Helsinki White

by James Thompson

  He shrugged. “I don’t keep track.”

  “Been drinking hard long?”

  “More since my brother got killed. It’s not so much that I like to get drunk. It just steadies my nerves.”

  Sweetness is one of those rare juicers. You never know when they’re tanked: they never slur, their eyes don’t droop. He always seems sober. He drove fast, wove in and out of traffic along the icy roads with careful precision. I said nothing, wanted to give it some thought. What I said wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Sometime there would come a point when he’d have to choose whether to self-destruct or build a life for himself.

  At NBI HQ in Vantaa, he filled out his application for a job as a linguist. He got the job through nepotism, but it wasn’t a sham. Our team needed a linguist with exactly his abilities, for translation of electronic eavesdropping on foreign criminals. He only lacks Dutch. We could use someone who speaks it, because so much pot and Ecstasy comes from Amsterdam. We got it done and started out toward Arvid’s. We wouldn’t be taking his Toyota again. The shock absorbers were worn out, and every bump in the road jarred my knee, sent pain shooting through it. I have a Saab 9-5, 2007 model, which I love. We’d be taking it from now on.

  On the way, I asked him about his plans for an education. Since he was now an NBI employee, he didn’t have to go to the police academy in Tampere. He could stay here and attend the University of Helsinki or a polytechnic trade school.

  “I got a job,” he said. “What do I need school for?”

  “That was our agreement when I hired you,” I said. “I expect you to earn a degree. What you study, though, is up to you.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “You can pick for me.”

  Then I got it. He would apply for whatever I suggested, then fail the entrance exam but claim he tried and acted in good faith.

  “No,” I said. “It’s your life, and what we’re doing now won’t last forever. You make a decision, and you study like hell for the entrance exam. If you don’t go to school, you can’t work for me. End of story.”

  This made him mad. He didn’t speak to me for the next hour.

  After we picked up Arvid’s clothes, I asked him if Milo had been teaching him some computer skills. “No. I don’t like being around him if I don’t have to. He calls me names, makes fun of the way I talk and tells me I’m stupid. I’m not stupid.”

  Sweetness has an East Helsinki accent and uses the area’s slang. Sometimes I don’t get what he’s saying. Helsinki is funny that way. Dialects vary so much that you can often place a person’s roots to within half a mile. East Helsinki dialect screams lower class.

  “I’m not going to take much more of that shit from him,” Sweetness said.

  “You want me to speak to him about it?”

  He scoffed. “Pomo, I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.”

  “Just don’t hurt him like you did the dope dealer.” I was curious. “Did that bother you?” I asked.

  “Naw, he deserved it. I couldn’t care less.” He switched topics. “Milo taught me a little about surveillance, though. I got some good pictures to show you.”

  “I told you to stay in the car and out of sight.”

  “Milo said that was bullshit, that I had to learn to be—what do you call it?—surreptitious. I gotta say, he was right. I got some great pics.”

  After physical therapy, Sweetness took me home, and I invited him to eat with us. It was like watching a pig at the trough. He ate at lightning speed, watched with an empty plate to make sure we had our fill, then devoured every last bite left on the stove. Why did I think my relationship with Sweetness was going to equate to Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady?

  10

  February eighteenth, Thursday. Nine days since my brain tumor was removed. My luck was extreme. My headache disappeared. I suffered no common physical side effects. No weakness, motor control or problems with coordination. No difficulties with speech. No more seizures. No mental deficiencies. Quite the opposite. Each day, I felt that my powers of cognition and memory increased. I remained, however, emotionally flat.

  I continued my one-month sick leave. It didn’t go as Kate and I had imagined: quiet time together, just us and our child. Milo and Sweetness were always underfoot. Arvid, though, knew how to make his presence unobtrusive. Kate liked him more and more over time. He mostly kept to himself, listened to music with his MP3 player, tended to Anu, grocery shopped and often cooked. He was an excellent chef, and taught Kate much about traditional Finnish cuisine. As a longtime world traveler, his English was good.

