Helsinki Blood

by James Thompson

  “What if she won’t come?”

  “Do whatever it takes. Don’t give her a choice. And there’s more you need to know.” I told him about the shattered window, what the brick said about ten million ways to die, and the tear gas. “We shouldn’t have stolen that money,” I said.

  I heard waves break, him suck on a pipe, and the crackle of burning marijuana.

  “Do you have any idea how goddamned hard it is to sail and fish with only one good hand? We didn’t steal it, we earned it. If we hadn’t taken it, the national chief of police and the interior minister would have, and then blamed us for it anyway. We were fucked if we did or fucked if we didn’t. We might as well be rich.”

  He was right. “We have to think of our families,” I said. “They could hurt them to get at us. I’m thinking about your mother.”

  He muttered “Fuck,” then went silent for a minute. “Mom is here, I can’t think of anywhere safer, unless I send her out of the country. You know, Vaara, you’re a real fucking buzzkill.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’ll be back in Helsinki in about four hours,” he said. “And don’t worry. I promise I’ll bring Kate home to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and we rang off.

  9

  Sweetness and Jenna watched TV, disappeared occasionally for fuck sessions, sipped beers. Mirjami continued the role of Anu’s nanny. Changed her, fed her, played with her. I gave her a couple hundred euros for grocery and household money. The keys to Kate’s Audi hung on a nail by the front door. I told her to use it if she liked. She went home and got clothes, makeup, the things she needed for an extended stay, and grocery shopped.

  We still hadn’t discussed how long she should stay. I didn’t mention it. It was clear that Sweetness, my Luca Brasi, would stay until these crises had passed. As such, Jenna would also be a permanent member of the household until then. I supposed Mirjami had the same in mind. I hid my exasperation with unwanted houseguests. It wasn’t their fault that I wanted to be alone. I thanked Mirjami for being such a great help to me, especially now, when I needed it the worst. My gratitude was sincere. I said I could never possibly repay her. This gladdened her. She said her twenty-third birthday was two days away, for me to do something nice for her.

  I sat with Anu, Katt and a crime novel, Rööperi, by Harri Nykänen. Anu was in the first stages of learning to talk. “Äi-äit-äi-äit.” Mirjami wanted to believe Anu was calling her äiti—mother—but that was wishful thinking. Anu was just babbling, as children her age are wont to do. Men came to replace my windows with bulletproof glass. At about six by eight feet, the one that had been shattered was a big job. I took us all down the street to Hilpeä Hauki to sip beers until they were done.

  • • •

  HILPEÄ HAUKI—the Happy Pike—is unassuming, furnished with simple dark wood, polished brass bar fixtures and beer taps. Sofas and padded chairs surround low tables in the corners. Most patrons were outside on the patio. It was vacation season and the sun was shining, they could drink the day away. The bar’s front window is made of several glass panels. They can be pushed and folded to collapse together on one side and create an open-air bar. Conversations and a gentle breeze wafted inside. I texted Milo and told him where we were.

  Mike came over and greeted us.

  “Seems like you’re living in here,” I said. “Don’t any other bartenders feel like coming to work?”

  “They’re mostly on vacation, so I’m working open to close by myself most days.”

  “Sounds like no fun.”

  “The paychecks are fun. Can we have a word?”

  “Sure. You can say whatever you need to in front of these folks, though.”

  “Are the girls old enough to drink?”

  Jenna isn’t. Not legally, but she drinks like a fish, so on a social level, she’s well beyond her years with booze. And being so well-endowed makes her look older than she is. I lied for her. “Yeah.”

  He leaned over and put his hands flat on the table. Full-sleeve tattoos showed below the rolled-up cuffs of his shirt. He lowered his voice so other customers couldn’t hear. “Are you carrying a gun?” he asked.

  Just to tease him, I pulled the .45 from the holster clipped to my belt at the small of my back and plunked it onto the table. “Want to hang it behind the bar while I drink?”

  He grimaced. “Put that fucking thing away. That’s why I want to talk to you. That kind of shit scares people. That guy you hit with your cane coughed up blood.”

  I didn’t care, said nothing.

  “You’re a police inspector, and I respect that,” he said, “but I’m sheriff in this bar. I don’t want or need help.”

  I saw that I’d really upset him. “I apologize. I know I screwed up when I opened my mouth and threatened that asshole, but when he insulted me, I just lost it for a minute. Like I told you when you asked me then, it was a bad day.”

  He scrutinized me. “Is today a bad day?”

  I had to laugh a little. “Worse.”

  “I’m sorry, but you know where I’m going with this, right?”

  “Yeah, I do. If I keep frightening the good citizens, you’re going to have no choice but to ban me from the bar.”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll behave. This crew I’m with saves me from myself in my darker moments. I’m sorry I put you in an awkward position.”

  He stood upright and put a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks for understanding. I promised to buy you a beer the next time I saw you. What will it be?”

  “A Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. To sweeten my disposition.”

  “And for the rest of you?”

