Her Enemy

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Feeling orphaned when Angel left me, I pressed myself closer to the wall and sucked down some more wine. I stared at the partygoers. A woman about my size, dressed in a low-cut rubber dress and jingling chains, danced passionately in the middle of the floor with a tall man wearing a rubber Nazi uniform and sporting a hedgehog flattop. Based on what Angel had told me, I could now presume this was a steady couple out for an evening of entertainment. How did they manage to get dressed like that without the babysitter seeing?

  As people frankly sized each other up, the mood was somehow expectant, hungry. One of the men in street clothes locked eyes with me, looking like he wanted to make a move on me. I turned away. Two leather-clad escapees from a Tom of Finland drawing kissed feverishly in a corner, while a man who looked like an employee of the tax administration stared on lasciviously. The guy who had been eyeing me across the floor approached, but gave up when Angel swept back up alongside me.

  “Some mix-up with the comp list,” Angel explained. “But back to our performances. You should know that Kimmo planned them. He knew exactly what he wanted. I was just an actor taking directions. Given all that, I have a hard time imagining him enjoying playing dominant. He’s a pure-blooded masochist who wanted to be under someone else’s control.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I mumbled petulantly and then explained to Angel how I lost my temper with Kimmo earlier in the day over his sniveling. Angel again laughed that dangerous laugh of hers.

  “That’s why I can’t imagine Kimmo murdering anyone,” Angel said. “He’s just so passive. Maybe not all sadomasochism fetishists are the most upstanding members of society, but they usually don’t dare play out their fantasies in real life. And strangling his girlfriend wasn’t ever Kimmo’s fantasy, anyway.”

  “You said something about how this was all ‘real’ for Kimmo’s sister, Sanna. Tell me about her.”

  “Sanna got involved with this guy named Otso Hakala. Otso was pretty dangerous—he sold drugs, he used drugs, and now he’s sitting in prison. Sometimes we’d have to intervene when he and Sanna started making a scene here at the club. For them, the beating and dominating was an everyday thing, not just a fun ritual. It seemed negative. The rest of us had several conversations about whether we really wanted their kind here. Did you ever meet Sanna?”

  When I nodded, Angel continued. “Then you understand. People could forgive Sanna for almost anything. Yeah, she was a druggie and an alcoholic and a complete mess in every other way too, but she was still sweet and wonderful. When the police arrested Otso and he wasn’t near her any more, Sanna’s life started looking up. We even attended some lectures together at the college. Her lack of interest in women was a shame. The last time I saw her was at the university, two days before she died. She was as sober as a judge and said she had found a boyfriend she could start a new life with. I almost believed her. Then, a few days later, Kimmo called and said she was dead. I wasn’t even surprised. I’d always known that call was coming sooner or later.”

  I imagined Sanna in this cement warehouse, the sleeves of her leather jacket rolled up, scars on her arms, a submissive look in her eyes. Hoping for trouble.

  “Did Sanna visit Otso in jail?” I asked.

  Angel didn’t know. If I were still a police officer, I easily could have checked on Hakala’s movements around the time of Sanna’s and Armi’s deaths. Otso was my ideal murderer: criminal record, violent tendencies, and, best of all, I didn’t know him.

  “By the way, that guy’s a cop,” Angel said, pointing at a man with long blond sideburns, who was wearing jeans.

  As he turned away from the bar holding his drink, I thought the jeans-wearing cop looked vaguely familiar. He was probably on the force seven years previously, after I had graduated and then worked briefly on the vice squad. I hoped he wouldn’t recognize me.

  “Maybe he’s here because of Kimmo.”

  Unless Ström was a complete ape, he would have his team checking these connections too.

  “That may be, but then he’ll have to blow his cover. The poor thing thinks he’s undercover, but he looks like a cop from a mile away. It’s strange that they always send the same guy to safeguard our virtue. I would have expected them to fight over who gets to come to our parties, since half of them would probably like to get involved.”