  Sweetness played chauffeur, took me to physical therapy three times a week, stopped by to see if we needed anything approximately every ten minutes. At night, he surveilled politicos. He bought a good camera. He showed me his videotaped victories with pride. He had a close-up of Hanna Nykyri, head of the Social Democratic Party, with a dick in her mouth. A wider shot proved said dick didn’t belong to her husband. He had a picture of Daniel Solstrand, minister of foreign affairs, with a dick in his mouth. Owner of said dick appeared underage. Sweetness had pics of the national chief of police and the minister of the interior with a variety of woman, a veritable bevy of quail.

  The minister, Osmo Ahtiainen, is an overweight pig not choosy about his quiff. A video showed the fat fuck minister in the saddle of a woman who looked like she might be the village blacksmith. She changed the TV channel with a remote control. The sound was off. He didn’t notice. He came, squealed and grunted. She fake came with him, gave him the “Oh, baby, you’re the best” patter.

  One morning, while we were alone, I had a talk with Arvid. I asked him if he would like to be our bookkeeper, since Jyri wanted ledgers kept. “The murder you’re accused of falls under the National Security Act,” I said. “If I get caught, and you have the books, they can’t be used against me.”

  “You won’t get caught for the simple reason that police corruption, at least in the public consciousness, is so rare here as to be non-existent, and you’re the most famous cop in the nation, so no one would believe it. It would be like trying to convince them that Jesus was a pedophile.”

  It’s true. After being shot twice in the line of duty and being decorated for bravery both times—and especially since Milo and I stopped a school shooting and were glorified in the press for saving the lives of children—I’m a nationally respected figure.

  “But sure, I’ll do it,” he said. “It will be fun. I’ll keep them in a code from the war and teach it to you, make it feel like the old days.”

  Most of Arvid’s time in the war was spent in Valpo, our secret police during those years.

  Then I brought up what I really wanted to talk about, and told Arvid about going flat and feeling no emotion. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep up the pretense, and it will cause me to wreck my marriage,” I said, “or it will cause me to make an error in judgment in my work and get somebody hurt.”

  I had already told him about my black op, ripping off drug dealers, taking money.

  “I already told you, boy,” he said. “You inherited your family blood. You’re a killer, you just need the right justifications so you can pretend otherwise. There have been times in my life when I felt nothing. It started during the Winter War. I felt no fear, no joy or misery, no guilt. It went away over time, but sometimes, when I’m under stress, I still go numb inside. Our circumstances are different, your problem is neurological and mine is post-traumatic stress syndrome. I’m just saying I have an idea of what you’re going through. You love your wife. Just because you can’t feel it right now doesn’t mean it isn’t so. And this black-bag operation—you’ve been lying to yourself—people are going to die and you knew it when you took it on. Maybe you’re better off if you don’t feel anything for a while.”

  Arvid had become a mentor to me. My first and doubtless last. He’s the only man I ever met that I trusted and respected enough to look to for wisdom. I didn’t say anything, just sat there
and tried to process what was doubtless true. He patted my knee and went to the kitchen to do the dishes. Left me to my thoughts.

  Milo called. He was building surveillance gear and a new computer, said he didn’t have room to work in his tiny apartment, and asked if he could use one end of my dining room table as a workbench.

  He lives in squalor in an apartment barely big enough to turn around in. Our dining room table is huge, and he was doing this for the group. It was hard to say no.

  “Are you going to trash my house?”

  “No. I just need one end of the table for a couple days.”

  He showed up an hour later with boxes of components. Started stacking them in the corner. It was a big pile. He was going to trash my house. Arvid walked into the room. Milo saw him and a look came over his face like he just saw the girl of his dreams. So he had an ulterior motive for asking to work here. He wanted to meet Arvid.

  Milo considers himself patriotic above all things and is fascinated by Finland’s role in the Second World War. He reads incessantly about the Winter War of 1939–40, in which Finland slaughtered Russians by the droves. Arvid is one of the great heroes of the Winter War and personally killed hundreds of Russians, as well as taking out six tanks, charging at them with Molotov cocktails.

