Helsinki Noir

by James Thompson

  Laukia swallowed and cleared his throat. “Is she a . . . whore?”

  “No, of course not,” Tapsa laughed with affectionate sarcasm, “she’s a Sunday school teacher.”

  Laukia smirked and glanced over at the table next to them. The young couple sitting there were obviously doing Europe on an InterRail pass. They did not represent a significant risk of getting caught.

  “I would recommend, however,” Tapsa added, giving Laukia a long look from under his brows, “that you not use that particular job title in her presence.”

  Laukia slid the card toward himself and turned it over. “Madame Kismet,” he sneered. “My my . . . peel off your outer layer and what do we find but a closet perv—”

  “I’ve never cheated on my wife,” Tapsa interrupted with a calm look. “Nor, needless to say, am I pressuring you to do anything you don’t want to do. But if you feel that a little adventure might loosen a knot or two in your relationship, reset the counter to zero . . .” He could see in Laukia’s eyes that he had made up his mind. “She has a room in the Vaakuna Hotel.” Tapsa nodded in the direction of the hotel in question, which stood maybe a hundred paces from where they were sitting.

  Laukia slipped the card into his shirt pocket, wiped the corners of his mouth, and stood up.

  “Not going to finish that beer?”

  “I don’t seem to be thirsty anymore,” Laukia said with a sly smile.

  “In that case,” Tapsa laughed, “I seem to have helped you more than AA.”

  “I’ll tell you how much it helped next week.” Laukia smiled and tapped himself on the chest.

  “Spare me the details.”

  Laukia winked at Tapsa and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Tapsa replied. “The pleasure is all mine.”

  III

  Rarely had a week passed so quickly in Jari-Pekka Laukia’s life. He had arranged to meet Madame Kismet the night of the next AA meeting, and as he moved through his week he noticed himself feeling sensations in his body that he’d thought had been numbed years before. The last time Laukia had been so keyed up was back when he was a teenager, when his easily excited imagination had aroused him at the most inappropriate times.

  During those seven days nothing affected Laukia but the thought of his approaching date, which began to swell in his overheated thoughts beyond all proportion. Laukia began to believe that this would be no sordid quickie with some anonymous sex worker but a kind of catharsis that would burst his invisible but oppressive shackles.

  Laukia had been galvanized—and he owed it all to Tapsa. Now there’s an alcoholic who has truly earned his whiskey bottle.

  The only thought that troubled Laukia was how close he had come to not experiencing any of this: if he hadn’t lost his wallet, this would never have happened.

  * * *

  Laukia stepped a bit unsteadily out through the Vaakuna’s main entrance onto Postikatu. He stopped to look at the traffic at the Station Square while his breathing calmed. Whenever he left an AA meeting he was always sure that people could see right through him, see his weakness. Now he was sure that he reeked of sex, and that he would find his debauchery in a dark hotel room projected onto billboards throughout the city center. Laukia knew he was grinning like an idiot, but felt he had a right. At last he felt like a man, in the sexual-identity sense, and if that feeling bubbled up over the rim a little, so what? Now it’s my turn.

  * * *

  Tapsa sat at the men’s regular table at the back of the almost empty restaurant.

  “Hey there!” Laukia called out cockily, as if he owned the world.

  “Hello,” Tapsa said in his polite, restrained style. “How are things?”

  “Right now things are unusually good,” Laukia smirked.

  “So,” Tapsa said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He took his glasses off, folded them neatly, and laid them carefully on top of the book he’d been reading. “What happens next?”

  The strange question stumped Laukia. “In what sense?”

  “Did your meeting with Madame Kismet produce the desired result?”

  “One of them, at least,” Laukia said.

  Tapsa allowed this crude allusion a joyless laugh. “I didn’t mean that, exactly.”

  “Nothing else matters a good goddamn,” Laukia said, stretching his arms luxuriously.

  “But of course it does,” Tapsa said sternly, folding his hands on the table.

