Helsinki Noir

by James Thompson

  Suhonen crouched down and silently opened the mail slot. Takamäki slid the package through the slot and it landed with a thud on the floor of the apartment.

  “It’s just addictive,” Suhonen said.

  They got back in the elevator and Takamäki pushed the button for the first floor. “Once in a while real life works like that too.”

  SNOWY SARCOPHAGUS

  BY JUKKA PETÄJÄ

  Meilahti

  Translated by Jill G. Timbers

  No one could have predicted the course of the next several days. Everyone talked only of the heavily gusting snow and the snowdrifts that were burying the city and forcing the fleet of plows into action in the middle of the night. But more snow fell than could be plowed from the streets. Traffic was badly muddled, as were the city residents, particularly those driving cars. The Meilahti neighborhood on the western side of central Helsinki felt walled off, though it was only some five kilometers from the center of town. The snow rendered the distance great in a different way, at least insofar as what was close was now just as far away as the city’s remotest corners—the many faceless annexed areas that were more like human pens or snow dumps than actual parts of Helsinki. All of a sudden Meilahti had become a suburb forcibly separated from the city center, a suburb that led its own sleepy life and could just as well have been situated dozens of kilometers away on Helsinki’s eastern or northern border. Trudging home through the unbroken snow, the deaconess of the Meilahti parish church, the Church of the Good Samaritan, was the first to notice the snowmen—as would later become evident from the police report.

  Two larger-than-life snowmen stood in the swirling snowstorm in the courtyard in front of the church’s main doors. The deaconess, panting in her bulky coat, wondered how the children had managed to reach so high. Perhaps adults had been helping them. The thought of grown-ups and children building snowmen together warmed her heart. The world was not all evil. Hope remained, if faith sometimes wavered, and fortunately you could lean on God. He had atoned for the sins of mankind with His own blood, the minister had said as he removed his clerical collar. One of the snowmen had an empty beer can for a nose. For the other, a newspaper was rolled up for the purpose. Their eyes were bottle caps and the mouths were made from cigarette butts. Their smiles would surely have exposed nicotine-yellowed teeth, had the snowmen been possessed of chewing equipment.

  The sky stretched heavily over the church like a blackout curtain. Heavy snowflakes wafted down like white balls against a black velvet background. The scene could have been straight from a pointillist painting. Georges Seurat at the North Pole. Frozen points. Heavenly Morse code. The deaconess stood gazing up at the heavens which did not seem to belong to the everyday world but rather to some more perfect reality. A reality you couldn’t charge into wearing muddy boots. She felt as if she were in communion with something greater than herself, some mystical state of existence that could not be captured with words but produced a strong physical sensation. One’s soul was filled with light and warmth even though outside it was dark and cold. She thought again of the children and on her face appeared a smile scarcely visible behind the raised collar of her quilted coat. A burst of warmth surged through her heart. She thought of the minister’s languid eyes when he glanced at her in the vestry after the service. A lovely moist film sparkled from his eyes and his gaze was lingering, somehow penetrating, and she wanted to believe that the minister was slowly undressing her in his mind. The warmth traveled down her body. Snowflakes danced in her hair. She had forgotten her ski hat at home. She sank in over her knees in the deep snow, and her trip home to Pikku Huopalahti, a part of town which nearly merged into Meilahti, though it had only been built in the 1990s, did not go very quickly.

  Where the different parts of town met, different time periods seemed to collide. Rent-controlled postwar Finland that had eked out a living under the war reparations stood side by side or, better, one behind the other with affluent postmodern Finland with its Nokia. Life, however, was such that the snow whirled evenly, democratically, through both neighborhoods.

  The deaconess calculated that despite the weather she would probably make it home in fifteen minutes and could then open her well-earned bottle of red wine. She looked behind her one more time. The snow softened the outlines of the snowmen so that they didn’t seem to begin or end at any certain spot and the vanishing outlines slid in gradations into the misty landscape. The snow around them was untouched, pristine, without a footprint, or else new snow had buried any footprints long ago. The thought crossed her mind that the snowmen had been conceived from nowhere as if from the Virgin Mary. At least, that’s what she told the police at the questioning at the Pasila police station.

