The Lion of Justice (5 page)

I was startled when I felt something brush my leg. It was the largest cat I’d ever seen: a long-legged gray tabby so massive that it must’ve weighed twenty pounds. Maybe his ancestors were Italian forest cats. I wanted to hold it, but when I reached out, he retreated. The light from the door was suddenly dimmed when an angry monk stood in the doorway. He began to blather at me in a quick, sputtering way. I didn’t understand the words, but the gist of his message was very clear: I had better take a hike, or else. Back in Eastern Finland, people used to say that if you don’t behave yourself, God will throw a hot rock on you. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the monk was saying the same thing.

I’d run out of time on the meter, but the monastery spirits had protected me from a ticket. I made my way toward Montalcino. I saw signs pointing toward Val d’Orcia, with promises of bed-and-breakfasts. I was in luck and got a room at the first one. In addition to breakfast, the house offered dinner, so I had a Margherita pizza and a small pitcher of Brunello. I mustered enough energy to check flights from Florence to Helsinki, and my luck continued: a flight with a layover in Vienna had some seats left, although catching it would mean an early wake-up call. The sooner I was out of Italy, the better. Brother Gianni was right; there was nothing for me here anymore.

I woke up at five in the morning and took stock of everything I’d forgotten to do. I had never checked what was in the envelope, and I’d also not bothered to figure out who Hund, Kassi, and Cavallo were. Leaving the envelope in checked luggage may have been too risky, as luggage could go missing, especially if I had to switch planes. I shoved the envelope and the kaleidoscope in my carry-on bag and left the envelope untouched. I’d deal with them when I could be sure nobody was watching me. Some of my belongings were on Untamo Road in Helsinki with my neighbor, Mrs. Voutilainen, and some of them were in storage in Hevonpersiinsaari. Mrs. Voutilainen probably hadn’t received my postcard from Italy, so she wouldn’t know to expect me, and I couldn’t stay with her forever.

I stopped at a gas station to buy a phone card and make some calls. The clerk gave me a pathetic look:
Jeez, one of these relics from a generation with no cell phones
.

First I called Hund, but all I got was his voice mail in Italian. I called again to listen to it more carefully, in case the recording mentioned a name. Not as far as I could tell. I had more luck with Cavallo; someone picked up.

“
Pronto
,” a woman screamed. “
Carlo, dove tu
?
Con una donna
.”

I interrupted her to ask whether she spoke English. She said yes but continued in Italian, angrily asking who the hell I was and why was I calling Carlo.

I begged her to switch to English, at which point she asked if I was Carlo’s American lover. The story began to unfold. Cavallo was some guy named Carlo, and his wife hadn’t seen him in two days. She had found his phone in the glove compartment of his car.

“Where would Carlo go without a car? Did you pick him up?”

“No. Have you gotten in touch with the police about his disappearance?” I asked. I had a bad feeling about Carlo’s whereabouts.

“No! They’d just laugh at me! The police in this village know nothing! I’d have to drive all the way to Florence!”

“Where do you live?”

“Lago di Scanno. As if you didn’t know.”

“I have never met your husband, Mrs. . . . ?”

“Dolfini.”

“Mrs. Dolfini, does your husband have one leg shorter than the other? Does he use insoles?”

“You’ve never met him, but you know all this? Who are you? What do you want from me?”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell Mrs. Dolfini that her husband had been murdered. The least I should’ve done was make sure someone was there to comfort her, but she had no reason to believe me. So I made like a real coward and hung up. I didn’t know where Lago di Scanno was. All I knew was that there were large lakes in the mountains of northern Italy.

I decided to call Kassi when I got back to Finland—that number was Finnish. I drove off and left my car at the airport in Florence, causing an argument with the rental company, because I was returning the car two weeks too early. I checked in, checked my bags, and rushed toward security. Only there did I remember that I still had the kaleidoscope in my backpack, and I didn’t know what was inside it. I saw a drug-sniffing dog on the other side of the gate. It looked calm, but I’d seen these dogs enough to know they could switch from calm to alert in a split second. I did my best to look like an innocent tourist on my way home from a short visit to Tuscany. I hoped the security agents wouldn’t look at my neck, where my pulse was visibly beating twice as fast as usual.

