Helsinki White

by James Thompson

  Aino stayed for coffee, hung around for about an hour. She and Kate had a blossoming friendship. I was glad when she left. Her presence made me feel like my dick was going to burst.

  A packet of dossiers arrived about two p.m. They contained info on criminals culled from the ship’s manifest of the Baltic Princess, the ferry from Tallinn due to arrive in Helsinki at four thirty. I agreed to participate in this black-ops project because I wanted to help people. This day marked my first attempt to do so.

  Milo showed up around noon and started assembling his new computer. The circles around his eyes were so dark, he looked like he wore camo stick.

  “How many hours do you normally sleep?” I asked.

  “Two or three.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s all my body requires.”

  He has problems I didn’t even want to contemplate.

  While he worked on his electronics, I memorized the faces of the criminals entering the country aboard the Baltic Princess.

  The ferries are cruise ships and offer all the amenities. The larger ones offer nightclubs and big stage-production entertainment. Cabins of various grades. Pubs. Shopping malls. A variety of restaurants, including fine dining. A buffet that offers at least fifty dishes. The main attraction is buying goods at Estonian prices. Alcohol, tobacco and luxury items, especially perfume and makeup, are offered at about half of Finnish rates. The trips are inexpensive, and the usual trip entails groups having parties at sea and drinking themselves into cut-rate comas.

  They also transport about a hundred criminals a day from Tallinn into Helsinki. There is no airport-type inspection. The ferries bring thousands of people back and forth between the two cities every day, but have almost no security. The criminals bring drugs, guns, women pressed into prostitution. The border police safeguarding the harbors were recently cut by eleven percent, so they’re by and large lawless zones.

  We took Milo’s Nissan Sentra. Not suitable for Sweetness the baby-faced ogre and a large man on crutches. My plan was to strong-arm a couple pimps, frame them up, stick them in a Finnish jail, and send their hookers back to Estonia.

  It was a cold, blustery day, flurries of snow on and off. The full parking lot was filthy gray ice. We parked and leaned against the car. Milo and I smoked. Sweetness injected nuuska into the hole in his gum and took a hit from his flask. He offered it to us. We declined.

  The ship landed. Passengers disembarked. Most bore heavy loads from shopping in Estonia. Some got in the taxi line. Some made for the tram. They were no good to us. We couldn’t shake them down in a crowd. Others made their way to the bar on the other side of the lot to keep the party rolling. I watched faces. For a while, it seemed I would be disappointed. No criminals from the rap jackets appeared. Then finally, when the ship was almost empty, two pimps with four girls headed toward the bar. All were well dressed, young, good-looking.

  Sweetness held my arm to keep me from falling, and we met them in the center of the lot. We drew guns. We flashed police cards. The men swore, protested, threatened. The girls stayed quiet. Milo and Sweetness threw the men up against a car, kicked their legs apart, patted them down and took their passports. I took the passports from the girls, wrote down their names, DOBs and passport numbers so I could check up on them later, and gave their passports back to them. Two of them were underage.

  Milo took the pimps’ flash rolls and handed them to me. I counted out about seven thousand euros, divided it into four, and gave it to the girls. Sweetness translated for me. “Go back to Estonia. Get out of Tallinn. If you don’t want to hook anymore, disappear. Get a job. This is your start-up money.”

  They just stared at me. “Scram!” I shouted and Sweetness repeated, shouted, after me. They ran back to the terminal.

  Milo took two pistols out of his coat and held them out to the pimps. They got the idea. Frame-up and jolt in Finnish prison. They refused to touch them.

  We pressed Glocks into their chests. I said, “We put them in your hands while you’re alive or after you’re dead. Same difference.” Sweetness translated. They took the pistols, reluctant. We called the border police and handed the pimps off to them. We helped the girls. Strong-arm, extortion and frame-up. It seemed right. Mission accomplished.

