Nights of Awe

by Harri Nykanen

The union with the fabric merchant had been childless, but my mother had three children with my father: Eli, me and Hannah. When Eli was born, Mum quit her job at a hair salon.

  My father, who was a hydraulic engineer, didn’t have things any easier. A peace-loving man by nature, he feared my mother. Maybe that’s the reason he was often away in northern Finland. He worked for a large energy company and was involved in every dam and power-plant project in Lapland.

  He was also involved when the power company bought stretches of riverbank at ridiculously low prices from the locals and harnessed the rapids to churning out cash. And it was Dad’s slide rule that was the source of the profit and environmental calculations for the Loka reservoir.

  Northern Finland is where Dad died, too. He drowned on a fishing and hunting trip that had been organized for the energy company’s upper management. The drunken CEO insisted on trying whitewater rafting, and Dad, who was the most sober of the bunch, had been forced to man the oars. The boat hit a rock and capsized. Dad’s body was found the next day, a couple of miles downstream.

  Jewish jokes often feature a woman who’s as loud as my mother and defends her family like a tigress. I’d like to think that that’s what Mum was like, but I’m afraid she looked out first and foremost for herself. In Poland she had learnt to fight for every last heel of bread. Living like that refines some people; others it turns callous and hard.

  My worst nightmares started shortly after my father’s death. I was a little over ten then. When Dad died, my family was left almost destitute. The energy company paid some sort of lump-sum compensation for our loss, but that money went to paying the mortgage. Mum had been working at the salon across the street from our apartment for a few years again, and soon she set up her own salon for men and women.

  The way she got the money for the salon is Kafka family legend.

  Mum marched into the bank where my uncle Dennis was the manager and slapped down the calculations for the amount she needed in front of him. My uncle was in the middle of some important financing negotiations and tried to escort my mother out. But Mum would not let up. She said that, if need be, she’d hang from the door by her teeth until Uncle Dennis promised to give her the money. My uncle knew my mother and understood that this was not an empty threat. When Mum grabbed the doorframe with both hands, my uncle lost his nerve and promised to loan her as much money as she could ever imagine needing. Mum thanked Uncle Dennis politely, kissed him on the forehead, and left.

  The salon was a success, but for Eli and me it was a source of lifelong trauma. Mum couldn’t afford to hire an assistant at the start, so Eli and I were forced to work there. We ran Mum’s errands, swept up the hair from the floor, and sometimes, when it was really busy, I even had to wash the customers’ hair. I hated it. I eventually started getting asthma from the hairspray and dye fumes I was inhaling, and the doctor ordered me to quit. Eli had already quit earlier under the pretence of his studies.

  It was three in the morning and I was lying in bed, trying to figure out what part of my subconscious had lured Mum into my dreams. She had been dead and gone for sixteen years already.

  “Manjak!”

  Sometimes when she flew into a rage, Mum would grab my hair and let me have an earful of horrible Hebrew and Arabic insults. She’d spit them out like spells, so for a couple of weeks I’d feel like I was cursed.

  I was forced to admit to myself that the Arabic curse word was what had brought Mum to mind.

  Arabic?

  An idea occurred to me, and I recalled the conversation I had had with my schoolmate a few hours back. What was it he had asked, when he had told me the meaning of the word manjak?

  “Nothing else, just manjak?”

  I decided to call my friend again first thing in the morning. If my suspicions held true, it would change everything.

  9

  I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. It was five-thirty in the morning. I had slept poorly since my middle-of-the-night insight, and it took a minute before I was fully awake.

  To top of it all off, I had been dreaming about playing ping-pong with a beautiful female Israeli soldier whose shirt was unbuttoned to her navel. I had been winning 7 – 3 when my phone rang.

  “Lieutenant Toivola here from the Järvenpää police department, morgen.”

  I was not happy to hear from my commuter-town colleague, despite the impressive level of his linguistic skills.

  “You folks have a search out on a green Citroën C5 hatchback. Might be that it’s turned up.”

