Shirtless and snoring.
That was how Cal found Frank sleeping on the couch the next morning.
An empty bottle of wine stood guard on the coffee table, while an empty bottle of Armagnac had abandoned its post and lay wedged halfway under the couch. Frank was almost sixty, and Cal wondered how he stayed so lean. Maybe it was Frank's CAN-DO attitude: caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine—until he'd given up smoking years ago.
Frank liked to think of himself as a work in progress.
A cardboard shoebox sat on the coffee table near the empty bottle of wine. Its lid was closed, which struck Cal as oddly orderly compared to the disheveled state of everything else, Frank included.
"Are you going to come cuddle or are you just going to stand there staring at me like a perv?"
Frank had cracked one eye open, but he otherwise hadn't moved.
Cal sunk into an empty lounge chair with a groan of effort. His knee hurt from yesterday and his finger was in a splint, thanks to Eeva's continued care.
"Good morning to you, too," he said, glancing at the table. "What's in the box?"
"A present!"
Frank sat up, sudden and alert. His energy didn't match his appearance. Even his mustache looked amiss.
"For me?"
Frank shook his head. "For me."
Cal needed an aspirin, not more of Frank's games.
"It's nearly noon, you know? I'm meeting with Eeva soon in the garden to talk about what happened yesterday. I think you should join us. She invited you."
Frank didn't seem surprised by this.
"I might do that."
Cal stared at the unplugged television and wished there was something playing to fill the room with noise. Frank watched him watching the blank screen.
"Alright, are you going to show me what's in the box?" Cal asked finally.
Frank leaned forward and drummed his delicate fingertips on the cardboard lid, and it sounded like the heavy raindrops on the tin roof of Frank's childhood home, an old Cracker house at the edge of town on the bank of a lazy creek. The house was raised off the ground on concrete blocks and snakes would hide under the house when the summer turned too hot. Cal remembered the nightmares he would have when he would sleep over; dreams of snakes crawling up through the floor.
Cal hadn't visited often.
"This, my bosom buddy," Frank said, "Is for me—for the next time we meet our poorly acting friends—and, since it might help get your watch back, I guess it's also for you."
"You're killing me with suspense, Frank. Open the box."
Frank did and it was filled with tissue paper; the kind you'd wrap presents or shoes with. Inside was a cloth bundle, which Frank removed and set on the table next to the box. The empty wine bottle looked on with interest. Frank unfolded the bundle and picked up a shiny, silver pistol. Frank pulled back the slide with expertise and confirmed that a round was or was not in the chamber.
"Bang-bang, baby."
Frank smiled behind bloodshot eyes.
Cal couldn't believe what his own were seeing.
An hour later both of them were in the garden behind Wine House. It was mid-February, and the flower beds had yet to bloom, but the worst of winter seemed to be over.
Niles and Jonathan were present, as usual, even if this weren't a formal meeting of the Garden Gang. Jonathan read his Jack Trinity novel on a bench while Niles flew his hobby drone from a pool of sunshine between trees. Cal and Frank joined them where stone pavers made a circle around the small fountain in the center of the garden. Tomorrow was the opening parade of the Nice Carnival and tourists poured into the city like the cheerful rosé Frank passed around the garden.
Frank offered a glass to Niles, but the old Brit was too engrossed with his drone to accept.
"You really love that thing, don't you?" Frank said.
"What can I say?" Niles smiled. "It gives me wings."
"Eeva's coming," Cal announced. He held his glass and an extra one awkwardly with his finger in a splint. It still ached. "I'm going to come clean about what we've been up to: investigating Marat Solonik's operation. Obviously, they're dangerous—"
"—You think?" Niles said without looking up.
Cal groaned. "Can we all get over the fact that they kicked my ass yesterday? My point is that, somehow, they figured out what we were doing and followed me up to Castle Hill. We need to steer clear of them and I think Eeva has a right to know so she can keep herself safe."
"Assuming it was you they followed up the hill . . . " Niles said.
"Good point," Frank said.
"And why would they be following me?" Eeva said from where she appeared at the edge of the paver circle.
Cal couldn't help but smile at the sight of her. She held a bottle of wine by its neck, and she was dressed for spring in a pair of shorts and a tank top, and her long legs and toned arms caused even Jonathan to glance over the top of his paperback.
Niles greeted her first.
"Eeev'ah, m'dear! Come give an old man a proper greeting."
