Helsinki White

by James Thompson

  Kate and I spent the morning in bed. We made love for the first time since Anu was born. Technically speaking, she had been able to have sex for a couple weeks, but she was nervous about it and we waited. Afterward, we lounged with Anu and Katt and talked. Just small talk. Her lack of work and reticence on both our parts to discuss mine limited our topics of discussion. But having both an infant and a kitten—both were growing fast—filled the void.

  Around noon, the door buzzer rang. Kate sighed. “None of them would dare show up this early, would they?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “it’s something else.”

  Two deliverymen brought in massive boxes. I asked the men to open the boxes for me, and they unveiled a massive man’s chair covered in soft blue-gray fabric, a stool, and a reading lamp.

  Kate watched, astonished and amused, as I directed where they should be placed. I gave them a generous tip, and the deliverymen left.

  I plunked down in the chair and put my feet up. The seat was four feet wide, had plenty of room for both of us. I patted the seat beside me. “Try it out,” I said.

  She sat snuggled up next to me and interlaced her feet with mine on the stool. She asked, “So, what prompted this?”

  The dining and living room are one open space. Only a low dais separates the two rooms. Our couch faces away from the dining room toward a big flat-screen TV and entertainment center. A built-in bookcase composes the wall to the right. Besides these things, the living room contained only a couple chairs for guests. Usually, Kate sat on the couch beside me or lay on it in front of me, with my arm draped over her, especially if we were watching TV.

  “It’s just something I’ve never had but always wanted,” I said. “I spend a lot of time at home. I can sit here with my laptop if I’m working, and it’s big enough for the whole family to sit in together if we like.”

  She nodded her head in agreement. “Pretty cool,” she said. “It’s really high-quality. How much did it cost?”

  I said, “Don’t ask.”

  She didn’t, just buried her face deep in my shoulder for a little post-coital dozing. Katt sat in my lap and purred. Anu lay in her crib, and I heard barely audible snoring. She was having a nap, and I did the same.

  Around one, I woke and told Kate I had to get ready for the party, and that Moreau, a French policeman, would be coming at four for a brief discussion about the murder investigation.

  “It takes you ten minutes to shower and shave,” she said.

  “I have primping to do,” I said.

  It was a strange word for her to hear come out of my mouth as a way of describing my ablutions.

  “‘Primping’?”

  “Yes, primping.”

  She scooted over so I could get up. “Far be it from me to interfere. By all means, primp.”

  I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and set about dyeing my hair. After I was done and it was dry, I realized I didn’t own a comb, hadn’t in over twenty years. My hair hadn’t been long enough to warrant one. It was still pretty short, though, and I just sort of mussed it forward with my fingers and thought it looked all right.

  I examined myself in the mirror. I was thirteen pounds lighter from not working out, was down to a hundred and eighty, but had no fat on me. My scar was gone. My hair was auburn. I wasn’t sure who I was looking at.

  I realized that my vision seemed sharper. Everything seemed sharper. Memories seemed muddled compared to my current perceptions. I felt my thinking had become more focused, more insightful. I wondered if the empty space in my skull was filling in, if I would regain my emotions anytime in the near future.

  I walked out of the bathroom naked, without my crutches, forced myself not to limp, and found Kate in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water. She dropped it, and it shattered on the floor. She stammered out, “Oh my God.”

  “Is that a good or bad ‘Oh my God’?” I asked.

  Her stare was intense and she couldn’t seem to stop. “I don’t know. In my mind, I see my husband of three months ago, but I look at the man in front of me, and the two don’t equate. You look like a different person. And ten years younger.”

  I flashed my practiced smile and started picking up shards of glass. “That was my intention.”

  ARVID SHOWED UP half an hour early. I had dressed in case someone did just that, put on jeans and a new sweater. He took off his shoes in the foyer, pulled a small gift-wrapped box out of his jacket pocket and looked me up and down. “Nice job,” he said, “you’re almost unrecognizable.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Sorry to come early,” he said, “but I need a few minutes to talk to you.”

  He walked into the living room. “Goddamn. Nice chair.”

