The Red King of Helsinki

by Helena Halme

  * * *

  Pia didn’t feel as brave as she had done earlier. Hiding in Anni’s parents’ bedroom had made her feel as though she was still being held by the KGB. When she saw Iain on the landing she could have cried there and then. She could see Heikki didn’t like the man. She herself should dislike him after all the lies about the drugs he’d told her mother. But Iain had apologised, and he seemed to be the only person who could and would help her find Anni. And he seemed to want to protect Pia and her mother. She felt like crying when she thought about Anni.

  ‘Is she OK, do you think?’

  Iain didn’t reply for a while, but then said, ‘Yes I should think so.’

  Pia looked long and hard at Iain. Was he telling the truth? Would he tell her if he thought the KGB had the Linnonmaa family?

  ‘Who was the girl you were talking to outside?’ Iain asked.

  ‘Sasha.’

  ‘Do you know her last name?’ Iain was scribbling into his notebook.

  ‘Roche.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a Finnish name?’

  ‘I think her father is French or something.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Iain was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Pia, ‘And is she friends with Heikki?’

  Pia stared at Iain. His large eyes settled on Pia’s for a while with a sad look. Then he looked away, as if he was a little embarrassed.

  Pia remembered the way Sasha had asked Heikki in a mock whisper to call her. How they’d been standing close to one another at the smoking place, and the conversation she’d obviously interrupted outside the lockers in the entrance hall of the Lyceum. And when Pia had accused Sasha of trying to get it on with Heikki, she’d called her a ‘stupid girl’.

  When Pia said nothing, Iain coughed and said, ‘I assume they are, hmm, friendly?’

  Pia decided she might as well tell him everything.

  ‘Pia, can you do something for me?’ Iain finally said after they’d discussed all that had passed that evening. ‘I’m not going to let you out of my sight. The Colonel has agreed that I will give you constant surveillance. But, and this is very, very important, Pia. Do you always wear that colourful scarf?’

  ‘I can do,’ Pia said, puzzled.

  ‘Can you wear it from now on, or at least until I tell you not to?’

  ‘Of course, but what…’

  ‘Listen,’ Iain said, interrupting Pia, ‘if you can’t see me, stop and take your scarf off. If you still don’t see me, make your way here to the Council.’

  ‘But Kovtun said I should keep away from the Council.’

  Iain was quiet for a moment. Then he dug something out of his pocket. ‘This will get you in quickly.’

  Pia took a small brass key from Iain’s hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She felt grateful towards Iain, and less alone with the awful fear she felt for Anni.

  Iain smiled and said, ‘And now I will take you home.’ He patted Pia on her arm.

  Pia said, ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Heikki and Sasha. Why are you so interested in them?’

  Iain looked at Pia for a long time, as if judging whether she was strong enough to cope with what he was about to tell her. ‘There’s no reason. We’re just making sure no one knows of Kovtun’s plans to defect.’

  Pia was glad Iain walked her home. Even though she could tell he wasn’t pleased about it. All that she had learned that day was going around in her head as they walked briskly along Kasarminkatu towards her block of flats. It was dark, but the street lights and the snow made it perfectly easy to see. Pia glanced sideways at Iain. He still looked cold in his new coat and his breath froze in the air, making it seem as if he was puffing on a cigarette. Pia looked up and down the street. A tram was turning the corner. No sign of the Russian. Iain must have frightened him off.

  * * *

  Pia could not sleep at all that night. She knew there was a connection between the KGB and Anni’s disappearance, and that connection must have something to do with the planned defection of the blond-haired Russian. If only she could talk to her mother! But Iain had warned her not to say a word about her theory to her mother. As if she would blab again, although it would be difficult not to talk to Heikki tomorrow.

  14

  Maija woke early. She’d spent the whole night trying to get to sleep. Now she felt exhausted. Her bedside clock showed 6.05. She put on her dressing gown and walked over to Pia’s door. Silently, she opened it and peered inside. The girl was fast asleep, her head half buried inside the duvet. Maija closed the door soundlessly and went over to the telephone in the hall.

