While waiting in line at the bakery, she ran into the sergeant with the nearly unintelligible English who’d questioned her outside the garrison. After exchanging a few forced comments about the weather and how she was liking seeing the sun set at eleven thirty in the evening, he made a rather ham-fisted attempt to arrange a dinner date. “Food, huh? Eat? Both?” he said, waggling his forefingers at her and then at himself.
She couldn’t imagine the conversation and she didn’t want to have sex with him, so she shook her head no and said “boyfriend” a few times.
They chatted some more as the line moved forward. He had a holstered pistol she admired. He extracted it for her. It was a Glock 17, looked like, with an extra-thick handgrip—the sergeant had large hands. She admired it.
“You get one, gun basement,” he said. “’Stand?”
She didn’t ’stand, so she shrugged.
“I take you. I take you.”
He did take her, all the way to the center of town. Down a little alley off the main plaza in front of the sulfur-colored town hall and civic center, he showed her a gun shop. She spent an hour perusing the stock while he chatted with the owner and leisurely ate a breakfast quiche he’d purchased at the bakery.
She selected a Glock 17 similar to his save for the factory grip. Through the sergeant, she negotiated a deal with the owner. He arranged to swap out its current handle for a rubberized diamondback grip. The owner also put new luminous dots into the sights of the pistol—free of charge.
He let her onto the garrison gun range and she put fifty rounds through the gun, familiarizing herself with it. Her sergeant—Ruddi was his name, apparently—must have sensed something about her, since he quit trying to get her out on a date and instead wanted to hear Duvalier talk about ways to kill a Reaper, or a Big Mouth (they were a serious problem in the Baltic and in the waters of the Danish straits).
They cleaned their weapons together. She learned two Finnish expressions. Varo! meant “watch out” and anteeksi was a common way to say “excuse me.”
One of the garrison soldiers brought them a tray of freshish—meaning dried and salted—fish, potatoes, and vegetables of the summer harvest. They had beer out of a cask as well, with a label burned into the side of the cask with a branding iron. Some popular local brew, a very decent lager, she thought.
“See. We dinner, after it all,” Ruddi said.
She laughed and agreed.
The gun had set her back the majority of her expense money. She’d have to live very cheaply on the free stuff for the delegates and their associates, perhaps step up her attempts to get invitations to the nicer dinners and receptions.
The town had an old-fashioned public bathhouse and sauna. There were also numerous private ones that were “welcome to the delegates” so everyone could enjoy the Finnish tradition of sauna, even though it wasn’t midwinter and they’d miss the full effect of running into the snow to cool off.
The Baltic League had come to some arrangement with the owners, and attendees of the conference were free to use the bath part, though you still needed a little money to tip the staff. Massages, pumicing, and individual lathering with a sponge was extra, of course.
She visited the larger baths out of some mixture of curiosity and boredom.
There were one or two curious delegates like her there for the experience. Most of the attendees seemed to be older locals, who bought monthly passes at reduced rates. From what she could see, it was as much social ritual as personal hygiene. The Finns came to the baths to chat over tea, exchange canned or preserved items from their gardens, read, even play chess.
The bath part was fascinating. After soaping and rinsing in a little stall with a wood slat chair to sit on, you stepped on through to the men’s or women’s (or mixed, for the daring, and she wasn’t that daring, more because she was embarrassed by her dreadful feet than modesty) soaking pool. In a true nod to the Old World, the water was heated by hot rocks dropped into a little cistern at the bottom of the pool. A grate was put over the rock bed to add a measure of safety. The heated water circulated through the natural tendency of the hot water to rise, as far as she could tell. The cooled rocks were extracted regularly and returned to the fireplace by cheerful attendants who joked with the old men in Finnish.
She loved it. Except for the part where the old ladies beat each other all over the skin with leafy birch branches. Supposedly it kept the skin young and supple (according to an English information sheet they handed her). She’d engaged in conversation with the Finns mostly through pantomime, though the oldest ones knew a few polite words of English that had been taught in the schools of their youth.
On her third time she brought Valentine, and a little pair of canvas slippers so they could go to the common room together. They both wrapped thin towels around their waists, like most of the Finns. The women were unconcerned with exposing their breasts in a bathhouse, or at least those who were concerned about it stuck to the women-only side. When she emerged from the bath to move to the sauna—still enjoyable in the cool, bright summer of the north—she felt deliciously sexy with the wet wrap clinging about her waist and buttocks. That was an unusual feeling for her. Valentine’s maleness brought it out, she supposed, though everything above her waist counted him just as an old friend. Well, the reproductive organs did have their own separate consciousness. Between odd moments of arousal and her monthly cycle, it sometimes felt as though her ovaries were running the show.
Val’s wet towel didn’t leave much to the imagination, either. Most of the other attendees were staring at his scars, the big exit wound in his leg and the burn marks on his back in particular. One, who’d heard them speaking English, asked, “You have in wreck?”
“Boiler room accident,” Valentine said. He’d told Duvalier about being scalded by steam while pursuing a Kurian through the bowels of a Kurian tower in Little Rock.
“Ooch,” the Finn said sympathetically. He pulled at his bottom lip, as if trying to extract English vocabulary. “You are… lucky… for being alive.”
Valentine smiled and shrugged.
He’d endured more physical pain than she had fighting the Kurians. She liked to disappear when the bullets started flying; Cats just weren’t of much use in mass slaughter. He’d suffered emotionally, too. She’d been brought up in a Kurian Zone. She sometimes thought most of her emotional responses were like burned circuitry from that. The wiring was there; it just had no power. Most of the time.
“Been meaning to tell you, this weekend I’m going away,” Valentine said. “Three days at most—trip to Helsinki.”
“With Eva Stepanek?” Duvalier asked. The pleasant sexiness boiled up and disappeared like water on one of the rocks fresh from the fireplace.
“Yes. I’m curious about her art collection. She’s really proud of it. It’s all in storage, but when she’s no longer sailing, she plans to open a little gallery or museum. She hasn’t decided which. She wanted to show me some of the finds. I’m no expert, of course. Maybe when we met years ago I was too skeptical of her plans—I honestly can’t remember. She seems to want to prove something to me.”
That she ca