The Lion of Justice (9 page)

There was a knock on the door that afternoon. It was one of the regulars from the back patio, Veikko. He seemed harmless and was never aggressive when he was drunk. He spent most of his time sitting on a folding chair and looking out to sea.

“Come on in,” I told him in a friendly tone, but Veikko stood at the door and pointed at the window that I’d temporarily covered in cardboard.

“They really did a number on the place, those rascals,” he said.

“Did you see who broke the window?” I asked.

“They were them bald-headed men—what do you call strong boys like that—the size of tanks? I was too afraid to intervene. Did they make a huge mess?” Veikko asked.

Veikko had woken up around two in the morning to steps and clinking sounds. The baldies had first tried to break the back door but failed. Then they moved to the front of the building, and Veikko had followed to see what they were up to.

“They were looking for someone. They left shouting cuss words. I didn’t go near the window, thinking I’d be blamed for it. The cops love to toss us in jail even if we haven’t done anything.”

“So you think they were looking for someone? Was it Monika?” I asked, although I was pretty sure that wasn’t the case. “Were they Finnish?”

“Yes, they spoke in Finnish. And if I heard correctly, they were talking about some dude. Saying that the dude wasn’t in,” said Veikko.

“Dude? What dude?” asked Monika, but I already had an idea.

A break-in at Sans Nom could have meant that Rytkönen or one of his allies thought David Stahl was in Finland and staying with me.

I bought and installed the CCTV at the restaurant that evening, and I didn’t hear anything from the police. Instead, David began to appear in my dreams. In them, a creature with David’s body and the head of a lynx appeared and made love to me. Once I woke up to the feeling of a rough tongue on my cheek. I kept on calling for David, then Frida, and once I realized they were both gone, I almost burst into tears.

“Leave me alone, Stahl,” I yelled into my pillow. I still wanted to keep Frida close to me.

At the end of September, I went to the Tapiola neighborhood with Monika. She hadn’t found fitting flared black waiter’s slacks from the Stockmann department store in Helsinki, so she was sent off to a store in Tapiola to try on possible options. The pants mostly fit, but they’d need to be shortened an inch, and neither one of us had time for sewing despite our van being full of cotton tablecloths and towels we’d salvaged from secondhand stores, all in need of mending. Monika’s plan was to use lots of recycled items in Sans Nom. Even the van was used. Monika had it painted by a student at the vocational school. The restaurant sign looked like it was created by the best local graffiti artist, and it was surrounded by artistic renditions of vegetables: carrots, potatoes, beets, and artichokes. I thought the van was too flashy. We should have invested in a more anonymous-looking van to match Sans Nom so nobody would pay attention to us.

It was early afternoon as I left to pick up Monika’s tailor-made slacks. On my way she called me and asked me to get two pairs of medium beige pantyhose while I was at it. For the first time in her employment, I had to wonder whether I was a bodyguard, an assistant, or an errand girl. When I left Stockmann with my purchase, I pulled next to an SUV at the traffic light and glanced over. The man riding shotgun looked familiar, and it took me a moment to recognize him. It was Usko Syrjänen. Apparently I ogled long enough, because he rolled his window down.

“You want an autograph or what?” Syrjänen sounded shocked. “This is certainly not the place for it.”

Syrjänen’s car got the green light, and although mine was still red, I swerved quickly to his lane and disregarded the angry honking of cars behind me as I began to follow the SUV onto Länsiväylä. I wanted to see who was working for Syrjänen as a driver.

I almost crashed into the median when I finally caught up with the SUV again and saw who it was. He’d shaved the goatee off his pale face and was wearing aviators, but I knew it was him. He’d once kidnapped my employer and gone after me, too. The SUV was driven by Yuri Trankov.

