Helsinki Noir

by James Thompson

  I hear a door open and shut. His voice echoes. He sounds surprised and aggrieved. She says something staccato and sharp. His reply is heated. The only word I understand is äiti—mother. If Kati responds to that, I can’t hear it through the door.

  Silence stretches. I roll an invisible cigarette in my sweaty fingers, dying for one. My heart thuds so loud that the whole closet resonates with the sound. I’ve never been this nervous in my life, not even before my first proper gig. Those were good nerves. This is something else, a feeling of being poisoned, bad shit inside my veins and guts. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

  To give myself something else to focus on, I activate the stopwatch on my mobile phone and stare at the seconds ticking by. With each minute, the idea of killing him in cold blood becomes even more incomprehensible. I’m not sure if I can make myself move from this spot.

  The display lights up, an incoming call. Startled, I almost drop the damn thing. On the first note of the ring tone, I thumb it to vibrate. I hope he didn’t hear. Trying not to breathe, I press my ear to the door, listen.

  The door handle turns. I tense, prepare to flee. Light floods in. She stands there, expressionless.

  “He drank most of the bottle and went in sauna,” she whispers.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Go. Stick to plan.”

  Forcing myself to get on with it, I take my position by the door to the showers, flatten myself against the wall. Kati gestures at me, reminding me to take off my clothes and put on rubber gloves. She’s thought this through. I wouldn’t have remembered. I’m operating in a very short window of time now. As I undress down to my boxers, hands shaking, she disappears into the changing room.

  My skin is goosepimpled. I’m breathing too fast.

  The shower runs. It’s time. No backing out now.

  Her father comes through. The opening door keeps me out of his sight. He staggers to the edge of the pool, obviously very drunk, his heat-mottled back to me. I think of Kati and the money, tell myself that the world is mine. And then I’m no longer thinking at all. I run at him, leap onto his back. We plunge into the cool water. I hold him down with my weight, my head half underwater. Kati told me not to grab his hair or neck, not to do anything that would leave bruises. He thrashes against me, but I’m stronger, and now nothing matters but ending his life. I rise to gulp air, push him down again. He weakens and after a while stops moving, but I don’t let go yet.

  I turn away from him and see her watching us, impassive.

  Soon it’s done. The body floats facedown.

  I get out of the pool, adrenalized, exhilarated. This is the moment when it all changes for me. I stare down at the body, feeling nothing for him. And why should I? He died so that we could make a new life for ourselves.

  “LA, here we come,” I say.

  We go up to her apartment and fuck.

  * * *

  The police call it a drunken accident—here, alcohol is practically a natural cause of death. I’m surprised that I feel almost no remorse. Even though I have flashbacks of his body bobbing in the water like a lump of lard, I don’t have reservations about swimming in the pool. I’ve crossed some mental threshold. Something inside me must’ve broken. I don’t care to think about it much. Mostly I’m just excited by all my future opportunities. I’m like a child waiting for his Christmas presents.

  The big day comes. Unusually, she’s up before me. She nudges me awake and tells me everything’s sorted. Her lawyer completed all the paperwork. She kisses me on the forehead and hands me a shoe box. “Time to get up. You must leave.”

  I don’t understand.

  “I have to pack,” she says.

  “What, going somewhere?”

  “LA.”

  Confused, I open the box. It contains bundles of fifty euro notes. I stare at her, resisting the obvious interpretation.

  “Fifty thousand,” she says.

  I see no flicker of emotion on her face. Her eyes are glass marbles. I try to think of a joke to lighten the mood. But nothing’s funny anymore.

  “We had good times, Malcolm. It’s over.”

  The words are a blow to my stomach. So this is how it is. Secret machinery has turned inside her head. She used me and now she’s paying me off. This is Helsinki, where they don’t communicate, and no one really knows anyone else. My anger is cold and detached. I feel like I’ve been submerged in an ice bath.

