Antanas Sileika - Underground

“Just a word to the wise. You have to be a little bit careful about the British because they make distinctions among themselves. The man we’re going to see was born in Moscow, and his father was born in Archangel, but if you call him an Englishman he’ll be insulted. You’d be better off calling him Estonian than English. He ran a timber business in Tallinn before the war. But he considers himself a Scot. They’re a very proud people.”

“Meanwhile, most Brits cannot distinguish a Latvian from a Lithuanian.”

“Foreigners always seem so silly, don’t they?”

“What happened to this Scotsman’s business?”

“All swept away when the Reds came to Estonia the first time, back in ’40. He fled to Finland with his Estonian wife, and then to Sweden. I think he must hate the Reds more than you do.”

Zoly took Lukas to a remote part of the harbour and along a quay that had three boats tied up to it. Two were fishing boats, but the third was a sleeker craft, something like a large customs patrol boat with a bridge, two lifeboats and quarters down below. Asking no one’s permission, Zoly took Lukas onto the deck and they climbed down a ladder to a narrow corridor with two doors. Zoly rapped on one of the doors and opened it.

“Close the door behind you,” a voice said. “The cold air is blowing in here.”

Zoly brought Lukas into a low cabin with a small table and four chairs. There was a bottle of whisky on the table and a Thermos of tea beside it. A large man in shirt sleeves was standing up, his broad, weathered face serious but the eyes genial. He had thick white hair, a little too long, and the girth of a man who enjoyed his food. He wore suspenders and his suit jacket hung on the chair behind him.

“Leonard Dunlop,” he said, extending his hand. Lukas had worked on the farm since he was a child, and he had lived in the forest, so his hands were not exactly soft, but Dunlop’s were very big and meaty and hard, as if he handled rough goods often.

“Zoly, I think the captain has some coffee on the bridge upstairs. He might enjoy your company.”

Zoly nodded and went out, closing the door behind him. Lukas could hear the metal ladder creak as he made his way back up on deck.

“Drink?” Dunlop asked in Russian.

“Why not?”

“What language do you prefer to speak?”

“I have some English.”

“Good for you. We’ll start in that, but we can speak Russian or Polish if you want, or Finnish or Estonian, if you speak those.”

Dunlop poured small glasses of whisky for each of them and glasses of tea as a chaser. They drank the whisky neat and sat down and Dunlop launched into a talk about Lukas’s reports and then asked questions about the state of the partisans in Lithuania. They had another two glasses of whisky as they talked and Lukas felt the alcohol go to his head. Dunlop did not show himself to be any the worse for the drink.

Where Lukas came from, and throughout the whole of Eastern Europe, alcohol was as common as tea, and had been more common during the war. It had caused the undoing of the best of plans, but was consolation for the failure of those plans and the murderous nature of history. Drinking was a way of life for Eastern Europeans. Although he had not been drinking much over the previous years with Flint, Lukas could hold his own as long as the drinking didn’t go on too long, in which case Dunlop’s superior body weight and years of practice would give him the advantage.

“What do you think of this boat?” Dunlop asked suddenly.

“I don’t know much about boats.”

“It’s a refitted German E-boat. Now attached to the British fishery protection service, but it has the same German captain it’s had since it was launched in 1943. They used it to patrol the Baltic and drop agents behind the lines, and to torpedo our ships. Let me tell you, the captain saw a few of our own boys drown. But that’s all in the past now. We’re fighting a common enemy. This boat has been stripped of its armaments—no more torpedo tubes. It was overhauled in Portsmouth—twin Mercedes-Benz 518 diesel engines. We can guarantee a speed of forty-five knots, the fastest on the Baltic, and the quietest. The exhausts have been installed underwater.”

“Do you use this boat very often?” Lukas asked.

“From time to time. We hope to use it again.”

“And what, exactly, are the English views on the Baltics in general, and Lithuania in particular?”

“First, I need to know if you’re working with the Americans.”

“No, not yet.”

Dunlop smiled and poured them each a shot. “Good. The Americans don’t understand the subtleties of the Baltic. It’s too far away from them.”

“I’m not sure I understand them either. I’m a simple man. We need allies, not diplomats.”

“Unless you learn subtlety, you’ll just stir up the Reds.”

“My people are dying, Mr. Dunlop. We aren’t concerned about stirring up the Reds. We’d like to annoy them so much that they pack up and go home.”

“I know something about the Reds and the Baltic. I’ve lived here my whole life and I’d never be involved in anything that would harm you. My wife is Estonian. The real interest of Britain is to make the Baltic States independent again.”

Dunlop was likely using some kind of mixture of truth and lies, but Lukas could not distinguish one from the other. His sixth sense, his nose for deception, which had served him so well back in Lithuania, did not function properly out here in Sweden. It was clear enough that Dunlop wanted Lukas and the partisans for some purpose. The question was, did Lukas and the partisans want the British, given that they would do nothing to free the country and were so much weaker than the Americans since the war?

“We appreciate you,” said Lukas. “At least someone knows we’re dying and knows what we’re dying for. But what I need to know is what you can do for us. I’m beginning to understand that we shouldn’t hope for a war?”

Dunlop’s look answered that question.

“In that case I need to know what you can deliver. We need weapons, for example. With every passing year it gets harder to find new weapons, and ammunition for the ones we have. We need regular radio contact, crystals and at least two sets of radio transmitter/receivers, as well as men who can operate them and who have been trained in ciphers. We need money, preferably rubles, to buy food and other supplies, like printing presses. If there were some way of getting duplicating machines into the country, that would be very good for us too. We need medications: gramicidin for wounds, aspirin and morphine for pain, ether for operations, as well as cyanide capsules.”

“That’s quite an order. Why should we give any of this to you?”

“For compensation, for one thing, for letting us drop out of your conscience for so long. And you said you wanted to see the Baltics free.”

“Spare me the discussion of my conscience. You’re not going to free the Baltics, not alone. We need something too. We need train spotters who will let us know the schedules. We need to understand the movement of troops, especially any massing that could mean mobilization. We need the command structure of the Baltic Red Army, including names of officers and descriptions of ones who can be turned if possible. We need general economic news—five-year plans and so on.”

“You need spies.”

“I need people who are clear they work for me first and for themselves second.”

“I work for my country first.”

“A very noble sentiment. We can discuss sentiments later.”

Dunlop started to tell stories of the Russian Revolution, which had happened when he was a young man. He had intended to throw a bomb at Lenin himself, but his father, a Moscow merchant, had hustled him out of the country and soon enough there was no going back.