She leaned over his wheelchair and gave him a kiss on the cheek and when she pulled back, Niles wore a grin larger than his eyeglasses.
"I brought another bottle," she said, lifting a chardonnay.
"You knew we were drinking?" Niles said with exaggerated surprise.
"Very observant of her," Frank said with exaggerated suspicion.
He and Niles were obviously playing some private game or sharing some joke that Cal wasn't privy to.
"All she'd have to do is follow you around for a day," Cal said to Frank and it came out meaner than he intended.
Good.
He and Eeva shared a quick embrace and then sat together on an open bench. Frank accepted the bottle of Chardonnay and then took a seat of his own on another bench.
"I'm teasing," Frank said. "Obviously, she saw us from her bedroom window. It doesn't take a super-spy to know we take wine in the garden."
"It's true, I was watching for you to know when to come down," said Eeva. "And, Niles, if I see that drone of yours fly past my window one more time, I'm going to throw my shoe at it."
"Guilty! Guilty as charged!" the old man admitted. "You can't blame an old man for being curious."
"I can and I will."
Niles blushed and nodded that he understood.
"Now, let's cut to the chase," Eeva said. "I understand your insinuation, but I am not a spy—"
"Spook," Frank interrupted.
"Whatever." She continued. "Yes, I worked in the Estonian government, but I was a data analyst. Yes, much of it was, how-do-you-say . . . classified, but I never went on missions or managed a network of spies. However, I feel responsible for what happened on the hill."
"You mean Cal almost getting killed?" Frank said. His eyes fixated on Eeva like the lenses of two microscopes.
"Yes," she said.
"And his watch getting stolen?" Frank continued. "Which was an anniversary gift from his dead wife, by the way."
Eeva's face went white.
"Jesus, Frank! Enough!" Cal said.
Frank sat back against the bench.
Cal turned back to Eeva and took her hand in his.
"It's fine. Really, it wasn't your fault. Frank and I have been—"
"—But it was," she interrupted. "Two times I've been down to the Port and two times they've followed me, and both times, you got caught in the aftermath."
She paused.
"I'm sorry."
Cal squeezed her hand.
"There's no need," he said. "Yesterday, Zebra knew me by name. Like I was saying, Frank and I have been up to something that pissed them off. They went up to that hill to deliver a message."
Cal shared the details of the Garden Gang's investigation: Mercury Deliveries, the Kosatka, and how they were all connected. He finished by saying, "And everything is owned by a Russian millionaire named—"
Eeva cut him off.
"Marat Solonik," she said. "I know."
Eeva explained everything and it all had to do with the Kosatka. The roots of the situation reached all the way back to World War II. Estonia had been invaded three times, first by the Soviets, then by Nazi Germany, and finally by the Soviets again. Eeva's little nation had been a battlefield between major powers, and while Grandpa Mac had rolled into Nice in his Sherman tank as a hero, Eeva's grandparents had been sheltering from artillery fire and fighting starvation. By the end of the war, Estonia was no longer a country so much as a puppet state with Soviet masters pulling the strings.
Cal sat on the edge of the bench as she spoke, leaning into her story. This was his subject after all, and his passion. He wished he could have given his students a chance to learn history like this, straight from the mouths of the families who lived it. Eeva was a gifted narrator, and if she'd shared this story in his classroom, there wouldn't have been a single student with their head laying bored on their desk.
After 1945, the war was over, but Eeva's story wasn't. The Soviets remained in Estonia. So did their brutality.
Starvation.
Mass executions.
Constant surveillance from the secret police.
The Soviet dominion lasted fifty-one years until their occupation finally ended in 1991, right before Eeva had turned twenty years old. Meanwhile, Frank had finished his Army tour and was back in Germany as a baby spook and Cal was in the middle of his short-lived baseball career in the minor league, still dating Molly. The contrast between their lives was unsettling. Hell, when Cal was smashing home runs to Gun N' Roses, Eeva was risking arrest over bootlegged Smiths albums.
It put things in perspective.
And the past never fully left. A third of Estonia’s population was culturally Russian, the legacy of decades of forced migration. Moscow’s collapse didn’t bring peace so much as transformation. Former party men and intelligence officers reinvented themselves as businessmen. Generals became traffickers. Corruption didn’t vanish; it metastasized. Russia became a gangster state; a kleptocracy, where might made right, and the most brutal and most devious became billionaires.
Not unlike the West, Cal thought, but with more bodies falling out of windows.
