Helsinki White

22

Milo came over the next day to finish his last “synthesizable VHDL model of exact solutions for a three-dimensional hyperbolic positioning system.”

We sat at the dining room table. Kate lay near us on the couch, reading a book. I continued wading through files, a policeman’s nightmare drudgery. I was firm in my belief now, though, that the identity of Lisbet Soderlund’s murderer was an open secret, and the way to solve this case was through the application of intimidation and pressure, or maybe through the application of biographical leverage-blackmail-until someone ratted out the killer.

I viewed these files with a different eye now, deciding who to approach. I agreed with Moreau, and I was now looking for someone who not only was capable of decapitating a woman but was also an accomplished marksman. This narrowed down the field a great deal. The shooter likely had considerable military experience, well beyond that of a typical Finnish conscript.

It occurred to me that Moreau would fill the bill as the murderer. I made some calls, checked with the French police. They refused to provide details, but he wasn’t in Finland at the time of Kaarina Saukko’s murder. However, he was a policeman on a diplomatic passport, listed as an attache at the French embassy.

The disappearance of Antti Saukko troubled me. It was entirely possible, given his relationship with his family, that his kidnappers released him and he chose to simply change his identity and disappear. Pursuing a missing person, unless there is some reason to indicate that said missing person is the victim of a crime, is trampling on that individual’s rights. We have the entitlement to abandon our lives at will, hence the policy of no body, no murder. The fate of the three missing children of kidnapper Jussi Kosonen concerned me, but it wasn’t my case.

My cane leaned against the table beside me. Milo nodded toward it. “You know, you could poison the teeth on that thing if you wanted to. Did you enjoy your party yesterday?”

“Yeah, I really did. And I meant what I said. The cane you gave me is my favorite possession. Do we have any money left after your spending spree?”

“Oodles. Robbing dope dealers is so lucrative, I’m not sure why more people like us don’t take up the occupation.”

“I’m sure some do, but have short-lived careers. Your sawed-off was a good idea. If you load it with something non-lethal, it could get us out of jams if we got stuck, say, pulling a heist and a few guys walked in. Just don’t do anything weird, like load it with bee-hive rounds or rat-poisoned buckshot.”

The dark circles under his eyes deepened. Always a sign of trouble. Milo was both obdurate and rambunctious, an often annoying, even dangerous combination. Now he wanted a fight. “Well, would it be fucking OK with you if I just fucking carry lethal ammo, should fucking necessity arise?”

I tamed him with the unexpected and then switched gears to disengage his temper.

“Sure. Did you spend much time with Moreau?”

I noticed Kate’s eyes drift from her book to us.

“We dropped off Arvid and Sweetness. I don’t know why he thinks he’s fooling anyone hiding his drinking.”

Now we had Kate’s full attention. She hadn’t caught on to Sweetness’s drinking. It can be hard to tell someone is drunk if you never see them sober.

Milo fired up his machine and fiddled with it for a minute. “Goddamn it. These work, but not well enough. They pick up the cell phones but can’t track enough at one time and the range is too short.”

“What do you need?”

Asking was a mistake. Prolix Milo kicked into gear. “I can’t get my hands on one because of its military-grade sales status, and I couldn’t fake my way through it, and even by our standards, they cost a fortune. A GSM A5.1 Real Time Cell Phone Interceptor. It’s undetectable, can handle twenty phones in quad band and four base stations.”

It meant nothing to me and I wasn’t interested. “What did you do after you dropped off the others?”

Milo doesn’t have a raconteur’s bone in his body. “We went to my place and looked at the weapons. A Remington 870 tactical shotgun to handle ballistic breaching lockbuster shotgun rounds. A Heckler amp; Koch UMP machine gun. It’s much like the MP5 but state-of-the-art and made from the latest in advanced polymers. And a.50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle. It’s like something out of Star Wars. The optical ranging system is an integrated electronic ballistic computer…”

He went on. Kate hated this kind of rambling constantly disturbing her tranquillity. This was what she had complained about. It made her feel as if she lived in a police precinct instead of a home, and she had also sacrificed a great deal of privacy having the team ginning around like they lived here.

Milo would have continued but I cut him off. “What do you think of Moreau?”

“He’s a really cool guy. He told me he would teach me how to use the.50 Barrett. Why did you shoot down his idea about selling the heroin?”

“It’s tricky and dangerous. We just keep ripping off dealers. Keep them beaten down.”

Milo switched to Finnish, so Kate wouldn’t understand. “So long as they don’t start a drug war and we have to hide it by dissolving any more bodies in acid. That really skeeved me out.”

