Nights of Awe

by Harri Nykanen

  I reported the latest news on the investigation and the inquiries that were still under way. The shell found near Weiss’s body was from a different weapon from the Linnunlaulu bullets or the shells and bullets found at Hamid’s body shop. However, Tagi and Ali Hamid and Ali’s employee Wasin Mahmed had all been shot with the same gun.

  Leivo informed us that he and the police commander had met with the Israeli ambassador and been provided with the latest information on Saijed, Bakr, Weiss and Kaplan. He didn’t tell us what information the ambassador had been provided with in return. Leivo was clearly taken by his conference with the ambassador and summarized everything he had absorbed by reminding us that there are criminals in every country.

  “If an Israeli kills someone, chances are he’s an average criminal, not a Mossad assassin. Weiss and Kaplan are common drug traffickers who just happen to be Israeli citizens.”

  “And what if an Arab kills? Is he always a terrorist?”

  I registered Huovinen knitting his brows in a sign to tread carefully.

  “Of course not… but in this case there are also other indications of terrorism,” Leivo noted. “Weapons and explosives, in addition to the information we have on the perpetrators’ backgrounds.”

  “So we’re supposed to base the investigation on the assumption that we’re dealing with a showdown between common Israeli drug traffickers and dangerous Arab terrorists and who’s worse? Besides, we still don’t know who the perpetrators are, we’re just assuming.”

  “I’m not going to say one way or the other, but in light of the most recent information, it would appear so. The Israelis are certain that the man who got hit by the train was Saijed and the one who’s still on the loose is Bakr.”

  “Weiss and Kaplan are up to their ears in the events at Linnunlaulu,” I said. “It’s hard to consider them common criminals.”

  “Common criminals can help terrorists in exchange for payment. There doesn’t have to be anything ideological about it. According to the ambassador, this is exactly what this is a question of.”

  “It would be good if you could share the new information provided by the ambassador with the rest of us.”

  The deputy chief cleared his throat, and his face took on a concentrated expression.

  “Yes, well… he promised to deliver us data gathered by the Israeli police and tax authorities on Kaplan and Weiss. He promised to do all he could to help us apprehend Kaplan. He considered Kaplan a dangerous criminal. In addition, we will receive assistance from Klein, the embassy’s head of security, as necessary.”

  Leivo rose and straightened out the creases in his trousers.

  “I believe we’re on the right trail. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t take advantage of the ambassador’s promise of assistance and the latest know-how.”

  Leivo nodded and exited. Huovinen waited for a moment and quipped: “Use the latest know-how, boys. We’re on the right trail.”

  When we were out in the corridor, Simolin whispered: “The phone records arrived.”

  I followed him into his office. Stenman followed at our heels: she could sense the news in Simolin’s secretiveness.

  Simolin pulled out the prints of phone records from a locked drawer. He peeked out into the corridor, which seemed a little excessive, closed the door behind him, and spread the sheets across his desk.

  “Here’s the data for one month from the phone belonging to the man considered to be Ismel Saijed and the calls made from it to Hamid’s body shop, home and mobile phone, the calls made by Hamid, and location information. The information on Laya’s calls hasn’t come in yet. The calls that were located were all made from the greater Helsinki area, mostly Helsinki proper. There are no clusters; the calls are spread out all over different parts of town. In other words, the data isn’t much use. However…”

  Simolin clicked the mouse a couple of times.

  “I made a graph of all of the calls. It looks like this.”

  The image made up of lines, circles and points looked like a lace-making pattern.

  “Mr X… in other words, the man suspected of being Hassan Bakr. He’s clearly the number-one player, this spider here. This number, with the traffic that’s pretty unidirectional, must be his. Bakr has placed calls to both Ali and Tagi Hamid and clearly more often to the man hit by the train, who we suspect is Ismel Saijed. Saijed, on the other hand, has only contacted Bakr twice, in other words on the day that Ali Hamid was killed and then slightly before his death… Because Bakr is most important, his back is protected the best. I’m guessing he has contacted Saijed through accomplices abroad. Saijed received about thirty international calls over the month… from Syria, Israel, England and Pakistan.”

  Simolin underlined two numbers…

  “These here are interesting. Ali Hamid called both of these numbers several times during the month, and he was called from these numbers approximately just as many times, most recently on the night he was killed.”

  I glanced at the numbers. One was a landline number; the other was a mobile number starting in 040. I recognized the first four digits of the landline number.

  “That’s the number for SUPO.”

  Simolin nodded.

  “Both of them go to our old friend.”

  “Sillanpää?”

  “Good guess.”

  At least you couldn’t blame Sillanpää for not trying. He was popping up everywhere.

  When you added the call data to what we’d heard from the sister-in-law of the dead body-shop employee, there wasn’t much that remained unclear: Sillanpää and Ali Hamid knew each other, and Sillanpää was trying to milk Hamid for information, or else Hamid was Sillanpää’s snitch.

  In either case, the season of mutual openness and trust between Inspector Sillanpää and myself had remained uncommonly brief.