  Under her watchful eyes, I get dressed. There’s nothing for me here except the banality of broken dreams. Never was. I’m going far away.

  But not before I get some answers. I push her against the bedroom wall, pin her there. Her expression is a picture of outraged disbelief. She hadn’t expected this.

  “Talk to me. Tell me why.”

  She laughs, a sound as sharp as breaking glass, and knees me in the groin. Starbursts in my eyes, I cup the agony and sit on the edge of the bed. She darts away. I hear clattering in the kitchenette. Then she’s standing in the doorway with a knife in her white-knuckled fingers, an absurd sight.

  “Seriously?” I say.

  “Leave.”

  I stand, the pain ebbing. “Not until you tell me everything. You lied to me about what your father did, didn’t you?”

  She swipes the air with the blade. “Vitun mulkku.”

  “Oh, do stop it.” I clutch her wrist and wrench the knife from her. She grabs for it with one hand, the other going for my eyes. Jerking back to avoid her fingernails, I stumble against the bed. We fall together onto the yielding mattress, her on top of me.

  She shrieks. Fat wet drops spatter my face. The blade is wedged across her mouth. It’s as if she’s clenching it between her teeth, pirate-style. Except the sharp side is facing the wrong way. Howling, she pulls free. Her bloody mouth stretches halfway across her cheeks, sliced clean open in an obscene smile. The tip of her almost severed tongue hangs out. Hands on her face, she scurries to the bathroom.

  Best be leaving. I won’t get any answers from her. Besides—what does it matter? Now that I know what she’s really like, all I want is to be rid of her. Maybe I’ll write a song about her later. Something about a knife in the heart. Could be my breakthrough hit. Taking the box of cash with me, I go knock on the bathroom door. She’s locked herself in.

  “I’ll be leaving now. Whenever you look at the scars, think of me.”

  Her reply is an incomprehensible gurgle.

  “And good luck with your modeling career.”

  My next stop is a travel agency. I’m fucking off to Madrid. They’re a talkative people, the Spanish.

  This story was originally written in English.

  LITTLE BLACK

  BY TEEMU KASKINEN

  Aurinkolahti

  Translated by Kristian London

  I was standing at a door downtown. It was night. I had stood outside this door on many nights before and would do so again. It was no big deal.

  I was a doorman, a security guard. I had had plenty of time to think about it and had come to the conclusion that a door and security were two sides of the same coin—security was nothing more than a symbol, an abstraction that people from different parts of the world used different words to define. The Finnish word for security guard, järjestysmies, was derived from järki, sense. Järki had a sharp sound, it struck like an ax. A door could be equally ax-like. You could put a man’s fingers into the crack between the doorjamb and the door and crush them to a pulp. You could do the same to a man’s head. Sufficient mass, a sharp blow, and a solid door were all you needed to inflict a mangling he’d never forget. But unfortunately even I couldn’t afford such nihilism.

  Doors opened or they remained closed. They brought security to the world. They were security—always either open or closed. They let you pass or blocked your way. Doors were a metaphor for the universe, a binary computer code you could use to explain everything the human world could possibly contain.

  Everything consisted of ones and zeros. Ones got
in. Zeros didn’t get anywhere. All roads were closed to them.

  The door was security was the door. Everything was material. But above the material world wandered creatures of another sort—us—to whom the laws of this world did not apply.

  I was Cerberus. In Finland, doormen were called Cerberuses. That always made me smile. I thought it was pretty fitting.

  * * *

  When people were trying to get in, I didn’t care how drunk they were. Their intoxication amused me. But if they dared to give me a disparaging glance, if they dared to raise their eyes to mine without fear or trembling, I wouldn’t let them in. And if they dared to play the familiarity card, well, that was even more reason for me to send them on their way.

  I only let in enough Africans to avoid racism charges. I let in Indians and Russkies in similar measure, because I knew neither felt any love, kinship, or sympathy for Africans. Black women—I would have let in more of them. It was too bad more didn’t try. Africans kept close watch over their own. Nubians left their princesses at home and went out in gangs to screw easy white Finnish women.

