Helsinki White

by James Thompson

  My cane leaned against the table beside me. Milo nodded toward it. “You know, you could poison the teeth on that thing if you wanted to. Did you enjoy your party yesterday?”

  “Yeah, I really did. And I meant what I said. The cane you gave me is my favorite possession. Do we have any money left after your spending spree?”

  “Oodles. Robbing dope dealers is so lucrative, I’m not sure why more people like us don’t take up the occupation.”

  “I’m sure some do, but have short-lived careers. Your sawed-off was a good idea. If you load it with something non-lethal, it could get us out of jams if we got stuck, say, pulling a heist and a few guys walked in. Just don’t do anything weird, like load it with bee-hive rounds or rat-poisoned buckshot.”

  The dark circles under his eyes deepened. Always a sign of trouble. Milo was both obdurate and rambunctious, an often annoying, even dangerous combination. Now he wanted a fight. “Well, would it be fucking OK with you if I just fucking carry lethal ammo, should fucking necessity arise?”

  I tamed him with the unexpected and then switched gears to disengage his temper.

  “Sure. Did you spend much time with Moreau?”

  I noticed Kate’s eyes drift from her book to us.

  “We dropped off Arvid and Sweetness. I don’t know why he thinks he’s fooling anyone hiding his drinking.”

  Now we had Kate’s full attention. She hadn’t caught on to Sweetness’s drinking. It can be hard to tell someone is drunk if you never see them sober.

  Milo fired up his machine and fiddled with it for a minute. “Goddamn it. These work, but not well enough. They pick up the cell phones but can’t track enough at one time and the range is too short.”

  “What do you need?”

  Asking was a mistake. Prolix Milo kicked into gear. “I can’t get my hands on one because of its military-grade sales status, and I couldn’t fake my way through it, and even by our standards, they cost a fortune. A GSM A5.1 Real Time Cell Phone Interceptor. It’s undetectable, can handle twenty phones in quad band and four base stations.”

  It meant nothing to me and I wasn’t interested. “What did you do after you dropped off the others?”

  Milo doesn’t have a raconteur’s bone in his body. “We went to my place and looked at the weapons. A Remington 870 tactical shotgun to handle ballistic breaching lockbuster shotgun rounds. A Heckler & Koch UMP machine gun. It’s much like the MP5 but state-of-the-art and made from the latest in advanced polymers. And a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle. It’s like something out of Star Wars. The optical ranging system is an integrated electronic ballistic computer…”

  He went on. Kate hated this kind of rambling constantly disturbing her tranquillity. This was what she had complained about. It made her feel as if she lived in a police precinct instead of a home, and she had also sacrificed a great deal of privacy having the team ginning around like they lived here.

  Milo would have continued but I cut him off. “What do you think of Moreau?”

  “He’s a really cool guy. He told me he would teach me how to use the .50 Barrett. Why did you shoot down his idea about selling the heroin?”

  “It’s tricky and dangerous. We just keep ripping off dealers. Keep them beaten down.”

  Milo switched to Finnish, so Kate wouldn’t understand. “So long as they don’t start a drug war and we have to hide it by dissolving any more bodies in acid. That really skeeved me out.”

  But Kate did understand. She set Anu on a cushion, turned around, rested her folded arms on the back of the sofa and her head on her arms. “Pardon me. What was that again? Something about bodies and acid.”

  I explained to her what had happened. That one gangster killed another and we had to cover it up, or gangsters would start gunning each other down in the streets, Helsinki Homicide would get involved and inevitably would trail the murders and the reasons behind them back to us.

  “We really had no choice,” I said.

  Since the beginning of the Cold War, because of its geographic location, Helsinki has been awash in spies. Out of survival instinct, these spies had made an unspoken agreement many years ago, early in the Cold War. Helsinki would be holy ground, a sacred city to which secret warriors could travel without fear. Even after the Cold War, Helsinki remained a city in which both its inhabitants and fringe dwellers existed in relative safety. I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying that tradition.

