CHAPTER TWO

 

 

 

Same Day

Tallinn, Estonia

 

 

While growing up on a farm in Soviet Russia, Sergei Bobrinsky had seen a sketchbook filled with drawings of the city of Tallinn and had assumed the sketches had been exaggerated. But as he walked along the cobblestone streets as an adult and marveled at the sights around him, he realized that the artist had actually failed to do it justice.

Everywhere he looked, he saw things that he couldn’t believe.

Ancient gates as wide as dragons.

Gothic spires that touched the sky.

And orange coned roofs atop ivy-covered towers.

As one of the best-preserved medieval cities in the world, Tallinn’s Old Town was the most popular tourist attraction in all of Estonia, but it was more than that for Bobrinsky. For him, this was a dream come true. Not only because it had taken him decades to get there, but because the city was filled with storybook images that seemed to be lifted straight from his imagination.

Without a television or a library as a child, he had hungered for glimpses of faraway lands to take his mind off the grim reality he had faced every day. Most of his friends had been fascinated with America after hearing stories about blue jeans, fast cars, and soft toilet paper. But Bobrinsky had figured those things would never find their way past the Iron Curtain, and even if they did, they would be limited to government officials in Moscow.

So he had focused his fantasies on something closer to home: a fairytale city on the Soviet side of the Curtain that he could dream about at night and draw during the day.

Something to get him through the brutal winters.

Something in his dreary life to look forward to.

And now he was finally there.

Somehow it didn’t seem real.

With the sleeve of his shirt, he dabbed at the moisture in his eyes as his two children watched with confusion. Although he shed many a tear in private, they had never seen their father cry—even while their mother had slowly died. Yet there he was crying on a busy sidewalk.

“Papa?” whispered his six-year-old daughter in Russian. Her name was Angelina, and she was the spitting image of her mother. Blonde hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks.

He looked down at her and smiled. “Don’t worry. Happy tears.”

She nodded but somehow sensed it was more than that, so she buried her face in his side and wrapped her arms around him while giving him a mighty hug.

His smile widened as he enjoyed the moment. “Thank you, my little princess. You always know how to make your papa happy.”

As she continued to cling to her father, he reached out his hand and placed it on the head of his seven-year-old son. His name was Sasha. He had the same rosy cheeks as his sister but a much surlier attitude. “Come here, my little prince, and give your papa a hug.”

Sasha pulled away instead. “I’m hungry.”

Bobrinsky didn’t take it personally. He knew his son had been filled with anger ever since cancer had won the war. “I’m hungry, too. What would you like to eat?”

“Ice cream!” Sasha exclaimed.

Bobrinsky smiled. “Lunch first, then ice cream. Whatever flavor you want.”

That was enough to keep his boy in line as they looked for somewhere to dine.

They had arrived earlier that day at the Port of Tallinn, along with thousands of others who poured into Estonia by boat. Located across the Baltic Sea from Finland, Old City Harbour was one of the busiest passenger ports in the world, servicing cruise lines from Helsinki, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg. But unlike most visitors, who would return to their ships later that afternoon to continue their journeys elsewhere, Bobrinsky planned on staying.

This is where they would start anew.

The place he had dreamed about as a boy.

Like most Russians who lived through Perestroika during their teenage years, Bobrinsky had celebrated the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 but had struggled to find his footing afterward. It wasn’t until he had moved away from his parents’ farm to the medium-sized city of Veliky Novgorod that he eventually found his calling.

While living in a one-room apartment above a butcher shop, he had learned that a formal education wasn’t a requirement for success in this brand-new Russia. Money was pouring in from all over as the world’s economic powers tried to take advantage of the markets that had been off-limits to them until the Curtain had come crashing down. And with that cash came foreigners, many of whom were looking for Cold War souvenirs from the once-proud empire.

So the enterprising Bobrinsky went to work, buying outdated Soviet items at a fraction of the price and then selling them to tourists. It didn’t matter if it was a coffee mug or a toothbrush. If it had the letters CCCP on it or a hammer and sickle, he could sell it for a ridiculous price. Before long, his reputation had started to spread, and he was receiving so many requests that he had been forced to hire a secretary to answer the phone while he was out scrounging.

To him, it was the ultimate irony.

For years, the communist party had held him back.

Now he was making money off its carcass.

After a while, he had realized that the supply and demand for Soviet souvenirs would eventually die, so he had slowly shifted his business model to other hard-to-find items. He knew he couldn’t compete with the prices of the Russian underworld and wanted no part of the violence that went with it, so he stayed away from drugs, weapons, and illegal contraband.

Instead, he turned his focus to specific items like first-edition novels or antique desks—the type of things he could find at estate sales and secondhand stores, while occasionally smuggling in goods from overseas. As his business continued to grow, his goal was to do well, but not well enough to draw the attention of the crime syndicates that were growing in power.

Still, it was a delicate dance.

He needed to make enough money to feed his family, yet not enough to stay off the radar of the criminals who would gladly extort him for services he didn’t need. He had seen many small business owners forced to shut their doors because of exorbitant protection fees, and he was determined to prevent that from happening to him. So he and his family had moved frequently, always trying to stay one step ahead of the wolves.

But everything had changed when his wife got sick.

She had battled hard for nearly two years, and during that time, Bobrinsky had been forced to work, parent, and nurse, while performing all of the other duties that went with the slow, painful death of a spouse. With little time to focus on business, Bobrinsky had gotten desperate.

In a moment of weakness, he had made a deal with the devil.

Before he knew it, his wife was gone, his nest egg was empty, and his business was in tatters. If not for his children, he surely would have turned to the bottle like so many of his comrades. Instead, he had decided to take a chance and look for a fresh start.

For over two decades, he had avoided coming to Tallinn. He had always assumed there was no way it could possibly live up to the magical place that he had conjured up as a child. But after thinking things through, he had a massive change of heart. He figured if there was one thing he needed in his life right now, it was a little bit of magic, so he had sold whatever he could, bought three tickets under an assumed name, and boarded a ship for the city of his dreams.

All in hopes of leaving his old life behind.