Helsinki Blood (23 page)

W
e arrive home to an empty house. Jenna is out. A note on the table says she got bored and went exploring. There’s little to do except housework. The place has stood empty for a while and needs a good dusting. I’m not in the mood, and while my knee hurts less than it did before the cortisone, it’s still a pain in the ass to perform simple tasks with only one free hand, my cane always in the other.

I browse Arvid’s book collection instead. He—or maybe Ritva or both of them—was an ardent crime and thriller novel fan. Complete works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John le Carré, Graham Greene, Jim Thompson, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Mika Waltari. I decide to work my way through the whole 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain. That should keep me busy for a while. I settle down in what was Arvid’s armchair and start reading
Cop Hater
. The others wander in. Sweetness has been to Alko, bought a dozen bottles of
kossu
and a case of beer. Milo has been on his boat, working on his computer, I imagine writing his manifesto.

Jenna and Sweetness do what they do best, sit at the table and drink. They whisper the private jokes of young lovers and giggle. In a little while, everyone gets hungry, and by general consensus, we decide to go to a good restaurant. This trip feels more and more like a vacation than I thought it would.

We go to Wanha Laamanni. It’s only been a restaurant for a few years, but the building was constructed near the medieval cathedral around 1790. The menu is gourmet. Sweetness complains about the lack of steaks. As far as he and this place are concerned, it’s like lipstick on a pig. He turns up his nose at the snails in gorgonzola. Roast lamb, after a few aperitifs, pacifies him. For me, wild boar rillettes as an appetizer and a main course of charcoal-grilled Arctic char with choron sauce, saffron and fennel. Kate chooses salmon infused with the flavor of tar. She pronounces it inedible, so we trade. This should be the test for Finnish citizenship. If you enjoy the taste of tar, you pass. If you don’t, you should spend a few more years here until you do. I find it delicious.

Milo has to eat left-handed. He has a hard time keeping food on his fork. He has to learn to do almost everything in his life over again. I hope surgery repaired his carpal tunnel and radial nerve sufficiently so that he regains some function in his hand. Being disabled makes for a hard life.

After dinner, when the coffee and cognac arrive, Sweetness announces he’s talked to his mother and she checked his mail for him. He’s been accepted at the police college in Tampere and as a Russian-language student at the University of Helsinki.

Slots in universities and polytechnics are competitions. Often, six hundred people will sit down together and test for a position in a department, and only fifty will be accepted. The smart thing to do is to treat studying for the examinations like a job and apply to more than one department to increase your odds. Sweetness has actually done this. He now has a possibility to build a career that doesn’t involve beating the hell out of people.

I’m impressed and order champagne to celebrate: a bottle of Dom. I wonder if Kate considers where the money for these extravagances came from. They’re reminders of our various and sundry crimes that left Milo, Sweetness and me millionaires. Maybe she’s pushed it out of her mind and tells herself I’m wealthy from my inheritance from Arvid. It’s partly true.

Sweetness’s success is a bright note in a stressful, even frightening time in my life. I’m afraid my wife’s mental illness will cause me to lose her. I’m afraid that, in the end, I’ll lose my leg. I’m afraid for all our lives, least of all my own. And my friends are planning to change the course of Finnish history to save all our lives. I’m afraid of what will happen to all of us if they fail. Good news in this time of confusion and mayhem was much needed.

We walk off our meal and go home. This appears to be the pattern we’ll follow. Quiet days, good meals, long walks and early nights. For Kate and me and our relationship, my devout hope is that this pattern will be therapeutic and bring catharsis.

Milo invites Sweetness to go drinking with him. Jenna assumes she’s included. She’s not, and miffed about it. Sweetness cites a need for “guy time.”

Kate and I get ready for bed. I set an alarm on my cell phone.

“What are you doing that for?” she asks.

“Milo and I are going fishing early tomorrow morning.”

Fearful of upsetting her, I stick to my side of the bed and avoid anything that might be construed as physical contact.

