Long Shot

7

“Go up in the castle,” Ivan had directed. Swanson had not spent much time in castles. He was more familiar with Cinderella’s palace in Disneyland than those in the real world, where centuries had passed them by. They were anachronisms in modern warfare. After weaving lazily through the back streets of Narva on the R nineT, he looped around the big Route 1 traffic circle, and there it was, a big and brooding stone fortress that had been anchored beside the fast-flowing river for more than seven hundred years. On the far side of the river was another one. It was in Russia.

He parked the bike and just rested on it, studying the structure and imagining having to go against such a defensive bulwark with a spear or bow and arrow. Good luck with that! The Danes, Germans, Swedes and Russians all passed through those old stones at one time or another, and none had managed to stay. Finally, the bombs, tanks, artillery and sheer explosive power of World War II had ruptured the walls and ruined the castle. Restoration was still incomplete. Time and technological change might conquer such a place, but Kyle did not have a lot of time on his side. Neither, however, was he trying to conquer it. Swanson would go inside tomorrow as a tourist, for what was a castle good for these days other than to serve tourists?

It was almost four o’clock, and the sky was thick with black clouds, foretelling probable rain. Cruising the downtown area, Kyle found a coffee shop near the river, a small place with a picture of the Swedish Lion painted on the street window and beneath it was taped a small cardboard sign: Speak English Here. He nosed into the curb, peeled away some of the heavy gear and went inside. It was small but neat, and he was the only customer. He chose the table at the rear, with his back to the white wall and facing the street outside, an automatic choice for a man who lived with danger. A young woman at the counter glanced his way, shoved her cell phone in a back pocket and ambled over, looking at him curiously. “You are English or somewhere.”

“Good guess. I’m Canadian. I saw your sign,” he replied pleasantly. “How did you know?”

“First, I have never seen you before, so this is probably your first time in Narva, yes? Also, you have no beer belly and do not stink like a Cossack, so you are not a Russian; you have neat hair, look healthy, but are too dark to be Scandanavian and too pale to be a Slav. I see all people. You are early in the season, too, are you not? This is only April, and the predapokaliptichesky is in July.” She handed him a little menu that had thumbnail pictures of food and drink, and when he raised his eyes at the long, strange word, she translated. “Our Narva International Motorcycle Festival. Your expensive European bike is outside.” She crossed her arms and cocked a hip, waiting. “You want beer?”

“Sure,” he said. “What do you have that is a local brew?”

“Saku is good, and is cheap.” The girl was only about twenty, slender, with the long legs of youth, huge smoky eyes and long brown hair that tumbled to her shoulders. “If not for the motorcycles, why are you here? I would never come to Narva on a holiday.”

“It is my work. As you say, the bike festival, your predapwhatever. I am a freelance magazine writer and I’m doing some advance work.”

Satisfied, she walked to the counter and called out the order. An old man with a drooping Kaiser Wilhelm mustache pulled a foamy beer into a glass, and the server brought it back and took a seat across the table. She lit a cigarette and checked her phone while Kyle tasted the beer. Not bad. “My name is Anneli Kallasti,” she said, examining his face as if measuring it. “You are?”

Kyle took a second, deeper swallow of the amber liquid as he considered the answer. She was a cyber-type, obviously quick with her cell phone. She would immediately run it through Google, which would confirm the cover story, but also it would risk pinging the CIA net back home and give them his GPS numbers. In the age of computers, staying totally off the map was getting ever more difficult. “I am Simon Brown, from Toronto.”

“Simon Brown, you should not be telling people that you are a writer. They may think you came to Narva to write about politics. Our municipal election is a very important thing this year.”

Kyle laughed. “Politics? I saw a lot of leaflets tacked to poles and posters on walls and guessed that it was about candidates. That stuff is beyond me, Anneli, and it is boring, at least to me. I just do motorcycles and tourism pieces. Tomorrow I will go see the castle.”

“Politics can be dangerous here.” Her eyes darted around the shop and the sidewalk beyond and her face grew serious. “I give you this. Leave your tourism and bikes and do Narva politics now. The world will be watching.”

What the hell is she talking about? “Sorry, but no politics. Can I buy something to eat here?”

“Our politics are more interesting and important than bikes. Finish your beer,” she said, rising and making a round trip to the counter. She came back with a tourist street map and wrote quickly on the back. “Go out and do some tourism reporting. See this memorial. It is the most important in our city.” She leaned forward and rested on her elbows. “Then you return back here in two hours and take me to dinner. Meanwhile, I give you a few more places to go and see.”

