. Each year the risk of something going very badly awry increased, and he often felt his luck running down like a rope of sand, leaving little to which to cling.