Helsinki Blood iv-4

by James Thompson

  Sweetness, of course, lines up three kossu shots and knocks them back one after the other, “to build his appetite,” which is already enormous and needs no enhancement. In keeping with their diet, he and Jenna order steaks. He orders two.

  I would like to join them, have a good piece of red meat-I miss it-but my gun-shot mouth isn’t up to chewing it yet. Instead, I have roasted salmon in mushroom sauce. Kate has a perch fillet in dill and remoulade sauce.

  We take a stroll down the boardwalk after dinner. Pushing Anu’s stroller spares me the decision of whether to hold Kate’s hand or not, as I have to guide the pram with one hand and limp along with my cane in the other.

  We get home. Kate announces she’s tired, needs sleep. I’m exhausted as well. Carrying Anu, I tag along up the stairs behind her and into the bedroom. She cocks her head and looks at me, quizzical.

  This is a kind of litmus test. I’m nervous. “Can I share the bed with you?” I ask.

  She sits down on the bed, mulls it over and nods. “You have to sleep somewhere.”

  I feel a great sense of relief. That’s good enough for now. We perform our pre-bed ablutions, take our medications, stand side by side as we brush our teeth. Without speaking, we climb into opposite sides of the bed. I kiss her shoulder and wish her good night. She doesn’t respond.

  35

  In the morning, there’s no food in the house, so we go out for breakfast. Kate is polite, if not warm, toward me. On occasion, I see her face go blank for a moment, as if she’s having little lapses, either unable to recall something or remembering something she would rather not.

  Afterward, she asks if we can explore the old town. It’s a little maze of arts-and-crafts stores, antique shops and junk for tourists. She loves this shit. I play the good husband, trail around behind her with my wallet ready as she chooses little things that catch her eye.

  Handmade place mats for the table, some candles, a bottle opener with a handle made from a reindeer antler. This is tourist season. A small army of husbands and wives follows exactly the same routine. Porvoo is primarily Swedish-speaking, so I can at least be of some use, translating questions to clerks for her on occasion. Mostly just for fun. The clerks cater to a lot of foreigners, and most speak English well.

  Kate tires easily. We go to a grocery and do a little food shopping. By the time we get home, she’s ready for a nap. She has therapy at four. Sweetness promised to drive, and I promised to come along. The bus ride is only about an hour, but I worry that being surrounded by strangers-or even just the social pressure of having to spend so much time alone with Sweetness-would be unnerving for her. I picked up two newspapers at the grocery. One shows a couple of my photos from Yelena’s suicide scene. The other, showing more taste, chose not to run them.

  The Russian ambassador was recalled. Soon he’ll be, as the Ripper and the Raper put it, fish chum. I killed him with my photos as surely as Milo killed Kate’s brother by giving him so much dope. I can’t bring myself to care. I hope his gangster partner, Yelena’s father, hangs him from a cross and crucifies him. Finland requested permission to remand him pending further investigation. Moscow refused, and made a formal complaint because Finnish police processed the crime scene without diplomatic consultation. Exactly what I expected.

  But it reminds me that I have another task to carry out, and soon: finding the nearly two hundred girls pressed into sexual slavery on the list Sasha had in his iPad. And Loviise. They suffer as I procrastinate. For a man hanging around doing nothing, I have much to do. Try to bring my wife back to good health and keep my family together. Play whatever part I must to end our feud with the greater powers of the establishment and make us all safe again. As the homicidal Adrien Moreau would have put it, restore harmony to all our lives. No small order.

  But when I think of those women, again I hear the trumpets sounding and the pounding of my white charger’s hooves as I engage in battle to save the day. I see the look of love and adoration on Kate’s face, the ugliness of the past erased, my reward for all the good I’ve done. And if I manage to free all those women, it would no longer just be the act of symbolism of saving a single girl, but an act that helps a great many people. Some true vindication of the vicious things we’ve done.