  “Try it out,” I said.

  Arvid plunked into the chair and put his feet up.

  Kate came in and moved to sit with us. I gave her a look that said we needed a moment, and asked her if she would be kind enough to make some coffee. She gave us privacy.

  “Here.” He handed me the box. “Open it.”

  I sat down on the couch at an angle from him and tore off the wrapping paper to find an old and worn hinged box. Inside the box was his Winter War medal. Only a few men left alive had earned one, and God knows how much blood was spilled and suffering endured to earn it.

  I held it, turned it over in my hands, admired it, put it back in its box and tried to hand it back to him. “I’m honored, but I can’t accept this.”

  His hands were on the chair’s armrests, and he refused to lift a hand to take it back.

  “I’m giving this to you, and telling you something now, because I can take advantage of your post-surgery condition. You’re emotionless, and you won’t protest or argue with me. It’s true, that medal was my most prized possession, but it’s symbolic of something else. I’ve seen a lawyer, had the papers drawn up, and made you my heir.”

  This confused me. “Why?”

  “I have no family. My friends are all dead and buried. I just turned ninety. I needed to make a decision or when I die, my estate will go to the government, and they’ll spend the majority of it on things I disapprove of. Your position is tenuous. You may not be a policeman much longer. My home is spacious and comfortable, a good place to raise a family, and it’s paid for. Plus, I have considerable assets. They’ll make you safe from the vagaries of political misfortunes.”

  “But still, why me and why now?”

  “Don’t make me uncomfortable. You know why. You’re a good boy, I’ve enjoyed your friendship, and you’ve made me feel a part of your family. Why now? I’m ninety fucking years old. Don’t be thick.”

  I sat for a moment, overwhelmed. I searched for words, but only found two. “Thank you.”

  He smiled. “You’re welcome. Let’s not speak of it again.”

  We enjoyed a comfortable silence. Kate didn’t bring coffee. She had lived in Finland long enough to know we wanted peace, not caffeine.

  The buzzer rang again. Milo and Sweetness arrived at the same time. They were weighed down with packages. They looked at me and gawked. Sweetness dropped his armload of gift-wrapped boxes. “Damn, pomo,” he said. “You look great, but I wouldn’t have even recognized you.”

  “You two laughed at me when I told you to keep a low profile, so I decided to set an example.”

  “You did a good job,” Milo said. “You look so … young.”

  They had to make three trips to get all the boxes into the apartment, and they piled them in the middle of the living room. They kicked off their boots and found places to sit. Arvid kept my new chair. Kate sat on the couch beside me, and Sweetness on the other side of her. Milo swept the house for electronic surveillance, then sat on the floor, in the middle of his treasure trove.

  “Well, Kari,” he said, “welcome back to the world.”

  “I never left it.”

  “You came close enough.”

  “Not really.”

  Milo had on an exquisite new leather jacket.
Must have cost a fortune. Our talk about anonymity must not have quite taken hold. I didn’t comment on it.

  “Does anyone notice anything unusual about this coat?” he asked.

  No one did, and he kept waiting, so finally Kate said, “Well, it’s very nice,” so he would get on with it.

  “It’s custom-made to conceal this,” Milo said, and drew an antique sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from a soft and thin leather holster sewn into the coat’s lining. He handed it to me. It was the most beautiful firearm I’d ever seen.

  “It’s a 10-gauge Colt Model 1878 Hammer shotgun. When it first came out, it was the most expensive gun Colt made. It’s a side lock, double-hammer, double-trigger gun with brown Damascus pattern barrels, blue trigger guard and break lever.”

  I looked it up and down. It was covered in gorgeous floral scroll engravings. The barrels extended just past the fore-end, and the buttstock had been cut down to the pistol grip with such skill that it looked as if it had been designed that way. The modifications to the checkered walnut and ebony were the work of a master craftsman.

  “When it was manufactured, it had thirty-two-inch barrels,” Milo said. “Before it was turned into this hand cannon.”

  I passed it around so the others could admire it. “Can it handle modern ammunition?” I asked.

