The Lion of Justice (17 page)

This character had definitely known how to avoid the cameras. Still, there were a couple of glimpses that didn’t completely crush my theory about it being Rytkönen. I just wondered what he was up to. Why would an officer from the Bureau show interest in the security system at a restaurant in Ruoholahti? Not to steal our booze. I had a bad feeling he was here for me. Had Rytkönen found out that I was the one calling him from Stahl’s phone?

Jouni called for me from the kitchen, saying we had an emergency. Two of the kitchen staff had caught the flu. So for the next week, I worked in the kitchen as a sous chef while each staff member took a turn getting the flu, including Monika and Jouni, but luckily they were off at different times. I remained healthy. I checked the security cameras daily for new signs of Rytkönen slinking around, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Päivi Väänänen-Huttunen kept her promise and called me when I was on my way to work the evening shift. She sounded agitated.

“I couldn’t keep reading those diaries. They just seemed so childish,” she said. “The things a high schooler worries about. Apparently getting a
B
on an English test was the end of the world. But I did find something about Anneli. She was always very happy. In my diary I wondered how she could be in such a good mood all the time. I guess I was envious of her, too. Boys liked her because she was so easygoing.”

“Was she a flirt?”

“Not more than others. In the early seventies, girls had to pretend to be much more prudish than girls these days, and we had to wait for the boys to make the first move. Anyway, the diaries aren’t actually that important. I called Tiina Turpeinen, her last name is Mäkelä now. She told me the police had dropped by to talk with her about your mother’s murder early last year. Tiina couldn’t figure out why they had opened the case again. Your father had been convicted, and that was the end of it. The police officer who came by was pretty strange, too, but he had a valid-looking international badge.”

“An international badge? Do you have Tiina Mäkelä’s phone number? Where does she live?”

Päivi gave me a phone number and mentioned that Tiina Mäkelä lived across from the Siuntio church. I thanked her and typed in Tiina’s number so hastily that I mistyped it twice. I called, but she didn’t pick up. I left her a voice mail, and it took only a couple of minutes for her to call back.

“Sorry, I don’t answer unknown numbers,” she said. “So nice to hear from you, Hilja. I’ve thought of you often, especially since that police officer visited me in the spring. How are you?”

I really didn’t have the patience for small talk, so I told Tiina that I was working at a restaurant in Helsinki and lived downtown. Then I asked her to tell me more about the police officer.

“He was tall. Had an accent when he spoke Finnish.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“I may have written it down somewhere. He didn’t give me a business card. Let’s see . . .” I heard the phone hit the table. “Here we go. I can’t really tell from the handwriting . . . Looks like the last name begins with an ‘s,’ and only the first letter of the first name is legible. I’m thinking ‘p’?”

I was pretty sure it was a ‘d.’ I asked Tiina if she would have time to meet tomorrow morning. It was my day off.

“I’d love to, but I’m working in the morning. School’s out at three. Can you come then?”

I said okay but that I had to make some arrangements. We agreed to meet at Tiina’s place at three thirty.

When I got to Sans Nom, chaos was still in full swing. Monika, who was rarely upset, had a fit when I told her I was going to Siuntio the following afternoon.

“But we have a private event until three. We can’t manage without you. Mohammed and Alex are sick, and Helinä’s nose is so runny I can’t let the customers see her.”

“Well, you’ll just have to manage.”

“Monika, don’t let Hilja always get her way,” Jouni roared out of eyesight.

“And you shut the hell up! Can’t I go to Veikkola for the vegetable pickup tomorrow instead of the day after tomorrow? They’re not in the ground anymore, right?”

“I need fresh produce for Friday,” Jouni growled.

Monika found a compromise. I was only allowed to meet with Tiina Mäkelä for thirty minutes, then I had to hurry back.

