Lucifer's Tears

by James Thompson

  “My country is the standard-bearer for the world . . .” Mary says and stops, I guess for once uncertain what to say.

  Taina cuts her off. “And more is the fucking pity.” She switches to Finnish, tells Jari and the boys they’re leaving. Now.

  Jari pulls me aside, tells me that Taina got so upset because the decision to terminate her pregnancy broke her heart. She never got over it, and Mary hurt her feelings. He tells me he’s sorry, that maybe we can get together again after John and Mary are gone. Within five minutes, they’re out the door.

  KATE, JOHN, MARY AND I Sit in silence at the kitchen table. I can’t read Kate’s face. John is amused. His eyes dance. Mary glowers. The migraine booms.

  John breaks the ice. “I think this calls for a drink.”

  I tell him what he already knows. “The kossu is in the freezer.”

  He brings the bottle and two glasses.

  “Sure,” Mary says. “Start boozing. That’s what you two are good at.”

  I pour us shots. We shoot them down, I pour us another round.

  Kate says, “Kari, you don’t look well.”

  Their voices reverberate like my head is in a steel drum. I’m afraid I’ll pass out again, as I did at Arvid’s. I need to take painkillers, but I don’t want to leave Kate alone to deal with this mess, even for a minute. “The headache,” I say. “I need to go to bed soon. Kate, will you come with me?”

  Kate turns to Mary. “I’m proud of you and John. I wanted to show you off to Kari’s family. I had never met them before and wanted to make a good impression. You humiliated me. Why?”

  “That wasn’t my intention,” Mary says. “You know my feelings about abortion, but I said nothing, even though I have a Christian duty to speak out.”

  Kate glares at Mary and raises her voice. “You insulted nice people. You insinuated that Americans are somehow better than them.”

  “I pointed out that America’s generosity helped make Finland what it is today. I see nothing wrong with that.” Mary points at me. “You let your family insult me and my country. That was wrong.”

  Now it’s my fault. Un-fucking-believable. I consider how much shit I should eat to maintain good relations and keep the peace. I think about Kate and the stress this is causing her, and the possibility of losing our child. I would eat all the shit Mary can dish out, but Kate took a stand. I have to back her up.

  “I understand that your religious beliefs are important to you,” I say, “but Jari and Taina came here in the spirit of family and friendship. You sent a clear message that their culture and beliefs are inferior to your own. And whatever your beliefs, Taina shared an intimate and doubtless painful experience with you. You did it without speaking, but you made your feelings about it clear enough. No matter what you believe, surely you can see that some lines shouldn’t be crossed.”

  She folds her hands, prayer-style, and looks at me. “Kari, I’ll be frank. I don’t care for your drinking or swearing, and I hate it that my sister lives halfway across the world from her home because of you.”

  She stupefies me. I can’t deal with her, because I don’t understand her. “What’s the matter with Finland?” I ask.

  “You live in a nation where homosexual relationships and abortion are sanctioned by the government. This country lives contrary to God’s law.”

  “But abortions are legal in the States, too. And some states ratify same-sex relationships.”

  “Those are missteps on the path to righteousness and soon to be corrected. The Finnish people, however, live in sin.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. She reminds me of Legion.

  John smacks the table with his hand, just like Kate does when she’s furious. I picture him learning it from her when they were kids. “Goddamn it, Mary,” he says, “leave Kari alone. He’s a good guy.”

  John seems to have depths that belie his outward veneer. He keeps surprising me. “Kari,” he says, “I’m sorry, but fuck this. It’s time we all start telling the truth around here.”

  He’s going to tell Kate the truth about himself. I’m terrified. “Don’t, John,” I say.

  I watch Kate’s face, but can’t read it. She presses a thoughtful finger to pursed lips. The migraine screams that stress will make Kate miscarry and it will kill her. All because I couldn’t keep her goddamned idiot brother under control. My vision blurs. My ears ring. My heart thumps in my chest so hard it hurts.

