Behind God's Back (20 page)

“His son Roni's loans were also arranged through Max. He took out loans totalling almost a million euros.”

“Still.”

“You know that Jacobson's daughter Lea is married to the Israeli director of Baltic Invest. Maybe the killer threatened to do something to them?”

My uncle's hands started to tremble as he sipped his tea. This was due to his age, though, not the topic of conversation.

“Did Jacobson offer any reason as to why he intended to pay off the Baltic Invest loan?” I asked.

“He had heard that they were under investigation in Israel. He thought there was something fishy about the company. He was angry with his son-in-law because he had recommended a loan from them even though he was perfectly aware of the scandal.”

“Did he use the word ‘angry'?”

“No, but it was clear from his tone. He told me he had read his son-in-law the riot act, and also spoken to his daughter about it.”

“What feelings did he have about Max's role in the matter?”

“He was irked about that, too. He felt that Max just skimmed off his share and bore no concern or responsibility for the company's credibility. Max had boasted about what a financially solid company Baltic Invest was. Samuel said that he had given Max a piece of his mind, and your brother, too, even though Max was the one who handled all the loans.”

“Did Roni intend to change lenders, too?”

“We didn't discuss that.”

“What's your opinion of Roni?”

I valued my uncle's knowledge of human nature. As a bank director, he had learnt to assess people's character. I remember him telling me that not a single one of his customers had skipped out on a loan. Or one had, but he had a good excuse: he was hit by a car and died.

“Roni is the type who tears down everything earlier generations have built up. There's no way he would have ever been a director if he hadn't been Samuel's son. Samuel would also bemoan Roni's tomfoolery from time to time.”

“What did he mean by tomfoolery?”

“Oh, most recently he'd complained about the affair… When Roni started seeing that former beauty queen.”

“So it wasn't about money or anything more serious?”

“If it was, he didn't tell me.”

“You said that the company's loans couldn't have been used to blackmail Jacobson… But what if Roni had screwed up his finances, and that was used to blackmail his father? How do you think Jacobson would have reacted to that?”

“He would have cleaned up the mess, or at least helped Roni clean it up.”

“What if the mess was too big to be cleaned up with their money?”

“Then it would have had to be a truly massive… How would Roni have ever achieved anything of that scale?”

“I don't know, but I know there are plenty of ways. Some guys are gamblers, some make bad investments, others take drugs. Roni was in Lapland when his father was shot. One possibility is that the father knew of the threat and sent his son away to safety. He locked himself up in the house and told everyone he was sick.”

“Is that what you suspect?”

“It's one possibility that occurred to us.”

“Have you interrogated Roni?”

“No, we've talked to him, that's all. We don't have any evidence of anything like what I just mentioned. Other motives could exist. Does anything else occur to you?”

My uncle leant back in his chair and let his head fall back until his gaze hit the spot where the ceiling and the wall met. It was his typical stance when he was concentrating. It was his way of shutting himself off from the outside world. I let him think in peace.

“Is there room for the victims' Jewishness in your theories? I'm not talking about the most obvious thing, anti-Semitism, but something related to our community. Could that be the factor linking the two cases?”

“That occurred to us, too, but we couldn't come up with the link.”

“How about the Jewish congregation? Jacobson was on the board.”

“But not Max, at least as far as I know.”

“No, but he was on the congregation's security committee ever since your brother resigned.”

“That's not much of a coincidence. Any congregation member who's the least bit active is invited to take a leadership position.”

“It's only been a month and a half. Your brother's resignation was unexpected.”

“Do you know why he resigned?”

“Because of time commitments, evidently. I heard that Silberstein was a little peeved. Max stepped in for him.”

I hadn't heard about this, but I wasn't too up on goings-on in the congregation. I only attended synagogue on the most important holidays, like Yom Kippur, which was coming up way too soon.

“What do you know about the killer?” my uncle asked.

I broke the Criminal Investigations Act by revealing confidential information to him, but with my uncle I knew that I'd get my investment back in spades. Furthermore, I trusted him. He would never do anything that would put me in a compromising position. I told him everything, down to the surprise visit from Sillanpää.

“That's quite the quandary you're in. You could have excused yourself from the case because of Eli, and Lea too.”

“I didn't want to, at least not yet. If anything else comes up, I guess I'll have to.”

“More coincidences. The presumed killer is working for Baltic Invest. Your friend at the Security Police suspects that the killer is here in Helsinki to assassinate a Russian criminal while he attends synagogue. That sounds believable at first, but when you start thinking about it, it doesn't. Not really. In the first place, why kill someone at the synagogue? It's not the easiest place for an operation like that. The synagogue will be monitored and guarded, and making a getaway would be difficult. It would be a lot easier to kill the Russian somewhere else. Let me show you something…”

My uncle rose, retrieved a folder from the glass-fronted bookcase, and handed it to me. It contained press clippings from an Israeli newspaper, some in Hebrew and others in English. They were about Amos Jakov, who was considered one of the wealthiest men in Israel, and delved into the criminal investigations focusing on him and Benjamin Hararin.

“I've been keeping up with the story purely out of my own interest,” my uncle said.

“I heard that the investigations had been called off,” I said.

