Helsinki Blood

39

We make an early visit to see Ai. Sweetness was right to recommend him. He has his shit together. He’s showered, dressed, made coffee and has pulla-sweetbread-frozen, not fresh, but hot from the oven in case we haven’t eaten yet. He sits in his throne and chain-smokes. We supplicants pull up chairs near to him. We accept coffee and pulla. I notice the coffee is some expensive special blend.

“Everything has been done as per your requests,” he says to me, “and since those methods failed, we’ve gone a step further.

“Cars were tailed to all seventeen houses of prostitution,” he says. “All license numbers were taken from the cars, but I realized that the plates could be switched at will, so all the cars were keyed.”

I don’t know the term. “Keyed?”

“A key was raked just over the gas tank of each car, an inch or two of paint scraped off, to make the vehicles easily identifiable. In addition, although each supposed diplomat was photographed, he was also mugged.” He hands me a big pile of wallets and passports. “To make the people you seek even more recognizable, each was assaulted and damage done to his face.”

“You’re quite thorough,” I say.

“The amount you paid us buys thoroughness. Lastly, each and every house of prostitution was searched. The girl you’re looking for isn’t in any of them. I’m sorry to have failed you. No effort was spared.”

I believe him. “You did a good job,” I say. “I may call upon you again. Or, if you want or need something, feel free to call me.”

“Our business is concluded,” he says, and stands, signaling that we’re dismissed.

• • •

IT SEEMS like a long time since Milo and I pulled a B amp;E together, although it was really only two or three months ago. We haven’t lost the knack. We’re in the Russian trade delegation office by six thirty a.m. and out by seven. All my hopes are fulfilled. A cardboard box in the supply room is full of passports in no order, just tossed into it helter-skelter as girls were taken in. We’ll take them with us when we leave.

They bother to neither shut down nor password-protect the one computer in the office, I assume because the protection of diplomatic immunity has made the Russians involved lax and careless. It contains names, addresses and phone numbers. I thought a hundred seventy-nine women and only seventeen apartments didn’t match up. The records in Sasha’s iPad were incomplete because he was only privy to information about their prostitutes in Helsinki, whereas this is a regional office. The network extends to Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, and other cities as well.

The names of which people are responsible for which women are in a list, by country. The Finns who work for the organized-crime group in the Russian diplomatic corps are also listed, along with bookkeeping records of their pay. I ask Milo to do a search and look for any information about Loviise. I hope that they have a record of her, including her current location. If so, we could go and get her right now. There’s nothing, my hopes are dashed. Milo just boots it down and takes it with us, power cord and all. The ring can be rolled up at any time now. I’m just waiting on Milo’s assassination Go Day to release the info.

The discord between Milo and me is gone, or at least gone to the wayside for the time being. The productive morning pleased him as much as it did me. I spend most of the day reading Ed McBain. Kate bought an e-reader so she can download books. Rather than wait weeks and pay exorbitant shipping rates from the U.S. or UK to Finland, she can have them within minutes at a lower cost. She spends most of the day on the davenport, reading a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. She tells me she doesn’t want me to accompany her to therapy today. She feels good, confident enough to travel alone.

This trip really has become a summer vacation, and when I put the coming massacre out of my mind, I feel relaxed and peaceful. It’s not hard to do. I can’t bring myself to care about the coming demise of the bastards who set out to hurt my family. My main role, it’s becoming clear, is that of chief cook and bottle washer. I look at cookbooks, plan a braised rabbit for the evening meal. That night, Kate and I make tentative, rather bungling love, like a couple of shy and inexperienced teenagers.

Quiet living, sans a houseful of cops and talk of crime, death and mayhem, brings us together. We quickly develop a pleasant daily routine. I’m wealthy. I start to consider retiring, think about spending my life raising my daughter, start thinking I would like a second child. This is one of the few times in my life that I’ve felt a sense of harmony.

Then Tuesday comes and blots all this out. Kate leaves for therapy. I play with Anu, and Milo knocks on the door. I won’t have to take a bus to Helsinki to murder Jan Pitkanen. Judging by the GPS tracker on his car, he’s coming to me.

I ask a stupid question. “How did he find us?”

“Duh. You’re on record as owning this house, and my boat has a GPS. He is a fucking secret police detective, after all.”

Maybe this was inevitable. It makes me especially angry because I have no choice but to put Anu to bed and leave her alone. I’ve never done that before. I change clothes fast. Put on my bulletproof vest and a shirt and jacket over it. Milo’s not looking. I slip the quarter of a million I borrowed from Sweetness into one jacket pocket in case there’s the slightest chance to end this without blood, and my silenced Colt into a holster under it. Milo can follow Pitkanen’s car with his iPad. It’s synced with his computer.