We lie in silence for a while. “Don’t you want to touch me anymore? Are you so angry?” she asks.

I’m flummoxed. “Angry for what? I’m not angry about anything. I’m afraid you’re angry, and I don’t want to do anything to upset you.”

She lies on her back, arms at her sides, stares at the ceiling. “I left you when you were too weak to care for yourself. I was cruel to you on the rare occasions I saw you, refused to let you see your child very often, and then I dumped her on you so I could run to the other side of the world to turn into a drunk.”

I’m taken aback, wasn’t expecting this. “You were sick. You’re suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, so says Torsten. How can I be mad at you for being traumatized? And I was behind the trauma. I did many questionable things, some ugly things, some wrong things.”

“Your brain surgery made a mess out of you,” she says.

“Yes, it did.”

I don’t say that if I was put in the same situations now, I don’t know what I would do differently. I began with the best of intentions and slowly sank into the sewer of corruption. I always meant well. My biggest mistake was not understanding that I was being used, that my greatest flaw is naïveté. I’m naïve no longer. I know what I
would
change. I wouldn’t have let myself be manipulated and put in such positions in the first place.

“I told you to do those things,” Kate says, “I advised you to do the very things I came to loathe, the things that made me wonder who you are and where the man I married went.”

“You had little choice. You were scared, afraid I would die of cancer. It’s hard to say no to someone under those circumstances. And like me, you kept believing I could extricate myself from the corruption. We didn’t understand that would never happen. As it was put to me, ‘This isn’t a game you can just decide you don’t want to play anymore.’”

“Are you going to do things differently now?”

“Yes.”

“No more robbing drug dealers. No more taking money you didn’t earn. No more bodies dissolved in acid. You’ll become an honest cop again?”

I wish I could preface my answer with the absolute truth.
After I make the people in my world safe again, I will return to honesty and abide by the law
. “If I decide to be a cop again. I’m tired. I’m shot to pieces. I’m mentally and emotionally worn down. I may retire.”

“I’m done advising you. Do what you think best for yourself. Have I done such terrible things?”

“No.”

“Do you still love me?”

“Heart and soul.”

“Can we be a family again?”

“That’s my greatest wish.”

She scoots over and lays her head on my shoulder. “Good.” Within minutes, she’s asleep there, in an old and familiar position. It seems like centuries have passed since she slept there, and having her there again, I feel those years fall away from me in a kind of spiritual rebirth.

I
step off the dock into Milo’s boat at five thirty a.m. He’s already up, slurping coffee and dictating into a microphone. Judging by his eyes, he’s had a wake and bake. I pick up the hashish pipe next to his computer. It’s pungent, freshly used. Its warmth and smell confirm it.

“So where are we off to?” I ask.

“Let me show you something first. Sweetness and I didn’t really go out drinking last night.”

He leads me to the other cabin and pulls a tarp away to reveal a gun safe lying on its back. The lock is gone, drilled out. I comment on it. Milo sighs. “Like everything, lock picking is hard for me just using my left hand. This belonged to the good major. Sweetness and I B&Eed him and boosted it. It’s made of cheap metal and not that heavy, so we just hoisted it up and carried it out to the Jeep on our shoulders.”

He flips open the door. “A .50 cal Barrett, two assault rifles, and a small assortment of handguns. Another step in the plan accomplished.”

We go to the kitchenette and he pours me a cup of coffee. He takes some gun parts out from the cabinet he keeps cups in.

“Have you learned how to fieldstrip your Colt?” he asks.

I had so little to do when I was sitting home alone, and had promised myself that I would learn to shoot, so I practiced until I could do it with my eyes closed. “Yeah, I learned.”

He hands me a barrel and firing pin. “After you kill Pitkänen, the first thing you do is replace the ones in your Colt with these and fire it a couple times. That way, the rifling and pin mark on the brass will clear you if you’re caught. Just tell the truth and explain that you’ve been practicing marksmanship, and it will explain the powder residue on the gun and your hands.”

