Nights of Awe (20 page)
Authors: Harri Nykanen
“See you then… and sorry I woke you up.”
14
Tagi Hamid’s apartment was in an old building on Toinen Linja, across from the Kallio municipal centre. The landlord – a skinny guy, about seventy – was waiting in his car out front. The car was a brand-new, silver-grey Volvo. He eyed us but didn’t get out until we parked. He was wearing a tracksuit that rustled as he walked; it was in stark contrast to the status projected by the car. He was carrying a plastic folder under one arm.
“Harjumaa?” I asked, just to be sure.
“That’s right, and I assume you’re from Criminal Investigations… I trust you, but I’d still like to see that badge if you don’t mind.”
I showed him my police ID, and so did Simolin.
“There’s so much at stake here you can’t afford to take any of it lightly.”
He clenched the folder under his arm as if it were full of top-secret information.
I conceded that he was right; there was no call for lightheartedness.
Harjumaa began flipping through his folder, intermittently wetting his finger in his mouth. He evidently had psoriasis, because the nail was as hooked as an eagle’s talon. He showed the rental agreement, holding the contract at a safe distance. I did manage to note that Hamid’s rental agreement wasn’t the only one. He was clearly a wealthy man who raked in sizable sums through his property rentals.
“Here it is,” he said, his hand and voice trembling. He took a step backwards when I reached for the folder.
“Could I get a better look at it?”
Harjumaa hesitantly stepped closer.
I examined the contract. It had been signed a little over two months ago, and the rental period had been noted as “month-to-month, with a two-month notice period”. Harjumaa had demanded three months’ rent in advance – 1,350 euros.
The apartment was not even two hundred square feet.
“This is what you get for being a nice guy and trying to help someone out. That’s the last time I ever let to a foreigner. I’m losing out on a month’s rent here.”
He looked at me as if seeking sympathy for his tragic fate.
“Don’t you get to keep the deposit?”
“That won’t go far if I have to clean up after him and fix the place up. If I could start over, I’d become a plumber. They really bleed you dry.”
“How many apartments are you renting out?”
Harjumaa considered for a moment whether this information was classifiable as a trade secret.
Wiping his brow, he confessed: “A few… but the taxman makes sure that you can’t get rich off of being a landlord. First headaches and worries keep you up all night and then you barely break even. And the renters… they’re real troublemakers these days, they complain about everything. It’s never warm enough, or it’s too hot, or then the soundproofing’s bad, or the toilet’s broken. Nothing’s good enough. And of course they ought to get hardwood floors and triple-glazed windows for free.”
Harjumaa’s dramatic gestures and the greed emanating from his voice made him seem like the prototypical bloodsucker.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him throw himself to the ground and shower himself in ashes in the throes of rent-loss agony.
“Isn’t 450 euros a pretty decent return on 190 square feet?”
“You have to take into consideration all the trouble I go through. Plus the expenses. And the money invested in the apartment. I could get more out of it elsewhere, and with less effort, too. But someone needs to put a roof over people’s heads.”
“I’m taking this, it’ll be returned to you in due time,” I said, showing him the rental agreement.
The apartment was on the second floor. The window looked out onto the dumpsters in the courtyard.
“Nice view,” Simolin remarked.
The furnishings were sparser than sparse: a small table and two flea-market chairs.
The bed also looked like a flea-market acquisition. A grey blanket had been tossed across it.
On the floor there was a stack of books, a cassette-player boom box and a portable TV, but the apartment still didn’t look like a student shack.
I held out my hand to Harjumaa.
“I’d like the key please. I’ll get it back to you as soon as the apartment has been searched.”
“It’s the only key and I need it. There’s someone coming to look at the place this evening who wants to move in right away… every day it’s empty ends up costing me.”
I snatched the key.
“How did Hamid hear about the place?” Simolin asked.
“I had an ad in the paper.”
“Did he speak Finnish well enough?”
“No, he had someone with him, some relation, an older man who spoke Finnish. When I wondered whether or not I dared to rent to a foreigner, he said he lived in Finland and had his own company. Promised to back his relative.”
“Was his name Ali Hamid?”
“Ali something.”
“Is this where you met them?” I asked.
“Right here. I was getting the place ready.”
In the kitchen there was a newish refrigerator and a mustard-yellow stove with a frying pan and a small steel pot on top. The tap was dripping. Harjumaa noticed and rushed over to turn it off.
“Always leaving the tap running… as if water didn’t cost anything.”
The dripping didn’t stop in spite of Harjumaa’s efforts. It was the seal that leaked.
“Just had this fixed a year ago. Plumber just about robbed me blind, too.”
“Did you see whether they came in their own car?”
“No, there was someone else coming to see the place and I stayed here to wait.”
“And it was just the two of them?”
“I guess, at least no one else came upstairs.”
Simolin measured the apartment with his eyes.
“Does the place come with basement or attic storage?”
“There’s a walk-in and a potato cellar in the basement. The attic is for drying clothes.”
“Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’ll let you know as soon as you’re allowed to enter the apartment again.”
“What about tonight?” Harjumaa nagged.
“Not a chance. I’ll be sure to let you know.”
Harjumaa was an obstinate soul. He still wouldn’t leave.