  Thank God, John takes my meaning and relents. He gets up, puts on his jacket and boots. “I’m leaving now. I’ve got a date. Kari, thank you for dinner and all you’ve done for me. Mary, while we’re here, at least try to pretend you’re a decent human being.”

  A date? He takes the spare keys from the nail beside the door and walks out.

  Kate, Mary and I look at each other for a few seconds. Without speaking, Mary goes to the spare bedroom and shuts the door.

  Kate reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I’m dizzy,” I say. “Could you please get the bag with the medicine Jari prescribed for me, and a glass of water?”

  She brings them and sits beside me. I drop a painkiller into the water and watch it dissolve, then decide what the hell, I’ll try shotgunning dope. I break a tranquilizer and a sleeping pill into chunks and put them in the glass. I have a little kossu left and dump it in, too. I drink the cocktail.

  “Let me take you to bed,” Kate says.

  We undress and get under the covers. Kate lays her head on me. I feel silent tears drip onto my shoulder. “I never would have dreamed my brother and sister would become who they are,” she says.

  The dope kicks in fast. It’s hard to keep my eyes open. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve never doubted how much you love me,” she says, “but still, sometimes the lengths you go to prove it surprise me.”

  I realize she sees through John and knows what he’s become and, further, senses that somehow I’ve been protecting her from it. I wonder what else she knows, if she understands that I’ve been hiding other things about myself from her, and if so, if she knows what they are. I wrap her in my arms and sleep.

  35

  I WAKE UP at eight thirty a.m. I slept well, feel rested for the first time in I don’t know how long. Kate isn’t in the bed beside me. I go to the kitchen for coffee. Kate has left a note signed with a lipstick kiss print. She and Mary got up early to do some sightseeing and shopping. I take it they’re making an effort at reconciliation. John is nowhere to be seen. His boots aren’t in the foyer. I assume his date went well.

  I smoke, drink coffee and process my conversation with Bettie Page Linda. This investigation reeks of cover-up, and the national chief of police, if not behind it, is aware of it. I think I know why, and it’s time for him to come clean. I call him. He takes the offensive.

  “Vaara, your actions go beyond contradicting my instructions. Not only has Rein Saar not been charged with murder, but the press knows that Iisa Filippov and Rein Saar were tased. Why do I think you’re the leak?”

  I ease in. “I’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about Arvid Lahtinen.”

  “Another case of insubordination on your part. Why hasn’t the matter been put to bed yet?”

  “Because he’s guilty. He and my grandpa and other Valpo detectives committed war crimes. They took part in the Holocaust. Arvid admitted it.”

  Silence.

  “Further, Arvid demands that you make the Germans fuck off. He’s blackmailing you. If what he views as harassment continues, he says he’ll write a book detailing the government’s persecution of Jews. He claims that Marshal Mannerheim was prepared to deliver Finnish Jews to the Germans for extermination. He says Valpo handed over a hundred and thirty suspected Communists to the Gestapo, but that the military turned over three thousand. That we starved prisoners of war and murdered them by exploiting them for slave labor, and that we shared the Nazi ideology and expansionist dreams.”

  I listen to Jyri breathe for a minute. “Publication of such
a book would be unacceptable,” he says.

  “Arvid says he has more to tell me. I’m going to meet with him again today. I wanted to apprise you of the situation because issuing a simple denial won’t make it go away. The truth is going to come out.”

  “Okay,” Jyri says, “I’ll bring the interior minister up to speed. We’ll make some kind of decision after you meet with Arvid today and we have more information to work with.”

  Now I lift the ax. “Other truths are going to come out. About the Filippov murder. I think we should discuss it.”

  Another pause. “What truths?”

  I drop the ax on his neck. “Like your rather unusual sexual encounter with Linda Pohjola only hours before the murder.”

  I hear Jyri gulp.

  “I recall that when I investigated the Sufia Elmi murder, your number, as well as the numbers of other politicos, were in her phone. You told me not to release that information.”

  “So?”

  “So you fucked her and used me to cover it up, to save you and others embarrassment.”