  Hell broke loose four days later.

  The temperature had climbed to nearly -4°F, the skies had cleared, and the snowstorm had subsided. Traffic had started to move again and the buses and streetcars were running almost on schedule. Life was returning to normal. The machine was working again. As if the collapsed grid had been erected anew. Only a few snowflakes drifted down. Two bare-handed boys were making icy snowballs in the churchyard; they’d tossed their wool mittens, heavy with crusted ice, into the snow. The boys had leaned a red plastic sled against the church’s frost-covered yellow brick wall. They stood next to each other, legs braced, and aimed their snowballs at the snowmen that were now cloaked with a sparkling coat of ice which reflected the cold sunshine directly into their eyes. It was only on the fourth hit that a chunk broke off one snowman’s side. When the piece crashed down and sent up a spray of white, the boys were still as mice for a second and then started to scream for all their worth. The snowman had a black arm that had frozen in a pleading position. It was the arm of a Nigerian woman—as later became apparent. There were two victims. Each had been buried in a snowy sarcophagus.

  * * *

  Two murdered Nigerian women in Meilahti. The frozen corpses had been transported to the Institute of Forensic Medicine located just a kilometer away from the crime scene—assuming that the young women had been murdered in the churchyard. What was behind this? Meilahti was not exactly a part of town where people were murdered. It was chilling how someone had made both of the bodies into snowmen. Was there some hidden message?

  At the Pasila police station, Inspector Pekka Suokko of the Helsinki Criminal Investigation Department ran his hands through his increasingly thin hair, and his dry scalp snowed white on the keyboard. There were several grease spots on his shirt, and the cuffs had dirty edges, even though in his hurry he had thought he was choosing a clean shirt. That was meant to counter the chaos inside him. He did not want anyone peeking into his head. The crime scene inspectors were still working in the churchyard. He had no real expectations. They would only end up with buckets of water, melted snow, to bring to the Institute. The autopsy would probably reveal more.

  As he turned his cell phone to silent, Suokko glanced at the old wall clock. The second hand no longer worked. You could still tell time by it, anyway. Not much else at the police station worked either. The Meilahti church deaconess would be in the questioning room any minute now. It was she who had summoned the police. The patrolman said that the frightened woman had hurried into the yard when she heard the boys scream.

  Whores. That’s what the Nigerian women likely were. It would be the natural explanation. They’d hardly come to Helsinki to clean, Suokko thought as he rose with difficulty. His knees cracked under his weight; maybe they were protesting the pace he was keeping. Didn’t matter. His life was on track. At most a bit skewed, like his kneecap. His wife was vacationing in Madeira with her lover. Suokko knew he could do nothing about it. Their marriage was going through a phase that did not exactly make him feel light-hearted—quite the opposite.

  Still, he had stayed dry, even though he had not attended an AA meeting for two weeks. When it came down to it, he was satisfied with the decisions he had made. A little over two years ago he had finally understood the advantages of a slo
wer career and had requested a transfer from the position of assistant police chief to criminal investigator because his motivation, belief, and strength were at an end. He was no longer in control of his personal life and was not getting any satisfaction from his ever more administrative job. It had all become just routine. He had chased away low spirits with unrestrained drinking. The diagnosis was right, the medicine, wrong. Not many people could change an organization to fit themselves; they themselves had to change to fit the organization. It was shit. Not good for anyone.

  Suokko tucked his shirt into the tight waist of his pants and stepped into the dimly lit corridor that smelled of the same cheap disinfectant used in all the government offices. At that moment, he stopped. Damn. Same empty head summer and winter. He remembered what he’d forgotten and he went back to get the photographs of the murdered women. He had received them from the Institute of Forensic Medicine fifteen minutes earlier.