  21

  I barely had time to drop by my place to shower and change for my escort gig. I took the tram to Hakaniemi and continued from there on foot. The weather was cold and it looked like rain.

  Even though I believed that Vivica Mattsson was in no danger, I grew more alert as I approached her apartment. I stopped just short of a hundred yards from her building and looked around. I didn’t see anything suspicious; I didn’t see much of anything, actually. The cold was keeping everyone inside, and the street was totally dead.

  I walked over in front of Mattsson’s building and scanned the vicinity again. A couple of young people exited the neighbouring building and a car drove down the hill, passing Mattson’s place before turning towards Hakaniemi.

  I pressed the buzzer and waited. Nothing happened. I pressed again. No response.

  I had Mattson’s number stored in my phone. I called it.

  No one answered.

  I pressed buzzers at random until I got in. I climbed up to the fourth floor and listened. I couldn’t hear anything except the sounds of everyday life; behind Mattsson’s door all was silent.

  I rang the doorbell. No one came to open it. I peeked in through the mail slot, but all I could see was a strip of the Persian rug in the entryway.

  If she had decided to go in to work on her own after all, why hadn’t she bothered to call me?

  I called information and asked them to connect me to the porter at the City Theatre. Vivica Mattsson hadn’t arrived at work yet.

  I called Mattsson’s number again and pressed my ear to the mail slot. The phone either wasn’t in the apartment or it was turned off; otherwise I would have heard it ring.

  I went downstairs and found the building manager’s number on the bulletin board. He answered immediately. I blew things shamelessly out of proportion to get him to hurry. He promised to be there in ten minutes.

  I called Simolin and asked him to come to the apartment.

  The manager arrived in eight minutes. We climbed up to the third floor together. I pulled out my gun and asked for the key.

  He paled and handed it to me.

  “You’d better go now.”
r />   The guy backed down the stairs.

  I unlocked the door and carefully cracked it open. When the gap was about an inch and a half wide, I peered in. No signs of anything unusual in the entryway. I started to creep farther into the apartment, but then I realized it was pointless. If someone was there, they would have heard me enter.

  But I still held my gun at the ready.

  I saw Mattsson’s dog first. It was lying dead on the plush carpet in the living room. The bedroom door was ajar. I pushed it wide with the tip of my shoe. By now it was no surprise to find Vivica Mattsson sprawled across the double bed. A bloody groove coiled around her neck. She was as dead as the dog in the front room.

  I touched her hand. It was cool. I circled the body and saw her face. Her swollen tongue protruded from her mouth like some strange flower. I looked at her and felt at first guilt and then simply rage.

  “I was sure there was no danger,” I explained, more to myself than the others.

  Stenman, Simolin and Huovinen looked at me with sympathy.

  “What a fucked-up situation,” Huovinen sighed, glancing at the body on the bed.

  “Why did she let a stranger in if she was so afraid?” Stenman wondered.

  I wondered that, too, and then I remembered something.

  “It was a man and a woman who went to Hamid’s place. Maybe the woman rang the doorbell and she forgot to stay on her guard.”

  Some critically relevant thought floated through my mind like a dying ember. I emptied my brain of everything else so I could follow the tiny, feeble trail that it left in its wake. Suddenly I caught hold of it.

  “The dog!”

  “Yeah, what about it?” Huovinen asked.

  “I don’t mean Mattsson’s dog, I mean a woman I saw in the park.”

  I told them about the woman who was walking the dog in Sibelius Park and my uncle’s warning.

  “If the woman who rang the doorbell had a dog, then another dog person would definitely open the door.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about the woman?” Huovinen scolded.

  “I didn’t believe my uncle.”

  The CSI came over.

  “The dog was shot with a twenty-two with a silencer; the woman was strangled, as you can see. It looks like there were two perpetrators, because it was all done so tidily.”

  “Maybe they followed Mattsson and saw that she met you two and then they decided to kill her,” Huovinen suggested.

  “Who’s they?” Simolin asked.

  “Kaplan and his accomplice.”

  “Why didn’t he just skip the country? What reason would he have for staying here and chasing down Mattsson? Something here is seriously out of whack,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me, perplexed.

  “What?”

  “I know Kaplan and I know how smart he is. Why would he follow me in such a way that he’d be exposed, and then Mattsson in a way that he’d be exposed again.”

  I remembered Dan’s call and how he had riled me up, just like when we were kids. I was better than him at table tennis, but he was the most irritating player I knew. It was like he read my thoughts and guessed my next move. If I rushed over to the right edge during a long rally to return the hit, he’d send it left. If I was expecting a backhand smash, he’d backspin me a drop shot that would barely clear the net. After that, it would take everything I had to keep from smacking the smirk off Dan’s face with my paddle.

  Suddenly I realized what was going on. I was absolutely sure.

  “When Kaplan called me, he reminded me that he had always been sharper than me. He wanted me to get worked up and focus all my attention on chasing him, so the others would have room to manoeuvre – the killers, the man and the woman.”

  Huovinen started to say something, but changed his mind when the crime-scene investigator stepped into the doorway and raised a forefinger to his lips. We all looked at each other. The investigator gestured for me to come into the bedroom.

