Some of the costumed figures at the front of the church began to shuffle along their pew into the aisle, and for a moment Rudi thought the service was already over, but the singers gathered around the coffin and composed themselves and Rudi stared in horror. Oh, gods, they’re actually going to sing.
And after a moment or so, they did, these old men and women who looked as if they had stepped out of a kitsch tourist postcard, and it was beautiful. Rudi didn’t know the song, didn’t even think it was Estonian – he caught a few words that sounded Lithuanian, which had been one of his father’s obsessions – but the old folk sang their hearts out, and Rudi suspected that, had he any feelings left for his father, it might have brought him to tears.
The song finished, the celebrant delivered one last homily, then the old chaps took up the coffin again and began to carry it down the aisle to the door. None of them was under seventy, but even in life Toomas had been virtually weightless, a figure composed mostly of gristle and sinew and spite, and they bore him easily. As the mourners in the church turned and started to follow the coffin, Rudi noticed a number of curious glances cast his way.
When everyone had gone outside, Rudi left the church and followed them along the path around the building to a little graveyard. A group of people was already standing around an open grave. Rudi stood at the back again while the celebrant said something the wind blew away, the coffin was lowered into the grave, and then everyone just spontaneously started to wander off.
As the other mourners were leaving, he saw a woman he thought he recognised, although he couldn’t work out where from. She was very short and quite stout and rather beautiful, and moved with the rolling gait of someone with hip problems who was wearing a powered exoskeleton under her clothes to help her walk. He thought she must be in her seventies, her grey hair cut collar-length and her clothes sensible but not cheap, and she had on her face an expression of acute irritation.
She seemed to be unaccompanied, standing to one side of a small group of people, and as Rudi looked at her she turned her head slightly and their eyes met and with a single lurch of his heart he suddenly knew who she was.
He took a step towards her, stopped, and she turned away from the grave and walked back towards the trees at the edge of the church’s property, and a moment later she had vanished from sight in the direction of the little line of parked vehicles on the road.
Rudi blinked and took a long, unsteady breath.
“Are you all right?” asked Juhan.
“Yes,” said Rudi. “Yes, I am.”
“DID YOUR FATHER ever tell you how we lost the Frenchmen?” Juhan asked.
“No,” said Rudi.
They were sitting in Rudi’s cottage back at the farm, Juhan having tagged along with him without being asked, a paper-wrapped package tucked under his arm. He had then produced from an inside pocket of his leather jacket a full bottle of a rather good whisky, put it on the table in the little living room, and found a couple of glasses in the kitchen. Rudi suddenly couldn’t be bothered to argue.
“I should tell you the story of how your father was born in two places at once,” Juhan mused.
“I should tell you that nothing about my father would surprise me,” Rudi said, topping up their glasses.
Juhan picked up his glass, looked at it for a moment, then emptied it in one and put it back on the table for another refill. “We were in our twenties. That was a wild old time, you have no idea.”
Rudi lit a small cigar, offered the tin to Juhan, who shook his head. “I have some idea,” he said.
“You never lived under the Russians. It got pretty surreal. Once upon a time you had to get a permit from your workplace to buy a car, and the Party had to approve it, and when it arrived it would most likely be some piece of shit Lada that cost you three years’ pay.” He picked up his glass and waggled it above the table until Rudi refilled it. “But the Finns now, the Finns were having a wild old time, buying cars and just giving away the ones they didn’t want any longer. And when we kicked the Soviets out everybody wanted a car, didn’t matter how crappy it was. Me and your father, we went over the border this one time and we bought an old Saab from this bloke on the other side for three bottles of vodka.” He drained his glass again. “Damn thing caught fire the moment we drove it back into Estonia.”
“You were saying,” Rudi murmured, refilling the glass again and wondering when exactly the old man would start getting drunk, “something about my father being born in two places.”
Juhan nodded. “Your grandfather’s family came from Parnu. Your grandmother’s came from some godawful village out east, I can’t remember where, but both families wanted Toomas to be born where they came from. It was important to them, the gods only know why. This caused a lot of friction between the two families, so your grandfather came up with this plan.”
Rudi sat forward and leaned his elbows on the table.
“Your grandfather, he was an interesting man. Knew a lot of interesting people. Knew a lot of interesting things about a lot of interesting people. So he had a word, and called in some favours, and lo and behold, on the day of Toomas’s birth there were two birth certificates. Both identical, apart from the place of birth. One in Parnu, the other in... wherever it was, somewhere near Räpina, I think. And your grandfather could show his parents one certificate, and his wife’s parents the other one, and everyone was happy.”
Rudi thought about it. “I can think of any number of ways that could go wrong,” he said.
Juhan shrugged. “They got away with it. For years Toomas had two passports.”
“What?”
“Two passports. You don’t have an uncommon surname, the place of birth was different, all the forms were in order, the authorities never checked.”
“So where was he born? Parnu or Räpina?”
Juhan chuckled. “Neither. He was born in Viljandi.”
