Helsinki Blood (22 page)

W
e get to Porvoo around eight p.m. We travel light, it doesn’t take long to get our things out of the Wrangler and inside.

It’s called a shore house—a few stand in a row along the river—built after the great fire of 1760, and by tradition painted ocher red. They were built to house goods traded with German ships from the Hanseatic League. Given its size, picturesque location and place in history, as well as being situated in the tourist mecca of the old town, it’s worth a small fortune.

When I told Kate it would be a kind of summer vacation, I lied. I believed she and Anu would have to be constantly guarded, unable to venture out without Milo, Sweetness or me for protection. Changes in circumstances have made a real vacation possible. The Russians have other fish to fry—trying not to die—Veikko Saukko’s killers are dead, thanks to Phillip Moore. The only immediate threat known to me is Jan Pitkänen. He’s not stupid enough to kill a cop’s family by himself. We have those most valuable of things: time and freedom. I believe this place will help Kate heal.

I show her around. For decades, Arvid and his wife Ritva made this their home, and it’s been untouched since their passing. Their ghosts and shadows seem to be everywhere. It’s an odd feeling, but not a bad one, as they’re the ghosts of friends. It even makes the place seem more friendly, in a strange way is a source of comfort.

I turn Katt loose out of his travel carryall. He leaps out to investigate. Arvid and Ritva had four cats. He has much to occupy him, rooting them out, until his tiny mind reaches the conclusion that they’re no longer here. They mourned for Ritva after her death. Their constant meowing was a reminder to Arvid of the death of his wife of half a century. He couldn’t bear for anyone else to have them, so he drowned them. He built a square box for a coffin and left it in the backyard. It was winter, the ground too hard to dig. It’s nailed shut. Kate can’t look in it. Still, I need to bury it or throw it in the sea or something.

The downstairs is one large, almost open space. In the front of it, a davenport and three well-worn, comfortable armchairs surround a coffee table. Against the wall to the left of it, an antique bookcase with glass doors serves as a liquor cabinet. To the right, a fireplace. A big, dark oak dining room table is farther into the room. Behind it, a massive soapstone stove stands floor-to-ceiling and is the room’s only divider. Behind and to the left of it is a well-equipped kitchen with both gas and wood-burning stoves. Pots and pans hang from hooks on the ceiling. A half bath is next to the back door, which leads out to a sizable backyard surrounded by a brick wall, with an untended flower garden. It feels like a home.

Upstairs are two bedrooms and a full bath. Kate and I put our things in the master bedroom, Arvid and Ritva’s room. Everything is antique. The bed. The wardrobe. The chest of drawers. A writing desk. They were together for fifty years. They might have bought them all new. The closets and drawers are full of their things. I make room for ours and wonder if I’ll be sleeping in here tonight.

Everyone is hungry. For the first time in a long time I feel that I can take Kate and Anu out and they’ll be safe. I suggest Wilhem Å, a restaurant just a few minutes’ walk from our house. It’s atmospheric. Its large patio extends out over the river. Moored boats are lined up in front of the patio. It’s a lovely evening, still daylight, a breeze coming off the river. We order beers, except for Kate. She orders orange juice. What Torsten said appears to be true. Valdoxan appears to have replaced alcohol as her nepenthe.

She’s healing. I offer a silent prayer of thanks and hope that she continues. I have an inkling that her situation is like falling down a well. She can see light at the top, and it’s narrow enough for her to climb out, but the walls are slick and precarious. It would be all too easy for her to slip and hurtle back to the bottom and land with a splash, once again in the freezing water.

Sweetness, of course, lines up three
kossu
shots and knocks them back one after the other, “to build his appetite,” which is already enormous and needs no enhancement. In keeping with their diet, he and Jenna order steaks. He orders two.

I would like to join them, have a good piece of red meat—I miss it—but my gun-shot mouth isn’t up to chewing it yet. Instead, I have roasted salmon in mushroom sauce. Kate has a perch fillet in dill and remoulade sauce.

We take a stroll down the boardwalk after dinner. Pushing Anu’s stroller spares me the decision of whether to hold Kate’s hand or not, as I have to guide the pram with one hand and limp along with my cane in the other.

We get home. Kate announces she’s tired, needs sleep. I’m exhausted as well. Carrying Anu, I tag along up the stairs behind her and into the bedroom. She cocks her head and looks at me, quizzical.

This is a kind of litmus test. I’m nervous. “Can I share the bed with you?” I ask.

She sits down on the bed, mulls it over and nods. “You have to sleep somewhere.”