  “What half do I belong to then?” I blurted out. “I went to the police academy before I went to law school. Cops aren’t all bad.” I couldn’t help how much the stereotyping irritated me. However, Angel simply grinned in a way that put me so off balance that I emptied my wine bottle and then excused myself to the restroom.

  Of course, there was no restroom in the warehouse itself, just some portable toilets at the back of the parking lot. The summer night was surprisingly dark, and on my way I discovered that my liberal vodka bracer and the small bottle of wine already had gone to my head. I would have to lay off for a while if I wanted to get anywhere with my work. The dark Angel both enthralled and annoyed me. Why was she flirting with me? Couldn’t she tell I was just a shy hetero doing my job too, just like the cop?

  I clambered into the surprisingly clean porta-potty. As I was pulling my skirt back over my thighs, I heard steps approaching outside. Although the other units were empty, no one entered them. As if someone were waiting for me outside.

  My heart pounded.

  Probably one of the gawking men from inside who had followed me and now wanted who-knew-what. I considered for a moment what to do, but then I remembered that I was a woman, not a worm, and that I had a small knife in my purse like I always did. So I just opened the door.

  Outside, a woman with a shaved head was stamping a cigarette on the ground and then stepped in past me. She laughed and said, “My mistress won’t let me smoke at home, so now I can’t even imagine smoking in an outhouse.”

  As I returned to the party, an imposing apparition happened to walk through the door with me. About Antti’s height, the man had long black curls any heavy-metal rocker would have envied. His boots and well-broken-in brown leather costume fit him like a second skin. For a moment, I wondered whether I still had what it took to pick up a hot guy. Then I tweaked myself by the mental ear—I wasn’t here for carousing.

  During my absence, something had started to happen on the stage. A fat man with tattoos covering his entire body sat in lotus position in the middle of the stage pushing long acupuncture needles through his skin after a whip-thin woman, just as tattooed, sterilized them first. An antiseptic hospital smell reached my nose over the emissions of the smoke machine. A young man in high heels danced with abandon in the middle of the floor. I felt adrift and, despite my good intentions, marched to the bar for another demibottle. The wine tasted better this time. I moved closer to the stage to see the ritualistic needle performance, trying to force myself to watch as the needles penetrated the man’s skin, going in and coming out through his thigh, his arm, and, finally, his neck. Did he feel anything? Was he like a yogi who could pass his spirit outside his own body and feel no physical pain?

  “Does that turn you on?” a male voice asked. I looked up involuntarily and saw a perfectly normal, pleasant-looking young man in the classic rebel’s outfit: jeans, white T-shirt, and the same sort of black leather jacket I was wearing.

  “No, not really.”

  “Want to dance instead?”

  Why not? I thought, joining him to dance to the frantic commotion of synthesizers and drums until we were weak at the knees. Suddenly I was eighteen years old again, at a bar legally for the first time, looking for that one “right” person. When Pelle Miljoona’s “I Wanna Make Love to You” started to come over the speakers, the song took my mind to an even more distant memory, to a high-school party with Sanna dancing next to me to the same song.

  Sanna. I wasn’t here to dance. After the song ended, I walked off the dance floor with my chevalier trailing after me.

  “Have you had enough dancing?” The way he looked me up and down now was too similar to what
I’d seen in Dr. Hellström’s eyes. “I like that skirt on you. If piercing isn’t your thing, then what is? Are you a domina?”

  “I can be…whatever—I’m a Pisces: fluid, changing, mixed,” I answered, striving for the challenging tone of Angel’s voice.

  “You can be…whatever? Sounds interesting. I’m Sebastian,” the man said, extending his hand. I took it.

  “Maria.”

  “Not the virgin though, right?”

  I pulled my hand away.

  “Bad joke, and old to boot.”

  “My apologies, m’lady. I vow to do better.” Sebastian bowed as a suitor might in a movie from the 1940s, at which point I realized I had unwittingly set in motion a role-play I now desperately wanted to escape. All I could think of to do was lop him off at the knees with as much hauteur as I could manage without breaking character.

