I change direction and start toward Helsinki, drive fast despite the snow. I call John and tell him to meet me at Roskapankki. He says he’s busy right now. I hear a squeal and giggle in the background. I’m interrupting a fuck session. Good for John. “Too bad,” I say. “Go there now. I’m going to get your boots back for you.”
He brightens. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”
Headache Alien screeches. I find myself furious. John is a decent guy, problems or no, didn’t deserve to have a speed freak steal his boots and leave him barefoot in the snow in minus twenty degrees. Then I realize the real reason for my anger is that said speed freak was mean to someone Kate loves. Same difference, I’m enraged.
I enter Roskapankki. John skulks near the bar, ashamed. Arska sits on a bouncer stool near the door, says he didn’t have to detain the guy I’m looking for, he isn’t going anywhere. He points at a table with four losers sitting at it, half-full pints of beer in front of them. I slide Arska two fifties. I order six beers at the bar, tell John to bring them to the table. I pull up two chairs and sit with four derelicts in their mid-twenties. Their eyes tell me they’re flying. They look at me, amused and curious. John sets beers in front of all of us and takes a seat beside me, huddles close for protection. I note, to my surprise and pleasure, that he’s sober.
“Hi, guys,” I say. “My name is Kari. Let’s be friends.”
They check out the gunshot scar on my face. Their laughs are bemused. They’re thinking, what the hell, free beer. We clink glasses. John doesn’t have to tell me who stole his boots. The lankhaired greaseball fuckwad beside me is wearing them. I don’t have to tell him I’ve come for the boots. My presence here with John announces it.
“Nope,” Fuckwad says.
I smile. “Nope what?”
“Haista vittu.” Sniff cunt. His friends tense up, smell violence brewing and start working themselves up to beat the shit out of me, en masse.
My dad says that to me when he’s drunk and angry. I don’t like it. “I’m a cop,” I say, “and I’m prepared to overlook your stealing John’s boots if you kindly and quietly return them. I also won’t shake you down for drugs.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not holding, and I’m keeping the boots. Fuck off and run along now.”
He wants to be tough in front of his friends. They chuckle. I sigh. “I’d rather not go to the trouble of arresting you.”
One of his buddies says, “I recognize you. You’re one of the cops that killed that retard down the street yesterday.”
“Yep,” I say.
Fuckwad laughs, has no respect for anyone or anything. “Please, arrest me. It will make a great story. Retard killer arrests boot thief.” He points at John. “You should have seen the look on that guy’s face when I told him to take his boots off and give them to me. He didn’t even put up a fight, just sat down in the snow and did it.”
He cackles at the memory. He’s serious, he’d rather go to jail than return the boots. I suppose he’s arrested on a regular basis and it makes no difference to him. John stares down at the floor, humiliated. Fuckwad’s friends howl and knee-slap.
Of course, humiliating John was the point of stealing the boots in the first place. Disgracing others is Fuckwad’s idea of a good time. Both my headache and temper flare. I won’t arrest Fuckwad. At least not today.
When I was a young guy and first moved to Helsinki, I bartended in rakalat like this on occasion to make ends meet. The beer glasses are cheap and thick-hard to break-but the surface tension of the glass is so great that when they shatter, they explode.
I laugh along with them, good-natured. With my left hand, I hold up my pint in front of Fuckwad’s face and squeeze. He looks at me, smirking and quizzical. I squeeze harder, the glass goes off like a bomb, shatters into a thousand pieces. Beer and glass fly away from me toward Fuckwad, into his face and across the room. He recoils in his chair and gawks disbelief, face beer-soaked and covered with tiny bleeding cuts.
His friends shoot upright to their feet and back away. John and I remain seated. I glance around. Arska still lounges on the bouncer’s stool. He winks at me, amused. The bartender gapes, says nothing.
Fuckwad’s eyes brim with tears. “You fucking asshole,” he says, “you could have blinded me.”
I pick little glass shards out of my left hand and flick them at him with my right. “That was the idea,” I say. “Didn’t work.” I pick up another pint. “I could try again.”
