A pattern established that was neither fulfilling nor intolerable. He would arrive in Persereiikkä after stopping in two or three rural backwaters—he had learnt almost at once the trick of sleeping through a film whilst appearing to be awake, and now found the opening score of The Titfield Thunderbolt soothingly somnolent. His only worry was that he might show the same film twice to the same village and not realise it.
After a night in Persereiikkä he would press on to Joeerämaa the next morning, load up with moonshine, show Momo another Carry On film and follow a different route, via different villages and with any luck different films, back to Helsinki.
The first time he handed over the envelope, Pastorius said, “You haven’t opened it?”
“Why would I?”
And Pastorius had riffled through the money with the dexterity of a casino dealer and divvied up four equal shares. Wilderness did not bother to count his, merely weighed it on the palm of the hand. After two more runs he reckoned he’d got the equivalent of three months’ pay tucked away at the back of the cutlery drawer. After six he might have felt rich, if he’d bothered to count it.
He also had, and this puzzled and surprised him, a hint of that forgotten feeling of belonging that only came with “partners in crime.” The Schiebers revisited. None of them was Eddie, the ultimately reliable man, but Pastorius was honest in his dishonesty, a crook you could trust to play fair, and while Momo and Bruce were ne’er-do-well piss artists … neither of them was a Frank Spoleto.
But on the Sunday night following a late August black market trip, he arrived home to a note under the door:
You must tell Burton something. She’s in London for ten days as of yesterday. And you can bet your bottom dollar she’s complaining like hell about you. Joe—please give me something I can put on file and show to her the minute she gets back. I know nothing’s happening up there, but couldn’t you dress that up as a positive? All quiet on the northern front? Or some such nonsense?
Janis
Wilderness liked to think he could take good advice when he saw it. To have the Brocken Witch kick up a shit storm just when he was starting to make serious money would be counterproductive. He typed up a no-names account of Pastorius’s ferreting expeditions and presented it as evidence of no Russian activity. He threw in handy phrases such as “on the one hand” and “all things considered” and wondered about “under the circumstances” … but he couldn’t think what circumstances there might be.
On Monday morning he got into chancery ahead of Janis Bell, put his puffed-up piece of nonsense on her desk and whilst hoping to make a run for it before she arrived, could not help pausing to read the schedule for “the week in culture” that she had left next to the IBM—two more poets and an expert on Norman architecture.
He scribbled “called by the wild” across the schedule and set off north again. He had, after all, a new treat for the culturally deprived Finns—a three-year-old BBC recording of the wedding of Princess Alexandra to the Hon. Angus Ogilvy in Westminster Abbey. Who could resist? Once Finland had seen that, the Cold War was all over bar the shouting.