Where Have All the Young Girls Gone

by Leena Lehtolainen

  I walked home because I needed some fresh air and exercise. The cold had brought frost with it, creating a sheet of ice over the puddles. It was a quiet Friday night in our neighborhood, though there were lights visible in almost all of the houses. There wasn’t any music playing, and no one was out and about except for a lone smoker on a terrace. It wasn’t until just before our yard that I passed a dog walker, but I didn’t recognize her. As I entered the yard, a taxi pulled into the driveway. It was my dad coming back from his party. I stayed outside, waiting for him while he paid the driver. The walkway was slippery, and I didn’t know how boozy class reunions for math teachers got. At least the way he was walking didn’t indicate excessive imbibing.

  “Hi,” he said in surprise. “Where have you been at this hour?”

  “I had to stop by work again. Was the party good?”

  “Well, if realizing that we’re all old and that some of us are already in the grave is good, then yes. Are the children asleep?”

  Taneli’s window was dark, but there was still a light on in Iida’s room. She was always up half the night on weekends, and Monday mornings were always full of foot-dragging. It was probably some sort of karma: my parents had had to nag me to go to sleep too.

  “I was just thinking in the taxi that it’s good you aren’t in Afghanistan anymore. The people who died there are someone else’s daughters and sons too, but at this age I don’t have the energy to carry the whole world’s cares. My own are enough to bear,” Dad admitted as we stepped inside. “Do you have any juice? I’m thirsty.”

  While I hunted down some black currant juice for him, Antti came downstairs to greet us. I sent one more text message to Ursula to let her know that Rahim had not confessed, and that he would be in a cell overnight. Then I went to turn on my computer. The police academy explosion in Afghanistan was all over the Finnish media now. No one had claimed responsibility for the strike, but information about what had happened was lacking in general. The number of victims had climbed to nine, but there were still people missing. I hadn’t received any messages from my students. I checked my e-mail at five-minute intervals, but no turquoise envelope icon appeared in my inbox. I tried to convince myself that that didn’t necessarily mean anything ominous.

  Just when I was going to bed, I saw that my phone, which was on silent, was ringing. From the beginning of the number, I could tell that the call was coming from Radio Finland. They probably wanted me to comment on the terror attack or Tuomas’s rampage. I didn’t feel like talking about either. Antti was still sitting up watching a French movie on Canal+. I knew I would wake up when he came to bed, but I let him watch TV in peace. The cats, on the other hand, immediately showed up at the foot of the bed, and I was just falling asleep when they started fighting.

  “Rascals,” I mumbled, half-awake. But then I couldn’t fall asleep again. I just tossed and turned, thinking about whether I should go back to the computer. Instead I grabbed my phone and checked my e-mail. Nothing. But Lauri Vala had decided to grace me with another text. I begrudgingly opened the messaging app, hoping Vala would know something about my students.

  “If I were you, I’d take out more life insurance, Kallio. If those drug lords decide to take revenge for founding a police academy on their turf, no one will be safe anywhere.”

  The smell of explosives and burned flesh returned to my nose. That same smell now hung over the ruins of the police academy. The powers that be in Finland had been squabbling all fall and winter about how seriously Finland should participate in the ISAF forces’ operations in Afghanistan and whether Finland was at war or not. I’d lived my own childhood and teenage years in the shadow of the Cold War and fear of the bomb. Finland had the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which in theory meant that in the event of an attack on our eastern neighbor through Finland, Finland was supposed to defend its WWII-era enemy. We’d been cowed by visions of American bombs falling from the sky, even though there was hardly anything in Finland that would have interested the United States. We were just a convenient buffer zone between East and West.