  “Where?”

  “Kerava, a sandpit in the middle of the woods. Burnt to a crisp. I’m on the scene. The wreck’s still giving off so much heat you could grill sausages on it.”

  “What makes you think it’s the car we’re looking for? The plates?”

  “No, the plates were stolen in Kerava, but doesn’t that say something too? This one’s metallic green like yours, or at least it was. Now it’s burnt black. Can still make out some of the original paint on the boot, though. Haven’t been able to check the serial on the engine or the chassis yet, have to scrape off the soot first. But there haven’t been any other green Citroën C5s reported stolen.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There’s a body behind the wheel.”

  “A body?”

  “That’s right, male, extra well-done. They’re having a look at it as we speak.”

  “I’ll be there in about an hour. Don’t move anything.”

  “We won’t.”

  The trip took an hour and seven minutes, even without me showering first; the place was hard to find. Toivola had resourcefully ordered a patrol to wait where the road turned off, and they gave me the directions I needed. The autumn sky was growing light as I drove down the forest road. It turned right at a metal shed that was leaning to one side, and then continued through a quarter-mile of dense spruce woods before coming to an abrupt end at a sandpit. The car had been driven behind a little ridge, so you couldn’t see it from the road. At the bottom of the pit stood a small pool with the carcass of a shopping-cart jutting out of it. Finland was dotted by thousands of these sandpits, as if some incredibly hard-working and efficient sandpit salesman had sold the same pothole to every county in the country.

  Toivola was leaning against a patrol car, sipping coffee from a paper cup. Maybe a considerate wife had packed him a Thermos and salami sandwiches that morning. We shook hands. He looked good-natured: round face, whiskers, blond. His hip-length dark-green coat was made of heavy cloth and had German-style brown-leather piping at the sleeves and pockets. His brimmed cap was also dark brown and trimmed in leather.

  I wouldn’t have remembered the guy’s name if he hadn’t mentioned it, but I remembered his face. Toivola and I had attended some class together. I didn’t even remember what it was, but Toivola did.

  “We were at the same self-evaluation course for officers.”

  “That’s right.”

  I didn’t want to get a reputation as an arsehole, but I wasn’t in the mood for reminiscing. Toivola didn’t let my reticence bother him. He was a lieutenant after all, and had been around the block a few times.

  “That class sure was a waste of scarce taxpayer funds. At this age, the only way I learn is the hard way. Never make the same mistake more than three times,” Toivola said, taking me by the sleeve. I let him guide me, even though I could have found the way myself. I could sense the nostril-tingling reek of burnt rubber, plastic and smoke from twenty yards away.

  The car looked downright mournful. The fire had burnt it so thoroughly that you couldn’t see the original colour. The tyres were nothing more than shreds dangling around the rims. The windows were broken and the metal had buckled from the heat. The water used to extinguish the flames had turned the ground around the vehicle to muck, and you could make out the white dregs of extinguishing foam inside the car. A crime-scene investigator decked out in overalls and thick-soled rubber boots was busying himself at its rear.

&n
bsp; We stopped next to the vehicle.

  “The man was most probably still alive when the car ignited or was ignited,” Toivola informed me.

  The charred torso of the deceased was shrivelled over the wheel as if he had fallen asleep at it. I examined the face; nothing identifiable remained. The skin, which had split from the heat, looked like a hot dog that had been roasted too long in a campfire. I could feel the heat still emanating from the car.

  I frowned at the body that had spoilt my elegant scenario. This whole time I had assumed that the rental Citroën would be found near Linnunlaulu, in the place where the man who had been hit by the train left it. I couldn’t come up with any reason off the top of my head for what the hell the car was doing in the middle of the forest twenty-five miles from Helsinki, and who this broiled guy behind the wheel was. In any case, it looked like he was also mixed up in the Linnunlaulu events. That meant that the total body count was now up to five, which was a lot, even for cities bigger than Helsinki.