  Jenna got a pilsner. Sweetness took a lager and three shots of kossu. Mirjami got a mineral water. She sat next to me, Anu in her stroller between us. Mirjami reached over and gave my hand a squeeze. “The little one has to be taken care of,” she said, “and I think a few drinks would do you some good.”

  She had a way of making me smile. Her small kindnesses were touching. At that time, she was the only person who didn’t irritate me just by the nature of her existence. Excluding Kate and Anu. For Kate, I felt a mixture of love, anger, dread and fear. We have to be careful who we love in this life. To give others love is to give them the power to destroy us. It’s so easy to love Anu. Unconditional love that she returns out of innocence. I reached into her stroller and she wrapped a tiny hand around my index finger. I wanted to savor her unconditional love now. It wouldn’t last forever.

  Mike brought the drinks. I grabbed a kossu from in front of Sweetness. The shot glass was misted with frost. They kept the kossu in the freezer, as it should be. I knocked it back.

  “Atta boy,” Sweetness said.

  It went down with a cold burn that mellowed into a warmth in my stomach and spread all the way to my fingers and toes. The others talked. I ignored them. I wasn’t thinking, not anything, just being. When my glasses emptied, both beer and kossu, more kept appearing in front of me. Time passed, Milo wandered in, pulled up a chair and sat beside me. We said nothing, just looked at each other. I was certain that, like everyone else, he thought I looked like overwrought shit.

  After a couple minutes, he went to the bar and came back with a cola. “What do you want to see happen here?” he asked.

  “I want to see Kate here. Whatever it takes.”

  “What about her brother?”

  “What about him?”

  “Obviously, Kate isn’t going to come back just because I ask nicely, or she wouldn’t have gone there in the first place.”

  I nodded agreement.

  “So I’ll have to pressure her by threatening to harm John.”

  He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. He had a thick black brace on his right wrist and hand to immobilize them. His fingers stuck out of the end. “Fine,” I
said.

  “As long as he’s there, she’ll always have a place to run to.”

  “Are you asking me if I want you to kill him?”

  He said nothing.

  “No. I don’t want that.”

  “I booked our tickets. My plane leaves in two hours. I have an eleven-hour one-way flight. The return flight is in four days, twenty-six hours including one layover. Give me his address.”

  I memorized it from the return address on the letters John wrote to Kate. All of which asked to borrow money. “Four thirty-seven Grove Acre Drive.”

  Milo took out an iPad, opened Google Earth, and zoomed in on it at street level. Why the fuck didn’t I think of that? My mind wasn’t working right. It was on overload and I hadn’t realized it. I reminded myself that I had to be careful not to make mistakes.

  We saw a small, ramshackle single-family dwelling with a little yard. The street was lined with similar houses on both sides of the street, in various degrees of dilapidation.

  Milo pondered this. “Whoever is harassing you is escalating their methods. However, I don’t think lives are in imminent danger, as it would be more expedient to have just killed you in the first place.”

  I nodded agreement, swilled beer.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  I did.

  “Do you realize you’re in some kind of shock?”

  I thought I was just suffering from a combination of pain and anxiety. “I know I’m not thinking straight. My wife, my home, my body all fucked up. I’ve been coping, but today I feel overwhelmed.”

  “I have to go,” he said. “When I get back, we’ll sort this out and put an end to it.” He handed me a set of keys. “These are to my apartment and gun safe. If you need to take extraordinary measures, go in there and get the right ordnance for the job.”

  I finished off another kossu. “I owe you.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure you’ll have a chance to pay me back.”

  He got up and left. After a while, the window repairmen called and informed me that my windows were now bulletproof. I paid our bill, thanked Mike, and dropped him a fifty as a way of both apologizing for the trouble I’d caused and for the good treatment he’d given us.

  We went back to my apartment. Only the chair, with the deep cuts from glass shards, gave any indication that something untoward had happened here. It was only early evening, but I was so exhausted that I could barely keep my eyes open, and asked Mirjami if she could look after Anu while I napped. She didn’t mind.

  I looked around, tried to be a cop for a few minutes. I stood in front of the big window and imagined I was a sniper looking for a firing position to kill someone in here. That couldn’t happen now, but we were under surveillance, and our watchers had chosen such a place, as evidenced by the tear gas grenade, which had been propelled by a firearm. I could likely see them too, if I knew where to look.

  Sweetness came over and looked out with me. He had no knowledge of such things. He chose civil service over military service, and spent his mandatory time playing with children in a kindergarten instead of with men in the forest playing war games. He asked me what I was doing, and I explained.

  “Pomo”—boss—“you know the number of people likely responsible for all this can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Actually less. It’s just a question of when we get off our dead asses, pay some visits, and put a stop to this bullshit.”

  “Soon,” I said.

  My worry for Kate had been so all-consuming, at first it made the harassment, a brick through a window, seem inconsequential. But at least to some degree, I had come to my senses. Someone crossed a line and I was beyond anger. Things were done that could have hurt my little girl.