As soon as I got off work, I looked through my things for the best picture of David I could find. It had been taken near the mountains in Seville in the spring, about one and a half years ago. David’s hair was blond and short, and he looked straight into the camera. His eyes smiled, but his lips didn’t. That’s why I had liked this picture the most: it looked like David was revealing to the photographer—me—what he really thought with his eyes. But perhaps the laughter in his eyes was aimed
at
me. David had told me in Montemassi multiple times that he couldn’t risk coming back to Finland since he left on the
I Believe
. Now it seemed clearer than ever that he had lied to me.

The empty van shook in the wind as I drove the Turku motorway toward Veikkola. I blasted
Musta Humppa
, a Led Zeppelin cover by the band Eläkeläiset, in the car stereo. In Veikkola I threw the root vegetables and other veggies into the van so carelessly that Jouni would have told me off. He went to extremes to make sure his ingredients were clean and high quality, and this occasionally unnerved Monika, who didn’t want to waste food by throwing it away. I took the route to Siuntio through Lapinkylä and was soon stuck behind a tractor pulling a load of chopped wood. No matter how I flashed my lights, the driver didn’t let me pass. It was twenty to four when I finally pulled into Tiina Mäkelä’s yard. She opened the door before I even rang the bell. A dachshund jumped out from behind her and started barking at me, showing Tiina how alert he was.

“Onni really wants to go for a walk, but he’ll just have to wait until we’re done. Come on in,” Tiina said.

I walked along the maze of a hallway to the dining room. Tiina was only familiar to me from pictures. Her soap-opera hairstyle had turned into a light-gray bob, and her square black glasses gave her a sharp expression.

She took a good look at me, then bluntly said, “You don’t look much like Anneli. More like your father.” It sounded like she had just given me a prison sentence. “Want some coffee?”

“First tell me about that police officer. Why did he come to see you, and what did he want?”

“See, that’s what I was wondering, too. He even called me a couple of times and made sure I was the same person who had attended high school and the classroom-teacher program with Anneli Karttunen, later known as Anneli Suurluoto. I asked him why they were interested in the case thirty years after Anneli’s death. The officer said he was doing research on spousal murder characteristics across Finland, Estonia, and Germany. He said it was a project for some European police force, and Anneli’s murder case had been chosen as one of the sources. When he first called me, I told him I didn’t want to even think about what happened. He gave me a few days to mull it over, and of course the predictable happened when I was forced to return to my past. Anneli began to haunt me.”

“How?”

“She appeared in my dreams. You were there once, too, walking along the church aisle, crying. As if Anneli was demanding to be remembered and that I needed to talk to the police officer. Like I somehow owed it to her. So I finally agreed to meet with him, just like I agreed to meet you.”

The man had come over and asked Tiina to tell him everything she remembered about Anneli and to look for any old photos she might have. When I heard this I got goose bumps.

“Do you happen to have a picture where my mother is smiling and wearing a ruby ring on her ring finger? The picture we displayed at her memorial?”

“Yes, I do. Do you want to see it? The man asked to take that one and a couple of others for making copies, and he returned the originals like he promised.”

“First, let me show you a picture.” I pulled a photo of David from my purse. “Is this the police officer who visited you? David Stahl?”

Although David’s hair was black when we’d met in Italy, I’d seen his Europol badge and I knew that he had a blond crew cut in it.

Tiina barely glanced at the photo. “Yeah, that’s him. And you’re right, the name was Stahl. I have to say, he looks a lot scarier in this picture than in real life. He made me feel somehow guilty for Anneli’s death. And I’ll tell you straight, too, I never liked Keijo, and that’s why your mother and I didn’t stay in touch. Anneli followed Keijo to Lappeenranta and dropped out of school when you were born. She said she’d finish her studies later, although Keijo didn’t want her to.”

While I was fascinated by these memories of my mother, I interrupted and asked Tiina for the exact date when David had seen her. She went to get a thick journal. The date was March 28, a couple of weeks before I’d gone to Italy. David had told me that he’d been in Italy since February.