  “No. It would explode like a grenade. I got everything so I can make shells just like they were in the 1880s. The same gunpowder, paper shell casings, wadding. Everything is perfect. Cut down like this, the shot pattern is wide enough to take out a room full of men with a single blast if I let both barrels go. But you have to be careful. If you shot it with one hand, instead of keeping the other on top of it for ballast, the gun would rear up and backward, maybe break your wrist and split your head open.”

  My thoughts turned back to his apartment and his hand reloading outfit. When I was there once, he was loading shotgun shells with fléchettes, razor-sharp darts, instead of normal lead shot. In this weapon, they would cut a room full of men into fish bait. “Load it with rock salt,” I said. “That thing’s a menace. Even rock salt will tear through clothes and scorch the hide off somebody. Use birdshot at most.”

  The dark circles around his eyes furrowed and he wanted to argue, but he didn’t want to ruin our fun today. Arvid handed it back to him. He put it back in his jacket and hung it up in the closet.

  He came back and handed each of us a passbook and paperwork from a bank in Bermuda. Arvid, Kate, and Anu got them, too. “We all have offshore accounts now,” he said. “I put seventy-five thousand in each of them to start. Go to your accounts online and change your passwords and you’re all set.”

  I thought Kate might be distressed by killing machines and repositories for stolen money. Instead, she seemed fascinated. “Why Bermuda?” she asked.

  “Because I didn’t have to leave the country,” Milo said. “Opening an offshore account in Bermuda doesn’t require you to be present at the bank. An account can be opened by mail.”

  Milo was on a roll and about to embark on one of his biblical length rants, citing the mandate I had given him to be in charge of acquisitions. Kate escaped, went to the kitchen to cut a cake she had made for the party. He ranted and words zinged through my head: window mounts, suction cups on glass, audio surveillance, wireless video, wireless audio, Bluetooth stealthware.

  Just when I thought he would never stop, he asked us to look out the window. He pointed out two vehicles. “Those are ours,” he said. The first was a Crown Victoria.

  I felt my eyes roll. “Oh, Milo, not a Crown Vic.”

  The cliché of all law enforcement vehicles. Aside from actually being used by many American police departments, Crown Vics have also appeared in dozens or even hundreds of films and TV shows as cop cars. It’s an embarrassment.

  Milo laughed so hard that he held his belly, trying to stop. “I know,” he said, “but I couldn’t help myself. This isn’t just any Crown Vic. This is the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. It’s got heavy-duty parts and two hundred and fifty horses under the hood, plus a higher idle, and the transmission has more aggressive shift points and is built for firmer and harder shifts. For God’s sake, it’s even got Kevlar-lined doors for gunfights. It’s only got twenty thousand miles on it, and I got it for four thousand euros. Besides, I’m going to be the one driving it most of the time.”

  I conceded defeat.

  “Maybe everybody will like this one better.” He handed Sweetness a set of keys. “You look like Gulliver in Lilliput driving around in your little worn-out shitbox.”

  He pointed down at a good-looking SUV. “Behold the 2008 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara. It’s got four-wheel drive and four doors—I thought that would be handy for putting in Anu’s car seat—and an extra-wide wheelbase. And it’s a convertible, fun with summer coming on. It’s high on safety features: an electronic stability program and seat-mounted side air bags, a navigation system and Sirius satellite radio. And a MyGIG multimedia entertainment system to make driving fun.”

  Sweetness crossed his arms and furrowed his brow, flummoxed, as if this were some sort of trick, afraid Milo was teasing him. “This is for me?”

  “It belongs to the group, but I bought it for you to keep and be the primary driver, and I registered it under your name. So yeah, it’s yours.”

  Still perplexed, he said, “Thank you.”

  Milo didn’t acknowledge him. He turned toward me. “You like your Saab, so I didn’t get you a vehicle,” and then to Kate, “and I didn’t know if you drive or want a car.”

  “I have a license, but I just use public transportation, since you really don’t need a car in Helsinki anyway.” She pointed at the small mountain of packages that still lay on the floor. “Should we take a break for cake and coffee?”