  That’s the way it always went. Over the past twenty years, Finns had been methodically taught that anything that came from abroad was better than anything Finnish. They called it multiculturalism. And the more distant and exotic the goods, the harder you grasped for it. And so the diseases spread.

  I personally wouldn’t have touched a single one of those young women who got shit-faced at the nightclub week after week—at least not without a condom. Of course I had a couple of times. Now and then I’d tell one of the last of her herd, one of those slutty stragglers who hung back by the door after last call, swaying and coatless, to wait a second. A bouncer’s charisma almost always worked; I’d be rewarded with a vacant, inebriated smile, a limp kiss, and a blunt promise of more. And then once the place had emptied, I’d walk the bitch back to the men’s room for a minute before calling her a cab.

  From time to time, colleagues and acquaintances would ask me why I kept working as a doorman after I had been promoted to investigator. I’d wondered that myself many times, asked myself the same question.

  The answer: I enjoyed carrying out justice and wielding power.

  * * *

  A mixed group joined the end of the line. I had time to observe them before they got to the door. It was probably a bunch of coworkers, men and women, a couple of foreigners, and a tiny figure in an electric wheelchair, a weird-looking young guy whose face was normal but limbs were all shriveled. He was maybe thirty. His gaze was steady, his hair came down to his shoulders. He looked intelligent for a cripple. His twisted hands were resting on his wheelchair armrests as if nailed there. His twisted feet were stacked one on top of the other on the footrest. He had to be paralyzed from the waist down. I wondered what sort of human-factory quality control had failed so miserably to let a man like this into the world.

  Evidently the cripple couldn’t read my mind, because he eyed me without concern. Something in the way he looked at me made me anxious. I let people in, the line moved forward. This gave the cripple an even better vantage point to watch me. How did he dare to look right at me that way? It was just a little too familiar. He didn’t even seem to be bothered by the fact that he was deformed. What exactly did he see in me? What was he going to do when he got up to me, start telling me what disease had crippled him? I didn’t want to know. The thought alone repulsed me. Deformed, disabled people like him always thought their illnesses and problems were fascinating to us healthy people. But inadequacy wasn’t interesting. Defective was defective. Worthless was worthless, the zero class for whom the door would remain shut.

  I didn’t let them in.

  The women in the group were furious. I said that they had all had a little too much to drink. One of the foreigners called me a pig. I laughed. Once again, I got to hear what a cold, racist country Finland is.

  * * *

  People who ended up here from the third world would call my homeland a bad, cold-hearted place for just about any reason. Compared to the bloodbaths of the Congo, the Taliban state of Afghanistan, and the drug wars of Mexico, apparently prosperous, centrally heated, well-lit Finland was hell.

  We all know that tribulations refine us. We all know that a certain number of trials are necessary to turn men into men.

  If people from anus mundi felt like they had leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire when they arrived in Finland, that meant Finns were the most refined people on the planet.

  We didn’t need civil wars or natural catastrophes to turn us into men. Even without them, this hellish country of ours, which was either too bright or too dark, had polished us into sparkling human diamonds, the wisest people on earth. We could have easily solved the world’s problems. We would have been the right party to resolve complicated global issues, make farsighted decisions, pass judgments that in their earth-shattering fairness would have brought all the less capable and more childish nations to their knees.

  But we didn’t bother. We didn’t want to share our wisdom with stupid people. Stupid people wouldn’t have learned anyway. Not worth the effort.

  * * *

  I grabbed the cripple’s wheelchair and turned him back in the direction he had come. The party finally left. They looked like they had been punched in the face. But they would have been even more disappointed if I had let them in. As a matter of fact, I had done them a favor.

  At night, downtown Helsinki was a network of bars and nightclubs, a web into which thousands upon thousands of gullible victims flew over and over, only to be eventually ensnared.