He seems to have thought of everything. “How are you going to get Roope Malinen out to his summer cottage where you can kill him after his frame-up rampage?”

“What happened to the less you know, the less you have to do theory? The more you know, the more culpable you are.”

“I’m already culpable.”

“We’re not sure yet. Either entice him out there with a phony meeting he believes has to be held in private, or just abduct his sorry ass and force him there. That doesn’t concern me as much as making certain his family isn’t there. He has to go there alone in order to commit suicide after his atrocities. Sweetness will attend to that part of things.”

“Have you got a Go Day yet?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

“I’ve got another aspect to it that might deflect some media attention. All those girls in the apartments owned or rented by Russian diplomats. Raiding them and freeing them on or around the same day seems like a good idea. Every day that goes by, those girls suffer, so if you’re bent on doing this, do it soon. We release the info on the girls forced into the slave trade, it has to be dealt with immediately. It will create havoc in the police department, among the media, everywhere, just overload them all with more than they’re able to deal with efficiently.”

“A good idea,” Milo says. “I’ll get this together as fast as I can.”

I ask nothing more for now. Lying to myself about not taking part in an event that will change history is the ultimate in self-deception.

Milo pilots, I fish. By the time we’ve reached his uninhabited island destination, I’ve got a pretty good catch: some nice salmon, perch and pike.

There are actually two islands, a little less than a kilometer apart. Milo chose this spot so he can practice with his sniper rig, shooting from one to the next. Vegetation is sparse on both of them, but there are a few trees he can shoot at long distance.

He says we’re going to learn to shoot pistols the way Adrien Moreau taught us. No using the back sight. Just using the front sight, as if pointing with our index fingers. We shoot at smaller things and from farther away as we get the hang of it. We practice only with silencers, because we’re not training to be cops at the moment, we’re studying to be assassins.

We start with a garbage can lid at fifteen paces. I have to hold a cane in my left hand, so we decide I should turn sideways, like an old-fashioned dueler, to make a thinner target. He tries facing forward, with his damaged right hand supporting his left, but he says it hurts like hell when the pistol goes off. He has to stop that method and tries standing sideways, like me, and shooting one-handed.

This goes better. At first, we’re just sort of waving our pistols around, and if we hit the trash can lid at all, it’s near the outside perimeter. But after we burn up about a thousand rounds, we start to get the hang of it and at least hit the lid with consistency.

Milo lies down and tries out the Barrett. He picks a tree on the other island. The correct method is to apply equal pressure across the trigger with the index finger, slowly, so not even the shooter knows when the rifle will discharge. His index finger won’t do this, so he puts the tip of his finger on the trigger and fires by slowly pulling his whole arm backward. Not only does he miss the tree entirely, but the recoil, akin to that of a cannon, jars his damaged wrist so badly that he screams.

He rolls over and tries the process as if he were left-handed, which means he peers through the scope with his left eye. Since he’s right-eyed, this proves difficult. At first, he misses the tree again, but after a few rounds his eye adjusts, and he can’t shoot any kind of group, but can at least hit the tree.

When we’re done, I tell him that we’re a couple of buffoons with these weapons and there’s no way we can pull this off. I ask him where he intends to shoot from when he assassinates Veikko Saukko. “From the boat,” he says.

I start to laugh.

He gets furious. “And what is so fucking funny about that?”

“You can’t even hit a fucking tree lying down, and you think you’re going to hit a moving target from a rocking boat. It’s fucking ludicrous.”

His face twists into something like hatred, and it makes me laugh all the more.

He forces himself to stay calm, to maintain his dignity. “I have to go to Helsinki to pick up something I mail-ordered. And tomorrow, you insignificant fuck, I will show you how I’m going to blow his brains out, from a boat, and from several hundred meters away.”

“Cool,” I say, “I’ll look forward to it.”

We start back to my place. I catch a couple more fish while he sulks.