Eeva described her job as watching that system cannibalize itself. She tracked numbers, relationships, and money. The same names appeared again and again, straddling politics, crime, and industry.
Marat Solonik was one of them.
By the mid-2000s, Solonik was a major player in the black market, using military contacts to sell everything from rations to artillery. He hid behind a legitimate import-export business, leveraging family ties inside Estonia to mask his operations. Everyone knew what he was. No one touched him. It was through that monitoring that Eeva first learned of his newest acquisition.
A luxury yacht.
Renamed Kosatka.
"So, when I saw the Kosatka docked here in Nice, I had to investigate. I took some photos on my phone with the intent of sending them to former colleagues in Estonia. I might not be what you call an intelligence officer, but I knew the information would be welcome back home."
"And then Goggles spotted you snooping," said Frank, "He called his buddy, Hoodie, and they followed you onto the tram hoping to either scare you away or discover who you were and if you posed a threat."
Eeva nodded.
Cal and Eeva sat knee to knee on the bench, and he felt a magnet drawing him towards her. The lines at the corners of her eyes had history behind them now, and the faint crease in her brow was a battleline she had crossed. She was remarkable. She was a survivor.
Yet, even as Eeva had opened up, Cal felt himself shutting down. She was beautiful, she was competent, and she seemed to like him, but she'd also played him for a fool—and that hurt worse than his hand.
She was suddenly too close. Cal stood and stepped away where he could breathe.
"You could have told us this on that first day," Cal said. "You could have told us that these thugs were working for a Russian gangster. The situation was way more dangerous than you led us to believe."
Eeva jumped from the bench.
"I know and I'm sorry! We lost them in the garden, and I felt that was the end of it. I sent the pictures back to Estonia and moved on."
Was that true? Cal wanted to believe her.
Niles watched wide-eyed but said nothing. Jonathan continued to read his paperback, but Cal doubted that Jack Trinity was more interesting than the real-life spook story playing out around the fountain in their hidden garden.
Frank sat relaxed on his bench, his empty wineglass dangling from his fingers. He stared at Eeva like he was studying an insect.
"Except that wasn't the end of it, was it?" he said.
Eeva seemed startled, like she'd forgotten Frank was there. "What do you mean?"
"You walked him right past the Kosatka on your way up the hill. Cal knew better than to get that close, but I guess he couldn't say no to a pretty face."
"Frank—" Cal warned.
Eeva's shoulders slumped.
"You're right," she said. "It had been weeks since the metro and I didn't think there was any danger. I didn't mean to drag any of you into this."
"But you did," Frank pressed.
Cal cut in. Frank could be such an asshole, even when he was right.
"But she didn't know about our own surveillance op. Did she, Frank? Zebra—on the other hand—knew exactly who I was. He called me by my name, Frank! He told me to stop and to tell my masters to stop . . . like I'm the fucking spy."
"Spook," Frank corrected.
"Oh, whatever!"
Cal only realized he was pacing when he stopped to face Eeva directly.
"But you took photos of the Kosatka from the top of the hill, remember? With your phone and its crazy zoom? We were going to take a selfie and then that cannon startled us. Eeva, tell me the truth. Was it ever actually a date . . . or was I just a convenient excuse to get a better angle for your photos?"
"Cal—"
Frank interrupted her and was on his feet now, too. "Your old bosses in Estonia wanted more and Cal was your perfect cover."
"No! It's not like that!" Eeva glared at Frank. "Cal, listen to me."
She sank back onto the bench.
"I'm not a spook, but maybe I became one—I needed to collect more evidence. But I also wanted to spend time with you," she said. "I thought I could do both at the same time. But you got hurt and lost your watch. I'm sorry."
"She is a spook, Cal!" Frank said, standing closer. "She was sent a mission to gather more intelligence and used you as cover to avoid suspicion—and failed miserably, I might add."
She shook her head no, but her lips were pressed tightly together.
Three sets of eyes formed a triangle.
Cal's were welling with tears. God, he'd been a fool: a fool to think he'd be able to retire in peace with Frank around, a fool to believe that another woman could heal his heart after losing Molly, and a fool to run away from his problems in Florida.
He turned and walked away.
"Cal!" Eeva called after him, but he ignored her.
Behind him, Niles's drone crashed to the ground and Cal could hear the old Englishman behind him groan about his batteries.
Crash and burn, Cal thought. Welcome to the club.