  The illuminated darkness of downtown offered the promise of joy and jubilation, of drunken, good-natured fun, of rendezvous with friends and encounters with strangers. On weekends, countless people headed out from their homes imagining they’d gain entrance to an adult amusement park fueled by alcohol and good music.

  Of course they never did, since no such place existed on the Helsinki peninsula. We Cerberuses made sure of that. The meager joy that the Helsinki nightlife offered mortals was arbitrarily rationed. And it was specifically the arbitrariness of the rationing and the anonymous absoluteness of the control that ensured the end began before the beginning, before the door. The end started in line.

  Those who made it in were able to drink absurdly overpriced beer or sticky-sweet drinks, enjoy pan-European top-forty trash, shitty service, and a decibel level that made your ears bleed and prevented any sort of rational communication.

  Everything was inane, expensive, crude, desperate, and pitiful, including the establishments, the staff, and the customers. Only the lack of light and the blood-alcohol levels prevented the customers from seeing it all. The staff saw but didn’t care.

  We were paid to guard the gates of hell.

  I let in more of the unsuspecting drunks who didn’t look me in the eye.

  * * *

  The next day was a workday. I was interviewing a young Iranian woman. She had arrived in Finland almost a year earlier, which was the amount of time it took the immigration office to process asylum seekers’ applications. I didn’t believe a word of what she told me. I never did. Of course, she might have been telling the truth, how would I know? Maybe her husband, a teacher, really had been arrested on suspicion of antigovernment activities and tortured to death in some prison. Maybe she really did fear for her life. Maybe she really had managed to escape Iran along smugglers’ paths without a passport, without proper recollections of the route, of the people who arranged the trip, of her traveling companions. More likely, she had flown from Tehran to Turkey and from there across the border into Greece, or on a forged passport directly north, maybe all the way to Finland. Or else some nice relative had sent a Finnish passport to her in Iran. There were a lot of ways. There was no point thinking about all of them. My job was to decide whether she would be allowed into Finland or not. That was the only thing I had to think about.

  The woman’s name was Noushafarin. She was beautiful in a c
lassically Persian way. Roman nose, slender, black-haired arms. The pits of her shirt had darkened during the interview; I could sense the sharp tang of woman-sweat in my nostrils. I wondered what evolutionary development made females from that part of the world sweatier and hairier than European representatives of the gender. Was it a result of natural selection?

  I asked another question. The interpreter, Yalda, translated into Farsi. I eyed the interpreter and the asylum seeker and compared them to each other. Not bombshells, but both decent looking. The asylum seeker had darker hair: a couple of strands had slid out from under her scarf. I clicked the recorder off. I could sense both women instantly become a degree more alert.

  I asked Yalda to translate: Did Noushafarin like to give head?

  Yalda didn’t say anything.

  I asked again. Yalda asked Noushafarin something, definitely not what I had asked. The other woman answered obediently.

  I asked if Noushafarin liked anal sex.

  Yalda was quiet for a minute, just gazed at the table in front of her and breathed, her cute, bra-enveloped tits rising beneath her shirt.

  I asked if Noushafarin liked taking cock in all of her holes.

  Yalda glanced at me; her expression seemed angry. I didn’t like it. I put my hand under the table and pinched her leg, hard.

  Yalda shrieked, then bit her lip. I let go. Noushafarin looked surprised. Yalda asked her something. Noushafarin once more responded obediently.

  Yalda said that Noushafarin took cock in her mouth and vagina, but didn’t particularly care for anal sex.

  I asked Yalda if she had definitely asked everything correctly.

  Yalda nodded. Then she started to cry.

  I announced that the questioning was over for the day. I roughly gathered the papers into a stack on the tabletop and rose to open the door. Noushafarin understood and disappeared into the hallway. I closed the door, grabbed Yalda by the waist, and slammed her stomach-first onto the table.

  “Smile,” I said.