  “Can we remove the body yet?” asked the CSI. “It’s interfering with the investigation of the car.”

  I looked at Toivola.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” he said.

  I gave my consent.

  The recalcitrant corpse was forcibly wrenched from between the wheel and the metal skeleton of the seat and lifted into a plastic body bag. The deceased lay there, arms and legs bent, as if reaching for something that he would never now obtain. The two burly ambulance drivers swung the body bag lightly up onto the stretcher and carried it off. The thought crossed my mind that some unlucky medical examiner was going to be getting an unusually messy gig.

  Toivola pointed at the warped seat frame.

  “An expert from the fire department examined the car. Looks like either under the seat or right next to it there was some sort of incendiary device with a smallish initial charge. The explosion wasn’t very powerful, but the driver was at least knocked unconscious, and the fire took care of the rest. Died almost immediately. What do you think?”

  “What about you?”

  “Maybe the idea was to clean up tracks by burning the car, but the bomb exploded too early by mistake.”

  I could tell that my lack of a good night’s sleep was still congealing my thinking. When I was tired I was grumpy and didn’t bother hiding it, even from myself. But Toivola had been helpful in every way imaginable, so I tried to suppress my bad mood – despite the fact that the female soldier I had been playing ping-pong with had been extremely beautiful and ready for more than a little ball-bouncing.

  I had thought about her during the drive. I was sure that she was some sort of delayed echo from my visit to Israel over ten years earlier. When I was at the Wailing Wall, a group of soldiers had showed up, machine guns dangling loosely. Two of them had been women, and one of them one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I was convinced she had been the inspiration for King Solomon as he feverishly dictated the Song of Songs.

  It had been ten years, though, and that former Rose of Sharon had probably ballooned into a housewife in some dull Jerusalem suburb. And when her even-better-fed hubby, a hydrological and sewer engineer, walked in the door on the Sabbath, he found his surly wife and three well-fed kids in yarmulkes waiting for him.

  Maybe I was just jealous. I was a Jewish heterosexual who was privately suspected of being gay or defective in some other way, like all forty-year-old bachelors.

  And for Jews, the phrase “forty-year-old bachelor” was more problematic than normal, at least as far as my relatives were concerned. According to the Talmud, Torah studies are the only acceptable reason to postpone tying the knot.

  Twenty years ago, I had lived with a woman for almost three years, and she and I had planned on getting married. Nothing came of it, because she felt Jewish traditions were overly oppressive. A few years later, she married a Kurd from Iraq and converted to Islam.

  “Is there any information on the deceased?” I asked.

  “No, or at least we don’t have an identity yet.”

  I circled the car and stopped at the rear.

  Toivola was right. The original green colour was visible on the boot. I no longer doubted that the car was the one we were looking for. I bent over to examine the inside of the boot but didn’t find anything unusual. The tools that had been in the side panel had tumbled out as the plastic melted. Next to them was a mangled snarl of iron that I figured had been the stand for a warning triangle.

  “Did the deceased have anything that could be used to identify him, a ring or necklace?”

  Toivola dug into the side pocket of his loden coat and pulled out three plastic bags.

  “A Citizen watch, a gold necklace with a Gemini medallion and the text For Kimi, 17 June 2003. A bunch of keys at the end of a steel chain, a large metal buckle, a couple of metal tubes blackened beyond recognition, and some unidentifiable clods.” I glanced at the keys. There were three of them: two normal Abloy keys and one Abloy Disklock.

  Our friend Kimi, born under the sign of Gemini, dealt another blow to my theories. My scenario didn’t have room for a Finnish killer or even a Finnish accomplice. The only good thing was that now we had something concrete to grab on to.

  “Judging by the necklace and the horoscope medallion, the deceased is pretty young. With that information and the name and birth date, we could try and pinpoint an identity.”

  Toivola nodded and showed me the buckle.

