Helsinki Blood iv-4

by James Thompson

  “Let me think about this,” I say, and step out for some cold water and kossu. It doesn’t take me long to make up my mind.

  I sit back down in the sauna. I’m cold from the shower, splash some water on the stones to warm me up. “No,” I say.

  Milo’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean no. I don’t want to murder all those people.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ. They want to murder you and your family, and I’m sure mine and Sweetness’s along with them. You think they knew Mirjami and Jenna were going to be in the Audi when it blew? They assumed it would be Kate.”

  “Sorry,” I say, “I just can’t see us doing it.”

  “Pomo,” Sweetness says, “I’m with Milo on this one.”

  These two have never put me on the defensive before. “When did this become a democracy? Sweetness, you call me pomo-boss-doesn’t that imply I make all final decisions?”

  Milo gulps beer, now hot and ruined, says “Yuck,” and goes out to get a cold one. He sits down beside me. “We don’t want to usurp your authority or make you angry, but you’re the boss in work-related matters. When it comes to protecting ourselves and the people we love, we get a say in what happens. I won’t ask you to participate if you’re dead set against it, but this is going to happen.”

  I think of Kate. My extra-legal activities were the spark behind her emotional trauma. If she found out I murdered someone, or was even an accessory to murder-which, having heard the plan, I de facto am-it could end our marriage and make her even sicker. I have to balance this against stopping further attempts on her life. I explain this to the others.

  Milo replies, “The manifesto, the guns and possibly explosives will take us a couple weeks to get together. You have time to think about it. And as far as Kate goes, if you decide to take part, just hide it from her. You would anyway.”

  “Let’s let it go for now,” I say. “We’ll move to Arvid’s place, and in the meantime, keep me posted on the progress you make. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he says.

  “Anybody have any ideas about how to find Loviise Tamm?” I ask.

  “The way I understand it,” Milo says, “she was snatched by Russian diplomats. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So they probably either took her to the embassy or to another whorehouse. Another whorehouse seems way more likely to me.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  “And Russian diplomats are overseeing the operation?”

  “Well, I think most aren’t really diplomats, but spies here with diplomatic passports for cover. With some hired help from a few Finns, according to the files we pulled out of their electronics.”

  “Then we need to tail the people working at the embassy until they lead us to the right whorehouse. The problem, of course, is that there are twenty or thirty of them, and only three of us. It would be fucking helpful if we had the manpower of the police department for this.”

  I lean up against the wall and pull one knee up, let the bad one lie flat on the bench. The heat is easing the pain in both my knee and my jaw.

  “Let me think about this,” Sweetness says, and fetches fresh beers for all of us.

  He sits down and says, “I’m hesitant to suggest this, but I could call my cousin, Ai.”

  “Ai,” Milo says, “as in what people yell when they’re in pain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why is he called Ai?” I ask.

  “He’s my cousin, my dad’s sister’s kid, sixteen now. My aunt was a bad drunk and drug user, turned really mean when she was high. When Ai was about three, he tried to take a cookie or something, and she smashed his hand when he reached for it. She hit him hard with an iron skillet and broke bones in his hand and wrist. He screamed ‘Ai’ and started to cry, which made her madder. She said she’d give him something to really cry about, and she stuck his hand in a pot of boiling water and held it there. Dad went over there about three days later and Ai hadn’t been given any medical treatment. The skin peeled off like a glove almost to his elbow. Dad didn’t want his sister to go to jail, so he just took Ai home, put burn ointment on it and wrapped it up till it healed. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “His hand is withered and all the nerves in it are dead. Plus, it always looks worse than it is because he puts cigarettes out on it to impress people and make them think he’s tough. Which he is.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why he’s called Ai,” Milo says.

  “I told you his mom was fucking mean. She started calling him that to make fun of him. She would actually tell the story when she was drunk and stoned, like it was funny, and the nickname stuck. Now he doesn’t like to be called anything else. Like it’s some kind of badge of honor.”