  In our time as a black-ops unit, we may have crossed the line, but the people we hurt were bad. The world would be better off without most of them. In those cases, justice was served. I served it through criminal actions. That was wrong, but I believe in the adage “Who must do the hard things? He who can.” Though I don’t regret my actions, I don’t want to repeat them. I don’t like hurting people. I don’t want to jeopardize my marriage. I need only to look in the mirror to see that I’ve done my duty. Now I wish only to live in peace.

  Milo shows up around two, comes to the house and asks Sweetness to help him bring his things in from the boat. Sweetness is the only one of us undamaged, and as a result, finds himself constantly playing errand boy for all of us, but he never complains. Alcoholism and sociopathic tendencies aside, he’s a good kid.

  I go out with them to have a look at Milo’s boat, moored near the house. It’s a twenty-five-foot Coronado with two cabins, about forty years old but well cared for. Milo, convinced as he is that everyone is fascinated by technical details, fills us in on everything from its masthead sloop to its draft to how many watts the solar panels generate to details about its engines and props and even its Danforth-style anchors. For Sweetness and me, much of his lecture might as well be in Greek, but we’ve learned it’s easier to indulge him than shut him up.

  Even by his standards of haggard appearance, he looks exhausted. Eyes like bloody holes in his head may be the result of his smoking dope along the ride, but still. “Hard night?” I ask.

  “I was up all night writing the manifesto,” he says. “It’s not hard, and I’m having fun with it, but it’s pretty time-consuming.”

  Most of what he’s brought along is guns and bullets. He’s hesitant to leave the sniper rifle in the boat, but I don’t want Kate to see it or the massive amount of ammo. Enough to fight a short war, there’s no way to explain it. His pistol is fine, standard police fare, but I especially don’t want her to see his beloved 10-gauge Colt sawed-off shotgun, as she used it to blow Adrien Moreau in half.

  The three of us sit down on the dock, let our feet dangle over the water and light cigarettes. “I cruised by Veikko Saukko’s mansion,” Milo says. “Sure as shit, just like his calendar says, he was out behind the house, knocking golf balls into the sea. Kind of weird, isn’t it? I’m going to kill one man practicing golf and two men playing it on the same day. Generally, people don’t consider it a dangerous sport.”

  “Do you have a plan and a schedule yet?” I ask.

  “One time, I went to a junkyard looking for a carburetor for a car I used to have,” Milo says. “A piece-of-shit Volkswagen from the seventies. This big fat fuck was in a shack-the so-called office-lying on a couch with the springs popping out of it, watching a soap opera on a TV so old it was black-and-white and had rabbit-ear antennas, eating a bag of candy. I asked him if they had one. He said, ‘I dunno.’ I asked him if they had that make of Volkswagen. He said, ‘I dunno. Maybe. You gotta go out and look around.’ I said, ‘Well, goddamn it, what the fuck do you know?’ He said, ‘Not much. The less you know, the less you have to do.’ I thought that was true and pretty wise, especially coming from that dumb shit. And it applies here. How much do you really want to know?”

  I shrug and flick my cigarette butt into the river. It goes out with a hiss and starts its journey toward the sea. “What I need to know, I guess.” As I said to Moore, pre-knowledge of a crime is tantamount to collusion. I’m as guilty as Milo and Sweetness.

  “What you need to know is that every morning, you and I are going to get up before dawn and claim we’re going fishing. What we’re really going to do is go to a little uninhabited island I know and learn to shoot with our disabilities. That OK with you?”

  “Su
re.”

  “But to pique your curiosity, a little B amp;E last night reveals that Jyri Ivalo keeps his golf clubs in the trunk of his Mercedes.”

  He gets up and grabs the bag with his computer in it, Sweetness shoulders his duffel bag and we go inside. Milo looks around. “Nice place. Where should I sleep?”

  I point at the davenport. “I guess there. The beds are already taken.”

  “I’ll just sleep in the boat,” he says. “The bed is comfortable, and I can keep an eye on my Barrett.”

  I go upstairs and find Kate awake, getting ready to go to therapy. “I heard Milo’s voice,” she says. “Why is he here?”