  “I do not care for men who tell old jokes!” I snarled, then marched back into the first room and scanned for Angel, whom I found talking to the man with the devastating black curls. When I caught her eye, she beckoned me over.

  “This is Joke,” Angel said.

  Immediately Joke started asking about Kimmo. The concern in his voice was at odds with his outward appearance. Down to the riding crop hanging from his waist, he was the epitome of the twisted gothic hero. True, he would whip the heroine with his crop, but then he would enclose her in his tender embrace and explain that the chastening he gave was only out of love.

  “Do you think you could be ready to testify in Kimmo’s defense?” I asked him. “To say that he isn’t violent? To say that—Oh hell!”

  Next to the girl collecting entrance fees stood Detective Sergeant Pertti Ström, arrogantly waving his badge. After talking his way in without paying, he turned to examine those present with the same expression my mother might wear upon finding a colony of silverfish in a bag of flour.

  “There’s the man who arrested Kimmo. The arch-asshole himself,” I explained to Angel and Joke. Ström hadn’t overlooked this avenue of investigation after all. Maybe I was underestimating him, or maybe he wasn’t as sure of Kimmo’s guilt as I thought. I remembered my own experience as a police officer, meticulously combing through details and checking every possible lead. Surely Ström had needed more than sharp elbows to rise through the ranks. He must have been good at his job.

  The nascent respect I had managed to feel for Ström for two whole minutes disappeared in the blink of an eye when he marched over to us and the first words out his mouth were: “I should have guessed you were defending that pervert because you’re just like him!”

  “Watch out—it’s catching,” I said icily. “Although, I have a hard time believing there’s anything left for you to learn about sadism.”

  Ström couldn’t get his eyes off my leather skirt.

  “If I had known you were into this rubber stuff, I would have arrested you for Mäenpää’s murder, not Hänninen. You wanted Mäenpää out of the way so you could play your own little games with him.”

  This idea was so absurd that I burst out laughing right in his face. “Why haven’t I killed my own boyfriend then?” I asked and then emptied the rest of my second bottle of wine down my throat so I wouldn’t dump it on Ström. Ström didn’t answer; instead he asked Angel and Joke the same sorts of questions I had, albeit in a much less civil tone. Even though I knew it was a punishable offense to tape people without their permission, I discreetly switched on my miniature voice recorder. The wine was moving pleasantly through my body. Now that I was too drunk to do anything sensible, I decided to spend the rest of the night observing and acting as though I was just there to have fun.

  Despite my buzz, I realized that Ström was presenting his questions with more skill than I expected. Not that he got anything more out of Joke or Angel than I did, since they took such a dim view of the police in general. Joke was repeating word for word something Kimmo had written for the club newsletter, when I suddenly needed to use the restroom again and headed outside.

  Inside the portable toilet, I kind of came to my senses. What was I really doing here? Going home would be the best course of action. I decided to stop inside to say good-bye to Angel and then leave.

  As I stepped out, a figure in a leather jacket stepped out of the shadows and grabbed me firmly by the wrist.

  “You aren’t going to get away from me that easily, Maria,” Sebastian said, putting an unpleasant emphasis on my name.

  Anger flashed in his eyes, with something else I didn’t care to name thinly veiled beneath.

  “Hands off!” I jerked my wrist back the way I learned in my self-defense course, but his grip held. However, he wasn’t prepared for the sudden kick of my high-heeled shoe to his ribs, and he doubled over and fell to his knees on the asphalt, gasping in pain.

  “Be more careful about who you try molesting next time,” I hissed and then ran back inside. Sebastian wasn’t really injured—the pain would pass soon enough—and I didn’t know what he would do next. Disappearing back into the crowd was my best option.

  Inside, Ström still seemed to be bullying Joke, who looked like he needed some help. I was in no shape to play the Good Samaritan tonight, so I continued on to the back hall where Angel was talking to a small group of attractive-looking lesbians clad head to toe in leather. Onstage, a slender man in a white halter dress was doing a drag imitation of Marilyn Monroe. I joined Angel to listen to the women’s conversation, since they were talking about Kimmo and the police, and I didn’t object when a bald girl with sharp eyes offered me some whiskey from a flask.