  “You said ‘was’ mean. Where is she now?”

  “Disappeared three years ago. Ai says she went out to score and never came back. I think the truth is he killed her. He’s meaner than she was. He’s like the fucking devil, that’s why I hesitate to call him. She was on permanent disability because of her substance abuse, and Ai lives alone, has since she disappeared. I think nobody ever reported her as a missing person and he lives off her social security pension.”

  “What about his father?” I ask.

  “He doesn’t know who his father is.”

  “And he can help us how?”

  “He runs a gang in East Helsinki. They would follow the Russians for us, if the price was right.”

  Jesus, what a story. “What the fuck,” I say. “Give the kid a call. It might be interesting to do business with a teenage devil incarnate.”

  26

  Sweetness secures an invitation to visit Ai for us. Despite Sweetness’s assurances that he’s in fit condition to drive, we’re all drunk, and I insist that we take a taxi. It pulls up in front of a building that screams government subsidized. A place to warehouse refugees, dopers, drunks, the mentally ill, and some people who just suffer the misfortune of being poor.

  Garbage is strewn around the door. Said door has the glass knocked out of it. Little kids are playing out front, despite it being past midnight. I notice they’re all white. Most often, quite a few of the tenants in these places are black immigrants. The government likes to dump them in shitholes like this. Usually, the government will control a portion of the apartments in a building like this, and the rest will be privately owned.

  We take an elevator to the third floor and ring the buzzer. A teenage boy opens the door. “I’m not fond of cops,” he says. “Your ID cards.”

  He holds out a hand, gnarled, withered and scabbed. His small and ring fingers are bent and twisted. He puts a cigarette out on his palm, flicks the butt into the hallway and keeps his hand out, faceup. The stench of burnt flesh sickens me. No doubt his intention. It’s apparent that the hand has little or no mobility. Seeing our police cards was a command, not a request. We lay them down on his dead hand. He inspects them with the other hand and gives them back. “Come in.”

  We enter, and other than being polluted with blue cigarette smoke so thick it makes my eyes water, the place is immaculately clean. And well-decorated. About a dozen young men, aged about fourteen to early twenties, are hanging around, most of them sitting on the floor, almost all smoking and sucking on beers or ciders. They wear the white-trash uniform: black boots or sneakers, black jeans, hoodies, some of them with the hoods over their heads, some with baseball caps cocked at forty-five-degree angles. These are the kinds of kids I loathe.

  Ai, however, doesn’t fit in this picture. He’s dressed in neat, preppy clothes. His Lacoste shirt is blue and pressed. He appears to be aged a hundred years old, the oldest teenager I’ve ever seen. His face isn’t scarred, it’s ravaged by life. He sits in a leather wingback chair, which obviously serves as his throne, and lays his forearms and hands on the armrests. For lack of anywhere to sit, the three of us stand in front of him, like petitioners to a king.

  “No hello for your cousin?” Sweet
ness asks.

  Dismissive, Ai says, “Hello, Cousin.”

  He turns his attention to me. “State your business.” So he noticed that I’m ranking officer here from my police card. That escapes a lot of people.

  “Let’s start with your business,” I say.

  “Very well. If we must.”

  The other hoodlums listen in rapt attention, hang on his every word.

  “You’re a teenage boy. I’m given to understand you’ve lived alone since age thirteen. How did you manage to get that by social services?”

  He lights a cigarette. He has an ashtray in a stand by his throne. “I gave them no cause for inquiry. I haven’t missed a day of school in that time. My grades are the highest in my class. I dress well.”

  I feel like I’ve entered a fictional world. That this is a Sherlock Holmes tale and I’m surrounded by the Baker Street Irregulars, but they answer to a pint-sized and disfigured Professor Moriarty.

