Starlitz pulled up at the little wooden dock. The entire island, shored in weed-slimed dark granite, was about twenty acres. The little old lady lived here with her even older and hailer brother. They'd both been born on the island, and had originally lived with their parents, but the father had died in 1950 and the mother in 1968.
The only access to the island was by boat. There were no phones, no electricity and no plumbing. The home was a two-story stone mansion with a steep slate roof, a stone well and a wooden outhouse. The eaves were carved and painted in yellow and red. There were some chickens and a couple of squat little island sheep. A skinny wooden derrick had a homemade lighthouse, with an oil lantern. A lot of seagulls around.
Starlitz yelled a loud ahoy from the dock, which seemed the most polite approach, but there was no answer from the house. So they trudged up across the rocks and turf, and found the mansion's door and knocked. No response.
Starlitz tried the salt-warped door. It was unlocked. The windows were open and a faint breeze was playing through the parlor. There were hundreds of shelved books in Finnish and Swedish, some fluttering papers, and quite a few cheerily demented oil paintings. Some quite handsome bronze statuary and some framed Finnish theater posters from the 1930s. A wind-up Victrola.
Starlitz opened the hall closet and looked at the rough weather gear -oilskins and boots. "You know something? This little old lady is as tail as a house. She's a goddamned Viking." He left the parlor for the composition room. He found a wooden secretary and a fine velvet chair. Dictionaries, a Swedish encyclopedia. Some well-thumbed travel hooks and Nordic photography collections. "There's nothing in here," he muttered.
"What are you looking for?" said Aino.
"I dunno exactly. Something to explain how this works."
"Here's a note!" Arno called.
Starlitz went back into the parlor. He took the note, which had been written in copperplate longhand on lined Sperry the Nerkulen novelty notepaper.
"Dear Mister Staffins," read the note, "Please pardon my not here being. I go to Helsingfors to testify. I go to Suomi Parliament as long needing for civic duty call. I regret I must miss you and hoping to speak with you about my many readers in Tokio another much more happier time. Sorry you must row so far and not have meet. Please help your self(s) to tea and biscuits all ready in kitchen. Goodbye!"
"She's gone to Helsinki," Starlitz said.
"She never travels any more. I'm very surprised." Aino frowned. "She could have saved us a lot of trouble if she had a cellphone."
"Why would they want her in Helsinki?"
"Oh, they made her go there, I suppose. The local Alanders. The local collaborationist power structure."
"What good do they think she can do? She's not political."
"That's true, but they are very proud of her here. After all, the children's clinic -- The Fluuvin's Children's Clinic in Foglo? -- that was hers."
"Yeah?."
"Also the park in Sottunga. The Fluuvin Park in Brando and the Grand Fluuvin Festival Playground. She built all of those. She never keeps the money. She gives the money away. Mostly to the Fluuvin Pediatric Disease Foundation."
Starlitz pulled off his shades and wiped his forehead. "You wouldn't know exactly which pediatric diseases in particular have caught her fancy, right?"
"I never understood such behavior," said Aino: "Really, it must be a mental illness. A childless spinster from the unjust social order ... Denied any healthy sex life or outlets... . Living as a hermit with all her silly books and paintings all these years ... No wonder she's gone mad."
"Okay, we're going back," Starlitz said. "I've had it."
Raf and Starlitz were outside in the woods, slapping at the big slow-moving Scandinavian mosquitoes. "I thought we had an understandings" Raf said, over a muffled chorus of bestial howls from the sauna. "I told you not to bring her back here."
"She's your lieutenant, Raf. You straighten her out."
"You could have been more tactful. Invent some little deception."
"I didn't wanna get dumped off the boat." Starlitz scratched his bitten neck. "I face a very serious kink in my negotiations, man. My target decamped big-time and I got a very limited market window. This is Japanese pop culture we're talking here. The Japanese run product cycles in hyperdrive. They can burn out a consumer vogue in four weeks flat. There's nobody saying that Froofies will move long-term product like Smurfs or Seuss."
"I understand your financial difficulties with your Tokyo backers. If you can just be patient. We can take steps. We'll innovate. If necessary the Republic of the Alands will nationalize literary production."
"Man, the point of this thing is to sue the guys in Japan who are already ripping her off. We gotta have something on paper that looks strong enough to stand up and bark in the courts in The Hague. You gonna strong-arm people anywhere over vaporous crap like intellectual property, it's gotta look heavy-duty, or they don't back off."
"Now you're frightening me," Raf said. "You should take a little time in the sauna. Relax. They're running videos."
"Videos right in all that goddamn steam, Raf?"
Raf nodded. "These are some very special videos."
"I fuckin' hate videos, man."
"They're Bosnian videos."
"Really?"
"Not easy to obtain. They're from the camps."
"You're showing those mercs atrocity videos?"
Raf spread his arms. "Welcome to 21st Century Europe!" he shouted at the empty shoreline. "Brand-new European apartheid regimes! Where gangs of war criminals abduct and systematically rape women from other ethnic groups. While the studio lights blaze and the minicams roll!"
"I'd heard those rumors," Starlitz said slowly. "Pretty hard to believe them though."
"You go inside that sauna, and you'll believe those videos. It's quite incredible, but it's all quite real. You might not enjoy them very much, but you need to see this video documentation. You must come to terms with these practices in order to understand modern political developments. It's video that is like raw meat."
"Must be faked, man."
Raf shook his head. "Europeans always say that. They always ignore the rumors. They always discover the atrocities when it is five years too late. Then they act very shocked and concerned. Those videos exist, my friend. I've got them. And I've got more than that. I've got some of the women."
"You're kidding."
"I bought the women. I bartered them for a pair of Stinger missiles. Fifteen Bosnian abductees. I had them shipped up here in sealed cargo trucks. I went to a lot of trouble."
"White slavery, man?"
"I'm not particular about color. It wasn't me who enslaved them. I'm the man who saved their lives. There were many other girls who were more stubborn or, who knows, probably less pretty. They're all dead in a ditch with bullets in the backs of their heads. These women are survivors. I wish I had more than fifteen of them, but I'm only getting started." Raf smiled. "Fifteen human souls! I rescued fifteen people! Do you know that's more people than I've ever personally killed?"
"What are you going to do with these women?"
"They'll entertain my loyal troops, first of all. I needed them for that, which gave me the idea. I admit this: it's very hard work in the sex-labor industry. But under my care, at least they won't be shot afterwards."
Raf strolled along the rocky shoreline to the edge of the resort's dock. It was a nice dock, well-outfitted. The fiberglass speed launch was tied up to one rubber-padded edge of it, but the dock could have handled a minor cruise ship.
"Those women will be grateful. Here, we will admit they exist! They haven't even had identities. And this world is full of people like them. After ten years of civil war, they sell slaves openly now in the Sudan. Kurds are gassed like vermin by Iraqis and shot out of hand by Turks. The Sinhalese are killing Tamils. We can't forget East Timor. All over the planet, groups of little people are quietly vanishing. You can find them cowering, hiding all around the world, without papers, without legal identities... . The world's truly stateless people. My kind of people. But these are rich little islands -- where there is room for thousands of them."