buried the German air-turbine in Finland,' he says. 'I will sell it to the Russians or the Americans-whoever gets there, first.'
'Where's Julieta?' Shaftoe asks again. Speaking of naivete.
'In town,' Otto says. 'Shopping.'
'So you've got cash.'
Otto looks seasick. Tomorrow is payday.
Then Shaftoe's going to be on a bus, headed for Stockholm.
Shaftoe sits down across from Otto and they drink coffee and talk about weather, smuggling, and the relative merits of various small fully automatic weapons for a while. Actually, what they are talking about is whether Shaftoe will get paid, and how much.
In the end, Otto issues a guarded promise to pay, provided that Julieta does not spend all of the money on her 'shopping' trip, and provided that Shaftoe unloads the boat.
So Bobby Shaftoe spends the rest of the day carrying Soviet mortars, rusty tins of caviar, bricks of black tea from China, Lapp folk art, a couple of icons, cases of pine-flavored Finnish schnapps, coils of vile sausages, and bundles of pelts up out of the hold of Otto's boat, down the dock, into the cabin.
Meanwhile, Otto goes into town, and still has not come back long after night has fallen. Shaftoe sacks out in the cabin, tosses and turns for about four hours, sleeps for about ten minutes, and then is awakened by a knocking at the door.
He approaches the door on hands and knees, gets the Suomi machine pistol out of its hiding place, then crawls to the far end of the cabin and exits silently through a trap door in the floor. There is ice on the rocks below, but his bare feet give him enough traction to clamber around and get a good view of whoever is standing there, pounding on the door.
It is Enoch Root himself, nowhere to be seen this last week or so.
'Yo!' Shaftoe says.
'Bobby,' Root says, turning around, 'I gather you heard.'
'Heard what?'
'That we are in danger.'
'Nah,' Shaftoe says, 'this is just how I always answer the door.'
They go into the cabin. Root declines to turn on any lights and keeps looking out the windows like he's expecting someone. He smells faintly of Julieta's perfume, a distinctive scent that Otto has been smuggling into Finland by the fifty-five-gallon drum. Somehow, Shaftoe is not surprised by this. He proceeds to make coffee.
'A very complex situation has arisen,' Root says.
'I can see that.'
Root is startled by this, and looks up blankly at Shaftoe, his eyes glowing stupidly in the moonlight. You can be the smartest guy in the world, but when a woman comes into the picture, you're just like any other sap.
'Did you come all this way to tell me that you're fucking Julieta?'
'Oh, no, no, no!' Root says. He stops for a moment, furrows his brow. 'I mean, I am. And I was going to tell you. But that's just the first part of a more complicated business.' Root gets up, shoves hands in pockets, walks around the cabin again, looking out the windows. 'You have any more of those Finnish guns?'
'In that crate to your left,' Shaftoe says. 'Why? We gonna have a shootout?'
'Maybe. Not between you and me! But other visitors may be coming.'
'Cops?'
'Worse.'
'Finns?' Because Otto has his rivals.
'Worse.'
'Who then?' Shaftoe can't imagine worse.
'Germans. German.'
'Oh, fuck!' Shaftoe hollers disgustedly. 'How can you say they're worse than Finns?'
Root looks taken aback. 'If you're going to tell me that Finns are worse, pound for pound, than Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other Germans.'
'Okay,' Shaftoe mutters.
Root hauls the lid off a crate, pulls out a machine pistol, checks the chamber, aims the barrel at the moon, peers through it like a telescope. 'In any case, some Germans are coming to kill you.'
'Why?'
'Because you know too much about certain things.'
'What certain things? Gunter and his new submarine?'
'Yes.'
'And how, may I ask, do you know this? It has something to do with the fact that you're fucking Julieta, right?' Shaftoe continues. He's bored rather than pissed off. This whole Sweden thing is old and tired to him now. He belongs in the Philippines. Anything that doesn't get him closer to the Philippines just irritates him.
'Right.' Root heaves a sigh. 'She thinks highly of you, Bobby, but after she saw that picture of your girlfriend-'
'Snap out of it! She doesn't give a shit about you or me. She just wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts.'
'What are the bad parts?'
'Having to live in Finland,' Shaftoe says. 'So she has to marry someone with a good passport. Which nowadays means American or British. You might have noticed that she didn't fuck Gunter.'
Root looks a little queasy.
'Well, maybe she did then,' Shaftoe says, heaving a sigh. 'Shit!' Root has rooted an ammo clip out of another crate and figured out how to affix it to the Suomi. He says, 'You probably know that the Germans have a tacit arrangement with the Swedes.'
'What does 'tacit' mean?'
'Let's just say they have an arrangement.'
'The Swedes are neutral, but they let the Krauts push them around.'
'Yes. Otto has to deal with Germans at each end of his smuggling route, in Sweden and in Finland, and he has to deal with their navy when he's out on the water.'
'I'm aware that the fucking Germans are all over Europe.'
'Well, to make a long story short, the local Germans have prevailed upon Otto to betray you,' Root says.
'Did he?'
'Yes. He did betray you.'
'Okay. Keep talking, I'm listening to you,' Shaftoe says. He begins to mount a ladder up into the attic, but then he thought better of it.
'I guess you could say he repented,' Root says.
'Spoken like a true man of the cloth,' Shaftoe mutters. He's into the attic now, crawling on hands and knees over the rafters. He stops and sparks up his Zippo. Most of its light is absorbed by a dark green slab: a crude wooden crate with Cryllic letters stenciled on it.
Root's voice is filtering up from below: 'He came to, uh, the place where Julieta and I, uh, were.'
A minute later, the crowbar rises up through the hatch, like the head of a cobra emerging from a basket. Shaftoe grabs it and begins assaulting the crate.
'Otto was torn. He had to do what he did, or the German could have shut down his livelihood. But he respects you. He couldn't bear it. He had to talk to someone. So he came to us, and told Julieta what he had done. Julieta understood.'
'She understood!?'
'But she also was horrified at the same time.'