  12

  The next night, I made a call to the police in Estonia, gave them the ID info from the hookers we’d sent back there to get a new lease on life. Three were in the hospital, raped and beaten, used rubbers stuffed in their mouths. One was dead, killed in her apartment. Her hands in a kitchen sink filled with water. A toaster tossed in. Electricity fried her face glossy black. She was fifteen. They had gone straight from the boat to a whore bar hangout. Word of the pimps’ arrest made it there within hours. They took the blame. I tried to do good. Their blood was on my hands. It was an experiment I wouldn’t try again. Arvid was right, people would be hurt. I was a fool.

  Milo finished building his toys. His laptop and the mobile eavesdropping devices’ stations were slaved to the computer he had built. By this point, Milo and Sweetness had attached GPS tracking devices to the vehicles of most of the major criminals in Helsinki. We could watch them travel on a computer screen.

  The capabilities were limited by range and the number of phones they could monitor at one time, but Milo set up his mobile eavesdropping stations to monitor the phones of criminals on our upcoming heist list. Their calls were recorded, as were their SMS messages. If they were in Russian or Estonian, Sweetness translated. Milo could set his phone up to ring when a particular criminal’s phone was in use, handy if we planned to rob said criminal at a particular day and time. The criminals told us where they were, what they had, and when to rob them.

  We burgled, heisted, robbed, almost nightly. My role, because of my lack of mobility, was to sit in the car and watch, cell phone in hand, to make sure no one walked in on Milo and Sweetness. Since the B&Es were almost always in the wee hours of the morning, I left after Kate was asleep and was home before she woke. My family life was at least outwardly unaffected. Kate knew. I hid nothing. I sensed her disapproval, but she didn’t complain.

  During B&Es, Milo mirrored the hard drives from criminals’ computers, stole their banking codes, lifted their financial info, inserted viruses so that he could manipulate their computers from his own. We emptied their bank accounts, left them penniless. We continued in this way for weeks. A small fortune accrued.

  There were consequences, some foreseen, some unforeseen.

  I believed, and at that point rightly so, that no violence would be necessary. These thefts would be seen as betrayals among criminals, who would then go to war because of them. Foreign criminals are reticent to kill each other in Finland. Russian and Estonian criminals prefer to kill each other in their home countries, where corruption is rife, because they have little fear of prosecution, whereas in Finland, they almost certainly will be caught and incarcerated. The Helsinki Homicide history intimidates them. No murder had gone unsolved in Helsinki since 1993.

  However, in the criminal world, to come up missing a large quantity of cash or drugs leads to mistrust. Theft isn’t an acceptable excuse. Mistrust and uncertainty, like as not, end in homicide. In Tallinn and St. Petersburg, mafia wars raged. The body count, both cities combined, numbered seventeen. And of course, that only counted the bodies that had been found. This was OK with me.

  Milo listened to the threats made during their telephone conversations. When the thieves were caught—meaning us—we would be tortured for days, slowly destroyed physically but not allowed to die. They would cut off our dicks, make us eat them. And so on.

  If I wanted criminals locked up, either Finnish or foreign, I had various options. Drugs or guns discovered during B&Es could be left in place, or moved to the home of a criminal I had a particular disdain for and used for a frame-up. A simple phone call to the police would lead to an arrest. I had yet to exercise this option. Gangsters running free could be robbed again.

  Unforeseen consequences.
We did our job so well that we ran Helsinki dope dry. Junkie suicides and pharmacy break-ins reached astronomical proportions. A pharmacist was shot to death.

  Milo and Sweetness stopped any pretense of comradeship. Milo called Sweetness “the court jester,” “doofus,” “clown,” “the other half of a halfwit.” Sweetness responded with a long list of insults suggesting Milo was effete: “Mary,” “sissy,” and my favorite, “Miss Froufrou.”

  On March third, I went to Fazer, the best bakery in Helsinki, and bought the fanciest cake they had. Fazer makes some of the world’s best chocolate, and this was Karl Fazer’s first shop. He opened it in 1891. I had a coffee and a pastry while I was there, because the back room is built under a dome that echoes. You can eavesdrop on conversations around the room from reflecting voices.