“So he had three birth certificates.”
Juhan shook his head. “The birth was registered in Parnu and Räpina. Officially, he was born in two different places.”
Rudi sat back and downed his vodka. “Jesus Maria,” he muttered. “I come from a family of con artists.”
“Anyway, he showed me the two birth certificates this one time, and are you going to top my glass up for me or do I have to do it myself? Thank you.”
“You were going to tell me,” Rudi said, putting the bottle back down on the table, “about Toomas and the Frenchmen.”
“Mm,” said Juhan. “Yes. The Frenchmen.” He picked up his glass and, with miraculous self-control, managed to only half-empty it before looking thoughtful. “Toomas and I were working as guides at Kadriorg. The band had split up; I needed the money. One day Toomas turned up for work and told me he’d been contacted by this Frenchman who wanted to hire us as guides for him and his friends.”
Because this seemed to require a response, Rudi said, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you and Toomas, in particular?”
Juhan shook his head. “I never found out. Do you want to hear this or not?”
Not particularly, no. “Sure. Go on.”
“I need a piss. Back in a minute.” Juhan got up from the table, jacket zippers jingling, and walked to the bathroom without the slightest hint of a weave or stagger or stumble. Rudi looked at the bottle, which was three quarters empty – most of it now inside Juhan – and shook his head. Most of his father’s friends had been legendary drinkers, but they always said it was just part of being an Estonian male.
He took out his phone and called up its news browser and flicked through the front page articles. Community, Community, Community. Reports about the ongoing talks at the UN, travelogues from writers who had visited the Community, recipe books, films, novels, fashions. Starbucks was opening another fifty franchise operations around the Community; an American firm was in discussions about providing new-generation coal mining machinery. The edges between the nations were beginning to blur. H
e wondered what the Presiding Authority thought about it all. He didn’t bother Googling Mundt or murders in the Sakha Republic; if Smith had been telling the truth about a news blackout he wasn’t going to find anything in the public record, and he didn’t have any resources of his own that far east. He looked at the package Juhan had brought with him, sitting on the other side of the table. It was wrapped in somewhat aged brown paper and it was about the size of a box of chocolates. He reached out and picked it up speculatively. It was heavier than he’d expected. He put it back down.
“There were three of them,” Juhan said, returning from the bathroom. “And they all had umbrellas.”
Rudi put his phone away. “Umbrellas.”
“Three of them.” Juhan sat down and held out his glass and Rudi refilled it. “Weird. Twitchy. They wanted to go to Lahemaa.”
Rudi sat back and looked at him. “Really?”
“Really.” Juhan drank half his drink and put the glass down on the table. “The one in charge, he had maps of the Park. Said they were botanists and they’d heard of this really rare plant that was only found in this one place and they wanted to photograph it and take samples and stuff. I don’t know; neither of us knew anything about plants.”
Rudi poured himself a drink. “What happened?”
Juhan shrugged. “We took them out to the Park and we lost them.”
“How can you lose three Frenchmen?”
The old man shook his head. “We were... oh, I don’t know where, out in the wilds somewhere, kilometres from Palmse. The French bloke was dicking about with his maps and coordinates and stuff and all of a sudden they all just charged off down a track and your father followed them and he came back half an hour later and said they’d gone.”
Rudi sat very still, an awful realisation beginning to dawn on him. “What happened then?”
“We looked for them for hours, but they were gone. Toomas said he thought they’d fallen into a bog and we’d better make a run for it or we’d be arrested.” He picked up his glass and drained it. “So we left.”
“Jesus Maria,” said Rudi. “You just ran away?”
“We were young. The police would have thought we’d killed them. We didn’t want to go to jail.”
“What happened after that?”
“We watched the papers and the news for a while, in case they turned up. Or their bodies. But the years went by and nothing. I’d almost forgotten about it until I heard your Dad had died.”
I’d almost forgotten about it... “Three men might have died and you just ran away.”
Juhan shrugged. “We weren’t supposed to be there.” This time he reached out and filled his glass himself. “Fucking Frenchmen.”
“I had no idea Paps had ever been to the Park before we moved there.”
“It’s not exactly something you tell your kids.”
“Why are you telling me?”
Juhan sat back and looked sourly at him. “Toomas is gone, I won’t last much longer. I just thought someone should know. In case the bodies turned up one day. At least you can tell the authorities who they were.”
“You don’t seriously think I’m going to get myself involved in this, do you? Gods, just telling me about it makes me an accessory.”
“What you do with it is your business,” Juhan told him. “I’ve done my bit.”
“No, your bit was to contact the Park authorities and get them to search properly and take the consequences. Not just... Christ.” Rudi rubbed his eyes. “I shouldn’t blame you; this was probably all Toomas’s idea,” he said tiredly. “I know how his mind worked. Evil old bastard.”
“What time is it?” Juhan asked.
Rudi looked at his watch and scowled. He looked at the window and discovered that somehow, while they had been exploring the surreal landscape of his father’s life, night had fallen. He’d missed the last ferry back to Virtsu.