  He had known that at some point a Nigerian sex-trafficking ring would have to turn up in Finland too. But he had not been expecting murders. The first inkling had come over a week ago when he had received an e-mail from Brussels asking him to check on the situation of Nigerian women who had entered Finland, legally or illegally. Behind this was a just-completed investigation by Nigerian officials according to which as many as 40,000 girls or women had been smuggled to the closest West African countries to become sex workers. Simon Egede, executive secretary of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, reported that investigators had found slave camps in Mali, the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger, Libya, Morocco, and Cape Verde, full of Nigerian women and girls. Nowadays, human trafficking was part of Finnish reality too. Nearly two hundred million homeless people were on the move in the world. Some of them were merchandise. Simon Egede had asked him to survey the situation in Finland and the other Nordic countries, because he suspected that there were many more Nigerian pimps and whores than the police thought. Egede wanted to expand his investigation from West Africa to also include the EU, so that EU residents would at least become aware of the miserable reality of the Nigerian women who had fled poverty to become victims of human trafficking, and also of the indifference of Europe’s national police forces and immigration offices.

  The deaconess sat in the bleak room with her back straight, her hair in a tight bun, and her mouth a tight line. The woman could actually have been pretty if she had had even a touch of style. As he squeezed onto the narrow bench, Suokko cast a furtive glance at the woman’s breasts, which would have made many a woman in civilian life proud. Not bad, not bad at all. He cleared his throat when he realized he was gawking, raked his straggly hair, raised his chin, and stared at the ceiling as if something extremely important had just occurred to him. But his head was empty. The fluorescent light on the ceiling was on its last gasp. He saw in it a metaphor for his own life. Got to pull himself together or this won’t go anywhere. Suokko pulled his chair forward and sought a more natural position. He announced in a loud voice (keeping in mind the recording and the subsequent report he’d need to make) the topic of the questioning, his own name, his rank, those present, and the precise time at which questioning of the witness was beginning.

  To the clearly terrified deaconess, he said as nicely as possible that she need not be scared of anything because she was there only as a witness, not a suspect. It did not help. The deaconess, white-faced, just looked more frightened. Her body crumpled like a balloon losing air. Suokko was sure that Lieutenant Kauko Mähönen, sitting behind the one-way mirror in the observation room, was snickering to himself. Fun for him. Suokko turned on the microphone and started the tape.

  The deaconess, breathing heavily, was not able to answer even the simplest questions because she was not at all sure what she had seen and didn’t remember when she had first noticed the snowmen in the churchyard. She spoke in such a confused and incoherent way that Suokko was unable to construct an exact timeline for what she had done on the night she spotted the snowmen as she left for home. The deaconess nervously toyed with a loose curl on her forehead, winding it around her index finger. She got badly off track talking about barely related things and then she began to blather about the minister’s blue eyes that offered comfort in the midst of the deepest sorrow. Suokko tried to cover his irritation and requested as nicely as he could that the deaconess answer the questions posed. They were not here to talk about anything else. In the end he managed to extract a few morsels of valuable information from the woman. The deaconess had not seen any tracks in the snow, not even any snow-covered depressions suggesting that someone had walked to the yard to make the snowmen or left the spot after the job was done. The snow had been pristine, virginal—like the deaconess herself, thought Suokko.

  Suokko spread the photographs on the table and asked the deaconess if she knew or had ever seen these Nigerian women. She shook her head firmly as she stared at the expressionless death masks, but she was too horrified to get a word out. Suokko believed her. He quickly removed the pictures because he did not want to cause any more anxiety for this woman who was clearly unused to violence and death. Strange, though. You would have thought she’d be accustomed to constant funerals and the continuous tolling of death bells. Didn’t the whole Lutheran church base its salvation doctrine on the crucifixion of Jesus, on the death of God’s son? Then he pulled himself up and resolved to banish heretical thoughts. The whole stupid session was just a waste of recording tape. Bending closer to her, he asked the deaconess if she suspected anyone of the murders. She was alarmed. She blanched white as snow.