He trembles and raises his hands to his face. “Please no.”
“I asked you nicely. Give me the boots.”
He tries to jerk them off as fast as he can. He turns his chair over and pitches to the floor. He keeps tugging at the boots.
I get up, stand over him and wait. I let blood drip from my hand onto his head. He offers me the boots.
I take them. “Get out,” I say.
His eyes dart, looking to his friends for backup, but they’re chuckling again, this time at his humiliation. He rights his chair and pulls himself back into it. He gives me a pitiful look of appeal.
“I said out.”
He whimpers. “It’s minus fucking twenty-five degrees.”
I nod toward John. “If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for you. I’m going to stand outside and watch. You’re going to walk until I can’t see you anymore.”
He gathers his courage and little remaining dignity, and starts to take his coat from the back of his chair.
I shake my head. “No coat.”
He lurches toward the door. I give John his boots and follow, and John tags along behind me. I thank Arska, step outside, ball up some snow in my cut hand and watch Fuckwad hurry along the ice.
John stands beside me. “I didn’t know it was possible to crush a beer glass in your hand,” he says.
“Me neither,” I say.
He puts an arm around my shoulders. “I’ll never forget this.”
“Me neither.”
“I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”
“Be a brother your sister can be proud of. Be her friend.”
“I’ll do my best,” he says.
“Tell her you missed your Sedona Wests and bought them back from UFF,” I say.
“I haven’t been around much. Nobody noticed they were gone.”
I check my watch. We’re near the house. Jari and his family are coming over for dinner tonight. I have just enough time to groceryshop, go home and check on Kate, and still make it to Filippov Construction and tail Linda when she gets off work.
32
It starts snowing hard again. John tags along while I groceryshop. We go to Alko. I buy a couple bottles of wine and two bottles of Koskenkorva. I tell John to hide one in his suitcase and sneak drinks to stay level, warn him not to let Kate catch him boozing alcoholic-style, especially in the daytime.
We go home. Kate and Mary are watching Dr. Phil. A bad sign. Kate hates Dr. Phil. It tells me Kate prefers listening to the good doctor to conversation with her sister.
I say hi to Mary, kiss Kate hello and touch her belly. “Learning anything from Phil?” I ask.
She mimics him. “Haaaney, what yoo got yourself is a drankin’ problem. Watcha need to dooo to cure yoor problem, haaney, is quit yer goddamned drankin’.”
She does a good imitation. It makes me laugh. John sits down to watch TV with them.
“What’s for dinner?” Kate asks.
“Karjalanpaisti.”
She smiles. “Dee-yummy.”
“I better get it started. Kate, I have to go out to work again. If I prep it now, can you pop it in the oven at five, so it will be done when Jari and his family get here?”
“Sure,” she says. “What happened to your hand?”
“I slipped on the ice, and rock salt in the snow cut it. No big deal.”
“What is karjalanpaisti?” Mary asks me.
“Something good. You’ll see.”
“How’s your headache?” Kate asks.
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“Not bad.”
My head is splitting. I go to the bedroom and get a painkiller, so I can make it through the evening without my migraine singing songs that tell me to do bad things, and put dinner together. When I’m done, I go to the living room, sit down next to Kate and read the newspaper. I come across an article about the harsh treatment of Jews in Finland, and Helsinki in particular, during the nineteenth century. I think of the word Pasi Tervomaa used. Confluence. The persecution of Jews is suddenly everywhere I look.
The article says Jews were confined to living in designated areas. Jews were denied passports. Jews were forbidden to conduct many types of business, including, of course, moneylending. The list of citizens’ rights denied Jews is long. Because of these oppressive laws, a quarter of Finnish Jews either left Finland on their own or were deported.
This runs contrary to my perception of the Finnish treatment of Jews. Our country takes pride in its wartime record in that regard. Common wisdom holds that we protected Jews. During the war, they fought alongside other Finnish troops. Strangely enough, this means that Jews also fought alongside Germans. Finnish soldiers even operated a field synagogue.
