The place was a one-bedroom flat on the third floor. It was furnished as spartanly as possible; there were no unnecessary comforts. That might have encouraged slacking. The only furnishings were a couple of chairs and a table, on top of which lay a laptop and a black notebook. All events of interest were logged in the notebook, along with the time. The kitchen contained a microwave, a coffee machine and a fridge. A digital video camera on a tripod stood at the window, with a SUPO agent sitting at it.
“Pretty lousy stake-out if you didn’t notice anything,” I remarked, taking a look through the camera.
Sillanpää walked over to where I was standing at the window. He raked his fingers through his greasy hair and left it sticking straight up. Then he pointed across the street. A hard rain was whipping the city and the window, blurring the view. Thunderstorms had been forecast for that evening. Autumn had arrived in Helsinki.
“I wouldn’t say so. Nurmio’s place is in that building diagonally opposite. Tough floor plan. There’s a back door in the stairwell that goes to the basement, and from there routes lead in all kinds of directions – including the back yard and the courtyard of the building next door. We had one vehicle parked outside, prepared to follow if Nurmio made any moves. During office hours, we’d get a couple more too, but do you think we have the resources to watch every single escape route and rat hole? We’re already cooking the books to stretch our budget.”
“What are your plans regarding Nurmio?”
Sillanpää walked into the kitchen and took a paper mug from the table. “You want some coffee?”
I nodded, and Sillanpää poured some for me. I sipped it. It was old and strong. Coffee like that kept agents alert during their shift. I dropped in a couple of sugar cubes and stirred it with a plastic spoon. Sillanpää tapped two sweeteners into his cup.
“You wouldn’t believe how many packs of coffee we’ve gone through in a month, and how many kebabs and pizzas. The restaurant’s probably going to go out of business once surveillance ends. I wonder how they’ll claim those kebabs on expenses? Probably the bosses’ entertainment account.”
“Have you started looking for Nurmio?”
“All the places we know of: former girlfriends, criminal buddies, his sister who lives in Vantaa. Nothing. It’s a tough manhunt, because we can’t ask directly. We don’t want him to find out about us.”
“You’d think he already had.”
“There’s nothing to indicate that. We believe he went underground because he saw a drawing of himself in the papers. So thanks a lot. I’d be grateful if you had something in your back pocket that would help us find him. We’ve got so much political pressure on us that we’re starting to split at the seams. The Minister of the Interior knows about this and his calcified veins are about to pop.”
Regardless of how he was talking, Sillanpää didn’t appear particularly stressed.
“Has he had any visitors?”
“Over the course of the stakeout, he only had four visitors, three of whom were women. Nurmio brought them home from a nightclub and they disappeared within a couple of hours. Boom-boom, bye-bye. We stopped them and told them we were narcotic agents. None of them knew Nurmio from before. They just left with him since he lived nearby and was pleasant company. None of them had been given his phone number. All he had told them was that he sold Israeli boat and car chemicals and had lived in Israel for a few years.”
“And the fourth?”
Sillanpää gazed out at the rain sweeping the street as if he found the natural phenomenon truly fascinating. “It’s raining pretty hard… The fourth was Max Oxbaum.”
Sillanpää saw my face, and could tell I was seriously ticked off.
“Sorry. We hadn’t agreed on cooperation at that point. Now I’m playing with an open hand. Oxbaum came here two days before he was killed. He came in the middle of the day and was inside for twenty minutes or so.”
“I suppose you talked to him, too?”
“He was an attorney and a sly old fox. We decided it was wisest to not expose ourselves.”
And now I decided it was time for me to show my hand.
“That story about a Russian gangster visiting Finland was a complete fabrication. You said you were playing with an open hand.”
Sillanpää knew how to maintain a poker face. “Says who?”
“You think Nurmio is here to kill the new Israeli Minister of Justice, Haim Levi, who is coming to Finland in a week.”
Sillanpää considered this for a moment. “All right. Open hand. We didn’t want to tell you about Levi, because we suspected that your brother was involved. We do believe that Levi is the target, but we don’t suspect your brother any more.”
“Why not?”
“Something turned up.”
There was no point pressing him. Sillanpää wouldn’t give me anything more about Eli. On the other hand, what he had told me put my mind at ease.
“Max must have been in touch with Norm. We could compare his telecommunications data with Jacobson’s.”
“Good. Do it.”
“Who paid the rent on his place?”
“Nurmio paid half a year’s rent in advance. The money came through an Estonian bank, a former shell company. Oxbaum bought it three months ago and is on the board. Nurmio’s name doesn’t appear anywhere.”
“I’m assuming you guys tapped Nurmio’s place?”
“No. There was a deadbolt. We decided it was best not to try so we wouldn’t tip him off. Mossad training means noticing visits like that.”
“Regardless of whether or not Nurmio had Mossad training, there’s no point waiting around any more. Let’s go over and see what we can find.”
“You think so?”
“Yup. There must be some clues in there.”
The thought clearly appealed to Sillanpää. “I have to talk to my boss.” He went into the kitchen and made a call. I waited at least five minutes, listening to a hole being drilled into the wall in the next apartment over.