  In the twenty-first century, it felt like religions had built much higher fences than political ideologies ever had. All around these new walls hung the gnawing awareness that, the way things were going, there wasn’t going to be enough food or water for everyone. It wasn’t possible to ensure a Finnish-style standard of living for everyone. It was easy to think the flood would come during our lifetimes, but it was harder to see any further than that. During my own parents’ lifetimes, the world had changed so completely that their parents would never have believed it. People composed broadside ballads about the war in Japan and the sinking of the Titanic, but it took weeks for the message the songs contained to circle the globe. My father recalled the ballad about the Titanic as being one of the great horror stories of his childhood. Finland, as a grand duchy of Russia, had citizens fighting in Japan, and Finns died in the Titanic disaster, so even though these events occurred far away, they became a part of my father’s life. Now there was no refuge from war, not even in neighboring Sweden, which had lived in peace for almost two hundred years.

  I fell back asleep, and my dreams carried me to Afghanistan, to the police academy, shiny and new, the cold stone and ruddy wood floors gradually being covered with rugs, bookshelves, and decorations. Before my trip I’d seen pictures of the building in various stages of completion. Their own new building was a magnificent symbol of the country’s efforts to create a democratic, corruption-free police force, but more important than the building were the people who worked in it. In my dream I was listening to Uzuri’s Pashto recitation again, but it was interrupted by a young girl in a headscarf who rushed into the room yelling in Finnish: “Everybody out, the building is rigged with explosives!” In the dream I recognized the girl’s face: she was the Afghani girl who had disappeared in January, Aziza Abdi Hasan, whom I had never seen except in pictures. I awoke to a terrible crash and at first didn’t know where I was. Afghanistan? But soon I could make out the outlines of our bedroom, traced by the light from the streetlamps shining through the shades, and Antti, who swore as he lay next to me.

  “Effing cats. We shouldn’t let them in the bedroom! They were fighting with each other again and knocked my book off the nightstand. It’s only six. Let’s try to get some more sleep.”

  I tossed and turned for a while but couldn’t get back to sleep. Antti started to snuffle, and from downstairs came my father’s chain saw snoring. He’d forgotten to attach the ball to his pajama top to stop him from rolling onto his back. For once he was getting to sleep in the position he preferred.

  I got up to go to the bathroom and brought along my phone. No text messages, one e-mail from Ursula. It had been sent to me and Ruuskanen.

  “I got ahold of the Corolla’s owner. He freely admitted to having loaned his car to Rahim Ezfahani and claims that he thought Rahim had a legal driver’s license. He was afraid of the police, or at least of me. Or he thought that I was tempting him to sin because I wasn’t wearing a headscarf. The car is in our possession and on the way to Forensics.”

  The message had been sent at 3:32 a.m. Anyone would have been afraid if the police came ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night and started asking questions about whether the family’s Corolla had been loaned to anyone recently. Ruuskanen hadn’t answered the message yet. I finally admitted to myself that I was fully awake and tiptoed down to the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker and pull on clean running clothes from the drying line. I drank a cup of coffee with cream and went outside into the cold.

  I ran at a relatively leisurely pace for a half an hour, more to clear my head than to actually exercise. Since the Afghanistan trip I’d been having nightmares on and off, and the best medicine had been getting outside. The skyline glowed promisingly—today I might even need sunglasses. The winter had entailed record-breaking snowfall, but soon the coltsfoot would emerge and the blackbirds would start
warbling. Completely irrationally, I felt happy. Hell, at least I was alive and able to run on my own two feet, though it had been a good while since my fortieth birthday, and without the dye bottle my hair would have streaks of gray.

  My cheerfulness fell flat once I went inside. Dad had woken up, made more coffee, and turned on the TV. He’d muted it and put on the subtitles so as not to disturb the others.

  “Twenty dead,” was the first thing he said as I started stretching and reading the news ticker. Vala had been right for once: the drug lords were the prime suspects in the bombing. One of the main goals of Afghanistan’s reconstituted police force had been to get the flourishing drug trade under control. Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world’s heroin. If even half of that could be taken off the market, the distributors’ financial losses would be enormous.