I feel a great sense of relief. That’s good enough for now. We perform our pre-bed ablutions, take our medications, stand side by side as we brush our teeth. Without speaking, we climb into opposite sides of the bed. I kiss her shoulder and wish her good night. She doesn’t respond.

I
n the morning, there’s no food in the house, so we go out for breakfast. Kate is polite, if not warm, toward me. On occasion, I see her face go blank for a moment, as if she’s having little lapses, either unable to recall something or remembering something she would rather not.

Afterward, she asks if we can explore the old town. It’s a little maze of arts-and-crafts stores, antique shops and junk for tourists. She loves this shit. I play the good husband, trail around behind her with my wallet ready as she chooses little things that catch her eye.

Handmade place mats for the table, some candles, a bottle opener with a handle made from a reindeer antler. This is tourist season. A small army of husbands and wives follows exactly the same routine. Porvoo is primarily Swedish-speaking, so I can at least be of some use, translating questions to clerks for her on occasion. Mostly just for fun. The clerks cater to a lot of foreigners, and most speak English well.

Kate tires easily. We go to a grocery and do a little food shopping. By the time we get home, she’s ready for a nap. She has therapy at four. Sweetness promised to drive, and I promised to come along. The bus ride is only about an hour, but I worry that being surrounded by strangers—or even just the social pressure of having to spend so much time alone with Sweetness—would be unnerving for her. I picked up two newspapers at the grocery. One shows a couple of my photos from Yelena’s suicide scene. The other, showing more taste, chose not to run them.

The Russian ambassador was recalled. Soon he’ll be, as the Ripper and the Raper put it, fish chum. I killed him with my photos as surely as Milo killed Kate’s brother by giving him so much dope. I can’t bring myself to care. I hope his gangster partner, Yelena’s father, hangs him from a cross and crucifies him. Finland requested permission to remand him pending further investigation. Moscow refused, and made a formal complaint because Finnish police processed the crime scene without diplomatic consultation. Exactly what I expected.

But it reminds me that I have another task to carry out, and soon: finding the nearly two hundred girls pressed into sexual slavery on the list Sasha had in his iPad. And Loviise. They suffer as I procrastinate. For a man hanging around doing nothing, I have much to do. Try to bring my wife back to good health and keep my family together. Play whatever part I must to end our feud with the greater powers of the establishment and make us all safe again. As the homicidal Adrien Moreau would have put it, restore harmony to all our lives. No small order.

But when I think of those women, again I hear the trumpets sounding and the pounding of my white charger’s hooves as I engage in battle to save the day. I see the look of love and adoration on Kate’s face, the ugliness of the past erased, my reward for all the good I’ve done. And if I manage to free all those women, it would no longer just be the act of symbolism of saving a single girl, but an act that helps a great many people. Some true vindication of the vicious things we’ve done.

In our time as a black-ops unit, we may have crossed the line, but the people we hurt were bad. The world would be better off without most of them. In those cases, justice was served. I served it through criminal actions. That was wrong, but I believe in the adage “Who must do the hard things? He who can.” Though I don’t regret my actions, I don’t want to repeat them. I don’t like hurting people. I don’t want to jeopardize my marriage. I need only to look in the mirror to see that I’ve done my duty. Now I wish only to live in peace.

Milo shows up around two, comes to the house and asks Sweetness to help him bring his things in from the boat. Sweetness is the only one of us undamaged, and as a result, finds himself constantly playing errand boy for all of us, but he never complains. Alcoholism and sociopathic tendencies aside, he’s a good kid.

I go out with them to have a look at Milo’s boat, moored near the house. It’s a twenty-five-foot Coronado with two cabins, about forty years old but well cared for. Milo, convinced as he is that everyone is fascinated by technical details, fills us in on everything from its masthead sloop to its draft to how many watts the solar panels generate to details about its engines and props and even its Danforth-style anchors. For Sweetness and me, much of his lecture might as well be in Greek, but we’ve learned it’s easier to indulge him than shut him up.

Even by his standards of haggard appearance, he looks exhausted. Eyes like bloody holes in his head may be the result of his smoking dope along the ride, but still. “Hard night?” I ask.

“I was up all night writing the manifesto,” he says. “It’s not hard, and I’m having fun with it, but it’s pretty time-consuming.”

Most of what he’s brought along is guns and bullets. He’s hesitant to leave the sniper rifle in the boat, but I don’t want Kate to see it or the massive amount of ammo. Enough to fight a short war, there’s no way to explain it. His pistol is fine, standard police fare, but I especially don’t want her to see his beloved 10-gauge Colt sawed-off shotgun, as she used it to blow Adrien Moreau in half.