9

I barely got the van under control. I’d sped past the SUV and couldn’t slow down because the car behind me was riding my bumper. What was Trankov’s business in Finland, and what was he doing with Syrjänen? Trankov had kidnapped a Finnish politician a couple of years earlier, which got him banned from the country. Had the ban been lifted? Had Helena Lehmusvuo, the politician, known about it? Although Helena had claimed she’d survived the incident without a scratch and very little emotional damage, seeing her kidnapper would rip all the old wounds open again.

I didn’t know what to do. Follow Syrjänen and Trankov? I didn’t know if Trankov had seen me. I was a nobody to Syrjänen, who hadn’t recognized me. I didn’t know how far they were going and if following them would give me any answers, so following them seemed insane.

At Suomenoja I took the exit and turned back toward Helsinki. Monika was waiting for me at the restaurant, but I needed to see Laitio first, and I trusted he was at his place on Urheilu Road instead of the main offices. I could also ask him about Rytkönen.

Traffic was at a standstill in Ruoholahti. Why weren’t people using public transportation instead of driving? Most of the cars had only one person in them. To the left of me, a woman was applying lipstick and talking into a Bluetooth earpiece. She was probably one of those people who watched TV on an elliptical machine while frying phyllo dough dumplings.

When I finally got to Urheilu Street, there was no parking. I didn’t want to get a ticket with the company van—bad publicity—so I parked behind the nearby hockey arena, then jogged back to Laitio’s place. The jog did me good, my only recent exercise.

I rang Laitio’s buzzer.

“We’re not buying anything,” a curt reply came, the voice I had hoped to hear.

“This is Ilveskero. All hell’s broken loose. Trankov is back in Finland. I just saw him, and you won’t believe this. He was driving Usko Syrjänen around.”

“Yuri Trankov? Paskevich’s bastard son? He wasn’t supposed to ever come. I’ll let you in, but wait a minute. I’m not decent yet.”

I took my time climbing the stairs, trying not to think about what Laitio meant by
decent
. I was pissed at myself for not getting Syrjänen’s license plate number. What was that thing Mike Virtue had said? Even if we were knocking on death’s door, we couldn’t let our concentration waver. And that’s exactly what I’d done when I was stunned at seeing Trankov.

I waited behind the door a while before it opened. Laitio was wearing mustard yellow again, but he was not wearing a tie and had on a cardigan. Maybe ties were reserved for visits from the boss. The apartment smelled like French fries. My stomach growled.

Laitio invited me in with a nod. The usual wall of cigar smoke was gone, and the place felt like it was just cleaned and aired out. Laitio opened an enormous leather briefcase and pulled out a laptop.

“Proper archives, all gone. Now everything is here, behind a password. What if I forget the passwords or someone else gets ahold of them? It was different back in the day. Multiple padlocks and a damn angry lady, Eini Rantanen, made sure no outsider would have access to the Bureau’s classified information. Whether it was the president or the police chief, you still had to explain what you were looking for. Even President Koivisto had to wait for almost half an hour before Eini brought him the information he needed. Not so these days. And where did that damned mouse go again?” Laitio was poking the laptop’s touch pad and cursed.

“I’d get an external mouse,” I said.

“Cats have a damn external mouse,” he said. “There we go. Let’s see. Trankov, Yuri Valentin. There. What the hell? His ban was overturned in June.”

Helena Lehmusvuo had never pressed charges for the kidnapping, and instead there’d been an agreement to keep quiet about it. I had no desire to protect the ministers and members of the Finnish Security Intelligence Service who had made the decision, but I did as Helena told me and didn’t leak any information to journalists. Mike Virtue had made sure we’d remember how important being loyal to the client was, and I kept that in mind even when I got nothing out of it.

“Who made this decision? Who has authorization?” I demanded.

“Goddamned bosses at the Bureau or Intelligence Service have run some sort of a secretive preliminary investigation and decided not to press charges. Or Trankov was let in the country because he could be used to catch a bigger fish. Maybe they were after Trankov’s dad. Paskevich may have an ax to grind with Syrjänen, as he was a business partner to Paskevich’s now-dead enemy Vasiliev. Remember how Syrjänen claimed to know nothing about Vasiliev’s criminal activities? It was an easy part to play—all the witnesses were dead,” Laitio said.