I went through security without a hitch only to find out that my plane would be fifteen minutes late. Last chance to buy souvenirs, like aprons adorned with the statue of David. David’s parents had been in Florence when his mother was pregnant, and David was named after Michelangelo’s statue. The Stahls claimed they didn’t choose a naked sex symbol; to them, David was the embodiment of courage against an overpowering enemy. David’s dad had seen Michelangelo’s David as Estonia and Soviet Russia as Goliath, who had to be defied even if it meant destruction. David occasionally made fun of the whole notion; who was he supposed to attack with a slingshot? I looked at a postcard of the statue’s face, and there was nothing erotic about it—just a desperate-looking young man. We were supposed to visit Florence together to see his namesake, but like so many other things, we’d never done it. When we began boarding I decided to buy the postcard, even if it made me feel like an idiot. After all, it wasn’t a picture of the man I had thought of as my David a couple of days before.

Air traffic over Vienna was chaos, so we had to circle over the airport for an excruciatingly long time. Once we landed, I had to run like a maniac to make it through security and catch my flight to Finland. My forehead was already beaded with sweat when a security official began to reel items back inside the scanner.

“Is this your backpack?” a man with a walrus mustache asked. He could barely fit in his uniform, and he hadn’t bothered to button his jacket.

“Yes, it is,” I replied.

“Could you step aside, please, and open it for me?”

“But my plane’s about to take off.”

I had worked airport security and knew resistance was futile. I just had to make it as quick as possible, so I stepped aside and opened my backpack. The security officer dug around for a while and beamed when he found the kaleidoscope.

“Too dangerous. You could hit someone with this.”

I knew he was right. Then again, there was always room for interpretation: kaleidoscopes were not weapons. I tried to think about what would make me give in. This guy seemed like a real by-the-book type.

“All right then. Hit me with it,” I urged him. “It’s a gift for my niece who collects kaleidoscopes, and she’s nine.” I flashed a benevolent smile. “Come on. Let me take it—I promised her a kaleidoscope. Her mom will skin me alive if I let this kid down.”

I was actually surprised when he waved his hand, urging me to move on with all my things.

Vienna is something else
, I thought, striding past a bar gray with smoke. You could smoke at the airport.

I bought a yodeling lemming for Mrs. Voutilainen. She’d once commiserated on how she had passed on a chance to buy one of these kitschy Austrian equivalents of a singing fish on the wall on her trip. “Remember, Hilja, we regret what we don’t do more often than things we have done,” she’d often told me.

I was still thinking about her words on the plane. Had I not done something I should have? Maybe I should have stayed in Tuscany, talked to the police, and told them about David and Carlo Dolfini. I was innocent, so what did I have to worry about? That was hard to believe. My connection to David was worrisome enough, and sharing secrets with Finnish government leaders didn’t make matters easier. Whoever was after David could not have known what David confided to me.

Unfortunately, he’d told me nothing.

Returning to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport made me feel trapped. I’d left the country with such high hopes, and here I was again. Finland was still gray, and there were no leaves on the trees. Spring was standing still, with sooty piles of snow lining the roads. My brain felt the same. I had to wait for my bag for over half an hour—there was a strike again.

The following morning I thanked my lucky stars for leaving Italy when I did; the ash cloud created by the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland had messed up all the flights within Europe, and if someone was after me, they wouldn’t be able to follow me to Finland anytime soon.

5

I went for the simplest accommodation and hopped on bus 615 at the airport and got off at the intersection of Mäkelä Street and Koskela Road. I didn’t have keys to Mrs. Voutilainen’s apartment, nor had I told her I was coming. She had a cell phone for emergencies but preferred her landline. Nobody answered when I rang her doorbell, so I called the cell, only to get her voice mail. I left a message on her cell and then on her landline answering machine. I decided to go to Käpygrilli for a beer to clear my head, which rarely worked. When I finished my second beer, I was in such good shape that I decided to book a night at Hotel Torni. Whenever David was in Finland, he stayed there, so I’d get close to him by doing the same. Torni might prove to be the most secure place to finally open the secret envelope.