  “Apparently,” Kate said, “I’ve been kept in the dark about some details, but it’s gone something like this. You’ve committed a number of thefts, maybe dozens, I don’t know. But because you didn’t know what you were doing, you stole too much, and a lot of people have died because of it. You incited someone to murder, and you left the body to dissolve in a vat of acid. Am I correct here?”

  “Yes.”

  Milo was already putting his boots on, making his escape. He needn’t have. She wouldn’t be angry at him. I gave the orders. I was her husband. And he had given her, among other things, a two-thousand-euro bottle of perfume yesterday, as an act of friendship and to make up for her inconvenience. I was alone on the gallows. He shut the door behind him with a soft click.

  “This isn’t my home,” Kate said, “it’s a gangster hangout. Has it occurred to you that I might like to have people over, like Aino, friends from the hotel, but I can’t because Milo might slip and mention who’s been killed or body dumped? I don’t even know where Anu and I fit in your life. You’ve changed. You’re colder, more distant. I don’t know if it’s because of your job or your surgery or both.”

  I sat down in my armchair and considered which truths to tell her and which not to. I didn’t even know what the truth was. I still couldn’t tell her that I was nearly without emotion and felt little or nothing for her or our child.

  “I’m disillusioned,” I said. “I was misled, turned into Jyri’s cat’s-paw. I’m no more than a bagman and an enforcer for corrupt and criminal politicians. Sooner or later I’ll outlive my usefulness and they’ll find a way to dispose of me. I have to find a way to destroy them first. I’ll get money and passports. When the day comes, we’ll disappear.”

  “This is insane,” she said, “and can only end badly. We should leave now, take the money you’ve got and go to Aspen. You can use your stolen money and pursue hobbies: take nature photos, collect stamps, whatever.”

  “I gave you that opportunity,” I said, “and you declined. I know it wasn’t fair because you felt like you might be granting the last wish of a dying man, but now things are what they are, and I’ll see this job through. I took the job because I wanted to do some good. And before I quit, I will. We may have to leave, but not yet. I’m sorry.”

  The news started on television, and we both almost missed it. The main story:

  “Winter War hero Arvid Lahtinen committed suicide this morning…”

  We were both dumbstruck. Our argument ceased and I turned up the volume. He shot himself outside his house, probably because he didn’t want to decomp for God knows how long before someone found him. He put on a suit, carried a chair outside, and sat while he put the gun to his head. I suppose he thought it would be more dignified than being found in a heap on the wet ground. The reporter speculated on the reasons behind his suicide, discussed the murder charges against him, both domestic and international, and his achievements as a national hero.

  Kate cried. “Why?” she asked me.

  I thought what sparked his action was his time here, the remembrance of what it was like to be part of a family, the realization that he would be old and alone now, had nothing to look forward to but a slow death in an aged, soon-to-be-failing body. Before long, illness, the loss of his home and independence. And he would have to do it alone, without his beloved wife of half a century.

  “Because he didn’t enjoy life without his wife. Because he knew he had had a good run, but his time was over, and if he left now, he could die with his dignity intact.”

  “He was my frien
d,” Kate said.

  “Mine too. He told me that he was leaving everything to me. I should have known then.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. House. Money. Everything.”

  Kate sat down next to me in the oversized chair. We were silent together for a while.

  “Work with Moreau,” she said. “You fucked up a lot of things because you didn’t have the experience to know better. He does. If you learn, you can achieve some of the good that for some mystifying reason is driving you, and we can stop all this.”

  “OK,” I said.

  I was Arvid’s heir and so responsible for his funeral arrangements. The service was held in Helsinki’s magnificent and most prestigious church, Tuomiokirkko. It sits atop Senate Square and looks down upon both the city and the sea. The church was full, and the man and what he represented were truly mourned. I acted as a pallbearer. It seemed, after he was laid to rest, that nothing was ever the same again. Especially for Kate. I don’t know if the suicide of a man she called friend awakened something inside her, or killed it.