  After a shower I read the morning paper, which also reported on the bombing. The paper had a grainy picture of the smoking building, apparently taken by a cell phone. An American agency was credited for the image. Even though I couldn’t help but imagine the stench of burning in my nostrils, I forced myself to eat a good breakfast.

  There hadn’t been any word from Ruuskanen, and I didn’t feel like doing his work for him. Another call came in to my cell phone from the Radio Finland number. I went to the sauna to answer—it was the only place in the house where I could talk in private.

  “Good morning, this is Aija Heikkinen from Radio Finland News. Am I speaking to the Detective Maria Kallio who was training instructors for the new police academy in Afghanistan and who participated in the opening ceremonies?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the terror attack at the police academy, in which at least twenty people lost their lives. Would you like to comment?”

  “Are you taping this conversation?”

  “Not yet. I’ll ask your permission before taping.”

  “I don’t know enough about it yet to really say anything. I’m completely dependent on the media for information right now.”

  “Were you threatened during the training or the opening ceremonies?”

  “Not until right after the opening ceremonies. As you most likely know, our convoy was hit by a roadside bomb. But we never had concrete evidence about who carried out the attack.”

  “What do you think about Finland being involved in international projects of this sort? Is it sensible to invest tax revenues paid by our citizens on risky undertakings with the potential for such catastrophic losses?”

  I swallowed the first answer that came to mind, that the tax revenues paid by our citizens always seemed to be going astray, no matter what they were intended for. Of course, we had to take care of the elderly and the children, and the few WWII vets still around, but investing in almost anything else always seemed to be grand larceny in someone’s mind.

  “It’s a question of global responsibility. Founding the police academy was in the interest of Finland and other Western countries, because an active, well-organized police force will hinder the drug trade in Afghanistan.” I repeated my oft-quoted rationale, which was sure to sound just as rote as it was.

  “Can I have that last comment again, this time on tape?”

  I repeated the sentence, and the reporter asked again if I knew whether any of the instructors trained in Finland were among the victims. I just said again that I didn’t know anything about the identities of the victims.

  I’d barely gotten rid of the reporter when Ursula called. She’d started canvassing the Ezfahanis’ neighborhood early that morning with Puupponen, trying to find any witnesses who might have seen the gray Corolla or Rahim on the night Noor was killed.

  “The initial tire-tread analysis hasn’t ruled anything out. Mark my words—it was Rahim who did it. Should we put up warnings in the mosques? When this comes out, the anti-immigration types are going to be all over them.”

  “No provocations, Ursula,” I managed to say, and then my phone beeped again. This time it was Ruuskanen. He was announcing that my cell and the Violent Crime Unit would be holding a joint meeting at the station at ten thirty. There would be no way to know how long the workday would be after that.

  Taneli had skating practice, but he already knew how to use the bus, and besides, my dad could go with him. Grandpa’s visit had happened to come at the perfect time.

  There wasn’t any more specific information in the newspaper about the terror strike than I’d seen on TV, so after finishing my breakfast I went to check online for more details. American sources were saying that communication links to the police academy were down; it was silly to draw any hasty conclusions about the fate of my students just because they hadn’t answered their e-mail. I found a video clip on the CNN website and tried in vain to look for people I might recognize, but everyone was just the same faceless blob rushing back and forth. And besides, the women’s heads were covered with headscarves, and after being gone for several months I couldn’t remember how each of my students moved.

  I discussed practical arrangements for the day with my dad and Antti, and promised to let them know once I knew when I would be coming home. My father was sewing on a button that had come off the collar of Iida’s winter coat, grumbling all the while. It made me smile to remember that once he had played Tailor Halme, a sort of Finnish Don Quixote and his favorite character from Finnish literature, at the community theater in a production based on Väinö Linna’s Under the Northern Star trilogy.