  “This was in the back seat, a purse buckle, and this junk here is the contents of the purse, a tube of lipstick and the mirror from a powder case. If I’m right, there was also a woman in the car at some point. What do you think?”

  I took a couple of steps back and looked around.

  “About the woman?”

  “About the whole thing.”

  “There’s been a search out on the car since yesterday morning. It seems a little odd that it didn’t burn until now.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Toivola agreed. “What do you make of that?”

  “If there had been a firebomb in the car, it could have been on a delayed detonator with a long fuse so that the car wouldn’t be found too fast.”

  Toivola kicked at a hunk of rock.

  “Do you know what this place is?”

  “What?”

  “A spot where the local kids come to spawn. Maybe that’s what the victim was up to.”

  “Could you find out if are there any Kimis in the area who were born on 17 June?”

  Toivola promised to check and suggested: “Should we agree that you hold on to the case for the time being and we provide backup? The other alternative is to ask the NBI to help out.”

  I already had my hands full with the four earlier bodies, but if the fifth was part of the picture, I needed it to put the whole puzzle together.

  “Sounds good.”

  Toivola stepped aside and made a call. In the meantime, I went over to the investigator.

  “Find any footprints leaving the car?”

  “The ground is too compacted and the firefighters made a mess of the rest, but let’s see what we come up with. It’ll still take hours for us to search the terrain… You have a pretty big case under investigation in Helsinki, don’t you? And this on top of everything else.”

  “When do you think the fire started?”

  “The call came in at four-thirty. The car was still burning hard when the firefighters arrived, so it hadn’t been burning for very long.”

  I glanced at my watch. Twenty to eight. I knew that Huovinen would be awake by now, maybe even at work, so I called him and told him where I was and what had happened.

  “We need you here, too. The deputy chief ordered the release of the victims’ photographs today if the final body isn’t identified. You probably haven’t seen the tabloids yet?”

  “Nah, what are they saying?”

  “Both of them are linking the killings to terrorism and the sraeli – Palestinian situation.”

  “On what g
rounds?”

  “Wasn’t clear to me. When do you think you can be here?”

  “I’ll shoot for nine.”

  “I’ll set up a meeting for quarter-past. Try and make it, we might be hosting some VIPs. High society, you know.”

  I had to hand it to Huovinen. He stood like a breakwater between me and the higher-ups and took the blows. You never would have guessed it based on his impeccably dapper appearance. Toivola walked over.

  “Looks like we found him right off. Kimi Rontu, born 17 June 1979. Originally from Hyvinkää, but evidently sublets from relatives in Kerava. A narcotics violation and three car thefts under his belt. I also found out that the car wasn’t here in the early evening. A couple of cars had been stolen downtown, and since we know from experience that stolen cars get abandoned here at the pit, a patrol dropped by to check it out. Time was six-fifteen p.m. That Citro didn’t show up until afterwards.”

  I offered Toivola my praises and he accepted them, pleased.

  “Could you still check one more thing? If there was a woman with Rontu, then maybe she was injured and went to the hospital for treatment.”

  “I should have thought of that myself,” Toivola said, annoyed. “I’ll have someone get on it first thing. What if we drop by the kid’s place right now? We might find something there that’ll shed light on all this. Maybe he brought the girl around to meet the landlords.”

  “I’m in a bit of a rush, but if we head out right this minute…”

  “Right this minute. I know the place, just follow me.”

  I followed Toivola’s dull grey Toyota. A car like that was meant to be driven by a modest man, so modest that it smacked of excess.

  I followed him out of the woods, onto a side road, and across the main road into a neighbourhood of sparsely spaced single-family homes. The houses were the flat-roofed 1970s variety. Toivola’s brake lights flashed and he made a sudden turn into the yard of a brick house. There was room for three cars in front of the garage. One of the spots was taken by a burgundy Volvo.

  “Looks like there’s someone home,” Toivola said. He pressed the doorbell, and a tinkling that sounded like a loose-stringed harp came from inside. A small copper-trimmed overhang sheltered the doorstep.