  I said, “That guy I mentioned will be here in a little while. Let’s wait on him.”

  Milo’s face said Goody goody gumdrop, now my circus won’t have an intermission. Four big and heavy boxes were in a stack. “These are care packages for all of us guys. They’re all the same.”

  “Me too?” Arvid asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re one of us, one of the team.”

  Arvid smiled at him as he would a child. “I am? How so?”

  “Kari said you’re our bookkeeper. Anyway, we all think of you as one of the team.”

  Arvid’s smile widened, indulgent, and he nodded assent. “All right. Then I’m one of the team.”

  Milo paused, cautious. I saw him consider whether he should vocalize something. “I’ve been thinking. The team should have a name.”

  When I felt emotions, I would have teased him without mercy. “What name do you suggest?”

  “How about …” He paused again and pretended like he hadn’t been thinking about it. “The New Untouchables. Or, since Arvid is one of us, the New Veterans.”

  Arvid looked at me. This last was an insult to him and the men who had suffered through the ordeal he and his brothers in arms had experienced. I felt certain he was considering ripping off Milo’s head and shitting down his neck.

  I tried to lighten the situation. “Remember the movie Fight Club?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Milo said, and his tone told me he wondered where I was going with this.

  “The first rule of Fight Club was ‘Nobody talks about Fight Club.’ What if they hadn’t given Fight Club a name? It would have been really hard to talk about. The first rule of … is nobody talks about … Maybe we shouldn’t have a name, so no one can talk about us. To name a thing is to define it. If we have no name, in a sense, we don’t exist.”

  It was the truth and he realized it as such. “You’re right, forget the name thing. It was a stupid idea.”

  I glanced at Arvid. He was placated.

  “Would everyone like to open their boxes, or should I just open one and show you everything?”

  “Arvid, Sweetness, and you need to take them home,” I sa
id. “Maybe it’s better if you just open mine.”

  I checked the time. Four o’clock. Moreau wasn’t the kind of man who would be late. He was a spook. He was watching us from somewhere, waiting for us to finish so he wouldn’t intrude.

  Milo took each item out, one by one, and gave us a running commentary on each as he did so. Our knives: “The Spyderco Delica Black Blade. Overall length, seven and one eighth inches. Closed, four and a quarter inches. Blade length, two and seven eighths inches. The Delica4 has a non-reflective VG-10 flat saber-ground blade coated with black titanium carbon nitride.”

  He went on citing its virtues from memory, basically reciting the entire manual. He did the same with: night-vision goggles, Nomex coveralls, shoulder holsters, belt holsters, ankle holsters, gloves, Kevlar masks, zip-lock plastic handcuffs, bulletproof vests, utility belts, glass cutters, lock picks, electronic pick guns, key wax, ear protection, Maglites, saps that were extendable steel rods, Kevlar vests, Tasers, flash-bang stun grenades, double magazine pouches and spare magazines, Gemtech silencers that would render our weapons so quiet that we would only hear the clatter of our automatics’ slides recycling, and in discussing these he hinted at the weapons that we would receive to go with them. In his mind, setting us up, sitting us on pins and needles of anticipation.

  Kate tried to escape to be with Anu, but he called her back. Milo had a small box for her containing a Taser and pepper spray, because it’s a dangerous world out there. The others were bored enough to cut their own throats with their Spyderco Delica Black Blades, but I was fascinated. Each item had been chosen with utmost care. I had never seen such a display, such an act of love. This team was the most important thing that had ever happened—and possibly ever would happen—to him.

  Next came our weapons. First, we all got new .45 caliber 1911 Colts with three-inch barrels. Backup guns to be worn in ankle holsters.

  He handed all us men boxes. Sweetness got the biggest. He asked, “Should we take turns, or all open them at the same time?”

  Milo didn’t hesitate. “We have to take turns. I’ll go first.” He had bought himself a serious collector’s item, a.45 Colt 1911, manufactured in 1918, with black walnut grips and engraving patterns on the frame and slide.