  “My business is this,” I say. “I’m looking for a girl named Loviise Tamm. She’s been kidnapped by a member of the Russian diplomatic delegation. Their embassy is Russian soil. I can’t enter it and search for her any more than I could the Kremlin. She is to be forced into prostitution. The delegation has, to the best of my knowledge, seventeen houses of prostitution, but I don’t know their locations. Sooner or later, she’ll likely wind up working in one of them. I want you to use your people to surveil the diplomats, many of whom are actually spies, identify the people involved with prostitution, find out where the houses of prostitution are, and locate the girl if possible. She’s easy to spot. She’s tiny and has Down syndrome.” I take out her photo and pass it around the room. “It seems to me that the easiest way to do that would be to enter the houses as customers. Your crew looks like it would have few qualms about using the services of prostitutes.”

  He looks thoughtful for a moment. “Why don’t you just use police for this?”

  “For personal reasons, it falls outside their purview.”

  He glances at a kid on the floor. Said kid hops up and brings him a beer. “I know a little about surveillance,” Ai says. “Why don’t you just GPS and monitor their vehicles? Chalk-mark their tires for certainty. Use security camera footage to get the license plate numbers and images of the people involved.”

  Milo breaks in. “The cars are swept every day for bugs and bombs. The vehicles all have tinted windows. They’ve arranged their transportation so that no one can see who enters or exits the vehicles coming and going from the embassy.”

  Ai turns sarcastic. “So you’re an expert on Russian embassy surveillance counter-measures.”

  “No,” Milo says. “It’s standard diplomatic security protocol.”

  Ai sips beer. “But yet, you believe we can accomplish all this and defeat their security measures, when you, trained detectives, are unable to do so.”

  “Sulo thinks you can,” I say. I use his real name, as I doubt Ai knows his nickname. “Can you or can’t you?”

  “That would depend on my motivation.”

  I take Sasha Mikoyan’s credit card and account access codes from my wallet. “This is the account of a dead man. I checked it today, it’s still active and contains a hundred and three thousand euros. More than likely, you can withdraw three thousand euros a day in cash from an automatic teller machine, or if you prefer the safety of emptying it into another account, in the event that it gets locked, my colleague”-I gesture toward Milo-“will help you set up something offshore.”

  He holds out his hand, I put the card and codes in it, and he looks them over. I’m certain he’s never had a chance to make so much money.

  “Agreed,” he says.

  “Do you have the means and will to accomplish this task? For that much money, I expect a successful outcome.”

  “We do, and you’ll have it. Our means might be,” he pauses, searching for the correct word, “zealous.”

  I turn to face his friends. They’ve listened and are dumbfounded at the prospect of so much money. I have their respect now. I could ask them if they had fucked their sisters and they would tell me the truth. “How many of you have felony arrests?” All but two raise their hands. “How many of you are armed?” Four hold up pistols. A few display knives.

  I ask Ai, “Would you like me to open rat jackets on all of you? Odds are good some of you will be arrested, and if I say you work for me as informants, I can almost certainly get the charges dropped.”

  He considers it. “A gracious offer, but we decline. It strikes me as something that will come back to haunt us later. If we need to do something drastic, we’ll use juveniles.”

  I hand him a business card. “I want regular reports.”

  “You’ll have them.”

  My earlier curiosity is renewed. “Don’t any blacks live here?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  He gets up, goes to another room, and comes back with a Crossman air rifle. He loads a pellet into it and pumps it a dozen times to get a lot of pressure behind the projectile. He goes to an open window. A girl of about five plays downstairs in the yard. He shoots with it. She shrieks in surprise and pain.

  “We prefer the company of good, God-fearing white folks,” he says. “After being stabbed, shot, beaten and so on, the blacks all decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Besides, it made room for my friends to move into their apartments. Most of us live here now.”

  Yep, the kid is like the devil. I’ve never seen a child in such mental anguish. “Regular reports,” I say, and we take a taxi home.

  27

  My phone rings at nine a.m. It’s the National Bureau of Investigation forensic mechanic.

  “I got fascinated by the explosion in your Audi and pulled an all-nighter,” he says.