  Then on to Alko, the state-run liquor monopoly. I had specialordered a bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII cognac. Price: one thousand five hundred euros. The youngest cognac in the blend is fifty years old. The oldest, about a hundred years. I hid them until the evening, then set them on the table. Kate and I waited until Arvid ambled in. “Happy ninetieth birthday,” I said, and we sang to him.

  It moved him so much that he almost shed a tear. He opened the cognac box and took out the crystal decanter. “It was the only gift I could find that’s older than you,” I said. It made him laugh and we passed a pleasant evening.

  On March seventh, Anu was christened and officially named. Winter hung on as if it would never end. The temperature was minus ten that day. We asked my brother, Jari, and his wife, Taina, to be Anu’s godparents. They’re good people, have two fine boys of their own. I invited Jyri Ivalo to the ceremony, and to our house afterward for coffee and cake. He took it as a sign of respect, a gesture meaning that I wanted to solidify our relationship. He attended and gave Anu the traditional gift of a silver spoon set.

  Milo didn’t attend. During the ceremony, he was busy black-bagging Jyri’s home. He made a mirror copy of Jyri’s hard drive and photographed relevant papers. We now had the user names and passwords for all information available to the national chief of police. Milo said Jyri was so fucking stupid he didn’t even password protect his home computer. He also planted a MAC-10 and eight balls of heroin and cocaine in various places around the house. More insurance, should Jyri choose to betray me.

  On March fifteenth, my sick leave officially ended and I returned to duty, whatever that meant. I supposed I had an office at NBI headquarters with my name on the door. I had no intention of ever going there to find out. The date, the Ides of March, struck me as a harbinger.

  13

  Wednesday, March seventeenth. It was late morning. I lounged around in bed. Katt had crawled inside my shirt, shredded my chest with his claws and fallen asleep. Anu chewed on the little finger of my left hand. I was doing nothing, thinking nothing. Just existing. My cell phone rang. I reached over, careful not to wake Katt, and took my phone from the nightstand. Jyri Ivalo was calling. To answer or not to answer? I answered.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “And good morning to you. I have a job for you.”

  We’d heisted the town dry. I had nothing to do, wanted to do nothing. “I’m covered up in work,” I said.

  “Lisbet Söderlund was murdered. Her head was sent by mail to the Finnish Somalia Network. It was sent by normal post, packed in Styrofoam peanuts and newspaper. A note composed of letters cut from headlines of a newspaper said ‘nigger lover.’ Forensics is there now. The case is yours. I need you to go over there right now.”

  I turned the relevant facts over in my mind, considered the ramifications of taking the case. The Finnish Somalia Network, as the name suggests, is a political group that represents Somali immigrants in Finland. Söderlund was a Swedish-speaking Finn—and so, needless to say, white—politician belonging to the Swedish People’s Party. Söderlund was a member of the European Parliament for about a decade. After the 2007 elections she was chosen to be the new minister of immigration and European affairs. She had come to be a symbol in her self-appointed role as a champion of immigrants’ rights, far beyond the call of duty of her post. As the government’s foremost advocate of immigrants’ rights, she became the object of contempt and hatred of the extreme right and racists. For a time, until it was removed because of its illegality, a Facebook page existed called I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund. The page attracted some hundreds of members.

  Her head in the mail was an escalation over a previous event involving the Finnish Somalia Network. During the last holiday season, they were sent a pig’s head, along with a note reading “Merry Christmas.”

  I said, “It’s political, it’s high-profile. Her assassination will be remembered by history and the eyes of the world will be focused on the investigation. It will draw attention to me that I don’t need. It doesn’t serve your purposes, either. It’s a bad idea.”

  “It’s the most significant murder in the region since Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986. I agree, and I don’t want you involved. However, the president does.”

  “Why the fuck does Tarja Halonen think I should investigate this?”

  Jyri sighed, aggravated. “It goes back to the Sufia Elmi murder. Immigrants are going to be up in arms over this. There will be protests, maybe retaliatory crimes. You solved the only case in our history of a high-profile black person’s murder. Therefore, Halonen believes your involvement will give the immigrant community confidence that the government is committed to solving Söderlund’s murder, and help assuage their anger. And she’s probably right.”

