Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (15 page)

And the food! There were street vendors and restaurants, cafés and bakeries, all doing a thriving business, with everything wrapped up in brown paper and string that all seemed to come from the same source. Every three steps a new aroma seemed to strike: coffee, yeast baking, chocolate melting, meat roasting (she had to follow that one; it turned out to be a vast wheel of spiced flesh rotating on a heated spit that a man would shave and then sell with a little red onion and sour cream on a piece of flatbread, her first encounter with a “gyro”).

The Old World must have been something like this,
she thought.

She mostly watched Stamp shop. A few of the Canadians remarked on her syrup-sweet Southern accent, but not as many as Duvalier would have thought.

When their feet grew sore, they stopped in one of the cafés.

“You haven’t bought anything,” Stamp stated, as though it were an accusation.

“I don’t need anything.”

“Oh, sweetie pie, you should treat yourself. I wasn’t expecting Canada to have so much. I figured I’d have to wait until we got to Europe. But wouldn’t it be nice to have some fresh, stylish clothes for the trip?”

For just a moment, Duvalier was jealous of the world that Stamp
inhabited. She had time to think about clothes, how they looked, what others thought about how they looked. It seemed both frivolous and appealing at the same time.

“Listen, Alessa, I have a stash of gold coins. I want to change one of them for the funny-money currency they use around here and spend it shopping and eating. They have cheap seafood everywhere here, and I’m in the mood to stuff myself, enjoy some wine, and pick up something nice.” Stamp wore an inviting but practiced smile.

Duvalier wondered briefly what she meant by “pick up something nice.”

“Why me? Sime seems more the type for perusing a wine list.”

“You seem like you don’t know what girl time is. I like exploring. This is the first time I’ve had an opportunity to travel, and I need a partner in fun. I’d feel a little safer with someone tough around. I don’t want one of the guys. I’m not looking for a date or anything like that. Certainly I don’t know you, but I feel comfortable around you and, well, I’m sorry to be blunt, but you look like you need it. Don’t take that the wrong way.”

How many guys have given her the “diamond in the rough” line? Not as many lately. “Honestly, I’ve never been one for appearances.”

“Well, I think you could be really something if you made a little effort. You’d be shocked at how little it takes. C’mon, as a personal favor. I know a lot of people between Austin and Little Rock. I should be able to do you a good turn someday, when you’re no longer doing front-line work. Truthies.”

“I don’t care for the front lines any more than you do,” Duvalier said. “I avoid them if at all possible. But what I do, I plan to keep
doing until they get me. There are a lot of forgotten bodies out there, people swallowed by the crematoriums after the Reapers have had their fun, who deserve a little payback.”

Stamp looked a little ashamed. “I should really do more to support the cause. Maybe I can get a hospital built by one of the foundations. I’m on three boards.”

Duvalier found herself smiling back. “Okay, build a hospital and name the operating room after me. Or maybe a mortuary room. Something sharp and bloody would be a nice legacy.”

Stamp’s smile grew more natural. “There you go, then. Deal.”

With the beginnings of a bond formed, Stamp asked her to “truthies” on Valentine. While Duvalier had no end of anecdotes that might be entertaining, she didn’t much feel like issuing them in exchange for a few pieces of clothing.

Refreshed, they wandered around the blocks for a few more hours, looking through windows. Off the main streets and in the alleys there were a lot of secondhand-clothing stores, places to get shoes repaired, and on every other corner there was a place to sell valuables. Duvalier looked at the gleaming jewelry behind armored glass and thought about the broken dreams each piece represented.

Of course, she’d never had much in the way of dreams to break to begin with. The only rings she’d ever worn were as fake as a thirty-dollar bill.

The raw spring cold made them hungry again quickly, and as Duvalier’s ever-troublesome stomach growled, they looked at menus posted next to doors until she found a seafood place where Stamp liked the look of the “plating.” The only kind of plating Duvalier was familiar with involved armor on reconnaissance vehicles, but she
figured Stamp was in her element when it came to how the forks should lie on the napkins. She just nodded when Stamp asked her if she wanted to get a bite.

She had a chowder soup and a pan-fried piece of cod covered with little pealike things that Stamp told her were capers. They were nicely salty, without the overtaste of olives, and went with the cod admirably. Stamp drank wine and Duvalier had a cola. It was a real cola, a wonderful combination of fizzy and syrupy with a hint of fruit cocktail—the restaurant’s own concoction, which they called an Italian Cola, though the waiter seemed to take it as a personal insult that she wouldn’t drink wine with the meal.

After they were fortified by the food, the real shopping began. Duvalier found spending time with Stamp strangely exhausting, like trying to converse in a foreign language. Her one triumph came when she found some “French milled” soaps for Valentine and a boar’s-hair brush for Ahn-Kha. Stamp offered to pay, but she still had some of Montee’s Canadian currency left, and it was enough to get soap and their biggest brush, anyway.

“You’re not getting yourself a little indulgence? Not even chocolates?”

“Gives me the runs,” Duvalier said. Which was only sometimes true; the ration chocolate in the Kurian Zone had some strange fat in it that kept her squatting. She’d had real Hershey bars and been fine.

Stamp wasn’t quite the sophisticate she claimed to be. Some of the shop staff corrected her on minor points: she called any sort of fancy dress “couture” (“if it’s hanging on a rack, it’s not couture,” sniffed an Italian shopgirl) and she called an alligator purse “patent
leather.” Even Duvalier, who wasn’t quite clear on what culottes were, was pretty sure alligator hides weren’t patent.