I got a room with a panoramic view on the tenth floor. It was a single, and David would have fit perfectly next to me. The sea surrounded Helsinki from all sides, and I could see the Old Church Park and the tower of St. John’s Church to the south. After all the small villages in Tuscany, the city felt like a metropolis.

I looked in the minibar and pondered whether I should have another beer, but then I realized I should open David’s envelope before I got tipsy. I looked toward the railway station, and the rides of Linnanmäki, the amusement park, loomed behind it. I lifted the kaleidoscope to my eye and watched the city view change into a swirl of colorful pieces. Our neighbors the Hakkarainens, back in Hevonpersiinsaari, had a kaleidoscope when I was a kid, and I’d admired it often.

There was space between the protective glass and the rotating section in the kaleidoscope, but because the shards of glass were moving freely and completely visible, it seemed like nothing was hidden between them. I was avoiding the inevitability of breaking the kaleidoscope to make sure, and I decided to avoid it a bit longer and focused on the envelope. The red seal had to be broken, so I got my nail clippers. Just as I started cutting, my phone rang; it was Mrs. Voutilainen.

“Hilja, dear child, you’re back,” she exclaimed.

“I just got back today.”

“Is everything all right? Weren’t you supposed to stay there longer?”

“A change of plans. Where are you now?”

“I’ve been in Tuuri and the Ähtäri Zoo, on a trip for retirees. They even have lynx at the zoo—you liked them, right?”

“Tell them hi for me. Do you think I could stay with you for a couple of nights when you’re back?”

“You can let yourself in now if you want. Oona Nykänen from downstairs has the key, and she’s usually home with her baby. I’ll call her to let her know.”

I told her I wouldn’t get there until the next day, when Mrs. Voutilainen would be home. If she thought I was being uncharacteristically curt, she didn’t say anything. I’d have to come up with a story about Italy. I couldn’t allow her to be in danger if someone came asking questions.

I went back to opening the envelope, and the red wax fell in crumbling flakes to the table. I realized I had not used gloves when handling the envelope and kaleidoscope. My fingerprints had only been taken at the security academy in Queens for the school’s purposes, and although I trusted Mike Virtue, the rest of the staff could be bribed. Both the CIA and the FBI may have had information on me, but I doubted they were coming after David or me.

The envelope contained another envelope, small and brown, nothing unusual. “David” had been scribbled on it, and it was glued closed. I opened it only to find another, smaller envelope softened by Bubble Wrap, and I had a feeling I was playing with a nesting doll that would disappear before my eyes.

There was a hard rectangle under the Bubble Wrap. I furiously tore the envelope open. The package had two small silk paper rolls. I opened the larger of them first to find a white-and-purple USB stick.

I’d left my computer behind in the Untamo Road apartment because I had wanted to leave everything behind. There was probably a computer downstairs in the hotel lobby, but checking the contents of this stick in a public area seemed like a bad idea. I unwrapped the smaller package. It contained a ring, a thin golden band with three red stones embedded in it. They looked like rubies. The ring was small and meant for a woman. I slipped it on my ring finger, and it almost got stuck on the second joint. There was no engraving.

Had David bought this for me? Was he planning on proposing? In Finnish tradition men didn’t go around getting engagement rings by themselves; independent Finnish women wanted to select the jewelry they’d be wearing. I didn’t even like rubies; they looked too much like drops of blood. But how would David have known? We had never talked about it. We could never make our relationship official because the less documentation there was about David, the better, and if I married Daniel Lanotte, it would not be seen as a valid marriage, as David had never officially changed his name.