  Laukia wrinkled his brow. What the hell’s going on here?

  “Are you planning to give your marriage another chance?” Tapsa enunciated his words with exaggerated care.

  “How the hell would I know?” Laukia burst out. “Not fifteen minutes ago I had the goddamn wildest orgasm of my life. I want to recover from it in peace, not rain on that particularly wonderful parade by thinking about my marriage.”

  “But that was precisely why you did it,” Tapsa noted. “In order to decide whether you want to continue with your current life.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Laukia snapped with such intensity that Tapsa fell back in surprise. “What bug crawled up your ass? And what fucking business is it of yours what happens to my marriage?”

  The man who called himself Tapsa scratched his nose, let his gaze fall to the book on the table, and took a deep breath. “Have you ever heard of the study,” he asked with a toneless, almost whispering voice, “that found that 3 or 4 percent of men and 1 percent of women are born killers?”

  “Can’t say I have,” Laukia responded irritably.

  “They write of individuals who can take another person’s life without the tiniest shred of remorse,” Tapsa said, raising his eyes to meet Laukia’s.

  “Fascinating. Has all this trivia driven you back to drink?”

  “Consider,” Tapsa continued as if Laukia had not sneered, “three or four men in a hundred can kill without remorse, but of those, one in a thousand is even more exclusive: he isn’t just capable of it, he’s addicted to it.”

  Laukia and Tapsa glared at each other. They were like two schoolboys in a staring contest.

  “Do you mean to say . . .” Laukia wheezed, his pure disbelief withering his voice down to nothing, “that you . . .”

  Tapsa said nothing.

  “This is bullshit,” Laukia hissed.

  The empathetic look in Tapsa’s sad eyes had grown cold. “Thirty-seven,” he said slowly, easily. “Or thirty-eight if you count the woman who choked on her own vomit while I was cutting her husband’s head off with a bread knife.” Tapsa scratched an ear.

  Laukia sat there silent, listening. Even though he didn’t believe a word this guy was saying, he began to feel an uncomfortable rumbling in the pit of his stomach.

  “I have succeeded in restricting my appetite to a single victim per year. That way I can keep everything under control, and I’m able to promise myself to let my will manage my desire and not the other way around.”

  Tapsa had not taken his hollow gaze off Laukia’s eyes throughout this little speech. Sheer astonishment had let Laukia’s mouth fall open. He could only sit and stare at the stranger across the table from him.

  “Jesus F. Christ,” Laukia sighed at last. “Are you insane?”

  “That’s certainly one diagnosis,” Tapsa nodded, raising his eyebrows.

  Laukia burst out laughing. This had to be a big joke—a sick one, to be sure, black humor of the rarest sort, perfectly executed. “Okay, you got me! Why the hell would you confess something like that to me if it was true?”

  Tapsa watched Laukia as he writhed helplessly in the throes of anxious giggles. “You asked me to tell you about my own problem.”

  “Yeah, but my problem was that I’m sick of my marriage,” Laukia said with sudden heat, spit flying from his mouth. “Walk around the train station tapping men on the shoulder and you’ll find a hundred of them that will confess the exact same problem without the tiniest hesitation. But you—you reveal that you�
�re a serial killer! What’s gonna stop me from calling the cops right this instant?”

  “Good luck proving it,” Tapsa replied calmly, without raising his voice.

  “But the tiniest hint of a thing like that would be enough to ruin your reputation, your life,” Laukia insisted. He wanted to see where Tapsa’s sick mind game was leading them.

  “If you want to talk about ruining someone’s life, what if I were to feel obliged to bring up your sick behavior in the Vaakuna Hotel?”

  Laukia felt a lump rising to his throat and sticking there. “What?”

  “The webcam video is a bit grainy, but it’s clear enough to make out who’s doing what to whom. I was especially taken with that intriguing moment when you were choking your partner, then rammed into her ass and shouted a man’s name. Am I wrong in surmising that to be your father-in-law’s name?” As he spoke, Tapsa tipped his head to one side, like a scientist studying a rat in a cage.

