She wasn’t nearly ugly enough to be Karpov’s sister, but perhaps a cousin. Grisha stepped into view. Her agreeable proportions and medium stature heightened his interest.
“Ah, here is Charter Captain Grigorievich. We can leave at once,” Karpov said.
The woman’s eyes traveled over him slowly. Nothing coy about this one, he thought. He smiled.
“Welcome aboard Pravda. I’m Grisha. May I stow your gear?”
Her face softened a measure, adding attractiveness, and she handed him the canvas bag. It weighed nothing. An unknown, but delectable, scent touched his nose during the exchange.
“Captain Grisha,” she said with the smallest of smiles. “I’m Valari Kominskiya.” Her English sounded first-language. He wondered if her Russian was as proficient.
Grisha put the bag on the forward bunk and returned to the bridge.
“We can leave now.” Karpov said again.
Fifteen minutes later, as Pravda motored north on T’angass Narrows, their conversation became cryptic.
“Did you have difficulty getting in or out?”
“No,” Valari said. “My documents worked as smoothly as gold in St. Petersburg.”
“Keep your subversive comments to yourself, or I’ll take official notice,” Karpov said with a growl. “What is the temper of Sam?”
What on earth were they talking about, more relatives? Grisha turned his head slightly to hear her answer over the engine noise. Karpov caught the movement.
“Wait,” he ordered. “We’ll go below to the cabin where there are fewer ears.”
Grisha stared studiously through the windscreen while the two clumped down the steps into the cabin. He smiled to himself and slid aside a piece of the console molding. Some cargoes could speak, and additional knowledge had a way of turning into more rubles. After mounting the tiny phone in his right ear, he flipped the switch concealed in the opening.
“…States are very nervous. One man told me they were ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop,’ whatever that means,” Valari said.
“Which do they fear the most, New France or the Confederacy?”
“It’s a toss-up,” she said in fluent Russian. “They are allies. Tension is high between the governments. Texas is very friendly to British Canada. The great fear in Texas is of New Spain and the First People’s Nation. Our historic ally, the Spanish, have been rattling sabers along the Rio Grande by placing additional troops at El Paso and Marronville. With New Spain as common enemy, California and Texas get along well. California is so friendly with British Canada that one may cross the Columbia River freely without showing a passport on either side.”
“The religious country in the wasteland, is it anything we must worry about?”
“Deseret? The Mormons hate the other nations so fiercely they would sell themselves to the French Catholics before they would help any of them. They are neutral, you know.”
“Neutral, in what way?”
“No matter who fights who, they will join neither side. Like Switzerland in Europe.”
“So our U.S. friends are completely surrounded by antagonism,” Karpov said.
“So it would seem. But what do we really care about North Amerikan countries?”
“We have internal problems you will be apprised of in New Arkhangel. If the southern countries were to act in tandem against us it would be very bad.”
“I didn’t see any unity or antagonism. But I saw a lot of spoiled people.”
“You’re becoming hardened,” Karpov said.
“Not hardened, envious. Every one of our agents-in-place lives on a grand scale compared to what my family has in Russia. Our woman in Montreal owns two automobiles!”
Grisha blinked. Karpov was a spymaster? They chartered Pravda~ for a debriefing session? It did make sense, after a fashion.
“No!” Karpov’s surprise carried clearly over the tiny earphone.
“Perhaps we should pay them less?”
“At least she provides us with accurate information. She told me there is softening about us in the western republics.”
“Didn’t you just come through California?”
“Yes. But our man in San Francisco spends all of his money on cannabis cigarettes, which makes him useless for days at a time. All he wanted to do was make love and eat.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Make love with him.”
“That is none of your svinia affair.”
“It used to be.”
Something thumped on the table, and Grisha realized Karpov had been drinking vodka throughout the debriefing.
“Not anymore, Nikki. You’re just not my type.”
“You’d sleep with our Creole captain, I saw it in your eyes.”
“He is pretty to look at, but he holds no interest for me beyond the objectives of our voyage. I am weary of men and their strutting and crowing.”
“You prefer women to sleep with, is what you mean?”
Valari stomped up the companionway. Grisha’s heart lurched as he jerked the tiny phone from his ear and hastily stuffed the wires back into their hidden compartment. She stormed past before he could shut the false molding, but she had eyes only for her anger and the passing scenery.
“That bastard is such a svinia, a pig!” she said in a hissing voice.
“Someday I will kill him.”
“I believe he dropped out of finishing school,” Grisha said in a theatrical Californian accent. He quietly pushed the small door shut. The molding blended with the rest of the console. He wondered what she meant by
“the objectives of our voyage.”
When Valari laughed she almost looked pretty. “You’re married, aren’t you?”
The question caught him off guard.
“At the moment.”
“I’ve been out of the country for two years. What does ‘at the moment’ mean? Is it a marriage of convenience to obtain citizenship papers?”
“No. It means that at any moment she is going to leave me for another man.”
“Oh.”