  23

  Vappu—May Day, the heaviest drinking holiday of the year. In Helsinki, a good day to stay at home. It’s amateur night, normal people reduce themselves to the level of dumb beasts. Children as young as ten or twelve pass out on the streets of downtown. May Day Eve fell on a Friday, so festivities would begin as soon as people got off work and continue for three days.

  When I was a young man, the drinking culture was much different. People still got shitfaced, but with style. Men wore suits to bars, and doormen wore them also. The madding crowds didn’t shriek about whose turn it was. They waited in line, humble. Patrons were required to sit at tables. They couldn’t switch tables at will. If they wanted to move, they had to ask a server to move their drink to another table for them. Bartenders didn’t sling drinks, they administered communion, and were frequently addressed as herra baarimestari—sir barmaster—and it wasn’t until about thirty years ago that women were allowed in drinking establishments without male escorts.

  Vappu, too, has changed. In a time that doesn’t seem that far distant, Vappu had been a drinking day, especially for university students, but also a family day. People donned their high school graduation caps—still the tradition—but took their kids out with them, had family picnics. It lacked the tone of complete debauchery now attached to it.

  It’s a different world now. Banks would also carry more cash than usual, as people prepared to pour their bank accounts down their necks. A good day for a robbery.

  Every year, the great hope is that Vappu will be warm, and the nation can sit on sidewalk patios, drink, and celebrate the rite of spring. This year was a disappointment. The temperature was just above freezing and rain drizzled. No matter, spring would be celebrated nonetheless.

  At ten thirty a.m. on that dreary May Day Eve, with the tellers’ cash drawers freshly filled, two men entered the branch of Sampo Bank in Itäkeskus, in East Helsinki. They wore black military-style clothing, ski masks, and carried AK-47-type rifles. Each had two banana clips fastened end to end with black electrical tape, so that when one clip was shot empty, the two-clip rig would only have to be flipped to re-load, eliminating the need to reach for another clip.

  They fired off bursts into the air to make their presences known and began screaming in thick, grammatically poor English. One shot an unarmed bank guard dead. They didn’t have to order people to lay prone on the floor. The few early customers flung themselves down in the hope of staying out of harm’s way. No alarm was triggered. The robbers ordered the tellers to fill black plastic grocery bags with money. One teller, an older woman, too terrified to move, was also executed.

  The robbery was over in less than three minutes. Before they left, one robber bellowed, “We strike against the enemies of God.” The other laughed and shouted, “Lock your daughters up, you motherfuckers, we comin’ to get you.”

  I was called within minutes of the robbery and told to come to the crime scene because, as with the young soldier whose throat had been cut, it was felt that the robbery was related to the murder of Lisbet Söderlund.

  Milo living so close to me was a convenience. I called him, picked him up, and we were at the bank within half an hour. It wouldn’t be my case, it would go to Saska Lindgren. Apparently, a race war was in progress, he would be given the cases related to it, and I would consult because of the presidential mandate concerning Lisbet Söderlund. We questioned all present. We looked at the videotapes. Although we couldn’t be certain because the only exposed skin we had to go by was the area around their eyes, all agreed that the perps were black.

  Milo rolled a tape back and forth a few times. “The rifles they used,” he said, “are Rk 95 Tps, the type stolen from the training camp. An unlikely coincidence.”

  According to the rules of battle as set forth by the white combatants in this race war, the original decree was “For every crime committed by black men, we will kill a nigger in retribution.”

  That hadn’t proven accurate. A number of crimes had been committed by blacks since then without retribution. My gut told me, though, that they had realized the difficulties behind killing a black person for every crime committed, but as was the case with the young soldier, murder would be answered with murder, and if we couldn’t unravel this fast, more people would soon die.