We have no vehicle, so we just walk, at a snail’s pace because it’s all I can do, in his general direction. His car comes toward us, he recognizes us, and slows from a distance, I suppose, having lost his element of surprise, considering his best course of action. He pulls up beside us. “Meet me in the cathedral,” he says.

Great. The oldest parts of the cathedral-a small church for such a lofty description, it holds about seven hundred and fifty people-dates from the 1300s. It’s been at least partially destroyed several times over, the latest being in 2006, when the roof was burned, an act of arson. Still, most of it as it exists is hundreds of years old, and it’s a beautiful place, a place where one can feel the presence of God, and we’re about to desecrate it.

We see his parked car. He got there well ahead of us. It’s either stake out his car and wait, which isn’t an option, because I have an untended infant at home, or walk in the front doors and see what happens. A church is supposed to be a place of refuge. I hope he chose it for that reason.

We step in and the doors close behind us. The church is empty except for us. I hear clatter clatter clatter, and see Milo fall. I hear the same sound three more times and feel like Mike Tyson hit me with a combo to the chest, but I stay upright. Pitkanen took a place in a pew about thirty paces into the church and on the left for protection, and with a silenced pistol, shot us both as we walked in. If we hadn’t worn bulletproof vests, we’d both be dead now.

“Goddamn it,” I say, “this is the house of God. Can’t we kill each other outside?”

“That,” he says, “is exactly why we’re here.”

I say, “Sorry about a few scars on your face. I sympathize, have some of my own. And it’s always a damned shame when your wife can’t get along with your girlfriend. But this is fucking mental.”

He answers. “I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, he would not have sent a scourge like me upon you.”

I get it. He’s so crazy that he makes Milo seem levelheaded and lucid.

Also, it’s evident that he’s a crack shot. I see his head disappear as he ducks down. I motion for Milo to go to the left, and I walk down the center aisle.

Pitkanen pops his head up, and I fire. The shot goes high and wild and thunks into a pew far beyond him. But it makes him keep his head down, and he’s trapped between Milo and me. I see Milo fire and hear his slide clatter. He stays low and quiet, so I guess he missed but at least kept Pitkanen trapped in place. These silenced weapons make me feel like we’re in a silent movie. I’m Tom Mix, here I come. I get to the row he’s hiding in. He shoots me in the heart twice more. I see the slide of his pistol is all the way back, so the gun is empty. He has to stop to reload. I don’t even try to shoot him. My pistol pointed at him disconcerts him and slows him down. I hop toward him on my good leg and throw myself on top of him instead.

He struggles, but I’m bigger and stronger than he is. I pin him down and reach under his shirt. He’s also wearing a bulletproof vest. I pull it up and jam the muzzle of my Colt up and under it, until I feel the underside of his rib cage. I fire four times through his vital organs. He goes slack. Dead-fish eyes stare at me.

I grab my cane, and use it and the pew to push myself up. I call out. “Milo, you alive?”

I can’t see him. He’s still on the floor. “Yeah, it just hurts like a motherfucker.”

“Well, get up and come over here.”

He does it, weaving and staggering.

“Would you go through his pockets and find his car keys? We’ve got to get him out of here, and I have to go home. Anu is there by herself. Kate will shit a brick if she gets home before me.”

It’s the long way out, but the cathedral has a small and much less noticeable side door. I feel a sense of the ridiculous as the two of us, both handicapped, and having just taken the equivalent of a vicious beating, grunt, groan and swear as we drag him away. There’s no damage to the church, except for some slugs buried in wooden pews and spent brass that will create a legendary mystery, and Pitkanen leaves no blood trail as we drag him away.

We’re lucky. Pitkanen is just an average-sized man. And even luckier because Milo isn’t strong enough to heft him up with one arm and dump him in the trunk of his own car, but I am. So we drive away and park not too far from my house.

I tell Milo he doesn’t have to explain his disappearance to his wife, but I do, so he’s in charge of body disposal. I make it home fifteen minutes before Kate. By that time, I’m so stiff I can barely move. I say I took Anu out to Milo’s boat. We were getting off and he was about to hand her to me, but I fell and hit my chest hard on an upright support beam. She asks to look at it. The left side of my chest is black and blue and swollen. She asks if I need an X-ray. I say no. Finnish style, she blows on it to make it better, instead of kissing it like an American. She’s becoming more of a Finn every day.