The USB stick could have clues about the ring, and I evaluated my options. The hotel lobby was out of the question, and I was suspicious about Internet cafés. It was best to just pay for the room and get the keys for Mrs. Voutilainen’s place.

I gargled with mouthwash to get the flavor of beer out of my mouth and changed into a fresh shirt. I put the USB stick and the ring into my wallet among the coins. David had joked that my wallet looked manly, but it made sense. I could use it when I was dressed up as my alter ego, Reiska Räsänen. I just needed to remember to switch out my real driver’s license with Reiska’s fake. Carrying it was always a risk because if it were spotted as a fake, I’d be charged with document forgery and lose my bodyguard license. Right now Reiska’s driver’s license was in the same locked safe as my licensed gun, back in the Hevonpersiinsaari cabin. The safe was fireproof and burglarproof. I hadn’t needed to use Reiska since I’d gone to see David in Spain a little over a year ago. Sometimes I missed my rude male persona.

Just as I was leaving the room, my phone vibrated. The call was from a Finnish number, but I didn’t recognize it, so I didn’t pick up—although it could have been David. I closed the door and waited. Soon there was a voice mail.

“Hey, Hilja, it’s Monika. Call me when you can. I’m back in Finland and not doing too well.”

Monika had left the message in Finnish. Her voice was higher and more strained than in her native Swedish. I called her back right away.

“Monika, hi! I didn’t recognize the number. How are you?” I asked.

“It’s a new provider. Are you still in Italy?”

“I just got back to Finland today.” I’d sent her an e-mail before I’d left for Tuscany, thinking she was still in Mozambique. We hadn’t met in a long time because Monika had been staying in the remotest, poorest areas of Mozambique for almost four years. She ran a restaurant that fed those in need for free. This radical change in a celebrity chef’s life had caused quite an uproar, and Finns called her a foolish idealist and a Finnish-Swedish millionaire who could afford to throw money into a bottomless pit of third world aid.

“So you’re in Helsinki?” asked Monika. “Would you have time to meet me today? I’m staying on Yrjö Street in my cousin’s place while he’s in India.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m in Hotel Torni right next to you! I can come right now. Do you have a computer there?”

Monika was one of the few people in the world I trusted. Or perhaps the only one these days, seeing how David had betrayed me.

“I do. Don’t pay for another night at the hotel. There’s plenty of room here. The code for the door is 6664.”

“I’ll think about it. See you soon!”

It dawned on me in the elevator what Monika had tried to tell me: she was “not doing too well.” I walked across the street and punched in the code. I felt foolish. She had tried to get me to visit her in Mozambique, but instead I’d used my money to run after David.

The woman who opened the door looked familiar but not. When Monika left for Africa, she had cut her blond hair even shorter, cropped like a little boy. She tanned easily and looked like she’d just gotten back from a couple of weeks of sailing. Monika was about five foot three, and the delicious food she prepared never impacted her slender, muscular body.

This Monika looked worn-out. Her crow’s feet and dimples ran deeper than ever, and not from smiling. Her hair was blinding white from the sun, and she’d pulled it into two thin pigtails. She was frail. As she hugged me I could feel her bones poking out under her skin.

“Hilja! I’m so glad to see you. Come in.” Monika spoke in Finnish.

I didn’t learn Swedish until I worked for her. I’d considered Swedish as Monika’s language, but it had become David’s language in such force that single words could make me recall joyful and painful memories. It was good that Monika was sticking to Finnish.

The apartment inside the old art nouveau–style house was furnished in a variety of colors. Monika’s cousin collected string instruments and images of Buddha, and I was afraid I’d break something. I sat on a low, silky sofa, and Monika lowered herself gently onto a sofa across from me.

“You want something to drink? I assume you still prefer tea over coffee?”

What I would have preferred was a stiff drink. It was hard to watch Monika’s slow movements as she carefully put her feet on the sofa.

“I thought you’d stick around Tuscany for a while by what you said in your e-mail.”

“Well, things don’t always go the way you plan. David performed one of his disappearing acts again.”