Grisha made a show of checking his charts. He glanced at his watch and immediately powered up the radio.
“…move across the Alexandr Archipelago by nightfall. Thirty-knot winds increasing to forty to fifty knots by morning. Seas two to three meters. For the outside waters, Dixon Entrance to Christian Sound, smallcraft warning. Seas two to four meters. West winds forty knots increasing to fifty-five by morning—”
Grisha snapped off the radio and peered at the horizon. A dark line rapidly moved out of the west, staining the abnormal blue sky back to familiar tones.
“We’re in for some rough weather,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Are we in any danger?”
He tried to laugh, but even to him it sounded more like a bark.
“One is always in danger in Russian Amerika, one way or another.”
“Is this one of your pithy Native American sayings?”
“It’s truth, like my boat.”
“How can a boat be truth?” she asked with more than a hint of angry sarcasm.
“How can it be a lie?”
Karpov emerged from the cabin, vodka bottle in hand. “I’m hungry.”
A gust of cold wind heeled the boat over to starboard. The temperature dropped ten degrees in as many seconds.
Karpov braced himself and stared out at the rapidly advancing weather.
“Storm?” he said in a small voice.
Grisha started to smile at their discomfort but stopped himself. It would not do to laugh at the wind.
“Da,” he said.
Karpov hastily drank from the bottle. He peered at Valari.
“You will go below with me, now.”
She scowled back. “In the Amerikas they have the perfect expression for someone like you. Would you like to know it?”
Karpov quietly stared at her, eyes hidden in wrinkled folds of skin.
“Go fuck yourself, is what the
y say. I think you should do that now.”
With surprising speed he lunged forward and slapped her open-handed. Her head smacked against the bulkhead with a solid thunk and she emitted a startled yell.
“Hey!” Grisha shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Karpov turned to face him. His English had gained polish. “This is none of your concern, Captain Grigorievich. You are being well paid. You will drive the boat and mind your own business.”
Grisha clenched his teeth and said nothing. Karpov gathered Valari in one arm and hauled her down the companionway as if she were a sack of oats.
Then the storm caught them and Karpov started his last fight.
3
Tolstoi Bay, Prince of Wales Island
Pravda danced and jerked on the anchor line. The small cove on Prince of Wales Island sheltered them from the brunt of the storm. Grisha took a firm grasp under Karpov’s shoulders.
“Ready?”
Valari nodded sharply.
“Hup!”
They swung the stiffing body off the deck and up onto the gunwale at the stern, balancing it carefully. The memory of butchering hogs flashed through his mind.
“Okay, I’ll hold him, put the box on his chest.”
She bent over and grabbed the box tied to the corpse with a short line, sat it in the middle of Karpov’s chest.
“Push!” Grisha ordered.
The body splashed into the water and, spinning in a slow circle behind the heavy box of weapons, sank rapidly out of sight.
Numb lassitude spread over him, and he relaxed for the first time in three days. Suddenly Valari pressed against him, her hands moving over his face, chest, groin.
“I need you,” she said. “Right now.”
With a tired smile he pulled her into the cabin.
The bright sky held no wind when he woke. For a long moment he lay in the bunk beside the woman and collected his thoughts. He tried to figure out how he could have changed the outcome.
This charter was set up by the government, even he knew that. Would the Okhana believe their concocted story about the loss of one of their agents?
“What’s the matter, Captain Lover?”
Grisha turned his head and looked at her. The now-familiar mouth smiled, lips parted slightly as if anticipating a kiss. But Valari’s eyes held a hardness unaffected through murder and sex.
He’d seen eyes like hers only a couple of times. They had belonged to desperate men whose only hope lay with the legal benediction of the Troika Guard. Both had finished badly, one shot for cowardice and the other killed in a barroom brawl.
He had let this situation get out of his control. With this woman he had helped murder a man and finally cheated on his wife. Too much, too fast. He knew nothing about her, yet she held his life in her hands. Amazing how an orgasm could clear the mind.
“What are we going to do now?” he asked.
“He got drunk and fell over the side during the storm.” Her eyes searched his. “Isn’t that what you said last night?”
“Yes, but…” Grisha licked his suddenly dry lips, “You must attest to what I say, no matter what. Agreed?”
“ Da.” Valari’s eyes narrowed and her mouth flattened. “But you must be very convincing and not waver.”
“I can do that. But you worked for him, or with him, isn’t there someone you could talk to, and make this be all right?”
Something deep in her eyes shifted and for a moment he thought he saw triumph before they became veiled. “Just who do you think I am?”
“I know you’re an agent for the government. I know Karpov was someone you reported to. There’s much that I don’t know.
“Why did they hire a boat to bring you to New Arkhangel when flying would have been much more expedient? Why did Karpov hire me?” He felt angry.
“Why, at my age, is everything in my life suddenly out of control?”
“I cannot tell you more than I already have. If you do not wish to face the Okhana we have two options. We can turn ourselves in and tell the truth, which would mean the gallows for both of us—”
“For stopping him from raping you? For saving us all from drowning because he imperiled this craft?”