  “Then I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it,” I said. “The president gets what the president wants.” There was no possible argument to the contrary. “But let’s do it like this. You say this is a matter of national security and I can’t speak to the press until the case is over. You take the limelight and attention away from me.”

  “That was my plan. The address is Kuninkaantie 38. Let me know what happens. I have to keep the president apprised.” He rung off.

  I THOUGHT ABOUT bringing Milo, decided against it. He would talk incessantly and have strong opinions on every detail. I didn’t want to hear them. I called Sweetness and he drove me to the crime scene. It had been five weeks since my surgeries. In a couple weeks, after I gained just a little more strength in my knee, I could trade in these crutches for a cane and drive again.

  On the way over, I tried to impress the gravity of this case on Sweetness and repeated Jyri’s comparison to the murder of Olof Palme.

  “Who’s he?” Sweetness asked.

  I couldn’t fucking believe it. Had this boy been to school? Did he spend history classes sniffing glue?

  “He was a Swedish prime minister and was assassinated in 1986. He was a harsh critic of both the U.S. and the USSR, among other governments. The murder went unsolved. Conspiracy theorists claim that either the CIA or KGB assassinated him. The point is that these two murders will be compared, and the whole world will be watching to see what happens.”

  “Are we going to be famous?”

  “Probably.”

  “Cool.”

  The city streets were still lined with high banks of snow and ice, but we hadn’t had much fresh snow for a while, so they were dirty and gray, the edges fringed in black filth.

  A large crowd, mostly black people, had formed outside the Finnish Somalia Network. Sweetness pushed our way through and helped me walk until we made it inside. Two crime scene techs and a pathologist were examining Lisbet Söderlund’s head. The cardboard box it came in was on another table. I imagined the shock of whoever opened it. Heads are heavy, the package must have generated curiosity. Digging through Styrofoam peanuts and wadded-up newspaper to find a severed head would add a new dimension to anyone’s morning. The note was in the box. It looked like the letters were cut out with scissors and stuck to a sheet of printing paper with children’s glue stick. “Nigger lover.” Lovely sentiment.

  I a
sked the techs if I could touch Lisbet’s head. The pathologist said it was OK. I picked it up by her hair, dark, with a thick shock of gray in the front. She was an attractive woman in her fifties. I spun it in a slow circle. Nothing unusual. Her eyes were closed. I flipped it upside down to look at the decapitation wound. It looked clean and neat, not a hack job. I borrowed a magnifying glass and took a close look at the spine. It was cut, not snapped, and I discerned saw tooth marks. Whoever killed her was well prepared, had the proper tools, took their time and did a good job of it. Sweetness examined the head with me. He asked if he could hold it. I handed it to him. He stared at it long and hard.

  The cutting said a great deal about the murder. Few people can remove a head and keep their calm, not make a mess of it. I asked the pathologist if she had any insights she might share with me. Not yet. I’d seen all I needed to and we left.

  I went home, fired up the laptop and checked the Internet site of Helsingin Sanomat, the nation’s leading newspaper. It was already announced that I would lead the investigation. There was an article on me, my strength and determination, taking on the nation’s most pressing crime despite recent brain surgery. It cited other cases of international interest I’ve handled. I turned on the tube. The case—and my face—were on all the news broadcasts. My change of appearance now seemed prescient.

  Several articles detailed Lisbet Söderlund’s career. They discussed her bravery and resolve, leading a life of public service that culminated in giving up that life for her beliefs. I was more interested in the reader comments on the articles than the articles themselves. They ran about two to one, those glad she was dead, stating that she got what she deserved, and those mourning her loss. The site was supposed to be moderated, but opinions weren’t censored. There were already a couple hundred, so I skimmed. “Niggers out. White men unite.” “Killer white man’s hero and patriot.” “Immigrants parasites on the Finnish taxpayer.” “Gang rapists.”