“They’ve been remodelling for two weeks,” the agent at the camera said.
“You guys only have one man staking out at a time?” I asked.
“At first there were two of us, but we used up our overtime pretty fast, so we had to scale back to one.”
Sillanpää returned from his expedition to the kitchen. “OK. We’re good. Our lock guy will meet us there.”
“What about me?” the agent asked as we were leaving.
“You stay here. Warn us if you see him approaching, even though I doubt he’s coming back.”
We waited outside for the SUPO lock specialist to arrive. Once he got there, we negotiated in the car for a minute and then decided to go in through the back door. To get to it, we had to head around to the back and down to the basement. We stopped at a grey door. The door had two locks: a normal house-key lock and a Boda deadbolt. The Boda looked brand new.
Sillanpää gave the order: “Go for it.” He had promised we didn’t have to worry about leaving signs of a break-in; the main thing now was getting the door open. Calling in the building super would have required too much explaining.
The specialist drilled a hole an inch in diameter between the locks, at the point where the door and the jamb met. He slid in a crowbar. One powerful wrench, and the door popped open.
Sillanpää peered in. He didn’t see anything, so he continued in. I followed.
The back door opened onto a hallway with a bathroom off to the side. That led to an unfurnished back room and the street-side storefront, where the large display window had been covered with blinds.
The main room contained a desk, a couple of armchairs, a computer, an almost-empty bookshelf and a dead body. It was lying on its back near the middle of the floor, its half-open eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. A pistol with a silencer lay next to one hand. There was a bullet hole right under the eye, another in the temple.
“Don’t touch anything,” I instinctively ordered Sillanpää. He stopped and looked
at the body.
“It’s not Nurmio.”
I had noticed the same thing. The deceased looked like a foreigner.
I bent down and went through his pockets. The wallet held a driver’s licence issued in St Petersburg. According to it, the man’s name was Igor Semeyev.
“Russian.”
“He has a gun, too. What the fuck happened here?” Sillanpää growled.
“Probably what it looks like. There was a shoot-out, and Nurmio shot our friend Igor Semeyev here.”
“No wonder Nurmio split,” Sillanpää said.
23
I was sitting at my window, watching flashes light up the southern sky somewhere above Suomenlinna. I counted the seconds: one, two, three, four… ten. A scattered rumbling rolled between the buildings and deepened to a drum-like thud.
Ten times the speed of sound in a second. The thunderstorm was two miles away.
I had always liked storms and thunder, but only on land. They scared me at sea. When we were kids, Dad would take us to down the Kaivopuisto marina, where the waves would crash onto the rocks and the wind would hurl salt spray in our faces. Dad had loved it, too. Eli, on the other hand, had always been terrified of storms and thunder. He’d drag his feet and shriek until Dad would be forced to lug him down the shore. Things like that had to leave indelible trauma.
The wind rattled the open ventilation window, and the raindrops pelted my face. The sensation of water and wind felt like a caress from Mother Nature.
My beautiful scheme, which had been based on Nurmio’s culpability, was completely demolished, and I hadn’t managed to piece together a new one in its place.
The dead body that had been found in Nurmio’s room had been confirmed as the person indicated on the licence. The St Petersburg police had corroborated his identity. He was a criminal that the Russian police were more than familiar with, a paid hitman for the Minsk mafia. It was a pretty sure bet that he was also the man I had seen at Max’s boat, as well as the one Jari Wallius had seen leaving the Jacobsons’ house.
After receiving this information, it felt like I was trying to put together two different puzzles whose pieces had been scrambled up. No matter how hard I tried to fit them together, I couldn’t form a picture that made any sense.
Was the mafia killer after Nurmio, or vice versa? Or had they been working together and then argued about something? When two killers argued, more often than not dead bodies would result.
Semeyev must have entered through the back door, because the SUPO stake-out man hadn’t noticed him. I almost felt sorry for the guy who had been on duty at the time.
Nurmio presumably knew Semeyev, because he had let him in. The gun we had found at Semeyev’s side had been fired once. A .22 calibre bullet was found in one of the cupboards in the kitchenette. It had pierced the door and bored into the back wall. In addition to being the right calibre, Semeyev’s gun was the right make, a Margolin. It looked like Semeyev had killed both Max and Jacobson.
The bullets that had killed Semeyev, on the other hand, had been fired from a 9 mm.
Sillanpää had been just as mystified as I was. On top of it, he cursed the fact that Semeyev had been shot while SUPO was staking out the premises. That wouldn’t look good in the reports, especially if it got leaked to the press.
A huge bolt of lightning lit up the sky, and the thunder followed only a few seconds later. The thunderstorm was right overhead now. It was like the sky was pummelling the city in its ribs. Rain drummed against the windowsill at an ever-intensifying pace, and the wind picked up until the large linden in the courtyard of the building opposite was forced to bend to it. A woman was running down the street with an umbrella, trying to get into her portico. The umbrella turned inside out from the force of the wind. She found her keys and dove into the shelter of the stairwell.
Like a lot of old-fashioned people, Mom had been afraid of thunderstorms and had rushed around unplugging all the appliances as soon as she heard any rumbling. She told us stories from her childhood of lightning balls entering a home through the telephone, circling the room and exiting through the window…
My cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen: blocked.