  “Lord the Father. The Devil.”

  Suokko tried not to laugh. He suspected the woman did not mean that Lord the Father and the Devil were one and the same. He told the deaconess the interview was over and thanked her for her time. Once on her feet, she curtsied.

  Suokko returned quickly to his office and only after sitting down did he realize he had left the photos in the interview room. The bitter cold could be felt inside too, insofar as the air in the room was dryer than ever and full of static electricity that made his thin hair stand on end.

  Mähönen could drive him to Meilahti where he could do some honest footwork, thought Suokko. He wanted to talk with the minister and interview the residents of the nearby buildings, in case they had noticed anything unusual over these past days. An unexpected witness observation—he could use that right about now. The temperature had dropped and it was snowing again. He looked out the window, from where, beyond the rows of three-story buildings, he could make out Keskuspuisto, Helsinki’s Central Park, that wooded swath that ran through different parts of the city all the way to the Töölönlahti Bay. He stood rooted in place, staring into the distance. Dark window. Snow on a TV screen. White noise.

  * * *

  Seen from Mannerheimintie heading straight into downtown, the bell tower of the Meilahti Church looked like a chimney of some waste treatment plant. But no smoke came from it. Suokko fingered the dashboard nervously. He glanced around and waited impatiently for Mähönen to turn the car onto Kuusitie. The clock ticked. The tires spun. The drifts had been neatly plowed to the side of the road and several cars were buried in the snow. He knew that the bell that ended up in the bell tower had originally been meant for Vyborg’s old cathedral, but it was never installed there because Finland had to relinquish Karelia to the Soviet Union in the last stretch of World War II. They finally managed to smuggle the bell into Finland, despite the war, and it was eventually donated to the Meilahti Church in the early 1950s when the church was being constructed. A bigger problem than the installation of Vyborg’s old cathedral bell was the resettling of nearly a half million evacuees who had fled Karelia after the war. Displaced Karelians settled in Helsinki’s densely populated areas as well as its annexed areas, but some also landed in the old apartment buildings alongside Mannerheimintie Street, where more room was made by adding floors. Since then, the area’s ethnic balance had not changed. Instead, the socioeconomic map ha
d been redrawn over the past decades. Studio apartments had been renovated into attic suites where interior decorators, designers, producers, and consultants lived. If this sort went dancing, they’d go to the city center or to Kallio and wouldn’t hang around their own neighborhood in the evening. Meilahti was a safe harbor for the Finnish bourgeoisie, even though it had its share of international schools and day care centers. The students came in from other places. For that reason alone, the murder of the Nigerian women spawned fear and confusion among the residents. The last murder, actually manslaughter, had occurred in the early 1960s when a group of drunks had knifed a guy to death for stealing a buddy’s bottle. In the past ten years the police had documented only two narcotics offences. With a deep sigh Suokko loosened his seat belt. Heartburn. Maybe he shouldn’t have eaten bacon earlier that morning.

  He felt shitty even though untangling the fate of the Nigerian women had pumped a good shot of adrenaline into his system. If he had seen a shooting star in the sky he would have wished for his wife to finally leave the other man. But only snowflakes danced in the sky. No hope, no good omens that would give him a pretext to imagine the situation would draw to a close. He couldn’t even guzzle himself into a drunken stupor. That option was no longer open to him.

  Snow-whipped Meilahti looked empty, deserted, as if people had been removed from the landscape because they did not fit into the elements of Finnish architecture. Most people were of course at work and others were inside because of the weather. Meilahti was not a sketchy part of the city—far from it. It didn’t have a single lively night spot, just some coffee shops. People here went to bed at ten p.m. or drank behind drawn drapes. The car came to an intersection and the back went into a skid. Mähönen stepped on the gas.

  “Left here.”

  “Gee, thanks. Wouldn’t have thought of it.”

  “Enough.”