“And nobody thought of asking Stahl what Syrjänen’s role had been?” I asked.

Laitio gave me a sideways glance. “You didn’t ask, either, did you?”

“I tried, but he doesn’t reveal much, not even in bed.” The thought of this was really painful. Besides, Stahl wasn’t interested in Syrjänen. He was tracking Vasiliev and his business plans. “What does your database say about Stahl or Usko Syrjänen?” I asked.

“Why would I tell you?”

“Do you know if Syrjänen was aware of what was going down a couple of years ago?”

“I have no idea what the bosses know,” yelled Laitio. “All right, Syrjänen, let’s search for him.” Laitio’s one-finger typing method was painfully slow. “Here we go. Syrjänen has had so many speeding tickets that they could pay for months of my salary. Looks like his license was taken away because of the tickets, so no wonder he needs a chauffeur. The plate number for the SUV is USK-O3. He has four other cars, too, and the license plates all have the letters USK and numbers from two to six. The first seems to have been demolished already.”

“Man wants his name everywhere in some form. His boat was called
I Believe
,
believe
being the English translation of his name, Usko,” I explained to Laitio.

“His current boat is
I Believe 2
, three feet longer than the previous one. Syrjänen doesn’t place small bets when he’s in the game, but I can’t find anything else about him besides the usual. I guess I don’t have the right passwords. I’ll look into why Trankov’s ban was overturned. I still have it in me to blackmail my bosses. They don’t want their messes in the newspapers.”

My stomach rumbled even louder now, and Laitio heard it.

“Are you on some sort of diet?” he asked.

“No. I just didn’t have time to eat today.”

“Women. Always trying to lose weight. My daughter isn’t eating carbs these days, and my old lady is on some bizarre soup diet. With the money we’ve spent on those soup mixes, I could’ve gotten a freezer full of good steaks. Anyway, I’ll make one more search for Stahl.”

There was commotion in the apartment next door, and some
thing heavy fell onto the ground. Then there was a familiar-sounding
yelp. Frida had made the same sound when she was annoyed.

“Damned Kokki destroying the house again. I just hope he knocked down that damn ugly vase my wife inherited from her aunt. If that hideous pot broke, I’ll give the cat extra shrimp in his dish tonight. Wait a minute while I check on him. My wife wants to get rid of him because he pees on the rugs. Honestly, Kokki has better taste in interior design than she does.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes when Laitio got up and started walking toward the other apartment without locking his computer. He had to know I was going to snoop around. This man was a walking intelligence risk to the Bureau. He’d also saved his login name and password on the home page. I put them in my cell phone. When Laitio returned I was back in my chair, stomach still growling.

“He knocked over a chair playing with a ball of yarn. The old tom still has energy. I told the wife that if the cat goes, so do I. So far that’s been effective,” Laitio said.

I’d never seen any of Laitio’s family, and he wasn’t in the habit of talking about them. He understood that someone could use them to hurt him, although it seemed like the best way to torture him would be to snag his cat.

He settled at the computer and began poking at the keys with his right index finger. Didn’t they teach typing in his days at the academy?

“Well, I’ll be damned. Stahl’s information seems to have been wiped ever since Rytkönen got on board this summer. Nothing’s like it used to be. I have copies of those old papers, but there’s nothing in them you don’t already know. Caruso has tried to track down Dolfini, but he’s been having a hard time without resources to bribe people. Those Italian informants are damned greedy. And as long as there’s no body, there’s no murder. The Italian boys know what they’re doing. Listen, Ilveskero, it’s best if we mind our own business. When the big shots decide to stay quiet, the lion of justice becomes a petulant kitten whose neck can be broken at any moment.”