  He recovers his aplomb, tries to regain the offensive. “Everyone—except maybe you, which annoys me—has peccadilloes. I like cooze. That’s not a crime. Sufia Elmi was fine quiff. Exceptional. I would have recommended fucking her to anyone, and I don’t appreciate your superior tone.”

  “I don’t care if you fucked Sufia Elmi, but the realization that you did and suppressed it told me you have a habit of being disingenuous, and that habit is impeding my investigation. Iisa Filippov had a history of being, shall we say, generous with her favors. I think you fucked her, too, before Linda Pohjola. You fucked both of Ivan Filippov’s women, and I doubt he appreciated it. You know something about this murder. It’s time to tell me about it.”

  An angry suck of air. “Fuck you, Kari. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You’re implicated. You’re now a suspect.”

  He swears under his breath, goes silent and waits.

  “Where did you and Linda have your encounter?” I ask.

  I can almost hear him considering the ramifications of truth versus further duplicity. Seconds tick by. “I had never been there before. Some apartment in Töölö. I was drunk. She took me there and sucked my dick. Then she wanted me to leave. I wandered around, found a taxi stand, went home and passed out.”

  Jyri is normally so arrogant that I find myself enjoying his humiliation. “Did your sexual encounter include the employment of a green vibrating double-donged dildo?”

  I think she stuck it in his ass, and after he knows that I know it, he’ll tell me anything I want. He doesn’t answer. I picture him on the other end of the phone, wanting to cry.

  “I think I know where you were, and I want you to verify it.” I give him Rein Saar’s address. He gives no indication that he recognizes it. I tell him to meet me there at eleven, and hang up without waiting for him to accept or decline.

  36

  MY THERATIST, Torsten Holmqvist, has on his outdoorsy look this morning, like L.L.Bean laid out his clothes for him. Brown brushed-twill pants, a houndstooth shirt with a lamb’s-wool cardigan, moccasins on his feet. The rugged Torsten, a man of contrasts. His various facades still amuse me, but the enmity I felt toward him is gone.

  He’s in a good humor, and mine is better today. We sit in his big leather chairs. He offers me coffee. His morning tea of choice is chamomile. We smoke, relax. He looks out the window toward the sea. I follow his gaze. Snow is thick on the ground. The ice in the harbor is solid. The sun is rising, the sky is clear. “It’s a beautiful day,” he says.

  I agree.

  “I saw you on the news,” he says, “stopping a school shooter at Ebeneser School. It’s quite a coincidence that you assaulted a man and saved a child at the same location only days apart.”

  “It was no coincidence. They were the same man.”

  He raises his eyebrows, sucks his pipe. “Do you think those incidents are related?”

  I wish he wouldn’t treat me like an idiot. “Of course they’re related. My beating him sparked his attack.” I haven’t said this aloud before, haven’t wanted to think about it.

  “Do you believe you caused his death?”

  “Yes.”

  He crosses his legs and tugs at the perfect crease in his trousers, strokes his chin—psychiatrist cliché-style—with his fingers. “It’s reasonable to think that your bad judgment played a part in his actions, but in my professional opinion, he was a time bomb and would have gone off sooner or later. Don’t take too much upon yourself. Could you tell me about the incident?”

  I give him a brief account. Tell him I think Legion had no intention of hurting anyone, just went there to die. Describe putting a gun to my own head. Describe Milo’s cowboy behavior.

  “Your fellow detective seems to admire you,” Torsten says, “to the point that he’s proud of killing a man so he can be like you.”

  I hadn’t thought of this. “Are you saying I turned Milo into a killer?”

  “Milo probably did the right thing, but his false bravado speaks of an unhealthy relationship between you. But like Vesa Korhonen, he was more than likely a time bomb, and your influence upon him lit his fuse.”

  I light another cigarette, say nothing.

  “Kari,” he says, “if you had to choose one word to describe the emotion that has predominantly defined your life thus far, what would it be?”

  The use of my name to create false intimacy. I let it go and consider the question. “Remorse.”

  He jots in his notebook.