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “You may not thank me when you hear the findings. First, there was a hot fuel mix in the gas tank. Enough to start the car, but not enough to keep it running long. There was ether both in front of the fuel injectors’ carbonized nozzles and under the driver’s seat. I’m pretty sure a hole had been drilled so that it aimed up under the driver’s seat and squirted fuel. When the line lost pressure, fire shot backward up the line, ignited the ether under the seat and also set off the gas tank.”

  “So it was a pro job.”

  I hear him suck hard on a cigarette and gulp what I assume, from the blowing then slurping sound, is hot coffee. “And very slick. Here’s how pro it was. Ether eats through plastic, so the ether was poured into plastic bags, probably freezer bags or something, and those bags were placed in thin, watertight balsa wood boxes, so that a portion of the ether leaked into them. The flame coming out of the carbonized nozzles set the balsa wood, which is absorbent, on fire, which in turn ignited the ether and started the process. It was hard to spot the remains of the burned-up boxes, because balsa doesn’t leave much and there was already carbon all over the place. I picked up traces of acetone from the balsa leftovers, so I’m pretty sure that was the scenario. Somebody wants you dead, or at least burned to a crisp.”

  “What do you preferably drink?” I ask.

  “Good single-malt scotch. Why?”

  “I’ll bring a bottle by for you by way of thanks.”

  I can almost hear his smile. His job doesn’t garner much appreciation. “Stay safe,” he says.

  • • •

  KATE AND I take a taxi to see Torsten Holmqvist. I met Torsten not long after moving to Helsinki. I had broken the Sufia Elmi case, one might say by attrition, because so many people under suspicion died. I was shot in the face. I had been promised a slot in Helsinki Homicide, but the department decided I needed my psyche delved into before starting in my new position.

  I never liked Torsten. He’s a Swedish-speaking Finn, wealthy, and I got the impression that like many rich Swedish-speaking Finns, he believes he’s battre folk, as I’ve heard them call themselves, a cut above the rest of us commoners. I find everything from his expen
sive preppy clothing to the apple-scented tobacco he smokes in his briarwood pipe pretentious, and he thought I couldn’t see through him when he tried to manipulate me. I interrogate people for a living. He never seemed to understand that he and I are, in a sense, in the same business, and it annoyed me. It wasn’t that he’s bad at his job, quite the opposite. He was just the wrong therapist for me.

  I think, though, that he truly cares about his patients. Seeing Kate today, on short notice, because she’s in crisis, serves as proof of that. His office is in a beautiful home in the district of Eira, near embassy row, and worth millions. A bay window looks out on the sea. It’s a perfect day, warm enough for T-shirts and shorts, the sea dotted with pleasure craft under a cobalt-blue sky.

  When I woke Kate and told her we were coming here, she didn’t resist. She must know she needs this. She looks bad, haggard and worn. It took more than booze and jet lag to do this to her, more like something that gnaws at her soul.

  “Do you mind if Kari joins us in our session today?” he asks Kate.

  She shakes her head no.

  “I thought,” Torsten says, “as an outside observer and as a witness to the trials you’ve been through, he might be able to shed some light on how I might best help you. If at any time you feel uncomfortable with his presence, if you feel it inhibits you or prevents you from sharing a confidence with me, I’ll ask him to take a seat in the waiting room until we’re done here. Is this acceptable to you?”

  His English is excellent. She nods her head yes.

  Torsten offers us coffee or tea. I take the coffee. Kate takes some herbal tea blend. I sit on the couch, a little away from them, and Kate takes a chair, separated from him by a small table. He provides me with an ashtray, fills his pipe and lights it.

  “Would you like to begin, or shall I?” he asks.

  She starts trembling. “You.”

  “Very well. I thought we were making progress here. What prompted you to run away?”

  Tears appear in the corners of her eyes. “I couldn’t remember things. I was afraid that I was unable to care for Anu. I wasn’t getting better, I was getting worse. I killed someone. Killers aren’t supposed to be mothers. Mothers aren’t supposed to be killers. I don’t deserve her.”