“Why did you become a cop?” I asked, my stomach growling.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Laitio dug into the pockets of his stretched-out cardigan and produced a banana. “Eat that. I don’t want to listen to your stomach anymore. My wife says one banana is enough for a woman’s lunch.”

Laitio was still full of surprises. The banana would have satisfied me as well as a skinny squirrel would’ve filled a lynx’s empty stomach, so I tried not to eat it too fast.

“Why did I become a cop? Because it’s fun to bust criminals. Or just for the feeling of being in power, you know? You get to insult people legally.” Laitio opened the top drawer of his writing desk and pulled out a cigar. The cutter made a sharp snap, and he put a Cohiba in his mouth. He got the match to light on his third try.

“And the reason you became a bodyguard was to make up for your mother’s inability to protect herself from your father,” Laitio said. His eyes lit up when the first puff of smoke escaped his lips.

“Armchair psychology. I was four when it happened—how would a kid prevent a murder?”

“Kids often think everything is their fault. Have you heard anything from Keijo Kurkimäki?”

My back stiffened as it always did when I heard my father’s name, though he was no father to me. He’d sired me and left me with the genes of a murderer. I shook my head. As a teenager I’d imagined the most gruesome ways to kill my father. Uncle Jari had been worried about me when I’d placed a hold at the library for books on torture methods.

“Books really should come with age limits,” he had said when I was reading an English book on the Inquisition. Uncle didn’t understand much of the text, but the pictures of Catherine wheels and testicle-crushing devices were illustrative enough. “Why are you reading this? No wonder you scream in your sleep with all these nightmares. Maybe you should go and talk to one of those—”

“I don’t need a shrink! I just need to know what I should look out for,” I’d told him.

My phone rang. It was Monika asking what was taking so long. She thought I’d been in an accident. This gave me an excuse to take off. Laitio told me to keep him updated if I saw Trankov again, and he’d ask around about Syrjänen.

I stopped at a nearby deli for a bacon sandwich and ate it while I walked to the van. I appreciated Monika’s ideology on ethical foods, and I liked working for her, but I had my vices.

It was almost midnight by the time we got home. The grand opening was on the following Friday, and we had to spend some of the weekend in Turku at the convention. Monika took a shower and hit the hay—she had to wake up at seven. I broke into the Bureau’s database. I was worried that Laitio was computer savvy enough to check the last time his username was used to log in, but I had to take that chance. I made random searches for ministers, business owners, and trashy celebrities, and I could find something on almost anyone. There were not just criminal records; this database also included information that should never have been saved about some people’s private lives. Hardly anyone had anything interesting in their records. This told me more about Laitio’s status in the Bureau than anything else: secrets were kept from him.

Of course I couldn’t avoid checking what was listed under my name. I had no criminal record, so there shouldn’t have been anything. It looked like the Bureau thought of me as a security risk, because my folder was larger than the current prime minister’s. In addition to my current and former name (Hilja Kanerva Suurluoto), there was a description of how I’d witnessed my mom getting stabbed to death by my father when I was a kid, information on my time at the security academy in Queens, copies of my security guard and weapon license (no record of misuse), and a list of my work history. Anita Nuutinen’s murder and my role in it were described briefly. I’d quit the gig a day before she was shot to death near Moscow’s Frunzenskaya subway station. The culprit was a homeless alcoholic who had tried to rob her.

I looked for Helena Lehmusvuo next. There was no mention of her kidnapping two years earlier. I felt sorry for Laitio. Maybe Rytkönen and his cronies were just happy to keep him from asking difficult questions. The smoking rule had been a convenient excuse for Laitio to work from home, where he didn’t bother the
important
people. Before I turned the computer off, I checked my e-mail. Nothing.

Turku hosted a book and music convention at the same time the food convention was going on. I’d always hated places that were teeming with people but where nobody performed security checks. You never knew when a frustrated young author whose work had been rejected by every publishing house would decide to take revenge, though people from the fine arts realm were a naïve bunch—the first to condemn acts of violence, although they made those acts possible by not preparing for them.