  I went into seclusion with the hope that it would bring catharsis, help rid me of anger. Allow me to reach inside myself and find a pacifist buried somewhere in my soul. Instead, I found a vengeful spirit that demanded a price be paid. The noise of the young people drinking, laughing and listening to music made me want to scream at them all to shut the fuck up. I took a sleeping pill and waited for it to kick in. As I fell asleep, visions of murder danced in my head.

  10

  July thirteenth. I wake up, plagued by anxiety, frustration and worry. I want to be alone. My apartment is full of people. My mind is bent. My nerves destroyed.

  I get out of bed and find the others sitting in the dining room. I go out to the balcony to smoke. Sweetness follows me. “Bad news,” he says.

  Just the idea of more bad news pisses me off. He points down at the street. The windows have all been beaten out of my Saab. I’m furious but feel no adrenaline. Although my emotions have returned to some extent, they’re by no means normal. Part of that abnormality is that adrenaline doesn’t accompany rage. I have no fight-or-flight response.

  “It was about four this morning,” he says. “I heard the smashing and pulled on some jeans so I could go down there, but they worked fast and were gone before I could even get a look at them.”

  I’ve been thinking like a victim instead of a predator, working from a defensive mind-set instead of taking the offensive. We must be under constant surveillance in order for our enemies to know the best times to attack us. I do what any cop with half a brain should. I watch for watchers.

  I scan the rooftops. It’s a clear summer day, blue skies and sunshine. I look for the glint of light on optics. And I find it, but not where I thought it would be. It’s in the window of the apartment across the street from mine and one over. It offers a good view of most of my living room. The sun makes a double flare on the optics, so it’s binoculars, not a rifle scope. I tell Sweetness to look without looking.

  He bends over, lights a cigarette and glances up over his cupped hand. He recently started smoking. He used nuuska—a kind of snuff—since he was a kid and so is addicted to nicotine, but women tend not to be turned on by a mouth with tobacco in it, especially since it tends to stick between the teeth, a bit unsightly—women who aren’t smokers themselves tend not to be thrilled by cigarettes either, but even less so by nuuska—so he traded his lungs for love. Plus Milo and I smoke, and Sweetness looks up to and mimics us, especially me.

  “Well, pomo,” he says, “what’s the plan?”

  I think it over. Thanks to cortisone shots taking the edge off the pain, my mind as well as my body is working better today. “I’ll get dressed, then we’ll both go downstairs. I’ll go out the front door and check out the damage done to my Saab. You go out back to the inner courtyard, between the buildings, and circle around the block so they don’t see you. Just press the buzzers for every apartment, someone will let you in, then you go get them and bring them out so we can talk to them.”

  “Get them how?”

  I shrug. “Knock on the door. That usually works. If they ask who it is, say police and hold up your National Bureau of Investigation ID. If they still don’t open, or notice that your ID says you’re a translator instead of a cop, use your silenced .45 as a key and shoot the lock to pieces. If you do, call me. I’ll come up and talk to other cops if they show, to make it seem like a legit bust. I’ll bring some dope to plant on them. If you have to shoot them, try not to kill them. We need to interrogate them.”

  One of the nice things about being a famous cop is that other police, and everyone actually, tend to believe anything I say.

  We get outside. I gimp over to my Saab. There’s a note inside, on the driver’s seat. “There are ten million ways your family could die, too.”

  Someone is working very hard to get me to kill them. About ten minutes later, two men come out the front door of the building they were surveilling us from, Sweetness behind them, doubtless with his pistol at their backs. I lean against my Saab. He walks them over to me. They look like bikers: long hair, biker boots, primary drive chains from motorcycles as belts—handy because they can be used as steel whips or turned sideways an
d swung as flexible bludgeons—and leather vests. They don’t have gang colors, though, so they must be independents. One is rail thin, the other on the chunky side. The kind of blubber that comes from sucking down beer day and night for years.

  I hold up the note threatening my family. Only someone in the know could have written it, because the official story for the media stated that the ten million euros in ransom money had been recovered. A good ploy. Finders keepers and tax free, too. Assuming they can get it back from me and my colleagues.

  “Whatcha gonna do,” Chunky says, “gun us both down here in the middle of the street, in broad daylight?”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” I say, “but you’re doing your best to talk me into it.”

  They both smirk. Skinny leans against the hood of my car. Chunky stands in front of me with his arms crossed and legs spread. The ignoramus says, “Suck my dick, crip.”

  Sweetness kicks out in a kind of high stomp that catches the side of Chunky’s knee and it buckles. I hear the crunch. Ligaments, tendons, all the shit that holds his knee together, give way. He falls to the street and grabs his destroyed knee with both hands. To his credit, he sucks it up, doesn’t make a sound, but the awful pain shows in his eyes.

  “Inspector Vaara doesn’t likes back talk,” Sweetness says.

  “No,” I say, “he doesn’t. No one likes a smarty-pants.”

  “You’re cops?” Skinny asks.

  “So they tell me. But you don’t have to call me inspector. Sir will suffice.”

  I carry what is known as a gadget cane. Especially in the Victorian era, canes were made with every conceivable device built into them. Mine is my most prized possession and worth a fortune. Milo gave it to me, a gift purchased with our ill-gotten gains.