My time was up, and I had to get back to Sans Nom. Tiina asked when we could meet again; she wanted to get to know Anneli’s daughter better. I didn’t want to promise anything. I was so humiliated and angry at David that I was determined to throw the ruby ring into the sea and tear up all his photos.

I worked for a week and a half before I had my next day off, a Monday. The last time Sans Nom had been closed, I’d spent it cleaning and prepping foods to compensate for the lack of staff. It was now November, and the days were even darker. I had always considered Helsinki a well-lit city, but now shady corners were everywhere, and the darkness ate all my energy. Nothing seemed to bring it back, not long jogs along the shore, dark chocolate, or even vitamins. Trankov called me at the restaurant a couple of times and persistently demanded to find out when we’d continue with his painting, but each time, my hands were tied with Sans Nom. The last time he called, it turned out he was pretty busy, too. He had to go to Moscow with Syrjänen. He said he’d call me when he got back, but he didn’t know when that would be. When I hung up I felt like I had been released from under an oppressive weight. Maybe Trankov had finally had enough of me.

At six o’clock on Monday evening, I caved. I called the international number service to look up David’s family members. There was a phone number for Anton Stahl in Tartu, no other relatives came up in the search. I asked for the address. David had told me how his family lived in the city center near a moat park. When I located a map of Tartu online, I saw that the address fit this description. While we’d been in Montemassi, David had planned on taking me to meet his family, as soon as it would have been safe for him to return to Estonia. I had really believed him.

I peeked out of my room to see what Monika was up to. On her evenings off she usually meditated, and when she was in that state, she didn’t hear or see anything. I closed the doors between our rooms. I didn’t want her to know how desperate I was. I prepared myself to find out that David was dead. Or that he was in Tartu with a wife. Or in a prison in Belarus. I tried to prepare myself for everything while I dialed the phone number. First the numbers for a nondomestic call, then Estonia’s country code, and finally the landline number for the Stahls. Cell phone information wasn’t available.

A woman answered. It sounded like a TV was turned on to a sports channel—I could hear the excited commentator.

“Are you Eva Stahl, David’s mother?” I asked in Swedish, knowing it was Eva’s first language.

“Who is this?” Her tone dropped, and she sounded suspicious, then hissed something in Estonian. The TV was turned down. So there were other people around.

“I’m Hilja, David’s friend.” I knew David had been back to see his parents the year before, in the fall. Now I’d find out whether I was brought up during that trip.

“What friend? What is this about? What do you know about David? Are you from the police?”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Confusion might turn out to be the best weapon.

“A year ago. We haven’t heard a single word, except what the Finnish police told us. And you’re a Finn, too, aren’t you? You speak Swedish like a Finn, and your name is Finnish.”

“That’s right. I’m Finnish. The police officer who called you was my colleague Martti Rytkönen, right? He’s not on David’s case anymore.”

“Yes, Rytkönen. He was a nice man. You said you’re David’s friend. What’s your name again?”

“Hilja . . . Karttunen. I also work with him in Europol.”

If Rytkönen called David’s parents again and found out that someone had called, he’d figure out it was me, but I had no time to hesitate.

“Do you have any news about David? Is he finally safe? Or was he thrown into jail for supposedly murdering that Italian man?” Eva Stahl’s voice was anxious and hopeful.

“Unfortunately, we do not have that information. We’ve lost track of him.”

The woman let out a little yelp. I wanted to stop lying and tell her I was just as desperate as she was to find out what had happened to her son. Only my pride prevented me from doing this.

“What did he tell you about Carlo Dolfini’s murder?”

“Only that he was innocent. He is, isn’t he?”

I didn’t know what to say. David had lied to me, so I was sure he could do it to his mother, too.

“David said he had been staying with Jaan. Are you familiar with Jaan Rand? He’s a monk at a monastery in Tuscany, goes by the name Brother Gianni. But even he doesn’t know about David,” Eva Stahl continued.