  The number she dialled answered immediately.

  She listened to the man’s voice and said, ‘I’ll meet you at 7.30.’

  Again she listened and said, ‘Alright. Goodbye.’

  Maija put the phone down and for a while stood still in the hall, staring at the receiver.

  Before Maija left the flat half an hour later, she wrote a note for Pia, saying she had to get into work early. She often did overtime on Saturday mornings, so it shouldn’t rouse Pia’s suspicions. It was still dark outside and bitterly cold. As she waited at the tram stop, moving her feet about to keep warm, she wondered how she hadn’t made the connection before. Though how that would have changed anything she didn’t know. It was pure chance their two daughters were the same age, and ended up in the same class in the same school. Maija knew that by meeting the man she was entering the world she had chosen to leave eighteen years before. But now Pia was involved. She would have to do everything she could to protect her. She needed to know what he was up to. Why he wanted to see her.

  Jukka Linnonmaa hadn’t really aged. Even under the harsh lights of the Happy Days Café, he looked youthful. Perhaps the odd line around his mouth betrayed an age over forty, for surely he was older than Maija? He still had all of his fair hair, falling softly onto his forehead.

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ she said to Mr Linnonmaa.

  He stared at his cup of black coffee. He looked up, surprised, ‘Neither have you, Miss Kuortamo.’

  ‘Mrs Mäkelä, now.’

  ‘Of course’

  Neither spoke for a moment. Maija was thinking how eighteen years ago their paths had hardly touched. Mr Linnonmaa had been far above her in the Customs hierarchy. Unlike Maija, he wasn’t based at the border crossing in Vaalimaa, near the town of Hamina. She’d spoken with him on the telephone most days, but only seen him a few times. Were it not for all those rumours among the staff about his true role, Maija was sure she wouldn’t have remembered him. But it was the voice, his voice, after he called the second time last night that reminded her. Was that what this was all about?

  ‘Mrs Mäkelä…’ Mr Linnonmaa began.

  ‘Maija, please.’

  Linnonmaa looked up and smiled briefly, ‘I’m Jukka.’ He reached his hand across the table to Maija. How old-fashioned, Maija thought. She accepted Linnonmaa’s gesture and shook his hand.

  ‘Maija, I’ve asked to see you because I need to explain something to you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Has Pia told you that I’m a diplomat now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maija recalled what her former work colleagues had said about this man. That he had special duties at the border, to do with the illegal immigrants from the Soviet Union.

  * * *

  Maija’s degree in Russian language had always been a problem. First her mother was against it. Maija’s grandfather fought the Reds in the Civil War in 1917, and her father the Russians twenty-five years later in the Winter War. His family were from Karelia.

  ‘It was the war that killed him,’ her mother said. Maija knew it was the years at the Lappeenranta paper mill that had given him lung cancer but said nothing.

  Maija’s aunt talked about the two evacuations from Karelia, where 400,000 had to leave their homes and livelihoods. Her home as well as the childhood home was near Viipuri, now beyond the border in the Soviet Union. Maija’s aunt wa
s a fierce woman. Her father’s older sister, she had a small build, dark eyes and a temper that could take her from burst of anger to fits of laughter in seconds. Maija was a little afraid of Aunt Eija. She was the cook in the family and would turn up before parties to make her Karelian pies and complicated cinnamon pastries and cookies. Her pies had the thinnest of rye casings and the rice filling was lathered with butter. ‘We didn’t have any luxuries like butter after the war,’ she’d tell Maija, when, as a little girl, she was ordered to help Aunt Eija. Auntie’s husband had died in the war; how, Maija wasn’t ever quite sure. She had visions of Uncle Kaarlo in a fist fight with a tall Russian while their large farmhouse with beautifully carved porches was in flames in the background. Aunt Eija carried pictures of the farmhouse they had lost as well as a black-and-white portrait of her dead husband in her purse. She never lost an opportunity to take the pictures out and decry the Soviet state.

