But as we left the cafe and proceeded to Sofija’s apartment house Milan said that the food tasted good to him.
I nodded. And then did a monumental double-take because what he had said, word for word, was “Man garsho bariba.”
I looked at Milan, who was smiling shyly, and at Minna, who was simply beaming. Esperanto would be unnecessary from now on, as would Serbo-Croat. In a few days the little minx would have him speaking Lettish.
Chapter 13
We were about as cozy as a group of five can reasonably expect to be in an apartment designed to accommodate two. I explained that I had no need of a bed, that I could more easily sleep during the day, when the others were up and about, and that most of my planning for the exodus would have to be done at night anyway. Sofija and Zenta, who shared a large bed in the one small bedroom, decided that there was certainly room in that big bed for Minna as well. Milan declared that he would sleep most comfortably on the couch. So the sleeping arrangements were not particularly inconvenient. It was when we were all present and all awake that the apartment was overly crowded. We would sit balancing plates of food on our laps, or stumble about bumping into one another, or merely demonstrate through general discomfort and malaise that the apartment did not fulfill our territorial imperative.
I coped with this situation by carefully being absent at times when everyone else was present. The girls were away most of the day, and it was easy enough for me to invent mysterious missions that would take me out of the apartment during the evenings.
It was easy, in fact, to invent almost anything but an escape route out of Latvia. There were too many of us, and we were too heavily loaded down for us to get out as easily as Milan and I had gotten in. If I had come alone, and if Sofija herself had been alone, a routine of border-hopping and disguises might have worked. Now, with our party of two transformed into a party of five, that was out of the question.
And Minna, delight though she was, constituted another problem. She couldn’t be expected to walk long distances or endure much in the way of hardship. She was only six years old.
All of which meant that our departure would have to be swift, bold, abrupt.
And therefore dangerous.
We would need a car for a start. That wouldn’t be too difficult, I decided; one of the girls could simply borrow one from a friend (girls who look like that invariably have friends who are anxious to lend them cars), and we could abandon the car when the time came. That, after all, is what friends are for.
With a halfway decent car we could drive from Riga to Tallinn in four hours at the outside. The Estonian capital is on the Gulf of Finland just fifty miles south of Helsinki. The Russians patrol those waters carefully, but no marine patrol can be that perfect, and it seemed reasonable to assume that a fast ship in the hands of an alert and cooperative (and greedy) boatman could get us through.
I was unsure how wide-armed a reception we could expect in Helsinki. The Finns have the good sense to remain on good terms with the Russians. Still, a plea for political asylum had to carry some weight. Of course a plea for political asylum generally entails publicity, and Finland is honeycombed with Russian operatives, so Finland might not be the safest place on earth. But if we could reach an American embassy in Finland, then perhaps…
I spent four fairly rotten days and nights playing with this dilemma. I don’t think I would have gotten much sleep during those days even if I had been capable of it. What it came down to, finally, was that Finland was better than any other possibility, but that any serious thought about what to do in Finland had to wait until it was established whether or not we could expect to get there.
None of which could be properly assessed in Riga. So one night, after dinner, I shook hands with Milan, embraced the Lazdinja sisters warmly, kissed Minna, and went to Tallinn.
The waterfront bars in Tallinn are much like waterfront bars at any seaport. Talk of women and ships, heavy drinking, conversations in a dozen languages at once, and underneath it all a healthy disrespect for law and order. Every seaman is, at heart, a smuggler and an anarchist. When a man spends so much of his time sailing on open waters with sailors from all over the world, he learns not to care much about the prevailing governments on that one-fourth of the globe that God, for some mysterious reason, saw fit to spoil by covering it with land.
Waterfront bars are good places. Men drink, men get drunk, men fight, men occasionally kill one another, but a waterfront bar remains a generally good place to be.
I was in just about every damned one in Tallinn. I lived in them until I found my man, and then I spent a long time scouting him and another long time conversing with him. It took a couple of days and nights until I was virtually certain he was right. He had a fast ship, he had no love for any government and liked the Soviet government least of all, and, most important of all, he hungered for money.
I had $1,000 U.S. in a money belt around my waist. The farther one gets from America, the more desirable the U.S. dollar becomes. I felt it ought to be enough to carry the deal. A man with a fast ship of his own in a port like Tallinn is almost certain to be a full-time smuggler, working contraband back and forth between Helsinki and Tallinn. A smuggler is accustomed to heavy profits, but a thousand U.S. dollars for one night’s work still added up to a substantial sum. So I waited until we were alone in the night, halfway between one saloon and the next on down the line, and then I made my pitch.
“Ander,” I said, “you are an intelligent man. You know this port and these waters. I have a question for you.”
He waited.
“Let us suppose, Ander, that there was a family of five, a man and two women and a child and a grandfather, and all of them without papers. Let us suppose that they wanted to go from Estonia to Finland, and to leave Estonia without anyone knowing of it, and then to enter Finland without anyone knowing it. Let us suppose-”
“They would have to go by boat,” he said.
“That would no doubt be the best way.”
“It would be dangerous. Very few men would have the courage to transport them. And very few families would have the resources to afford such a trip.”
Ah, good. We were getting closer to brass tacks.
“Do you think a man with the necessary amount of courage could be found? And with the skill and daring to make the trip in safety?”
“It is possible.”
“And what resources would the family require?”
“A great deal.”
He was a Dutchman or a Lascar or a German or a Spaniard, depending upon his audience and his mood. He was somewhere between thirty and fifty. He was not going to name a price, nor was he going to settle for a sum until he knew it was as much as he could possibly get.
So I said, “Ander, this family would give its entire resources. Everything. Its entire resources amount to exactly one thousand dollars, American. In American bills. Twenty fifty-dollar bills.”
“That is not enough.”
The inevitable response. “Then, there is no point in our discussing this family further,” I said, “because this family never tries to make bargains. This family has precisely the sum of money mentioned, no more and no less, and there is no point in our wasting our time.”
And I shook hands warmly with him and went back to the bar from whence I had come.
I outwaited him. It took some doing, because he was fairly certain that I needed him more than he needed me and he was dead right. But I had no more chips left, and the sooner he realized as much, the easier things would be all around. I waited an hour, nursing beers and talking with some Norwegians, and then Ander came in, passed me, brushed my arm with his, and nodded shortly at the door.