She did, however, insist on taking Duvalier to a salon to have her hair and face done. She agreed more enthusiastically than she would have believed possible a few days ago. The trip was seeming less and less of an op and more like the vacation Colonel Lambert had promised. Stamp was much more in her element there, and Duvalier had had a theatrical streak and done stage makeup a few times in her life. She’d had to doll up enough times that she was comfortable with makeup. She tried a few different colors and finally went with a pale violet base and purple highlight to go with the green in her eyes. It felt oddly relaxing to lie back in a chair and have someone putter away at her eyes, and the results were startling, even before they moved on to finishing touches with the hair. They couldn’t do much with her short-short hair, but they did plaster it down with something that gave it a nice shine and brightened the color.

The cosmetologists tut-tutted over her skin. “Do you live under a sunlamp?” one asked.

“I’m outdoors a lot,” Duvalier said.

“Take care, duckies,” the beauticians said as they left. Stamp gave a wink and a wave.

Stamp wanted more wine, and Duvalier hoped she wouldn’t have to carry her home. Rain and wind came in from the sea with the evening, ruining their makeup and hair in a few minutes of chill exposure.

“Short hair has its advantages,” Stamp said as they surveyed the ruins in the shelter of a doorway.

“I’m pretty tired. Time to call it a day?” Duvalier asked.

“I was going to save this for later, but you might as well have it now,” Stamp said, handing over a little gift bag.

In it was a selection of makeups, lip glosses, and some kind of little pearly drops you were supposed to break open and rub around your eyes and forehead to get rid of wrinkles.

Duvalier snorted. “I feel like I owe you an apology for wasting your money.”

“Plenty more money where that came from.”

“From where does the family fortune spring?” Duvalier asked.

“UFR contracts, mostly. Roads, bridges, power lines. We do a little of everything. We’ve been busy with the respite buildup. War’s such a dead end.”

They left the hotel for Halifax’s harbor side on a chill morning, before dawn on the first day of May, piled into that same plumbing supply van with the fold-down seats.

Everyone, even so-phlegmatic-it-was-hard-to-tell-he-was-alive Sime, had enjoyed Halifax. Duvalier now found the cold ocean air refreshing. Valentine had told her what the west coast of Lake Superior was like in winter—cold and damp that sank in deep and was tough to get rid of quickly, even in the warmest room—and she’d been expecting something like that. This was more like wet and windy fall weather, which she always enjoyed, provided she didn’t have to walk far in it.

They were waiting for their ride to the docks, having received a message that their stopover in Halifax was coming to an end the following morning. Everyone was back in their travel clothes,
toiletries and freshly washed laundry all packed away. Stamp had on a blue-and-white-striped shirt under a navy-colored blazer, with a cute white hat. Valentine had muttered that she looked like a Cracker Jack sailor as they shared a last round of coffee from the café below.

“No, that just won’t do,” Stamp said, looking at Duvalier.

“What won’t do?” she asked.

“You’re about to take your first cross-Atlantic voyage. You can’t board looking like a stowaway rat,” Stamp said.

“I believe this is your first cross-Atlantic voyage, too, Thérèse,” Sime said. “While you certainly look nautical, I doubt it’ll be a yacht parade.”

“I’m going on board looking right,” she replied. “Whaddya think?” she asked, performing a clumsy pirouette for Duvalier.

“Anchors aweigh,” she said.

Duvalier submitted to having her makeup put on. Stamp loaned her a nautical-looking cable sweater. Fortunately, Stamp’s shopping mania on Duvalier’s behalf hadn’t gone so far as to include a new wardrobe, so she was able to slouch around in her duster and the borrowed sweater. She wondered how her tired old Evanshikers—rubber-soled ankle boots from a cottage industry in Evansville that turned worn-out tires into new footwear tread—would handle seawater.

Preffer nursed the old van through the tight streets, going gently through the turns and taking it easy on the brakes. If there was a Kurian spy keeping tabs on the activities of the Refugee Network, his job was made a lot easier.

“Do you have any idea of the cabin arrangements?” Stamp asked Sime once they were loaded in the back.

“No, the Baltic League organized the rest of the trip through the Refugee Network,” Sime said. “I just had orders to get to Halifax by a certain date.”

“Hmmm. Let’s hope we’re not sharing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ahn-Kha said. “I put in a request to bunk with you. We settled it while you were napping off the wine yesterday. I hope I get you. You’re so clean and quiet. But I must warn you, when I get seasick, I become very gassy.”

“What?” Stamp asked, shocked.

“A joke,” Ahn-Kha said. “I suspect we’ll be down in a hold somewhere for at least part of the trip. We’ll be lucky if we’re just sharing with each other and not the ship’s rats.”

“He’s contrary from not being able to stretch out in bed,” Valentine said. “I’m looking forward to it. The only blue water I’ve ever been on was the Caribbean. The North Atlantic will probably be a little more exciting.”

“I prefer my jokes starting with animals walking into a saloon,” Stamp said.

Sime wanted their departure quiet and discreet. Their transport couldn’t have been more humble.

The
Out for Lunch
was a disappointment to Stamp. Her pleasure-cruise outfit seemed clownish when set in front of a rust-sided fishing boat that had a definite odor of fish to it.

It was a wide-bodied boat with high sides, with roughly the proportions and lines of an oversized rowboat, except for the big control house amidships. Masts with yardarms for nets and the placement or
extraction of fishing gear stood to either side just behind the control house. Much of the woodwork on deck looked newly replaced, and the control house had a fresh coat of paint. It seemed the captain-owner maintained the boat by working on whatever was the most pressing need in the winter off-season.