  I didn’t have the energy to put on makeup or style my hair, so I pulled my stocking cap down low over my head as I left to walk to work. Despite the sunshine, the wind was blowing so hard that the end of my nose felt like it was freezing solid, and my eyes started to water. On my way, Söderholm, the guitarist and lead singer of the Flatfeet, texted me the date and time of our next rehearsal. It was impossible for me to commit to anything, and all of my bandmates had the same problem. Sometimes months went by before all the band members had time to practice together. We only played occasional gigs. There was always demand during the Christmas office party season, and if we were up to it, we would perform in late summer at the police department open houses in Espoo, Vantaa, and Lohja.

  Söderholm was the Espoo Police Department weapons expert and a ballistics analyst with an international reputation; he was also the most un-policeman-looking man I’d ever seen. Even when he went abroad to give lectures, he wore his battered leather jacket and boots, and had been stopped by airport security more often than all of my other Finnish colleagues combined. I texted him back, suggesting that we get together for lunch when we both had time. The other members of the band were working for the Helsinki police and the National Bureau of Investigation these days.

  In our ten thirty meeting, Ruuskanen wasn’t exactly what you’d call perky, and Ursula also gave off a vibe suggesting she’d slept only a couple of hours, apparently on the lumpy bed in the on-call room at the station. Her makeup was minimal, and some mascara had flaked onto her cheek.

  From the very beginning of the meeting, it was apparent that Ursula thought Rahim was guilty. Forensics had already found his fingerprints in the car, and under the front driver-side seat they’d found a broken bracelet with pink glass flowers and the name “Noor” in Persian script.

  “Noor was in the car. I checked with her mother, and the bracelet belonged to the girl. The owner of the car denies ever having met a female cousin of Rahim Ezfahani. He isn’t an Iranian; he’s Somali.”

  “The Somali could be lying,” Puustjärvi pointed out. “Who knows? Maybe he strangled the girl himself.”

  “Don’t confuse things. I’m just saying what we know so far.”

  “One at a time!” Ruuskanen snapped. He didn’t have a tie on, and the top couple of buttons of his shirt had been left open. A thick gold chain and graying, curly chest hair were visible through the collar opening. I hadn’t noticed Ruuskanen wearing any jewelry before except a wedding ring, which was a simple, narrow ba
nd.

  “The interpreter will be here at 11:15. Kallio tried to question the Ezfahani boy alone yesterday. It was a good attempt, but they won’t talk to women. That’s just the name of the game,” Ruuskanen said.

  “Oh, come on!” Ursula snapped before I had time to say anything. “Omar Hassan talked my ear off, in perfectly good English. Apparently, he lived in London before he fell in love with a Finnish au pair and followed her to Espoo. At first, he was a little shy, but then he sang like a bird. Maybe their desire to speak depends on which woman is asking the questions.”

  “At two in the morning I would talk too, just to be able to get back to sleep,” Puupponen put in. “I looked up this Omar Hassan guy online. There’s more than one person by that name in Finland, but our Omar was married to a Finnish girl and got a residency permit six years ago. The couple live at different addresses now, but they haven’t divorced. And Omar is unemployed at the moment.”

  “But he still has enough money for a car,” Ruuskanen pointed out.

  “It would be nice to know if Omar lends his Corolla to people out of the goodness of his heart or if he charges for it,” Ursula continued. “In any case, he’s loaned the car to Rahim several times, including on the day Noor was killed. Rahim returned the car the next morning. Clean, as it always is when he borrows it. We’ll see what Forensics finds. Does Rahim know how to use a car vac, or is that women’s work?”

  “If you talked like that about a Finnish man, I would be offended,” Koivu cut in. “I have three half-Vietnamese children, two of whom look more like their mother than me. We run into this labeling constantly. How do we know Tuomas Soivio didn’t kill his girlfriend himself, and now he’s trying to frame Rahim? OK, Soivio has an alibi that his family and uncle are backing up. But so does Rahim. Which one are we more likely to believe? Soivio.”