Helsinki White

3

On the evening of Friday, February fifth, Milo, Sweetness and I committed our first heist. As the national chief of police, Jyri is able to collate a great deal of information from police around the nation, and he also has a cordial relationship with Osmo Ahtiainen, the minister of the interior. Among his other duties, Ahtiainen heads SUPO. Ahtiainen also has amicable and cooperative relationships with his counterparts in both Estonia and Sweden. Through his own position and relationship with Ahtiainen, Jyri has access to a mountain of information.

Jyri had fed me dossiers on the Finnish and Swedish Gypsies and information on the drug deal. They were to meet at the dog park set on top of the hill in the neighborhood of Torkkelinmaki at seven p.m. It’s a good meeting place. A wide-open area, plenty of people around letting their dogs run and play together.

I told Kate where I was going. She grimaced, told me not to get hurt, but made no attempt to dissuade me. Milo, Sweetness and I showed up at six and sat on park benches in a triangle around the park. My idea was to wait until the Gypsies arrived and for all of us to slowly amble toward them. We would have them surrounded, draw weapons and surprise them, take their weapons if they were armed, then just grab up their dope and money and get the hell out.

As I sat waiting, I decided it was an ill-thought-out and dangerous plan. I’m a lousy shot. Sweetness had never fired a gun. All four of the targets were hardened criminals, likely armed, and might prefer to fight. I pictured a gun battle at close quarters, stray rounds cutting down dogs and their owners. It ending with all of us lying dead on the ground, dogs sniffing our corpses. We had planned all along for Milo to attach global positioning system tracking devices to their vehicles before the heist, to make ripping them off again in the future easier. I called off the armed robbery and told Milo to just GPS their vehicles. We would B amp;E them later.

And so we did. We watched the men trade backpacks, shake hands, and drive away in two separate cars. They drove about six blocks, parked, locked their cash and contraband in the trunks of their vehicles, and went together into a shithole bar to celebrate the event. We followed, Milo picked their car locks, and within five minutes, we had their money, dope and three handguns.

The following evening, we did the same again. This time, we B amp;Eed a luxurious home in the Helsinki suburb of Vantaa. The dealer was a dentist running a drug business on the side. Sweetness surveilled his house beginning in early evening. The dentist went out for a Saturday night on the town. We didn’t know when he would get back, so we waited. He returned home, shit drunk, in a taxi at about four thirty a.m.

When he turned out the lights, we gave him a half hour to pass out and, using flashlights dimmed with red lenses, went through the house like we owned it. We found several grocery bags behind a shoe rack in a hall closet. They were filled with loose, used bills, mostly in small denominations. Milo booted up the dentist’s computer and installed viral software so that he could monitor every keystroke, track his e-mails. Milo could use the computer as if he owned it from the comfort of his own home. He also installed software into the dentist’s cell phone so he could eavesdrop on his calls and read his text messages. We now owned the dentist. These technological intrusions became our modus operandi.

When I got home, I changed Anu and fed her with breast milk we kept in the fridge. This became my nightly post-heist habit. I also usually manned the breast pump. It made me feel more like part of the process.

The next day, I asked Milo and Sweetness to help me sort, band and count the dentist’s money. In early afternoon, they came over. Kate and Anu were napping in the bedroom. Sweetness wanted to play DJ, put on a Thelonius Monk album. We dumped out bills from seven grocery bags, sat on the floor and start sorting them. Milo and I went out to the balcony once in a while for smoke breaks. Sweetness uses nuuska.

The first time Kate saw Sweetness stick nuuska in his lip, she was both curious and disgusted. He took out a can of snuff, packed a syringe tube with it, and pressed it into his upper lip. I explained to her that it’s like American snuff, but drier, and users don’t have to spit juice. She asked why she couldn’t see a lump under his lip where he put it in. I told her it had salt or some irritant in it, which abraded the tissue, so that nicotine would hit the user’s system faster.

Over time, it cuts a hole deep through the gum. Nuuska users like it better after the hole cuts and rots through, because the nesting place made it unnoticeable and less messy. She was appalled. Sale of nuuska is illegal in Finland, so people buy quantities of it from the shop on the ferry to and from Sweden for themselves and their friends, and tobacconists keep it under the counter for preferred customers. Police ignore the infraction. Some of them enjoy their nuuska as well. I got hooked on nicotine with it when I was a young athlete. It’s popular among hockey players.

Sweetness took breaks and went outside, he claimed, for fresh air. He was lying, and I wondered what he was hiding.

After a couple hours, I noticed that a car, an Acura, had been parked across the street for a couple hours, wedged in a slot cut by a plow in the snowbank. I thought I caught a glimpse of binoculars. I asked Milo and Sweetness to go out and investigate.

“Yes, pomo-boss,” Sweetness said, put on his coat and made for the door. Milo trailed behind. I went out on the balcony to watch. I must have asked Sweetness not to call me pomo at least a dozen times, told him that if he has to call me anything, to call me Kari. Milo approached the driver’s-side door, Sweetness the passenger’s side. Milo held his police card up to the glass. The driver’s-side window rolled down. The man reached toward an inner coat pocket. Milo drew his pistol so fast that I barely saw it. Milo hammered the man in the face and head with the butt of his Glock multiple times. I heard him scream.

The other watcher went for his pistol. Sweetness smashed the passenger’s-side window with his elbow-protected by his overcoat-and reached through the window. He grabbed the man’s shoulder with a massive hand and the man howled in pain. Sweetness held the man in check. Milo took their wallets, checked their identities. He tossed the wallets back into the car. The men drove away.

Milo and Sweetness came back inside. Milo laughed. “I just beat the fuck out of a SUPO agent,” he said.

“I asked you to investigate, not rearrange his face,” I said.

“He reached inside his coat. He could have been reaching for a weapon.”

I didn’t criticize further. Milo was right to stop him, even if he was overzealous.

So the secret police were watching us. I didn’t know if it was a big deal or not. I had a meeting with Jyri the next day. I would ask him about it then. We finished counting the money. Two hundred and fifty-two thousand euros. We’d stolen almost half a million that weekend. A good start. I figured what the fuck, and tossed the boys packets of ten thousand each. “This is a onetime event, I’m not even taking one for myself, but these are bonuses for a job well done,” I said.