  “He’s going to stay with us for a little while.”

  “I don’t understand. We’re supposed to be having a vacation, but you brought everyone that works for you with us.”

  Think fast, Kari. “I can’t get around very well, and you have some. . problems. While you were away, Sweetness came to help me out, especially because I had Anu. I was in so much pain, it was all I could do to make it to the grocery store and back. Jenna goes wherever Sweetness goes. Milo has been away. I haven’t seen him for a while, and he’s not in very good shape either: He’s partially disabled and depressed about it, and I thought our company might do him some good. Besides, he’s going to sleep in his boat. He mainly wants to fish. You won’t see much of him.”

  She looks at me askance. “And you had Mirjami with you as well, a small army of helpers. Good for you.”

  “Mirjami came one day because she and Jenna had become good friends, and I guess they just wanted to party together. Mirjami was a registered nurse, saw what bad shape I was in, and threatened to call an ambulance if I didn’t do something about it, so I called Jari. He agreed to shoot up my knee and jaw with cortisone to relieve my pain, but thought I needed to have my knee professionally bandaged and braced daily so I wouldn’t damage it further. Mirjami volunteered for the job. And so it ended up that I found myself living with an apartment full of kids.”

  “Did you really not fuck her?”

  “I swear to you that I didn’t.”

  She turns toward me and brushes the back of her hand against my cheek. “After what I’ve done, I wouldn’t blame you if you had, but I’m glad that you didn’t.”

  We make the forty-five-minute drive to Helsinki, mostly in silence, and drop Kate off at Torsten’s door. Sweetness and I go to a little grocery store down the street and buy a six-pack. We take it to Kaivopuisto, a big and beautiful park, sit on the grass, enjoy the beautiful day and sunshine and drink a couple. Sweetness pulls out his flask.

  “Please,” I say. “Not with Kate in the vehicle.”

  He takes a second to decide whether to argue with me, then screws the lid down and puts it away.

  We’re waiting in the Jeep when Kate exits. She asks if I’ll ride in the back with her on the return trip. Her eyes are red and puffy from weeping. I get in the back with her and she takes my hand. When we get out on the highway, she lays her head on my shoulder. Sweetness leaves the stereo off, I’m sure to give us time for Finnish silence. It often relates more meaning than spoken words ever could. We spend the trip home in the quiet.

  36

  We arrive home to an empty house. Jenna is out. A note on the table says she got bored and went exploring. There’s little to do except housework. The place has stood empty for a while and needs a good dusting. I’m not in the mood, and while my knee hurts less than it did before the cortisone, it’s still a pain in the ass to perform simple tasks with only one free hand, my cane always in the other.

  I browse Arvid’s book collection instead. He-or maybe Ritva or both of them-was an ardent crime and thriller novel fan. Complete works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John le Carre, Graham Greene, Jim Thompson, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, and Mika Waltari. I decide to work my way through the whole 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain. That should keep me busy for a while. I settle down in what was Arvid’s armchair and start reading Cop Hater. The others wander in. Sweetness has been to Alko, bought a dozen bottles of kossu and a case of beer. Milo has been on his boat, working on his computer, I imagine writing his manifesto.

  Jenna and Sweetness do what they do best, sit at the table and drink. They whisper the private jokes of young lovers and giggle. In a little while, everyone gets hungry, and by general consensus, we decide to go to a good restaurant. This trip feels more and more like a vacation than I thought it would.

  We go to Wanha Laamanni. It’s only been a restaurant for a few years, but the building was constructed near the medieval cathedral around 1790. The menu is gourmet. Sweetness complains about the lack of steaks. As far as he and this place are concerned, it’s like lipstick on a pig. He turns up his nose at the snails in gorgonzola. Roast lamb, after a few aperitifs, pacifies him. For me, wild boar rillettes as an appetizer and a main course of charcoal-grilled Arctic char with choron sauce, saffron and fennel. Kate chooses salmon infused with the flavor of tar. She pronounces it inedible, so we trade. This should be the test for Finnish citizenship. If you enjoy the taste of tar, you pass. If you don’t, you should spend a few more years here until you do. I find it delicious.