  Later that evening, Milo called me. He’d picked up something interesting on a cell phone tap. Helsinki was heroin dry, and Russians were going to try to re-lubricate. The Russians believed they were safe, as only two men knew about the deal, the seller and the buyer. One would bring five kilos to Helsinki tomorrow. It was worth a million euros plus on the street. The deal was for half a million, wholesale price.

  The normal price of a gram of heroin was a hundred twenty euros. With the city bone dry, the buyer planned to sell it for more than twice that price. He would distribute by the ounce, and then one more rung down the ladder, smaller dealers would sell by the eight ball—three and a half grams—but end users would pay two hundred fifty a gram. Plus, this was eighty-eight percent pure Afghan heroin. Street heroin was usually fifty percent. He could step on it hard with lactose and sell it off as close to eight kilos. In Afghanistan, a kilo costs five thousand bucks. Five thousand becomes a million. The stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of.

  Tomorrow was Vappu. They would seal the deal and celebrate spring by having some drinks on the patio outside at Kaivohuone—The Well Room—at five p.m., and then make the exchange in the parking lot. Milo asked if I wanted to take it on.

  I considered it. What was my goal? To make Helsinki heroin-free or gangster-free? I wasn’t a social worker, the answer was gangster-free. Stealing the city dry has been a mistake, but unleashing five kilos on Helsinki would mean a total loss of control, dealers back in business. Also, it might cause a number of overdose deaths, as junkies whose systems were nearly clear shot up doses that, when totally hooked, would only have gotten them high.

  “Let’s snatch it,” I said. “It’s an easy one. We just go out to the full parking lot and pop their trunks. People won’t recognize me with my image overhaul. Nobody will even give us a second glance.”

  “It’s Vappu for us, too,” Milo said. “What do you say we have a few drinks while we’re there?”

  “OK. Why not? Let’s have some fun.”

  “I’ll call Sweetness and tell him to meet us,” Milo said, and rang off.

  24

  Kaivohuone opened its doors in 1838, and began its life as a spa with a sea view for the Russian elite. It’s now a national landmark, not far from embassy row. For many years though, the stately white building has served as a nightclub. Legally, it holds a thousand people inside and four hundred outside, but in summer the place is oversold, so jammed you can barely move. Its prices, from cover charge to drinks, are outrageous, and the people that spend a great deal of time there do so partly to show off that they can afford to. Kaivo is the place to be on Vappu.

 
; Others go to rub shoulders with the wealthy, so that for a brief, shining moment, they can feel themselves one of them while they gawk around, hoping to catch a glimpse of a B-class star.

  It has traditionally catered to the children of wealthy Swedish-speaking Finns. Young people, many of them students, who can afford three-hundred-euro bar tabs two or three times a week, drinking themselves stupid under the midnight sun, despite never having had jobs.

  The city owns it. The neighbors hate it because the noise level makes it like living next to an airport with jets constantly taking off and landing during the summer months. It changed management a few years ago. It’s falling apart, shaken to bits by years of abuse from the throbbing sound system. Through some sort of backroom deal, it came into the hands of a Helsinki nightclub tycoon, with the agreement that he would put ten million into its restoration and convert it into a fine dining establishment the city could be proud of.

  Instead, he put about fifty euros into paint, gimcracks and doodads, made some cosmetic changes so that he could say he lived up to his word and renovated it, and kept operating it as a nightclub. The building still stands, the kids keep rockin’.

  I went to the front of a hundred-meter line to the outdoor patio, showed the doorman my police card, said I was there on official business, and was ushered in ahead of the crowd, gratis. The place was oversold and I could have shut it down as a fire hazard if I chose to, and they knew it. They would have plied me with free Dom Pérignon for the evening if I asked for it. The patio was packed with beautiful young people weaving and staggering, their eyes glazed from their second-day drunk.

  I saw Milo wave at me. He’d managed to get a table, a small miracle. He’d probably showed his police card, intimidated some kids and commandeered it. Sweetness was with him. I pushed and shoved my way over to them. They had saved a seat for me.