  Laukia was breathing hard. His heart seemed to be pounding in his head, harder and harder with every beat. “You little shit,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “What, are you blackmailing me?”

  “Of course not!” Tapsa laughed. “I mean you no harm. You can consider the knowledge that such a recording even exists a safety net.”

  “A safety net?”

  Tapsa nodded. “I’ve learned the hard way that when friendship reaches a certain level of trust, certain individuals seem to feel a temptation to abuse that trust.”

  Laukia buried his face in his hands and leaned forward on the table. “What the hell do you want?”

  “The way I see things, we can help each other.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You have something blocking your path in life, and to start over you need to clear it out of the way. And I—” Tapsa broke off for a moment. “Well, there is a gigantic pit in the path of my life, and I have to keep on filling it in order to proceed.”

  Laukia looked Tapsa straight in the eye, hoping against hope that this would be the moment at which he would stop the charade, reveal that he was just kidding. In his heart, however, Laukia knew that this was not going to happen. “Monster,” he huffed.

  “Don’t try to tell me you never toyed with the idea yourself.”

  “What?” Laukia whispered with a quiver in his voice. “The idea of killing my wife?”

  “I hope you’ll see this as the only window that will ever open up in the stone wall of your suffering,” Tapsa said. “You do understand, don’t you, the unique nature of this offer? The only thing left for you to do is make sure you have an airtight alibi.”

  Laukia could feel himself freezing inside. “Did . . . did you really cut off a man’s head with a bread knife?”

  “A person has seven neck vertebrae,” Tapsa said, bending his head and pointing to his neck, “the thinnest of which are up here at the top. Severing them with a bread knife is not an easy task, and quite distasteful. It’s mostly hard work, sawing away for a very, very long time. Well, I was young then, and impatient.”

  Laukia gulped. His heart was beating almost intolerably hard.

  “You’d be surprised at how much junk there is in a neck. Muscles, and especially the ligaments that tie the vertebrae together, plus a bunch of other stuff that requires a lot of energy to cut through quickly. You have to insert the knife at the intervertebral disc. It simply won’t go through the bone. To cut or crush that you need something a lot more powerful. In fact, your ordinary household knife is in every possible way a bad choice if you’re trying to cut off a man’s head. You’re much better off with a broadaxe for that job.”

  Laukia closed his eyes. He could feel the cold sweat popping out on his temples. This cannot be happening.

  “Nor should we forget the bleeding,” Tapsa continued with a dry laugh and a snap of his fingers. “Just how much blood you get depends on the target’s physical attributes, of course, but let me tell you right now that when you start chopping through the arteries and other blood vessels in the neck, the mess is incredible.”

  Laukia rubbed his face. He felt nauseous. He pressed his palm to his mouth and forced the rising vomit back down his throat.

  Tapsa ordered two glasses of water and two coffee liqueurs. For ten minutes the two men just sat there in silence. Laukia stared at the table and Tapsa went back to reading his book. He was in no hurry, and he knew that Laukia would pick up the thread of the conversation again once he had gotten over his quite understandable initial shock and horror.

  “It would never work,” Laukia finally whispered. “Not in a million years. The cops would be all over me.”

  “You don’t know me, ” Tapsa said, without bothering to raise his eyes from the pages of his book. “You don’t know my name, you haven’t offered me any money or services in return, nothing. You didn’t hire me to kill your wife. As far as you know, you just spilled your guts at the AA meeting—a group whose whole reason for being is that you can talk about anything you like with people you don’t know. You’ve talked about your fears, your nightmares, your anxieties, precisely as you’ve been encouraged to do. You can’t be held responsible for what your listeners do with what you tell them. Maybe one of them followed you, and acted on his own sick fantasies.”

  “That is how this looks,” Laukia growled.

  “As we’ve agreed, each of us has his own demons,” Tapsa shrugged. “Don’t you want to be rid of your own?”