  Milo has to eat left-handed. He has a hard time keeping food on his fork. He has to learn to do almost everything in his life over again. I hope surgery repaired his carpal tunnel and radial nerve sufficiently so that he regains some function in his hand. Being disabled makes for a hard life.

  After dinner, when the coffee and cognac arrive, Sweetness announces he’s talked to his mother and she checked his mail for him. He’s been accepted at the police college in Tampere and as a Russian-language student at the University of Helsinki.

  Slots in universities and polytechnics are competitions. Often, six hundred people will sit down together and test for a position in a department, and only fifty will be accepted. The smart thing to do is to treat studying for the examinations like a job and apply to more than one department to increase your odds. Sweetness has actually done this. He now has a possibility to build a career that doesn’t involve beating the hell out of people.

  I’m impressed and order champagne to celebrate: a bottle of Dom. I wonder if Kate considers where the money for these extravagances came from. They’re reminders of our various and sundry crimes that left Milo, Sweetness and me millionaires. Maybe she’s pushed it out of her mind and tells herself I’m wealthy from my inheritance from Arvid. It’s partly true.

  Sweetness’s success is a bright note in a stressful, even frightening time in my life. I’m afraid my wife’s mental illness will cause me to lose her. I’m afraid that, in the end, I’ll lose my leg. I’m afraid for all our lives, least of all my own. And my friends are planning to change the course of Finnish history to save all our lives. I’m afraid of what will happen to all of us if they fail. Good news in this time of confusion and mayhem was much needed.

  We walk off our meal and go home. This appears to be the pattern we’ll follow. Quiet days, good meals, long walks and early nights. For Kate and me and our relationship, my devout hope is that this pattern will be therapeutic and bring catharsis.

  Milo invites Sweetness to go drinking with him. Jenna assumes she’s included. She’s not, and miffed about it. Sweetness cites a need for “guy time.”

  Kate and I get ready for bed. I set an alarm on my cell phone.

  “What are you doing that for?” she asks.

  “Milo and I are going fishing early tomorrow morning.”

  Fearful of upsetting her, I stick to my side of the bed and avoid anything that might be construed as physical contact.

  We lie in silence for a while. “Don’t you want to touch me anymore? Are you so angry?” she asks.

  I’m flummoxed. “Angry for what? I’m not angry about anything. I’m afraid you’re angry, and I don’t want to do anything to upset you.”

  She lies on her back, arms at her sides, stares at the ceiling. “I left you when you were too weak to care for yourself. I wa
s cruel to you on the rare occasions I saw you, refused to let you see your child very often, and then I dumped her on you so I could run to the other side of the world to turn into a drunk.”

  I’m taken aback, wasn’t expecting this. “You were sick. You’re suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, so says Torsten. How can I be mad at you for being traumatized? And I was behind the trauma. I did many questionable things, some ugly things, some wrong things.”

  “Your brain surgery made a mess out of you,” she says.

  “Yes, it did.”

  I don’t say that if I was put in the same situations now, I don’t know what I would do differently. I began with the best of intentions and slowly sank into the sewer of corruption. I always meant well. My biggest mistake was not understanding that I was being used, that my greatest flaw is naivete. I’m naive no longer. I know what I would change. I wouldn’t have let myself be manipulated and put in such positions in the first place.

  “I told you to do those things,” Kate says, “I advised you to do the very things I came to loathe, the things that made me wonder who you are and where the man I married went.”

  “You had little choice. You were scared, afraid I would die of cancer. It’s hard to say no to someone under those circumstances. And like me, you kept believing I could extricate myself from the corruption. We didn’t understand that would never happen. As it was put to me, ‘This isn’t a game you can just decide you don’t want to play anymore.’”

  “Are you going to do things differently now?”

  “Yes.”

  “No more robbing drug dealers. No more taking money you didn’t earn. No more bodies dissolved in acid. You’ll become an honest cop again?”