“That's true. But they might be starting up again. It all depends on one man.”

“Who?”

“Don't you follow events in your spiritual homeland? The Israeli Minister of Justice resigned four months ago, and the new Minister of Justice has announced that the affair will be investigated down to the very bottom. He's a dangerous man; evidently he's so insanely honest that he intends to expose his experience and knowledge of bribes involving politicians from his own political party. He has already revealed how the Mossad sold information gathered through wiretapping to businessmen, and how they made millions off it by buying or selling stock at the right time. One columnist wrote that the new Minister of Justice is so principled that he can look forward to a very short life.”

My uncle's story sparked a vague memory that I sensed was somehow important, but I couldn't get a proper grip on it.

“Who is the new Minister of Justice?”

“Haim Levi. Former secretary of the Labour Party. He has held prominent positions in the party for almost fifteen years. Levi also knows about the Mossad's doings, so they don't have a lot of love for him, either.”

“Haim Levi,” I repeated, as I remembered where I had heard the name. He was the young man posing with his host in the photo in Samuel Jacobson's office. The former exchange student had metamorphosed into a man of influence. No
wonder Jacobson had hung the picture on his wall. I doubted it had been there before Levi's advancement to power player.

I told my uncle about the photo. He furrowed his bushy brows and gazed at me, almost in wonderment.

“So now do you understand?”

“I'm not following…”

“Levi will be paying a visit to Finland soon, and Samuel was one of those responsible for planning the agenda. Last time we met, he said that Levi had announced that he wanted to go and relive old times at their cottage. He was an exchange student here, and stayed with the Jacobsons. My guess is that the target is not some Russian mafioso, it's Levi. And my guess is that your friend at the Security Police knows it, too.”

20

It was starting to feel like, in addition to keeping tabs on me, Sillanpää always tried to screw me over whenever I ran into him. My instincts told me that my uncle was right and that Levi was the killer's true target. But in spite of the political dimensions, Sillanpää's deception felt too egregious. I asked myself what he imagined he was achieving by sending me after some Russian mafioso. Then I answered my own question: he was afraid I would arrest Nurmio before they had accumulated sufficient evidence that he had been hired to kill Levi. If that were the case, Sillanpää had, strictly speaking, told the truth. And it was presumably also true that he wanted to exploit my connections to the Jewish congregation. I had to admit that the mafia man thing was a pretty clever ruse. While Sillanpää was sending me off on a wild goose chase, the information brought in by my investigation would help them crack the Levi case.

I decided that he wanted to hide the true target because it involved foreign policy and the delicate relationship between Finland and Israel. Anything of the sort was too sensitive to turn over to normal criminal investigators. Such matters were hallowed to the Security Police.

After reflecting on it, I eventually decided to see how things progressed without revealing my suspicions to Sillanpää. I'd borrow a page from his book, and bluff.

I decided to start by making the rounds of the bigwigs in the Jewish community. In a sense I had already begun with my uncle and brother, but now I'd step outside the family. I chose Silberstein as my first target.

I didn't beat around the bush; I went straight to his workplace. He was upper management at a large engineering firm, where the lords of millimetre-precision machining and the princes of stress calculations sat in meticulous, modest cubicles staring at their computer screens, as if all earthly wisdom were contained therein.

Silberstein glanced at me with his usual coolness, and I felt like a corporate spy from Apple in the holiest of Microsoft holies. The room as was drab as every other one in the building. Silberstein was no visual maverick. He probably wasn't a maverick in any sense of the word. The bookshelf held company publications, patent legislation and a few other deadly boring yet appropriate volumes. A couple of corporate pennants stood on the windowsill, and a large photograph hung from the wall. It showed Silberstein shaking hands with a guy with a moustache. I took a closer look and realized it was Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, who had won seven gold medals for the US in Munich. Spitz was Jewish.

“Was that taken in Finland?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“No, Jerusalem. Would you mind getting to the point?”

The fact that Silberstein didn't even try to impress me by telling me more about his meeting with Spitz revealed the caste to which he relegated me.

I replied equally brusquely. “I'd be happy to. To begin with, could you tell me what duties Max Oxbaum had in the congregation?”

“What do you mean… what duties?”

“He was on the executive committee. Did he have some particular area of responsibility?”

“Yes. Security.” I didn't laugh, even though I found this amusing. Max's role in the congregation wasn't news to me, but it offered a good entrée to the real matter at hand. “He took over when your brother quit.”

“What did that mean in practice?”

“He represented the congregation and worked with the security company, the police and the security detail from the Israeli
embassy as necessary, considering the risks represented by various events.”

“Jacobson and Max were both on the executive committee, and now both of them are dead. Has that occurred to you?”

“At least not from the perspective you're getting at.”

“And what perspective would that be?”

“Isn't it obvious? That their position in the congregation would have been the cause of their deaths.”

“Why couldn't it have been?”

Silberstein's response was a dispassionate stare tinged with a pinch of condescension.

“Did Max have anything out of the ordinary going on right before his death?”

“What do you mean by out of the ordinary?”

“Did the congregation have any risk-sensitive events coming up where Max would have been involved in the arrangements?”

Silberstein hesitated for a second. When he continued, I knew he was lying, or at least soft-pedalling.