  Huovinen followed me in. The investigator pointed at something underneath the window sill near the bed. We bent over to look. A small wireless radio transmitter had been attached to the bottom of it.

  I would never doubt my uncle’s wisdom again.

  Someone was listening in on Mattson’s apartment.

  We went back into the entryway. Huovinen whispered: “What do we do?”

  “Just continue as normal. I don’t think anyone’s listening to the place any more.”

  “Maybe we could trace the tap.”

  “Mika, get in touch with the experts at the phone company.”

  Simolin nodded and exited into the corridor.

  “Not your average case,” Huovinen said thoughtfully.

  “No, even though someone’s trying to feed it to us as if it were one.”

  “Who?” Huovinen asked.

  I didn’t have time to answer before footsteps could be heard from the corridor. I glanced out and saw Sillanpää bounding towards us.

  “I happened to be in the area,” he said. “Might be best if we hash things out.”

  “Again? Is there something you want to tell us about your friendship with Ali Hamid?”

  “I get that you’re pissed off, but so are we. I heard she’s dead.”

  Sillanpää glanced around. The old lady who lived next door was snooping on us through her cracked-open front door.

  “Let’s find a better spot,” Sillanpää said.

  Sillanpää’s idea of a better spot was a van with tinted windows parked out in front of the building. The back of the van was filled with all kinds of equipment, tape recorders and laptops. There were two men in the vehicle. They were sitting in front of a monitor that looked like a GPS navigator; it was showing a map. Both men had headsets on, and one was talking into his: “The target is turning from Tuusulantie onto Ring Road III and moving west…”

  Sillanpää looked at us and said: “The target is a van. We’re following it.”

  “What’s in it?” Huovinen pressed.

  “Two men and a woman and a plywood crate. I believe you’d be pretty interested to meet them.”

  “Are Mattsson’s killers in the van?”

  “So it would seem, and Hamid’s and his employee’s. We also believe that they rigged the Koivukylä bomb.”

  “I know that Ali Hamid was your snitch,” I said.

  “Source. It was thanks to him we picked up those guys’ trail.”

  “A little too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ali Hamid called you shortly before he was killed. You went to the body shop and found the bodies.”

  Sillanpää looked at me, assessing how much I knew.

  “We have eyewitness and security-camera footage of the van.”

  Sillanpää knew that I knew too much. He couldn’t play dumb, so he decided to meet me halfway.

  “The operation would have been endangered if the bodies had been found that night. I can’t tell you any more than that.”

  “No need to. You mean that Tagi might have called off the meeting on the bridge, and you and the Israelis wouldn’t have got the opportunity to bag Bakr and Saijed.”

  Sillanpää didn’t respond.

  “From the police’s perspective, that means that you’re suspected of aiding and abetting four murders and two homicides,” Huovinen stated coldly.

  “Sometimes there’s a pretty goddamn huge gap between theory and practice. We live in a world where the intelligence agencies of democratic countries cooperate with each other as long as there’s a common enemy.”

  “Your cooperation killed six people,” Huovinen continued.

  “We realized too late that we were playing according to different rules, and we didn’t have time to stop them. Besides, we initially thought that Bakr and Saijed killed the Hamid cousins. We broke off cooperation as soon as we found out the truth, and now we’ll help you in every way possible.”

  “Is Dan Kaplan in the vehicle?”

  “No. We don�
��t know where he is, but we know he’s part of the same group.”

  “Do you know where the van is headed?”

  “I’m guessing the airport.”

  “The target is turning onto Airport Road…”

  “Pretty good guess, huh?”

  “Why don’t you guess the rest while you’re at it,” Huovinen growled angrily.

  “You’ll hear the whole story. But we’ll have to agree how things are going to be communicated. This stuff is international-level.”

  “The lead investigator is responsible for communicating about the case,” Huovinen said.

  “We have a few requests to make,” Sillanpää said.

  “You can always make requests.”

  Sillanpää’s story lasted about five minutes.

  “The vehicle is outside the cargo terminal,” announced one of the men manning the phones.

  “Want to head out there with us?” Sillanpää asked.

  We didn’t turn him down.

  Auschwitz and Treblinka. I had visited both as a young Inter-Railer. A million Jews had been killed like slaughter animals infected with a contagious disease. Something like that breeds an incomprehensible amount of agony, rage and fear, the combination of which had conditioned Jews to sensitivity in sniffing out hostility behind, before and within words. At times, anti-Semitism is detected where it doesn’t exist. It’s monitored like the weather: sometimes it’s sunny, sometimes conditions seem to be getting worse. Absolute zero is the winter backlash of the Holocaust, which is never reached but occasionally approached. That’s why you always had to be awake and alert. Never again was tattooed on the shoulder of every Jew.

  One’s attitude towards the state of Israel was another eternally ticklish topic. Were all actions of the state of Israel acceptable simply because they were carried out by Israel and its politicians, leaders and soldiers?

  By no means did all Jews approve of Israel’s power politics in the occupied territories, but on the other hand…

  Many of us balanced like the milkman Tevye between traditions and patriotism. On the one hand… on the other hand…