“Is this Detective Kafka?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Someone you’ve been pretty eager to find these past few days – at least according to the papers.”
“Nurmio?”
“No, Leo Meir. I’ve already got used to my new name. Are you interested in meeting me?”
“Why? I’m not —”
“This is an offer that will not come again. Do you want to meet me or not?”
“Of course —”
“Good. Where are you?”
“Central Helsinki. Punavuori.”
“Good. Then fifteen minutes is enough. Does your phone have enough battery?”
I glanced at the power symbol. Four bars. “Yes.”
“Keep your phone on the whole time so I can hear you. Put on a warm coat and head towards Iso Roobertinkatu. Do it now… And leave your gun at home so there aren’t any accidents.”
I followed his instructions and at the same time wondered what I should do. I didn’t have a landline and couldn’t call anyone; besides, Nurmio would have heard me. I walked down the stairs and out of the door, headed left and, at the next intersection, turned onto Fredrikinkatu. The wind was blowing from behind me, from the sea, and I took shelter between two buildings. The rain had eased off a little.
“Where are you?” Nurmio asked.
“Freda.”
“Good. Tell me when you’re at the corner of Iso Roobertinkatu.”
That didn’t take longer than a minute. “Now.”
“Continue towards Bulevardi.”
I followed his directions.
“Turn onto Uudenmaankatu,” Nurmio said, and a moment later added: “And take the next left onto Annankatu.”
I had almost reached Bulevardi when Nurmio said: “Stop.”
I stopped and looked around.
“Turn back.”
I turned and walked back towards Iso Roobertinkatu.
“Stop. There’s a silver Opel station wagon in front of you. Get in on the driver’s side.”
I saw the Opel. It was parked in front of an antique shop. I could see someone sitting in the passenger seat.
I looked into the car. I had no problem recognizing Nurmio. He was wearing a dark sports coat and a burgundy tie. He pointed at the driver’s seat. I paused for a moment, then made my decision. I opened the door and sat down at the wheel.
“Pleasure to meet you, despite the fact that I’m not a big fan of the police. Start up the car, and we’ll go for a little drive.”
I started up and headed towards Bulevardi. I slowed down as we approached the intersection, and Nurmio immediately told me which way to go. “Take a left… If you know who I am, why haven’t you told the press? No decent picture, not even a name, even though you have both.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s all the same. I didn’t ask you here to answer my questions, but to listen.”
“Suits me.”
“I didn’t kill Jacobson, so you’re looking for the wrong guy.”
“Who did, then?”
Nurmio grunted. “Don’t underestimate me. I noticed that you guys have already paid a visit to my lodgings. You found the answer there, didn’t you?”
“Igor Semeyev?”
“He’s a killer for the Russian mafia. You ran tests on his gun, didn’t you? It was probably used to shoot Jacobson and Oxbaum.”
Nurmio was right. The gun had been fast-tracked through the tests, and it had been confirmed that it had been used to shoot both Jacobson and Oxbaum.
“And you shot Semeyev?”
“I had to. The shithead tried to shoot me, and he almost didn’t miss. We’ve known each other for years, but it just goes to show you can’t trust anyone.”
“Why did he try to kill you?”
“Someone
had given him orders. Semeyev doesn’t kill for fun.”
“Who is the someone behind the orders?”
“Stop for a second.”
I found a parking place off of Hietalahdentori Square.
“I’m not sure, but I can offer you a few good candidates. I’ve been making some calls and poking around since I killed Semeyev. I’m starting to get to the heart of what’s going on. I think you’ll be interested in hearing what I have to say.”
I admitted I was. “Can I take notes?”
“Go for it. You’ve probably looked into my background. What do you know about it?”
“You were suspected of narcotics violations and —”
“I mean the period when I was in the Middle East,” Nurmio said.
“You’re suspected of having done favours for the Mossad, because you received Israeli citizenship so quickly.”
Nurmio laughed.
“You could say that again. I did them a lot of favours: big favours. I saved the Mossad a lot of headaches.”
“And now you’re working for a company owned by Benjamin Hararin. And Hararin in turn works for Amos Jakov.”
“Also true. Good. Nice to see someone do their homework properly. Jakov and I met when he was still in the Mossad. I was his subordinate and carried out his orders. He’s an intelligent man; I’m not at all surprised he made a fortune in business. He had old criminal contacts in Russia, and he used all the knowledge a high-level Mossad leader has to his advantage, and that’s saying a lot. He’s so rich and powerful these days that no one sneezes in Israel without him knowing it. Ten years ago, I was conducting some business of my own in Syria and Lebanon and doing a few favours for Jakov on the side. When I got back to Israel, he hired me to work for his company, in security.”
“Is he the one who sent you to Finland?”
“In a way.”
“If you didn’t kill Jacobson, what were your orders?”
“To remind him, Oxbaum and a few other people that they owed certain parties a debt of gratitude. They were starting to forget. I was also supposed to ensure that they behaved themselves and didn’t cause any trouble.”
Behind God's Back Page 16