  Laukia sighed deeply. He could not believe he was having this conversation.

  “You’ve told me that you never truly loved your wife. That there are no feelings between the two of you—”

  “That’s not the problem!” Laukia snapped, trying to keep his agitated voice down to a whisper. “I hate her, and promise you that the feeling is mutual—but we’re talking about murder!”

  “You’ve criticized your wife’s family for their religious fanaticism.” Tapsa gazed across at Laukia over the top of his glasses. “You’ve called it empty moralism. Aren’t you doing the same now?”

  “We aren’t talking about throwing Jesus at gay marriage. This is a crime, and a fucking serious one!”

  “Sure, from one point of view,” Tapsa smiled. “And yet at the same time, somewhere in this modern world of ours a Muslim dad kills his daughter because she’s seeing the wrong guy. In some Iranian village a woman is stoned, or burned, because she got raped, or because she is seen as shaming her husband’s family. In those cases murder is seen as the only option. As merciful and justified, as a liberation for everyone involved.”

  “What a pity we didn’t meet in Iran,” Laukia laughed contemptuously.

  “Isn’t it true, though, that laws and religions are all human inventions? They were created to serve a worldly purpose, and the number of purposes the world has to offer is surprisingly large. Civilization is a sleight-of-hand. If human beings truly were superior beings solemnly charged by God to dominate all other creatures, this primitive desire wouldn’t drive me.”

  Laukia shook his head. “I couldn’t do it to my daughter. How could I live with myself afterward?”

  Tapsa sipped his tea and gave Laukia a moment to gather his thoughts. “Time heals all wounds,” he finally said with an understanding smile. “Your shared grief would bring the two of you closer.”

  Laukia stuffed a piece of nicotine gum in his mouth, then hid his violently trembling hands in his lap. “What if I say no?”

  “Then you say no.”

  Laukia gulped. He couldn’t look Tapsa in the eye. “Would you kill me?”

  “No. I’d just disappear from your life. Even if you changed your mind, and later wanted to take me up on my offer, that option would never be on the table again.”

  Laukia sighed with relief and nodded his head. “Maybe it’s not . . . such a terrible thing.”

  “Well,” Tapsa said with a fleeting smile, closing his book, “you know the answer to that better than I.”

  Laukia was afraid he was about to burst into tears. His
mind simply could not grasp the enormity with which it had been burdened. It had all been staged, all of it, from the very beginning. His wallet hadn’t dropped out of his pocket: Tapsa had lifted it, knowing at a very early stage what Laukia had to offer him. And what did Tapsa have to offer Laukia? A ghastly service that would become a secret that would haunt Laukia for the rest of his life. But for that price, that unbelievably heavy price, he would gain the rest of his life. He would be free. Not unconditionally free, certainly, but freer than he’d been for a quarter of a century. And after hearing this offer, could he return to living in a cage? Could he look himself in the mirror and meet the eyes not only of an alcoholic who had thrown his life away, but a coward?

  Laukia’s wife had been murdering her husband for twenty-five years.

  Now it was Laukia’s turn.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Really?” Tapsa smiled.

  “Yeah,” Laukia nodded. “What do I do?”

  “Nothing. As I said, all you have to do is make sure you’ve got an alibi. I’ve done this lots of times. I don’t make mistakes.”

  Laukia’s head was trembling with uncertainty, but he forced it to nod.

  “The less you know about what I’m going to do, the better it will be for you.”

  “I believe you.”

  “It’ll happen one week from today, while you’re at the AA meeting. Will your wife definitely be home alone?”

  “She will.”

  “Speak up at the meeting. After that, go out to eat somewhere. Talk to people, be visible. Don’t overact, but play it so that you’re seen, so you have eyewitnesses.”

  “Got it.”

  “It won’t be an easy week for you,” Tapsa said, giving Laukia’s arm a squeeze, “but I promise that after it’s over things will take a marked turn for the better.”