  Milo raced across the room, grabbed Arvid’s hand and started pumping it. “It’s a pleasure, sir. A great honor. As a Finn, let me express my personal gratitude for your bravery and sacrifice.”

  Arvid sighed, jerked his hand free. “For God’s sake, stop kissing my ass.”

  Milo’s euphoria was short-lived. He hadn’t considered that Arvid might not enjoy the sum of the continual and uncritical admiration of everyone he came into contact with. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that …” he could only stammer.

  Arvid spared him further humiliation. “It’s all right, just get over it.”

  Wisely, Milo kept his mouth shut and started unpacking his boxes.

  Kate walked in. She saw the mess and it pissed her off. “What in the name of God is all this?”

  I said, “I told him he could work in here, because his apartment is so small.”

  Kate looked put out in the extreme. “What, then, may I ask, are you building?”

  He kid-in-candy-store smiled. “Can you please just wait one minute?” He unpacked an oblong box-shaped gizmo with dials and such on it. Plugged it in, made some adjustments. “This is a bug sweeper,” he said. “It detects radio signals and info-burst packets used to monitor mains-powered transmitters, telephone transmitters, video transmitters, cell phones, tracking devices, you name it. It sniffs out mains carrier low-frequency and infrared laser-emitting devices. It also picks up signals from more sophisticated devices that only transmit momentarily and notify you that a signal has been detected: burst transmitters that accumulate information and fire it off in a fraction of a second.”

  “You realize,” I said, “that, to the rest of us, your explanation was just a half minute of incomprehensible ratchet noises.”

  The black rings around his eyes crinkled with delight. “Allow me to demonstrate.” He walked around the room with something that resembled an oversized mobile phone with an antenna and a plethora of control gizmos. As he neared Kate’s purse, it emitted a beep that pulsed faster and faster the closer he got. He asked her to take her cell phone out of her purse. Steady beep.

  The door buzzer rang. It was Sweetness, just checking to see if we need anything.

  As Milo neared him, the beeping started again. And again got stronger as Milo got closer. Milo reached into Sweetness’s coat pocket and pulled out his phone. Steady beep. It was the same for all of us. Even Arvid.

  “The apartment is clean,” Milo said, “but SUPO tapped all our phones.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Arvid laughed. Kate’s mouth gaped. Sweetness hadn’t taken in the ramifications yet.

  Milo ripped the tape off another box. It contained new Nokia phones. “These are N95s loaded with encryption software. The encryption,” he said, “is certified by the Israeli ministry of defense. There are no back doors. The encryption keys are randomly generated by the software and can’t be provided to anyone, either private organization or government. It’s a dual combination of asymmetric and symmetric encryption with end-to-end protection, from phone to phone, for both audio and text messages. A one-thousand-and-twenty-four-bit random master key is automatically generated per contact and replaced at every call start, and a two-hundred-and-fifty-six-bit random session key is replaced every second.”

  He paused, waiting for us to cheer at our good fortune.

  “That’s great news,” Sweetness said.

  Milo didn’t get it that Sweetness was teasing him. “Just insert the SIM cards from the phones you have now, and your privacy is ensured. We can even have conference calls if we like.”

  “I get one too?” Arvid asked. “What for? I just change diapers and cook.”

  “Sir,” Milo said, “what is ours is yours. I have another gift for you as well, but I’d like to wait until we have Kari’s ‘Welcome back to the world’ party, when he officially goes back on duty to give it to you.”

  I forgot to mention it to Kate.

  “Party?” she asked.

  “If it’s OK with you,” Milo said, “I’d like to have it here on the twenty-eighth of March. I need time to get everything together. It’ll take a few weeks. I have—or will have—gifts for you as well.”

  Her curiosity was piqued. “Sure, we can have a party.”

  She was miffed because the house was full of people. Violent and criminal people at that, even if they all worked for the police—or, in Arvid’s case, used to. Later, she told me she felt as if she was trying to raise a child in the lair of a terrorist cell. But Milo had proven the value of his undertakings and won her over for the time being.