“They rarely believe survivors who do not bring back a corpse.”
“He fell over the side. We were in a storm, right?”
“Or we can go to California, ask for political asylum, and start our lives over.”
“Political asylum? Who are we to ask for that?”
“I’m an espionage agent for Imperial Russia, you are my lover. They would give us asylum.”
He allowed himself to think about it, to savor the idea like a bite of potato salad or a mouthful of good ale. His marriage was finished and he didn’t want to be in the same small town where Kazina would be showing off her new Russian husband. He would forfeit the house but if the authorities refused to believe them he would also forfeit his life.
He had to depend on Valari. Of course, she already said she owed him, but he couldn’t bring himself to trust her. A small part of his brain pointed out that this would be a new adventure, something he had sorely missed since leaving the Troika Guard.
He couldn’t go on smuggling forever.
“We’ll need money,” he said.
“Do you have any?”
“Yes. I’ve put away half my earnings for three years now. At first it was for my children…” He turned his head and stared toward the overhead, focused on an image infinitely far away. “Then it was for my escape.”
“How much?”
“Enough to live on for a year.”
“It’s on the boat?”
“No. It’s in my workshop behind my house at Akku.”
“Where your wife is,” Valari said.
“And her lover,” he agreed.
“Check the weather,” she said, smiling.
“I don’t understand it,” he said, staring at the high cloud cover where blue peeked through in spots. “Yesterday the radio said it would be worse by this morning.”
She laughed behind him. “How often are they correct?”
He grinned and snapped on the radio. The low-pressure system had inexplicably shifted far to the north and west where the storm now pounded from Kodiak Island to sprawling St. Nicholas, the huge military bastion of Russian Amerika on Cook’s Inlet.
Good, I hope the Russian Amerika Company offices all wash out to sea.
They ran north as fast as he dared push the boat. Grisha settled into an apprehensive anticipation. Something about his feelings struck a chord in his memory.
Suddenly he was again a frightened five-year-old, watching his drunken father beat his mother. His mother grunted with the blows, trying to cover her face and chest. Grisha’s fear for his mother finally overcame selfpreservation and he attacked his father.
He pounded on his father with small fists. The next thing he knew, his mother was bathing his face with cold water. Pitr Grigorievich had knocked him out, realized the monstrousness of his actions, and fled into the night.
They had waited together, fearful and expectant, for the man to return and for it all to begin again. Which it did.
Grisha shook his head at the vividness of the memory. He knew he still harbored old anger for his father, but he thought the fear long vanquished. And how was this like that?
They spent the night at transient moorage in a small settlement on Mitkof Island. Fuel cost more there, but Grisha didn’t want to run into anyone he knew. Not that Valari let him get that far from the double bunk in the bow and her insatiable needs.
By 0900 the next morning they were on the last leg of their trip. The fair weather held for the entire day and they made good time. Akku Channel lay quiet and empty in the late evening when they rounded the south end of Douglas Island.
The stamp mills sat silent, something that only happened on Christmas Day and the Czar’s birthday. The last glow of light reflected on the water. Suddenly fireworks shouted
across the sky as they neared town.
“What are they celebrating, a local holiday?” Valari asked.
´Grisha thought hard. “No. There’s no holiday in early July. I don’t know what’s going on.”
He slowed as they passed under the bridge, but no patrol boats lurked in their usual spots. They idled up to the fuel dock, and he tied the boat while she stepped into the office.
“There’s nobody here.”
Laughter and music drifted down from the Harbor Hotel. Fireworks popped and whistled above them, the acrid stink of gunpowder drifted on the air. Grisha shrugged and filled the fuel tanks.
“This bothers me,” Valari said. “I want to know what’s happening.”
He moved Pravda over to her normal berth as full darkness settled over an unusually boisterous Akku.
“You wait here. I’ll get the money, and we’ll go look at California.”
“Be careful, Grigoriy,” she whispered, then kissed him ardently.
He hurried away, wondering where they would be a year from now. From half a block away he could see that every light in his house blazed. People milled about, laughing and drinking.
A party. She’s actually having a party.
He crept close enough to see Kazina radiant on the arm of Kommander Fedorov. She wore a dress new to him, and the kommander stood resplendent in full dress uniform. They made a handsome couple.
Surprisingly, the teeth didn’t bite at him. He tensed in the old way, but they were gone.
It’s over, and I don’t care anymore, he thought. A new adventure waits for me.
The sense of freedom left him giddy. He hurried around the house to his well-built shop. Quietly he slipped in through the door and stopped, pulse drumming in his head.
He wasn’t alone. Barely discernible noises exuded from the dark, sawdust-scented space. He peered at the workbench but could see nothing in the dim light other than a few tools out of place.
Three large electric saws dominated the center of the room. Sorted wood filled racks against the back wall, and his drafting table and books loomed on the left. The only thing against the right wall was his cot—
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