“There is a difference of about twenty years in our ages, Anneli. I’m not looking for a good time.” He took a look at the map. She had placed an X on the location of the coffee shop, circled a few other points and traced a line from his current location to the memorial.

She tapped a few numbers on her phone, then settled back after reading the screen. “There are many hundreds of Simon Browns in Canada. So, yes, Mister Brown, although you are not totally unattractive for sex, this is not a romantic date, and I am not a prostitute. I will take you to meet my boyfriend. You will need to hire me as a translator because not many people in Narva speak English. Also, he is in politics. He is going to be our new mayor!”

Narva bore concrete scars and more sour memories than charm. It was almost destroyed when the Red Army took it back from the Nazis during World War II, only to later designate it an off-limits industrial zone. Incredible pollution of the land and air, and poverty for the people, followed. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Russians pulled out, taking whatever valuable industry they could salvage along with them, while burying the radioactive waste from a failed nuclear facility. Communist apparatchiks who had run the city remained in control. The legacy of decades of Soviet rule was a uniform architecture of big, square and rectangular buildings, many of them still empty, concrete signatures of collective failure.

Swanson used the reference points marked on the map to take a slow, meandering tour of the city, and thought it looked worse than the bad side of Detroit. They reminded Swanson of big box stores in America, but here, the boxes were stacked high atop one another, with windows empty of glass, brickwork collapsed and weeds taking over. No wonder young Anneli would not choose to be a tourist in her hometown.

And while the black, blue and white flag of Estonia snapped in the wind, and St. Peter’s Square promised to be a starting block for urban renewal, the city as a whole had remained stubbornly Russian, very reluctantly embracing its important new role as the third-largest city in an independent country. Now that he began to notice details, he saw campaign posters everywhere, in every color. He did not understand a word on them.

When Swanson felt he had absorbed enough sadness, he retreated to a forested area near the river south of the city, ventured deep into the trails and set up a cold camp. It would be uncomfortable to sleep outside, but he had the proper gear and had been in worse places. He wasn’t planning on being around for more than one night at the most. Checking into a hotel was out of the question, for that would leave electronic traces. He walked to the riverbank and looked across at a mirroring forest in the Russian Federation and wondered what was buried back in there.

Swanson was thoroughly ready for a drink by the time Anneli Kallasti climbed onto the back of the motorcycle and guided him to the strangely named “German Pub.” It was a cellar joint on Malmi that was sedate on the exterior but was rocking inside. She had pulled her hair into a ponytail and wore low-cut jeans with patterned silver spangles on the back pockets and a tight burnt-orange sweater beneath her jacket. The loud music smashing from overhead speakers brought an instant smile to her face. It was early, but people were already on the dance floor. She grabbed his hand and led him to a table, and called for three mugs of beer and a plate of bratwurst appetizers while checking her phone.

“Brokk, my guy, will be here in a minute,” she said as her eyes roamed the gathering crowd. They were mostly twentysomethings, bursting with energy.

It reminded Swanson of the musical Cabaret, about a club that operated in Berlin during the early Nazi years, and customers left their problems outside the door to spend a few hours forgetting their troubles in wine and beer and music. Was this place part of the rebirth of Estonia, or was it a last gasp of freedom? He drank his beer and watched.

Anneli used a mirror to fix her pretty face, which lit up when Brokk Mihailovich came through the door and immediately started greeting friends. He was tall and slim, with onyx eyes that flashed over the crowd until he saw Anneli, who waved. Then, with the confidence of a veteran politician working a rope line, the man in the droopy white wool sweater and worn jeans moved with almost feline grace through the crowd, trolling for votes by sharing a handshake here, a whispered confidence there, or a pat on the shoulder or a quick hug, never losing the smile nor slowing down. Good cheer followed in his wake, adding to the loose atmosphere of the club. Like if Brokk was present, this was the place to be.

Anneli jumped up and gave him a public and proprietary kiss on the lips, as if establishing her territory, and Mihailovich lifted her off the floor with an effortless embrace. He turned her loose and extended his hand. “I am Brokk Mihailovich, Mister Brown. Welcome to Narva.” The English was almost without accent.

“Good to meet you,” Swanson said. Anneli had obviously briefed him.

Mihailovich and Anneli slid into the booth and spoke briefly in Estonian, shared a private laugh, then switched to English as they started on the brats and beer. Brokk paused now and again to wave or greet someone.