  “What else are you working on?” she asked.

  “I’m building three synthesizable VHDL models of exact solutions for three-dimensional hyperbolic positioning systems,” he said.

  “More ratchet noises,” she answered.

  “They’re mobile stations for eavesdropping on cell phones, so we can do to the bad guys what was done to us. They’re not that great. The range is only a couple miles and they can only handle three or four phones at a time, but they’re the best I can do. And I’m building a new computer to suit our purposes. There isn’t one commercially made that has the exact components I want, and it saves a lot of money, too.”

  “Here’s the deal,” she said. “My husband is recovering from two major surgeries. He needs quiet. We have a newborn infant. She and I both need quiet. You can spend a limited amount of time here to build your toys, but I want the house kept neat and your presence unobtrusive.” She turned to Sweetness. “You really are sweet, and you have our gratitude for driving Kari around, for shopping and just being generally helpful. But from now on, call before you come over, and don’t call three times a day. This is our home, not your squad room.”

  Milo and Sweetness stared at the floor, hands in pockets, and waxed regretful.

  “Kate, should I go home?” Arvid asked.

  She walked over and put her hand on his shoulder. “Please, stay a few more days. You’ve been a great help to us, and we’re grateful.”

  He flashed the smile that charmed her and nodded assent.

  Kate left the room, went to tend to Anu.

  I asked Milo, “How many heists have you pulled since I gave you that packet of info?”

  “Two.”

  “How did they go?”

  He and Sweetness shared an awkward glance. “Last night, we cased the apartment and the dealer was gone, so I picked the lock and we entered. A woman was asleep in her bed. She heard the door open, woke up, came out of her bedroom and saw us.”

  “What happened?”

  “I found a roll of duct tape and mummified her. She had on pajamas, but still, it would have hurt like hell when it got pulled off, so Sweetness stood her up an
d held her up in place, and I rolled it around her backwards, so the sticky part faced out. Only her mouth was taped shut, and we tied a scarf around her eyes. Then we stuck her to the kitchen wall. And after all that, we only got twenty-three thousand euros.”

  “Can she ID you?”

  “No. We wore balaclavas the whole time.”

  It must have made an interesting picture. “Milo, work on your contraptions for a while if you want. Quietly. Sweetness, go home for a while or dig some dirt on politicos or whatever. Both of you be back here tomorrow at three p.m. Milo, what weapons have we confiscated?”

  “Four handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, and a Daddy MAC.”

  We would save the MAC-10 for something special. Illegal possession of fully automatic weapons carries more jail time. “Bring a couple pistols,” I said, “for a frame-up.”

  Sweetness left. Milo unpacked his goodies, placed the components in orderly piles in the corner and threw out the boxes, so the dining room did indeed look neat. He left for the day, and according to Kate’s wishes, we passed a quiet evening.

  11

  In the morning, Aino, Kate’s assistant, who was taking Kate’s place while she was on enforced maternity leave, stopped by our apartment to drop off some papers. Her gorgeous blue eyes were framed by a mop of messy blond hair. She’s built the opposite of Kate. Short and lush instead of tall and thin. A long and sexy upper lip. Her sweater accentuated magnificent breasts. I got an insta-hard-on. All I could think about was fucking her.

  It took me by surprise. I’d never wanted anyone besides Kate since I first laid eyes on her, and I hadn’t had this kind of reaction to a woman since I was a teenager. I tried not to stare, to act natural. I was sitting on the couch and covered my crotch with the morning newspaper. I had found a new dimension to my post-op symptoms. My primitive desires included other women.

  Jyri called. There were a number of big-money drug deals going down over the coming weeks. He knew I was weak and on crutches. How much could I do? Could Milo and Sweetness work independent of me? Could we get the jobs done? He didn’t know how much they had already accomplished. I wanted to participate. I was bored shitless. I said we would find a way. Unless I was on death’s door, I would participate. I counted the days. Two weeks until I could drive again. A month until I ditched the crutches.