  “Everyone is certainly dressed to the nines,” I stuttered to her, and then smiled at a transsexual dressed in the guise of a 1960s housewife who danced past. People had strange fantasies—there really were people who wanted that old-fashioned life. Did he want his partner to dress up in a shocking-orange flowery dress with an electric-green scarf over his (or her) hair as well?

  “Hopefully you’ll see Kimmo done up in full garb someday,” Angel said. “He’s always one of the best-dressed men here.”

  “Speaking of the men here, do you know a guy named Sebastian? He got a little too enthusiastic outside, and I had to bring him back to earth.”

  Angel shook her head. “I don’t; he must not be a regular. Ah, Joke escaped from the police!”

  Joke danced over to us, and there was no sign of Ström or Sebastian anywhere, so I joined the general revelry, recording a comment about Kimmo every now and then. Everyone thought he was a nice, sweet guy, and no one believed he would actually hurt someone. Awash in a sea of black clothing, red lips, and gleaming chains, Joke and I danced wildly, oblivious to anything else. At some point, I got thirsty and had a beer.

  I realized it was two thirty in the morning, and I was completely drunk.

  The lousy warehouse even lacked a phone. No one knew where the nearest taxi stand was, so I decided to try to flag down a cab on the West Highway.

  My steps clacking against the worn asphalt as I walked toward civilization, the old cop in me said bad things could happen to a drunk woman walking alone at night dressed this way. The old feminist in me said a drunk woman walking alone at night dressed this way had the same rights as anyone else. I tried desperately to walk without swaying my hips—or listing to one side.

  “Mariaaa! Maaariiaaa!” A male voice echoed over the asphalt. The shout had something familiar about it, but the echo made it strange and frightening. Sebastian? I didn’t want to hang around to find out, so I ran toward the lights and people on the highway as fast as I could in my high heels. The shouts continued behind me for a while. When I reached the stop where I had gotten off the bus earlier, I stopped to wait for a taxi, but all of the cabs that whizzed by were occupied.

  Then a dark blue Saab pulled over in front of me.

  “Kallio. Why didn’t you stop and wait for me? I was yelling for you. C’mon, jump in!” A familiar voice, gruff and commanding.

  “You couldn’t pay me to get in the same car with you
right now, Ström.”

  “Do I have to arrest you first?”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Public intoxication and general indecency. Where are you headed? You live in Tapiola, right?”

  Ström’s unmarked police Saab did look inviting. Only ten minutes separated me from a shower and my bed. I swallowed my pride and climbed into the front seat, trying to tell myself it was OK to take advantage of dickheads. Avoiding a taxi ride would save me a fair amount of cash anyway.

  “Why did you leave the force?” Ström asked, sounding surprisingly docile as we crossed the first bridge on the way from Helsinki back to Espoo.

  “It wasn’t a good fit for me.”

  “And being a lawyer is a better fit? What you were doing tonight looked more like playing private detective.”

  “What wouldn’t a self-sacrificing attorney do for her client? Ström, I heard you interrogated Kimmo without me. Let that be the last time, or I’m reporting you!”

  “He didn’t ask for his lawyer to be present. And are you absolutely sure this little excursion isn’t a waste of your resources?”

  “You mean tonight, or defending Kimmo Hänninen?”

  “I mean the whole lawyer thing. Do you really want to sit in front of a desk for thirty years, shuffling paper, flipping through law books, and then going off to boring trials where you have to pretend to think exactly the opposite of what you really know? How is that a good fit for someone like you? You need action—that was obvious enough tonight. And besides, trying to make a murderer look innocent is immoral.”

  “Immoral? If you ask me, it’s a hell of a lot more immoral that you’re trying to put an innocent person in jail because you’re obsessed with what kind of sex he likes, instead of trying to catch the real murderer. Jesus. You haven’t checked into half of the other possibilities!”