Cryptonomicon

Otto's boat is fresh in from Finland, bobbing on an incoming tide, tied up to his bird's nest of a jetty. The boat, he knows, is still loaded up with whatever Finns are exchanging for coffee and bullets at the moment. Otto himself is sitting in the cabin, drinking coffee naturally, red-eyed and plumb wrung out.

"Where's Julieta?" Shaftoe says. He's starting to worry that she moved back to Finland or something.

Otto turns a bit greyer every time he drives his tub across the Gulf of Bothnia. He looks especially grey today. "Did you see that monster?" he says, then shakes his head in a combination of wonderment, disgust, and world-weariness that can only be attained by hardened Finns. "Those German bastards!"

"I thought they were protecting you from the Russians."

This elicits a long thunder-roll of dark, chortling laughter from Otto. "Zdrastuytchye, tovarishch!"he finally says.

"Say what?"

"That means, 'Welcome, comrade' in Russian," Otto says. "I have been practicing it."

"You should be practicing the Pledge of Allegiance," Shaftoe says. "Soon as we get done taking down the Germans, I figure we'll just kick her into high gear and beat the Russkies all the way back to Siberia."

More laughter from Otto, who knows naïveté when he sees it, but is not above finding it charming. "I have buried the German air-turbine in Finland," he says. "I will sell it to the Russians or the Americans--whoever gets there, first."

"Where's Julieta?" Shaftoe asks again. Speaking of naïveté.

"In town," Otto says. "Shopping."

"So you've got cash."

Otto looks seasick. Tomorrow is payday.

Then Shaftoe's going to be on a bus, headed for Stockholm.

Shaftoe sits down across from Otto and they drink coffee and talk about weather, smuggling, and the relative merits of various small fully automatic weapons for a while. Actually, what they are talking about is whether Shaftoe will get paid, and how much.

In the end, Otto issues a guarded promise to pay, provided that Julieta does not spend all of the money on her "shopping" trip, and provided that Shaftoe unloads the boat.

So Bobby Shaftoe spends the rest of the day carrying Soviet mortars, rusty tins of caviar, bricks of black tea from China, Lapp folk art, a couple of icons, cases of pine-flavored Finnish schnapps, coils of vile sausages, and bundles of pelts up out of the hold of Otto's boat, down the dock, into the cabin.

Meanwhile, Otto goes into town, and still has not come back long after night has fallen. Shaftoe sacks out in the cabin, tosses and turns for about four hours, sleeps for about ten minutes, and then is awakened by a knocking at the door.

He approaches the door on hands and knees, gets the Suomi machine pistol out of its hiding place, then crawls to the far end of the cabin and exits silently through a trap door in the floor. There is ice on the rocks below, but his bare feet give him enough traction to clamber around and get a good view of whoever is standing there, pounding on the door.

It is Enoch Root himself, nowhere to be seen this last week or so.

"Yo!" Shaftoe says.

"Bobby," Root says, turning around, "I gather you heard."

"Heard what?"

"That we are in danger."

"Nah," Shaftoe says, "this is just how I always answer the door."

They go into the cabin. Root declines to turn on any lights and keeps looking out the windows like he's expecting someone. He smells faintly of Julieta's perfume, a distinctive scent that Otto has been smuggling into Finland by the fifty-five-gallon drum. Somehow, Shaftoe is not surprised by this. He proceeds to make coffee.

"A very complex situation has arisen," Root says.

"I can see that."

Root is startled by this, and looks up blankly at Shaftoe, his eyes glowing stupidly in the moonlight. You can be the smartest guy in the world, but when a woman comes into the picture, you're just like any other sap.

"Did you come all this way to tell me that you're fucking Julieta?"

"Oh, no, no, no!" Root says. He stops for a moment, furrows his brow. "I mean, I am. And I was going to tell you. But that's just the first part of a more complicated business." Root gets up, shoves hands in pockets, walks around the cabin again, looking out the windows. "You have any more of those Finnish guns?"

"In that crate to your left," Shaftoe says. "Why? We gonna have a shootout?"

"Maybe. Not between you and me! But other visitors may be coming."

"Cops?"

"Worse."

"Finns?" Because Otto has his rivals.

"Worse."

"Who then?" Shaftoe can't imagine worse.

"Germans. German."

"Oh, fuck!" Shaftoe hollers disgustedly. "How can you say they're worse than Finns?"

Root looks taken aback. "If you're going to tell me that Finns are worse, pound for pound, than Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other Germans."

"Okay," Shaftoe mutters.

Root hauls the lid off a crate, pulls out a machine pistol, checks the chamber, aims the barrel at the moon, peers through it like a telescope. "In any case, some Germans are coming to kill you."