Heinrich Himmler pushed for the deportation of our Jews to concentration camps. Our legendary general Gustaf Mannerheim replied, “While Jews serve in my army, I will not allow their deportation.”
Mannerheim’s hero status is such that he’s viewed as Finland’s Messiah. His military prowess and adroit political abilities allowed him to play the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany off one another, and ensured that neither overran us. On Independence Day in 1944, Mannerheim visited the Jewish synagogue in Helsinki and took part in a commemorative service for the Jewish soldiers who had died in the Winter and Continuation Wars, and presented the Jewish community with a medal. These things are common knowledge.
An SS stalag, manned in part by Finns, where Jews were sent by the Finnish government with full knowledge that they would be murdered, is antithetical to history as written. We love Jews. We hate Jews. Which is it? I call Pasi Tervomaa and explain my confusion and misgivings. “Did Mannerheim know about the slaughter in 309?” I ask.
“Let me put it this way. Mannerheim had the means to know if he chose to, and as such, he bore responsibility. If the Stalag 309 case had been brought before a tribunal at the end of the war, under the Nuremberg principles, Mannerheim would have been prosecuted as accessory to murder. That said, a lot of papers hit his desk, and he was an old man. He could have overlooked something. And the responsibility wasn’t his alone. The president and the interior minister at the time, Risto Ryti and Toivo Horelli, probably also gave their indirect blessings to Finnish collusion in 309 and the events that occurred there.”
“I remember that President Ryti and some ministers were convicted in war responsibility trials. Is there any connection?”
“No. Ryti and the others were sentenced in a show trial as a sop to the Soviets. They were charged with influencing Finland to wage war against the Soviet Union and United Kingdom in 1941, and for preventing peace during the Continuation War. By the way, it’s rumored that Mannerheim wasn’t charged because Stalin intervened. He liked Mannerheim. Or maybe Stalin didn’t actually like anyone, but found Mannerheim useful.”
“This is all demoralizing,” I say.
“I was disappointed when I learned these things, too,” Pasi says. “There’s a lot more information out there if you care to look for it. A lot of it in the public domain on the Internet. Most people just don’t want to hear it.”
When I get off the phone, I hear Kate, John and Mary chatting. Mary isn’t lecturing. John isn’t drunk. Their voices are cheerful. They’re smiling. This heartens me. I say good-bye to them and set out to find Bettie Page Linda.
33
I drive to Vantaa. Road conditions are bad. Helsinki is experiencing a near-record snowfall. Snowplows run twenty-four/seven but can’t keep up. Towers of snow line the streets. Usually, snow is carted away in trucks and dumped, but the city has run out of places to put it. Some roads are impassable.
I get to Filippov Construction at four forty-five p.m. and park about fifty yards from the front door. Because of the falling snow, my car is almost invisible from this distance. Filippov and Linda exit the building at five and leave in separate cars. She drives a 2003 Ford Mustang. He drives a new Dodge Journey. They go in different directions. I suspect he’s going home and she’s going to Helsinki.
Following Linda is easy. She doesn’t drive too fast, road traffic is light, and I’m difficult to spot because of weather conditions. I was right, she goes straight to downtown Helsinki and enters a parking garage. I park in the same garage. She walks toward Stockmann Department Store. I close the gap between us and catch her under the big clock at the main entrance. I touch her arm, and she turns.
“Ms. Pohjola,” I say, “I’d like a word, if I may.”
She bats her dark eyes at me and her red lips turn up into a charming smile. “Tell me, Inspector, what would you like to talk about?”
“Sex, lies and videotape.”
Her laugh is giddy. “Oh, dear, that boy that works with you has been in my computer. He also rooted around in my underwear drawer. If he’s going to be a successful voyeur, he has to learn to put things back in their proper places.”
I wait.
“Yes,” she says, “let’s have a chat. Do you have somewhere in mind?”
“How about Iguana? The tables in the back might offer us some privacy.”
She nods agreement and takes my arm. We walk like lovers across the street and into the faux Mexican restaurant. “A hot drink would be nice,” she says.
