“How many?” she said softly. “How many died?”
He glanced over at her white, tightly held face. “No one knows for sure. A U.S. government study in the late forties put the number of dead at between two and three million-most of them women and children. And the very old, of course.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
Jax blew out his breath in a long sigh. There had been some revisionist attempts to drastically lower the death figures. But most historians without a political agenda tended to agree that the original estimates were probably conservative. He said, “We all think we know what’s true and what isn’t. You think the U.S. could never have been complicit in something like this, while I think it’s impossible for someone to sit in a room on a Naval base in New Orleans and somehow ‘see’ a Russian shipyard in her mind.”
She was silent for a moment, watching a stork rise from its nest on the rafters of a ruined barn. “That’s different.”
“Is it?”
By the time they reached the coast, a brisk wind had blown away all but a few wisps of the low-hanging clouds that had made the morning so bleak. The sky that arched above them now was a vast, pastel blue reflected by the waters of the Curonian Lagoon to their right and the Baltic Sea to the north.
They followed a narrow road that cut through vast dunes ranging from thirty to sixty feet high. Most had been planted with pine forests in an effort to overcome the dunes’ habit of swallowing entire villages. But some were still wind-sculpted, shifting mounds of bare golden sand.
They found the village of Rybachy just a few kilometers short of the Lithuanian border. Seagulls wheeled, screeching, above rows of wooden fishing boats rocking beside a pier that stretched far out into the waters of the lagoon. Nearby, the ruins of an old Teutonic Knights’ castle stood guard over a few hundred houses, many of them still showing the carved wooden fronts of a different age and different inhabitants.
“There,” said October, pointing to a white stucco house with a red tiled roof about halfway down a leafy street. “That’s where Captain Baklanov’s widow lives.”
Jax pulled into the shelter of a spreading elm and killed the engine. The curtains at the house’s windows were all tightly drawn, the neatly tended yard deserted.
“I wonder if she speaks English,” said October, thrusting open her car door.
“Probably not. Why?”
A soft smile touched her features. “I was just trying to figure out how I’m supposed to let you do the talking if she only speaks Russian.”
“Oh? Like you let me do the talking with Andrei?”
“I did.”
“You didn’t.”
They walked up a brick path to the house’s shallow front steps. Jax noticed her limp was getting better. She said, “What if she doesn’t want to talk to us?”
“We tell her we’re from her husband’s insurance company. She’ll talk to us.”
October stopped in the middle of the walk. “But that’s mean. What if Baklanov didn’t have any insurance? We’d get her hopes up for nothing.”
He groaned. “You have way too many scruples to work for the CIA. Tell her we’re journalists from the AP doing a story.”
“On what?”
“Crime? Modern pirates?” He rang the bell. “Make something up. It’s what spies do, you know. We lie.”
Heavy footsteps sounded on the other side of the door. “But-”
The door swung inward to reveal a stout woman with graying hair and a full, puffy face, her features blurred by grief. “Yes?” she said, her eyes narrowing with suspicion.
“Dobrih dyen,” said October, giving the woman a wide smile. “Uhhh…” For a moment, she froze. Then she cleared her throat and said in her flawless Russian, “We’re journalists with the Associated Press.”
She chose the modern Baltic pirates angle. Jax’s Russian was just good enough to enable him to follow most of what was being said. When Anna Baklanov turned her watery gray stare from Tobie to Jax, he slipped out his wallet and presented her with his press card.
While October stared at him in wide-eyed wonder, the captain’s widow took the card between two fingers and scowled. He had no way of knowing if she could read it or not, but her jaw hardened and she started to close the door. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”
Jax stuck his foot in the rapidly closing gap and said to Tobie, “Tell her we’ll pay.”
October translated.
The widow sniffed. “I’ve no time for this. I’m on my way to stay with my mother-in-law.”
“A thousand rubles,” said Jax. In a province where over half the population made less than four thousand rubles a month, a thousand rubles was a lot of money. In the States, it would buy you a tank of gas.
Anna Baklanov sniffed again and opened the door.
She led them into a bizarrely furnished sitting room that looked more like Arabian Nights than Russian Revolution. Massive mansaf trays a meter wide, made of copper coated with tin, hung above olive wood chests inlaid with mother of pearl. There were scimitars from Turkey and Syria, daggers from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, colorful thick carpets from the land of the Hindu Kush. This was a side of Jasha Baklanov they hadn’t been expecting. At the far end of the room, dominating it all, stood an easel proudly displaying a framed black-and-white photograph of a little girl with wild hair presenting President Brezhnev with a bouquet of white roses. If Jax squinted, he could see the ravaged remnants of that little girl in Anna Baklanov.
“I had the militia here two days ago,” she said, fumbling with a pack of cigarettes. “Wanting to know who hired Jasha to raise that old U-boat. As if I knew.”
October nodded sympathetically. “Jasha didn’t talk about his business much, did he?”
“What man does talk about business when he comes home? Hmmm? That’s why he comes home, to get away from business. Eat his dinner, drink his vodka.” She paused to light her cigarette and drew hard. “You’d like some vodka?”
“No, thank you,” said October.
Jax smiled, “One glass.”
Anna Baklanov heaved to her feet and disappeared through a door.
October whispered, “I hate vodka.”
“Russia runs on vodka. You’ll never get her to talk if you don’t drink with her.”
The widow was back in a moment bearing a tray with three glasses, a bottle of vodka, and slices of dark bread. She filled their glasses to the brim.
“It must be tricky raising an old submarine,” said October, taking her glass with care.
“Jasha was the best.” Vodka in hand, Anna Baklanov leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He’d done it before, you know. Sold the sub itself for the steel, and auctioned everything from Kraut helmets to belt buckles and gas masks on eBay.”
October took a sip of her vodka and choked. “Someone hired him for that?” she asked, her voice a raw rasp. “Or was it his own plan?”
“Of course it was his plan.” Anna Baklanov upended her own glass and let the vodka slide down her throat in an easy motion that made Tobie’s eyes widen. “He got the idea from something he read on the Internet, about the British salvaging the old German U-boats they sank off the coast of Ireland.”
“Smart man,” said October.
Jasha’s widow nodded and fumbled for a handkerchief to blow her nose.
October said, “So he had experience raising World War II submarines. I suppose that’s why these men came to him.”
Anna Baklanov tucked her handkerchief out of sight, lit another cigarette, and nodded. “They’d heard about him.”
“They were Russians?”
She shook her head. “Two of them spoke Russian, but they weren’t Russian.”