Juhan pushed the package across the table to him. “This is for you,” he said.
Rudi looked at it. “What is it?”
“Your father told me to give it you if anything happened to him.”
Rudi sighed. His father had had a great fondness, although when all was said and done very little flair, for the dramatic. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want it, whatever it is.”
“He gave it me a year or so after the Coup.” Coup, Rudi presumed, being Toomas’s word for the possibly government-sponsored riot which had put an end to his dreams of statehood for the Park. “Not long after we moved him into the flat in Rakvere. ‘Anything happens to me, give it to the boy,’ he said.”
There was no need to ask which boy; his brother Ivari was dead by then, of injuries sustained during the riot. He poked the package with a finger. Then he pushed it back across the table. “I don’t want anything from him, Juhan,” he said. “He made our lives a misery, he drove my mother away – now I learn he was probably responsible for the deaths of three Frenchmen. If you think I’m taking this thing, you’re crazier than he was.”
Juhan regarded him levelly. Then he poured the last of the Scotch into his glass and knocked it back in one. “He said you’d say that.”
“Well then.”
Juhan reached into his jacket again, and, like a stage conjurer, produced another full bottle of Scotch. He snapped the seal on the bottle’s cap, filled their glasses. “He wasn’t a bad man, you know.”
“He was a wizened little monster, Juhan; he damaged every life he ever touched.”
“He did a lot for the Park. Don’t you ever forget that.” Juhan pushed the package back to Rudi. “He didn’t leave a lot. Some books, old recordings. They all went to the Folk Song Society. This is for you.” He sat back and drank his drink.
Rudi felt his shoulders slump. It had been an eventful day; if he had ever been unsure of what the word infodump meant, he wasn’t now.
“Anyway,” Juhan said. “Let’s finish this bottle and then I’ll get a cab back to my B&B and we can go our separate ways. Okay?”
AS IT TURNED out, it took them – Juhan, really – somewhat longer to finish the second bottle than it had the first. The years seemed to finally be catching up on the old musician. By the time Rudi started to try and find Juhan a ride back to his lodgings on the other side of the island, it was past midnight and Muhu’s only taxi service had gone to bed and so had the family who owned the farm.
“Well I’m not walking back,” said Juhan, who finally seemed to be getting a little tipsy.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Rudi, who was not particularly drunk – he was too angry about too many things for that – but really, really tired. “You can have the sofa.”
Juhan looked across the sitting room at the old-fashioned and somewhat overstuffed sofa and sniffed. “With my back?”
Rudi looked at him. “You old sod,” he said.
Juhan blinked innocently at him. “One day you’ll be my age,” he warned sagely.
“I fucking hope not. Okay. You have the bed.”
AFTER JUHAN HAD spent half an hour in the bathroom – and rendered it uninhabitable probably for the next century or so following what must have been a spectacularly catastrophic bowel movement – and gone to bed, Rudi sat in the living room staring into space, trying to fit bits and pieces of half a dozen things together. Juhan’s story about the Frenchmen – assuming it was true; he didn’t entirely trust any of Toomas’s friends – cast a new light on his father’s tenacious interest in Lahemaa. Had Toomas actually killed them for some reason? Once upon a time he would have said murder was about the one thing his father wasn’t capable of, but now he wasn’t sure. He was almost certain he was going to have to tell the authorities about this somehow.
He sighed and waved up the entertainment set’s browser, pulled down a menu and did a search for Mundt and the Sakha Republic, was none the wiser after half an hour’s surfing. Pointless. He was too tired to make sense of any of it. He sat for a while thinking of the short
woman he had seen at the graveside and wondered why she wasn’t crying. At around two, he rearranged the cushions on the sofa, curled up, and fell asleep.
HE WASN’T SURE, at first, what woke him. Or even, for a few moments, where he was. His mouth tasted awful, his head throbbed, his eyes were all gummy, and his neck ached because he had slept awkwardly. He spent so long dwelling on these things that it took him a while to notice that the room smelled of smoke.
He sat up on the sofa and his head spun a little. He waved a hand at the floor lamp in the corner and it came on, filling the room with a foggy nimbus of illumination. Smoke was drifting through the living room in slow billowing panes.
“Juhan!” Rudi stood up and went over to the bedroom door. “Juhan, we’re on fire!” He put his hand on the door handle, snatched it away again. The handle was red hot. He put the fingers of his other hand on the door experimentally, then the flat of his hand. The door was hot too. Looking down, he saw smoke pouring out from under the door and around his feet. “Juhan!”
Rudi ran over to the front door, threw it open, and immediately tripped and fell headlong over something lying just outside. On his hands and knees, he took his phone out of his pocket and switched it on, and by the light of the screen he found himself looking at the body of a young woman lying almost on the threshold of the cottage. She was wearing black combat fatigues and a webbing harness festooned with knives and guns and grenades and other, more inscrutable, devices. She had been shot in the chest at least twice, maybe several more times, it was hard to tell.
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