“What do you mean?” Monika drew a sharp breath, then shuddered as if her lungs were in pain.

I wasn’t sure how much I should tell her. Any outsider would have thought I was reckless and insane, and I needed to get help from the inside. I couldn’t let David disappear like that.

“He just took off. He can’t stand still for a moment, it seems. He won’t tell me who’s after him.” I hadn’t dared to tell Monika the truth about what David had been up to; e-mail and phone messages could easily be hacked. Last Christmas I had sent her a package with a hidden letter inside, which contained pretty much everything about David, although I kept him anonymous. “We don’t need to talk about David. Nothing we say will change the situation. What made you come back to Finland?”

Monika stood up awkwardly, as if she had no sense of balance.

“I’ll make you some tea,” she said. “Give me a minute.” Monika wore sandals, and she shuffled toward the kitchen. Once she reached the parquet, the sound was eerie, as if she were slowly skating across the floor. I thought about rushing over to help her. I could hear clanging in the kitchen, and something fell but didn’t break. Soon she was back with a tray, tea bags, two cups with saucers, a pot of honey, and a plate of cookies. She held the tray as if it weighed twenty pounds, and her arms shook from the strain. I stood up and grabbed the tray from her and set it down on the coffee table.

“Spit it out. What’s up with you?” I demanded.

“Nobody seems to know. Doctors back in Maputo first said it was an intestinal disease, which would have explained why I can’t keep any food down. But then my muscles began to get weaker, so I came back to Finland for more thorough testing. I didn’t want to leave my kitchen, but Joau promised he’d take over.”

“Joau?” I remembered Monika mentioning a man over the phone and in some e-mails. I’d assumed he was her lover.

“Joau.” A sad smile came over her face. “My lover. He’s Catholic, in his forties, and has a wife and five children in Maputo. Obviously that didn’t prevent us from getting involved. Maybe he was my illness. I knew it wouldn’t go far. My heart and mind wouldn’t let me give him up, so my body broke and forced me to leave. Maybe I’ll heal now that I’m hundreds of miles away.”

Monika’s arms stopped shaking, and she turned to fill the cups. The rooibos tea had a deliciously ruby glow, its scent promising comfort.

“Sounds like we both have rotten luck with men,” I said. “Have the doctors given you a prognosis?”

“My first appointment is tomorrow. I’ve always avoided private practices. I think it’s unfair for people to get different service based on how rich they are. But when push comes to shove, my idealism apparently means nothing.” Monika lifted the teacup to her colorless lips. “I wasn’t going to just sit around waiting for horrible news from the doctors. I had to come up with something, so while I was still in Mozambique, I looked for restaurants for sale. I want to bring Chez Monique back. Organic and locally produced foods became super trendy while I was gone, so there’ll be plenty of customers. I’m just trying to think of how to combine an African kitchen organized for the poor with Finnish cuisine.”

“Watered-down buttermilk and manioc?” I was glad my clumsy joke made her laugh.

“You’ve told me about what your uncle Jari fed you as a child. You fished and picked berries, and only that lynx got meat from the store,” said Monika.

“Frida.” Saying her name out loud felt like a religious rite, even after all these years. I’d never get over losing her. Mother, Uncle Jari, Frida, and now David, gone without a trace. I wouldn’t let Monika leave me, too.

“Chez Monique or perhaps Uncle Jari’s Corner Café? I’m open to new names.” Now Monika’s eyes were sparkling with excitement. “Are you working for anyone right now? I’m looking for a strong and efficient person to work security and crowd control.”

That’s exactly what I wanted. Working for Monika had been the best time of my life. There had been meaning to my existence, which was mostly filled with drifting from job to job since Uncle Jari died. I nodded, and she talked about ideas for the new restaurant, obviously trying to block thoughts of her illness, which could prevent the whole thing. I didn’t want to think about that, either. She’d offered for me to stay with her; her cousin would be back from India at the end of May, but by then Monika would have a place of her own. We tried to hold on to each other because we had no one else.