“It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. I’d just give them a quick tour. Remember, I was the one who was prepared to help out the police here…”
Simolin took Harjumaa by the shoulder and escorted him brusquely into the entryway.
“We’ll let you know.”
“If I had known—”
Harjumaa’s words were cut off as Simolin pulled the door shut behind him and snapped: “I would have whipped out the tear gas next.”
Our preliminary investigation of the apartment was soon completed. In the wardrobe there were a few shirts and pairs of underwear, a couple of pairs of trousers, a grey jacket, a hooded nylon parka and an empty plastic suitcase. There was nothing in the pockets, not even a bus ticket. In the entryway there were dark-brown shoes and a ski cap, in the kitchen just the bare necessities.
Simolin looked around in wonder.
“How can anyone live without collecting the tiniest slip or scrap of paper? Trouser and shirt pockets totally empty. Even the garbage was empty.”
“Maybe he was anticipating that the place would be searched.”
“He didn’t have anything on him when he was found, either, not even keys or a mobile. Where are they?”
“Let’s take a closer look,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, we had examined the bottoms and backs of the wardrobes, gone through the clothes once more, the air circulation vents, the food supplies and the insides and backs of the fridge and the oven. Simolin also cracked open the backs of the television and the boom box and peered inside. It wasn’t until we got to the combined toilet-shower space that we scored. When I lifted up the drain cover, I spotted a plastic bag. I pulled it out into the light. Inside there was a small wad wrapped in plastic, a roll of cash as fat as my forefinger, and a Yale key.
The cash was hundred-dollar bills.
I carried our find into the kitchenette and poured the contents out onto the counter. I took the wad and made a small incision in it. White powder drifted out.
Simolin glanced at me: “Maybe this is a drug thing after all.”
I considered this for a moment and then rejected it. The packet weighed ten grams at most. The substance might have been for Hamid’s own use, or for a little income on the side. Business of that scale doesn’t involve murders.
Simolin counted the cash.
“A thousand dollars.”
“Should we call in a dog?”
“Let’s go down to the basement first.”
The basement smelt of mouldy clothes and mothballs. We found the right walk-in, but it was empty and there wasn’t a lock on the door.
We went back out into the corridor. I noticed a grey door on the opposite wall. Behind it, a hallway stretched back. It was about ten yards long and lined with rows of numbered doors on either side.
I looked for number five, which was the number of Hamid’s apartment.
I fitted the key into the lock and turned it.
On the floor there was a long nylon gym bag. I yanked down the zipper and saw half a dozen bricks, slightly larger than a cigarette carton, wrapped in brown resin paper. It took a second before I realized what they were.
On the other hand, the dark-green metal tube was a cinch to recognize. It was a disposable grenade launcher. The bricks wrapped in paper were plastic explosives. Next to them lay a gleaming black machine gun, a dozen electric blasting caps and a device that looked like a delayed detonator.
“If you want peace, prepare for war,” Simolin muttered. “Looks like this guy was planning a little military campaign.”
The bag also contained an English-language pocket calendar. I took it and locked the door. We went back up to Hamid’s apartment, where I called the police bomb squad. I didn’t believe that the explosives were dangerous, but I didn’t want to transport a loaded launcher and dozens of kilos of bombs to HQ in our car.
As I waited, I studied the calendar. Simolin was curious and squeezed in behind me.
The calendar had been primarily used to make notes on meetings, phone calls and other everyday things. I searched for the day when Hamid and Harjumaa had signed the rental agreement. The meeting place and time had been marked in block letters. The calendar also contained Arabic notations.
As I browsed through it, a piece of paper that had been folded into quarters fell out. Simolin picked it up, studied it for a minute, whistled softly, and handed it to me.
A rough map had been sketched on it in ballpoint pen. The place was easy enough to identify. Lapinrinne, Malminrinne and Malminkatu.
The location of the synagogue had been circled.
I opened the calendar again and looked up 3 October.
A small Star of David had been scrawled there.
On 3 October, the foreign minister of Israel would be visiting the synagogue.
15
From the masses of clutter in the window of the pawnshop, you would have imagined that it was the owner’s life mission to collect stuff, not sell it. We stepped in, and I introduced Stenman and myself.
“You called in a tip-off about the Kerava homicide,” Stenman said.
“Kafka, was that the name?”
I knew what was coming. “No, I’m not related to the Kafka who owned the pawnshop on Pursimiehenkatu.”
“No?”
The sparse-whiskered, middle-aged man was organizing the heap of stuff that filled the counter. He must have had an amazing visual memory or excellent notes. There was more junk than a couple of small factories could produce in a week. Stenman slapped Ben Weiss’s photo down in front of him.
“Is this the man you saw the day before yesterday around two p.m.?”
“Beautiful autumn sunshine out there,” commented the man, gazing out at the street through the dusty window. Then he took the photo and peered at it myopically from under his glasses.
“Sure looks a lot the same. They wanted to break a bill for parking, but I told them that I’m not a change machine. If I got a euro for every time someone asked me to change money, I wouldn’t have to do anything else.”
“What do you mean, they?” I asked.
“There were two of them. The other one spoke and this guy was silent.”
Two thirty-year-old men barged in, preceded by wafts of booze breath.
“Howdy. Isn’t this the place where you can buy and sell, trade and steal?”
“Please state your business, gentlemen,” said the shop owner.
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