The three of us sit down on the dock, let our feet dangle over the water and light cigarettes. “I cruised by Veikko Saukko’s mansion,” Milo says. “Sure as shit, just like his calendar says, he was out behind the house, knocking golf balls into the sea. Kind of weird, isn’t it? I’m going to kill one man practicing golf and two men playing it on the same day. Generally, people don’t consider it a dangerous sport.”

“Do you have a plan and a schedule yet?” I ask.

“One time, I went to a junkyard looking for a carburetor for a car I used to have,” Milo says. “A piece-of-shit Volkswagen from the seventies. This big fat fuck was in a shack—the so-called office—lying on a couch with the springs popping out of it, watching a soap opera on a TV so old it was black-and-white and had rabbit-ear antennas, eating a bag of candy. I asked him if they had one. He said, ‘I dunno.’ I asked him if they had that make of Volkswagen. He said, ‘I dunno. Maybe. You gotta go out and look around.’ I said, ‘Well, goddamn it, what the fuck
do
you know?’ He said, ‘Not much. The less you know, the less you have to do.’ I thought that was true and pretty wise, especially coming from that dumb shit. And it applies here. How much do you really want to know?”

I shrug and flick my cigarette butt into the river. It goes out with a hiss and starts its journey toward the sea. “What I need to know, I guess.” As I said to Moore, pre-knowledge of a crime is tantamount to collusion. I’m as guilty as Milo and Sweetness.

“What you need to know is that every morning, you and I are going to get up before dawn and claim we’re going fishing. What we’re really going to do is go to a little uninhabited island I know and learn to shoot with our disabilities. That OK with you?”

“Sure.”

“But to pique your curiosity, a little B&E last night reveals that Jyri Ivalo keeps his golf clubs in the trunk of his Mercedes.”

He gets up and grabs the bag with his computer in it, Sweetness shoulders his duffel bag and we go inside. Milo looks around. “Nice place. Where should I sleep?”

I point at the davenport. “I guess there. The beds are already taken.”

“I’ll just sleep in the boat,” he says. “The bed is comfortable, and I can keep an eye on my Barrett.”

I go upstairs and find Kate awake, getting ready to go to therapy. “I heard Milo’s voice,” she says. “Why is he here?”

“He’s going to stay with us for a little while.”

“I don’t understand. We’re supposed to be having a vacation, but you brought everyone that works for you with us.”

Think fast, Kari.
“I can’t get around very well, and you have some . . . problems. While you were away, Sweetness came to help me out, especially because I had Anu. I was in so much pain, it was all I could do to make it to the grocery store and back. Jenna goes wherever Sweetness goes. Milo has been away. I haven’t seen him for a while, and he’s not in very good shape either: He’s partially disabled and depressed about it, and I thought our company might do him some good. Besides, he’s going to sleep in his boat. He mainly wants to fish. You won’t see much of him.”

She looks at me askance. “And you had Mirjami with you as well, a small army of helpers. Good for you.”

“Mirjami came one day because she and Jenna had become good friends, and I guess they just wanted to party together. Mirjami was a registered nurse, saw what bad shape I was in, and threatened to call an ambulance if I didn’t do something about it, so I called Jari. He agreed to shoot up my knee and jaw with cortisone to relieve my pain, but thought I needed to have my knee professionally bandaged and braced daily so I wouldn’t damage it further. Mirjami volunteered for the job. And so it ended up that I found myself living with an apartment full of kids.”

“Did you really not fuck her?”

“I swear to you that I didn’t.”

She turns toward me and brushes the back of her hand against my cheek. “After what I’ve done, I wouldn’t blame you if you had, but I’m glad that you didn’t.”

We make the forty-five-minute drive to Helsinki, mostly in silence, and drop Kate off at Torsten’s door. Sweetness and I go to a little grocery store down the street and buy a six-pack. We take it to Kaivopuisto, a big and beautiful park, sit on the grass, enjoy the beautiful day and sunshine and drink a couple. Sweetness pulls out his flask.

“Please,” I say. “Not with Kate in the vehicle.”

He takes a second to decide whether to argue with me, then screws the lid down and puts it away.

We’re waiting in the Jeep when Kate exits. She asks if I’ll ride in the back with her on the return trip. Her eyes are red and puffy from weeping. I get in the back with her and she takes my hand. When we get out on the highway, she lays her head on my shoulder. Sweetness leaves the stereo off, I’m sure to give us time for Finnish silence. It often relates more meaning than spoken words ever could. We spend the trip home in the quiet.