  “Would you care to explore that?”

  “No.”

  Torsten is smart enough to understand that I need time and distance from the school shooting in order to contextualize it. He changes the subject, asks how my head is, and if I saw Jari.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He wants me to have tests to rule out tumors, disease and nerve damage in my face. I’m in the unusual position of hoping your theory is correct, and I’m only suffering from sublimated panic attacks.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “He gave me narcotic painkillers, and I took one before I left the house. They work. I’m pain-free at the moment. I had a bad experience, though. I passed out while conducting an interview.”

  I tell him about Arvid and the implications about Ukki.

  “You seem to want to protect the memory of your grandfather,” he says.

  I picture Ukki beating the hell out of a starving prisoner, tied to a chair, with a fire hose sap. It splits open and buckshot flies. I shudder. “Wouldn’t you?”

  He shrugs. “Perhaps not. It would depend on the situation. Tell me about your grandparents on both sides.”

  “I called Mom’s parents Ukki and Mummo. We didn’t go there often, but I loved being at their house. They were sweet to me, and my brothers and sister, too. After Suvi died, they doted on me, I guess because I was the youngest after she passed away. I didn’t get to know them that well, though, because they died when I was eleven and twelve, respectively. Ukki smoked like a train, and lung cancer killed him. I think Mummo died of loneliness. The only thing I remember odd about them was their intense hatred of Russians. Just the word ‘Russia’ could send them into tirades.”

  “Because of the war?”

  I nod.

  “You told me your father’s parents were cruel.”

  “Mean-spirited in the extreme. Really shitty people.”

  “So you have no desire to protect their memories in a positive light, as you do your mother’s parents.”

  “They were mean to kids. He was drunk on Midsummer’s Eve, stood up in a boat to take a piss, fell into the lake and drowned. Their sauna burned down. She died in the fire. Fitting deaths for both of them.”

  “That’s serious acrimony.”

  I shrug. “So.” I remember something. “They hated Germans like the plague, as much as Ukki and Mummo hated Russians.”

  “The war affected people in deep ways,” he says
. “Do you want to talk about the ways in which they were cruel?”

  “Not at present.”

  I light yet another cigarette. Just thinking about them makes me uncomfortable.

  He switches gears. “How is the visit from your wife’s brother and sister going?”

  “Not well. Mary seems to have a good heart, but she’s a religious fanatic and a right-wing political nut. Likewise, John seems like a decent sort, but he’s a drunk and drug abuser.”

  I tell Torsten about the fiascos with John.

  “This week,” he says, “you assaulted a mentally ill person to protect children. You became so intent on protecting your grandfather that you suffered some kind of episode, and you lied to your wife to protect her from her own family. Your desire to protect seems to have no bounds.”

  “Is that a criticism?” I ask.

  “No. An observation.” He asks, “Whom have you loved in your life?”

  I’m afraid this is going in a silly boo-hoo-hoo direction, but I promised myself I’d try to work with Torsten. I think about it. “My parents, Ukki and Mummo, my brothers and sister, my ex-wife, when we were young, and Kate.”

  “No one else?”

  “No people, but I loved a cat, named Katt.” I laugh aloud at the maudlin idea of it. “The dumb bastard choked to death on a rubber band.”

  He appears thoughtful, fills his pipe again and lights it. “May I offer a conjecture?” he asks.

  “Be my guest.”

  “Your father beat you when you were a child, but you say you bear him no ill will. Yet you have little contact with your immediate family. Is it possible that you don’t see them now, because you were the youngest, and none of them did anything to protect you from your father?”

  “They were afraid of him, too.”

  “Failure to protect is a form of betrayal. Your sister died. She left you. Another form of betrayal. Your ex-wife betrayed you in the literal sense and abandoned you. Even Katt died and left you. Your Ukki has turned out to have been a war criminal and this tarnishes your image of him. A betrayal. Is it possible that you’re overprotective of Kate because she’s the only person in your life who has loved you without betrayal, and that, deep down, you fear that if you lose her, you’ll never know love again?”