  ‘We lost our homeland, but Finland kept her independence. We didn’t lose the war against Stalin’s Russia, and we were never occupied like those poor Baltic states.’

  But Maija took to the Russian language easily. She even loved the impossible alphabet. Her teacher got her a scholarship to Jyväskylä University. When she left, her mother stayed inside the wood-panelled house, sitting with her back to the window, refusing to wave her goodbye. The night before Maija was due to leave, she’d cried and said, ‘You’ll come back a Communist, and then all the pain and suffering your father, grandfather and uncle went through fighting for an independent Finland will be in vain.’ Maija tried to explain how the language had been there long before Stalin and that she’d have nothing to do with politics, but her mother wouldn’t listen.

  After graduation she had several job offers. Most of her friends were married with small children and no money while Maija took a well-paid job with the Customs in Hamina as a translator. Whether it was Maija’s good work prospects or the three lonely years her mother spent in the little cottage by the lake in Lappeenranta, while Maija was at university, when she came home her mother was finally placated. She arranged a feast with Aunt Eija, with a long table laden with Karelian pies, meat stew, pastries and cookies. There was even home-brewed beer, sahti, and strong black coffee, which some of the men strengthened with large glugs of grain vodka.

  The first months in Hamina were her happiest. Maija loved the translation work. She had money to buy what she wished. She went home at regular intervals to see her mother. The Customs had built a new block of flats and Maija got a small studio with an alcove kitchen. Many of her colleagues were young and lived in the same kind of flats. After a few months she was asked to interpret for a Russian man who’d crossed the border. He was unusually thin with wispy blonde hair and an untidy beard. He never stopped smiling, as his eyes darted from Antti, the Finnish Immigration Officer to Maija. After he’d given his name and occupation – carpenter – he was asked why he wanted to settle in Finland

  ‘I am escaping Communism.’

  Maija translated.

  Antti lifted his head from the pad he was writing on. He leant back in his chair and looked at Maija. He coughed and said, ‘Miss Kuortamo, can I have a word?’

  He took Maija to a long corridor running the length of the old red-brick building.

  ‘This is a little awkward,’ Antti said.

  Maija looked at his pale eyes. She’d only met Antti once before, at a drinks party thrown in the first week of Maija’s new job by one of her new friends from the customs office. He was engaged to a pretty dark-haired girl who worked in the grocery shop in Hamina. The girl had been a little drunk, holding onto Antti’s arm the whole of the evening, so Maija hadn’t really spoken to him at all.

  ‘Did I do something wrong?’

  Maija was afraid she’d spoiled her first big chance in her new job. She preferred simultaneous translation. It gave her a thrill. There was no time to go back and correct your mistakes. You had to be right first time. Compared to interpretation, editing and re-editing long passages of translation was boring.

  Antti looked down at Maija. He was a head taller than her.

  ‘No, it’s just that these Russians…’ Antti paused, ‘they don’t know what they’re saying. But if you translate everything, I have to note it down.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Antti looked up and down the corridor where they stood. He came closer to Maija and lowered his voice, ‘If I put he’s here for political reasons, we’ll have to send him back. Finland’s neutral, remember?’ he said and winked.

  Maija had been naïve, even stupid. Of course, she must be careful. She nodded. Antti followed her back to the interview room.

  The carpenter had been lucky. Most of the Russians trying to cross the border were shot by Soviet marksmen before they reached Finland. The ones who got through were helped by Antti and a few others who shared his convictions, but many were marched back to the Soviet officials. ‘Shipped to Siberia if they’re lucky,’ Antti said to Maija.

  ‘The KGB are all powerful in Finland. They can take whoever they like and do whatever they like to them.’ Antti shrugged his shoulders, ‘We just do as much we can. Which isn’t much.’

  This was October 1961, the same year the Soviet Union closed the border between East and West Berlin and started shooting anyone trying to climb over the wall and escape to the West.