She moves toward a big table in the rear and takes off her coat. Underneath it, she has on a tight black sweater and a short black skirt. Black stockings descend into black leather boots. Her attire doesn’t surprise me. A lot of Helsinki women refuse to succumb to the weather, no matter how severe, at the expense of fashion.
I bring us two Irish coffees and sit across from her. She takes a sip. It leaves an ungodly sexy line of cream along her upper lip. She licks it away, provocative. Linda is drop-dead gorgeous. “Where shall we begin?” she asks.
I decide on the aggressive approach. “The murder of Iisa Filippov has strong fetish overtones, and the fetishes you and Ivan Filippov engage in suggest that I should suspect you of the crime.”
She taunts me. “Why, Inspector, what fetishes might you mean? Let me guess, you saw a video in which I perform fellatio on Ivan while I masturbate with a vibrator. He wears a mask and is quite rough with me. I orgasm, then use the vibrator on him, and he comes, too. Did the video you saw go something like that?”
She’s embarrassing me, as is her intention. “Yes, very much like that.”
She looks at me with impish glee, and although Linda is beautiful, I notice certain flaws. Her right eye is a little slow. Her lips are on the thin side. “It’s not as if I’m the only one who enjoys these kinds of sex games,” she says. “Your national chief of police does as well. At least, he seemed to.”
This comes out of left field, takes me off guard. “You enacted this particular sex game with Jyri?”
“Something like it. On the morning of Iisa’s murder. Jyri can serve as my alibi.”
“Why do you think both Filippov and Jyri failed to mention this to me?”
She sips Irish coffee and does the cream-lick tongue trick again. “Perhaps because you failed to ask them.”
She slides a foot out of a boot, raises it under the table and massages my crotch with her toes. I go stiff, zero to sixty, in about two seconds. She has an amazing knack for turning me on, seems to know what I want even before I do. It’s disconcerting in the extreme. My first inclination is to push her foot away, but I’m curious about what I might learn while she plays out her little charade. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
She says, “You like it that I look like her, don’t you, Inspector?”
“You mean like Bettie Pa
ge?”
She keeps massaging. Her toes do amazing things. “Yes,” I say, “I like it.”
“Me too,” she says. “It’s nice to be someone else. That’s the nature of my fetish, the negation of my personality. That’s why Ivan was so rough with me in the video. He treats me not as a person, but as a thing to be used. His fetish, naturally enough, is to be an aggressive but faceless user. Our sexual relationship isn’t uncommon. Perhaps you should try it. You’re manly. I like that. And I like to be watched. That’s why we make the videos. The other detective, Milo, likes to watch. Maybe I could suck your cock while Milo watches and jerks off. You can come in my mouth and Milo can blow on my face. I’ll videotape it and watch it with Ivan while we play our sex roles.”
My hard-on wilts. I remove her foot from my crotch. “Thanks,” I say, “but my wife wouldn’t approve.”
Her eyes sparkle. “What a stick-in-the-mud she must be. The point I’m trying to get across to you is that I like to be used, not to hurt others. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Maybe I am, or maybe I’m being manipulated. Her skills in that regard are extraordinary.
“Can I ask you about your relationship with Iisa? I gather you two were very close. And about how you came to have a sexual relationship with her husband. Given your friendship, it seems an unusual state of affairs. No pun intended.”
She turns off her overt sexuality, puts her foot back in her boot. Her voice becomes matter-of-fact. “Years ago, I met Iisa at a party. We did a lot of coke-we always did a lot of drugs together-and one night we noticed that we look a great deal alike. We started doing our hair and makeup the same, for fun. We even had sex once, just to see what it would be like to fuck yourself, but we weren’t that into it. We were high one night, and Iisa decided we should trick Ivan and get him to fuck me, to see if he would notice the difference. Iisa liked to watch, so she hid and videotaped it. That night, Ivan and I found we have symbiotic fetishes, and history, as they say, was made. Fucking Ivan bored Iisa. She decided to do him a favor, and let me do it for her. Iisa even convinced Ivan to hire me to work at Filippov Construction. I became, in a manner of speaking, part of the family.”
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