“Why are you so popular?” Kyle asked.

“I am running to become the mayor of Narva,” the young man said. “The youngest candidate by far, so these people are my constituents, what your politicians would call my base. I work hard to keep them on my side.”

“Ah. Anneli told me you were political.”

“Everyone is political, including you, Simon… may I call you that?”

“Sure, but you’re wrong. I’m about as political as a tree. I stay as far away from that stuff as I can get.”

Anneli laughed. “We don’t have that luxury, Simon. This city is ninety percent Russian, by heritage, language, age and preference. Brokk is a lawyer and is a leader in trying to create a true democracy, and a true national identity. That’s why we all love him.”

“Good. Best of luck.” Swanson raised his mug in a toast. “The Old Guard giving you a lot of opposition?”

The lawyer moodily nodded. “Every day. We will win eventually, but progress is slow. Their time is over, and now we are all waiting around for that whole generation to die off. This election is important because my main opponent wants to resurrect legislation to make Narva autonomous, to officially split off from Estonia and take this city back to being officially Russian. I want you to interview me for your publications and help me win. Estonia must remain whole.”

Kyle gave a guffaw of disbelief. “I write travel stories, Brokk. I’m not a political reporter or a news correspondent. I am not qualified to interview you on details of your platform, or whatever.”

Mihailovich never lost his sense of humor. “You are a journalist, Simon, a voice to the outside world and we need you. The New York Times and the papers in London would buy this story on the spot. Everyone writes about the castle, so you would have the exclusive on what this town is really about.”

“And maybe drop in a couple of quotes from you and an observation that Narva is changing and modernizing?”

“Exactly.” Brokk was a convincing young man.

It sounded logical, but Swanson said, “Maybe. Do you have some other stories that I can combine it with to help get it published?”

Anneli looked at her lover. “The Lenin statue. That would work.”

Brokk agreed. “Like every other country in the USSR, Estonia was littered with statues of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, standing proud and bestowing the blessings of communism on all the little people. We had a large one in St. Peter’s Square, but when we became independent, we discovered that it was hard to attract foreign investment with old Lenin still dominating the middle of town.”

“What did you do?”

“We moved the famous old Bolshevik into an obscure corner of the castle. Out of sight, out of mind,” Anneli said. “Oh, you should have heard the old Cossacks howl in protest. That will be a good story, right? You can get photos of it and then post it all over the Net. And you can use it to push the current political angle and get Brokk’s name out to millions of people around the world.”

Mihailovich stretched a long arm around Anneli’s shoulders and brought her close. “She is convinced that social media is going to get me elected. Twitter and Facebook and all the rest.”

Kyle pursed his lips in thought, then asked, “On the city council, wouldn’t you be dealing with routine things like construction permits and sewage arguments? I mean, what’s the point? You would not set foreign policy.”

The magnetism of Brokk Mihailovich was getting to Swanson. A man in a hurry, sure of his path and his future. “Sure, I will do that routine stuff. But I can also do a lot more, Simon. I will make life better for the people of Narva and get us out from under that Russian boot even more. Human rights. The Disappeared. Our staggering economy. Better care for our old, sick and homeless, less police brutality and civic corruption.”

“Sounds like you may be running for president, not mayor. What are ‘the Disappeared’?”

Both of the young people turned serious in a heartbeat. “We must tread carefully on this, Simon,” Brokk said. “Proof is hard to come by, and the Russians are volatile about the subject.”

Anneli slapped her hand on the table, leaned across and hissed in a softer tone, like a cute, poisonous viper. “Well, fuck the Russians. People like us — the opponents of the leftover commies — have begun to vanish in the past few months from towns all along the border. One day they are amongst us, and the next day they are gone without a trace. Nothing is ever heard from them again and the police say they probably just left town.”

“Shhh,” Brokk cautioned her. “Maybe we can discuss that later, after I get to know Simon better. After all, he may be a spy sent to entrap us.”

“I have no secrets, Brokk. I’m a writer for tourists. If you want to know how much it costs to go up in the Eiffel Tower, then I’m your guy. The name of a good restaurant with low prices in London? Got you covered. Anything else is out of my league.” He finished his beer and signaled for another. “I never discuss religion or politics while drinking, and frankly, I do not like the idea of being used by you two revolutionaries.”

Both stared at him. Anneli finally called for another beer herself, and declared, “Then you are a useless human being.”

“Yeah. That pretty much sums me up,” Swanson said.