  Linnonmaa had been Antti’s superior. Maija thought Antti must have reported to him, and he often phoned Maija up to ask for some clarification or other on the transcripts. Maija never found out what happened to Antti. Whether he ever married the dark-haired girl or not.

  Maija hung her head. She didn’t want to remember how, indirectly, she had betrayed that poor man, and others like him, who thought they had reached safety in Finland. She’d believed that the immigration process was fair. It was only in the month she gave in her notice that she’d realized the Russian had not been granted refugee status in Finland. In the files she happened on accidentally, not one appeal was accepted. And there were at least a hundred names on the list she saw. The man had told Maija he’d be imprisoned, if not killed, if he was returned to the Soviet authorities.

  But when she found out the truth, Maija was engaged to be married to Ilkka, and ready to start her new life in Helsinki. She hadn’t wanted to get involved in politics, not with a baby growing inside her. So she never spoke to anyone about her work. But every time she saw a Russian in Helsinki, she remembered and felt ashamed she hadn’t done anything. Like the tiny Finnish nation, in the face of the whole of the Soviet machinery, Maija was helpless. With bitter disappointment she realised she had little of the fighting spirit, sisu, that her father and grandfather had displayed in standing up to the Russians.

  She looked over to Linnonmaa, who was stirring his coffee with a concentrated effort.

  ‘It is rather delicate,’ he said.

  Maija waited.

  Linnonmaa settled his pale blue eyes on Maija and continued, ‘I don’t want you to be alarmed, but something the girls have got involved in…something they shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Drugs? But the other night on the telephone you said they weren’t into…’

  ‘No, not drugs. It’s to do with diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.’

  Maija stared at Jukka Linnonmaa. Had he heard of her snooping all those years ago? How did her work then have anything to do with Pia?

  A door behind them opened, letting in a noisy group of women. A chill wind blew in and reached down the back of Maija’s spine. She shivered and pulled her cardigan tighter around her.

  Jukka Linnonmaa leant closer to Maija and said, ‘It’s Anni who’s gone and…’ he sighed and said, ‘she is such a kind girl. She’s befriended these Commies at school. It’s rather difficult for me as they have contacts to the Soviet Embassy and…’

  ‘What has this got to do with my daughter?’

  ‘Well, Pia is friends with them too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh
dear, this is rather difficult.’ Linnonmaa smiled again; it was the same insincere facial expression he had made when they’d started the conversation.

  ‘Go on,’ Maija said, glancing at her wrist watch. She wasn’t in a hurry, it was only half past eight, but she wanted Linnonmaa to get to the point.

  ‘Alright, the friend I’m talking about is Heikki Tuomila.’

  15

  Leena spotted the man as soon as she walked out of the gym hall. It had become her little Friday treat to take the tram to Stockmann’s, instead of having lunch in the dreary staff room at the Lyceum. She usually chose a luxurious tuna salad or an open rye sandwich in the café on the top floor of the store. The place was always busy and she enjoyed watching suited businessmen or well-dressed ladies enjoy their coffee and sandwiches. Afterwards she’d admire the clothes on the first floor. She rarely had the money for the expensive items, but once she’d bought a pair of French trousers; they were still the best piece of clothing in her wardrobe.

  The man was standing in the exact same spot as last Monday. He had on a different coat, a little more sensible for the weather, but he still looked foreign, and come to think of it, cold. No Stockmann’s lunch today. This was her chance. She’d show Vadi what a clever woman she was!

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Hmm, sorry?’ The man looked shocked. I’m not that frightening, Leena thought. Perhaps her teacher demeanour was a bit too overpowering. She’d just finished another frustrating session with the Friendship Tournament team, and Pia’s lack of co-ordination was sending her over the edge.

  ‘Actually, I wondered if you had a cigarette?’ Leena tried to soften the tone of her voice.

  ‘Hmm, no, sorry, don’t smoke.’ He still looked like a frightened rabbit, not at all the evil character Vadi had made him out to be. Suppose he was just following orders. Leena had to change tactics. ‘Are you waiting for Pia?’ Now this was bold.