But Kate did understand. She set Anu on a cushion, turned around, rested her folded arms on the back of the sofa and her head on her arms. “Pardon me. What was that again? Something about bodies and acid.”

I explained to her what had happened. That one gangster killed another and we had to cover it up, or gangsters would start gunning each other down in the streets, Helsinki Homicide would get involved and inevitably would trail the murders and the reasons behind them back to us.

“We really had no choice,” I said.

Since the beginning of the Cold War, because of its geographic location, Helsinki has been awash in spies. Out of survival instinct, these spies had made an unspoken agreement many years ago, early in the Cold War. Helsinki would be holy ground, a sacred city to which secret warriors could travel without fear. Even after the Cold War, Helsinki remained a city in which both its inhabitants and fringe dwellers existed in relative safety. I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying that tradition.

“Apparently,” Kate said, “I’ve been kept in the dark about some details, but it’s gone something like this. You’ve committed a number of thefts, maybe dozens, I don’t know. But because you didn’t know what you were doing, you stole too much, and a lot of people have died because of it. You incited someone to murder, and you left the body to dissolve in a vat of acid. Am I correct here?”

“Yes.”

Milo was already putting his boots on, making his escape. He needn’t have. She wouldn’t be angry at him. I gave the orders. I was her husband. And he had given her, among other things, a two-thousand-euro bottle of perfume yesterday, as an act of friendship and to make up for her inconvenience. I was alone on the gallows. He shut the door behind him with a soft click.

“This isn’t my home,” Kate said, “it’s a gangster hangout. Has it occurred to you that I might like to have people over, like Aino, friends from the hotel, but I can’t because Milo might slip and mention who’s been killed or body dumped? I don’t even know where Anu and I fit in your life. You’ve changed. You’re colder, more distant. I don’t know if it’s because of your job or your surgery or both.”

I sat down in my armchair and considered which truths to tell her and which not to. I didn’t even know what the truth was. I still couldn’t tell her that I was nearly without emotion and felt little or nothing for her or our child.

“I’m disillusioned,” I said. “I was misled, turned into Jyri’s cat’s-paw. I’m no more than a bagman and an enforcer for corrupt and criminal politicians. Sooner or later I’ll outlive my usefulness and they’ll find a way to dispose of me. I have to find a way to destroy them first. I’ll get money and passports. When the day comes, we’ll disappear.”

“This is insane,” she said, “and can only end badly. We should leave now, take the money you’ve got and go to Aspen. You can use your stolen money and pursue hobbies: take nature photos, collect stamps, whatever.”

“I gave you that opportunity,” I said, “and you declined. I know it wasn’t fair because you felt like you might be granting the last wish of a dying man, but now things are what they are, and I’ll see this job through. I took the job because I wanted to do some good. And before I quit, I will. We may have to leave, but not yet. I’m sorry.”

The news started on television, and we both almost missed it. The main story:

“Winter War hero Arvid Lahtinen committed suicide this morning…”

We were both dumbstruck. Our argument ceased and I turned up the volume. He shot himself outside his house, probably because he didn’t want to decomp for God knows how long before someone found him. He put on a suit, carried a chair outside, and sat while he put the gun to his head. I suppose he thought it would be more dignified than being found in a heap on the wet ground. The reporter speculated on the reasons behind his suicide, discussed the murder charges against him, both domestic and international, and his achievements as a national hero.

Kate cried. “Why?” she asked me.

I thought what sparked his action was his time here, the remembrance of what it was like to be part of a family, the realization that he would be old and alone now, had nothing to look forward to but a slow death in an aged, soon-to-be-failing body. Before long, illness, the loss of his home and independence. And he would have to do it alone, without his beloved wife of half a century.

“Because he didn’t enjoy life without his wife. Because he knew he had had a good run, but his time was over, and if he left now, he could die with his dignity intact.”

“He was my friend,” Kate said.

“Mine too. He told me that he was leaving everything to me. I should have known then.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. House. Money. Everything.”

Kate sat down next to me in the oversized chair. We were silent together for a while.

“Work with Moreau,” she said. “You fucked up a lot of things because you didn’t have the experience to know better. He does. If you learn, you can achieve some of the good that for some mystifying reason is driving you, and we can stop all this.”

“OK,” I said.

I was Arvid’s heir and so responsible for his funeral arrangements. The service was held in Helsinki’s magnificent and most prestigious church, Tuomiokirkko. It sits atop Senate Square and looks down upon both the city and the sea. The church was full, and the man and what he represented were truly mourned. I acted as a pallbearer. It seemed, after he was laid to rest, that nothing was ever the same again. Especially for Kate. I don’t know if the suicide of a man she called friend awakened something inside her, or killed it.